Aftermath, page 36
“Maybe.”
“Is that a yes or a no?”
“I suppose so.”
“Might you have had a falling-out?”
“What are you getting at?”
Banks scratched the scar beside his right eye. “It’s like this, Mick. I come here to talk to you again, and it seems to bother you, but you don’t ask me if we’ve found Leanne alive, or found her body yet. It was the same with Ian—”
“You’ve talked to Ian?”
“This morning. I’m surprised he didn’t get straight on the phone to you.”
“He can’t have been very worried.”
“Why should he be?”
“I don’t know.”
“The thing is, you see, that you both ought to be asking me if we’ve found Leanne alive, or if we’ve found her body, or if we’ve identified her remains.”
“Why?”
“Why else would I come to talk to you?”
“How should I know?”
“But the fact that you don’t ask makes me wonder if you know something you’re not telling me.”
Mick folded his arms. “I’ve told you everything I know.”
Banks leaned forward and held Mick’s gaze. “Know what? I think you’re lying, Mick. I think you’re all lying.”
“You can’t prove anything.”
“What would I need to prove?”
“That I’m lying. I told you what happened. We went for a drink in the Old—”
“No. What you told us was that you went for coffee after the film.”
“Right. Well . . .”
“That was lying, wasn’t it, Mick?”
“So what?”
“If you can do it once, you can do it again. In fact, it gets easier the more you practice. What really happened that night, Mick? Why don’t you tell me about it?”
“Nothing happened. I already told you.”
“Did you and Leanne have a fight? Did you hurt her? Maybe you didn’t mean to. Where is she, Mick? You know, I’m certain of it.”
And Mick’s expression told Banks that he did know, but it also told him that he wasn’t going to confess to anything. Not today, at any rate. Banks felt pissed off and culpable at the same time. It was his fault that this line of inquiry hadn’t been properly followed up. So fixated had he become on a serial killer abducting young girls that he had ignored the basics of police work and not pushed hard enough at those in the position to know best what had happened to Leanne: the people she had been with at the time she disappeared. He should have followed up, knowing of Ian Scott’s criminal record, and that it involved drugs. But no. Leanne was put down as the third victim of the unidentified serial killer, another pretty young blond victim, and that was that. Winsome Jackman had done a bit of follow-up work, but she had pretty much accepted the official story too. Banks’s fault, all of it, just like Sandra’s miscarriage. Just like bloody everything, it seemed sometimes.
“Tell me what happened,” Banks pushed again.
“I’ve told you. I’ve fucking told you!” Mick sat up abruptly. “When we left the Old Ship, Leanne set off home. That was the last any of us saw of her. Some pervert must have got her. All right? That’s what you thought, isn’t it? Why are you changing your minds?”
“Ah, so you are curious,” Banks said, standing up. “I’m sure you’ve been following the news. We’ve got the pervert who took and killed those girls—he’s dead, so he can’t tell us anything—but we found no trace of Leanne’s body on the premises, and believe me, we’ve taken the place apart.”
“Then it must’ve been some other pervert.”
“Come off it, Mick. The odds against one are wild enough, the odds against two are astronomical. No. It comes down to you. You, Ian and Sarah. The last people she was seen with. Now, I’m going to give you time to think about it, Mick, but I’ll be back, you can count on that. Then we’ll have a proper talk. No distractions. In the meantime, stick around. Enjoy the music.”
When Banks left, he paused just long enough at the garden gate to see Mick, silhouetted behind the lace curtains, jump up from the sofa and head over to the telephone.
16
The Monday-morning sunlight spilled through Banks’s kitchen window and glinted on the copper-bottomed pans hanging on the wall. Banks sat at his pine table with a cup of coffee, toast and marmalade, the morning newspaper spread out before him and Vaughan Williams’s Variations on a Theme by Thomas Tallis playing on the radio. But he was neither reading nor listening.
He had been awake since before four, a million details dancing around in his mind, and though he felt dog-tired now, he knew he couldn’t sleep. He would be glad when the Chameleon case was all over, when Gristhorpe was back at work, and when he could go back to his normal duties as detective chief inspector. The responsibility of command over the past month and a half had exhausted him. He recognized the signs: lack of sleep, bad dreams, too much junk food, too much booze and too many cigarettes. He was reaching the same near-burnout state as he had been in when he left the Met for North Yorkshire years ago, hoping for a quieter life. He loved detective work, but it sometimes seemed that modern policing was a young man’s game. Science, technology and changes in management structure hadn’t simplified things; they had only made life more complicated. Banks realized that he had probably come to the limits of his ambition when he actually thought that morning, for the first time, about packing in the Job altogether.
He heard the postman arrive and went out to pick up the letters from the floor. Among the usual collection of bills and circulars, there was a hand-addressed envelope from London, and Banks immediately recognized the neat, looping hand.
Sandra.
Heart beating just a little too fast for comfort, he carried the pile back into the kitchen. This was his favorite room in the cottage, mostly because he had dreamed about it before he had seen it, but what he read in Sandra’s letter was enough to darken the brightest of rooms even more than his previous mood had darkened it.
Dear Alan,
I understand that Tracy told you Sean and I are expecting a baby. I wish she hadn’t, but there it is, it’s done now. I hope this knowledge will at least enable you to understand the need for expediency in the matter of our divorce, and that you will act accordingly.
Yours sincerely,
Sandra
That was it. Nothing more than a cold, formal note. Banks had to admit that he hadn’t been responding to the matter of divorce with any great dispatch, but he hadn’t seen any need for haste. Perhaps, he was even willing to admit, deep down, he was stubbornly clinging to Sandra, and in some opaque and frightened part of his soul he was holding to the belief that it was all just a nightmare or a mistake, and he would wake up one morning back in the Eastvale semi with Sandra beside him. Not that that was what he wanted, not anymore, but he was at least willing to admit that he might harbor such irrational feelings.
Now this.
Banks put the letter aside, still feeling its chill. Why couldn’t he just let go of this and move on, as Sandra clearly had done? Was it because of what he had told Annie, about his guilt over Sandra’s miscarriage, about being glad that it happened? He didn’t know; it all just felt too strange: his wife of over twenty years, mother of their children, now about to give birth to another man’s child.
He tossed the letter aside, picked up his briefcase and headed out for the car.
He intended to go to Leeds later in the morning, but first he wanted to drop by his office, clear up some paperwork and have a word with Winsome. The drive to Eastvale from Gratly was, Banks had thought when he first made it, one of the most beautiful drives in the area: a narrow road about halfway up the daleside, with spectacular views of the valley bottom with its sleepy villages and meandering river to his left and the steeply rising fields with their drystone walls and wandering sheep to his right. But today he didn’t even notice all this, partly because he did it so often, and partly because his thoughts were still clouded by Sandra’s letter and vague depression over his job.
After the chaos of the weekend, the police station was back to its normal level of activity; the reporters had disappeared, just as Lucy Payne had. Banks wasn’t overly concerned about Lucy’s going missing, he thought as he closed his office door and turned on the radio. She would probably turn up again, and even if she didn’t, there was no real cause for concern. Not unless they came up with some concrete evidence against her. At least in the meantime, they could keep track of her through ATM withdrawals and credit card transactions. No matter where she was, she would need money.
After he had finished the paperwork, Banks went into the squad room. DC Winsome Jackman was sitting at her desk chewing on the end of a pencil.
“Winsome,” he said, remembering one of the details that had awoken him so early in the morning, “I’ve got another job for you.”
And when he’d told her what he wanted her to do, he left by the back exit and set off for Leeds.
It was just after lunch when Annie entered the CPS offices, though she hadn’t managed to grab a bite to eat herself yet. The Crown solicitor appointed to the case, Jack Whitaker, turned out to be younger than she had expected, late twenties or early thirties, she guessed, prematurely balding, and he spoke with a slight lisp. His handshake was firm, his palm just a little damp. His office was certainly far tidier than Stafford Oakes’s in Eastvale, where every file was out of place and stained with an Olympic symbol of coffee rings.
“Any new developments?” he asked after Annie had sat down.
“Yes,” said Annie. “PC Taylor changed her statement this morning.”
“May I?”
Annie handed him Janet Taylor’s revised statement, and Whitaker read it over. When he’d finished, he slid the papers over the desk back toward Annie. “What do you think?” she asked.
“I think,” Jack Whitaker said slowly, “that we might be charging Janet Taylor with murder.”
“What?” Annie couldn’t believe what she’d just heard. “She acted as a policewoman in pursuit of her duty. I was thinking justifiable homicide, or, at the very most, excusable. But murder?”
Whitaker sighed. “Oh, dear. I don’t suppose you’ve heard the news, then?”
“What news?” Annie hadn’t turned on the radio when she drove down to Leeds, being far too preoccupied with Janet’s case and her confused feelings about Banks to concentrate on news or chat.
“The jury came back on the John Hadleigh case just before lunch. You know, the Devon farmer.”
“I know about the Hadleigh case. What was the verdict?”
“Guilty of murder.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Annie. “But even so, surely that’s different entirely? I mean, Hadleigh was civilian. He shot a burglar in the back. Janet Taylor—”
Whitaker held his hand up. “The point is that it’s a clear message. Given the Hadleigh verdict, we have to be seen to be acting fairly toward everyone. We can’t afford to have the press screaming at us for going easy on Janet Taylor just because she’s a policewoman.”
“So it is political?”
“Isn’t it always? Justice must be seen to be done.”
“Justice?”
Whitaker raised his eyebrows. “Listen,” he said, “I can understand your sympathies; believe me, I can. But according to her statement, Janet Taylor handcuffed Terence Payne to a metal pipe after she had already subdued him, then she hit him twice with her baton. Hard. Think about it, Annie. That’s deliberate. That’s murder.”
“She didn’t necessarily mean to kill him. There was no intent.”
“That’s for a jury to decide. A good prosecutor could argue that she knew damn well what the effect of two more hard blows to the head would be after she’d already given him seven previous blows.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Annie said.
“No one’s sorrier than I am,” said Whitaker.
“Except Janet Taylor.”
“Then she shouldn’t have killed Terence Payne.”
“What the hell do you know? You weren’t there, in that cellar, with your partner bleeding to death on the floor, a dead girl staked out on a mattress. You didn’t have just seconds to react to a man coming at you with a machete. This is a bloody farce! It’s politics, is all it is.”
“Calm down, Annie,” said Whitaker.
Annie stood up and paced, arms folded. “Why should I? I don’t feel calm. This woman has been going through hell. I provoked her into changing her statement because I thought it would go better for her in the long run than saying she couldn’t remember. How does this make me look?”
“Is that all you’re concerned about? How it makes you look?”
“Of course it’s not.” Annie lowered herself slowly back into the chair. She still felt flushed and angry, her breath coming in sharp gasps. “But it makes me look like a liar. It makes it look as if I tricked her. I don’t like that.”
“You were only doing your job.”
“Only doing my job. Only obeying orders. Right. Thanks. That makes me feel a whole lot better.”
“Look, we might be able to get a bit of leeway here, Annie, but there’ll have to be a trial. It’ll all have to be a matter of public record. Aboveboard. There’ll be no sweeping it under the table.”
“That’s not what I had in mind, anyway. What leeway?”
“I don’t suppose Janet Taylor would plead guilty to murder.”
“Damn right she wouldn’t, and I wouldn’t advise her to.”
“It’s not exactly a matter of advising. Besides, that’s not your job. What do you think she would plead guilty to?”
“Excusable homicide.”
“It wasn’t self-defense. Not when she crossed the line and delivered those final blows after Payne was rendered incapable of defending himself or of attacking her further.”
“What, then?”
“Voluntary manslaughter.”
“How long would she have to serve?”
“Between eighteen months and three years.”
“That’s still a long time, especially for a copper in jail.”
“Not as long as John Hadleigh.”
“Hadleigh shot a kid in the back with a shotgun.”
“Janet Taylor beat a defenseless man about the head with a police baton, causing his death.”
“He was a serial killer.”
“She didn’t know that at the time.”
“But he came at her with a machete!”
“And after she’d disarmed him, she used more force than necessary to subdue him, causing his death. Annie, it doesn’t matter that he was a serial killer. It wouldn’t matter if he’d been Jack the bloody Ripper.”
“He’d cut her partner. She was upset.”
“Well, I’m certainly glad to hear she wasn’t calm, cool and collected when she did it.”
“You know what I mean. There’s no need for sarcasm.”
“Sorry. I’m sure the judge and jury will take the whole picture into account, her state of mind.”
Annie sighed. She felt sick. As soon as this farce was over she was getting the hell out of Complaints and Discipline, back to real police work, catching the villains.
“All right,” she said. “What next?”
“You know what next, Annie. Find Janet Taylor. Arrest her, take her to the police station and charge her with voluntary manslaughter.”
“Someone asking to see you, sir.”
Why was the fresh-faced PC who popped his head around the door of Banks’s temporary office at Millgarth smirking? Banks wondered. “Who is it?” he asked.
“You’d better see for yourself, sir.”
“Can’t someone else deal with it?”
“She specifically asked to see someone in charge of the missing girls case, sir. Area Commander Hartnell’s in Wakefield with the ACC, and DCI Blackstone’s out. That leaves you, sir.”
Banks sighed. “All right. Show her in.”
The PC smirked again and disappeared, leaving a distinct sense of smirk still in the air, rather like the Cheshire cat’s smile. A few moments later, Banks saw why.
She tapped very softly on his door and pushed it open so slowly that it creaked on its hinges, then she appeared before him. All five feet nothing of her. She was anorexically thin, and the harsh red of her lipstick and nail polish contrasted with the almost translucent paleness of her skin; her delicate features looked as if they were made out of porcelain carefully glued or painted on her moon-shaped face. Clutching a gold-lamé handbag, she was wearing a bright green crop top, which stopped abruptly just below her breasts—no more than goose pimples despite the push-up bra—and showed a stretch of pale, bare midriff and a belly-button ring, below which came a black PVS micro-skirt. She wore no tights, and her pale thin legs stretched bare down to the knee-highs and chunky platform heels that made her walk as if she were on stilts. Her expression showed fear and nervousness as her astonishingly lovely cobalt-blue eyes roved restlessly about the stark office.
Banks would have put her down for a heroin-addicted prostitute, but he could see no needle tracks on her arms. That didn’t mean she wasn’t addicted to something, and it certainly didn’t mean that she wasn’t a prostitute. There are more ways of getting drugs into your system than through a needle. Something about her reminded him of Chief Constable Riddle’s daughter, Emily, but it quickly passed. She bore more resemblance to the famous heroin-chic models of a few years ago.
“Are you the one?” she asked.
“What one?”
“The one in charge. I asked for the one in charge.”
“That’s me. For my sins,” said Banks.
“What?”
“Never mind. Sit down.” She sat, slowly and suspiciously, eyes still flicking restlessly around the office, as if she were afraid someone was going to appear and strap her into her chair. It had obviously taken her a lot of courage to come this far. “Can I get you some tea or coffee?” Banks asked.
