Aftermath (24 page)

Pat chewed on the edge of her thumb for a moment before answering. ‘She changed a bit over the past few months, now you come to mention it,’ she said finally. ‘I can’t
say exactly when it started, but she seemed more nervy, more distracted, as if she had a problem, a lot on her mind.’

‘Did she confide in you?’

‘No. We’d drifted apart quite a bit by then. Was he really beating her? I can’t understand it, can you, how a woman, especially a woman like Lucy, can let that
happen?’

Jenny could, but there was no point trying to convince Pat. If Lucy sensed that would be her old friend’s attitude towards her problem, it was no surprise that she turned to a neighbour
like Maggie Forrest, who at least showed empathy.

‘Did Lucy ever talk about her past, her childhood?’

Pat looked at her watch. ‘No. All I know is that she’s from somewhere near Hull and it was a pretty dull life. She couldn’t wait to get away, and she didn’t keep in touch
as much as she should, especially after Terry came on the scene. Look, I really have to get back now. I hope I’ve been of help.’ She stood up.

Jenny stood and shook her hand. ‘Thanks. Yes, you’ve been very helpful.’ As she watched Pat scurry back to the bank, Jenny looked at her watch, too. She had enough time to
drive out to Hull and see what Lucy’s parents had to say.

•

It was several days since Banks had last stopped in at his Eastvale office, and the amount of accumulated paperwork was staggering since he had temporarily inherited Detective
Superintendent Gristhorpe’s workload. Consequently, when he did find time to drop by the station late that afternoon, driving straight back after his interview with Geoff Brighouse, his
pigeonhole was stuffed with reports, budget revisions, memos, requests, telephone message slips, crime statistics and various circulars awaiting his signature. He decided to clear up some of the
backlog of paperwork and take Annie Cabbot for a quick drink at the Queen’s Arms to discuss her progress in the Janet Taylor investigation, and maybe build a few bridges in the process.

After leaving a message for Annie to drop by his office at six o’clock, Banks closed the door behind him and dropped the pile of papers on his desk. He hadn’t even changed his
Dalesman
calendar from April to May, he noticed, flipping over from a photo of the stone bridge at Linton to the soaring lines of York Minster’s east window, pink and white may blossom
blurred in the foreground.

It was Thursday, the eleventh of May. Hard to believe it was only three days since the gruesome discovery at number thirty-five The Hill. Already the tabloids were rubbing their hands with glee
and calling the place ‘Dr Terry’s House of Horrors’ and, even worse, ‘The House of Payne’. They had somehow got hold of photographs of both Terry and Lucy Payne
– the former cropped from a school class picture, by the look of it, and the latter from an ‘employee of the month’ presentation to Lucy at the NatWest branch where she worked.
Both photos were poor in quality, and you’d have to know who they were before you’d recognize either of them.

Banks turned on his computer and answered any e-mail he thought merited a response, then he picked away at the pile of paper. Not much, it seemed, had happened in his absence. The major
preoccupation had been with a series of nasty post-office robberies, in which one masked man terrorized staff and customers with a long knife and an ammonia spray. No one had been hurt yet, but
that didn’t mean they wouldn’t be. There had been four such robberies in the Western Division over a month. DS Hatchley was out rounding up his ragbag assortment of informants. Apart
from the robberies, perhaps the most serious crime on their hands was the theft of a tortoise that happened to be sleeping in a cardboard box nicked from someone’s garden, along with a
Raleigh bicycle and a lawn mower.

Business as usual. And somehow Banks found an odd sort of comfort in these dull, predictable crimes after the horrors of the Paynes’s cellar.

He turned on his radio and recognized the slow movement from a late Schubert piano sonata. He felt a tight pain between his eyes and massaged the spot gently. When that didn’t work he
swallowed a couple of Paracetamol he kept in his desk for emergencies such as this, washed them down with tepid coffee, then he pushed the mound of paper aside and let the music spill over him in
gentle waves. The headaches were coming more frequently these days, along with the sleepless nights and a strange reluctance to go to work. It reminded him of the pattern he went through just
before he left London for Yorkshire, when he was on the edge of burnout, and he wondered if he was getting in the same state again. He should probably see his doctor, he decided, when he had
time.

The ringing telephone disturbed him, as it had so often before. Scowling, he picked up the offending instrument and growled, ‘Banks.’

‘Stefan here. You asked me to keep you informed.’

Banks relaxed his tone. ‘Yes, Stefan. Any developments?’ Banks could hear voices in the background. Millgarth, most likely. Or the Payne house.

‘One piece of good news. They’ve lifted Payne’s prints from the machete used to kill PC Morrisey, and the lab reports both yellow plastic fibres from the rope in the scrapings
taken from under Lucy Payne’s fingernails, along with traces of Kimberley Myers’s blood on the sleeve of her dressing-gown.’

‘Kimberley’s blood on Lucy Payne’s dressing-gown?’

‘Yes.’

‘So she
was
down there,’ Banks said.

‘Looks like it. Mind you, she could explain away the fibres by saying she hung out the washing. They did use the same kind of clothes-line in the back garden. I’ve seen
it.’

‘But the blood?’

‘Maybe more tricky,’ said Stefan. ‘There wasn’t very much, but at least it proves that she was down there.’

‘Thanks, Stefan. It’s a big help. What about Terence Payne?’

‘The same. Blood and yellow fibres. Along with a fair quantity of PC Morrisey’s blood.’

‘What about the bodies?’

‘One more, skeletal, out in the garden. That makes all five.’

‘Skeletal? How long would that take?’

‘Depends on temperature and insect activity,’ said Stefan.

‘Could it have happened in just a month or so?’

‘Could have, with the right conditions. It hasn’t been very warm this past month, though.’

‘But is it possible?’

‘It’s possible.’

Leanne Wray had disappeared on the thirty-first of March, so there was at least some possibility that it was her remains.

‘Anyway,’ Stefan went on. ‘There’s plenty of garden left. They’re digging very slowly and carefully to avoid disturbing the bones. I’ve arranged for a
botanist and an entomologist from the university to visit the scene tomorrow. They should be able to help us with time of death.’

‘Did you find any clothing with the victims?’

‘No. Nothing of a personal nature.’

‘Get to work on identifying that body, Stefan, and let me know the minute you have anything, even if it’s negative.’

‘Will do.’

Banks said goodbye to Stefan and hung up, then he walked over to his open window and sneaked a prohibited cigarette. It was a hot, muggy afternoon, with the sort of tension in the air that meant
rain would probably come soon, perhaps even a thunderstorm. Office workers sniffed the air and reached for their umbrellas as they headed home. Shopkeepers closed up and wound back the awnings.
Banks thought about Sandra again, how when she used to work at the community centre down North Market Street they would often meet for a drink in the Queen’s Arms before heading home. Happy
days. Or so they had seemed. And now she was pregnant with Sean’s baby.

The Schubert piano music played on, the serene and elegiac opening of the final, B flat sonata. Banks’s headache began to subside a little. The one thing he remembered about Sandra’s
pregnancies was that she hadn’t enjoyed them, hadn’t glowed with the joys of approaching motherhood. She had suffered extreme morning sickness and though she didn’t drink or smoke
much, she continued to do both because back then nobody made such a fuss about it. She also continued to go to galleries and plays and meet with friends, and complained when her condition made it
difficult or impossible for her to do so.

While pregnant with Tracy, she had slipped on ice and broken her leg in her seventh month and spent the rest of her confinement with a cast on. That more than anything had driven her crazy,
unable to get out and about with her camera the way she loved to do, stuck in their poky little Kennington flat watching grey day follow grey day all that winter while Banks was working all hours,
hardly ever home. Well, perhaps Sean would be around for her more often. Lord only knew, perhaps if Banks had been . . .

But he didn’t get to follow that thought to the particular circle of hell he was sure must be reserved for neglectful husbands and fathers. Annie Cabbot tapped at his door and popped her
head around, giving him a temporary escape from the guilt and self-recrimination that seemed to be so much his lot these days, no matter how hard he tried to do the right thing.

‘You did say six o’clock, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. Sorry, Annie. Miles away.’ Banks picked up his jacket, checking the pockets for wallet and cigarettes, then cast a backward glance at the pile of untouched paperwork on his
desk. To hell with it. If they expected him to do two, three jobs at once, then they could wait for their bloody paperwork.

•

As Jenny drove through a shower and looked out at the ugly forest of cranes that rose up from Goole docks, she wondered for the umpteenth time what on earth had induced her to
return to England. To Yorkshire. It certainly wasn’t family ties. Jenny was an only child and her parents were retired academics living in Sussex. Both her mother and father had been far too
wrapped up in their work – he as a historian, she as a physicist – and Jenny had spent more of her childhood with a succession of nannies and au pairs than with her parents. Given their
natural academic detachment, too, Jenny often felt that she had been far more of an experiment than a daughter.

It didn’t bother her – after all, she didn’t know any different – and it was very much the way she had lived her life, too: as an experiment. Sometimes she looked back
and it all seemed so shallow and self-centred that she felt herself panic; other times it seemed just fine.

She would turn forty that coming December, was still single – had never, in fact, been married – and while a bit shop-soiled, battered and bruised, she was far from down and out for
the count. She still had her looks and her figure, though she needed more and more magic potions for the former and had to work harder and harder at the university gym to keep those excess pounds
from creeping on, given her taste for good food and wine. She also had a good job, a growing reputation as an offender profiler, publications to her credit.

So why did she sometimes feel so empty? Why did she always feel she was in a hurry to get somewhere she never arrived at? Even now, with the rain lashing against her windscreen, the wipers going
as fast as they could go, she was doing ninety. She slowed down to eighty, but her speed soon started creeping up again, along with the feeling that she was late for something, always late for
something.

The shower ended. Elgar’s
Enigma Variations
was playing on Classic FM. To the north, a power station with its huge corset-shaped cooling towers squatted against the horizon, the
steam it spewed almost indistinguishable from the low cloud. She was nearing the end of the motorway now. The eastbound M62 was like so many things in life; it left you just short of your
destination.

Well, she told herself, she came back to Yorkshire because she was running away from a bad relationship with Randy. Story of her life. She had a nice condo in West Hollywood, rented at a most
generous rate by a writer who had made enough money to buy a place way up in Laurel Canyon, and she was within walking distance of a supermarket and the restaurants and clubs on Santa Monica
Boulevard. She had her teaching and research at UCLA, and she had Randy. But Randy had a habit of sleeping with pretty 21-year-old graduate students.

After a minor breakdown, Jenny had called it a day and come running back to Eastvale. Perhaps that explained why she was always in a hurry, she thought – desperate to get
home
,
wherever that was, desperate to get away from one bad relationship and right into the next one. It was a theory, at any rate. And then, of course, Alan was in Eastvale, too. If he was part of the
reason why she had stayed away, could he also be part of the reason why she had come back? She didn’t want to dwell on that.

The M62 turned into the A63, and soon Jenny caught a glimpse of the Humber Bridge ahead to her right, stretching out majestically over the broad estuary into the mists and fens of Lincolnshire
and Little Holland. Suddenly, a few shafts of sunlight pierced the ragged cloud cover as the ‘Nimrod’ variation reached its rousing climax. A ‘Yorkshire moment’. She
remembered the ‘LA moments’ Randy was so fond of pointing out in their early days when they drove and drove and drove around the huge, sprawling city: a palm tree silhouetted against a
blood-orange sky; a big, bright full moon low over the HOLLYWOOD sign.

As soon as she could, Jenny pulled into a lay-by and studied her map. The clouds were dispersing now, allowing even more sunlight through, but the roads were still swamped with puddles and the
cars and lorries swished up sheets of water as they sped by her.

Lucy’s parents lived off the A164 to Beverley, so she didn’t have to drive through Hull city centre. She pressed on through the straggling western suburbs and soon found the
residential area she was looking for. Clive and Hilary Liversedge’s house was a nicely maintained bay-window semi in a quiet crescent of similar houses. Not much of a place for a young girl
to grow up, Jenny thought. Her own parents had moved often throughout her childhood and though she had been born in Durham, she had at various times lived in Bath, Bristol, Exeter and Norwich, all
university towns, and all full of randy young men. She had never been stuck in a dull suburban backwater like this.