Aftermath (38 page)

‘Probably, but they’re nowhere near as vocal as the people who’ve already been phoning Millgarth, believe me. Cut her loose, Alan.’

‘But—’

‘We caught our killer and he’s dead. Let her go. We can’t hold her any longer.’

Banks looked at his watch. ‘We’ve still got four hours. Something might turn up.’

‘Nothing will turn up in the next four hours, believe me. Release her.’

‘What about surveillance?’

‘Too bloody expensive. Tell the local police to keep an eye on her, and tell her to stick around, we might want to talk to her again.’

‘If she’s guilty, she’ll disappear.’

‘If she’s guilty we’ll find the evidence and then we’ll find her.’

‘Let me have one more shot at her first.’ Banks held his breath as Hartnell paused at the other end.

‘All right. Talk to her one more time. If she doesn’t confess, let her go. But be bloody careful. I don’t want any allegations of Gestapo interrogation tactics.’

Banks heard a knock at his door, put his hand over the mouthpiece and called out, ‘Come in.’

Julia Ford entered and gave him a broad smile.

‘No worry on that score, sir,’ Banks said to Hartnell. ‘Her lawyer will be present at all times.’

‘Quite the zoo out there, isn’t it?’ Julia Ford said after Banks had hung up. The fine lines around her eyes crinkled when she smiled. She was wearing a different suit this
morning – grey with a pearl blouse – but it looked every bit as business-like. Her hair looked shiny, as if fresh from the shower, and she had applied just enough make-up to take a few
years off her age.

‘Yes,’ Banks answered. ‘Looks as if someone tipped the entire British media off about Lucy’s whereabouts.’

‘Are you going to let her go?’

‘Soon. I want another chat first.’

Julia sighed and opened the door for him. ‘Ah, well. Once more unto the breach.’

•

Hull and beyond were parts of Yorkshire Jenny hardly knew at all. On her map there was a tiny village called Kilnsea right at the southern tip of land where the Humber joined
the North Sea, just before a thin strip called Spurn Head, designated as a heritage coast, stuck out into the sea like a witch’s crooked, wizened finger. It looked so desolate out there that
Jenny shuddered just looking at the map, feeling the ceaseless cold wind and the biting salt spray she imagined were all one would find there.

Was it named Spurn Head because someone was spurned there once, she wondered, and her ghost lingered, walking the sands and wailing in the night, or because ‘spurn’ was a corruption
of ‘sperm’ and it looked a bit like a sperm wiggling out to sea? It was probably something much more prosaic, like ‘peninsula’ in Viking. Jenny wondered if anybody ever went
there. Birders perhaps; they were crazy enough to go anywhere in search of the elusive lesser speckled yellow tree warbler, or some such creature. It didn’t look as if there were any holiday
resorts in the region, except perhaps Withernsea, which Banks had visited yesterday. All the hot spots were much further north: Bridlington, Filey, Scarborough, Whitby, all the way up to Saltburn
and Redcar in Teeside.

It was a fine day: windy, but sunny with only an occasional high white cloud passing over. It wasn’t exactly warm – definitely light jacket weather – but then it wasn’t
freezing, either. Jenny seemed to be the only car on the road beyond Patrington, where she stopped briefly for a cup of coffee and a look at St Patrick’s church, reputed to be one of the
finest village churches in England.

It was desolate country, mostly flat farmland, green fields and the occasional flash of bright yellow rapeseed. What villages she passed through were no more than mean assemblages of bungalows
and the odd row of redbrick terraces. Soon, the surrealistic landscape of the North Sea Gas Terminal, with its twisted metal pipes and storage units, came into view, and Jenny headed up the coast
towards Alderthorpe.

She had been thinking about Banks quite a lot during her journey and came to the conclusion that he wasn’t happy. She didn’t know why. Apart from Sandra’s pregnancy, which was
obviously upsetting to him for any number of reasons, he had everything to be thankful for. For a start, his career was back on track, and he had an attractive young girlfriend. At least she
assumed that Annie was attractive.

But perhaps it was Annie who was making Banks unhappy? He had never seemed quite certain of their relationship whenever Jenny had questioned him. She had assumed that was mostly due to his
innate evasiveness when it came to personal and emotional matters – like most men – but perhaps he was genuinely confused.

Not that she could do anything. She remembered how disappointed she had felt last year when he had accepted her dinner invitation and failed to turn up, or even phone. Jenny had sat there in her
most seductive, silky outfit, duck à l’orange in the oven, ready to take a risk again, and waited and waited. At last he had phoned. He’d been called to a hostage situation.
Well, it was definitely a good excuse, but it didn’t do much to dispel her sense of disappointment and loss. Since then, they had been more circumspect with one another, neither willing to
risk making an arrangement in case it got screwed up, but still she fretted about Banks and still, she admitted to herself, she wanted him.

The flat desolate landscape went on and on. How on earth could anybody live in such a remote and backward spot? Jenny wondered. She saw the sign pointing east: ‘Alderthorpe ½
mile’ and set off down the narrow unpaved track hoping to hell there was no one coming the other way. Still, the landscape was so open – hardly a tree in sight – that she could
easily see someone coming from a long way away.

The half-mile seemed to go on for ever, as short distances often do on country roads. Then she saw a huddle of houses ahead, and she could smell the sea through her open window, though she
couldn’t see it yet. When she found herself turning left on to a paved street with bungalows on one side and rows of redbrick terrace houses on the other, she realized this must be
Alderthorpe. There was a small post office cum general store with a rack of newspapers fluttering in the breeze, a greengrocer’s and a butcher’s, a squat gospel hall and a mean-looking
pub called the Lord Nelson, and that was it.

Jenny pulled up behind a blue Citroen outside the post office and when she got out of the car she thought she could see curtains twitching over the road, feel curious eyes on her back as she
opened the post-office door.
No one comes here
, she imagined the people thinking.
What could she possibly want?
Jenny felt as if she had walked into one of those lost village stories,
the place that time forgot, and she had the illogical sense that by walking into it, she was lost too, and all memory of her in the real world was gone. Silly fool, she told herself, but she
shivered, and it wasn’t cold.

The bell pinged above her head, and she found herself in the kind of shop that she guessed had ceased to exist even before she was born, where jars of barley sugar rubbed shoulders with
shoelaces and patent medicines on high shelves, and birthday cards stood on a rack next to the half-inch nails and tins of evaporated milk. It smelled both musty and fruity – pear drops,
Jenny thought – and the light that filtered in from the street was dim and cast strips of shadow on the sales counter. There was a small post-office wicket, and the woman standing there in a
threadbare brown coat turned and stared at Jenny when she entered. The postmistress herself peered around her customer and adjusted her glasses. They had clearly been having a good natter and were
none too thrilled at being interrupted.

‘Can I help you?’ the postmistress asked.

‘I wondered if you could tell me where the old Murray and Godwin houses are,’ Jenny asked.

‘Why would you be wanting to know that?’

‘It’s to do with a job I’m doing.’

‘Newspaper reporter, are you?’

‘As a matter of fact, no. I’m a forensic psychologist.’

This stopped the woman in her tracks. ‘It’s Spurn Lane you want. Just over the street and down the lane to the sea. Last two semis. You can’t miss them. Nobody’s lived
there for years.’

‘Do you know if any of the children still live around here?’

‘I’ve not seen hide nor hair of any of ’em since it happened.’

‘What about the teacher, Maureen Nesbitt?’

‘Lives in Easington. There’s no school here.’

‘Thank you very much.’

As she left, she heard the customer whisper, ‘Forensic psychologist? Whatever’s that when it’s at home?’

‘Sightseer,’ muttered the postmistress. ‘Ghoul, just like all the rest. Anyway, you were saying about Mary Wallace’s husband . . .’

Jenny wondered how they would react when the media descended en masse, which they surely would do before long. It’s not often a place such as Alderthorpe sees fame more than once in a
lifetime.

She crossed the High Street, still feeling as if she were being watched, and found the unpaved lane that led east to the North Sea. Though there was a chill in the wind, the cloudless sky was
such a bright piercing blue that she put on her sunglasses, remembering with a flutter of anger the day she bought them on Santa Monica pier, with Randy, the two-timing bastard.

There were about five or six bungalows on each side of Spurn Lane near the high street, but about fifty yards along, there was only rough ground. Jenny could see two dirty brick semis another
fifty yards beyond that. They were certainly isolated from the village, which itself was isolated enough to begin with. She imagined that once the reporters and the television cameras had gone ten
years ago, the silence and loneliness and sense of grief must have been devastating for the community, the questions and accusations screaming out loud in the air. Even the residents around The
Hill, part of a suburb of a large, modern city, would be struggling to understand what had happened there for years, and many of the residents would need counselling. Jenny could only imagine what
Alderthorpe folk probably thought of counselling.

As she approached the houses, she became more and more aware of the salt smell of the sea breeze and realized that it was out there, only yards away beyond the low dunes and marram grass.
Villages along this coast had disappeared into the sea, Jenny had read; the sandy coastline was always shifting, and maybe in ten or twenty years time Alderthorpe would have vanished under water,
too. It was a spooky thought.

The houses were beyond repair. The roofs had caved in and the broken windows and doors were boarded up. Here and there, people had spray-painted graffiti: ‘ROT IN HELL’, ‘BRING
BACK HANGING’ and the simple, touching, ‘KATHLEEN: WE WILL NOT FORGET’. Jenny found herself oddly moved as she stood there playing the voyeur.

The gardens were overgrown with weeds and shrubs, but she could make her way through the tangled undergrowth closer to the buildings. There wasn’t much to see, and the doors had been so
securely boarded up that she couldn’t get inside even if she wanted to. In there, she told herself, Lucy Payne and six other children had been terrorized, raped, humiliated, tormented and
tortured for God knew how many years before the death of one of them – Kathleen Murray – led the authorities to the door. Now the place was just a silent ruin. Jenny felt like a bit of
a fraud standing there, the way she had in the cellar of The Hill. What could she possibly do or say to make sense of the horrors that occurred here? Her science, like all the rest, was
inadequate.

Even so, she stood there for some time, then she walked around the buildings, noting that the back gardens were even more overgrown than the front. An empty clothes-line hung suspended between
two rusty poles in one of the gardens.

As she was leaving, Jenny almost tripped over something in the undergrowth. At first she thought it was a root, but when she bent down and pulled aside the leaves and twigs, she saw a small
teddy bear. It looked so dishevelled it could have been out there for years, could even have belonged to one of the Alderthorpe Seven, though Jenny doubted it. The police or the social services
would have taken everything like that away, so it had probably been left later as a sort of tribute by a local child. When she picked it up, it felt soggy, and a beetle crawled out from a rip in
its back onto her hand. Jenny let out a sharp gasp, dropped the teddy bear and headed quickly back to the village. She had intended to knock on a few doors and ask about the Godwins and the
Murrays, but Alderthorpe had spooked her so much that she decided instead to head for Easington to talk to Maureen Nesbitt.

•

‘Right, Lucy. Shall we start?’

Banks had turned on the tape recorders and tested them. This time they were in a slightly bigger and more salubrious interview room. In addition to Lucy and Julia Ford, Banks had invited DC
Jackman along, too, though it wasn’t her case, mostly to get her impressions of Lucy afterwards.

‘I suppose so,’ Lucy said in a resigned, sulky voice. She looked tired and shaken by her night in the cell, Banks thought, even though the cells were the most modern part of the
station. The duty officer said she’d asked to have the light left on all night, so she couldn’t have slept much.

‘I hope you were comfortable last night,’ he said.

‘What do you care?’

‘It’s not my intention to cause you discomfort, Lucy.’

‘Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.’

Julia Ford tapped her watch. ‘Can we get on with this, Superintendent Banks?’

Banks paused, then looked at Lucy. ‘Let’s talk a bit more about your background, shall we?’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ Julia Ford butted in.

‘If you’ll allow me to ask my questions, you might find out.’

‘If it distresses my client—’

‘
Distresses your client!
The parents of five young girls are more than distressed.’

‘That’s irrelevant,’ said Julia. ‘It’s nothing to do with Lucy.’

Banks ignored the lawyer and turned back to Lucy, who seemed disinterested by the discussion. ‘Will you describe the cellar at Alderthorpe for me, Lucy?’