Dead Right (33 page)

Susan could hardly believe what she was hearing, even though it was exactly what she had expected. “So you admit it? Just like that? You used me to spy on my colleagues?”

“Well, seeing as you have the evidence, there’s not a lot else I can say, is there? I can hardly deny it. Yes.
Mea culpa
.”

“I don’t understand, Gavin. How could you do that?”

Gavin shrugged. “I never thought it would come to anything like this,” he said. “It was only little titbits, nothing important. Like I said, Riddle just wanted to be kept informed. But that wasn’t why I asked you out in the first place. That only came later. When he found out I was going out with you. And believe me, I didn’t tell him. He’s got quite a network, has Riddle.” He shrugged. “I didn’t really think it would do any harm.”

“Informed about Eastvale in general or DCI Banks in particular?”

Gavin shifted from foot to foot. “Well, he
did
ask about Banks in particular. He never really approved of Banks, you know. Thought he was a bit of a maverick, if truth be told.”

“I know that,” said Susan. “He never liked him. Right from the start. I remember the Deborah Harrison case, when Banks upset
some of Riddle’s important friends. Riddle was just looking for something to use against him. And you used me to get it for him. That’s what I can’t forgive.”

“Like I said, I didn’t really think I was doing anything—”

“Oh, stuff it, Gavin. I’m not interested in your excuses. You used me to scupper Banks’s career, and that’s all I care about.”

“If that’s how you want to see it.”

“Is there any other way?”

“I take it things are over between us, then?”

Susan could only look at him and shake her head. Then she turned to leave.

“What is it, Susan?” Gavin called after her. “Fancy him yourself, do you? You should listen to the way you talk about him. Like a lovesick teenager. Believe me, it wasn’t very difficult to get you talking about him. The hardest thing was getting you to stop. Even in bed.”

Susan slammed the door behind her and got back in her car. She couldn’t move, couldn’t even turn the key in the ignition. All she could do was sit there, hands gripping the steering-wheel, shaking. She took deep breaths.

And then Susan did something she hardly ever did, something she always hated herself for when it happened. She started to cry. Bloody great convulsive sobs. Because, fuck it, she said to herself, Gavin was right. She had never admitted it, but she had known it for ages. It
was
Banks she cared about; it
was
Banks she fancied. And, dammit, he was a married man, he was her senior officer, and he wouldn’t look at her that way in a month of Sundays. She was just another stupid girl in love with her boss and there was no way she could stay in Eastvale now, not after this.

III

It had long since turned dark when Banks got home. For hours, it seemed, he had driven around the Dales, hardly noticing where he was, or what music kept repeating on the cassette player. His knuckles still hurt, but the shaking inside had stopped. Had he
really done it? Punched Jimmy Riddle? He realized he had, and he also realized that at the moment the anger had burst out of him, it was Sandra he had been thinking of, not the bloody job.

The house was quiet and empty. A different quality of silence and emptiness than he had ever felt there before. First, he had a look around to see if anything was missing. Sandra hadn’t taken very much. Most of her clothes were still in the wardrobe, the scent of her hair still lingered on the pillows, and her photograph of the misty sunset above Hawes still hung over the fireplace in the living-room.

It made him think how only on Sunday, yesterday, he had wandered the Amsterdam museums in the rain, a pilgrim marvelling at Rembrandt’s
The Night Watch
in the Rijksmuseum, unsettled by
Crows in the Wheatfield
in the Van Gogh Museum, and, finally, elated by the bright, whimsical Chagalls in the Stedelijk Museum.

All the while thinking how Sandra would have loved it, and how he would like to treat her to a visit one weekend in spring.

But Sandra was gone.

He noticed the red light blinking on the telephone answering machine. Thinking it might be Sandra, he got up and pressed the replay button. One call was Vic Manson, two were hang-ups, but the next four were from Tracy. On the last one, she said, “Dad, are you there? It’s Sunday now. I’ve been trying to ring you all weekend. I’m worried about you. If you
are
there, please answer. I talked to Mummy and she told me what happened. I’m so sorry. I love you, Daddy. Please give me a ring.”

Banks stood by the phone for a moment, head in his hands, tears burning in his eyes. Then he did what any reasonable man would do in his situation. He cranked Mozart’s
Requiem
up as loud as he could bear it and got rat-arse drunk.

TWELVE

I

When Banks stirred on the sofa at about four o’clock in the morning, Mozart’s
Requiem
was still playing on “repeat.” And a more fitting piece of music he couldn’t imagine. It was playing loudly, too, and he was surprised that none of his neighbours had called the police. Still, he
was
the police. Or used to be.

Wishing he were still unconscious, he groaned, rubbed his stubble, rolled off the sofa and put some coffee on, turning the volume down on the stereo as he went. Then he stumbled upstairs and swallowed a handful of aspirins, washed down with two glasses of water to irrigate his dehydrated cells.

Back downstairs, as the coffee dripped through the filter with frustrating slowness, he surveyed the damage: twelve cigarette ends in the ashtray; no burns on the sofa or carpet; about two fingers of Laphroaig left. If he were going to keep up this rate of drinking he would have to start buying cheaper Scotch. Still, it could have been a lot worse, he concluded, especially as he remembered the bottle had only been about three-quarters full when he started.

When the coffee was ready, he decided to switch from the
Requiem
to the C minor mass, something to bring a little more light and hope into his bleak world, then he tried to collect his thoughts.

He had punched Jimmy Riddle; that was the first memory to came back. And he had skinned knuckles to prove it. Well, that had been a stupid thing to do, he realized now, and it had also probably put the mockers on his career.

Jobless, then. Also wifeless and hung over. At least the hangover would go away. It
could
be worse, couldn’t it? Yes it could, he realized. He could have been diagnosed with a terminal illness. He
racked his brains to see if that had, in fact, happened, but could find no memory of it. It would probably happen today the way his lungs felt after all those cigarettes.

So what was he going to do? Become a private eye? Enter a monastery? Get a job with some security outfit? Or should he just carry on and solve the Jason Fox case on his own to show up the police, run rings around Jimmy Riddle, just like Sherlock Holmes did around Inspector Lestrade? Alan Banks, Consulting Detective. Had a nice ring to it.

He poured himself a cup of black coffee and flopped back on the sofa. Looking at the misty Hawes sunset over the fireplace, for some reason he remembered Sandra telling him on Thursday that there
might have been
somebody else, but there wasn’t. Remembered the faraway look in her eyes when she said it.

And that made him angry. He pictured Sandra with some strapping, bearded young artist, standing in the wind on the moors doing a Cathy and Heathcliff, looking lovingly into each other’s eyes and exercising restraint. “No, my darling, we
mustn’t
. There’s too much at stake. Think of the children.” Grand passion collides with family values and moral responsibility. It was a scene from a cheap romance. But all the same, it made Banks clench his jaw. What
might
have been. And, come to think of it, he only had her word for it that she hadn’t left him to run off with someone else, someone she would only take up with publicly after a “decent” interval.

Well, two could play at that game. Banks had had his chances at infidelity in the past, too, but he hadn’t taken them. He hadn’t romanticized them, either. He thought especially of Jenny Fuller. There had been a time, some years ago, when something might have blossomed between them. Was it too late now? Probably. Jenny seemed to spend most of her time teaching in America these days, and she had a steady boyfriend over there. Then there was Pamela Jeffreys, the one Riddle thought was his mistress. Banks hadn’t slept with Pamela, either, but it was an appealing thought.

So many choices. So many possibilities. Then why did he feel so bloody miserable and empty? Because, he concluded, none of them were what he wanted. What he wanted, when it came right
down to it, was his job back, Sandra back and his hangover gone. Perhaps if he played a country-and-western song backwards … ? He couldn’t even do that, hating country-and-western the way he did. Still, taking stock of himself, he realized that, depressed as he was, he felt calmer now than when he was stuck at the airport yesterday contemplating his return home. Thumping Jimmy Riddle probably had something to do with that.

After the first cup of coffee, he realized he was hungry. He hadn’t eaten anything since that snack on the plane, a million years ago now. Searching through the remnants in the fridge, he managed to throw together three rashers of streaky bacon and two eggs only a week past their sell-by date. That would have to do. The one remaining slice of bread was a little stale, but it hadn’t turned green yet, and it would fry up nicely in the bacon fat. Cholesterol special. So what?

As he fried his breakfast, Banks remembered Tracy’s messages. He would have to ring her today and put her mind at rest. Should he explain to her about losing his job, too? Best not, yet, he decided. It was bad enough his daughter should suddenly find herself the child of a broken marriage the minute she flew the coop, let alone the child of a disgraced copper. There would be time enough for that later. He would have to phone Brian in Portsmouth, too, and his own parents. They would all be upset.

Suddenly, the day ahead seemed full of things to do. None of them pleasant. The only bright spot was that he wouldn’t have to worry about money for a while; the suspension was
with
pay. And Jimmy Riddle couldn’t do a thing about that until
after
a disciplinary hearing.

He cursed as he broke an egg while lifting it onto the plate and yolk ran all over the counter. It would have to do. No more left. Carefully, he used the spatula to lift the one unbroken egg onto the fried bread, then patted the bacon with some kitchen roll to remove the excess grease and tucked in. When he’d finished, he poured another cup of coffee and lit a cigarette.

It was still just past five in the morning, and he hadn’t a clue what to do to keep himself occupied until it was a decent time to start phoning people. Sleep was out of the question now, and he
knew he couldn’t possibly concentrate on reading a book or listening to music. He needed something completely mindless, something to keep his thoughts off his problems for a few hours. Like television.

But there was nothing on television at that time apart from something educational on BBC2 and a studio discussion on ITV, so he started sorting through the video collection, odds and sods he’d picked up over the years. Finally, he found one that would do. It was still in its cellophane wrapper, so someone must have bought him it as a present and he’d forgotten he had it.

Bridge on the River Kwai
. Perfect. He remembered his dad taking him to see a revival of it at the Gaumont when he was about twelve. It would take him back to those days, when life was simple, and right at the moment he would have given anything on earth to be that innocent twelve-year-old again, grabbing his father’s hand when Jack Hawkins burned leeches off with a cigarette, thrilling at the way all the birds flew up and the pool turned red with blood when they ambushed the Japanese patrol, and biting his nails to the quick as Alec Guinness made his final, dying, staggering way to the dynamite plunger. Yes, The
Bridge on the River Kwai
might just keep the dark hounds of depression at bay for another couple of hours, until daylight came.

II

Susan didn’t know where she was going when she left the station around eleven o’clock that morning, only that she had to get out of the office for a while. Let Riddle suspend her, too, if he found out.

The next thing she knew she found herself on Castle Walk looking out over the formal gardens and the river, all framed in the branches of the beeches. It was the same view she’d had from the bistro with Gavin on Saturday night. Just thinking about that night made her burn with shame and rage.

Across the Swain, a belt of trees called The Green partially obscured the East Side Estate, but she could still make out a few of the light red brick terraces and maisonettes, and the three
twelve-storey blocks of flats—a crime wave in themselves— poked their ugly heads way above the trees. Beyond the estate and the railway tracks were the chocolate factory and a few old warehouses, corrugated metal roofs glinting in the sun. A local diesel rattled by and blew its horn.

She would have to leave Eastvale; there was no doubt about that. Now that she had admitted her feelings to herself, she could no longer work with Banks. She couldn’t trust herself not to act like a love-struck schoolgirl; nor could she go running off in tears every time she saw him, either. And she
would
have to see him. He might be suspended for the moment, but a disciplinary hearing would probably reinstate him, she thought.

It also hadn’t taken her long to work out that, after what she had witnessed yesterday, Jimmy Riddle would want her as far away from North Yorkshire as possible. At least that could be easily accomplished without raising any eyebrows.

Although it
did
happen on occasion, it was rare for a DC to be promoted straight to the rank of detective sergeant within the same station. The most likely scenario was a transfer and at least a year back in uniform. This was supposed to be a safeguard against corruption: senior officers offering promotion in exchange for falsified evidence.