Innocent Graves (46 page)
“Didn’t the SOCOs search the graveyard the day after Deborah’s murder?”
“They did a ground search. We weren’t looking for a murder weapon, just Deborah’s knickers and anything the killer might have dropped in the graveyard. All we found were a few empty fag packets and some butts. Most of those were down to Jela
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, who we knew had worked in the graveyard anyway. We put the rest down to St Mary’s girls sneaking out for a smoke. Besides, it’s only in books that murderers stand around smoking in the fog while they wait for their victims. Especially now everyone knows we’ve a good chance of getting DNA from saliva.”
“What about the Inchcliffe Mausoleum? Deborah could have gained access to that, couldn’t she?”
“Yes. But we searched that, too, after we found the empty bottles. At least—”
The phone rang. Banks grabbed the receiver.
“Alan, it’s Ken Blackstone. Sorry it took so long.”
“Any luck?”
“We’ve got him.”
“Great. Did he give you any trouble?”
“He picked up a bruise or two in the struggle. Turns out he’d just left Paveli
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c’s house when our lads arrived. They followed him across the waste ground. He saw them coming and made a bolt for it, right across York Road and down into Richmond Hill. When they finally caught up with him he didn’t have the diary.”
Banks’s spirits dropped. “Didn’t have it? But, Ken—”
“Hold your horses, mate. Seems he dumped it when he realized he was being chased. Didn’t want to be caught with any incriminating evidence on him. Anyway, our lads went back over the route he’d taken and we found it in a rubbish bin on York Road.”
Banks breathed a sigh of relief.
“What do you want us to do with him?” Blackstone asked. “It’s midnight now. It’ll be going on for two in the morning by the time we get him to Eastvale.”
“You can sit on him overnight,” Banks said. “Nobody in this case is going anywhere in a hurry. Have him brought up in the morning. But, Ken—”
“Yes, it is Deborah Harrison’s diary.”
“Have you read it?”
“Enough.”
“And?”
“If it means what I think it does, Alan, it’s dynamite.”
“Tell me about it.”
And Blackstone told him.
TWENTY
I
At ten o’clock the next morning, with Jela
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cooling his heels in a cell downstairs, Banks sat at his desk, coffee in hand, lit a cigarette and opened Deborah Harrison’s diary. Ken Blackstone had given him the gist of it over the phone the previous evening—and he had not slept well in consequence—but he wanted to read it for himself before making his next move.
Like the inside of the satchel flap, it was inscribed with her name and address in gradually broadening circles, from “Deborah Catherine Harrison” to “The Universe.”
First he checked the section for names, addresses and telephone numbers, but found nothing out of the ordinary, only family and school friends. Then he started to flip the pages.
He soon found that many of her entries were factual, with little attempt at analysis or poetic description. Some days she had left completely blank. And it wasn’t until summer, when she had supposedly “lost” it, that the diary got really interesting:
5 August Yawn.
This must be the most boring summer there has ever been in my entire existence. Went shopping today in the Swainsdale Centre, just for something to do. What a grim place. Absolutely no decent shoes there at all and full of local yokels and horrible scruffy women dragging around even more horrible dirty children. I must work hard on mummy and persuade her to take me shopping to Paris again soon or I swear
I shall just die from the boredom of this terrible provincial town. In the shopping centre, I met that common little tart Tiffy Huxtable from dressage. She was with some friends and asked if I’d like to hang around with them. They didn’t look very interesting. They were all just sitting around the fountain looking scruffy and stupid, but there was one fit lad there so I said I might drop by one day. Life is so (yawn) boring that I really might do. Oh, how I do so need an adventure.
There were no entries for the next few days, then came this:
9 August
Tiffy’s crowd are a bunch of silly, common bores, just as I thought. All they can talk about is television and football and sex and pop music. I mean, really, darling, who gives a damn? I’m sure not one of them has read a book in years. Quite frankly, I’d rather stay at home and watch videos. Tracy Banks seems quite intelligent, but it turns out that she’s a policeman’s daughter, of all things. One boy looks a bit like that really cool actor from “Neighbours” and wears a great leather jacket. He really does have very nice eyes, too, with long lashes.
After that, things started to move quickly:
12 August
John (Oh, such disappointment! What a terribly common, dull and ordinary name, like “Tracy”!) stole a car tonight and took me for a joyride.
Me!!
Little miss goody-two-shoes. It was brill! If Daddy knew about it he would have apoplexy. It wasn’t much of a car, just a poky little Astra, but he drove it really fast out past Helmthorpe and parked in a field. It was so exciting even though I was a bit frightened we’d get caught by the police. When we parked he was like an octopus! I told him I’m not the kind of girl who does it the first time you go out, even if he did steal a car for me. Lads! I ask you. He asked me what he could
do the first time, and I told him we could just kiss. I really didn’t mind when he put his tongue in my mouth but I wouldn’t let him touch my breasts. I didn’t tell him I had never done it before. Though I came close with Pierre at Montclair last year, and if he hadn’t been too much in a hurry and had that little accident first we might have done it.
Then, three days later, she wrote:
15 August
Tonight, in another “borrowed” car, as John calls them, we actually did it for the first time! I made him take a van this time, because it’s cramped in a little Astra, and we went in the back. I wasn’t going to go all the way at first but things just got out of control. It didn’t hurt, like they say it does. I don’t know if I like it or not. I did feel excited and sinful and wicked but I don’t think I had an orgasm. I don’t really know, because I don’t know what they feel like, but the earth didn’t move or anything like that, and I didn’t hear bells ringing, just a funny feeling between my legs and I felt a bit sore after. I wonder if I will ever have multiple orgasms? Charlene Gregory at school told me she can have orgasms just from the vibrations of the engine when she’s on a bus, but
I don’t believe her. And Kirsty McCracken says she can get them from rubbing against her bicycle saddle while she’s riding. Maybe that’s true. I sometimes feel a bit funny when I’m horse-riding. Anyway, when he finished, it was really disgusting the way he just tied a knot in the condom and threw it out of the window into the field, and then he didn’t even seem to want to talk to me all the way back. Is this what happens when you give in to lads and let them have what they want? That’s what Mummy would say, even though she is French and they’re supposed to be so sexy and all.
17 August
John came to the house today. Mummy was out and he wanted us to go and do it upstairs but I was too frightened we’d get caught. Anyway, we barbecued some hot dogs on the back patio and I took a bottle of Father’s special wine from the cellar and we drank that. Of course, Mother came home! She was very nice about it, really, but I could tell she didn’t like John. Uncle Michael was there, too, and I could tell he really hated John on sight. John says nobody ever gives him a chance.
20 August
They all went to Leeds today—Mummy and Daddy and Uncle Michael—to some naff cocktail party or other, so I told John he could come over to the house again. This time I knew they’d be gone a long time so we did it in my bed! How sinful! How wickedly, deliciously sinful! I don’t know if I had an orgasm or not, but I certainly tingled a bit, and I didn’t feel at all sore. John wants me to do it without a condom, but I told him not to be stupid. I wouldn’t even think of it. I don’t want to get pregnant with his baby or get some sexual disease. That hurt him, that I thought he would have some disease to pass on to me. He can be so childish at times. Childish and boring.
But it wasn’t until a later entry that Banks found out for himself what Ken Blackstone meant when he said the diary might be “dynamite.”
21 August
I can hardly believe it, Uncle Michael is in love with me! He says he has loved me since I was twelve, and has even spied on me getting undressed at Montclair. He says I look like Botticelli’s Venus! Which is stretching it a bit, if you ask me. I remember seeing it in the Uffizi when Mummy and I went to Florence last year, and I don’t look a bit like her. My hair’s not as long, for a start, and it’s a different colour. I never thought Uncle Michael knew literature and art at all. Some of what he wrote sounds very poetic. And it’s all about me!! I don’t know what I shall do. For the moment, it will be my little secret. He’s not really my uncle of course, just my dad’s friend, so I suppose it is all right for him
to be in love with me, it’s not incest. It feels funny, though, because I’ve known him forever. Oops, I forgot to say how I know. Last night John and me stole Uncle Michael’s car because he was so beastly to him last week at the barbecue (now I know why: Uncle Michael must have been jealous!!). Well, Uncle Michael had left his computer in the back seat. We took it to John’s house (and thank the lord his horrible smelly mother was out—she really gives me the creeps)—and I couldn’t get into all his technical stuff but it only took me about fifteen minutes to
get the password to his word-processing directories: it’s MONTCLAIR, of course. After that, it was easy. Uncle Michael puts everything on his computer, even his shopping-lists! When I’d finished, I reformatted his hard drive. That’ll show him!
Banks put the diary aside and walked to the window. Mid-morning on a hot and humid June day, cobbled market square already full of cars and coaches. He wondered if this summer was going to be as
hot as the last one. He hoped not. Naturally, there was no air-conditioning in Eastvale Divisional HQ, or in the whole of Eastvale, as far as he knew. You just had to make do with open windows and fans—not a lot of use when there’s no breeze and the air is hot.
The diary wasn’t evidence, of course. Deborah Harrison had read some of Michael Clayton’s private files and discovered that he was sexually infatuated with her; it didn’t mean that he had killed her. But as Banks sat down again and read on, it became increasingly clear that Clayton, in all likelihood,
had
killed Deborah.
The telephone rang. Banks picked it up and Sergeant Rowe told him there was a Detective Sergeant Leaside calling from Swiss Cottage.
Banks frowned; he didn’t recognize the name. “Better put him on.”
Leaside came on. “It’s about a woman called Michelle Chappel,” he said. “I understand from the PNC that she was part of a case you’ve been involved in recently up there?”
Banks gripped the receiver tightly. “Yes. Why? What’s happened?”
“She’s been assaulted, sir. Quite badly. Lacerations and bruises, attempted strangulation.”
“Rape?”
“No, sir. I was wondering … We got a description of the suspect from a neighbour …” He read the description.
“Yes,” Banks said when he’d finished. “Dammit, yes. That sounds like Owen Pierce. All right, thanks Sergeant. We’ll keep an eye open for him.”
II
Ive Jela
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was surly after his night in the cells. Banks had him brought up to an interview room and left him alone there for almost an hour before he and Superintendent Gristhorpe went in to ask their questions. They didn’t turn the tape recorder on.
“Well, Ive,” said Banks, “you’re in a lot of trouble now, you know that?”
“What trouble? I do nothing.”
“Where did you get that diary?”
“What diary? I never see that before. You policeman put it on me.”
Banks sighed and rubbed his forehead. He could see it was going to be one of those days. “Ive,” he said patiently, “both Mile Paveli
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and Vjeko Batorac have seen you with the diary. You asked them to read it for you. You even hit Vjeko when he tried to hang onto it.”
“I remember nothing of this. I do nothing wrong. Vjeko and I, we quarrel. Is not big deal.”
“Come on, lad,” said Gristhorpe, “help us out here.”
“I know nothing.”
Gristhorpe gestured for Banks to follow him out of the room. He did so, and they stood silently in the corridor for a few minutes before going back inside. It seemed to work; Jela
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was certainly more nervous than he had been before.
“Where you go?” he asked. “What you do?”
“Listen to me, Ive,” said Banks. “I’m only going to say this once, and I’ll say it slowly so that you understand every word. If it hadn’t been for you, an innocent man might not have spent over six months in jail, suffered the indignity of a trial and incurred the wrath of the populace. In other words, you put Owen Pierce through hell, and even though he’s free now, a lot of people still think he really killed the girls.”
Jela
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shrugged. “Maybe he did. Maybe court was wrong.”
“But more important even than Owen Pierce’s suffering is Ellen Gilchrist’s life. If it hadn’t been for you, Ive Jela
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, that girl might not have had to die.”
“I tell you before. In my country, many people die. Nobody ca—”
Banks slammed his fist on the flimsy table. “Shut up! I don’t want to hear any more of your whining self-justification and self-pity, you snivelling little turd. Do you understand me?”
