The Summer That Never Was (27 page)

“In that case,” said Banks, “I’m sure you won’t mind if our forensic experts have a close look at your house and your car. We’d also like to take a DNA sample, just for comparison.”

Wells stuck his chin out. “What if I
do
mind?”

“We’ll keep you here until we get a search warrant. Remember, Norman, I wouldn’t like to say judges are swayed by such things, but Luke Armitage came from a wealthy and well-respected family, while you’re a disgraced schoolteacher eking out a living in a dingy used-book shop. And that shop was the last place we know Luke visited before he disappeared.”

Wells hung his head. “Fine,” he said. “Go ahead. Do what you will. I don’t care any more.”

After a sleepless night on Saturday, Michelle had spent Sunday getting over the shock of what had happened in her flat and trying to rein in her emotional response in favour of more analytical thought.

She hadn’t got very far.

That someone had gained entry and arranged things in order to frighten her was obvious enough. Why was another matter entirely. That the interloper knew about Melissa surprised her, though she supposed people could find out anything about her if they really wanted. But given that he knew, it would have been evident when he searched her bedside drawers that the little dress was Melissa’s, and that its desecration would cause her a great deal of anguish. In other words, it had been a cold, calculated assault.

The flats were supposed to be secure, but Michelle had been a copper long enough to know that a talented burglar could get around almost anything. Though it went against every grain of Michelle’s nature not to report the break-in to the police, in the end she decided against it. Mostly, this was because Graham Marshall’s name had been written in her own red lipstick on the dressing-table mirror. The intrusion was meant to frighten her off the case, and the only people who knew she was working on it, apart from the Marshalls themselves, were other police officers, or people connected with them, like Dr. Cooper. True, Michelle’s name had been in the papers once or twice when the bones had first been found, so technically everyone in the entire country could know she was on the case, but she felt the answers lay a lot closer to home.

The question was, “Was she going to be frightened off the case?” The answer was, “No.”

At least there hadn’t been much cleaning up to do. Michelle had, however, dumped the entire contents of her bathroom cabinet and would have to contact her doctor for new prescriptions. She had also dumped the contents of the fridge, which hadn’t been a big job at all. More important, she had found a locksmith in the Yellow Pages and arranged to have a chain and an extra deadbolt lock put on her door.

As a result of her weekend experience, Michelle felt drained and edgy on Monday morning and found herself
looking at everyone in Divisional Headquarters differently, as if they knew something she didn’t, as if they were pointing at her and talking about her. It was a frightening feeling, and every time she caught someone’s eye she looked away. Creeping paranoia, she told herself, and tried to shake it off.

First, she had a brief meeting with DC Collins, who told her he was getting nowhere checking the old perv reports. Most of the people the police had interviewed at the time were either dead or in jail, and those who weren’t had nothing new to add. She phoned Dr. Cooper, who still hadn’t located her knife expert, Hilary Wendell, yet, then she went down to the archives to check out the old notebooks and action allocations.

These days, since the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, there were very strict rules regarding police notebooks. You couldn’t leave blank pages, for example. Each page was numbered, and if you missed one by mistake you had to draw a line through it and write “omitted in error.” Entries had to be preceded by date and time, underlined, and at the end of each day the officer had to draw a continuous line below the final entry. Most of this was to prevent officers from “verballing” suspects–attributing to them words they hadn’t used, confessions they hadn’t made–and to avoid any sort of revisions after the fact. Notes were made on the spot, often quickly, and accuracy was important because the notebooks might need to be used in court.

An officer’s notebooks could be invaluable when trying to reconstruct the pattern of an investigation, as could the action allocations, records made of all the instructions issued to investigating officers by the senior investigating officer. For example, if DC Higginbottom was asked to go and interview Joe Smith’s neighbour, that order, or “action,” would be recorded in the actions allocation book, and his record of the interview would be in his notebook. By looking at the actions, you could determine
which areas of enquiry had been pursued and which had not, and by reading the notebooks, you could unearth impressions that might not have made it into final statements and formal reports.

Completed notebooks were first handed to a detective inspector, who would look them over and, if everything was acceptable, send them to the records clerk for filing. That meant they piled up over the years. Whoever said we were heading for a paperless world, Michelle thought, as she walked along the rows of shelving stacked to the ceiling with boxes, obviously wasn’t a copper.

Mrs. Metcalfe showed her where the notebooks were filed, and Michelle went first, by instinct, to Ben Shaw’s. But no matter how many times she flipped through the boxes, checked and rechecked the dates, in the end she had to admit that if there had been notebooks covering the period of major activity in the Graham Marshall case, from the day of his disappearance, 22nd August, 1965, over the next month or two, then they had vanished.

Michelle found it difficult to decipher Shaw’s handwriting in the notebooks she did find, but she could just about make out that his last entry was on 15th August, 1965, when he had been questioning a witness to a post-office robbery, and the next one was a new notebook started on 6th October of the same year.

Michelle asked for Mrs. Metcalfe’s help, but after half an hour even the poor records clerk had to admit defeat. “I can’t imagine where they’ve got to, love,” she said. “Except they might have got misfiled by my predecessor, or lost in one of the moves.”

“Could someone have taken them?” Michelle asked.

“I don’t see who. Or why. I mean, it’s only people like you who come down here. Other police.”

Exactly what Michelle had been thinking. She could have taken out anything she wanted during her visits, and Mrs. Metcalfe would have been none the wiser. Which meant that anyone else could, too. Someone had gained
entry to her flat and tried to scare her off the case, and now she found that nearly two months’ worth, a crucial two months’ worth, of notebooks had somehow disappeared. Coincidence? Michelle didn’t think so.

Half an hour later, when they had run into the same problem with the action allocation book for the Graham Marshall case, Michelle knew in her bones that the actions and the notebooks were gone forever, destroyed, most likely. But why? And by whom? The discovery didn’t help her paranoia one bit. She was beginning to feel way out of her depth. What the hell should she do now?

After the interview, Banks felt the urge to get out of the station, away from the acrid stink of Norman Wells’s sweat, so he decided to head out Lyndgarth way and talk to Luke Armitage’s music teacher, Alastair Ford, while Annie continued to supervise the search for Luke’s mystery woman.

In Banks’s experience, music teachers were an odd lot indeed, partly, no doubt, because of the frustration of trying to instill the beauties of Beethoven and Bach into minds addled with Radiohead and Mercury Rev. Not that Banks had anything against pop music. In his day, the class had kept pestering their Music teacher, Mr. Watson, to play the Beatles. He relented once, but looked glum the whole time. His feet didn’t tap, and his heart wasn’t in it. When he played Dvorák’s
New World
symphony or Tchaikovsky’s
Pathètique Symphony
, however, it was another matter. He closed his eyes, swayed and conducted, hummed along as the main themes swelled. All the time the kids in the class were laughing at him and reading comics under their desks, but he was oblivious, in a world of his own. One day Mr. Watson failed to turn up for class. Rumour had it that he’d suffered a nervous breakdown and was “resting” in a sanitarium. He never returned to teaching, as far as Banks knew.

Yesterday’s rain had rinsed the landscape clean and brought out the bright greens of the lower daleside, dotted with purple clover, yellow buttercups and celandines. The limestone scar of Fremlington Edge glowed in the sunlight, and below it the village of Lyndgarth, with its small church and lopsided village green, like a handkerchief flapping in the wind, seemed asleep. Banks consulted his map, found the minor road he was looking for and turned right.

Ford’s cottage was about as isolated as Banks’s own, and when he parked behind the dark blue Honda, he understood why. It wasn’t the
New World
symphony but the beautiful “Recordare” for soprano and mezzo-soprano from Verdi’s
Requiem
blasting out of the open windows at full volume. If Banks hadn’t been playing the Stones’
Aftermath
CD in the car, he would have heard it a mile away.

It took a bit of hammering at the door, but eventually the music quietened down and it was answered by the man Banks recognized from the Aeolian Quartet concert. Alastair Ford had a five o’clock shadow, a long, hooked nose and a bright gleam in his eyes. If he had any, his hair would probably have been sticking out in all directions, but he was quite bald. What was it about Luke Armitage? Banks wondered. This was the second person he’d met that day who had spent time with the boy and looked mad as a hatter. Maybe Luke attracted weirdos. Maybe it was because he was more than a little weird himself. However, Banks determined to keep an open mind. Whether Alastair Ford’s eccentricity had a dangerous edge remained to be seen.

“I’m as fond of Verdi as the next man,” said Banks, showing his warrant card, “but don’t you think it’s a bit too loud?”

“Oh, don’t tell me old farmer Jones has complained about the music again. He says it curdles his cows’ milk. Philistine!”

“I’m not here about the noise, Mr. Ford. Might I come in and have a word?”

“Now I’m curious,” said Ford, leading the way inside. His house was clean but lived-in, with little piles of sheet music here and there, a violin resting on a low table and the massive stereo system dominating the living room. “A policeman who knows his Verdi.”

“I’m no expert,” Banks said, “but I’ve recently bought a new recording, so I’ve listened to it a few times lately.”

“Ah, yes. Renée Fleming and the Kirov. Very nice, but I must admit I’m still rather attached to the von Otter and Gardiner. Anyway, I can’t imagine you’ve come here to discuss old Joe Green with me. What can I do for you?” Ford was birdlike in many ways, especially in his sudden, jerky movements, but when he sat down in the overstuffed armchair he fell still, fingers linked in his lap. He wasn’t relaxed, though. Banks could sense the man’s tension and unease, and he wondered what its cause was. Maybe he just didn’t like being questioned by the police.

“It’s about Luke Armitage,” said Banks. “I understand you knew him?”

“Ah, poor Luke. A remarkably talented boy. Such a great loss.”

“When did you last see him?”

“Around the end of term.”

“Are you sure you haven’t seen him since?”

“I’ve barely left the cottage since then, except to drive into Lyndgarth for groceries. Alone with my music after a term of teaching those philistines. What bliss!”

“I gather Luke Armitage wasn’t a philistine, though?”

“Far from it.”

“You were giving him violin lessons, am I right?”

“Yes.”

“Here or at school?”

“At school. Tuesday evenings. We have a reasonably well-equipped music room there. Mind you, we ought to
be grateful for anything these days. They’ll spend a fortune on sports equipment, but when it comes to music…”

“Did Luke ever talk to you about anything that was on his mind?”

“He didn’t talk a lot. Mostly he concentrated on his playing. He had remarkable powers of concentration, unlike so many of today’s youth. He wasn’t much of a one for small talk. We did chat about music, argued once or twice about pop music, which I gathered he was rather fond of.”

“Never about anything else?”

“Like what?”

“Anything that might have been bothering him, worrying him, anyone he might have been afraid of. That sort of thing.”

“I’m afraid not. Luke was a very private person, and I’m not the prying kind. Truth be told, I’m not very good at helping people with their emotional problems.” He ran his hand over his smooth head and smiled. “That’s why I prefer to live alone.”

“Not married?”

“Was. Many moons ago.”

“What happened.”

“Search me. What usually happens?”

Banks thought of Sandra.
What usually happens
? “So you just taught him the violin, that’s all?”

“Mainly, yes. I mean, he was in my class, too, at school. But I wouldn’t say I
knew
him or that we were friends or anything like that. I respected his talent, even if he did dabble in pop music, but that’s as far as it went.”

“Did he ever mention his parents?”

“Not to me.”

“What about his biological father? Neil Byrd?”

“Never heard of him.”

Banks looked around the room. “It’s a very isolated cottage you have here, Mr. Ford.”

“Is it? Yes, I suppose it is.”

“Isolation suits you?”

“It must do, mustn’t it?” Ford’s foot started tapping on the floor, his knee jerking, and not to the rhythm of the now barely audible
Requiem
.

“Do you ever have company?”

“Rarely. I play in a string quartet, and sometimes the other members come out here to rehearse. Other than that, I’m rather given to solitary pursuits. Look, I–”

“No girlfriends?”

“I told you, I’m not good at relationships.”

“Boyfriends?”

Ford raised an eyebrow. “I’m not good at relationships.”