Watching the Dark (Inspector Banks Mystery) (22 page)

Anyway, there was no point in speculating further. Whatever his motive, and whoever he was, Quinn’s killer had been in the woods at St Peter’s four days ago. They had a few solid leads to him now – the forensics on the tyre tracks and fibres, Quinn’s involvement in the Rachel Hewitt case, and now the blown-up part of one of the blackmail photos showing an A. Le Coq beer mat. She had Haig and Lombard checking if it was sold in other Baltic countries, too, or anywhere else in such quantities as to justify handing out free beer mats to bars – she wasn’t going to make the mistake of assuming too much at this point – but given that Rachel Hewitt had disappeared in Tallinn, and that Quinn had spent a week there working on the case there with the locals, she felt pretty certain about it.

There was very little about the Rachel Hewitt case in DC Gerry Masterston’s research so far, or in Quinn’s old files, which had arrived in the early afternoon. It was hardly surprising, really, Annie thought, as he had been only marginally connected with it. The real stuff would be in Tallinn. In Estonian. Whether it would be possible to get hold of those files if she needed to, she had no idea. In the meantime, she could at least start digging a bit into the background of what happened on that night six years ago.

Rachel Hewitt was to be maid of honour to her best friend Pauline Boyars at her wedding at St Paul’s Church in Drighlington on 5 August 2006. Before that, from 21 to 24 July they were going to Tallinn with four other close female friends for a hen weekend. The girls, all about nineteen years of age, were excited about the trip. They booked their cheap EasyJet flight early, and made sure they all got rooms at the Meriton Old Town Hotel, which someone told them was very comfortable and very close to lots of bars and clubs. To save money, the girls asked for twin beds and doubled up; Rachel shared with Pauline.

On the Friday they arrived, the girls met up in the hotel bar for a drink at six o’clock, then walked into town to find somewhere to eat. It was a hot evening, but they were early enough to get a table outside and enjoy some ‘authentic’ Estonian cuisine of pork in beer, and elk sausage. The idea was to have a relatively civilised and sedate Friday night out, which is exactly what they did, returning to the hotel around 11 p.m.

Saturday was for sightseeing and shopping, then came Saturday night, the big night itself, party time. They all got dolled up in their micro-skirts, spangly tops and fishnets, put on a bit of war paint and headed for the bars and clubs. At least they weren’t wearing bunny ears and tails, or little whiskers painted on their cheeks, as far as Annie could gather from the reports. They started with a few drinks in the hotel bar, then hit the town. After stopping at a few other bars, they ate steak and frites and drank wine outside at a restaurant, and after that things started to get a bit hazy.

Annie realised that she would have to go through the individual statements made by each of the girls before she could build up a clear picture of the order of events, but according to the newspaper and Internet reports, the girls went on to a couple of dance clubs, getting rowdier as the evening wore on. They were seen talking and dancing with various groups of boys over the course of the evening. Pauline was sick in the street, but soon recovered enough to go on with her friends to another bar on the main square.

Naturally, the boys flocked around them, their predatory instincts sensing the lack of inhibitions that comes with drunkenness, expecting easy pickings. According to all the accounts, though, there was no trouble. At least all the girls agreed on that. They moved on to yet another bar with a group of German youngsters they had befriended earlier at a nightclub, and it was maybe twenty minutes or so after that when Pauline began to wonder where Rachel had got to.

They checked all the rooms and toilets of the bar they had just arrived at, but she was nowhere to be seen. One of the others thought she might have been in the toilet when they left the previous bar, and may have missed their leaving, but she was equally sure that they’d told her where they were going. Pauline argued that they can’t have done, as they didn’t decide where they were going until they got outside, and it was the Germans’ idea, anyway.

Somehow, Rachel had become detached from her group.

Pauline asked one of the German boys to accompany her back to the previous bar, but in the winding streets of the Old Town they couldn’t remember exactly where it was, so they eventually gave up. They tried Rachel’s mobile, but all they got was her answering service. The police discovered later that Rachel had forgotten her mobile, left it in her hotel room.

At this point, Pauline said she assumed that Rachel would find her way back to the hotel, or get a taxi to take her there. They didn’t know the city well, having been there only a day, but although it was winding and confusing, the Old Town wasn’t very big, and Pauline thought that anyone wandering around for long enough was bound to return to the place they started from eventually. Besides, Rachel marched to the beat of her own drummer, and whatever she was up to, she would come back when she was ready.

Even so, Rachel’s defection put a bit of a damper on the night, so they all returned to the hotel, disappointing the German boys. They expected to find Rachel slumped in the bar, or passed out in her room, but when Pauline went back to her room to lie down, she wasn’t there. She said the room started spinning, and she was sick again. Then she fell asleep, or passed out, and when she awoke it was daylight. There was still no sign of Rachel. She felt awful; her head ached; her stomach churned, but despite the ravages of the hangover, concern for her friend gnawed away at her. It wasn’t like her to stay away
all
night. Pauline started to think that Rachel must have got lost somewhere and maybe ended up at another hotel, or maybe got caught up in a group and gone to a party. At worst, she worried that her friend had hurt herself, got hit by a car or something, and was in hospital. She went down to the hotel reception and asked to speak to the manager. The young assistant manager who came out to talk to her was concerned enough to bring in the police, and thus the whole nightmare began. Of course, the girls had drunk so much and visited so many bars and clubs that it took the police close to two days to get any sense of where they had been and what they had done, and by then, anyone who might have been there on the night in question was long gone.

Rachel Hewitt was never seen again, and no clues to her whereabouts were ever discovered.

Annie put aside the clippings and rested her head in her hands. Christ, she thought, what do you do? As a policewoman, she had seen the worst in human nature, and she thought that if something like that had happened to a friend of hers, she would have been down to the cop shop like a shot screaming for some action. But would she?

There had been no real reason to assume that anything bad had happened to Rachel. She sounded like a bit of a character to start with, up for adventure. Annie remembered when her best mate from school, Ellen Innes, had disappeared on a night out in Newquay. It wasn’t exactly a foreign country or anything, but there were some wild pubs, and things could get pretty crazy there on a Friday and Saturday night. Annie and her other two friends searched, but they couldn’t find Ellen in any of their usual haunts, so they went home, assuming she would come back when she was ready. Annie went to bed without calling anyone.

In the morning, after a few frantic phone calls between the girls’ parents, it transpired that Ellen had simply felt tired and decided to go to sleep on a quiet bench by the harbour. She was none the worse for wear, except for a bad hangover and a stiff back. Her parents gave her a strict curfew, and that was the end of the matter. But Annie thought of the things that could have happened, things that probably
had
happened to Rachel Hewitt. Of course, she realised that she had the benefit of hindsight and the experiences of twenty years as a police officer.

She didn’t blame Rachel’s friends. Anyone in their position, and their state of mind, would have done the same as they did. And the odds were that if Pauline had insisted on calling the police when she got back to the hotel that night, they would hardly have combed the city for the missing girl. At most, they might have done a sweep of some of the most popular bars, checked the hospitals for accident victims and scoured a few patches of open ground in case she’d nodded off somewhere, but they were hardly going to pull out all the stops for a nineteen-year-old foreign tourist missing a couple of hours at most. They would most likely have assumed that she went off with some boy and was happily screwing her brains out somewhere. In the morning she would be back. Police thinking could be very basic, Annie knew. Especially male police thinking.

Whether she was pregnant when she came back, had been infected with some STD or HIV, or whether she had tried to say no but had been too drunk to resist, was not their problem. Annie understood that much. The police couldn’t be the moral touchstones or guardians of the world, and to be honest, nobody would want or expect them to be. It was pointless trying to assign blame, except to whoever it was who had taken and hurt Rachel, for Annie was sure that was what must have happened. As sure as she was that Rachel Hewitt was dead. She could only hope it had been quick and painless. Annie sighed. Time to check and see if there was any progress on the Estonian mobile number called from Ingleby.

She turned to see Joanna Passero standing behind her, all blonde hair and elegant curves. Why did her appearance always make Annie feel so dowdy and tomboyish?

‘Is everything all right?’ Joanna asked.

‘Just fine and dandy.’

‘Are you in pain? Ca—’

‘I’m fine. Is there something you want to tell me?’

Joanna seemed taken aback. Annie was aware of the harshness of her tone, and blamed it mostly on the dark place her mind had been wandering in when she noticed her standing there. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I was just . . . the Rachel Hewitt case.’

Joanna glanced at the computer screen, which showed a photograph of a smiling Rachel under the heading ‘West Yorkshire Girl Disappears in Estonian Hen Weekend Tragedy’.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Did you once know someone who disappeared like that?’

‘We’ve all worked on cases,’ said Annie. ‘It’s nothing personal. Just empathy. Anyway, I’m sorry I was rude just now. Did you have something to tell me?’

Joanna pulled up a chair and sat down. ‘I’ve just got back from the post-mortem with DS Jackman,’ she said. ‘It was pretty straightforward, really. The man was definitely drowned, and Dr Glendenning is pretty certain he was drowned in the trough of water at the scene. They have to do various tests on the samples to be absolutely certain, of course.’

‘
Was
drowned, rather than just drowned?’

‘That’s how it appears. There were bruises on the back of his neck, on his upper arms, and on his shoulders. There were also marks on his wrists, where they had been bound with some sort of cord. The lab’s working on the fibres. Somebody held him under the water deliberately. He struggled. And Dr Burns was right, he was definitely waterboarded first.’

‘Jesus Christ, the poor sod,’ said Annie.

Before meeting Nick Gwillam, Banks ate lunch by himself at the Pizza Express behind the Corn Exchange and allowed himself a small glass of Sangiovese to wash down his Sloppy Giuseppe. He had considered giving Ken Blackstone a call to see if he was free for lunch, but decided that after his session with Corrigan he preferred his own company for a while. Talking to Corrigan, he thought, had probably been a waste of time, but as with so many similar conversations, he could only know that in retrospect. Just another in the long line of sad, tired, cocky, depressing villains that seemed to be Banks’s daily round.

Corrigan was small-time, though there was a chance he had connections with some big players in the people-trafficking world, whose victims provided him with his victims, and whom he helped keep in bondage. Essentially, he was a parasite on the bigger organism, but many animals willingly went through life with millions of parasites living on their skin or inside their bodies. It became something of a symbiotic relationship. There was always room for a bit of give and take in the world of crime. Especially take.

But that didn’t mean Corrigan had anything to do with Quinn’s death. Curly’s alibi would be easy to check out, so easy it had to be true, and Corrigan’s would be impossible to break, even if it were a lie. No doubt he had other minions capable of doing the job for him, and they should be easy enough to round up, but so far his little gang had no history of crossbow use, or of murder. He certainly intimidated people who owed him money, resorted to threats and even to violence on occasion, but he had never, as far as they knew, killed anyone yet. A dead debtor might well be a lesson to the rest, as Corrigan had pointed out, but he was also a loss of income. Why start the killing with a cop and bring down the heat? He was surely under enough pressure already, with the citywide investigation into his operation, and the suicides that could possibly be linked to it. If Corrigan had had Bill Quinn in his pocket, was somehow tied in to the photos and the blackmail, then it now appeared that there was a definite Estonian connection, too. Curiouser and curiouser.

After Banks had finished his lunch, he wandered up to Call Lane, then down Kirkgate. Hands in pockets, walking slowly and taking in the colours, sounds and smells, he cut through the indoor market with its white-coated barkers and stalls piled with scaly fish, marbled red meat and bright shiny fruit and vegetables. No matter how fresh everything was, there was always a faint smell of decay underneath it all.