Watching the Dark (Inspector Banks Mystery) (6 page)

‘Twenty-five years. I was at their silver wedding anniversary do last December.’

‘How old was Bill, exactly?’

‘Just turned forty-nine.’

‘How did he take her death?’

‘How do you think? He was devoted to her. He was devastated, naturally. This neck business that got him into St Peter’s was a bit of an excuse, if you ask me. Not that he hadn’t been having problems on and off for years. But I’d have said he was on the verge of a breakdown. Depressed, too. Couldn’t sleep.’

‘Winsome said it was a massive stroke.’

‘Sonia was always a bit frail. Heart problems. I think that was why Bill was especially protective of her. Some people said he was too much under her thumb, but it wasn’t really like that. He adored her. It was sudden, a stroke, yes.’

They both paused for a moment. Banks didn’t know about Ken, but he often felt a brief stab of worry about his own mortality these days. He contemplated his steak and kidney pie. He’d already eaten a sausage roll for breakfast. Not one vegetable all day, unless you counted the chips. Hardly the healthy diet he’d been promising himself since his last visit to the doctor. Still, he had stopped smoking years ago, had cut down on his drinking a bit recently, and he hardly ever put on any weight. Surely that had to be a good thing?

‘Poor sod,’ said Banks.

Blackstone raised his glass. ‘I’ll drink to that. And to life.’

They clinked glasses. One of the office girls smiled at Banks. ‘Birthday?’

‘Something like that,’ he said. The girls moved on to boasting about drunken exploits in Sharm-el-Sheikh, paying no further attention to Banks and Blackstone, who spoke quietly anyway. A gust of warm wind blew along the alley and carried just a hint of the summer to come.

‘There are a couple of things I’d like to know,’ said Banks, glancing around. ‘First off, it looked very much like a professional hit.’ Banks described what they had deduced so far about the crime scene.

Blackstone thought for a moment. ‘Well, if access was as easy as you say, anyone could have done it, though it would have had to have been someone who knew Bill was there, I suppose, someone who knew his habits and the lie of the land, or somehow managed to lure him down to the edge of the woods. And what professional hit man uses a crossbow? Have you considered an inside job, or helper, at any rate?’

‘Naturally,’ said Banks. ‘We’re open to just about anything at the moment, and we’ll be checking everyone out. But there are a few problems with that theory. How would someone on the inside get rid of the murder weapon, for example? As far as I’m concerned, the most likely scenario is that it was someone Quinn put away, a criminal with a grudge and a taste for revenge.’

One of the office girls lowered her voice, but not quite enough. ‘And the last night we were there Cathy pissed herself right in the main street. It was simply dripping down her legs. Like something out of
Bridesmaids
. Talk about embarrassed! Laugh? I nearly died. Jenny said we should find a Boots and buy her some adult nappies.’

‘Why do it at St Peter’s?’ Blackstone asked. ‘Have you thought about that? If someone wanted Bill out of the way, there must have been better opportunities, surely?’

‘Not necessarily, especially if timing was an issue. My guess is that it was easier. He was a sitting duck at St Peter’s. It might have been a bit harder to isolate him in the city. More chance of witnesses there, too. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an element of bravado. It probably appealed to the killer’s warped sense of humour to kill a cop in a place full of cops, even though they were disabled, or geriatric, for the most part.’ Banks paused. ‘But that begs a few questions.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like how did the killer find out Bill Quinn was at St Peter’s in the first place?’

‘It wasn’t a secret. I mean, anyone could have known, not only people on the inside with him, but others, friends, family, even his coll—’ Blackstone stopped, and his eyes hardened. ‘Wait a minute, Alan. Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’

‘We have to consider it, Ken. The possibility of a mole in Quinn’s team, someone in the department. There have been rumours, you know.’

‘You think it’s Bill? So what’s going to happen now? The works? Suspend operations, seize all the files? Send in Professional Standards or the Independent Police Complaints Commission?’

‘I hope it won’t come to that,’ said Banks. ‘We’re not sure about anything yet. All I’m saying is that it’s an angle we have to consider along with all the others until we can rule it out. Someone knew where to find him.’

‘Any trace evidence? Forensics?’

‘None yet. His pockets had been emptied, and his mobile is missing. We’re tracking down the provider, then at least we’ll have a list of calls to and from. The CSIs are working on the usual – footprints, fabrics, DNA, fingerprints. The area near the tree where they think the killer stood looks promising.’

‘So what do you want from me?’

‘Area Commander Gervaise will be asking for full details of Bill Quinn’s cases from the brass, and for a list of villains he’s put away, along with their release dates, but I thought I’d just pick your brains in the meantime, get a head start.’

Blackstone rubbed his cheeks. ‘Another drink first?’

‘Not for me, thanks, Ken.’

Blackstone studied the remains of his pint. ‘No. I suppose I can make do with what I’ve got left, too. Where to begin?’

‘Wherever you want.’

‘Well, Bill’s been around for a while. You’ll have quite a job on your hands going through the minutiae of his career.’

‘Let’s start at the top, then. Any counter-terrorism investigations?’

‘We try to leave that sort of thing to Special Branch. Of course, West Yorkshire can’t avoid getting in on the peripheries at times, especially in Bradford or Dewsbury and some parts of Leeds, but nothing comes immediately to mind. Surely you don’t believe this was some kind of a fatwa, do you?’

‘Just casting flies on the water.’

‘Aye. One thing I can tell you, though. It was Bill helped put away Harry Lake nearly twenty years ago. He was a young DS then, and it didn’t do his career any harm, I can tell you.’

Banks whistled between his teeth. Harry Lake was famous enough to have had books written about him. He had abducted, tortured and killed four women in the Bradford area in the early nineties, cut them up and boiled the parts. Like the even more infamous Dennis Nilsen, he was only caught when the body pieces he’d flushed down the toilet blocked the drains, and a human hand surfaced in one of his neighbour’s toilet bowls.

‘He can’t be out yet, surely?’ said Banks.

‘I don’t think he’ll ever get out. He’s in Broadmoor. But it’s worth checking. He always swore revenge, and maybe he persuaded some sick follower to do his dirty work for him? You know what it’s like. People like him get marriage proposals, offers of continuing his work for him. According to the prison governor, he gets plenty of those.’

Banks made a note. ‘There must be more?’

‘I suppose his other most famous case was his biggest failure. Well, not
his
really.’

‘Oh?’

‘The Rachel Hewitt business.’

‘Rachel Hewitt? Isn’t she that girl whose parents keep cropping up in the news, the girl who disappeared in Latvia, or wherever?’

‘Estonia, actually. Tallinn. Six years ago. Yes. And they were in the news again not too long ago. That phone-hacking inquiry. You might have heard. They’ve been complaining about being hounded by the media, phones tapped, private papers and diaries stolen and published. The sister went off the rails, apparently, and the press had a feeding frenzy.’

‘Bill Quinn worked that case?’

‘Bill worked this end, such as it was. Family and friends. Rachel’s background. The Tallinn police worked the actual disappearance. But Bill spent about a week out there liaising quite early in the investigation. Rachel was a West Yorkshire girl, from Drighlington, part of City & Holbeck Division, and he drew the short straw, depending on how you look at it. But with the local police running the investigation, and in a foreign country with different ways of doing things, he didn’t stand much of a chance. It was more of a show of strength and solidarity, really, and a bit of a PR exercise, if truth be told. Otherwise they’d have sent in a team.’

‘They didn’t?’

‘No. The British Embassy was involved, of course, but they don’t carry out criminal investigations in foreign countries. It was strictly Tallinn’s case. Nobody expected Bill to solve it where the locals had failed. That was back in the summer of 2006. As expected, he got precisely nowhere, but he did get his photo in the papers quite often, and he did a few press conferences with the parents of the missing girl.’

‘The Hewitts have had to use the media to keep their daughter’s name in the public eye, haven’t they?’

‘It’s a two-edged sword. You don’t get owt for nowt from those bastards.’

‘And what role did Bill play?’

‘As I said, he was just a glorified consultant, really.’

‘He’s not been implicated in the hacking business?’

‘Bill? Good lord, no. Though some days it seems we’ve all been tarred with same brush.’

‘So it’s unlikely to be connected with his murder?’

‘I can’t see how it could be. Nothing’s changed. Rachel still hasn’t been found. Her parents insist she’s being kept alive somewhere, but we’re all pretty certain she’s dead. Thing is, it haunted Bill. I don’t think he ever quite got over not solving it, not finding her. He was convinced she was already dead, of course, but I think he wanted to provide the parents with some sort of explanation, proof, some positive outcome. A body, for example.’

‘Anything else I should be looking at?’

‘Just the usual. Dozens of petty villains, domestic killings. What you’d expect from a long career in detective work. He’s put away burglars, murderers, muggers, embezzlers, gangsters and hard men. None of them stand out much except for Harry Lake, and maybe Steve Lambert, that big property developer, the one who paid someone to murder his wife about three years ago.’

‘I remember that one,’ said Banks. ‘Didn’t he claim someone broke in, and she was stabbed while interrupting a robbery?’

‘That’s right. Appeared to have a watertight alibi, too. The usual citizens above suspicion. But Bill stuck at it, followed the money trail, found the bloke he’d hired, along with a strong forensic connection to the scene. It was a solid case in the end, and Lambert went down swearing revenge.’

‘But he’s still inside, isn’t he?’

‘If he hired someone to kill his wife . . .’

‘Long tentacles?’

‘Possibly.’

‘I’ll bear it in mind. Mostly what we should look at first, though, is anyone he put away who’s actually come out recently, and anyone he’s pissed off who’s still wandering free.’

‘There’ll be a few. I’ll see if I can narrow things down a bit for you.’

‘Appreciate it, Ken.’

‘All this . . . Sorry. Bill was a mate, that’s all. It’s getting to me.’

‘I know, and I’m sorry, too. What about more recently? What was he working on when he died?’

Blackstone finished off his drink and stared at the empty glass. ‘Well, as you know, he was off duty for a couple of weeks with his neck problems before he went into St Peter’s, and before that he had a couple of weeks leave after Sonia . . . you know. Before that he was working with a specially formed city-wide team of detectives on a long-term surveillance and intelligence-gathering mission.’

‘What was it?’

‘Just the tip of the iceberg. It started with a gang of loan sharks. They operate around the poorest estates in the city, mostly targeting new immigrants, as often as not illegals, asylum seekers or unregistered migrants who still owe a bloody fortune for their staff agency fees, transport, lodgings and food. And, in some cases, for the risk of smuggling them in. Some of them live in dormitories in converted barns, or what have you, outside the city, but a lot of them have managed somehow or other to get hold of council houses, illegal sublets from fellow countrymen, mostly. Of course, the jobs they were promised and had to pay so much for didn’t materialise, or they ended up cleaning out pig sties or public conveniences for ten quid a week. Unless they’re attractive girls, of course, and then . . .’

‘I get the picture,’ said Banks. He thought once more of Quinn’s photographs, the young girl, and how she reminded him of a young girl some years ago, involved in the case during which his brother had been murdered. That girl had been trafficked from Eastern Europe, along with many others. It still went on.

It was going to be tricky, broaching the subject of Quinn’s infidelity and susceptibility to blackmail to Ken, but it had to be done, gently or otherwise. Sometimes, Banks felt, it was best to jump right in and dodge the retaliation, if it came. ‘We found some photos of Bill Quinn with a young girl – and I mean young, Ken – hidden in his room.’

‘Sexual?’

‘Well, they weren’t taken at a vicar’s tea party.’

‘And what do you make of this?’

‘I’m not sure, but blackmail comes to mind.’

Blackstone thrust his head forward. ‘Are you suggesting that Bill was in someone’s pocket?’