Unti Peter Robinson #22

by Peter Robinson

  “We don’t think so, Mrs. Lane,” said Banks. “Not yet. But it’s vital that we find him as soon as possible.”

  “Did he say anything about where he might be going next?” Annie asked.

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  “He didn’t get in touch again? Phone, or anything?”

  “No.”

  “Is there anything else you can tell us, however insignificant?”

  Denise thought for a moment. “When he was going, when we were alone at the front door, I managed to slip him some money we’d been putting by in the hall sideboard.”

  “How much money?”

  “It was only a hundred pounds, but it was all we had. Our ‘mad’ money. When Ollie found out he went spare.”

  I’ll bet he did, thought Banks. A hundred pounds wasn’t very much these days. It might get you mediocre lodgings for three, perhaps four nights, if you didn’t eat, or a ­couple of tanks of petrol. Lane abandoned his car even though he had the money to buy petrol. He had paid for parking because he wasn’t thinking and had simply done what he would normally do. Had the car broken down? Everyone said it was on its last legs. The forensics mechanics would be able to tell him about that. Or was Lane planning to come back for the car later but something had happened to prevent him? He had phoned Alex that evening from York, so he had still been free then.

  If he were to hazard a guess, Banks would have said that Lane left the car just to confuse everyone, took a train to York, wandered about there for a while plucking up the courage to phone Alex, then headed for London.

  And Montague Havers lived in London.

  THE DINNER was delightful, the ser­vice impeccable without being obtrusive, the crispy duck breast cooked just the way Winsome loved it, and Terry said his entrecÔte and frites were spot-­on. For starters, they shared chicken liver pâté, and instead of a sweet, they went for the cheese plate, which was served, as it should be, at room temperature. They drank a simple inexpensive Rioja, nothing outrageous or ostentatious, and Terry had only one glass because he had to drive. The small glass of ruby port he ordered for Winsome later went exceptionally well with the cheese. Their conversation flowed with an ease Winsome hadn’t realized existed. Terry didn’t talk about his experiences in Afghanistan, and Winsome largely avoided talking about her job. As they laughed a lot and told each other stories about their potholing experiences and areas they had explored, they found so many topics in common that they could have carried on talking all night. Terry had even been to Montego Bay on a ­couple of occasions, and had visited the area around Spring Mount and Maroon Town, where Winsome had spent her childhood as the daughter of a local police corporal. His own childhood, he confessed, had been that of an army brat, never staying anywhere long and finding it very difficult to make friends.

  The only disagreement arose when it was time to pay the bill, and even that was minor. Terry insisted on paying for the two of them, whereas Winsome insisted on going dutch. In the end, Winsome won, and Terry was gracious in defeat. Winsome noticed that he wasn’t carrying his stick, just an umbrella.

  They walked out onto Castle Hill, and Winsome immediately felt the wind and rain bring a chill to her bones. In her mind there flashed a vision of the country they had been talking about, where she had been brought up. Banana leaves clacking in the wind, the long walk to and from church in her Sunday best in the searing heat, out-­of-­season days walking the deserted beaches around Montego Bay, looking for driftwood with her father. She felt herself shiver. For better or for worse, England was her home now.

  Terry moved closer with his umbrella and gently put a tentative arm around her, sheltering the two of them under its broad black circle. She felt herself stiffen a little at his touch, but she didn’t shake him off. She could hear the umbrella whipping about in the wind, straining at the metal spokes, and feared it would snap inside out or simply fly off into the sky. Maybe they’d go with it, like Mary Poppins. But Terry managed to keep a grip on it as they headed around the corner and down the cobbled road toward the lights of the town square, the castle behind them tastefully floodlit against the sky. The shops were all closed, but the pubs and restaurants were open and the sounds of conversation and laughter drifted up on the night air along with the sounds of high heels clicking across the cobbles.

  “Can I give you a lift?” Terry asked.

  “It’s all right,” Winsome said. “I don’t live far.”

  “But it’s cold. You’re cold.”

  Winsome laughed. “I’m used to that. Thanks,” she said. “It really was a lovely evening.”

  “My pleasure.”

  They stopped as they entered the top of the square. “Well, I’m parked over there, behind the shopping center,” Terry said.

  Winsome pointed the other way. “I’m up York Road a bit.”

  “Well, if you won’t let me drive you home, then . . .”

  Winsome felt rather than saw him moving toward her, his lips aiming for hers. She felt a surge of panic, of claustrophobia almost, and found herself turning aside, so that his lips grazed against her cheek, then she heard herself saying a curt “Good night” and hurried off toward home, heart palpitating.

  She pulled her jacket collar around her throat to keep out the icy needles of wind and hurried along, head down, past the lit-­up shop signs and window displays until she got to her street, on the fringe of the student area. There she turned left, walked up the slight rise for fifty yards and turned into the imposing detached house, with its gables, bay windows and large chimneys, where she had the top-­floor flat.

  Once she was inside, she leaned back on the closed door and took stock. What on earth was she thinking of? It was only a good-­night kiss. Was that something to be so frightened of? But she had been. She remembered the tension that ran through her body when she saw him moving toward her, the tightness in her chest.

  She made herself a cup of chamomile tea in the kitchenette and thought about what a pleasant evening it had been, how easily their conversation had flowed. When she curled up in her favorite armchair, with only the shaded lamp lighting the room, she realized that she had very little experience of talking to anyone outside her job. Most of the time she talked to other cops, criminals, forensic scientists or lawyers. She had been a shy child and had never found it easy to socialize, and that carried over into her adult life. Was this what her life had come to? But wasn’t she too young to start wondering what had happened to all the promise, the dreams, the young woman who had walked down the jetway at Gatwick, excited as a little child at the life ahead of her in the new country she was about to discover? Marveling at the cars, the huge buildings, the fast motorways and even the unrelenting rain and a sky the color of dirty dishwater.

  No, she decided in the end. She hadn’t lost all that. She was still young and she had most of her life ahead of her. She was scared, she realized; that was all. Like so many ­people. Scared of commitment, scared of dipping a toe in the water. Scared of being hurt. It was a long time since she had had a serious boyfriend, someone there was a possibility of sharing her life with. Tonight had shown her that there could be other possibilities. That Terry liked her was obvious, and she knew she liked him. How could she get over her fear? How could she stop behaving like a silly little girl, probably making him think she was nothing but a tease? She was soon starting to feel really stupid about her behavior.

  Winsome sipped her tea, brow furrowed and swore to herself that the next time she saw Terry Gilchrist, she would kiss him. On the lips. That thought made her smile.

  12

  BANKS ENJOYED TRAIN JOURNEYS ONCE HE HAD GOT through the station experience, found somewhere to put his luggage and laid claim to an empty seat. Fridays were busy days on the East Coast line, but he got a midmorning train that wasn’t too full, and the seat next to his remained empty all the way to Kings Cross. He had decided to board at Darlington, though York wou
ld have been closer, because from Darlington the train would pass the airfield and hangar after Northallerton, and he wanted to have a look at the area from a train window. Doug Wilson had got the message through to the railways, and they had even put out a few flyers on selected trains, but so far nobody had come forward to report seeing anything out of the window on the Sunday morning in question. Banks was curious as to why.

  The sky looked like iron, and he got the feeling that if a giant banged the rolling landscape with a hammer it would clang and reverberate. It was partly the stillness that caused the effect, especially after last night’s wind, and the sudden dryness after the constant rains. Still, it felt like the calm before the storm. And the daffodils ought to be out by now.

  It didn’t take long to get to Northallerton and whizz through the small station without even slowing down. The only stop on this journey was York. Keeping his eyes fixed on the left, where the lighter gray of the Cleveland Hills broke the charcoal horizon in the distance, he finally saw the hangar coming up. There was a stretch of about a quarter of a mile of neglected pasture between the airfield and train lines, but he could see the huge hangar clearly. The problem was that all the action had occurred on the other side of the building, where the gate in the chain-­link fence was. Banks could see a ­couple of patrol cars and a CSI van parked by the outside fence—­Stefan’s team was still working there—­but it was all gone in a flash. Even if someone had been looking in that direction, he realized, they couldn’t have seen anything going on inside the hangar, and any cars parked right at the front would have been obscured by the building itself. The only possibility would have been someone noticing a lorry or a car heading down the road in front of the gate, parallel to the train tracks, but the timing had clearly been wrong for such an observation.

  Satisfied that they had probed that possibility to the end of its usefulness, Banks returned to his relaxation. There was no hot water on the train, which meant no tea or coffee and only cold sandwiches to eat. He decided he could manage the two-­and-­a-­half-­hour-­plus journey on an empty stomach. He still had half his Costa latte left when he boarded, so he made that last for a few miles. He had brought his noise-­canceling headphones, which meant he could listen to any kind of music he wanted, and not just the sort of loud rock that drowned out the train noise. He started off with the BartÓk and Walton viola concertos. Other musicians made fun of the viola in orchestras, but he loved its sound, somewhere between the plaintive keen of the violin and the resonant melancholy of the cello, with a sweet elegiac strain all of its own. He had known a professional violist once, a very beautiful young woman called Pamela Jeffreys, but he had let her slip away from him.

  The train rattled along and Banks was more aware of feeling the physical rocking than the sound. He was reading Hangover Square, but he looked up every now and then at the landscape. As they passed through flat green stretches of the English heartland, the flood damage was plain to see, whole fields underwater, streams and rivers overflowing their banks, and that terrible iron-­gray stillness about it all. He even saw a tractor marooned in the middle of a deep broad puddle, and thought of John Beddoes, whose stolen tractor seemed to have started all this. Was Beddoes connected somehow? An insurance scam, as Annie had suggested, or in some way more sinister, through some vendetta with the Lanes, perhaps. Other than for insurance, though, why would a man have his own tractor stolen?

  The train flashed through Peterborough, with its truncated cathedral tower, the river and its waterfront flats, looking a bit shabbier now than they had when Banks worked a case down there a few years ago. Banks had few friends left from his Peterborough childhood days. Graham Marshall had disappeared when they were all schoolboys, and many years later, when his body was found, Banks had helped with the investigation into what happened to him. They had been the famous five all those years ago: Banks, Graham, Steve Hill, Paul Major and Dave Greenfell. Steve Hill, the boy who had introduced the young Banks to Dylan, the Who, Pink Floyd and the rest, had been the next to go, from lung cancer a few years ago. And just last year Paul Major had died of an AIDS-­related illness. That left two out of five. No wonder Banks felt his circle of friends diminishing.

  He put down Hangover Square and switched the music to his playlist of Scott Walker singing Jacques Brel songs, starting with the beautiful “If You Go Away.” Banks liked Brel in the original, though he couldn’t understand all the words, but even he, with his limited French, knew that there was a big difference between “If You Go Away” and “Ne me quitte pas.” Where the English version was sad, the original was a desperate plea.

  The playlist lasted him all the way to London.

  ANNIE KNEW she’d been putting off the abattoir trawl, and after visiting four of the places she knew why. She had intended her objection to the assignment at the meeting partly as a joke, but she was fast coming to realize that there was nothing funny about it at all. She was getting heartily sick of abattoirs. Almost to the point of being physically sick on more than one occasion so far. The affront to her vegetarian sensibilities was almost more than she could take.

  Fortunately, the previous day she had headed off to the east coast with Banks and so postponed the task, but on Friday morning she had no excuse. All she could do to ameliorate things was to drag poor Doug Wilson along with her. She thought he’d provide a little comfort and amusement, but so far he had provided neither. If anything, he had been more disgusted than she was at the things they had seen, heard and smelled. If she hadn’t been a vegetarian already, occasional lapses into fish and chicken aside, she decided, she would be one by now. Doug wasn’t one himself, but Annie was starting to think that by the end of the day he might well be. If she were in the business of conversion, she knew now he was at his most vulnerable and it wouldn’t take much effort.

  For the most part, they had managed to avoid the working areas and have their conversations in offices that didn’t smell of the rank horrors being committed on the killing floor. But you couldn’t escape the stench entirely, or the screaming or bleating of the terrified animals. Nobody could convince Annie that they didn’t know exactly what was coming. No matter how much you modernized an abattoir and tarted it up, it was still barbaric, in her opinion. You could paint the inside yellow and pin children’s drawings to the wall and it wouldn’t change a thing.

  They were about to call it a day and head back to the station a bit early when Gerry Masterson rang Annie’s mobile.

  “Where are you?” Gerry asked. “Where are you right now?”

  “Wensleydale,” said Annie. “We’re just packing in for the day. Why?”

  There was a pause at the end of the line. For a moment, Annie thought she’d lost the connection. It happened often out here. “Gerry?” she said. “Are you still there?”

  “Have you visited Stirwall’s yet?”

  “No. We’re saving them for tomorrow.”

  “You’re not so far away.”

  “No, but—­”

  “I’m sorry to do this, guv, really I am, but I think you should go there now.”

  “Gerry, what’s going on? It’s been a crap day, to put it mildly.”

  “I know, I know. And I’m sorry. But I’ve been checking reports and speaking on the phone all day, and Stirwall’s reported a penetrating bolt pistol stolen about two years ago. We need more details.”

  Annie swore under her breath. “Can’t you get them over the phone?”

  “It needs an official visit. There’s always something else comes up you’d never think of on the phone. Employee records, for example. Someone might have some names for us. Besides, you’re a senior officer on the case.”

  Annie knew she was right. “OK, we’ll go now.”

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “Forget it. Got a name for us?”

  “Ask for James Dalby. He’s the head supervisor, and he’s there waiting for you.”

&n
bsp; As Annie turned the car around, Doug Wilson gave a heavy sigh.

  “What’s up, Dougal?” she asked. “Hot date tonight?”

  “Something like that,” said Wilson. “Actually, it’s my sister’s eighteenth-­birthday do. We’ve booked a table at that new steak restaurant in town.”

  Annie looked at her watch. “Don’t worry, you’ll make it in plenty of time.”

  “Aye. Smelling like an abattoir, no doubt.”

  “Well, you’ll be eating steak for dinner, won’t you?” said Annie with a sweet smile. “If what we’ve seen so far today hasn’t put you off, then why not watch a few more cows getting slaughtered first? Who knows, maybe you’ll even see your dinner before it’s dead.”

  “Ha-­ha,” said Wilson, then he scowled and looked out of the window at the dark gray moors.

  Soon the long squat shape of Stirwall’s loomed before them. There had been complaints that it had been built too close to the nearby village, and residents complained of the smell and noise at all hours of the day and night. But it was still there, still operating. Stirwall’s was one of the larger abattoirs in the area, too, with vans coming and going at all hours, stacks of boxes on pallets in the yard.

  They parked in the area marked vISITORS and asked the first worker they saw where they could find James Dalby. He pointed to the front doors and told them to turn left up the stairs and they’d find Mr. Dalby’s office on the first floor.

  They thanked him and walked toward the open entrance. The outside of the building was surrounded with lairages, as one of the workers at the previous slaughterhouse had called them, holding pens where the animals languished awaiting slaughter. At the moment, some of them were full of lowing cattle and others were being sluiced out according to health regulations before another batch was led in.

  The smell got worse inside. And the noise. As each animal came individually through a chute from the lairage, it was rendered unconscious by a knockerman’s bolt gun, then strung up by its hind legs on a line. Three monorails of dead animals slowly moved down the length of the abattoir. At each stage of the way, slaughtermen performed their specialized tasks, such as slitting the throat for bleeding, spraying with boiling water to loosen the skin, then the actual skinning and disemboweling, careful removal of valuable organs, such as the liver, kidneys, pancreas and heart. The stench was awful. Annie tried to keep her eyes averted as she climbed the metal stairs to Dalby’s office, but it was impossible. There was something about ugly violent death that demanded one’s attention, so she looked, she watched, she saw. And heard: the discharge of the bolt guns, the buzz of the mechanical saws, and the change in pitch when they hit bone as the head was cut off and the animal split in half. It was almost unthinkable that someone had done this to Morgan Spencer.