Careless Love

by Robinson, Peter

  Vernon started at her, disbelieving. ‘Allowances? Is that all you can say? My wife and I were involved in a serious collision. Through no fault of our own, I might add. We could have died. Nancy here is a witness. And you go on about allowances. I want to know whether you’ve charged him yet. And what are the possibilities of compensation? Above and beyond the cost of a new car, that is.’

  ‘If you want to bring charges against Mr Kelly, sir, that’s your prerogative,’ Winsome went on. ‘But it’s not our department.’

  Vernon glanced from one to the other. ‘Who’s the organ grinder and who’s the monkey here?’ Then he put his hand to his mouth. ‘Good God, that’s not what I meant. I mean to . . . I didn’t mean any offence. I—’

  Banks looked towards Winsome, who simply raised an eyebrow. ‘Perhaps if you would just stop blathering for a minute and listen to us’ he went on, ‘then you wouldn’t put your foot any further down your throat.’

  Vernon bridled. ‘Yes, of course. I assume you’re at least going to have the car moved to my garage for repairs? I can’t seem to get anyone there to commit to a pick-up time. That’s unless you need to take it in for forensic examination first.’

  ‘Forensic examination?’ Winsome echoed. ‘Why would we need to do that?’

  ‘To find proof. Evidence. Do you need me to tell you your job?’

  ‘Evidence of what?’

  ‘That it wasn’t my fault, of course. There must be something you can find, some scratch or dent that will prove his culpability.’

  ‘I don’t think we’ll be checking for anything along those lines,’ Winsome said. ‘But we will be taking the car in for forensic examination.’

  ‘But you just said . . . I don’t understand. Why? When will I get my car back. When can I get it fixed?’

  ‘We’re not a garage,’ Winsome said, ‘and we’re not in the tow-truck business.’

  ‘And from what I’ve seen,’ Banks added, ‘the only place that car is headed is the scrapyard.’

  ‘So what am I supposed to do?’

  ‘We’ll be in touch when our forensic experts have finished with it,’ Winsome said. ‘Then you can call your garage and make arrangements.’

  ‘You’re telling me now that I have to pay to get my own car back after you’ve taken it away?’

  ‘That’s usually how it works, sir,’ Winsome said. ‘Besides, I think you’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick here. There’s no evidence of dangerous driving in this case and, as I tried to tell you earlier, we’re not Traffic. We’re Homicide and Major Crimes.’

  Vernon’s mouth flapped open. He stared aghast at his wife, who shook her head slowly. ‘H-homicide?’

  ‘And Major Crimes,’ Winsome added.

  ‘I don’t understand. I mean, it was an accident. I don’t think the other driver intended to crash into us. He was just going too fast, wasn’t he, love? And nobody died. It wasn’t attempted murder or anything like that.’

  ‘We know that,’ said Banks. ‘As I suggested earlier, perhaps if you were to take your mind off the problem of your car for a moment and listen to what we have to say, we might get somewhere. Winsome.’

  First Winsome got the minor details cleared up: that the car did belong to Trevor Vernon, and that he had been involved in an accident with a white van on Belderfell Pass last Friday evening at 10.37.

  ‘Yes,’ said Trevor Vernon. ‘We were on our way home from Richmond. A rather fine production of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Georgian Theatre, as a matter of fact. That’s what I thought you were here about, the accident, but I don’t understand now why you are here.’

  ‘Bear with us a while, and I’ll explain,’ said Banks. ‘Earlier today,’ he began, ‘we had a call from some patrol officers from the site where your car was left. A woman driving by noticed something she thought was odd and stopped to see what it was.’ Banks paused for effect. ‘She found a dead girl sitting in the driver’s seat.’

  The Vernons looked at one another.

  ‘A dead girl?’ said Nancy.

  It didn’t come out quite like ‘A handbag?’ but it was close enough. Their shock and surprise was certainly genuine, though, Banks thought. Trevor Vernon had turned pale.

  ‘Yes. You didn’t have a passenger with you at the time of the accident, did you?’

  ‘Passenger?’ echoed Vernon. ‘Good Lord, no, of course not. The children were at home with the babysitter. Are you suggesting that we had something to do with this?’

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything yet,’ Banks said. ‘Just trying to get a few things straight. Though I suppose one could say you definitely did have something to do with what happened. The dead girl was found in your car, after all.’

  ‘But that was just a coincidence,’ said Vernon. ‘It could have been any car, surely?’

  ‘Perhaps. That’s something we need to find out.’

  ‘There was certainly no sign of any body in or out of the car when we were taken to Eastvale General,’ said Vernon. ‘Your men were there. They can verify that.’

  Banks nodded. ‘Oh, they do. When the car was moved into the lay-by and the notice put in the window by the police officers, there was definitely no body.’

  ‘Well, then? Doesn’t that prove it? However she got there, she got there after we’d gone.’

  ‘If you do know anything, it would be best to speak now.’

  ‘What do you mean, if we know anything?’ said Nancy Vernon. ‘How could we know anything?’

  ‘Something could have happened,’ said Banks. ‘Let’s just say, hypothetically, that you hit someone on the road earlier and stopped to help then realised that it was too late, the girl was dead. People get scared in these situations sometimes. They don’t always realise that the best course of action is to come to us. They panic. PC Knowles didn’t open the boot.’ Banks knew the girl hadn’t been run over – at least Dr Burns had found no obvious signs of it – but the Vernons weren’t to know that, unless they had also seen the body.

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ said Vernon. ‘You think we had a body in the boot all along? This is absurd. Assuming we did what you say, which we certainly did not, why would we want to move a body from the boot of our car to somewhere more open, and how do you think we got back to Belderfell Pass to do all this without a car?’

  ‘All I’m saying,’ Banks went on, ‘is that people tend to act irrationally in such situations. I just want to know if there’s anything you’re not telling us.’

  ‘We’re not criminals,’ said Nancy Vernon in a tremulous voice. ‘This is complete madness. We’ve never hurt anyone in our lives, have we, darling?’

  ‘We certainly have not. And I resent the insinuation.’

  ‘Do you have any enemies, Mr Vernon? Anyone who might want to cause trouble for you?’

  ‘You mean by implicating me in something like this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then, no, I’m pretty sure I don’t have that kind of enemy. And neither does Nancy. This whole conversation is unreal. I’m a wages clerk, and Nancy works part time at Boots. Our children go to Eastvale Comprehensive. We live a quiet, ordinary life. Things like this don’t happen to people like us. We’re decent folk.’

  Often the worst, in Banks’s experience, but he didn’t say anything.

  Winsome showed them a photograph of the victim that Peter Darby had taken at the scene. Fortunately, she hadn’t needed any touching up, just a little help with the lighting. She still looked dead, Banks thought. ‘Do you know this girl? Have you ever seen her before?’

  They shook their heads.

  ‘Is she the . . . you know . . . the girl in the car?’ asked Nancy Vernon.

  Winsome nodded.

  Nancy touched the photo. ‘Poor thing. She seems so young.’

  ‘Yes, she does,’ said Banks. He gave Winsome the nod to leave, and they both stood up. ‘Sorry to have bothered you at dinner time. And I apologise if some of our questions caused you discomfort. Cases like this ar
e difficult for everyone involved. We may need to talk to you again as the investigation progresses, so please make yourselves available. There’s no need to see us out.’

  When they were getting back into the car, Winsome said, ‘I don’t think they had anything to do with it, do you, guv?’

  Banks shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You saw their reaction when I told them about the girl’s body. He’s an arsehole of the first order, and no doubt has a few enemies, but he’s not a killer. Let’s get back to the station and see if we get any results from the photo on the evening news.’

  It was seven o’clock, shortly after Banks’s visit to the Vernons. Kirsten Brody had been and gone without telling him anything more than she had told him before. Peter Darby’s crime scene photo had made it in time for Look North and the local ITV news. There was nothing much for Banks to do now but wait and indulge in pointless speculation. He was standing at his office window in the dark looking down on the Christmas lights that glowed and twinkled in the market square. Rebecca Clarke’s viola sonata played in the background.

  Kirsten Brody could have put the body in the car herself before reporting it, Banks thought. She was up there alone at the scene for long enough. But why do that, then call the police to report it? No. It didn’t make sense, and it wouldn’t until they found out more about the victim’s life. And death. The girl’s body had been transported to the mortuary in the basement of Eastvale General Infirmary, Dr Burns having pronounced death at the scene, possibly due to asphyxiation on her own vomit, he had said, which pointed to some sort of drug overdose, either accidental or deliberate. They would have to wait until the post-mortem to be certain.

  Dr Burns wasn’t sure about time or place of death, putting it at two or perhaps three days earlier, which meant Saturday or Sunday, quite a window of opportunity. Banks hoped Dr Glendenning might be able to narrow it down a bit more when he got her on the table. The weather had been poor until Monday, so very few people would have used Belderfell Pass. The locals certainly knew how treacherous the winding, unfenced road could be even in the best of conditions.

  But for Kristen Brody’s ‘feeling’, the body might well have remained where it was until Trevor Vernon stopped waiting for the police to do it and arranged for the garage to come to take his car away. If someone had placed the girl in the car, or dropped her off there to die, he or she must have known that her body would be discovered before too long. There were far better places nearby to hide a body than in a damaged car with a POLICE AWARE sign in its window, especially if you didn’t want anyone to find it for a long time. As yet, nobody had reported a young woman missing. If she had got there herself, then how? She couldn’t have walked, especially dressed the way she was; she was too far from anywhere for that. Someone must have given her a lift and either dropped her off or dumped her.

  The telephone snapped Banks out of his stream of thought.

  ‘I think I know the identity of the girl whose photo they showed on the news tonight,’ the caller said. ‘I just can’t believe she’s dead.’

  ‘You knew her?’

  ‘Adrienne Munro,’ repeated the caller. ‘That’s her name.’

  ‘Was she a friend of yours?’

  ‘Not a friend. A student. I’m a lecturer at Eastvale College. Biology. Adrienne was one of my students. One of the brightest. I can’t quite believe what I just saw.’

  A student. That perhaps explained why nobody had reported her missing yet. She could have been in a hall of residence, or lived alone in one of the many flats and bedsits that thronged the college area. ‘Could you please come by the infirmary and confirm that identification, Mr . . .?’

  ‘Stoller. Luke Stoller. Would I have to look at her?’

  ‘We can arrange for video identification. We’ll still have to go to the family for formal identification, of course, but you could really help us out here. We’d hardly want to upset the poor girl’s parents if we’re not sure it’s their daughter.’

  ‘No. Of course not. I can see that. Naturally, I’ll come. I don’t know why I’m being so squeamish. I teach biology, after all. I’ve dissected a frog or two in my time. It’s just . . . someone you know. Especially someone so vital, so young. Christ, Adrienne was only nineteen. Just starting her second year.’

  ‘Was she studying biology?’

  ‘Agricultural sciences. Biology was one of her required components.’

  ‘Maybe we can talk to you about her later, once we know a bit more about what’s going on? For the moment, though, the identification would be a huge first step.’

  ‘I can meet you in reception at the infirmary in about fifteen or twenty minutes, if that’s all right?’

  ‘Excellent.’ Banks hung up the phone and went down to the squad room to find Winsome. She should have no trouble tracking down Adrienne Munro’s address, and that of her parents.

  Luke Stoller identified the body as that of Adrienne Munro, and Winsome came up with the necessary addresses. While Banks and Winsome waited for Adrienne’s parents to be driven down from Stockton to make a formal identification, they obtained a key from her landlord and walked down the tree-lined street of tall Victorian houses to number 27, where Adrienne Munro had a bedsit on the second floor. The bare branches stood in stark silhouette against the streetlights and above them, the clear crisp night was full of stars. Inside the building, it was warm, the stair carpet was clean and relatively new and the walls of the staircase and landings were decorated with tasteful reproductions of old masters. A smell of curry permeated the building, but that was to be expected in any student digs. Curry was cheap to make, and takeaways were plentiful.

  As bedsits go, Adrienne’s was fairly spacious, though the roof did slope at quite an angle over the bed itself. You’d bang your head when you got up in the night if you weren’t careful, Banks thought, realising he was now at the age when he had to get up in the night far more often than he did as a student.

  They put on their gloves and began the search.

  The room came with an en suite, which consisted of a tiny walk-in shower, toilet and sink. There was barely room for towels on the narrow rack and flimsy shelves. Still, it was better than a toilet and bathroom down the hall, shared with the rest of the house. The medicine cabinet revealed nothing but a toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, nail clippers, a shaver, paracetamol and various cosmetics. There was no sign of prescription drugs, no contraceptive pills or devices, either in the bathroom or in any of Adrienne’s bedside drawers. Nor were there any obvious signs of vomit in the sink, toilet or bathtub.

  The room itself was tidy, the bed made, dishes lying on the draining board next to the sink. Banks ran his finger over one of the plates. Quite dry. It felt like a cosy home away from home, with a certain warmth about it and an aura of being someone’s safe and special place or refuge. Above the small desk was a shelf of books, mostly textbooks on animal welfare and behaviour and wildlife conservation, along with a few paperbacks by Philippa Gregory, Antonia Fraser and Bernard Cornwell, showing a predilection for historical fiction. The ubiquitous Game of Thrones set of paperbacks was there, too, and it appeared to have been read. There was even an illustrated copy of Black Beauty, which also looked well thumbed, probably a relic from her childhood.

  One drawer held a passport, issued in March of the previous year, a bank statement showing a balance of £2,342 – perhaps the residue of her student loan – and Adrienne’s birth certificate, National Health card, student rail pass and other pieces of official paper. There was no sign of a driving licence. Another held a small amount of costume jewellery. Banks handed it all to Winsome, who bagged everything for later examination. All seemed in order, and it didn’t appear as if anything untoward had taken place in Adrienne’s bedsit, but the whole place would still require a thorough forensic search by a CSI team. For now, Banks thought, it would do no harm for him to get a little ahead of the game. On the desk sat a laptop and a mobile phone, which he asked Winsome to bag.

  �
��It’s probably one of those smartphones that needs a fingerprint,’ he said.

  ‘We can do that at the mortuary.’

  Banks looked at Winsome. ‘Yes, I suppose we can. It just feels sort of . . . I don’t know. Creepy. Like those movies where the baddies cut off someone’s finger to get access to the vault.’

  Winsome smiled. ‘We don’t have to cut her finger off, guv. And if you don’t mind my saying so, you seem to watch some terrible movies.’

  ‘I suppose I do. Anyway, we’ll hand the phone over to the techies and see if we can get a print-out of her emails and texts by tomorrow, along with a list of her phone calls and contacts.’

  The walls were painted cheerful colours, mostly yellow and orange, which Banks found a bit OTT, being more into muted blues and greens. Several posters were tacked up here and there; instead of pop stars or actors they featured National Geographic pictures showing a variety of wild animals – lions, leopards, elephants – along with a star chart and a reproduction of Breughel’s The Fall of Icarus. There were also posters advertising a recent Tosca at Covent Garden, Simon Rattle conducting Mahler’s 7th at the Barbican and Nicola Benedetti with her violin poised for a performance at the Royal Festival Hall. No Harry Styles or Justin Bieber. A serious young woman, then, or so it seemed.

  Adrienne owned a Dali Klatch Bluetooth speaker, a pair of expensive Bowers and Wilkins headphones and an Astell & Kern AK70 portable music player. All expensive gadgets. Banks whistled between his teeth and picked up the AK70. He had considered buying one himself after Apple cruelly discontinued the iPod Classic. He scanned the contents. There were a few pop bands and singers he had never heard of, except for Radiohead and Parquet Courts, but the bulk of her music was classical: Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Bach, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, a few Verdi and Puccini operas, even violin works by some contemporary composers like Ligeti, Tavener and John Adams. He was impressed. A violin rested in its case on the armchair, a selection of sheet music beside it on a music stand: Fauré’s ‘Après un rêve’ and the meditation from Massenet’s Thaïs. A competent violinist, then, as well as an agricultural sciences student. Adrienne Munro became more interesting the more he found out about her.