Careless Love

by Robinson, Peter

  The small wardrobe was filled with clothes, including distressed jeans, fashionable blazers and assorted tops as well as more formal skirts and dresses, like the one she had been wearing when they found her. They were all good quality, though not top designer labels. She also owned a row of fashionable shoes, from sandals and trainers to court shoes, high heels, strappy sandals, like the ones she had been wearing, and leather and suede ankle boots. It wasn’t hard to see where any spare cash Adrienne Munro might have had went. Clothes and gadgets. But how much spare cash did a student have these days? Did she have a part-time job? Rich parents? Banks didn’t think so.

  Banks also wondered whether Adrienne had a boyfriend. Though most women balked at the idea that they dressed for anyone other than themselves, he nevertheless regarded Adrienne’s wardrobe as one at least as calculated to impress men as to please herself. But there was no evidence of a boyfriend in her bedsit. No stray socks, extra toothbrush or condoms.

  Nor was there any evidence of drug use. And there wasn’t any booze at all.

  ‘It certainly doesn’t look as if she died here,’ Winsome said. ‘Though I’m not sure how we’d tell.’

  ‘If she did,’ said Banks, ‘she didn’t lie down on the bed to do it, and it’s hardly something you’d do sitting or standing, is it? Don’t you think it’s odd that there are no signs of a handbag or a purse, either here or in the car?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ said Winsome. ‘I was going to mention that at the scene. Most girls her age wouldn’t go anywhere without a lipstick, money or credit cards, and keys. And a mobile, of course.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. But she left that here. Why? And where’s the rest of her personal stuff?’

  ‘I suppose if someone’s intent on committing suicide, they don’t necessarily think the way they would normally,’ she said. ‘I mean, the way most of us do. Anyway, I’ll ask around.’

  ‘Just another mystery to add to the list.’ Banks took a final look around the bedsit and saw nothing he had missed on first glance. He checked his watch and touched Winsome’s shoulder. ‘Come on, we’d better call the control room and get some CSIs out here asap. And someone to preserve the scene until they get here. We should head back to the infirmary now. The Munros will be arriving soon, and we owe it to them to be there to meet them.’

  It was after ten o’clock when Banks got home to Newhope Cottage, having dropped off Adrienne’s phone and laptop with IT for analysis first thing in the morning. Adrienne’s parents had been too distraught to talk when they came in to identify the body, so he had arranged to drive up to Stockton and interview them the following day. He remembered how, in the cold, dreary mortuary, Mr Munro had tearfully identified his daughter’s body because his wife had been too upset to look at her. Winsome had offered them the services of a local doctor, accommodation in town and counselling, but they had insisted on returning to the family home, the only place they thought they would feel ‘right’. At least they had agreed to phone Mrs Munro’s mother, who lived in Middlesbrough, and she had said she would be waiting in the house with a pot of tea brewing when they got back.

  The postman hadn’t called at the cottage before Banks had left for work that morning, but there was nothing of interest waiting for him on the mat behind the door. He had ordered no CDs recently, having gone much more digital in his listening, exploring the world of lossless downloads, and he even got his copy of Gramophone directly on his iPad. Though he liked the ability to browse the archive, he missed turning the pages, the feel of a real magazine in his hands, and thought he might change his subscription to include the print version. He thought of Adrienne’s Astell & Kern and, once again, thought it might well be worth buying one. Streaming was all well and good when you had a Wi-Fi signal, but he liked to listen in the car, and on headphones while he walked, and he was running out of space on his Classic. He could use his smartphone, he supposed, but he associated that too closely with work.

  He had eaten only a ham and tomato sandwich from the police station canteen that day, so after turning up the thermostat a notch, he went through to the kitchen and found some aged cheddar and Rustique Camembert in the fridge. The crackers in his cupboard were a bit stale and tended to bend rather than snap, so he binned them. The cheese would be just fine by itself. Or rather, it would be fine with a glass of wine.

  He turned on the TV on its ledge above the breakfast nook to watch the news, but quickly turned it off again. The world news had been depressing throughout most of his life, but this past two or three years, it had seemed even more so, with the parade of creepy and dangerous clowns that British and American politics had become, the nuclear threat growing and Russia up to her old habits.

  Banks went through to the entertainment room and selected a CD of Chet Baker live in London, recorded in 1983. Baker was supposed to be well past his prime then, ruined by drugs, and not many years away from his mysterious demise after a fall from a high window in Amsterdam. But Banks thought it an excellent concert, and Baker was in terrific form. Music playing, he took his cheese and wine through to the conservatory.

  Outside the windows, the long hump of Tetchley Fell loomed black and forbidding in the distance against the night sky, where a half moon shone among the bright constellations. Banks could recognise only Orion, with its hunter’s belt pointing towards Sirius, and the dim glow of the nebula in the bottom half. It was about the only constellation he had ever been able to recognise apart from the Plough, despite a boyhood obsession with astronomy that had lasted at least a couple of school terms. His telescope had lasted about as long as his microscope.

  When he switched on the shaded lamp by his wicker chair, its reflection swallowed the view. Banks turned on the small fan heater, as it got especially cold in the conservatory on winter nights.

  No matter what, he knew he was lucky to live where he did and vowed they’d have to carry him out feet first. Though he could do without the terrible winter storms that brought the county to a standstill, nowhere else could he imagine enjoying all the seasons as much as he did, from the turning leaves of autumn to the first fogs of November, the December frost, then the snowdrops and bluebells of early spring and the hot still days of summer when bees droned among the fuchsias, and tits and finches flitted around the garden all day, then the swallows and swifts took to the skies in early evening. Most of the birds remained throughout the winter, except the swallows and swifts, which flew off to South Africa. But there were plenty of robins, blackbirds and great tits. He had even seen a tawny owl sitting on the fence at the bottom of his garden early one morning the previous week, just as the light was growing. It was probably the closest he had ever seen an owl and the experience had made him feel strangely light-hearted all day.

  Banks wasn’t even lonely most of the time – it had been over twenty years since he had split up with Sandra – but there were days when he ached for a companion, a lover, someone to share it all with. Time was running out for such things, he realised, and there was nothing more pathetic than an old man in a desperate search for young love. Better remain by himself than become a figure of fun or vilification.

  He had come close to relationships a few times, most recently with Jenny Fuller, an old friend, almost lover, returned from overseas. But time and distance had changed them both, and it wasn’t to be. Jenny had made it clear that while she still wanted to remain friends, she had no interest in picking up from where they had left off so many years ago.

  Linda Palmer, a poet he had met through one of his cases, had intrigued and attracted him enough to make him think that something more might develop between them, but there was distance about her, a strong aura of noli me tangere, which he attributed mostly to the circumstances that had brought them together in the first place – an investigation into her historical rape at the age of fourteen by a high-profile celebrity. Maybe she just didn’t fancy him, and that was all there was to it.

  Penny Cartwright, the folk singer, clearly wasn’t interested, eith
er, and she would never let him forget that he had treated her as a murder suspect in one of his first cases in Eastvale. They got along well enough. Banks admired her talent, went to listen to her sing in the Dog and Gun whenever he could, but he had given up any hope of more.

  And then there was Annie Cabbot.

  Banks and Annie had both been lonely of late, Annie since she had split up with her last boyfriend Nick Fleming. And it had been a few years, Banks realised, since he and his last lover Oriana had parted company. There were moments when he and Annie had almost consoled one another, but something always held them back. Whether it was fear of rejection or fear of success, neither seemed quite sure. Maybe it was the way times had changed, the way the rules that forbade abuse of power in the workplace sometimes also destroyed the possibility of love. Any relationship Banks and Annie had had in the past, they had entered into of their own free will. Mutual. Consensual. But that seemed irrelevant these days. In certain moments, Banks wondered if all this would hold them back for ever. They still flirted occasionally, and he sometimes wished it was more than that. God knew, he still had feelings for her.

  But tonight he was happy with his wine and cheese and Chet Baker playing his trumpet. He settled back in the cushion of his wicker chair and mulled over the day.

  He was still troubled about the dead girl, Adrienne Munro. It never went away, even after all these years, that feeling that grabbed and twisted his gut every time the victim was a young girl. He felt it every time he saw Linda Palmer, even though she was close to his own age now. He had to admit that he had no idea exactly what Adrienne was a victim of yet, but she was certainly dead, and that was upsetting enough.

  As he did so often in these cases, Banks thought of his own daughter Tracy when she was Adrienne’s age, so full of hope and a sense of immortality. She had gone through a difficult period later, including an almost fatal relationship with a serious bad boy, but she had come out at the other end a stronger person with a clearer sense of where she wanted to go and how to get there. Now she was working on her doctorate in history not far away in Newcastle, teaching part time. She had a flat, a steady boyfriend, of whom Banks almost approved, and all was well for the moment. He thought of phoning her but decided it was too late. He would call her tomorrow.

  Brian, his son, was away on tour with his band The Blue Lamps most of the time, endlessly on the road or in the recording studio. Fame didn’t seem to have changed him much, from what Banks had seen, though it hadn’t given him much of a chance to meet someone special and put down roots anywhere. He had once confessed to Banks, after a glass of wine too many, that he was often lonely on the road, that groupies weren’t really his scene and the rock-and-roll life wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, especially when you were in your early thirties.

  Adrienne Munro, sitting in that car, staring straight ahead with her dead eyes, had got to Banks even more than some of the more obvious victims of violence he came across in his job. So far, he had nothing but questions.

  A lot depended on Dr Glendenning’s post-mortem results, but as far as Banks was concerned, no matter what conclusion the doctor came to, there was a villain out there who needed catching and putting away. Even if Adrienne Munro had died from a self-administered overdose of drugs, then someone had supplied her with those drugs, and someone or something had pushed her towards the edge, and over. Even if she had died of a heart attack or a cerebral haemorrhage, someone had moved her body to the abandoned Focus, perhaps without first checking to make sure that she was dead. Why anyone had done that remained a mystery. It could have been a tasteless joke, putting her in a car marked POLICE AWARE. Or perhaps a well-wisher had wanted her to be found quickly, but hadn’t wanted to become entangled in an investigation into her death? Well, he would see about that. The unwritten rule on dealing with suspicious deaths was that it was better to err on the side of suspicion and put in place scene preservation and crime management procedures unnecessarily than fail to do so, only to discover later that the original suspicions were correct.

  The Chet Baker CD had finished, and Banks’s glass was empty. He wandered into the kitchen and refilled it, then went into the entertainment room again, where he programmed the system to play ‘Après un rêve’ from the hoard of music on his computer. He had a vocal version by Véronique Gens, but he chose the violin version by Nicola Benedetti, whose poster Adrienne had on her wall. He added her Thaïs ‘Meditation’ to the mini playlist, too, and stuck on Vaughan William’s ‘The Lark Ascending’ and Arvo Pärt’s ‘Spiegel im Spiegel’ just because he liked them so much. Those four pieces, along with another glass of claret, should see him to bed, he thought, though he doubted he would enjoy a deep and dreamless sleep. They were few and far between these days.

  2

  While Banks was attending the post-mortem of Adrienne Munro and Winsome was following up on the forensic results from the Belderfell Pass crime scene the following morning, DI Annie Cabot and DC Geraldine Masterson were at the scene of another suspicious death.

  Annie and Gerry parked next to the patrol car in the tourist car park at Tetchley Moor and struggled against the wind as they made their way through the twisted heather and gorse roots towards the stunned group of ramblers. Had last week’s mist still been shrouding the moors, it would have been easy to mistake them for an ancient druids’ stone circle, Annie thought, but a sharp wind had finally arrived, especially on the heights, and it dispersed the low-lying cloud and drizzle that had been plaguing the Dales for weeks, replacing it with significantly lower temperatures. Now the sun shone bright and the sky was robin’s egg blue, with only the merest hint of white gossamer clouds twisting in spirals like DNA high above.

  The wind moaned and whined and Annie’s winter coat flapped around her legs. Gerry’s long red hair whipped around her face, however much she tried the hold it back. When they got closer to the group, Annie recognised one or two of the faces from folk nights at the Dog and Gun she had attended with Banks.

  Police Constable Ernie Garrett, who had been first officer on the scene, was standing guard over the gully, hands clasped over his groin like a footballer in the wall waiting for the free kick. Annie and Gerry approached, watched closely by the stationary walkers. One of the members held a handkerchief to her mouth, pale with shock.

  When Annie leaned over the edge, she saw why. It looked as if the man had lost his way in the mist and fallen down the chasm, perhaps tripping over one of the heather or gorse roots that snaked all around the moors. He lay on his back, and his neck was twisted at an awkward angle. Annie guessed that the fall had probably broken it. There was also a fair amount of blood, which appeared to have come from where the back of the man’s head had hit a sharp stone. That he was dead was obvious enough, even to the layman. Small animals had clearly been nibbling at him, too, leaving marks on the exposed flesh of his face, ears and hands.

  But there was another feature odd enough to snare Annie’s interest: the man was wearing an expensive slate grey suit, white shirt, striped tie and black brogues. Hardly the latest trend in walking gear, and certainly not the kind of clothing anyone in his right mind would have worn for a hike on Tetchley Moor at any time of the year.

  But then, Annie thought, nobody in his right mind would have been walking in any sort of gear on Tetchley Moor over the past week or so.

  Nobody, that is, except for the dead man in the grey suit.

  Drinks in The Unicorn after a post-mortem was fast becoming a tradition. The pub was conveniently located opposite Eastvale General Infirmary, and it was usually quiet enough that he could hear himself think and have a private conversation.

  Banks hadn’t seen any reason why he should inflict Adrienne’s post-mortem on Winsome, so he had texted her and asked her to walk down from the station to meet him afterwards. While he waited, he read again through the report the IT specialist had handed him after their brief chat that morning. They were still working on Adrienne’s laptop, and probably would be for some time,
but they had been through the mobile without having recourse to go to her corpse for a fingerprint, and they were finished with it. He had her phone records before him.

  The emails all seemed innocuous enough, mostly to or from family and friends, as far as Banks could gather. There was no evidence of cyber stalking, sexting, bullying or the myriad other offences social media had made it easier to commit. Adrienne also received a lot of automatic notifications of forthcoming classical concerts in the area along with regular newsletters from the Sage, Wigmore Hall and other music venues.

  As far as apps were concerned, Adrienne had subscribed to the streaming and downloading services Idagio and Qobuz, and most of the downloaded music on her phone was classical. She had also bought an app for live screenings of the Berlin Philharmonic concerts which, Banks knew, cost around €150 a year. It was something Banks had thought about subscribing to himself, but felt that he wasn’t at home often enough to enjoy the luxury of the live broadcasts. Maybe he’d do it anyway. They all appeared in the archive eventually, and he could watch them at his leisure. The lure of seeing Patricia Kopatchinskaja dancing barefoot around Simon Rattle as she played the Ligeti violin concerto was almost too hard to resist.

  Adrienne also had both Facebook and Twitter accounts, along with Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp, but there was nothing unusual about their content: a few photos of her and her college friends acting silly or formally dressed at a ball or wedding, wearing funny hats at a birthday party, holiday photos from a pal in Spain, along with Twitter feeds from her favourite classical musicians and scientific thinkers. There was certainly nothing risqué, no nude images, or even sexy poses. Nor did she have Tinder or any more sinister dating apps. It would all have to be sifted through in detail, of course, along with the contents of her laptop. There might be a clue to what happened to her among all the detritus of her private life. There usually was. There is no privacy for the dead.