Careless Love

by Robinson, Peter

  Tired of staring into the gloom and learning nothing, Banks turned back to the path and took a deep breath of fresh air. Blackstone stood with his hands in his pockets, kicking at stones. ‘So what do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘I think you were right to call me. If it really was the same killer, this gives us two goes at him.’

  ‘I thought you said Adrienne Munro committed suicide?’

  ‘Maybe it was just meant to appear that way. She died from asphyxiation after an overdose of sleeping pills. Maybe that was an accident. It’s possible that Sarah Chen was also drugged but didn’t die of asphyxiation, that she had to be killed some other way. I don’t know, Ken. I’ve no idea what, or who, we’re dealing with. Any connection between this Sarah Chen and drugs?’

  ‘Not according to anyone we talked to, though I know that doesn’t necessarily mean much. The drugs squad have no intelligence on her. She wasn’t a known dealer, if that’s what you’re getting at. From what I’ve heard, I’d guess she might have been a casual user, but not the hard stuff, I don’t think. We’ll find out more at the PM, of course. I’ll also get onto the pathologist about taking special pains over toxicology, considering the Adrienne Munro link.’ Blackstone glanced at his watch. ‘Why don’t you come to the team meeting with me now? You can put your case to our DCS.’

  ‘What? With me smelling of beer?’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Blackstone. ‘You’re from North Yorkshire. They’ll be expecting it.’

  ‘It wasn’t a strategy,’ Gerry said over drinks in the Queen’s Arms a short while later. ‘I just started throwing things in, you know, to see how he’d react, then he really pissed me off.’

  ‘I’m not complaining,’ said Annie. ‘If I have one criticism of the way you handled yourself it was the use of “ma’am”. You know how I feel about that.’

  ‘But it worked, didn’t it? It made him feel even more superior, me tugging my forelock to you.’

  Annie grinned. ‘I suppose so. What first set you off?’

  ‘When he called me your sidekick.’

  Annie laughed and drank some beer. Dry days were all very well, but there was nothing like that first pint the day after two in a row. Gerry was on the diet ginger ale, she noticed, which wasn’t unusual. The pub was busy with the after-work crowd, and Annie smiled and said hello to a few familiar faces. Cyril was playing one of those interminable playlists that Banks seemed to love so much. Even she recognised ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’ though she had no idea of the name of the group singing it. She quite liked it.

  ‘Actually, it started before that,’ Gerry went on, leaning forwards. ‘His whole attitude. Right from the start. How important his time was. The “Mr” bit. His tone of voice. The way he looked at me, as if I was something nasty he’d got on the bottom of his shoe.’

  ‘It’s been my experience,’ Annie said, ‘that quite a few doctors are arrogant and controlling megalomaniacs, and surgeons are among the worst. But what do you think? Anything there?’

  Gerry tasted some diet ginger ale before answering. ‘Well, for a start,’ she said, ‘I don’t believe he was as shocked on hearing about Hadfield’s death as he let on.’

  ‘I agree. He knew already.’

  Gerry nodded. ‘I think so.’

  ‘Then why didn’t he say so?’

  ‘That I don’t know. But you asked me.’

  ‘OK.’ Annie picked up her pint glass. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I wanted to test his temper, too, or his restraint. Did you notice how he almost lost it that one time, when I talked down to him, told him he’d nothing to be afraid of?’

  ‘How could I miss it? But what did it mean?’

  ‘Just that he’s got a temper and a short rein. If Hadfield was pushed into that gully, there’s a man who might have done it.’

  ‘If he’d had a reason.’

  ‘I admit I’m speculating. I’m not even saying I think he did it, or that anything was done. These are my impressions of the man. They could have had a falling out and things got physical. That business about the golf wasn’t convincing at all.’

  ‘What about that last phone call?’ Annie said. ‘It’s more than a bit late to be phoning someone under normal circumstances. Even a friend. And Randall didn’t leave a message.’

  ‘No,’ said Gerry. ‘And that’s odd, given that they’d had two previous conversations that day. Randall might almost have been expecting Hadfield not to answer. But, then, why call so late in the first place?’

  ‘I don’t know what the financial world is like, but could anything so urgent come up that late on a Saturday evening that would prevent Hadfield from answering his phone?’

  ‘A late meeting or something?’ Gerry suggested. ‘Some sort of business crisis?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘The financial world is probably still our best bet if we’re searching for someone who had a reason to harm Hadfield. I think we need to examine his business dealings more closely.’

  ‘Do you think you can do that?’

  ‘Sure. I can handle it. I’ve got a few contacts in the fraud squad and white collar crime, and I know my way around the Internet.’

  ‘What about the Pandora charm?’ Annie asked.

  ‘Well, I suppose it means there was a woman involved at some point, doesn’t it? But let’s not make the sort of mistake a man would make and assume that it’s impossible a woman had anything to do with the world of high finance.’

  ‘And Randall?’

  ‘We can hardly mount twenty-four seven surveillance on him, can we, but it would be interesting to see what he does now we’ve made ourselves known to him.’

  ‘I’ll have a word with Alan. See if his mate Ken Blackstone from West Yorkshire can help. And I’ll see if I can find out any more about that charm.’

  ‘We’re in business, then,’ said Gerry, raising her glass.

  ‘Indeed we are,’ said Annie, clinking.

  It was after seven o’clock when Banks got home from Leeds. He had dropped in at the station on his way, found everyone gone and nothing new waiting for him, so he left. Maybe the connection between Adrienne Munro and Sarah Chen – a name and an unknown phone number – was a bit thin, but it wouldn’t get any stronger unless they worked at it. Tomorrow they would start to enter everything they had on the two cases into HOLMES, the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System, a computer programme developed to help with case management. It wasn’t a substitute for human intelligence, but it kept track of every little bit of information that was entered, and it sometimes came up with connections and inconsistencies that even the most perceptive of detectives missed, especially if the bits of connected information were on statements from two different county forces.

  This escalation would mean a meeting with Area Commander Gervaise in the morning, possibly even with ACC McLaughlin. It would also mean begging for a bigger budget and more manpower. All in all, he felt he could do with a quiet evening at home before he took it all on tomorrow.

  Picking up the bills and circulars after he had turned on the lights and turned up the heat a notch, Banks dumped the post on the table and walked down the hall to the kitchen. He hadn’t had a great deal of time for shopping in Leeds, but one thing he had done was drop in at Marks & Spencer’s and buy a ten-quid meal for two – including a bottle of Spanish Tempranillo – which consisted of a main of chilli and coriander chicken escalopes, a side dish of potato croquettes and a melting-middle chocolate pudding for dessert. He’d get two meals out that, at least, maybe three if he exercised a little portion control.

  He picked out some chicken and croquettes and put them in the toaster oven to cook. He would see how he felt about the chocolate pudding later. That done, he poured himself a glass of wine and watched the Channel 4 news on the little television above his breakfast nook while he waited. There was nothing new, just war, famine, earthquakes, storms, scandals, trade wars, tariffs, political corruption and murder, as usual. Ken’s case got a
brief mention, but not Banks’s. Another election in Africa had to be done all over again because of fraud. Italy was without a functioning government. Russia was causing trouble again. It was getting so they could write the news a few days ahead and all take a holiday for a while. About the only thing nobody ever got right in England was the bloody weather. Especially in Yorkshire. Maybe there was snow and ice ten miles down the road, but it was a clear night in Gratly, with the stars all brightly laid out on their black velvet cushion of night and a slip of a moon casting a ghostly glow over Tetchley Fell.

  Banks ate at the breakfast nook while the news presenter interviewed an economic expert on today’s predictions for the country’s future. At the end of it, Banks didn’t know whether to withdraw all his savings and hide them under his mattress or plough more into his retirement fund. Economics had never been his strongest subject.

  As he ate and half watched TV, he thought about the Blake quote Sarah Chen had tattooed on the back of her shoulder: ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’. Did it? He had heard it said many times before, back in the sixties, but always quoted very much out of context, which was a lengthy poem called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Opposites intrigued Blake. In the same poem, he had also written, ‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires’, which Banks hoped nobody took as literally as some did the excess quote.

  His own favourite was ‘A dead body revenges not injuries’, which was pretty much self-evident and also, in a way, the raison d’être for a job like his. It was an interesting poem to read and discuss, but never intended as a manual for living one’s life, the way many had taken it in the sixties. Jim Morrison, for example. Then there was Rimbaud with his ‘total derangement of all the senses’, bless him. Add Dalí’s melting clock, a Grateful Dead concert and a few doses of LSD and that pretty much defined the era Banks had grown up in.

  Things were different now, though. Pundits kept saying that the millennials had different values, and approached life very differently from the previous generation. What had Sarah Chen made of the words she had tattooed on her shoulder? Perhaps nothing, like the Tesco’s checkout girl. Or perhaps it was her credo for living. Banks doubted she had taken them literally. Blackstone had said she liked to give people the idea that she was more liberated than she really was, though he also got the impression she was an extroverted personality. So what had she in common with Adrienne Munro, and how had they met, if indeed they had? Adrienne had no tattoos. And according to most people Banks had talked to, she had been rather shy and retiring, perhaps even a bit puritanical, if not entirely virginesque. Still, they say opposites attract. If it wasn’t drugs, what was it? Sex? Both were wearing rather fetching and revealing dresses, as if they were off on a night out. But where? And had they been together that night before they died?

  Banks finished his meal and put his plate and cutlery in the dishwasher. It wasn’t full yet, so he just set it for another rinse cycle.

  While in Leeds, he had managed to get to Waterstones and buy an anthology of Russian poetry, and then to HMV, which seemed to have less and less on offer each time he visited, especially in the music section. How he missed the old Classical Record Shop, gone for years now, though he had to admit that one could have far greater choice online. Still, it was a matter of holding the disc, or LP, of having something substantial, like a real book rather than the electronic version. He wasn’t a Luddite, but he did believe there was still a lot of value in the old media. There were plenty of deals in the DVD section, now that more people had turned to Netflix and other online sources of movies, and he ended up buying three of his all-time favourites on Blu-ray for twenty quid: The Guns of Navarone, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Doctor Zhivago, none of which he had seen for a long time.

  Instead of sitting in the conservatory listening to music that evening, he took his wine into the entertainment room, put on Doctor Zhivago and sat facing the large screen TV with the lights out. He remembered first seeing the film years ago with his girlfriend of the time, Emily. They sat on the back row, as usual, and he had his arm around her, which was slowly going numb. He remembered the music, the lushly romantic ‘Lara’s Theme’, smoke from all the cigarettes, including his own, shimmering as it rose and swirled through the projector’s light, the girly shampoo smell of Emily’s hair as he turned to kiss her, the strawberry taste of her lipstick.

  The film had hardly begun when his mobile buzzed, and when he answered it, he heard the familiar voice of Zelda, with her slight Eastern European accent.

  ‘Alan? I am sorry if I have disturbed you. It is not too late, is it?’

  ‘No. Not at all. As a matter of fact, I just this minute started watching Doctor Zhivago.’

  Banks thought he heard Zelda laugh. ‘I hope you don’t take it too seriously as a lesson in history.’

  ‘I’ll try not to. What can I do for you?’

  ‘I am going to London tomorrow. They called earlier. I thought we should talk first.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘May I come to your office tomorrow morning?’

  ‘Can you make it lunchtime? I have some meetings in the morning I can’t get out of. Things have escalated a bit.’

  ‘The girl in the car?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK, but I must get a train from Northallerton in the afternoon.’

  ‘I’ll give you a lift to the station.’

  ‘Good. I will come to your office first. Goodnight, Alan. Enjoy Zhivago.’

  ‘I will. Goodnight. And thanks.’

  Banks turned back to Doctor Zhivago and soon found himself drawn into the sweeping love story set against a background of social upheaval, war and revolution. He was sure that Boris Pasternak’s novel was nowhere near as romantic as David Lean’s film, with its lingering, exquisitely lit close-ups of Julie Christie’s eyes, and he vowed to read it soon. But for now the movie version would do.

  When the film ended, a few hours and a bottle of wine later, he cried just the way he had the first time he saw it, when he had to hide his tears from Emily Hargreaves. But tonight he had nobody to hide his tears from.

  10

  The morning meetings had gone as expected, with grumblings all around from the brass about the expense, but in the end both Area Commander Gervaise and ACC Ron McLaughlin, along with Ken Blackstone’s supervisor in West Yorkshire, had bowed to the evidence that there was a link between the Adrienne Munro and Sarah Chen cases.

  Banks was named SIO, and Blackstone his deputy. Budgets were allocated, manpower assigned and the complexities of a major inquiry team began to take shape. They decided to keep the Eastvale boardroom as their incident room. There didn’t seem much point in positioning a mobile unit halfway down the A1. The travel distances were not so great, anyway. Terminals and phones were installed, office manager, document reader, researcher and the other key roles filled, and HOLMES was set in motion. Gerry worked with one of Ken Blackstone’s men getting the programme up and running.

  About noon, when Banks was finally free to relax for a moment, enjoying a coffee in his office and listening to Murray Perahia’s recording of Bach’s French Suites, a clearly spellbound young PC brought Zelda up to his office. Banks could hardly blame the boy. Zelda was wearing jeans and a black polo-neck jumper under a long navy woollen coat with a fur collar. She was wheeling a suitcase with one hand and carrying a Russian-style fur hat that could have come straight out of a Tolstoy novel, or Doctor Zhivago, in the other.

  ‘Ah. Bach,’ said Zelda. ‘Such a civilised policeman.’

  Banks stood up and reached out to shake her hand. She turned it to be kissed, so he kissed it. He noticed how long and tapered her fingers were. A pianist’s hands. ‘What on earth are you doing with that philistine Ray,’ he said.

  Zelda laughed and squeezed his hand. ‘I can put up with a bit of Led Zeppelin once in a while,’ she said, then made a face. ‘It’s that Captain Beefheart that drives me mad. And that Nico woman. She soun
ds as if she is singing from beyond the grave.’

  Banks laughed. The way she pronounced Beefheart indicated the exact amount of scorn she felt. ‘The Captain always was one of Ray’s favourites,’ he said. ‘I think he even saw The Magic Band perform live once, back in the day. Never got over it. And as for Nico . . . well, what can I say? Sit down, please. Did Ray talk to you? Have you had second thoughts?’

  Zelda smiled. ‘No second thoughts, despite Raymond’s efforts. I’m going to London this afternoon. More surveillance photographs for me. I wanted to see you first so that you can brief me, tell me what you want me to do.’

  ‘Is it always at such short notice?’

  ‘Mostly, yes.’

  ‘Is there anything you want to tell me now that you didn’t want to say the other night?’

  ‘No. Why should there be?’

  Banks shrugged. ‘I just got the impression there’s much more to your job than you say, that’s all.’ And your life, he almost added, but managed to restrain himself.

  ‘There is always more. You must understand that. But there are certain expectations of silence and secrecy, as I know there is in your job, too.’

  ‘I do understand that. I was talking about the element of risk.’

  ‘Oh, that.’ She waved a hand dismissively. ‘I told you. Mostly I sit in an office and look at photographs or CCTV footage. It is boring, but necessary. I’m no Modesty Blaise, Alan. I cannot run around tracking down the scum who profit from these crimes. But this I can do. And I know it gets results.’

  ‘Nobody’s denying that,’ said Banks who had hardly got over his surprise that Zelda had heard of Modesty Blaise. ‘But a man like Keane—’

  ‘I have met many men like Keane.’

  ‘You don’t—’