Close to Home

by Peter Robinson

  Banks had once worked on a case for the Met involving a modeling agency and he had been surprised that so many of these women who looked beautiful in magazines and on television lacked something in real life, their features perfect but bland, unformed and unfinished, like a blank canvas or an actor without a role. But Robin Armitage had presence.

  “I’m sure you know,” said Banks, “that Luke’s death changes everything. It changes the way we proceed in the investigation, and we’re going to have to go over much of the same ground again. This may seem tedious and pointless to you, but believe me, it’s necessary. I’m new to the case, but I took the time this morning to familiarize myself with the investigation so far, and I have to say that I’ve found nothing out of order, nothing I wouldn’t have done had I been in charge myself.”

  “Like I said,” Martin chipped in, “you lot stick together. I’ll be complaining to the chief constable. He’s a personal friend of mine.”

  “That’s your privilege, but he’ll only tell you the same as I’m telling you. If everyone gave in to a kidnapper’s demands without informing the police, it would be the most popular crime in the country.”

  “But look what happened when we did inform the police. Our son is dead.”

  “Something went wrong. This was an unusual case from the start; there are a number of inconsistencies.”

  “What are you suggesting? That it wasn’t a straightforward kidnapping?”

  “There was nothing straightforward about it at all, Mr. Armitage.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Robin. “The phone call…the ransom demand…they were genuine, surely?”

  “Yes,” said Annie, taking a cue from Banks. “But the ransom demand came an unusually long time after Luke disappeared, the kidnapper didn’t let you speak to your son, and the sum he asked for was ridiculously low.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Martin. “We’re not made of money.”

  “I know that,” Annie said. “But how would the kidnapper know? To all intents and purposes, footballers and models make millions, and you’re living in a mansion.”

  Martin frowned. “I suppose you’ve got a point. Unless…”

  “Yes?” Banks picked up the questioning again.

  “Unless it was someone close to us.”

  “Can you think of anyone?”

  “Of course not. I can’t imagine any of our friends doing something like this. Are you insane?”

  “Mrs. Armitage?”

  Robin shook her head. “No.”

  “We’ll still need a list of people to talk to.”

  “I’m not having you going around bullying our friends,” said Martin.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll be discreet. And, don’t forget, you’re the one who suggested it might be someone close to you. Anyone have a grudge against either of you?”

  “A few goalies, I suppose,” said Martin, “but nothing serious, no.”

  “Mrs. Armitage?”

  “I don’t think so. Modeling can be a brutally competitive career, and I’m sure I stood on my share of toes on the catwalk, but nothing so…terrible…I mean, nothing to make anyone do something like this, especially so long after.”

  “If you’d both like to think about it for a while, it would be a great help.”

  “You said it was odd that he wouldn’t let us talk to Luke,” Robin said.

  “It’s unusual, yes,” Annie answered.

  “Do you think it was because…because Luke was already dead?”

  “That’s possible,” said Annie. “But we won’t know until the pathologist has finished his job.”

  “When will that be?”

  “Perhaps by this evening or early tomorrow.” Dr. Burns, the police surgeon, had been unable to give an accurate estimate of time of death at the scene, so they would have to wait until Dr. Glendenning had finished his postmortem examination of Luke’s body. Even then, they had learned not to expect miracles from medical science.

  “Can you remember anything else about the caller?” Banks asked Martin Armitage.

  “I’ve told you everything I know. I can’t remember any more.”

  “The voice definitely wasn’t familiar?”

  “No one I recognized.”

  “And there was only the one call?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there anything else you can tell us that might be of help?”

  Both Martin and Robin Armitage shook their heads. Banks and Annie got up. “We’ll need to have a look at Luke’s room next,” said Banks, “and then we’d like to talk to your housekeeper and her husband.”

  “Josie and Calvin?” said Martin. “But why?”

  “They might be able to help.”

  “I can’t see how.”

  “Were they close to Luke?”

  “Not especially. If truth be told, I always got the impression that they thought him a bit of a weirdo. They’re wonderful people, salt of the earth, but sort of traditional in their views of people and behavior.”

  “And Luke didn’t fit the mold?”

  “No. He might as well have come from outer space as far as they’re concerned.”

  “Was there any animosity?”

  “Of course not. They are our employees, after all. What are you suggesting, that they had something to do with this?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything, merely asking. Look, Mr. Armitage, I can understand your feelings, honestly I can, but you must let us do our jobs the way we see fit. It’s not going to help at all if you start challenging every move we make. I promise you we’ll be as discreet as we can with all our inquiries. No matter what you think, we don’t go around bullying people. But we also don’t accept everything at face value. People lie for a variety of reasons, many of them irrelevant to the investigation, but sometimes it’s because they did it, and it’s for us to sort out the lies from the truth. You’ve already lied to us once yourself that we know of, when you rang DI Cabbot and told her you’d heard from Luke.”

  “I did that to protect Luke.”

  “I understand why you did it, but it was still a lie. Maybe you can see how complicated our job becomes when you take all the lies into account. The lies of the innocent, especially. As I said, we don’t take things, or people, at face value, and like it or not, every murder investigation begins close to home, then moves outward. Now, if you don’t mind, we’ll take a look at Luke’s room.”

  Michelle had been joking when she told Banks she was getting paranoid, but she was beginning to think that every time she visited the archives, Mrs. Metcalfe rang Detective Superintendent Shaw. Here he was again, preceded by the dark chill of his shadow, on the threshold of the tiny room.

  “Any progress?” he asked, leaning against the door.

  “I’m not sure,” said Michelle. “I’ve been going over the old crime reports for 1965 looking for some sort of connection with Graham’s disappearance.”

  “And have you found any?”

  “Not directly, no.”

  “I told you you were wasting your time.”

  “Maybe not entirely.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Michelle paused. She had to be careful what she said because she didn’t want Shaw to know that Banks had tipped her off to the Kray connection. That would send him into a tantrum she could well do without. “I was reading over the reports and statements on a protection racket investigation in July 1965, and Graham’s dad’s name came up.”

  “So? Where’s the connection?”

  “A club on Church Street called Le Phonographe.”

  “I remember that place. It was a discotheque.”

  Michelle frowned. “I thought disco was in the seventies, not the sixties.”

  “I’m not talking about the music, but the establishment itself. Clubs like Le Phonographe offered memberships and served meals, usually an inedible beef burger, if my memory serves me well, so they could sell alcohol legally after regular closing time. They’d sta
y open till three in the morning, or so. There’d be music and dancing, too, but it was usually Motown or soul.”

  “You sound familiar with the place, sir.”

  “I was young once, DI Hart. Besides, Le Phonographe was the sort of place you kept an eye on. It was a villains’ club. Owned by a nasty piece of work called Carlo Fiorino. Used to like to pretend he was Mafia, wore the striped, wide-lapel suits, pencil-thin mustache, spats and everything—very Untouchables—but his father was a POW who ended up staying on after the war and marrying a local farm girl out Huntingdon way. Plenty of local villains hung out there, and you could often pick up a tip or two. And I don’t mean for the three-thirty at Kempton Park.”

  “So it was a criminal hangout?”

  “Back then, yes. But petty. People who liked to think they were big players.”

  “Including Bill Marshall?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you knew about Bill Marshall’s activities?”

  “Of course we did. He was strictly a minor presence. We kept an eye on him. It was routine.”

  “What was this Carlo Fiorino’s game?”

  “Bit of everything. Soon as the new town expansion was well under way he turned Le Phonographe into a more up-market club, with decent grub, a better dance floor and a casino. He also owned an escort agency. We think he also got into drugs, prostitution and pornography, but he was always clever enough to stay one step ahead, and he played both sides against the middle. Most of the time.”

  “What do you mean, sir?”

  “Got himself shot in a drug war with the Jamaicans in 1982.”

  “But he never did time?”

  “Never got charged with anything, far as I remember.”

  “Doesn’t that strike you as odd, sir?”

  “Odd?” Shaw seemed to snap out of his reminiscing mood and become his grumpy old self again. He stuck his face so close to hers that she could smell his tobacco-mint-and-whiskey breath and see the lattice of purple veins throbbing in his bulbous nose. “I’ll tell you what’s bloody odd, DI Hart. It’s you asking these questions. That’s what’s odd. None of this can possibly have anything to do with what happened to Graham Marshall, and that’s a fact. You’re muckraking. I don’t know why, but that’s what you’re doing.”

  “Sir, all I’m doing is trying to get a handle on the circumstances of the boy’s disappearance. Looking over the investigation and over other investigations around the same time seems a reasonable way of doing it to me.”

  “It’s not your brief to look into the Marshall investigation, DI Hart, or any other, for that matter. Who do you think you are, Complaints and Discipline? Stick to your job.”

  “But sir, Bill Marshall was one of the men interviewed in connection with this protection racket, all involved with Carlo Fiorino and Le Phonographe. Some of the city center shopkeepers filed a complaint, and Marshall was one of the people they named.”

  “Was he charged?”

  “No, sir. Only questioned. One of the original complainants ended up in hospital and the other witnesses backed off, retracted their statements. No further action.”

  Shaw smirked. “Then it’s hardly relevant, is it?”

  “But doesn’t it seem odd to you that no further action was taken? And that when Graham Marshall disappeared, his father never came under close scrutiny, even though he had recently been implicated in a criminal ring?”

  “Why should he? Maybe he didn’t do it. Did that thought ever enter your head? And even if he was involved in some petty protection racket, it doesn’t make him a child killer, does it? Even by your standards that’s a long stretch of the imagination.”

  “Was Bill Marshall a police informer?”

  “He might have let slip the odd snippet of information. That’s how we played the game back then. Tit for tat.”

  “Is that why he was protected from prosecution?”

  “How the hell should I know? If you’ve read your paperwork, you’ll know I wasn’t on that case.” He took a deep breath, then seemed to relax and soften his tone. “Look,” he said, “policing was different back then. There was more give-and-take.”

  Plenty of take, Michelle thought. She’d heard stories of the old days, of departments, of stations and even of whole counties run wild. But she didn’t say anything.

  “So we bent the rules every now and then,” Shaw continued. “Grow up. Welcome to the real world.”

  Michelle made a mental note about Bill Marshall’s possible role as a police informer. If he had informed on criminals here in Peterborough, she could only imagine what the Krays might have done if he’d tried anything like that with them and then disappeared. The South Pole wouldn’t have been far enough, let alone Peterborough. “From what I can piece together,” she went on, “the Graham Marshall investigation followed one line of inquiry and one only when it became clear that he hadn’t run away from home: a sex killing by a passing pervert.”

  “Well? What’s so odd about that? It’s what the evidence pointed to.”

  “Just seems a bit of a coincidence, that’s all, that some pervert should happen to be driving by a quiet street at that hour in the morning, just as Graham’s doing his paper rounds.”

  “Wrong place at the wrong time. Happens often enough. Besides, do you think perverts don’t know about paper rounds? Don’t you think someone could have been watching, studying, stalking the Marshall kid, the way such perverts often do? Or didn’t they teach you that at Bramshill?”

  “It’s possible, sir.”

  “You think you can do better than us, do you?” said Shaw, his face turning red again. “Think you can out-detect Jet Harris?”

  “I didn’t say that, sir. It’s just the advantage of hindsight, that’s all. A long perspective.”

  “Look, we worked our bollocks off on that case, Jet Harris, Reg Proctor and me, not to mention dozens more DCs and uniforms. Have you any idea what that sort of investigation is like? The scope of it? How wide a net we cast? We were getting a hundred sightings a day from as far afield as Penzance and the Mull of fucking Kintyre. Now you come along with your fancy education and your Bramshill courses and you have the gall to tell me we were wrong.”

  Michelle took a deep breath. “I’m not saying you were wrong, sir. Only you didn’t solve the case, did you? You didn’t even find a body. Look, I know you came up the hard way, and I respect that, but there are advantages to an education.”

  “Yes. Accelerated promotion. They let you buggers run before you can toddle.”

  “Policing has changed, sir, as you pointed out not so long ago. And crime has changed, too.”

  “Sod that for a theory. Don’t spout your book-learning at me. A criminal’s a criminal. Only the coppers have got softer. Especially the ones at the top.”

  Michelle sighed. Time to change tack. “You were a DC on the Graham Marshall investigation, sir. Can you tell me anything at all?”

  “Look, if I’d known anything we’d have solved the bloody case, wouldn’t we, instead of having you point out how stupid we were?”

  “I’m not trying to make anyone look stupid.”

  “Aren’t you? That’s how it sounds to me. It’s easy to second-guess, given twenty-twenty hindsight. If Bill Marshall had anything to do with his son’s disappearance, believe me, we’d have had him. In the first place, he had an alibi—”

  “Who, sir?”

  “His wife.”

  “Not the most reliable of alibis, is it?”

  “She’d hardly give him an alibi for doing in her own son, now, would she? Tell me even you aren’t so twisted as to think Mrs. Marshall was involved.”

  “We don’t know, sir, do we?” But Michelle remembered Mrs. Marshall, her sincerity and dignity, the need to bury her son after all these years. Certainly it was possible she was lying. Some criminals are very good actors. But Michelle didn’t think so. And she wouldn’t be getting any answers out of Bill Marshall. “Did the Marshalls own a car?”

  “Yes, t
hey did. But don’t expect me to remember the make and number. Look, Bill Marshall might have been a bit of a Jack-the-Lad, but he wasn’t a child molester.”

  “How do you know that was the motive behind Graham’s abduction?”

  “Have some brains, woman. Why else does a fourteen-year-old boy go missing without a trace? If you ask me, I’d still say he might have been one of Brady and Hindley’s victims, though we could never prove it.”

  “But it’s way out of their area. A geographical profiler—”

  “More benefits of a university education. Profilers? Don’t make me laugh. I’ve had enough of this. It’s about time you stopped nosing about down here and got back on the bloody job.” And he turned and stalked out.

  Michelle noticed that her hand was shaking when he left, and she felt her breath held tight in her chest. She didn’t like confrontation with authority; she had always respected her bosses and the police hierarchy in general; an organization like the police couldn’t run efficiently without a quasi-military structure, she believed, orders given and obeyed, sometimes without question, if it came right down to it. But Shaw’s rage seemed out of proportion to the situation.

  She got up and returned the files to their boxes and gathered together her notes. It was well after lunchtime and time for some fresh air, anyway. Perhaps she would make a few phone calls, find someone who’d been on the job during the Kray era and head down to London the next day.

  Back in her office, she found a message slip on her desk informing her that Dr. Cooper had rung and wanted to know if she would drop by the mortuary sometime that afternoon. No time like the present, she thought, telling DC Collins where she was going and heading out to her car.

  The search of Luke’s room didn’t reveal much except a cassette tape marked “Songs from a Black Room,” which Banks, with Robin’s permission, slipped in his pocket to listen to later. Luke’s desktop computer contained nothing of interest. There was hardly any e-mail, which was only to be expected, and most of the Web sites he visited were connected with music. He also did a fair bit of online purchasing, mostly CDs, also to be expected from someone living in so remote a spot.