Bad Samaritan

by Michael J Malone

  ‘…thank you for it.’ I do the mental equivalent of girding my loins. Exhale. Say, ‘Let’s go and rub salt into a tragedy.’

  We walk down the drive, and the front door opens as we arrive.

  ‘You’ll be the polis,’ says the small, tidy man who opens the door. He’s white-haired, wearing grey trousers, blue shirt, brown cardigan. Judging by the sad expression but apparent lack of real grief I’m guessing he’s…

  ‘I’m the neighbour from number 3,’ he provides helpfully and points. ‘The bungalow there. Tom Sharp.’ He shakes his head slowly. ‘Such a terrible thing to happen to such a lovely wee family. Terrible. Just terrible.’

  ‘DI Ray McBain,’ I say. ‘And this is DC Alessandra Rossi. Can we come in?’

  ‘Sure, sure.’ He steps to the side, allowing us entry. ‘Kevin is in the front room,’ he says in a whisper and points along a cream-coloured hallway. ‘Jennie’s upstairs. The doctor sedated her.’

  The hallway is painted in a neutral cream, and here and there the wall is dotted with family photographs. All of them show a smiling girl through her various growth spurts. Baby to teen. From this I read Kevin and Jennie Banks only have one child.

  Tom walks ahead of us, and after a few quick steps he turns left through a doorway. We follow into a large kitchen-diner. A trim thirty-something male is sitting at a long pine dinner table. He’s holding a soft toy in one hand. In front of him a white mug full of black coffee. Judging by the way he’s staring into space, my guess is that the drink has been ignored so long it’s gone cold.

  ‘Kevin, son,’ says Tom, ‘these police officers need a wee word with you.’ He walks over to the hunched figure and places a hand on his shoulder. There is a delay before Kevin takes his eyes from the table top and looks at Tom as if he is a stranger.

  ‘Aye. Aye,’ he rumbles.

  Tom walks past us, back the way he came in as if desperate to get out of the house. As if grief was catching. ‘I’ll, eh … I’ll head off.’ He makes an apologetic face. ‘Kinda feeling in the way.’

  ‘Thanks, Tom,’ I say and turn to Kevin Banks. He’s now standing. Looks about six feet tall. Short black hair, greying at the temples. Navy pin-stripe trousers and white shirt with a patterned tie slung round his shoulders as if he was in the act of dressing for his day when the worst news possible arrived.

  ‘Can I offer you guys a tea, or a…?’ His voice is deep, the accent wears the smooth song of the Highlands. The offer of a drink is prompted purely by conditioning, because judging by the way his arms are hanging by his side, the effort to coordinate the required actions would be too great. I realise it’s also a delaying tactic. Judging by the way he’s biting at the inside of his cheek, he’s been fighting to keep a hold on his emotions. The redness around his eyes tells me he’s losing.

  ‘No thanks, Mr Banks.’ I say. ‘Just had one.’ I point at a chair. ‘Do you mind if we…?’

  He nods.

  The air fills with the scream of chair legs being scraped across wooden flooring. Out of the corner of my eye I can see Ale cringing against the noise. We sit.

  ‘Did she suffer?’ Kevin asks. His eyes move back and forward between Ale and I.

  ‘We haven’t had the result of the post mortem yet…’

  ‘I need to know. Did she suffer?’ He’s holding the toy bear in one hand and twisting a leg round and round with the other. His bottom lip is quivering, and a single tear is sliding down his cheek. ‘I turned the news off.’ He indicates with a nod of his head where the TV is pinned to the wall. ‘They just mentioned over and over again that a girl was…’ the word escapes on a breath ‘…dead.’

  ‘We can’t say for sure, Mr Banks,’ I say. He opens his mouth as if to ask the same question again. I keep on speaking. ‘What we can say is that she didn’t give up without a fight. Evidence suggests she had a good go at scratching his face off.’

  Ale looks at me as if to ask if this is something I should be divulging. I ignore her. The man needs something to cling on to help him deal with the nightmare of the next few weeks and months.

  Kevin closes his eyes. ‘Her talons, I call them.’ His mouth trembles into the facsimile of a smile. ‘She spends hours on those bloody nails. Trimming and polish…’ His voice trails off as he realises he spoke about her in the present tense.

  ‘What can you tell us about where she was heading off to last night?’ Ale asks.

  ‘She’s a young woman.’ He shrugs. ‘You almost give up asking when all you get is vague answers. “Out”, was all she said.’

  ‘Do you know who she was meeting?’

  ‘Friends?’ A guilt-laboured shrug. ‘You try to keep a balance between knowing what they’re up to and giving them space to learn about life on their own.’

  ‘Do you have contact details for her friends?’ I ask.

  He coughs. ‘My wife has some of their numbers on her mobile.’ He moves as if to stand up.

  ‘Don’t trouble your wife, Mr Banks,’ I say. ‘We have Aileen’s mobile. I’m sure all the details we need will be on there.’ If he’d been more aware of what was happening I’m sure he would have then asked me what was the point of the question? I wanted a feel for the family dynamics. They had an attractive living space, but did they communicate? How many answers would the parents be able to provide?

  ‘Her nails and her laptop and her phone. That’s Aileen’s world right there.’ Kevin Banks’s eyes go vacant, and I see what I think he sees. A young girl on her bed, connected to her phone by an earpiece and dabbing paint on her toenails as she talks.

  ‘Did she use Facebook and Twitter … all that stuff?’ I ask.

  ‘I tease her.’ He pushes out his bottom lip. ‘Can’t you just talk to people?’ His eyes return from his thoughts and reach mine. ‘What happened to just talking?’ He exhales. It is a long and tremulous breath.

  ‘Can you describe her state of mind when she left the house yesterday evening? Does anything strike you as being out of the ordinary?’

  Kevin purses his lips. ‘She … she was fine. Seemed like she was getting back to her usual self. Gave us the “don’t wait up” line.’

  ‘Back to her usual self?’ asks Ale.

  ‘Aye. She split up with her boyfriend, Simon, about six months ago. Simon Davis. They’d been sweethearts all the way through secondary school. Then he dumped her and started going out with her best friend.’

  ‘Ouch,’ says Ale.

  ‘Aye. Ouch right enough. Wee bastard. We treated him like family. Felt like a betrayal, you know. Even took him on holiday with us latterly.’ Pause. ‘She kind of went off the rails for a wee while after that. Coming home drunk, or high. We had a few rows I can tell you. And a few attempts to ground her. Which she totally ignored. Strong-willed, just like her mother.’ He outlines a scenario that will surely be playing through a million homes across the country.

  ‘Routine question, Mr Banks,’ I say. ‘Where were you and your wife last night?’

  ‘Here. We’re always here,’ he answers. ‘Don’t have much of a life outside of work. And Aileen.’ He swallows, picks up the bear and grips its waist. ‘After dinner we watched some telly. Can’t even remember what we watched. Then we went to bed. Neither of us sleep well until we hear Aileen’s key in the door…’ He pauses. A sob. His face twists with the pain. ‘We must have dozed off eventually because the next thing,’ he screws his eyes shut, ‘the police were at the door.’

  ‘I got ready for work.’ He releases the bear from the torture he is inflicting on it and moves both hands down the air in front of his body as if to demonstrate his work clothes. ‘Kept on going with my usual morning routine because it can’t be true. It’s someone else’s Aileen. Not my wee girl.’ He holds a hand over his mouth. His eyes screw shut. His shoulders shake in silent pain.

  We give him a moment.

  ‘It would be helpful if we cou
ld have a look at her bedroom,’ Ale says.

  ‘Top of the stairs. Second door on the right,’ Kevin manages to answer. He crosses his arms in a movement that comes across like he’s trying to hug himself.

  ‘Would you like to come up with us, please?’ I ask. My tone suggests I would rather he did. Thankfully, he’s in compliant mode. Too numb to be anything else. He gets to his feet slowly, as if age was his problem rather than the early stages of grief.

  We make a slow procession upstairs. He reaches a door. It has a small plaster plaque at eye level, pink flowers with the name Aileen embossed in white. He pushes it open and stands aside to let us past.

  A double bed rests under the window. Pink fairy lights are wrapped around the metal frame of the headboard. A thick quilt bears the outline of a body that had been pressed against the down. It emphasises how the room has recently been made vacant. Kevin steps forward and places the bear on the pillows. He then smooths out the shape of the body that had recently rested there. From the size of it I guessed it had been made by him.

  I look away to study the room. The walls are painted the same neutral colour the rest of the house wears. The wall to the right has a mirrored floor-to-ceiling wardrobe, and a dressing table rests against the wall on the left. It has a pile of books at one end and at the other an array of cosmetics. In the middle sits the glossy black rectangle of a closed laptop. In the corner there’s a bookcase. I can see Harry Potter, Jacqueline Wilson and more than a few vampire books.

  ‘Aileen loved that Twilight series. Kinda grown out of it now, but refused to get rid of the books.’ Kevin catches my line of sight. ‘When did vampires become the good guys?’

  ‘What was she studying?’ Ale asks.

  ‘History,’ Kevin answers. ‘Such a nothing degree in my opinion. I want her to do something more practical. Something that would lead to an actual job, you know. But girls nowadays,’ he shrugs, ‘there’s no telling them.’

  He looks out of the door and across the landing. I follow his line of vision and can see into another bedroom. It’s in darkness, heavy curtains closed, but I can make out a shape lying in the foetal position on the bed.

  ‘I’ll just go and…’ Kevin points towards the other bedroom. As he shuffles out his body language suggests he isn’t expecting to be of much use. In a few moments I hear his quiet rumble. A female voice. More soothing male sounds then a sharp, loud, ‘Just fucking leave me alone, Kevin,’ followed by gut-wrenching sobs.

  Ale catches my eye and makes a grim face. ‘Horrible,’ she whispers.

  ‘Do girls keep diaries nowadays?’ I ask her.

  ‘May well do. Online networking is more the thing now I expect. You don’t get a reaction from a diary.’

  ‘So it’s all about the reaction?’

  ‘Oh yes. We girls like a bit of drama, dontcha know.’ Ale pushes her face into a smile.

  I look around the room. Assessing. Filtering.

  ‘The laptop is a given. We’ll take that. Let’s have a look for anything else that might be of help.’

  Carefully and as quietly as we can, we look through Aileen Banks’s things. At one point I open a drawer to find it stuffed with underwear. I close it as quick as I can.

  ‘You do that one,’ I say to Ale. ‘I feel like a perv rifling through that.’

  ‘Daftie.’ She gets up from her crouch at the floor before the wardrobe and walks towards me. ‘No need to feel like that. You’re one of the good guys.’

  ‘Whatever.’ A predatory male kills a young girl, and it diminishes my standing as a man. Ale may tell me I’m one of the good guys, but I need to do something to remind myself. Like find the bastard who did this.

  Sometime later and we’ve been through everything. There’s nothing to suggest that Aileen was anything other than a pretty, normal girl in her early twenties.

  ‘I suspect the phone and laptop are going to be of more use to us,’ I say to Ale. ‘Let’s get back to the office.’

  We walk back down the stairs and can see from the hallway that Kevin is back in his seat at the dining table. He’s staring at the patterns in the wood, his expression slack, hands flat on the surface as if he’s forgotten how to work them.

  I cough. ‘Before we go, do you have a recent head and shoulder photo of Aileen?’

  * * *

  Back at the car, I throw the laptop and cables on to the backseat and then climb into the driver’s seat. Ale has her seatbelt on and is staring into the far distance.

  ‘God, I hate my job at times,’ she says. ‘That poor man.’

  ‘Close family members have to be removed from the list of suspects first,’ I remind her.

  ‘If that man harmed his daughter, I’ve a giant set of testicles and I’m an unemployed drag queen called Cindy.’

  There’s a knock at the car window and I turn to see the face of the neighbour peering in at me.

  I slide the window down.

  ‘Mr Sharp?’

  ‘Aye, son. Kevin…’ He nods his head in the direction of number five. ‘Do you think I should go back in?’

  ‘Do you know if they have any other family?’

  ‘Don’t really know them that well, to be fair. You know how it is. We talk over the fence on the odd nice day during the summer and nod at each other when clearing snow from the drive in the winter. That’s about the extent of neighbourliness these days.’ He stops talking, makes a face and leans back pressing his hands into his lower back. ‘Old age, son.’ He barks a laugh, then sobers as if laughter is temporarily banned. ‘Creeps up on you and brings a load of unwanted relatives.’

  ‘So – any idea where any relatives might be, then?’ I ask. I’m getting the feeling that Tom Sharp is a lonely old man and would like nothing more than to talk to us until it’s time to go to bed.

  Tom scratches his head. ‘Nairn? Up around that part of the country, I believe. His mother has been down to see them a few times. Nice old biddy. Can talk for Scotland, mind. Think she had a wee fancy for me.’ He leans forward and aims a wink at Ale.

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘I’ve only been here a few years myself, son. Bought this big hoose, ma wife dies and the weans move down to England. I call them weans. My son’s in his forties, and my daughter has just turned fifty. Now I’m rattling about in it. Don’t know what to do with myself. I should sell, I suppose…’

  ‘Did you happen to see Aileen leave the house yesterday?’

  ‘There’s no much that escapes me, son,’ he says proudly. ‘She was a lovely wee lassie. Always quick to smile. Mind you she wasn’t smiling much after that wee numpty chucked her.’

  ‘The boyfriend?’

  ‘Aye. Suppose that’s part of growing up, eh? Needin’ to try something new.’

  ‘When did she leave the house yesterday?’ I try and get him back on track.

  ‘I have my supper every night at nine o’clock. Toasted bagel and banana with a wee sprinkle of cinnamon. Bread doesn’t agree with me anymore. I can cope with a bagel, but. And I wash that down with a cup of tea. I was just taking a first bite when I heard the door slam shut and Aileen’s feet clipping up the drive.’

  ‘The door slammed shut?’ asks Ale.

  ‘Aye. She was a tempestuous wee thing at times. Didnae like her parents telling her what to do.’

  ‘Was she always like that or has that just been since she split up with her boyfriend?’

  ‘Naw, I’d say it was … what … eighteen months ago. When the mum and dad split up. He came back but, tail between his legs. Got the impression he was playing away, if you know what I mean. For a while after, the door would be slammed shut and Aileen would be storming up the drive shouting “hypocrites” as she went.’ He looks back up at the house. ‘Families, eh?’

  ‘Did you see who Aileen went off with? Was it a taxi or…’

  ‘Not a taxi. I
t was that new pal of hers. The one with the big mouth and the wee red Ford.’

  ‘Male or female?’

  ‘Oh, she was a female and flashed her boobs at me to prove it.’ Tom’s face reddens at the memory. ‘Young women nowadays. No shame.’

  ‘What made her flash at you?’ asks Ale

  ‘She clearly thinks I’m nosy. Just because I have my seat at the window. A red car catches my eye when I’m watching telly. It’s difficult not to turn round and look, you know. Anyway, one day she draws up, sees me looking, rolls her window down, shouts “Hey nosy, get a load of this,” and opens her shirt.’ He grins. ‘Fine set, right enough.’

  ‘Apart from the fine set,’ I ask, ‘and the red Ford, how else would you describe her?’

  ‘I only ever saw her sitting in the car, so I’ve no idea of height, but she had long dark hair and a plump-ish face. All that junk food the young ones eat nowadays I imagine. And a fine set.’ He shakes his head. ‘At my age that’s likely to set off a heart attack, but. She never parks at the front door when she comes to pick up Aileen.’ He pauses when he realises what tense he has just used. ‘I suspect mum and dad didn’t approve of the lassie in the Ford, and she waited out of their line of sight so they wouldn’t know.’

  ‘What about mum and dad? Did they leave the house at all last night?’

  Tom looks puzzled at my question. ‘Eh. Let me think.’ He stands up, stretches his back and then leans forward again. ‘Naw. A pair of home birds they two. Never out.’ Tom thinks some more. ‘I can see where you’re going with that, officer. I love a crime drama on the telly, me. First thing you do is rule out the nearest and dearest, eh?’

  ‘Right, Mr Sharp. Thank you.’ Save us from CSI devotees.

  I fire the ignition to signal my intent to leave. Tom opens his mouth again as if to say something else.

  ‘Got to go, Mr Sharp. You’ve been very helpful. If we have any more questions we know where to find you.’ I drive off.

  * * *

  Ale and I return to the office. There’s a report on my desk to say that time of death was between midnight and 4am. There is no sign of sexual assault vaginally or anally. There are, however, semen stains on her clothing. Tissue was also found under the girl’s fingernails, and this would be analysed to check for a match with the semen.