Friend of the Devil

by Peter Robinson

  “We’re trying to find out who Hayley had been seeing recently,” Winsome went on. “If it wasn’t you and it wasn’t Stuart Kinsey, do you have any idea who it might have been?”

  Zack paused. “Well, she didn’t say anything, but…” He glanced out of the window back down the street whence they’d come. “I don’t think you’d have to look much further than our Mr. Austin back there.”

  “Is that where she was going on Saturday night?”

  “I think so.”

  “Austin denied that he had anything to do with her.”

  Zack laughed. “He would, wouldn’t he? He’d stand to lose his job. They don’t take kindly to that sort of thing around here.”

  “Do you know this for a fact?”

  “About Mal and Hayley? Sure. I’ve seen them together, seen him with his hand creeping up her thigh, nibbling her neck.”

  “When was this?”

  “About a month ago.”

  Winsome felt her pulse speed up. Zack Lane had been worth the wait, after all. “Where did you see them?”

  “Pub outside Helmthorpe. The Green Man. They must have thought they were far enough out of the manor, but I was over there for a darts competition.”

  “Did they see you?”

  “I don’t think so. I cleared out pretty quickly when I saw them.”

  “Why?”

  “It would have been awkward. Remember, Austin’s my tutor, too.”

  “Yes,” said Winsome. “Of course.” She stood up. “Thanks, Mr. Lane. Thanks a lot.” Now she had the corroboration she needed, Winsome had the feeling that things were starting to progress, and Malcolm Austin was going to have a lot of difficult questions to answer the next time he got a visit from the police.

  8

  SO WHAT IS IT, ALAN? WHAT’S GOING ON? YOU COULD have cut the tension in there with a knife.”

  “Do you think Phil Hartnell noticed?”

  “He didn’t get where he is today by not noticing things like that. He probably thought you’d had a lovers’ tiff.”

  “And you?”

  “It seemed the logical assumption. But…”

  “But what, Ken?”

  “Well, you’re not lovers, are you? At least I thought you two were no longer an item.”

  “We’re not,” said Banks. “At least I didn’t think we were.”

  “What does that mean?”

  They were sitting outside on a bench at The Packhorse, in a yard just off Briggate. The walls were higher, but it made Banks think of The Maze and Hayley Daniels. Banks tucked into his jumbo haddock and chips, a pint of Black Sheep beside him. There was already a group of students at one table discussing a Radiohead concert, and the lunchtime office crowd was starting to trickle in, men with their ties loosened and jackets slung over their shoulders, and the women in long print skirts and short-sleeved tops, open-toed shoes or sandals. The weather really had warmed up since Sunday, and it was looking good for the weekend.

  “I wish I knew,” said Banks. He didn’t feel it was his place to tell Ken exactly what had happened the previous evening, so he gave the bare-bones version, leaving out any mention of the awkward pass Annie had made, or the way he had felt when her thighs and breasts brushed against him. Desire and danger. And he had chosen to protect himself from the danger rather than give in to the desire. But he couldn’t explain that to Ken, either. There had been jealousy, too, when she talked about toyboys. He had read somewhere that jealousy cannot exist without desire.

  “So what was all that about, then?” Blackstone asked.

  Banks laughed. “Annie doesn’t exactly confide in me these days. Besides, she’s been over at Eastern Area for a couple of weeks. We’ve not been in touch. Something strange is going on in her life; that’s all I can say for certain.”

  “She didn’t look good this morning.”

  “I know.”

  “You say she was drunk when she came to see you?”

  “That was definitely the impression I got.”

  “Maybe she’s got a problem with the bottle? It happens often enough in our line of work.”

  Banks stared into his half-empty pint. Or was it half full? Did he have a problem with the bottle? There were those who would say he did. He knew he drank too much, but he didn’t drink enough to give him a hangover every morning or interfere with his job, so he tended not to worry about it too much. What harm was he doing sitting around by himself having a few glasses of wine listening to Thelonious Monk or the Grateful Dead? So, once in a while he got the blues and let himself wallow in a few late Billie Holiday torch songs, or Dylan’s Modern Times, and perhaps poured an extra glass or two. So what? As Annie had said, what did he have in his miserable little life that was so wonderful he could afford to reject someone like her?

  “I don’t think it’s that,” Banks said. “Annie’s always enjoyed a pint, and she can hold her booze. No, I think that’s the symptom, not the cause.”

  “Man trouble?”

  “Why do we always assume it’s something along those lines?” Banks said. “Maybe it’s job trouble?” But even as he spoke, he wasn’t convinced. There were things that Annie had said last night, things he had only half understood, but if he read between the lines they pointed toward man trouble. He’d been involved in her love life before, and he didn’t know if he wanted to be involved again. “Maybe it’s dredging up that whole Lucy Payne and Janet Taylor business,” he said, hoping at least to divert, if not completely change, the subject.

  Blackstone sipped some beer. “She had a rough time of it,” he said. “Definitely got the short end of the shitty stick on that one.”

  “We all had a rough time of it,” said Banks. “But I know what you mean. Any ideas?”

  “On who might have done it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like AC Hartnell said, it’s a long list. One thing that brings me up short, though, is the…well, I suppose you could say the precision of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, first let’s assume that one way or another it wasn’t too hard for the killer to find out where Lucy Payne went when she left hospital. I know Julia Ford says her firm went to great lengths to disguise her identity and her whereabouts, but these things can all be circumvented if someone wanted to find out badly enough. A little inside help, a lot of public records, a few quid changing hands, whatever. So let’s put that aside and assume finding her was no real challenge. What I’m thinking about is the method. If it had been an angry and disturbed member of a victim’s family, say, then why not just take Lucy for a walk down the coast and push her over the cliff?”

  “I see what you mean,” said Banks. “To do it the way it was done, the killer had to go prepared. The razor, or whatever she used, for example.”

  “Yes. And even if we assume that someone set out to kill Lucy, that it was premeditated, it still makes more sense just to dump her over the side. It wasn’t as if she could be forced to confess anything, or even show any fear or feel pain. She couldn’t even talk.”

  “Are you suggesting that it wasn’t someone involved in the Chameleon case?”

  “I don’t know what I’m suggesting,” said Blackstone. “But it’s a possibility worth considering. Could anyone who was that angry at Lucy Payne for what she’d done to a family member be that cold-blooded? Where was the anger?”

  “If the killer had simply pushed Lucy off the edge of the cliff,” Banks said, “there’s always a chance that the body might never have been found.”

  “But they’d have recovered the wheelchair, surely, and that would have told them what happened.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Maybe I’m wrong,” said Blackstone. “I’m just thinking out loud. She might not have even died if she went over the cliff.”

  “No, Ken, I think you’re heading in the right direction. This was a cold-blooded job, simple as that. A job that had to be done efficiently. Almost like a hit. The killer had to know that the victim had di
ed at her hands, perhaps even watch her die. She couldn’t face the uncertainty. After all, if Lucy Payne was a quadriplegic already, there wasn’t much more harm anyone could do to her other than extinguish her life completely, what little of it there was left.”

  “And all that was left was inside,” said Blackstone.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just rambling. You’re right, though. It was an efficient method. It got the job done, and it left the evidence in plain sight, for all to see. There has to be something in that.”

  “So whoever did it was making a statement?” said Banks.

  “Yes. Draining her life’s blood. And what was that statement? I think when we get the answer to that, we’ll be a long way toward at least ruling out a lot of people.”

  “We?”

  “I mean Annie’s team.”

  “But it does feel like a continuation, doesn’t it?” Banks said. “Like unfinished business.”

  “Yes,” Blackstone agreed. “I was thinking of suggesting bringing in Jenny Fuller again, as a profiler. She worked the original case.”

  “I don’t know where she is at the moment. I think she’s left Eastvale for good. She could be in America or Australia as far as I know. I haven’t seen her in ages.”

  “You sound as if you regret that. History?”

  “Plenty,” said Banks, “but not the kind you’re thinking of. All my mistakes with Jenny are in what we didn’t do, not in anything we did. Missed opportunities rather than anything hastily done and regretted.”

  “Hmm.”

  “We’ve known each other a long time, that’s all,” said Banks. “Ever since I’ve been up north, as a matter of fact. I met her on my very first case. Maybe things could have been different, but they’re not, and it’s too late now. It never happened.”

  They finished their drinks and headed out to Briggate. The fine weather had brought people out in the city center, and the pedestrian precinct was packed, the shops doing brisk business: Marks & Spencer, Harvey Nichols, Debenhams, Curry’s Digital. All the fourteen-year-old mothers were out showing off their solarium suntans, pushing the pram with one hand and holding a cigarette with the other. Or so it seemed. After saying good-bye to Blackstone at the Headrow and promising to get together soon for a curry and a few pints, Banks went into Muji and bought a handful of those little cardboard-bound notebooks he liked so much, then he wandered into Borders to see if they had White Heat on sale. He had enjoyed the first volume of Dominick Sandbrook’s history of the fifties in Britain, Never Had It So Good, and looked forward to reading the second—his period, the sixties—after he’d finished Postwar. After that, he would check out the new CDs in HMV.

  ANNIE DIDN’T feel particularly proud of her performance at Millgarth as she drove into Whitby just over an hour and a half later. It was a beautiful day, and the sea lay spread out below her, all greens and blues, so much brighter and more vibrant than she had seen them before. The red pantile roofs of the houses straggled up the hillside, and the harbor walls stretched out into the water like pincers. The whole scene, flanked on either side by high cliffs, appeared more like an abstract landscape than a real place.

  From the heights, she could easily see the town’s two distinctive halves, split by the estuary: East Cliff, with its ruined abbey and Saint Mary’s Church, like an upturned boat; and West Cliff, with its rows of Victorian guesthouses and hotels, the statue of Captain Cook and the massive jawbone of a whale. Though Annie took in the sight, and her painter’s eye translated it to an abstract canvas, her mind was preoccupied with Banks, Eric and, most of all, her own erratic behavior. She’s Lost Control. Didn’t someone used to sing a song called that? Banks would know. Banks. Damn him. What had she been thinking? That one quick shag with him was going to make everything all right?

  The more she thought about Saturday night, the more convinced she became that it wasn’t the age difference that bothered her. After all, if it were the other way round, if she were a twenty-two-year-old woman, it would seem perfectly normal for most men of forty and above to sleep with her—she bet there wasn’t one of them would turn down a Keira Knightley or a Scarlett Johansson. There were also plenty of women in their forties who had bragged to Annie about making youthful conquests. She ought to be dead chuffed with herself for pulling Eric, rather than feeling so cheap and dirty. But she knew that she felt that way because that wasn’t who she was.

  Perhaps she felt so bad because she had always believed that she chose to sleep with men she could talk to in the morning, and the fact that they were often older than her, more mature, like Banks, never seemed to matter. They had more experience, more to talk about. The young were so self-obsessed, so image-conscious. Even when she was younger, she had felt the same way, had always preferred older men and thought boys her own age somewhat shallow and lacking in everything except sexual energy and frequency. Perhaps that was enough for some women. Perhaps it ought to be enough for her, but it wasn’t; otherwise she wouldn’t feel so bad.

  What upset her the most of all, and what refused to go away, was that she hadn’t known what she was doing. She had lost control. For some reason, she had been drunk enough that being fancied by a fit young lad when she’d just turned forty and was starting to feel ancient had appealed to her. Waking up with a blinding hangover and a stranger was never a good thing, in Annie’s experience, but in this case the fact that he was young enough to be her son only made it worse.

  And she couldn’t even claim that she had been coerced or date-raped or anything. There had been no Rohypnol or GHB, only alcohol and a couple of joints, and the worst thing about it was that, pissed as she had been, she knew she had been a willing participant in whatever had gone on. She couldn’t remember the details of the sex, only hurried fumblings, graspings, rough grunts and a sense of everything being over very quickly, but she could remember her initial excitement and enthusiasm. In the end, she assumed that it had been as unsatisfactory for him as it had been for her.

  Then there was the episode with Banks last night. Again, what on earth had she thought she was doing? Now things could never be the same; she’d never be able to face him with any self-respect again. And she had put both Banks and Winsome in an awkward position, driving in that state. She could have lost her license, got suspended from her job. And that seemed the least of her problems.

  The colors of the sea changed as she drove down the winding hill, and soon she was beside the houses, stopping at traffic lights in the streets of the town center, busy with normal life. A herd of reporters had massed outside the station, waving microphones and tape recorders at anyone coming or going. Annie made her way through with the help of the uniformed officers on crowd control and went to the squad room, where she found the usual scene of controlled chaos. She had hardly got in when Ginger came up to her. “You all right, ma’am? You look at bit peaky.”

  “I’m fine,” Annie growled. “Those bloody reporters are getting to me, that’s all. Anything new?”

  “Got a message for you from an ex-DI called Les Ferris,” Ginger said.

  “Who’s he when he’s at home?”

  “Local. Used to work out of here, but he’s down in Scarborough now. Put out to pasture, officially, but they give him a cubbyhole and employ him as a civilian researcher. Pretty good at it, apparently.”

  “And?”

  “Just says he wants to see you, that’s all.”

  “Aren’t I the popular one?”

  “He says it’s about an old case, but he thinks it might be relevant to the Lucy Payne investigation.”

  “Okay,” said Annie. “I’ll try to sneak out and fit him in later. Anything else come up while I’ve been away?”

  “Nothing, ma’am. We’ve talked to the people at Mapston Hall again. Nothing new there. If someone did know that Karen Drew was Lucy Payne, they’re hiding it well.”

  “We’re going to have to put a team on checking for leaks, dig a lot deeper,” Annie said. “We need to
look very closely at everyone in Julia Ford’s practice, the Mapston Hall staff, the hospital, social services, the lot. See if you can get someone local to help down in Nottingham and divide the rest up among our best researchers. Tell them it’ll mean overtime.”

  “Yes, guv,” said Ginger.

  “And I think we need to ask questions in other directions, too,” said Annie, taking the folders out of her briefcase. “We’re going to have to widen the base of our inquiry. Take this list of names and divide it up between yourself, DS Naylor and the rest of the team, will you? They’re all people who suffered one way or another at Lucy Payne’s hands six years ago, most of them in West Yorkshire. I’ve already liaised with the locals there, and they’ll give us as much help as they can. We need statements, alibis, the lot. I’ll pay a visit to Claire Toth myself tomorrow. She was close to the Paynes’ last victim, blamed herself for what happened. Any questions?”

  “No, ma’am,” said Ginger, scanning the list. “But it certainly seems as if we’ve got our work cut out.”

  “I’ve got more, specially for you, Ginger.”

  “How nice, ma’am.”

  “There was a young Canadian woman living on The Hill opposite the Paynes. She became quite close friends with Lucy, even after the arrest. Appeared on TV as her ‘champion,’ that sort of thing, thought Lucy was a poor victim.”

  “I see,” said Ginger.

  “She was also present when Lucy Payne had her ‘accident.’ Lucy was living in her house at the time. You can imagine the sense of betrayal she must have felt. Anyway, she has to be our chief suspect if she was anywhere near the scene. Her name’s Maggie, or Margaret, Forrest. She worked as an illustrator for children’s books, so the odds are that she’s still in the same line of work. You can check publishers, professional associations, what have you. You know the drill.” She passed a folder to Ginger. “The details are all in here.”

  “You said she’s Canadian. What if she’s gone home?”

  “Then she’s not our problem anymore, is she?”

  “And if I find her?”