“No, sir,” said Kerrigan. “She was too stunned. Near mute with terror, she was. It’ll be a long time before she has an easy night’s sleep again, I can tell you.”
Me, too, thought Banks, but he didn’t say anything about that. “Right,” he said. “You did a good job, Constable Kerrigan. You can go now. Stick around the station for now. We might need to talk to you again.”
“Of course, sir. Thank you, sir.”
PC Kerrigan left and no one said anything for a while. Finally, Gervaise said, “Anyone met Templeton’s parents? I understand they live in Salford.”
“That’s right,” said Banks. “I met them once, a few years back, when they came to Eastvale to visit him. Nice couple. I got the impression he didn’t get along very well with them, though. He never said much about them. They’ll have to be told.”
“I’ll see to it,” said Gervaise. “I know DS Templeton wasn’t exactly the most popular detective in the station,” she went on, “but I know that won’t stop anyone from doing their jobs.” She stared pointedly at Winsome, who said nothing. “Right, then,” Gervaise said. “As long as that’s understood, we can get down to work. Any theories?”
“Well,” said Banks, “first of all we have to ask ourselves what Kev was doing in The Maze close to midnight.”
“You’re implying that he was about to rape and kill Chelsea Pilton?” Gervaise said.
“Not at all,” Banks answered, “though we’d be remiss in our duties if we failed to acknowledge that possibility.”
“Pushing that unpleasant thought aside for a moment,” Gervaise said, “do you have any other theories for us to consider?”
“Assuming that Kev wasn’t The Maze killer,” Banks said, “I think it’s a pretty good guess that he was there because he hoped he might catch him. Remember at the last meeting, how he was convinced it was a serial killer who’d strike again soon in the same area?”
“And I ridiculed him,” said Gervaise. “Yes, I don’t need reminding.”
“I don’t mean to do that, ma’am,” said Banks. “You were right. We had no evidence to justify the expense of a full saturation operation. But it does appear rather as if Templeton took matters on himself.”
“Our Dr. Wallace agreed with him, too, as I remember,” said Gervaise.
“I’m not arguing right and wrong here,” Banks said. “I’m just trying to ascertain why Templeton was where he was.”
Gervaise nodded brusquely. “Go on.”
“I think he might have been there late on Friday, too,” Banks added. “I remember he was a bit peaky and tired yesterday, dragging his feet. I thought he’d been clubbing, woke up with a hangover, and I gave him a bollocking. He didn’t disabuse me of the notion.” Banks knew that his last words to Templeton had been harsh—something about growing up and behaving like a professional—and he also now knew that they had been unjustified, though how professional was it to wander a possible murder site alone and unarmed? Still, it didn’t make Banks feel any better.
He knew how Templeton rubbed most people the wrong way—accomplished women like Winsome and Annie in particular, and parents of difficult teenagers. No doubt there were some personal issues there. He could also be a racist, sexist bastard, and he had a personality that would steamroller over a person’s finer feelings if he thought it would get him what he wanted. Sometimes you had to do that to a certain extent, Banks knew—he had even done it himself with Malcolm Austin—but Templeton didn’t only do it out of necessity; he also seemed to take great relish in it. Even Banks had seen him reduce witnesses to tears or rage on occasion, and Winsome and Annie had seen it happen far more often.
He was also bright, hardworking and ambitious, and whether he would have matured with age, Banks didn’t know. He wouldn’t have the option now. He was gone, snuffed out, and that wasn’t bloody right. Even Winsome looked upset, Banks noticed, when he cast quick glances in her direction. He needed to talk to her. She could be carrying around a lot of guilt about the way she felt about Templeton, and it wouldn’t help the investigation. He remembered that one of the subjects she and Annie had discussed at dinner was the way Templeton had behaved with Hayley Daniels’s parents. Winsome hadn’t told Banks exactly what had gone on between them, but he knew that a line had been crossed, a bridge burned. It could be eating away at her now, when they all needed to start focusing and thinking clearly.
“I also find myself wondering if he was just hanging out there on spec,” Banks said, “or if he knew something.”
“What do you mean?” Gervaise asked.
“Maybe he had a theory, or some special knowledge, something he was working on that he didn’t share with the team.”
“That sounds like Templeton,” said Gervaise. “You mean he might have had inside knowledge, knew who was doing it, that it would happen again tonight, and he was after the glory?”
“Something like that,” said Banks. “We’d better have a very close look at his movements since the Hayley Daniels case began.”
“We’re overstretched as it is,” said Gervaise. “First Hayley Daniels, and now this. I’ll see about bringing in extra personnel.”
“Are you sure it’s not the same investigation?” Banks asked.
“At this moment,” said Gervaise, “we don’t know enough to say one way or another. Let’s wait at least until we get some forensics and talk to the girl, then we’ll have another session.”
“I’ll talk to her now,” said Banks. “And there’s another thing.”
“What?”
“Kev’s throat was cut. You can see it clearly. That’s the same way Lucy Payne was killed out Whitby way.”
“Oh, bloody hell,” said Gervaise. “Another complication we could do without. Right, I think you’d better start trying to find some answers.” She eyed the team grimly. “I want everybody out there on the streets, all night if necessary. Knocking on doors, checking CCTV footage. Wake the whole bloody town up if you have to. I don’t care. There has to be something. Kevin Templeton may have been an arsehole, but let’s not forget he was our arsehole and he deserves our best efforts.” She clapped her hands. “Now go to it!”
BANKS PAID another visit to the crime scene before heading for the hospital to see Chelsea Pilton. It was about half past two in the morning, and the market square was deserted except for the police cars, the SOCO van and the constable guarding the entrance. He jotted Banks’s name down and let him through. Some bright spark had chalked yellow markings on the pavements and flagstones to guide the way. Not exactly a ball of twine, but the next best thing, and it did make The Maze a lot easier to negotiate.
The SOCOs had erected a canvas covering over the square in which Templeton’s body had been found, and it was brightly lit from all directions. Officers were walking the ginnels and connecting passages with bright torches, searching for clues of any kind. The area immediately around the body had already been thoroughly searched, and crime scene coordinator Stefan Nowak gestured for Banks to come forward into the covered area.
“Alan,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too,” said Banks. “Me, too. Anything?”
“Early days yet. From what we’ve been able to gather from the blood spatter analysis so far, he was attacked from behind. He wouldn’t have known what hit him. Or cut him.”
“He would have known he was dying, though?”
“For a few seconds, yes, but there are no messages scrawled in blood, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“One lives in hope. Pocket contents?”
Stefan fetched a plastic bag. Inside it, Banks found Templeton’s wallet, some chewing gum, keys, a Swiss Army knife, warrant card, ballpoint pen and a slim notebook. “May I?” he asked, indicating the notebook. Stefan gave him a pair of plastic gloves and handed it to him. The handwriting was hard to read, perhaps because it had been written quickly, but it seemed as if Templeton liked to make brief notes, like an artist’s sketches. He hadn’t written the murderer’s na
me in there, either. There was nothing since the previous evening, when it appeared that he had also been haunting The Maze, to no avail, as Banks had suspected. He would examine the notebook in more detail later to see if there was anything in the theory that Templeton was following leads of his own, but for now he handed it back. “Thank you. Dr. Burns finished yet?”
“He’s over there.”
Banks hadn’t noticed the doctor in another corner of the square, dressed in navy or black, jotting in his notebook. He went over.
“DCI Banks. What can I do for you?”
“I’m hoping you can tell me a few things.”
“I can’t really tell you much at all,” said a tired Burns. “You’ll have to wait until Dr. Wallace gets him on the table.”
“Can we start with the basics? His throat was cut, wasn’t it?”
Burns sighed. “That’s the way it looks to me.”
“From behind?”
“The type of wound certainly supports DS Nowak’s blood spatter analysis.”
“Left- or right-handed?”
“Impossible to say at this point. You’ll have to wait for the postmortem, and even that might not tell you.”
Banks grunted. “Weapon?”
“A very sharp blade of some sort. Razor or scalpel, something like that. Not an ordinary knife, at any rate. From what I can see on even a cursory examination, it’s a clean, deep cut. The way it looks is that he simply bled to death. The blade cut through both the carotid and the jugular and severed his windpipe. The poor devil didn’t have a hope in hell.”
“How do you think it happened?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. I understand there was a witness?”
“Yes,” said Banks. “A girl. She saw it happen. I’m on my way to talk to her.”
“Then she might be able to tell you more. Perhaps he was following her?”
“Why? To warn her, protect her?”
“Or attack her.”
Kev Templeton, The Maze killer? Banks didn’t want to believe it, even though he had been the first to voice the possibility. “I don’t think so,” he said.
“I’m just trying to keep an open mind,” said Dr. Burns.
“I know,” said Banks. “We all are. I wonder what the killer thought Kev was doing, though?”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. I was just thinking of something else.” Annie’s case had come into his mind again. Lucy Payne sitting in her wheelchair, her throat cut with a sharp blade, a razor or a scalpel, a similar weapon to the one that had killed Templeton.
“I’m sure that Dr. Wallace will get around to the postmortem as soon as she can on this one,” Dr. Burns said. “She should be able to give you more answers.”
“Right,” said Banks. “And thanks. I’d better get to the hospital now and talk to the witness.” As he walked away, he was still thinking about Lucy Payne, and he knew that as soon as it reached a reasonable hour in the morning he would have to ring Annie in Whitby and see if they could get together to compare notes.
IT WASN’T as if Annie was sleeping well, or even sleeping at all. Banks could have rung her right then, and she would have been awake enough to hold a conversation. A sound had woken her from a bad dream, and she had lain there not moving, listening hard, until she was sure it was just a creak from the old house and nothing else. Who did she think it was, anyway? Eric come to get her? Phil Keane returned? The men who had raped her? She couldn’t let her life be ruled by fear. Try as she might, by then she couldn’t remember the dream.
Unable to sleep, she got out of bed and put on the kettle. Her mouth was dry, and she realized she had polished off the better part of a bottle of sauvignon blanc by herself last night. It was getting to be a habit, a bad one.
She peered through the curtains across the pantile rooftops down to the harbor, where the moon frosted the water’s surface. She wondered if she should have gone home to Harkside for the night, but she liked being close to the sea. It reminded her of her childhood in St. Ives, the long walks along the cliffs with her father, who kept stopping to sketch an abandoned farm implement or a particularly arresting rock formation while she was left to amuse herself. It was then that she had learned to create her own world, a place she could go to and exist in when the real world was too tough to handle, as when her mother died. She only remembered one walk with her mother, who had died when she was six, and all the way along the rough clifftop path her mother had held her hand as they struggled against the wind and rain, and told her stories about the places they would visit one day: San Francisco, Marrakech, Angkor Wat. Like many other things in her life, that probably wasn’t going to happen.
The kettle boiled and Annie poured water on the jasmine tea bag in her mug. When the tea was ready she lifted the bag out with a spoon, added sugar and sat cradling her fragrant drink, inhaling the perfume as she stared out to sea, noting the way the moonlight shimmered on the water’s ripples and brought out the texture and silvery-gray color of the clouds against the blue-black sky.
As she sat there watching the night, Annie felt a strange connection with the young woman who had come to Whitby eighteen years ago. Was it Kirsten Farrow? Had she looked out on the same view as this, all those years ago, planning murder? Annie certainly didn’t condone what she had done, but she felt some empathy with the damaged psyche. She didn’t know what the young woman had felt, but if she had done the things Annie thought she had, and if she had been Kirsten Farrow, it had been because that was her only way of striking back at the man who had condemned her to a kind of living death. There are some kinds of damage that take you far beyond normal rules and systems of ethics and morality—beyond this point be monsters, as the ancients used to say. The young woman had gone there; Annie had only stood at the edge of the world and stared into the abyss. But it was enough.
Annie had the overwhelming sensation that she was at an important crossroads in her life, but she didn’t know what the directions were; the signposts were either blurred or blank. She couldn’t trust herself to get close to a man. Consequently, she had abandoned her control to alcohol and gone home with a boy. Whatever demons were driving her, she needed to get sorted, get a grip, develop a new perspective and perhaps even a plan. Maybe she even needed outside help, though the thought caused her to curl up inside and tremble with panic. Then she might be able to read the signposts. Whatever she did, she had to break the circle of folly and self-delusion she had let herself get trapped in.
And there was Banks, of course; it seemed that there was always Banks. Why had she kept him at arm’s length for so long? Why had she abused their friendship so much this past week, thrown herself at him in some sort of drunken rage, then lied to his face about having a row with her boyfriend when he tried to help? Because he was there? Because she…? It was no use. No matter how hard she tried, Annie couldn’t even remember what it was that had split them apart. Had it been so insurmountable? Was it just the job? Or was that an excuse? She knew that she had been afraid of the sudden intensity of her feelings for him, their intimacy, and that had been one thing that had caused her to start backing away, that and the attachment he inevitably felt for his ex-wife and family. It had been raw back then. She sipped some hot jasmine tea and stared out to the horizon. She thought of Lucy Payne’s body, sitting there at the cliff edge. Her last sight had probably been that same horizon.
She needed to get things back on a professional footing, talk to Banks again about the Kirsten Farrow case and its history, especially since her conversation with Sarah Bingham. If Kirsten had disappeared, there was a good chance she had turned up in Whitby to kill Eastcote, the man who had stolen her future. Sarah Bingham had certainly lied about Kirsten’s movements, and the truth left her with no alibi at all.
It was more than just the case that was bothering Annie, though. She knew she wanted more from Banks. God, if she only knew what it was and how to go about getting it without hurting anyone…She couldn’t let go, that was on
e thing she knew for certain, not with both hands, not even with one. And a lot had changed since they split up. He seemed to have resolved most of his marital problems now that he had accepted Sandra’s remarriage and recent motherhood, and perhaps she was almost ready to acknowledge the power of her feelings; perhaps she was even ready for intimacy. If she followed all that to its logical conclusion, then she had to admit to herself that she still wanted him. Not just as a friend, but as a lover, as a companion…as…Christ, what a bloody mess it all was.
Annie finished her tea and noticed it had started to rain lightly. Perhaps the sound of the raindrops tapping against her window would help her get back to sleep, the way it had when she was a child, after her mother’s death, but she doubted it.
THE SEXUAL Assault Referral Centre, new pride and joy of Eastvale General Infirmary, was designed in its every aspect to make its patients feel at ease. The lighting was muted—no overhead fluorescent tubes or bare bulbs—and the colors were calming, shades of green and blue with a dash of orange for warmth. A large vase of tulips stood on the low glass table, and seascapes and landscapes hung on the walls. The armchairs were comfortable, and Bank knew that even the couches used for examinations in the adjoining room were also as relaxing as such things could be, and the colors there were muted, too. Everything was designed to make the victim’s second ordeal of the night as painless as possible.
Banks and Winsome stood just outside the door with Dr. Shirley Wong, whom Banks had met there on a number of previous occasions and had even had drinks with once or twice, though only as a colleague. Dr. Wong was a dedicated and gentle woman, perfect for the job. She also made a point of keeping in touch with everyone who passed through her doors and had a memory for detail Banks envied. She was a petite, short-haired woman in her late forties and wore silver-rimmed glasses. Banks was always surprised by her Geordie accent, but she had been born and bred in Durham. He introduced her to Winsome and they shook hands.
“I’m sorry to hear about your friend,” Dr. Wong said. “Detective Sergeant Templeton, wasn’t it? I don’t think I knew him.”
Friend of the Devil Page 30
