Friend of the Devil

by Peter Robinson

  There it was again, the familiar scene of the market square at closing time, young men and women being sick, squabbling, singing with their arms around one another. Then the group from The Fountain standing together briefly while Hayley explained that she was going down Taylor’s Yard for a piss and then…? Well, she hadn’t told them where after that. To Malcolm Austin’s, perhaps?

  But why would she want to go there? She was nineteen, pissed as a newt, out with her mates for a night on the town. Why would she want to go and visit a sober, older lover, who was probably lounging around in his carpet slippers sipping sherry and watching films that were made long before she was born? Well, love is blind, they say, but sometimes Banks thought it must be drunk as well. It didn’t matter, anyway. Wherever Hayley had intended to go, she didn’t get there. Someone intercepted her, and unless it was someone who had been lying in wait for any young girl to come by, as Templeton had believed, then it had to be someone who knew she would be there, a decision she had made only in the last minute or so, as they watched.

  Banks glanced again at the people around her. He recognized Stuart Kinsey, Zack Lane and a couple of others. Their names were all on file. Their alibis had been checked and rechecked, their statements taken. They could all be reinterviewed. Someone had to know something. Maybe someone was covering for a friend he thought had done it?

  The car went by, the couple on their way back from celebrating their wedding anniversary. And there was that annoying, flickering strip of light, like on restored copies of old black-and-white films. Banks made a note to ask technical services if they could get rid of it, though doing so probably wouldn’t reveal anything new. Then Hayley staggered off down Taylor’s Yard, and the rest headed for the Bar None.

  Banks knew that Stuart Kinsey had sneaked out of the back exit almost immediately to spy on Hayley, but what about the others? They said they stayed at the Bar None until about two o’clock, and various staff, customers and doormen said they had seen them during that period. But it didn’t take long to sneak out, and if you were clever enough, you could wedge the back door open and hope no one noticed before the time you got back. But why would Hayley linger in The Maze once she had done what she went there to do? She had no reason to do so, unless she was meeting someone there, and why would she do that when she had Malcolm Austin waiting for her? Unless there was someone else.

  It didn’t make sense. The killer had to be someone who knew that Hayley was going into The Maze, which meant that whoever it was had to act fast. How long does it take a woman to go down an alley and relieve herself in the dark? She was drunk, which would definitely slow her progress. And she’d been sick, too. On the other hand, she had little in the way of clothing to inhibit her. He could always ask a female constable to go in and do it, and time her. That would go down about as well as asking every woman connected with the Lucy Payne murder to take her top off. Sometimes the easiest and most obvious route was the only way you couldn’t go.

  Banks estimated about five minutes, in and out, and felt that was fairly generous. That gave the killer about three or four minutes to follow Hayley and grab her before she finished. Stuart Kinsey had gone in there about three or four minutes after her, which made it unlikely that anyone else in the Bar None could have gone out the same way at the same time. They would have bumped into each other. And Stuart Kinsey had at least heard part of the assault against Hayley, and he said he had seen no one else in The Maze.

  The tapes went on and on, Jamie Murdoch leaving with his bicycle at two-thirty, a few stragglers from the Bar None getting into a shoving match, then nothing. DC Doug Wilson switched off the player, put on the lights, and they all stretched. Over three hours had gone by, and nothing. It was time to send the team out on the streets to start talking to people again, and Banks had an appointment he wished he didn’t have to keep.

  BANKS LEANED on a wall outside Eastvale General Infirmary, feeling queasy, and took a few slow, deep breaths. Dr. Wallace had performed her postmortem on Kevin Templeton with her usual brisk speed and efficiency, but it had been difficult to watch. There had been no banter, no black humor—hardly a word spoken, in fact—and she had seemed to work with the utmost concentration and detachment.

  And nothing new had come of her efforts.

  Cause of death was the cut throat, time was fixed by the eyewitness Chelsea Pilton, and other than that he was dead, Templeton had been in good health. The postmortem also hadn’t told Dr. Wallace anything more about the weapon, though she leaned toward the theory that a straight-blade razor had been used, pulled most likely from left to right across Templeton’s throat, cutting the carotid, the jugular and the windpipe. It had been quick, as Dr. Burns had noted at the scene, but long enough for Templeton to have known what was happening to him as he struggled for breath and felt himself weaken through loss of blood and oxygen. The consolation was that he would have been in no great pain, but when it came down to it, Banks thought, only Templeton himself could have known that for certain.

  Banks stood on the steps of the infirmary, leaning beside the door, with a chill March wind blowing around him, and when he had regained his composure he decided to drive over to Eastvale College to talk to Stuart Kinsey again. On his way, he plucked up the courage to ring Sophia and ask her if she fancied a drink later. She did.

  He tracked Kinsey down in the coffee lounge, and they found a dim quiet corner. Banks bought two lattes and a couple of KitKats at the counter and sat down.

  “What is it now?” Stuart asked. “I thought you believed me?”

  “I do believe you,” said Banks. “At least I believe that you didn’t murder Hayley Daniels.”

  “What, then?”

  “Just a few more questions, that’s all.”

  “I’ve got a lecture at three.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll be done long before then if we can make a start.”

  “All right,” said Stuart, reaching for a cigarette. “What do you want to know?”

  “It’s about the night you followed Hayley into The Maze.”

  “I didn’t follow her.”

  “But you went to spy on her. You knew she was there.” The smoke drifted toward Banks, and for the first time in ages it didn’t bother him. In fact, it made him crave a smoke himself. Must have been the stress of seeing Templeton opened up on the table. He fought the urge and it waned.

  “I wasn’t spying!” Stuart said, glancing around to make sure no one could hear them. “I’m not a pervert. I told you, I wanted to see where she went.”

  “Did you think she was meeting someone?”

  “Not there, no. Whatever I thought of Hayley, I didn’t think she was the type for a quick drunken fumble in a dark alley. No, she went there for a piss, that’s all. I thought she was going to meet someone later, somewhere else.”

  Banks took the silver paper from his KitKat. “Did Hayley give any indications, either that night or at any other time, that there was something or someone bothering her?”

  “No. Not that I can think of. Why?”

  “She wasn’t worried about anything?”

  “You’ve asked me this before. Or the other officer did.”

  “Well, I’m asking you again.”

  “No. Nothing. Hayley was pretty happy-go-lucky. I mean, I never saw her really down about anything.”

  “Angry?”

  “She had a bit of temper. Had quite a mouth on her. But it took a lot to get her riled.”

  “She was upset in The Fountain, right? And she took it out on Jamie Murdoch.”

  “Yeah, a bit. I mean, he was the only one there apart from us. She called him a few names. Limp dick, dickhead, stuff like that. She was way out of line.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “How would you take it? He wasn’t happy.”

  “He told me it wasn’t a big deal.”

  “Well, he would, wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t want you to think he had a motive for hurting Hayley.”

  “Did he? W
as he really that angry?”

  “I don’t know. More like embarrassed. He rushed us out pretty quickly after that.”

  “Were they ever close at all, Hayley and Jamie?”

  “No way! Jamie was a loser. He dropped out of the college. I mean, look at him, stuck in the grotty pub night after night, half the time by himself while the landlord suns himself in Florida.”

  “Was there anyone in any of the pubs that night—especially The Fountain—who paid undue attention to Hayley, apart from the leather-shop owner?”

  “Men looked at her, yes, but nothing weird, not that I can remember. Nothing different from usual, anyway. And like I said, we were the last to leave The Fountain. Nobody followed us.”

  “Okay, Stuart. Let’s get back to The Maze now.”

  Stuart squirmed in his chair. “Must we?”

  “It’s important.” Banks gestured to the second KitKat on the table. “Do you want that?” Stuart shook his head. Banks picked it up and began to eat it. He had forgotten how hungry he was.

  “I don’t feel good about it,” Stuart said. “I’ve thought and thought since we last talked, and I know I must have heard it happening. I know I could have stopped it if I’d just done something. Made a lot of noise, banged a dustbin lid on the wall. I don’t know. But I bottled out. I got scared and ran away, and because of that Hayley died.”

  “You don’t know that,” said Banks. “Stop beating yourself up over it. I’m interested in what you heard.”

  “I’ve already told you.”

  “Yes, but you also said you heard some music, a snatch of a song, as if from a passing car. Rap, you said it was. And familiar. You couldn’t remember what it was when I last talked to you. Do you have any idea now?”

  “Oh, yeah, that. I think I do…you know, since we talked I’ve been playing it over and over in my mind, the whole thing, and I think it was The Streets, ‘Fit But You Know It.’”

  “I know that one,” said Banks. “Are you sure?”

  If Stuart was surprised that Banks knew the song, he didn’t show it. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ve got the CD. Just haven’t played it in a while.”

  “And you’re certain you heard it around the same time you heard the other sounds?”

  “Yes. Why? Is it important?”

  “Maybe,” said Banks. He checked his watch. “You’ll be late for your lecture,” he said, standing up. “Thanks for your time.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all.” Banks finished his latte, screwed up the KitKat wrapper, dropped it in the ashtray and left, thinking he had a pretty good idea why both Stuart Kinsey and Kevin Templeton heard the same music on different nights.

  JUST AFTER dark that evening, Annie found herself wandering down Saint Ann’s Staith by the estuary, past the blackboard with the tide tables on the short bridge that linked east and west. The strings of red and yellow harbor lights had just come on and made a hazy glow in the slight evening mist. They reflected, swaying slightly, in the narrow channels of the ebbing tide. Fishing boats leaned at odd angles in the silt, their masts tilting toward the fading light and rattling in the light breeze. A ghostly moon was just visible out to sea above the wraiths of mist. The air smelled of salt and dead fish. It was chilly, and Annie was glad she was wearing a wool coat and a pashmina wrapped around her neck.

  She walked along beside the railings, the shops opposite closed for the evening, a glow coming from the pubs and the two cafés still serving fish and chips. Vinegar and deep-frying fat mingled with the harbor smells. A group of Goths dressed in black, faces white, hung out smoking and talking by the sheds, near the “Dracula Experience,” and even so long before the holiday season, a few tourist couples walked hand in hand and families tried to control their unruly children. The large amusement arcade was doing plenty of business, Annie noticed, almost tempted to go in and lose a few coins on the one-armed bandits. But she resisted.

  She was feeling excited because Les Ferris had phoned late in the afternoon and told her the hair and fibers expert, Famke Larsen, had matched Kirsten Farrow’s sample of eighteen years ago with a hair taken from Lucy Payne’s blanket last week. So it was Kirsten. Back and in action again. Annie’s long shot had paid off and she could trust her copper’s instincts again. It gave her the focus she needed, and it appeased Superintendent Brough for a while.

  According to Famke, the similarities in color, diameter, medulla pattern and the intensity of pigment granules were enough to go on, but it wasn’t a match that would stand up in court. Annie didn’t care about that; she’d half expected it, anyway. Les Ferris had reminded her that hair was class evidence—that it was not possible to match a human hair to any single head—but for her purposes the identification was enough. Both samples were fine, Caucasian, with evenly distributed pigment and a slightly oval cross section.

  An unexpected bonus was that the hair found on Lucy Payne’s blanket hadn’t been sheared off; it came complete with its root. The only drawback, Famke had explained to Liam and Les, was that it was in what she called the “telogen stage.” In other words, it hadn’t been pulled out, it had fallen out, and that meant there were no healthy root cells and attached matter. The best they could hope for, Les summed up, was mitochondrial DNA, which is material that comes from outside the nucleus of the cells, and from the mother. Even so, it could help them come up with a DNA profile of Kirsten Farrow, Lucy Payne’s killer.

  The tide was out, so Annie went down the steps and on the beach. There was no one else around now, perhaps because of the late-March chill. As she walked, she wondered about Jack Grimley. Would a fall to the beach from the top of the cliffs have killed him? The beach wasn’t particularly rocky. She looked behind at the looming mass towering above her. It might have. But if he’d been lying on the sand for a while, wasn’t it likely that someone would have seen him? What if Kirsten had lured him down there, believing him to be her attacker, and killed him? There were some small caves in the bottom of the cliff face. Annie walked inside one. It was pitch-black and smelled of seaweed and stagnant rock pools. It wasn’t very deep, as far as she could tell, but you could hide a body there, behind a rock, at night especially, until the tide came and took it out to sea.

  She left the beach and walked up the steps from Pier Road to the Cook statue. For a moment, she sat on the bench there and thought, This is where Keith and Kirsten sat, where he kissed her and got no response. Was she so preoccupied with her revenge that she had gone beyond the merely human? It was also near here that a woman had been seen with Jack Grimley, and though she hadn’t been identified as Kirsten, Annie was certain that was who it was. What had they talked about? Had she lured him to the beach with promises of sex and killed him? Was that also how she had got Keith McLaren into the woods?

  Not too far away, Annie noticed lights and a pub sign. When she got up and walked closer, she saw that it was The Lucky Fisherman. Curious, she went inside. The door to her left opened on a small smoky public bar, where about five or six men stood around chatting, a couple of them smoking pipes. A football game played on a small television over the door, but nobody paid it much attention. When Annie walked in, they all stared at her, fell silent for a moment, then went back to their conversations. There were only a couple of tables, one of them occupied by an old woman and her dog, so Annie went out again and through the door on the right. This was the lounge, quite a bit bigger, but barely populated. Music played softly, a couple of kids were playing one of the machines and four people were clustered around the dartboard. It was warm, so Annie took her coat off and ordered a pint, taking it over to a table in the corner. Nobody paid her any attention.

  So this was where Keith had met Kirsten that evening, and where she had seen Jack Grimley whom, Annie guessed, she had believed for some reason to be the man who had hurt her. She hadn’t approached him, as far as Keith remembered, so she must have come back another night and perhaps waited for him outside. It wasn’t hard to lead a man where you wanted him to
go to if you were young and pretty. He wanted to go there, too.

  Annie sat sipping her beer and thinking about the past while she flipped through the pages of the latest Hello magazine she had bought earlier and carried in her shoulder bag. After a few moments she became aware of someone standing over her. Slowly, she looked up to see a broad-shouldered man with a shaved head and a handlebar mustache, probably in his early fifties.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “Are you that there new policewoman?”

  “I’m DI Cabbot, yes. Why?”

  “Thought I saw your picture in the paper this morning. You’ll be after the person who killed that woman in the wheelchair, then, won’t you?”

  “That would be one of my jobs, yes.” Annie put her magazine down. “Why? Do you know anything that could help?”

  He gave her a questioning glance, and she noticed that he was asking if it was okay to join her for a moment. She nodded.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t know owt. And the way I’ve heard it, I reckon she only got what she deserved. Still, it’s a terrible way to go, in a wheelchair and all, can’t defend yourself. I’d say it’s a coward’s work.”

  “Perhaps,” said Annie, taking a swig of beer.

  “But it was summat else I wanted to ask you about. I heard a rumor the police was asking questions about an old crime, something involving an old friend of mine.”

  “Oh?” said Annie. “Who would that be?”

  “Jack Grimley.”

  “You knew Jack Grimley?”

  “Best mates. Well, am I right?”

  “I don’t know where you got your information from,” Annie said, “but we’ve taken an interest in the case, yes.”

  “More than anyone could say at the time.”

  “I wasn’t here then.”

  He eyed her scornfully. “Aye, I can see that for myself.”

  Annie laughed. “Mr….?”

  “Kilbride.”