All the Colors of Darkness ib-18

by Peter Robinson

  B A N K S A N D Annie managed to grab an early lunch at the Queen’s Arms, already busy with earnest people in waterproof walking gear that warm wet Sunday in June. The rain had stopped when they left Wyman’s house, and the sun was breaking through gaps in the clouds.

  Banks snagged a dimpled copper-topped table for two in the corner near the gents, while Annie went to the bar and ordered roast lamb 7 8 P E T E R

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  and Yorkshire pudding for Banks and veggie pasta for herself. Conversations buzzed around them, and the pretty blond schoolgirl working her weekend job as waitress, was rushed off her feet with orders.

  Banks eyed his grapefruit juice with disdain and raised his glass to clink with Annie’s Diet Coke. “Here’s to working Sundays.”

  “It has been a while, hasn’t it?”

  “I think we’ve got a pretty good head start, at any rate,” Banks said.

  “What did you think of Derek Wyman?”

  “A bit of a trainspotter, really, isn’t he? An anorak.”

  “You always say that about someone with a passion or a hobby.”

  “Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Hobbies are so naff.”

  “When I was a kid, everyone had a hobby. You had to have. There were clubs at school. Stamp collecting, making model airplanes, playing chess, collecting tadpoles, growing watercress, whatever. I used to have hobbies.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know, collecting things. Coins. Cigarette cards. Birds’ eggs.

  Writing down car number plates.”

  “Car number plates? You’re not serious?”

  “Sure. We used to sit on the wall by the main road and write down as many as we could.”

  “Why?”

  “No reason. It was a hobby. That’s the point about hobbies; you don’t need a reason.”

  “But what did you do with them?”

  “Nothing. When I’d filled one notebook, I started another. Sometimes I tried to jot down the make of car, too, if I recognized it and was quick enough. I tell you, it would make our job a lot easier if there were more people doing that today.”

  “Nah, we don’t need it,” said Annie. “We’ve got CCTV everywhere.”

  “Cynic.”

  “What about the birds’ eggs?”

  “Well, you had to blow them, or they went bad and started to smell. I found that out the hard way.”

  “Blow them? You can’t be serious.”

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  “I am. You made little holes in each end with a pin and—”

  “Yuk,” said Annie. “I don’t think I want to know.”

  Banks studied her. “You asked.”

  “Anyway,” she went on, making a dismissive gesture, “that was probably when you were about ten or eleven. Derek Wyman’s in his forties.”

  “Theater’s a valid passion. There’s nothing anoraky about it. And it’s a bit more cerebral than trainspotting.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Annie. “Don’t you think there’s something rather heroic and romantic about standing there in your anorak in the wind and rain at the end of the platform, open to the elements, writing down the numbers of the diesels that zoom by?”

  Banks studied her expression. “You’re winding me up again.”

  Annie smiled. “Maybe just a little bit.”

  “All right. Very funny. Now what do you think about Wyman? Do you think he was telling the truth?”

  “He had no real reason to lie to us, did he? I mean, he knows we can check his alibi. And he got all those receipts and stubs for us before we left, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” said Banks. “They turned out to be very handy indeed.”

  “They were just in his wallet. Exactly where you’d put something like that.”

  “Cinema stubs, too?”

  “People do.”

  “I know.”

  “So what is it?”

  “Nothing,” said Banks. “Just my bloody scar’s itching, that’s all.”

  “How did you get that scar?”

  Banks ignored her. “Do you think there was something going on between them? Wyman and Hardcastle?”

  “No, not really. I think he was telling the truth about that. And his wife didn’t react. If she had her suspicions, I think she would have found it hard to hide them. Not all gays are promiscuous, you know, no more than all heteros are.”

  “Most blokes I know fancy plenty of women other than their wives.”

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  “That proves nothing,” said Annie. “Except that most blokes are bastards and your mates have probably never grown up.”

  “What’s wrong with fancying? With looking?”

  Annie turned away. “I don’t know,” she said. “Ask Sophia. See what she says.”

  Banks was silent for a moment, then he said, “What about Derek Wyman and Laurence Silbert?”

  “What about them?”

  “You know.”

  “Doubt it,” said Annie. “It doesn’t sound as if Silbert was much of a mixer.”

  “Then what, for crying out loud, are we missing?”

  Their food came and the waitress was in such a hurry that she almost dropped Banks’s lunch on his lap. She blushed and dashed away while he dabbed at the few spots of gravy that had landed on his trousers. “I swear Cyril’s help is getting younger every week.”

  “It’s hard to keep them,” Annie agreed. “No kid wants to go to school every day and then work here on weekends. The pay’s rubbish, for a start, and nobody tips them. It’s no wonder they don’t last long.”

  “I suppose so. Anyway, back to Derek Wyman.”

  “I thought he was okay,” said Annie. “I don’t think we’re missing anything. Like I said, he’s a bit of an anorak, that’s all. He can probably name every gaffer and best boy on every film he’s seen, but I doubt that makes him a killer.”

  “I didn’t say he was a killer,” Banks argued after a bite of lamb. “Just that there’s something niggling me about this whole murder-suicide business, that’s all.”

  “But that’s just what it is: a murder-suicide. Don’t you think maybe we’re just taking it all a little bit too seriously? You’re annoyed because you got dragged away from your romantic weekend, and you can’t find a good mystery to make it worthwhile.”

  Banks shot her a glance. “Wouldn’t you be?”

  “I suppose I would.”

  “It’s all so inconclusive,” said Banks. “I mean, was Hardcastle upset or wasn’t he? Some of the people he worked with said he was. Maria Wolsey, for example. Wyman said he wasn’t, but that he was generally A L L T H E C O L O R S O F D A R K N E S S

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  insecure and jealous with regard to Silbert’s traveling. I don’t know.

  There are just too many questions.” Banks put his knife and fork down and started to count them off on his fingers as he spoke. “Why did Silbert travel so much if he’d retired? Had Hardcastle and Silbert had a fight, or hadn’t they? Did either, or both, of them play away or not? Who’s Julian Fenner, and why doesn’t his phone number connect? What was Silbert up to in Amsterdam?”

  “Well, when you put it like that . . .” Annie said. “Maybe Edwina can help?”

  “People don’t just beat their lovers to death, then hang themselves for no reason.”

  “But the reason could be insignificant,” Annie argued. “If Hardcastle did it, then it could have been because of something that f lared up right there and then. You know as well as I do that some of the most inconsequential of things can spark off the worst violence in people. Burning a piece of toast, breaking a valuable ornament, taking the piss at the wrong moment. You name it. Maybe Hardcastle had had too much to drink, and Silbert chastised him for it? Something as simple as that. People don’t like being told they’ve had too much to drink. Maybe Hardcastle was a little pissed, already aggressive, and before he knew it Sil
bert was dead? We know from Grainger’s statement that he’d been drinking when he called at the hardware shop for the clothesline.”

  “Or someone else did it,” Banks said.

  “So you say.”

  “Look at the number of blows to Silbert after he was dead, the blood,” said Banks.

  “Heat of the moment,” argued Annie. “Hardcastle lost it. Saw red.

  Literally. When he stopped and saw what he’d done he was horrified.

  That calmed him down, so when he bought the washing line off Grainger he seemed distant, resigned, his mind already made up.

  Then he went to the woods and . . .”

  “But what about the damage inf licted on Silbert’s genital area?

  Doesn’t that suggest to you a sexual motive?”

  “Perhaps.” Annie pushed her half-empty plate aside. “It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, though, is it? If there’s sexual jealousy in-8 2 P E T E R

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  volved, the killer will go to the area that symbolizes it. Maybe they argued about Hardcastle going to London with Wyman, or about Silbert going to Amsterdam? We might never know. It still doesn’t mean that someone else did it. Whatever the motive—jealousy, infidelity, criticism of drinking habits, some antique Hardcastle might have broken—the result’s the same: an argument turned violent and one man was left dead. The survivor couldn’t bear what he’d done, so he committed suicide. There’s nothing sinister or unusual about that at all. Sad to say, but it’s very commonplace.”

  Banks put his knife and fork down and sighed. “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “Maybe I am just trying to justify losing my weekend.

  Or maybe you want to get this sorted quickly so we can concentrate on something really important, like all those police cones that have gone missing from the market square lately?”

  Annie laughed. “Well, at least you’re thinking along the right lines.”

  “Come on,” Banks said. “Let’s go have a shufti around Silbert’s house. The SOCOs should be pretty much done there by now. Then we’ll have another word with Edwina at the Burgundy. I get the impression that she’s got something else on her mind, too. We’ll see if we can find out something to shed a little more light on these matters.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” said Annie.

  A C O U P L E of SOCOs were collecting the remaining trace evidence in Silbert’s upstairs drawing room when Banks and Annie arrived there early on Sunday afternoon, but apart from them, the place stood empty.

  “We’ve had a good look around,” Ted Ferguson, one of the SOCOs, told them, “and there’re no hidden safes or compartments anywhere in the house. The only rooms with any personal stuff and papers in them are this one and the study down the hall.” He handed them some latex gloves from the crime scene bag on the f loor near the door. “We’ve got a few more things to do downstairs, but we’re done up here for now. We’ll leave you to it. Wear these.”

  “Thanks, Ted,” said Banks, opening the seal and slipping on the gloves.

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  The SOCOs went downstairs, and Banks and Annie stood on the threshold and took stock.

  Even though the body and the sheepskin rug it had lain on were gone, the blood spatter left on the walls and the traces of fingerprint powder on every surface now marked it as a crime scene. The framed photo under the shattered glass still lay on the f loor. It showed Mark Hardcastle smiling, standing next to Silbert. Banks picked it up carefully, brushed off some of the fingerprint powder and studied Silbert’s face. Handsome, certainly, cultured, slender and fit, and seeming much younger than sixty-two, he had a strong cleft chin, a high forehead and clear blue eyes. His dark hair had thinned just a little at the temples, and showed traces of gray above his ears, but it suited him.

  He wore a light blue cashmere jumper and navy chinos.

  Annie pointed out the framed blowup of Hindswell Woods on the wall. Most of the blood had been wiped off, though a few drops had smeared here and there. “Not a bad effort,” said Banks. “Whoever took it had an eye for a picturesque woodland scene. The way the light filters through the leaves and branches is beautiful.”

  “That’s the tree Mark Hardcastle hanged himself on,” Annie said, pointing out the oak. “It’s very distinctive.”

  They both gazed at the picture for a few moments, Banks remembering what Edwina Silbert had said last night about walks in woods full of bluebells. Then they started the search.

  Silbert’s computer showed nothing out of the ordinary on a cursory examination carried out by Annie, but it would have to be checked thoroughly by technical support if the evidence pointed toward a killer other than Mark Hardcastle. The desk drawers held only station-ery, holiday snapshots and a few files full of business receipts, along with telephone and utility bills.

  A set of keys in the middle drawer opened a locked antique wooden cabinet on the f loor beside the desk. Inside, Banks and Annie found the deeds to the house, bank statements, checkbooks and all the other papers they needed to discover that Silbert had been in the millionaire-plus bracket. His civil service pension certainly didn’t account for it, but regular checks from Viva and its various subsidiaries did. There were also a few large transfers from foreign 8 4 P E T E R

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  bank accounts, Swiss mostly, the nature of which remained unclear, but on the whole the mystery of Silbert’s wealth was solved. There was no will, so Silbert had either left one in the keeping of his solicitor, or he hadn’t made one, in which case his fortune would go to his mother.

  On the bottom shelf of the cabinet, Banks found a small bundle of personal letters held together by a rubber band. The first was dated September 7, 1997, and was from someone called Leo Westwood at an address in Swiss Cottage. Banks read through it quickly, Annie looking over his shoulder. It was written in a neat, sloping hand, by foun-tain pen, judging from the varying thickness of the ink strokes.

  Most of the content dealt with the death of the Princess of Wales and its aftermath. Westwood seemed to have little patience for Diana’s brother’s attack on the Royal Family in his funeral oration the previous day, finding it “inappropriate and ill-advised,” or for the general outpouring of grief from “the hoi polloi, who love this sort of thing almost as much as they love Coronation Street and East Enders.” Banks wondered what he would make of the recent inquiry and the accusa-tions f lying around about Prince Charles, the Duke of Edinburgh and MI6.

  There were also references to an afternoon’s antique hunting, a George I card table with an inlaid pattern that Silbert “would simply have adored,” and a delicious meal, including foie gras and sweet-breads, with “Gracie and Sevron” at a Michelin-starred restaurant in the West End, where they saw one of Tony Blair’s cabinet ministers dining with an out-of-favor colleague.

  The letter, like the rest, had been sent to Silbert, as diplomatic post, at the British Embassy in Berlin. Banks wondered if it had been read by censors. Gossipy as it was, there was nothing seditious in it, nothing calculated to bring the wrath of HMG down on Westwood or Silbert, and the only overt political reference was to Egon Krenz’s recent conviction for a shoot-to-kill policy on the Berlin Wall. All in all, it was chatty, well informed, snobbish and affectionate The writer was, no doubt, aware that his words would probably be read by people other than the intended recipient, so if he had been Silbert’s lover at the time, he had shown remarkable restraint. When Annie had finA L L T H E C O L O R S O F D A R K N E S S

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  ished reading it, Banks put the letter back in its envelope and returned it to the pile.

  “Do you think these could have caused a row?” Annie asked, tapping the pile of letters.

  “It’s possible,” Banks said. “But why now? I mean, they’ve probably been lying around since the late nineties, unless Silbert suddenly discovered them somewhere.”

  “Maybe Hardcastle did a bit of prying on Thursda
y evening or Friday morning while Silbert was still away in Amsterdam?”

  “Maybe,” said Banks. “But surely he’d had plenty of opportunities to pry before? Silbert traveled quite a bit. Why now?”

  “Jealousy got the better of him?”

  “Hmm,” said Banks. “Let’s go have a look down the hall.”

  The room was clearly Hardcastle’s study, and it was much less tidy than Silbert’s. Most of what they found related to Hardcastle’s work at the theater and his interest in set and costume design. There were notes, sketches, books and working scripts marked up with different-colored inks. On his laptop was a computer program for generating various screenplay formats, along with the beginnings of one or two stories. It appeared as if Hardcastle himself had also been interested in writing a movie script, a ghost story set in Victorian England, judging by the first page.

  In the top drawer of the desk, on the latest copy of Sight & Sound, lay a memory stick of the type most commonly used in a digital camera.

  “That’s odd,” Annie said, when Banks pointed it out to her.

  “Why?”

  “Hardcastle has a digital camera. It’s over here on the bottom book-shelf.” She picked up the small silver object and carried it over to Banks.

  “So?” said Banks.

  “Don’t be such a Luddite,” Annie said. “Can’t you see?”

  “Yes, I can see. Digital camera, memory card. I still say, ‘So what?’

  And I’m not a bloody Luddite. I’ve got a digital camera of my own. I know what memory cards are for.”

  Annie sighed. “This is a Canon camera,” she said, as if explaining 8 6 P E T E R

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  to a five-year-old. Though a five-year-old, Banks thought, would probably have known what she was talking about already. “It takes a compact f lash card.”

  “I know what you’re going to say,” said Banks. “This thing here isn’t a compact f lash card.”