Tracy nodded. “Okay.”
“On the way out of Leeds, Jaff stopped at Victor Mallory’s house. Why?”
“To change cars. Jaff was worried that the police might be looking for him in his own car.”
“So you knew about the gun by then, right?”
“No. He didn’t tell me about that until we got to your cottage, otherwise I might have been more concerned about getting away. He just seemed in a desperate hurry to leave Leeds. I thought maybe…you know…he was worried about getting busted for drugs.”
“You said you didn’t know he was a dealer.”
“I knew he had stuff from time to time. Just not a dealer like you mean.”
“Why didn’t he head straight for London?”
“Because he said he needed to make some phone calls, set up some deals. I didn’t know what he meant at the time, what he was talking about, but now I think he meant about selling the coke—there was a lot of it—and getting a phony passport and all that. He said it would take time, and he needed to lie low. He was on his mobile a lot.”
“But you didn’t know why was he running?”
“Not at that time. Not when we stopped at Victor’s, no.”
“Did you go inside Victor Mallory’s house with him?”
“No. Jaff told me to wait in the car.”
“Were you restrained in any way?”
“No.”
“So you could have simply got out and walked away at this point?”
“I suppose so. I wish I had, now. But I was confused. He told me to wait. He needed me to direct him to your cottage. He didn’t know the countryside. He’d never even heard of Gratly. But if I’d known what…I’d have got out and run as fast as I could.”
“It’s okay,” said Banks. “I’m not saying you did anything wrong. I’m just trying to get things clear, that’s all. How long was he in there?”
“I don’t know. Five or ten minutes. Fifteen at the most.”
“Do you know Victor?”
Tracy shrugged. “I’d met him a couple of times at the clubs. He seemed okay.”
“What happened next?”
“We switched cars and drove to Gratly. I’m sorry, Dad, sorry for leading him to the cottage. I really didn’t know what he was like, what he would do.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your CD collection. You mean you don’t know?”
“I haven’t been allowed home yet. The SOCOs have just about finished, and Superintendent Gervaise says she’ll arrange to send in a clean up team after them, then I can go back. Maybe tomorrow or the day after.”
“He made a bit of a mess, that’s all, chucking CDs around, breaking some of the jewel cases, spilling drinks.”
“Don’t worry. That’s not your fault. How did you find out about the gun Erin took?”
“We saw the news. They didn’t mention it specifically, but someone said they’d seen the police bring out a gun-shaped object wrapped in a tea cloth. He knew that’s what it was, that it had been missing from his bedroom and Erin must have taken it to get at him. That’s when he first told me what was going on.”
“Did he tell you why he was so upset about the police having it?”
“No.”
“What did you say?”
“I didn’t say anything. I just asked him why he needed a gun, and why Erin had taken it. He said that now I knew about it, I should see that he couldn’t let me go, that I had to stay with him to the bitter end.”
“He said that?”
“Yes. Please, Dad. You’re interrogating me again. Don’t you believe me?”
“Of course I do,” said Banks, though he was starting to have some misgivings about Tracy’s version of events. “And I’m sorry if I’m making you uncomfortable. I just want to get it all clear in my mind.”
“It’s not even clear in my mind.”
Banks sipped some Black Sheep. “I understand that. That’s the reason for the questions. They’re supposed to focus you, not make you feel as if you’re being interrogated.”
“I’m sorry.” Tracy twirled her glass. “He opened your wine. Drank some of the really good stuff. And your whiskey.”
“That’s all right,” Banks said, wondering just what sort of a mess McCready had made, and what he would find missing when he got home. “Telstar” started playing. It took Banks right back to when he was about twelve and used to listen to Alan Freeman’s Pick of the Pops every Sunday afternoon on a transistor in the park with his friends, looking at the girls who walked by, so pretty in their Sunday summer dresses, blushing and flirting. Graham Marshall always used to be with them, until he disappeared one Sunday morning during his paper round. Years later, Banks had helped to uncover what had happened to him. Graham’s face flashed before his mind’s eye as the music played. They had all liked that weird organ sound on “Telstar.”
Tracy lowered her voice and leaned forward. “And he had drugs. Some pot. Cocaine. A lot of it, in big plastic bags. Kilos. But he filled a little plastic bag for his own use. He was taking it all the time. He was crazy.”
“Yes. Our men found it in his hold-all along with about fifty thousand pounds. Know where that came from?”
“No. He had it from the start, I think, from his flat. At least he had the hold-all, and it seemed heavy. I didn’t take any of the coke. Honest, I didn’t, Dad.”
“It’s all right. I believe you. So he drank some wine, drank some whiskey, smoked some marijuana, snorted some coke. A right old knees-up, by the sound of it. Where were you while all this was going on?”
“Just sitting there watching. There was nothing I could do to stop him. He was much bigger and stronger than me.”
“I understand that. Did he…?”
“Rape me?” Tracy looked directly into Banks’s eyes and nodded. “Yes. He did. Later. When he found out who I was. He took me upstairs, to your room. I tried to fight, tried to resist him, but it was no good. He was so much stronger. He threw me down on the bed and—”
Banks felt his throat constrict and his heart beat fast. “It’s all right, Tracy. I don’t need to know the details. You say all this happened after he found out who you were, that you were a policeman’s daughter?”
“Yes. He found a letter or something with your name and rank on it. He found out you were a police detective, a DCI.”
“And how did he react?”
“It made him really angry at first, then he said it meant I might come in even more useful than he’d imagined. He was still furious at me for not telling him before. And he didn’t like the police. He became more aggressive. That’s when he raped me. He thought it was really cool, something special to do it to me in your room, on your bed, like he was getting at you personally, or violating you in some way.”
Banks certainly felt violated, and if McCready were still alive at that moment he would cheerfully have strangled him with his bare hands. “What happened when Annie came?” he asked.
“He was hiding behind the entertainment room door. The gun was in his hold-all in the breakfast nook. He told me to get rid of her as quickly as possible or he’d shoot her. I tried, Dad, I really tried. But you know Annie. She just wouldn’t stop, she wouldn’t give up, wouldn’t go…”
“She didn’t know the danger she was in,” Banks said. “She thought she was helping you. And she’s nothing if she’s not persistent.”
“She knew something was wrong, that I was there under duress. I know she was trying to help me, but she just wouldn’t take no for an answer, and then Jaff appeared and…”
“Tracy, you know you probably saved Annie’s life, don’t you? That mobile phone call you made.”
“She was bleeding. I thought she was going to die. What else could I do? He was so angry when he heard me phoning for an ambulance. I thought he was going to kill me, too, then, but I guess I was still too valuable to him. So he crushed my mobile.”
“And after that?”
“The car broke down on the moors. W
e were on foot, on the run. It was one misfortune after another. I have to say, if he was a master criminal, he wasn’t very good at it.” Tracy managed a grim smile.
“Lucky for us,” Banks said. He glanced at his watch, then over at the door. “Want another?”
“I shouldn’t,” Tracy said. “I’m already feeling a bit tipsy.”
“Coffee, then?”
“That’d be good.” Banks was just about to go and get Tracy a coffee and himself another pint when the door opened and Erin and Juliet Doyle walked in. Tracy gaped at Erin, then at Banks. “Did you arrange this, Dad?” she said.
“I told them we might be here until about half one, that’s all.”
The two girls just stared at each other for what seemed like an age, then Tracy got up from the table, walked over to Erin and threw her arms around her. Erin hugged her back. The tourists gawked. Banks caught Juliet Doyle’s eyes beyond Erin and Tracy. She just gave a curt nod. Banks breathed a sigh of relief. He had thought Tracy was going to thump Erin and that Erin and Juliet would never speak to each other again.
18
BANKS COULD HEAR THE STRAINS OF THE ADAGIO from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata as Françoise, the au pair, led him across The Farmer’s cavernous entrance hall toward the living room. Whoever was playing hit a wrong note, then hesitated and stumbled before picking up the melody again.
“The family is watching television,” Françoise explained in precise, unaccented English. “And Miss Eloise is practicing for the piano examinations in the next week.” She opened the door and announced Banks and Winsome formally. The uniformed officers were awaiting instructions in their cars outside.
Banks had never seen Fanthorpe’s wife before. She was a beautiful woman a good few years younger than her husband, with a figure sculpted by daily workouts, long silky brown hair and a complexion that can only be achieved either through the blessings of nature or the right combination of chemical emollients. She gave her husband a puzzled look. The little girl with the long ponytail sitting next to her didn’t take her eyes from Strictly Come Dancing on the forty-two-inch TV screen.
“I see I’ve interrupted a family tradition,” said Banks.
Fanthorpe got to his feet. “What do you want this time, Banks? I’ve had just about enough of this. This is too much. I’m going to ring my solicitor.”
“Maybe you can ask him to meet you at Western Area Headquarters,” Banks said. “We’ve got a custody suite waiting for you there.”
The woman was on her feet too, now, swiftly uncurled like a cat. “What is this, George?” she asked, with a slight Eastern European accent. “Who are these people? What are they doing in my house? What’s going on?”
The Farmer put the phone down and went to rest his hands on his wife’s shoulders. “It’s all right, Zenovia. Just calm down, love. I’ll handle this.” He strode toward the door and turned to Banks. “Come on. We’ll go into the den.”
“If you like,” said Banks, following him across the hall into the room where they had talked the previous week.
“This is an outrage,” said Fanthorpe, pouring himself a large whiskey and not even bothering to offer Banks one this time. He might actually have taken it. “It’s police harassment. It’s persecution. It’s—”
“All right, all right, Farmer. I get the message,” said Banks. “Let’s just all sit down and have a nice quiet little chat before I bring the lads in.”
“Lads?”
“The search team.” Banks took some papers from his pocket. “I have here a search warrant signed by a local magistrate empowering us to conduct a full and thorough search of your premises.”
“Search my house?” Fanthorpe spluttered. “You can’t do that! You can’t just—”
“We can and we will. But first things first. I’d like to let you know just how deep the shit is that you’re in.”
“What are you talking about?” Fanthorpe flopped into his leather armchair. He slopped a little whiskey on the front of his cable-knit jumper as he did so, and dabbed at it with a handkerchief he took from the pocket of his brown cords.
Winsome sat opposite him and took out her notebook and pen. “If you think I’m going to say anything incriminating,” said Fanthorpe, pointing his finger at her, “then you’ve got another think coming.”
“It always pays to be prepared, sir,” said Winsome. “Don’t you find?”
“What do you know about the shooting of Marlon Kincaid on the fifth November, 2004?” Banks asked.
“Marlon Kincaid? Do I look like someone who’d know a person called Marlon Kincaid?”
“Why not? He was a student at Leeds Polytechnic University. Well, technically, he’d just finished his studies but he was still hanging around the student pubs in the area, the way some people do, selling drugs. Couldn’t seem to let go of the old college life.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Marlon Kincaid. Art student. His dad was a big fan of Marlon Brando, apparently, which is how he got his name. Marlon was building quite the little business for himself, selling coke and various other illegal substances to the Leeds student population at parties and in the pubs and clubs.”
“So?”
“He had his own suppliers, and you weren’t one of them.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You couldn’t allow that, could you? You were well on your way to being the local drug kingpin, and along comes some skinny, long-haired upstart and cuts right into your market. Not only that, but he makes fun of you and it gets back to you. What did you do first? Warn him? Send Ciaran and Darren to administer a beating, perhaps?”
“This is rubbish.”
“But you had another weapon waiting in the wings, didn’t you? A young lad called Jaffar McCready who was fast proving himself indispensable. And dangerous. He needed to prove himself, and you needed him to do it. That one final act of outrageous loyalty that binds forever. You gave him a gun. You loaded it for him. Perhaps you even showed him how to fire it. And Jaffar McCready shot Marlon Kincaid. What he didn’t know was that he’d been seen. A most unreliable witness, for sure, especially at the time, but he’s scrubbed up quite nicely since then, soon to be a member of the ministry, actually, and his memory seems a lot clearer now, especially given everything we’ve found out since.”
“What does any of this have to do with me?”
“What you didn’t know was that, for reasons of his own, McCready kept the gun. A trophy. A souvenir. Call it what you will. You no doubt told him to get rid of it at the time, and you probably thought he had. After all, why would he want to keep an incriminating gun around? Maybe he was just sentimental. His first kill. Or perhaps he liked the idea of having something on you? Whatever the reason, he kept the gun. Then one night he had a row with his girlfriend. To spite him, to piss him off, she took the gun and ran off, went to stay with her parents in Eastvale. Her mother found it. Maybe she just was cleaning up her daughter’s room, the way mothers do, or maybe she was curious, wanted to see if she could find anything that would explain her daughter’s unusual silences, her odd behavior, her strange cast of mind since she’d come home. Either way, she found the gun. And that’s when things started to go wrong. But that doesn’t really matter here and now. What matters is that we found a clear set of fingerprints on the magazine inside the gun. Those fingerprints are yours. Can you explain how they got there?”
Fanthorpe frowned and sipped his whiskey. “I don’t have to. You can talk to my solicitor about it.”
“I will. But there’s really only one way they could have got there, isn’t there? You handled the magazine at some time.”
“So what? You didn’t find any of my prints on the outside of the gun, did you? On the trigger guard?”
“How do you know that?”
“Oh, very clever, Banks. Is this where I say, ‘Because I wiped them off,’ then put my hand to my mouth and admonish myself for making such a gaffe? It’s not going to happen. The fa
ct that you found my fingerprints on the magazine inside a gun proves nothing except that at one time I touched that magazine. It certainly doesn’t prove that I ever fired the gun. I don’t need a solicitor to prove that. You’re fishing.”
“Do you often go around handling magazines for prohibited weapons?”
“I can’t say as I ever remember doing such a thing. There are any number of ways it could have happened. Perhaps a vet used it to put down a sick animal.”
“A nine-millimeter Smith and Wesson automatic?”
“Maybe a copper passed it over to me once and asked me what I thought?”
“Pull the other one,” said Banks.
“And just how did you get my fingerprints for comparison in the first place? I’ve never been fingerprinted in my life. There’s no way I’m in your system.”
“That’s a terrible oversight, and I promise we’ll put the record straight as soon as possible. You did, however, handle a photograph of Jaff McCready that DS Jackman passed you the last time we were here. That glossy photographic paper has a wonderful sticky surface for fingerprints.”
“That’s entrapment! You’ve fitted me up.”
“Don’t be silly. It might conceivably be entrapment if they were forged documents, or a murder weapon. But it was only a photograph. It means nothing in itself.”
“I guarantee they’ll laugh you out of court.”
“Do you, really? Because I don’t think so. And I’m very glad to hear that you agree with me that it will get to court. These days the Crown Prosecution Service is very picky about the cases it allows to go to trial. They don’t like losing. They tend to choose dead certs.”
“Well, on the evidence you’ve got, there’s always a first time.”
“Then there’s the little matter of Darren Brody.”
“Darren Brody?”
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