Careless Love

by Peter Robinson

  “And you know the people he works for? What exactly is it you do?”

  “I told you. I look at pictures, give names to faces. My work is much like your work. I know many different kinds of people. I see many pictures when I help. I can ask questions, keep my eyes open.”

  “No,” said Banks. “No, Zelda. I’m sorry. I’m very grateful you told us and everything, but it’s far too dangerous. I don’t know how you got involved in it, but I’ve been on the fringes of that world, the sex-trafficking, and I know how violent it can be. Keane’s just as bad. I’m sure he fits in fine.”

  “Dangerous? How is this dangerous? Mostly I work in an office in London looking at photographs or videos. Surveillance and police mugshots. That is all. I do nothing dangerous. Nobody sees me except the people I work with.”

  “But surely your organization, whatever it is, has access to facial recognition software?”

  “Of course,” said Zelda. “But for that they need a database. I am there to help them build that database. Some of the faces I know are already in the system, but many are not. Your man Keane was not.”

  “Why you? I mean why are you doing this work?”

  “You think it’s not a job for a woman?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Banks said. “It’s very specialist work.”

  “Zelda is a super-recognizer,” Ray explained. “She never forgets a face. I noticed when we met that the faces of Mary and Gabriel from the Annunciation she was drawing on the pavement were spot on, as far as I could tell, and she didn’t use a crib or any kind of visual reference. It was amazing. She’s been tested and everything, at Cambridge no less, and she’s way up there. It’s quite a rare gift.”

  “Gift?” said Zelda. “Sometimes I wonder.”

  “Can you tell us the name of your supervisor? Put us in contact with him?”

  “I’m sorry, but I cannot do that. He would never forgive me. Much of his work depends on secrecy. Much of the department’s existence depends on secrecy. I have probably said too much already, but I want to help. I can look into it for you myself.”

  “If anything happened to you I’d never forgive myself.”

  “You’re pissing against the wind, mate,” said Ray. “I’ve never met a more stubborn woman than Zelda. Let her help you. She won’t take no for an answer. Believe me.”

  Zelda nodded. “That is true. I will simply observe while I do what I do anyway. Perhaps ask some questions of the right people. I cannot promise anything, but I might be able to find out if this man is still in the country. Even where he is and what he is doing. If he is still called Keane or if he has a new name.”

  Banks leaned back and glanced at Annie. He could see the hungry look in her eyes. Felt it in his own. It was a tempting offer, too tempting to resist. This man had tried to kill him, had burned down his home, and he would have succeeded if it hadn’t been for Annie and Winsome. Keane had taken Annie in so thoroughly that she hadn’t been able to trust herself in a relationship with a man ever since. “It seems that we can’t stop her, doesn’t it?” Banks said. Then he turned to Zelda again. “But I don’t like it. Don’t take any risks. And be careful.”

  Zelda tilted her head sideways, a ghost of a smile playing on her lips. “Always,” she said. “Oh, have some more wine, Alan. Tell me what music you have been listening to. Raymond is such a philistine.” She waved her hand at the music in general. “This is all right, but where is Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart?”

  She was signalling the end of the conversation, a change in topic. Donovan had finished some time ago. Now Bridget St. John was singing “Ask Me No Questions.”

  Banks smiled. “Zelda, you can come and listen to my Bach cantatas anytime you like.”

  Zelda laughed.

  “Watch it, mate,” said Ray, smiling.

  Annie rolled her eyes. “Give me Barry Manilow any day.”

  So they talked about music, about Bruckner and Mahler, Zelda’s favorites, and Verdi and Maria Callas. Then they went on to poetry. Zelda seemed to know a lot about the Russians: Pushkin, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak. Poets whose work Banks knew very little about. Akhmatova was her favorite, she said. Banks still felt unsettled at the mention of Phil Keane, but there was a spark of excitement that they might finally bring him to justice. He was worried about Zelda, though, mostly because he was ignorant about what she actually did and how good she was at it. Surely it couldn’t be as easy or as straightforward as she made out?

  Still, it had started now, and there was nothing he could do except hope to hell that nothing bad happened to her because of it. No matter what she and Ray had said, if anything did happen, he would never forgive himself, and he didn’t think Ray would forgive him, either, for all his talk. He helped himself to a wedge of Stilton and watched Zelda pour more wine and tease Annie for not drinking any. The candles flickered in a draft from the back door. Banks felt himself shiver. Ray went to put on some more music, but even Quicksilver Messenger Service doing “Mona” couldn’t dispel the mood brought on by Zelda’s story, and he found himself wondering about her motives for her work and these faces she never forgot. Where had she seen them in the first place?

  “ARE YOU sure you won’t stay and have a snifter?” Ray asked as they stood at the door. “I’ve got a very nice Armagnac.”

  “No, Ray,” said Annie. “I told you. I’m driving. And we’ve got a busy day at work tomorrow.”

  “Ah, yes. Criminals to catch. The offer of the spare room is still open. Even just for one. Alan?”

  “It’s tempting, Ray,” said Banks, “but I’d better be off, too. Thanks for . . . well, for a very interesting evening.”

  Zelda gave him a peck on the cheek and Annie hugged Ray.

  “Goodnight, Dad,” she said firmly, letting go, then grasped Banks’s arm and half-dragged him towards the car as he continued saying his own goodbyes.

  “Maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea Ray had,” he said. “About staying.”

  “Oh, just be quiet and put your seat belt on. Honestly,” Annie said as she set off along the village High Street. “Will he never grow up? For crying out loud, she’s young enough to be his granddaughter. And you and Ray behave like a couple of little kids.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Banks, “they seem to make a nice couple. And they seem happy together. What can be so wrong with that?”

  Annie shot him a piercing glance as she set off too fast along the High Street. “You would say that. That’s a typical male response. I’ll bet she has you all eating out of her hand. It’s practically bloody pedophilia.”

  “Come off it, Annie. Zelda’s thirty. She’s a grown-up. Old enough to make her choices. And at least she has the chance to do that now. And it sounds as if she does important work.” He paused. “Don’t be so hard on her. And slow down. The roads might be icy.”

  The glance Annie gave him was icier than any road. “A beautiful damsel,” she went on. “And bloody Mata Hari to boot. Who could resist?”

  “That’s a cruel thing to say, Annie. And it’s not fair.”

  “I notice you didn’t waste any time before you started flirting with her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “ ‘You can come and listen to my Bach cantatas anytime you like, Zelda,’ ” Annie mocked.

  Banks laughed. “What’s wrong with that? I meant it innocently enough.”

  “Men.” Annie put her foot down as they left the village for the dark unfenced road down the dale side. Banks hung on for dear life.

  Fortunately, it wasn’t a long journey. Annie screeched to a halt outside Newhope Cottage, spraying gravel in all directions. The place was in darkness, but when Banks clicked his key ring, a light came on over the porch.

  “Want to come in for a coffee or something?” he asked.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Come on, Annie. Don’t sulk. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

  “Have we? I don’t think so.”

  “Phil Keane.”r />
  “It probably won’t come to anything. Besides, that business is all in the past. It happened, and it’s over and done with.”

  “Maybe for you.”

  “He was my mistake.”

  “He cost us both a lot.”

  Annie leaned across him and opened the passenger door. “Are you going to get out now or what?”

  Banks sighed and got out of the car. As he bent to thank Annie for the lift and say goodnight, she shot off in another spray of gravel and left him standing there alone in the glow of the porch light.

  4

  THE MEETING IN THE BOARDROOM THAT THURSDAY MORNING was attended by the only four detectives remaining on the Eastvale Regional Homicide and Major Crimes squad: Detective Superintendent Alan Banks, DI Annie Cabbot, DS Winsome Jackman and DC Geraldine Masterson. Their fifth member, DC Doug Wilson, had recently left the force to pursue a teaching career. Due to budget restrictions, no replacement had yet been found for him, and Area Commander/Chief Superintendent Catherine Gervaise had warned Banks not to hold his breath waiting for one.

  A few images of the victims and a number of points raised by the investigations so far graced the whiteboard, but it didn’t amount to very much. Winsome had talked to both Kirsten Brody and the van driver John Kelly again, and it was now clear that nobody involved in the accident on Belderfell Pass or the discovery of the body had placed Adrienne Munro behind the wheel of the abandoned Ford Focus. The problem of how she had got there remained.

  Banks finished his coffee, stood up and started the proceedings. “Basically, we’ve got two suspicious deaths,” he began. “Let’s start with Adrienne Munro, aged nineteen. The way it appears is that Adrienne died from an overdose of sleeping pills, or to be more accurate, died from asphyxiating on her own vomit while unconscious from an overdose of sleeping pills.” He waved Wednesday’s morning paper in the air. “Though thanks to some shoddy reporting, everyone thinks she died a drug addict’s death, probably with a needle sticking out of her arm. Jazz Singh is working on the toxicology to determine exactly what composition and brand of sleeping tablets were used. There was no physical evidence that they were forced on Adrienne in any way. The other death, a male in his mid-sixties, appears to be due to injuries sustained from a fall into a gully on Tetchley Moor.

  “Adrienne clearly had to have been taken—most likely driven—to the abandoned car she was found in after her death. The unidentified male appears to have wandered into a gully and died from the fall. But Tetchley Moor is pretty remote, so we need to know how he got there in the first place and what he was doing there dressed the way he was on such a night. It’s not impossible that someone could have pushed or tossed him over the edge of the gully. Or perhaps he was being chased.

  “In neither case do we have any evidence of injuries inflicted on the victim by another person, which means that both deaths could be accidental, or the result of suicide. What we do have is evidence of the involvement of another person or persons after death, or possibly even, for a short time, before death occurred. It’s a bit of a conundrum, to say the least.

  “As regards timing, the best I can gather from studying Dr. Glendenning’s postmortem results and Dr. Burns’s crime-scene examinations is that the victims could have died at the same time, within a day of one another, or as long as two days apart. When pushed, the doctor told me that it was likely Adrienne Munro died first. Either way, we’re looking at last weekend, Friday night after midnight at the earliest, and Monday at the latest. Adrienne Munro’s parents last spoke with her on Saturday morning, and all they said was that she seemed a bit distracted, perhaps by her university workload.

  “We don’t know the identity of the deceased male yet, and needless to say that’s slowing us down. Animal activity has made arriving at a suitable image with which to go public difficult, but we have both our photographer Peter Darby and our occasional sketch artist Ray Cabbot working on it. Once we’ve identified him, we can work on finding out when and where he was last seen. He was wearing an expensive made-to-measure Hugo Boss suit and handmade leather brogues, so he was probably fairly wealthy. We hope for some results soon. In the meantime, we keep our eyes and ears open for any missing persons’ reports. Who knows, maybe he’s a Russian spy. Another Sergei Skripal. Maybe they’re both Russian spies. But somewhere, someone must be wondering where he is. Any more progress with this, Gerry?”

  Gerry Masterson shook her head. “Nothing, sir. No missing persons of that description, no matching fingerprints in the system. Ray and Peter hope to have something for us before close of play today. I’ve spoken with Adrian Moss at media liaison, and he assures us he’ll get it on tonight’s news. Until then, there’s not much more we can do. We’re guessing that the man lived locally, or at least not too far away, so we’ve got some of the beat constables and PCSOs asking around the nearby villages.”

  “Getting anywhere with the keys in his pocket?”

  “No, sir. Just common or garden house keys. A couple of Yales, deadlock, a few smaller ones that could belong to cupboards or sheds. I doubt they’ll tell us anything more until we find a house to match them.”

  “The key ring itself?”

  “Generic. No initials or ‘a present from Benidorm’ sort of stuff.”

  “Pity.”

  “We could use a bit more help with the door-to-door enquiries, sir. Can’t we draft in a few foot soldiers?”

  Banks nodded. “I’ve put in for a couple more PCSOs. And if we find we’re dealing with homicide, then I’ll have to go on my knees to headquarters and beg for office staff. For the moment, we’ll work both cases out of here. What did Dr. Glendenning have to say about the body on the moor?”

  “No evidence of a struggle,” Annie Cabbot said. “It was much the same as Dr. Burns told us at the scene. All the evidence points to the fact that he died where we found him, two or perhaps three days earlier. On further examination, we found nothing more in his pockets to help us uncover his identity, and there were no distinguishing marks on his body. There are still too many unanswered questions. What if someone did push him down that gully? A gentle push would have done it, and wouldn’t necessarily have left any traces. We’ve no way of knowing who else might have been up there at the time, no footprints or handy threads of fabric caught on the heather.”

  “Any signs of a boyfriend in the Munro case?” Gerry asked. “Or someone she’d rejected recently, upset in some way?”

  “There was someone she was seeing last year, and we’ll be talking to him,” said Banks. “But no one at the moment. Not according to her mother.”

  “Perhaps her parents didn’t know?” said Gerry. “My parents certainly didn’t know about all my boyfriends.”

  Annie looked at her. “All?”

  Gerry blushed. “Never you mind, guv. What I’m saying is that parents don’t necessarily know everything. When it comes right down to it, they don’t know very much at all.”

  Banks thought about his own adolescence and how little his parents knew about what he got up to. It had been the same with his own children, too. “True enough,” he said. “I suggest that first we find out what we can from Adrienne’s teachers and friends at the college. Winsome and I will head down there later this morning. We’ve got results on some of the phone numbers from her mobile. Nothing suspect so far, except perhaps the ex-boyfriend her parents mentioned to us. Colin Fairfax. They were supposed to have split up last year, but there are a number of calls from him since then. He may have been pestering her or stalking her. The last call made from her phone was on Saturday morning. The parents. That checks out. Annie, I’d like you and Gerry to keep on trying to find out the identity of the male. Put a bit of pressure on Peter and Ray. And keep in touch with Adrian Moss, too. He might be a bit of a pain in the arse, but he does have the contacts and the occasional good idea when it comes to media liaisons.” Banks picked up his folders and empty coffee cup as the detectives drifted out of the boardroom.

  Annie got his atte
ntion in the corridor.

  “Got time for a coffee? My treat.”

  “Fine,” said Banks.

  THE GOLDEN Grill had morphed into a Costa almost overnight, or so it seemed, and by mid-morning on a Thursday it was full of shivering shoppers taking a break. Banks ordered simple black coffee and a lemon poppy seed muffin, while Annie went for a latte and a giant chocolate chip cookie, and they made their way through the prams and shopping bags that cluttered the aisles and managed to find a table for two at the back, next to the toilets. The sound of children overdosed with sugar, and of babies crying for attention, made it unlikely that anyone would overhear their conversation.

  Before Banks could open his mouth, Annie touched his forearm and said, “I want to apologize for last night. I was out of line.”

  Banks nodded. “Maybe I was insensitive. I hadn’t realized how difficult it must be for you seeing Ray and Zelda together.”

  “No need to be patronizing, Alan. I’ve said I was out of line. I’ve apologized. And, by the way, you were flirting with Zelda.” She paused and took a bite of her cookie without taking her eyes off him.

  “She’s a remarkable woman. Ray’s a lucky fellow.”

  “There you are. That’s exactly what another bloke would say. I’m trying to apologize here, not start another argument.”

  “All right, all right.” Banks tested his coffee. It was still too hot.

  “It’s just so sudden, that’s all,” Annie said. “And startling. I mean, I’ve been used to Ray having girlfriends over the years. Of course I have. I was just a kid when my mother died, and when I look back, Ray wasn’t so old. He had his needs, as they say. And they all treated me respectfully.”

  “It’s quite a shock when you realize how young your parents were at certain key moments of your life. Somehow, they always seemed so much older than you.”

  “That’s because they were, you daft pillock.”

  Banks laughed. “You know what I mean.”

  Annie smiled, cradling her latte in both hands. “Yeah, I suppose I do. My mother always seems young. In my memories. In my dreams. But she never got old, so I suppose that makes sense.”