Careless Love

by Peter Robinson

  The one interesting tidbit that HOLMES had thrown up was that the amounts of the cash deposits into Adrienne Munro’s bank account matched withdrawals from one of Laurence Hadfield’s checking accounts. It was another confirmation that the two were linked, and that Hadfield was probably paying for the pleasure of Adrienne’s company. It was sad, he felt, that she had been brought so low. Everyone said she was a shy, bright, hard-working young woman with a desire to eradicate poverty and make the world a better place. It was easy to be cynical about the naivety of the young, but without it nothing would ever change very much. And there she was, cavorting with an old man like Laurence Hadfield. Banks thought of Zelda, who had no choice in the men who had used her and abused her.

  Banks got up, stretched and looked out through his rain-spattered window down on the cobbled market square. The festive lights were on in the square, the market cross lit up. It reminded him he would have to do his Christmas shopping soon. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do over the holiday period this year, but spending Christmas alone at Newhope Cottage with a plentiful supply of food and wine, didn’t seem like a bad option. Unless Tracy or Brian turned up, which would be even better.

  The rest of the team had headed off on their assigned tasks, which mostly involved showing Ray’s sketch of “Mia” around the pubs, cafés and coffee houses of Eastvale College. A few members of Ken Blackstone’s team were doing the same thing in Leeds.

  Banks had already heard from Winsome, who had quickly discovered that no one resembling Mia had ever worked behind the bar at Hadfield’s golf club. Gerry, who had remained in the squad room along with Annie, researching Anthony Randall, had not managed to dig up any serious dirt on the doctor. He hadn’t been disciplined, not even close, though there had been a minor incident some years ago in which a young female intern had made a complaint of sexual harassment against him. Apparently, the charges had been investigated and dropped, the doctor completely exonerated, which was hardly likely to happen today, Banks thought. But it was something, and he had asked Gerry to follow up, to try to find the complainant and get the details.

  Annie also told Banks about a phone conversation she had had the previous night with Poppy Hadfield, the upshot of which was that Laurence Hadfield had more than one mobile phone, though only one was ever found at Rivendell.

  Before Banks got back to his desk, there was a soft knock at his door and Jazz Singh walked in carrying a slim folder.

  “Come bearing good tidings?” Banks asked, offering her a seat.

  Jazz sat down. “I suppose you could say that.”

  “Do tell.”

  “I’ve finished the DNA comparison between the hair found in Laurence Hadfield’s bath drain and Adrienne Munro’s, and the short version is, it’s a match.”

  Banks leaned back, trying to put this new piece of the puzzle in its correct place. “Short version?” he said.

  Jazz waved her hand. “Just technical stuff, that’s all. We were lucky to get enough hairs with follicles to make the comparison. As you know, comparing hairs themselves is hit and miss at best.”

  “I know,” said Banks. “And likely to get thrown out as evidence in any trial.”

  Jazz nodded. “But this is solid. I won’t bore you with the numbers, it’s all in the report, but take it from me, one way or another, some of Adrienne Munro’s hair found its way down Laurence Hadfield’s plughole.”

  “Could she have died there?”

  “She could. Or maybe she just had a bath there. On the whole, I’d go for the former.”

  “Is it possible she drowned, or was drowned?”

  Jazz shook her head. “No. I thought that myself at first so I went over the postmortem report again in detail. First of all, there are no signs of bruising on her body, which you would almost certainly find if someone had held her head under water.”

  “And second?”

  “No water in the lungs. Which she would definitely have had if she had been drowned.”

  “So we can stick with our original cause of death?”

  “I think so.” Jazz paused. “There was something else in that bag full of gunk the CSIs brought me, and on further analysis it turned out to be a small amount of Adrienne Munro’s vomit.”

  “You mean—”

  “Yes, she was sick in the bath.”

  “And she died of asphyxiation due to inhaling her own vomit while unconscious, so . . .”

  “So, she very likely died there.”

  “Thanks, Jazz,” Banks said. “That’s brilliant.”

  And it was, but it didn’t solve the case, he realized. If there was a case to solve. Both Adrienne Munro and Laurence Hadfield were dead, so even if Hadfield had been responsible for Adrienne’s death, there was nothing to be done about it now. Randall, on the other hand, was still alive and well. And Mia.

  “With a bit more time, I should be able to find traces of methaqualone in the vomit, too,” Jazz went on. “If there are any, that is. It’s a small sample. That would probably clinch it as far as the CPS are concerned.”

  “Anything else?”

  Jazz stood up. “Isn’t that enough for you? Jeez, I don’t know. You give the man gold and he wants diamonds for icing. No, there isn’t anything else. As I said, just the numbers and technical details. I’ll get back to you on the methaqualone as soon as I can.”

  “I appreciate that, Jazz. Thanks.”

  “Just doing my job.”

  After she left, Banks leaned back in his chair and wondered what had happened at Hadfield’s house that night. When Adrienne had died in his bathtub, had he called Randall to try and resuscitate her sometime between eight and eleven that evening? If he had, he must have used another mobile as there was no record of a call to Randall on the phone they’d found in his study. In the circumstances, that was probably exactly what he would have done. And if Hadfield had another phone, a pay-as-you-go, it had definitely disappeared. Clearly, Randall hadn’t succeeded in the resuscitation, so had they then disposed of Adrienne’s body together? But what could have persuaded Randall, with his career at stake, to help even a friend like Laurence Hadfield dispose of a body? Did Hadfield have something on him?

  And then what happened? How had Hadfield ended up dead on Tetchley Moor? Had he gone there with Randall for some reason, and had Randall pushed him into the gully? Again, if so, why? A falling out of some sort, obviously, but over what? Every development in this case seemed to raise a dozen more questions or objections. There were no signs of foul play on Hadfield’s body, though both Dr. Burns and Dr. Glendenning did say that it was possible he had been pushed into the gully. A gentle shove was all it would have taken, and that wouldn’t have left any marks. So had Randall taken him to the abandoned Ford Focus first to dump Adrienne, then killed him on the way back? And what role did Sarah Chen have in all this? Why was she killed, and by whom? Then there was Mia.

  The phone rang and interrupted his chain of thought. It was Ken Blackstone calling from Leeds. “Ah, Ken,” Banks said. “I was going to call you about putting someone on watch at Anthony Randall’s place.”

  “Already done,” said Blackstone. “I’ve got someone here who met Mia. I think you’d better come down and hear her story for yourself. Can you get away?”

  “I can make it in about forty-five minutes to an hour. I’ll bring Annie with me. OK?”

  Banks could hear muffled voices on the end of the line, then Blackstone came back on the line. “No problem,” he said. “Apparently, we’re quite happy to wait as long as there’s another drink in it. We’re in the Original Oak. Headingley.”

  BANKS AND Annie made it to the Original Oak in fifty-two minutes, Creedence Clearwater Revivals’s greatest hits on the stereo speeding them on their way. He pulled up in a side street near the pub just as “Up Around the Bend” was finishing. Annie gave him a look of relief when the music stopped.

  “What’s up? You don’t like Creedence?” he said.

  “I’d rather have a bit of Barry Ma
nilow or Neil Diamond, to be honest.”

  “I give up,” said Banks.

  Annie grinned. “Maybe on the way back.”

  They walked into the busy pub and found Ken Blackstone with DC Sharon Musgrave, who had been showing the likeness of Mia around the student haunts, sitting in a corner with a young woman, who seemed to be happily tucking into a plateful of fish and chips, a half-finished pint of what looked like lager beside it.

  Blackstone shrugged as if to say it was only a minor bribe, and Banks and Annie sat down. “Leila didn’t want to go to the station, but she was happy enough to wait here and have a bite to eat,” he said. “We didn’t see any reason to disagree, as she’s done nothing wrong.”

  Banks nodded and turned to Leila. She was an attractive young woman with short dark hair and pale skin, marred only by a nose ring and another ring by the side of her right eye. She was wearing a soft tan kidskin jacket over her T-shirt, and the regulation distressed jeans. Banks sometimes thought they must be issued on entrance to all institutions of further education.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” Banks said. “But I suppose DCI Blackstone has already told you it’s important.”

  “It’s OK,” said Leila. “There are worse places to wait. I can’t tell you any more than I told her, though.” She gestured towards DC Musgrave.

  “It’s very important that we find this Mia as soon as possible,” said Banks.

  “Like I said, I’ll do my best.”

  “Can you tell me what happened, how you met?”

  Leila sighed and put her knife and fork down. Conversations rose and fell around them, but Banks fixed his attention on her words.

  “We met here,” she said. “Not this room, in the beer garden. It was a fine day near the beginning of term.”

  “Not so long ago, then?”

  “Couple of months or so.”

  “Was it your first time here?”

  “No. I’m a second-year student. It’s my local. I live down on Bainbrigge Road.”

  “So you’re here quite a lot?”

  “Quite a lot, yeah.”

  “And you’d never seen her before?”

  “No.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “She said she was an English student from Bristol, but she’d got fed up with it down there and transferred. She’d heard Leeds was a good place.”

  “Did you ever see her around campus?” Annie asked.

  “No. But I’m in psychology. Our departments aren’t exactly close.”

  “How about the student pub, the coffee shops?”

  Leila just shook her head.

  “So you got talking,” Banks said. “What happened then?”

  “Nothing, really. I mean we talked about music, and stand-up. Discovered we both like stand-up. We had a few drinks. Maybe a few too many in my case, truth be told.”

  “Was there anything unusual about your conversation?”

  “Not really. Just . . .” She gave a shake of her head. “I could have been misreading her, but at one point I thought she was telling me I could make a lot of money if I wanted.”

  “Did she tell you how?”

  “Just that she knew people, men, who would happily pay to be seen with me. I mean, she didn’t make it sound like prostitution or anything, but I sort of took it that way.”

  “How did you react?” Annie asked.

  “I told her I wasn’t interested in men.”

  “And then?”

  “She backed off, but . . .”

  “What did you talk about next?”

  “I can’t remember it all.” She gestured towards Blackstone and DC Musgrave. “Like I told them, I was a bit drunk by then. Only the long and short of it is I went home with her and we spent the night together. I’m a lesbian.”

  She said it proudly and defiantly, as if expecting some sort of shocked reaction.

  “So she took you to her home?” Banks said.

  “Yes. I . . . I mean, I share a house with a couple of other students. There’s never enough privacy. Mia has her own place.”

  “Good,” said Banks. “So you know where she lives.”

  Leila bit her lower lip. “I should, I know. I can remember the street but I’m not exactly sure about the house. Like I said, we’d had a few drinks. I mean, it’s not something I do every night, get picked up by a strange woman in a pub.”

  “I don’t suppose it is,” said Banks. “Did you see her again?”

  Leila looked angry and took a long pull on her lager before answering. “No,” she spat. “She gave me a phone number, and I called her the next day. It was . . . I mean, I liked her. I thought we really hit it off. We’d had a good time, and I thought maybe, you know, maybe she just cared about me a little bit, maybe there might be a relationship or something.”

  “But?”

  “She never answered. Not then, not ever. It was like she could see who it was calling and just pressed the red button on me.” She shook her head slowly. “I don’t know why. It wasn’t meant to be a one-night stand. I don’t do one-night stands.”

  “It was nothing to do with you,” said Banks. “It’s my guess she had other things that required her attention. It was just bad timing.” But this was the one mistake Mia had made, the careless moment he had been waiting for, and it had occurred at a time when all was going well for her, and when whatever happened later to Adrienne and Sarah was still part of an unimaginable future. Mia let her guard down with Leila, let her feelings and her desires run away with her, with no reason whatsoever to believe that her lapse would come back to haunt her. But it had. “Did you ever try to find her?”

  Leila seemed embarrassed by the question. Finally, she said, “I went back a couple of times, hung around the street, hoping to see her.”

  “Did you?”

  “No. I felt like a fool. I mean, we’d only spent the one night together. What did I expect?”

  “You didn’t think of knocking on a few doors, asking after her?”

  “I thought of it, but when it came to it, I didn’t dare. I mean, maybe if I’d seen her in the street I might have plucked up courage to talk to her, but if she thought I’d been tracking her down, stalking her, or whatever . . .” She let her voice trail off.

  “I understand,” said Banks. “You still have the phone number?”

  Leila nodded towards Blackstone and DC Musgrave. “I gave it to them.”

  “They’re working on it at the station,” said Blackstone. “Shouldn’t take long.”

  “Pay-as-you-go?”

  “They don’t think so.”

  “Excellent.” Banks guessed that Mia would have given Leila her real phone number, not one of the throwaways she used for business. He looked back at Leila, who seemed saddened by reliving her night of dashed hopes. “Can you show us the street, at least?” he asked.

  Leila nodded.

  THERE WAS no sense in them all going, so Banks and Annie drove off with Leila while Blackstone and DC Musgrave returned to their headquarters at Elland Road.

  Following Leila’s directions, Banks headed back towards the university and turned left off Headingley Lane before they reached Hyde Park, into an area of grand old houses. The street that Leila eventually pointed out was less grand than some of the others, but nonetheless impressive, all walled stone mansions with gables and turrets.

  “Pretty much all of these houses are divided into flats,” Leila said. “I remember thinking it was a bit upmarket for a student, but, well, by then, I wasn’t all that much interested in how she managed to pay for it. I just remember it was nice, the furnishings and all. And big.”

  “But you can’t remember which one it was?”

  “They all look the same from the outside, and the streetlights are widely spaced and not very bright. It was dark and Mia was driving. Maybe she shouldn’t have been, but it wasn’t that far. We were talking, then she’d pulled into a drive. I didn’t notice which one.”

  “Do you remember the car
?”

  Leila shook her head. “I really wasn’t paying attention to the car.”

  “What about when you left the following morning?”

  “I walked home. My head was spinning a bit, and I had a bit of a hangover. I wasn’t really paying attention to my environment. I mean, despite the headache and all, I was feeling pretty good. It had been a long time, you know, since I met someone. I was sure I’d see her again. I mean, I’d no reason to try and memorize where she lived. I thought she’d ring me.”

  As they stood at the end of the street and looked at the two rows of similar houses facing one another, Banks knew it wouldn’t take them long to find Mia’s, even if they had to resort to knocking on doors. But before they could make a move, Banks’s mobile went off. It was Blackstone with the address. The phone number was registered to a Mariela Carney. Number 36, Flat 5.

  “She didn’t even use her real name with me,” said Leila bleakly, after glancing at the screen.

  Banks turned to her. “Leila, you’ve been really helpful,” he said. “And I’m sorry the memories have caused you pain. But you don’t have to stay. We may need to talk to you again, but DI Cabbot can take you back to the Oak now, if you like?”

  Leila shook her head. “No,” she said. “I’d like to walk, if that’s all right.”

  “Of course it is,” said Annie.

  Leila gave them her address then walked off down the street, shoulders slumped.

  Banks could feel the excitement rising as he and Annie approached the house. There was no list of names, just doorbells marked with numbers, but as it happened, they didn’t have to ring Mariela’s, as the front door was unlocked.

  Banks and Annie walked up the next well-carpeted flight of stairs and stood on the landing, listening. Banks thought he could hear faint music coming from inside the flat. He knocked and waited, Annie standing to one side. Slowly, the door opened a few inches on its chain. The face he saw in the gap resembled the one in the drawing, except that her hair was a little longer. Gone was the spiky shaggy student style people had described.

  “Yes?” she said.

  Banks showed his warrant card and said, “Police.”

  Her door shut. For a moment Banks didn’t know whether she was going to lock it and try to escape through the window, but she was only taking it off the chain. Eventually, she opened it wide and invited them both inside.