Close to Home

by Peter Robinson

  More of a fuss might have been made over Joey’s escape had the new visitors not become the center of everyone’s awed attention. They were the first plainclothes policemen ever to enter the Banks household, and even young Banks himself forgot about Joey for the time being. Looking back now, it seemed like some sort of ill omen to him, but at the time he hadn’t seen any significance beyond the simple loss of a pet.

  Both men wore suits and ties, Banks remembered, but no hats. One of them, the one who did most of the talking, was about the same age as his father, with slicked-back dark hair, a long nose, a general air of benevolence and a twinkle in his eye, the sort of kindly uncle who might slip you half a crown to go to the pictures and wink as he gave it to you. The other one was younger and more nondescript. Banks couldn’t remember much about him at all except that he had ginger hair, freckles and sticking-out ears. Banks couldn’t remember their names, if he had ever known them.

  Banks’s father turned off the television set. Nine-year-old Roy just sat and gawped at the men. Neither detective apologized for disturbing the family. They sat, but didn’t relax, remaining perched on the edges of their chairs as the kindly uncle asked his questions and the other took notes. Banks couldn’t remember the exact wording after so many years, but imagined it went along the following lines.

  “You know why we’re here, don’t you?”

  “It’s about Graham, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. You were a friend of his, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any idea where he might have gone?”

  “No.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “Saturday afternoon.”

  “Did he say or do anything unusual?”

  “No.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Went shopping in town.”

  “What’d you buy?”

  “Just some records.”

  “What sort of a mood was Graham in?”

  “Just ordinary.”

  “Was anything bothering him?”

  “He was just like normal.”

  “Did he ever talk about running away from home?”

  “No.”

  “Any idea where he might go if he did run away? Did he talk about any particular places?”

  “No. But he was from London. I mean, his parents brought him up from London last year.”

  “We know that. We were just wondering if there was anywhere else he talked about.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What about secret hiding places?” The detective winked. “I know all lads have secret places.”

  “No.” Banks was unwilling to tell them about the big tree in the park—holly, he thought it was—with prickly leaves and branches right down to the ground. If you made your way through them, you ended up hidden inside, between the thick leaves and the trunk, like being in a teepee. He knew Graham was missing and it was important, but he wasn’t going to give away the gang’s secrets. He would look in the tree himself later and make sure Graham wasn’t there.

  “Did Graham have any problems you were aware of? Was he upset about anything?”

  “No.”

  “School?”

  “We’re on holiday.”

  “I know that, but I mean in general. It was a new school for him, wasn’t it? He’d only been there one year. Did he have any problems with the other boys?”

  “No, not really. He had a fight with Mick Slack, but he’s just a bully. He picks fights with all the new kids.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you seen any strange men hanging around the area lately?”

  “No.” Banks probably blushed as he lied. He certainly felt his cheeks burning.

  “Nobody?”

  “No.”

  “Did Graham ever mention anyone bothering him?”

  “No.”

  “All right, then, son, that’s it for now. But if you can think of anything at all, you know where the police station is, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I’m sorry about your budgie, really I am.”

  “Thank you.”

  They seemed all set to go then and got to their feet. Just before they left, they asked Roy and Banks’s parents a few general questions, and that was it. When they shut the door, everyone was quiet. There were still ten minutes of Coronation Street left, but nobody thought of switching on the television set again. Banks remembered turning to Joey’s empty cage and feeling the tears gather in his eyes.

  Annie waited until Martin Armitage’s Beemer had got a respectable distance ahead, then let a local delivery van get between them before she started to follow. The roads were quiet at that time in the morning—they were quiet most of the time, if truth be told—so she couldn’t appear too conspicuous. At the village of Relton, he turned right and followed the B-Road that ran about halfway up the valley side.

  They passed through tiny Mortsett, which didn’t even have a pub or a general store, and Annie got stuck when the delivery van stopped to make a call at one of the cottages. The road wasn’t wide enough for her to pass.

  She got out and prepared to show her warrant card and ask the driver to get out of the way—there was a passing area about twenty yards farther along—when she noticed Armitage pull over and stop about half a mile beyond the village. She had a clear view of the open road, so she brought out the binoculars she kept in her glove compartment and watched him.

  Armitage got out of the car with his briefcase, looked around and started walking over the grass toward a squat stone shepherd’s shelter about eighty yards off the road, up the daleside, and she didn’t think he was nervous because he was breaking the government foot-and-mouth regulations.

  When he got there, he ducked inside the shelter, and when he came out he wasn’t carrying his briefcase. Annie watched him walk back to his car. He stumbled once over the uneven ground, then glanced around again and drove off in the direction of Gratly.

  “Birds, is it?” a voice asked, disturbing Annie’s concentration.

  “What?” She turned to face the deliveryman, a brash gelhaired youngster with bad teeth.

  “The binoculars,” he said. “Bird-watching. Can’t understand it, myself. Boring. Now, when it comes to the other sort of birds—”

  Annie flipped him her warrant card and said, “Move your van out of the way and let me pass.”

  “All right, all right,” he said. “No need to get shirty. There’s no one home, anyway. Never is in this bloody godforsaken hole.”

  He drove off and Annie got back in her car. Armitage was long gone by the time she reached the spot where he had stopped, and there were no other cars in sight, save the delivery van, fast disappearing ahead.

  Annie was the one who felt nervous now. Was someone watching her with binoculars the way she had watched Armitage? She hoped not. If this was what she thought it was, it wouldn’t do to reveal police interest. The air was still and mild, and Annie could smell warm grass after rain. Somewhere in the distance, a tractor chugged across a field, and sheep baaed from the daleside as she ignored the posted warnings and made her way to the shelter. The place smelled musty and acrid inside. Enough light spilled through the gaps in the drystone for her to see the used condom on the dirt, empty cigarette packet and crushed lager cans. A local lad’s idea of showing his girlfriend a good time, no doubt. She could also see the briefcase, the inexpensive nylon kind.

  Annie picked it up. It felt heavy. She opened the Velcro strips and inside, as she had expected, found stacks of money, mostly ten- and twenty-pound notes. She had no idea exactly how much there was, but guessed it must be somewhere in the region of ten or fifteen thousand pounds.

  She put the briefcase back where it was and returned to her car. She couldn’t just sit there by the roadside waiting for something to happen, but she couldn’t very well leave the scene, either. In the end, she drove back to Mortsett and parked. There was no police sta
tion in the tiny hamlet, and she knew it would be no use trying to use her UHF hand radio behind so many hills, and at such a distance. Besides, it only had a range of a couple of miles. She was driving her own car, as she often did, and she hadn’t got around to having the more powerful VHF radio installed. It hardly seemed necessary, as she wasn’t a patrol officer and, more often than not, she simply used the car to drive to work and back, and perhaps to interview witnesses, as she had done that morning. Before she headed out on foot to find a good spot from which to watch the shelter without being seen, Annie picked up her mobile to ring the station and let Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe know what was going on.

  And wouldn’t you know it—the damn mobile didn’t work. Out of cell range. Bloody typical. She should have known. She was quite close to Gratly, where Banks lived, and her mobile didn’t work there, either.

  There was an old red telephone box in the village, but the phone had been vandalized, the wires torn from the cash box. Damn! Unwilling to take her eyes off the shelter for too long, Annie knocked on some doors, but the van driver had been right; nobody seemed to be home, and the one old lady who did answer said she didn’t have a telephone.

  Annie cursed under her breath; it looked as if she was on her own for the time being. She couldn’t leave the shelter unwatched, and she had no idea how long she would have to stay out there. The sooner she found a good vantage point, the better. Still, she thought, turning toward the hillside, it served her bloody well right for not calling in before she followed Armitage. So much for initiative.

  Chapter 5

  Nick Lowe’s The Convincer ended and Banks slipped in David Gray’s White Ladder. As he approached the turn-off to Peterborough, he wondered what to do first. He had rung his parents to let them know he was coming, of course, so perhaps he should go straight there. On the other hand, he was closer to Police HQ, and the sooner he introduced himself to Detective Inspector Michelle Hart, the better. So he headed for the police station in its idyllic setting just off the Nene Parkway, between the nature reserve and the golf course.

  In the reception area, he asked to speak to the detective in charge of the Graham Marshall investigation, introducing himself only as Alan Banks, a childhood friend. He didn’t want to appear to be pulling rank or even introduce himself as a fellow copper, at least not at first, not until he saw which way the wind was blowing. Besides, just out of curiosity, he wanted to know how they treated an ordinary member of the public who came forward with information. It would do no harm to play a bit of a game.

  After he had been waiting about ten minutes, a young woman opened the locked door that led to the main part of the station and beckoned him inside. Conservatively dressed in a navy-blue suit, skirt below the knees, and a button-down white blouse, she was petite and slim, with shoulder-length blond hair parted in the middle and tucked behind her small, delicate ears. She had a jagged fringe that came almost down to her eyes, which were a startling green, a color Banks remembered seeing somewhere in the sea near Greece. Her mouth was slightly down-turned at the edges, which made her look a bit sad, and she had a small, straight nose. All in all, she was a very attractive woman, Banks thought, but he sensed a severity and a reserve in her—a definite “No Entry” sign—and there was no mistaking the lines that suffering had etched around her haunting and haunted eyes.

  “Mr. Banks?” she said, raising her eyebrows.

  Banks stood up. “Yes.”

  “I’m Detective Inspector Hart. Please follow me.” She led him to an interview room. It felt very strange being on the receiving end, Banks thought, and he got an inkling of the discomfort some of his interviewees must have felt. He looked around. Though it was a different county, the basics were still the same as every interview room he had ever seen: table and chairs bolted to the floor, high window covered by a grille, institutional green paint on the walls, and that unforgettable smell of fear.

  There was nothing to worry about, of course, but Banks couldn’t help feeling just a little nervous as DI Hart put on her silver-rimmed oval reading glasses and shuffled the papers around in front of her, as he had done many times himself, to draw out the tension and cause anxiety in the person sitting opposite. It touched the raw nerve of his childhood fear of authority, even though he knew he was authority himself, now. Banks had always been aware of that irony, but a situation like this one really brought it home.

  He also felt that DI Hart didn’t need to act this way with him, that she was putting on too much of a show. His fault, perhaps, for not saying who he was, but even so, it was a bit heavy-handed to talk to him in an official interview room. He had come in voluntarily, and he was neither a witness nor a suspect. She could have found an empty office and sent for coffee. But what would he have done? The same, probably; it was the “us and them” mentality, and in her mind he was a civilian. Them.

  DI Hart stopped playing with her papers and broke the silence. “So you say you can help with the Graham Marshall investigation?”

  “Perhaps,” said Banks. “I knew him.”

  “Have you any idea at all what might have happened to him?”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Banks. He had intended to tell her everything but found it wasn’t as easy as that. Not yet. “We just hung around together.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Graham? It’s hard to say,” said Banks. “I mean, you don’t think about things like that when you’re kids, do you?”

  “Try now.”

  “He was deep, I think. Quiet, at any rate. Most kids joked around, did stupid stuff, but Graham was always more serious, more reserved.” Banks remembered the small, almost secret smile as Graham had watched others act out comic routines—as if he didn’t find them funny but knew he had to smile. “You never felt you were fully privy to what was going on in his mind,” he added.

  “You mean he kept secrets?”

  “Don’t we all?”

  “What were his?”

  “They wouldn’t have been secrets if I knew them, would they? I’m just trying to give you some sense of what he was like. There was a secretive side to his nature.”

  “Go on.”

  She was becoming edgy, Banks thought. Rough day, probably, and not enough help. “We did all the usual stuff together: played football and cricket, listened to music, talked about our favorite TV shows.”

  “What about girlfriends?”

  “Graham was a good-looking kid. The girls liked him, and he liked them, but I don’t think he had anyone steady.”

  “What kind of mischief did he get up to?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to incriminate myself, but we broke a window or two, did a bit of shoplifting, played truant, and we smoked cigarettes behind the cycle sheds at school. Pretty much normal stuff for teenagers back then. We didn’t break into anyone’s home, steal cars or mug old ladies.”

  “Drugs?”

  “This was 1965, for crying out loud.”

  “Drugs were around back then.”

  “How would you know? You probably weren’t even born.”

  Michelle reddened. “I know King Harold got an arrow in his eye at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, and I wasn’t born then.”

  “Okay. Point taken. But drugs…? Not us, at any rate. Cigarettes were about the worst we did back then. Drugs may have been increasingly popular with the younger generation in London, but not with fourteen-year-old kids in a provincial backwater. Look, I should probably have done this before, but…” He reached into his inside pocket and took out his warrant card, laying it on the desk in front of her.

  Michelle looked at it a minute, picked it up and looked more closely, then slid it back across the desk to Banks. She took off her reading glasses and set them on the table. “Prick,” she whispered.

  “Come again?”

  “You heard me. Why didn’t you tell me from the start you were a DCI instead of playing games and stringing me along, making me feel like a complete fool?”

  “Bec
ause I didn’t want to give the impression I was trying to interfere. I’m simply here as someone who knew Graham. Besides, why did you have to come on so heavy-handed? I came here to volunteer information. There was no need to put me in an interview room and use the same tactics you use on a suspect. I’m surprised you didn’t leave me here alone to stew for an hour.”

  “You’re making me wish I had.”

  They glared at each other in silence for a few moments, then Banks said, “Look, I’m sorry. I had no intention of making you feel foolish. And you don’t need to. Why should you? It’s true that I knew Graham. We were close friends at school. We lived on the same street. But this isn’t my case, and I don’t want you to think I’m pushing my nose in or anything. That’s why I didn’t announce myself at first. I’m sorry. You’re right. I should have told you I was on the Job right from the start. Okay?”

  Michelle gazed at him through narrowed eyes for a while, then twitched the corners of her lips in a brief smile and nodded. “Your name came up when I was talking to his parents. I would have got in touch eventually.”

  “The powers that be not exactly overwhelming you with assistance on this one, then?”

  Michelle snorted. “You could say that. One DC. It’s not a high priority case, and I’m the new kid on the block. New girl.”

  “I know what you mean,” Banks said. He remembered first meeting Annie Cabbot when she was put out to pasture at Harkside and he was in Outer Siberia back in Eastvale. That hadn’t been a high priority case to start with, either, but it had turned into one. He could sympathize with DI Hart.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “I didn’t know you were a copper. I suppose I should call you ‘sir’? Rank and all?”

  “Not necessary. I’m not one to stand on ceremony. Besides, I’m on your patch here. You’re the boss. I do have a suggestion, though.”

  “Oh?”

  Banks looked at his watch. “It’s one o’clock. I drove down from Eastvale this morning without stopping and I haven’t had a thing to eat. Why don’t we get out of this depressing room and talk about Graham over lunch? I’ll pay.”