Close to Home

by Peter Robinson

  “I suppose so. Why does it matter?”

  “At least it tells us he’s in an area where there’s a signal. Or he was when he made the call. Also, if he’s used it at other times, we’ll be able to get the information from the phone company. It might help us pinpoint him. Of course, it would be better if he left it switched on, but he’s not going to make things that easy for us.”

  “Tell me,” said Robin. “In your experience, in how many cases do they…how many times do the victims…”

  “I don’t have any statistics offhand,” Annie admitted. “But if it makes you feel any better, kidnappers are essentially businesspeople. They’re in it for the money, not to hurt anyone. There’s every chance that this will be resolved and that you’ll see Luke back here safe and sound.” Annie could feel her nose growing as she talked. Too much time had passed, she suspected, for a happy ending, though she hoped she was wrong. “In the meantime, while appearing to go along with his demands and not alarming him in any way, we want to make sure that in addition to getting Luke home safely, we take every opportunity to discover the kidnapper’s identity and bring him to justice.”

  “How can we help?” asked Robin.

  “You don’t have to do anything,” said Annie. “You’ve already played your part. Just leave the rest to us.”

  “Maybe you’ve scared him off,” Martin said. “Luke should be back by now. It’s been hours.”

  “Sometimes they wait a long time just to make sure nobody’s watching. He’s probably waiting till dark.”

  “But you can’t be certain, can you?” Robin said.

  “Nothing’s certain in this world, Mrs. Armitage.”

  “Robin. I told you. Oh, how rude of me!” She got to her feet. “All this time and I haven’t offered you anything to drink.” She was wearing denim shorts, Annie noticed, cut high on her long, smooth legs. There weren’t many women who could get away with the bare midriff look at her age, either, Annie thought. She wouldn’t even think of it herself, though she was only thirty-four, but what she could see of Robin’s stomach looked flat and taut, with a ring of some sort glinting in her navel.

  “No,” she said. “Really. I’m not stopping long.” There wasn’t much else Annie could do for Luke except wait, and she had promised herself a nice pint of bitter at the Black Sheep in Relton, where she could sit in peace and mull things over before calling it a day. “I just want to make certain that you’ll report any future communications, if there are any, straight to me. You’ve got the numbers where I can be reached?”

  Both Martin and Robin nodded.

  “And, of course, you’ll let me know the second Luke turns up.”

  “We will,” said Robin. “I just hope and pray that he does come home soon.”

  “Me, too,” said Annie, getting up. “There’s one more thing that puzzles me.”

  “What?” asked Robin.

  “Last night, when you rang to tell me you’d heard from Luke, you said he would be back tonight.”

  “That’s what he told Martin. The kidnapper. He said that if we left the money this morning, then Luke would be home unharmed by tonight.”

  “And you know that I wanted to see Luke as soon as he got back, to talk to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “So how were you going to explain everything?” asked Annie. “I’m curious.”

  Robin looked over at her husband, who answered, “We were going to persuade Luke to tell you what we said happened in the first place, that he’d run away and phoned us the night before to say he was coming back.”

  “Who thought of this?”

  “The kidnapper suggested it.”

  “Sounds like the perfect crime,” said Annie. “Only you two, Luke and the kidnapper would ever know that it had been committed, and none of you would be likely to talk.”

  Martin looked down at his drink.

  “He would have done that?” Annie went on. “Luke would have lied to the police?”

  “He would have done it for me,” said Robin.

  Annie looked at her, nodded and left.

  The Krays, Banks thought as he lay in his narrow bed that night. Reggie and Ronnie. He didn’t remember the exact dates, of course, but he had an idea that they were flying high in the mid-sixties, part of the swinging London scene, mixing with celebrities, pop stars and politicians.

  It had always intrigued him the way gangsters became celebrities: Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, John Dillinger, Dutch Schultz, Bugsy Siegel. Figures of legend. He had known a few of the lesser ones in his time, and they almost always rubbed shoulders with the rich and famous, as if celebrity recognized only itself and was blind to all else—morality, decency, honor—and they never lacked for beautiful women to run around with, the kind who were attracted by danger and the aura of violence. There seemed to be a glamour and mystique attached to making your money out of running prostitutes, supplying drugs and threatening to destroy people’s livelihoods if they didn’t pay protection, and it was more than likely that most film stars, sports personalities and pop stars were addle-brained enough to fall for it, the glamour of violence. Or was it the violence of glamour?

  The Krays were no exception. They knew how to manipulate the media, and being photographed with a famous actress, an MP, or a peer of the realm made it less likely that the truth about their real activities would come out. There was a trial in 1965, Banks remembered, and they came out of that more fireproof than they went in.

  It was hard to believe that Graham Marshall’s dad had had anything to do with them, though, and Banks had to admit that his father was probably right; it had just been the beer talking.

  Why, though? Why even hint at something like that if there wasn’t a scrap of truth in it? Maybe Bill Marshall was a pathological liar. But over his years as a copper, Banks had learned that the old cliché “There’s no smoke without fire” had a great deal to recommend it. And there were two other things: The Marshalls came from the East End of London, Kray territory in the mid-sixties, and Banks now remembered feeling afraid around Mr. Marshall.

  He already knew a bit about the Krays, most of it picked up when he was on the Met years ago, but he could dig deeper. There were plenty of books about them, though he doubted that any mentioned Bill Marshall. If he had done anything for them, it had obviously been low-level, going round the customers and exuding physical menace, maybe clobbering the occasional informer or double-dealer in a dark alley.

  He would have to tell DI Hart. Michelle. She had left a message with Banks’s mother while he was out, asking him to drop by Thorpe Wood at 9 A.M. the following morning. It was her case, after all. If there was a connection, though, he was surprised that it hadn’t come out in the investigation. Usually the parents come under very close scrutiny in missing child cases, no matter how grief-stricken they appear. Banks had once come across a young couple he had believed to be genuinely grieving the loss of their child, only to find the poor kid strangled for crying too loud and stuffed in the downstairs freezer. No, you couldn’t trust surfaces in police work; you had to dig, if only to make certain you weren’t having the wool pulled over your eyes.

  Banks picked up his old transistor radio. He had bought a battery earlier and wondered if it would still work after all these years. Probably not, but it was worth the price of a battery to find out. He unclipped the back, connected the battery and put the earpiece in his ear. It was just a single unit, like an old hearing aid. No stereo radio back then. When he turned it on, he was thrilled to find that the old trannie actually worked. Banks could hardly believe it. As he tuned the dial, though, he soon began to feel disappointed. The sound quality was poor, but it wasn’t only that. The radio received all the local stations, Classic FM and Radios 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, just like any modern radio, but Banks realized he had been half-expecting to go back in time. The idea that this was a magic radio that still received the Light Programme, Radio Luxembourg and the pirates, Radio Caroline and Radio London, was lodged somewhere in his mind.
He had expected to be listening to John Peel’s The Perfumed Garden, to relive those magical few months in the spring of 1967, when he should have been studying for his O-Levels but spent half the night with the radio plugged in his ear, hearing Captain Beefheart, the Incredible String Band and Tyrannosaurus Rex for the first time.

  Banks switched off the radio and turned to his Photoplay diary. At least he had a bedside light in his room now and didn’t have to hide under the sheets with a flashlight. Beside each week was a full-page photograph of an actor or actress popular at the time, usually an actress or starlet, chosen because of pulchritude rather than acting ability, and more often than not appearing in a risqué pose—bra and panties, the carefully placed bedsheet, the off-the-shoulder strap. He flipped through the pages and there they all were: Natalie Wood, Catherine Deneuve, Martine Beswick, Ursula Andress. Cleavage abounded. The week of August 15–21 was accompanied by a photo of Shirley Eaton in a low-cut dress.

  As he flipped through the diary, Banks discovered that he had hardly been voluminous or the least bit analytical; he had simply noted events, adventures and excursions, often in a very cryptic manner. In a way, it was a perfect model for the policeman’s notebook he was to keep later. Still, the pages were small, divided into seven sections, with room for a little fact or piece of cinema history at the bottom. If any of the dates happened to be a star’s birthday, as many did, a portion of the available space was taken up with that, too. Given the restrictions, he had done a decent enough job, he thought, deciphering the miniature scrawl. He had certainly been to see a lot of films, listing all of them in his diary, along with his terse opinions, which varied from “Crap” and “Boring” through “Okay” to “Fantastic!” A typical entry might read, “Went to the Odeon with Dave and Graham to see Dr. Who and the Daleks. Okay,” “Played cricket on the rec. Scored 32 not out,” or, “Rained. Stopped in and read Casino Royale. Fantastic!”

  He flipped to the Saturday before Graham disappeared, the twenty-first. “Went into town with Graham. Bought Help! with Uncle Ken’s record token.” It was the same LP they had listened to at Paul’s the next day. That was all he had written, nothing unusual about Graham’s state of mind. On Friday he had watched The Animals, one of his favorite groups, on Ready, Steady, Go!

  On Sunday, he had written, probably while in bed that night, “Played records at Paul’s place. New Bob Dylan LP. Saw police car go to Graham’s house.” On Monday, “Graham’s run away from home. Police came. Joey flew away.”

  Interesting he should assume that Graham had run away from home. But of course he would, at that age. What else? The alternatives would have been too horrific for a fourteen-year-old boy to contemplate. He flipped back to late June, around the time he thought the event on the riverbank had occurred. It was a Tuesday, he noticed. He hadn’t written much about it, simply, “Skived off school and played by river this afternoon. A strange man tried to push me in.”

  Tired, Banks put the diary aside, rubbed his eyes and turned out the light. It felt odd to be back in the same bed he had slept in during his teenage years, the same bed where he had had his first sexual experience, with Kay Summerville, while his parents were out visiting his grandparents one Saturday. It hadn’t been very good for either Banks or Kay, but they had persevered and got a lot better with practice.

  Kay Summerville. He wondered where she was, what she was doing now. Probably married with kids, the same way he had been until recently. She’d been a beauty, though, had Kay: long blond hair, slender waist, long legs, a mouth like Marianne Faithfull’s, firm tits with hard little nipples and hair like spun gold between her legs. Christ, Banks, he told himself, enough with the adolescent fantasies.

  He put on his headphones and turned on his portable CD player, listening to Vaughan Williams’s Second String Quartet, and settled back to more pleasant thoughts of Kay Summerville. But as he approached the edge of sleep, his thoughts jumbled, mixing memory with dream. It was cold and dark, and Banks and Graham were walking across a rugby field, goalposts silhouetted by the moon, cracking spiderweb patterns in the ice as they walked, their breath misting the air. Banks must have said something about the Krays having been arrested—was he interested in criminals, even then?—and Graham just laughed, saying the law could never touch people like them. Banks asked him how he knew, and Graham said he used to live near them. “They were kings,” he said.

  Puzzled by the memory, or dream, Banks turned the bedside light on again and picked up the diary. If what he had just imagined had any basis in reality, then it had happened in winter. He glanced through his entries for January and February 1965: Samantha Eggar, Yvonne Romain, Elke Sommer…But no mention of the Krays until the ninth of March, when he had written, “Krays went to trial today. Graham laughed and said they’d get off easy.” So Graham had mentioned them. It was flimsy, but a start.

  He turned off the light again, and this time he drifted off to sleep without further thoughts of either Graham or Kay Summerville.

  Chapter 8

  When Banks arrived at Thorpe Wood the following morning and asked to see Detective Inspector Hart, he was surprised when a man came down to greet him. The telephone call that his mother had told him about when he got back from the pub had been from Michelle.

  “Mr. Banks, or should I say DCI Banks? Come with me, please, if you would.” He stood aside and gestured for Banks to enter.

  “And you are?”

  “Detective Superintendent Shaw. We’ll talk in my office.”

  Shaw looked familiar, but Banks couldn’t place him. It was possible they had met on a course, or even on a case, years ago, and he had forgotten, but he usually had a good memory for faces.

  They didn’t speak on their way to Shaw’s office, and as soon as they got there Shaw disappeared, saying he’d be back in a couple of minutes. Old copper’s trick, Banks knew. And Shaw knew he knew.

  There wasn’t likely to be anything of interest in the office if Shaw was willing to leave Banks there alone, but he had a poke around nonetheless. Second nature. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but just looking for the sake of it. The filing cabinets were locked, as were the desk drawers, and the computer required a password. It began to seem very much as if Shaw expected Banks to nose about.

  There was an interesting framed photograph on the wall, quite a few years old by the look of it, showing a younger Shaw and Jet Harris standing by an unmarked Rover looking for all the world like John Thaw and Dennis Waterman in The Sweeney. Or was it Morse and Lewis? Is that how Shaw saw himself, as Sergeant Lewis to Harris’s Chief Inspector Morse?

  The bookcase held mostly binders and back issues of the Police Review. Mixed in were a few legal texts and an American textbook called Practical Homicide Investigation. Banks was browsing through this and trying not to look at the gruesome color illustrations when, after half an hour, Shaw came back, followed by a rather embarrassed-looking DI Michelle Hart.

  “Sorry about that,” said Shaw, sitting down opposite Banks. “Something came up. You know how it is.” Michelle sat to one side looking uncomfortable.

  “I know.” Banks put the book aside and reached for a cigarette.

  “There’s no smoking in here,” said Shaw. “Not anywhere in the building, not for any of us, these days. Maybe you’re still a bit behind the times back up in Yorkshire?”

  Banks had known that he probably couldn’t smoke, though Shaw had the nicotine-stained fingers of a heavy smoker, but he thought it at least worth a try. Obviously, though, this was going to be played the hard way, even though they had done him the courtesy of conducting the interview in the superintendent’s office rather than in a dingy interview room. He didn’t feel nervous, just puzzled and pissed off. What was going on?

  “So, what can I do for you, Superintendent Shaw?”

  “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  Shaw stared at Banks, and Banks searched through his store of faces for a match. The ginger hair was thin on top, one long s
ide strand combed over to hide the bald patch, but not fooling anyone; hardly any eyebrows; freckles, pale blue eyes, the face filled out and jowly; the fleshy, red-veined nose of a seasoned drinker. He was familiar, but there was something different about him. Then Banks knew.

  “You’ve had your ears fixed,” he said. “The wonders of modern medicine.”

  Shaw reddened. “So you do remember me.”

  “You were the baby DC who came to our house after Graham disappeared.” It was hard to believe, but Shaw would have been about twenty-one at the time, only seven years older than Banks, yet he had seemed an adult, someone from another world.

  “Tell me,” said Shaw, leaning forward across the table so Banks could smell the minty breath of a man who drinks his breakfast. “I’ve always wondered. Did you ever get your budgie back?”

  Banks leaned back in his chair. “Well, now we’ve got all the pleasantries out of the way, why don’t we get on with it?”

  Shaw jerked his head at Michelle, who slid a photograph across the desk to Banks. She looked serious with her reading glasses on. Sexy, too, Banks thought. “Is this the man?” she asked.

  Banks stared at the black-and-white photo and felt a rush of blood to his brain, ears buzzing and vision clouding. It all flooded back, those few moments of claustrophobia and terror in the stranger’s grip, the moments he had thought were his last.

  “Are you all right?”

  It was Michelle who spoke, a concerned look on her face.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “You look pale. Would you like a drink of water?”

  “No, thank you,” said Banks. “It’s him.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “After all this time I can’t be a hundred percent positive, but I’m as certain as I’ll ever be.”

  Shaw nodded, and Michelle took the picture back.

  “Why?” Banks asked, looking from one to the other. “What is it?”