“Could it be food poisoning?” Banks asked.
“It certainly looks like some kind of poisoning. A healthy person doesn’t usually die just like that. I suppose at a pinch it could be botulism,” Glendenning said. “Certainly some of the symptoms match. I’ll get the Board of Trade to check out that Chinese restaurant.”
“Any other possibilities?”
“Too damned many,” Glendenning growled. “That’s the problem. There’s enough nasty stuff around to make you that ill if you’re unlucky enough to swallow it: household cleaners, pesticides, industrial chemicals. The list goes on. That’s why we’ll have to wait for the test results.” And he hung up.
Cantankerous old bugger, Banks thought with a smile. How Glendenning hated being pinned down. The problem was, though, if someone—Owen, John, or some undiscovered enemy—had poisoned Anna, how had he done it? John Billings could have doctored her food at the Chinese restaurant, or her drink in the pub, or perhaps there was something she had eaten that he had simply failed to mention. He certainly had the best opportunity.
But John Billings seemed the most unlikely suspect: he loved the woman; they were going to get married. Or so he said. Anna Childers was quite well-off and upwardly mobile, but it was unlikely that Billings stood to gain, or even needed to gain, financially from her death. It was worth looking into, though. She had only been thirty, but she might have made a will in his favor. And Billings’s consultancy could do with a bit of scrutiny.
Money wouldn’t be a motive with Owen Doughton, though. According to both the late Anna and to Owen himself, they had parted without rancor, each content to get on with life. Again, it might be worth asking a few of their friends and acquaintances if they had reason to think any differently. Doughton had seemed gentle, reserved, a private person, but who could tell what went on in his mind? Banks walked down the corridor to see if either Detective Constable Susan Gay or Detective Sergeant Philip Richmond was free for an hour or two.
6
Two hours later, DC Susan Gay sat in front of Banks’s desk, smoothed her gray skirt over her lap, and opened her notebook. As usual, Banks thought, she was well dressed: tight blond curls; just enough makeup; the silver hoop earrings; black scoop-necked top; and a mere whiff of Miss Dior cutting the stale cigarette smoke in his office.
“There’s not much, I’m afraid,” Susan started, glancing up from her notes. “No will, as far as I can discover, but she did alter the beneficiary on her insurance policy a month ago.”
“In whose benefit?”
“John Billings. Apparently she has no family.”
Banks raised his eyebrows. “Who was the previous beneficiary?”
“Owen Doughton.”
“Odd that, isn’t it?” Banks speculated aloud. “A woman who changes her insurance policy with her boyfriends.”
“Well, she wouldn’t want it to go to the government, would she?” Susan said. “And I don’t suppose she’d want to make her ex rich either.”
“True,” said Banks. “It’s often easier to keep a policy going than let it lapse and apply all over again later. And they were going to get married. But why change it so soon? How much is it for?”
“Fifty thousand.”
Banks whistled.
“Owen Doughton’s poor as a church mouse,” Susan went on, “but he doesn’t stand to gain anything.”
“But did he know that? I doubt Anna Childers would have told him. What about Billings?”
Susan gnawed the tip of her Biro and hesitated. “Pretty well off,” she said. “Bit of an up-and-comer in the consultancy world. You can see why a woman like Anna Childers would want to attach herself to him.”
“Why?”
“He’s going places, of course. Expensive places.”
“I see,” said Banks. “And you think she was a gold digger?”
Susan flushed. “Not necessarily. She just knew what side her bread was buttered on, that’s all. Same as with a lot of new businesses, though, Billings has a bit of a cash-flow problem.”
“Hmm. Any gossip on the split up?”
“Not much. I had a chat with a couple of locals in the Red Lion. Anna Childers always seemed cheerful enough, but she was a tough nut to crack, they said, strong protective shell.”
“What about Doughton?”
“He doesn’t seem to have many friends. His boss says he’s noticed no real changes, but he says Owen keeps to himself, always did. I’m sorry. It’s not much help.”
“Never mind,” Banks said. “Look, I’ve got a couple of things to do. Can you find Phil for me?”
7
“Did you know that Anna had an insurance policy?” Banks asked Owen Doughton. They stood in the cold yard while Doughton stacked some bags of peat moss.
Doughton stood up and rubbed the small of his back. “Aye,” he said. “What of it?”
“Did you know how much it was for?”
He shook his head.
“All right,” Banks said. “Did Anna tell you she’d changed the beneficiary, named John Billings instead of you?”
Doughton paused with his mouth open. “No,” he said. “No, she didn’t.”
“So you know now that you stand to gain nothing, that it all goes to John?”
Doughton’s face darkened, then he looked away and Banks swore he could hear a strangled laugh or cry. “I don’t believe this,” Doughton said, facing him again. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this. You think I might have killed Anna? And for money? This is insane. Look, go away, please. I don’t have to talk to you, do I?”
“No,” said Banks.
“Well, bugger off, then. I’ve got work to do. But remember one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I loved her. I loved Anna.”
8
John Billings looked even more wretched than he had the day before. His eyes were bloodshot, underlined by black smudges, and he hadn’t shaved. Banks could smell alcohol on his breath. A suitcase stood in the hallway.
“Where are you going, John?” Banks asked.
“I can’t stay here, can I? I mean, it’s not my house, for a start, and . . . the memories.”
“Where are you going?”
He picked up the case. “I don’t know. Just away from here, that’s all.”
“I don’t think so.” Gently, Banks took the case from him and set it down. “We haven’t got to the bottom of this yet.”
“What do you mean? For Christ’s sake, man!”
“You’d better come with me, John.”
“Where?”
“Police station. We’ll have a chat there.”
Billings stared angrily at him, then seemed to fold. “Oh, what the hell,” he muttered. “What does it matter?” And he picked his coat off the rack and followed Banks. He didn’t see DS Philip Richmond watching from the window of the café over the road.
9
It was after seven o’clock, dark, cold, and windy outside. Banks decided to wait in the bedroom, on the chair wedged in the corner between the wardrobe and the dressing table. From there, with the door open, he could see the staircase, and he would be able to hear any sounds in the house.
He had just managed to get the item on the local news show at six o’clock, only minutes after Dr. Glendenning had phoned with more detailed information: “Poison suspected in death of Eastvale woman. Police baffled. No suspects as yet.” Of course, the killer might not have seen it, or might have already covered his tracks, but if Anna Childers had been poisoned, and Glendenning now seemed certain she had, then the answer had to be here.
Given possible reaction times, Glendenning had said in his late-afternoon phone call, there was little chance she could have taken the poison into her system before eight o’clock the previous evening, at which time she had gone out to dine with John Billings.
The house was dark and silent save for the ticking of a clock on the bedside table and the howling wind rattling the window. Eight o’clock. Nine. Nothing happe
ned except Banks got a cramp in his left calf. He massaged it, then stood up at regular intervals and stretched. He thought of DS Richmond down the street in the unmarked car. Between them, they’d be sure to catch anyone who came.
Finally, close to ten o’clock, he heard it, a scraping at the lock on the front door. He drew himself deep into the chair, melted into the darkness and held his breath. The door opened and closed softly. He could see a torch beam sweeping the wall by the staircase, coming closer. The intruder was coming straight up the stairs. Damn! Banks hadn’t expected that. He wanted whoever it was to lead him to the poison, not walk right into him.
He sat rigid in the chair as the beam played over the threshold of the bedroom, mercifully not falling on him in his dark corner. The intruder didn’t hesitate. He walked around the bed, within inches of Banks’s feet, and over to the bedside table. Shining his torch, he opened the top drawer and picked something up. At that moment Banks turned on the light. The figure turned sharply, then froze.
“Hello, Owen,” said Banks. “What brings you here?”
10
“If it was anyone, it had to be either you or him, John,” Banks said later back in his office, while Owen Doughton was being charged downstairs. “Only the two of you were intimate enough with Anna to know her habits, her routines. And Owen had lived with her until quite recently. There was a chance he still had a key.”
John Billings shook his head. “I thought you were arresting me.”
“It was touch and go, I won’t deny it. But at least I thought I’d give you a chance, the benefit of the doubt.”
“And if your trap hadn’t worked?”
Banks shrugged. “Down to you, I suppose. The poison could have been anywhere, in anything. Toothpaste, for example. I knew if it wasn’t you, and the killer heard the news, he’d try to destroy any remaining evidence. He wouldn’t have had a chance to do so yet because you were in the house.”
“But I was at the hospital nearly all yesterday.”
“Too soon. He had no idea anything had happened at that time. This wasn’t a carefully calculated plan.”
“But why?”
Banks shook his head. “That I can’t say for certain. He’s a sick man, an obsessed man. It’s my guess it was his warped form of revenge. It had been eating away at him for some time. Anna didn’t treat him very well, John. She didn’t really stop to take his feelings into account when she kicked him out and took up with you. She just assumed he would understand, like he always had, because he loved her and had her welfare at heart. He was deeply hurt, but he wasn’t the kind to make a fuss or let his feelings show. He kept it all bottled up.”
“She could be a bit blinkered, could Anna,” John mumbled. “She was a very focused woman.”
“Yes. And I’m sure Doughton felt humiliated when she dumped him and turned to you. After all, he didn’t have much of a financial future, unlike you.”
“But it wasn’t that, not with Anna,” Billings protested. “We just had so much in common. Goals, tastes, ambitions. She and Owen had nothing in common anymore.”
“You’re probably right,” Banks said. “Anyway, when she told him a couple of weeks ago that she was going to get married to you, it was the last straw. He said she expected him to be happy for her.”
“But why did he keep on seeing her if it hurt him so much?”
“He was still in love with her. It was better seeing her, even under those circumstances, than not at all.”
“Then why kill her?”
Banks looked at Billings. “Love and hate, John,” he said. “They’re not so far apart. Besides, he doesn’t believe he did kill her, that wasn’t really his intention at all.”
“I don’t understand. You said he did. How did he do it?”
Banks paused and lit a cigarette. This wasn’t going to be easy. Rain blew against the window and a draft rattled the venetian blind.
“How?” Billings repeated.
Banks looked at his calendar, trying to put off the moment; it showed a woodland scene, snowdrops blooming near the Strid at Bolton Abbey. He cleared his throat. “Owen came to the house while you were both out,” Banks began. “He brought a syringe loaded with a strong pesticide he got from the garden center. Remember, he knew Anna intimately. Did you and Anna make love that night, John?”
Billings reddened. “For Christ’s sake—”
“I’m not asking whether the earth moved, I’m just asking if you did. Believe me, it’s relevant.”
“All right,” said Billings after a pause. “Yes, we did, as a matter of fact.”
“Owen knew Anna well enough to know that she was frightened of getting pregnant,” Banks went on, “but she wouldn’t take the pill because of the side effects. He knew she insisted on condoms, and he knew she liked to make love in the dark. It was easy enough to insert the needle into a couple of packages and squirt in some pesticide. Not much, but it’s very powerful stuff, colorless and odorless, so even an infinitesimal coating would have some effect. The condoms were lubricated, so they’d feel oily anyway, and nobody would notice a tiny pinprick in the package. You absorbed a little into your system, too, and that’s why you felt ill. You see, it’s easily absorbed through skin or membranes. But Anna got the lion’s share. Dr. Glendenning would have found out eventually how the poison was administered from tissue samples, but further tests would have taken time. Owen could easily have nipped back to the house and removed the evidence by then. Or we might have decided that you had better access to the method.”
Billings paled. “You mean it could just as easily have been me either killed or arrested for murder?”
Banks shrugged. “It could have turned out any way, really. There was no way of knowing accurately what would happen, and certainly there was a chance that either you would die or the blame would fall on you. As it turned out, Anna absorbed most of it, and she had asthma. In Owen’s twisted mind, he wanted your lovemaking to make you sick. That was his statement, if you like, after suffering so long in silence, pretending it was OK that Anna had moved on. But that’s all. It was a sick joke, if you like. We found three poisoned condoms. Certainly if one hadn’t worked the way it did, there could have been a buildup of the pesticide, causing chronic problems. I did read about a case once,” Banks went on, “where a man married rich women and murdered them for their money by putting arsenic on his condoms, but they were made of goatskin back then. Besides, he was French. I’ve never come across a case quite as strange as this.”
Billings shook his head slowly. “Can I go now?” he asked.
“Where to?”
“I don’t know. A hotel, perhaps, until . . .”
Banks nodded and stood up. As they went down the stairs, they came face-to-face with Owen Doughton, handcuffed to a large constable. Billings stiffened. Doughton glared at him and spoke to Banks. “He’s the one who killed her,” he said, with a toss of his head. “He’s the one you should be arresting.” Then he looked directly at Billings. “You’re going to have to live with that, you know, Mr. Moneybags. It was you who killed her. Hear that, Mr. Yuppie Moneybags? You killed her. You killed Anna.”
Banks couldn’t tell whether he was laughing or crying as the constable led him down to the cells.
Missing in Action
People go missing all the time in war, of course, but not usually nine-year-old boys. Besides, the war had hardly begun. It was only September 20, 1939 when Mary Critchley came hammering on my door at about three o’clock, interrupting my afternoon nap.
It was a Wednesday, and normally I would have been teaching the fifth-formers Shakespeare at Silverhill Grammar School (a thankless task if ever there was one), but the Ministry had just got around to constructing air-raid shelters there, so the school was closed for the week. We didn’t even know if it was going to reopen because the plan was to evacuate all the children to safer areas in the countryside. Now I would be among the first to admit that a teacher’s highest aspiration is a school without pupil
s, but in the meantime the government, in its eternal wisdom, put us redundant teachers to such complex, intellectual tasks as preparing ration cards for the Ministry of Food. (After all, they knew what was coming.)
All this was just a small part of the chaos that seemed to reign at that time. Not the chaos of war, the kind I remembered from the trenches at Ypres in 1917, but the chaos of government bureaucracies trying to organize the country for war.
Anyway, I was fortunate enough to become a special constable, which is a rather grandiose title for a sort of part-time dogsbody, and that was why Mary Critchley came running to me. That and what little reputation I had for solving people’s problems.
“Mr. Bashcombe! Mr. Bashcombe!” she cried. “It’s our Johnny. He’s gone missing. You musht help.”
My name is actually Bascombe, Frank Bascombe, but Mary Critchley has a slight speech impediment, so I forgave her the mispronunciation. Still, with half the city’s children running wild in the streets and the other half standing on crowded station platforms clutching their Mickey Mouse gas masks in little cardboard boxes, ready to be herded into trains bound for such nearby country havens as Graythorpe, Kilsden, and Acksham, I thought perhaps she was overreacting a tad, and I can’t say I welcomed her arrival after only about twenty of my allotted forty winks.
“He’s probably out playing with his mates,” I told her.
“Not my Johnny,” she said, wiping the tears from her eyes. “Not since . . . you know . . .”
I knew. Mr. Critchley, Ted to his friends, had been a Royal Navy man since well before the war. He had also been unfortunate enough to serve on the aircraft carrier Courageous, which had been sunk by a German U-boat off the southwest coast of Ireland just three days before. Over five hundred men had been lost, including Ted Critchley. Of course, no body had been found, and probably never would be, so he was only officially “missing in action.”
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