“Only it’s past opening time and there are people waiting at the door.”
“Fine,” said Banks. “Better let them in. I’ll be off, then. Thank you for being so obliging.”
“Er…who’s going to pay, sir? For the drinks. Only the other man didn’t leave anything.”
Banks sighed and reached for his wallet.
Banks had told Sandra he would be late home, and she had made some sarcastic comment about that being nothing new. He hadn’t replied because he hadn’t wanted to start another row, but he had left the house in a thoroughly bad mood.
Now it was nearly two in the morning and the taxi was pulling up outside his flat. Banks was a little the worse for wear. Linda hadn’t answered her phone, and the other revelers had disappeared, so he had gone on to a club with Ozzy Albright and Burgess, where they had drunk expensive Scotch and flirted with the scantily clad hostesses. Burgess had picked up the tab, or so Banks believed. That certainly made up for the afternoon.
He took his shoes off and tiptoed into the flat as quietly as he could, but the door creaked, and so did the floorboards. He paused in the hall to listen for anyone stirring but heard only soft snoring sounds from the main bedroom.
He went into the living room and headed for the drinks cabinet. Another Scotch would finish off the evening nicely. Laphroaig, this time. Once he had poured himself a generous measure and the merest splash of water to bring out the flavor, he flipped through his LP collection looking for something suitable. He didn’t feel like jazz or classical, so he dug back into his rock collection. Finally, he picked Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left, put on his headphones, stumbled briefly over the footstool, then settled down on the sofa to “Time Has Told Me.”
It had been a subdued celebration, Banks thought as he stretched out and lit a cigarette, balancing the ashtray on his chest, perhaps because there would be no public recognition that they had caught their killer. Still, it had been fun. Hatchard had stood a round and even Commander Bickley, normally known as having short arms and deep pockets, had treated the team. Albright had tried to chat up the barmaid, whom everyone except him knew happened to be a bloke. A drunken cop groupie had lifted her T-shirt and shown everyone her tits. One of the DCs had drunk too much too fast and disgraced himself by being sick on the table. Everyone had cheered, then his mate helped him to the toilet to get him cleaned up, ready to resume the celebrations. Someone had tossed a glass of wine in someone else’s face.
All in all, a good time had been had by all before things got hazy at the nightclub. Even then, Banks vaguely remembered, Burgess had been all hail-fellow-well-met and turned out to have a cache of jokes neither Banks nor Albright had ever heard before.
“Time Has Told Me” segued into “River Man” and the next thing Banks knew he could hear the telephone ringing in the distance. He opened his eyes. His Laphroaig was half drunk on the table beside him, Nick Drake had finished ages ago, and his cigarette had gone out in the ashtray on his chest, smoldered down to a length of gray ash. Banks put it on the table beside his drink.
Struggling to his feet, he slipped off the headphones. The phone was ringing. As quickly as he could, he made it over to the stand and picked up the receiver.
“I was just going to hang up, sir,” the voice said. “Sorry for waking you.” It was the night dispatch officer at the station.
“What is it?” Banks mumbled. His tongue felt thick and furry, his mouth full of dead caterpillars.
“They want you down Soho, sir. Alley off Sutton Row, back of the Astoria.”
“I know it,” said Banks. “What is it?”
“Wouldn’t say, sir. Only that it’s urgent. There’s a car on its way.”
Banks had taken four Paracetamol, drunk two glasses of water, brushed his teeth and cleaned himself up as best he could in the ten or fifteen minutes it took the car to arrive. Luckily it was just after dawn and there wasn’t much traffic about. Though he wasn’t a particularly literary type, even in his hungover state he found himself thinking of the poem Wordsworth composed on Westminster Bridge when the car drove over Vauxhall Bridge. He had had to learn it by heart at school and still remembered it, even now. The city really was wearing the beauty of the morning “like a garment,” the soft early light orange and blue on the slow-moving Thames, and the “ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples” catching a ray of sun here or hiding in a mantle of shadow there.
But the effect didn’t last for long. Soon they were heading through Piccadilly Circus, where there was quite a bit more traffic, heading for Shaftesbury Avenue, Cambridge Circus and Charing Cross Road.
Sutton Row was blocked off at both the Soho Square end and at the Astoria theater, so Banks got out and walked down the narrow street. Just to his right, behind the Astoria, was an alley that turned left into a dead end. There, among the dumped rubbish, the overflowing dustbins, empty bottles, cigarette ends, soggy cardboard boxes and the smell of piss, lay a body. Pale faces turned to Banks as he approached, and he recognized Hatchard, tired but still sober; Albright, who lived nearer to the scene than Banks did and was definitely the worse for wear; and a couple of other team members, including the young DC who had been sick in the pub.
“Street cleaner found the body an hour or so ago, sir,” said Albright. “I’m sorry, sir.”
Banks looked down at the crumpled shape then fell to his knees beside it.
Jackie Simmons lay on her back, hands spread out at her sides, legs at crooked angles. She wore a knee-length plaid skirt and a pearl blouse, open at the collar. That was where Banks could see the dark, thick bruising across her throat. Her eyes were open, fixed on the sky but seeing nothing, and her skin was pale, dry and cool to the touch.
Someone had placed a broad strip of Sellotape across her mouth.
Banks turned his head to look up at the others, clustered around him. Their faces blurred, started to spin. He got to his feet feeling dizzy and staggered as far away from the body as he could before throwing up against the wall. He felt a comforting arm on his shoulder and saw Albright towering over him.
“You all right, sir?”
“I’ll be fine,” said Banks. “Just give me a minute.” He took a few deep breaths and steadied himself against the wall. “Can anyone rustle up some coffee?” he called out.
Albright glanced at one of the DCs, who disappeared in the general direction of Oxford Street.
“Make it strong and black,” Banks shouted after him.
The rest of the morning passed in a haze. There was paperwork to be done, files to be opened. Hatchard organized the incident room, called the meetings and handed out the actions. Even Roly Verity came by and pitched in. Banks did his bit, too. Hungover or not, he had helped get a murder investigation rolling so many times before that he could do it in his sleep. Except the circumstances were different every time. And it wasn’t usually someone he knew.
Hatchard invited him into the inner sanctum at noon for an update, a pot of fresh coffee sitting on his desk, and a plate of chocolate digestives beside it.
“What have we got so far?” Hatchard asked.
“The police surgeon estimates time of death somewhere between midnight and three,” Banks said. “Dr. O’Grady’s tied up most of the day, but he’ll get to the postmortem as soon as he can. Preliminary findings indicate death due to strangulation.” He paused and glanced over at Hatchard. “It appears as if someone came up behind her and hooked his forearm around her throat.”
“Was she killed where the body was found?”
“Seems that way, sir, according to lividity. We’ll know more later.”
“Any signs of defensive wounds?”
“She got in a few scratches, broke a fingernail or two. We bagged her hands.”
“You knew her, didn’t you?”
Banks paused and helped himself to coffee and another biscuit. “I wouldn’t say I knew her, sir,” he began. “I interviewed her informally on three occasions about the murder of Pamela Morrison. They
were friends and flatmates. You can see the notes I wrote up in the case files.”
“I’ve seen them. I know it’s all aboveboard. There’s obviously a connection with the other murders, given the Sellotape and all. What do you think it is? What did she tell you?”
“She didn’t really know anything, sir, but she did help put me on to Stafford. I mean, she described a man she had taken to her room who had acted in a frightening way and gone on about regaining innocence and purity, about being able to restore it to her, though he didn’t actually harm her in any way. She was able to give a decent physical description. I like to think it would have helped us catch him if things hadn’t turned out differently.”
Hatchard put a match to his pipe and a cloud of cloying blue smoke filled the air. Banks almost retched again, but he buried his face in his coffee instead. It helped. “You think this man was Stafford?” Hatchard asked.
“Yes, sir. I’m certain of it.”
“But Stafford is dead. Why do you think the girl was murdered? It could hardly be to shut her up, as she’d already spoken, and besides, it no longer mattered.”
“I think she was killed as an example, sir, a warning.”
“A warning?”
“Yes. By Micallef.”
“But—”
Banks held his hand up. “Please listen to me, sir. Micallef is in the property development business, among other things, and Stafford was chairman of an important government steering committee on development issues. I think that’s how they met, and I think Micallef made his…er…other services available to Stafford.”
“You think he knew? I mean, what Stafford was like?”
“No, sir. I don’t think so. At least not at first. I doubt that Micallef would stand for someone killing his girls like that, if only from a business perspective. I think he kept that part of the transaction at arm’s length. Stafford could meet the girls through the clubs, which is how I think it happened, and they would be made available to him in the usual manner. Micallef didn’t get his hands dirty with the actual pimping. But I do think that after the second one he was starting to realize there was something wrong. Maybe he thought someone was targeting him. Or maybe he guessed the truth. Either way, he was getting paranoid. And the girls were getting understandably jumpy.”
“What about Stafford’s suicide?”
“This is where it gets a bit nebulous, sir,” Banks admitted. “I think that Micallef realized it was Stafford soon after the Maureen Heseltine murder and went to visit him. We did get a vague description from a neighbor of a man leaving Stafford’s house around the time he probably died. Tall, fair-haired, smartly dressed.”
“But the witness didn’t see his face.”
“No, sir. That’s why I said it gets a bit nebulous.”
“But you think Micallef killed Stafford?”
“I think Micallef went to talk to him and one way or another persuaded him to commit suicide. It’s possible that Stafford was already on the verge. He’d tried it before. He’d also just got a prescription of sleeping pills a couple of days previous to his death. I think Micallef tipped the scales. I doubt that he actually killed him, but he pushed him to it. Anyway, there’s nothing can be proven there. Stafford goes down as a suicide. Micallef carries on as normal.”
“But there’s more?”
“Yes, sir. I think that Micallef also found out that Jackie Simmons had given me the description. It’s probably my fault, sir. I did talk to her on a number of occasions, and perhaps I wasn’t discreet enough. He must have seen us together, or someone did who told him.”
“You can’t blame yourself for this, Alan.”
“I wish it were different, sir. I should have been more careful. I…dammit, I liked the girl. I even told Micallef that Stafford, whose identity we didn’t know at the time, had scared one of his girls. Maybe he put two and two together and knew it was Jackie who’d told me that. Christ, maybe I even did want to reform her, save her. I don’t know. But I liked her. And it’s my fault.”
“You think Micallef strangled her?”
“Him or one of his minions. First thing we did this morning was run down his alibi, and as expected, it’s as solid as it usually is. He was playing cards with five respectable citizens in a flat near Mayfair. They could be lying. More likely he got Benny or maybe one of his Chinese Triad pals to do it.”
“Micallef’s in with the Triads?”
“As far as they’ll let anybody be. His hang-out is a Chinese restaurant on Gerrard Street known to have connections with 14K. I think it’s a drug connection but I don’t have anything to back that up.”
“But why kill the girl? What possible threat could she pose to him with Stafford dead, a suicide?”
“A statement. A warning to the others.” Banks shrugged. “A man like Micallef…it’s the way he operates. Fear.”
“So what next?” Hatchard asked.
“The usual. Keep asking around, searching for witnesses. I’ll have another friendly chat with Micallef, which will get us precisely nowhere. We’ll pull in Benny, which will get us just about as far, and maybe have a word with some of our paid informants in the Triads, see if they got wind of anything.”
“Christ, I remember things used to be a lot simpler in Soho,” said Hatchard, resting his pipe on the ceramic ashtray. “We used to know who all the villains were and where they were most of the time.”
“Ah, but that was before the city cleaned it up, sir,” said Banks.
“Hair of the dog, sir?” said Albright.
It was half past one and they were approaching the Pillars of Hercules down the alley beside Foyle’s, the arch ahead of them. “Why not,” said Banks.
They went inside, got a couple of pints and sat at a quiet table in the back.
“There’s this stuff called DNA they can use to identify people,” Albright said, out of the blue. He was always doing that, Banks realized, coming out with stuff he’d read. “I read an article about it in a forensics newsletter,” he went on. “Apparently this DNA is different in everyone. Completely unique. Like the body’s signature. Once you get a sample from a crime scene, you can match it against a sample from the suspect.”
Banks had heard about DNA, but he hadn’t really given it much thought. It seemed to belong to a world of the future, and he wasn’t sure he had a future. “How do you get a sample from the crime scene?” he asked.
“Trace evidence. Blood, saliva, skin, semen. Even a hair, if it’s still got the root.”
“And from the suspect?”
“You take some of his blood, semen, saliva, skin, a hair or whatever. I suppose saliva would be easiest, come to think of it. Maybe you could just use a toothbrush or something? I mean, you wouldn’t want to be taking a semen sample from a bloke, would you?”
“Jesus Christ, Ozzy, you do come up with the oddest bloody ideas.”
“Not my idea, sir. It’s science. Trouble is, it takes a long time to process, but they’ll streamline that. It’ll be all the rage soon, you mark my words. Make our job a lot easier.”
“Hmmm,” said Banks. “Get anywhere with Micallef’s alibi?”
“Just about where I expected to get,” said Albright. “They all agreed he was at an all-night card game in Mayfair, won about three hundred quid, too, from what I can gather.”
“Lucky bastard. What about his gambling companions?”
“A couple with form, the others ‘respectable.’”
“Meaning we haven’t caught them yet?”
“Something like that, sir.”
Banks downed half his drink and wiped his lips. “Pity.”
“Well, it was a long shot, sir. We never really thought he did it himself. Not his style. I don’t think he’s got the bottle.”
“Only for women.”
“Sir?”
“Never mind,” said Banks “Just a story somebody told me a long time ago. I think we’re pissing against the wind here.”
“I agree, sir, unless we ca
n find an eyewitness.”
“And eyewitnesses can be bribed, or scared off. It’s not as if we can offer witness protection like they do in America.”
“I could always hide her away at my house, sir, especially if she’s a good looker.”
Banks laughed. “Good idea, Ozzy. Good idea.” He finished his pint. “And I’ve got an even better one. My shout.”
In retrospect, Banks thought it might have been a mistake going to see Micallef after three pints of Beck’s, but then he realized that hindsight is only reliable after the event. And what was there to lose? Feeling a little better for the hair of the dog, the two of them headed along Greek Street toward Shaftesbury Avenue. It was another fine day, and the tourists were out in Soho in force, Americans mostly, Banks noticed by the accents he overheard. People were sitting outside at coffee shops and enjoying the march of humanity back and forth. It was a long way from the area at nighttime and a world away from twenty years back.
They darted between the taxis and buses on Shaftesbury Avenue and headed into Chinatown. The odds were that Micallef would be holding court there, as usual.
When they got to the restaurant, he wasn’t there, and the maître d’, of course, knew nothing. Banks and Albright walked along Gerrard Street to the corner of Macclesfield and pondered what to do. It was then that Banks noticed the car pull up across from the restaurant. The driver got out, checked the street like a minder, and opened the back door. It was Benny. And there was Micallef, resplendent in his Hugo Boss suit, lock of blond hair flopping over his eye.
“Come on, Ozzy,” said Banks. “No time like the present.” And he headed down the street, Albright a few paces behind.
Micallef saw Banks as he was crossing the street to the restaurant. He paused on the pavement, glanced over, then smiled and ran his forefinger across his lips as if to seal them with Sellotape.
Banks ran the last few yards and he hit Micallef hard in his midriff before Benny even knew what was going on. The two of them hit the pavement, Micallef underneath, and Banks punched at his kidneys, gut and, when he got in position, at his face. Micallef for all his height and ranginess wasn’t much of a street fighter, and he flailed to protect himself. Already the blood was flowing from a split lip and broken nose. Banks could see only red, only Jackie’s crumpled body left in the alley like a piece of garbage, the bruise on her throat and the Sellotape across her lips. He knelt on Micallef’s chest and punched and punched.
The Price of Love and Other Stories Page 38