Friend of the Devil

by Peter Robinson

  AT LEAST the cafés in the market square were open. Banks chose one only three doors down from Taylor’s Yard, on the upper level above the Age Concern shop, where he knew the coffee was good and strong, and sat down with Detective Superintendent Gervaise. She appeared quite attractive, he noticed, with the pert nose, blue eyes, Cupid’s bow lips and the slight glow her morning’s exercise had given to her pale complexion. The faint scar beside her left eye was almost a mirror image of his own. She was probably a good ten years younger than him, which put her in her early forties. Once they had given their orders, his for coffee, hers for a pot of Earl Grey tea, and toasted tea cakes for both of them, they got down to business.

  “It looks like we’ve got a particularly nasty murder on our hands,” Banks said.

  “And things have been so quiet lately,” said Gervaise. She laid her riding crop on the table, took off her helmet, gave her head a shake and ran her hand through her short fair hair, which lay flattened against her skull. “Ever since that business with the rock group.” She gave Banks a look.

  Banks knew that, even though she had given him the freedom he needed to solve his previous murder case, she had still been unhappy with its conclusion. Banks had, too. But that couldn’t be helped. Sometimes things just don’t work out the way you hope they will. Banks moved on quickly, telling her what he had found out from DS Templeton and Dr. Burns. “The body was discovered at eight-fifteen this morning by a Mr. Joseph Randall, age fifty-five, of Hyacinth Walk.”

  “And what was he doing in The Maze at that time on a Sunday morning?”

  “He’s the owner of the leather goods shop on the corner,” Banks explained. “It’s his storage room. He said he went around there to search for some samples, found the lock broken and saw her just lying there. Swore he didn’t touch anything. Said he backed out and ran straight across the square to the station.”

  “Do we believe him?”

  “He says he opened the storage room door at eight-fifteen, but one of the people in the market square told DS Templeton she saw Randall go into The Maze at ten past eight by the church clock, which is pretty accurate. She remembers because she was late for church and glanced up to see the time. The desk sergeant logged the report from Randall at eight twenty-one.”

  “That’s eleven minutes.” Gervaise pursed her lips. “Sounds rather thin,” she said. “Where is he now?”

  “DS Templeton sent him home with a constable. Apparently Mr. Randall was very upset.”

  “Hmm. Interview him yourself. Go in hard next time.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Banks, making a doodle in his notebook. Ever one for stating the obvious, was Gervaise. Still, it was best to let her think she was in control. Their order arrived. The coffee was as good as he remembered, and the tea cakes had plenty of butter on them.

  “What was she doing in The Maze by herself?” Gervaise asked.

  “That’s one thing we have to find out,” said Banks. “But, for a start, we don’t know that she was by herself. She could have gone in there with someone.”

  “To take drugs, perhaps?”

  “Perhaps. We found some pills in her handbag. Ecstasy. Or maybe she just got separated from her friends and someone lured her there with the promise of drugs? Still, you hardly need to hide away in The Maze to pop E. You can do it in any pub in town. She could have been taking a shortcut to the car park or the river.”

  “Did she have a car?”

  “We don’t know yet. She did have a driving license.”

  “Follow it up.”

  “We will. She was probably drunk,” Banks said. “At least tipsy. There was a whiff of vomit in the storeroom, so she may have been sick, if it wasn’t our killer’s. Forensics should solve that one, anyway. She most likely wouldn’t have been thinking about safety, and I doubt there’s any great mystery as to how or why she came to be in The Maze alone. There are any number of possibilities. She could have had an argument with her boyfriend, for example, and run off.”

  “And someone was lying there in wait for her?”

  “Or the chance of someone like her. Which indicates it might be a killer who knows the habits of the locals on a Saturday night in Eastvale after closing time.”

  “Better round up the usual suspects, then. Local sex offenders, known clients of sex workers.”

  “It’s being done.”

  “Any idea where she’d been?”

  “Judging by the way she was dressed,” Banks said, “it seems as if she’d been doing the rounds of the market square pubs. Typical Saturday-night getup. We’ll be canvassing all the pubs as soon as they open.” He glanced at his watch. “Which won’t be long now.”

  Gervaise squinted at him. “Not personally, I hope?”

  “Too much of a job for me, I’m afraid. Thought I’d put Detective Sergeant Hatchley in charge of it. He’s been housebound lately. Do him good to get out and about.”

  “Keep him on a tight leash, then,” said Gervaise. “I don’t want him offending every bloody minority group we’ve got in town.”

  “He’s mellowed a lot.”

  Gervaise gave him a disbelieving look. “Anything else?” She dotted her mouth with a paper serviette after a couple of dainty nibbles of tea cake.

  “I’ll get a couple of officers to work on reviewing all the CCTV footage we can find of the market square last night. A lot of the pubs have CCTV now, and I know the Bar None does, too. There should be plenty, and you know what the quality’s like, so it’ll take time, but we might find something there. We’ll also conduct a thorough search of The Maze, adjacent buildings, the lot, and we’ll do a house-to-house of the immediate area. Trouble is, there are ways in and out that don’t show up on any CCTV cameras. The exit into the car park above the river gardens, for example.”

  “Surely there must be cameras in the car park?”

  “Yes, but not covering it from that angle. They’re pointing the other way, into the car park from the alley. Easy to slip under them. It’s only a snicket, and hardly anyone uses it. Most people use the Castle Road exit, which is covered. We’ll try our luck, anyway.”

  “Check them all out as best you can.”

  Banks told her what Dr. Burns had said about cause and approximate time of death.

  “When will Dr. Wallace be available to do the postmortem?” she asked.

  “Tomorrow morning, I should hope,” said Banks. Dr. Glendenning had retired, in his own words, “to play golf,” about a month ago, and Banks hadn’t really seen his replacement at work, since there hadn’t been any suspicious deaths in that period. From what he could gather from his brief meetings with her, she seemed to be a dedicated professional and efficient pathologist.

  “The picture on the driving license I found in the handbag matches the victim,” Banks said, “and we’ve got an address from the flyleaf of her address book. Hayley Daniels. From Swainshead.”

  “Reported missing?”

  “Not yet.”

  “So perhaps she wasn’t expected home,” said Gervaise. “Any idea how old she was?”

  “Nineteen, according to the license.”

  “Who’s following up?”

  “DC Jackman’s gone to Swainshead to talk to the parents. She ought to be arriving there about now.”

  “Rather her than me,” said Gervaise.

  Banks wondered if she had ever been given the job of breaking bad news to a victim’s parents.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Gervaise said with a smile. “You’re thinking me, with all my nice upper-middle-class upbringing, university degrees, accelerated promotion and the rest, what would I know about it, aren’t you?”

  “Not at all,” said Banks with a straight face.

  “Liar.” Gervaise sipped some tea and stared at a spot just over Banks’s head. “My first week as a probationary PC,” she said, “I was working at Poole, Dorset. Mostly making tea and coffee. Friday morning they found the body of an eleven-year-old schoolboy on a tract of wasteland a
t the edge of town. He’d been raped and beaten to death. Working-class family. Guess who they sent?”

  Banks said nothing.

  “Christ, I was sick to my stomach,” Gervaise said. “Before I went out there. Really, physically sick. I was convinced I couldn’t do it.”

  “But you did?”

  She looked Banks in the eye. “Of course I did. And do you know what happened? The mother went berserk. Threw a plate of eggs, beans and chips at me. Cut my head open. I had to put the bloody handcuffs on to restrain her in the end. Temporarily, of course. She calmed down eventually. And I got ten stitches.” Gervaise shook her head. “What a day.” She looked at her watch. “I suppose I’d better ring my son and tell him lunch is off.”

  Banks glanced out of the window. The wind was blowing harder, and the people coming out of church were having a difficult time keeping their hats on and stopping their umbrellas from turning inside out. He thought of the body on the pile of leather. “I suppose so,” he said. “Today isn’t looking too good so far, either.” Then he went to the counter to pay.

  SWAINSHEAD, OR “The Head,” as the locals called it, started with a triangular village green which split the main road at the T-junction with the Swainsdale road. Around the green were the church, the village hall and a few shops. This, Winsome knew, was called Lower Head, and was the part most frequently visited by tourists. The Daniels Family lived in Upper Head, where the two branches of the road joined into one and separated two rows of stone cottages facing each other. Behind the cottages on both sides, the pastures rose slowly, crisscrossed by drystone walls, and finally gave way to steep fells ending in moorland.

  The area was so named because the source of the river Swain was to be found in the surrounding hills. It began as a mere puddle bubbling forth from the earth, overflowing into a thin trickle and then gaining strength as it went, finally plunging over the edge of a hanging valley at Rawley Force to cut its main course along the dale. Banks had once told Winsome about a case he’d worked on there, long before her time in Eastvale. It had taken him as far as Toronto in search of a missing expatriate. As far as Winsome knew, none of the people involved still lived in Swainshead, but those who did live there remembered the incident; it had become a part of village folklore. Years ago, people would have written songs about it, the kind of old broadsheet folk ballads that Banks liked so much. These days, when the newspapers and telly had picked the bones clean, there was nothing left for anyone to sing about.

  The sound of Winsome’s car door closing shattered the silence and sent three fat crows soaring up into the sky from a gnarled tree. They wheeled against the gray clouds like black umbrellas blowing inside out.

  Winsome checked the address as she walked past a pub and a couple of houses with “Bed and Breakfast” signs swinging in the wind, VACANCIES cards displayed in their bay windows. Three grizzled old men leaning on their walking sticks and chatting on the old stone bridge, despite the weather, fell silent and followed her with their eyes as she walked by. Winsome supposed they didn’t often see a six-foot black woman in Swainshead.

  The wind seemed to be blowing from all directions, and with it, like a part of it, came the sleet, stinging her eyes, seeping through her black denim jeans, tight around the thighs, where her jacket ended. It wouldn’t do the suede jacket much good, either, she realized, thinking she ought to have worn something more practical. But she’d been in a hurry, and it was the first thing she touched in the hall cupboard. How was she to know it was going to be like this?

  Winsome found the house and rang the doorbell. A dour constable answered, tried unsuccessfully to cover up his surprise at the sight of her, and led her into the front room. A woman who looked far too young to have a daughter the victim’s age sat there, staring into space.

  “Mrs. Daniels?” Winsome asked.

  “McCarthy. Donna McCarthy. But Geoff Daniels is my husband. I kept my maiden name for professional reasons. I was explaining to the constable here that Geoff’s away at the moment on business.”

  Winsome introduced herself. She noticed with approval that Donna McCarthy showed neither surprise nor amusement at her appearance.

  Mrs. McCarthy’s eyes filled up. “Is it true, what he told me? About our Hayley?”

  “We think so,” Winsome said, reaching for the plastic bag that held the address book Banks had given her. “Can you tell me if this belonged to your daughter?”

  Donna McCarthy examined the cover, with its William Morris pattern, and the tears spilled over. “She’s not my real daughter, you understand,” she said, voice muffled through the handkerchief. “I’m Geoff’s second wife. Hayley’s mother ran off twelve years ago. We’ve been married for eight.”

  “I see,” said Winsome, making a note. “But you can definitely identify that address book as belonging to Hayley Daniels?”

  Donna nodded. “Can I have a peek inside?”

  “I’m afraid you can’t touch it,” said Winsome. “Here, let me.” She took out the latex gloves she had brought for just such an eventuality, slipped the address book out of its bag and opened it to the flyleaf. “Is that Hayley’s handwriting?”

  Donna McCarthy put the handkerchief to her face again and nodded. Winsome flipped a few pages, and she kept on nodding. Finally, Winsome put the book away again and took off her gloves and crossed her wet legs. “Any chance of rustling up some tea?” she asked the constable. He gave her a look that spoke volumes about a man like him being asked to do such a menial task by a black woman of equal rank, albeit a detective, and sloped off, presumably toward the kitchen. Miserable bugger. Winsome touched the woman’s hand gently with her own. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “But I do need to ask you a few questions.”

  Donna McCarthy blew her nose. “Of course,” she said. “I understand.” She seemed a slight desolate figure alone on the sofa, but Winsome could see that she was also fit, almost muscular in her shoulders and arms. She had pale green eyes and short light-brown hair. Her clothes were casual, jeans and a plain white T-shirt showing the outline of her bra over small firm breasts. It stopped just short enough to show an inch or so of flat stomach.

  “Do you have a recent photograph of Hayley?” Winsome asked.

  Donna McCarthy got up and rummaged through a drawer, coming back with a snapshot of a young girl standing by the market cross. “That was taken about a month ago,” she said.

  “Can I borrow it?”

  “Yes; I’d like it back, though.”

  “Of course. When did you last see Hayley?” Winsome asked.

  “Yesterday evening. It must have been about six o’clock. She was going to catch the bus to Eastvale to meet some friends.”

  “Was this something she did often?”

  “Most Saturdays. As you probably noticed, there’s not a lot to do around here.”

  Winsome remembered the village where she had grown up, high in Jamaica’s Cockpit mountains above Montego Bay. “Nothing to do” had been an understatement there. Nothing but a one-room schoolhouse and a future in the banana-chip factory, like her mother and grandmother, unless you went down to the bay, as Winsome did at first, and worked at one of the tourist resorts. “Can you give me the names of her friends?” she asked.

  “Maybe a couple of them. First names. But she didn’t talk about them to me, and she didn’t bring them back here to meet us.”

  “Were they friends from work? School? College? What did Hayley do?”

  “She was a student at Eastvale College.”

  “She went by bus every day? It’s a long way.”

  “No. She drove. She’s got an old Fiat. Geoff got it for her secondhand. It’s his business.”

  Winsome remembered the driving license Banks had found in the girl’s handbag. “But she didn’t drive last night?”

  “Well, no, she wouldn’t, would she? She was off drinking. She was always careful that way. Wouldn’t drink and drive.”

  “How did she plan on getting home?”

  �
�She didn’t. That’s why…I mean, if I’d expected her home, I’d have reported her missing, wouldn’t I? I might not be her birth mother, but I did my best to love her as if I was, to make her feel…”

  “Of course,” said Winsome. “Any idea where she planned on staying?”

  “With one of her college friends, as usual.”

  “What was she studying?”

  “Travel and Tourism. National Diploma. It was all she wanted to do, travel the world.” Donna McCarthy started crying again. “What happened to her? Was she…?”

  “We don’t know,” Winsome lied. “The doctor will be examining her soon.”

  “She was such a pretty girl.”

  “Did she have a boyfriend?”

  The constable returned bearing a tray, which he plunked down on the table in front of the two women. Winsome thanked him.

  “Anything else?” he asked, voice dripping with sarcasm.

  “No,” Winsome said. “You can go now, if you like. Thanks.”

  The constable grunted, ignored Winsome and made a bow toward Donna McCarthy, then left.

  Donna waited a moment until she heard the front door shut, then said, “No one in particular. Not that I know of. A lot of kids today like to hang around with a group rather than hitch themselves up to just one lad, don’t they? I can’t say I blame them. Having too much fun to start going out with anyone seriously, aren’t they?”

  “I don’t mean to pry,” said Winsome, “but had there been anyone?…I mean, was Hayley sexually active?”

  Donna McCarthy thought for a moment, then said, “I’d be surprised if she wasn’t, but I don’t think she was promiscuous or anything. I’m sure she tried it. A woman can tell these things.” The central heating was turned up, and it was too warm in the small room. A sheen of moisture glistened on Donna’s brow.