Friend of the Devil

by Peter Robinson

  “Martina,” she said. “Martina Redfern.” She was a thin pouty redhead, who looked about the same age as Hayley Daniels, but was probably closer to Donna McCarthy.

  “Okay, Martina,” Winsome said. “Sit down. Let’s have a little chat.”

  “What about me?” said Daniels from the bed. “Will someone fucking untie me and let me go?”

  Martina looked toward him anxiously, but Winsome ignored him and took her aside. She knew she should break the bad news to Daniels, but how do you tell a naked man tied to a bed by his mistress that his daughter has been murdered? She needed time to take in the situation, and it wouldn’t do any harm to put a few dents in his dignity along the way. “Care to tell me about your evening?” she said to Martina.

  “Why?” Martina asked. “What is it?”

  “Tell me about your evening first.”

  Martina sat in the armchair by the window. “We had dinner at The Swan, near Settle, then we went to a club in Keighley. After that we came back to the hotel, and we’ve been here ever since.”

  “What club?”

  “The Governor’s.”

  “Would they remember you? We can check, you know.”

  “Probably the barman would,” she said. “Then there’s the taxi driver who brought us back here. And they’d remember us at The Swan, too. They weren’t very busy. But what are we supposed to have done?”

  Winsome was more interested in the time after midnight, but any sort of an alibi for last night would be a help for Martina and Daniels. It would take at least an hour to drive from Skipton to Eastvale. “What time did you get back here?” she asked.

  “About three o’clock.”

  “No wonder you needed a lie-in,” said Winsome. “Long past bedtime. And you were together all that time?”

  Daniels cursed and thrashed around on the bed. “That was the whole point of the exercise,” he said. “And this is police brutality. Untie me right now, you fucking black bitch.”

  Winsome felt herself flush with anger and shame as she always did when someone insulted her that way. Then she calmed herself down, the way her mother had taught her.

  “Can I get dressed now?” Martina asked, gesturing toward the bathroom.

  Winsome nodded and looked at the naked man on the bed, the man who had just called her a black bitch. His daughter had been raped and murdered last night, and she had to tell him now. She couldn’t just leave him there and keep putting it off, much as she would like to.

  Courses taught you only so much about dealing with unusual situations, and simulations even less. When it came right down to it, Winsome thought, there was no book to go by, only instinct. She wanted to hurt him, but she didn’t want to hurt him in the way she knew she was going to do. The image of Hayley Daniels lying there on the pile of leather like a fallen runner caused her breath to catch in her throat. Winsome took a deep breath. “I’m very sorry I have to tell you this, Mr. Daniels,” she said, “but I’m afraid it’s about your daughter.”

  Daniels stopped struggling. “Hayley? What about her? What’s happened to her? Has there been an accident?”

  “Sort of,” said Winsome. “I’m afraid she’s dead. It looks very much as if she was murdered.” There, it was said, the dreaded word that would change everything, and its weight filled the room and seemed to suck out all the air.

  “Murdered?” Daniels shook his head. “But…she can’t be. It must be someone else.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. There’s no mistake. She was carrying her driving license and an address book with her name in it.”

  “Was she?…I mean, did he…?”

  “I’d rather not say anything else until we get back to Eastvale,” Winsome said. “Your wife’s waiting for you there.”

  Martina came out of the bathroom in time to hear this. She looked at Winsome. “Can I untie him now?” she asked.

  Winsome nodded. Since she had told Daniels the news about Hayley, she had forgotten that he was still naked and tied to the bed. He seemed to have forgotten it, too. And somehow, humiliating Daniels didn’t matter anymore. She wasn’t a cruel person; she had simply wanted to quash his arrogance and hear an alibi from Martina before the two of them had time or reason to make anything up. In both these matters, she thought she had succeeded, but now she felt a little ashamed of herself.

  Martina got to work on the scarves as Daniels just lay there, staring at the ceiling. Finally freed, he sat up and wrapped the bedsheet around himself and cried. Martina sat beside him, glum and flushed. She tried to touch him, but he flinched. He had curly dark hair, a Kirk Douglas cleft in his chin and sideburns reaching the line of his jaw. Perhaps he was the kind of man some white women liked to mother, Winsome thought, but he did less than nothing for her. He looked up at her through his tears like a penitent schoolboy. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That remark I made earlier…it was uncalled for. I…”

  “I’m sorry, too,” said Winsome, “but untying you wasn’t my first priority. I needed to know why you were lying to your wife and where you were last night.” She pulled up a chair and sat down. “I’ve been trying to reach you all morning.”

  Daniels got to his feet and pulled on his underpants and trousers. Then he put on a shirt and started tossing socks and underwear from the drawers into an overnight bag. “I must go,” he said. “I must get back to Donna.”

  “Donna?” said Martina. “What about me? You told me you were going to leave her and get a divorce. We were going to get married.”

  “Don’t be stupid. Didn’t you hear? I’ve got to get back to her.”

  “But Geoff…What about us?”

  “I’ll ring you,” Daniels said. “Go home. I’ll ring you.”

  “When?”

  “When? When I’ve buried my bloody daughter! Now bugger off, won’t you, you stupid cow. I don’t think I can stand the sight of you anymore.”

  Sobbing, Martina picked up her bag, not bothering to go and pick up her toiletries from the bathroom, or anything she may have put in the wardrobe, and headed for the door. Winsome headed her off. “I need your name, address and phone number,” she said.

  Martina glared over at Daniels. “Ask him, why don’t you?” She edged forward.

  Winsome stood her ground. “I want you to tell me.”

  Martina paused, then gave Winsome the information. Next she opened the wardrobe and took out a three-quarter-length suede jacket. “Mustn’t forget my birthday present,” she said to Daniels, then she was out of the door and off down the corridor.

  Daniels stood with his grip in his hand. “All right,” he said. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go.”

  Winsome looked at him, shook her head slowly and led the way out.

  KAREN DREW’S body had been removed according to the coroner’s instructions, but the SOCOs were still clustered around the wheelchair at the cliff edge when Annie and Tommy Naylor got back after their visit to Mapston Hall.

  The wind had died down a little, leaving a light tepid drizzle. The SOCOs had tented the area to protect it from the elements while they worked, collecting samples and bagging them for evidence. The surrounding area had been thoroughly searched in a grid pattern, yielding nothing of immediate interest, and no weapon had been found at the bottom of the cliff, or anywhere else. It could have drifted out to sea, or Mary, if she was the killer, could have taken it away with her.

  Somehow or other, Annie thought, the mysterious Mary had slipped away into the morning and disappeared. She could be anywhere by now: anonymous in the London crowds, on a train to Edinburgh or Bristol. Had the murder been premeditated? If so, the odds were that she had worked out an escape route. If not, then she was working off her wits. But a stranger doesn’t just walk into a care home, ask to take out a specific patient and then slit her throat. She had said she was a friend, and whether that was true or not, there had to be some connection between this Mary and Karen Drew. To have any hope of finding Mary, they first had to discover as much as they could about Karen an
d the people she had known before her accident. It was best not to assume too much yet. While there were no signs of a struggle, it was also possible that Mary wasn’t the killer but had been another victim. What if Karen had been killed and Mary abducted, or killed and dumped in the sea, or somewhere else?

  Annie cursed the lax security at the care home, but to be realistic about it, Grace Chaplin had been right. What, or whom, did their patients need protecting from? They were harmless, incapable of moving and, some of them, even of speaking. Why on earth would anyone want to kill one of them? That was what Annie and her team had to find out.

  Annie noticed DS Liam McCullough, the crime scene coordinator, detach himself from the group of white-suited figures, and she called him over. They had met on several occasions before they started working together, as Liam was a close friend of the Western Area CSC, Stefan Nowak, which made for a less strained relationship, Annie found. SOCOs could be annoyingly possessive of their crime scenes, and tight-arsed about any information they gave out, but with Liam in charge, Annie’s job was just that little bit easier.

  “Nearly finished,” McCullough said, walking over to her, that lopsided grin on his face showing a mouthful of ill-fitting teeth.

  “Find anything useful?”

  “We won’t know what’s useful until later,” McCullough said.

  “We think the killer might be a woman,” Annie told him. “At least it was a woman who took the victim out of Mapston Hall, so that’s the theory we’re working on at the moment.”

  “Thanks for letting me know. It doesn’t make much difference now, but it’s good to bear in mind.”

  “I don’t suppose you found any footprints?”

  Liam pulled a face. “In this grass?”

  “Thought not. Fingerprints?”

  “Plenty on the wheelchair. Don’t worry, we’ll be every bit as thorough as Western Area.”

  “I have no doubt,” Annie said. “Any traces of a car parked in the vicinity?”

  “None that we could find.”

  “Okay,” said Annie. “I didn’t expect anything. We’ll have to send out a house-to-house team.” She looked around the bleak, windswept stretch of coast. “Not that there’s really anywhere for them to go.”

  “We did find several hairs on the victim’s blanket,” McCullough said. “No doubt some belong to the staff at the care home, and perhaps some to other patients, but you never know, the killer’s might be among them.”

  “The person who dealt with our suspect at Mapston said the woman’s hair was hidden under a hat.”

  McCullough smiled. “Haven’t you ever noticed how hair gets just everywhere?”

  “I expect you’re right,” said Annie, who had noticed a short black hair on her sleeve on her way there, as if she needed reminding about last night. “What about the marks on her ears and neck?”

  McCullough pulled a face. “Seagulls,” he said. “Postmortem, thank God. That’s why there’s no blood.”

  “I suppose that she was killed here, in the wheelchair?”

  “Yes. I consulted with the doc on that. Lividity is as you’d expect if that were the case, and there’s enough blood on the grass around the chair to bear it out. She was killed where she sat. We haven’t finished spatter analysis yet—the grass makes it difficult—but we’ve photographed and videoed every square inch.”

  “Okay. Well, carry on, Liam. And thanks for the update.”

  McCullough doffed his imaginary cap. “No problem. I trust you’re in charge of this inquiry?”

  “Detective Superintendent Brough’s the official SIO.”

  “So we send everything to you?” McCullough smiled.

  Annie smiled back. “Might as well. But do it discreetly.”

  “My middle name, discretion. Bye, ma’am.”

  “See you,” said Annie. She shivered as a gust of wind blew in from the sea and a seagull glided over her. She walked to the edge of the cliff and stood as close as she dared on the treacherous, slippery grass, looking down. The tide was well up now, the crashing waves dizzying and magnetic. She could understand how people had been drawn to jump into moving water, hypnotized and seduced by its sinuous swirling motion. Feeling a twinge of vertigo, she glanced at the empty wheelchair. It would have been so easy just to push it that extra foot or so, onto the rocks. No fuss. No blood. Why go to the trouble and mess of slitting Karen Drew’s throat?

  Unless, Annie thought with a sinking feeling, it was done to make some kind of statement. In her experience, killers who wanted to make statements were like bores at a party, a bugger to shut up until they’d finished what they had to say.

  WHILE JOSEPH RANDALL waited in an interview room, Banks sat in his office enjoying his first few moments of peace and quiet since Templeton’s phone call that morning. He had remembered to phone his mother, who thanked him for the card, and he was pleased to hear that all was well in the Banks household. His parents were going on a Mediterranean cruise in June, she had told him—their first time abroad, except for the time his father was in the army toward the end of the war. They were leaving from Southampton so they didn’t have to fly.

  Now Banks was sipping a cup of tea, eating a KitKat and listening to Anna Netrebko’s Russian Album as he jotted down a list of actions and TIEs—Trace, Interview and Eliminate—he thought should be carried out as quickly as possible in the Hayley Daniels murder investigation.

  Winsome had questioned the father, Geoff Daniels, and the hotel staff at the Faversham confirmed his alibi. No one had seen him leave his room since he arrived with his girlfriend Martina rather the worse for wear around three o’clock in the morning. The barman and doorman at the club in Keighley also remembered the couple, who had been there the whole time between about midnight and two-thirty. They had had more than enough to drink, he said, and at one point they were practically doing it right there on the dance floor. The bouncer even had to step in and ask them to cool it. There was no way either, or both, of them could have driven to Eastvale and killed Hayley. Winsome hadn’t tracked down the taxi driver yet, but it was just a matter of time.

  Also, mostly for form’s sake, Winsome had checked Donna McCarthy’s alibi with her friend and neighbor, Caroline Dexter. They had indeed spent the evening together eating pizza and watching Casino Royale, until well after midnight.

  Officers were already reviewing as much CCTV footage as they had been able to gather, and forensics experts were still busy in Taylor’s Yard, while most of the samples the SOCOs had collected were being prepared for analysis. Nothing would happen until Monday, of course, and results wouldn’t start coming until Tuesday, or even later in the week, depending on the tests and workloads of the labs involved. If only DNA results came as quickly as they seemed to do on television, Banks thought, his job would be a lot easier. Sometimes waiting was the worst part.

  Banks put the writing pad aside. He’d enter it all into the computer later. He glanced out of the window and was surprised to see snowflakes blowing horizontally on the wind, obscuring the market square. He watched for a few moments, hardly believing what he saw, then it stopped and the sun came out. Strange weather, indeed.

  He glanced at the map of The Maze he had had enlarged and pinned to his corkboard. There were far more ways in and out than he had realized, and it covered a greater area. Next to the map hung his Dalesman calendar. The month of March lay in neat columns below a photograph of Settle marketplace on a busy day. He had checkup appointments with both his dentist and his GP, having thought at the time it was best to get both unpleasant duties out of the way simultaneously. Now, he was beginning to wonder. Perhaps he should postpone the dentist until next month. Or the doctor.

  His only upcoming social engagement was a dinner party at Harriet Weaver’s, his old next-door neighbor in Eastvale, the following Saturday. Informal, Harriet had said, about ten or twelve people; bring a bottle, he would enjoy himself. Her niece Sophia was up from London and might drop by. Every man fell in love with Sophia, Har
riet said. Banks thought it would be a very foolish thing to do, in that case, and determined not to. It was all very well for middle-aged writers, artists or rock stars to go around falling in love with younger women, but most irresponsible for a police detective with as much baggage as he was carrying.

  Banks hated dinner parties, anyway, and he was only going because he felt guilty about not having kept in touch with Harriet and her husband since he had split up with Sandra. And she had had the good grace to invite him. Well, he’d go, then he’d leave as quickly as he decently could. It shouldn’t be too hard to get Winsome or someone to call his mobile on some pretext or other. It would save him from having to explain the latest crime statistics, or why so many obvious rapists and murderers got off, the usual sort of stuff you get at parties when people know you’re a policeman. One woman had even had the nerve to ask Banks to put a tail on her husband, whom she suspected of having an affair with a local estate agent. After Banks explained that he wasn’t Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, the woman lost all interest in him and started making eyes at the host.

  Banks got up. It was time to have a chat with Joseph Randall, who didn’t seem too happy at being dragged down to Western Area Headquarters that afternoon and left to stew in an interview room accompanied only by a taciturn constable who wouldn’t tell him why he was there. There was no reason for the delay other than to make Randall nervous and angry. In that state, he might make a slip. He had his Activan with him if he needed it, and the constable had been warned to watch out for any signs of a panic attack, so Banks hadn’t been worried on that score.

  The interview room was cramped, with one high barred window, a bare bulb covered by a rusty grille, metal table bolted to the floor, three fold-up chairs and the recording equipment. The interview would be videotaped, and as Banks set it up, DC Doug Wilson sat facing a disgruntled Randall, who began by asking for his solicitor.