Friend of the Devil

by Peter Robinson

  “And lots of ways in and out without being caught on camera,” said Templeton. “The doc’s right,” he went on, getting a frown from Dr. Wallace, which he didn’t notice. “He’s lurking in an area at times when there are likely to be a lot of drunken young girls nearby not exercising a great degree of common sense. There are other similar dark and isolated areas close to the town center, like the Castle Gardens and The Green, and they should be covered, too, but they’re all more open. The Maze is perfect for him. Remember, Jack the Ripper only operated in Whitechapel.”

  “Even so, that was a much larger area,” said Gervaise. “Anyway, I’m sorry but the best we can do at this point is increase the number of regular patrols in the area and put up warnings in the pubs advising people to avoid The Maze if they’re alone, especially females,” said Gervaise. “Also to stay in groups, not to wander off alone. That ought to be enough for now. Besides, the place is still a crime scene and will be for a while yet. It’s taped off.”

  “Only that part of it near Taylor’s Yard,” argued Templeton, “and if you’re bent on murder you’re hardly likely to worry about a small infringement like—”

  “That’s enough, DC Templeton,” said Gervaise. “The subject’s closed.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Templeton, tight-lipped.

  Everyone was silent for a few moments, then Gervaise asked Banks what was next.

  “We have a list of possibles,” said Banks. “Joseph Randall, Stuart Kinsey, Zack Lane, Jamie Murdoch and Malcolm Austin. And the serial-killer angle,” he added, looking at Templeton. “I think the next thing we need to do is have another go at all our suspects, a bit harder than we have before, and see if we can’t find a chink in someone’s armor.”

  Someone knocked at the door, and one of Stefan Nowak’s colleagues delivered an envelope to him. There was silence while he opened it. When he had finished, he glanced over at Banks. “That might not be necessary,” he said. “Remember I said our killer might not be as smart as you think? Well, according to the lab, the DNA found in the semen sample on Hayley Daniels’s thigh is the same as the saliva sample freely given by Joseph Randall. It looks very much as if we’ve got a positive match.”

  9

  THANKS FOR TAKING THE TROUBLE TO COME DOWN AND see me,” said Les Ferris, the researcher who said he had information, when Annie appeared in his office late that afternoon. “It’s almost knocking-off time, and I don’t get out much,” he went on, picking up his rumpled tweed jacket from the back of his chair, “so why not let me treat you to a pint? Or a cup of tea, if that’s your poison?”

  Annie thought for a moment. She’d fallen off the wagon last night with disastrous consequences, but she was feeling better now, and one pint wouldn’t do her any harm. Besides, the office was a mess and smelled of overripe banana skins. “Okay,” she said, “you’re on. A pint it is.”

  Les Ferris smiled, showing stained and crooked teeth. He was a bald, roly-poly sort of man with a red face, white whiskers and sad eyes.

  It was a beautiful evening in Scarborough, the sort you didn’t often get before the holiday season—or even during it, for that matter—and the locals were taking full advantage. Couples walked hand in hand on the prom and families with young children, or pushing prams, lingered at the edge of the sea, kids throwing pebbles at the waves. One brave man even rolled up his trouser legs and tested the water, but he didn’t last more than a few seconds. Annie could smell salt and seaweed and hear the gulls screeching overhead. For a second, they made her think of Lucy Payne’s body, and she shivered.

  “Cold?” asked Ferris.

  Annie smiled. “No,” she said. “Someone just walked over my grave.”

  Ahead, where the high promontory of Scarborough Castle bulged out and brooded over the bay, Annie could see the waves smashing against the seawall, the salt spray flying high. Ferris picked a cozy pub on a corner near Marine Drive. It looked over the harbor. The tide was out and a few white, red or green fishing boats rested on the wet sand. One man in a blue jersey was painting his hull. The pub was a Jennings house with guest beers, and Annie chose a pint of Cock-a-Hoop. Ferris reached for his cigarettes after he had set the drinks down on the scratched table. “Do you mind?” he asked.

  “Not at all,” said Annie. The place already reeked of smoke and several people at nearby tables were smoking. “Make the best of it while you can.”

  “I’ve tried to stop about twenty times,” said Ferris, “but somehow I just can’t seem to manage it. I’m about to turn sixty-five next month, so at this point I think I’d better just resign myself to my fate, don’t you?”

  That wasn’t what Annie had meant. She had been referring to the smoking ban coming into effect in July. But it didn’t matter. “Sixty-five isn’t old,” she said. “You might just as easily live to be ninety. If you stop.” She raised her glass. “Cheers. To ninety.”

  “Cheers. I’ll drink to that.” After he drank, Ferris inhaled deeply on his cigarette.

  “You said you had something to tell me,” Annie said.

  “Yes. I’m not really sure if any of it’s relevant, but when I heard about the identity of your victim it rang a bell.”

  “I’m hardly surprised,” said Annie. “Lucy Payne was quite notorious in her day.”

  “No, it’s not that. Not Lucy Payne.”

  “Perhaps you’d better start at the beginning?”

  “Yes,” said Ferris. “Yes, perhaps I had. I haven’t always been a humble researcher, you know,” he went on. “I’ve put in my time on East Yorkshire CID, as it was then. I might be past it now, but I was quite the dashing young detective at one time.” His eyes twinkled as he spoke.

  “I’ll bet you were,” said Annie, hoping a bit of flattery might help him get a move on. She had no particular plans for the evening, but she was looking forward to a quiet night in her room watching TV.

  “Not that we ever got many murders along this stretch of coast,” he went on, “which is probably why I thought of it. People say I’ve got a bee in my bonnet. For some reason, though, it’s always haunted me. Perhaps because it all ended up as mysterious as it began.”

  “What?” said Annie. “You’ve got me intrigued.”

  “A case I worked on back in 1989. A mere callow youth of forty-seven, I was then. I’d just made DS. None of your accelerated promotion rubbish in those days. Back then, you earned your stripes.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Annie said.

  “Aye, well, not that there aren’t plenty of good men around these days. A few women, too,” he added hastily.

  “This 1989 case,” Annie said, lest he put his foot even farther in his mouth. “What exactly brought it to your mind when you heard about Lucy Payne?”

  “I was just getting to that.” Ferris drained his pint. “Another?”

  “Not for me. I’m driving,” said Annie. “But let me get you one.”

  “Aye, all right,” Ferris said. “Women’s lib and all that. I’ll have another pint of Sneck-Lifter, please.”

  “Sneck-Lifter?”

  “Aye. I know it’s strong, but I don’t have far to go. Not driving, like you.”

  Annie went to the bar and asked for a pint of Sneck-Lifter. The barmaid smiled and pulled it for her. She jerked her head over at Ferris. “It’ll take more than this to lift his sneck,” she said.

  Annie laughed. “Luckily,” she said, “I won’t be around to find out.”

  The barmaid laughed with her, handed Annie her change and said, “Cheers, love.”

  Back at the table, Ferris thanked her for the pint and stared out of the window toward the sea. “Aye,” he said. “September 1989. Nasty business it was. I was working out of Whitby then, way you are now. Mostly quiet apart from a few pickpockets in high season, the occasional pub brawl, break-in or domestic incident.”

  “What happened?” Annie asked him.

  “Well, that’s just it,” Ferris said, scratching his chin. “We never rightly did find out. It was all no
bbut speculation and conjecture. Based on what few facts we had, of course. We did our best. Anyroad, it’s stayed with me all these years.”

  Annie sipped some beer. Might as well relax and let him tell it in his own time, she thought as she noticed the shadows lengthening outside. “I’m sure you did,” she said. “But what makes you think it’s linked to Lucy Payne’s murder?”

  “I never said that it was. It’s just a funny coincidence, that’s all, and if you’re as good a copper as you’re supposed to be, you won’t trust coincidence any more than I do.”

  “I don’t,” said Annie. “Go on.”

  “First off, we don’t get many murders in these parts, and you tend to remember all of them. We got even fewer back then. It started when a local bloke, a cabinetmaker called Jack Grimley, disappeared one night after leaving a pub called The Lucky Fisherman. A couple of days later his body washed up on the beach over Sandsend way.”

  “Murdered?”

  “Hard to say for certain,” said Ferris. “Could have been a head wound, the doc said, a smooth rounded object, but he’d been in the water a couple of days, been bashed about on the rocks.” He paused. “And the fish had been at him.”

  “Water in the lungs?”

  “No. That’s the thing.”

  That meant he hadn’t drowned. “So he hit the rocks first as he fell in?”

  “That was one theory.”

  “What was the coroner’s verdict?”

  “Death by misadventure. But DI Cromer, that’s Paddy Cromer, who was in charge of the investigation, were never satisfied. He’s dead now, or I’d suggest you have a word with him yourself. He had as much of a bee in his bonnet about it as I did, right up to the end. I was his DS.”

  Annie had no idea why Ferris was telling her this, or how it was relevant to the Lucy Payne murder, but she had some beer left in her glass and was content enough to spin it out for another few minutes while the sun went down. Pity they were facing east, she thought, or it would be a spectacular view. As it was, the delicate shade of blue reminded her of the blue in a piece of sculpted glass she had seen on the Venetian island of Murano once, many years ago, when she was a student. “Why wasn’t DI Cromer convinced?” she asked.

  Ferris touched the side of his red, veined nose. “Instinct,” he said. “Like women’s intuition, only more reliable. Copper’s instinct.”

  “So he had a hunch,” Annie said. “I still don’t get it.”

  Ferris gave her a dirty look, and for a moment she thought she’d ruined whatever rapport she had with him, but then he grinned. “No flies on you, are there? Anyway, whatever it was, Paddy wasn’t happy. Me, neither. I mean, Jack Grimley could have fallen off the cliff. It’s happened before. But according to his mates he hadn’t had much to drink, and he lived in the other direction. There was no reason for him to be walking on the cliff edge. Besides, there’s a beach at the bottom, not rocks. And that was when we first heard of the mysterious woman.”

  Annie pricked up her ears. “What mysterious woman?”

  “Patience, lass, patience. A witness thought he saw Jack talking to a woman up near the Cook statue. It was dark, though, and he admitted he could have been mistaken. Still, it was all we had at the time, the only piece of information that placed him near the cliffs. And he was with someone.”

  “Had he said anything earlier about meeting a woman?” Annie asked.

  Ferris shook his head. “Not to his mates he hadn’t.”

  “Not like a man,” said Annie. “Still, I suppose there could be any number of reasons for that. If it was a woman he was meeting, maybe she was married? Maybe even to one of his mates?”

  “We thought of that. Thing is, no one ever came forward. We dug around, too, turned up nothing. Anyway,” he hurried on, “if that was all that had happened, I wouldn’t have dragged you all the way down here. Not that it isn’t always a pleasure to have a drink with a pretty young girl.”

  Annie rolled her eyes and laughed. “How very gallant of you.”

  “I meant it,” said Ferris. “You are a pretty lass.”

  “It was the ‘young’ bit I was referring to.”

  “Well, it’s all relative, isn’t it?”

  “Indeed it is,” said Annie, an image of the naked Eric flashing across her mind’s eye. “So there’s more?”

  “There certainly is. I told you that Jack Grimley was just the first in a series of odd incidents that September. Odd enough to stick in my mind all these years as if they were yesterday. The second occurred a few days later, when a young Australian lad called Keith McLaren was found with a serious head wound in some woods near Dalehouse, up the coast a ways, inland from Staithes.”

  “I know it,” said Annie. “Isolated spot.”

  “Very. Anyway, the head wound showed remarkable similarities to Jack Grimley’s. A smooth rounded object. It was touch and go with young McLaren for a while, but he pulled through. Problem was, he’d no memory of what happened to him. The doctors said it might come back in time, in bits and pieces—it wasn’t due to any physical brain damage—but that was no use to us. Now, the interesting thing is that a couple of people said they saw him down by the harbor in Staithes, probably the day it happened, walking with a young woman with short brown hair, wearing jeans, a gray windcheater and a checked shirt. It was better than the description we got from the witness who saw Jack Grimley with a woman by the Cook statue because it was dark then, but we’d no way of proving it was even the same person, let alone of knowing who she was.”

  “Anyone get a good look at her?”

  “No, that’s the problem. We couldn’t even come up with a decent Identi-Kit from what we got.”

  “Any idea of her age?”

  “Young, they said. As in twentyish.”

  “And you worked on the assumption it was the same woman in both cases?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Probably, given the pathologist’s assessment of the wounds. What happened to McLaren?”

  “He recovered and went back to Australia.”

  “Do you have an address?”

  “God knows where he is now. He was from Sydney. I seem to remember he was set on becoming a lawyer, if that’s any help.”

  “Okay,” said Annie, making a note. “So this mystery woman shows up in two separate accounts involving two serious attacks in the area, linked by the similarity in head wounds, possibly made by a smooth rounded object, one resulting in death. And this is an area where you get very few violent incidents. Am I to take it that you’re making a connection here between this woman and the one who showed up at Mapston Hall to take Karen Drew—or Lucy Payne—for a walk on Sunday morning?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But that was eighteen years ago, Les,” said Annie. “What could it possibly have to do with what happened the other day?”

  Ferris grinned and shook his empty glass. “But there’s more. Buy us another Sneck-Lifter and I’ll tell you the whole story.”

  “HELLO, MR. RANDALL,” said Banks, when the officers brought Joseph Randall into the interview room. “Nice to see you again.”

  “You can spare me the pleasantries,” said Randall. “What do you mean by sending a police car to drag me out of my home? You couldn’t possibly have sent a more obvious signal to my neighbors if you’d tried.”

  “Signal of what?” Banks asked.

  “You know damn well what I’m talking about.”

  “Well, we wouldn’t want you to have to walk all this way, would we?”

  “Stop playing silly buggers. They wouldn’t even give me any reason why they were bringing me here.”

  “They probably didn’t know themselves,” said Banks. “You know how it is. Lowly PCs. Need-to-know basis. We don’t tell them everything.”

  Randall folded his arms. “This time I’ve called my solicitor. He’ll be meeting me here momentarily.”

  “Good idea,” said Banks. “We like to make sure everything’s aboveboard when we ge
t to this stage of an investigation.”

  Randall paused in his display of indignation and gave Banks a worried glance. “What do you mean, ‘this stage’?”

  “End game,” said Banks, casually shuffling the papers in front of him. “We find it works best for us in court if everyone knows his or her rights, so there are no possibilities of infringement. So, if you like, we’ll just wait here quietly until your solicitor arrives. It’s not the most salubrious of places.” Banks glanced around at the flaking institutional green paint, the high barred window and the bare lightbulb covered by a flyblown grille. “Still…Cup of tea while we wait?”

  Randall grunted. “No, I don’t want a bloody cup of tea. I want this over with so I can get out of here and go home.”

  “Mind if I have one?”

  “I don’t care what you do.”

  Banks asked the constable on guard to send for tea, and before it arrived, Randall’s solicitor popped his head around the door, appearing lost. As Banks had expected, he wasn’t used to having criminal clients. Most Eastvale solicitors weren’t. This one looked as if it was his first time inside a police interview room.

  “Come in,” said Banks. He didn’t recognize the young man in the ill-fitting suit, untidy hair and large spectacles. “You are?”

  The solicitor shook Randall’s hand and sat down in the spare chair. “Crawford. Sebastian Crawford. Solicitor.”

  “Sebastian takes care of all my affairs,” said Randall.

  “Good,” said Banks. “I’ll just call my colleague and we’ll be ready to start.” If Sebastian Crawford took care of all Randall’s interests, Banks thought, then he wasn’t likely to be very much of a criminal lawyer. With any luck, he would soon be way out of his depth.

  The tea arrived, along with DS Stefan Nowak, and they settled down in the interview room. When he was ready, Banks turned on the video and tape machines and stated the details of date, time, place and those present. He could see how this made Randall nervous, while Crawford just sat there, fascinated by the whole routine.