Friend of the Devil
Page 27
“Why?”
“You know why.”
Eric grinned. “Those photos? You want to delete them, don’t you? You don’t trust me.”
“That’s right. We’ll start with your mobile, then we’ll move on to your computer.”
“What do you think I’ll do? Post them on the Internet?” He rubbed his chin in mock conjecture. “I suppose I could, couldn’t I? Do you think they’ll accept nudes?”
“I don’t think you’re going to do anything with them,” Annie said. “You’re going to give me your mobile, then we’re going to check your computer, and I’m going to delete them.”
“Look, why don’t you sit down and have a drink? I’m not in a great hurry. We can talk about it.”
“I don’t want a drink, and I’m not staying long enough to sit down,” Annie said, holding her hand out. “There’s nothing to talk about. Give.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were making an obscene suggestion.”
“But you do, and I’m not. Come on.”
Eric folded his arms and stared at her defiantly. “No,” he said.
Annie sighed. She had thought he might want to play games. So be it. She sat down.
“So you will have that drink?” Eric said.
“I’ll sit down because this is clearly going to take longer than I expected,” Annie said, “but I still don’t want a drink. You know what I want.”
“I know what you wanted the other night,” said Eric. “But now I’m not so sure. There are some other pictures, you know. Ones you haven’t seen yet. Better ones.”
“I don’t care,” said Annie. “Just delete them, then we’ll forget all about it, forget it ever happened.”
“But I don’t want to forget it ever happened. Can’t you at least leave me something to remember you by?”
“I’ll leave you more than enough to remember me by if you don’t do as I say.”
“Is that a threat?”
“Take it as you will, Eric. I’ve had a long day. I’m running out of patience. Are you going to give me that mobile?”
“Or what?”
“All right,” said Annie. “We’ll do it your way. You were right the first time when you guessed what I do for a living. I’m a policewoman. A detective inspector, as a matter of fact.”
“Am I supposed to be impressed?”
“You’re supposed to do as I say.”
“What will you do if I don’t?”
“Do I have to spell it out?”
“Get some of your Neanderthal cronies to beat me up?”
Annie smiled and shook her head slowly. “I really don’t think I’d have to bring in any help, but no, that’s not the plan.”
“Pretty confident, aren’t you?”
“Look,” said Annie, “let’s stop playing games, shall we? What happened happened. Maybe it was good. I don’t know. I don’t remember, and it doesn’t do me any credit to say that. But no matter what, it was a mistake. If—”
“How do you know?”
“What?”
Eric sat up. “How do you know it was a mistake. You haven’t given me a chance to—”
“It was a mistake for me. Just accept that. And your recent behavior hasn’t helped matters at all.”
“But why?”
“I really don’t want to go into it. I didn’t come here to cause trouble. I just came to ask you—nicely—to let me delete those photos. They’re embarrassing and, quite frankly, I wouldn’t even want to consider a relationship with anyone who would take them.”
“You didn’t object at the time. And don’t forget, you took some, too. Can’t you lighten up a bit, cut me a bit of slack? It was just harmless fun.”
“Give me the fucking BlackBerry!” Annie was shocked at her own vehemence, but Eric was pushing her patience way beyond its limits. She couldn’t be bothered explaining the difference between her taking a few innocent photos for fun in a club and his taking more intimate ones, that she couldn’t even remember, in the privacy of the bedroom. If he couldn’t understand that himself, he didn’t deserve any slack.
He seemed shocked, too. He said nothing for a moment, then reached into his hip pocket, pulled out his mobile and tossed it to her. She caught it. “Thank you,” she said. When she found the media library, she scrolled through all the photos he had taken that night. In addition to the ones she had seen, in which she had at least been awake, there were others of her sleeping, hair tousled, a breast exposed. Nothing really dirty, but crude and invasive. She deleted them all. “Now the computer.”
He waved her to the desk in the corner. “Be my guest.”
The same pictures were on his computer, so she deleted all those, too. Just as a precaution, she also emptied his recycle bin. She knew there were ways of getting back erased data, but she doubted that Eric was up to the task, or even that he could be bothered, for that matter. Maybe he’d stored them on a CD or a smart drive, too, but short of ransacking his entire flat she couldn’t do much about that. “Is that all?” she asked.
“Yeah, that’s all. You’ve got what you came for. Now just fuck off.” He turned away, picked up his drink and pretended to watch television.
“Before I go,” Annie said, “let me just tell you what will happen if you do have copies and if any of them turn up on the Internet. You were wrong about me enlisting people I know to beat you up. That’s way too crude. But I do have friends, and, believe me, we can make your life very uncomfortable indeed.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Eric, not bothering to turn his gaze away from the television. “And just how will you do that?”
“If any of those photos turn up anywhere, I’ll not only claim I was drunk at the time they were taken, which is true, and which anyone can see, but that I think I was given a date-rape drug.”
Eric turned to face her slowly, an uncomprehending expression on his face. “You’d actually do that?” he said.
“Yes. And if it became necessary, the police officers who searched your flat would find Rohypnol or GHB or some such thing. You’d be surprised how much we have lying around the station spare.” Annie felt her heart beating in her chest, and she was sure that Eric must be able to hear it, or even see the twitching. She wasn’t used to lying, or threatening, like this.
Eric lit another cigarette. He had turned pale and Annie could see that his hands were shaking. “You know,” he said, “I really believe that you would. When I met you, I thought you were a nice person.”
“Don’t give me that crap. When you met me, you thought here’s a not-too-bad-looking drunk old bitch I can get into bed without too much trouble.”
Eric’s jaw hung open.
“What’s wrong?” Annie went on. “Home truth’s not palatable to you?”
“I…just…” He shook his head in wonder. “You’re really something else, a real piece of work.”
“Believe it,” said Annie. “I take it I don’t need to say any more?”
Eric swallowed. “No.”
“On that, note, then, I’ll say good-bye.”
Annie was careful not to slam the door behind her. As angry and upset as she was, she needed to demonstrate to Eric that she was in control, even if she wasn’t. When she walked into the cool night air, she paused at the corner of the street and took a few deep breaths. She’d done it, she told herself. Problem over. Sorted. So much for Annie Cabbot, Angel of Mercy. Why was it, though, she thought as she walked down the street and looked out at the dark glittering sea beyond, that as obnoxious as Eric was, she felt as if she had just broken a butterfly on a wheel? But then, she reminded herself, he wasn’t a butterfly at all, more like a snake, and she smiled.
12
CLUTCHING HIS BOTTLE OF WINE IN ONE HAND, BANKS took a deep breath and rang the doorbell. It felt strange being back on the street where he had lived with Sandra and the kids for so many years. Now Sandra had remarried and become a mother again, Tracy had finished university, and Brian was in a successful rock band. But
when Banks looked at the drawn curtains of his old home, an unremarkable semi with bay window, new door and pebble-dashed facade, the memories flooded back: sharing a late-night cup of hot chocolate with Tracy when she was twelve, having come home late and depressed from investigating the murder of a girl about her age, Strauss’s “Four Last Songs” on the stereo; Brian’s first stumbling musical attempts at playing “Sunshine of Your Love” on the acoustic guitar Banks had bought him for his sixteenth birthday; making love to Sandra as quietly as possible downstairs on the sofa after the kids had gone to bed, trying not to burst out laughing when they fell on the floor. He also remembered his last few weeks alone there, passing out on the sofa with the bottle of Laphroaig on the floor beside him, Blood on the Tracks on repeat on the CD player.
Before he could travel any farther down the perilous path of memory, the door opened and Harriet Weaver stood there, looking hardly a day older than when she had first welcomed Banks and his family to the neighborhood twenty years ago. Banks leaned forward and kissed her on both cheeks.
“Hello, Alan,” she said. “I’m so glad you could come.” Banks handed her the wine. “You shouldn’t have. Come in.”
Banks followed her into the hall, where he hung up his coat, then they went through to the living room. Most of the guests had already arrived and were sitting in the convivial glow of orange-shaded table lamps, chatting and drinking. There were twelve people in all, and Banks knew two couples from his years next door: Geoff and Stella Hutchinson, from number twenty-four, and Ray and Max, the gay couple from across the street. The others were either Harriet’s friends from the library, or her husband David’s colleagues from the arcane and, to Banks, deadly dull, world of computers. Some of them he had met before briefly.
He had driven straight from the station, about five minutes away, stopping only to pick up the bottle of wine from Oddbins, having spent most of the day in his office going over the statements and forensic reports on the Hayley Daniels case. He had also been occasionally distracted by the thought of Annie’s case: Lucy Payne in a wheelchair with her throat slit. He remembered Lucy lying in her hospital bed, in some ways a pitiful, fragile figure with her pale, beautiful, half-bandaged face, in other ways enigmatic, scheming, manipulative, and perhaps truly evil. Banks had never made up his mind on that score, though he was one of the few who had seen the videos, which convinced him that Lucy had been as involved as her husband, Terry, in the abduction and sexual torture of the girls. Whether she had actually killed anyone was another matter entirely, and one the courts never had to decide upon. Everyone believed she did, no matter what. Her eyes had given nothing away and her instinct for self-preservation had been strong.
It was always difficult to make the transition from the macabre to the mundane, Banks found, but sometimes inconsequential small talk about England’s chances of scoring against Andorra after their pathetic 0–0 draw with Israel, or the Tories’ chances in the next election, were a welcome antidote to the day’s preoccupations.
Dinner parties always made him nervous, for some reason, and he couldn’t even drink too much to take the edge off because he had to drive home. He wasn’t going to take the kind of risk that Annie had taken the other night. She had been lucky. Thinking about Annie, he realized that he would probably have invited her as his “date” if they had been on better terms. Even though they were no longer romantically involved, they gave each other moral support in social situations like this from time to time, strength in numbers. But after her odd behavior on the last two occasions they had met, he didn’t know how things stood between them, or how they would develop.
Greetings over, Banks took the glass of wine David offered and sat next to Geoff and Stella. Geoff was a paramedic, so he was hardly likely to start going on about RAM and gigs. Dead or dying bodies Banks could handle. Stella ran an antique shop on Castle Road, and she always had an interesting tale or two to tell.
As he made small talk, Banks glanced around at the others. There were a couple of supercilious prats he recognized from a previous party and didn’t particularly like, the kind who got a few drinks in them and became convinced that they could do a better job than anyone else of putting the world to rights. But the rest were okay. Most were around his age, mid-fifties, or a little younger. Harriet had put on some soft classical music in the background, Bach by the sound of it, and the smell of lamb roasting with garlic and rosemary drifted in from the kitchen. A couple of plates of hors d’oeuvres were doing the rounds, and Banks helped himself to a small sausage roll when it came his way.
Fortunately, he wasn’t the only stray of the group. Most of the guests were couples, but Banks knew that Graham Kirk, from the next street over, had recently split up with his wife, and Gemma Bradley, already three sheets to the wind, had driven her third husband out two years ago and hadn’t found a fourth yet. Harriet worked with Gemma, though, and clearly felt sorry for her. The other odd man out was Trevor Willis, a rather surly widower who kept nipping outside for a smoke with Daphne Venables, wife of one of David’s colleagues. Banks knew from previous occasions that Trevor was the kind who got quieter and more morose the more he drank, until he ended up nodding off—once, with dramatic effect, right into his trifle.
It was at times like this when Banks dearly wished he still smoked, especially on a mild March evening. Sometimes it was good to have an excuse to escape outside for a few minutes when the conversation got too loud or too dull.
Geoff was in the middle of a story about an old woman who regularly called an ambulance just to get a lift to her hospital appointments, and how, just to scare her, one of the paramedics had remarked upon noticing a problem with her leg and said it would have to come off, when Harriet called them through to dinner.
It took her a few minutes to get everyone seated according to the plan, and Banks found himself between Daphne and Ray, opposite Max and Stella. It could have been worse, he reflected, accepting a refill of wine from David as Harriet dished out plates of goat’s cheese and caramelized onion tart. The only ones already drunk were Gemma and Trevor, though Daphne seemed well on her way, judging by the way she kept squeezing Banks’s arm whenever she spoke to him. The tart was delicious, and there was enough free-flowing conversation for Banks to sit quietly and enjoy it without being drawn in.
He had just finished his tart, and Daphne was holding his arm telling him a funny story about a runaway mobile library, when the doorbell rang. Everyone carried on with their conversations while Harriet got up and rushed over to answer it. Daphne was demanding all Banks’s attention, breathing Sancerre and stale tobacco his way, while exuding wafts of whatever strong perfume she was wearing.
The next thing he knew, Harriet was pulling up another chair at the end of the table. Thirteen for dinner, Banks thought, remembering the Poirot story. It was supposed to be unlucky. Conversations paused, men gawped and women stiffened. Banks still couldn’t escape Daphne’s grip on his left arm. He felt as if he’d been cornered by the Ancient Mariner. Over to his right, he heard an unfamiliar female voice say, “I’m sorry I’m so late.”
Finally, Daphne let go of him, and without being rude he was able to glance over and see Harriet fussing about how being late was no problem, setting an extra place for the new guest, who looked over at him and smiled. Then he remembered: Sophia had arrived at last.
CHELSEA WAS running late. She put her mascara on too thickly but didn’t really have time to apply it all over again. It would have to do. She tugged at her bra under the skimpy top and squirmed until it felt comfortable, then dashed downstairs and put her heels on.
“Bloody hell,” said her father, turning away from the television for a rare moment as Chelsea teetered on one leg in the hallway. “Do you have any idea what you look like, girl?”
“Shut up, Duane,” her mother said. “Leave the poor lass alone. Didn’t you ever go out and have a good time when you were a young lad?”
“Maybe, but I didn’t dress like a fucking—”
How she wished she lived in Leeds or Manchester or Newcastle, then she’d be able to stay out later, all night if she wanted, but Eastvale had pretty much closed down by half twelve or one o’clock on a Saturday night, except for the Bar None, where they had a naff DJ and lousy music, and the Taj Mahal, which was full of sad drunken squaddies drinking lager by the gallon and shoveling down vindaloo before they got shipped off to Iraq. Tomorrow she was going to see The Long Blondes at The Sage, in Gateshead, with Shane, in his car, their first real date without anyone else around. That would be excellent. Then on Monday it was back to work in the shop. Such was her life.
They were all meeting in the market square. Chelsea couldn’t see a bus anywhere, they were so few and far between after six o’clock on the East Side Estate, so she’d have a fifteen-minute walk to get there, across the river, then up the hill past the gardens and the castle. It was already dark and her high heels made it tough going. They would be starting out in The Red Lion, she knew, and if she missed them there, they would most likely drop by The Trumpeters for a couple of games of pool before moving on to The Horse and Hounds, where there was usually a band playing covers of famous old songs like “Satisfaction” and “Hey Jude.” They weren’t bad sometimes. Better than the decrepit trad jazz they had on Sunday lunchtimes, at any rate.