Banks thought for a moment. He had never been greedy, but more money meant more CDs and DVDs, maybe even a better sound system, and a good turntable like Miller’s to play the old vinyl he had recently brought up from his parents’ house in Peterborough. More money meant getting central heating installed in the cottage, maybe even a lick of paint here and there. More holidays would mean the occasional bargain weekend in Paris, Rome or Barcelona. But he knew better than to get carried away with himself. Nothing came without a price tag. He had a vision of himself so consumed by paperwork and budget meetings that he simply had no time left to get out and do the job he was best at.
‘What do you think?’ Gervaise asked.
‘I honestly don’t know what to say.’
Gervaise stood up and leaned forward, resting her palms flat on the desk. ‘You don’t have to make up your mind right at this very moment. Give it a few days. Remember, though, that as a superintendent, you wouldn’t have to retire until sixty-five.’
‘I’ll think about it, I promise,’ said Banks.
‘Good man,’ beamed Gervaise. ‘I knew you would. Let’s give it until this Miller case is settled and take it from there, shall we? By then, with any luck, you’ll have yet another feather in your cap. If you keep your nose clean, that is.’
Banks put his espresso cup back in its saucer and stood up to leave. ‘Whatever you say, ma’am.’
As usual these days, it was dark by late afternoon. As there were no other developments, and Winsome and the CSIs were still at the scene, Banks took the file Gerry Masterson had prepared on Gavin Miller home with him shortly before six o’clock and picked up some fish and chips from Helmthorpe High Street on his way. He hung up his raincoat on the rack by the door and carried his briefcase and dinner down the hall to the kitchen, where he made a pot of tea and sat down to eat and watch the evening news on the TV above the breakfast nook. It was the usual depressing mix of weather, politics and financial doom.
After he had put the dishes in the dishwasher – in a few days he would have enough to make it worthwhile running the damn thing – he poured himself a glass of Layers, an Aussie red blend he had come to enjoy lately, then he went into the entertainment room to select the music.
As he searched through his collection, he found himself drawn to the Grateful Dead. He hadn’t played any of their CDs in a long time. He had listened to the Dead a lot more when he was younger, and had even seen them live once at the Empire Pool, Wembley, in 1972. He remembered being impressed by Jerry Garcia’s guitar playing. More recently, he had been enjoying Norma Waterson’s version of ‘Black Muddy River’. No doubt their music would make an appropriate soundtrack for his reading. He didn’t have much to choose from, as it turned out, so he picked American Beauty.
Banks liked the sound of rain on the conservatory roof, so he decided he would sit out there to read over Gerry Masterson’s preliminary notes on Gavin Miller. She had been most embarrassed and apologetic that she had so little to show him when he had dropped by the squad room to see her. The whole business was going far too slowly, she said, and the notes she had were very sketchy and rough. Usually, she would have much more information by now. Banks told her not to worry and to stick at it.
He took his wine and briefcase through and settled back in his favourite wicker chair. With the reading light on, he couldn’t see a thing in the darkness beyond the windows except his own reflection and that of the spines of the books on the shelves behind him. The rain was softer now, a gentle hiss rather than a heavy drumming. He remembered reading, or seeing in a film somewhere, that W.C. Fields couldn’t sleep unless it was raining, and that he lay dying for some time, until the rain started. Then he died. Banks thought he might like to die to the sound of rain, not in the icy shackles of winter or the bright warmth of a summer’s day, or with the coloured autumn leaves drifting down, but in spring, perhaps, an April shower falling on the glass roof and windows of his conservatory. It wasn’t a morbid thought, but quite a comforting one, as was the sound. He sipped some wine and, with ‘Box of Rain’ playing softly in the background, began to read the few pages of the hastily written preliminary notes that DC Masterson had been kind enough to photocopy for him to take home.
DC Masterson’s account was very bare bones, though it covered a lot of ground, Banks noticed, and as he read, his imagination filled in some of the blanks. Gavin Miller had been born near Banbury, Oxfordshire, on 29 November 1953, almost sixty years ago. His father had been a teacher at a local comprehensive school, which Miller had attended, and his mother a housewife. Miller was an only child and grew up in a cottage at the end of a long leafy lane on the edge of town, with no close neighbours.
Miller had shown some academic promise at school, though he didn’t quite get the qualifications necessary for Oxford or Cambridge. He did well in his A-levels, however, and ended up reading English at the University of Essex, which he attended from 1971 to 1974, leaving with a second-class honours degree. After a period spent working to save up as much money as he could, Miller disappeared to Canada in 1977 to study film and literature at Simon Fraser University near Vancouver. From what Gerry Masterson could work out, Miller seemed to have remained over there for the next six years. That would explain some of the photos of cityscapes and mountain landscapes they had found in Miller’s drawer, Banks thought. He had seen similar images of Canada before.
Gerry admitted that she had lost track of his movements during the four-year period after he graduated from Simon Fraser from 1979 to 1983 – the ‘lost years’ – and she needed to contact consulates and immigration sources, registrars and administrative assistants. It was a time-consuming job, even if you were looking for fresh information. Miller turned up again at home in Banbury in 1983. He would have been pushing thirty by then, Banks calculated, and this was not an era when the children stayed at home as long as they do these days.
So far, Gavin Miller seemed like so many others, a young man who had not quite fulfilled his potential, or hadn’t had as much potential to fulfil as he thought he did. He also didn’t seem to have grown up, in some ways, but remained stuck in the interests and tastes of his youth. Even though he was fifty-nine, his small cottage was full of existentialist philosophy books and shelves of psychedelic vinyl from an earlier time.
The rain had stopped now, though it still streaked the windows. A fine day was promised for the start of tomorrow, but you could never trust the weather forecasts these days. The only thing you could be certain of was that rain would come again, sooner rather than later.
The Grateful Dead were singing ‘Ripple’, which Banks thought might be the kind of song he would like to have played at his funeral. Its airy mysticism rather appealed to him, the idea of life as a ripple in still water, when no pebble has been tossed into it. And the melody and harmonies were beautiful. He sighed. Enough thoughts of death and rain and ripples in undisturbed water. What was it about today that had sent his mind spinning in such a direction?
He realised that it was probably something to do with the similarities between himself and Gavin Miller. But just how alike were they? True, they had shared some tastes in music and films, much of it the same as they had enjoyed in their youth, but was that so strange? They were close to the same age, had grown up in with the same pop culture – the Beatles, James Bond, the Saint, Bob Dylan, and so on. Banks’s dad still listened to Henry Hall, Nat Gonella and Glenn Miller, music he had first heard during the war. There was nothing odd about a taste for the past. Some people still enjoyed Abba and the Bay City Rollers.
Banks also had to admit that he often preferred stopping in, drinking wine and listening to music alone to going down to the local on a Saturday night. So what did that make him?
Newhope Cottage might be bigger and better furnished than the signalman’s cottage Miller had lived in, Banks thought, but it was just as isolated, and Banks had deliberately chosen to live there after his divorce from Sandra. Had Miller been running away from something, too, and
had it caught up with him? He could have simply been running away from himself, of course, and when he found he couldn’t, had committed suicide. But Banks doubted it. Something didn’t sit right about his choice of method, not when there were more than enough pills in his bathroom cabinet to do the job, and five thousand pounds in his pocket when he died.
Banks returned to what little remained of DC Masterson’s notes. Almost a year after he had returned from Canada, Miller had begun a series of jobs in local colleges, where he had toiled away in obscurity for twenty years or more, teaching general arts, media studies, film and English literature in such places as Exeter, Grantham and Barrow-in-Furness, never staying in any one place for any length of time, until he arrived at Eastvale College in 2006.
Miller left the college in 2009, gave up his rented flat in Eastvale and made a down payment on the signalman’s cottage near Coverton. It didn’t appear that he had attempted to find another job. Gerry had noted that the person she talked to on the telephone at the college, Trevor Lomax, head of the department in which Miller had taught, seemed a little cagey when he found out who she wanted to talk about. He made a mental note to get someone to go out there and talk to Lomax the following morning.
Miller had married only once, as far as Gerry could discover, and that had lasted six years and had ended in 1996. His wife had remarried two years later and gone to live in New Zealand. Gavin’s father had died three years ago, and his mother had entered a private care home near Oxford, which took up the money from the sale of the cottage outside Banbury, and more or less all the savings that the Millers had accumulated over the years. When Miller died, he had been unable to meet his last two mortgage payments, the utility companies had been hammering at his door and his credit card was maxed out to the limit.
The desperate financial straits Gavin Miller had been in towards the end of his life also made Banks think there might be something more to the drugs angle. People often saw drugs as a quick way of making a big return on an investment. Someone so desperate for money might turn to crime. Five thousand pounds was a lot of money to a man in Miller’s position, and it would have got him out of the immediate hole he was in, at the very least, with even a little left over.
Blackmail was another possibility, of course, but most victims don’t kill their blackmailers, who have usually set things up in such a way that if anything happens to them, the cat gets let out of the bag anyway. No one had broken into Miller’s house, for example, to see if there was anything incriminating left behind there. If Miller had been blackmailing someone, it was hardly likely that he would hand over all his evidence for five thousand pounds. Blackmailers always have something in hand, and they always come back for more.
Putting the file aside, Banks massaged his temples and rubbed his eyes. It was getting late. American Beauty had finished some time ago, and the silence was all-embracing. Once in a while, he heard a light breeze sough through the trees, or a distant car on the Helmthorpe road, but apart from that, nothing. He topped up his glass, went into the entertainment room to put on Live Dead, and went outside. There was a little bulge in the wall beside the beck, and he enjoyed standing there, or even sitting on the wall when it was dry, to contemplate the night and enjoy his last drink of the evening. In the old days, he used to love having a smoke out there, too, but those days were long gone.
Already there were stars showing between the grey rags of cloud, and the air was full of that lovely fresh earth smell you get after a good country rainfall. It was still a little chilly, but he wouldn’t be staying out for long. He walked over to the wall beside Gratly Beck and leaned at his usual spot overlooking the terraced falls, all the way down the daleside to the slate roofs of Helmthorpe High Street and the church tower below the old mill, the fields and the cemetery. The water was high, and the beck had turned into quite a torrent after the rains. The falls were fast and noisy, filling the air with a fine cool spray. Banks often enjoyed falling asleep to the sound of the rushing water as he lay in bed.
To his left stretched the dark woods, raindrops dropping from leaves as the wind shook them, and tapping on the leaves below. The River Swain was a silvery squiggle along the flat valley bottom about a mile away. The strains of Garcia’s lyrical guitar playing on ‘Dark Star’ wove into the sounds of the beck and the dripping leaves as Banks leaned there thinking how much he loved the place, and how retirement might be not such a bad idea after all.
He thought about Gavin Miller for a while longer, the haggard and broken body that looked like that of an old man, then tossed down the rest of his wine, shivered and went back inside.
2
The boardroom, with its polished oval table, whiteboards and fancy new glass board already christened Red Ron’s Folly, was ready for the morning meeting at nine o’clock, and the whole team was present, including Area Commander Catherine Gervaise, Annie Cabbot, PC Kirwan and Stefan Nowak. Black coffee in one hand and black marker in the other, Banks took to the front of the room and tried to bring some order out of fragments of information the team had dug up so far, starting with Gerry Masterson’s exploration of Miller’s life. The problem still remained that they couldn’t be certain Miller’s death wasn’t due to suicide. Dr Glendenning was set to perform the post-mortem later that afternoon, and Banks was hoping he would unearth something that might help them decide one way or the other. Even so, the death seemed suspicious enough that he believed it was vital to get at least the beginnings of an investigation going as quickly as possible.
Gerry Masterson looked very businesslike this morning, Banks thought, with her red wavy Pre-Raphaelite hair tied back, a crisp white blouse, and oval black-rimmed glasses perched on her nose. She shifted her papers in front of her and cleared her throat. ‘Well, sir,’ she began, then gave a shy glance towards Gervaise, ‘and … er … ma’am.’
‘Skip the formalities, Gerry,’ said Gervaise, ‘or else we’ll be here all day.’
Gerry’s pale skin blushed a pinkish-red. ‘Yes, ma’am … I’m sorry. I mean, right.’ She studied her notes, seemed undecided whether she needed them or not, then pushed them aside a couple of inches and rested her hands on the table, looking over her audience. ‘I assume you’ve read my notes on Gavin Miller?’
They all nodded.
‘Well, it’s slow going,’ she said, ‘and I apologise for not having very much to give you, as Mr Miller doesn’t seem to have had much in the way of social intercourse over the past while, or any sort of family life. Anyway, I’ve narrowed what I do know down to three areas that might benefit from fruitful enquiry.’
Banks raised his marker, ready to take down what she said.
‘First of all, and probably hardest of all to investigate, is the period he was overseas after finishing his degree at the University of Essex. We know that he spent the years from 1977 to 1979 at Simon Fraser University, near Vancouver, pursuing a graduate diploma in Film Studies and Literature, then … well, we don’t really know where he was or what he was doing for the following four years. I call them the “lost years”. We’re pretty sure he wasn’t back in the UK until late 1983, but other than that … I still have a number of inquiries outstanding on this, a few calls I’m waiting for, and I’ll follow up on them later today, when the time difference isn’t quite so awkward, but it doesn’t look too hopeful. It was a long time ago.’
‘You’re thinking something might have happened during that “lost” period that led to Miller’s death thirty years later?’
‘I’m just saying it’s possible, sir. It’s unknown territory. He could have made dodgy contacts that came back to haunt him.’
‘I think,’ said Gervaise, ‘that before we commit to putting any resources into investigating that period thoroughly, we should hear what else you have to say, or the next thing we know we’ll be sending a team out there. And you know what havoc that would play with the budget.’
‘Of course,’ Gerry went on, a little chastened. ‘Next is a little closer to the present. It�
��s his three years at Eastvale College from 2006 to 2009.’ She leafed through her notes. ‘I believe I made a note of how his department head Trevor Lomax seemed reluctant to talk about him.’
‘Any idea why?’ Banks asked.
‘No, sir.’
Banks looked at Annie. ‘Can you pay Mr Lomax a visit at the college?’
‘Be my pleasure. You never know, I might learn something.’
Everyone groaned.
Banks turned back to Gerry. ‘And the third area? You said there were three.’
‘Yes, sir. We need to know what Miller has been doing recently, since he’s been living at the signalman’s cottage outside Coverton. Someone must know something, but all I’ve managed to gather so far is that he was a loner with no friends in the village, and had few or no visitors, as far as anyone can tell. Not that they would have known, anyway, as his cottage was so isolated. I mean, I suppose he could have been having wild parties there every night, and nobody would have been any the wiser.’
‘Possibly not,’ said Banks. ‘Though the villagers might have noticed an unusual number of cars or motorcycles on their streets, or in their car park late at night.’
‘If they parked in the village,’ said Gerry. ‘All I’m getting at is that everyone’s pretty sure he lived a quiet life out there, but he could have had regular visitors – a girlfriend, say. Probably no one would have thought anything of just one car parked in the village occasionally, or perhaps his visitor knew the tracks and lanes to take to get to the cottage and drove straight there.’
‘True,’ Banks agreed. ‘But did he have a girlfriend? We’re calling him a loner, saying he didn’t mix. Would a girlfriend put up with the kind of life Miller led out there? Might she not want to go out occasionally? A club? The cinema? For a meal or a drink?’
‘Unless she was like him, sir.’
‘An odd couple, indeed. OK, I take your point. We’ll bear it in mind. Cherchez la femme.’
Children of the Revolution Page 3