Sleeping in the Ground

by Peter Robinson

  ‘Now, now, doc,’ said Banks. ‘Remember: it’s not the gun but the person who fires it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Burns. ‘But take the gun away from them and do you think they’d have the guts to do it some other way? A knife? A rope? Bare hands? I doubt it. When you’ve seen as many gunshot injuries as I have, you can’t help but be a bit cynical about the whole thing. I know people argue it’s a valid and enjoyable sport, like any other, but why the hell can’t they just play golf or tennis like everyone else?’

  Banks had forgotten that Dr Burns had worked briefly with the military in Iraq. ‘At least this time it’s not some innocent victim,’ he said.

  Dr Burns sighed. ‘No. We had enough of those on Saturday.’ He got wearily to his feet. ‘I’m off home now. You’ll have my report sometime tomorrow. Let’s at least try and be pleased it’s over, shall we?’

  ‘We’ll be drinking champagne before the night’s through.’

  Dr Burns glanced at Annie. ‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that,’ he said. ‘Goodnight.’ Banks noticed that Annie was dozing with her head resting on the island. He nudged her gently and suggested it might be time to leave. The teams were professional and methodical, and it would be hours yet before they finished.

  ‘Sir?’ It was one of the search team come down from the study upstairs. ‘I think you might be interested in this.’ He held out a scrapbook. ‘I found it taped underneath the bottom of one of the desk drawers in the study.’

  Banks slipped his latex gloves back on and opened it. Most of the pages were filled with clipped newspaper and magazine articles about Laura Tindall and Benjamin Kemp, especially the reports of their upcoming wedding at St Mary’s church, Fortford. Here and there, a word or line had been underlined in red. There were newspaper photographs, articles, stories of Benjamin Kemp’s heroism, grainy images of Laura in her modelling days, including one or two, clearly printed from an Internet site, in which she appeared naked. They were tasteful model’s poses, the kind that could be called erotic rather than pornographic.

  Banks handed back the scrapbook. ‘It seems he had his sights set on Benjamin and Laura well enough. If only we knew why. Bag it and make sure it gets priority tagging.’

  ‘Right you are.’ The officer headed back upstairs.

  Back out in the rain, Banks offered to drive, and Annie accepted.

  ‘I can hardly keep my eyes open,’ she said.

  ‘Come back with me,’ Banks said. ‘You can have Tracy’s room. It’s made up. All fresh linen and everything. Harkside’s a bloody long way, and it’s half three in the morning already.’

  Annie said nothing for a while. ‘Mm,’ she said finally. ‘And one of Ray’s famous fry-ups for breakfast. What a treat. How could a girl possibly resist?’

  Chapter 7

  Eastvale was throbbing with excitement on Tuesday morning, from what Banks could see when he drove in with Annie through the throng of reporters and cameramen. Banks had not managed to get much sleep, and as a consequence he felt groggy as he dodged questions and headed inside. Annie didn’t seem much more lively. At least Ray had done a bit of shopping the previous day and cooked them some eggs and bacon with their morning coffee. He said he would be out house-hunting most of the day, so not to worry about him.

  The desk sergeant told Banks that Mike Trethowan, head of the firearms cadre, had left a message to meet him in the lab as soon as possible. Also, Dr Glendenning sent his regrets, but he was still busy with the victims of the wedding shooting and wouldn’t be able to get around to Martin Edgeworth’s post-mortem until tomorrow morning, if then.

  They were lucky that the Eastvale Regional HQ was attached to a small forensic laboratory in the building next door, though the lab was constantly under threat due to budget cuts. Even though the technicians there handled jobs from all over the county, Banks could generally get priority on most matters. Unfortunately, the lab wasn’t equipped to deal with ballistics. For that, Edgeworth’s weapons, bullets and casings had to be sent to LGC Forensics in Wakefield.

  Trethowan was chatting with CSM Stefan Nowak and Vic Manson, the fingerprints expert, when Banks and Annie dropped by.

  ‘Good timing,’ Trethowan said. ‘Vic here has just confirmed Martin Edgeworth’s prints on both weapons, and there was gunshot residue on his hand, too.’

  ‘Good. No other prints?’

  ‘None,’ said Manson.

  ‘What about the shell casings and the remaining bullets?’

  ‘Clean.’

  ‘You mean no prints at all?’ Banks said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Trethowan. ‘It doesn’t mean much, though. People often wear thin gloves, latex or cotton, when they’re handling explosive materials. Edgeworth made his own bullets.’

  ‘Even so . . .’

  ‘We’re just waiting for the designated firearms officer to pick the guns up and take them to Wakefield for further testing,’ Trethowan went on. ‘I’ve had a quick shufty at them myself, and I honestly don’t think there’s much doubt that the rifle is the one used at St Mary’s, and the Taurus is the gun that killed Edgeworth.’

  Banks nodded. Trethowan led him and Annie over to the table where the guns lay sealed in carefully labelled plastic bags.

  ‘Ugly things, aren’t they?’ Annie said.

  ‘Do you think so?’ said Trethowan. ‘I think they have a sort of beauty all their own, a shapeliness, a form that perfectly suits their purpose. They’re actually rather sleek and elegant machines, when you think about it.’

  ‘It’s not so much their form I think about as their purpose.’

  ‘Don’t you mean their owner’s purpose?’

  ‘Oh, we’re back to that hoary old chestnut, are we?’ Banks cut in.

  Trethowan laughed. ‘I suppose it’s become one of the great conundrums, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Not to me it hasn’t,’ said Annie, fingering the scar on her chest where a bullet had entered her several years ago, narrowly missing her heart.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Trethowan.

  ‘No matter.’

  Banks stood over the two weapons, the one matte black, the other stainless steel with a hard black rubber butt. As per regulations, the Taurus had a barrel extension, which resembled a silencer, to comply with the twelve-inch legal requirement, and there was a long metal tubular extension sticking out from the butt, so that the gun as a whole was over twenty-four inches in length, also as required by law. Handguns were barely tolerated these days, and those that were had to be almost as long as rifles, far too long and bulky to hide easily in your pocket or stick down your trousers like the gangsters did on TV, but still easy enough to stick in your mouth and pull the trigger.

  Trethowan stood beside them. ‘Both perfectly legal and both registered to Martin Edgeworth,’ he said.

  ‘I assume all the regular checks were made when Edgeworth applied for his certificate?’ Banks said.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Trethowan. ‘I’ve verified the documents, and there’s no doubt that Edgeworth was deemed fit to own firearms. No charges or convictions, not even a speeding ticket, and no health issues raised by his doctor. Solid guarantors. All above board.’

  ‘What did he use the guns for? Hunting?’

  ‘Competitive shooting, mostly. Targets more than clay pigeons, of course. For clay pigeons you’d generally use a shotgun of some sort.’ He touched the bag with the revolver inside. ‘This baby here is a Taurus 66 .357 long-barrelled revolver, using a .357 Magnum FMJ 158 grain bullet. One bullet fired and fragments dug out of the wall of Edgeworth’s cellar.’ He moved on to the AR15. ‘And this daddy, as you know already, is an AR – Armalite Rifle – 15, emasculated for legal use under a firearms certificate in the UK.’

  ‘Do you think you could stop referring to the weapons in familial terms, please?’ Annie said. ‘I mean, it makes me cringe to hear someone talking about guns as babies and daddies. And “emasculated”? Give us a break.’

  Trethowan reddened. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Just a pi
ece of AFO slang.’

  ‘And you’re still certain that Edgeworth would have been able to work the bolt fast enough to get off ten shots in under a minute?’ Banks asked.

  ‘Yes. Easily. There are ten bullets missing from the thirty-round clip of 5.56mm bore ammunition, which qualifies for small-bore calibre designation. But it’s small-bore with full-bore performance, as they say, if it’s loaded with the right ammo. In this case, he used .223 Remington 55 grain bullets. They travel at three thousand feet per second and carry eleven hundred foot-pounds of energy.’

  ‘More than enough to do the job from that distance, I take it?’

  ‘More than enough. Especially with the hollow points.’

  Annie had wandered away to talk to Stefan Nowak. Banks couldn’t blame her. He wasn’t especially comfortable around firearms himself, though he had been through some basic training. And it did sometimes seem to him that the relish with which some AFOs talked about weapons was more than a little OTT.

  The AFO charged with delivering the guns for ballistic examination arrived, signed the necessary papers, put the plastic bags inside a large messenger bag and headed out. Banks couldn’t think of anything else to ask Trethowan, so he made his farewells and they left.

  Chief Superintendent Gervaise’s office was set up in a similar way to Banks’s, but everything was bigger, befitting her senior rank, even the conference table they sat around. And the chairs around her conference table were more comfortably padded.

  Adrian Moss had joined Banks and Gervaise for a quick briefing. The young MLO was wearing so much black that he might have been going to a funeral, Banks thought. His gelled black hair shone and his perpetual five o’clock shadow and black-rimmed spectacles completed the style. Banks supposed his attire was appropriate for someone who had to face the media at a time like this. Much as he liked to criticise Moss, he didn’t envy him his job today. The poor boy was stressed out enough already, and Banks doubted he had managed to get much sleep lately. There had been too much going on behind the scenes. For a start, the firearms cadre versus emergency services issue hadn’t been resolved yet, and it probably wouldn’t be without the appointment of a special commission and the preparation of a thousand-page report, which would cost the taxpayers a fortune and probably be so ambiguous as to leave all parties scratching their heads as to what to do after they had read it.

  Moss crossed his legs and balanced a yellow A4 pad on his knee. He had a press conference coming up soon and was anxious for angles. He could handle the spin himself, but he needed something to work with in the first place, something suitable for spinning.

  ‘It’s the usual ending to this kind of saga, isn’t it?’ Moss began. ‘Killer mows down a congregation then goes home and tops himself.’

  ‘Is that what you think happened?’ Banks said.

  ‘Well, it is, isn’t it?’

  ‘I think what Superintendent Banks means,’ said Gervaise, ‘is that there could easily have been a number of different outcomes to yesterday’s actions.’

  Moss frowned, pen poised. ‘Such as?’

  Gervaise flashed Banks a wry smile, as if to tell him he had got himself into this and must get himself out. ‘Alan?’

  ‘Well,’ Banks said, ‘Edgeworth could easily have gone on a rampage and shot a lot more people before either forcing us to take his life or killing himself when we had him cornered.’

  Moss made a few scratches on his pad. ‘But he didn’t, did he?’ he said. ‘I mean, he didn’t get the chance. So we’re golden, aren’t we? We saved lives. It’s win–win.’

  Banks took a deep breath. ‘I suppose you could say that,’ he said. ‘Apart from one or two minor ticks.’

  ‘Minor ticks . . .?’

  ‘Laura Tindall, Francesca Muriel, Katie Shea, Benjamin Kemp, Charles Kemp. Need I go on? Edgeworth killed five people and wounded four. He put Diana Lofthouse in a wheelchair. And he’s ruined even more lives. Do you think people just return to normal, pick up and carry on, after something like this? Some of them never will. If you ask me, that’s the story the media will be going with, the aftermath, the human story, not how it was a “win–win” situation for us. We did nothing. We got lucky.’

  Moss scratched on his pad. ‘I like that,’ he said. ‘ “The human story”. But you’re not being fair to yourself. You did track the killer down.’

  ‘It was routine police work, a paper trail, and that’s not very exciting to our friends out there. A helicopter and jeep chase over moorland terrain in zero visibility followed by a stand-off and shootout would have made much better copy.’

  Moss tapped his pen on his pad and chewed on his bottom lip. A few of his abundant glossy curls were hanging over his creased brow above his glasses. ‘That’s what I was getting around to,’ he said. ‘I mean, when you get right down to it, it’s all rather boring, isn’t it? I mean, as a story.’

  ‘Not for the victims and their families.’

  ‘No, I know that. I didn’t mean to be disrespectful or anything. But try to see it from my point of view.’ He gestured towards the window. ‘And theirs. We don’t have much to give them, do we? I mean, the whole gun law business is getting rather predictable, for a start. They’ve just about done that one to death. No pun intended.’

  ‘None heard,’ said Banks. ‘And since when hasn’t a bit of blood and gore been enough for them?’

  ‘I don’t mean to be critical, Superintendent,’ said Moss, ‘but I don’t think you fully understand the situation. I mean my situation. The media situation in general. I’m sensing resistance here. You underestimate them. They’re not simply a bunch of children suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Banks, with a questioning sideways glance at Gervaise. ‘They’re not? Do enlighten me, then.’

  ‘There’s no need to be sarcastic,’ said Moss. ‘We simply see the world in different ways. That’s all. But we do need to be on the same page here.’

  ‘And how do you see all this?’

  ‘That there must be another story. A better story. This can’t be the end.’

  ‘Isn’t it the bridal party they’ll all be writing about?’ Banks asked. ‘That’s where the glamour and tragedy lie. Laura Tindall was a sexy model; Ben Kemp a war hero. Martin Edgeworth was a nobody. A bloody retired dentist, for crying out loud. What are you going to do, dredge up the statistics about how many retired dentists become rampage killers?’

  ‘A possibility,’ said Moss, jotting down another thought, ‘but they’ve already had enough of the victims. They’ve been running pictures of Laura Tindall on the catwalk and Benjamin Kemp in his fatigues holding a weapon that, in my opinion, is similar to the one the victims were shot with. People are getting tired of the ex-supermodel and the war hero.’

  ‘And you say we’re not dealing with a bunch of kids suffering from ADHD?’ said Banks.

  Gervaise gave him a warning glance. ‘So, what’s your suggestion, Adrian?’ she asked. ‘I assume you have an alternative in mind?’

  ‘Yes.’ Moss paused for effect before his pronouncement. ‘It’s Edgeworth’s story now.’

  ‘What?’ said Banks.

  ‘You said it yourself. The details of the investigation aren’t very interesting. The manhunt wound down too soon, held no real excitement, and the weather’s been too bad to do much location filming, anyway. You followed a paper trail. It led you to Edgeworth. Simple.’

  ‘You’re saying we solved the case and stopped a mass murderer too quickly?’ Banks said.

  Moss managed a thin smile. ‘If you care to put it that way, yes. You’ve left the table bare, Superintendent. Well, not quite.’

  ‘Once again,’ said Gervaise, ‘what do you suggest?’

  Moss leaned forwards, put both feet firmly on the floor and tossed his pad on the table, where it landed with a loud slap. ‘People are fascinated by what motivates killers like Edgeworth,’ he said. ‘What makes them tick. Look at all the books on mass murderers
like Moat and Bird and the rest. Dunblane. Hungerford. Or Columbine and Sandy Hook in the States. The Pulse nightclub in Orlando. And serial killers? For crying out loud. Just pick one. They give them nicknames and make movies about them: the Yorkshire Ripper, Son of Sam, the Moors Murderers, the Boston Strangler, the Zodiac Killer, the Green River Killer. I mean, why are we still fascinated with Jack the Ripper after all these years? How many people can remember the names of any of his victims? But how many books have been written about him and these killers? Most of them by journalists.’

  ‘Mary Kelly,’ said Banks.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mary Kelly. One of the Ripper’s victims.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Right.’

  ‘OK, Adrian,’ said Banks, holding up his hand. ‘I take your point. People are interested in the grotesque, in the aberrations, deviations from the norm. That’s why they read Silence of the Lambs and so on. Why Hannibal Lecter and Norman Bates are such cultural icons.’

  ‘Exactly! And they’re interested because, no matter how much has been written, no matter how many of these monsters we’ve studied, no matter how many reports and learned dissertations there have been, we still don’t understand them. There’s still a need, a hunger, for more knowledge about such things, such people. What makes them tick. What went wrong. How they became defective. They can’t be pigeon-holed, filed, put away in a box marked read and understood. They’re still viable. No matter how much we think we know, the bloke next door could still be a serial killer or a mass murderer. That’s the angle to exploit.’

  ‘But that isn’t our job,’ said Banks. ‘And to be perfectly honest, neither is this. I certainly didn’t sign up to waste my time sitting around coming up with angles for the media to use.’

  Banks moved to stand up, but Gervaise waved him down. ‘Hang on a minute, Alan. Hear him out.’

  Banks sat reluctantly.

  ‘Please don’t think for a minute that I’m trying to tell you how to do your job,’ said Moss, ‘or what your job is, but it’s been my experience over the years that the boundaries have changed, and the media expect people like you to do a lot more than keep order and put bad guys away – in fact, half the time they criticise you for doing those very things.’