Strange Affair

by Peter Robinson

“It’s not your fault. The best thing you can do is try to answer my questions as clearly and calmly as possible. Okay?”

  Kate nodded but continued to sniffle and dab at her eyes and nose.

  “This phone call came between half past ten and a quarter to eleven?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “What about Jennifer’s family?” Annie asked. “Where do they live? How did she get along with them?”

  “Fine, as far as I know,” said Kate. “I mean, she didn’t visit them that often, but they live in Shrewsbury. You don’t when they’re so far away, do you?”

  “No,” said Annie, whose father lived even farther away, in St. Ives. “Can you find their address for me, too? Now that we know it is Jennifer’s body we found, someone will have to let them know what’s happened.”

  “Of course,” said Kate. “I’ve got that one in my PDA. You know, in case of emergencies or anything. I never thought I’d need it for something like this.” She dabbed at her eyes again, fetched her shoulder bag and gave Annie the address.

  Annie stood up. “And now,” she said, “can I have a look at Jennifer’s room, while you dig out those other addresses?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Banks left his car parked in Corinne’s street, only a short walk from Roy’s, took the District Line from Earl’s Court to Embankment and walked up to the main post office behind Trafalgar Square. There he bought a padded envelope and posted both CD copies—Roy’s business files from the USB drive and the sex images—to himself at Western Area Headquarters. It was always a good idea, he thought, to have backup, preferably stored in a different location. He kept the original CD of JPEGs and the USB drive in his briefcase along with the papers Corinne had printed out for him.

  After he had finished at the post office, he dropped in at the first newsagent’s he saw and bought another packet of Silk Cut.

  While he was paying he noticed one of the headlines in the evening paper and looked closer. A young woman, as yet unidentified, had been found shot dead in a car outside Eastvale, North Yorkshire. No doubt if he’d been on duty he would have caught the case, but as things were, it would be Annie’s. He didn’t envy her having to deal with the media feeding frenzy guns always caused, but perhaps Gristhorpe would take care of the press, the way he usually did.

  Banks lit a cigarette and started to walk. He had often done so when he worked on the Met, and sometimes it helped him sort out his feelings or solve a problem. Whether it did or not, he had always enjoyed walking around the West End at night, no matter how much it had changed in character since his early days on the beat.

  Outside the pubs, knots of people stood clutching pint glasses, laughing and joking. In Leicester Square, jugglers and fire-eaters entertained the crowds of American tourists in shorts and T-shirts who milled around drinking water from plastic bottles.

  It was a sultry evening and the square was bustling with people: long queues for the Odeon, metal barriers up, some premiere or other and everyone hoping to catch a glimpse of a star. Banks remembered doing crowd duty there once as a young PC in the early seventies. One of the Bond films, The Man with the Golden Gun, he thought. But that had been a cold night, not far off Christmas, as he remembered, he and his fellow PCs linking arms to keep back the onlookers as flashbulbs popped (and they were flashbulbs back then) and the stars stepped out of their limos. He thought he saw Roger Moore and Britt Ekland, but he could have been wrong; he never was much of a celebrity spotter.

  Banks had loved going to the cinema back then. He and Sandra must have gone twice a week before the kids, if he was on the right shift, and sometimes, if he was on evenings or nights, they’d go to a matinee. Even after Brian was born they got a neighbor to babysit now and then, until undercover work made it too difficult for him.

  These days, he hardly ever went at all. The last few times he’d been to see a film, there always seemed to be someone talking, and the place was sickly with the smell of hot buttered popcorn, the floors sticky with spilled Coke. It wasn’t so much like going to the cinema anymore as it was like hanging out in a café where they showed moving pictures on the wall. There was a new multiplex in Eastvale, an extension of the Swainsdale Centre, but he hadn’t been there yet and probably never would go.

  Banks made his way into Soho. It was going on for nine now, still daylight, but the sun was low, the light fading, and he was hungry. He hadn’t eaten since that wretched curry round the corner from Roy’s place. Here the streets were just as crowded, outdoor tables at the restaurants and cafés on Old Compton Street, Greek Street, Dean Street, Frith Street overflowing. A whiff of marijuana drifted on the air, mingling with espresso, roasting garlic, olive oil and Middle Eastern spices. Neons and candlelight took on an unnatural glow in the purple twilight, smudged a little by the faint, lingering heat haze. Boys held hands as they walked down the street, or stood on street corners, leaning in toward each other. Beautiful young women in cool, flimsy clothing walked together laughing or hung on the arms of their dates.

  Banks made it to Tottenham Court Road before the electronics shops closed and after little deliberation bought a laptop with a DVD-RW/CD-RW drive. It was light enough to carry easily in a compartment of his briefcase, and it would do everything he needed it to do and more. It also didn’t break his bank account, still bolstered by the insurance money from the fire. He took out the manual and various extra bits and pieces, put them in his briefcase, too, and left the packaging in the shop, After that, feeling hungry, he headed back to Soho.

  On Dean Street, Banks found a restaurant he had eaten at once before, with Annie, and had enjoyed. Like all the others, the outside tables were crowded and the frontage was fully open to the street. Nevertheless, Banks persevered inside and was rewarded with a tiny table in a corner, away from the street and the noise. It was no doubt the least desirable table in the house as far as most people were concerned, but it suited Banks perfectly. It was just as hot inside as out, so location made no difference as far as that was concerned, and a waitress came over almost immediately with the menu. She even smiled at him.

  Banks mopped his brow with the serviette and studied the options. The print was small and he reached for his cheap, nonprescription reading glasses. He had found himself relying on them for reading the papers and doing crosswords more often lately.

  It didn’t take him long to settle on steak, done medium, chips and a half bottle of Château Musar. He sipped at his first glass of wine while he was waiting for his meal and the rich, complex flavor was every bit as powerful as he remembered it. Annie had liked it, too.

  Annie. What was he going to do about her? Why had he been behaving like such a bastard after what she had done for him? She was seriously pissed off at him, he knew, but surely if he really tried…maybe he could break through the barrier of her anger. Truth be told, things had been shaky between them ever since they broke up. He had been jealous of Annie’s relationships, and he knew that she was jealous of his. That was partly what had made his curt dismissal of her in the hospital so unforgivable. But the circumstances had been exceptional, he told himself. He had not been in his right mind.

  His steak and chips arrived and Banks turned his thoughts back to Roy. With any luck, he would turn up something from the computer stuff—why would Roy hide it otherwise?—a name, a company, something that would send him in the right direction. The problem was that he would more likely than not turn up too much, and Banks didn’t have a slew of DCs to send out on the streets to filter out the red herrings. Perhaps he could go back and enlist more of Corinne’s help. She had said she would be willing.

  For a moment, a shadow of concern for Corinne passed over him with a chill, and he shivered. Had he brought her danger along with Roy’s business secrets? But he was sure he hadn’t been followed to her house, nor was there anyone on his tail now. She would be all right, he assured himself. He would ring her first thing in the morning, just to make sure.

  He had only once had dinner with Roy, h
e realized as he bit into the juicy fillet. They saw each other in passing at family gatherings, of course, though there had been few enough of those over the years, and Banks had been at Roy’s first wedding, but as far as the two them sitting down to dinner together, there had been only the one occasion, and the invitation had come out of the blue, for no particular reason that Banks could gather.

  It was in the mid-eighties, when the financial world was reeling under the shock of insider-trading scandals. Whatever he was now, Roy had been a stockbroker then, and in his Armani suit, with his hundred-quid haircut, he looked every inch the successful businessman, apple of his mother’s eye. Banks had been a mess, much as he was now, he thought, aware of the irony. Approaching burnout in London, career and marriage held together by threads, he was waiting to hear if his application for a transfer to North Yorkshire had been approved when Roy rang him one day at the office—he wasn’t even sure his brother knew where he lived at that time—and asked him if he was free for dinner at The Ivy.

  The restaurant was packed with entertainment people and Banks thought he recognized a star or two, but he couldn’t put names to faces. They had certainly looked and acted as if they were stars. After a half hour of family chat and polite inquiries into Banks’s career and well-being over a very expensive shepherd’s pie and an even more expensive bottle of Burgundy, Roy had steered the conversation toward the recent scandals. Nothing was said overtly, but Banks went away with the impression that Roy had been pumping him. Not that he knew anything, but his brother had expressed interest in the way such investigations were done, how the police gathered information, what they thought of informers, exactly where the law stood on the issue, and so on. It was done very well, and it continued over the frozen berries and white chocolate sauce he had had for dessert, but it was definitely a fishing expedition.

  There was another thing, too. Banks couldn’t be certain, but he had been around drugs enough to recognize the signs, and he was sure Roy was high. Coke, he suspected. After all, that was the drug of choice back then among successful young men about town. At one point in the evening Roy excused himself to go to the toilet and came back slightly flushed and even more animated, sniffling every now and then.

  And that, Banks realized, was probably when he first started thinking of his brother as a possible criminal. Before that, he had merely been the annoying little brother, the paragon against whom Banks was matched and found wanting. Even now, when Banks looked back on their conversation that evening, he still thought he was right, that Roy had been up to something and wanted to run down the odds on his getting caught. Well, he hadn’t got caught, and now it seemed he had moved on to other things. But were they more honest?

  Banks poured the last of the Château Musar into his glass. Maybe he should have ordered a whole bottle, he thought. But that was too much, and he wanted to keep a reasonably clear head for tomorrow. From what he could see through the clustered diners in the dim light, the street outside was even busier. The crowd was mostly young and they’d probably be drinking and clubbing until the early hours.

  Over coffee and cognac, Banks remembered that he had nowhere to stay. He had forgotten to book a hotel room. Then he felt the pressure of the keys and the mobile in his pocket and he knew that he had decided where he was staying the minute he had pocketed them and left Roy’s house. It was useless trying to get a taxi at this hour in the maze of Soho streets, so he walked up to Charing Cross Road, where he picked one up in no time and asked the driver to take him to South Kensington.

  Winsome had been patiently ringing Banks’s parents and children on and off for most of the afternoon and early evening without any luck. When it came to Banks’s friends, she was at a loss to know who they were. He had left an old address book in his drawer, but there weren’t many entries, and some were so old the numbers were no longer in service. It felt odd, searching for her boss, poring over the personal address book of someone she called “sir” and looked up to, but there was no doubt that he might be able to answer a few questions. Winsome also realized that he might be in danger. After all, a woman apparently on her way to see him had been shot, and his half-renovated cottage had been broken into. Coincidence? Winsome didn’t think so.

  Consulting the list of family phone numbers, Winsome had first called the daughter, Tracy, in Leeds. When she had finally got through to her around teatime, Tracy said she had no idea where her father was. The son, Brian, wasn’t answering his mobile, so she left a message. When she phoned Banks’s parents for the third time, early in the evening, a woman answered.

  “Mrs. Banks?” Winsome said.

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  “My name’s DC Jackman. I work with your son, DCI Banks. I’ve been trying to get in touch with you all afternoon.”

  “Sorry, love, we’ve been to visit my brother and his wife in Ely. Why? What’s wrong? Has something happened to Alan?”

  “Nothing’s happened, Mrs. Banks. As far as we know everything’s just fine. He’s on holiday this week, but I’m sure you know how it is with this job. I’m afraid we need him for something, and it’s rather urgent. He seems to have forgotten to take his mobile. I was wondering if you knew where he was.”

  “No, dear,” said Mrs. Banks. “He never tells us where he’s going these days.”

  “I don’t suppose he does,” said Winsome, “but it was worth a try. Have you spoken with him recently?”

  “As a matter of fact, he rang early this morning.”

  “What about, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Oh, I don’t mind, dear. It was a little bit odd. See, he was asking about his brother, about Roy, and…well, they’ve never been very close.”

  “So it was unusual for DCI Banks to be asking about him?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he want to know?”

  “He wanted to know if I knew where Roy was, just like you want to know where Alan is. What’s going on? Are you sure there’s nothing wrong?”

  “Nothing to worry about, Mrs. Banks. We just need him to help us out with something, that’s all. Could you give me his brother’s address and phone number if you’ve got them?”

  “Of course,” said Mrs. Banks. “I know his address by heart but I’m no good with numbers. You’ll have to wait a moment while I look it up.”

  “That’s all right,” said Winsome. “I’ll hold.”

  She heard the handset laid gently to rest on a hard surface, then the sound of muffled voices. A few seconds later, Mrs. Banks came back on the line and gave her the number. “He’s got one of those mobiles. Do you want that number, too?” she asked.

  “Might as well.”

  “Silly business, people having to stay in touch all the time,” said Mrs. Banks. “Makes you wonder how we managed without all these newfangled gadgets, but we did, didn’t we? Listen to me go on. You’re probably too young to remember.”

  “I remember,” said Winsome, who had grown up in a shack high in Jamaica’s Cockpit Country, open to the elements, without telephone or electricity or any of the other myriad things that seemed so essential to life in twenty-first-century Britain.

  Mrs. Banks gave her the number and Winsome said goodbye. For a moment she sat thinking, tapping her ballpoint on the pad, then she found DI Cabbot’s mobile number and picked up the phone again.

  Sorry about Blunt and Useless,” said DI Brooke. “They’re a right couple of prize plonkers, but it’s hard to get good help these days, and they just happened to be on duty.”

  “Blunt and Useless?”

  “Sharpe and Handy. Get it?”

  Annie laughed. “It’s all right. We’ve got a few like that ourselves.”

  They were sitting in a noisy pub on Brixton Road drinking pints of Director’s bitter. David Brooke was about Banks’s age, but he looked older and he was much more well-rounded, with a placid, moon-shaped red face that always made Annie think of a farmer, and only a few tufts of ginger hair still clinging to his freckled skul
l. His navy-blue suit had seen better days, as had his teeth, and he had taken off his tie because of the heat, which made him look even more like some yokel up from Somerset for a wedding or a football match.

  Annie’s search of Jennifer Clewes’s room had yielded nothing of immediate interest—except that Jennifer collected porcelain figurines, mostly fairy-tale characters; liked Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Ella Fitzgerald; and read hardly anything that wasn’t to do with business and commerce, apart from the occasional Mills and Boon novel. If her clothes were not for work, they were mostly casual: jeans, denim skirts and jackets, T-shirts, cotton tops. Nothing lacy or flouncy. She had one good frock and two pairs of black high-heeled shoes. The rest of her footwear consisted of trainers and sandals.

  Her computer, at first glance, revealed nothing out of the ordinary. There was no diary and no personal papers, only a calendar, the days filled mostly with personal appointments. She had a dentist’s visit scheduled for the thirteenth. If there was anything else, it was for the computer experts to find. Annie did, however, acquire a much better photograph of Jennifer—alive and smiling against an ocean backdrop. Kate Nesbit told her it had been taken in Sicily the previous year, when Jennifer had gone there on holiday with Melanie Scott, her old schoolfriend from Shrewsbury.

  When she had finished at the flat, Annie phoned and booked a room for two nights at a hotel by Lambeth Bridge, after first ringing Gristhorpe again and clearing it with him. Tomorrow was Sunday, so the Berger-Lennox Centre would most likely be closed. Annie would pay her visit first thing Monday morning before heading back up north. On Sunday, she would go and talk to Melanie Scott. The local police would inform Jennifer’s parents of their daughter’s death and drive them to Eastvale to make a formal identification of the body.

  “So how are things going, Dave?” Annie said. “It’s been a while.”

  “Too long, if you ask me. Things are fine, thanks. Actually, the big news is that I’m up for promotion at last. Chief Inspector.”