Strange Affair

by Peter Robinson

  Banks put the mobile aside and went back to the bathroom, where he removed his rumpled clothes and climbed into Roy’s luxury Power Shower, turning it on full. The jets of hot water pummeled his body back into some semblance of humanity.

  As he dried himself on a thick soft towel, Banks realized that he had left his overnight bag in the boot of his car, which was parked outside. He didn’t want to dash out and fetch it right now, so he brushed his teeth with Roy’s electric toothbrush, which almost ripped his gums to shreds, and borrowed a clean short-sleeved shirt and socks from his brother’s wardrobe. He had to wear his own jeans because Roy’s were too long for him and too big around the waist.

  After he had found Roy’s stash of coffee in one of the kitchen cupboards and made himself a decent pot, Banks took it with him upstairs and returned to the entertainment room and the mobile. The phone call and digital image should be traceable, Banks knew, given the police’s technical resources. You could also learn an awful lot from a mobile phone’s sim card. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the resources at the moment. How important was it? he wondered.

  Banks still couldn’t let go of the idea that his brother might have been involved in something illegal and that that was why he’d vanished. Things had threatened to catch up with him and he’d had to run away fast and hide out. If that was the case and Banks brought in the local police, then he risked getting Roy into serious trouble. If something terrible came out—drugs or pornography, for example—and Roy went to jail, it could kill their parents.

  On the other hand, there wasn’t much more he could do alone except work on the leads he already had: the names from Roy’s call list and mobile phone book, and from the files Corinne had printed for him. He knew what his duty was, what he would advise anyone else in his position to do, but still he hesitated. At least he had the laptop computer now, so he could spend a bit more time on the CD and USB drive, and there was one person he could turn to for help.

  First he went into Roy’s office. There was another telephone message, he noticed. It must have come in while he was taking his shower. Again it was from Annie Cabbot, and she simply asked Roy to ring her as soon as possible. Banks had forgotten all about last night’s message. He still wasn’t sure that he wanted Annie involved—she would definitely want him to make Roy’s disappearance an official police matter—but he was curious enough to dial her mobile number and find out what she was after. He got no signal. Making a mental note to try again later, he picked up the telephone and rang Corinne, just to make sure. He breathed a sigh of relief when she said she was fine. She sounded sleepy. He apologized for waking her, said he’d be in touch and rang off.

  Finally he dialed a number he had committed to memory. As requested, he left a message and fifteen minutes later the phone rang. He snatched up the handset.

  “Banks here.”

  “What’s so urgent you have to disturb a hardworking copper on his only day off?” asked Detective Superintendent Richard “Dirty Dick” Burgess.

  “I need to see you,” said Banks. “Urgently.”

  Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks weighed heavily on Superintendent Gristhorpe’s mind, and not only because if Banks were around, Gristhorpe might be able to spend a bit more time on his drystone wall rather than having to drive into Western Area Headquarters so early on a Sunday morning. No doubt there would be a crowd of reporters to deal with, as the issue of guns always touched a nerve. Despite having some of the strictest gun control laws in the world, enacted in the wake of the Dunblane massacre, the country seemed to be flooded with cheap illegal guns from Ireland and eastern Europe.

  As it was, he still had a little time in hand, so he took his mug of strong tea out to the back garden and rested it on his chair while he studied various stones from the pile to see which one fit best. The wall went nowhere and fenced nothing in, but for Gristhorpe it had become almost as necessary as breathing. He would never finish it—how could you finish something that went nowhere?—but if he ever did, he would pick it apart and start again. Wall-building was almost a lost art in the modern Dales, and while Gristhorpe had no pretensions to being an expert, of doing the work professionally, it was both his homage and his therapy.

  As he weighed his options, Gristhorpe was pleasantly aware of the sun on his face and the light breeze that ruffled through his unruly thatch of hair, delicate as a woman’s fingers. He thought of his wife, Mary, and her feather-light touch, and realized it was over twelve years now since the cancer had taken her. He still missed her as he would miss a part of himself, and not a day went by when he didn’t think of her, remember some detail of her face, an expression, her gentle voice, her sense of humor, a certain gesture.

  The air, he noticed, smelled of wild garlic, with a hint of tar from the hot road surface. Gristhorpe sipped some tea and decided upon a stone. The one he chose fit perfectly. Then he dragged his thoughts back to the matter in hand: Banks.

  Over the years, Banks had been more than just a junior officer to Gristhorpe. He could remember his first impressions of an edgy, nervous chain-smoking detective on the verge of career burnout and he had wondered if he had made a mistake in approving the transfer. But Banks had made a journey back to some sort of equilibrium, aided in part by the Yorkshire countryside he had now adopted as his home.

  In some ways, Gristhorpe knew that he had been a kind of mentor to the new Banks, not so much in terms of doing the job, but in human terms. Banks was a complex sort, and Gristhorpe wondered if he ever would find the peace and harmony he seemed to be looking for. After the divorce from Sandra, which Gristhorpe knew still hurt Banks deeply, and the messy relationship with Annie Cabbot, Banks seemed to have found a measure of happiness in his isolated cottage, but even that had come to an abrupt and violent end. Where next? Gristhorpe hadn’t a clue, and he didn’t think Banks had, either.

  Gristhorpe drank more tea and looked for another stone. He wanted to know what Banks’s connection with the dead woman was before word of it leaked out. At the moment, it was simply a matter of trying to track Banks down through his family, but if that didn’t work, then the next step would have to be an official one, and that could harm Banks’s career. It would mean using the media. They would have to put his photo in the newspapers, request anyone who thought they had seen him to call the police. And every copper in the country would be on the lookout for him, too. It wasn’t only that Gristhorpe wanted to know why the dead woman had Banks’s address in her back pocket—the wrong address—but that Annie had said the cottage had been broken into, and the builders swore they had locked up as usual after their day’s work and left no valuable equipment behind.

  Gristhorpe finished his tea and put the stone in place. Too big. He chucked it back on the pile and went indoors. Time to go to work.

  Banks had a couple of hours to kill before his meeting with Burgess. First he called Julian Harwood and was surprised to get an appointment to meet at Starbucks on Old Brompton Road at two o’clock that afternoon. Harwood sounded like the kind of person who thought giving you the time of day was doing you a big favor, but the mention that Banks was Roy’s brother got his interest.

  After that, he had made a written note of the names and numbers in Roy’s call list and mobile phone book, just in case. In his experience, electronic gadgets tended to behave erratically just when you most needed them to do what they were designed for.

  Many of the names on the list matched those in the book, and he found Julian, Rupert and Corinne among them. Others were businesses mentioned in the files Corinne had copied, and then there were services, such as hairdresser, tailor, bank manager, dentist and doctor. None of it told him very much. He rang a few of the numbers, including Rupert’s, but nobody knew where Roy was—at least no one admitted to knowing where he was.

  A woman called Jenn figured quite prominently in the last thirty calls—at least ten of them were to or from her—and Banks guessed she was Corinne’s replacement. He tried ringing the number but it was unav
ailable. He wondered if there was any other way he could get in touch with her. The odds were that if she had nothing to do with Roy’s disappearance, she would ring his mobile before too long.

  As Banks glanced through the stack of memos and accounts, looked at all the company logos and names, he felt frustration set in. None of them meant anything to him, and he didn’t have the time or the resources to check them all out. He had no access to the Police National Computer, for a start. He could be looking at the names of dozens of criminals and not even know it. Burgess might help, but he would only tell Banks what he wanted him to know.

  Banks spent half an hour having another look around the house and found nothing more of interest. Then he settled down to examine the JPEG files on the CD he had found yesterday. He sat his new laptop computer on the kitchen table, brewed himself some coffee and managed to follow the instructions and get the machine going. He slipped in the CD and found Windows Explorer tucked away at the bottom of the Accessories menu.

  His computer automatically displayed the 1,232 JPEG files as thumbnails. Banks scrolled through these, all images of naked women with file names like Maya, Teresa, April, Mia and Kimmie, or of men and women engaged in sex acts. If he rested his cursor on one of them, information about file dimension, type and size would appear in a little box. Most of the JPEG images were between 25 and 75 kilobytes in size.

  When he got to the 980th image, however, Banks noticed that it and the next two were different; all three were numbered with the prefix “DSC” and showed two men sitting together at what looked to be an outdoor café. When he let his cursor rest on one of them, he found that, at 650 kilobytes, it was considerably larger than the earlier images, and that it was taken on Tuesday, the eighth of June, at 3:15 P.M. by a camera identified as E4300. Roy’s Nikon was a 4300 model. According to the “details” view, the other images were all downloaded the next day, so it looked as if Roy had dragged them in from another folder.

  Intrigued, Banks double-clicked on the first image of the two men. He didn’t recognize either of them. They were leaning toward each other, in earnest conversation. Both wore white open-necked shirts and light, casual trousers. One was bulkier with curly graying hair, the other younger and thinner with spiky black hair, a goatee and a hunted, watchful expression on his face, as if he was worried about being spied upon.

  The following two images were of the same scene, taken in rapid succession. Banks scrolled to the end of the folder, but all he found was more Larissas, Natashas, Nadias and Mitzis.

  On Tuesday afternoon, then, Roy had taken three candid photographs of two men in conversation at an outdoor café, and on Wednesday he had burned them on a CD, hidden among hundreds of erotic images. He had then placed the CD in the Blue Lamps jewel case, which stood out like a sore thumb in his music collection.

  So who were the men and what, if anything, did they have to do with Roy’s disappearance? Banks picked up the laptop and took it upstairs. It was time to learn how to use Roy’s printer.

  DC Kevin Templeton thought he’d died and gone to heaven when he reported to Gristhorpe that morning and the boss said to take Winsome with him and pay Mr. Roger Cropley an early visit. The credit card companies were not exactly forthcoming when it came to providing information, even to the police, but the service center’s CCTV cameras showed a number plate beginning with YF, which was the Leeds licensing office. The Driver and Vehicle Licencing Agency offices were closed on Sundays, so Templeton had had to resort to the local telephone directories and electoral rolls. As luck would have it, the name eventually yielded a north Eastvale address, which also meant that Mr. Cropley would, in all likelihood, have taken the same road off the A1 as Jennifer Clewes.

  Templeton let Winsome drive the short distance to Cropley’s, sneaking a surreptitious glance at the taut black fabric stretched over her thighs whenever she changed gear. Christ, they could kill a man, he thought with wonder. Then he realized he was so randy that morning because he hadn’t shagged the redheaded clerk last night, the way he had intended. She had given him a nasty look, too, when he got to work that morning, one of those looks that said, “You’ve had your chance, mate, now on your bike.” Still, he knew he could break down her resistance again given the opportunity. He was also tired, he realized, not having slept for more than an hour or so, but that he could deal with.

  As the empty Sunday-morning streets flashed by, he put his head in detective gear and planned out his interview. He liked Cropley for the killing. There were one or two small glitches, but nothing he couldn’t reason his way past: No sexual interference, for a start, which was a bit of a puzzle, and no struggle, either. Then there was Banks’s address in the victim’s pocket. But Templeton was sure Cropley had pulled her over and tried it on and something had gone disastrously wrong.

  “How was your Saturday night?” he asked Winsome.

  She gave him a sideways glance. “Fine. And yours?”

  “You already know about mine, spent sampling the delights of motorway cuisine. What did you get up to, then?”

  “Up to? Nothing special. Club social.”

  “Club?”

  “Yeah, the potholing club.”

  Templeton knew that Winsome liked to climb down holes in the ground and explore underground caverns. He couldn’t think of anything more boring, or, for that matter, more terrifying, given that he suffered from claustrophobia. “Where d’you hold it?” he asked. “Gaping Gill?”

  “Very funny,” said Winsome. “Actually we met in the Cock and Bull. You should come along sometime.”

  Was she asking him out? “The Cock and Bull?”

  “No, idiot. Potholing.”

  “No way,” said Templeton. “You’ll not get me down one of those black holes.”

  “Coward,” she said. “Here we are.”

  She pulled up in front of a neat Georgian semi, an unremarkable house with mullioned windows and beige stone-cladding. The street was on a low rise and offered a magnificent view out west to lower Swainsdale. There was a small limestone church with a square Norman tower at the end of the street and people were already filing in for the morning service.

  Templeton jabbed at the doorbell, Winsome beside him. Despite, or perhaps because of, his lack of sleep, Templeton felt pepped up, excited, like the one time he had taken Ecstasy at a club. Winsome seemed cheerful enough in that cool and graceful way she had, and if she had noticed him glancing at her thighs in the car, she hadn’t said anything.

  The man who answered the door didn’t look particularly like a pervert as far as Templeton could tell, except that he was wearing sandals with white socks, but he did match the description Ali had given him at Watford Gap. About forty, with thinning sandy hair, slim but with a beer belly sagging over his worn brown corduroy trousers, he had a long face with pouchlike cheeks and a rather hangdog expression. He reminded Templeton a bit of that actor who seemed to be in all the old sitcom repeats on telly with Judi Dench and Penelope Keith.

  “Mr. Cropley?” said Templeton, showing his warrant card. “We’re police officers. We’d like a word, if we may.”

  Cropley looked puzzled the way they all did when the police came calling. “Oh, yes, of course,” he said, moving aside. “Please, come in. My wife’s just…” He let the sentence trail, and Templeton and Winsome followed him into a living room that smelled of cinnamon and apples, where Mrs. Cropley was putting the finishing touches to a colorful flower arrangement. She was taller than her husband, and bony, with strong, almost masculine, features. She looked a bit severe to Templeton, and he could well imagine her cracking out the leathers and whip for an evening S and M session. The thought made him shudder inside. And maybe it drove Mr. Cropley to other things.

  “It’s your husband we want to talk to,” Templeton said, smiling. “First off, at any rate.”

  Mrs. Cropley stood there for a moment before the penny dropped. When it did, she gave her husband a look, then turned and left the room without a word.

  T
empleton tried to read significance into that look. There was something there, no doubt about it. One of Cropley’s dirty little secrets had come back to haunt him, and his wife knew what it was, was letting him know that she knew, and he was on his own.

  “We were just going to get ready for church,” said Cropley.

  “I’m afraid the vicar will have to manage without you this morning,” said Templeton.

  “What’s it about?”

  “I think you know. First of all, were you driving up the M1 and the A1 late Friday evening?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “What make of car do you drive?”

  “A Honda.”

  “Color?”

  “Dark green.”

  “Did you stop at the Watford Gap services?”

  “Yes. Look, I—”

  “While you were there, did you notice a young woman alone?”

  “There were a lot of people there. I…”

  Templeton caught Winsome flashing him a glance. She knew. Cropley was evading the question, the first sign of guilt.

  “I’ll ask you again,” Templeton went on. “Did you see a young woman there in the café alone? Nice figure, hennaed hair. She’d be hard to miss.”

  “I can’t remember.”

  Templeton made a show of consulting his notebook. “Thing is,” he went on, “the bloke behind the counter remembers you sitting opposite the girl, and the petrol station attendant remembers you filling up at the same time this young woman was there. That’s how we found out your name, from the credit card slip. So we know you were there. Do you remember seeing a young woman at the garage? She was driving a light blue Peugeot 106. Think about it. Take your time.”