Strange Affair

by Peter Robinson

  “But why would Roy send this woman to see me? Why not come himself?”

  “I don’t know. Her flatmate said Jennifer received a phone call around a quarter to eleven that Friday and left right after. Said it shook her up a bit. Did your brother sound worried when he heard the doorbell?” Annie asked.

  “No,” said Banks. “I’ve thought a lot about that, and he sounded fine. I mean, if he’d been worried it was someone come to do him harm he wouldn’t have answered it, would he? He’d probably have tried to scarper out of the back window. Besides, the bloke across the street said Roy just locked his door and got into the car with his visitor as if things were quite normal.”

  “So what do you think happened?”

  “I’ve been trying to piece together the events of that day,” Banks said. “The way I see it is that Roy comes home just before half past nine, from where I don’t know, but something has upset him. He puts his mobile on the kitchen table, or it’s already there, pours himself a glass of wine and goes up to his office to check phone messages, e-mail, or whatever. He takes the wine with him. Maybe he sits and mulls things over for a minute or two, then he decides that whatever it is he’s found out is worth calling his estranged policeman brother about. Maybe he even senses that he’s in danger because of something he knows. Anyway, he phones me and tells me he needs my help. While he’s on the phone, the doorbell rings. He answers it and goes off in a car with whoever it is. Willingly, it appears. And he forgets his mobile, even though he’s given me the number. I’d say that means he’s more than a little distracted.”

  “Maybe it was Roy who rang Jennifer later, then?” Annie suggested.

  “And gave her directions to my cottage and told her to set off right there and then because he couldn’t come himself? Maybe it was. But why? What happened between half past nine and a quarter to ?leven?”

  “That we don’t know.” Annie paused. “Poor lass,” she said. “Everything I’ve found out about Jennifer tells me she was a decent, hardworking, caring person, perhaps a bit naive and idealistic.”

  “So what got her killed?”

  “I wish I knew.” Annie sipped her wine. The light changed and she could tell that clouds were gathering, the world darkening around them. “What are you going to do next?”

  “Carry on my own personal covert operation,” said Banks

  Annie smiled. “What can I say?”

  “Nothing. You?”

  “I’ll talk to Dave Brooke as soon as I can and I’m pretty sure he’ll want to see you. I mean it, Alan. Our cases have crossed and I’m not leaving any loose ends. Besides, given what happened to Jennifer Clewes, Roy could be in danger. Have you thought about that?”

  “I haven’t thought about much else,” said Banks. “Mostly I’ve been thinking that he’s done a runner, with kidnapping a distant second. Your connecting him with the murdered girl puts a different complexion on things.”

  “I’m glad you see it that way. If you’d bothered to keep in touch, we might have got to this point ages ago.”

  “How was I to know you were looking for me?”

  “You know what I mean. Anyway, I’ve still got a couple of things to do tomorrow. Jennifer was killed on our patch, but her life was down here. It makes things awkward.”

  “So what do you have to do?”

  “Visit Jennifer’s workplace, for a start. She worked at a family-planning center in Knightsbridge. It—”

  “What’s it called?” Banks asked.

  “The Berger-Lennox Centre. Why?”

  Banks opened the folder again and started turning over sheets of paper, some of them covered with his own spidery scrawl. Finally he pointed to a printed sheet. “I thought I remembered the name,” he said. “It’s one of the centers Roy invested in. One of Julian Harwood’s companies. Are you sure that’s where Jennifer Clewes worked?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps that’s where they met, then. Harwood told me that Roy’s a hands-on sort of investor, likes to check out his assets. And if Jennifer Clewes was a good-looking young woman…”

  “Which she was,” said Annie.

  “Bingo.”

  “It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

  “Maybe not,” said Banks. “But it’s another connection. One person murdered, another disappeared. Her phone number is in his book, my address is in her back pocket, and they have this family-planning center in common. I don’t know about you, but that’s way too many coincidences for me. Maybe I’ll go with you tomorrow. Find out for certain. Someone must remember if Roy’s been there.”

  Annie paused. She wanted to be diplomatic but didn’t quite know how to do it. In the end, she threw caution to the wind. “You can’t,” she said. “You know you can’t. It’s not your case. I’ve already made it clear I’m making your brother’s disappearance official and I’m giving you a bit of room to maneuver, but you can’t just come muscling in. You have no official standing in the Jennifer Clewes investigation whatsoever.”

  “But what if there’s a connect?on with what’s happened to Roy?”

  “Look, Alan, you’ve got no official standing there, either. I’m not taking you with me and that’s that.”

  “Fine,” said Banks. “Okay. I understand.”

  “Don’t sulk. It doesn’t suit you.” Annie stood up. She felt a little wobbly, but it was nothing she couldn’t handle. “And stick around. DI Brooke will be wanting to take your statement.” Annie heard a light tapping sound on the leaves behind her. It quickly grew louder and faster. The rain had started again.

  It was early evening and Banks was sitting in Roy’s office reading through the files of correspondence Corinne had printed out when he heard someone at the door. At first he thought it might be Roy, but why would he be knocking at his own door? Then he thought it might be DI Brooke come to interview him and decided it would be best to get it over with. Even so, he looked for some sort of weapon, just in case. All he could find was a set of golf clubs in the landing cupboard, so he grasped one of the irons and answered the door. The man who stood there was about Banks’s age. He was wearing a dark suit, had a neat side parting in his graying black hair and a serious, intelligent look in his eyes. He could have been a policeman, Banks thought, except that he was wearing a clerical collar. He looked at the golf club and at Banks.

  “Hello,” he said, reaching his hand out tentatively. “Hunt’s the name. Ian Hunt. Roy home?”

  Banks shook his hand. It felt damp and cool. “No,” he said. “I’m his brother, Alan. What’s it about?”

  “He’s mentioned you,” said Hunt. “The policeman. But I didn’t think…Never mind.”

  Banks had a good idea what Ian Hunt didn’t think, but he kept quiet. He needed all the information he could get, and a defensive attitude from the outset wouldn’t help matters much. He wondered what the hell the vicar was doing calling around at Roy’s house. “Would you like to come in?”

  “Yes. Yes, please, if it’s all right.”

  Banks propped the golf club by the front door and led the way to the kitchen at the back, where he had recently sat with Annie, and offered Hunt a chair. Hunt made no comment about the club. Banks didn’t want to seem as if he was interrogating the man, but he realized he had practically forgotten the simple art of conversation after all his years in the force. His job affected the way he saw and dealt with everyone. He had even been brusque with Corinne. “Why did you want to see Roy?” he asked.

  “No real reason,” Hunt said. “Only he didn’t turn up at church this morning, and that’s not like him.”

  Banks nearly fell off his chair. “Church?” Wonders never cease.

  “Yes. Why? What’s so strange about that?”

  “Nothing,” said Banks, who hadn’t set foot inside a church since his childhood, except for weddings and funerals. He and Roy hadn’t been given a particularly religious upbringing, and neither of their parents had been regular churchgoers. At school, back in those days, there were
prayers and a hymn every morning, of course, but apart from a few years of Sunday school and a brief stint in the Lifeboys and Boys’ Brigade, that had been it as far as Banks was concerned. Now this.

  “Normally, I wouldn’t bother dropping by,” said Hunt, “but there was a meeting of the resto?ation fund committee after the service and Roy has always been a keen contributor. Not only financially, you understand, but also in terms of ideas. Very creative mind, Roy.”

  “Cup of tea, Vicar?”

  “Please. And call me Ian. Unless you want me to call you Chief Inspector?”

  “Ian it is.” Banks put the kettle on. Tea with the vicar on a Sunday afternoon, he thought. How very genteel. This wasn’t a world he would ever have suspected Roy of inhabiting. He found the tea bags next to the coffee and put two in the flower-patterned teapot.

  “If you don’t mind me asking,” said Banks as the kettle was coming to a boil, “when did Roy start going to church?”

  “I don’t mind at all,” said Hunt. “He started attending services on the sixteenth of September, 2001.”

  “I didn’t expect you to remember the exact date,” Banks said.

  “But how could I forget? You’d be surprised how many people returned to the church, or first started attending, around that time.”

  Banks had to think for a moment before he realized the significance of the date. It must have been the first Sunday after the attack on the World Trade Center. But why should that affect Roy so much? He poured boiling water into the pot. “What drew him there?” he asked.

  Hunt paused. “You really don’t know much about your brother, do you?”

  “No,” said Banks. “And the more I find out, the less I know.”

  “That’s the universal paradox of knowledge”

  “Maybe so,” said Banks, “but at the moment I’m interested in more practical knowledge. I don’t suppose you have any idea where Roy might be?”

  Hunt blinked. “I was the one who came here looking for him, remember?”

  “Even so.”

  Hunt looked at Banks with curiosity in his eyes. “I can see you’ve been trained not to take anything at face value,” he said. “No, I have no idea where he is.”

  “Why did you come here?”

  “I told you. The meeting. It’s not like Roy not to even leave a message.”

  “When did you last see him?”

  “Last Sunday.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “We chatted briefly after the service.”

  “How did he seem?”

  “Fine. Quite normal.”

  Banks got the milk from the fridge, giving it a quick sniff to see if it was still all right, poured the tea, then sat down opposite Hunt. “I don’t mean to seem so abrupt,” he said, “but I’m concerned. Roy left a rather disturbing message on my answering service, and when I came down here to see him he’d disappeared and the front door was unlocked.”

  “I can see why you would be concerned,” said Hunt.

  “So the two of you chatted often?”

  “Yes,” said Hunt. “We’d often spend an hour or two together, usually at the vicarage, sometimes over lunch.”

  Roy lunching at the vicarage was an image Banks found very hard to visualize. “Did he open up to you? I mean, did he…”

  “I know what you mean.” Hunt shifted in his chair. “Yes, I’d say he opened up about his feelings. At least to some extent.”

  “Feelings about what?”

  “Many things.”

  “I’m afraid that’s a bit too vague for me,” said Banks. “Do you think you could be more specific? It’s not as if you took his confession or anything.” Banks realized that he hadn’t ascertained what denomination Hunt represented. “I mean, you’re not Catholic, are you?”

  “Church of England. But I don’t know how much I can help you. Roy never went into great detail about anything he did.”

  “I don’t suppose he would,” said Banks. “But did you get any idea why he started attending church on the sixteenth of September, 2001, other than some vague sense of unease about the way the world was going?”

  “It wasn’t that.” Hunt took a deep breath. “It’s my feeling that your brother had lost his moral compass, had become so engrossed in the making of money that how he made it no longer mattered to him.”

  “He’s not unusual in that,” said Banks.

  “No. But it’s my guess that what happened in New York on the eleventh brought it home to him in no uncertain terms.”

  “You’re not saying he was somehow connected to the attacks, are you?”

  “Oh, no,” said Hunt. “No, you’re missing the point entirely.”

  “What, then?”

  “Didn’t he tell you? He was there.”

  Banks had to pause a moment to take this in. “Roy was in New York when the attacks took place?”

  Ian Hunt nodded. “According to what he told me, he had an appointment with a banker in the second tower. He was running late and his taxi got caught up in traffic. The next thing he knew, everyone was coming to a halt and getting out of their cars, some of them pointing up. Roy got out, too, and he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The smoke and flames. People jumping out of windows. It took him three days to get on a flight home.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Banks. “Sorry. He never told me this.”

  “But you’re not close, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Anyway, it gave him pause for thought—the enormity of it all, fate, how everything was connected, what unimaginable consequences could arise from seemingly unimportant, unrelated actions. These were all things he wanted to talk about. I had no answers, but he seemed to find something of what he wanted in the church, in prayer, Holy Communion, and in our discussions.”

  Banks remembered what Burgess had said about the arms deal. Roy had found out that a shipment he had brokered had found its way into the wrong hands. Had Roy really been so naive as to think that arms dealing was just a business like any other? He probably hadn’t given it too much thought, Banks decided, lured by the money and the excitement. Warned off by Special Branch, he had backed away from that line of work immediately, but he had witnessed the attacks on the World Trade Center and he was stricken by conscience, by the fact that guns or missiles he had exported could have been used in something like this. Roy realized he had crossed a line and he didn’t like what he saw on the other side.

  Suicide bombers in distant desert places are one thing, but being there, in New York, on the eleventh of September, 2001, and witnessing what happened must have been devastating. It certainly made it impossible for Roy to remain willfully ignorant of the kind of things terrorists intended to do to the West, given the means and opportunity. And, unknowingly or not, Roy had ?nce helped out with the means. Hence the guilt. Roy had turned to the church for absolution.

  This was a new perspective on his brother, and one that would take Banks a little time to get used to. It certainly didn’t match the Roy he remembered from the last time he had seen him just eight months ago, but then that had been Roy-at-home, a careful image he projected for his parents. Had Roy even told their parents what he had seen? Banks doubted it. Despite his religion, though, Roy had continued to make money; he had hardly given it all to charity and taken a vow of poverty, or chastity, for that matter. Clearly guilt only went so far and cut so deep.

  So what had happened to him? Had he lost his moral compass again? The making of money, perhaps even more than the money itself, was an addiction to some people, like gambling, heroin or cigarettes. Banks had given up smoking the previous summer when he found out that an old schoolfriend had died from lung cancer, but he had started again after a fire took his home, his possessions and, almost, his life. Where was the logic in that? But such is the nature of addiction.

  “Has anything in your recent conversations given you any reason to think Roy might have got into some sort of dangerous gray area again?” Banks asked.

>   “No,” said Hunt. “Nothing.”

  “He didn’t mention his business activities?”

  “We didn’t talk about business. Our conversations were mostly of a philosophical and spiritual nature. Look, I know Roy’s not a natural man of religion, and I very much doubt that he’s a saint, even after what happened, but he does have a conscience and sometimes it troubles him. He’s still a hard-nosed businessman, the kind of person you’d expect to cut a corner or two and not always ask too many questions, but I’d say he’s a lot more careful these days. He’s drawn his own lines.” Hunt paused. “He’s always looked up to you, you know.”

  “You could have fooled me.” Growing up, Banks had done everything wrong. He had stayed out too late, got caught shoplifting and smoking, got into fights, neglected his school-work, and, the final insult, he had turned away from business studies and chosen a career of which neither of his parents approved. Roy, on the other hand, from five years behind, had watched his brother’s progress and learned what not to do.

  “It’s true,” said Ian Hunt. “He did look up to you, especially when you were children. You just never paid him any attention. You ignored him. He felt neglected, rejected, as if he always let you down.”

  “He was my little brother,” said Banks.

  Hunt nodded. “And always in the way.”

  Banks remembered when he was going out with Kay Summerville, his first serious girlfriend. Roy was about twelve at the time, and whenever their parents went out for a night at the local pub and Banks invited Kay over to listen to records, among other things, he would always have to pay Roy to stay in his room. So maybe Roy was always in the way, Banks thought, but he found the means to profit from it.

  “Anyway,” Banks said, “I wasn’t aware that he looked up to me in any way. He certainly never let it show.”

  “I’m not saying Roy isn’t competitive. You were good at sports, for example. He wasn’t, so he worked hard at what he did best. He compensated.”

  Good? Banks had been a tolerable fly halfback then, fast and slippery. At cricket he hadn’t been much cop as a batsman but had been a decent mid-pace bowler. Roy had been an overweight, bespectacled and unattractive child, not at all athletic? and at school the other kids teased him and called him a swot. Once the bullying got serious enough that Bank stepped in and put an end to it, so no one could say he never did anything for Roy. But he certainly hadn’t done enough.