‘I’ll have a closer look here later. Let’s move on.’
Two of the bedrooms were obviously the children’s, and had been for a number of years. Now that they were both grown up, they probably just stayed there when they came back from university for the holidays. One was a light airy space containing a storage unit stuffed with old dolls and a bookcase full of classics. Banks pulled out a copy of Middlemarch and saw the inscription, ‘To Jessica with love from Auntie Jennifer on your 15th birthday.’ Banks whistled between his teeth. Reading Middlemarch at fifteen was pretty good going; reading Middlemarch at any age was pretty good going. Like most people, Banks had watched it on TV.
The second room, which bore a plaque marking it as ‘Robbie’s Room’, was much darker in colour scheme and had little sign of childhood memorabilia other than a collection of model boats, but there were a few festival and concert posters on the walls: Green Man Festival 2010, Glastonbury 2009, Elbow, Kaiser Chiefs, Paolo Nutini. Banks noticed the electric guitar resting against a small amp in one corner. It reminded him of his own son Brian. No doubt Quinn’s son owned at least one other guitar, probably acoustic; he wouldn’t go off to university for weeks on end without one. There was also a compact CD player, but very few CDs. He probably downloaded most of his music. As for books, there were a few science-fiction and fantasy titles, old copies of MOJO, and that was it.
The third bedroom, the largest, clearly belonged to Quinn and his wife. Like the living room, it was tidy, the bed made, no discarded clothing on the floor, but there was more dust on the windowsill. The wardrobe held a hamper full of dirty laundry. Banks wondered what would happen to it now that its owner was dead. Would it ever be washed? Maybe one of Quinn’s children would wash it and give it to Oxfam.
‘Better go through that lot, too,’ Banks said to DS Palmer. ‘You never know what people leave in their pockets and put in the wash.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Palmer. ‘We have. Not even so much as a used tissue or bus ticket. And there are no signs of disturbance in any of the bedrooms.’
Banks and Palmer returned to the study. Set aside at the edge of the desk was a small heap of file folders. ‘We picked those up off the floor,’ Palmer said. ‘It’s mostly just a lot of general correspondence, day-to-day stuff, bills and so on. We’ll take it all in and go through it in detail, but these may be of more immediate interest.’
Banks doubted it. Not if someone had already been through the place first. He picked up the first folder. Harry Lake. Like most good detectives, Quinn supplemented his official notes and reports with his own observations. These often consisted of intuitions, gut feelings and imaginative ramblings that wouldn’t make it past his SIO’s scrutiny. They might be worth taking back to the station and studying, but Banks wouldn’t give them a high priority. If there had been anything of interest to him in Quinn’s study, it would be gone now. He flipped through the stack. There was nothing on Warren Corrigan or Stephen Lambert, he noticed, but also very little on Rachel Hewitt, the failure that had apparently haunted him. If Quinn had been in the habit of keeping personal files on all his cases, or at least his major cases, then what was missing would probably reveal far more than what was present, even though a clever villain would know to take a few irrelevant files along with the important one, just to muddy the waters.
Banks picked up some more folders and flipped quickly through them. He found a mix of handwritten notes and printed pages, yellow stickies and file cards, along with the occasional photocopy – a parking ticket, train ticket, passport photo, the usual odds and ends of an investigation. As a matter of routine, he checked the undersides of the drawers and backs of the filing cabinets to see if anything had been taped to them, but found nothing.
One thing he did find, in a folder stuffed with old Visa bills, was a photograph. Either the burglar had seen it and decided it was of no interest to him, or he had missed it. Curious, Banks pulled it out. It was of a young girl, aged about eighteen or nineteen, cropped from a group shot. Her arms were stretched out sideways, as if wrapped around the people on either side of her, both of whom were represented only by their shoulders.
At first Banks felt a tremor of excitement because he thought it might have been the girl in Quinn’s photos, but it clearly wasn’t her, even allowing for the possibility of disguise. This girl had fine golden-blonde hair down to her shoulders. It looked as if it had been braided then left free to tumble. She had a small nose in the centre of an oval face, an appealing overbite and light blue eyes, set in the most delicate porcelain complexion. The girl in the photo with Quinn was darker-skinned, more exotic, with fuller lips and dark eyes. This one was an English rose. So who was it? She seemed familiar, a face he had seen, perhaps more than once, and he guessed that she was Rachel Hewitt. Keith Palmer couldn’t help him. Just in case Banks was completely out on a limb he took the photo downstairs and checked it against the framed family shots he had noticed on the sideboard. It certainly wasn’t Quinn’s daughter. She had coarser brown hair, was carrying far more weight, and could by no means be said to have a porcelain complexion.
And when he looked up from the family photo, he got the shock of his life to see the same face, this time in the living, breathing flesh, standing right in front of him, a red-faced PC behind her, saying, ‘I’m sorry, sir, I couldn’t stop her. She says she’s Jessica Quinn, DI Quinn’s daughter. She lives here.’
‘I came as soon as I could,’ said Jessica, brushing past Banks into the living room, ‘What’s going on? What are all those people doing here? Have they been searching the house? Have they been in my room?’
Her voice was rising to a hysterical pitch. Banks put his arm on her shoulder, but she shook him off. ‘Jessica—’
‘You can’t do this. You just can’t do this. It’s an invasion of privacy. My father will . . . my father . . .’
And suddenly she crumpled and fell in tears on the sofa. Banks sat down opposite her in an armchair. It was best to let her cry, he thought, as the great chest-racking sobs came from her, even though she buried her face in a cushion. He gestured for DS Palmer to leave the room and carry on with the search. Jessica was still a little overweight, as she was in the family photo, and the baggy jumper and shapeless peasant skirt she wore didn’t flatter her. Her face, when Banks saw it again, was pretty enough, but dotted with teenage acne as well as streaked with tears. Her tangled hair hadn’t been washed or brushed for a few days. She seemed to be what his old politically incorrect colleague DS Jim Hatchley would have described as ‘a hairy-legged eco-feminist,’ though Banks could vouch for neither the legs nor the eco-feminism.
‘Jessica,’ he said, when she had been quiet for a while, ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry you had to walk in on this. But it has to be done, and quickly.’
Jessica reached into her shoulder-bag for a tissue and rubbed her eyes and nose. ‘I know. I’m sorry, too,’ she said. ‘It was just driving up here all by myself, knowing about Dad . . . it got to me. I just got into a terrible state. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I was lucky I didn’t have an accident.’
‘One of our cars would have brought you.’
‘No, I wanted to drive myself. Really. I needed . . . just to be alone. The last place I wanted to be was in the back of a police car. I used to think it was exciting when I was young, when Dad . . .’ She started crying again, more softly this time, and took out another tissue. ‘You must think I’m a terrible softie.’
‘Not at all,’ said Banks. ‘Where’s your brother?’
‘Robbie’s on his way. We talked on the mobile. He was just leaving when I got to my turn-off. You know Keele. It’s in the middle of bloody nowhere, and he doesn’t have a car. I just had to drive along the M62.’ Her eyes filled with tears again. ‘I can’t believe this. How could it happen? First Mum, and now Dad. My God, we’re orphans now.’ She cried again.
‘I know it’s a terrible shock,’ said Banks, ‘but I do need to ask you some questions. How about a cup of tea before we start? It�
�s a bit of a cliché, but I could really do with one myself.’
Banks followed Jessica into the kitchen. He offered to make the tea, but she told him to sit down, she knew where everything was. Banks sat at the solid pine table while Jessica set about boiling the kettle and putting two tea bags into a white teapot with red hearts all over it. The kettle didn’t take long. As she poured the boiling water, Jessica looked at the sink and rubbed her sleeve across her eyes. ‘Typical Dad. He just lets things pile up like that. All neat and tidy and clean, of course, but honestly, I mean, who else would just leave a dish rack full of dishes if he knew he was going away for two weeks? And I’ll bet he didn’t think to empty out the fridge. I don’t even dare open it.’
‘It’s not too bad,’ said Banks. ‘There’s a bit of green stuff here and there, but at least it doesn’t smell. The milk’s off.’ His own fridge went like that occasionally, too, with things changing colour and starting to smell a bit, but he saw no point in admitting that to Jessica.
‘Men. Just sugar do, then?’
‘Please. Two teaspoons.’
The tea ready, Jessica poured, set the two mugs down on the table and slumped in a chair, resting her chin in her hands. ‘I just can’t get my head around this.’ She gave Banks a sudden sharp glance. ‘What happened? Will I have to identify the body?’
‘Somebody will,’ said Banks. ‘You or your brother. Don’t worry. The family liaison officer will deal with all that. She should be here soon. Didn’t they tell you what happened?’
‘Only that he was dead.’
‘He was murdered, Jessica. That’s why we’re here. That’s why there are men searching the house.’
‘Murdered? Dad? But he wasn’t even at work. He was . . .’
‘I know. He was killed in the grounds of St Peter’s. It was quick. He wouldn’t have suffered.’
Her eyes brimmed with tears again. ‘They always say that. How do you know? I’ll bet you suffer a lot if you know you’ll be dead in even a split second.’
There was no reply to that. Banks sipped the hot, sweet tea. Just what he needed.
‘There’s been a break in here,’ he said. ‘We think it’s connected. They’ve been through your dad’s study. Maybe you can help us determine what’s missing.’
‘I’m only here in the holidays. I wouldn’t know what’s supposed to be where, especially in Dad’s study. None of us were allowed in there.’
‘Do you know whether your father owned a laptop?’
‘Yes, he did.’
Well, that was one question answered, but it begged another. ‘Did he use it much? I’m wondering why he didn’t take it with him to St Peter’s. I mean, laptops are small and light enough to carry around. That’s what they’re for. As far as I know, they had Wi-Fi available up there.’
Jessica gave him a sad, indulgent smile. ‘Dad was such a Luddite when it came to things like that. Oh, he had one – he could just about do email and stuff like that – but it was always me or Robbie had to sort it out for him whenever we came up. He was always messing it up, getting viruses, ignoring error messages. If something didn’t work immediately, he just kept pressing the “enter” key or clicking the mouse. Honestly, he’d have about ten copies of Internet Explorer open at the same time, and he wondered why it was running so slowly. He was hopeless.’
‘Did he use it for writing or anything else? Facebook?’
‘Writing? Dad hated writing. Reports were the bane of his life. And Facebook . . . well, I’d blush if I had to tell you what he thought about social networks. No, if anything, he probably used it a bit for surfing the Internet, you know fishing and gardening sites, that sort of thing. And he did manage to work out Skype so we could talk for free during term time. Half the time he couldn’t get the video bit working, though, so it was voice only.’
‘Games?’
‘I doubt it. He wasn’t much of a one for computer games. Now trivia, that’s another thing. He probably used Wikipedia a lot.’
Banks smiled. He supposed, then, that there wasn’t much, if anything, of value on Quinn’s laptop, except, perhaps, for some emails. Whoever had taken it had probably done so as a safety measure, just in case there was something incriminating on it, or because he believed it contained information he wanted. In either case, he was probably out of luck. If Quinn wasn’t a big computer fan, they had a far better hope of finding something interesting in his phone call logs than in his emails, Banks reckoned. ‘Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to harm your father?’ he asked.
‘No. I mean, really. I suppose maybe some of those villains he caught. But he was well liked. He didn’t have a lot of close friends outside of work. He was a bit of a loner, bit of an anorak, if truth be told. He liked being off by himself fishing and bird-watching. And working on his allotment. I used to go with him and help him sometimes when I was younger, especially on the allotment, but you know . . . you change . . . lose interest . . . grow apart. Robbie used to go to the tarn sailing model boats with him. He used to build them himself. Lovely, some of them, the detail. Now we just tease him about being an old anorak.’ She put her hand to her face and stifled a sob. ‘Sorry.’
Banks could feel sympathy. His own children had been the same, interested in whatever seven-day wonder he had been passionate about at the time until they were about thirteen, and then they didn’t want to know; they just wanted to be off with their friends. He made a mental note to ask Keith Palmer’s lads to check out Quinn’s allotment. The odds were that he’d have at least a little gardening shed there. It might be just the sort of place to hide something, and the burglar would probably not have known about it.
Jessica’s expression had become wistful, and Banks got the impression that she wished she hadn’t lost interest in the things that bound her to her father, that she had continued to help him on the allotment and accompany him on fishing trips and bird-watching expeditions, that they hadn’t grown apart. But it happens to everyone. There was nothing he could say to her to make her feel better. It was too late now.
His own father had been a keen cyclist in his younger days, Banks remembered, and many was the day Banks had accompanied him on rides beside the Nene, or across the Cambridgeshire flatlands, when he was eleven or twelve. But like his own children, and like Jessica, the older he had got, the less interested he had become in going with his father on bicycle rides. All he wanted to do was hang around with his mates listening to the latest Beatles, Bob Dylan or Animals record. There had been no room for adults and their boring interests in his world. He was lucky his father was still alive – at least they had been able to rebuild a few bridges in the past few years – but they wouldn’t be going on any bicycle rides together again.
‘It was most likely to do with his work,’ Banks said. ‘Do you know if he received any threatening letters or phone calls recently?’
‘No. But I’ve been at university since Christmas, except I came home when Mum died, of course, and he didn’t mention anything then. He never talked about that stuff at home. His job. Well, hardly ever. Sometimes he’d tell us funny stories about things that happened at the station, but I think he liked to protect us from the bad stuff.’
Exactly as Banks had done with Brian and Tracy. ‘So you can’t think of anyone who wanted to harm him? He didn’t get any threats or anything?’
‘Not that I know of.’ Jessica cradled her mug in both hands and took a sip.
‘I did find one thing you might be able to help me with,’ Banks said, going back into the living room for the photo he had left there. He brought it through to the kitchen and turned it around on the table so that Jessica could get a good look. ‘Is this Rachel Hewitt?’
‘That’s Rachel. She’s so beautiful, isn’t she?’ Jessica bit her lower lip, the tears flowing over. ‘He could never let it go, you know. Never let her go. It’s like she was his only failure, and he had to beat himself up with it every time he got a bit down. It used to drive Mum crazy.’
�
��It wasn’t his fault,’ said Banks. ‘They still haven’t found her.’
‘That’s because she’s dead,’ said Jessica. ‘She was dead right from the start. And if you don’t mind my saying so, you’re being terribly naive if you think saying it wasn’t his fault ever did any good. As far as he was concerned, it was his fault. He wasn’t entirely logical about it. We tried to tell him, time after time, but it didn’t work. Why couldn’t they all just believe that she was dead? Why couldn’t he just believe it? Besides, can you imagine what her life would be like if she’d been abducted by some pervert and kept in a cellar as some sort of sex slave? Or forced into prostitution?’
‘Even if he had believed that she was dead,’ said Banks, ‘it wouldn’t have stopped him from doing his job, or from blaming himself. If he was a good copper, he would still have needed to know what happened to her, and why.’
She gave Banks a sharp glance. ‘A good copper. What’s that supposed to mean? Anyway, why do you want to know about this? What does any of it have to do with Dad’s death?’
‘I’ve got no idea. Probably nothing. The photo was just sitting there in a folder full of Visa bills, with no identification or anything. The name came up before. She seemed familiar . . .’
‘She should be. Her face has been plastered over the papers often enough these past six years or so. Still is every now and then, when her parents step up the campaign again.’
Banks could hardly imagine how he would feel if his own daughter disappeared completely without trace in a foreign country, but he had always felt a deep sympathy for the Hewitts and their ongoing grief. They had suffered at the hands of the media, too, and were now caught up as victims in the never-ending phone-hacking scandal, which must make it hurt all over again. Banks was suspicious of ‘closure’ and all it implied, thought it was some sort of modern psycho-babble, but he knew that in their case there could be no rest, no peace, until their daughter’s body was recovered and returned home.
Watching the Dark (Inspector Banks Mystery) Page 6