There was a DAB radio, but no stereo system or CDs. A wide-screen TV dominated one wall, and beside it stood a bookcase crammed with DVDs. A lot of sports, Banks noticed, some block-buster movies and a few American TV series, such as The Simpsons, 24 and CSI. There were a few books, too, mostly tattered paperbacks by Ken Follett, Jack Higgins, Chris Ryan or Andy McNab, along F R I E N D O F T H E D E V I L
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with some texts on criminal law and American tomes on investigative procedure. There were no framed family photographs on the mantelpiece, and the only wall decoration was a cheaply framed poster for Psycho that Banks remembered had been given away free in a newspaper just last year.
The toilet-and-bathroom combination revealed the usual things—
shampoo, toothpaste, paracetamol, hair gel, razor, shaving cream and so on. No prescription drugs. The towel that hung over the side of the bath was still damp, and beads of moisture dotted the sides and bottom of the tub and wall tiles.
In the kitchen, Templeton’s freezer was empty apart from a tray of ice cubes, and in the fridge Banks found milk, eggs, cheese, HP Sauce, tomato ketchup, the remains of an Indian takeaway and a Tupperware container of leftover spaghetti Bolognese. There was also a wine rack full of Tesco’s and Sainsbury’s wines—pretty good ones, too, Banks noticed—and a fairly expensive espresso-making machine.
Which left the small bedroom, with its double bed and night table with shaded lamp, and one large wardrobe full of clothes and shoes. The suits were good quality. Not exactly Armani or Paul Smith, but Banks would have been very suspicious if Templeton had owned such expensive clothing on a detective sergeant’s salary. The only photograph in the f lat stood on his dressing table under the window. It showed a young girl, perhaps eighteen or nineteen, her long hair blowing in the wind, hand held up to hold it out of her eyes, smiling at the camera, squinting slightly in the sun, autumn leaves swirling around her. Banks had no idea who it was or why Templeton kept it in his bedroom. A girlfriend, perhaps? He had never talked about his private life.
There was nothing but loose change, condoms and pen and paper in the night-table drawer. A digital alarm clock set for 6:00 a.m. stood on top.
Banks went back into the living room and sat at Templeton’s desk.
The laptop computer was password- protected and would have to go down to technical support for analysis. Banks riff led through the drawers and found a stack of ledger-sized notebooks filled with Templeton’s neat but crabbed hand. Entries were dated, like a diary, but all Templeton wrote about was the cases he worked on. Banks checked the most 2 9 0 P E T E R
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recent ledger and found that Templeton had written up what he had done on Friday night:
0000h. Entered Maze via car park entrance. Light poor. Buildings high, many overhanging. Impossible to keep an eye on the whole place. Distant sounds from square as the pubs close. Nobody comes here. No footsteps.
0023h. Hear snatch of The Streets “Fit But You Know It” from a car whizzing by, or a door opening and closing, then it’s gone.
Muff led dance music from inside the Bar None. More waiting.
More nothing. Still sure I’m right. Killer will strike again, and what a good way of having a laugh at us it would be if he did it the following week, in the same place!
Summary: Hung around until two o’clock and nothing happened.
When the town had been silent for half an hour and it was clear that neither killer nor victim was going to come here tonight, I decided to end the surveillance for this evening.
So Banks’s theory about Templeton privately policing The Maze had been right. Not that it was any great consolation in the face of the young lad’s murder. Banks took one more glance around the f lat, then he locked up and headed back to the station, taking the ledger with him.
I T WA S a long drive to Eastvale and Annie wasn’t entirely sure that it was justified, but what Banks had said over the phone had intrigued and disturbed her enough. There had been no way she was going back to bed after Keith McLaren’s phone call, anyway, no matter how tired she felt. And so she meandered over the moors that Sunday morning, with hardly any traffic to slow her down. The sun had burned off the morning mist completely by then, and it was a freshly scrubbed spring day.
When Annie walked into the Western Area Headquarters at about half past ten, she could sense the strained and melancholy atmosphere.
Even if Banks hadn’t told her, she would have known immediately that a policeman had been killed. There was no other atmosphere like it.
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People bent over their tasks with gritted teeth, tempers were short and over it all lay a pall of shock and outrage.
Banks was in his office with Winsome standing beside him as he shuff led through a pile of papers on his desk. He stood up to greet Annie, and she could detect none of the hostility from him that she might have expected after their last meeting. That only made her feel worse.
He ought to hate her. Of the two, only Winsome seemed frosty. She left almost immediately after a brusque “hello.” Banks gestured for Annie to sit down and called for coffee.
“Sorry I rang so early,” he said. “I hope you didn’t have a wild night on the town last night.”
“Why would you think that?” Annie said.
“No reason. It was Saturday night, that’s all. People do tend to go out. Or maybe you stayed in with your boyfriend?”
“What boyfriend?”
“The one you told me about the other night. The young lad.”
Annie reddened. “Oh, him. Yeah, well, have you ever had a wild night out in Whitby?”
“Many times,” said Banks, with a smile.
“Then you know more about the hidden charms of the place than I do. Anyway, I was already up and working when you rang.” She paused.
“I really am sorry to hear about Kev. I wasn’t a fan, as you know, but no matter what I thought of him as a man or as a detective, I’m sorry about what happened to him.”
“He wasn’t a man, really,” said Banks. “The poor sod was just a boy. A lot of us seemed to forget that.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was headstrong, impetuous, immature.”
Annie managed a weak grin. “Those qualities are the prerogative of youth all of a sudden, are they?”
“Touché,” said Banks. “Anyway, that’s what I want to talk to you about, really. What happened to Kev.” Banks gave her a quick run-down of what he knew so far, most of which he had pieced together from Chelsea Pilton’s eyewitness account and scraps of information from PC Kerrigan, Stefan Nowak and Dr. Burns. “You’ll agree there are similarities with the Lucy Payne murder?”
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“My God, yes.” Annie ran her hand through her tousled hair. “I had no idea.” She told Banks about her conversations with Sarah Bingham and Keith McLaren, and how the mysterious Kirsten Farrow’s name kept coming up. “What the hell is going on, Alan?” she asked.
“I wish I knew,” said Banks. “But whatever it is, I don’t like it.”
“You and me, neither. Any ideas on who this mystery woman is?”
“I suppose it could be this Kirsten. Anything on Maggie Forrest yet?”
“Yes. Ginger tracked her down through her publishers. She’s back in Leeds. I was thinking of paying her a visit this afternoon. But what makes you think of her? I mean, she might have had a good motive for Lucy Payne’s murder, but she had none at all for Templeton’s, as far as we know.”
“True,” said Banks. “It could be two different killers. We’ll try to keep an open mind, but my guess, like yours, is that if it’s not Maggie, it could be Kirsten Farrow somehow, and for some reason, returned, remodeled. But how or why, or who or where she is, I have no idea. I don’t even know how we can get a lead on that. She dropped out of sight years ago. It’s a pity the Australian’s memory isn’t any
better.”
“The only thing I can think of,” said Annie, “is to go back to the source of the leak again.”
“Leak?”
“Yes. It was one of the first things we started thinking about when we discovered that Karen Drew was really Lucy Payne. Who knew?
And how?”
“And?”
“We still don’t know. Our people have been questioning the staff at Mapston Hall, and the Nottingham police have been helping us out down there at the hospital and social services. I mean, it’s a tricky one.
Anyone could be lying, and we’d be hard pushed to prove it.”
“What we need,” said Banks, “is a connection between one of the people who knew that Karen was Lucy, and someone who might possibly be Kirsten Farrow or Maggie Forrest, or know one of them.”
“Yes,” said Annie, “but how do we unearth that? And how would we know if we’d found it? We don’t even know where to start looking F R I E N D O F T H E D E V I L
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for Kirsten. For Christ’s sake, we don’t even know that it was her who killed those men eighteen years ago.”
“But you’ve got a pretty strong feeling that it was, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think happened to her?”
Annie thought for a moment. Her brain felt sluggish, but she recalled Les Ferris’s tale and what she had since heard from Keith McLaren and Sarah Bingham, and she tried to string her thoughts into something resembling a logical sequence. “From what I can piece together,” she said, “Kirsten must have figured out somehow the identity of her attacker, only she didn’t pass this information on to the police; she went after revenge herself. She finally tracked him down to Whitby—how, I don’t know—and after a false start—Jack Grimley, the poor unlucky sod—she killed him.”
“And the Australian?”
“I don’t know. We talked about that. It’s possible he came too close to working out what was going on. If he knew she was the same person who was in Whitby when Grimley died, and he could link her to him . . . ? Keith McLaren did tell me that he’d noticed Kirsten staring at someone in The Lucky Fisherman—and this is something he only remembered fairly recently—so she might have figured he was a danger to her. Or . . .”
“Yes?”
“Well, we know he was found in some woods outside Staithes, and that he was seen with a young woman. Say they went for a walk in the woods, things went too far for Kirsten—remember, she was totally traumatized by her experiences as well as mutilated—and she killed him, or thought she had.”
“Self-defense?”
“In her eyes. Maybe overkill in ours. I really don’t believe that Keith McLaren is a rapist.”
“Okay,” said Banks. “And next?”
“I can’t imagine how she must have felt when she had done what she set out to do and finally killed Eastcote, but she couldn’t go back to her old life. She hung around the fringes of it, for a while, saw Sarah a few 2 9 4 P E T E R
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more times, her parents, perhaps played at being normal, then she finally dropped out of sight a couple of years later. She wasn’t a serious suspect at the time, remember. She had an alibi, and as far as anyone knew, she had no way of knowing that Greg Eastcote was her attacker. That only came out later, when the police searched his house. It’s only now that she seems to have become a suspect in four murders, two of them eighteen years after the others. Anything could have happened since then.
She could have gone anywhere, become anyone, done anything.”
“So what do we know about her?” Banks said. “She’d be, what, forty by now?”
“About that, if she’d just finished uni in 1988.”
“And she could be anyone, in any walk of life?”
“Yes. But let’s not forget that she had a university degree. Only English Lit, but even so . . . By all accounts she was a bright girl with a great future ahead of her. I mean, the odds are that we might be dealing with a professional woman.”
“Unless her experiences completely undermined her ambitions,”
Banks argued. “But it’s a good point. If she really has done what we think she’s done, she’s incredibly focused, determined and resourceful.
Anyway, it narrows things down. We can certainly check university records. We’re looking for a professional woman, most likely, who could have known that Karen Drew was Lucy Payne.”
“Julia Ford, Lucy’s lawyer, for a start. Ginger went to talk to her again on Friday afternoon and she wasn’t convinced she was telling us everything she knows.”
“Lawyers are naturally tight when it comes to giving information.”
“I know,” said Annie. “But Ginger thinks it was more than that with Julia Ford. I trust her instincts.”
“Maybe I should go and have a word with Ms. Ford,” Banks said.
“It’s been a while since we crossed swords.”
“Sarah Bingham’s a lawyer, too, though she says she hasn’t seen Kirsten in years.”
“Believe her?”
“I think so,” Annie said.
“Okay. Who else?”
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“A doctor?” Annie suggested. “Perhaps from the hospital she was in near Nottingham. Or Mapston Hall. There are doctors and nurses there.”
“Good point,” said Banks.
“One thing still gets me, though,” said Annie. “If we’re on the right track, why would she kill Templeton?”
“Another mistake?” Banks suggested. “She thought he was the killer stalking the girl, when in fact he was protecting her, like she must have thought Grimley was her attacker eighteen years ago? But you’re right. We need much more corroboration than we’ve got so far that the murders are linked. Who’s your crime scene coordinator?”
“Liam McCullough.”
“He’s a good bloke,” said Banks. “Have him consult with Stefan on this. There has to be trace evidence in common: hairs, fibers, blood, the dimensions of the wound, something to link Lucy Payne and Kev.
Let’s see if we can get the pathologists talking to each other, too, when Dr. Wallace has finished with Kev.”
“Okay,” said Annie. “Les Ferris has tracked down the hair samples from the Greg Eastcote case to compare Kirsten’s with the ones Liam and his team collected from Lucy Payne. He says he should be able to get a comparison fixed up for tomorrow morning. That could at least tell us once and for all whether it’s her we are dealing with or not. We also need to know why, if it is Kirsten, she started again after all this time.”
“If we’re right about her motivation,” said Banks, “then I’d guess it’s because she hasn’t been close to any other sex murderers over the past eighteen years. I’m going down to Leeds again sometime this week.
While I’m there, I’ll talk to Julia Ford, see if I can push her in the right direction, and I’ll have a read through the old Chameleon postmortem reports Phil Hartnell got out. I have to check, but I seem to remember that the wounds the Paynes inf licted on their victims were similar to those that Kirsten’s attacker inf licted on her, from what you tell me. I know it can’t have been the same killer—Terence Payne is dead, and this Greg Eastcote seemed pretty definite for the killings eighteen years back—but maybe the similarity set her off.”
“But how could Kirsten know that the Paynes inf licted similar wounds on their victims?” Annie asked.
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“There were plenty of media reports at the time, and later, after Lucy Payne was kicked loose. The press didn’t waste a moment in reminding people exactly what had been set free among them by our legal system, whether she could walk or not. Kirsten Farrow is also scarred physically, remember, and that could help us, too.”
“I don’t see how,” said Annie. “We can hardly ask every woman connected with the case to strip to the waist.”
“Pity,” said Ba
nks. “But you’re right.”
Annie rolled her eyes.
“Anyway,” Banks went on, “we’ve got more than enough to be going on with. Let’s compare notes again when you’ve talked to Maggie Forrest.”
Annie stood up. “Right you are.” She paused at the door. “Alan?”
“Yes.”
“It’s good to be working together again.”
T H E R E S T of Banks’s Sunday went by in a whirl of meetings and interviews, none of which threw any more light on either the Hayley Daniels or the Kevin Templeton murders—both, apparently, killed by different people, for different reasons, in the same place.
Templeton’s parents arrived from Salford to identify their son’s body, and Banks had a brief meeting with them in the mortuary. It was the least courtesy he could offer under the circumstances. He thought it would also be a good idea to let them believe their son had been killed in the line of duty rather than acting on his own initiative.
Templeton’s mother broke down in tears and talked about how they’d failed him, and how it all went back to when his sister ran away from home at seventeen, though she swore it wasn’t really their fault, that they couldn’t keep a girl who was sleeping with men the way she was in a god-fearing house. They’d tried to find her afterward, the father explained, even reported her missing to the police, but to no avail.
And now they’d lost their son, too.
Banks now thought he knew who was in the photograph on Templeton’s bedside table, and why Kev had sometimes been so hard on F R I E N D O F T H E D E V I L
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families he interviewed. Christ, he thought, the secrets and burdens people carry around with them.
He needed to talk to Stuart Kinsey again about the snatch of music he had heard in The Maze the night Hayley was killed. Templeton said he had heard something similar in his notes, and Banks had a theory he wanted to put to the test.
As a result of all that, it was past six o’clock before he realized that he hadn’t rung Sophia about their proposed walk. It wasn’t that he hadn’t thought of her often during the day—in fact she was powerfully and frequently present in his thoughts for someone he had only just met—
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