Aftermath

12

Banks hadn’t had a break all day, had even missed his lunch interviewing Lucy Payne, so with no real plan in mind, around three o’clock that afternoon, he found himself wandering down an alley off North Market Street toward the Old Ship Inn, heavy with the recent news that the second body discovered in the back garden of 35 The Hill was definitely not Leanne Wray’s.

Lucy Payne was being held in a cell in the basement of police headquarters and Julia Ford had booked herself in at The Burgundy, Eastvale’s best, most expensive hotel. The task force and forensics people were working as fast and as hard as they could, and Jenny Fuller was probing Lucy’s past – all looking for that one little chink in her armor, that one little piece of hard evidence that she was more involved with the killings than she let on. Banks knew that if they unearthed nothing more by noon tomorrow, he’d have to let her go. He had one more visit to make today: to talk to George Woodward, the detective inspector who had done most of the legwork on the Alderthorpe investigation, now retired and running a B amp;B in Withernsea. Banks glanced at his watch. It would take him about two hours: plenty of time to head out there after a drink and a bite to eat and still get back before too late.

The Old Ship was a shabby, undistinguished Victorian watering hole with a few benches scattered in the cobbled alley out front. Not much light got in, as the buildings all around were dark and high. Its claim to fame was that it was well-hidden and known to be tolerant of underage drinkers. Many an Eastvale lad, so Banks had heard, had sipped his first pint at the Old Ship well before his eighteenth birthday. The sign showed an old clipper ship, and the windows were of smoked, etched glass.

It wasn’t very busy at that time of day, between the lunch-hour and the after-work crowd. Indeed, the Old Ship wasn’t busy very often at all, as few tourists liked the look of it, and most locals knew better places to drink. The interior was dim and the air stale and acrid with more than a hundred years’ accumulated smoke and beer spills. Which made it all the more surprising that the barmaid was a pretty young girl with short, dyed red hair and an oval face, a smooth complexion, a bright smile and a cheerful disposition.

Banks leaned against the bar. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a cheese-and-onion sandwich, is there?”

“Sorry,” she said. “We don’t serve food after two. Packet of chips – sorry, crisps – okay?”

“Better than nothing,” said Banks.

“What flavor?”

“Plain will do fine. And a pint of bitter shandy, too, please.”

As she was pouring the drink and Banks was dipping into a packet of rather soggy potato crisps, she kept glancing at him out of the corner of her eye and finally said, “Aren’t you the policeman who was here about that girl who disappeared a month or so ago?”

“Leanne Wray,” said Banks. “Yes.”

“I thought so. I saw you here. You weren’t the policeman I talked to, but you were here. Have you found her yet?”

“It’s Shannon, isn’t it?”

She smiled. “You remember my name and you never even talked to me. I’m impressed.”

Shannon, Banks remembered from the statement taken by DC Winsome Jackman, was an American student taking a year off from her studies. She had already traveled around most of Europe, and through relatives and, Banks suspected, a boyfriend, she had ended up spending a few months in Yorkshire, which she seemed to like. Banks guessed that she was working at the Old Ship, perhaps, because the manager wasn’t concerned about visas and permits, and paid cash in hand. Probably not much of it, either.

Banks lit a cigarette and looked around. A couple of old men sat smoking pipes by the window, not speaking, not even looking at one another. They seemed as if they might have been there since the place first opened in the nineteenth century. The floor was worn stone and the tables scored and wobbly. A watercolor of a huge sailing ship hung crookedly on one wall, and on the opposite one, a series of framed charcoal sketches of seagoing scenes, quite good to Banks’s untrained eye.

“I wasn’t trying to be nosy,” Shannon said. “I was only asking because I haven’t seen you since and I’ve been reading about those girls in Leeds.” She gave a little shudder. “It’s horrible. I remember being in Milwaukee – that’s where I’m from, Milwaukee, Wisconsin – when all the Jeffrey Dahmer stuff was going on. I was only a kid but I knew what it was all about and we were all scared and confused. I don’t know how people can do things like that, do you?”

Banks looked at her, saw the innocence, the hope and the faith that her life would turn out to be worth living and that the world wasn’t an entirely evil place, no matter what bad things happened in it. “No,” he said. “I don’t.”

“So you haven’t found her, then? Leanne?”

“No.”

“It’s not that I knew her or anything. I only saw her once. But, you know, when something like that happens, like you think you might be the last person to have seen someone, well…” She rested her hand on her chest. “It sort of sticks with you, if you know what I mean. I can’t get the picture out of my mind. Her sitting over there by the fireplace.”

Banks thought of Claire Toth, whipping herself over Kimberley Myers’s murder, and he knew that anyone remotely connected with what Payne had done felt tainted by it. “I know what you mean,” he said.

One of the old men came up to the bar and plunked his half-pint glass down. Shannon filled it for him; he paid and went back to his chair. She wrinkled her nose. “They’re in here every day. You can set your watch by them. If one of them didn’t turn up I’d have to call an ambulance.”

“When you say you can’t get Leanne’s image out of your mind, does that mean you’ve given any more thought to that evening?”

“Not really,” said Shannon. “I mean, I thought… you know, that she’d been taken, like the others. That’s what everyone thought.”

“I’m starting to believe that might not be the case,” said Banks, putting his fear into words for the first time. “In fact, I’m beginning to think we might have been barking up the wrong tree on that one.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Anyway,” Banks went on. “I just thought I’d drop by, see if you remembered anything you forgot to mention before, that sort of thing. It’s been a while.” And that, he knew, meant that any trail Leanne may had left would have gone cold. If they had screwed up in assuming too quickly that Leanne Wray had been abducted by the same person, or persons, as Kelly Matthews and Samantha Foster, then any clues as to what had really happened could well have vanished forever by now.

“I don’t know how I can help,” said Shannon.

“Tell me,” said Banks, “you say they were sitting over there, right?” He pointed to the table by the empty tiled fireplace.

“Yes. Four of them. At that table.”

“Did they drink much?”

“No. I told the policewoman before. They only had a drink or two each. I didn’t think she was old enough but the landlord tells us not to bother too much, unless it’s really obvious.” She put her hand over her mouth. “Shoot, I probably shouldn’t have said that, should I?”

“Don’t worry about it. We know all about Mr. Parkinson’s practices. And don’t worry about what you told us before, Shannon. I know I could go and look it all up in the files if I wanted, but I want you to start again, as if it had never happened before.”

It was hard to explain to a civilian, but Banks needed the feel of investigating Leanne’s disappearance as if it were a fresh crime. He didn’t want to start by poring over old files in his office – though it would no doubt come to that if something didn’t turn up soon – he wanted to start by revisiting the place where she had last been seen.

“Did Leanne seem intoxicated at all?” he asked.

“She was a bit giggly, a bit loud, as if maybe she wasn’t used to the drink.”

“What was she drinking?”

“I can’t remember. Not beer. Maybe wine, or it could have been Pernod, something like that.”

“Did you get the impression that the four of them had paired off? Anything along those lines?”

Shannon thought for a moment. “No. Two of them were clearly a couple. You could tell by the way they were touching one another casually. I mean, it’s not as if they were necking or anything. But the other two, Leanne and…”

“Mick Blair,” said Banks.

“I don’t know their names. Anyway, I got the impression he might have been a bit keen, and she was flirting a bit, maybe because of the drinks.”

“Was he bothering her at all?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that, or I’d have a made a point of saying so before. No, just the way I caught him looking at her once or twice. They seemed comfortable enough together, but as I say, I just thought maybe he fancied her and she was playing him along a bit, that’s all.”

“You didn’t mention this before.”

“It didn’t seem important. Besides, nobody asked me. Back then, everyone was more concerned that she’d been abducted by a serial killer.”

True enough, Banks thought, with a sigh. Leanne’s parents had been adamant that she was a good girl and would never, under any normal circumstances, break a curfew. So certain were they that she must have been attacked or abducted that their certainty influenced the investigation, and the police broke one of their cardinal rules: Don’t make assumptions until you’ve checked out every possible angle. People were also making noises about Kelly Matthews and Samantha Foster at the time, so Leanne’s disappearance – another nice, well-adjusted teenager – became linked with theirs. And there was, of course, the matter of the abandoned shoulder bag. In it were Leanne’s inhaler, which she needed in case of an asthma attack, and her purse, which contained twenty-five pounds and a handful of change. It made no sense that she would throw away her money if she was running away from home. Surely she would need all she could get?

DC Winsome Jackman had questioned Shannon, and perhaps she should have asked more probing questions, but Banks couldn’t blame Winsome for the omissions. She had discovered what mattered at the time: that the group had been well-behaved, that they had caused no problems, that there had been no arguments, that they weren’t drunk, and that there had been no unwelcome attention from strangers. “What was their general mood?” Banks asked. “Did they seem quiet, rambunctious, or what?”

“I don’t remember anything unusual about them. They weren’t causing any trouble, or I’m sure I’d have said. Usually you get that with people who know they’re drinking underage. They know they’re under sufferance, if you know what I mean, so they tend not to draw attention to themselves.”

Banks remembered the feeling well. At sixteen he had sat, proud and terrified, with his mate Steve in a poky little pub a mile or so from the estate where they both lived, drinking their first pints of bitter in a corner by the jukebox, smoking Park Drive tipped. They had felt like real grown-ups, but Banks also remembered being worried in case the police came around, or someone who knew them came in – one of his father’s friends, for example – so they tried to fade into the woodwork as much as possible.

He sipped his shandy and crumpled up the crisp packet. Shannon took it from him and put it in the waste bin behind the bar.

“I do remember that they seemed excited about something just before they left, though,” Shannon added. “I mean they were too far away for me to hear anything and they weren’t really noisy about it, but I could tell someone had come up with a good idea for something to do.”

Banks hadn’t heard about this before. “You’ve no idea what it was?”

“No, it was just like, they were going, ‘Yeah, let’s do that.’ Then a couple of minutes later they left.”

“What time was this?”

“Must have been about a quarter to eleven.”

“And they were all excited about this idea? Including Leanne?”

“I couldn’t honestly separate out the reactions for you,” Shannon said with a frown. “It was just a general sort of thing, as if someone had an idea for something to do and they all thought it would be fun.”

“This great idea, did you get the impression it was something they were going to do right then, after they left here?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps. Why?”

Banks finished his drink. “Because Leanne Wray had an eleven-o’clock curfew,” he said. “And according to her parents she never stayed out past her curfew. If she was planning on going off anywhere with them after they’d been here, she’d have missed it. There’s something else, too.”

“What?”

“If they were all planning to do something, it means her friends all lied.”

Shannon thought for a moment. “I see what you mean. But there was no reason to think she wasn’t going home. She might have. I mean, it could have been just the three of them planning something. Look, I’m really sorry… I mean, I never thought, you know, last time. I tried to remember everything that was important.”

“It’s okay,” said Banks, smiling. “Not your fault.” He looked at his watch. Time to head out for Withernsea. “Must dash.”

“Oh. I’m leaving at the end of next week,” said Shannon. “I mean, my last night’s a week next Wednesday, you know, if you’d like to stop by for a drink, say good-bye.”

Banks didn’t know how to take the invitation. Was it a come-on? Surely not. Shannon couldn’t have been a day over twenty-one. Still, it was nice to think there was even the remotest chance that a younger girl fancied him. “Thanks,” he said. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it, so in case I don’t, I’ll say bon voyage now.”

Shannon gave a little “whatever” sort of shrug and Banks walked out into the dismal alley.

It was only mid-afternoon, but Annie would have sworn that Janet Taylor was drunk. Not totally, falling-down pissed, but emitting a slight buzz, fuzzy around the edges. She’d had a bit of experience with drunks at the artists’ commune where she had grown up with her father, Ray. There had once, briefly, been an alcoholic writer, she remembered, a big, smelly man with rheumy eyes and a thick, matted beard. He hid bottles all over the place. Her father told her to stay away from him and once, when the man, whose name she couldn’t remember, started talking to her, her father got angry and made him leave the room. It was one of the few times she had ever seen Ray really angry. He liked a drop or two of wine now and then, and no doubt he still smoked a bit of pot, but he wasn’t a drunk or a drug addict. Most of the time he was consumed by his work, whatever painting it happened to be at the time, to the exclusion of pretty much everything, including Annie.

Janet’s flat was a mess, with clothes strewn everywhere and half-full cups of tea on the windowsill and mantelpiece. It also smelled like a drunk’s room, that peculiar mix of stale skin and the sweet-and-sour smell of booze. Gin, in Janet’s case.

Janet slumped on to a wrinkled T-shirt and a pair of jeans on the armchair, leaving Annie to fend for herself. She cleared some newspapers off a hard-backed chair and sat.

“So what is it now?” Janet asked. “You come to arrest me?”

“Not yet.”

“What, then? More questions?”

“You’ve heard Terence Payne died?”

“I’ve heard.”

“How are you doing, Janet?”

“How am I doing? Ha. That’s a good one. Well, let me see.” She started counting off on her fingers as she spoke. “Apart from not being able to sleep, apart from pacing the flat and feeling claustrophobic whenever it gets dark, apart from reliving the moment over and over again whenever I close my eyes, apart from the fact that my career’s pretty much fucked, let me see… I feel just fine.”

Annie took a deep breath. She certainly wasn’t there to make Janet feel any better, though in a way she wished she could. “You know, you really should seek some sort of counseling, Janet. The Federation will-”

“No! No, I’m not seeing any shrinks. I’ll not have them messing with my head. Not with all this shit going on. When they’ve done with me, I’ll not know whether I’m coming or going. Imagine how that would look in court.”

Annie held her hands up. “Okay. Okay. It’s your choice.” She took some papers from her briefcase. “I’ve attended Terence Payne’s postmortem, and there’s a couple of things I’d like to go over on your statement.”

“Are you saying I was lying?”

“No, not at all.”

Janet ran her hand through her lifeless, greasy hair, “Because I’m not a liar. I might have been a bit confused about the sequence of events – it all happened so fast – but I told it as I remember it.”

“Okay, Janet, that’s fine. Look, in your statement you say you hit Payne three times on the left temple and once on his wrist, and that one of the blows to the temple was delivered two-handed.”

“Did I?”

“Yes. Is that correct?”

“I couldn’t remember exactly how many times or where I hit him, but that seemed about right, yes. Why?”

“According to Dr. Mackenzie’s postmortem, you hit Payne nine times. Three on the temple, one to the wrist, one on the cheek, two to the base of the skull while he was crouching or kneeling, and two to the top of his head while he was squatting or sitting.”

Janet said nothing, and a jet from the airport streamed into the silence, filling it with the roar of engines and the promise of distant, exotic places. Anywhere but here, Annie was thinking, and she guessed that Janet probably felt the same. “Janet?”

“What? I wasn’t aware you’d asked me a question.”

“How do you respond to what I just said?”

“I don’t know. I told you, I wasn’t counting. I was just trying to save my life.”

“Are you sure you weren’t acting out of revenge for Dennis?”

“What do you mean?”

“The number of blows, the position of the victim, the violence of the blows.”

Janet turned red. “Victim! Is that what you call the bastard? Victim. When Dennis was lying there on the floor with his lifeblood pumping away, you call Terence Payne a victim. How dare you?”

“I’m sorry, Janet, but that’s the way a case would be presented in court, and you’d better get used to the idea.”

Janet said nothing.

“Why did you say what you did to the ambulance attendant?”

“What did I say?”

“ ‘Is he dead? Did I kill the bastard?’ What did you mean by that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even remember saying it.”

“It could be construed as meaning you set out to kill him, do you see?”

“I suppose it could be twisted that way, yes.”

“Did you, Janet? Did you intend to kill Terence Payne?”

“No! I told you. I was just trying to save my life. Why can’t you believe me?”

“What about the blows to the back of his head? When might those have occurred in the sequence of events?”

“I don’t know.”

“Try harder. You can do better than that.”

“Maybe when he was bent over reaching for his machete.”

“Okay. But you don’t remember delivering them?”

“No, but I suppose I must have done if you say so.”

“What about those two blows to the top of his head? Dr. Mackenzie tells me they were delivered with a lot of force. They weren’t just random hits.”

Janet shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Annie leaned forward and held Janet’s chin between thumb and forefinger, looking into her blurry, scared eyes. “Listen to me, Janet. Terence Payne was taller than you. By the angle and force of those blows, the only way they could have been delivered was if he was sitting and the attacker had plenty of time to take a huge, uninterrupted downward swing and… well, you get the picture. Come on, Janet. Talk to me. Believe it or not, I’m trying to help you.”

Janet twisted her chin from Annie’s grip and looked away. “What do you want me to say? I’d only get myself deeper in trouble.”

“Not true. You’ll get nowhere if you’re perceived as lying or covering up your actions. That’ll only lead to perjury. The truth’s your best defense. Do you think there’s a person on that jury – if that’s what it comes to – who won’t sympathize with your predicament, even if you did admit to losing it for a few moments? Give yourself a break here, Janet.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Tell the truth. Was that how it happened? Was he down and you just lost your temper, gave him one for Dennis. And, crack, there’s another? Is that how it happened?”

Janet jumped up and began pacing, wringing her hands. “So what if I did give him one or two for Dennis? It was nothing less than he deserved.”

“That’s what you did? You remember now?”

Janet stopped and narrowed her eyes, then she poured herself two fingers of gin and knocked it back. “Not clearly, no, but if you’re telling me that’s how it happened, I can hardly deny it, can I? Not in the face of the pathologist’s evidence.”

“Pathologists can be wrong,” Annie said, though not, she thought, about the number, strength and angle of the blows.

“But who will they believe in court?”

“I’ve told you. If it comes to that you’ll get a lot of sympathy. But it might not come to court.”

Janet sat down again, perched at the edge of the armchair. “What do you mean?”

“It’s up to the CPS. I’ll be meeting with them on Monday. In the meantime, if you want to alter your statement at all before then, now’s the time to do it.”

“It’s no good,” said Janet, holding her head in her hands and weeping. “I don’t remember it clearly. It all seemed to happen so fast, it was over before I knew what was happening, and Dennis… Dennis was dead, bleeding on my lap. That went on forever, me telling him to hang on, trying to stanch the blood.” She looked at her hands as if seeing the same thing Lady Macbeth saw, what she couldn’t wash away. “But he wouldn’t stop bleeding. I couldn’t stop it from coming out. Maybe it happened as you said. Maybe that’s the only way it could have happened. All I remember is the fear, the adrenaline, the…”

“The anger, Janet? Is that what you were going to say?”

Janet shot her a defiant glance. “What if I was? Wasn’t I right to feel anger?”

“I’m not here to judge you. I think I’d have been angry myself, maybe done exactly the same as you. But we’ve got to get this sorted. There’s no way it’ll simply disappear. As I say, the CPS might decide not to press charges. At the worst you’d be looking at excusable homicide, maybe even justifiable. We’re not talking jail time here, Janet. Thing is, though, we can’t hide it, and it won’t go away. There’s got to be some action.” Annie spoke softly and clearly, as if to a frightened child.

“I hear what you’re saying,” Janet said. “It’s like I’m some sort of sacrificial lamb tossed to the slaughter to appease public opinion.”

“Not at all.” Annie stood up. “Public opinion is far more likely to be on your side. It’s just procedure that has to be followed. Look, if you want to get in touch with me about anything, anything at all before Monday, here’s my card.” She wrote her home and mobile numbers on the back.

“Thanks.” Janet took the card, glanced at it and set it on the coffee table.

“You know,” Annie said at the door, “I’m not your enemy, Janet. Yes, I’d have to give evidence if it came to court, but I’m not against you.”

Janet gave her a twisted smile. “Yeah, I know,” she said, reaching for the gin again. “Life’s a bitch, isn’t it?”

“Sure is.” Annie smiled back. “Then you die.”

“Claire! It’s so nice to see you again. Come in.”

Claire Toth walked into Maggie’s hall and followed her through to the front room, where she slouched on the sofa.

The first things Maggie noticed about her were how pale she was and that she had cut off all her beautiful long blond hair. What was left lay jaggedly over her skull in such a manner as to suggest that she had cut it herself. She wasn’t wearing her school uniform but a pair of baggy jeans and a baggy sweatshirt that hid all signs that she was an attractive young woman. She wore no makeup, and her face was dotted with acne. Maggie remembered what Dr. Simms had said about the possible reactions of Kimberley’s close friends, that some might suppress their sexuality because they thought that would protect them from predators such as Terence Payne. It looked as if Claire was trying to do just that. Maggie wondered if she should comment, but decided not to.

“Milk and cookies?” she asked.

Claire shook her head.

“What is it, sweetheart?” Maggie asked. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” said Claire. “I can’t sleep. I just keep thinking of her. I just lie awake all night with it going through my head – what must have happened to her, what she must have felt like… I can’t bear it. It’s awful.”

“What do your parents say?”

Claire looked away. “I can’t talk to them. I… I thought, you know, you might understand better.”

“Let me get those cookies, anyway. I could do with one myself.” Maggie fetched two glasses of milk and a plate of chocolate chip cookies from the kitchen and put them down on the coffee table. Claire picked up her milk and sipped at it, then reached out and picked up a cookie.

“You read about me in the papers, then?” Maggie said.

Claire nodded.

“And what did you think?”

“At first I couldn’t believe it. Not you. Then I realized it could be anybody, that you didn’t have to be poor or stupid to be abused. Then I felt sorry for you.”

“Well, please don’t do that,” said Maggie, trying on a smile. “I stopped feeling sorry for myself a long time ago, and now I’m just getting on with life. All right?”

“Okay.”

“What sort of things do you think about? Do you want to tell me?”

“How terrible it must have been for Kimberley, with Mr. Payne, you know, doing things to her. Sex. The police didn’t say anything to the papers about it, but I know he did horrible things to her. I can just picture him there, doing it, hurting her, and Kimberley so helpless.”

“It’s no use imagining what it was like, Claire. It won’t do any good.”

“Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I do it on purpose?” She shook her head slowly. “And I keep going over the details of that night in my mind. How I just said I was staying for a slow dance with Nicky and Kimberley said that was okay, she’d probably find somebody to walk home with but it wasn’t very far anyway and the road was well-lit. I should have known something would happen to her.”

“You couldn’t know, Claire. How could you possibly know?”

“I should have. We knew about those girls, the ones who’d gone missing. We should have stuck together, been more careful.”

“Claire, listen to me: it’s not your fault. And I know this sounds harsh, but if anyone should have been more careful, perhaps it’s Kimberley. You can’t be blamed for dancing with a boy. If she was concerned, then she should have made sure she had someone to walk home with her and not gone off alone.”

“Maybe she didn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe Mr. Payne gave her a lift.”

“You told the police you didn’t see him. You didn’t, did you?”

“No. But he could have been waiting outside, couldn’t he?”

“I suppose so,” Maggie admitted.

“I hate him. I’m glad he’s dead. And I hate Nicky Gallagher. I hate all men.”

Maggie didn’t know what to say to that. She could tell Claire that she’d get over it in time, but a fat lot of good that would do. The best thing she could do, she decided, was have a talk with Mrs. Toth and see if they could persuade Claire to go for counseling before things got worse. At least she seemed to want to talk about her thoughts and feelings, which was a good start.

“Was she conscious all the time he was doing stuff with her?” she asked. “I mean, was she aware of him doing it to her?”

“Claire, stop it.” But Maggie was spared further debate by the phone. She listened, frowning, said a few words and then turned back to Claire, who managed to pull herself out of her absorption with Kimberley’s ordeal for a moment and ask her who it was.

“It was the local television station,” Maggie said, wondering if she sounded as stunned as she felt.

A flicker of interest. “What did they want?”

“They want me to go on the local news show tonight.”

“What did you say?”

“I said yes,” said Maggie, as if she couldn’t quite believe it herself.

“Cool,” said Claire, squeezing out a tiny smile.

There are many English seaside resorts that look as if they have seen better days. Withernsea looked as if it had never seen any good days at all. The sun was shining over the rest of the island, but you wouldn’t know it at Withernsea. A vicious cold rain slanted in from the iron sky, and waves from a North Sea the color of stained underwear churned up dirty sand and pebbles on the beach. Set back from the front was a strip of gift shops, amusement arcades and bingo halls, their bright-colored lights garish and lurid in the gloomy afternoon, the bingo caller’s amplified “Number nine, doctor’s orders!” pathetic as it sounded along the deserted promenade.

The whole thing reminded Banks of long ago childhood holidays at Great Yarmouth, Blackpool or Scarborough. July or August days when it seemed to rain nonstop for two weeks, and all he could do was wander around the amusement arcades losing pennies in the one-armed bandits and watching the mechanical claw drop the shiny cigarette lighter just before it reached the winner’s chute. He had never played bingo, but had often watched the hard-faced peroxide women sit there game after game, chain-smoking and staring down at the little numbers on their cards.

On better days, and when he reached his teens, Banks would spend his time searching through the secondhand bookshops for the old Pan books of horror stories or steamy bestsellers such as The Carpetbaggers and Peyton Place. When he was thirteen or fourteen, feeling way too grown-up to be on holiday with his parents, he would wander off alone for the day, hanging around in coffee bars and browsing through the latest singles in Woolworth’s or a local record shop. Sometimes he would meet a girl in the same predicament, and he had had his first adolescent kisses and tentative gropings on these holidays.

Banks parked by the seafront and, without even stopping for a look at the water, hurried to the house directly across from him, where retired DI George Woodward now ran his B amp;B. The VACANCIES sign swung in the wind and creaked like a shutter on a haunted house. By the time Banks rang the front doorbell he was cold and soaked to the skin.

George Woodward was a dapper man with gray hair, bristly mustache and the watchful eyes of an ex-copper. There was also an aura of the hangdog about him, most noticeable as he looked over Banks’s shoulder at the weather and shook his head slowly. “I did suggest Torquay,” he said, “but the wife’s mother lives here in Withernsea.” He ushered Banks in. “Ah, well, it’s not that bad. You’ve just come on a miserable day, that’s all. Early in the season, too. You should see it when the sun’s shining and the place is full. A different world altogether.”

Banks wondered on which day of the year that momentous event occurred, but he kept silent. No point antagonizing George Woodward.

They were in a large room with a bay window and several tables, clearly the breakfast room where the lucky guests hurried down for their bacon and eggs every morning. The tables were laid out with white linen, but there were no knives and forks, and Banks wondered if the Woodwards had any guests at all at the moment. Without offering tea or anything stronger, George Woodward sat at one of the tables and bade Banks sit opposite.

“It’s about Alderthorpe, is it, then?”

“Yes.” Banks had spoken with Jenny Fuller on his mobile on his way out to Withernsea and learned what Elizabeth Bell, the social worker, had to say. Now he was after the policeman’s perspective.

“I always thought that would come back to haunt us one day.”

“How do you mean?”

“Damage like that. It doesn’t go away. It festers.”

“I suppose you’ve got a point.” Like Jenny had with Elizabeth Bell, Banks decided he had to trust George Woodward. “I’m here about Lucy Payne,” he said, watching Woodward’s expression. “Linda Godwin, as was. But that’s between you and me for the moment.”

Woodward paled and whistled between his teeth. “My God, I’d never have believed it. Linda Godwin?”

“That’s right.”

“I saw her picture in the paper, but I didn’t recognize her. The poor lass.”

“Not anymore.”

“Surely you can’t think she had anything to do with those girls?”

“We don’t know what to think. That’s the problem. She’s claiming loss of memory. There’s some circumstantial evidence, but not much. You know the sort of thing I mean.”

“What’s your instinct?”

“That she’s more involved than she’s saying. Whether she’s an accessory or not, I don’t know.”

“You realize she was only a twelve-year-old girl when I met her?”

“Yes.”

“Twelve going on forty, the responsibility she had.”

“Responsibility?” Jenny had said something about Lucy taking care of the younger children; he wondered if this was what Woodward meant.

“Yes. She was the eldest. For Christ’s sake, man, she had a ten-year-old brother who was being regularly buggered by his father and uncle and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it. They were doing it to her, too. Can you even begin to imagine how all that made her feel?”

Banks admitted he couldn’t. “Mind if I smoke?” he asked.

“I’ll get you an ashtray. You’re lucky Mary’s over at her mother’s.” He winked. “She’d never allow it.” Woodward produced a heavy glass ashtray from the cupboard by the door and surprised Banks by pulling a crumpled packet of Embassy Regal from the shirt pocket under his beige V-neck sweater. He then went on to surprise him even further by suggesting a wee dram. “Nowt fancy, mind. Just Bell’s.”

“Bell’s would be fine,” said Banks. He’d have just the one, as he had a long drive home. The first sip, after they clinked glasses, tasted wonderful. It was everything to do with the cold rain lashing at the bay windows.

“Did you get to know Lucy at all?” he asked.

Woodward sipped his Bell’s neat and grimaced. “Barely spoke to her. Or any of the kids, for that matter. We left them to the social workers. We’d enough on our hands with the parents.”

“Can you tell me how it went down?”

Woodward ran his hand over his hair, then took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Good Lord, this is going back a bit,” he said.

“Whatever you can remember.”

“Oh, I remember everything as if it was yesterday. That’s the problem.”

Banks tapped some ash from his cigarette and waited for George Woodward to focus his memory on the one day he would probably sooner forget.

“It was pitch-black when we went in,” Woodward began. “And cold as a witch’s tit. The eleventh of February, it was. 1990. There was me and Baz – Barry Stevens, my DS – in one car. The bloody heater didn’t work properly, I remember, and we were almost blue with cold when we got to Alderthorpe. All the puddles were frozen. There were about three more cars and a van, for the social workers to isolate the kids, like. We were working off a tip from one of the local schoolteachers who’d got suspicious about some of the truancies, the way the kids looked and behaved and, especially, the disappearance of Kathleen Murray.”

“She’s the one who was killed, right?”

“That’s right. Anyway, there were a couple of lights on in the houses when we got there, and we marched straight up and bashed our way in – we had a warrant – and that was when we… we saw it.” He was silent for a moment, staring somewhere beyond Banks, beyond the bay window, beyond even the North Sea. Then he took another nip of whiskey, coughed and went on. “Of course, we didn’t know who was who at first. The two households were mixed up and nobody knew who’d fathered who anyway.”

“What did you find?”

“Most of them were asleep until we bashed the doors in. They had a vicious dog, took a chunk out of Baz as we went in. Then we found Oliver Murray and Pamela Godwin – brother and sister – in a bed with one of the Godwin girls: Laura.”

“Lucy’s sister.”

“Yes. Dianne Murray, the second-eldest child, was curled up safe and sound in a room with her brother Keith, but their sister, Susan, was sandwiched between the other two adults.” He swallowed. “The place was a pigsty – both of them were – smelled terrible. Someone had knocked a hole through the living-room wall so they could travel back and forth without going outside and being seen.” He paused a moment to collect his thoughts. “It’s hard to get across the sense of squalor, of depravity you could feel there, but it was tangible, something you could touch and taste. I don’t just mean the dirt, the stains, the smells, but more than that. A sort of spiritual squalor, if you catch my drift. Everyone was terrified, of course, especially the kids.” He shook his head. “Sometimes, looking back, I wonder if we couldn’t have done it some other way, some gentler way. I don’t know. Too late for that now, anyroad.”

“I understand you found evidence of satanic rituals?”

“In the cellar of the Godwin house, yes.”

“What did you find?”

“The usual. Incense, robes, books, pentagram, an altar – no doubt on which the virgin would be penetrated. Other occult paraphernalia. You know what my theory is?”

“No. What?”

“These people weren’t witches or Satanists; they were just sick and cruel perverts. I’m sure they used the Satanism as an excuse to take drugs and dance and chant themselves into a frenzy. All that satanic rigmarole – the candles, magic circles, robes, music, chanting and whatnot – it was just something to make it all seem like a game to the children. It was just something that played with their minds, like, didn’t let the poor buggers know whether what they were doing was what was supposed to be happening – playing with Mummy and Daddy even if it hurt sometimes and they punished you when you were bad – or something way out, way over-the-top. It was both, of course. No wonder they couldn’t understand. And all those trappings, they just helped turn it into a kid’s game, ring around the roses, that’s all.”

Satanic paraphernalia had also been found in the Paynes’s cellar. Banks wondered if there was a connection. “Did any of them profess any sort of belief in Satan at any time?”

“Oliver and Pamela tried to confuse the jury with some sort of gobbledygook about the Great Horned God and 666 at their trial, but nobody took a blind bit of notice of them. Trappings, that’s all it were. A kid’s game. Let’s all go down in the cellar and dress up and play.”

“Where was Lucy?”

“Locked in a cage – we later found out it was a genuine Morrison shelter left over from the war – in the cellar of the Murray house along with her brother, Tom. It was where you got put if you misbehaved or disobeyed, we found out later. We never did find out what the two of them had done to get put there, though, because they wouldn’t talk.”

“Wouldn’t or couldn’t?”

“Wouldn’t. They wouldn’t talk out against the adults, their parents. They’d been abused and messed up in their minds too long to dare put it into words.” He paused a moment. “Sometimes, I don’t think they could have expressed it all anyway, no matter how much they tried. I mean, where does a nine-year-old or an eleven-year-old find the language and points of reference she needs to explain something like that? They weren’t just protecting their parents or shutting up in fear of them – it went deeper than that. Anyway, Tom and Linda… They were both naked and dirty, crawling in their own filth, looked as if they hadn’t eaten for a couple of days – I mean, most of the children were malnourished and neglected, but they were worse. There was a bucket in the cage, and the smell… And Linda, well, she was twelve, and it showed. She was… I mean they’d made no provisions for… you know… time of the month. I’ll never forget the look of shame and fear and defiance on that little kid’s face when Baz and I walked in on them and turned the light on.”

Banks took a sip of Bell’s, waited until it had burned all the way down, then asked, “What did you do?”

“First off, we found some blankets for them, as much for warmth’s sake as modesty’s, because there wasn’t much heat in the place, either.”

“After that?”

“We handed them over to the social workers.” He gave a little shudder. “One of them couldn’t handle it. Well-meaning young lass, thought she was tough, but she didn’t have the stomach.”

“What did she do?”

“Went back to the car and wouldn’t get out. Just sat there hunched up, shivering and crying. There was no one to pay her much mind as we all had our hands full. Me and Baz were mostly occupied with the adults.”

“Did they have much to say?”

“Nah. Surly lot. And Pamela Godwin – well, there was clearly summat wrong with her. In the head. She didn’t seem to have a clue what was going on. Kept on smiling and asking us if we wanted a cup of tea. Her husband, though, Michael, I’ll never forget him. Greasy hair, straggly beard and that look in his dark eyes. You ever seen pictures of that American killer, Charles Manson?”

“Yes.”

“Like him. That’s who Michael Godwin reminded me of: Charles Manson.”

“What did you do with them?”

“We arrested them all under the Protection of Children Act, to be going on with. They resisted arrest, of course. Picked up a few lumps and bruises.” He gave Banks a challenge-me-on-that-one-if-you-dare look. Banks didn’t. “Later, of course, we came up with a list of charges as long as your arm.”

“Including murder.”

“That was later, after we found Kathleen Murray’s body.”

“When did you find her?”

“Later that day.”

“Where?

“Out back in an old sack in the dustbin. I reckon they’d dumped her there until the ground softened a bit and they could bury her. You could see where someone had tried to dig a hole, but they’d given up, the earth was so hard. She’d been doubled over and been there long enough to freeze solid, so the pathologist had to wait till she thawed out before he could do the postmortem.”

“Were they all charged?”

“Yes. We charged all four adults with conspiracy.”

“And?”

“They were all committed for trial. Michael Godwin topped himself in his cell, and Pamela was found unfit to stand trial. The jury convicted the other two after a morning’s deliberation.”

“What evidence did you have?”

“What do you mean?”

“Could anyone else have killed Kathleen?”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. One of the other kids, maybe?”

Woodward’s jaw tightened. “You didn’t see them,” he said. “If you had, you wouldn’t be making suggestions like that.”

“Did anyone suggest it at the time?”

He gave a harsh laugh. “Believe it or not, yes. The adults had the gall to try and pin it on the boy, Tom. But nobody fell for that one, thank the Lord.”

“What about the evidence? How was she killed, for example?”

“Ligature strangulation.”

Banks held his breath. Another coincidence. “With what?”

Woodward smiled as if laying down his trump card. “Oliver Murray’s belt. The pathologist matched it to the wound. He also found traces of Murray’s semen in the girl’s vagina and anus, not to mention unusual tearing. It looks they went too far that once. Maybe she was bleeding to death, I don’t know, but they killed her – he killed her, with the knowledge and consent of the others, maybe even with their help, I don’t know.”

“How did they plead? The Murrays?”

“What would you expect? Not guilty.”

“They never confessed?”

“No. People like that never do. They don’t even think they’ve done anything wrong, they’re so beyond the law, beyond what’s normal for the rest of us folks. In the end, they got less than they deserved, in that they’re still alive, but at least they’re still locked up, out of harm’s way. And that, Mr. Banks, is the story of the Alderthorpe Seven.” Woodward put his palms on the table and stood up. He seemed less dapper and more weary than when Banks had first arrived. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got the rooms to do before the missus comes back.”

It seemed like an odd time to be doing the rooms, Banks thought, especially as they were all probably vacant, but he sensed that Woodward had had enough, wanted to be alone and wanted, if he could, to get rid of the bad taste of his memories before his wife came home. Good luck to him. Banks couldn’t think of anything more to ask, so he said his good-byes, buttoned up and walked out into the rain. He could have sworn he felt a few lumps of hail stinging his bare head before he got into his car.

Maggie began to have doubts the moment she got in the taxi to the local television studio. Truth be told, she had been vacillating ever since she first got the call early that afternoon inviting her to participate in a discussion on domestic violence on the evening magazine show at six o’clock, after the news. A researcher had seen the article in the newspaper and thought Maggie would make a valuable guest. This was not about Terence and Lucy Payne, the researcher had stressed, and their deeds were not to be discussed. It was an odd legal situation, she explained, that no one had yet been charged with the murders of the girls, and the main suspect was dead, but not proved guilty. Could you charge a dead man with murder? Maggie wondered.

As the taxi wound down Canal Road, over the bridge and under the viaduct to Kirkstall Road, where the rush hour traffic was slow and heavy, Maggie felt the butterflies begin the flutter in her stomach. She remembered the newspaper article, how Lorraine Temple had twisted everything, and wondered again if she was doing the right thing or if she was simply walking back into the lions’ den.

But she did have very good, strong reasons for doing it, she assured herself. In the first place, she wanted to atone for, even correct, the image the newspaper had given of Lucy Payne as being evil and manipulative, if she could slip it in somehow. Lucy was a victim, and the public should be made to realize that. Secondly, she wanted to rid herself of the mousy, nervous image Lorraine Temple had lumbered her with, both for her own sake and in order to get people to take her seriously. She didn’t like being thought of as mousy and nervous, and she was damn well going to do something about it.

Finally, and this was the reason that pushed her to say yes, was the way that policeman, Banks, had come to the house shouting at her, insulting her intelligence and telling her what she could and couldn’t do. Damn him. She’d show him. She’d show them all. She was feeling empowered now, and if it was her lot to become a spokeswoman for battered wives, then so be it; she was up to the task. Lorraine Temple had let the cat out of the bag about her past, anyway, so there was nothing more to hide; she might as well speak out and hope she could do some good for other others in her position. No more mousy and nervous.

Julia Ford had phoned her that afternoon to tell her that Lucy was being detained in Eastvale for further questioning and would probably be kept there overnight. Maggie was outraged. What had Lucy done to deserve such treatment? Something was very much out of kilter in the whole business.

Maggie paid the taxi driver and kept the receipt. The TV people would reimburse her, they had said. She introduced herself at reception and the woman behind the desk called the researcher, Tina Driscoll, who turned out to be a cheerful slip of a lass in her early twenties with short bleached blond hair and pale skin stretched tight over her high cheekbones. Like most of the other people Maggie saw as she followed Tina through the obligatory television studio maze, she was dressed in jeans and a white blouse.

“You’re on after the poodle groomer,” Tina said, glancing at her watch. “Should be about twenty past. Here’s Makeup.”

Tina ushered Maggie into a tiny room with chairs and mirrors and a whole array of powders, brushes and potions. “Just here, love, that’s right,” said the makeup artist, who introduced herself as Charley. “Won’t take a minute.” And she started dabbing and brushing away at Maggie’s face. Finally, satisfied with the result, she said, “Drop by when you’ve finished and I’ll wipe it off in a jiffy.”

Maggie didn’t see a great deal of difference, though she knew from her previous television experience that the studio lighting and cameras would pick up the subtle nuances. “David will be conducting the interview,” said Tina, consulting her clipboard on their way to the green room. “David,” Maggie knew, was David Hartford, half of the male-female team that hosted the program. The woman was called Emma Larson, and Maggie had been hoping that she would have been asking the questions. Emma had always come across as sympathetic on women’s issues, but David Hartford, Maggie thought, had a cynical and derogatory tone to his questioning of anyone who was passionate about anything. He was also known to be provocative. Still, the way Maggie was feeling, she was quite willing to be provoked.

Maggie’s fellow guests were waiting in the green room: the grave, bearded Dr. James Bletchley, from the local hospital; DC Kathy Proctor of the domestic violence unit; and Michael Groves, a rather shaggy-looking social worker. Maggie realized she was the only “victim” on the program, Well, so be it. She could tell them what it was like to be on the receiving end.

They all introduced themselves and then a sort of nervous silence fell over the room, broken only when the poodle emitted a short yap at the entry of the producer, there to check that everyone was present and accounted for. For the remainder of the wait, Maggie chatted briefly with her fellow guests about things in general and watched the hubbub as people came and went and shouted questions at each other in the corridors outside. Like the other TV studio she had been in, this one also seemed to be in a state of perpetual chaos.

There was a monitor in the room, and they were able to watch the show’s opening, the light banter of David and Emma and a recap of the day’s main local news stories, including the death of a revered councillor, a proposed new roundabout for the city center and a “neighbors from hell” story from the Poplar estate. During the commercial break after the poodle groomer, a set worker got them all in position on the armchairs and sofas, designed to give the feel of a cozy, intimate living room, complete with fake fireplace, wired up their mikes and disappeared. David Hartford made himself comfortable, in a position where he could see the guests without having to move too much, and where the cameras would show him to best advantage.

The silent countdown came to an end, David Hartford straightened his tie and put on his best smile, and they were off. Close up, Maggie thought, David’s skin looked like pink plastic, and she imagined it would feel like a child’s doll to the touch. His hair was also too impossibly black to be natural.

As soon as David started his introduction to the subject, he swapped his smile for a serious, concerned expression and turned first to Kathy, the policewoman, for a general idea of how many domestic complaints they got and how they dealt with them. After that, it was the social worker, Michael’s, turn to talk about women’s shelters. When David turned to Maggie for the first time, she felt her heart lurch in her chest. He was handsome in a TV-host sort of way, but there was something about him that unnerved her. He didn’t seem interested in the problems and the issues, but more in making something dramatically appealing out of it all, of which he was the focus. She supposed that was what television was all about when you came right down to it – making things dramatic and making presenters look good, but still it disturbed her.

He asked her when she first knew there was something wrong, and she briefly detailed the signs, the unreasonable demands, flashes of anger, petty punishments and, finally, the blows, right up to the time Bill broke her jaw, knocked out two of her teeth and put her in hospital for a week.

When Maggie had finished, he turned to the next question on his sheet: “Why didn’t you leave? I mean, you’ve just said you put up with this physical abuse for… how long… nearly two years? You’re clearly an intelligent and resourceful woman. Why didn’t you just get out?”

As Maggie sought the words to express why it didn’t happen as simply as that, the social worker cut in and explained how easy it was for women to get trapped in the cycle of violence and how the shame often prevented them from speaking out. Finally, Maggie found her voice.

“You’re right,” she said to David. “I could have left. As you say, I’m an intelligent and resourceful woman. I had a good job, good friends, a supportive family. I suppose part of it was that I thought it would go away, that we would work through it. I still loved my husband. Marriage wasn’t something I was going to throw away lightly.” She paused, and when nobody else dived into the silence, said, “Besides, it wouldn’t have made any difference. Even after I did leave, he found me, stalked me, harassed me, assaulted me again. Even after the court order.”

This prompted David to go back to the policewoman and talk about how ineffective the courts were in protecting women at risk from abusive spouses, and Maggie had the chance to take stock of what she had said. She hadn’t done too badly, she decided. It was hot under the studio lights and she felt her brow moisten with sweat. She hoped it wouldn’t rinse away the makeup.

Next David turned to the doctor.

“Is domestic violence specifically directed from men to women, Dr. Bletchley?” he asked.

“There are some cases of husbands being physically abused by their wives,” said the doctor, “but relatively few.”

“I think you’ll find, statistically,” Michael butted in, “that male violence against women by far outstrips women’s against men, almost enough to make female violence against men seem insignificant. It’s built into our culture. Men hunt down and kill their ex-partners, for example, or commit familial massacres in a way that women do not.”

“But that aside,” David asked next, “don’t you think sometimes, that a woman might overreact and ruin a man’s life? I mean, once such accusations have been made, they are often very difficult to shake off, even if a court finds the person not guilty.”

“But isn’t it worth the risk,” Maggie argued, “if it saves the ones who really need saving?”

David smirked. “Well, that’s rather like saying what’s hanging a few innocent people matter as long as we get the guilty ones, too, isn’t it?”

“Nobody intentionally set out to hang innocent people,” Kathy pointed out.

“But, say, if a man retaliates in the face of extreme provocation,” David pressed on, “isn’t the woman still far more likely to be seen as the victim?”

“She is the victim,” Maggie said.

“That’s like saying she asked for it,” Michael added. “Just what kind of provocation justifies violence?”

“Are there not also women who actually like it rough?”

“Oh, don’t be absurd,” said Michael. “That’s the same sort of thing as suggesting that women ask to be raped by the way they dress.”

“But there are masochistic personalities, aren’t there, Doctor?”

“You’re talking about women who like their sex rough, yes?” said the doctor.

David seemed a little embarrassed by the directness of the question – clearly he was a man used to asking, not answering – but he nodded.

Dr. Bletchley stroked his beard before answering. “Well, to answer your question simply: Yes, there are masochistic women, just as there are masochistic men, but you have to understand that we’re dealing with a very tiny fragment of society here and not that section of society concerned with domestic violence.”

Obviously glad to be done with this line of questioning, David moved on to his next question, phrasing it carefully for Maggie. “You’ve recently had some involvement with what’s become rather a cause célèbre involving domestic abuse. Now, while we can’t discuss the case directly for legal reasons, is there anything you can tell us about that situation?”

He looked hungry for an answer, Maggie thought. “Someone confided in me,” she said. “Confided that she was being abused by her husband. I offered advice, as much help and support as I could give.”

“But you didn’t report it to the authorities.”

“It wasn’t my place to do that.”

“What do you think of that, DC Proctor?”

“She’s right. There’s nothing we can do until the persons themselves report the matter.”

“Or until things come to a head, as they did in this instance?”

“Yes. That’s often the unfortunate result of the way things work.”

“Thank you very much,” David said, about to wrap things up.

Maggie realized she had weakened at the end, got sidetracked, so she launched in, interrupting him, and said, “If I might add just one more thing, it’s that victims are not always treated with the care, respect and tenderness we all think they deserve. Right now, there’s a young woman in the cells in Eastvale, a woman who until this morning was in hospital with injuries she sustained when her husband beat her last weekend. Why is this woman being persecuted like this?”

“Do you have an answer?” Dave asked. He was obviously pissed off at the interruption but excited by the possibility of controversy.

“I think it’s because her husband’s dead,” Maggie said. “They think he killed some young girls, but he’s dead, and they can’t exact their pound of flesh. That’s why they’re picking on her. That’s why they’re picking on Lucy.”

“Thank you very much,” David said, turning to the camera and bringing out his smile again. “That just about wraps things up…”

There was silence when the program ended and the technician removed their mikes, then the policewoman went over to Maggie and said, “I think it was extremely ill-advised of you to say what you did back there.”

“Oh, leave her alone,” said Michael. “It’s about time someone spoke out about it.”

The doctor had already left, and David and Emma were nowhere to be seen.

“Fancy a drink?” said Michael to Maggie as they left the studio after having their makeup removed, but she shook her head. All she wanted to do was get a taxi home and climb into a nice warm bath with a good book. It might be the last bit of peace and quiet she got if there was a reaction to what she had said tonight. She didn’t think she had broken any laws. After all, she hadn’t said Terry was guilty of the killings, hadn’t even mentioned his name, but she was also certain that the police could find something to charge her with if they wanted to. They seemed to be good at that. And she wouldn’t put it past Banks at all. Let them do it, she thought. Just let them make a martyr of her.

“Are you sure? Just a quick one.”

She looked at Michael and knew that all he wanted to do was probe her for more details. “No,” she said. “Thank you very much for the offer, but no. I’m going home.”