Aftermath

14

“So what do you think of Lucy Payne?” Banks asked DC Winsome Jackman as they walked along North Market Street on their way to talk to Leanne Wray’s parents.

Winsome paused before answering. Banks noticed several people gawk at her as they walked. She knew she was a token minority, she had told Banks when he interviewed her, brought in to fulfill a quota demanded in the aftermath of the Stephen Lawrence case. There were to be more police officers from minorities, the ruling stated, even in communities where those minorities were, to all extent, nonexistent, like West Indians in the Yorkshire Dales. But she also told him she didn’t care about the tokenism and she’d do a damn good job anyway. Banks didn’t doubt her for a moment. Winsome was ACC McLaughlin’s golden girl, set for accelerated promotion and all its blessings; she’d probably be a superintendent before she was thirty-five. And Banks liked her. She was easygoing, had a wicked sense of humor, and she didn’t let the race thing get in the way of doing her job, even when other people tried to put it in the way. He knew nothing about her personal life except that she enjoyed both climbing and spelunking – the very thought of which gave Banks a severe case of the heebie-jeebies – and that she lived in a flat on the fringe of the Eastvale student area. Whether she had a boyfriend, or a girlfriend, Banks had no idea.

“I think she might have been protecting her husband,” Winsome said. “She knew, or she suspected, and she kept quiet. Maybe she didn’t even admit it to herself.”

“Do you think she was involved?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think she was attracted to the dark side, especially the sex, but I’d pull up short of assuming she was involved. Weird, yes. But a killer…?”

“Remember, Kathleen Murray died of ligature strangulation,” Banks said.

“But Lucy was only twelve then.”

“Makes you think, though, doesn’t it? Isn’t the house just down here?”

“Yes.”

They turned off North Market on to a grid of narrow streets opposite the community center, where Sandra used to work. Seeing the place and remembering the times he dropped in on her there or waited to pick her up after work to go to a play or a film made Banks feel a pang of loss, but it passed. Sandra was gone now, far, far away from the wife he used to have.

They found the house, not at all far from the Old Ship – maybe ten or fifteen minutes’ walk, and most of it along the busy, well-lit stretch of North Market Street, with its shops and pubs – and Banks knocked at the front door.

The first thing that assailed his senses as Christopher Wray opened the door was the smell of fresh paint. When Banks and Winsome stepped inside, he saw why. The Wrays were redecorating. All the wallpaper in the hallway had been stripped, and Mr. Wray was painting the living-room ceiling cream. The furniture was covered with sheets.

“I’m sorry for the mess,” he apologized. “Shall we go in the kitchen? Have you found Leanne yet?”

“No, not yet,” said Banks.

They followed him through to the small kitchen, where he put the kettle on without even asking if they wanted a cup of tea. They all sat at the small kitchen table, and for the short time it took the kettle to boil, Mr. Wray chatted on about the redecoration as if determined to avoid the real subject of their visit. Finally, tea made and poured, Banks decided it was time to steer things around to the subject of Leanne.

“I must say,” he began, “that we’re at a bit of a loss.”

“Oh?”

“As you know, our men have been working at the Payne house for days now. They’ve recovered six bodies, four of which have been identified, but none of the six is your daughter’s. They’re running out of places to look.”

“Does that mean Leanne might still be alive?” Wray asked, a gleam of hope in his eyes.

“It’s possible,” Banks admitted. “Though I’ve got to say, after all this time without contact, especially given the nationwide appeals on TV and in the press, I wouldn’t hold out a lot of hope.”

“Then… what?”

“That’s what we’d like to find out.”

“I don’t see how I can help you.”

“Perhaps you can’t,” Banks said, “but the only thing to do when a case is stalled like this is to go right back to first principles. We’ve got to go over the ground we covered before and hope we see it from a new perspective this time.”

Wray’s wife, Victoria, appeared in the doorway and looked puzzled to see Banks and Winsome enjoying a chat and a cup of tea with her husband. Wray jumped up. “I thought you were resting, dear,” he said, giving her a peck on the cheek.

Victoria wiped the sleep from her eyes, though she looked to Banks as if she had spent at least a few minutes putting on her face before coming down. Her skirt and blouse were pure Harvey Nichols, and her accent was what she thought sounded like upper class, though he could hear traces of Birmingham in it. She was an attractive woman in her early thirties, with a slim figure and a full head of shiny, natural-brown hair that hung over her shoulders. She had a slightly retroussé nose, arched eyebrows and a small mouth, but the effect of the whole was rather more successful than one might imagine from the separate parts. Wray himself was about forty and pretty much medium in whatever category you might describe him, except for the chin, which slid down toward his throat before it even got started. They were an odd couple, Banks remembered thinking from the first time he had met them: he was a rather basic, down-to-earth bus driver, and she was an affected social climber. What had drawn them together in the first place Banks had no idea, except perhaps that people who have suffered a great loss, as Christopher Wray had, might not necessarily be the best judges of their next move.

Victoria stretched, sat down and poured herself a cup of tea.

“How are you feeling?” her husband asked.

“Not bad.”

“You know you’ve got to be careful, in your condition. The doctor said so.”

“I know. I know.” She squeezed his hand. “I’ll be careful.”

“What condition’s that?” Banks asked.

“My wife’s expecting a baby, Superintendent.” Wray beamed.

Banks looked at Victoria. “Congratulations,” he said.

She inclined her head in a queenly manner. Banks could hardly imagine Victoria Wray going through anything as messy and painful as childbirth, but life was full of surprises.

“How long?” he asked.

She patted her stomach. “Almost four months.”

“So you were pregnant when Leanne went missing?”

“Yes. As a matter of fact, I’d just found out that morning.”

“What did Leanne think of it?”

Victoria looked down into her teacup. “Leanne could be willful and moody, Superintendent,” she said. “She certainly wasn’t quite as ecstatic as we hoped she would be.”

“Now, come on, love, that’s not fair,” said Mr. Wray. “She’d have got used to it in time. I’m certain she would.”

Banks thought about the situation: Leanne’s mother dies a slow and painful death from cancer. Shortly afterward, her father remarries – to a woman Leanne clearly can’t stand. Not long after that, the stepmother announces she’s pregnant. You didn’t need to be a psychologist to see that there was a situation ripe for disaster. It was a bit close to the bone for Banks, too, though he had hardly been in Leanne’s position. Still, whether it’s your father having a baby with your new stepmother or your estranged wife having one with the bearded Sean, the resulting feelings could be similar, perhaps even more intense in Leanne’s case, given her age and her grief over her mother.

“So she wasn’t happy with the news?”

“Not really,” Mr. Wray admitted. “But it takes time to get used to things like that.”

“You have to be at least willing to try first,” said Victoria. “Leanne’s too selfish for that.”

“Leanne was willing,” Mr. Wray insisted.

“When did you tell her?” Banks asked.

“The morning of the day she disappeared.”

He sighed. “Why didn’t you tell us this when we interviewed you after Leanne’s disappearance?”

Mr. Wray looked surprised. “Nobody asked. It didn’t seem important. I mean, it was a private family matter.”

“Besides,” said Victoria, “it’s bad luck to tell strangers until after three months.”

Were they really so thick or were they just playing at it? Banks wondered. Trying to keep his tone as calm and neutral as possible, reminding himself that they were the parents of a missing girl, he asked, “What did she say?”

The Wrays looked at each other. “Say? Nothing, really, did she, dear?” said Mr. Wray.

“Acted up, is what she did,” said Victoria.

“Was she angry?”

“I suppose so,” said Mr. Wray.

“Angry enough to punish you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Listen, Mr. Wray,” Banks said, “when you told us that Leanne was missing and we couldn’t find her within a day or two, we were all of us willing to think the worst. Now, what you’ve just told us puts a different light on things.”

“It does?”

“If she was angry at you over her stepmother’s pregnancy, then she might easily have run away to strike back.”

“But Leanne wouldn’t run away,” Mr. Wray said, slack-jawed. “She loved me.”

“Maybe that’s the problem,” Banks said. He didn’t know if it was called the Electra complex, but he was thinking of the female version of the Oedipus complex: Girl loves her father, then her mother dies, but instead of devoting himself to her, the father finds a new woman, and to make things worse, he makes her pregnant, threatening the entire stability of their relationship. He could easily see Leanne doing a bunk under circumstances like that. But the problem still remained that she would have to be a very uncaring child indeed not to let them know she was still alive after all the hue and cry about the missing girls, and she wouldn’t have got far without her money and her inhaler.

“I think she’d probably be capable of it,” said Victoria. “She could be cruel. Remember that time when she put castor oil in the coffee, the evening of my first book-club meeting? Caroline Opley was sick all over her Margaret Atwood.”

“But that was early days, love,” Mr. Wray protested. “It all took a bit of getting used to for her.”

“I know. I’m only saying. And she didn’t value things as she should have. She lost that silver-”

“Do you think she might have at least been angry enough to disobey her curfew?” Banks asked.

“Certainly,” answered Victoria without missing a beat. “It’s that boy you should be talking to. That Ian Scott. He’s a drug dealer, you know.”

“Did Leanne take drugs?”

“Not to our knowledge,” said Mr. Wray.

“But she could have done, Chris,” his wife went on. “She obviously didn’t tell us everything, did she? Who knows what she got up to when she was with those sorts of people.”

Christopher Wray put his hand over his wife’s. “Don’t get excited, love. Remember what the doctor said.”

“I know.” Victoria stood up. She swayed a little. “I think I need to go and lie down again for a while,” she said. “But you mark my words, Superintendent, that’s the one you should be looking at – Ian Scott. He’s no good.”

“Thank you,” said Banks. “I’ll bear that in mind.”

When she’d gone, the silence stretched for a while. “Is there anything else you can tell us?” Banks asked.

“No. No. I’m sure she wouldn’t do… what you say. I’m sure something must have happened to her.”

“Why did you wait until morning to call the police? Had she done that sort of thing before?”

“Never. I would have told you if I thought that.”

“So why did you wait?”

“I wanted to call earlier.”

“Come on, Mr. Wray,” said Winsome, touching his arm gently. “You can tell us.”

He looked at her, his eyes beseeching, seeking forgiveness. “I would have called the police, honest I would,” he said. “She had never stayed out all night before.”

“But you’d had an argument, hadn’t you?” Banks suggested. “When she reacted badly to the news of your wife’s pregnancy.”

“She asked me how could I… so soon after… after her mother. She was upset, crying, saying terrible things about Victoria, things she didn’t mean, but… Victoria told her to get out if she wanted, and said she could stay out.”

“Why didn’t you tell us this at the time?” Banks asked, though he knew the answer: embarrassment, that great social fear – something Victoria Wray would certainly be sensitive to – and not wanting the police involved in your private family arguments. The only way they had found out about the tension between Victoria and Leanne in the first place was through Leanne’s friends, and Leanne clearly hadn’t had time or chance to tell them about Victoria’s pregnancy. Victoria Wray was the kind of woman, Banks thought, who would make the police use the tradesman’s entrance, if they had a tradesman’s entrance – and the fact that they didn’t was probably an unbearable thorn in her side.

There were tears in Mr. Wray’s eyes. “I couldn’t,” he said. “I just couldn’t. We thought it was as you said, that perhaps she had stayed out all night to spite us, to demonstrate her anger. But no matter what, Superintendent, Leanne isn’t a bad girl. She would have come back in the morning. I’m certain of that.”

Banks stood up. “May we have another look at her room, Mr. Wray? There may be something we missed.”

Wray looked puzzled. “Yes, of course. But… I mean… it’s been redone. There’s nothing there.”

“You redecorated Leanne’s room?” Winsome said.

He looked at her. “Yes. We couldn’t stand it with her gone. The memories. And now, with the new baby on the way…”

“What about her clothes?” Winsome asked.

“We gave them to the Oxfam shop.”

“Her books, belongings?”

“Them, too.”

Winsome shook her head. Banks asked, “May we have a peek, anyway?”

They went upstairs. Wray was right. Not an object remained that indicated the room had ever belonged to a teenager like Leanne Wray. The tiny dresser, bedside drawers and matching wardrobe were all gone, as was her bed with the quilt bedspread, little bookcase, the few dolls left over from her childhood. Even the carpet was gone and the pop star posters had been ripped off the walls. Nothing remained. Banks could hardly believe his eyes. He could understand how people want to escape unpleasant memories, don’t like being reminded of someone they’ve loved and lost, but all this just over a month after their daughter’s disappearance, and without her body having been found?

“Thank you,” he said, indicating for Winsome to follow him down the stairs.

“Isn’t that weird?” she said when they’d got outside. “Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

“Think what, Winsome?”

“That maybe Leanne did go home that night. And that maybe when they heard we were digging up the Paynes’ garden, Mr. Wray decided it was time for redecoration.”

“Hmm,” said Banks. “Maybe you’re right, or maybe people just have different ways of showing their grief. Either way, I think we’ll be looking a bit more closely at the Wrays over the next few days. You can start by talking to their neighbors, see if they’ve seen or heard anything unusual.”

After her chat with Maureen Nesbitt, Jenny decided to visit Spurn Head itself before heading for home. Maybe a good long walk would help her think things over, blow the cobwebs away. Maybe it would also help her get rid of the eerie feeling she had had since Alderthorpe that she was being watched or followed. She couldn’t explain it, but every time she turned suddenly to look over her shoulder, she felt rather than saw something slip into the shadows. It was irritating because she couldn’t quite grasp whether she was being paranoid or whether it was a case of just because she was paranoid it didn’t mean someone wasn’t following her.

She was still feeling it.

Jenny paid her entrance fee and drove slowly along the narrow track to the car park, noticing an old lighthouse, half under water, and guessing that the sands had shifted since it was built and left it stranded there.

Jenny walked down to the beach. The place wasn’t quite as desolate as she had imagined it to be. Just ahead, on a platform a little way out to sea, attached to the mainland by a narrow wooden bridge, were a dock and control center for the Humber pilots, who guided the big tankers in from the North Sea. Behind her stood the new lighthouse and a number of houses. Across the estuary, Jenny could see the docks and cranes of Grimsby and Immingham. Though the sun was shining, there was quite a breeze and Jenny felt the chill as she walked the sands around the point. The sea was an odd combination of colors – purple, brown, lavender, everything but blue, even in the sun.

There weren’t many people around. Most of those who visited the area were serious birders, and the place was a protected wildlife sanctuary. Even so, Jenny saw a couple or two walking hand in hand, and one family with two small children. As she walked, she still couldn’t shake off the feeling of being followed.

When the first tanker came around the head, it took her breath away. Because of the sharp curve, the huge shape seemed to appear there suddenly, moving very fast, and it filled her field of vision for a few moments, then one of the pilot boats nearby guided it over the estuary toward Immingham docks. Another tanker followed only moments later.

As Jenny stood on the sand looking out over the broad waters, she thought of what Maureen Nesbitt had told her about the Alderthorpe Seven.

Tom Godwin, Lucy’s younger brother, had stayed with his foster parents until he was eighteen, like Lucy, then he had gone to live with distant relatives in Australia, all thoroughly checked out by the social services, and he now worked on their sheep farm in New South Wales. By all accounts, Tom was a sturdy, quiet sort of boy, given to long walks alone, and a sort of shyness that made him stutter in front of strangers. Often he woke up screaming from nightmares he couldn’t remember.

Laura, Lucy’s sister, was living in Edinburgh, where she was studying medicine at the university, hoping to become a psychiatrist. Maureen said Laura was well-adjusted, on the whole, after years of therapy, but there was still a timidity and reticence about her that might make it hard for her to face some of the more human challenges of her chosen profession. There was no doubt she was a brilliant and skilled pupil, but whether she could handle the daily pressures of psychiatry was another matter.

Of the three surviving Murray children, Susan had committed suicide, tragically, at the age of thirteen; Dianne was in a sort of halfway house for the mentally disturbed, suffering from severe sleep disorders and terrifying hallucinations. Keith, like Laura, was also a student, though Maureen reckoned he would be about graduation age by now. He had gone to the University of Durham to study history and English. He was still seeing a psychiatrist regularly and suffered from bouts of depression and anxiety attacks, especially in confined places, but he managed to function and do well in his studies.

And that was it: the sad legacy of Alderthorpe. Such blighted lives.

Jenny wondered if Banks wanted her to continue now that he’d let Lucy go. Maureen Nesbitt had said her best bets were clearly Keith Murray and Laura Godwin, and as Keith lived closer to Eastvale, she decided she would try to reach him first. But was there any more point to it all? She had to admit that she hadn’t found any psychological evidence that significantly strengthened the case against Lucy. She felt every bit as inadequate as many officers on the task force thought all offender profilers were anyway.

Lucy could have sustained the kind of psychological damage that made her a compliant victim of Terence Payne’s, but there again, she might not have. Different people subjected to the same horrors often go in completely different directions. Perhaps Lucy was truly a strong personality, strong enough to put the past behind her and get on with life. Jenny doubted that anyone had the strength to avoid at least some kind of psychological fallout from the events in Alderthorpe, but it was possible to heal, at least partially, over time, and to function on some level, as Tom, Laura and Keith had also demonstrated. They might be the walking wounded, but at least they were still walking.

When Jenny had covered half the circle of the head, she cut back through the long grass to the car park and set off down the narrow track. As she went, she noticed a blue Citroën in her rearview mirror and felt certain that she had seen it somewhere before. Telling herself to stop being so paranoid, she left the head and drove toward Patrington. When she’d got closer to the edges of Hull, she called Banks on her mobile.

He answered on the third ring. “Jenny, where are you?”

“Hull. On my way home.”

“Find out anything interesting?”

“Plenty, but I’m not sure that it gets us any further. I’ll try to put it all together into some sort of profile, if you want.”

“Please.”

“I just heard you had to let Lucy Payne go.”

“That’s right. We got her out of a side exit without too much fuss, and her lawyer drove her straight to Hull. They did some shopping in the city center, then Julia Ford, the lawyer, dropped Lucy off at the Liversedges’. They welcomed her with open arms.”

“That’s where she is now?”

“Far as I know. The local police are keeping an eye on her for us. Where else can she go?”

“Where, indeed?” said Jenny. “Does this mean it’s over?”

“What?”

“My job.”

“No,” said Banks. “Nothing’s over yet.”

After Jenny had hung up, she checked her rearview mirror again. The blue Citroën was keeping its distance, allowing three of four other cars between them, but there was no doubt it was still back there on her tail.

“Annie, have you ever thought of having children?”

Banks felt Annie tense beside him in bed. They had just made love and were basking in the aftermath, the gentle rushing of the falls outside, the occasional night animal calling from the woods and Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks drifting up from the stereo downstairs.

“I don’t mean… well, not now. I mean, not you and me. But ever?”

Annie lay still and silent for a while. He felt her relax a little and stir against him. Finally, she said. “Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. It’s been on my mind. This case, the poor devils in the Murray and Godwin families, all the missing girls, not much more than kids, really. And the Wrays, her being pregnant.” And Sandra, he thought, but he hadn’t told Annie about that yet.

“I can’t say as I have,” Annie answered.

“Never?”

“Maybe I got shortchanged when it came to handing out the maternal instinct, I don’t know. Or maybe it’s to do with my own past. Anyway, it never came up.”

“Your past?”

“Ray. The commune. My mother dying so young.”

“But you said you were happy enough.”

“I was.” Annie sat up and reached for the glass of wine she had put on the bedside table. Her small breasts glowed in the dim light, smooth skin sloping down to the dark brown areolas, slightly upturned where the nipples rose.

“Then why?”

“Good Lord, Alan, surely it’s not every woman’s duty in life to reproduce or to analyze why she doesn’t want to. I’m not a freak, you know.”

“I know. Sorry.” Banks sipped some of his wine, lay back against the pillows. “It’s just… well, I had a bit of a shock the other day, that’s all.”

“What?”

“Sandra.”

“What about her?”

“She’s pregnant.” There, he’d done it. He didn’t know why it should have been so difficult, or why he had the sharp, sudden feeling that he would have been wiser to have kept his mouth closed. He also wondered why he had told Jenny straight away but delayed so long before telling Annie. Partly it was because Jenny knew Sandra, of course, but there was more to it than that. Annie didn’t seem to like the intimacy implied by details of Banks’s life, and she had sometimes made him feel that sharing any part of his past was a burden to her. But he couldn’t seem to help himself. Since splitting up with Sandra, he had become far more introspective and examined his life much more closely. He saw little point in being with someone if he couldn’t share some of that.

At first, Annie said nothing, then she asked, “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“I don’t know.”

“How did you hear the news?”

“From Tracy, when we went to lunch in Leeds.”

“So Sandra didn’t tell you herself?”

“You know as well I do we don’t communicate much.”

“Still, I would’ve thought… something like this.”

Banks scratched his cheek. “Well, it just goes to show, doesn’t it?”

Annie sipped more wine. “Show what?”

“How far apart we’ve grown.”

“You seem upset by this, Alan.”

“Not really. Not upset so much as…”

“Disturbed?”

“Perhaps.”

“Why?”

“Just the thought of it. Of Tracy and Brian having a little brother or sister. Of…”

“Of what?”

“I was just thinking,” Banks said, turning toward her. “I mean, it’s something I haven’t thought about in years, denied it, I suppose, but this has brought it all back.”

“All what back?”

“The miscarriage.”

Annie froze for a moment, then said, “Sandra had a miscarriage?”

“Yes.”

“When was that?”

“Oh, years ago, when we were living in London. The kids were small, too small to understand.”

“What happened?”

“I was working undercover at the time. Drugs squad. You know what it’s like, away for weeks at a time, can’t contact your family. It was two days before my boss let me know.”

Annie nodded. Banks knew that she understood about the pressures and stresses of undercover work firsthand; a knowledge of the Job and its effects was one of the things they had in common. “How did it happen?”

“Who knows? The kids were at school. She started bleeding. Thank God we had a helpful neighbor, or who knows what might have happened.”

“And you blame yourself for not being there?”

“She could have died, Annie. And we lost the baby. Everything might have gone just fine if I’d been there like any other father-to-be, helping out around the place. But Sandra had to do everything, for crying out loud – all the lifting, shopping, odd jobs, fetching and carrying. She was replacing a lightbulb when she first started to feel funny. She could have fallen and broken her neck.” Banks reached for a cigarette. He didn’t usually indulge in the “one after” for Annie’s sake, but this time he felt like it. He still asked, “Is it okay?”

“Go ahead. I don’t mind.” Annie sipped more wine. “But thanks for asking. You were saying?”

Banks lit up and the smoke drifted away toward the half-open window. “Guilt. Yes. But more than that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was working drugs, like I said, spending most of my time on the streets or in filthy squats trying to get a lead to the big guys from their victims. Kids, for the most part, runaways, stoned, high, tripping, zonked out, whatever you care to call it. Some of them as young as ten or eleven. Half of them couldn’t even tell you their own names. Or wouldn’t. I don’t know if you remember, but it was around the time the AIDS scare was growing. Nobody knew for sure yet how bad it was, but there was a lot of scare-mongering. And everyone knew you got it through blood, from unprotected sex – mostly anal sex – and through sharing needles. Thing was, you lived in fear. You just didn’t know if some small-time dealer was going to lunge at you with a dirty needle, or if some junkie’s drool on your hand could give you AIDS.”

“I do know what you mean, Alan, though it was a bit before my time as a copper. But I’m not following. What has it got to do with Sandra’s miscarriage?”

Banks sucked in some smoke, felt it burn on the way down and thought he ought to try stopping again. “Probably nothing, but I’m just trying to give you some sense of the life I was living. I was in my early thirties, with a wife and two kids, another on the way, and I was spending my life in squalor, hanging out with scum. My own kids probably wouldn’t have recognized me if they’d seen me in the street. The kids I saw were either dead or dying. I was a cop, not a social worker. I mean, I tried sometimes, you know, if I thought there was a chance a kid might listen, give up the life and go home, but that wasn’t my job. I was there to get information and to track down the big players.”

“And?”

“Well, it’s just that it has an effect on you, that’s all. It changes you, warps you, alters your attitudes. You start out thinking you’re an ordinary decent family man just doing a tough job, and you end up not really knowing what you are. Anyway, my first thought, when I heard Sandra was okay but that she’d had a miscarriage… Know what my first feeling was?”

“Relief?” said Annie.

Banks stared at her. “What made you say that?”

She gave him a small smile. “Common sense. It’s what I’d feel – I mean if I’d been in your boots.”

Banks stubbed out the cigarette. He felt somehow deflated that his big revelation had seemed so obvious to Annie. He swirled some red wine around in his mouth to wash away the taste of smoke. Van Morrison was well into “Madame George,” riffing on the words. A cat howled in the woods, maybe the one that came for milk sometimes. “Anyway,” he went on, “that’s what I felt: relief. And of course I felt guilty. Not for just not being there, but for being almost glad it happened. And relieved that we wouldn’t have to go through it all again. The dirty nappies, the lack of sleep – not that I was getting much sleep anyway – the extra responsibility. Here was one life I didn’t have to protect. Here was one extra responsibility I could easily live without.”

“It’s not such an uncommon feeling, you know,” said Annie. “It’s not so terrible, either. It doesn’t make you a monster.”

“I felt like one.”

“That’s because you take too much on yourself. You always do. You’re not responsible for all the world’s ills and sins, not even a fraction of them. So Alan Banks is human; he isn’t perfect. So he feels relief when he thinks he should feel grief. Do you think you’re the only one that’s happened to?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t asked anyone else.”

“Well, you’re not. You just have to learn to live with your imperfections.”

“Like you do?”

Annie smiled and flicked a little wine at him. Luckily, she was drinking white. “What imperfections, you cheeky bastard?”

“Anyway, after that we decided no more kids, and we never talked about it again.”

“But you’ve carried the guilt around ever since.”

“Yes, I suppose so. I mean, I don’t think about it very often, but this brought it all back. And do you know what else?”

“What?”

“I loved the Job more. I never for a moment thought of giving it all up and becoming a used-car salesman.”

Annie laughed. “Just as well. I can’t imagine you as the used-car-salesman type.”

“Or something else. Something with regular hours, less chance of catching AIDS.”

Annie reached out and stroked his cheek. “Poor Alan,” she said, snuggling closer. “Why don’t you just try to put it all out of your mind. Just put everything out of your mind, everything except the moment, me, the music, the here and now.”

Van was getting into the meandering, sensuous “Ballerina” and Banks felt Annie’s lips, soft and moist, running over his chest, down his stomach, lingering, and he managed to do as she said when she reached her destination, but even as he gave himself up to the sensation of the moment, he still couldn’t quite get the thought of dead babies out of his mind.

Maggie checked the locks and the windows for the second time before going to bed that Saturday night, and only when she was satisfied that all was secure did she take a glass of warm milk upstairs with her. She had hardly got halfway up when the telephone rang. At first, she wasn’t going to answer it. Not at eleven o’clock on a Saturday night. It was probably a wrong number anyway. But curiosity got the better of her. She knew that the police had been forced to let Lucy go that morning, so it might be she, looking for help.

It wasn’t. It was Bill. Maggie’s heart started to beat fast, and she felt the room closing in on her.

“You’re creating quite a stir over there, aren’t you?” he said. “Heroine and champion of battered wives everywhere. Or is that championess?”

Maggie felt herself shrinking, shriveling, her heart squeezing into her throat. All her bravado, her empowerment, withered and died. She could hardly talk, hardly breathe. “What do you want?” she whispered. “How did you find out?”

“You underestimate your celebrity. You’re not only in the Globe and the Post, you’re in the Sun and the Star, too. Even a picture in the Sun, though it’s not a very good one, unless you’ve changed a hell of a lot. They’ve been giving quite a bit of coverage to the Chameleon case, as they call it, comparing it to Bernardo and Homolka, naturally, and you seem to be caught right up in the thick of it.”

“What do you want?”

“Want? Me? Nothing.”

“How did you find me?”

“After the newspaper stories, it wasn’t difficult. You had an old address book you forgot to take with you. Your friends were in it. Thirty-two, The Hill, Leeds. Am I right?”

“What do you want with me?”

“Nothing. Not at the moment, anyway. I just wanted to let you know that I know where you are, and I’m thinking of you. It must have been very interesting living across the street from a killer. What’s Karla like?”

“It’s Lucy. Leave me alone.”

“That’s not very nice. We were married once, remember.”

“How could I forget?”

Bill laughed. “Anyway, mustn’t run up the firm’s phone bill too much. I’ve been working very hard lately, and even my boss thinks I need a holiday. Just thought I’d let you know I might be taking a trip over to England soon. I don’t know when. Might be next week, might be next month. But I think it’d be nice if we could get together for dinner or something, don’t you?”

“You’re sick,” Maggie said, and heard Bill chuckling as she hung up.