Aftermath

20

For someone who disliked hospitals as much as Banks did, he seemed to have spent more than enough time in the infirmary over the past couple of weeks, he thought as he walked down the corridor to Maggie Forrest’s private room on Thursday.

“Oh, it’s you,” Maggie said when he knocked and walked in. She wouldn’t look him in the eye, he noticed, but stared at the wall. The bandage over her forehead held the dressing at the back of her head in place. The wound had been a nasty one, requiring several stitches. She had also lost a lot of blood. When Banks had got to her, the pillow was soaked with it. According to the doctor, though, she was out of the woods and should be okay to go home in a day or so. Now she was being treated for delayed shock as much as anything. Looking at her, Banks thought of the day not so long ago when he first saw Lucy Payne in a hospital bed, one eye bandaged, the other assessing her situation, black hair spread out on the white pillow.

“Is that all the thanks I get?” he said.

“Thanks?”

“For bringing in the cavalry. It was my idea, you know. True, I was only doing my job, but people sometimes feel the need to add a word or two of personal thanks. Don’t worry, I don’t expect a tip or anything.”

“It’s easy for you to be flippant, isn’t it?”

Banks pulled up the chair and sat at her bedside. “Maybe not as easy as you think. How are you?”

“Fine.”

“Really?”

“I’m all right. A bit sore.”

“It’s hardly surprising.”

“Was it really you?”

“Was what really me?”

Maggie looked him in the eye for the first time. Hers were dulled with medication, but he could see pain and confusion there, along with something softer, something less definable. “Who led the rescue party.”

Banks leaned back and sighed. “I only blame myself that it took me so long,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I should have worked it out earlier. I had all the pieces. I just didn’t put them together quickly enough, not until the SOCO team found the camcorder in the pond at the bottom of The Hill.”

“That’s where it was?”

“Yes. Lucy must have dumped it there sometime over that last weekend.”

“I go there sometimes to think and feed the ducks.” Maggie stared at the wall, then turned to face him again after a few seconds. “Anyway, it’s hardly your fault, is it? You’re not a mind reader.”

“No? People sometimes expect me to be. But I suppose I’m not. Not in this case. We suspected from the start that there must have been a camcorder and tapes, and we knew she wouldn’t part with the tapes easily. We also knew that the only person she was close to was you, and that she had visited your house the day before the domestic disturbance.”

“She couldn’t have known what was going to happen.”

“No. But she knew things were coming to a head. She was working on damage control, and hiding the tapes was part of it. Where were they?”

“The loft,” Maggie said. “She knew I didn’t go up there.”

“And she knew she’d be able to get at them without too much trouble, that you were probably the only person in the whole country who’d give her house room. That was the other clue. There was really nowhere else for her to go. First we talked to your neighbors, and when Claire’s mother told us you’d just got home and another neighbor said she’d seen a young woman knocking at your back door a couple of nights ago, it seemed to add up.”

“You must think I was so stupid to take her in.”

“Foolish, maybe, naïve, but not necessarily stupid.”

“She just seemed so… so…”

“So much the victim?”

“Yes. I wanted to believe in her, needed to. Maybe as much for me as for her. I don’t know.”

Banks nodded. “She played the role well. She could do that because it was partially true. She’d had a lot of practice.”

“What do you mean?

Banks told her about the Alderthorpe Seven and the murder of Kathleen Murray. When he had finished, Maggie turned pale, swallowed and lay back in silence, staring at the ceiling. It was a minute or so before she spoke again. “She killed her cousin when she was only twelve?”

“Yes. That’s partly what set us looking for her again. At last we had a bit of evidence that suggested she was more than she pretended to be.”

“But a lot of people have terrible childhoods,” said Maggie, some color returning to her face. “Perhaps not as terrible as that, but they don’t all turn into killers. What was so different about Lucy?”

“I wish I knew the answer,” said Banks. “Terry Payne was a rapist when they met, and Lucy had killed Kathleen. Somehow or other, the two of them getting together the way they did created a special sort of chemistry, acted as a trigger. We don’t know why. We’ll probably never know.”

“And if they’d never met?”

Banks shrugged. “It may never have happened. None of it. Terry finally gets caught for rape and put in jail, while Lucy goes on to marry a nice young man, have two point four children and become a bank manager. Who knows?”

“Makes sense. She’d done it before. He hadn’t.”

“She said she did it out of kindness.”

“Maybe she did. Or out of self-protection. Or out of jealousy. You can’t expect her to understand her own motives any better than we can, or to tell the truth about them. With someone like Lucy it was probably some strange sort of combination of all three.”

“She also said they met because he raped her. Tried to rape her. I couldn’t really understand. She said she raped him as much as he raped her.”

Banks shifted in his chair. He wished he could have a cigarette, even though he had determined to quit before the year was out. “I can’t explain it any more than you can, Maggie. I might be a policeman, and I might have seen a lot more of the dark side of human nature than you, but something like this… for someone with a past like Lucy’s, who knows how topsy-turvy things can get? I should imagine that after the things that had been done to her in Alderthorpe, and given her peculiar sexual tastes, Terence Payne was a bit of a pussycat to deal with.”

“She said to think of her as a five-legged sheep.”

The image took Banks back to his childhood, when the traveling fair came around at Easter and in autumn and set up on the local recreation ground. There were rides – Waltzers, Caterpillar, Dodgems and Speedway – and stalls where you could throw weighted darts at playing cards or shoot at tin figures with an air rifle to win a goldfish in a plastic bag full of water; there were flashing lights and crowds and loud music; but there was also the freak show, a tent set up on the edge of the fairground, where you paid your sixpence and went inside to see the exhibits. They were ultimately disappointing, not a genuine bearded lady, elephant man, spider woman or pinhead in sight. Those kinds of freaks Banks only saw later in Todd Browning’s famous movie. None of these freaks were alive, for a start; they were deformed animals, stillborn or killed at birth, and they floated in the huge glass jars full of preserving fluid – a lamb with a fifth leg sticking out of its side; a kitten with horns; a puppy with two heads, a calf with no eye sockets – the stuff that nightmares were made of.

“Despite what happened,” Maggie went on, “I want you to know that I’m not going to let it turn me into a cynic. I know you think I’m naïve, but if that’s the choice, I’d rather be naïve than bitter and untrusting.”

“You made a mistake in judgment and it almost got you killed.”

“Do you think she would have killed me if you hadn’t come?”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know. I’ve got a lot of thinking to do. But Lucy was… she was as much a victim as anything. You weren’t there. You didn’t hear her. She didn’t want to kill me.”

“Maggie, for crying out loud, will you just listen to yourself! She murdered God knows how many young girls. She would have killed you, believe me. If I were you, I’d put the victim thing right out of my mind.”

“I’m not you.”

Banks took a deep breath and sighed. “Lucky for both of us, isn’t it? What will you do now?”

“Do?”

“Will you stay at The Hill?”

“Yes, I think so.” Maggie scratched at her bandages, then squinted at Banks. “I don’t really have anywhere else to go. And there’s still my work, of course. Another thing I’ve discovered through all this is that I can also do some good. I can be a voice for people who don’t have one, or who don’t dare speak out. People listen to me.”

Banks nodded. He didn’t say so, but he suspected that Maggie’s very public championing of Lucy Payne might well tarnish her ability to act as a believable spokesperson for abused women. But perhaps not. About all you could say about the public, when it came right down to it, was that they were a fickle lot. Maybe Maggie would emerge as a heroine.

“Look, you’d better get some rest,” Banks said. “I just wanted to see how you were. We’ll want to talk to you in some detail later. But there’s no hurry. Not now.”

“Isn’t it all over?”

Banks looked into her eyes. He could tell she wanted it to be over, wanted to stand at a distance and think it through, get her life going again – work, good deeds, the lot. “There still might be a trial,” he said.

“A trial? But I don’t…”

“Haven’t you heard?”

“Heard what?”

“I just assumed… oh, shit.”

“I’ve been pretty much out of it, what with the drugs and all. What is it?”

Banks leaned forward and rested his hand on her forearm. “Maggie,” he said, “I don’t know how to say this any other way, but Lucy Payne isn’t dead.”

Maggie recoiled from his touch and her eyes widened. “Not dead? But I don’t understand. I thought… I mean, she…”

“She jumped out of the window, yes, but the fall didn’t kill her. Your front path is overgrown, and the bushes broke her fall. The thing is, though, she landed on the sharp edge of one of the steps and broke her back. It’s serious. Very serious. There’s severe damage to the spinal cord.”

“What does that mean?”

“The surgeons aren’t sure of the full extent of her injuries yet – they’ve got a lot more tests to do – but they think she’ll be paralyzed from the neck down.”

“But Lucy’s not dead?”

“No.”

“She’ll be in a wheelchair?”

“If she survives.”

Maggie looked toward the window again. Banks could see tears glistening in her eyes. “So she is in a cage, after all.”

Banks stood up to leave. He was finding Maggie’s compassion for a killer of teenage girls difficult to take and didn’t trust himself not to say something he’d regret. Just as he got to the door, he heard her small voice: “Superintendent Banks?”

He turned, hand on doorknob. “Yes.”

“Thank you.”

“Are you all right, love?”

“Yes, why shouldn’t I be?” said Janet Taylor.

“Nothing,” the shopkeeper said, “Only…”

Janet picked up her bottle of gin from the counter, paid him and walked out of the off-license. What was up with him? she wondered. Had she suddenly sprouted an extra head or something? It was Saturday evening, and she had hardly been out since her arrest and release on bail the previous Monday, but she didn’t think she looked that different from the last time she’d been in the shop.

She climbed back up to her flat above the hairdresser’s, and when she turned her key in the lock and walked inside she noticed the smell for the first time. And the mess. You didn’t notice it so much when you were living in the midst of it, she thought, but you certainly did when you went out and came back to it. Dirty clothes lay strewn everywhere, half-full coffee cups grew mold, and the plant on the windowsill had died and wilted. The smell was of stale skin, rotting cabbage, sweat and gin. And some of it, she realized, turning her nose toward her armpit, came from her own body.

Janet looked in the mirror. It didn’t surprise her to see the lank, lifeless hair and the dark bags under her eyes. After all, she had hardly slept since it happened. She didn’t like to close her eyes because when she did, it all seemed to play over and over again inside her mind. The only times she could get any rest at all were when she’d had enough gin and passed out for an hour or two. No dreams came then, only oblivion, but as soon as she started to stir, the memory and the depression kicked in again.

She didn’t really care what happened to her as long as the nightmares – sleeping and waking – went away. Let them kick her off the Job, put her in jail, even. She didn’t care as long as they also wiped out the memory of that morning in the cellar. Didn’t they have machines or drugs that could do that, or was that only something she’d seen in a movie? Still, she was better off than Lucy Payne, she told herself. Paralyzed from the neck down in a wheelchair for life, by the sound of it. But it was no less than she deserved. Janet remembered Lucy lying in the hall, blood pooling around her head wound, remembered her own concern for the abused woman, her anger at Dennis’s male chauvinism. Appearances. Now she’d give anything to have Dennis back and thought even paralysis too slight a punishment for Lucy Payne.

Moving away from the mirror, Janet stripped off her clothes and tossed them on the floor. She would have a bath, she decided. Maybe it would make her feel better. First, she poured herself a large gin and took it into the bathroom with her. She put the plug in and turned on the taps, got the temperature right, poured in a capful of bubble bath. She looked at herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. Her breasts were starting to sag and the lard-colored skin was creasing around her belly. She used to take good care of herself, work out at the police gym at least three times a week, go out for a run. Not for a couple of weeks, though.

Before dipping her toes into the water, she decided to bring the bottle and set it on the edge of the tub. She’d only have to get out and fetch it soon, anyway. Finally, she lay back and let the bubbles tickle her neck. At least she could clean herself. That would be a start. No more off-license clerks asking her if she was all right because she smelled. As for the bags under her eyes, well, they wouldn’t go away overnight, but she would work on them. And on tidying up the flat.

On the other hand, she thought, after a good long sip of gin, there were razor blades in the bathroom cabinet. All she had to do was stand up and reach for them. The water was good and hot. She was certain she would feel no pain. Just a quick slit on each wrist, then put her arms underwater and let the blood seep out. It would be like going to sleep, only there would be no dreams.

As she lay there wrapped in the warmth and softness of the bubble bath, her eyelids started to droop and she couldn’t keep her eyes open. There she was again, in that stinking cellar with Dennis spurting blood all over the place and that maniac Payne coming at her with a machete. What could she have done differently? That seemed to be the question that nobody could, or would, answer for her. What should she have done?

She jerked to consciousness, gasping for breath, and at first the bathtub looked as if it were full of blood. She reached out for the gin, but she was clumsy and she knocked the bottle on the bathroom floor. It shattered on the tiles and spilled its precious contents.

Shit!

That meant she’d have to go out and buy more. She picked up the bath mat and shook it hard to get rid of any glass that might have lodged there, then she hauled herself out of the tub. When she stepped on to the mat, she underestimated her capacity for balance and stumbled a little. Her right foot hit the tiles, and she felt the sting of the glass on her sole. Janet winced with pain. Leaving a thin trail of blood on the bathroom floor, she negotiated her way into the living room without further injury, sat down and pulled out a couple of large slivers of glass, then she put on some old slippers and went back for peroxide and bandages. First she sat on the toilet seat and poured the peroxide as best she could over the sole of her foot. She almost screamed out in pain, but soon the waves abated and her foot just started to throb, then turn numb. She swathed it in bandages, then went to her bedroom and got dressed, putting on clean clothes and extra-thick socks.

She had to get out of the flat, she decided, and not just for as long as it took to go to the off-license. A good drive would help keep her awake, the windows wide open, breeze blowing in her hair, rock music and chatter on the radio. Maybe she’d drop in on Annie Cabbot, the only decent copper among them. Or perhaps she’d drive out into the country and find a B amp;B where nobody knew who she was or what she had done, and stay a night or two. Anything to get away from this filthy, smelly place. She could pick up another bottle on the way. At least now she was clean, and no stuffy off-license clerk was going to turn his nose up at her.

Janet hesitated a moment before she picked up her car keys, then pocketed them anyway. What more could they do to her? Add insult to injury and charge her with drink driving? Fuck the lot of them, Janet thought, laughing to herself as she limped down the stairs.

That same evening, three days since Lucy Payne had jumped out of Maggie Forrest’s bedroom window, Banks was at home listening to Thaïs in his cozy living room with the melted-Brie ceiling and the blue walls. It was his first escape from the paperwork since he had visited Maggie Forrest in hospital on Thursday, and he was enjoying it immensely. Still uncertain about his future, he had decided that before making any major career decisions, he would first take a holiday and think things over. He had plenty of leave due and had already talked to Red Ron and picked up a few travel brochures. Now it was a matter of deciding where to go.

He had also spent quite a lot of time over the past couple of days standing at his office window looking down on the market square and thinking about Maggie Forrest, thinking about her conviction and her compassion, and now he was still thinking about her at home. Lucy Payne had tied Maggie to the bed and was about to strangle her with a belt when the police broke in. Yet Maggie still saw Lucy as the victim, and could shed tears for her. Was she a saint or a fool? Banks didn’t know.

When he thought about the girls Lucy and Terry Payne had violated, terrorized and murdered – of Kelly Matthews, Samantha Foster, Melissa Horrocks, Kimberley Myers and Katya Pavelic – paralysis wasn’t sufficient; it didn’t hurt enough. But when he thought of Lucy’s violent and abusive childhood at Alderthorpe, then a quick, clean death or a lifetime of solitary confinement seemed a more apt punishment.

As usual, what he thought didn’t really matter, because the whole business was out of his hands, the judgment not his to make. Perhaps the best he could hope for was to put Lucy Payne out of his mind, which he would succeed in doing over time. Partially, at any rate. She would always be there – they all were, killers and victims – but in time she would fade and become a more shadowy figure than she was at the moment.

Banks had not forgotten the sixth victim. She had a name, and unless her childhood was like Lucy Payne’s, someone must have once loved her, held her and whispered words of comfort after a nightmare, perhaps, soothed away the pain when she fell and scraped her knee. He would have to be patient. The forensic experts were good at their jobs, and eventually her bones would yield up something that would lead to her identity.

Just as the famous “Meditation” at the end of the first CD started, his phone rang. He was off duty and at first thought of not answering, but curiosity got the better of him, as it always did.

It was Annie Cabbot, and she sounded as if she were standing in the middle of a road, there was no much noise around her: voices, sirens, car brakes, people shouting orders.

“Annie, where the hell are you?”

“Roundabout on the Ripon Road, just north of Harrogate,” Annie said, shouting to make herself heard over the noise.

“What are you doing there?”

Somebody spoke to Annie, though Banks couldn’t hear what was said. She answered abruptly and then came back on the line. “Sorry, it’s a bit chaotic down here.”

“What’s going on?”

“I thought you ought to know. It’s Janet Taylor.”

“What about her?”

“She ran into another car.”

“She what? How is she?”

“She’s dead, Alan. Dead. They haven’t been able to get her body out of the car yet, but they know she’s dead. They got her handbag out and found my card in it.”

“Bloody hell.” Banks felt numb. “How did it happen?”

“Can’t say for sure,” Annie said. “The person in the car behind her says she just seemed to speed up at the roundabout rather than slow down, and she hit the car that was going round. A mother driving her daughter home from a piano lesson.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ. What happened to them?”

“The mother’s okay. Cuts and bruises. Shock.”

“The daughter?”

“It’s touch and go. The paramedics suspect internal injuries, but they won’t know till they get her to hospital. She’s still stuck in the car.”

“Was Janet pissed?”

“Don’t know yet. I wouldn’t be surprised if drinking had something to do with it, though. And she was depressed. I don’t know. She might have been trying to kill herself. If she did… it’s…” Banks could sense Annie choking up.

“Annie, I know what you’re going to say, but even if she did do it on purpose, it’s not your fault. You didn’t go down there in that cellar, see what she saw, do what she did. All you did was carry out an unbiased investigation.”

“Unbiased! Christ, Alan, I bent over backward to be sympathetic toward her.”

“Whatever. It’s not your fault.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Annie, she was no doubt drunk, and she went off the road.”

“Maybe you’re right. I can’t believe that Janet would take someone else with her if she wanted to kill herself. But whichever way you look at it, drunk or not, suicide or not, it’s still down to what happened, isn’t it?”

“It happened, Annie. Nothing to do with you.”

“The politics. The fucking politics.”

“Do you want me to come down?”

“No, I’m okay.”

“Annie-”

“Sorry, got to go now. They’re pulling the girl out of the car.” She hung up, leaving Banks holding the receiver and breathing quickly. Janet Taylor. Another casualty of the Paynes.

The first CD had finished, and Banks had no real desire to listen to the second one after the news he had just heard. He poured himself two fingers of Laphroaig and took his cigarettes outside to his spot by the falls and, as the vivid orange and purple colors streaked the western sky, he drank a silent toast to Janet Taylor and to the nameless dead girl buried in the Paynes’ garden.

But he hadn’t been out there five minutes when he decided he should go to Annie, had to go, no matter what she had said. Their romantic relationship might be over, but he had promised to be her friend and give her support. If she didn’t need that right now, when would she? He looked at his watch. It would take him an hour or so to get there, if he moved fast, and Annie would probably still be at the scene. Even if she’d gone, she would be at hospital, and he would be able to find her there easily enough.

He left the tumbler, still half-full, on the low table and went to grab his jacket. Before he could put it on, the phone rang again. Thinking it was Annie calling back with more news, he answered. It was Jenny Fuller.

“I hope I haven’t called at an awkward moment,” she said.

“I was just going out.”

“Oh. An emergency?”

“Sort of.”

“Only I was thinking we might have a drink and celebrate, you know, now it’s all over.”

“That’s a great idea, Jenny. I can’t do it right now, though. I’ll call you later, okay?”

“Story of my life.”

“Sorry. Got to go. I’ll call. Promise.”

Banks could hear the disappointment in Jenny’s voice, and he felt like a real bastard for being so abrupt with her – after all, she had worked on the case as hard as anyone – but he didn’t want to explain about Janet Taylor, and he didn’t feel like celebrating anything.

Now it’s all over, Jenny had said. Banks wondered if it would ever be all over, the aftermath of the Paynes’ rampage, if it would ever cease taking its toll. Six teenage girls dead, one still unidentified. Kathleen Murray dead these ten years or more. PC Dennis Morrisey dead. Terence Payne dead. Lucy Payne paralyzed. Now Janet Taylor dead and a young girl seriously injured.

Banks checked for his keys and cigarettes, and headed out into the night.