Aftermath

2

Acting Detective Superintendent Alan Banks – “acting” because his immediate boss, Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe, had shattered his ankle while working on his drystone wall and would be off work for at least a couple of months – signed the first officer’s log at the gate, took a deep breath and walked into 35 The Hill shortly after six o’clock that morning. Householders: Lucy Payne, age twenty-two, loan officer at the local NatWest branch up near the shopping precinct, and her husband, Terence Payne, age twenty-eight, schoolteacher at Silverhill Comprehensive. No kids. No criminal record. To all intents and purposes an idyllic, successful young couple. Married just one year.

All the lights were on in the house, and the scene-of-the-crime were already at work, dressed – as Banks was – in the obligatory white sterile overalls, overshoes, gloves and hoods. They looked like some sort of phantom housecleaning crew, Banks thought – dusting, vacuuming, scraping up samples, packaging, labeling.

Banks paused a moment in the hall to get the feel of the place. It seemed an ordinary enough middle-class home. The ribbed coral-pink wallpaper looked new. Carpeted stairs to the right led up to the bedrooms. If anything, the place smelled a bit too much of lemon air freshener. The only thing that seemed out of place was the rust-colored stain on the cream hall carpet. Lucy Payne, currently under observation by both doctors and police in Leeds General Infirmary, just down the corridor from where her husband, Terence Payne, was fighting for his life. Banks hadn’t a lot of sympathy to spare for him; PC Dennis Morrisey had lost his struggle for life far more quickly.

And there was a dead girl in the cellar, too.

Most of this information Banks had got from Detective Chief Inspector Ken Blackstone over his mobile on the way to Leeds, the rest from talking to the paramedics and the ambulance crew outside. The first phone call to his Gratly cottage, the one that woke him from the shallow, troubled and restless sleep that seemed to be his lot these days, had come shortly after half-past four, and he had showered, thrown on some clothes and jumped in his car. A CD of Zelenka Trios had helped him keep calm on the way and discouraged him from taking outrageous risks with his driving on the A1. All in all, the eighty-mile drive had taken him about an hour and a half, and if he hadn’t had too many other things on his mind, during the first part of his journey he might have admired the coming of a beautiful May dawn over the Yorkshire Dales, rare enough so far that spring. As it was, he saw little but the road ahead and barely even heard the music. By the time he got to the Leeds Ring Road, the Monday-morning rush hour was already under way.

Circumventing the bloodstains and daffodils on the hall carpet, Banks walked to the back of the house. He noticed someone had been sick in the kitchen sink.

“One of the ambulance crew,” said the SOCO busy going through the drawers and cupboards. “First time out, poor sod. We’re lucky he made it back up here and didn’t puke all over the scene.”

“Christ, what did he have for breakfast?”

“Looks like Thai red curry and chips to me.”

Banks took the stairs down to the cellar. On his way, he noted the door to the garage. Very handy if you wanted to bring someone into the house without being seen, someone you had abducted, perhaps drugged or knocked unconscious. Banks opened the door and had a quick glance at the car. It was a dark four-door Vectra, with an “S” registration. The last three letters were NGV. Not local. He made a note to have someone run it through the DVLA at Swansea.

He could hear voices down in the cellar, see cameras flashing. That would be Luke Selkirk, their hotshot crime scene photographer, fresh from his army-sponsored training course up at Catterick Camp, where he had been learning how to photograph scenes of terrorist bombings. Not that his special skill would be needed today, but it was good to know you were working with a highly trained professional, one of the best.

The stone steps were worn in places; the walls were whitewashed brick. Someone had put more white and blue tape across the open door at the bottom. An inner crime scene. Nobody would get beyond that until Banks, Luke, the doctor and the SOCOs had done their jobs.

Banks paused at the threshold and sniffed. The smell was bad: decomposition, mold, incense, and the sweet, metallic whiff of fresh blood. He ducked under the tape and walked inside and the horror of the scene hit him with such force that he staggered back a couple of inches.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t seen worse; he had. Much worse: the disemboweled Soho prostitute, Dawn Whadden; a decapitated petty thief called William Grant; the partly eaten body parts of a young barmaid called Colleen Dickens; bodies shredded by shotgun blasts and slit open by knives. He remembered all their names. But that wasn’t the point, he had come to learn over the years. It wasn’t a matter of blood and guts, of intestines poking out of the stomach, of missing limbs or of deep gashes flapping open in an obscene parody of mouths. That wasn’t what really got you when it came right down to it. That was just the outward aspect. You could, if you tried hard, convince yourself that a crime scene like this one was a movie set or a theater during rehearsals, and that the bodies were merely props, the blood fake.

No, what got to him most of all was the pity of it all, the deep empathy he had come to feel with the victims of crimes he investigated. And he hadn’t become more callous, more inured to it all over the years, as many did, and as he had once thought he would. Each new one was like a raw wound reopening. Especially something like this. He could keep it all in check, keep the bile down in his rumbling gut and do his job, but it ate away at him from the inside like acid and kept him awake at night. Pain and fear and despair permeated these walls like the factory grime had crusted the old city buildings. Only this kind of horror couldn’t be sandblasted away.

Seven people in the cramped cellar, five of them alive and two dead; this was going to be a logistical and forensic nightmare.

Someone had turned an overhead light on, just a bare bulb, but candles still flickered all over the place. From the doorway Banks could see the doctor bent over the pale body on the mattress. A girl. The only outward signs of violence were a few cuts and bruises, a bloody nose, and a length of yellow plastic clothesline around her neck. She lay spread-eagled on the soiled mattress, her hands tied with the same yellow plastic line to metal pegs someone had set into the concrete floor. Blood from PC Morrisey’s severed artery had sprayed across her ankles and shins. Some flies had managed to get in the cellar, and three of them were buzzing around the blood clotted under her nose. There seemed to be some sort of rash or blistering around her mouth. Her face was pale and bluish in death, the rest of her body white under the bulb’s glare.

What made it all so much worse were the large mirrors on the ceiling and two of the walls that multiplied the scene like a fun-fair trick.

“Who turned the overhead light on?” Banks asked.

“Ambulance men,” said Luke Selkirk. “They were first on the scene after PCs Taylor and Morrisey.”

“Okay, we’ll leave it on for the time being, get a better idea of what we’re dealing with. But I want the original scene photographed, too, later. Just the candlelight.”

Luke nodded. “By the way, this is Faye McTavish, my new assistant.” Faye was a slight, pale, waif-like woman, early twenties perhaps, with a stud through her nostril and almost no hips at all. The old heavy Pentax she had slung around her neck looked too big for her to hold steady, but she managed it well enough.

“Pleased to meet you, Faye,” said Banks, shaking hands. “Only wish it could be in better circumstances.”

“Me too.”

Banks turned to the body on the mattress.

He knew who she was: Kimberley Myers, age fifteen, missing since Friday night, when she had failed to return from a youth-club dance only a quarter of a mile from her home. She had been a pretty girl, with the characteristic long blond hair and slim, athletic figure of all the victims. Now her dead eyes stared up at the mirror on the ceiling as if looking for answers to her suffering.

Dried semen glistened on her pubic hair. And blood. Semen and blood, the old, old story. Why was it always the pretty young girls these monsters took? Banks asked himself for the hundredth time. Oh, he knew all the pat answers; he knew that women and children made easier victims because they were physically weaker, more easily cowed and subdued by male strength, just as he knew that prostitutes and runaways made easy victims, too, because they were less likely to be missed than someone from a nice home, like Kimberley. But it was much more than that. There was always a deep, dark sexual aspect to these sorts of things, and to be the right kind of object for whoever had done this, the victim needed not only to be weaker, but needed breasts and a vagina, too, available for her tormentor’s pleasure and ultimate desecration. And perhaps some aura of youth and innocence. It was despoilation of innocence. Men killed other men for many reasons, by the thousands in wartime, but in crimes like this, the victim always had to be a woman.

The first officer on the scene had had the foresight to mark out a narrow pathway on the floor with tape so that people wouldn’t walk all over the place and destroy evidence, but after what had happened with PCs Morrisey and Taylor, it was probably too late for that anyway.

PC Dennis Morrisey lay curled on his side in a pool of blood on the concrete floor. His blood had also sprayed over part of the wall and one of the mirrors, rivaling in its pattern anything Jackson Pollock had ever painted. The rest of the whitewashed walls were covered with either pornographic images ripped from magazines, or childish, obscene stick figures of men with enormous phalluses, like the Cerne Giant, drawn in colored chalk. Mixed in with these were a number of crudely drawn occult symbols and grinning skulls. There was another pool of blood by the wall next to the door, and a long dark smear on the whitewash. Terence Payne.

Luke Selkirk’s camera flashed and snapped Banks out of his trance-like state. Faye was wielding her camcorder now. The other man in the room turned and spoke for the first time: Detective Chief Inspector Ken Blackstone of the West Yorkshire Police, looking immaculate as ever, even in his protective clothing. Gray hair curled over his ears, and his wire-rimmed glasses magnified his sharp eyes.

“Alan,” he said, in a voice like a sigh. “Like a fucking abattoir, isn’t it?”

“A fine start to the week. When did you get here?”

“Four forty-four.”

Blackstone lived out Lawnswood way, and it wouldn’t have taken him more than half an hour to get to The Hill, if that. Banks, heading the North Yorkshire team, was glad that Blackstone was running West Yorkshire’s part of their joint operation, dubbed the “Chameleon” squad because the killer, thus far, had managed to adapt, blend into the night and go unnoticed. Often, working together involved ego problems and incompatible personalities, but Banks and Blackstone had known each other for eight or nine years and had always worked well together. They got on socially, too, with a mutual fondness for pubs, Indian food and female jazz singers.

“Have you talked to the paramedics?” Banks asked.

“Yes,” said Blackstone. “They said they checked the girl for signs of life and found none, so they left her undisturbed. PC Morrisey was dead, too. Terence Payne was handcuffed to the pipe over there. His head was badly beaten, but he was still breathing, so they carted him off to hospital sharpish. There’s been some contamination of the scene – mostly to the position of Morrisey’s body – but it’s minimal, given the unusual circumstances.”

“Trouble is, Ken, we’ve got two crime scenes overlapping here – maybe three, if you count what happened to Payne.” He paused. “Four, if you count Lucy Payne upstairs. That’ll cause problems. Where’s Stefan?” Detective Sergeant Stefan Nowak was their Crime Scene Co-coordinator, new to the Western Division HQ in Eastvale, and brought into the team by Banks, who had been quickly impressed by his abilities. Banks didn’t envy Stefan his job right now.

“Around somewhere,” said Blackstone. “Last time I saw him, he was heading upstairs.”

“Anything more you can tell me, Ken?”

“Not much, really. That’ll have to wait until we can talk to PC Taylor in more detail.”

“When might that be?”

“Later today. The paramedics took her off. She’s being treated for shock.”

“I’m not bloody surprised. Have they-”

“Yes. They’ve bagged her clothes and the police surgeon’s been to the hospital to do the necessary.”

Which meant taking fingernail scrapings and swabs from her hands, among other things. One thing it was easy to forget – and a thing everyone might want to forget – was that, for the moment, probationary PC Janet Taylor wasn’t a hero; she was a suspect in a case of excessive use of force. Very nasty indeed.

“How does it look to you, Ken?” Banks asked. “Gut feeling.”

“As if they surprised Payne down here, cornered him. He came at them fast and somehow struck PC Morrisey with that.” He pointed to a bloodstained machete on the floor by the wall. “You can see Morrisey’s been slashed two or three times. PC Taylor must have had time enough to get her baton out and use it on Payne. She did the right thing, Alan. He must have been coming at her like a bloody maniac. She had to defend herself. Self-defense.”

“Not for us to decide,” said Banks. “What’s the damage to Payne?”

“Fractured skull. Multiple fractures.”

“Shame. Still, if he dies, it might save the courts a bit of money and a lot of grief in the long run. What about his wife?”

“Way it looks is he hit her with a vase on the stairs and she fell down. Mild concussion, a bit of bruising. Other than that, there’s no serious damage. She’s lucky it wasn’t heavy crystal or she might have been in the same boat as her husband. Anyway, she’s still out and they’re keeping an eye on her, but she’ll be fine. DC Hodgkins is at the hospital now.”

Banks looked around the room again, with its flickering candles, mirrors, and obscene cartoons. He noticed shards of glass on the mattress near the body and realized when he saw his own image in one of them that they were from a broken mirror. Seven years bad luck. Hendrix’s “Roomful of Mirrors” would never sound quite the same again.

The doctor looked up from his examination for the first time since Banks had entered the cellar, got up off his knees, and walked over to them. “Dr. Ian Mackenzie, Home Office pathologist,” he said, holding his hand out to Banks, who shook it.

Dr. Mackenzie was a heavily built man with a full head of brown hair, parted and combed, a fleshy nose, and a gap between his upper front teeth. Always a sign of luck, that, Banks remembered his mother once telling him. Maybe it would counteract the broken mirror. “What can you tell us?” Banks asked.

“The presence of petechial hemorrhages, bruising of the throat, and cyanosis all indicate death by strangulation, most likely ligature strangulation by that yellow clothesline around her throat, but I won’t be able to tell you for certain until after the postmortem.”

“Any evidence of sexual activity?”

“Some vaginal and anal tearing, what looks like semen stains. But you can see that for yourself. Again, I’ll be able to tell you more later.”

“Time of death?”

“Recent. Very recent. There’s hardly any hypostasis yet, rigor hasn’t started, and she’s still warm.”

“How long?”

“Two or three hours, at an estimate.”

Banks looked at his watch. Sometime after three, then, not long before the domestic dispute that drove the woman over the road to dial 999. Banks cursed. If the call had come in just a short while earlier, maybe only minutes or an hour, then they might have saved Kimberley. On the other hand, the timing was interesting for the questions it raised about the reasons for the dispute. “What about that rash around her mouth? Chloroform?”

“At a guess. Probably used in abducting her, maybe even for keeping her sedated, though there are much more pleasant ways.”

Banks glanced at Kimberley’s body. “I don’t think our man was overly concerned about being pleasant, do you, Doctor? Is chloroform easily available?”

“Pretty much. It’s used as a solvent.”

“But it’s not the cause of death?”

“I wouldn’t say so, no. Can’t be absolutely certain until after the postmortem, of course, but if it is the cause, we’d expect to find more severe blistering in the esophagus, and there would also be noticeable liver damage.”

“When can you get to her?”

“Barring a motorway pileup, I should be able to schedule the postmortems to start this afternoon,” Dr. Mackenzie said. “We’re pretty busy as it is, but… well, there are priorities.” He looked at Kimberley, then at PC Morrisey. “He died of blood loss, by the looks of it. Severed both his carotid artery and jugular vein. Very nasty, but quick. Apparently his partner did what she could, but it was too late. Tell her she shouldn’t blame herself. Hadn’t a chance.”

“Thanks, Doctor,” said Banks. “Appreciate it. If you could do the PM on Kimberley first…”

“Of course.”

Dr. Mackenzie left to make arrangements, and Luke Selkirk and Faye McTavish continued to take photographs and video. Banks and Blackstone stood in silence taking in the scene. There wasn’t much more to see, but what there was wouldn’t vanish quickly from their memories.

“Where does that door over there lead to?” Banks pointed to a door in the wall beside the mattress.

“Don’t know,” said Blackstone. “Haven’t had a chance to look yet.”

“Let’s have a butcher’s, then.”

Banks walked over and tried the handle. It wasn’t locked. Slowly, he opened the heavy wooden door to another, smaller room, this one with a dirt floor. The smell was much worse in there. He felt for an overhead light switch but couldn’t locate one. He sent Blackstone to get a torch and tried to make out what he could in the overspill of light from the main cellar.

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness in the room, Banks thought he could see little clumps of mushrooms growing here and there from the earth.

Then he realized…

“Oh, Christ,” he said, slumping back against the wall. The nearest clump wasn’t mushrooms at all, it was a cluster of human toes poking through the dirt.

After a quick breakfast and an interview with two police detectives about her 999 call, Maggie felt the urge to go for a walk. There wasn’t much chance of getting any work done for a while anyway, what with all the excitement over the road, though she knew she would try later. Right now, she was restless and needed to blow the cobwebs out. The detectives had stuck mostly to factual questions, and she hadn’t told them anything about Lucy, but she sensed that one of them, at least, didn’t seem satisfied with her answers. They would be back.

She still didn’t know what the hell was going on. The policemen who talked to her had given away nothing, of course, had not even told her how Lucy was, and the local news on the radio was hardly illuminating, either. All they could say at this stage was that a member of the public and a police officer had been injured earlier that morning. And that took second place to the ongoing story about the local girl, Kimberley Myers, who had vanished on her way home from a youth-club dance on Friday evening.

As she walked down the front steps past the fuchsias, which would soon be flowering and drooping their heavy purple-pink bells over the path, Maggie saw the activity at number 35 was increasing, and neighbors had gathered in little knots on the pavement, which had now been roped off from the road.

Several men wearing white overalls and carrying shovels, sieves, and buckets got out of a van and hurried down the garden path.

“Oh, look,” called out one of the neighbors. “He’s got his bucket and spade. Must be off to Blackpool.”

But nobody laughed. Like Maggie, everyone was coming to realize that something very nasty indeed had happened at 35 The Hill. About ten yards away, across from the narrow, walled lane that separated it from number 35, was a row of shops: pizza take-away, hairdresser, mini-mart, newsagent, fish and chips; and several uniformed officers stood arguing with the shopkeepers. They probably wanted to open up, Maggie guessed.

Plainclothes police officers sat on the front wall, talking and smoking. Radios crackled. The area had fast begun to resemble the site of a natural disaster, as if a train had crashed or an earthquake had struck. Maggie remembered seeing the aftermath of the 1994 earthquake in Los Angeles, when she went there once with Bill before they were married: a flattened apartment building, three stories reduced in seconds to two; fissures in the roads; part of the freeway collapsed. Though there was no visible damage here, it felt the same, had the same shell-shocked aura. Even though they didn’t know what had happened yet, the people were stunned, were counting the cost; there was a pall of apprehension over the community and a deep sense of terror at what destructive power the hand of God might have unleashed. They knew that something momentous had occurred on their doorsteps. Already, Maggie sensed, life in the neighborhood would never be the same.

Maggie turned left and walked down The Hill, under the railway bridge. At the bottom was a small artificial pond in the midst of the housing estates and business parks. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. At least she could sit on a bench by the water and feed the ducks, watch the people walking their dogs.

It was safe, too – an important consideration in this part of the city, where old, large houses, such as the one Maggie was staying in, rubbed shoulders with the newer, rougher council estates. Burglary was rife, and murder not unknown, but down by the pond, the double deckers ran by on the main road just a few yards away, and enough ordinary people came to walk their dogs that Maggie never felt isolated or threatened. Attacks occurred in broad daylight, she knew, but she still felt close enough to safety down there.

It was a warm, pleasant morning. The sun was out, but the brisk breeze made it necessary to wear a light jacket. Occasionally, a high cloud drifted over the sun, blocking the light for a second or two and casting shadows on the water’s surface.

There was something very soothing about feeding ducks, Maggie thought. Almost trance-like. Not for the ducks, of course, who seemed to have no concept of what sharing meant. You tossed the bread, they scooted toward it, quacked and fought. As Maggie crumbled the stale bread between her fingers and tossed it into the water, she recalled her first meeting with Lucy Payne just a couple of months ago.

She had been in town shopping for art supplies that day – a remarkably warm day for March – then she’d been to Borders on Briggate to buy some books, and afterward she found herself wandering through the Victoria Quarter down toward Kirkgate Market, when she bumped into Lucy coming the other way. They had seen each other before in the street and at the local shops, and they had always said hello. Partly through inclination and partly through her shyness – getting out and meeting people never having been one of her strong points – Maggie had no friends in her new world, apart from Claire Toth, her neighbor’s schoolgirl daughter, who seemed to have adopted her. Lucy Payne, she soon found out, was a kindred spirit.

Perhaps because they were both out of their natural habitat, like compatriots meeting in a foreign land, they stopped and spoke to each other. Lucy said it was her day off work and she was doing a bit of shopping. Maggie suggested a cup of tea or coffee at the Harvey Nichols outdoor café, and Lucy said she’d love to. So they sat and rested their feet, their parcels on the ground. Lucy noticed the names on the bags Maggie was carrying – including Harvey Nichols – and said something about not having the nerve to go inside such a posh place. Her own packages, it soon became clear, were from British Home Stores and C amp; A. Maggie had come across this reluctance in northern people before, had heard all the stories about how you’d never get the typical Leeds anorak-and-flat-cap crowd into an upmarket store like Harvey Nichols, but it still surprised her to hear Lucy admit to this.

This was because Maggie thought Lucy was such a strikingly attractive and elegant woman, with her glossy black raven’s-wing hair tumbling down to the small of her back, and the kind of figure men buy magazines to look at pictures of. Lucy was tall and full-breasted, with a waist that curved in and hips that curved out in the right proportion, and the simple yellow dress she was wearing under a light jacket that day emphasized her figure without broadcasting it out loud, and it also drew attention to her shapely legs. She didn’t wear much makeup; she didn’t need to. Her pale complexion was smooth as a reflection in a mirror, her black eyebrows arched, cheekbones high in her oval face. Her eyes were black, with flint-like chips scattered around inside them that caught the light like quartz crystals as she looked around.

The waiter came over and Maggie asked Lucy if she would like a cappuccino. Lucy said she’d never had one before and wasn’t quite sure what it was, but she would give it a try. Maggie asked for two cappuccinos. When Lucy took her first sip, she got froth on her lips, which she dabbed at with a serviette.

“You can’t take me anywhere,” she laughed.

“Don’t be silly,” said Maggie.

“No, I mean it. That’s what Terry always says.” She was very soft-spoken, the way Maggie had been for a while after she left Bill.

Maggie was just about to say that Terry was a fool, but she held her tongue. Insulting Lucy’s husband on their first meeting wouldn’t be very polite at all. “What do you think of the cappuccino?” she asked.

“It’s very nice.” Lucy took another sip. “Where are you from?” she asked. “I’m not being too nosy, am I? It’s just that your accent…”

“Not at all, no. I’m from Toronto. Canada.”

“No wonder you’re so sophisticated. I’ve never been any further than the Lake District.”

Maggie laughed. Toronto, sophisticated?

“See,” said Lucy, pouting a little. “You’re laughing at me already.”

“No, no, I’m not,” Maggie said. “Honestly, I’m not. It’s just that… well, I suppose it’s all a matter of perspective, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“If I were to tell a New Yorker that Toronto is sophisticated, she’d laugh in my face. The best thing they can say about the place is that it’s clean and safe.”

“Well, that’s something to be proud of, isn’t it? Leeds is neither.”

“It doesn’t seem so bad to me.”

“Why did you leave? I mean, why did you come here?”

Maggie frowned and fumbled for a cigarette. She still cursed herself for a fool for starting to smoke at thirty when she had managed to avoid the evil weed her whole life. Of course, she could blame it on the stress, though in the end it had only contributed more to that stress. She remembered the first time Bill had smelled smoke on her breath, that quick-as-a-flash change from concerned husband to Monster Face, as she had called it. But smoking wasn’t that bad. Even her shrink said it wasn’t such a terrible idea to have the occasional cigarette as a crutch for the time being. She could always stop later, when she felt better able to cope again.

“So why did you come here?” Lucy persisted. “I don’t mean to be nosy, but I’m interested. Was it a new job?”

“Not exactly. What I do I can do anywhere.”

“What is it?”

“I’m a graphic artist. I illustrate books. Mostly children’s books. At the moment I’m working on a new edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.”

“Oh, that sounds fascinating,” said Lucy. “I was terrible at art in school. I can’t even draw a matchstick figure.” She laughed and put her hand over her mouth. “So why are you here?”

Maggie struggled with herself for a moment, stalling. Then a strange thing happened to her, a sense of inner chains and straps loosening, giving her space and a feeling of floating. Sitting there in the Victoria Quarter smoking and drinking cappuccino with Lucy, she felt an immediate and unheralded surge of affection for this young woman she hardly knew. She wanted the two of them to be friends, could see them talking about their problems just like this, giving each other sympathy and advice, just as she had with Alicia back in Toronto. Lucy, with her gaucheness, her naïve charm inspired a sort of emotional confidence in Maggie: this was someone, she felt, with whom she would be safe. More than that; though Maggie may have been the more “sophisticated” of the two, she sensed that they shared more than it appeared. The truth was difficult for her to admit to, but she felt the overwhelming need to tell someone other than her psychologist. And why not Lucy?

“What is it?” Lucy said. “You look so sad.”

“Do I? Oh… Nothing. Look, my husband and I,” Maggie said, stumbling over the words as if her tongue were the size of a steak, “I… er… we split up.” She felt her mouth drying up. Despite the loosened bonds, this was still far more difficult than she had thought it would be. She sipped some more coffee.

Lucy frowned. “I’m sorry. But why move so far away? Lots of people split up and they don’t move countries. Unless he’s… oh, my God.” She gave her cheek a little slap. “Lucy, I think you’ve just put your foot in it again.”

Maggie couldn’t help allowing herself a thin smile, even though Lucy had touched upon the painful truth. “It’s all right,” she said. “Yes, he was abusive. Yes, he hit me. You can say I’m running away. It’s true. Certainly for a while I don’t even want to be in the same country as him.” The vehemence of her words when they came out surprised even Maggie herself.

A strange look came into Lucy’s eyes, then she glanced around again, as if looking for someone. Only anonymous shoppers drifted up and down the arcade under the stained-glass roof, packages in hands. Lucy touched Maggie’s arm with her fingertips and Maggie felt a little shiver run through her, almost like a reflex action to pull away. A moment ago, she had thought it would do her good to admit to someone, to share what happened with another woman, but now she wasn’t so sure. She felt too naked, too raw.

“I’m sorry if it embarrasses you,” Maggie said, with a hard edge to her voice. “But you did ask.”

“Oh, no,” said Lucy, grasping Maggie’s wrist. Her grip was surprisingly strong, her hands cool. “Please don’t think that. I asked for it. I always do. It’s my fault. But it doesn’t embarrass me. It’s just… I don’t know what to say. I mean… you? You seem so bright, so in control.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I thought: How could something like that happen to someone like me? Doesn’t it only happen to other women, poor, less fortunate, uneducated, stupid women?”

“How long?” Lucy asked. “I mean…?”

“How long did I let it go on before I left?”

“Yes.”

“Two years. And don’t ask me how I could let it go on for so long, either. I don’t know. I’m still working on that one with the shrink.”

“I see.” Lucy paused, taking it all in. “What made you leave him in the end?”

Maggie paused a moment, then went on. “One day he just went too far,” she said. “He broke my jaw and two ribs, did some damage to my insides. It put me in hospital. While I was there I filed assault charges. And do you know what? As soon as I’d done it I wanted to drop them, but the police wouldn’t let me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know what it’s like over here, but in Canada it’s out of your hands if you bring assault charges. You can’t just change your mind and drop them. Anyway, there was a restraining order against him. Nothing happened for a couple of weeks; then he came around to the house with flowers, wanting to talk.”

“What did you do?”

“I kept the chain on. I wouldn’t let him in. He was in one of his contrite moods, pleading and wheedling, promising on his mother’s grave. He’d done it before.”

“And broken his promise?”

“Every time. Anyway, then he became threatening and abusive. He started hammering at the door and calling me names. I called the police. They arrested him. He came back again, stalking me. Then a friend suggested I move away for a while, the further the better. I knew about the house on The Hill. Ruth and Charles Everett own the place. Do you know them?”

Lucy shook her head. “I’ve seen them around. Not for a while, though.”

“No, you wouldn’t have. Charles was offered a year’s appointment at Columbia University in New York, starting in January. Ruth went with him.”

“How did you know them?”

“Ruth and I are in the same line of work. It’s a fairly small world.”

“But why Leeds?”

Maggie smiled. “Why not? First, there was the house, just waiting for me, and my parents came from Yorkshire. I was born here. Rawdon. But we left when I was a little girl. Anyway, it seemed the ideal solution.”

“So you’re living across the road in that big house all alone?”

“All alone.”

“I thought I hadn’t seen anyone else coming and going.”

“To be honest, Lucy, you’re pretty much the first person I’ve spoken to since I got here – apart from my shrink and my agent, that is. It’s not that people aren’t friendly. I’ve just been… well… stand-offish, I suppose. A bit distant.” Lucy’s hand still rested on Maggie’s forearm, though she wasn’t gripping at all now.

“That makes sense. After what you’ve been through. Did he follow you over here?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think he knows where I am. I’ve had a few late-night hang-up calls, but I honestly don’t know if they’re from him. I don’t think they are. All my friends back there swore they wouldn’t tell him where I was, and he doesn’t know Ruth and Charles. He had little interest in my career. I doubt that he knows I’m in England, though I wouldn’t put it past him to find out.” Maggie needed to change the subject. She could hear the ringing in her ears, feel the arcade spinning and her jaw aching, the colored-glass roof above her shifting like a kaleidoscope, her neck muscles stiffening, the way they always did when she thought about Bill for too long. Psychosomatic, the shrink said. As if that did her any good. She asked Lucy about herself.

“I don’t really have any friends, either,” Lucy said. She stirred her spoon around the dregs of her cappuccino froth. “I suppose I was always rather shy, even at school. I never know what to say to people.” Then she laughed. “I don’t have much of a life, either. Just work at the bank. Home. Taking care of Terry. We haven’t been married a year yet. He doesn’t like me to go out by myself. Even today, my day off. If he knew… That reminds me.” She looked at her watch and seemed to become agitated. “Thank you very much for the coffee, Maggie. I really have to go. I have to get the bus back before school comes out. Terry’s a teacher, you see.”

Now it was Maggie’s turn to grasp Lucy’s arm and stop her from leaving so abruptly. “What is it, Lucy?” she asked.

Lucy just looked away.

“Lucy?”

“It’s nothing. It’s just what you were saying earlier.” She lowered her voice and looked around the arcade before going on. “I know what you mean, but I can’t talk about it now.”

“Terry hits you?”

“No. Not like… I mean… he’s very strict. It’s for my own good.” She looked Maggie in the eye. “You don’t know me. I’m a wayward child. Terry has to discipline me.”

Wayward, Maggie thought. Discipline. What strange and alarming words to use. “He has to keep you in check? Control you?”

“Yes.” She stood up again. “Look, I must go. It’s been wonderful talking to you. I hope we can be friends.”

“I do, too,” said Maggie. “We really have to talk again. There’s help, you know.”

Lucy flashed her a wan smile and hurried off toward Vicar Lane.

After Lucy had gone, Maggie sat stunned, her hand shaking as she drained her cup. The milky foam was dry and cold against her lips.

Lucy a fellow victim? Maggie couldn’t believe it. This strong, healthy, beautiful woman a victim, just like slight, weak, elfin Maggie? Surely it couldn’t be possible. But hadn’t she sensed something about Lucy? Some kinship, something they had in common. That must be it. That was what she hadn’t wanted to talk to the police about that morning. She knew that she might have to, depending on how serious things were, but she wanted to put off the moment for as long as she could.

Thinking of Lucy, Maggie remembered the one thing she had learned about domestic abuse so far: it doesn’t matter who you are. It can still happen to you. Alicia and all her other close friends back home had expressed their wonder at how such a bright, intelligent, successful, caring, educated woman like Maggie could fall victim to a wife beater like Bill. She had seen the expressions on their faces, noticed their conversations hush and shift when she walked in the room. There must be something wrong with her, they were all saying. And that was what she had thought, too, still thought, to some extent. Because to all intents and purposes Bill, too, was bright, intelligent, caring, educated and successful. Until he got his Monster Face on, that is, but only Maggie saw him like that. And it was odd, she thought, that nobody had thought to ask why an intelligent, wealthy, successful lawyer like Bill should feel the need to hit a woman almost a foot shorter and at least eighty pounds lighter than he was.

Even when the police came that time he was hammering at her door, she could tell they were making excuses for him – he was driven out of his mind by his wife’s unreasonable action in taking out a restraining order against him; he was just upset because his marriage had broken up and his wife wouldn’t give him a chance to make it up. Excuses, excuses. Maggie was the only one who knew what he could be like. Every day she thanked God they had no kids.

Which was what she was thinking about as she drifted back to the present, to feeding the ducks on the pond. Lucy was a fellow sufferer, and now Terry had put her in hospital. Maggie felt responsible, as if she should have done something. Lord knows, she had tried. After Lucy’s subsequent tale of physical and psychological abuse at the hands of her husband had unfolded during their many furtive meetings over coffee and biscuits, with Maggie sworn to absolute secrecy, she should have done something. But unlike most people, Maggie knew exactly what it was like. She knew Lucy’s position, knew that the best she could do was try to persuade her to seek professional help, to leave Terry. Which she did try to do.

But Lucy wouldn’t leave him. She said she had nowhere to go and no one to go to. A common enough excuse. And it made perfect sense. Where do you go when you walk out on your life?

Maggie had been lucky she had the friends to rally around her and come up with at least a temporary solution. Most women in her position were not so fortunate. Lucy also said that her marriage was so new that she felt she had to give it a chance, give it some time; she couldn’t just walk out on it; she wanted to work harder at it. Another common response from women in her position, Maggie knew, but all she could do was point out that it wasn’t going to get any better, no matter what she did, that Terry wasn’t going to change, and that it would come to her leaving sooner or later, so why not leave sooner and spare herself the beatings?

But no. Lucy wanted to stick it out awhile longer. At least a little while. Terry was so nice afterward, so good to her; he bought her presents, flowers, swore he would never do it again, that he would change. It made Maggie sick to hear all this – literally, as she once vomited the minute Lucy left the house – the same damn reasons and excuses she had given herself and those few close friends who knew about her situation all along.

But she listened. What else could she do? Lucy needed a friend, and for better or for worse, Maggie was it.

Now this.

Maggie tossed the last crumbs of bread into the pond. She aimed for the scruffiest, littlest, ugliest duckling of them all, the one way at the back that hadn’t been able to get at the feast so far. It made no difference. The bread landed only inches from his beak, but before he could get to it, the others had paddled over in a ferocious pack and snapped it right from under his mouth.

Banks wanted to get a look at the whole interior of 35 The Hill before the SOCOs started ripping it apart. He didn’t know what it would tell him, but he needed to get the feel of it.

Downstairs, in addition to the kitchen with its small dining area, there was only a living room containing a three-piece suite, stereo system, television, video, and a small bookcase. Though the room was decorated with the same feminine touch as the hallway – frilly lace curtains, coral-pink wallpaper, thick-pile carpet, cream ceiling with ornate cornices – the videos in the cabinet under the TV set reflected masculine tastes: action films, tape after tape of The Simpsons, a collection of horror and science fiction films, including the whole Alien and Scream series, along with some true classics such as The Wicker Man, the original Cat People, Curse of the Demon and a boxed set of David Cronenberg films. Banks poked around but could find no porn, nothing homemade. Maybe the SOCOs would have better luck when they took the house apart. The CDs were an odd mix. There was some classical, mostly classic FM compilations and a best-of-Mozart set, but there were also some rap, heavy metal, and country-and-western CDs. Eclectic tastes.

The books were also mixed: beauty manuals, Reader’s Digest condensed specials, needlecraft techniques, romances, occult and true crime of the more graphic variety, tabloid-style biographies of famous serial killers and mass murderers. The room showed one or two signs of untidiness – yesterday’s evening paper spread over the coffee table, a couple of videos left out of their boxes – but on the whole it was clean and neat. There were also a number of knick-knacks around the place, the sort of things that Banks’s mother wouldn’t have in the house because they made dusting more difficult: porcelain figures of fairy-tale characters and animals. In the dining room, there was a large glass-fronted cabinet filled with Royal Doulton chinaware. Probably a wedding present, Banks guessed.

Upstairs were two bedrooms, the smaller one used as a home office, along with a toilet and bathroom. No shower, just sink and tub. Both toilet and bathroom were spotless, the porcelain shining bright, the air heavy with the scent of lavender. Banks glanced around the plug holes but saw only polished chrome, not a trace of blood or hair.

Their computer expert, David Preece, sat in the office clacking away at the computer keys. A large filing cabinet stood in the corner; it would have to be emptied, its contents transferred to the exhibits room at Millgarth.

“Anything yet, Dave?” Banks asked.

Preece pushed his glasses back up his nose and turned. “Nothing much. Just a few pornographic Web sites bookmarked, chat rooms, that sort of thing. Nothing illegal yet, by the looks of it.”

“Keep at it.”

Banks walked into the master bedroom. The color scheme seemed to continue the ocean theme, but instead of coral it was sea blue. Azure? Cobalt? Cerulean? Annie Cabbot would know the exact shade, her father being an artist, but to Banks it was just blue, like the walls of his living room, though a shade or two darker. The queen-size bed was covered by a fluffed-up black duvet. The bedroom suite was assemble-it-yourself blond Scandinavian pine. Another television set stood on a stand at the bottom of the bed. The cabinet held a collection of soft-core porn, if the labels were to believed, but still nothing illegal or homemade, no kiddie stuff or animals. So the Paynes were into porn videos. So what? So were more than half the households in the country, Banks was willing to bet. But more than half the households in the country didn’t go around abducting and killing young girls. Some lucky young DC was going to have to sit down and watch the lot from start to finish to verify that the contents matched the titles.

Banks poked around in the wardrobe: suits, shirts, dresses, shoes – mostly women’s – nothing he wouldn’t have expected. They would all have to be bagged by the SOCOs and examined in minute detail.

There were plenty of knickknacks in the bedroom, too: Limoges cases, musical jewelry boxes, lacquered, hand-painted boxes. The room took its musky rose and aniseed scent, Banks noticed, from a bowl of potpourri on the laundry hamper under the window.

The bedroom faced The Hill, and when Banks parted the lace curtains and looked out of the window, he could see the houses atop the rise over the street, half hidden by shrubs and trees. He could also see the activity below, on the street. He turned and looked around the room again, finding it somehow depressing in its absolute sterility. It could have been ordered from a color supplement and assembled yesterday. The whole house – except for the cellar, of course – had that feel to it: pretty, contemporary, the sort of place where the up-and-coming young middle-class couple about town should be living. So ordinary, but empty.

With a sigh, he went back downstairs.