Aftermath

5

Leanne Wray was sixteen when she disappeared from Eastvale on Friday, the thirty-first of March. She was five feet two inches tall, weighed only six stone twelve pounds, and was an only child living with her father, Christopher Wray, a bus driver, and her stepmother Victoria, who stayed home, in a terrace house just north of Eastvale town center. Leanne was a pupil at Eastvale Comprehensive.

Leanne’s parents later told police that they saw nothing wrong in letting their daughter go to the pictures that Friday night, even though they had heard of the disappearances of Kelly Matthews and Samantha Foster. After all, she was going with her friends, and they said she had to be home by half-past ten at the latest.

The one thing Christopher and Victoria might have objected to, had they known about it, was the presence in the group of Ian Scott. Christopher and Victoria didn’t like Leanne hanging around with Ian. For one thing, he was two years older than she was, and that meant a lot at her age. For another, Ian had a reputation as a bit of a troublemaker and had even been arrested twice by the police: once for taking and driving away and once for selling Ecstasy in the Bar None. Also, Leanne was a very pretty girl, slim and shapely, with beautiful golden-blond hair, an almost translucent complexion and long-lashed blue eyes, and they thought an older boy like Ian could be interested in her for only one thing. That he had his own flat was another black mark against him.

But Leanne just liked to hang out with Ian’s crowd. Ian’s girlfriend, also with them that night, was Sarah Francis, age seventeen, and the fourth in the party was Mick Blair, age eighteen, just a friend. They all said they had walked around the center for a while after the film, then gone for a coffee at the El Toro – though the police discovered on further investigation that they had actually been drinking in the Old Ship Inn, in an alley between North Market Street and York Road, and lied about it because both Leanne and Sarah were under age. When pressed, they all said that Leanne had left them just outside the pub and headed home on foot at about a quarter past ten, a journey that should have taken her no more than ten minutes. But she never arrived.

Leanne’s parents, though angry and worried, gave her until morning before calling the police, and an investigation, headed by Banks, soon went into full swing. Eastvale was papered with posters of Leanne; everyone who had been at the cinema, in the Old Ship Inn and in the town center that evening was questioned. Nothing. They even ran a reconstuction, but still nothing came of it. Leanne Wray had vanished into thin air. Not one person reported seeing her since she left the Old Ship.

Her three friends said they went to another pub, The Riverboat, a crowded place that stayed open late, and ended up at the Bar None on the market square. The closed-circuit TV cameras showed them turning up there at about half-past twelve. Ian Scott’s flat was given the full SOCO treatment to see if any evidence of Leanne’s presence could be found there, but there was nothing. If she had been there, she had left no trace.

There were hints of tension in the Wray home, Banks soon discovered, and according to a school friend, Jill Brown, Leanne didn’t get on well with her stepmother. They argued a lot. She missed her real mother, who had died of cancer two years ago, and Leanne had told her friend that she thought Victoria ought to go out and get a job instead of “sponging off her dad,” who didn’t make a lot of money anyway. Things were always a bit tough financially, Jill said, and Leanne had to wear sturdier clothes than she thought fashionable and make them last longer than she would have wished. When she was sixteen, she got a Saturday job in a town center boutique, so she was able to buy nice clothes at a discount.

There was, then, the faintest hope that Leanne had run away from a difficult situation and somehow hadn’t heard the appeals. Until her shoulder bag was found in the shrubbery of a garden she would have passed on her route home. The owners of the house were questioned, but they turned out to be a retired couple in their seventies and were soon exonerated.

After the third day, Banks contacted his assistant chief constable, Ron McLaughlin, and discussions with Area Commander Philip Hartnell of West Yorkshire Police followed. Within days, the Chameleon task force was created and Banks was put in charge of North Yorkshire’s part. It meant more resources, more man-hours and more concentrated effort. It also meant, sadly, that they believed a serial killer was at work, and this was something the newspapers lost no time in speculating about.

Leanne was an average pupil, so her teachers said. She could probably do better if she tried harder, but she didn’t want to make the effort. She intended to leave school at the end of the year and get a job, maybe in a clothes shop or a music shop like Virgin or HMV. She loved pop music, and her favorite group was Oasis. No matter what people said about them, Leanne was a loyal fan. Her friends thought her a rather shy but easygoing person, quick to laugh at people’s jokes and not given much to introspection. She also suffered from mild asthma and carried an inhaler, which had been found along with the rest of her personal things in the abandoned shoulder bag.

If the second victim, Samantha Foster, was a little eccentric, Leanne Wray was about as ordinary a lower-middle-class Yorkshire lass as you could get.

“Yeah, I’m all right to talk, sir. Really. Come on in.”

PC Janet Taylor didn’t look all right to Banks when he called at her flat after six that evening, but then anyone who had, that morning, both fought off a serial killer and cradled her dying partner’s head on her lap had every right to look a bit peaky. Janet was pale and drawn, and the fact that she was dressed all in black only served to accentuated her pallor.

Janet’s flat was above a hairdresser’s on Harrogate Road, not far from the airport. Banks could smell the setting lotion and herbal shampoo inside the ground-floor doorway. He followed her up the narrow staircase. She moved listlessly, dragging her feet. Banks felt almost as weary as Janet seemed. He had just attended Kimberley Myers’s postmortem, and while it had yielded no surprises – death by ligature strangulation – Dr. Mackenzie had found traces of semen in the vagina, anus and mouth. With any luck, DNA would link that to Terence Payne.

Janet Taylor’s living room showed signs of neglect typical to a single police officer’s dwelling. Banks recognized it all too well. He tried to keep his own cottage clean as best he could, but it was difficult sometimes when you couldn’t afford a cleaning lady and you didn’t have time yourself. When you did have a bit of free time, the last thing you wanted to do was housework. Still, the small room was cozy enough despite the patina of dust on the low table and the T-shirt and bra slung over the back of the armchair, the magazines and occasional half-empty teacups. There were three framed posters of old Bogie movies on the walls – Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen – and some photos on the mantelpiece, including one of Janet looking proud in her uniform, standing between an older couple Banks took to be her mother and father. The potted plant on the windowsill looked to be on its last legs, wilting and brown around the edges of the leaves. A television set flickered in one corner, the sound turned down. It was a local news program, and Banks recognized the scene around the Payne house.

Janet moved the T-shirt and bra from the back of the armchair. “Sit down, sir.”

“Can we have the sound on for a minute?” Banks asked. “Who knows, maybe we’ll learn something.”

“Sure.” Janet turned the volume up, but all they got was a repeat of AC Hartnell’s earlier press statement. When it was over, Janet got up and turned off the TV. She still seemed slow in her movements, slurred in her speech, and Banks imagined it was something to do with the tranquilizers the doctor would have given her. Or maybe it was the half-empty bottle of gin on the sideboard.

A plane took off from Leeds and Bradford Airport, and while the noise didn’t actually shake the flat, it was enough to rattle a glass and make conversation impossible for a minute or so. It was also hot in the small room, and Banks felt the sweat gather on his forehead and under his arms.

“It’s why the place is so cheap,” Janet said after the noise had waned to a distant drone. “I don’t mind it that much. You get used to it. Sometimes I sit here and imagine I’m up there in one of them, flying off to some exotic country.” She got up and poured herself a small gin, adding some tonic from an open bottle of Schweppes. “Fancy a drink, sir?”

“No, thanks. How are you coping?”

Janet sat down again and shook her head. “The funny thing is, I don’t really know. I’m all right, I suppose, but I feel sort of numb, as if I’ve just come around from an anesthetic and I’m still all padded in cotton wool. Or like I’m in a dream and I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning and everything will be different. It won’t, though, will it?”

“Probably not,” said Banks. “It might even be worse.”

Janet laughed. “Well, thanks for not giving me a load of bollocks.”

Banks smiled. “My pleasure. Look, I’m not here to question your actions, but I need to know what happened in that house. Do you feel up to talking about it?”

“Sure.”

Banks noticed her body language, the way she crossed her arms and seemed to draw in on herself, and guessed that she wasn’t up to it, but he had to press on nonetheless.

“I felt like a criminal, you know,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“The way the doctor examined me, bagged my clothes, scraped under my fingernails.”

“It’s routine. You know it is.”

“I know. I know. That’s not what it feels like on the receiving end, though.”

“I suppose not. Look, I’m not going to lie to you, Janet. This could be a serious problem. It could be over in no time at all, a minor bump in the road, but it could stick around, cause you problems with your career-”

“I think that’s pretty much over, don’t you, sir?”

“Not necessarily. Not unless you want it to be.”

“I must admit I haven’t given it a lot of thought since… you know.” She gave a harsh laugh. “Funny thing is, if this was America, I’d be a hero.”

“What happened when you first received the call?”

Janet told him about the car fire and the call and finding Lucy Payne unconscious in the hallway in short, halting sentences, occasionally pausing for a sip of gin and tonic, once or twice losing her thread and staring toward the open window. Sounds of evening traffic came up from the busy road and occasionally a plane landed or took off.

“Did you think she was seriously hurt?”

“Serious enough. Not life-threatening. But I stayed with her while Dennis checked around upstairs. He came back with a blanket and a pillow, I remember that. I thought that was nice of him. It surprised me.”

“Dennis wasn’t always nice?”

“It’s not a word I’d use to describe him, no. We disagreed a lot, but I suppose we got on okay. He’s all right. Just a bit of a Neanderthal. And full of himself.”

“What did you do next?”

“Dennis went in back, the kitchen. I mean, someone had hit her, and if it was her husband, the odds were he was still in the house somewhere. Right? Probably feeling sorry for himself.”

“You stayed with Lucy?”

“Yes.”

“Then what happened?”

“Dennis called me, so I left her. She was as comfortable as I could make her, with the blanket and the pillow. The bleeding had pretty much stopped. I didn’t think she was in any real danger. The ambulance was on its way…”

“You didn’t sense any danger in the house?”

“Danger? No, not at all. I mean, no more than you do in any domestic. They can turn on you. It’s happened. But no.”

“Okay. What made you go down to the cellar? Did you think her husband might be there?”

“Yes, I suppose we must have.”

“Why did Dennis call you?”

Janet paused, clearly embarrassed.

“Janet?”

Finally she looked at him. “You’ve been there? Down the cellar?”

“Yes.”

“That picture on the door. The woman.”

“I saw it.”

“Dennis called me to see it. It was his idea of a joke. That’s what I mean. Neanderthal.”

“I see. Was the door open? The door to the cellar?”

“No, it was closed. But there was light showing under it, a sort of flickering light.”

“You didn’t hear anyone in there?”

“No.”

“Did either of you call out before you went in, identifying yourselves as police officers?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Okay, Janet. You’re doing fine. Carry on.”

Janet’s knees were pressed tight together and she was twisting her hands on her lap as she spoke. “Like I said, there was this flickering light.”

“The candles.”

Janet looked at him and gave a little shudder. “There was a bad smell, too, like drains.”

“Did you have any reason to be afraid at this point?”

“Not particularly. It was creepy, but we were proceeding cautiously, as we always do in such situations. Routine. He could have been armed. The husband. We were aware of that possibility. But if you mean did we have any inkling of what we’d find in there, then no. If we had, we’d have been out of there like a shot and brought in the troops. Dennis and me, we’re neither of us the hero types.” She shook her head.

“Who went in first?”

“I did. Dennis kicked the door in and stood back, like, you know, making a bow. Taking the piss.”

“What happened next?”

She gave a sharp jerk of her head. “It was all so fast. It was a blur. I remember candles, mirrors, the girl, crude drawings on the walls, things I saw out of the corners of my eyes. But they’re like images from a dream. A nightmare.” Her breathing became sharper and she curled up on the armchair, legs under her, arms wrapped around herself. “Then he came. Dennis was right behind me. I could feel his breath warm on my neck.”

“Where did he come from?”

“I don’t know. Behind. A corner. So fast.”

“What did Dennis do?”

“He didn’t have time to do anything. He must have heard or sensed something to make him turn, and the next thing I knew he was bleeding. He screamed out. That’s when I pulled my baton. He cut Dennis again, and the blood sprayed over me. It was as if he hadn’t noticed me, or he didn’t care, he’d get to me later. But when he did, I had my baton out and he tried to slash me but I deflected it. Then I hit him…” She started to sob and rubbed the backs of her hands against her eyes. “Sorry. Dennis, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Banks said. “Take it easy, Janet. You’re doing fine.”

“He had his head on my lap. I was trying to hold the artery closed, like they teach in First Aid. But I couldn’t do it. I’d never done it before, not with anyone real. The blood just kept seeping out. So much blood.” She sniffed and ran the back of her hand across her nose. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay. You’re doing fine, Janet. Before that. Before you tried to save Dennis, what else did you do?”

“I remember handcuffing the man to one of the pipes.”

“How many times did you hit him?”

“I don’t remember.”

“More than once?”

“Yes. He wouldn’t stop coming, so I hit him again.”

“And again?”

“Yes. He kept getting up.” She started sobbing again. When she’d calmed, she asked, “Is he dead?”

“Not yet.”

“The bastard killed Dennis.”

“I know. And when a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it, right? If you don’t, it’s bad for business, bad for detectives everywhere.”

Janet looked at him as if he were crazy. “What?”

Banks looked up at Bogart as Sam Spade. Clearly the posters were there for show, not as a result of any great passion for the films themselves, and his pathetic attempt at lightening things up fell flat. “Never mind,” he said. “I was just wondering what went through your mind.”

“Nothing. I didn’t have time to stop and think. He’d cut Dennis and he was going to cut me. Call it self-preservation if you like, but it wasn’t a conscious thought. I mean, I didn’t think I’d better hit him again or he might get up and cut me. It wasn’t like that.”

“What was it like?”

“I told you. A blur. I disabled the killer, handcuffed him to one of the pipes and then I tried to keep Dennis alive. I didn’t even look in Payne’s direction again. To be honest, I didn’t give a damn what shape he was in. Only Dennis.” Janet paused and looked down at her hands clasped around the glass. “You know what really gets me? I’d just been nasty to him. All because he’d been telling his damn sexist jokes to that fireman.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’d been arguing, that’s all. Just before we got to the house. I told him his mole was probably cancerous. It was cruel of me. I know he’s a hypochondriac. Why did I do that? Why am I such a horrible person? Then it was too late. I couldn’t tell him I didn’t mean it.” She cried again and Banks thought it best to let her get it all out. It would take more than one tearful session to purge her of her guilt, but at least it was a start.

“Have you been in touch with the Federation?”

“Not yet.”

“Do it tomorrow. Talk to your rep. They’ll be able to help with counseling, if you want it, and…”

“Legal representation?”

“If it comes to that, yes.”

Janet got to her feet a bit more unsteadily and went to pour herself another drink.

“Are you sure that’s wise?” Banks asked.

Janet poured herself a stiff measure and sat down again. “Tell me what else I should be doing, sir. Should I be going to sit with Dennis’s wife and kids? Should I try to explain to them how it happened, how it was all my fault? Or should I just smash up my flat and go out on the town and pick a fight in some anonymous pub somewhere, the way I feel like doing? I don’t think so. This is by far the least harmful alternative to anything else I’d rather be doing right now.”

Banks realized that she had a point. He had felt that way himself more than once, and had even given in to the urge to go out on the town and pick a fight. It hadn’t helped. He would be a hypocrite if he said he didn’t understand plenty about finding oblivion at the bottom of a bottle. There had been two periods in his life when he had sought solace that way. The first was when he felt he was fast approaching burnout those last few months in London, before the transfer to Eastvale, and the second was more than a year ago, after Sandra had left him.

The thing was, people said it didn’t work, but it did. As a short-term solution, for temporary oblivion, there was nothing to match the bottle, except perhaps heroin, which Banks hadn’t tried. Maybe Janet Taylor was right, and tonight drinking was the best thing she could do. She was hurting, and sometimes you had to do your hurting by yourself. Booze helped dull the pain for a while, and eventually you passed out. The hangover would be painful, but that was for tomorrow.

“Right you are. I’ll let myself out.” On impulse, Banks leaned over and kissed the top of Janet’s head as he left. Her hair tasted of burned plastic and rubber.

That evening, Jenny Fuller sat in her home office, where she kept all the files and notes on the investigation on her computer, no office having been made available to her at Millgarth. The office looked out over The Green, a narrow stretch of parkland between her street and the East Side Estate. She could just see the lights of the houses through the spaces between the dark trees.

Working so closely with Banks had made Jenny remember a lot of their history. She had once tried to seduce him, she recalled with embarrassment, and he had resisted politely, claiming to be a happily married man. But he was attracted to her; she knew that much. He wasn’t a happily married man anymore, but now he had “The Girlfriend,” as Jenny had come to call Annie Cabbot, though she had never met her. That had come about because Jenny had spent so much time out of the country and hadn’t even been around when Banks and Sandra separated. If she had been… well, things might have been different. Instead, she had embarked on a series of disastrous relationships.

One of the reasons she had spent so much time away, she had finally admitted to herself after coming back from California this last time with her tail between her legs, was to get away from Banks, from the easy proximity to him that tormented her so much while she pretended to be casual about the whole thing, and much cooler than she felt. And now they were working closely together.

With a sigh, Jenny returned her attention to her work.

Her main problem thus far, she realized, had been an almost complete lack of forensic and crime scene information, and without them, it was damn near impossible to produce a decent threshold analysis – an initial review that could serve as an investigative compass, help the police know where to look – let alone a more complex profile. About all she had been able to work on was the victimology. All this, of course, had given her detractors on the task force – and they were legion – plenty of ammunition.

England was still in the dark ages as far as the use of consultant psychologists and criminal profiling went, Jenny believed, especially as compared to the USA. Partly this was because the FBI is a national force with the resources to develop national programs and Britain has fifty or more separate police forces, all operating piecemeal. Also, profilers in the USA tend to be cops and are therefore more readily accepted. In Britain, profilers are usually psychologists or psychiatrists and, as such, are distrusted by the police and the legal system in general. Consultant psychologists would be lucky to make it to the witness box in an English court, Jenny knew, let alone be accepted as expert witnesses, the way they are in the USA. Even if they did get in the box, whatever evidence they gave would be looked at askance by judge and jury, and the defense would wheel in another psychologist with a different theory.

The dark ages.

When it came right down to it, Jenny was well aware that most of the police she worked with regarded her as perhaps only one step up from a clairvoyant, if that, and that they only brought her in because it was easier than not doing so. But still she struggled on. While she was prepared to admit that profiling was still, perhaps, more of an art than a science, and while a profile could rarely, if ever, point the finger at a specific killer, she believed that it could narrow the field and help focus an investigation.

Looking at pictures on a screen just didn’t do it for Jenny, so she spread out the photographs again on her desk, though she knew them all by heart: Kelly Matthews, Samantha Foster, Leanne Wray, Melissa Horrocks and Kimberley Myers, all attractive blond girls between the ages of sixteen and eighteen.

There had been too many assumptions for Jenny’s liking right from the start, the prime one being that all five girls had been abducted by the same person or persons. She could, she had told Banks and the team, make out almost as a good a case for their not being linked, even on such little information as she possessed.

Young girls go missing all the time, Jenny had argued; they have arguments with their parents and run away from home. But Banks told her that detailed and exhaustive interviews with friends, family, teachers, neighbors and acquaintances showed that all the girls – except perhaps Leanne Wray – came from stable family backgrounds and, apart from the usual rows about boyfriends, clothes, loud music and what have you, nothing unusual or significant had happened in their lives prior to their disappearance. These, Banks stressed, were not your common or garden-variety teenage runaways. There was also the matter of the shoulder bags found abandoned close to where the girls had last been seen. With the botched Yorkshire Ripper investigation still hanging like an albatross around its neck, West Yorkshire was taking no chances.

The number became four, then five, and no traces whatsoever could be found of any of the girls through the usual channels: youth support groups, the National Missing Persons Helpline, Crimewatch UK reconstructions, MISSING: CAN-U-HELP posters, media appeals and local police efforts.

In the end, Jenny accepted Banks’s argument and proceeded as if the disappearances were linked, at the same time keeping clear notes of any differences between the individual circumstances. Before long, she found that the similarities by far overwhelmed the differences.

Victimology. What did they have in common? All the girls were young, had long blond hair, long legs and trim, athletic figures. It seemed to indicate the type of girl he liked, Jenny had said. They all have different tastes.

By victim number four, Jenny had noticed the pattern of escalation: nearly two months between victims one and two, five weeks between two and three, but only two and a half weeks between three and four. He had been getting needier, she thought at the time, which meant he might also become more reckless. Jenny was also willing to bet that there was a fair degree of personality disintegration going on.

The criminal had chosen his haunts well. Open-air parties, pubs, dances, clubs, cinemas and pop concerts were all places where you were very likely to find young people, and they all had to get home one way or another. She knew that the team referred to him as the “Chameleon” and agreed that he showed a very high level of skill in taking his pick of victims without being seen. All had been abducted at night in urban settings – desolate stretches of city streets, ill-lit and deserted. He had also managed to stay well beyond the range of the CCTV cameras that covered many city centers and town squares these days.

A witness said she saw Samantha, the Bradford victim, talking to someone through the window of a dark car, and that was the only information Jenny had about his possible method of abduction.

While the New Year’s Eve party, the Harrogate pop concert, the cinema and university pub were common knowledge, and obvious hunting grounds, one question that had bothered Jenny since Saturday morning was how the killer had known about the youth-club dance after which Kimberley Myers had been abducted. Did he live in the neighborhood? Was he a church member? Had he simply happened to be passing at the time? As far as she knew, these things weren’t advertised outside the immediate community, or even beyond the club’s actual members.

Now she knew: Terence Payne lived just down the street, taught at the local comprehensive. Knew the victim.

Also, now, some of the things she had learned that day were making sense of some of the other puzzling facts and questions she had gathered over the weeks. Of the five abductions, four had occurred on a Friday night, or in the early hours of Saturday morning, which had led Jenny to believe that the killer worked a regular five-day week, and that he devoted his weekends to his hobby. The odd one out, Melissa Horrocks, had bothered her, but now that she knew Payne was a schoolteacher, the Tuesday, eighteenth of April, abduction made sense, too. It was the Easter holidays, and Payne had more spare time on his hands.

From this scant information – all this before the Kimberley Myers abduction – Jenny had surmised that they were dealing with an abductor who struck opportunistically. He cruised suitable locations looking for a certain type of victim, and when he found one, he struck as fast as lightning. There was no evidence that any of the girls had been stalked either on the evening of, or prior to, their abductions, though it was a possibility she had to bear in mind, but Jenny was willing to bet that he had scouted the locations, studied every way in and out, every dark nook and cranny, all the sight lines and angles. There was always a certain level of risk involved in things such as this. Just enough, perhaps, to guarantee that quick surge of adrenaline that was probably part of the thrill. Now Jenny knew that he had used chloroform to subdue his victims; that decreased the level of risk.

Jenny had also not been able until now to take into account any crime scene information because there hadn’t been a crime scene available. There could be plenty of reasons why no bodies turned up, Jenny had said. They could have been dumped in remote locations and not discovered yet, buried in the woods, dumped in the sea or in a lake. As the number of disappearances increased, though, and as time went on and still no bodies were found, Jenny found herself moving toward the theory that their man was a collector, someone who plucks and savors his victims and perhaps then disposes of them the way a butterfly collector might gas and pin his trophies.

Now she had seen the anteroom, where the killer had buried, or partially buried, the bodies, and she didn’t think that had been done by chance or done badly. She didn’t think that the toes of one victim were sticking through the earth because Terence Payne was a sloppy worker; they were like that because he wanted them that way, it was part of his fantasy, because he got off on it, as they said back in America. They were part of his collection, his trophy room. Or his garden.

Now Jenny would have to rework her profile, factoring in all the new evidence that would be pouring out of number 35 The Hill over the next few weeks. She would also have to find out all she could about Terence Payne.

And there was another thing. Now Jenny also had to consider Lucy Payne.

Had Lucy known what her husband was doing?

It was possible, at least, that she had her suspicions.

Why didn’t she come forward?

Because of some misguided sense of loyalty, perhaps – this was her husband, after all – or fear. If he had hit her with a vase last night, he could have hit her at other times, too, warned her of the fate that awaited her if she told anyone the truth. It would have been a living hell for Lucy, of course, but Jenny could believe her doing that. Plenty of women lived their whole lives in such hells.

But was Lucy more involved?

Again, possible. Jenny had suggested, tentatively, that the method of abduction indicated the killer might have had a helper, someone to lure the girl into the car, or distract her while he came up from behind. A woman would have been perfect for that role, would have made the actual abduction easier. Young girls wary of men are far more likely to lean in the window and help when a woman pulls over at the curb.

Were women capable of such evil?

Definitely. And if they were ever caught, the outrage against them was far greater than against any male. You only had to look at the public’s reactions to Myra Hindley, Rosemary West and Karla Homolka to see that.

So was Lucy Payne a killer?

Banks felt bone-weary when he pulled up in the narrow lane outside his Gratly cottage close to midnight that night. He knew he should have probably taken a hotel room in Leeds, as he had done before, or accepted Ken Blackstone’s offer of the sofa, but he had very much wanted to go home tonight, even if Annie had refused to come over, and he didn’t mind the drive too much. It helped relax him.

There were two messages waiting for him on the machine. The first was from Tracy, saying she’d heard the news and hoped he was all right, and the second was from Leanne Wray’s father, Christopher, who had seen the press conference and the evening news and wanted to know if the police had found his daughter’s body at the Payne house.

Banks didn’t answer either of them. For one thing, it was too late, and for another, he didn’t want to talk to anybody. He could deal with them all in the morning. Now that he was home, he was even glad that Annie wasn’t coming. The idea of company tonight, even Annie’s, didn’t appeal, and after all he’d seen and thought about today, the idea of sex held about as much interest as a trip to the dentist’s.

Instead, he poured himself a generous tumbler of Laphroaig and tried to find some suitable music. He needed to listen to something, but he didn’t know what. Usually he had no trouble finding what he wanted in his large collection, but tonight he rejected just about every CD he picked out. He knew he didn’t want to listen to jazz or rock or anything too wild and primitive like that. Wagner and Mahler were out, as were all the Romantics: Beethoven, Schubert, Rachmaninoff and the rest. The entire twentieth century was out, too. In the end, he went for Rostropovich’s rendition of Bach’s cello suites.

Outside the cottage, the low stone wall between the dirt lane and the beck bulged out and formed a little parapet over Gratly Falls, which was just a series of terraces, none more than a few feet in height, running diagonally through the village and under the little stone bridge that formed its central gathering place. Since he had moved into the cottage the previous summer, Banks had got into the habit of standing out there last thing at night if the weather was good enough, or even sitting on the wall, dangling his legs over the beck and enjoying his nightcap and a cigarette before bed.

The night air was still and smelled of hay and warm grass. The Dale below him was sleeping. One or two farmhouse lights shone on the far valley side, but apart from the sounds of sheep in the field across the beck and night animals from the woods, all was quiet. He could just make out the shapes of distant fell sides in the dark, humpbacked or jagged against the night sky. He thought he heard a curlew’s eerie trill from high up on the moors. The new moon gave sparse light, but there were more stars than he had seen in a long time. As he watched, a star fell through the darkness, leaving a thin milky trail.

Banks didn’t make a wish.

He felt depressed. The elation he had expected to feel on finding the killer somehow eluded him. He had no sense of an ending, of an evil purged. In some odd way, he felt, the evil was just beginning. He tried to shake off his sense of apprehension.

He heard a meow beside him and looked down. It was the skinny marmalade cat from the woods. Starting that spring, it had come over on several occasions when Banks was outside alone late at night. The second time it appeared, he had brought it some milk, which it lapped up before disappearing back into the trees. He had never seen it anywhere else, or at any other time than night. Once, he had even bought some cat food, to be more prepared for its visit, but the cat hadn’t touched it. All it would do was meow, drink the milk, strut around for a few minutes and go back where it came from. Banks fetched a saucer of milk and set it down, refilling his own glass at the same time. The cat’s eyes shone amber in the darkness as it looked up at him before bending to drink.

Banks lit his cigarette and leaned against the wall, resting his glass on its rough stone surface. He tried to purge his mind of the day’s terrible images. The cat rubbed against his leg and ran off back into the woods. Rostropovich played on, and Bach’s precise, mathematical patterns of sound formed an odd counterpoint to the wild roaring music of Gratly Falls, so recently swelled by the spring thaw, and for a few moments, at least, Banks succeeded in losing himself.