All the Colors of Darkness

18

It was a muggy evening on the London streets. The rain had stopped by the time Banks was walking down King’s Road at about half past eight, but a kind of heavy mist hung in the air, enveloping everything in its warm humid haze. The street still maintained its usual aura of busyness, of constant motion and activity. It was one of the things Banks loved so much about London, and one of the things he loved to escape from by going back to Gratly.

The street lamps made blurred halos in the mist, and even the sounds of the main street were muffled. Banks had sensed an odd mood as he made his way on the tube and by foot. London was still in shock from Friday’s bombing, but at the same time people were determined to get on with life as usual, to show that they weren’t going to be intimidated. There were probably even more people out and about than you would normally find on a humid Monday night. They needed to stand up and be counted. Banks felt a part of that, too. But most of all he wanted to find Sophia.

He turned into her street, which was considerably quieter, and felt his chest tighten as he rang her doorbell. No answer. He had a key, but there was no way he was going to use it. Besides, he had no reason to go in if she was out. He had deliberately not phoned her to say he was coming, too, in case she reacted badly and tried to avoid him.

She was probably working. Often her job demanded that she attend evening events—readings, openings, premieres—so he decided to pass the time in their local wine bar, just around the corner. Like other cafés and bars he had passed on his way, it was crowded. Not many establishments had tables out on the pavement along King’s Road— there simply wasn’t that much room—so the inside tables were all taken, and knots of people stood around where they could find a bit of space, leaned on pillars, held their glasses and talked.

Banks went to the closest section of the bar, where he was able to wedge himself between a couple of noisy, animated groups who had probably come for a drink after work and stayed too long. Nobody paid him any attention, including the bar staff. Angie, the blond Australian barmaid, was engaging in her favorite pastime—flirting with the customers.

Then, through the crowd, Banks saw a profile he recognized sitting at one of the tables. Sophia. She was unmistakable, her smooth cheek, the graceful curve of her neck, her dark hair tied up and held in place by that familiar tortoiseshell comb, one or two loose strands curling like tendrils over her shoulders. She was in half-profile and would only be able to see him if she turned around. But she wasn’t going to do that.

Opposite her sat a young man with lank longish fair hair and the kind of scruffy beard you get after not shaving for four or five days. He was wearing a light green corduroy jacket over a black T-shirt. Banks hadn’t seen him before, but that didn’t mean much. He knew that Sophia had many friends in the arts he hadn’t met. He was just about to walk over when he noticed Sophia leaning in toward the man, the way women do when they’re interested. Banks froze. Now more than ever anxious not to be seen, he edged away from the bar toward the exit, without even having ordered a drink. The next moment he was wandering down the street, heart pounding, not quite sure what to do.

There was a pub just down King’s Road called the Chelsea Potter, and in a daze Banks wandered inside and bought a pint. There were no seats left, but there was a shelf running below the front windows, where he could rest his drink. From there, he could see the end of Sophia’s street. He decided that if she went home alone, he would approach her, but if she went with the man from the wine bar, he would head back to Eastvale.

Someone had left an Evening Standard, and he started reading an article on the aftermath of the bombing, keeping one eye on the street. They had a photograph of the young blonde in the yellow dress—she was a model, it said, and one of the survivors. She had told the reporter how terrible it was, but she didn’t mention anyone rescuing her. She didn’t mention clinging on to the Selfridges bag, either, only that her darling dog Louie had survived, too.

Banks had been in the pub perhaps an hour and a half, had long ago finished the newspaper article and was into the dregs of his second pint of Pride, when he saw Sophia and her friend turn into her street. There were still plenty of people around outside, so he left the rest of his drink and crossed over, just part of the crowd. From the corner, he could watch them approach Sophia’s front door. They stood for a moment, chatting, then she put her key in the lock. She paused for just a moment, turning the key, and glanced down the street to where Banks’s car was still parked. Then she opened the door. The man put his hand on the small of her back and followed her inside. Banks walked away.

Annie cursed the rain as she walked around the parked car. The way the wind blew slantwise rendered her umbrella close to useless, and in the end it was easier just to close it and get wet. She was wearing a waist-length leather jacket, which she had treated with waterproofing spray, her jeans, which she hadn’t, and her red PVC boots, which would keep out anything. Only her hair was getting seriously wet, and that was now short enough to dry in seconds. She thought about what Carol Wyman had said about going blond. Maybe she would.

For the moment, though, she was looking at Derek Wyman’s 2003 Renault, which was parked in a lay-by across from the Woodcutter’s Arms, a couple of miles outside the village of Kinsbeck, about twenty miles southwest of Eastvale, over the moors from Gratly and Helmthorpe.

A local patrol car had discovered it about an hour ago and called it in. Now Annie and Winsome were on the scene, shooing away the sheep. The patrol officers, a couple of surly buggers by the name of Drury and Hackett, which sounded like a bad comedy duo to Annie, were leaning against their car smoking, clearly eager to get on their way back to whatever pub they spent their shift in. Annie wasn’t going to make it that easy for them. They had already made it quite obvious that they didn’t like taking orders from two plainclothes female officers, one of them black.

No crime was suspected, at least not yet, so Annie had no reason to preserve the scene, but she was aware that a forensic examination of the car might become necessary if the situation changed. Still, there were certain things she needed to know. She tried the driver’s door, but it was locked, as was the other side. There was no way she was going to force her way in. Wiping off the rain and glancing through the window, she could see that the keys were gone, and there was nothing out of the ordinary in the interior on a cursory examination in poor light conditions. No obvious blood. No signs of a struggle. No cryptic messages scrawled on the windscreen. Nothing. She turned to PC Drury. “It’s an unusual place to leave a car, isn’t it?” she said. “Any ideas?”

“I was thinking maybe he might have run out of petrol,” said Drury. “Want me to check?”

“Good idea,” said Annie, perfectly happy to let the man do what was clearly man’s work and dig out a dipstick to measure the level of fuel. When he had finished, Drury seemed very pleased with himself, so Annie knew he must be right.

“Nary a drop left,” he said, “and not a garage for three or four miles.”

“What about in the village?”

“Closed a year back.”

“Do you think he may have walked to the garage to get petrol?”

“Possible,” said Drury. “But if it was me, I’d have gone to the Woodcutter’s and phoned and enjoyed a pint while I was waiting.” He pointed down the road, in the opposite direction from the village. “The garage is down the road that way. You can’t miss it.” Then he checked his watch. “Though I doubt it’ll be open at this time of an evening.”

It was after eight o’clock. Annie knew that most businesses kept short hours in this part of the country. “Why don’t you go down there and check for us?” she said. “Wake them up if you have to.” She gestured over to the pub. “We’ll be in there.”

Drury glared at her, but he had a word with his partner, who stamped out his cigarette. They got in their patrol car with exaggerated slowness and drove off down the road.

Winsome and Annie walked into the welcome shelter of the lounge bar, which was deserted apart from an old man and his dog by the empty fireplace, and two farm laborers enjoying their pints at the bar. Everyone looked around.

“Evening, all,” said Annie, smiling as she walked up to the bar. The farm laborers gawped at Winsome and edged away to give them room. “Thank you,” Annie said. She turned to the barman. “Two Cokes, please.”

“Want ice in them?”

Winsome shook her head.

“In one of them,” Annie said. “Nasty night out there.”

“Seen worse,” the barman said.

“My colleague and I are from Major Crimes, Eastvale,” Annie said, fl ashing her warrant card. “We’re here in connection with that car parked over the road.”

“Been there since yesterday, it has,” said the barman.

So Derek Wyman clearly hadn’t just gone down the road for petrol. Or if he had, something had stopped him from coming back. But there was nowhere else to go. It was all open countryside around there, as far as Annie could tell—the pub was as close to the edge of the moors as you could get. Sheep came and grazed right beside it and nosed around the parked cars. Annie didn’t even know if any buses ran along the B road outside, but she doubted it. If Wyman had disappeared into the wilds, she would have to wait until tomorrow to get a search organized; the light was already bad, and soon it would be getting dark.

The barman handed her the drinks and she paid. “Yesterday, you say?” she said. “Any idea what time?”

“Well,” said the barman, scratching his bald head. “At a guess, it’d probably be about the time the bloke who was driving it came in.” The farm laborers snickered.

Ah, thought Annie, a true Yorkshire wit. This area had a surfeit of them, if Drury and Hackett were anything to go by. Must be something in the water. Or the beer.

“Did he look anything like this?” Annie asked, taking Wyman’s photograph from her briefcase.

The bartender scrutinized it. “Aye,” he said finally. “I’d say he looked a lot like that, yes.”

“So this was the man?”

The barman grunted.

“I’ll take that as a yes, shall I?” Annie said. “What time was he here?”

“About seven o’clock Sunday evening.”

Annie remembered that Carol had told her the matinee finished at half past four. It certainly didn’t take two and a half hours to get from Eastvale to here, so he must have been somewhere else first, maybe just driving around aimlessly, unless the MI6 pair had been chasing him. “How long did he stay?” she asked.

“Two drinks.”

“How long’s that?”

“Depends on how long a man takes to drink them.”

Winsome leaned over the bar. “Would you prefer to shut the place up and come to Eastvale to answer these questions? Because that can be arranged, you know.”

That shocked him. The farm laborers laughed, and he blushed. “Hour and a half, maybe.”

“What state of mind was he in?” Annie asked.

“How would I know?”

“Try to remember. Was he upset, jolly, aggressive? Did he appear flustered? What?”

“Just kept himself to himself, like. Sat in the corner over there and drank quietly.”

“What else was he doing? Did he have a book? A newspaper? A mobile? Magazine?”

“Nowt. He just sat there. Like he was thinking or something.”

“So he was thinking?”

“Looked like that to me.”

“How would thee know, tha’s never done it,” said one of the farmhands. The other laughed. Winsome shot him a warning glance, and they shifted uneasily on their feet.

“Did he say anything?” Annie asked. “Did he talk to you or anyone else at all?”

“No.”

“He wasn’t with anyone?”

“I already said he was sat by himself.”

“Did anyone come in and talk to him?”

“No.”

“What about after he’d gone? Did anyone come looking for him, asking about him?”

“Only thee.”

“Did you see where he went when he left?”

“How could I? I was working behind the bar. You can’t see the road from here.”

“Okay,” said Annie. “Any idea where he might have gone?”

“How would I know?”

“Guess,” Annie said. “Is there anywhere near here a traveler might go and spend the night, for example?”

“Well, there’s a youth hostel up the lane.”

“There’s Brierley Farm, too, Charlie, don’t forget,” said one of the farmhands.

“Brierley Farm?”

“Aye. They converted the barn for bed-and-breakfast a couple of years ago. It’s half a mile back toward Kinsbeck. You can’t miss it. Big sign outside.”

“Anything else?”

“Not nearby. Not that you’d leave your car here and walk to.”

“He’d run out of petrol,” Annie said.

“Bert’s garage closes at five o’clock on a Sunday,” said the barman, “so he’d have no joy there.”

At that moment the door opened and everyone looked around again.

“Oh, how jolly,” muttered Annie to Winsome. “It’s Dreary and Hackneyed again.”

“That’s Drury and Hackett to you, ma’am,” said one of them, with a weighty pause before the “ma’am.”

“Any luck?” she asked.

“No. He wasn’t there. They were closed, anyway.”

“Right,” said Annie, finishing her Coke. “I think it’s a bit late to start sending out the search parties on the moors tonight, but we can make a start by doing a house-to-house of the area—the youth hostel and Brierley Farm being first on our list. All right, lads?”

“But we’ve got our patrol route to cover,” one of the officers protested.

“Want me to clear it with your superior?” Annie asked.

“No,” the officer mumbled. “Don’t bother. Come on, Ken,” he said to his partner. “Let’s start with Brierley.”

If truth be told, Banks probably hadn’t been fit to drive, he thought as he pulled up outside his Gratly cottage at some ungodly hour in the morning. But all he knew was that he couldn’t stay in London. After he had tossed his pay-as-you-go mobile into the Thames, he felt that he had to get away.

The drive home hadn’t gone too badly. He had wanted loud, raucous sixties rock and roll, not mournful torch ballads, so he set his Led Zeppelin collection on random. The first track that came on was “Dazed and Confused,” which just about said it all. The rest of the drive had passed in a sort of aural slide show of guitar solos, memories and surges of anger alternating with resignation. He was probably lucky to be alive, though, he thought. He didn’t really remember the M1 at all now, just the loud music and a swirling haze of red brake lights ahead and the glaring headlights coming toward him on the other side.

As he drove, he second-guessed himself, told himself he should have gone over to Sophia and her friend in the wine bar, should have confronted them on the doorstep, punched the bloke on the nose. Too late for all of that. He had done nothing, and this was where it had led him.

He had also tried to convince himself that it was all innocent, just a drink with an old friend, but there had been something about the body language, the ease between them, the chemistry, that he just didn’t believe it, and he couldn’t shake the images of Sophia in bed with the young man, the bed where they slept, with the semicircular stained-glass panel above the window and the net curtains fluttering in the breeze.

When he finally shut the door behind him, he felt exhausted, wrung out, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to get to sleep. Instead of trying, he poured himself a large glass of wine and, without turning any lights or music on, went to sit in the conservatory.

So this was how it felt to have your heart broken, he thought. And, damn it, it really did feel like something was broken. He could feel the pieces inside him grating against one another. It had been so long that he had forgotten the sensation. Annie hadn’t broken it when they split up, only bruised it a bit. He and Michelle had simply drifted apart. No, the last time he had felt anywhere near like this was when Sandra had left him. He put his feet up and took a deep breath, reached for the bottle on the table at his side and refilled his glass. He hadn’t eaten since lunchtime, and his stomach growled, but he couldn’t be bothered to go and see if there was anything in the fridge. He didn’t think there was, anyway. It didn’t matter. Rain pattered on the glass. The wine would soon take the edge off his appetite, and if he drank enough he would find sleep. Or oblivion.