Not Dark Yet

15

Banks felt a lot better the following morning after his first night at home. He was even hungry enough to scorch some toast to eat with his coffee. The headache was almost gone, as was most of the nausea. The dizziness still came and went, but the main thing was that he had got his memory back, or most of it, and had even managed to shuffle it into what seemed like the right chronology. The problem was what to do with it.

The missing fragments had fallen into place. He remembered Keane telling him that Zelda was being kept in the same building, and that she was with Petar Tadić, who was settling a score of some kind. Then Keane went on to tell him about Tadić torturing and killing Faye Butler, and his killing Hawkins, who was double-crossing the Tadićs. And he saved the best for last: Zelda had killed Goran Tadić, just as she had written in her notebook. So it wasn’t fantasy. Now Banks really could be charged with aiding and abetting the murder, should it all come out.

Banks thought again of the severed arm Burgess had mentioned. What had Petar Tadić done with his brother’s body? Could it be his? It wasn’t every day they found severed arms in recycling plants, even in London, nor was it unknown for gang members to chop up dead colleagues and scatter the parts over a large area. No time for ritual or honour when you’ve got a body to get rid of. So it could be Goran’s arm. On the other hand, there were other Croatian criminal gang members in the country, so it wouldn’t do to jump to conclusions without more evidence.

Banks also now remembered Zelda yelling for him to run as the fire flared up. He had done so instinctively, without looking back, but when he got outside and turned to see her, she wasn’t there. He had gone back to the doorway, he remembered, to see if she was still inside and whether he could get to her. The place was an inferno by then, and there was nothing he could do without sacrificing his own life, and his instinct for self-preservation had kicked in. He got the hell out of there. He had staggered away, half choked, then fallen in the weed-filled reservoir, hit his head on the bottom and passed out.

Now he was convinced that he should have waited for Zelda, even though the flames were quickly spreading, or at least made sure she went before him, instead of just running off without thinking. If she had been trapped by a falling beam or something and burned to death, he would never be able to forgive himself. He vaguely remembered brief snatches of consciousness, the firefighters picking him up, paramedics loading him on to a gurney, someone shining a light in his eyes, someone gently shaking him in the night, but most of it was blank until he woke up in the hospital bed.

But now that he had his memory back, he was stuck with a serious dilemma. He still didn’t know where Zelda was, or even if she was still alive. Newry had simply said there were two bodies in the burned-out treatment plant. Keane was certainly one of them, but the other could be Zelda’s or Petar Tadić’s. It was also possible that there was a third body the search team hadn’t yet found, and that all three were burned to a crisp in there. Burned human remains sometimes went undetected, or were damaged by firefighting and recovery operations. Fire scene investigators often couldn’t tell the human remains from other fire- and water-damaged debris.

If Zelda had survived, though, she had probably run off through a different exit and gone somewhere she thought was safe. But things had changed. Now he knew she was a murderer — at least an alleged murderer, according to Keane — and he was a cop. He was supposed to catch murderers and see that they went to trial and, if found guilty, received their due punishment. But this was Zelda. Nelia Melnic.

He had read parts of her notebook, but he had brushed them off as fantasy at the time. What if it was true, as Keane had said? What if Zelda had killed Goran Tadić? What was he going to do about it? He had seen her kill Keane with his own eyes. A good argument for self-defence could be made for that killing. But Goran Tadić? Perhaps the same was true, but he knew nothing about the circumstances of what happened. Maybe Keane was lying; it wouldn’t be the first time. But he had thought Banks was about to die, so why bother lying to him? To send him to his grave thinking a woman he cared for was a killer? Was Keane that cruel? Perhaps. The sensible, logical, moral thing to do was report what he knew to AC Gervaise, or Superintendent Newry, and leave it to others to track down Zelda, and to the jury and judge to decide on her fate.

But he couldn’t do that.

So what the hell was he to do?

Annie and Gerry had skipped the cream tea and started out from Wool shortly after they had talked to the Sedgwicks, but not before Gerry had phoned the General Register Office and managed to persuade someone there to track down the birth details of Marjorie Sedgwick. They told her not to expect an answer until the following day as they were short-staffed. Now it was the following morning, and they were both tired. It had been a long journey back and a late night.

‘We didn’t dig deeply enough into Marnie’s background,’ Gerry said as she sat on the edge of Annie’s desk in the squad room, coffee in hand. ‘My mistake. I’m sorry. I should have found out what happened to her before we went to Dorset.’

Annie swivelled in her chair. ‘Not to worry too much,’ she said. ‘We hadn’t known her full name for very long. It’s still early days, and we’ve got more to work with now. It probably won’t make any difference in the long run. We’re not racing against time.’

‘I suppose the question we should ask ourselves is whether we still have a case to investigate now that the victim is dead.’

‘Good point,’ said Annie. ‘We’ll certainly have to scale down. The budget’s bound to be cut. But let’s carry on until we hear something from the AC. We can at least argue that we think the rape and Marnie’s suicide could be somehow connected with Blaydon’s murder.’

‘Fair enough,’ Gerry said. ‘And if Charlotte Westlake was more involved than she’s letting on, we may be on to something.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘We should find out what the registry has to tell us soon enough.’

‘Let’s not forget,’ Annie added, ‘there’s still a rapist walking free out there.’

‘Perhaps not,’ said Gerry. ‘I’ve been thinking. You know, maybe you were just being provocative the other day, suggesting that Charlotte Westlake might have killed Blaydon, but let me play devil’s advocate here and suggest that Blaydon was the rapist, and Charlotte was keeping quiet either out of fear or some sort of misplaced loyalty. Why have we never seriously considered Blaydon for the rape before?’

‘We did discuss it with Alan the other day,’ Annie said. ‘But we dismissed the idea. And it hasn’t been very long since we found the cards.’

‘Yes, but why? We never followed up. We never took it seriously. Maybe we dismissed it too soon?’

‘It was hard to follow up. Blaydon was already dead. And we had no clear image of the rapist from the SD card images.’

‘Fair enough,’ Gerry argued. ‘It’s blurry and vague. But the image in the recording is as likely to be him as just about anyone else. Same size, shape, and gender, at any rate. OK, maybe you can tell it’s not a giant or a hugely overweight person, but other than that... You couldn’t recognise your own father from it. Think about it.’

‘We just never thought of Blaydon as a rapist, did we?’ said Annie. ‘A crook, yes, a gangster or wannabe gangster, yes, maybe even a killer, but a rapist? Maybe you’re right and that was short-sighted of us.’

‘We had nothing concrete to link him with Marnie until you told me Timmy Kerrigan saw him talking to her at the party.’

‘True,’ said Annie, ‘but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.’

‘I think it does,’ Gerry said. ‘It’s the first time we’ve had any sort of evidence or witness statement linking Blaydon and Marnie together. Sure, she worked at his parties, at least a couple of them, at any rate, and he probably knew of her existence through Charlotte. But until you talked to Timmy Kerrigan, nobody reported having actually seen Blaydon and Marnie meeting and talking. Remember how Charlotte told us she was getting worried about how decadent the parties were becoming, how they were crossing boundaries of taste and morality? Perhaps we were seeing Blaydon in free fall, and that was where he landed. Rape. Take the boundaries away and you’re left with moral anarchy. What he wanted, he took. And maybe he wanted Marnie.’

‘You’re suggesting that he drugged Marnie’s drink and took her to the bedroom?’ said Annie.

‘Why not? It would have been easy for him. He was the boss. It was his house. He knew the layout. He had access to any room he wanted. All he had to do was get her alone for a while and give her a drugged drink. Apparently, he didn’t know about the minicam with the motion detector that Roberts had set up. Think about it. End of the evening. Marnie’s been working. She’s tired. Her parents said she was always too trusting. Blaydon was an old friend of Charlotte Westlake’s. Maybe Charlotte’s been protecting him?’

‘But she has no reason to do that. He was dead before we ever talked to her. She’d nothing to fear from him. I mean, why protect a dead man?’

Gerry shrugged. ‘I’m not saying it’s a perfect theory.’

‘OK,’ said Annie. ‘Let’s say we run with that for a while and see where it leads us. What happens next? Who killed Blaydon?’

‘Well, it wasn’t Marnie. She jumped off Durdle Door on 17 May and Blaydon and Roberts were killed on 22 May. The Albanians still look good for it, I’d say. The ballistics, the gutting. It’s their style. But who’s to say Blaydon wasn’t also the rapist and that his murder had nothing to do with the rape? We shouldn’t necessarily let one crime distract us from another.’

‘So maybe we could go back to my original screwball suggestion,’ said Annie. ‘That Charlotte Westlake murdered Blaydon. Let’s face it, she doesn’t have much of an alibi for 22 May. Organising some book award in Bradford? Really?’

‘What was her motive?’

‘Anger at what he did to Marnie? Female solidarity? After all, Marnie was her employee, not one of Tadić’s hookers.’

‘Still, that’s pushing it a bit as a motive, isn’t it?’

Annie laughed. ‘Like yours, it’s hardly a perfect theory. Maybe Roberts was the intended victim and Blaydon was collateral damage? Roberts could have been blackmailing Charlotte about something, and she uncovered his whole scheme, threatened to tell Blaydon. Maybe Roberts had a recording of her we didn’t find? Maybe because she took it when she killed them?’

‘Too many maybes,’ said Gerry. ‘We’re going around in circles here. It’s making me dizzy.’

‘It doesn’t mean we should stop searching, though, does it? Even though Marnie and Blaydon are dead. And I think we should definitely have a much closer look at Charlotte Westlake. We’ve interviewed her twice, and I don’t believe she’s been completely honest with us on either occasion.’

‘I’ll get on it.’ Gerry’s phone rang, and she grabbed the handset. She listened for a while and made some notes, then thanked the caller and put down the handset.

‘Come on, then, give,’ said Annie. ‘You’re like the cat that got the cream. What is it?’

‘Marnie’s father is listed as unknown,’ Gerry said, ‘but the mother’s name is Christine Pollard.’

‘No way!’ said Annie.

Gerry smiled. ‘Way.’ They high-fived.

‘Have you got an address?’

‘The parents in Halifax. That was nineteen years ago, mind you. I’ll talk to them if they’re still there, then maybe we can haul Mrs. Westlake in again. Arrest her this time. Suspicion of murder. The full works: caution, lawyer and all, if that’s what she wants.’

Annie rubbed her hands together. ‘Oh, goody,’ she said. ‘I’ll oil the rack and sharpen the thumbscrews.’

There were still a few firefighters and CSIs at the old water treatment plant when Banks pulled up at the cordon they had erected around the main building, where all the damage had been concentrated. The control room took up the entire lower floor, and upstairs there had been a number of offices and a staff common room, where the second body had been found. Since then, searchers had looked again for any traces of a third victim, but found none. That was good news.

Banks showed his warrant card to the officer with the clipboard who guarded the scene and walked towards the entrance.

‘Better take care,’ said one of the fire investigation officers. ‘It can still be a bit dodgy in there.’

Banks thanked him, put on the hard hat the officer handed him and went inside. The smell of wet ash and burned rubber was almost overwhelming inside the building. Its acrid, gritty texture caught in his throat. He also thought he could discern an undertone of petrol, which took him right back to the night it happened and set off a surge of panic that fortunately passed quickly. A man turned from collecting samples, pulled his face mask aside and said hello. Banks recognised the lugubrious fire investigation officer Geoff Hamilton. They had worked together on a narrowboat fire set by Phil Keane some years ago.

‘Anything new?’ Banks asked.

‘Nothing startling,’ said Hamilton. ‘Your CSIs found evidence of a car parked at the side entrance, in the old staff park. The ground’s concrete, cracked and weedy, and the tracks are too faint to tell us much, but there were some oil stains and skid marks. It was definitely there. And recently.’

‘Anything else?’

‘This is where you were tied up,’ Hamilton said, pointing to an area not far from the main door. It was still possible to see what had once been ropes, now twisted and charred, on the ground, and chalk marks had been made around the area where Keane’s body had fallen. ‘You were lucky,’ he went on. ‘You can see where all the petrol was. Someone obviously cared whether you lived or died.’

‘Yes,’ said Banks, remembering Zelda’s face close to his, her breath pungent with days of bad food, fear, and a trace of vomit, the speed with which she worked at his bonds with the knife before the flames whooshed up around them. Then the shouted instruction: ‘RUN!’ He should have looked back.

‘Is this our old friend again?’ Hamilton asked.

‘Doesn’t it have his signature?’

‘There are similarities. It’s multi-seated, different spots connected by streamers. Not entirely as random as it might have seemed. I’ll have to get more analyses done, gas chromatology and so on, and compare them with the records.’

‘No need to bother, Geoff,’ said Banks. ‘It was Keane. I was there.’

‘So I heard,’ said Hamilton. ‘Don’t let it become a habit.’

‘I promise. By the way, you might check with the Met fire investigation service on a fire at a house in the Highgate area a couple of months ago. It presented as a typical chip-pan fire, but...’

‘Not his style, if this is anything to go by.’

‘He may be versatile. I’d say it’s worth a closer look, but as he was likely one of the corpses they hauled out of here, maybe there’s not much point in pinning a crime on a ghost. But there are a couple of coppers I can think of down there who wouldn’t mind knowing. Just one for the record books, maybe, if you’ve got a spare moment.’

Hamilton grunted. ‘Chance would be a fine thing.’ Then he put his face mask on again and knelt by a pile of charred rubbish.

Banks went upstairs to the other marked crime scene. There was tape across the doorway and most of the floor had collapsed, so he stood for a few moments and stared at the chain, darkened by fire, attached to the solid metal radiator, half disappeared through the burned floor. Was this where Zelda had been kept? Though the fire had only spread up there later, it had done as much damage as it had everywhere else. The walls were charred and the ceiling partially collapsed. The firefighters had been a while turning up, mostly because there had been no working alarm and no one present had been in a position to call them. So how had they been informed? Banks wondered. Who had called them? The building wasn’t very far from the A1, though it was hidden from the motorway by a stretch of woodland. The flames would possibly have been visible to a passing motorist once they had reached their apex.

He went back downstairs and found the side door that led to the small staff car park. He could see the CSIs had marked off an area with an oil stain and tyre tracks where someone had accelerated too quickly. Zelda? It made sense. She had cut Banks free then dashed off to save herself. She would have been in a hurry to get away before anybody found her. Maybe hurt and in pain, too. But where was she?

The road out wasn’t much more than an unfenced laneway, but after curving a mile or more around the woods and running parallel to the A1 for a while, it came to a roundabout that fed into the main artery. From there, she could have gone anywhere. CCTV and ANPR would be no use because they had no idea what make of car she was driving or what the number was, and the A1 was always busy. It could be the dark Ford Fiesta that Kit Riley had told them about in the Black Bull, but there were thousands of dark Fiestas on the roads. They might be able to find out, given time, but it would probably be too late by then. She would have dumped the car as soon as she could and found some other mode of transport.

Banks went back through the building and stood by the rectangular reservoir. Its bottom was covered in weeds and shrubbery after years of neglect, and that was what had cushioned Banks’s fall. If he had hit the hard bottom full on, he might have done himself even more serious damage. At least a broken limb, if not a fractured skull. He gave a shudder as he shouted farewell to Geoff Hamilton and the others and headed back to his car. Just before he got there, he turned and asked one of the investigators, ‘It’s a bit isolated around here, isn’t it? Do you know who called it in?’

The investigator scratched his head. ‘I can’t say for sure,’ he answered, ‘but I do remember the boss saying it was a woman’s voice.’

A thin drizzle had started when Gerry pulled up that afternoon outside Mrs. Pollard’s house on the outskirts of Halifax. It was a dark stone semi, millstone grit, probably, halfway up a hill, with a pub at the bottom and a fine view of the Pennines beyond, including a couple of enormous woollen mills with tall chimneys, now mostly converted into craft shops, art galleries, cafes, and local theatre venues. Misty rain hung over the valley.

Tracking Mrs. Pollard down had been easy enough — she was still at the same address listed by the General Register Office — but Gerry wasn’t quite sure how to broach the subject of her visit. She certainly didn’t want Mrs. Pollard to think she was looking for evidence of her daughter’s wrongdoing, yet she could hardly lie and say she was checking a job reference. Should anything she learned from this visit become important in a court case, then a lie like that could easily get it dismissed. The visit would have to appear to be related to Blaydon’s murder, which it was in a way, but without even the vaguest of hints that Charlotte Westlake might be responsible for that.

When Gerry introduced herself, Mrs. Pollard asked to see her identification, which she studied closely for half a minute before handing it back. ‘You can’t be too careful these days, love,’ she said. ‘I had a bloke on the phone the other day telling me my bank account had been hijacked and asking for my details. He even knew the last three transactions I’d made on my Mastercard.’

‘It’s very sensible of you to be cautious,’ said Gerry, following her inside. ‘These scammers are getting very clever these days.’

‘Now sit yourself down and tell me what it’s all about,’ said Mrs. Pollard — or Lynne, as she asked Gerry to call her. But first, unlike her daughter, she offered tea, which Gerry was happy to accept after her drive.

Lynne Pollard disappeared into the kitchen and fussed for a while, while Gerry took the opportunity to examine the living room. She didn’t remember seeing many photographs at Charlotte Westlake’s house, just one of Charlotte and a man she assumed to be Gareth, her late husband, but Lynne Pollard more than made up for it. There were framed photographs of Charlotte’s graduation, her wedding, Charlotte as a child and as a teenager (Gerry guessed), not to mention Charlotte with Adele and Charlotte with Daniel Craig. How these meetings had come about, Gerry had no idea. She was glad she had discovered that Charlotte was an only child, because any sibling visiting this shrine would go away with an enormous inferiority complex, if that wasn’t an oxymoron.

Lynne Pollard came back with a teapot, cups, and all the necessaries on a tray and perched at the edge of an armchair upholstered in what resembled a Laura Ashley pattern. She was a short, plump woman with a recently permed head of blue-grey hair. Her face was round and relatively unlined, with a smooth pinkish complexion, small nose, and a wobbly double-chin. She wore brown slacks, moccasin-style slippers, and a loose beige cardigan over a white blouse. Apart from a couple of rings, the only jewellery she wore was a cross on a silver chain around her neck. She wore a little lipstick and a touch of rouge, but no mascara or eyeliner.

‘You’ve got a nice view,’ Gerry said.

‘On a good day, yes. Cradle of the Industrial Revolution. That’s what my husband used to say.’

Gerry happened to have discovered in her researches that Mr. Pollard had died not terribly long after Charlotte Westlake’s husband, but she thought it only polite to ask after him. ‘Is your husband deceased?’

‘Yes. Cyril passed on three and a half years back. Heart. Just like that. Went to bed one night, dead by morning. Never smoked in his life, took a one-hour constitutional every day, hardly touched a drop of alcohol except a small dry sherry at Christmas. It just goes to show you, doesn’t it?’

Exactly what it went to show her, Gerry had no idea. Maybe that life was fleeting and one should enjoy every moment. Well, she tried to do that already.

Lynne Pollard stirred milk and sugar into the tea. ‘So what’s all this about? It’s not every day I get a visit from a police detective.’

Gerry gestured towards the photographs. ‘You must be very proud of your Charlotte,’ she said.

‘Christine,’ Mrs. Pollard corrected her. ‘She was always Christine at home. And, yes, Cyril and I were terribly proud of her. She got into Oxford, you know. Oxford! The only girl from her school to do it in the year.’

‘What about her career?’

‘Oh, wonderful. You know she mixed with some of the most important, famous people you can imagine. Politicians, pop stars — there’s her with Adele — you name it. If they needed something organising, they asked for Christine. Well, Charlotte, I suppose, as it was her professional name.’

‘How did you feel when she went to work for Mr. Blaydon?’

‘Is that what this is about? Connor Blaydon?’

‘You knew him?’

‘Met him on a couple of occasions. Perfect gentleman. You know, there’s been a lot of lies and slanders slung around about him since his death.’

‘It was murder, Mrs. Pollard, and I’m one of the officers investigating what happened.’

‘We all know what happened, love. And it’s Lynne. Those foreigners killed him, that’s who. Wanted him to be part of their evil crime empire and he wouldn’t have it. Turned them down flat.’

‘Did Char — Christine tell you this?’

‘Yes. She knew him well enough. Why haven’t you arrested them yet, that’s what I’d like to know?’

‘They’re on the run,’ said Gerry.

‘Then you’d better hurry up and catch them before we cut ourselves off from the Continent for good.’

Gerry didn’t see any point in telling her that Albania wasn’t yet a member of the EU. Not that it mattered much any more. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s Connor Blaydon’s murder I came to talk to you about. Christine has been very helpful — as you say, she knew him best — but we wondered if you too could shed any light on his background, maybe fill in a few blanks?’

‘I don’t see how I can help you, love. He was Christine’s friend.’

‘Yes, but you met him. You said so.’

‘Only on a couple of official occasions.’

‘How long had Christine known him?’

‘I know she did some events for him early on, when she was first in the business after university. Then she cut back a bit on the events when she married Gareth and it was after he died that she went to work for Mr. Blaydon. But you already know that.’

‘When did she leave university?’

‘When she was twenty-one. 1998 that would have been.’

‘And after that?’

‘She went off travelling with her friends.’

Gerry remembered Charlotte saying something about going to Thailand and Vietnam, then the Mediterranean. ‘For how long?’

‘Nearly a year. She’d saved up a lot from her summer jobs, and it was something she’d always wanted to do.’

‘So she came home when?’

‘July, it would have been. July 1999.’

‘And she lived with you here?’

‘No. She had friends in Oxford and she stayed with them until she got herself fixed up with a job. Surely she could tell you all this. Her memory’s probably a lot better than mine.’

‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong with your memory. Besides, it’s useful to get a different perspective. I’m especially interested in the time she spent abroad. Do you know where she was last, say, June that year?’

‘1999? They were in Greece then.’

‘Whereabouts?’

‘I honestly don’t remember exactly. Greek names. I’ve never been very good with those. Tell you what, though, just hang on a minute.’

Gerry heard her go upstairs, then the sound of cupboard doors opening and closing. A minute or so later, Lynne Pollard came back down with a cardboard box and put it on the low coffee table. As far as Gerry could tell, it was full of envelopes and postcards.

‘I’ve kept everything she’s ever sent me,’ Lynne said. ‘Every letter, every card, ever since she went on her first school exchange when she was fourteen.’

Gerry looked at the treasure trove of Charlotte Westlake’s past and smiled at Lynne. ‘Where shall we begin, then?’ she asked.

Banks pulled up in the car park of Eastvale General Infirmary at three o’clock that afternoon and headed straight for the basement. The high-tiled corridor echoed as he walked along towards the autopsy suite and Dr. Karen Galway’s office.

Dr. Galway was sitting at her L-shaped desk, which was piled high with file folders. She was wearing a powder-blue blouse, and her white coat was hanging from a hook behind the door. She had bright green eyes, a rather long nose, thin, tight lips, and a high domed forehead over which hung a fringe of greying hair. A framed print of Rembrandt’s ‘The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp’ hung on the wall opposite her desk. While Banks admired the artist’s skill, he could think of any number of Rembrandt paintings he would rather have hanging on his wall.

‘Catching up with paperwork?’ he asked.

The doctor rolled her eyes and spoke with a trace of Dublin accent. ‘Like you wouldn’t believe.’ She swivelled her chair to face him. ‘Sit down, please. I wasn’t expecting you. I heard you’d caught a nasty bump on the head.’

Banks sat. ‘Two. I’d say it’s an occupational hazard, but it really isn’t. Must be the first time in years.’

‘You saw Dr. Chowdhury here?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s very good.’

‘He looks about twelve.’

Dr. Galway laughed. ‘I’ll tell him you said that. Actually, he’s thirty-three. A graduate of the Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London. By the way, aren’t you supposed to be resting? It’s customary for concussion sufferers to rest.’

‘It was a couple of days ago. And I’m sitting down, aren’t I?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I suppose I should still be resting, but in reality, life gets in the way. Or in this case, criminal investigation.’

‘You have short-term memory loss, don’t you?’

‘What?’

‘Very funny.’

‘Yes. That’s true, but there’s nothing wrong with the rest of my memory.’

‘I just didn’t expect you to be back at work so soon, that’s all.’

‘We still have a missing person to find as well as a rape and murder to solve. I can’t afford the luxury of rest at the moment.’

‘In that case, what do you want to know?’

‘Have you completed the post-mortems yet?’

‘I was in at six o’clock this morning. There wasn’t a lot left to work with. I’ve been as thorough as I know how, but I’d be the first to admit I’m not well experienced with burn victims. As a matter of fact, of all the bodies I have to perform post-mortems on, they disturb me the most. I’m not shirking my duty or making excuses, you understand, just being honest. And if you think you need a second opinion, I wouldn’t hesitate to call in an expert in the field I know in Edinburgh. He’s worked in various war zones around the world, so he’s more than acquainted with the properties of fire. I worked with him briefly in Iraq several years ago, and he handled most of the tough burn cases.’

‘I hardly think that will be necessary. What have you found out?’

‘The damage was quite advanced in both cases, and the remains are very fragile. Fire causes any number of changes to the human body — blistering, skin splits, exposure, and rendering of subcutaneous fat. Then the muscles that overlie the bones retract when they’re exposed to extreme heat. That’s what causes the so-called pugilistic position often found in burn victims. What I’m saying is that kind of damage makes it almost impossible to identify any pre-fire trauma the victim might have been exposed to.’

‘So you can’t say if either of them was shot, stabbed, or bashed on the head?’

‘I didn’t say that. The skin, flesh, and fat are gone. So badly damaged by fire and by being transported here that they won’t tell me what happened. But if the victim had been shot, I would expect to find a bullet — if not the hole it made — and if he was bashed over the head, as you so eloquently put it, I would expect damage to the skull indicating that, unless it exploded from the inside, of course.’

‘Of course,’ said Banks, feeling momentarily sick. ‘Have you?’

‘No. Stab wounds are particularly difficult, for example. Because the skin blisters and splits in fire, and the inner organs are consumed, any trace of an original knife wound in flesh would probably be erased. On the other hand, if the knife came into contact with a bone, then there could be evidence of that contact on the bone.’

‘A notch?’

‘That kind of thing, yes.’

‘And is there?’

‘On one of the bodies, yes.’

‘Which one?’

‘The one on the lower level.’ Dr. Galway twisted in her chair and pointed to a spot on her back. ‘Fifth rib, posterior left.’

‘Meaning?’

‘There’s a slight nick on the bone that could be a knife mark. I’ll be further analysing and measuring it, of course, and may soon be able to tell you something about the weapon that caused it. But don’t get your hopes up too high. It’s a tiny nick and there could be other reasons it’s there.’

‘What would the result of such a wound be?’

‘Most likely, depending on the angle and the length of the blade, it would have pierced the lung.’

‘Would the killer, assuming there was one, have needed expert knowledge?’

‘Not necessarily. He wouldn’t have had to be a trained commando. It could have just been a lucky stab. Lucky for the killer, I mean. An expert would have known exactly what he was doing, of course, but that knowledge wasn’t essential to the deed.’

It was Keane, Banks knew. Zelda had stabbed him twice in the back. He had witnessed it. ‘And the other victim?’

‘No sign of knife wounds, but I wouldn’t rule it out.’

‘Did they both die in the flames?’

‘Impossible to say. They were both so badly burned that it wasn’t possible to measure smoke inhalation. I’m sorry to be so vague, but it’s well-nigh impossible to determine these things from the remains we had left.’

‘Can you get DNA?’

‘The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.’

‘Can you?’

‘It’s possible. Bones can be quite durable when all else is burned beyond recognition. The DNA may be degraded or contaminated, but there’s a good chance it won’t be. These bones are only semi-burned in places, especially the ones found on the upper level, not black or blue-grey, so there’s still hope. The teeth, too, could be a possible source. I’m working on it with Dr. Jasminder Singh from your forensics lab. There is just one more thing.’

It was probably the answer to the question Banks had been afraid to ask. ‘Yes?’

‘The pelvic bones were badly burned but still held their shape. Both victims were male.’