Playing With Fire

Chapter 15

The fire engines were gone when Banks arrived at Patrick Aspern’s house shortly after two in the morning, and two police patrol cars were parked diagonally across the street, blocking it to all traffic. He hadn’t known what to expect in terms of damage, but from the outside, at least, the house seemed intact. The local police had sealed off the path, and a line of blue-and-white tape barred the gateway, where a young constable, who looked to be freezing his bollocks off, even in his overcoat, was logging everyone who came and went. Banks went up to him and asked for DI Ken Blackstone.

The PC wrote something on his clipboard and gestured with his thumb. “Inside, sir,” he said with a wistful tone.

Banks walked down the path. The front door was closed, but not locked, and there were signs of forced entry. The firefighters, or someone else?

Banks found Ken Blackstone and the local DI from Weetwood, Gary Bridges, in the living room. DI Bridges presented quite a contrast to Banks and the elegant, dapper Blackstone. In some ways he resembled DS Hatchley, though he was in far better shape. He was a big man in a baggy creased suit, an ex-rugby forward with arms and legs like steel cables, a head of thick sandy hair and piercing green eyes. The traces of his Belfast accent were still in his voice, even though he’d spent most of his life in England.

Banks looked around the room. There was no trace, or even smell, of fire or smoke damage anywhere. Sitting on the sofa, where he cut a slight and lonely figure indeed, was Mark Siddons. The room was warm, but Mark had a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and was trembling slightly. He looked over when Banks walked in, then quickly averted his eyes. What looked like streaks of dirt, or blood, stained his face and the hands gripping the blanket. There was also blood on the side of his head.

“What’s going on?” Banks asked, after greeting Blackstone and Bridges. “Where’s the fire?”

“Gary here rang me at home as soon as he heard the location,” said Blackstone. “His lads had been helping us check up on Aspern, so he knew I had an interest.”

“It started in Dr. Aspern’s surgery,” Bridges said. “At the back. An addition, really. The damage isn’t serious, and it’s pretty well contained.” He gestured toward Mark. “Seems this lad here snapped into action with the extinguisher real sharpish.”

Banks looked at Mark. “That right?” he asked.

Mark nodded.

“Was it you who broke in?”

Mark said nothing.

“Sure you didn’t start the fire yourself?” Banks went on.

“I didn’t start it.”

“I warned you to stay away.”

“I didn’t do it.”

“What makes you think he did?” Bridges asked. “What’s going on here? DI Blackstone said Dr. Aspern was involved in a case you’re working on, but that’s about all I know. Do you think this might be related?”

“The personnel’s the same,” said Banks, then he explained about the other fires and Mark’s problems with Patrick Aspern. Mark said nothing. He seemed to be lost in his own world, still trembling.

“So what happened?” Banks asked.

“We’re still not clear yet,” Blackstone said. “But the fire’s not the main problem.” He looked at Mark. “And the leading firefighter told me the front door was already open when they got here. Do you want a look at the scene?”

Banks nodded. Blackstone glanced at Bridges. It was a courtesy to seek his permission because they were on his patch. “It’s okay,” Bridges said. “Looks like we’ll be working together on this one, anyway. I’ll take the lad here down to the station.”

“Why are you arresting me?” Mark asked. “I haven’t done anything.”

“Where else would you go at this hour?” Banks asked.

Mark just shrugged.

Bridges looked over at Banks. “Breaking and entering?”

“That’ll do for starters. And see if you can get a doctor to have a look at him, would you? We’ll talk to him tomorrow.”

“Okay,” said Bridges. “Be careful in there. The doc’s been and gone, but the photographer’s not finished yet, I think, and the SOCOs haven’t done their stuff. Can’t seem to get the idle buggers out of bed.”

“It’s pretty grim,” Blackstone said as he and Banks walked down the plush-carpeted hall to the back of the house.

Banks remembered the scene on the boats and in Gardiner’s caravan. He didn’t imagine it could be much worse than either of those. And it certainly couldn’t be worse than what he had witnessed in that tall, narrow terraced house all those years ago.

“There’s just one connecting door through from the main house,” Blackstone said, turning the handle. “And there’s a separate entrance from the outside into a small waiting room for the patients. They’re mostly private, and I expect they pay a little bit extra for the olde worlde charm. I’ll bet the doctor paid house calls, too.”

There wasn’t much olde worlde charm in evidence when Blackstone opened the door to Aspern’s surgery, but whatever damage had been done there hadn’t been done by fire. Even with the slight charring and spray of foam from the extinguisher, it was plain to see that the walls and floor were covered in blood, and that the blood came from the body of Patrick Aspern, well beyond the help of any doctor now, spread-eagled on the floor, the entire front of his body ripped open in a glistening tapestry of tissue, organ, sinew and bone.

Banks glanced at Blackstone, who was looking distinctly peaky. “Shotgun?” he said. “Close range? Both barrels?”

“Exactly. Gary’s bagged it and tagged it.”

“Jesus Christ,” Banks said under his breath. In such a small room, the impact must have been tremendous. Even now he could still smell the powder mingled with burned rubber, surgical spirit and blood. Banks could only imagine the deafening noise and the spray of arterial blood, the gobbets of flesh blown clean off the bone, leaving dark slimy trails on the walls. Even the eye chart was splattered with blood, and so was the hypodermic syringe on the floor by the chair.

“Who did it?” Banks asked.

“Looks like the wife,” said Blackstone. “But she’s not talking yet.”

“Frances?” Banks said. “Where is she?”

“Station.”

“And the boy was in the room, too? Mark?”

“Yes.”

“What does he have to say for himself?”

“Nothing. You saw for yourself. I think he’s still in shock. We’ll have to wait awhile before we get anything out of him.”

Banks kept silent for a few moments, looking around the room. A shambles, in the original meaning of the word. He noticed several strands of cord on the floor by the doctor’s chair. “What’s that?” he asked.

“We think the boy must have been tied to the chair.”

“Why?”

“Don’t know yet. But Mrs. Aspern must have cut him free.”

“And the fire?”

“Hardly got started before the kid turned the extinguisher on it. As you can see.”

He pointed to a burned patch on the carpet, which had spread as far as the cubbyhole used to store patient files and singed the crisp white sheets on the examination table.

“Who set it?”

“Again, it looks like the wife.”

Frances Aspern. Well, maybe she had reached a snapping point, Banks thought. If what he suspected had been going on, and if she had known, then he could only guess at the power of the emotions she had suppressed, or how warped and dangerous they had become under the pressure of the years. But something must have happened to make her snap. A trigger of some sort. Maybe they would get something out of her or Mark later.

The outside door opened, letting in a draft of icy night air. “Sorry, lads,” said the photographer, tapping his Pentax. “I finished the video, then I had to go back to the car for this.”

The young photographer didn’t seem at all fazed by the scene of carnage in front of him. Banks had seen the same lack of reaction before. He knew that photographers often managed to distance themselves through their lenses. To them, the scene was only another photo, an image, a composition, not real human blood and guts spilled there. It was their way of coping.

Banks wondered what his way of coping was and realized he didn’t really have one. He looked upon these scenes as exactly what they were – outbursts of anger, hate, greed, lust or passion, which left one human being mangled and split open, the fragile bag of blood burst, and he didn’t have any way of distancing himself. But still he slept at night, still he didn’t faint or puke his guts up over someone’s shoes. What did that say about him? Oh, he remembered them all, of course, all the victims, young and old, and sometimes his sleep was disturbed by dreams, or he couldn’t get to sleep for the images that assaulted his mind, but still he lived with it. What did that make him?

“Alan?”

Banks turned to see Ken Blackstone frowning at him.

“All right?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“My sofa?”

“Why not,” said Banks, with a sigh. “It’s a bloody long way home, and I’m knackered. Got any decent whiskey?”

“I think I could rustle up a dram or two of Bell’s.”

“That’ll do nicely,” said Banks. “Let’s leave it to DI Bridges and go. We’ll sort this mess out tomorrow.”

Annie was in the office early, despite a mild hangover and a mostly sleepless night. Phil had picked up the Turners and set off for London after dropping her at the front doors of Western Area Headquarters. She made a pot of strong coffee in the squad room and settled down to some much neglected paperwork. She was just starting to enjoy the relative early-morning peace and quiet when the place started springing to life. DC Rickerd was first in, followed by Winsome. Then Kevin Templeton and the others came and went, attending to the varied tasks and minutiae of a major investigation. Annie felt embarrassed to be wearing the same clothes she’d gone to dinner in the previous evening, but nobody noticed, or at least nobody said anything. Banks wasn’t there, anyway. She could only imagine the kind of look she’d get from him. Sometimes she felt as if he could smell the sex on her, no matter how long she had showered.

It wasn’t long after nine when an excited DC Templeton came up to her waving a sheet of paper. “I’ve got it!” he said. “I’ve got it.”

“Alleluia,” said Annie. “What have you got?”

“McMahon and Gardiner. The connection.”

Annie felt the excitement of a big break spread around the squad room like the first breath of spring. Everyone put in hard and long hours on a case, and something like this was payday for them all, whether they’d worked that particular angle or not.

“Come on, then, Kev,” she said. “Give.”

“They were at university together,” said Templeton. “Well, it wasn’t actually a university back then, but it is now.”

“Kev, slow down,” said Annie. “Give me the details so they make sense.”

Templeton ran his hand over his wavy brown hair. He had some sort of gel on it, Annie noticed, which made it look wet, as if he’d just walked out of the shower. He always did fancy himself a bit, did Kevin Templeton, she thought, and he was a good-looking, trim, fit lad who probably did really well with the girls. He had a touch of the Hugh Grant boyish charm about him, too, the sort of quality that called out for a bit of mothering, but just enough to make it an attractive proposition for the right type of woman. Not Annie. She wasn’t the mothering kind.

“Okay,” he went on, reading from the sheet. “Between 1978 and 1981, both Thomas McMahon and Roland Gardiner attended the former Leeds Polytechnic, since 1992 known as Leeds Metropolitan University. Back then it was made up of the Art College, the College of Commerce, the College of Technology and the Cookery School. Thomas McMahon attended the Art College, obviously, and Roland Gardiner went to the College of Commerce.”

“Did they know one another?”

Templeton scratched his forehead. “Can’t tell you that, ma’am. Only that they were both there at the same time.”

Winsome shot Annie a glance. Annie smiled at her. One day she’d get Kevin Templeton out of the habit of calling her “ma’am,” too. Coming from a handsome young lad like him, it really did make her feel like an old maid.

“In my experience,” Annie said, “it’s pretty unlikely that art and commerce students shared the same interests. I doubt they’d ever mix.”

“Not the same subjects, maybe,” said Templeton, “but that’s only a part of what college is all about, isn’t it? There’s the pub, student politics, the music scene. Leeds Poly always had great bands. They could have met through something like that.”

“ ‘Could have’ isn’t good enough, Kev. If we’re to make any sort of link, we need to know for certain. And we need to know who else they hung out with. There’s a fair chance that whoever killed them met them back then, was someone who was maybe part of the same scene. I certainly don’t believe it’s a coincidence that two men who were murdered so close together and in much the same way just happened to go to the same poly at the same time. But we need a definite connection, if one exists. And there’s the late William Masefield to consider, too. How was he linked with the others, if he was?”

“Well,” said Templeton, “I could always get on to the authorities in Leeds. I’m sure their records go back that far.”

“And what do we do then? Check up on every student who attended Leeds Poly from 1978 to 1981? It’d be like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.”

“Can you think of any other way?”

“I’ve got an idea,” said Winsome.

Annie and Templeton looked at her. “Go on,” Annie said.

“Friends Reunited dot com. I’m a member. I’ve used it before to locate people. I admit it’s a short cut, but it might help narrow things down a bit. Of course, you’ve only got the people who have taken the trouble to register on the site, but there’s a chance one of them might remember McMahon or Gardiner. We can send out an e-mail to everyone on the list who left Leeds Poly in 1981, asking if they knew a Thomas McMahon and a Roland Gardiner, and see what kind of response we get back. Plenty of people are constantly online these days, so if we’re lucky we might even get a speedy reply.”

“It’s worth a try,” said Annie, getting to her feet. “Come on, let’s do it.”

The interview room was the same as just about every interview room Banks had ever been in: small, high window covered by a grille, bare bulb similarly covered, metal table bolted to the floor. The institutional green paint looked fresh, though, and Banks fancied he could still smell traces of it in the stale air. Either that or the Scotch he had drunk with Ken Blackstone the previous night was giving him a headache. He massaged his temples.

Frances Aspern sat opposite Banks and DI Gary Bridges, who was not only wearing the same suit as he had last night, but looked as if he’d slept in it, too. Dressed in disposable navy overalls, Frances Aspern seemed listless and distant, and much older than she had when Banks first saw her. The dark circles under her eyes testified that she hadn’t slept, and she was fidgeting with a ring. Not her wedding ring, Banks noticed. That was gone.

“Are you ready to talk to us?” Bridges asked, when he had issued the caution and set the tape machine rolling.

Frances nodded, a faraway look in her eyes.

“Can you speak your answers out loud, please?” Bridges asked.

“Yes,” she said, in a small voice. “Sorry.”

“What happened last night?”

Frances paused so long before answering that Banks was beginning to think she hadn’t heard DI Bridges’s question. But eventually she began to speak. “We were asleep. Patrick heard a noise downstairs. He took his gun out of the cabinet and went down.” Her voice was a monotone, disconnected from her feelings, as if the things she was saying were of no interest to her.

“What happened then?”

“I waited. A long time. I don’t know how long. Then I went downstairs. He was going to hurt the boy. I picked up his gun and shot him, then I cut the boy free and told him to go.”

“What about the fire?” DI Bridges asked.

“Fire cleanses,” she said. “I wanted to purify the house.”

“What did you use to start it?”

“Rubbing alcohol. It was on the table.”

“What happened?”

“The boy came back and put it out. I told him not to, but he didn’t listen. Then he made me sit down and he rang the police. I just felt so tired I didn’t care what happened, but I couldn’t sleep.”

“I’m trying to understand all this, Frances,” Bridges said. “Why did you kill your husband?”

Frances looked at Banks, not at Bridges, her eyes burning with tears now. “Because he was going to hurt the boy.”

“He was going to hurt Mark?” It was DI Bridges who spoke, but Frances continued to look at Banks.

“Yes,” she said. “Patrick is a cruel man. You must know that. He was going to hurt the boy. He was tied to the chair.”

“But why did he want to hurt Mark?” Bridges asked.

Slowly, Frances turned to face him, still fiddling with her ring. “Because of Christine,” she said. “The boy took Christine from him. Patrick couldn’t bear to lose.”

Banks felt a chill ripple up his spine. Bridges turned to him, looking confused. “DCI Banks,” he said, “you’re familiar with the background to this case. Is there anything you’d like to ask?”

Banks turned to Frances Aspern. “You’re saying that your husband was going to harm Mark because Mark lived with Christine on the boat, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Did Patrick go to the boat last Thursday evening? Did he start the fire?”

Frances looked up sharply, surprised. “No,” she said. “No, we were at home. That much is true.”

“But was your husband sexually abusing Christine?”

The tears spilled over from Frances’s eyes and rolled down her cheeks, but she didn’t sob or wail. “Yes,” she said.

“For how long?”

“Since she was twelve. When she… you know, when she started to develop. He couldn’t stop touching her.”

“Why didn’t she stop him? She must have known what was happening, that it was wrong? She could have gone to the authorities.”

Frances wiped the tears from her eyes and cheeks with the sleeve of her overalls and gave Banks a what-do-you-know look. “He was the only father she had ever known,” she said. “He was strict with her when she was growing up. Always. She was terrified of him. She never dared disobey his demands.”

“And you knew about the sexual abuse from the start?”

“Yes. From very early on, at any rate.”

“How did you find out?”

“It’s not hard to recognize the signs, when you’re around all the time. Besides…”

“It happened with you, too?”

“How do you know?”

“I’m just guessing.”

She looked away. “I tried to tell Daddy, but I couldn’t. He wouldn’t have believed me, anyway, and if he had, it would have broken his heart.”

“So you did nothing about Christine, either?”

“How could I? I was terrified of him.”

“Even so, after your experiences, your own daughter…”

She slapped the table with her palm. “You’ve no idea how cruel Patrick could be. No idea.”

“Why? Did he hit you? Did he hit Christine?”

She shook her head. “No. What he did… it was worse than that, much worse. Cold, calculated.”

“What did he do?”

Frances looked away again, at a spot on the wall above Banks’s head, her eyes unfocused. “He… he knew chemicals.” She gave a harsh laugh. “Of course he did, he was a doctor, after all, wasn’t he?”

“What do you mean, Frances?”

She looked directly at Banks, her expression unfathomable. “Patrick knew drugs. Not illegal drugs. Prescriptions. What made you sleep. What made you stay awake. What made your heart beat like a frightened bird inside your chest. What made you sick. What made you have to go to the toilet all the time. What made your skin burn and your mouth dry.”

Banks understood. And wished he didn’t. He looked at Bridges, who seemed to have turned a shade paler. Just when he thought he’d seen and heard it all, dug about as deep as anyone can into the darkness of the human soul and remained sane, something else came along and knocked all his assumptions out of the window.

“Now you understand,” Frances Aspern said, a note of shrill triumph in her voice. “But even that wasn’t it. I could have stood the pain, the cruelty.”

“What was it, Frances?” Banks asked.

“My father. He worshiped Patrick. You know he did. You’ve talked to him. He rang us after you left. How could I tell him? It was like before, like I told you. Even if I could have made him believe, it would have broken his heart.”

“So for the sake of your father’s trust in Patrick Aspern you let your husband abuse both you and your daughter? Is that what you’re saying?”

“What else could I do? Surely you understand? If it came out what kind of man Patrick was, what he did, it would have destroyed my father. He’s not a strong man.”

He had looked healthy enough the other day, Banks thought, though appearances could be deceptive. But there was no point in pursuing this line of questioning. Whatever her reasons, Frances Aspern knew the enormity of what she had done, and she knew she had to live with the consequences.

“What about Paul Ryder?” Banks asked.

“Who?”

“Paul Ryder. Christine’s birth father, remember? We haven’t been able to find him.”

Frances looked down at the scarred tabletop and ran her fingertips over its rough surface.

“There was no Paul Ryder, was there?” Banks said.

She responded with a barely perceptible shake of the head.

“Patrick was Christine’s real father, wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” she said, still looking down at the table.

“Remember when we first met, when Patrick wanted to drive you to Eastvale to identify the body?”

Frances just looked at him.

“You said, ‘She’s my daughter.’ I took it to imply that you were putting him in his place, reminding him that he was only Christine’s stepfather, but that wasn’t it, was it?”

“When you live a lie for long enough,” Frances said, in little more than a whisper, “you come to believe it.”

Banks let the silence stretch, with only the hiss of the tape and muffled sounds from the station in the background, then he looked at Bridges, who shook his head slowly. “Let’s suspend this interview for now,” Banks said. Bridges nodded and turned off the tape machine.

“Alan out again, is he?” asked DS Stefan Nowak, popping his head around the squad room door close to lunchtime that day.

“Another fire,” Annie said. “In Leeds, this time. I’ve just been on the phone with him, and it seems that Mrs. Aspern, the doctor’s wife, has killed her husband and tried to set fire to the body.”

Stefan whistled between his teeth.

“Indeed,” saidAnnie. “Have you got anything new for us?”

“I might have.” Stefan walked into the room and sat down opposite Annie. He looked as handsome and regal as ever, and just as remote and unreadable. Not for the first time, Annie wondered what sort of private life he had. Did he have friends outside the force? Family? Was he gay? She didn’t sense that in him, but she had been wrong before.

Stefan opened the folder he had brought with him. “What do you want first,” he asked, “the good news or the bad news?”

“I don’t care,” Annie said.

“Well,” Stefan went on, “apart from the soil and gravel samples, which do match samples from the lay-by, we drew a blank with the Jeep Cherokee. The car rental company had done a bloody good job of cleaning it, inside and out. We did find some hair, fibers and a partial print under the front seat, but it’s not much more than a smudge. We might be able to do some computer enhancement, but don’t expect too much.”

“That’s pretty well what I figured,” said Annie. “I wouldn’t be surprised if our killer gave it a good going over, too. He seems to be the meticulous type.”

“And we checked a sample of petrol from the fuel tank of Leslie Whitaker’s Jeep Cherokee with the accelerant from the Gardiner fire.”

“And?”

“It doesn’t match.”

“Shit,” said Annie.

“We do have the Nike trainer impression, though. That’s pretty distinctive. If he hasn’t ditched them, we can match them when we find a suspect.”

“Was that the good news or the bad news?”

Stefan smiled. “It might be nothing, but one of our lads found traces of candle wax puddled near the point of origin in Roland Gardiner’s caravan.”

“You mean he’d been having a romantic evening?”

“No,” said Stefan, “that’s not what comes to mind. Not my mind, anyway. Call me a cynic, but I see it in a different light altogether.”

“Joke,” said Annie. “Never mind. Wasn’t there also a candle beside the girl who died on the boat?”

“Yes,” said Stefan, “but that’s different. The fire didn’t originate on the boat, and it was pretty clear she’d used the candle to prepare the heroin she’d injected. Also, the boyfriend said in his statement that he made sure the candle was out before he left.”

“Mark Siddons? I can’t understand why everybody is so quick to believe anything he says. He could easily have been lying.”

“No, this is something else.”

“I think I know what you’re getting at,” said Annie.

“Yes. It looks as if it was used as some sort of primitive time-delay ignition device. It’s not unusual in arson cases.”

“So the killer makes sure Gardiner’s fast asleep, pours out the petrol, then lights the candle and leaves?”

“And an hour, or two hours later, the candle burns down, meets the petrol, and puff! Up it goes.”

“Can you estimate how long?”

“If we can discover exactly what make and length of candle it was, and if we assume it hadn’t been used previously, was still whole, then yes. But don’t hold your breath. We don’t have a lot to go on.”

“An estimate?”

“Well, an ordinary household candle is seven-eighths of an inch in diameter, and it burns one inch every fifty-seven minutes in a draft-free environment.”

“The caravan could hardly have been a draft-free environment, could it?”

“Agreed,” said Stefan. “But there was hardly any wind that night. Anyway, let’s say you’ve got a six-inch candle, that gives you nearly six hours of burn time before ignition, all factors being equal.”

“How could the killer rely on Gardiner’s remaining unconscious for that long?”

“He couldn’t. Look, Annie, it could have been just a candle stub. Half an inch, an inch. Half an hour, or an hour at the most.”

“Or it could have been two hours, or three?”

“Afraid so. It could even have been one of those fancy thick candles, which would burn much more slowly. We’re doing what tests we can on the wax, but as I said, don’t get your hopes up.”

“What about Thomas McMahon’s barge? Anything there?”

“No signs of candle wax. It looks as if that fire was set directly.”

“But not the Gardiner fire?”

“No.”

“Isn’t using a candle like that unreliable?”

“Extremely. Very crude and unpredictable. Not to mention dangerous. Any number of things can, and do, go wrong. You could accidentally ignite the accelerant when you’re lighting the candle, for example. Or you light it and leave and a draft blows it out. Or it topples over and sets the accelerant off sooner than you’d hoped. It’s amateur, but it can also be very effective, if it works. I’m sorry it’s not very much to go on,” Stefan apologized, “but it does tell us one thing, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Annie, already turning over the implications in her mind. “It tells us that whoever set the second fire needed time, most likely time to arrange for an alibi. And which of our suspects seems to have a watertight alibi?”

Stefan thought for a moment, then answered. “Leslie Whitaker?”

“Exactly.”

“But what about the petrol?”

“He must have been bright enough to siphon some from someone else’s car. Maybe he knew there was a chance we’d be able to trace it. Don’t you see, Stefan? It makes sense. Whitaker said he went out for an eight-o’clock dinner in Harrogate with nine other booksellers. They all vouched for him. We already know that he supplied Thomas McMahon with the special paper he needed to produce his forgeries. They were in it together. He practically admitted as much. One reason we almost ruled Whitaker out was that he’s got an alibi for the Jennings Field fire, but not the one on the barges.”

“But this timing device puts paid to his alibi?”

“Yes,” said Annie. “If he was in Harrogate for that dinner at eight o’clock, then he must have left Eastvale, or Lyndgarth, where he lives, at about seven. But surely it would have been possible for him to use a two-or three-inch candle and gain a couple of hours or more burn time before the accelerant ignited?”

“Easily, assuming it all went according to plan.”

“This time it did,” said Annie. “We’ll have him in, Stefan. And then we’ll have him.”

After the interview with Frances Aspern, Banks picked up a coffee in the canteen and remembered that he had intended to ring Dirty Dick Burgess. He found an empty office and took out his mobile.

“At last,” said Dirty Dick. “I’ve been leaving messages for you in Eastvale all bloody morning.”

“Bit of a crisis up here,” said Banks, giving a brief explanation of his night and morning. “Anyway, what have you got?”

“Not much, I’m afraid. Business aboveboard. Solo operation. No partner. No employees. Philip Keane is a well-respected and popular member of the art community. Judgment valued, pals with all the movers and shakers, dealers, collectors, gallery owners, that sort of thing. Not exactly Anthony Blunt, but you get the picture.”

“Blunt?” said Banks. “Why mention him? Wasn’t he a spy, along with Philby, Burgess and MacLean? The fourth man?”

“Yes,” said Burgess, “but he was also surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures and director of the Courtauld Institute.”

“Of course,” said Banks. “Yes, I remember. Interesting. A master of the art of deception. Anything else?”

“Nothing. Philip Keane has lived a completely blameless life. At least for the past four years.”

“Four years? And before that?”

“There’s the glitch. Before that, there’s nothing. Nada. Zilch. Bupkis.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that he appeared fully formed on the scene four years ago, like Athena from the head of Zeus. And if you’re thinking of teasing me about classical analogies, Banksy, don’t. I got a first in classics at Oxford.”

“Bollocks,” said Banks. “Go on, though. You’ve got me interested.”

“Like I said, there’s nothing else to tell. The trail stops there. It’s as if Keane didn’t exist until four years ago.”

“He must have been born, for a start.”

“Oh, well, if you’d like me to send a team down to Saint Catherine’s House… Or perhaps I should go myself? Shouldn’t take long. Let me see, unusual name that, Philip Keane. I suppose you’ve got the details of his date and place of birth?”

“All right,” said Banks. “I get the point. Give it a rest. Maybe Keane studied and worked in museums and galleries abroad. Maybe that’s where he was before.”

“Maybe he did, and we can certainly check that, too, given time and resources. How official do you want this to be?”

Banks thought for a moment. He didn’t want it to be official at all just yet. Not unless he got something more concrete to go on. On a whim, he asked, “Can you check if anyone called Philip Keane was connected in any way with a fire four years ago, and if he was ever associated with someone called William Masefield?”

“Fire? Where?”

“I don’t know,” said Banks, explaining about William Masefield’s stolen identity. “It’s a long shot. But if it is him, it could be an MO. He might have done it before.”

“So you want me to keep digging?”

“If you can. But still discreetly. This case is confusing enough already. It just keeps shifting in the wind. It’d be nice to get some good solid information for a change.”

“I do have one practical suggestion to make,” offered Burgess.

“Oh, and what’s that?”

“You could talk to his wife.”