Strange Affair

CHAPTER TWO

Unaware of the excitement just a few miles down the road, Banks was up and around before eight o’clock that morning, coffee and newspaper on the table in front of him, mild hangover held at bay by aspirin. He hadn’t slept at all well, mostly because he had been waiting for the phone to ring. And he hadn’t been able to get that song Penny Cartwright had been singing out of his mind: “Strange Affair.” The melody haunted him and the lyrics, with their images of death and fear, troubled him.

His window framed a view of blue sky above the rising northern daleside and the gray flagstone roofs of Helmthorpe, about half a mile away at the valley bottom, dominated by its church tower with the odd turret on one corner. It was similar to his view from the wall by his old cottage, just a slightly different angle. But it failed to move him. He could see that it was beautiful, but he couldn’t feel it. There seemed to be something missing, some connection, or perhaps there was a sort of invisible shield or thick fog between him and the rest of the world and it dimmed the power of all he had held dear to move him in any way.

Music, landscape, words on a page – all seemed inert and impotent, distant and unimportant.

Since the fire had consumed his home and possessions four months ago, Banks had become withdrawn and taciturn; he knew it, but there was nothing he could do about it. He was suffering from depression, but knowing that was one thing, changing it quite another.

It had started the day he left the hospital and went to look at the ruins of his cottage. He hadn’t been prepared for the scale of the damage: roof gone, windows burned out; inside a shambles of charred debris, nothing salvageable, hardly anything even recognizable. And it didn’t help that the man who had done this had got away.

After a few days convalescing at Gristhorpe’s Lyndgarth farmhouse, Banks had found the flat and moved in. Some mornings he didn’t want to get out of bed. Most nights he spent watching television, any old rubbish, and drinking. He wasn’t drinking too much, but he was drinking steadily, mostly wine, and smoking again.

His withdrawal had driven the wedge even deeper between him and Annie Cabbot, who desperately seemed to need something from him. He thought he knew what it was, but he couldn’t give it to her. Not yet. It had also cooled his relationship with Michelle Hart, a detective inspector who had recently transferred to Sex Crimes and Child Protection in Bristol, much too far away to maintain a reasonable long-distance relationship. Michelle had her own problems, too, Banks realized. Whatever it was that haunted her was always there, always in the way, even when they were laughing or making love. They’d been good for each other for a while, no doubt about it, but now they were down to the “just good friends” stage that usually comes before the end.

It seemed as if the fire and subsequent spell in the hospital had put his life on pause, and he couldn’t find the “play” button. Even work, when he got back to it, had been boring, consisting mostly of paperwork and interminable meetings that never settled anything. Only an occasional pint with Gristhorpe or Jim Hatchley, a chat about football or the previous evening’s television, had relieved the tedium. His daughter, Tracy, had visited as often as she could, but she had been studying hard for her finals.

Brian had dropped by a few times, too, and now he was in a recording studio in Dublin with his band working on a new CD. Their first as the Blue Lamps had done okay, but the second was slated for much bigger and better things.

More than once Banks had thought of counseling, only to reject the idea. He had even considered that Dr. Jenny Fuller, a consultant psychologist he had worked with on a number of cases, might be able to help, but she was on one of her extended teaching gigs – Australia this time – and when he thought more about it, the idea of Jenny delving into the murky depths of his subconscious didn’t hold a lot of appeal. Maybe whatever was there was best left there.

When it came down to it, he didn’t need any interfering shrink poking around in his mind and telling him what was wrong. He knew what was wrong, knew he spent too much time sitting around the flat and brooding. He also knew that the healing process – the mental and emotional process, not merely the physical – would take time, and that it was something he had to do alone, make his way step by weary step back to the land of the living. No doubt about it, the fire had burned much deeper than his skin.

It wasn’t so much the pain he’d endured – that hadn’t lasted long, and he couldn’t even remember most of it – but the loss of all his worldly goods that had hit him the hardest. He felt like a man adrift, unanchored, a helium balloon let float off into the sky by a careless child. What was worse was that he thought he ought to be feeling a great sense of release, of freedom from materialism, the sort of thing gurus and sages spoke about, but he just felt jittery and insecure. He hadn’t learned the virtue of simplicity from his loss, had learned only that he missed his material possessions more than he ever dreamed he would, though he hadn’t yet been able to muster up the energy and interest to start replacing those items that could be replaced: his CD collection, his books and DVDs. He felt too weary to start again. He had bought clothes, of course – comfortable, functional clothes – but that was all.

Still, he reflected, munching on a slice of toast and marmalade as he scanned the reviews section of the newspaper, things were definitely improving a little each day. It was becoming easier to get out of bed on a morning, and he had got into the habit of occasionally taking a walk up the daleside opposite his flat on a fine day, finding the freshness and exercise invigorating. He had also enjoyed Penny Cartwright’s singing the previous night and was beginning to miss his CD collection. A month or so ago, he wouldn’t even have bothered reading the reviews in the paper.

And now brother Roy, who hadn’t even rung or visited him in the hospital, had left a mysterious urgent message and had not called back. For the third time since he got up that morning, Banks tried Roy’s numbers. He got the answering machine again, the recorded voice telling him to leave a message, and the mobile was still switched off.

Unable to concentrate on the newspaper any longer, Banks checked his watch and decided to ring his parents. They should be up by now. There was just a chance that Roy was there, or that they knew what was going on. He certainly seemed to keep in touch with them more than with Banks.

His mother answered and sounded nervous to be getting a call so early in the day. In her world, Banks knew, early-morning phone calls never meant good news. “Alan? What is it? Is there something wrong?”

“No, Mum,” Banks said, trying to put her at ease. “Everything’s fine.”

“You’re all right, are you? Still recovering?”

“Still recovering,” said Banks. “Look, Mum, I was wondering if our Roy was there.”

“Roy? Why would he be here? The last time we saw Roy was our anniversary last October. You must remember. You were here, too.”

“I remember,” said Banks. “It’s just that I’ve been trying to ring him…”

His mother’s voice brightened. “So you two are making it up at last. That’s good to hear.”

“Yes,” said Banks, not wishing to disabuse his mother of that scrap of comfort. “It’s just that I keep getting his answering machine.”

“Well, he’s probably at work. You know how hardworking our Roy is. Always got something or other on the go.”

“Yes,” Banks agreed. Usually something about two shades away from being criminal. White-collar, though, which didn’t seem to count as crime to some people. When Banks thought about it, he realized he really hadn’t a clue what Roy actually did to make his money. Only that he made a lot of it. “So you haven’t heard from him recently?”

“I didn’t say that. As a matter of fact he rang about two weeks ago, just to see how your dad and I are doing, like.”

The implied rebuke wasn’t lost on Banks; he hadn’t rung his parents for a month. “Did he have anything else to say?”

“Not much. Except he’s keeping busy. He might be away, you know. Have you thought about that? He did say something about an important business trip coming up. New York again, I think. He’s always going there. I can’t remember when he said he was going, though.”

“Okay, Mum,” said Banks. “That’s probably where he is. Thanks very much. I’ll wait a few days and call him when he gets back home.”

“You make sure you do, Alan. He’s a good lad, is Roy. I don’t know why you two haven’t been getting on better all these years.”

“We get along fine, Mum. We just move in different circles, that’s all. How’s Dad?”

“Same as ever.” Banks heard the rustle of a newspaper – the Daily Mail his father read just so he could complain about the Conservatives – and a muffled voice in the background. “He says to say hello.”

“Right,” said Banks. “Say hello back… Well, take care of yourselves. I’ll call again soon.”

“Mind you do,” said Banks’s mother.

Banks rang off, tried Roy’s both numbers once again, but still no Roy. There was no way he was going to wait a few days, or even hours. From what he knew of Roy, under normal circumstances if he had buggered off somewhere and not bothered to ring back, Banks would have assumed he was sunning himself in California or the Caribbean with a shapely young woman by his side. That would be typical of him and his me-first attitude. As far as Roy was concerned, there was nothing in life you couldn’t get through with a smile and a wad of cash. But this was different. This time Banks had heard the fear in his brother’s voice.

He deleted the message from his answering service, threw a few clothes along with his toothbrush and razor into an overnight bag, checked that the lights were out, unplugged all the electrical items and locked the flat behind him. He knew he wouldn’t get any rest until he got to the bottom of Roy’s odd silence, so he might as well drive down to London and find out what was happening himself.

Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe called the meeting in the boardroom of Western Area Headquarters after lunch, and DI Annie Cabbot, DS Hatchley, crime scene coordinator DS Stefan Nowak, along with DCs Winsome Jackman, Kev Templeton and Gavin Rickerd sat in the high, stiff-backed chairs under the gaze of ancient wool barons with roast beef complexions and tight collars. Their notes and files were set in neat piles on the dark polished table beside Styrofoam cups of tea or coffee. Pinned to corkboards on the wall by the door were Peter Darby’s Polaroids of the scene. It was already hot and stuffy in the room and the small fan Gristhorpe had turned on didn’t do much good.

Soon, when the investigation got seriously under way, more manpower would be allocated, but these seven would remain the core team. Gristhorpe as senior investigative officer and Annie, who would do most of the fieldwork, as his deputy and administrative officer. Rickerd would be office manager, responsible for setting up and staffing the murder room; Hatchley would act as receiver, there to weigh the value of every piece of information and pass it on for computer entry; Winsome and Templeton would be the foot soldiers, tacking down information and conducting interviews. Others would be appointed later – statement readers, action allocators, researchers, and the rest – but for now it was of prime importance to get the system into place and into action. It was no longer merely a suspicious death. Jennifer Clewes – if that was really the name of the victim – had been murdered.

Gristhorpe cleared his throat, shuffled his papers and began by asking Annie for a summary of the facts, which she gave as succinctly as possible. Then he turned to DS Stefan Nowak.

“Any forensics yet?”

“It’s still early days,” said Stefan, “so I’m afraid all I can give you at the moment is what we don’t have.”

“Go on.”

“Well, the road surface was dry and there are no discernible tire tracks from any other vehicle. Also, we haven’t turned up any physical evidence – discarded cigarette ends, spent matches, that sort of thing. There are plenty of prints on the outside of the car, so that will take Vic Manson a while to sort out, but they could be anyone’s.”

“What about inside the car?” Gristhorpe asked.

“It’s in the police garage right now, sir. We should know something later today. There is one thing.”

“Yes?”

“It looks as if she was definitely forced off the road. The left wing hit the drystone wall.”

“But there was no damage to the right wing, at least not that I could see,” Annie said.

“That’s right,” Stefan agreed. “The car that forced her over didn’t make physical contact. Pity. We might have got some nice paint samples.”

“Keep looking,” said Gristhorpe.

“Anyway,” Stefan went on, “whoever it was must have got in front of her and veered to the left rather than come at her directly from the side.”

“Well,” said Gristhorpe, “what do you do if a you’re a woman alone and a car comes up fast behind you on a deserted country road at night?”

“I’d say either you take off like a bat out of hell or you slow down and let him get by and put as much distance as possible between the two of you,” said Annie.

“Exactly. Only in this case he forced her over to the side of the road.”

“The gear stick,” Annie said.

“What?” Gristhorpe asked.

“The gear stick. She was trying to get away. She was trying to reverse.”

“That’s the way it looks,” said Stefan.

“But she wasn’t fast enough,” said Annie.

“No. And she stalled.”

“Do you think,” Annie went on, “that there might have been two of them?”

“Why?” asked Gristhorpe.

Stefan looked at Annie and answered. It was uncanny, she thought, how often their thoughts followed the same pathways. “I think DI Cabbot means,” he said, “that if the driver had to put on the brake, unfasten his seat belt and pull out his gun before getting out, those few seconds might have made all the difference.”

“Yes,” said Annie. “Though why we should assume a murderer would be so law-abiding as to wear a seat belt is stretching it a bit. And he may have already had his gun out and not bothered to turn off the ignition. But if someone was there to leap out, say someone in the back, with his gun ready and no seat belt to unfasten, then she wouldn’t have had time to recover from the shock and get herself into reverse. Remember, she’d probably be panicking.”

“Hmm,” said Gristhorpe. “Interesting. And possible. Let’s keep an open mind for the time being. Anything else?”

“Not really,” said Stefan. “The victim’s been taken to the mortuary and Dr. Glendenning said he should be able to get around to the postmortem sometime this afternoon. In the meantime, it still looks very much as if death was due to a single gunshot wound above the right ear.”

“Any ideas about the sort of weapon used?”

“We’ve found no trace of a cartridge, so either our killer was smart and picked up after himself, or he used a revolver. At a rough estimate, I’d say it’s probably a twenty-two caliber. Anything bigger would most likely have left an exit wound.” Stefan paused. “We might not have had a lot of practice with gunshot wounds around these parts,” he said, “but our ballistics specialist, Kim Grainger, knows her stuff. That’s about it, sir. Sorry we can’t be a bit more helpful right now.”

“Early days, yet,” said Gristhorpe. “Keep at it, Stefan.” He turned to the rest of the group. “Has anyone verified the woman’s identity yet?” he asked.

“Not yet,” said Annie. “I got in touch with Lambeth North. It turns out their DI at Kennington is an old friend of mine, Dave Brooke, and he sent a couple of DCs to her address. Nobody home. They’re keeping an eye on the place.”

“And there are no reports of her car being stolen?”

“No, sir.”

“So it’s still more than within the realm of possibility that the registered keeper of the vehicle is the person found dead in it?”

“Yes. Unless she lent her car to a friend or hasn’t noticed it’s gone missing yet.”

“Do we even know for certain that she was alone in the car?” Gristhorpe asked.

“No.” Annie looked at Stefan. “I’m assuming that’s something they’ll be able to help us determine down at the garage.”

Stefan nodded. “Perhaps.”

“Anyone run her name through our system?”

“I did, sir,” said Winsome. “Name, prints, description. Nothing. If she ever committed a criminal act, we didn’t catch her.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Gristhorpe said. “All right, first priority, find out who she is and what she was doing on that road. In the meantime, I assume we’re already making door-to-door inquiries in the general area of the incident?”

“Yes, sir,” said Annie. “Problem is, there’s not much in the general area. As you know, it happened on a deserted stretch of road between the A1 and Eastvale in the early hours of the morning. We’ve got people going from house to house, but there’s nothing except a few holiday cottages and the occasional farmhouse within a mile each way of the car. Nothing’s turned up so far.”

“Nobody heard the shot?”

“Not so far.”

“An ideal place for a murder, then,” Gristhorpe commented. He scratched his chin. Annie could see by the stubble that he hadn’t shaved that morning. Hadn’t combed his unruly hair, by the looks of it, either. Still, personal grooming sometimes took backstage when it came to the urgency of a murder investigation. At least as far as the men were concerned. Kev Templeton was far too vain, of course, to look anything but his gelled, athletic and trendy best, not to mention cool as Antarctica, but Jim Hatchley had definitely taken a leaf out of Gristhorpe’s book. Gavin looked like a train spotter, right down to the National Health specs held together over his nose by a plaster. Winsome was immaculate in pinstripe navy trousers and matching waistcoat over a white scallop-neck blouse, and Annie felt rather conservative in her plain pastel frock and linen jacket. She also felt unpleasantly sweaty and hoped it didn’t show.

Finding herself doodling a cartoon of Kev Templeton in full seventies gear, complete with the Afro and tight gold lamé shirt, Annie dragged herself away from her sartorial musings, admonishing herself once again for having difficulty concentrating these days, and got back to the matter in hand: Jennifer Clewes. Gristhorpe was asking her a question, and Annie realized she had missed it.

“Sorry, sir?”

Gristhorpe frowned at her. “I said do we have any idea where the victim was driving from?”

“No, sir,” said Annie.

“Then perhaps we should set about canvassing all-night garages, shops open late, that sort of thing?”

“If the victim really is Jennifer Clewes,” Annie said, hoping to make up for her lapse in concentration, “then the odds are that she came from London. As the road she was found on leads to and from the A1, which connects with the M1, that makes it even more likely.”

“Motorway service stations, then?” Kevin Templeton suggested.

“Good idea, DC Templeton,” said Gristhorpe. “I’ll leave that to you, shall I?”

“Wouldn’t it be better to get the local forces on it, sir?”

“That’ll take too much time and coordination. We need results fast. Better if you do it yourself. Tonight.”

“Just what I always fancied,” Templeton grumbled. “Driving up and down the M1 sampling the local cuisine.”

Gristhorpe smiled. “Well, it was your idea. And I hear they do a very decent bacon panini at Woodall. Anything else?”

“DC Jackman mentioned that there had been a similar crime some months ago,” Annie said.

Gristhorpe looked at Winsome Jackman, eyebrows raised. “Oh?”

“Yes, sir,” said Winsome. “I checked the details. It’s not quite as similar as it appears on first glance.”

“Even so,” said Gristhorpe. “I think we’d like to hear about it.”

“It was near the end of April, the twenty-third. The young woman’s name was Claire Potter, aged twenty-three, lived in North London. She set off at about eight o’clock on a Friday evening to spend the weekend with friends in Castleton. She never got there. Her car was found in a ditch by the side of a quiet road north of Chesterfield by a passing motorist the following morning and her body was found nearby – raped and stabbed. The way it looks is that her car was forced into a ditch by her assailant. The pathologist also found traces of chloroform and characteristic burning around her mouth.”

“Where was she last seen?”

“Trowell services.”

“Nothing on the service station’s closed-circuit TV?” asked Gristhorpe.

“Apparently not, sir. I had a brief chat with DI Gifford at Derbyshire CID, and the impression I got was that they’ve reached a dead end. No witnesses from the cafeteria or garage. Nothing.”

“The MO is different, too,” Annie pointed out.

“Yes,” said Gristhorpe. “Jennifer Clewes was shot, not stabbed, and she wasn’t sexually interfered with, at least not as far as we know. But you think there could be some connection, DC Jackman?”

“Well, sir,” mused Winsome, “there are some similarities: stopping at the services, being forced off the road, a young woman. There could be any number of reasons why he didn’t assault her this time, and he could certainly have acquired a gun since his last murder. Maybe he didn’t enjoy stabbing. Maybe it was just a bit too up close and personal for him.”

“Okay,” said Gristhorpe. “Good work. We’ll keep an open mind. Last thing we want is to let a serial killer slip through our hands because we don’t see the connection. I take it you’ll be activating HOLMES?”

“Yes, sir,” said Winsome. The Home Office Large Major Enquiry System was an essential tool in any major investigation. Every scrap of information was entered into the computer and connections were made in ways even a trained officer might easily miss.

“Good.” Gristhorpe stood up. “Okay. Any-”

There was a knock at the door and Gristhorpe called out, “Come in.”

Dr. Wendy Gauge, Dr. Glendenning’s new and enigmatic assistant, stood there, looking as composed as ever, that mysterious, self-contained smile lingering around her lips the way it always did, even when she was bent over a corpse on the table. Rumor had it that Dr. Gauge was being groomed as Glendenning’s successor when the old man retired, and Annie had to admit that she was good.

“Yes?” said Gristhorpe.

Wendy Gauge moved forward. “I’ve just come from the mortuary,” she said. “We were removing the victim’s clothing and I found this in her back pocket.” She handed over a slip of lined paper, clearly torn from a notebook of some sort, which she had thoughtfully placed in a transparent plastic folder. “Her killer must have taken everything else from the car,” Dr. Gauge went on, “but… well… her jeans were very tight and she was… you know… sitting on it.”

Annie could have sworn Dr. Gauge blushed.

Gristhorpe examined the slip of paper first, then frowned and slid it down the table for the others to see.

Annie could hardly believe her eyes, but there, scrawled in blue ink and followed by directions from the motorway and a crude map of Helmthorpe, were a name and address:

Alan Banks

Newhope Cottage

Beckside Lane

Gratly, near Helmthorpe

North Yorkshire

By the time his colleagues back in Eastvale were speculating as to what his name and address were doing in a murder victim’s back pocket, Banks was in London, making his way through the early-Saturday afternoon traffic, past the posh restaurants and Maserati showrooms, toward his brother Roy’s South Kensington house, just east of the Gloucester Road. It was years since he had driven in London, and the roads seemed more crowded than ever.

He had never seen where Roy lived before, he realized as he drove under the narrow brick arch and parked in the broad cobbled mews. He got out and looked at the whitewashed brick exterior of the house with its integral garage next to the front door and a mullioned bay window above. It didn’t look big, but that didn’t matter these days. A house like this, in this location, would probably fetch eight hundred k or more on today’s market, Banks reckoned, maybe even a million, and a hundred k of that you’d be paying for the privilege of having the word “mews” in your address.

All the houses stood cheek by jowl, but each was different in some detail – height, facade, style of windows, garage doors, wrought-iron balconies – and the overall effect was of quiet, almost rural, charm, a nook hidden away from the hurly-burly that was literally just around the corner. There were houses on all three sides of the cul-de-sac, and the red brick archway, only wide enough for one car, led to the main road, helping to isolate the mews from the world outside. Beyond the houses at the far end, a tower block and a row of distant cranes, angled like alien birds of prey, marred the view of a clear sky.

There were hardly any other cars parked in the mews, as most of the houses had private garages. The few cars that were on display were BMWs, Jaguars and Mercedes, and Banks’s shabby little Renault looked like a poor relation. Not for the first time the thought crossed his mind that he needed a new car. It was a hot morning for June, hotter here than up north, and he took off his jacket and slung it over his shoulder.

First he checked the number against his address book. It was the right house. Next he pressed the doorbell and waited. Nobody came. Perhaps, Banks thought, the bell didn’t work, or couldn’t be heard upstairs, but he remembered hearing it buzz on Roy’s phone message. He knocked on the door. Still no answer. He knocked again.

Occasionally, a car would pass by the archway, on Old Brompton Road, but otherwise the area was quiet. After knocking one last time, Banks tried the door. To his surprise, it opened. Banks could hardly believe it. From what he remembered, Roy had always been security-conscious, fiercely protective of his possessions, had probably been born that way. One of the first things he had done, as soon as he was old enough, was save up his pocket money to buy a padlock for his toy box, and woebe-tide anyone caught touching his bike or his scooter.

Banks examined the lock and saw that it was the dead-bolt kind, which you had to use a key both to open and to close. Behind the door were a copy of that morning’s Times and a few letters, bills or junk. There was the keypad of a burglar-alarm system just inside the hall, but it hadn’t been activated.

To the left was a small sitting room, rather like a doctor’s waiting room, with a beige three-piece suite and a low glass-topped coffee table, on which lay a neat pile of magazines. Banks flipped through them. Mostly business and hi-tech. Between the sitting room and the kitchen, at the back of the house, ran a narrow passage, with a door on the right, near the front, leading to the garage. Banks peeked in and saw that Roy’s Porsche 911 was parked there. The car was locked, the bonnet cold.

Back in the house, Banks took the door that led to a narrow flight of stairs. He stood at the bottom and called Roy’s name. No reply. The house was silent except for the myriad daily sounds we usually tune out: distant traffic, the hum of a refrigerator, the ticking of a clock, a tap dripping somewhere, old wood creaking. Banks shuddered. Someone had just walked over his grave, his mother would say. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was, but he felt a distinct tingling up his spine. Fear. There was no one in the house; he was reasonably sure of that. But perhaps someone was watching the place? Banks had learned to trust his instincts over the years, even if he hadn’t always acted on them, and he sensed that he would have to move carefully.

He walked into the kitchen, which looked as if it had never been used for anything but making tea and toast. The whole downstairs – sitting room, passage and kitchen – was painted in shades of blue and gray. The paint smelled fresh. A couple of framed photographs in high-contrast black-and-white hung in the passage. One was a female nude curled on a bed, the other a hill of brick-terraced houses leading down to a factory, its chimneys smoking, cobbles and slate roofs gleaming after rain. Banks was surprised. He hadn’t known that Roy was interested in photography, or in art of any kind. But then there was so much he didn’t know about his estranged brother.

In the kitchen stood a small rustic wooden table with two matching chairs, surrounded by the usual array of countertops, toaster, storage cupboards, fridge, oven and microwave. The table was clear, apart from an opened bottle of Amarone with the cork stuck back in, and, half hidden behind the bottle, a mobile phone. Banks picked up the phone. It was off, so he turned it on. It was an expensive model, the kind that sends and receives digital images, and there was plenty of battery power left. He tried the voice mail and text functions, but the only messages were the ones he had left. Was Roy the kind of person who would forget to take his mobile with him when he went out under normal circumstances, especially as he had given Banks the number? Banks doubted it the same way he doubted that Roy would deliberately leave his front door unlocked or forget to turn on his burglar alarm unless he was really rattled by something.

A wine rack stood on one of the counters, and even Banks could tell that the wines there were very high-end clarets, chiantis and burgundies. Above the rack hung a ring of keys on a hook. One of them looked like a car key. Banks put them in his pocket. He checked the fridge. It was empty except for some margarine, a carton of milk and a piece of moldy cheddar. That confirmed it. Roy was no gourmet cook. He could afford to eat out, and there were plenty of good restaurants on Old Brompton Road. The back door was locked, and the window looked out on a small backyard and an alley beyond.

Before going upstairs, Banks went back to the garage to see if the car key on the ring fit the Porsche. As he had suspected, it did. Banks opened the driver’s door and got in.

He had never sat in such a car before, and the luxurious leather upholstery embraced him like a lover. He felt like putting the key in the ignition and driving off somewhere, anywhere. But that wasn’t why he was here. The car’s interior smelled clean and fresh, with that expensive hint of leather. From what Banks could see, there were no empty crisp packets or pop cans on the backseat or cellophane wrappers on the floor. Nor was there one of those fancy GPS gadgets that would tell Banks what Roy’s last destination had been. In the side pocket was a small AA road atlas open to the page with “Reading” in the bottom right and “Stratford-upon-Avon” at the top left. There was nothing else except the car’s manual and a few CDs, mostly classical. Banks got out and checked the boot. It was empty.

Next, Banks ventured upstairs, a much larger living space than downstairs because it extended over the garage. At the top of the stairs, he found himself on a small landing with five doors leading off. The first led to the toilet, the second to a modern bathroom, complete with Power Shower and whirlpool bath. There were the usual shaving and dental-care implements, aspirin and antacid, and rather more varieties of shampoo, conditioner and body lotions than Banks imagined Roy would need. He also wouldn’t need the pink plastic disposable razor that sat next to the gel for sensitive skin, not unless he shaved his legs.

At the back was a bedroom, simple and bright, with flower-patterned wallpaper: double bed, duvet, dressing table, drawers and a small wardrobe full of clothes and shoes, everything immaculate. Roy’s clothing ran the gamut from expensive casual to expensive business, Banks noticed, looking at the labels – Armani, Hugo Boss, Paul Smith – and there were also a few items of women’s clothing, including a summer dress, a black evening gown, Levi’s, an assortment of short-sleeve tops and several pairs of shoes and sandals.

The drawers revealed a few items of jewelry, condoms, tampons and a mix of men’s and women’s underwear. Banks didn’t know whether Roy was into cross-dressing, but he assumed the female items belonged to his girlfriend of the moment. And as there was nowhere near enough women’s paraphernalia to indicate that a woman actually lived there, she probably just kept a few clothes, along with the items in the bathroom, for when she stayed over.

Banks remembered the young girl who had been with Roy the last time they met. She had looked about twenty, shy, with short, shaggy black hair streaked with blond, a pale, pretty face and beautiful eyes the color and gleam of chestnuts in October. She also had a silver stud just below her lower lip. She had been wearing jeans and a short woolly jumper, exposing a couple of inches of bare, flat midriff and a navel with a ring in it. They were engaged, Banks remembered. Her name was Colleen or Connie, something like that. She might know where Roy had gone. Banks could probably trace her from Roy’s mobile’s phone book. Of course, there was no guarantee that she was still Roy’s fiancée, or that the clothes and toiletry items were hers.

Next to the bedroom, and quite a bit larger, was what appeared to be Roy’s office, furnished with filing cabinets, a computer monitor, fax machine, printer and photocopier. Again, everything was shipshape, no untidy piles of paper or yellow Post-it notes stuck on every surface, as in Banks’s office. The desk surface was clear apart from an unused writing tablet and an empty glass of red wine, the dregs hardening to crystal. On a bookcase just above the desk were the standard reference books – atlas, dictionary, Dunn and Bradstreet, Who’s Who.

Roy certainly kept his life in order, and Banks remembered that he had been a tidy child, too. After playing, he had always put his toys carefully away in their box and locked it. His room, even when he was a teenager, was a model of cleanliness and tidiness. He could have been in the army. Banks’s room, on the other hand, had been the same sort of mess he’d seen in most teens’ bedrooms on missing persons cases. He’d known where everything was – his books were in alphabetical order, for example – but he had never fussed much about making his bed or tidying the pile of discarded clothes left on the floor. Another reason his mother had always favored Roy.

Banks wondered if Roy’s computer would tell him anything. The flat-panel monitor stood on the desk, but Banks was damned if he could find the computer itself. It wasn’t on or under the desk, or on the shelf behind. There were a keyboard and a mouse, but keyboard, mouse and monitor were no use without the computer. Even a novice like Banks knew that.

Given Roy’s interest in electronic gadgets Banks would have expected a laptop, too, but he could find no signs of one. Nor a handheld. He remembered Roy showing off a flashy new Palm – one of those gadgets that do everything but fry your eggs in the morning – at the party last year.

Needless to say, there was nothing so remotely useful as a Filofax. Roy would keep all that information on his computer and his Palm, and it seemed that they were both gone. Still, Banks had the mobile, and that ought to prove a fruitful source of contact numbers.

There was a Nikon Coolpix 43000 digital camera in one of the pigeonholes behind the computer desk. Banks knew a little about digital cameras, though his cheap Canon was well below Roy’s range. He managed to switch it on and figured out how to look at the images on the LCD screen, but there was no memory card in it, no images to see. He searched around the adjoining pigeonholes for some sort of image-storage device but found nothing. That was another puzzle, he realized. All the things you expect to find around a computer – zip drive, tape backups or CDs – were all conspicuous in their absence. There was nothing left but the monitor, mouse and keyboard and an empty digital camera.

One other gadget remained: a 40G iPod, another little electronic toy Banks had thought of buying. He dipped in at random, hearing snatches of arias here and a bit of an overture there. Banks had always thought his brother a bit of a philistine, didn’t know he was an opera buff, that they might have something in common. From what he could remember, when Banks had been into Dylan, The Who and the Stones, Roy had been a Herman’s Hermits fan.

One of the songs Banks stumbled across was “Dido’s Lament” from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and he found himself listening for just a little longer than he needed, feeling a lump in his throat and that burning sensation at the back of his eyes he always got when he heard “When I am laid in earth.” The upsurge of emotion surprised him. Another good sign. He had felt little or nothing since the fire and thought that was because he had nothing left to feel with. It was encouraging to have at least a hint that there was life in the old boy yet. He browsed through the iPod’s contents and found a lot of good stuff: Bach, Beethoven, Verdi, Puccini, Rossini. There was a complete Ring cycle, but nobody’s perfect, thought Banks. Least of all Roy. Still, the extent of his good taste was a surprise.

The telephone was like a mini computer system in itself. Banks managed to dial 1471 and find out that the last incoming call was the one he had made himself that morning before setting off for London. Roy hadn’t subscribed to the extra service that gave the numbers of the last five callers. Banks realized it probably didn’t matter, as he had called at least five times himself. The phone was hooked up to a digital answering machine, and after a bit of dodgy business with the buttons Banks discovered three messages, all from him. The other times he had called he hadn’t bothered leaving one.

Banks thought he heard a sound from somewhere inside the house. He sat completely still and waited. What if Roy came back and found Banks going through his personal things and business records? How would Banks talk his way out of that one? On the other hand, Banks would be relieved to see Roy, and surely Roy would understand how his phone call had set off alarm bells in the mind of his policeman brother. Nevertheless, it would be embarrassing all around. A minute or two passed and he heard nothing more, so he put it down to one of the many sounds an old house makes.

Banks opened the desk drawers. The two bottom ones held folders full of bills and tax records, none of which seemed in any way unusual at a casual glance, and the top drawers were filled with the usual stuff of offices: adhesive tape, rubber bands, paper clips, scissors, scratch pads, staplers and printer cartridges.

The shallow central drawer contained pens and pencils of all shapes and sizes. Banks stirred them around with his hand, and one struck his eye. It was thicker and shorter than most of the other pens, squat and rectangular in shape, rather than round. Thinking it might be some kind of marker, he picked it up and unclipped the top. It wasn’t a pen. Where the nib should have been, instead there was a small rectangle of metal that looked as if it plugged into something. But what? A computer, most likely. Banks put the top back on and clipped it in his shirt pocket.

The last door led to a large living room above the garage. It was the front room with the bay window Banks had noticed from the street. The color scheme here was different, reds and earth colors, a desert theme. There were more framed black-and-white photographs on the walls, too, and Banks found himself wondering if Roy had taken them himself. He didn’t know whether you could take black-and-white photos of that quality with a digital camera, but maybe you could. He could still dredge up no memory of his brother’s interest in photography; as far as Banks knew, Roy hadn’t even belonged to the camera club at school, and most kids did that at some time in the vain hope that whoever ran it would sneak in a nude model one day.

This room, like the rest of house, was clean and tidy. Not a speck of dust or an abandoned mug anywhere. Banks doubted Roy cleaned it himself; more likely he employed a cleaning lady. Even the entertainment magazines on the table were stacked parallel to the edge, Hercule Poirot style. A luxurious sofa bed sat under the window, facing the other wall, where a forty-two-inch wide-screen plasma TV hung, wired up to a satellite dish and a DVD player. On looking more closely, Banks noticed that the player also recorded DVDs. Under the screen stood a subwoofer and a front center speaker, and four smaller speakers were strategically placed around the room. It was an expensive setup, one that Banks had often wished he could afford.

Banks walked to the fitted wall cabinets and cast his eye over the selection of DVDs and CDs. What he saw there puzzled him. Not for Roy the latest James Bond or Terminator movie, not schoolgirl porn or Jenna Jameson, but Fellini’s 8½, Kurosawa’s Ran and Throne of Blood, Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Truffaut’s The Four Hundred Blows. There were some films that Banks could see himself watching – The Godfather, The Third Man and A Clockwork Orange – but most of them were foreign-language art films, classics of the cinema. There were a few rows of books, too, mostly nonfiction, on subjects ranging from music and cinema to philosophy, religion and politics. Another surprise. In a small recess stood one framed family photograph.

Banks studied Roy’s large collection of operas on both DVD and CD: The Magic Flute, Tosca, Otello, Lucia di Lammermoor and others. A complete Bayreuth Ring cycle, the same as the one on the iPod. There was also a little fifties jazz and a few Hollywood musicals – Oklahoma!, South Pacific, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers – but no pop at all except for the Blue Lamps’s debut. Banks was pleased to see that Roy had bought Brian’s CD, even though he probably hadn’t listened to it. He slid it out and opened the case, wondering what it would sound like on Roy’s expensive stereo system. Instead of the familiar blue image on the CD, he saw the words “CD – ReWritable” and that the disk held 650 megabytes, or 74 minutes of playing time.

Banks stuck the CD in his jacket pocket and went over to sit on the sofa. Several remote-control devices rested on the arm, and when he had worked out which was which, he switched on the TV and amp just to see what the setup looked and sounded like. It was a European football game, and the picture quality was stunning, the sound of the commentary loud enough to wake the dead. He turned it off.

Banks went back into the office and took the writing tablet from the desk and a pen from the drawer and carried them down to the kitchen with him. At the kitchen table, he sat down and wrote a note explaining that he’d been to the house and would be back, in case Roy returned while he was out, and asked him to get in touch as soon as possible.

He wished now that he had thought to bring his mobile so he could leave a number, but it was too late; he had left it on his living room table next to his unused portable CD player, having got out of the habit of using it over the past few months. Then he realized he could take Roy’s. He wanted to check through the entries in the phone book, anyway, so he might as well have the use of it in case Roy needed to get in touch with him. He added this as a PS to the note, then he put the mobile in his pocket. On his way out, he tried the most likely-looking key and found it fit the front door.