Blackstone nodded. “I see,” he said. “Then Clegg became a problem and they had to send their own men?”

“Something like that.”

“Makes sense. Clegg was a bit of a ladies’ man, you know, according to my DC who talked to his colleagues,” Blackstone said.

“Yes. His estranged wife, Melissa, suggested as much. Did he have a girlfriend?”

“Yes. Apparently nothing serious since he split up with his wife. Prefers to play the field. Recently he’s been seeing a receptionist from Norwich Insurance. Name of Marci Lapwing, if you can believe that. Aspiring actress. DC Gaitskill had a word with her this morning. Says she’s a bit of a bimbo with obvious attractions. But he’s a bit of an asshole himself, is Gaitskill, so I’d take it with a pinch of salt. Anyway, they saw each other the Saturday before Clegg’s disappearance. They went for dinner, then to a nightclub in Harehills. She spent the night with him and he took her home – that’s Seacroft – after a pub lunch out at the Red Lion in Burnsall on Sunday afternoon. She hasn’t seen or heard from him since.”

“Is she telling the truth?”

“Gaitskill says so. I’d trust him on that.”

“Okay. Thanks, Ken.”

“Clegg had a reserved parking space at the back of the Court Centre. According to what we could find out, he used to eat at a little trattoria on The Headrow after work on Thursdays. The waiters there remember him, all right. Nothing odd about his behavior. He left about six-thirty or a quarter to seven last Thursday, heading west, toward where his car was parked, and that’s the last sighting we have.”

“The car?”

“Red Jag. Gone. We’ve put it out over the PNC along with this.” Blackstone took a photograph from his briefcase and slid it over the tablecloth. It showed the head and shoulders of a man in his early forties, with determined blue eyes, a slightly crooked nose, fair hair and a mouth that had a cruel twist to its left side.

“Clegg?”

Blackstone nodded and put the photograph back in his briefcase. “We’ve also been through Clegg’s house in Chapel Allerton. Nothing. Whatever he was up to, he kept it at the office.”

“Anything on Hamilton and the other car?”

“The boffins are still working on the car. I pulled Hamilton ’s record myself and we had another chat with him at the station this afternoon.” He shook his head. “I can’t see it, Alan. The man’s as thick as two short planks. I don’t think he’s even heard of St. Corona, and he’s strictly small fry on the drugs scene. By the time he gets his stuff to sell, it’s been stepped on by just about every dealer in the city.”

“It was just a thought. Thanks for giving it a try.”

“No problem. We’ll have another shot in a day or two, just in case. And we’ll keep a discreet eye on him. Look, back to what I was saying before. How do you think the goons knew about Pamela Jeffreys if she wasn’t involved?”

Banks felt the anger flare up inside him again, but he held it in check. “That’s all too easy,” he said. “Remember, they were also following me around yesterday. I think they started at Clegg’s office first thing yesterday morning and one, or both of them, stayed on my tail until I spotted them outside Calvert’s flat that evening. They didn’t know who the hell I was, and the only other person I met that they hadn’t talked to already was Pamela Jeffreys. They must have thought we were in it together. I met her near the hall where she was rehearsing, and either one of them hung around to follow her home, or they found out some other way who she was and where she lived.

“She must have looked like their best lead so far. They thought she had some connection with Clegg and that she knew where he was or was holding something for him. Clegg has obviously got something they want. Most likely money. If he was laundering for their boss, then it looks like he might have skipped with a bundle. Either that or he’s got some sort of evidence for blackmail – books, bank account records. And that’s probably what they were looking for when they tore her place apart. Back to square one. The goons worked Pamela over because they thought she knew something, or had something of theirs. She didn’t. And I blame myself. I should have bloody well known I was putting her at risk.”

“Come off it, Alan. How could you know?”

Banks shrugged and tapped out a cigarette. He was the only smoker in the entire restaurant and had to ask the waiter specially for an ashtray. It was getting like that these days, he noted glumly. He’d have to stop sometime soon; he knew he was only postponing the inevitable. He had thought about getting a nicotine patch, then quickly dismissed the idea. It was the feel of the cigarette between his fingers he wanted, the sharp intake of tobacco smoke into the lungs, not some slow oozing of poison through his skin into his blood. Pity about the health problems.

He felt rather like St. Augustine must have felt when he wrote in his Confessions: “Give me chastity and continency – but not yet!”

“You know what really pisses me off?” Banks said after he had lit the cigarette. “Dirty Dick Burgess was following me around that day, too, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he’d seen them outside Melissa Clegg’s shop.”

“How would he know who they are?”

“Oh, I think he knows them, all right.”

“Even so, what could he have done? They hadn’t broken any laws.”

Banks shrugged. “I suppose not. It’s too bloody late now, anyway,” he said. “Let’s just hope they don’t go back to see Betty Moorhead and Melissa Clegg.”

“Don’t worry. Charlie Waltham will have them both covered by now. He’s a good bloke, Alan. And he’ll have descriptions of Mutt and Jeff out, too. They won’t get far.”

“I hope not,” said Banks. “I bloody hope not. I’d like a few minutes alone with them in a quiet cell.”

3

Back at the hotel, Banks felt caged. Anger burned inside him like the hot Indian spices, but it would take more than Rennies to quell it. What a bloody fool he’d been to do nothing when he realized he had been followed. He had practically signed Pamela Jeffreys’s death warrant, and it was through no virtue of his that she had survived her ordeal. So far.

He poured himself a shot of Bell ’s and turned on the television. Nothing but a nature program, a silly comedy, an interview with a has-been politician and an old Dirty Harry movie. He watched Clint Eastwood for a while. He had never much enjoyed cop films or cop programs on television, but watching right here and now, he could identify with Dirty Harry tracking down the villains and dealing with them his own way. He had meant what he said to Blackstone. A few minutes alone with Pamela Jeffreys’s attackers and they would know what police brutality was all about.

But he hated himself when he felt that way. Luckily, it was rare. After all, policemen are only human, he reminded himself. They have their loyalties, their lusts, their prejudices, their agonies, their tempers. The problem was that they have to keep these emotions in check to do their jobs properly.

“You go home and puke on your own time if you want to get anywhere in this job, lad,” one of his early mentors had told him at a grisly crime scene. “You don’t do it all over the corpse. And you go home and punch holes in your own wall, not in the child molester’s face.”

Unable to concentrate, even on Dirty Harry, he turned off the television. He couldn’t stand up, couldn’t sit down, didn’t know what he wanted to do. And all the time, the anger and pain churned inside him, and he couldn’t find a way to get them out.

He picked up the phone and dialled the code for Eastvale, then put it down before he started dialling his own number. He wanted to talk to Sandra, but he didn’t think he could explain his feelings to her right now, especially the way they’d been drifting apart of late. God knew, under normal circumstances she was an understanding wife, but this would be pushing it a bit far: a woman he had lusted after, fantasized about, gets beaten within a hair’s breadth of her life, and he’s whipping himself over it. No, he couldn’t explain that to Sandra.