Chapter 15
1
The sky was a sheet of gray shale, smeared here and there by dirty rags of cloud fluttering over the wooded hillsides on a cool wind. Rooks and crows gathered noisily in the roadside trees like shards of darkness refusing to dispel. Even the green of the dense beech forests looked black.
Banks and Sergeant Hatchley, who had driven through the night at breakneck speed from Eastvale, stood and looked in silence at the patrol car with the shattered windscreen and at the outline of the body on the tarmac about six or seven feet ahead, near which dark blood had coagulated in shallow puddles on the road surface. Close by, Detective Superintendent Jarrell from the Thames Valley Police paced up and down, shabby beige raincoat flapping around his legs.
The road had been cordoned off, and several patrol cars, lights circling like demented lighthouses, guarded the edges of the scene, where the SOCOs still worked. Local traffic had been diverted.
“It was a cock-up,” Superintendent Jarrell growled, glaring at the two men from Yorkshire the minute they got out of Banks’s Cortina and walked over to him. “A monumental cock-up.”
Jarrell was clearly looking for somewhere to place the blame, and it irritated the hell out of him that no matter how hard he tried, it fell squarely on his own shoulders. The two PCs might have made a mistake in not tattooing the Granada ’s number on their memories, and the radio operator had certainly screwed up royally, but in the police force, as in other hierarchical structures, when an underling screws up, the responsibility goes to the top. You don’t blame the foot-soldiers, you blame the general, and everybody gets a good bollocking, from the top down.
Banks knew that Ken Blackstone at West Yorkshire had followed correct procedure in getting a photograph, description and details about Arthur Jameson out to all divisions. And the point he had most emphasized was, “May be armed. Observe only. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES ATTEMPT TO APPREHEND.”
Jarrell’s was one of those unfortunate faces in which the individual features fail to harmonize: long nose, small, beady eyes, bushy brows, a thin slit of a mouth, prominent cheekbones, receding chin, mottled complexion. Somehow, though, it didn’t dissolve into total chaos; there was an underlying unity about the man himself that, like a magnetic field, drew it all together.
“Any update on the injured officer, sir?” Banks asked.
“What? Oh.” Jarrell stopped pacing for a moment and faced Banks. He had an erect, military bearing. Suddenly the fury seemed to bleed out of him like air from a tire. “Miller was killed outright, as you know.” He gestured at the outline and the surrounding, stained tarmac with his whole arm, as if indicating a cornucopia. “There’s about seven pints of his blood here. Everett ’s still hanging on. Just. The bullet went in through his upper lip, just under the nose, and it seems to have been slowed down or deflected by cartilage and bone. Anyway, it didn’t get a chance to do serious brain damage, so the doc says he’s got a good chance. Bloody fool.”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, sir,” Banks said, “it looks like they got into a situation they couldn’t get out of. We had no reason to think Jameson knew we were onto him. Nor had we any reason to think he was a likely spree killer. We want him for a job he was hired to do coldbloodedly. He must have panicked. I know it doesn’t help the situation, sir, but the men were inexperienced. I doubt they’d handled much but traffic duty, had they?”
Jarrell ran his hand through his hair. “You’re right, of course. They pulled him over on a routine traffic check. When Miller called in the vehicle number, the radio operator called the senior officer on the shift. He tried to talk her through it calmly, but… Hell, she was new to the job. She was scared to death. It wasn’t her fault.”
Banks nodded and rubbed his eyes. Beside him, Hatchley’s gaze seemed fixed on the bloody tarmac. When Banks had got the call close to two A.M. – his first night at home in days – he had first thought of taking Susan Gay, then, not without malice entirely, though affectionate malice, he had decided that it was time Sergeant Hatchley got his feet wet. He knew how Hatchley loved his sleep. Consequently, they hadn’t said much on the way down. Banks had played Mitsuko Uchida’s live versions of the Mozart piano sonatas, and Hatchley had seemed content to doze in the passenger seat, snoring occasionally.
Most chief inspectors, Banks knew, would have had someone else drive, but he was using his own car, the old Cortina, no longer produced now and practically an antique. And, damn it, he liked driving it himself.
“Seen enough here?” Jarrell asked.
“I think so.”
“Me, too. Let’s go.”
Jarrell drove them down the road. “Believe it or not,” he said, “this is very pretty countryside under the right circumstances.”
About a mile along the road, toward Princes Risborough, Jarrell turned left onto a muddy farm track and bumped along until they got to a gate on the right, where he pulled up. A hedgerow interspersed with hawthorns shielded the field and its fence from view. Cows mooed in the next field.
The gate stood open, and as Banks and Hatchley followed Jarrell through, they both sank almost to their ankles in mud. Too late, Banks realized, he hadn’t brought the right gear. He should have known to bring the wellingtons he always carried in the boot of his car. Like most policemen, he took pride in keeping his shoes well polished; now they were covered in mud and probably worse, judging by the prevalence of cows. He cursed and Jarrell laughed. Hatchley stood holding onto the gatepost trying to wipe most of it off on the few tufts of grass there. Banks looked at the muddy field dotted with cowpats and didn’t bother. They’d only get dirty again.
In the field, a group of men in white boiler suits and black wellington boots worked around a car that stood bogged down in the mud with its doors open. The air was sharp with the tang of cow-clap.
One of the men had propped a radio on a stone by the hedgerow, and it was tuned to the local breakfast show, at the moment featuring a golden oldie: Cilla Black singing “Anyone Who Had a Heart.” One of the SOCOs sang along with it as he worked. The cows mooed even louder, demonstrating remarkably good taste, Banks thought. They weren’t so far away after all. They were, in fact, all lying down in a group just across the field. Cows lying down. That meant it was going to rain, his mother always said. But it had rained already. Did that mean they’d been in the same position for hours? That it was going to rain again?
Giving up on folk wisdom, Banks turned instead to look at the abandoned Granada, the bottom of its chassis streaked with mud and cow-shit. It had been found, Jarrell said, just over an hour ago, while Banks and Hatchley had been in transit.
“Anything?” Jarrell shouted over to the team.
One of the men in white shook his head. “Nothing but the usual rubbish, sir,” he said. “Sweet wrappers, old road maps, that sort of thing. He must have taken everything of use or value. No sign of any weapons.”
Jarrell grunted and turned away.
“He’d hardly have left his guns, would he?” said Banks, “not now he’s officially on the run. I’d guess he probably had a rucksack or something with him in the car. Look, sir, you know the landscape around here better than I do. If you were him, where would you go?”
Jarrell looked up at the louring sky for a moment, as if for inspiration, then rubbed at the inside corner of his right eye with his index finger. “He has a couple of choices,” he said. “Either head immediately for the nearest town, get to London and take the first boat or plane out of the country, or simply lie low.” He pointed toward the hills. “A man could hide himself there for a good while, if he knew how to survive.”