Given the two occurrences – an abandoned shoulder bag and a missing girl – especially as the young DC who was given the assignment remembered something similar had happened in Roundhay Park, Leeds, on New Year’s Eve – the inquiry began that very morning with calls to Samantha’s parents and close friends, none of whom had seen her or heard of any change in her plans or normal routine.
For a brief time, Michael Stringer, the poet who had been reading his work at the pub, became a suspect, given the inscription he had written in his book of poems for her, but a number of witnesses said he carried on drinking in the city center and had to be helped back to his hotel around three-thirty in the morning. The hotel staff assured the police that he hadn’t seen the light of day again until teatime the following day.
Inquiries around the university turned up one possible witness, who thought she saw Samantha talking to someone through a car window. At least the girl had long blond hair and was wearing the same clothes Samantha was when she left the pub – jeans, black calf-high boots and a long, flapping overcoat. The car was dark in color, and the witness remembered the three last letters on the number plate because they formed her own initials: Kathryn Wendy Thurlow. She said she had no reason to believe that there was any problem at the time, so she crossed over to her street and carried on to her own flat.
The last two letters of a car number plate indicate the origin of its registration, and WT signifies Leeds. The DVLA at Swansea were able to supply a list of over a thousand possibles – as Kathryn hadn’t been able to narrow the search down to make or even color – and the owners were interviewed by Bradford CID. Nothing came of it.
All the searches and interviews that followed turned up nothing more about Samantha Foster’s disappearance, and rumblings were starting on the police tom-toms. Two disappearances, almost two months and about fifteen miles apart, were enough to set off a few alarm bells but not a full-blown panic.
Samantha didn’t have many friends, but those she did have were loyal and devoted to her, in particular Angela Firth, Ryan Conner and Abha Gupta, who were all devastated by her disappearance. According to them, Samantha was a very serious sort of girl, given to long reflective silences and gnomic utterances, with no time for small talk, sports and television. She had a level head on her shoulders, though, they insisted, and everyone said she wasn’t the type to go off with a stranger on a whim, no matter how much she talked about the importance of experiencing life to the full.
When the police suggested that Samantha might have wandered off under the influence of drugs, her friends said it was unlikely. Yes, they admitted, she liked to smoke a joint occasionally – she said it helped her with her writing – but she didn’t do any harder drugs; she also didn’t drink much and couldn’t have had more than two or three glasses of wine the entire evening.
She didn’t have a boyfriend at the moment and didn’t seem interested in acquiring one. No, she wasn’t gay, but she had spoken of exploring sexual experiences with other women. Samantha might appear unconventional in some ways, Angela explained, but she had a lot more common sense than people sometimes imagined on first impressions; she was just not frivolous, and she was interested in a lot of things other people laughed at or dismissed.
According to her professors, Samantha was an eccentric student with a tendency to spend too much of her time reading outside the syllabus, but one of her tutors, who had published some verse himself, said that he had hopes she might make a fine poet one day if she could cultivate a little more self-discipline in her technique.
Samantha’s interests, so Abha Gupta said, included art, poetry, nature, Eastern religions, psychic experiences and death.
Banks and Ken Blackstone drove out to The Greyhound, a low-beamed rustic pub with Toby jugs all around the plate racks in the village of Tong, about fifteen minutes from the crime scene. It was going on for two o’clock, and neither of them had eaten yet that day. Banks hadn’t eaten much in the past two days, in fact, ever since he had heard of the fifth missing teenager in the wee hours of Saturday morning.
Over the past two months, he had sometimes thought his head would explode under pressure of the sheer amount of detail he carried around in it. He would awaken in the early hours of the morning, at three or four o’clock, and the thoughts would spin around his mind and prevent him from going back to sleep. Instead, he would get up and brew a pot of tea and sit at the pine kitchen table in his pajamas making notes for the day ahead as the sun came up and spilled its liquid honey light through the high window or rain lashed against the panes.
These were lonely, quiet hours, and while he had got used to, even embraced, solitude, sometimes he missed his previous life with Sandra and the kids in the Eastvale semi. But Sandra was gone, about to marry Sean, and the kids had grown up and were living their own lives. Tracy was in her second year at the University of Leeds, and Brian was touring the country with his rock band, going from strength to strength after the great reviews their first independently produced CD had received. Banks had neglected them both, he realized, over the past couple of months, especially his daughter.
They ordered the last two portions of lamb stew and rice and pints of Tetley’s bitter at the bar. It was warm enough to sit outside at one of the tables next to the cricket field. A local team was out practicing, and the comforting sound of leather on willow punctuated their conversation.
Banks lit a cigarette and told Blackstone about AC Hartnell giving North Yorkshire the PC Taylor investigation, and his certainty that it would go to Annie.
“She’ll love that,” said Blackstone.
“She’s already made her feelings quite clear.”
“You’ve told her?”
“I tried to put a positive spin on it to make her feel better, but… it sort of backfired.”
Blackstone smiled. “Are you two still an item?”
“I think so, sort of, but half the time I’m not sure, to be honest. She’s very… elusive.”
“Ah, the sweet mystery of woman.”
“Something like that.”
“Maybe you’re expecting too much of her?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes when a man loses his wife he starts looking for a new one in the first woman who shows any interest in him.”
“Marriage is the last thing on my mind, Ken.”
“If you say so.”
“I do. I haven’t bloody time, for a start.”
“Talking about marriage, how do you think the wife, Lucy Payne, fits in?” Blackstone asked.
“I don’t know.”
“She must have known. I mean, she was living with the bloke.”
“Maybe. But you saw the way things were set up back there. Payne could have sneaked anyone in through the garage and taken them straight into the cellar. If he kept the place locked and barred, nobody need have known. It was pretty well soundproofed.”
“I’m sorry, but you can’t convince me that a woman lives with a killer who does what Payne did and she hasn’t a clue,” said Blackstone. “What does he do? Get up after dinner and tell her he’s just off down to the basement to play with a teenage girl he’s abducted?”
“He doesn’t have to tell her anything.”
“But she must be involved. Even if she wasn’t his accomplice, she must at least have suspected something.”
Someone gave the cricket ball a hell of a whack and a cheer went up from the field.
Banks stubbed out his cigarette. “You’re probably right. Anyway, if there’s anything at all to connect Lucy Payne to what happened in the cellar, we’ll find out. For the moment, she’s not going anywhere. Remember, though, unless we find out differently, we’d better remember that she’s a victim first and foremost.”