“Not yet.”
“The bastard killed Dennis.”
“I know. And when a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it, right? If you don’t, it’s bad for business, bad for detectives everywhere.”
Janet looked at him as if he were crazy. “What?”
Banks looked up at Bogart as Sam Spade. Clearly the posters were there for show, not as a result of any great passion for the films themselves, and his pathetic attempt at lightening things up fell flat. “Never mind,” he said. “I was just wondering what went through your mind.”
“Nothing. I didn’t have time to stop and think. He’d cut Dennis and he was going to cut me. Call it self-preservation if you like, but it wasn’t a conscious thought. I mean, I didn’t think I’d better hit him again or he might get up and cut me. It wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like?”
“I told you. A blur. I disabled the killer, handcuffed him to one of the pipes and then I tried to keep Dennis alive. I didn’t even look in Payne’s direction again. To be honest, I didn’t give a damn what shape he was in. Only Dennis.” Janet paused and looked down at her hands clasped around the glass. “You know what really gets me? I’d just been nasty to him. All because he’d been telling his damn sexist jokes to that fireman.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’d been arguing, that’s all. Just before we got to the house. I told him his mole was probably cancerous. It was cruel of me. I know he’s a hypochondriac. Why did I do that? Why am I such a horrible person? Then it was too late. I couldn’t tell him I didn’t mean it.” She cried again and Banks thought it best to let her get it all out. It would take more than one tearful session to purge her of her guilt, but at least it was a start.
“Have you been in touch with the Federation?”
“Not yet.”
“Do it tomorrow. Talk to your rep. They’ll be able to help with counseling, if you want it, and…”
“Legal representation?”
“If it comes to that, yes.”
Janet got to her feet a bit more unsteadily and went to pour herself another drink.
“Are you sure that’s wise?” Banks asked.
Janet poured herself a stiff measure and sat down again. “Tell me what else I should be doing, sir. Should I be going to sit with Dennis’s wife and kids? Should I try to explain to them how it happened, how it was all my fault? Or should I just smash up my flat and go out on the town and pick a fight in some anonymous pub somewhere, the way I feel like doing? I don’t think so. This is by far the least harmful alternative to anything else I’d rather be doing right now.”
Banks realized that she had a point. He had felt that way himself more than once, and had even given in to the urge to go out on the town and pick a fight. It hadn’t helped. He would be a hypocrite if he said he didn’t understand plenty about finding oblivion at the bottom of a bottle. There had been two periods in his life when he had sought solace that way. The first was when he felt he was fast approaching burnout those last few months in London, before the transfer to Eastvale, and the second was more than a year ago, after Sandra had left him.
The thing was, people said it didn’t work, but it did. As a short-term solution, for temporary oblivion, there was nothing to match the bottle, except perhaps heroin, which Banks hadn’t tried. Maybe Janet Taylor was right, and tonight drinking was the best thing she could do. She was hurting, and sometimes you had to do your hurting by yourself. Booze helped dull the pain for a while, and eventually you passed out. The hangover would be painful, but that was for tomorrow.
“Right you are. I’ll let myself out.” On impulse, Banks leaned over and kissed the top of Janet’s head as he left. Her hair tasted of burned plastic and rubber.
That evening, Jenny Fuller sat in her home office, where she kept all the files and notes on the investigation on her computer, no office having been made available to her at Millgarth. The office looked out over The Green, a narrow stretch of parkland between her street and the East Side Estate. She could just see the lights of the houses through the spaces between the dark trees.
Working so closely with Banks had made Jenny remember a lot of their history. She had once tried to seduce him, she recalled with embarrassment, and he had resisted politely, claiming to be a happily married man. But he was attracted to her; she knew that much. He wasn’t a happily married man anymore, but now he had “The Girlfriend,” as Jenny had come to call Annie Cabbot, though she had never met her. That had come about because Jenny had spent so much time out of the country and hadn’t even been around when Banks and Sandra separated. If she had been… well, things might have been different. Instead, she had embarked on a series of disastrous relationships.
One of the reasons she had spent so much time away, she had finally admitted to herself after coming back from California this last time with her tail between her legs, was to get away from Banks, from the easy proximity to him that tormented her so much while she pretended to be casual about the whole thing, and much cooler than she felt. And now they were working closely together.
With a sigh, Jenny returned her attention to her work.
Her main problem thus far, she realized, had been an almost complete lack of forensic and crime scene information, and without them, it was damn near impossible to produce a decent threshold analysis – an initial review that could serve as an investigative compass, help the police know where to look – let alone a more complex profile. About all she had been able to work on was the victimology. All this, of course, had given her detractors on the task force – and they were legion – plenty of ammunition.
England was still in the dark ages as far as the use of consultant psychologists and criminal profiling went, Jenny believed, especially as compared to the USA. Partly this was because the FBI is a national force with the resources to develop national programs and Britain has fifty or more separate police forces, all operating piecemeal. Also, profilers in the USA tend to be cops and are therefore more readily accepted. In Britain, profilers are usually psychologists or psychiatrists and, as such, are distrusted by the police and the legal system in general. Consultant psychologists would be lucky to make it to the witness box in an English court, Jenny knew, let alone be accepted as expert witnesses, the way they are in the USA. Even if they did get in the box, whatever evidence they gave would be looked at askance by judge and jury, and the defense would wheel in another psychologist with a different theory.
The dark ages.
When it came right down to it, Jenny was well aware that most of the police she worked with regarded her as perhaps only one step up from a clairvoyant, if that, and that they only brought her in because it was easier than not doing so. But still she struggled on. While she was prepared to admit that profiling was still, perhaps, more of an art than a science, and while a profile could rarely, if ever, point the finger at a specific killer, she believed that it could narrow the field and help focus an investigation.
Looking at pictures on a screen just didn’t do it for Jenny, so she spread out the photographs again on her desk, though she knew them all by heart: Kelly Matthews, Samantha Foster, Leanne Wray, Melissa Horrocks and Kimberley Myers, all attractive blond girls between the ages of sixteen and eighteen.
There had been too many assumptions for Jenny’s liking right from the start, the prime one being that all five girls had been abducted by the same person or persons. She could, she had told Banks and the team, make out almost as a good a case for their not being linked, even on such little information as she possessed.