There were two messages waiting for him on the machine. The first was from Tracy, saying she’d heard the news and hoped he was all right, and the second was from Leanne Wray’s father, Christopher, who had seen the press conference and the evening news and wanted to know if the police had found his daughter’s body at the Payne house.
Banks didn’t answer either of them. For one thing, it was too late, and for another, he didn’t want to talk to anybody. He could deal with them all in the morning. Now that he was home, he was even glad that Annie wasn’t coming. The idea of company tonight, even Annie’s, didn’t appeal, and after all he’d seen and thought about today, the idea of sex held about as much interest as a trip to the dentist’s.
Instead, he poured himself a generous tumbler of Laphroaig and tried to find some suitable music. He needed to listen to something, but he didn’t know what. Usually he had no trouble finding what he wanted in his large collection, but tonight he rejected just about every CD he picked out. He knew he didn’t want to listen to jazz or rock or anything too wild and primitive like that. Wagner and Mahler were out, as were all the Romantics: Beethoven, Schubert, Rachmaninoff and the rest. The entire twentieth century was out, too. In the end, he went for Rostropovich’s rendition of Bach’s cello suites.
Outside the cottage, the low stone wall between the dirt lane and the beck bulged out and formed a little parapet over Gratly Falls, which was just a series of terraces, none more than a few feet in height, running diagonally through the village and under the little stone bridge that formed its central gathering place. Since he had moved into the cottage the previous summer, Banks had got into the habit of standing out there last thing at night if the weather was good enough, or even sitting on the wall, dangling his legs over the beck and enjoying his nightcap and a cigarette before bed.
The night air was still and smelled of hay and warm grass. The Dale below him was sleeping. One or two farmhouse lights shone on the far valley side, but apart from the sounds of sheep in the field across the beck and night animals from the woods, all was quiet. He could just make out the shapes of distant fell sides in the dark, humpbacked or jagged against the night sky. He thought he heard a curlew’s eerie trill from high up on the moors. The new moon gave sparse light, but there were more stars than he had seen in a long time. As he watched, a star fell through the darkness, leaving a thin milky trail.
Banks didn’t make a wish.
He felt depressed. The elation he had expected to feel on finding the killer somehow eluded him. He had no sense of an ending, of an evil purged. In some odd way, he felt, the evil was just beginning. He tried to shake off his sense of apprehension.
He heard a meow beside him and looked down. It was the skinny marmalade cat from the woods. Starting that spring, it had come over on several occasions when Banks was outside alone late at night. The second time it appeared, he had brought it some milk, which it lapped up before disappearing back into the trees. He had never seen it anywhere else, or at any other time than night. Once, he had even bought some cat food, to be more prepared for its visit, but the cat hadn’t touched it. All it would do was meow, drink the milk, strut around for a few minutes and go back where it came from. Banks fetched a saucer of milk and set it down, refilling his own glass at the same time. The cat’s eyes shone amber in the darkness as it looked up at him before bending to drink.
Banks lit his cigarette and leaned against the wall, resting his glass on its rough stone surface. He tried to purge his mind of the day’s terrible images. The cat rubbed against his leg and ran off back into the woods. Rostropovich played on, and Bach’s precise, mathematical patterns of sound formed an odd counterpoint to the wild roaring music of Gratly Falls, so recently swelled by the spring thaw, and for a few moments, at least, Banks succeeded in losing himself.
6
According to her parents, Melissa Horrocks, aged seventeen, who failed to return home after a pop concert in Harrogate on the eighteenth of April, was going through a rebellious phase.
Steven and Mary Horrocks had only the one daughter, a late blessing in Mary’s mid-thirties. Steven worked in the office of a local dairy, while Mary had a part-time job in an estate agent’s office in the city center. Around the age of sixteen, Melissa developed an interest in the kind of theatrical pop music that used Satanism as its main stage prop.
Though friends advised Steven and Mary that it was harmless enough – just youthful spirits – and that it would soon pass, they were nonetheless alarmed when she started altering her appearance and letting her schoolwork and athletics slip. Melissa first dyed her hair red, got a stud in her nose and wore a lot of black. Her bedroom wall was adorned with posters of skinny, satanic-looking pop stars, such as Marilyn Manson, and occult symbols her parents didn’t understand.
About a week before the concert, Melissa decided she didn’t like the red hair, so she reverted to her natural blond coloring. There was a good chance, Banks thought later, that if she’d kept it red, that might have saved her life. Which also led Banks to think that she hadn’t been stalked before her abduction – or at least not for long. The Chameleon wouldn’t stalk a redhead.
Harrogate, a prosperous Victorian-style North Yorkshire city of about seventy thousand, known as a conference center and a magnet for retired people, wasn’t exactly the typical venue for a Beelzebub’s Bollocks concert, but the band was new and had yet to win a major recording contract; they were working their way up to bigger gigs. There had been the usual calls for a ban from retired colonels and the kind of old busybodies who watch all the filth on television so they can write letters of protest, but in the end this came to no avail.
About five hundred kids wandered into the converted theater, including Melissa and her friends Jenna and Kayla. The concert ended at half-past ten and the three girls stood around outside for a while talking about the show. The three of them split up at about a quarter to eleven and went their separate ways. It was a mild night, so Melissa said she was going to walk. She didn’t live far from the city center, and most of her walk home took her along the busy, well-lit Ripon Road. Two people later came forward to say they saw her close to eleven o’clock walking south by the junction of West Park and Beech Grove. To get home, she would turn down Beech Grove and then turn off after about a hundred yards, but she never got there.
At first there was a faint hope that Melissa might have run away from home, given the running battle with her parents. But Steven and Mary, along with Jenna and Kayla, assured Banks this could not be the case. The two friends in particular said they shared everything, and they would have known if she was planning on running away. Besides, she had none of her valued possessions with her, and she told them she was looking forward to seeing them the next day at the Victoria Centre.
Then there was the satanic element, not to be lightly dismissed when a girl had disappeared. The members of the band were interviewed, along with as many audience members as could be rounded up, but that went nowhere, too. Even Banks had to admit when examining the statements later that the whole thing had been pretty tame and harmless, the black magic merely theater, as it had been for Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper in his day. Beelzebub’s Bollocks didn’t even bite the heads off chickens on stage.
When Melissa’s black leather shoulder bag was found in some bushes two days after her disappearance, as if it had been tossed from the window of a moving car, money still intact, the case came to the attention of Banks’s Chameleon task force. Like Kelly Matthews, Samantha Foster and Leanne Wray before her, Melissa Horrocks had disappeared into thin air.