“What would?”

“The way the girls were taken. A girl walking home on her own would be most unlikely to stop and give directions, say, to a male driver, but she might stop if a woman called her over.”

“And the man?”

“Crouched down in the backseat with the chloroform ready? Jumps out the back door and drags her in? I don’t know the details. But it makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, it makes sense. Have you got any other evidence of her complicity?”

“None. But it’s early days yet. The SOCOs are still going through the house and the lab boys are working on the clothes she was wearing when she was assaulted. Even that might come to nothing if she says she went down in the cellar, saw what her husband had done and ran away screaming. That’s what I mean about her waiting to see which way the wind blows. If Terence Payne dies, Lucy’s home free. If he lives, his memory could be damaged irretrievably. He is very badly hurt. And even if he recovers, he might decide to protect her, gloss over what part she played.”

“If she played a part. She certainly couldn’t rely on his memory being damaged, or his dying.”

“That’s true. But it might have given her the perfect opportunity to cover up her own involvement, if there was any. You had a look around the house, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“What was your impression?”

Jenny sipped some wine and thought about it: the magazine perfect decor, the little knickknacks, the obsessive cleanliness. “I suppose you’re thinking of the videos and books?” she said.

“Partly. There looked to be some pretty raunchy stuff, especially in the bedroom.”

“So they’re into porn and kinky sex. So what?” She raised her eyebrows. “As a matter of fact, I’ve got a couple of soft porn videos in my bedroom. I don’t mind a little kinkiness, now and then. Oh, don’t blush, Alan. I’m not trying to seduce you. I’m simply pointing out that a few videos featuring three-way sex and a bit of mild, consensual S and M don’t necessarily make a killer.”

“I know that.”

“And while it is true,” Jenny went on, “that, statistically, most sex killers are into pornography of an extreme kind, it’s false logic to argue the opposite.”

“I know that, too,” said Banks. “What about the occult connection? I wondered about the candles and incense in the cellar.”

“Could be just for atmosphere.”

“But there was a sort of ritual element.”

“Possibly.”

“I was even wondering if there could be some connection there with the fourth victim, Melissa Horrocks. She was into that satanic rock music stuff. You know, Marilyn Manson and the rest.”

“Or maybe Payne just has an extreme sense of irony in his choice of victims. But look, Alan, even if Lucy did get off on the kinky stuff and Satanism, it’s hardly evidence of anything else, is it?”

“I’m not asking for court evidence. At the moment I’ll take anything I can get.”

Jenny laughed. “Clutching at straws again?”

“Maybe so. Ken Blackstone reckons Payne might also be the Seacroft Rapist.”

“Seacroft Rapist?”

“Two years ago, between May and August. You were in America. A man raped six women in Seacroft. Never caught. It turns out Payne was living there, single, at the time. He met Lucy that July, and they moved to The Hill around the beginning of September, when he started teaching at Silverhill. The rapes stopped.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time a serial killer was a rapist first.”

“Indeed not. Anyway, they’re working on DNA.”

“Have a smoke if you want,” Jenny said. “I can see you’re getting all twitchy.”

“Am I? I will, then, if you don’t mind.”

Jenny brought him an ashtray she kept in the sideboard for the occasional visitor who smoked. Though a non-smoker herself, she wasn’t as fanatical about not allowing any smoking in her house, as some of her friends were. In fact, her time in California had made her hate the nico-Nazis even more than the smokers.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked.

“Your job,” said Banks, leaning forward. “And the way I see it now is that we’ve probably got enough to convict Terry Payne ten times over, if he survives. It’s Lucy I’m interested in, and time’s running out.”

“What do you mean?”

Banks drew on his cigarette before answering. “As long as she stays in hospital, we’re fine, but as soon as she’s released we can only hold her for twenty-four hours. Oh, we can get extensions, maybe in an extreme case like this up to ninety-six hours, but we’d better damn well have something solid to go on if we’re going to do that, or she walks.”

“I still think it’s more than possible that she had nothing to do with the killings. Something woke her up that night and her husband wasn’t there, so she looked around the house for him, saw the lights in the cellar, went down and saw-”

“But why hadn’t she noticed before, Jenny? Why hadn’t she been down there before?”

“She was afraid to. It sounds as if she’s terrified of her husband. Look at what happened to her when she did go down.”

“I know that. But Kimberley Myers was the fifth victim, for God’s sake. The fifth. Why did it take Lucy so long to find out? Why did she wake up and go exploring only this time? She said she never went down in the cellar, that she didn’t dare. What was so different about this time?”

“Perhaps she didn’t want to know before. But, don’t forget, the way it looks is that Payne was escalating, unraveling. I’d guess he was fast becoming highly unstable. Perhaps this time even she couldn’t look away.”

Jenny watched Banks take a contemplative drag on his cigarette and let the smoke out slowly. “You think so?” he said.

“It’s possible, isn’t it? Earlier, if her husband was behaving strangely, she might have suspected that he had some sort of horrible secret vice, and she wanted to pretend it wasn’t there, the way most of us do with bad things.”

“Sweep it under the carpet?”

“Or play the ostrich. Bury her head in the sand. Yes. Why not?”

“So we’re both agreed that there are any number of possibilities to explain what happened and that Lucy Payne might be innocent?”

“Where are you going with this, Alan?”

“I want you to dig deep into Lucy Payne’s background. I want you to find out all you can about her. I want-”

“But-”

“No, let me finish, Jenny. I want you to get to know her inside out, her background, her childhood, her family, her fantasies, her hopes, her fears.”

“Slow down, Alan. What’s the point of all this?”

“You might come across something that implicates her.”

“Or absolves her?”

Banks held his hands out, palms open. “If that’s what you find, fine. I’m not asking you to make anything up. Just dig.”

“Even if I do, I might not come up with anything useful at all.”

“Doesn’t matter. At least we’ll have tried.”

“Isn’t this a police job?”

Banks stubbed out his cigarette. “Not really. I’m after an evaluation here, an in-depth psychological profile of Lucy Payne. Of course, we’ll check out any leads you might stumble across. I don’t expect you to play detective.”

“Well, I’m grateful for that.”

“Think about it, Jenny. If she’s guilty, she didn’t just start helping her husband abduct and kill young girls out of the blue on New Year’s Eve. There has to be some pathology, some background of psychological disturbance, some abnormal pattern of behavior, doesn’t there?”

“There usually is. But even if I find out she was a bed wetter, liked to start fires and pulled the wings off flies, it still won’t give you anything you can use against her in court.”

“It will if someone was hurt in the fire. It will if you find out about any other mysterious events in her life that we can investigate. That’s all I’m asking, Jenny. That you make a start on the psychopathology of Lucy Payne, and if you turn up anything we should investigate further, you let us know and we do it.”