It was Thursday, the eleventh of May. Hard to believe it was only three days since the gruesome discovery at number 35 The Hill. Already the tabloids were rubbing their hands with glee and calling the place “Dr. Terry’s House of Horrors” and, even worse, “The House of Payne.” They had somehow got hold of photographs of both Terry and Lucy Payne – the former cropped from a school class picture, by the look of it, and the latter from an “employee of the month” presentation to Lucy at the NatWest branch where she worked. Both photos were poor in quality, and you’d have to know who they were before you’d recognize either of them.
Banks turned on his computer and answered any E-mail he thought merited a response, then he picked away at the pile of papers. Not much, it seemed, had happened in his absence. The major preoccupation had been with a series of nasty post office robberies, in which one masked man terrorized staff and customers with a long knife and an ammonia spray. No one had been hurt yet, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t be. There had been four such robberies in the Western Division over a month. DS Hatchley was out rounding up his ragbag assortment of informants. Apart from the robberies, perhaps the most serious crime on their hands was the theft of a tortoise that happened to be sleeping in a cardboard box nicked from someone’s garden, along with a Raleigh bicycle and a lawn mower.
Business as usual. And somehow Banks found an odd sort of comfort in these dull, predictable crimes after the horrors of the Paynes’ cellar.
He turned on his radio and recognized the slow movement from a late Schubert piano sonata. He felt a tight pain between his eyes and massaged the spot gently. When that didn’t work he swallowed a couple of Paracetamol he kept in his desk for emergencies such as this, washed them down with tepid coffee, then he pushed the mound of papers aside and let the music spill over him in gentle waves. The headaches were coming more frequently these days, along with the sleepless nights and a strange reluctance to go to work. It reminded him of the pattern he went through just before he left London for Yorkshire, when he was on the edge of burnout, and he wondered if he was getting in the same state again. He should probably see his doctor, he decided, when he had time.
The ringing telephone disturbed him, as it had so often before. Scowling, he picked up the offending instrument and growled, “Banks.”
“Stefan here. You asked me to keep you informed.”
Banks relaxed his tone. “Yes, Stefan. Any developments?” Banks could hear voices in the background. Millgarth, most likely. Or the Payne house.
“One piece of good news. They’ve lifted Payne’s prints from the machete used to kill PC Morrisey, and the lab reports both yellow plastic fibers from the rope in the scrapings taken from under Lucy Payne’s fingernails, along with traces of Kimberley Myers’s blood on the sleeve of her dressing gown.”
“Kimberley’s blood on Lucy Payne’s dressing gown?”
“Yes.”
“So she was down there,” Banks said.
“Looks like it. Mind you, she could explain away the fibers by saying she hung out the washing. They did use the same kind of clothes-line in the back garden. I’ve seen it.”
“But the blood?”
“Maybe more tricky,” said Stefan. “There wasn’t very much, but at least it proves that she was down there.”
“Thanks, Stefan. It’s a big help. What about Terence Payne?”
“The same. Blood and yellow fibers. Along with a fair quantity of PC Morrisey’s blood.”
“What about the bodies?”
“One more, skeletal, out in the garden. That makes all five.”
“Skeletal? How long would that take?”
“Depends on temperature and insect activity,” said Stefan.
“Could it have happened in just a month or so?”
“Could have, with the right conditions. It hasn’t been very warm this past month, though.”
“But is it possible?”
“It’s possible.”
Leanne Wray had disappeared on the thirty-first of March, which was slightly over a month ago, so there was at least some possibility that it was her remains.
“Anyway,” Stefan went on, “there’s plenty of garden left. They’re digging very slowly and carefully to avoid disturbing the bones. I’ve arranged for a botanist and an entomologist from the university to visit the scene tomorrow. They should be able to help us with time of death.”
“Did you find any clothing with the victims?”
“No. Nothing of a personal nature.”
“Get to work on identifying that body, Stefan, and let me know the minute you have anything, even if it’s negative.”
“Will do.”
Banks said good-bye to Stefan and hung up, then he walked over to his open window and sneaked a prohibited cigarette. It was a hot, muggy afternoon, with the sort of tension in the air that meant rain would probably come soon, perhaps even a thunderstorm. Office workers sniffed the air and reached for their umbrellas as they headed home. Shopkeepers closed up and wound back the awnings. Banks thought about Sandra again, how when she used to work at the community center down North Market Street they would often meet for a drink in the Queen’s Arms before heading home. Happy days. Or so they had seemed. And now she was pregnant with Sean’s baby.
The Schubert piano music played on, the serene and elegiac opening of the final, B-flat sonata. Banks’s headache began to subside a little. The one thing he remembered about Sandra’s pregnancies was that she hadn’t enjoyed them, hadn’t glowed with the joys of approaching motherhood. She had suffered extreme morning sickness, and though she didn’t drink or smoke much, she continued to do both because back then nobody made such a fuss about it. She also continued to go to galleries and plays and meet with friends, and complained when her condition made it difficult or impossible for her to do so.
While pregnant with Tracy, she had slipped on the ice and broken her leg in her seventh month and spent the rest of her confinement with a cast on. That more than anything had driven her crazy, unable to get out and about with her camera the way she loved to do, stuck in their poky little Kennington flat watching gray day follow gray day all that winter while Banks was working all hours, hardly ever home. Well, perhaps Sean would be around for her more often. Lord only knew, perhaps if Banks had been…
But he didn’t get to follow that thought to the particular circle of hell he was sure must be reserved for neglectful husbands and fathers. Annie Cabbot tapped at his door and popped her head around, giving him a temporary escape from the guilt and self-recrimination that seemed to be so much his lot these days, no matter how hard he tried to do the right thing.
“You did say six o’clock, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Sorry, Annie. Miles away.” Banks picked up his jacket, checking the pockets for wallet and cigarettes, then cast a backward glance at the pile of untouched paperwork on his desk. To hell with it. If they expected him to do two, three jobs at once, then they could wait for their bloody paperwork.
As Jenny drove through a shower and looked out at the ugly forest of cranes that rose up from Goole docks, she wondered for the umpteenth time what on earth had induced her to return to England. To Yorkshire. It certainly wasn’t family ties. Jenny was an only child and her parents were retired academics living in Sussex. Both her mother and father had been far too wrapped up in their work – he as a historian, she as a physicist – and Jenny had spent more of her childhood with a succession of nannies and au pairs than with her parents. Given their natural academic detachment, too, Jenny often felt that she had been far more of an experiment than a daughter.
It didn’t bother her – after all, she didn’t know any different – and it was very much the way she had lived her life, too: as an experiment. Sometimes she looked back and it all seemed so shallow and self-centered that she felt herself panic; other times it seemed just fine.