10

Friday morning started badly for Maggie. She had spent a night disturbed by vague and frightening nightmares that scuttled away into the shadows the minute she awoke screaming and tried to grasp them. Getting back to sleep was difficult not only because of the bad dreams, but also because of the eerie noises and voices she could hear from across the road. Didn’t the police ever sleep?

Once, getting up to go for a glass of water, she looked out of her bedroom window and saw some uniformed police officers carrying cardboard boxes into a van waiting with its engine running. Then some men carried what looked like electronic equipment through the front door, and a short while later Maggie fancied she could see a strange ghostly light sweeping the living room of number 35 behind the drawn curtains. The digging continued in the front garden, surrounded by a canvas screen and lit on the inside, so that all Maggie could see was enlarged and deformed shadows of men silhouetted against the canvas. These figures carried over into her next nightmare, and in the end she didn’t know whether she was asleep or awake.

She got up a little after seven o’clock and headed for the kitchen, where a cup of tea helped soothe her frayed nerves. This was one English habit that she had slipped into easily. She planned to spend the day working on Grimm again, perhaps “Hänsel and Gretel,” now that she had satisfactory sketches for “Rapunzel,” and trying to put the business of number 35 out of her head for a few hours at least.

Then she heard the paperboy arrive and the newspaper slip through her letter box on to the hall mat. She hurried out and carried it back to the kitchen, where she spread it on the table.

Lorraine Temple’s story was prominent on the front page, beside the bigger headline story about Terence Payne’s dying without recovering consciousness. There was even a photograph of Maggie, taken without her knowledge, standing just outside her front gate. It must have been taken when she was going down to the pub to talk with Lorraine, she realized, as she was wearing the same jeans and light cotton jacket as she had worn on Tuesday.

HOUSE OF PAYNE: NEIGHBOR SPEAKS OUT, ran the headline, and the article went on to detail how Maggie had heard suspicious sounds coming from across The Hill and called the police. Afterward, calling Maggie Lucy’s “friend,” Lorraine Temple reported what Maggie had said about Lucy’s being a victim of domestic abuse, and how she was scared of her husband. All of which was fine and accurate enough, as far as it went. But then came the sting in the tail. According to sources in Toronto, Lorraine Temple went on to report, Maggie Forrest herself was on the run from an abusive husband: Toronto lawyer, William Burke. The article detailed the time Maggie had spent in hospital and all the fruitless court orders issued to stop Bill’s going near her. Describing Maggie as a nervous, mousy sort of woman, Lorraine Temple also mentioned that she was seeing a local psychiatrist called Dr. Simms, who “declined to comment.”

Lorraine ended by suggesting that, perhaps because of Maggie’s own psychological problems, Maggie had been gullible, and that her identification with Lucy’s plight may have blinded her to the truth. Lorraine couldn’t come out and say that she thought Lucy was guilty of anything – the laws of libel forbade that – but she did have a very good stab at making her readers think Lucy might just be the sort of manipulative and deceitful person who could twist a weak woman like Maggie around her little finger. It was rubbish, of course, but effective rubbish, nonetheless.

How could she do that? Now everybody would know.

Every time Maggie walked down the street to go to the shops or catch the bus into town, the neighbors and shopkeepers would look at her differently, with pity and perhaps just the merest hint of blame in their eyes. Some people would avoid looking her in the eye and perhaps even stop talking to her, associating her too closely for comfort with the events at number 35. Even strangers who recognized her from the photograph would wonder about her. Perhaps Claire would stop coming to see her altogether, though she hadn’t been since the time the policeman turned up, and Maggie was already worried about her.

Perhaps even Bill would find out.

It was her own fault, of course. She had put herself in harm’s way. She had been trying to do a favor for poor Lucy, trying to garner her some public sympathy, and the whole thing had backfired. How stupid she had been to trust Lorraine Temple. One lousy article like this and her whole new fragile, protected world would change. Just like that. It wasn’t fair, Maggie told herself as she cried over the breakfast table. It just wasn’t fair.

After a short but satisfying night’s sleep – perhaps due to the generous doses of Laphroaig and Duke Ellington – Banks was back in his Millgarth cubbyhole by eight-thirty on Friday morning, and the first news to cross his desk was a note from Stefan Nowak informing him that the skeletal remains dug up in the Paynes’s garden were not Leanne Wray’s. Had Banks been harboring the slightest hope that Leanne might still be alive and well after all this time, he would have jumped for joy, but as it was, he rubbed his forehead in frustration; it looked as if it was going to be another one of those days. He punched in Stefan’s mobile number and got an answer after three rings. It sounded as if Stefan was in the middle of another conversation, but he muttered a few asides and gave his attention to Banks.

“Sorry about that,” he said.

“Problems?”

“Typical breakfast chaos. I’m just trying to get out of the house.”

“I know what you mean. Look, about this identification-”

“It’s solid, sir. Dental records. DNA will take a bit longer. There’s no way it’s Leanne Wray. I’m just about to set off back to the house. The lads are still digging.”

“Who the hell can it be?”

“Don’t know. All I’ve been able to find out so far is that it’s a young woman, late teens to early twenties, been there a few months and there’s a lot of stainless steel in her dental work, including a crown.”

“Meaning?” Banks asked, a faint memory beckoning.

“Possible Eastern European origin. They still use a lot of stainless steel over there.”

Right. Banks had come across something like that before. A forensic dentist had once told him that Russians used stainless steel. “Eastern European?”

“Just a possibility, sir.”

“All right. Any chance of that DNA comparison between Payne and the Seacroft Rapist turning up before the weekend?”

“I’ll get onto them this morning, see if I can give them a prod.”

“Okay. Thanks. Keep at it, Stefan.”

“Will do.”

Banks hung up, more puzzled than ever. One of the first things AC Hartnell had instituted when the team was first put together was a special squad to keep tabs on all missing persons cases throughout the entire country – “mispers,” as they were called – particularly if they involved blond teenagers, with no apparent reasons for running away, disappearing on their way home from clubs, pubs, cinemas and dances. The team had monitored scores of cases every day, but none had met the criteria of the Chameleon investigation, except one girl in Cheshire, who had turned up alive and contrite two days later after a brief shack-up with her boyfriend, about which she just happened to forget to tell her parents, and the sadder case of a young girl in Lincoln who, it turned out, had been run over and had not been carrying any identification. Now here was Stefan saying they’d probably got a dead Eastern European girl in the garden.

Banks didn’t get very far with his chain of thought before his office door opened and DC Filey dropped a copy of that morning’s Post on his desk.