8

ONE

Banks walked slowly by the river. He wore his fur-lined suede car-coat, collar up, hands thrust deep in his pockets. As he walked, he breathed out plumes of air. The river wasn’t entirely frozen over; ducks paddled as usual, apparently oblivious to the cold, in channels between the lumps of grey ice.

As he walked, he thought about the success he had had that morning with the BBC. A keen young researcher in the local studio had taken the trouble to dig out and listen to the 22 December taped carol broadcast, using a stopwatch. The programme had started at seven sharp. ‘Away in a Manger’ began just over midway through the broadcast – 7.21, to be exact – and finished two minutes, fourteen seconds later. Banks marvelled at the precision. With such a sense of exact measurement, the young woman perhaps had a future working for the Guinness Book of Records or the Olympic Records Committee. Anyway, they now knew that Caroline’s likely killer had been let in between 7.21 and 7.24.

They also knew that it wasn’t Charles Cooper. Richmond had talked to the regulars at Tan Hill and confirmed his alibi: Cooper had been drinking there between about six thirty and ten thirty on 22 December and on most other evenings leading up to the Christmas period. It would be more difficult for him to explain long absences to his wife at any other time, Banks thought.

Banks started thinking about the victim, Caroline Hartley, again and realized he still didn’t know much about her. She had run away from home at sixteen, gone to London, got herself pregnant, picked up a conviction for soliciting, come back up north and shacked up first with Nancy Wood, who was out of the picture now, and then with Veronica Shildon. Attractive to both men and women – but now interested only in the latter – vivacious and enthusiastic, but given to thoughtful, secretive moods, a budding actress, a good mimic. That was about all. It covered ten years of the woman’s life, and it didn’t add up to a hell of a lot. There had to be more, and the only place to find out – as Caroline’s friends and family either wouldn’t talk or didn’t know – was in London. But where to start?

Banks picked up a flat stone and skimmed it across the water towards the Green. Briefly, he thought of Jenny Fuller, who lived in one of the Georgian semis there. A lecturer in psychology at York, she had helped Banks before. She would be damn useful in this case, too, he thought. But she’d gone away somewhere warm for Christmas. Tough luck.

Up ahead, near the bridge, Banks saw a boy, no older than twelve or thirteen. He had a catapult and was aiming pebbles at the ducks out on the river. Banks approached him. Before saying a word, he took out his identity card and let the boy have a good long look.

The boy read it, then glanced up at Banks and said, ‘Are you really a copper or just one of those perverts? My dad’s warned me about blokes like you.’

‘Lucky for you, sonny, I’m really a copper,’ Banks said, and snatched the metal catapult from the boy’s hand.

‘Hey! What you doing? That’s mine.’

‘That’s a dangerous weapon is what that is,’ Banks said, slipping it in his coat pocket. ‘Think yourself lucky I don’t take you in. What do you want to go aiming at those ducks for anyway? What harm have they ever done you?’

‘Dunno,’ the kid said. ‘I wasn’t meaning to kill them or anything. I just wanted to see if I could hit one. Can I have my catapult back, mister?’

‘No.’

‘Go on. It cost me a quid, that did. I saved up out of my pocket money.’

‘Well don’t bother saving up for another,’ Banks said, walking away.

‘It’s bloody daylight robbery,’ the kid called after him. ‘You’re no better than a thief!’

But Banks ignored him, and soon the shouting died down. There was something in what the boy had said that interested him: ‘I wasn’t meaning to kill them or anything. I just wanted to see if I could hit one.’

Could he really divorce the action from its result as cleanly and innocently as that? And if he could, could a murderer, too? There was no doubt that whoever plunged the knife into Caroline Hartley’s body had meant her to be dead, but had that been the killer’s original intention? The bruise on the cheek indicated that she had been hit, perhaps stunned, first. How had that come about? Was it the kind of thing a woman would do, punch another woman?

Could it have been some kind of sexual encounter gone out of control, with the original object not so much murder but just a desire to see how far things could go? A sadomasochistic fantasy turned reality, perhaps? After all, Caroline Hartley had been naked. But that was absurd. Veronica and Caroline were respectable, middle-class, conservative lesbians; they didn’t cruise the gay bars or try to lure innocent schoolgirls back to the house for orgies, like the lesbians one read about in lurid tabloids. Still, when lovers fight, no matter what sex, they can easily become violent towards one another. What happened between the punch and the stabbing? What warped sequence of emotions did the killer feel? Caroline must have been unconscious, or at least momentarily stunned, and the killer must have picked up the knife, which lay so conveniently on the table by the cake.

What made her do it? Would she have done it if the knife hadn’t been so close to hand? Would she have gone into the kitchen and taken a knife from the drawer and still had the resolve when she got back to the living room? Impossible questions to answer – the kind that Jenny might have been able to help with – but they had to be answered or he would never find the key to his problem. Banks needed to know what happened in the dark area, what it was that pushed someone beyond argument, past reason, past sex, beyond even simple physical assault, to murder.

He turned his back on the river and started walking up the hill by the formal gardens back around the castle to the market square. Back at the station, as soon as he turned from the stairwell to the corridor that led to his upstairs office, he saw Susan Gay come rushing towards him with a sheet of paper flapping in her hand. She looked like the cat that had got the cream. Her eyes gleamed with success.

‘Found her,’ she announced. ‘Ruth. It’s a small London publishing company. Sappho Press. I faxed them the photo and they said they had it taken for a dust jacket and for general publicity.’

‘Good work,’ Banks said. ‘Tell me, what made you call that particular press out of the dozens we had listed?’

Susan looked puzzled. ‘I got as far as “S” in the alphabet. It took me all morning.’

‘Do you know who Sappho was?’

Susan shook her head.

Gristhorpe would have known, Banks thought, but you could hardly demand a degree in classics of everyone who wanted to join the police. On the other hand, perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea: an elite squad of literary coppers.

‘She was an ancient Greek poet from the isle of Lesbos,’ he said.

‘Is that…?’ Susan began.

Banks nodded.

She blushed. ‘Well I’d like to say I got the literary clue, like in Agatha Christie,’ she said, ‘but it was down to pure hard slog.’

Banks laughed. ‘Well done, anyway. Tell me the details.’

‘Her name’s Ruth Dunne and apparently she’s published a couple of books. Doing very well for herself in the poetry scene. The woman I spoke to said one of the bigger publishers might be after her soon. Faber and Faber perhaps.’

‘What kind of stuff does she write?’

‘Well, that’s another thing. They told me she started by writing the kind of thing the Sappho Press people support. I assumed it was feminist stuff, but now you mention it… Anyway, she’s moved away from that, they said, and it looks like she’s shifting into a broader market, whatever that means.’