No, she decided in the end. She hadn’t lost all that. She was still young and she had most of her life ahead of her. She was scared, she realized; that was all. Like so many ­people. Scared of commitment, scared of dipping a toe in the water. Scared of being hurt. It was a long time since she had had a serious boyfriend, someone there was a possibility of sharing her life with. Tonight had shown her that there could be other possibilities. That Terry liked her was obvious, and she knew she liked him. How could she get over her fear? How could she stop behaving like a silly little girl, probably making him think she was nothing but a tease? She was soon starting to feel really stupid about her behavior.

Winsome sipped her tea, brow furrowed and swore to herself that the next time she saw Terry Gilchrist, she would kiss him. On the lips. That thought made her smile.

12

BANKS ENJOYED TRAIN JOURNEYS ONCE HE HAD GOT through the station experience, found somewhere to put his luggage and laid claim to an empty seat. Fridays were busy days on the East Coast line, but he got a midmorning train that wasn’t too full, and the seat next to his remained empty all the way to Kings Cross. He had decided to board at Darlington, though York would have been closer, because from Darlington the train would pass the airfield and hangar after Northallerton, and he wanted to have a look at the area from a train window. Doug Wilson had got the message through to the railways, and they had even put out a few flyers on selected trains, but so far nobody had come forward to report seeing anything out of the window on the Sunday morning in question. Banks was curious as to why.

The sky looked like iron, and he got the feeling that if a giant banged the rolling landscape with a hammer it would clang and reverberate. It was partly the stillness that caused the effect, especially after last night’s wind, and the sudden dryness after the constant rains. Still, it felt like the calm before the storm. And the daffodils ought to be out by now.

It didn’t take long to get to Northallerton and whizz through the small station without even slowing down. The only stop on this journey was York. Keeping his eyes fixed on the left, where the lighter gray of the Cleveland Hills broke the charcoal horizon in the distance, he finally saw the hangar coming up. There was a stretch of about a quarter of a mile of neglected pasture between the airfield and train lines, but he could see the huge hangar clearly. The problem was that all the action had occurred on the other side of the building, where the gate in the chain-­link fence was. Banks could see a ­couple of patrol cars and a CSI van parked by the outside fence—­Stefan’s team was still working there—­but it was all gone in a flash. Even if someone had been looking in that direction, he realized, they couldn’t have seen anything going on inside the hangar, and any cars parked right at the front would have been obscured by the building itself. The only possibility would have been someone noticing a lorry or a car heading down the road in front of the gate, parallel to the train tracks, but the timing had clearly been wrong for such an observation.

Satisfied that they had probed that possibility to the end of its usefulness, Banks returned to his relaxation. There was no hot water on the train, which meant no tea or coffee and only cold sandwiches to eat. He decided he could manage the two-­and-­a-­half-­hour-­plus journey on an empty stomach. He still had half his Costa latte left when he boarded, so he made that last for a few miles. He had brought his noise-­canceling headphones, which meant he could listen to any kind of music he wanted, and not just the sort of loud rock that drowned out the train noise. He started off with the BartÓk and Walton viola concertos. Other musicians made fun of the viola in orchestras, but he loved its sound, somewhere between the plaintive keen of the violin and the resonant melancholy of the cello, with a sweet elegiac strain all of its own. He had known a professional violist once, a very beautiful young woman called Pamela Jeffreys, but he had let her slip away from him.

The train rattled along and Banks was more aware of feeling the physical rocking than the sound. He was reading Hangover Square, but he looked up every now and then at the landscape. As they passed through flat green stretches of the English heartland, the flood damage was plain to see, whole fields underwater, streams and rivers overflowing their banks, and that terrible iron-­gray stillness about it all. He even saw a tractor marooned in the middle of a deep broad puddle, and thought of John Beddoes, whose stolen tractor seemed to have started all this. Was Beddoes connected somehow? An insurance scam, as Annie had suggested, or in some way more sinister, through some vendetta with the Lanes, perhaps. Other than for insurance, though, why would a man have his own tractor stolen?

The train flashed through Peterborough, with its truncated cathedral tower, the river and its waterfront flats, looking a bit shabbier now than they had when Banks worked a case down there a few years ago. Banks had few friends left from his Peterborough childhood days. Graham Marshall had disappeared when they were all schoolboys, and many years later, when his body was found, Banks had helped with the investigation into what happened to him. They had been the famous five all those years ago: Banks, Graham, Steve Hill, Paul Major and Dave Greenfell. Steve Hill, the boy who had introduced the young Banks to Dylan, the Who, Pink Floyd and the rest, had been the next to go, from lung cancer a few years ago. And just last year Paul Major had died of an AIDS-­related illness. That left two out of five. No wonder Banks felt his circle of friends diminishing.

He put down Hangover Square and switched the music to his playlist of Scott Walker singing Jacques Brel songs, starting with the beautiful “If You Go Away.” Banks liked Brel in the original, though he couldn’t understand all the words, but even he, with his limited French, knew that there was a big difference between “If You Go Away” and “Ne me quitte pas.” Where the English version was sad, the original was a desperate plea.

The playlist lasted him all the way to London.

ANNIE KNEW she’d been putting off the abattoir trawl, and after visiting four of the places she knew why. She had intended her objection to the assignment at the meeting partly as a joke, but she was fast coming to realize that there was nothing funny about it at all. She was getting heartily sick of abattoirs. Almost to the point of being physically sick on more than one occasion so far. The affront to her vegetarian sensibilities was almost more than she could take.

Fortunately, the previous day she had headed off to the east coast with Banks and so postponed the task, but on Friday morning she had no excuse. All she could do to ameliorate things was to drag poor Doug Wilson along with her. She thought he’d provide a little comfort and amusement, but so far he had provided neither. If anything, he had been more disgusted than she was at the things they had seen, heard and smelled. If she hadn’t been a vegetarian already, occasional lapses into fish and chicken aside, she decided, she would be one by now. Doug wasn’t one himself, but Annie was starting to think that by the end of the day he might well be. If she were in the business of conversion, she knew now he was at his most vulnerable and it wouldn’t take much effort.

For the most part, they had managed to avoid the working areas and have their conversations in offices that didn’t smell of the rank horrors being committed on the killing floor. But you couldn’t escape the stench entirely, or the screaming or bleating of the terrified animals. Nobody could convince Annie that they didn’t know exactly what was coming. No matter how much you modernized an abattoir and tarted it up, it was still barbaric, in her opinion. You could paint the inside yellow and pin children’s drawings to the wall and it wouldn’t change a thing.