Aftermath (16 page)

‘You can’t put that down to us, sir,’ Bowmore protested, red in the face. ‘That’s just not on.’

‘Oh, isn’t it? What if you’d seen or heard something suspicious while you were in the house interviewing him? What if your finely developed detective’s instinct had picked up on something and you’d asked to have a look around?’

‘Bradford CID didn’t—’

‘I don’t give a damn what Bradford CID did or didn’t do. They were examining a single case: the disappearance of Samantha Foster. You, on the other hand, were investigating a case of serial abductions. If you’d had any reason at all to look in the cellar you’d have had him, believe me. Even if you’d poked around his video collection it might have raised your suspicions. If you’d looked at his car, you’d have noticed the false plates. The ones he’s using now end in NGV, not KWT. That might have rung a few alarm bells, don’t you think? Instead you decide on your own that this action isn’t worth rushing on. God knows what else you thought was so much more important. Well?’

They both looked down.

‘Nothing to say for yourselves?’

‘No, sir,’ muttered a tight-lipped DC Singh.

‘I’ll even give you the benefit of the doubt,’ said Banks. ‘I’ll assume that you were pursuing other angles and not just skiving off. But you still screwed up.’

‘But he must’ve lied to Bradford CID,’ Bowmore argued. ‘He’d only have lied to us, too.’

‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ said Banks. ‘I’ve told you. You’re supposed to be
detectives
. You don’t take anything at face value. Maybe you’d have noticed something about his body language. Maybe you’d have caught him out in a lie. Maybe – God forbid – you might have even checked one of his alibis and found it didn’t hold up. Maybe just something might have made you a little bit suspicious about Terence Payne. Am I making myself clear? You had at least two, maybe three, more things to go on than Bradford had, and you blew it. Now you’re off the case, both of you, and this is going on your records. Clear?’

Bowmore looked daggers at Banks, and Singh seemed close to tears, but Banks had no sympathy for either of them at that moment. He felt a splitting headache coming on. ‘Get the hell out of here,’ he said. ‘And don’t let me see you in the incident room again.’

Maggie hid herself away in the sanctuary of Ruth’s studio. Spring sunshine spilled through the window, which she opened an inch or two to let in some air. It was a spacious room at the back of the house, originally the third bedroom, and while the view through the window left a lot to be desired – a grotty, litter-strewn back passage and the council estate beyond – the room itself was perfect for her needs. Upstairs, in addition to the three rooms, toilet and bathroom, there was also a loft, accessed by a pull-down ladder, that Ruth said she used for storage. Maggie didn’t store anything there; in fact, she never even went up there, as she felt disturbed by spidery, dusty, neglected places, the mere thought of which made her shiver. She had allergies, too, and the slightest hint of dust made her eyes burn and her nose itch.

Another bonus today was that upstairs at the back of the house she wasn’t constantly distracted by all the activity out on The Hill. It was open to traffic again, but number thirty-five was screened off and people kept coming and going, bringing out boxes and bags of God knew what. She couldn’t quite put it out of her mind, of course, but she didn’t read the newspaper that morning, and she tuned the radio to a classical station that had few news breaks.

She was preparing to illustrate a new coffee-table selection of Grimm’s fairy tales, working on thumbnails and preliminary sketches, and what nasty, gruesome little stories they were, she discovered on reading through them for the first time since childhood. Back then, they had seemed remote, cartoonish, but now the horror and the violence seemed all too real. The sketch she had just finished was for ‘Rumpelstiltzskin’, the poison dwarf who helped Anna spin straw into gold in exchange for her first-born. Her illustration was a bit too idealized, she thought: a sad-looking girl-child at a spinning-wheel, with just the suggestion of two burning eyes and the distorted shadow of the dwarf in the background. She could hardly use the scene where he stamped so hard his foot went through the floor and his leg came off as he tried to pull it out. Matter-of-fact violence, no dwelling on blood and guts the way so many films did these days – special effects for the sake of it – but violence nonetheless.

Now she was working on ‘Rapunzel’ and her preliminary sketches showed the young girl – another first-born taken from her true parents – letting her long blonde hair down from the tower where she was held captive by a witch. Another happy ending, with the witch being devoured by a wolf, except for her talon-like hands and feet, which it spat out to be eaten by worms and beetles.

She was just trying to get the rope of hair and the angle of Rapunzel’s head right, so that it would at least
look
as if she might be able support the prince’s weight, when the telephone rang.

Maggie picked up the studio extension. ‘Yes?’

‘Margaret Forrest?’ It was a woman’s voice. ‘Am I speaking to Margaret Forrest?’

‘Who’s asking?’

‘Is that you, Margaret? My name’s Lorraine Temple. You don’t know me.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I understand that it was you who dialled in the emergency call on The Hill yesterday morning? A domestic disturbance.’

‘Who are you? Are you a reporter?’

‘Oh, didn’t I say? Yes, I write for the
Post
.’

‘I’m not supposed to talk to you. Go away.’

‘Look, I’m just down the street, Margaret. I’m calling on my mobile. The police won’t let me near your house, so I wondered if you’d care to meet me for a drink or something. It’s almost lunchtime. There’s a nice pub—’

‘I’ve nothing to say to you, Ms Temple, so there’s no point in our meeting.’

‘You
did
report a domestic disturbance at number thirty-five The Hill early yesterday morning, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Then I
have
got the right person. What made you think it was a domestic?’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand. I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You heard noises, didn’t you? Raised voices? Breaking glass? A thud?’

‘How do you know all this?’

‘I’m just wondering what made you jump to the conclusion that it was a domestic disturbance, that’s all. I mean, why couldn’t it have been someone grappling with a burglar, for example?’

‘I don’t know what you’re getting at.’

‘Oh, come on, Margaret. It’s Maggie, isn’t it? Can I call you Maggie?’

Maggie said nothing. She had no idea why she didn’t just hang up on Lorraine Temple.

‘Look, Maggie,’ Lorraine went on, ‘give me a break here. I’ve got my living to make. Were you a friend of Lucy Payne’s, is that it? Do you know something about her background? Something the rest of us don’t know?’

‘I can’t talk to you any more,’ Maggie said, and then she did hang up. But something Lorraine Temple had said struck a chord, and she regretted doing so. Despite what Banks had told her, if she were to be Lucy’s friend, then the press might prove an ally, not an enemy. She might have to speak to them, to mobilize them in Lucy’s support. Public sympathy would be very important, and in that the media might be able to help her. Of course, all this depended on the approach the police took. If Banks believed what Maggie had told him about the abuse, and if Lucy confirmed it, as she would, then they would realize that she was more of a victim than anything else and just let her go as soon as she was well again.

Lorraine Temple was persistent enough to call back a couple of minutes later. ‘Come on, Maggie,’ she said. ‘Where’s the harm?’

‘All right,’ said Maggie, ‘I’ll meet you for a drink. Ten minutes. I know the place you mean. It’s called the Woodcutter. At the bottom of The Hill, right?’

‘Right. Ten minutes. I’ll be there.’

Maggie hung up. While she was still close to the phone, she took out the Yellow Pages and looked up a local florist. She arranged to have some flowers delivered to Lucy in her hospital bed, along with a note wishing her well.

Before she left, she had one last quick look at her sketch and noticed something curious about it. Rapunzel’s face. It wasn’t the all-purpose fairy-tale princess sort of face you saw in so many illustrations; it was individual, unique, something Maggie prided herself on. More than that, though, Rapunzel’s face, half turned to the viewer, resembled Claire Toth’s, even down to the two spots on her chin. Frowning, Maggie picked up her rubber and erased them before she went off to meet Lorraine Temple from the
Post
.

•

Banks hated hospitals, hated everything about them, and he had done so ever since he’d had his tonsils out at the age of nine. He hated the smell of them, the colours of the walls, the echoing sounds, the doctors’ white coats and the uniforms the nurses wore, hated the beds, thermometers, syringes, stethoscopes, IVs, and the strange machines glimpsed behind half-open doors.
Everything
.

If truth be told, he had hated it all since well before the tonsil experience. When his brother Roy was born, Banks was five, seven years too young to be allowed inside a hospital at visiting time. His mother had some problems with the pregnancy – those unspecified
adult
problems that grown-ups always seemed to be whispering about – and spent an entire month there. Those were the days when they’d let you hang on to a bed that long. Banks was sent away to live with his aunt and uncle in Northampton and went to a new school for the whole period. He never settled in, and being the new boy, he had to stick up for himself against more than one bully.

He remembered his uncle driving him to the hospital to see his mother one dark, cold winter’s night, holding him up to the window – thank God she was on the ground floor – so he could wipe the frost off with his wool mitten and see her swollen shape halfway along the ward and wave to her. He felt so sad. It must be a horrible place, he remembered thinking, that would keep a mother from her son and make her sleep in a room full of strange people when she was so poorly.

The tonsillectomy had only confirmed what he already knew in the first place, and now he was older, hospitals still scared the shit out of him. He saw them as last resorts, places where one
ends up
, where one goes to die, and where the well-intentioned ministrations, the probing, pricking, slicing and all the various –
ectomies
of medical science only postpone the inevitable, filling one’s last days on earth with torture, pain and fear. Banks was a veritable Philip Larkin when it came to hospitals, could think only of ‘the anaesthetic from which none come round’.

Lucy Payne was under guard at Leeds General Infirmary, not far from where her husband lay in intensive care after emergency surgery to remove skull splinters from his brain. The PC sitting outside her room, a dog-eared Tom Clancy paperback on the chair beside him, reported no comings or goings other than hospital staff. It had been a quiet night, he said. Lucky for some, Banks thought, as he entered the private room.

The doctor was waiting inside. She introduced herself as Dr Landsberg. No first name. Banks didn’t want her there, but there was nothing he could do about it. Lucy Payne wasn’t under arrest, but she
was
under the doctor’s care.

‘I’m afraid I can’t give you very long with my patient,’ she said. ‘She has suffered an extremely traumatic experience, and she needs rest more than anything.’

Banks looked at the woman in the bed. Half her face, including one eye, was covered with bandages. The eye that he could see was the same shiny black as the ink he liked to use in his fountain pen. Her skin was pale and smooth, her raven’s-wing hair spread out over the pillow and sheets. He thought of Kimberley Myers’s body spread-eagled on the mattress. That had happened
in Lucy Payne’s house
, he reminded himself.

Banks sat down beside Lucy, and Dr Landsberg hovered like a lawyer waiting to interrupt when Banks overstepped his PACE bounds.

‘Lucy,’ he said, ‘my name’s Banks, Acting Detective Superintendent Banks. I’m in charge of the investigation into the five missing girls. How are you feeling?’

‘Not bad,’ Lucy answered. ‘Considering.’

‘Is there much pain?’

‘Some. My head hurts. How’s Terry? What’s happened to Terry? Nobody will tell me.’ Her voice sounded thick, as if her tongue were swollen, and her words were slurred. The medication.

‘Perhaps if you just told me what happened last night, Lucy. Can you remember?’

‘Is Terry dead? Someone told me he was hurt.’

The concern of the abused wife for her abuser – if that was what he was witnessing – didn’t surprise Banks very much at all; it was an old sad tune, and he had heard it many times before, in all its variations.

‘Your husband was very badly injured, Lucy,’ Dr Landsberg cut in. ‘We’re doing all we can for him.’

Banks cursed her under his breath. He didn’t want Lucy Payne to know what kind of shape her husband was in; if she thought he wasn’t going to survive, she could tell Banks whatever she wanted, knowing he’d have no way of checking whether it was true or not. ‘Can you tell me what happened last night?’ he repeated.

Lucy half closed her good eye; she was trying to remember, or pretending she was trying to remember. ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember.’

Good answer, Banks realized. Wait and see what happens to Terry before admitting to anything. She was sharp, this one, even in her hospital bed, under medication.

‘Do I need a lawyer?’ she asked.

‘Why would you need a lawyer?’

‘I don’t know. When the police talk to people . . . you know, on television . . .’

‘We’re not on television, Lucy.’

She wrinkled her nose. ‘I know that, silly. I didn’t mean . . . never mind.’

‘What’s the last thing you remember about what happened to you?’

‘I remember waking up, getting out of bed, putting on my dressing-gown. It was late. Or early.’

‘Why did you get out of bed?’

‘I don’t know. I must have heard something.’