Aftermath (27 page)

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 ‘Hansel and Gretel’, now that she had satisfactory sketches for ‘Rapunzel’, and trying to put the business of number thirty-five out of her head for a few hours at least.

Then she heard the paperboy arrive and the newspaper slip through her letterbox onto 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: NEIGHBOUR 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. Afterwards, 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 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 neighbours 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 thirty-five. 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 favour 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 cubby-hole 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 harbouring 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 blonde 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.

•

Annie parked her purple Astra up the street and walked towards number thirty-five The Hill, shielding her eyes from the morning sunlight. Crime scene tape and trestles blocked off that section of pavement in front of the garden wall, so that pedestrians had to make a detour onto the tarmac road to get by. One or two people paused to glance over the garden gate as they passed, Annie noticed, but most walked to the other side of the road and averted their eyes. She even saw one elderly woman cross herself.

Annie showed her warrant card to the officer on duty, signed in at the gate and walked down the garden path. She wasn’t afraid of seeing gruesome sights, if indeed there were any left inside the house, but she had never before visited a scene so completely overrun with SOCO activity, and just walking into it made her edgy. The men in the front garden ignored her and went on with their digging. The door was ajar, and when Annie pushed gently, it opened into the hall.

The hallway was deserted and at first the house seemed so quiet inside that Annie thought she was alone. Then someone shouted, and the sound of a pneumatic drill ripped through the air, coming up from the cellar, shattering her illusion. The house was hot, stuffy and full of dust, and Annie sneezed three times before exploring further.

Her nerves gradually gave way to professional curiosity, and she noted with interest that the carpets had been taken up, leaving only the bare concrete floors and wooden stairs, and that the living room had been stripped of furniture, too, even down to the light fixtures. Several holes had been punched in the walls, no doubt to ensure that no bodies had been entombed there. Annie gave a little shudder. Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ was one of the more frightening stories she had read at school.

Everywhere she went she was conscious of the narrow, roped-off pathway she knew she was supposed to follow. In an odd way it was like visiting the Brontë parsonage or Wordsworth’s cottage, where you could only stand and look beyond the rope at the antique furniture.

The kitchen, where three SOCOs were working on the sink and drains, was in the same sorry state, tiles wrenched up, oven and fridge gone, cupboards bare, fingerprint dust everywhere. Annie hadn’t thought anyone could do so much damage to a place in three days. One of the SOCOs looked over at her and asked her rather testily what she thought she was doing there. She flashed him her warrant card and he went back to ripping out the sink. The pneumatic drill stopped and Annie heard the sound of a vacuum cleaner from upstairs, an eerily domestic sound amid all the crime scene chaos, though she knew its purpose was far more sinister than getting rid of the dust.

She took the silence from the cellar as her cue to go down there, noting as she did so the door open to the garage, which had been stripped as bare as the rest of the house. The car was gone, no doubt in the police garage being taken apart piece by piece, and the oil-stained floor had been dug up.

She sensed herself becoming hypersensitive as she approached the cellar door, her breath coming in short gasps. There was an obscene poster of a naked woman with her legs spread wide apart on the door which Annie hoped the SOCOs hadn’t left there because they enjoyed seeing it. That must have unnerved Janet Taylor to start with, she thought, advancing slowly, as she imagined Janet and Dennis had done. Christ, she felt apprehensive enough herself, even though she knew the only people in there were SOCOs. But Janet and Dennis hadn’t known what to expect, Annie told herself. Whatever it was, they hadn’t expected what they got. She knew far more than they had, and no doubt her imagination was working overtime on that.

Through the door, much cooler down here, trying to feel the way it was, despite the two SOCO officers and the bright lighting . . . Janet went in first, Dennis just behind her. The cellar was smaller than she had expected. It must have happened so quickly. Candlelight. The figure leaping out of the shadows, wielding a machete, hacking into Dennis Morrisey’s throat and arm because he was the closest. Dennis goes down. Janet already has her side-handled baton out, extended, ready to ward off the first blow. So close she can smell Payne’s breath. Perhaps he can’t believe that a woman, weaker and smaller than him, can thwart him so easily. Before he can recover from his shock, Janet lashes out and hits him on the left temple. Blinded by pain and perhaps by blood, he falls back against the wall. Next he feels a sharp pain on his wrist and he can’t hold onto the machete. He hears it skitter away across the floor but doesn’t know where. He rears up and goes at her. Angry now because she knows her partner is bleeding to death on the floor, Janet hits him again and again, wanting it to be over so she can tend to Dennis. He scrabbles after where he thought the machete went, blood dripping down his face. She hits him again. And again. How much strength does he have left by now? Annie wondered. Surely not enough to overpower Janet? And how many more times does she hit him now he’s down, handcuffed to the pipe, not moving at all?

Annie sighed and watched the SOCOs shifting their drill to dig into another spot.

‘Are you going to start that thing up again?’ she asked.

One of the men grinned. ‘Want some ear-muffs?’

Annie smiled back at him. ‘No, I’d rather just get out of here before you start. Can you give me another minute or so?’

‘Can do.’

Annie glanced around at the crude stick figures and occult symbols on the walls and wondered how integral a part of Payne’s fantasy they were. Banks had also told her that the place was lit by dozens of candles, but they were all gone now, as was the mattress they had found the body on. One of the SOCOs was on his knees looking at something on the concrete floor over by the door.

‘What is it?’ Annie asked him. ‘Found something?’

‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘Some sort of little scuff marks in the concrete. It hardly shows at all, but there seems to be some sort of pattern.’

Annie knelt to look. She couldn’t see anything until the SOCO pointed to what looked like small circles in the concrete. There were three of them in all, pretty much equidistant.

‘I’ll try a few different lighting angles,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘Maybe some infrared film to highlight the contrasts.’

‘Could be a tripod,’ Annie said.

‘What? Bugger me – sorry, love – but you could be right. Luke Selkirk and that funny little assistant of his were down here a day or two ago. Maybe they left the marks.’

‘I think they’d have been more professional, don’t you?’

‘I’d better ask them, hadn’t I?’

Annie left him to it and walked through the far door. The ground had been sectioned into grids and the soil had been dug up. Annie knew that three bodies had been found there. She followed the narrow, marked path across to the door, opened it and walked up the steps into the back garden. Crime scene tape barred her entrance at the top of the steps, but she didn’t need to go any further. Like the anteroom in the cellar, the overgrown garden had been divided into grids and marked out with rope. Most of them had already been cleared of grass and weeds and topsoil, but some, further back, remained overgrown. At the far wall, a large waterproof sheet used to protect the garden from yesterday’s rain lay rolled up like a carpet.

This was a delicate job, Annie knew from watching the excavation of a skeleton at the village of Hobb’s End. It was far too easy to disturb old bones. She could see the hole, about three feet deep, where one body had been dug up, and now there were two men gathered around another hole, taking off the soil with trowels and passing it to a third man who ran it through a sieve as if he were panning for gold.