Aftermath (42 page)

‘Why?’

‘Just the thought of it. Of Tracy and Brian having a little brother or sister. Of . . .’

‘Of what?’

‘I was just thinking,’ Banks said, turning towards her. ‘I mean, it’s something I haven’t thought about in years, denied it, I suppose, but this has brought it all back.’

‘All what back?’

‘The miscarriage.’

Annie froze for a moment, then said, ‘Sandra had a miscarriage?’

‘Yes.’

‘When was that?’

‘Oh, years ago, when we were living in London. The kids were small, too small to understand.’

‘What happened?’

‘I was working undercover at the time. Drugs squad. You know what it’s like, away for weeks at a time, can’t contact your family. It was two days before my boss let
me
know.’

Annie nodded. Banks knew that she understood about the pressures and stresses of undercover work first hand; a knowledge of the job and its effects was one of the things they had in common. ‘How did it happen?’

‘Who knows? The kids were at school. She started bleeding. Thank God we had a helpful neighbour, or who knows what might have happened.’

‘And you blame yourself for not being there?’

‘She could have died, Annie. And we lost the baby. Everything might have gone just fine if I’d been there like any other father-to-be, helping out around the place. But Sandra had to do everything, for crying out loud, all the lifting, shopping, odd jobs, fetching and carrying. She was replacing a light bulb when she first started to feel funny. She could have fallen and broken her neck.’ Banks reached for a cigarette. He didn’t usually indulge in the ‘one after’ for Annie’s sake, but this time he felt like it. He still asked, ‘Is it okay?’

‘Go ahead. I don’t mind.’ Annie sipped more wine. ‘But thanks for asking. You were saying?’

Banks lit up and the smoke drifted away towards the half-open window. ‘Guilt. Yes. But more than that.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I was working drugs, like I said, spending most of my time on the streets or in filthy squats trying to get a lead to the big guys from their victims. Kids, for the most part, runaways, stoned, high, tripping, zonked out, whatever you care to call it. Some of them as young as ten or eleven. Half of them couldn’t even tell you their own names. Or wouldn’t. I don’t know if you remember, but it was around the time the AIDS scare was growing. Nobody new for sure yet how bad it was, but there was a lot of scaremongering. And everyone knew you got it through blood, from unprotected sex – mostly anal sex – and through sharing needles. Thing was, you lived in fear. You just didn’t know if some small-time dealer was going to lunge at you with a dirty needle, or if some junkie’s drool on your hand could give you AIDS.’

‘I do know what you mean, Alan, though it was a bit before my time as a copper. But I’m not following. What has it got to do with Sandra’s miscarriage?’

Banks sucked in some smoke, felt it burn on the way down and thought he ought to try stopping again. ‘Probably nothing, but I’m just trying to give you some sense of the life I was living. I was in my early thirties, with a wife and two kids, another on the way, and I was spending my life in squalor, hanging out with scum. My own kids probably wouldn’t have recognized me if they’d seen me in the street. The kids I saw were either dead or dying. I was a cop, not a social worker. I mean, I tried sometimes, you know, if I thought there was a chance a kid might listen, give up the life and go home, but that wasn’t my job. I was there to get information and to track down the big players.’

‘And?’

‘Well, it’s just that it has an effect on you, that’s all. It changes you, warps you, alters your attitudes. You start out thinking you’re an ordinary decent family man just doing a tough job, and you end up not really knowing what you are. Anyway, my first thought, when I heard Sandra was okay but that she’d had a miscarriage . . . Know what my first feeling was?’

‘Relief?’ said Annie.

Banks stared at her. ‘What made you say that?’

She gave him a small smile. ‘Common sense. It’s what I’d feel – I mean if I’d been in
your
boots.’

Banks stubbed out the cigarette. He felt somehow deflated that his big revelation had seemed so obvious to Annie. He swirled some red wine around in his mouth to wash away the taste of smoke. Van Morrison was well into ‘Madame George’, riffing on the words. A cat howled in the woods, maybe the one that came for milk sometimes. ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘that’s what I felt: relief. And of course I felt guilty. Not for just not being there, but for being almost glad it happened. And relieved that we wouldn’t have to go through it all again. The dirty nappies, the lack of sleep – not that I was getting much sleep anyway – the extra responsibility. Here was one life I didn’t have to protect. Here was one extra responsibility I could easily live without.’

‘It’s not such an uncommon feeling, you know,’ said Annie. ‘It’s not so terrible, either. It doesn’t make you a monster.’

‘I felt like one.’

‘That’s because you take too much on yourself. You always do. You’re not responsible for all the world’s ills and sins, not even a fraction of them. So Alan Banks is human; he isn’t perfect. So he feels relief when he thinks he should feel grief. Do you think you’re the only one that’s happened to?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t asked anyone else.’

‘Well, you’re not. You just have to learn to live with your imperfections.’

‘Like you do?’

Annie smiled and flicked a little wine at him. Luckily she was drinking white. ‘What imperfections, you cheeky bastard?’

‘Anyway, after that we decided no more kids and we never talked about it again.’

‘But you’ve carried the guilt around ever since.’

‘Yes, I suppose so. I mean, I don’t think about it very often, but this brought it all back. And do you know what else?’

‘What?’

‘I loved the job more. I never for a moment thought of giving it all up and becoming a used car salesman.’

Annie laughed. ‘Just as well. I can’t imagine you as the used car salesman type.’

‘Or something else. Something with regular hours, less chance of catching AIDS.’

Annie reached out and stroked his cheek. ‘Poor Alan,’ she said, snuggling closer. ‘Why don’t you just try to put it all out of your mind. Just put everything out of your mind, everything except the moment, me, the music, the here and now.’

Van was getting into the meandering, sensuous ‘Ballerina’ and Banks felt Annie’s lips, soft and moist, running over his chest, down his stomach, lingering, and he managed to do as she said when she reached her destination, but even as he gave himself up to the sensation of the moment, he still couldn’t quite get the thought of dead babies out of his mind.

•

Maggie checked the locks and the windows for the second time before going to bed that Saturday night, and only when she was satisfied that all was secure did she take a glass of warm milk upstairs with her. She had hardly got halfway up when the telephone rang. At first, she wasn’t going to answer it. Not at eleven o’clock on a Saturday night. It was probably a wrong number anyway. But curiosity got the better of her. She knew that the police had been forced to let Lucy go that morning, so it might be her, looking for help.

It wasn’t. It was Bill. Maggie’s heart started to beat fast, and she felt the room closing in on her.

‘You’re creating quite a stir over there, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Heroine and champion of battered wives everywhere. Or is that championess?’

Maggie felt herself shrinking, shrivelling, her heart squeezing into her throat. All her bravado, her
empowerment
, withered and died. She could hardly talk, hardly breathe. ‘What do you want?’ she whispered. ‘How did you find out?’

‘You underestimate your celebrity. You’re not only in the
Globe
and the
Post
, you’re in the
Sun
and the
Star
, too. Even a picture in the
Sun
, though it’s not a very good one, unless you’ve changed a hell of a lot. They’ve been giving quite a bit of coverage to the “Chameleon” case, as they call it, comparing it to Bernardo and Homolka, naturally, and you seem to be caught right up in the thick of it.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Want? Me? Nothing.’

‘How did you find me?’

‘After the newspaper stories, it wasn’t difficult. You had an old address book you forgot to take with you. Your friends were in it. Thirty-two, The Hill, Leeds. Am I right?’

‘What do you want with me?’

‘Nothing. Not at the moment, anyway. I just wanted to let you know that I know where you are, and I’m thinking of you. It must have been very interesting living across the street from a killer. What’s Karla like?’

‘It’s Lucy. Leave me alone.’

‘That’s not very nice. We were married once, remember.’

‘How could I forget?’

Bill laughed. ‘Anyway, mustn’t run up the firm’s phone bill too much. I’ve been working very hard lately, and even my boss thinks I need a holiday. Just thought I’d let you know I might be taking a trip over to England soon. I don’t know when. Might be next week, might be next month. But I think it’d be nice if we could get together for dinner or something, don’t you?’

‘You’re sick,’ Maggie said, and heard Bill chuckling as she hung up.

Banks had always
thought that Sunday morning was a good time to put a little pressure on an unsuspecting villain. Sunday afternoon was good, too, after the papers, the pub and the roast beef and Yorkshire pud have put him in a good mood and he’s stretched out in the armchair, newspaper over his head, enjoying a little snooze. But on Sunday morning, if they weren’t particularly religious, people were either relaxed and all set to enjoy a day off, or they were hungover. Either way made for a good chat.

Ian Scott was definitely hungover.

His oily black hair stood in spikes on top and lay flat at the sides, plastered to his skull where he had lain on the pillow. One side of his pasty face was etched with crease marks. His eyes were bloodshot and he wore only a grubby vest and underpants.

‘Can I come in, Ian?’ said Banks, pushing gently past him before he got an answer. ‘Won’t take long.’

The flat reeked of last night’s marijuana smoke and stale beer. Roaches still lay scattered in the ashtrays. Banks went over and opened the window as wide as it would go. ‘Shame on you, Ian,’ he said. ‘A lovely spring morning like this, you ought to be out walking down by the river or having a crack at Fremlington Edge.’

‘Bollocks,’ said Ian, scratching those very items as he spoke.

Sarah Francis stumbled in from the bedroom, holding her tousled hair back from her face and squinting through sleep-gummed eyes. She was wearing a white T-shirt with Donald Duck on the front, and nothing else. The T-shirt only came down to her hips.

‘Shit,’ she said, covering herself with her hands as best she could and dashing back into the bedroom.

‘Enjoy the free show?’ said Ian.

‘Not particularly.’ Banks tossed a heap of clothes from the chair nearest the window and sat down. Ian turned on the stereo, too loud, and Banks got up and turned it off. Ian sat down and sulked and Sarah came back in wearing a pair of jeans. ‘You could have bloody warned me,’ she grumbled to Ian.

‘Shut up, you silly cunt,’ he said.

Now Sarah sat down and sulked, too.

‘Okay,’ said Banks. ‘Are we all comfortable? Can I begin?’

‘I don’t know what you want with us again,’ said Ian. ‘We told you everything that happened.’

‘Well, it won’t do any harm to go over it again, will it?’

Ian groaned. ‘I don’t feel well. I feel sick.’

‘You should treat your body with more respect,’ said Banks. ‘It’s a temple.’

‘What do you want to know? Get it over with.’

‘First off, I’m puzzled by something.’

‘Well, you’re the Sherlock, I’m sure you can work it out.’

‘I’m puzzled by why you haven’t asked me about Leanne.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’d hardly be back here interrupting your Sunday morning, would I, if Leanne had turned up dead and buried in a serial killer’s garden?’

‘What are you saying? Speak English.’

Sarah had curled herself into a foetal position in the other armchair and was watching the exchange intently.

‘What I’m saying, Ian, is that you didn’t ask about Leanne. That concerns me. Don’t you care about her?’

‘She was a mate, that’s all. But it’s nothing to do with us. We don’t know what happened to her. Besides, I’d’ve got round to it eventually. My brain’s not working properly yet.’

‘Does it ever? Anyway, I’m beginning to think you do.’

‘Do what?’

‘Know something about what happened to Leanne.’

‘That’s rubbish.’

‘Is it, really? Let’s back up a bit. First off, we’re pretty certain now that Leanne Wray wasn’t one of the Chameleon’s victims, as we had first thought.’

‘Your mistake, isn’t it?’ said Ian. ‘Don’t come looking to us to bail you out.’

‘Now, if that’s not the case, then it stands to reason that something else happened to her.’

‘You don’t need to be a Sherlock to figure that one out.’

‘Which, discounting the possibility of
another
stranger killing her, leaves three possibilities.’

‘Oh, yeah? And what are those?’

Banks counted off on his fingers. ‘One, that she ran away from home. Two, that she did go home on time and her parents did something to her. And three, the main reason I’m here, that she didn’t, in fact, go home after you left the Old Ship. That the three of you stayed together and
you
did something to her.’

Ian Scott showed no expression but scorn as he listened, and Sarah started sucking on her thumb. ‘We told you what happened,’ Ian said. ‘We told you what we did.’

‘Yes,’ said Banks. ‘But the Riverboat was so busy the people we talked to were very vague about seeing you. They certainly weren’t sure about the time and weren’t even sure it was that Friday night.’

‘But you’ve got the CCTV. For fuck’s sake, what’s Big Brother watching for if you can’t believe what you see?’

‘Oh, we believe what we see all right,’ said Banks. ‘But all we see is you, Sarah here and Mick Blair entering the Bar None shortly after half past twelve.’