Aftermath (48 page)

Well, she thought, you’ve well and truly done it now, this time, haven’t you, Jenny?

•

There were no new developments at Millgarth, according to Ken Blackstone on the phone that morning. The SOCOs were getting to the point where there wasn’t much left of
the Payne house to take apart. Both gardens had been dug up to a depth of between six and ten feet and searched in a grid system. The concrete floors in the cellar and the garage had been ripped up
by pneumatic drills. Almost a thousand exhibits had been bagged and labelled. The entire contents of the house had been stripped and taken away. The walls had been punched open at regular
intervals. In addition to the crime scene specialists going over all the collected material, forensic mechanics had taken Payne’s car apart looking for traces of the abducted girls. Payne may
be dead, but a case still had to be answered and Lucy’s role still had to be determined.

The only snippet of information about Lucy Payne was that she had withdrawn £200 from a cashpoint machine on Tottenham Court Road. It figured she would go to London if she wanted to
disappear, Banks thought, remembering his search there for Chief Constable Riddle’s daughter, Emily. Perhaps he would have to go and search for Lucy, too, although this time he would have all
the resources of the Metropolitan Police at his disposal. Maybe it wouldn’t come to that; maybe Lucy wasn’t involved and would simply ease herself into a new identity and a new look in
a new place and try to rebuild her shattered life.
Maybe.

Banks looked again at the loose sheets of paper on his desk.

Katya Pavelic
.

Katya, Candy’s ‘Anna’, had been identified through dental records late the previous evening. Fortunately for Banks, she had suffered a toothache shortly before she disappeared
and Candy had directed Katya to her own dentist. Katya had disappeared, according to Candy, sometime last November. At least, she remembered, the weather was cool and misty and the Christmas lights
had recently been turned on in the city centre. That likely made Katya the victim before Kelly Matthews.

Certainly Candy, or Hayley Lyndon as she was called, had seen both Terence and Lucy Payne driving around the area on a number of occasions but she couldn’t connect them directly with
Katya. The circumstantial evidence was beginning to build up, though, and if Jenny’s psychological probing into the old Alderthorpe wounds turned up anything interesting, then it might be
time to reel Lucy in. For the moment, let her enjoy the illusion of freedom.

Katya Pavelic had come to England from Bosnia four years ago, when she was fourteen. Like so many young girls there she had been gang-raped by Serbian soldiers and then shot, saving herself only
by playing dead under a pile of corpses until some Canadian UN peace-keepers found her three days later. Her wound was superficial and the blood had clotted. Her only problem was an infection and
that had responded well to antibiotics. Various groups and individuals had seen that Katya got to England, but she was a disturbed and troublesome girl who soon ran away from her foster parents
when she was sixteen, and they had tried in vain to find her and contact her ever since.

The irony wasn’t lost on Banks. After having survived the horrors of the Bosnian war, Katya Pavelic had ended up raped, murdered and buried in the Paynes’s back garden. What was the
bloody point of it all? he asked. As usual, he got no answer from the Supreme Ironist in the Sky, only a deep hollow laughter echoing through his brain. Sometimes, the pity and the horror of it all
were almost too much for him to bear.

And there remained one more unidentified victim, the one who had been buried there the longest: a white woman in her late teens or early twenties, about five foot three inches tall, according to
the forensic anthropologist, who was still conducting tests on the bones. There was little doubt in Banks’s mind that she could easily be another prostitute victim and that might make the
corpse hard to identify.

Banks had had one brainstorm and pulled in Terence Payne’s teacher friend Geoff Brighouse to help him find the schoolteacher the two of them had taken up to their room at the convention.
Luckily, Banks turned out to be wrong and she was still teaching in Aberdeen. Though she expressed some anger about her experience, she had kept quiet mostly because she didn’t want to damage
her teaching career and had written that one off to experience. She had also been very embarrassed and angry with herself for being so drunk and foolish as to go to a hotel room with two strange
men after all the things she had read in the papers. She had almost fainted when Banks told her that the man who had coerced her into having anal sex was Terence Payne. She had only been on first
name terms with the two and hadn’t made the connection from the photo in the newspapers.

Banks opened his window onto another fine day in the market square, tourist buses pulling up already, disgorging their hordes onto the gleaming cobbles. A quick glance around the church’s
interior, a walk up to the castle, lunch at the Pied Piper – Banks felt depressed just thinking about what had happened there yesterday – then they’d pile back in the coach and be
off to Castle Bolton or Devraulx Abbey. How he wished he could go on a long holiday. Maybe never come back.

The gold hands against the blue face of the church clock stood at five past ten. Banks lit a cigarette and planned out the rest of his day, plans that included Mick Blair, Ian Scott and Sarah
Francis, not to mention the grieving parents, Christopher and Victoria Wray. Winsome had discovered nothing new from talking to the Wrays’ neighbours, none of whom had either seen or heard
anything unusual. Banks still had his suspicions about them, though he found it difficult to convince himself that they could actually have
killed
Leanne.

He had suffered yet another restless night, this time partly because of Annie. Now, the more he thought about her decision, the more sense it made. He didn’t want to give her up, but if he
were to be honest, it was best all round. Looking back at her on-again-off-again attitude towards their relationship, the way she bristled every time other aspects of his life came up, he realized
that however much there had been, the relationship had also been a lot of grief, too. If she didn’t like the way his past made her face details of her own, like the abortion, then perhaps she
was right to end it. Time to move on and stay ‘just friends’, let her pursue her career and let him try to exorcise his personal demons.

Just as he was finishing his cigarette, DC Winsome Jackman tapped at his door and walked in looking particularly elegant in a tailored pinstripe suit over a white blouse. The woman had clothes
sense, Banks thought, unlike himself and unlike Annie Cabbot. He liked Annie’s casual style – it was definitely
her
– but no one could accuse her of making a fashion
statement. Anyway, best forget about Annie. He turned towards Winsome.

‘Come in. Sit down.’

Winsome sat, crossing her long legs, sniffing accusingly and wrinkling her nose at the smoke.

‘I know, I know,’ Banks said. ‘I’m going to stop soon, honestly.’

‘That little job you asked me to do,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d like to know that your instinct was right. There was a car reported stolen from Disraeli Street between
nine-thirty and eleven o’clock on the night Leanne Wray disappeared.’

‘Was there, indeed? Isn’t Disraeli Street just around the corner from the Old Ship Inn?’

‘It is, sir.’

Banks sat down and rubbed his hands together. ‘Tell me more.’

‘Keeper’s name is Samuel Gardner. I’ve spoken to him on the phone. Seems he parked there while he popped into the Cock and Bull on Palmerston Avenue, just for a pint of shandy,
he stressed.’

‘Of course. Perish the thought we should try to do him for drink driving two months after the event. What do you think, Winsome?’

Winsome shifted and crossed her legs the other way, straightening the hem of her skirt over her knees. ‘I don’t know, sir. Seems a bit of a coincidence, doesn’t it?’

‘That Ian Scott’s in the neighbourhood?’

‘Yes, sir. I know there are plenty of kids taking and driving away, but . . . well, the timing fits and the location.’

‘Indeed it does. When did he report it missing?’

‘Ten past eleven that night.’

‘And when was it found?’

‘Not until the next morning, sir. One of the beat constables came across it illegally parked down by the formal gardens.’

‘That’s not very far from the Riverboat, is it?’

‘Ten minute walk, at the most.’

‘You know, this is starting to look good, Winsome. I want you to go and have a word with this Samuel Gardner, see if you can find out any more from him. Put him at ease. Make it clear we
don’t give a damn whether he drank a whole bottle of whisky as long as he tells us everything he can remember about that night. And have the car taken into the police garage for a full
forensic examination. I doubt we’ll find anything after all this time, but Scott and Blair aren’t likely to know that, are they?’

Winsome smiled wickedly. ‘Doubt it very much, sir.’

Banks looked at his watch. ‘When you’ve talked to Gardner and the car’s safe in our care, have Mick Blair brought in. I think a little chat with him in one of the interview
rooms might be very productive.’

‘Right you are.’

‘And have Sarah Francis brought in at the same time.’

‘Okay’

‘And, Winsome.’

‘Sir?’

‘Make sure they see one another in passing, would you?’

‘My pleasure, sir.’ Winsome smiled, stood up and left the office.

•

‘Look,’ said Jenny, ‘I haven’t had any lunch yet. Instead of standing around here in the street, is there anywhere near by we can go?’ Though her
immediate fears had dispersed somewhat when the young man simply asked her who she was and what she wanted, without showing any particular inclination towards aggression, she still wanted to be
with them in a public place, not up in the flat.

‘There’s a café down the road,’ he said. ‘We can go there if you want.’

‘Fine.’

Jenny followed them back to the arterial road, crossed at the zebra and went into a corner café that smelled of bacon. She was supposed to be slimming – she was
always
supposed to be slimming – but she couldn’t resist the smell and ordered a bacon butty and a mug of tea. The other two asked for the same and Jenny paid. Nobody objected. Poor students
never do. Now that they were closer, sitting at an isolated table near the window, Jenny could see that she was mistaken. While the girl definitely resembled Lucy, had her eyes and mouth and the
same shiny black hair, it
wasn’t
her. There was something softer, more fragile, more
human
about this young woman, and her eyes weren’t quite so black and impenetrable;
they were intelligent and sensitive, though their depths flickered with horrors and fears Jenny could barely imagine.

‘Laura, isn’t it?’ she said when they’d settled.

The young woman raised her eyebrows. ‘Why, yes. How did you know?’

‘It wasn’t difficult,’ Jenny said. ‘You resemble your sister and you’re with your cousin.’

Laura blushed. ‘I’m only visiting him. It’s not . . . I mean, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Jenny. ‘I don’t jump to conclusions.’ Well, not
many
, she said to herself.

‘Let’s get back to my original question,’ Keith Murray cut in. He was more hard-edged than Laura and not one for small talk. ‘That’s who are you and why
you’re here. You might as well tell me what you were doing at Alderthorpe, too, while you’re at it.’

Laura looked surprised. ‘She was in Alderthorpe?’

‘On Saturday. I followed her to Easington and then to Spurn Head. I turned back when she got to the M62.’ He looked at Jenny again. ‘Well?’

He was a good-looking young man, brown hair a little over his ears and collar, but professionally layered, slightly better dressed than most of the students she taught, in a light sports jacket
and grey chinos, highly polished shoes. Clean shaven. Clearly a young lad who took some pride in his rather conservative appearance. Laura, in contrast, wore a shapeless sort of shift that hung
around her in a haze of material and hid any claims she might have had to the kind of figure men like. There was a reticence and tentativeness about her that made Jenny want to reach out and tell
her everything was fine, not to worry, she didn’t bite. Keith also seemed very protective of her and Jenny wondered how their relationship had developed since Alderthorpe.

She told them who she was and what she was doing, about her forays into Lucy Payne’s past, looking for answers to her present, and both Laura and Keith listened intently. When she had
finished, they looked at one another, and she could tell they were communicating in some way that was beyond her. She couldn’t tell what they were saying, and she didn’t believe it was
some sort of telepathic trick, just that whatever they had been through all those years ago had created a bond so strong and deep that it went beyond words.

‘What makes you think you’ll find any answers there?’ Keith asked.

‘I’m a psychologist,’ Jenny said, ‘not a psychiatrist, certainly not a Freudian, but I do believe that our past shapes us, makes us what we are.’

‘And what
is
Linda, or Lucy, as she calls herself now?’

Jenny spread her hands. ‘That’s just it. I don’t know. I was hoping you might be able to help.’

‘Why should we help you?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Jenny. ‘Maybe there are some issues back then you still have to deal with yourselves.’

Keith laughed. ‘If we lived to be a hundred we’d still have issues to deal with from
back then
,’ he said. ‘But what’s that got to do with Linda?’

‘She was with you, wasn’t she? One of you.’

Keith and Laura looked at one another again and Jenny wished she knew what they were thinking. Finally, as if they had come to a decision, Laura said, ‘Yes, she was
with
us, but in
a way she was apart.’