Aftermath (52 page)

Indeed we have, thought Banks.

‘You just wanted to get into her knickers, then?’ said Winsome.

That seemed to shock Blair, coming from a woman, a beautiful woman at that, with a soft Jamaican accent.

‘No! I mean, I liked her, yes. But I wasn’t trying it on, honest. I wasn’t trying to force her or anything like that.’

‘What happened, Mick?’ Banks asked.

‘Ian said why don’t we take a car and do some E and smoke a couple of spliffs and maybe drive up to Darlington and go clubbing.’

‘What about Leanne’s curfew?’

‘She said fuck the curfew, it sounded like a great idea to her. Like I said, she was a bit wild that night. She’d had a couple of drinks. Not a lot, like, just a couple, but she didn’t usually drink and it was just enough to loosen her up a bit. She wanted to have some fun.’

‘And you thought you might get lucky?’

Again, Winsome’s interjection seemed to confuse Blair. ‘No. Yes. I mean, if she was willing. Okay, I fancied her. I thought, maybe . . . you know . . . she seemed different, more devil-may-care.’

‘And you thought the drugs would make her even more willing?’

‘No. I don’t know.’ He looked at Banks in annoyance. ‘Look, do you want me to go on with this or not?’

‘Go on.’ Banks gave Winsome the signal to keep out of it for the time being. He could imagine the scenario easily enough: Leanne a little drunk, giggly, flirting with Blair a bit, as Shannon the barmaid had said, then Ian Scott offering Ecstasy in the car, maybe Leanne unsure about it, but Blair encouraging her, egging her on, hoping all the time to get her into bed. But all that was something they could deal with later on, if necessary, when they had established the circumstances of Leanne’s disappearance.

‘Ian stole the car,’ Blair went on. ‘I don’t know anything about stealing cars, but he said he learned when he was a kid growing up on the East Side Estate.’

Banks knew all too well that stealing cars was one of the essential skills for kids growing up on the East Side Estate. ‘Where did you go?’

‘North. Like I said, we were going to Darlington. Ian knows the club scene up there. Soon as we set off Ian handed out the E and we all gobbled it up. Then Sarah rolled a spliff and we smoked that.’

Banks noticed that it was always someone else committing the illegal act, never Blair, but he filed that away for later. ‘Had Leanne taken Ecstasy or smoked marijuana before?’ he asked.

‘Not to my knowledge. She always seemed a bit strait-laced to me.’

‘But not that night?’

‘No.’

‘Okay. Go on. What happened?’

Mick looked down at the table and Banks could tell he was coming to the hard part. ‘We hadn’t got far out of Eastvale – maybe half an hour or so – when Leanne said she felt sick and she could feel her heart was beating way too fast. She was having trouble breathing. She used that inhaler thing she carried with her, but it didn’t do any good. Made her worse, if you ask me. Anyway, Ian thought she was just panicking or hallucinating or something, so first he opened the car windows. It didn’t do any good, though. Soon she was shaking and sweating. I mean, she was really scared. Me, too.’

‘What did you do?’

‘We were in the country by then, up on the moors above Lyndgarth, so Ian pulled off the road and stopped. We all got out and walked out on the moor. Ian thought the open spaces would be good for Leanne, a breath of fresh air, that maybe she was just getting claustrophobic in the car.’

‘Did it help?’

Mick turned pale. ‘No. Soon as we got out she was sick. I mean
really
sick. Then she collapsed. She couldn’t breathe and she seemed to be choking.’

‘Did you know she was asthmatic?’

‘Like I said, I saw her use the inhaler in the car when she first started feeling weird.’

‘And it didn’t enter your mind that Ecstasy might be dangerous for an asthma sufferer, or that it might cause a bad reaction with the inhalant?’

‘How could I know? I’m not a doctor.’

‘No. But you
do
take Ecstasy – I doubt this was your first time – and you must have been aware of some of the adverse publicity. The Leah Betts story, for example, the girl who died about five years ago? A few others since.’

‘I heard about them, yes, but I thought you just had to be careful about your body temperature when you were dancing. You know, like, drink plenty of water and be careful you don’t dehydrate.’

‘That’s only one of the dangers. Did you give her the inhaler again when she became worse out on the moor?’

‘We couldn’t find it. It must have been back in the car, in her bag. Besides, it had only made her worse.’

Banks remembered viewing the contents of Leanne’s shoulderbag, seeing the inhaler there among her personal items and doubting that she would have run away without it.

‘Didn’t it also cross your mind that she might have been choking on her own vomit?’ he went on.

‘I don’t know, I never really . . .’

‘What
did
you do?’

‘That’s just it. We didn’t know what to do. We just tried to give her some breathing space, some air, you know, but all of a sudden she sort of twitched, and after that she didn’t move at all.’

Banks let the silence stretch for a few moments, conscious only of their breathing and the soft electric hum of the tape machines.

‘Why didn’t you take her to the hospital?’ he asked.

‘It was too late! I told you. She was dead.’

‘You were certain of that?’

‘Yes. We checked her pulse, felt for a heartbeat, tried to see if she was breathing, but there was nothing. She was dead. It all happened so quickly. I mean, we were feeling the E, too, we were panicking a bit, not thinking clearly.’

Banks knew of at least three other recent Ecstasy-related deaths in the region, so Blair’s account didn’t surprise him too much. MDMA, short for methylenedioxy methamphetamine, was a popular drug with young people because it was cheap and kept you going all night at raves and clubs. It was believed to be safe, though Mick was right that you had to be careful about your water intake and body temperature, but it could also be particularly dangerous to people suffering from high blood pressure or asthma, like Leanne.

‘Why didn’t you take her to a hospital when you were all still in the car?’

‘Ian said she’d be okay if we just got out and walked around for a while. He said he’d seen that kind of reaction before.’

‘What did you do then, after you discovered she was dead?’

‘Ian said we couldn’t tell anyone what had happened, that we’d all go to jail.’

‘So what
did
you do?’

‘We carried her further out on the moor and buried her. I mean, there was a sort of sink hole, not very deep, by a bit of broken-down drystone wall, so we put her in there and we covered her up with stones and bracken. Nobody could find her unless they were
really
looking, and there weren’t any public footpaths near by. Even the animals couldn’t get to her. It was so desolate, the middle of nowhere.’

‘And then?’

‘Then we drove back to Eastvale. We were all badly shaken up, but Ian said we ought to be seen about the place, you know, acting natural, as if things were normal.’

‘And Leanne’s shoulder-bag?’

‘That was Ian’s idea. I mean, we’d all decided by then that we’d just say she left us outside the pub and set off home and that was the last we saw of her. I found her bag on the back seat of the car, and Ian said maybe if we dumped it in someone’s garden near the Old Ship, the police would think she’d been picked up by a pervert or something.’

And indeed we did, thought Banks. One simple, spur-of-the-moment action, added to two other missing girls whose bags had also been found close to the scenes of their disappearances, and the entire Chameleon task force had been created. But not in time to save Melissa Horrocks or Kimberley Myers. He felt sick and angry.

There was mile after mile of moorland up beyond Lyndgarth, Banks knew, none of it farmed. Blair was right about the isolation, too. Only the occasional rambler crossed it, and then usually by the well-marked paths. ‘Can you remember where you buried her?’ he asked.

‘I think so,’ said Blair. ‘I don’t know about the exact spot, but within a couple of hundred yards. You’ll know it when you see the old wall.’

Banks looked at Winsome. ‘Get a search party together, would you, DC Jackman, and have young Mick here go out with them. Let me know the minute you find anything. And have Ian Scott and Sarah Francis picked up.’

Winsome stood up.

‘That’ll do for now,’ Banks said.

‘What’ll happen to me?’ Blair asked.

‘I don’t know, Mick,’ said Banks. ‘I honestly don’t know.’

The interview
had gone well, Maggie thought, as she walked out onto Portland Place. Behind her, Broadcasting House looked like the stern of a huge ocean liner. Inside, it had been a maze. She hadn’t understood how anyone could find their way around, even if they had worked there for years. Thank the Lord the programme’s researcher had met her in the lobby, then guided her through security to the entrails of the building.

It started to rain lightly, so Maggie ducked into Starbuck’s. Sitting on a stool by the counter that stretched along the front window, sipping her latte and watching the people outside wrestle with their umbrellas, she reviewed her day. It was after three o’clock in the afternoon and the rush-hour seemed to have begun already. If it ever ended in London. The interview she had just given had focused almost entirely on the generalities of domestic abuse, things to watch out for, patterns to avoid falling into, rather than her own personal story, or that of her co-interviewee, an abused wife who had gone on to become a psychological counsellor. They had exchanged addresses and phone numbers and agreed to get in touch, then the woman had had to dash off to give another interview.

Lunch with Sally, the art director, had gone well, too. They had eaten at a rather expensive Italian restaurant near Victoria Station, and Sally had looked over the sketches, making helpful suggestions here and there. Mostly, though, they had talked about recent events in Leeds, and Sally had shown only the natural curiosity that anyone who happened to live across the street from a serial killer might expect. Maggie had been evasive when questioned about Lucy.

Lucy
. The poor woman. Maggie felt guilty for leaving her alone in that big house on The Hill, right opposite where the nightmare of her own life had recently come to a head. Lucy had said she would be okay, but was she just trying to put a brave face on things?

Maggie hadn’t been able to get tickets for the play she wanted to see. It was so popular it was sold out, even on a Wednesday. She thought she might book into the hotel anyway and go to the cinema instead, but the more she thought about it, and the more she looked out at the hordes of passing strangers, the more she thought she ought to be there for Lucy.

What she would do, she decided, was wait till the rain stopped – it only looked like a mild shower, and she could already see some blue clouds in the sky over the Langham Hilton across the road – do some shopping on Oxford Street and then head home in the early evening and surprise Lucy.

Maggie felt much better when she had decided to go home. After all, what was the point in going to the cinema by herself when Lucy needed someone to talk to, someone to help take her mind off her problems and help her decide what to do with her future?

When the rain had stopped completely, Maggie drained her latte and set out. She would buy Lucy a present, too, nothing expensive or ostentatious, but perhaps a bracelet or a necklace, something to mark her freedom. After all, as Lucy had said, the police had taken all her things and she didn’t want them back now; she was about to start a new life.

•

It was late in the afternoon when Banks got the call to drive out to Wheaton Moor, north of Lyndgarth, and he took Winsome with him. She had done enough work on the Leanne Wray case to be there at the end. Most of the daffodils were gone, but white and pink blossoms covered the trees, and the hedgerows glowed with the burnished gold stars of celandines. Gorse flowered bright yellow all over the moors.

He parked as close as he could to the cluster of figures, but they still had almost a quarter of a mile to walk over the springy gorse and heather. Blair and the others had certainly carried Leanne a long way from civilization. Though the sun was shining and there were only a few high clouds, the wind was cold. Banks was glad of his sports jacket. Winsome was wearing calf-high leather boots and a herringbone jacket over her black poloneck sweater. She strode with grace and confidence, whereas Banks caught his ankle and stumbled every now and then in the thick gorse. Time to get out and exercise more, he told himself. And time to stop smoking.

They reached the team that Winsome had dispatched about three hours ago. Mick Blair was handcuffed to one of the uniformed officers, greasy hair blowing in the wind.

Another officer pointed down the shallow sink hole, and Banks saw part of a hand, most of the flesh eaten away, the white bone showing. ‘We tried to disturb the scene as little as possible, sir,’ the officer went on. ‘I sent for the SOCOs and the rest of the team. They said they’d get here ASAP.’

Banks thanked him. He glanced back towards the road and saw a car and a van pull up, figures get out and make their way across the rough moorland, some of them in white coveralls. The SOCOs had soon roped off an area of several yards around the mound of stones and Peter Darby, the local crime scene photographer got to work. Now all they needed was Dr Burns, the police surgeon. Dr Glendenning, the Home Office pathologist, would most likely conduct the PM, but he was too old and important to go scrambling across the moors any more. Dr Burns was skilled, Banks knew, and he already had plenty of experience of on-scene examinations.

It was another ten minutes before Dr Burns arrived. By then Peter Darby had finished photographing the scene intact and it was time to uncover the remains. This the SOCOs did slowly and carefully, so as not to disturb any evidence. Mick Blair had said that Leanne died after taking Ecstasy, but he could be lying; he could have tried to rape her and choked her when she didn’t comply. Either way, they couldn’t go around jumping to conclusions about Leanne. Not this time.