Peter Robinson: The Price of Love and Other Stories

“How deep did it go?”

“A lot deeper than people had originally thought. He had serious gambling debts at the time of the Soho killings, and it turns out Micallef had bought some of them. We know Micallef himself had an alibi for Jackie Simmons, and so, it turns out, did Benny Fraser, his chief enforcer. The alibis could have been manufactured, of course, and there were others who could have done it, including the Chinese, but the young lad, a fresh pair of eyes and all, decided to have a closer look at Roly. The thinking was that he’d done it at Micallef’s request to get out of his debts and, from Micallef’s point of view, it put Roly in his power ever after, tied them together. They were already close enough, and this was the clincher. Of all the people involved, it turns out that Roly Verity didn’t have much of an alibi. He’d been at the celebration party with us, on and off, but remember he didn’t come on with us to the club, that was just you, me and... what was his name?”

“Burgess,” said Banks. “Dirty Dick Burgess.”

“Ah, yes. Burgess. How could I forget? I wonder what happened to him.”

“Counterterrorism,” said Banks. “Very hush-hush.”

“I’d never have thought it,” said Albright. “Anyway, once our bright spark found out that Verity could have done it, he started going over the forensics. And that brought us to the DNA. You remember the lab got skin samples from under Jackie Simmons’s fingernails? Anyway, she’d scratched her killer as he strangled her.”

“Will the DNA sample the Spanish took from Verity stand up?”

“The CPS says it will. All aboveboard, agreed to, witnessed, signed for, the lot. Between you and me, he didn’t have much choice. He didn’t know why they were doing it, but he thought his future on the Costa del Sol depended on it.”

“Well, in a way it did, didn’t it?” said Banks. “Well done. Good work, Ozzy.”

“As I said, it wasn’t me. The only fear is that he might not survive the journey. According to the Spanish authorities, his heart’s just about conked out.”

“Roly’s heart conked out years ago,” said Banks. “Anyway, Ozzy, you’re the bearer of good tidings. Thank you. We must get together sometime when I’m down your way.”

“Indeed,” said Albright. “I don’t drink now, so it’ll have to be Starbucks, I’m afraid. Oh, before I forget, I bumped into someone who said to say hello to you. Part of the cold case team, as it turns out.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. A DCI called Linda. Linda Jameson. Says she used to know you.”

Jesus Christ. Linda. Banks felt a jolt through his chest. He tried to keep the emotion he felt out of his voice. “Yes, I believe I knew her once,” he said. “Done well for herself, then?”

“Very. She’s head of the cold case Psychological Profiling Unit. One of the few actual cops doing the job. Went to university part-time and everything. Got all the degrees.”

“Good for her,” said Banks. “I always thought she was a bright lass.”

“Course, back then we laughed at all that stuff.”

“Not you, Ozzy,” said Banks. “You had more foresight than the lot of us put together. Look, I’d better go now. Thanks for the good news. Hope to see you soon.”

Albright said his farewells and Banks put down the phone. Linda. Well, he had once told her that she ought to be a psychologist or something, and now she’d gone and done it. Had he treated her badly? He didn’t think so. He remembered their last meeting at her Waterloo flat, his home away from home. She shed a few tears, they had a bit too much to drink, a long good-bye kiss, too long, really... It was all so many years ago, and they had never been in touch since. For a moment, he thought he could smell chamomile tea and hear the rustling of a silk kimono.

A coach pulled into the market square and disgorged its cargo of tourists. Banks remembered that he had been thinking about getting away for a while, just for a break, somewhere different. He reached for his phone to ring his travel agent and find out what was on offer, but before he could dial he heard a tap at his door.

“Yes?” he called.

The door opened and Annie Cabbot stepped in, looking good with her new short layered haircut, a few highlights here and there, tight jeans and a simple mauve top. She frowned at him. “Something wrong?”

“No,” he said. “Nothing. Just an old case. Brings back memories. What is it?”

“Stabbing on the East Side Estate. Are you interested, or do you want me to take Winsome?”

Banks looked out at the clear blue sky through his window, then back at Annie. He smiled. “I’ll come with you,” he said. “Memory Lane gets a bit stuffy sometimes. I could do with a breath of fresh air.”

“Going Back.”This novella has never been published before in the U.S. It appeared first in the Canadian and U.K. expanded editions of Not Safe After Dark and Other Stories. I wrote it early in 1999, so it falls between In a Dry Season and Cold Is the Grave in the Banks chronology. At that point, I didn’t know that I was going to send Banks back home to deal with his old school friend’s disappearance in Close to Home (2003), and I wanted to show him interacting with his family and responding to the place where he grew up. In manuscript, it reached 106 pages, too long for any of the magazines or anthologies that regularly published my stories, and too short for separate book publication. And so it sat there gathering dust until I came to write Close to Home, when I incorporated parts of the novella into the novel — mostly details about the street where Banks grew up, his relationship with his parents, the music he listened to and the books he read in 1965. When the story was first published, I made some revisions to shift it chronologically. Now it sits somewhere between Close to Home and Playing with Fire. I also tried to avoid too much repetition of details I had cannibalized for the novel without spoiling the original conception. I haven’t touched it since.

“Cornelius Jubb.”This grew out of researching and writing about the Second World War in In a Dry Season. When Karin Slaughter came up with the idea of a series of stories linked through time by a charm bracelet, she asked me to set mine in this period, and it became the second story in Like a Charm. It’s really about the title character and racial injustice. By naming him Cornelius Jubb and making him a black American GI stationed in Yorkshire in the Second World War, I was able to stress both the differences and the similarities between him and the locals. He might seem strange and exotic, but he has a Yorkshire name. Naturally this perplexes the local people. I had also written a couple of stories featuring Frank Bascombe, as “Special Constable” in the war, and this was intended as a third, though I couldn’t use his name in the anthology for copyright reasons.

“The Magic of Your Touch.”For some reason this is one of my favorites, though I have always felt a little guilty that it was probably not quite as long as editor Robert J. Randisi had hoped for. It would be hard to see how it could be longer. This is an example of a story that really had no genesis other than the desire to sit down and write something to do with music, as the anthology was called Murder and All That Jazz. I had no idea where it was going. Obviously the variation on the Faustian “deal with the devil” (Robert Johnson at the crossroads!) was in my mind, as was the nature of obsession, and the corrosive nature of guilt, as in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” But I didn’t know any of that at the time I started writing. All I knew was that a man was wandering lost in an urban landscape that resembled something out of David Lynch’s Eraserhead. What he would do, what would become of him, I had no idea until several hours later when the story was finished. Another thing I like about it is that it contains elements of horror and the supernatural that do not usually appear in my work. I have always thought that if I didn’t write crime I would write horror, so I was pleased to be able to include at least a little touch of it here.