Peter Robinson: Past Reason Hated

Banks passed the police station with hardly a glance. Sometimes, the formality of the job and its cold, calculated procedures just didn’t reflect what really happened, the pain people felt, the pain Banks felt. Perhaps the rites and rituals of the job – the forms to be filled in, the legal procedures to be followed – were intended to keep the pain at a distance. If so, they didn’t always succeed.

About twenty yards beyond the station, on Market Street, he stopped and turned. That damn blue light was still shining above the door like a beacon proclaiming benign, paternal innocence and simplicity. Almost without thinking, he took the catapult from his pocket, scraped up a couple of fair-sized stones from the icy gutter, put one in the sling and took aim. The stone clattered on the pavement somewhere along North Market Street. He took a deep breath, sighed out a plume of air, then aimed again carefully, trying to recreate his childhood accuracy. This time the lamp disintegrated in a burst of powder-blue glass and Banks took off down a side street, the back way home, feeling afraid and guilty and oddly elated, like a naughty schoolboy.

Peter Robinsongrew up in Yorkshire, and now lives in Canada.

His Inspector Banks series has won numerous awards in Britain, Europe, the United States and Canada. There are now fifteen novels published by Pan Macmillan in the series, of which Past Reason Hated is the fifth. Aftermath, the twelfth, was a Sunday Times bestseller.