Peter Robinson: Strange Affair

He walked into the kitchen, which looked as if it had never been used for anything but making tea and toast. The whole downstairs – sitting room, passage and kitchen – was painted in shades of blue and gray. The paint smelled fresh. A couple of framed photographs in high-contrast black-and-white hung in the passage. One was a female nude curled on a bed, the other a hill of brick-terraced houses leading down to a factory, its chimneys smoking, cobbles and slate roofs gleaming after rain. Banks was surprised. He hadn’t known that Roy was interested in photography, or in art of any kind. But then there was so much he didn’t know about his estranged brother.

In the kitchen stood a small rustic wooden table with two matching chairs, surrounded by the usual array of countertops, toaster, storage cupboards, fridge, oven and microwave. The table was clear, apart from an opened bottle of Amarone with the cork stuck back in, and, half hidden behind the bottle, a mobile phone. Banks picked up the phone. It was off, so he turned it on. It was an expensive model, the kind that sends and receives digital images, and there was plenty of battery power left. He tried the voice mail and text functions, but the only messages were the ones he had left. Was Roy the kind of person who would forget to take his mobile with him when he went out under normal circumstances, especially as he had given Banks the number? Banks doubted it the same way he doubted that Roy would deliberately leave his front door unlocked or forget to turn on his burglar alarm unless he was really rattled by something.

A wine rack stood on one of the counters, and even Banks could tell that the wines there were very high-end clarets, chiantis and burgundies. Above the rack hung a ring of keys on a hook. One of them looked like a car key. Banks put them in his pocket. He checked the fridge. It was empty except for some margarine, a carton of milk and a piece of moldy cheddar. That confirmed it. Roy was no gourmet cook. He could afford to eat out, and there were plenty of good restaurants on Old Brompton Road. The back door was locked, and the window looked out on a small backyard and an alley beyond.

Before going upstairs, Banks went back to the garage to see if the car key on the ring fit the Porsche. As he had suspected, it did. Banks opened the driver’s door and got in.

He had never sat in such a car before, and the luxurious leather upholstery embraced him like a lover. He felt like putting the key in the ignition and driving off somewhere, anywhere. But that wasn’t why he was here. The car’s interior smelled clean and fresh, with that expensive hint of leather. From what Banks could see, there were no empty crisp packets or pop cans on the backseat or cellophane wrappers on the floor. Nor was there one of those fancy GPS gadgets that would tell Banks what Roy’s last destination had been. In the side pocket was a small AA road atlas open to the page with “Reading” in the bottom right and “Stratford-upon-Avon” at the top left. There was nothing else except the car’s manual and a few CDs, mostly classical. Banks got out and checked the boot. It was empty.

Next, Banks ventured upstairs, a much larger living space than downstairs because it extended over the garage. At the top of the stairs, he found himself on a small landing with five doors leading off. The first led to the toilet, the second to a modern bathroom, complete with Power Shower and whirlpool bath. There were the usual shaving and dental-care implements, aspirin and antacid, and rather more varieties of shampoo, conditioner and body lotions than Banks imagined Roy would need. He also wouldn’t need the pink plastic disposable razor that sat next to the gel for sensitive skin, not unless he shaved his legs.

At the back was a bedroom, simple and bright, with flower-patterned wallpaper: double bed, duvet, dressing table, drawers and a small wardrobe full of clothes and shoes, everything immaculate. Roy’s clothing ran the gamut from expensive casual to expensive business, Banks noticed, looking at the labels – Armani, Hugo Boss, Paul Smith – and there were also a few items of women’s clothing, including a summer dress, a black evening gown, Levi’s, an assortment of short-sleeve tops and several pairs of shoes and sandals.

The drawers revealed a few items of jewelry, condoms, tampons and a mix of men’s and women’s underwear. Banks didn’t know whether Roy was into cross-dressing, but he assumed the female items belonged to his girlfriend of the moment. And as there was nowhere near enough women’s paraphernalia to indicate that a woman actually lived there, she probably just kept a few clothes, along with the items in the bathroom, for when she stayed over.

Banks remembered the young girl who had been with Roy the last time they met. She had looked about twenty, shy, with short, shaggy black hair streaked with blond, a pale, pretty face and beautiful eyes the color and gleam of chestnuts in October. She also had a silver stud just below her lower lip. She had been wearing jeans and a short woolly jumper, exposing a couple of inches of bare, flat midriff and a navel with a ring in it. They were engaged, Banks remembered. Her name was Colleen or Connie, something like that. She might know where Roy had gone. Banks could probably trace her from Roy’s mobile’s phone book. Of course, there was no guarantee that she was still Roy’s fiancée, or that the clothes and toiletry items were hers.

Next to the bedroom, and quite a bit larger, was what appeared to be Roy’s office, furnished with filing cabinets, a computer monitor, fax machine, printer and photocopier. Again, everything was shipshape, no untidy piles of paper or yellow Post-it notes stuck on every surface, as in Banks’s office. The desk surface was clear apart from an unused writing tablet and an empty glass of red wine, the dregs hardening to crystal. On a bookcase just above the desk were the standard reference books – atlas, dictionary, Dunn and Bradstreet, Who’s Who.

Roy certainly kept his life in order, and Banks remembered that he had been a tidy child, too. After playing, he had always put his toys carefully away in their box and locked it. His room, even when he was a teenager, was a model of cleanliness and tidiness. He could have been in the army. Banks’s room, on the other hand, had been the same sort of mess he’d seen in most teens’ bedrooms on missing persons cases. He’d known where everything was – his books were in alphabetical order, for example – but he had never fussed much about making his bed or tidying the pile of discarded clothes left on the floor. Another reason his mother had always favored Roy.

Banks wondered if Roy’s computer would tell him anything. The flat-panel monitor stood on the desk, but Banks was damned if he could find the computer itself. It wasn’t on or under the desk, or on the shelf behind. There were a keyboard and a mouse, but keyboard, mouse and monitor were no use without the computer. Even a novice like Banks knew that.

Given Roy’s interest in electronic gadgets Banks would have expected a laptop, too, but he could find no signs of one. Nor a handheld. He remembered Roy showing off a flashy new Palm – one of those gadgets that do everything but fry your eggs in the morning – at the party last year.

Needless to say, there was nothing so remotely useful as a Filofax. Roy would keep all that information on his computer and his Palm, and it seemed that they were both gone. Still, Banks had the mobile, and that ought to prove a fruitful source of contact numbers.

There was a Nikon Coolpix 43000 digital camera in one of the pigeonholes behind the computer desk. Banks knew a little about digital cameras, though his cheap Canon was well below Roy’s range. He managed to switch it on and figured out how to look at the images on the LCD screen, but there was no memory card in it, no images to see. He searched around the adjoining pigeonholes for some sort of image-storage device but found nothing. That was another puzzle, he realized. All the things you expect to find around a computer – zip drive, tape backups or CDs – were all conspicuous in their absence. There was nothing left but the monitor, mouse and keyboard and an empty digital camera.