Peter Robinson - Playing With Fire

“Like Frances?”

“Yes.”

“So you saw history repeating itself?”

“I suppose so.”

“Did you ask your daughter or her husband why Christine left home at sixteen?” Banks persisted.

Julia put her hands to her ears. “Please stop! Make him stop, Maurice.”

“It’s all right, Mrs. Redfern,” said Banks. “I’m not here to badger you. I’ll slow down. Let’s all just take a minute and relax. Take a deep breath.” He finished his tea. It was lukewarm.

“As you can see, Mr. Banks,” Maurice said, “this is all very upsetting, and I can’t see what any of it has to do with Christine’s unfortunate death. Perhaps you’d better leave.”

“Murder’s an upsetting business, Dr. Redfern, and I haven’t finished yet.”

“But my wife…”

“Your wife is emotional, I can see that. What I’d really like to know is why.”

“I’d have thought that was quite obvious.”

“Not to me it isn’t.”

“You coming here and-”

“I don’t believe that’s the reason, and I don’t think you do, either.”

“What are you getting at, man?”

Banks took a deep breath. Here goes, he thought. “There have been serious allegations that Patrick Aspern had been sexually abusing his stepdaughter, probably since puberty.”

Maurice Redfern shot to his feet. “Are you insane? Patrick? What allegations? Who made them?”

“Christine told her boyfriend, Mark Siddons, that that was partly why she started using drugs, drugs she got from her stepfather’s surgery, to escape the shame and the pain. He also suggested that Patrick Aspern later let her have the drugs in return for her silence, and perhaps for her sexual favors.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Maurice, sinking back into his chair, pale. “Not Patrick. I won’t believe it.”

“So that’s what she meant,” Julia Redfern said, in a voice hardly louder than a whisper.

“What?” said Banks. “What did she say?”

“Just that I was better off not knowing, that’s all. And that I wouldn’t believe her, never in a million years, she said, even if she told me. And that look on her face.” She turned to her husband, tears welling up in her eyes again. “Oh, my God, Maurice, what have we done?”

“Get a grip on yourself, Julia,” said Maurice. “It’s all lies. Lies made up by some drug-addled boy. We’ve done nothing to be ashamed of. Our daughter married a good man, and now someone’s trying to blacken his character. That’s all. We’ll deal with this through our solicitor.” He stood up. “I’d prefer it if you left now, Mr. Banks. Unless you’re going to arrest us or something, we don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

Banks had nothing more to ask, anyway. He already had his answers. He nodded, got up and left, the apple pie still untouched on its plate.

It was well after dark when Mark got off the number one bus outside the Lawnswood Arms, just past the Leeds Crematorium. His journey had taken so long because there weren’t that many buses from Eastvale to Leeds, and he had to change in Harrogate. Then he had to buy a street map at W.H. Smith’s to find out how to get to Adel. He had never visited Tina’s parents before – never had any reason to – but the address was on the inside cover of some of the books she had kept with her in the squat and on the boat, and he remembered it. He also knew the security code you had to punch in to stop the burglar alarm from going off. Tina had made him memorize it. A month or so ago, Danny Boy had suffered a brief disruption in distribution, and to keep Tina sane, Mark had pretended to go along with a half-baked scheme to break into her father’s surgery and steal some morphine. Luckily, Danny Boy had come through before things really got out of hand.

There was nothing but fields across the main road, and beyond them, down the hill, Mark could see the clustered lights of Adel village. Still unsure of exactly what he was going to say or do, Mark was drawn by the lights of the Lawnswood Arms and went inside. He hadn’t eaten any lunch, so he was hungry, for one thing, and maybe a few drinks would give him some Dutch courage.

The Lawnswood Arms seemed more of a family pub than a local watering hole, though at eight o’clock that evening there were hardly any families in evidence. Mark went to the bar and ordered a pint of Tetley’s cask and looked at the menu. Steak and chips would do just fine, he decided. The first pint went down so fast the barman gave him a dirty look when he ordered a second. He’d seen that look before: “I’ve got my eye on you, mate. I know trouble when I see it.” Well, maybe he was going to be trouble, but not for the bartender.

He got two pints down before his food was ready and ordered a third to wash down the steak. He wasn’t showing any signs of drunkenness, so they had no reason to refuse to serve him, and they didn’t. He just sat quietly in his corner, smoking and thinking. If they knew his thoughts, then maybe they’d call the police, but they didn’t. The more he drank, the darker his thoughts became. Surges of emotion, sometimes anger, shot with red, black and gray.

He’d been wandering aimlessly, he realized now, with nowhere to go and nobody to talk to, nobody to share his grief with, nobody to hold him when he cried. But he never had had anyone. He had always been alone. Just him and his imagination, and his wits. The only difference was that he was even more adrift than ever now that Tina, his anchor, his burden, his reason for being, was gone.

He thought about Crazy Nick lying bleeding on the floor; he thought about his mother, how she’d never wanted him because he got in the way of her good times, though when he heard she was dead he had felt oddly alone in the world. But most of all he thought about Tina. He had never seen her body, he realized, so her parents must have identified her. The thought of Aspern gloating over her, touching her, made his flesh crawl. His last memory of her, the one he would carry forever, was the frail figure huddled in the sleeping bag, needle barely out of her arm, giving a little sigh of pleasure, and Beth Orton playing quietly on the CD. Not “Stolen Car” but a more recent one, a song about being on a train in Paris, as he snuffed out the candle and left her to sneak off to the welcoming arms of Mandy. If only he’d stayed with her, the way he’d promised, the way he had always done before…

“You all right?”

The voice sounded far away, and when he looked up, Mark noticed it was one of the bar staff collecting glasses, a young girl, perhaps not much older than Tina, though he knew she had to be over eighteen to work in a pub. She had a short spiky haircut and a gold stud through her lower lip, just like Tina, and in a way she reminded him of her, the way she could be when she held the darkness at bay.

“Yeah,” he said. “Fine. Just thinking.”

She stared at him, an assessing look in her eye. “Not good thoughts, by the looks of you.”

“You could say that.”

She lowered her voice. “Only, old misery-guts over there has been giving you the evil eye all night. One wrong move and you’re cut off. You weren’t thinking of making any wrong moves, were you?”

“No,” said Mark. “Not here, at any rate.”

“Well, that’s all right, then.” She smiled. “I’ve not seen you here before.”

“That’s because I’ve never been here before.”

“Not from around these parts?”

“No.”

“Cathy!”

The new voice came from the bar. “Oops,” she said, grimacing. “Got to go. Old misery’s calling. Remember, tread carefully.”

“I will,” said Mark.

The brief conversation had brought him back to a world of normality, at least for a few moments, and he wondered if his life could ever be good again. The girl might not have been trying to pick him up, but she was definitely flirting with him, and he could tell she fancied him. If his world were normal he’d have pursued the matter and maybe gone home with her, if she had her own flat. She probably did, he thought. Looked like a student, and the university wasn’t far down the road. The bus had passed it on the way out of town. But after what happened to Tina, and him being with Mandy at the time, somehow made it so he just couldn’t contemplate anything like that, even though this girl Cathy reminded him of Tina.