Peter Robinson - Aftermath

Jenny had also not been able until now to take into account any crime scene information because there hadn’t been a crime scene available. There could be plenty of reasons why no bodies turned up, Jenny had said. They could have been dumped in remote locations and not discovered yet, buried in the woods, dumped in the sea or in a lake. As the number of disappearances increased, though, and as time went on and still no bodies were found, Jenny found herself moving toward the theory that their man was a collector, someone who plucks and savors his victims and perhaps then disposes of them the way a butterfly collector might gas and pin his trophies.

Now she had seen the anteroom, where the killer had buried, or partially buried, the bodies, and she didn’t think that had been done by chance or done badly. She didn’t think that the toes of one victim were sticking through the earth because Terence Payne was a sloppy worker; they were like that because he wanted them that way, it was part of his fantasy, because he got off on it , as they said back in America. They were part of his collection, his trophy room. Or his garden .

Now Jenny would have to rework her profile, factoring in all the new evidence that would be pouring out of number 35 The Hill over the next few weeks. She would also have to find out all she could about Terence Payne.

And there was another thing. Now Jenny also had to consider Lucy Payne.

Had Lucy known what her husband was doing?

It was possible, at least, that she had her suspicions.

Why didn’t she come forward?

Because of some misguided sense of loyalty, perhaps – this was her husband , after all – or fear. If he had hit her with a vase last night, he could have hit her at other times, too, warned her of the fate that awaited her if she told anyone the truth. It would have been a living hell for Lucy, of course, but Jenny could believe her doing that. Plenty of women lived their whole lives in such hells.

But was Lucy more involved?

Again, possible. Jenny had suggested, tentatively, that the method of abduction indicated the killer might have had a helper, someone to lure the girl into the car, or distract her while he came up from behind. A woman would have been perfect for that role, would have made the actual abduction easier. Young girls wary of men are far more likely to lean in the window and help when a woman pulls over at the curb.

Were women capable of such evil?

Definitely. And if they were ever caught, the outrage against them was far greater than against any male. You only had to look at the public’s reactions to Myra Hindley, Rosemary West and Karla Homolka to see that.

So was Lucy Payne a killer?

Banks felt bone-weary when he pulled up in the narrow lane outside his Gratly cottage close to midnight that night. He knew he should have probably taken a hotel room in Leeds, as he had done before, or accepted Ken Blackstone’s offer of the sofa, but he had very much wanted to go home tonight, even if Annie had refused to come over, and he didn’t mind the drive too much. It helped relax him.

There were two messages waiting for him on the machine. The first was from Tracy, saying she’d heard the news and hoped he was all right, and the second was from Leanne Wray’s father, Christopher, who had seen the press conference and the evening news and wanted to know if the police had found his daughter’s body at the Payne house.

Banks didn’t answer either of them. For one thing, it was too late, and for another, he didn’t want to talk to anybody. He could deal with them all in the morning. Now that he was home, he was even glad that Annie wasn’t coming. The idea of company tonight, even Annie’s, didn’t appeal, and after all he’d seen and thought about today, the idea of sex held about as much interest as a trip to the dentist’s.

Instead, he poured himself a generous tumbler of Laphroaig and tried to find some suitable music. He needed to listen to something, but he didn’t know what. Usually he had no trouble finding what he wanted in his large collection, but tonight he rejected just about every CD he picked out. He knew he didn’t want to listen to jazz or rock or anything too wild and primitive like that. Wagner and Mahler were out, as were all the Romantics: Beethoven, Schubert, Rachmaninoff and the rest. The entire twentieth century was out, too. In the end, he went for Rostropovich’s rendition of Bach’s cello suites.

Outside the cottage, the low stone wall between the dirt lane and the beck bulged out and formed a little parapet over Gratly Falls, which was just a series of terraces, none more than a few feet in height, running diagonally through the village and under the little stone bridge that formed its central gathering place. Since he had moved into the cottage the previous summer, Banks had got into the habit of standing out there last thing at night if the weather was good enough, or even sitting on the wall, dangling his legs over the beck and enjoying his nightcap and a cigarette before bed.

The night air was still and smelled of hay and warm grass. The Dale below him was sleeping. One or two farmhouse lights shone on the far valley side, but apart from the sounds of sheep in the field across the beck and night animals from the woods, all was quiet. He could just make out the shapes of distant fell sides in the dark, humpbacked or jagged against the night sky. He thought he heard a curlew’s eerie trill from high up on the moors. The new moon gave sparse light, but there were more stars than he had seen in a long time. As he watched, a star fell through the darkness, leaving a thin milky trail.

Banks didn’t make a wish.

He felt depressed. The elation he had expected to feel on finding the killer somehow eluded him. He had no sense of an ending, of an evil purged. In some odd way, he felt, the evil was just beginning. He tried to shake off his sense of apprehension.

He heard a meow beside him and looked down. It was the skinny marmalade cat from the woods. Starting that spring, it had come over on several occasions when Banks was outside alone late at night. The second time it appeared, he had brought it some milk, which it lapped up before disappearing back into the trees. He had never seen it anywhere else, or at any other time than night. Once, he had even bought some cat food, to be more prepared for its visit, but the cat hadn’t touched it. All it would do was meow, drink the milk, strut around for a few minutes and go back where it came from. Banks fetched a saucer of milk and set it down, refilling his own glass at the same time. The cat’s eyes shone amber in the darkness as it looked up at him before bending to drink.

Banks lit his cigarette and leaned against the wall, resting his glass on its rough stone surface. He tried to purge his mind of the day’s terrible images. The cat rubbed against his leg and ran off back into the woods. Rostropovich played on, and Bach’s precise, mathematical patterns of sound formed an odd counterpoint to the wild roaring music of Gratly Falls, so recently swelled by the spring thaw, and for a few moments, at least, Banks succeeded in losing himself.

According to her parents, Melissa Horrocks, aged seventeen, who failed to return home after a pop concert in Harrogate on the eighteenth of April, was going through a rebellious phase.

Steven and Mary Horrocks had only the one daughter, a late blessing in Mary’s mid-thirties. Steven worked in the office of a local dairy, while Mary had a part-time job in an estate agent’s office in the city center. Around the age of sixteen, Melissa developed an interest in the kind of theatrical pop music that used Satanism as its main stage prop.