Peter Robinson - Aftermath

Though friends advised Steven and Mary that it was harmless enough – just youthful spirits – and that it would soon pass, they were nonetheless alarmed when she started altering her appearance and letting her schoolwork and athletics slip. Melissa first dyed her hair red, got a stud in her nose and wore a lot of black. Her bedroom wall was adorned with posters of skinny, satanic-looking pop stars, such as Marilyn Manson, and occult symbols her parents didn’t understand.

About a week before the concert, Melissa decided she didn’t like the red hair, so she reverted to her natural blond coloring. There was a good chance, Banks thought later, that if she’d kept it red, that might have saved her life. Which also led Banks to think that she hadn’t been stalked before her abduction – or at least not for long. The Chameleon wouldn’t stalk a redhead.

Harrogate, a prosperous Victorian-style North Yorkshire city of about seventy thousand, known as a conference center and a magnet for retired people, wasn’t exactly the typical venue for a Beelzebub’s Bollocks concert, but the band was new and had yet to win a major recording contract; they were working their way up to bigger gigs. There had been the usual calls for a ban from retired colonels and the kind of old busybodies who watch all the filth on television so they can write letters of protest, but in the end this came to no avail.

About five hundred kids wandered into the converted theater, including Melissa and her friends Jenna and Kayla. The concert ended at half-past ten and the three girls stood around outside for a while talking about the show. The three of them split up at about a quarter to eleven and went their separate ways. It was a mild night, so Melissa said she was going to walk. She didn’t live far from the city center, and most of her walk home took her along the busy, well-lit Ripon Road. Two people later came forward to say they saw her close to eleven o’clock walking south by the junction of West Park and Beech Grove. To get home, she would turn down Beech Grove and then turn off after about a hundred yards, but she never got there.

At first there was a faint hope that Melissa might have run away from home, given the running battle with her parents. But Steven and Mary, along with Jenna and Kayla, assured Banks this could not be the case. The two friends in particular said they shared everything, and they would have known if she was planning on running away. Besides, she had none of her valued possessions with her, and she told them she was looking forward to seeing them the next day at the Victoria Centre.

Then there was the satanic element, not to be lightly dismissed when a girl had disappeared. The members of the band were interviewed, along with as many audience members as could be rounded up, but that went nowhere, too. Even Banks had to admit when examining the statements later that the whole thing had been pretty tame and harmless, the black magic merely theater, as it had been for Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper in his day. Beelzebub’s Bollocks didn’t even bite the heads off chickens on stage.

When Melissa’s black leather shoulder bag was found in some bushes two days after her disappearance, as if it had been tossed from the window of a moving car, money still intact, the case came to the attention of Banks’s Chameleon task force. Like Kelly Matthews, Samantha Foster and Leanne Wray before her, Melissa Horrocks had disappeared into thin air.

Jenna and Kayla were devastated. Just before Melissa had walked off into the night, they had joked, Kayla said, about perverts, but Melissa had pointed to her chest and said the occult symbol on her T-shirt would ward off evil spirits.

The incident room was crowded at nine o’clock on Tuesday morning. Over forty detectives sat on the edges of their desks or leaned against the walls. Smoking was not permitted in the building, and many of them chewed gum or fidgeted with paper clips or rubber bands instead. Most had been on the task force since the beginning, and they had all put in long hours, invested a lot of themselves in the job, emotionally as well as physically. It had taken its toll on all of them. Banks happened to know that one unfortunate DC’s marriage had broken up over the hours he spent away from home and the neglect he displayed toward his wife. It would have happened some other time, anyway, Banks told himself, but an investigation like this one can put the pressure on, can push events to a crisis point, especially if that crisis point isn’t too far away to start with. These days, Banks also felt that he was approaching his own crisis point, though he had no idea where it was or what would happen when he got there.

Now there was at least some sense of progress, no matter how unclear things still seemed, and the air buzzed with speculation. They all wanted to know what had happened. The mood was mixed: on the one hand, it looked as if they had their man; on the other, one of their own had been killed and his partner was about to be put through the hoops.

When Banks strode in somewhat the worse for wear after another poor night’s sleep, despite a third Laphroaig and the second disc of Bach’s cello sonatas, the room hushed, everyone waiting to hear the news. He stood next to Ken Blackstone, beside the photographs of the girls pinned to the corkboard.

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll do my best to explain where we are with this. The SOCOs are still at the scene, and it looks as if they’ll be there for a long time yet. So far, they’ve uncovered three bodies in the cellar anteroom, and it doesn’t look as if there’s room for any more. They’re digging in the back garden for the fourth. None of the victims has been identified yet, but DS Nowak says the bodies are all young and female, so it’s reasonable to assume for the moment that they’re the young girls who went missing. We should be able to make some headway on identification later today by checking dental records. Dr. Mackenzie performed the postmortem on Kimberley Myers late yesterday and found that she had been subdued by chloroform but death was due to vagal inhibition caused by ligature strangulation. Yellow plastic fibers from the clothesline were embedded in the wound.” He paused, then sighed and went on. “She was also raped anally and vaginally and forced to perform fellatio.”

“What about Payne, sir?” someone asked. “Is the bastard going to die?”

“The last I heard was that they had to operate on his brain. Terence Payne is still in a coma, and there’s no telling how long that might last, or how it will end. By the way, we now know that Terence Payne lived and taught in Seacroft before he moved to west Leeds in September the year before last, at the start of the school year. DCI Blackstone has him in the frame for the Seacroft Rapist, so we’re already checking DNA. I’ll want a team to go over the casework on that one with the local CID. DS Stewart, can you get that organized?”

“Right away, sir. That’ll be Chapeltown CID.”

Chapeltown would be hot to trot on this, Banks knew. It was a “red inker” for them – an easy way of closing several open case files at one fell swoop.

“We’ve also checked Payne’s car registration with DVLA in Swansea. He was using false plates. His own plates end in KWT, just like the witness in the Samantha Foster disappearance saw. The SOCOs found them hidden in the garage. That means Bradford CID must have already interviewed him. I’d imagine it was after that he switched to the false ones.”

“What about Dennis Morrisey?” someone asked.

“PC Morrisey died of blood loss caused by the severing of his carotid artery and jugular vein, according to Dr. Mackenzie’s examination at the scene. He’ll be doing the PM later today. As you can imagine, there’s getting to be quite a queue down at the mortuary. He’s looking for assistance. Anyone interested?”