Peter Robinson - Aftermath

“It’s just a bit over-the-top, that’s all.”

“ Over-the-top ? I’ll tell you what’s over the bloody top.” Banks pointed at Lucy. “Kimberley’s blood on the sleeves of her dressing gown. Yellow fibers under her fingernails. She killed Kimberley Myers.”

“It’s all circumstantial,” said Julia Ford. “Lucy’s already explained to you how it might have happened. She doesn’t remember. That’s not her fault. The poor woman was traumatized.”

“Either that or she’s a damn good actress,” said Banks.

“Superintendent!”

Banks turned back to Lucy. “Who are the other girls, Lucy?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“We’ve found two unidentified bodies in the back garden. Skeletal remains, at any rate. That makes six altogether, including Kimberley. We were only looking into five disappearances, and we haven’t even found all of those yet. We don’t know these two. Who are they?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“Did you ever go out in the car with your husband and pick up a teenage girl?”

The change of direction seemed to shock Lucy into silence, but she soon found her voice and regained her composure. “No, I did not.”

“So you knew nothing about the missing girls?”

“No. Only what I read in the papers. I told you. I didn’t go in the cellar and Terry certainly didn’t tell me. So how could I know?”

“How indeed?” Banks scratched the little scar beside his right eye. “I’m more concerned with how you could possibly not have known. The man you’re living with – your own husband – abducts and brings home six young girls that we know of so far, keeps them in the cellar for… God knows how long… while he rapes and tortures them, then he buries them either in the garden or in the cellar. And all this time you’re living in the house, only one floor away, two at the most, and you expect me to believe you didn’t know anything, didn’t even smell anything? Do I look as if was born yesterday, Lucy? I don’t see how you could fail to know.”

“I told you I never went down there.”

“Didn’t you notice when your husband was missing in the middle of the night?”

“No. I always sleep very heavily. I think Terry must have been giving me sleeping pills with my cocoa. That’s why I never noticed anything.”

“We didn’t find any sleeping pills at the house, Lucy.”

“He must have run out. That must be why I woke up on Monday morning and thought something was wrong. Or he forgot.”

“Did either of you have a prescription for sleeping tablets?”

“I didn’t. I don’t know if Terry did. Maybe he got them from a drug pusher.”

Banks made a note to look into the matter of sleeping tablets. “Why do you think he might have forgotten to drug you this time? Why did you go down to the cellar this time?” he went on. “What was so different about this time, about Kimberley? Was it because she was too close to home for comfort? Terry must have known he was taking a huge risk in abducting Kimberley, mustn’t he? Was he obsessed with her, Lucy? Was that it? Were the others merely practice, substitutes until he could no longer stop himself from taking the one he really wanted? How did you feel about that, Lucy? That Terry wanted Kimberley more than you, more than life itself, more than freedom?”

Lucy put her hands to her ears. “Stop it! It’s lies, all lies! I don’t know what you mean. I don’t understand what’s going on. Why are you persecuting me like this?” She turned to Julia Ford. “Get me out of here now. Please! I don’t have to stay and listen to any more of this, do I?”

“No,” said Julia Ford, standing up. “You can leave whenever you like.”

“I don’t think so.” Banks stood up and took a deep breath. “Lucy Payne, I’m arresting you as an accessory in the murder of Kimberley Myers.”

“This is ludicrous,” shot Julia Ford. “It’s a travesty.”

“I don’t believe your client’s story,” said Banks. He turned to Lucy again. “You don’t have to say anything, Lucy, but if you fail to say something now that you later rely on in court, it might be held against you. Do you understand?”

Banks opened the door and got two uniformed officers to take her down to the custody officer. When they came toward her she turned pale.

“Please,” she said. “I’ll come back whenever you want. Please, I’m begging you, don’t lock me all alone in a dark cell!”

For the first time in his dealings with her, Banks got the sense that Lucy Payne was genuinely afraid. He remembered what Jenny had told him about the Alderthorpe Seven. Kept in cages without food for days . He almost faltered, but there was no going back now. He forced himself to remember Kimberley Myers spread-eagled on the bed in Lucy Payne’s dark cellar. Nobody had given her a chance. “The cells aren’t dark, Lucy,” he said. “They’re well-lit and very comfortable. They regularly get four stars in the police accommodation guide.”

Julia Ford gave him a disgusted look. Lucy shook her head. Banks nodded toward the guards. “Take her down.”

He’d managed it by the skin of his teeth, and he didn’t even feel as good about it as he had thought he would, but he’d got Lucy Payne where he wanted her for twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours to find some real evidence against her .

Annie felt only indifference toward Terence Payne’s corpse laid out naked on the steel autopsy table. It was simply the shell, the deceptive outer human form of an aberration, a changeling, a demon. Come to think about it, though, she wasn’t even certain she believed that . Terence Payne’s evil was all too human. Over the centuries men had raped and mutilated women, whether as acts of plunder in wartime, for dark pleasures in the back alleys and cheap rooms of decaying cities, in the isolation of the countryside, or in the drawing rooms of the rich. It hardly needed a demon in human form to do what men themselves already did so well.

She turned her attention to events at hand: Dr. Mackenzie’s close examination of the exterior of Terence Payne’s skull. Identity and time of death had not been a problem in this case: Payne had been pronounced dead by Dr. Mogabe at Leeds General Infirmary at 8:13 P.M. the previous evening. Naturally, Dr. Mackenzie would do a thorough job – his assistant had already carried out the weighing and measuring, and photographs and X rays had been taken – indeed, Annie guessed Mackenzie to be the kind of doctor who would do a thorough postmortem on a man shot dead right in front of his very eyes. It didn’t do to make assumptions.

The body was clean and ready for cutting, as there’s no man cleaner than one who has just been through surgery. Luckily, the police surgeon had been dispatched to take fingernail scrapings, bloodstained clothing and blood samples when Payne had first arrived at the infirmary, so no evidence had been lost due to the scruples of hospital hygiene.

At the moment, Annie was interested only in the blows to Payne’s head, and Dr. Mackenzie was paying particular attention to the cranium before performing the full postmortem. They had already examined the fractured wrist and determined that it was broken by a blow from PC Janet Taylor’s baton – which lay on the lab bench by the white-tiled wall – and there were also several defense bruises on Payne’s arms, where he had tried to ward off PC Taylor’s blows.

Unless Payne had been murdered by a nurse or doctor while he was in hospital, PC Janet Taylor’s actions were most likely directly responsible for his death. What had yet to be determined was just how culpable she was. An emergency operation to relieve a subdural hematoma had complicated matters, Dr. Mackenzie had told Annie, but it should be easy enough to separate the surgical procedure from the unskilled bludgeoning.