Peter Robinson - Aftermath

“He can’t have been very worried.”

“Why should he be?”

“I don’t know.”

“The thing is, you see, that you both ought to be asking me if we’ve found Leanne alive, or if we’ve found her body, or if we’ve identified her remains.”

“Why?”

“Why else would I come to talk to you?”

“How should I know?”

“But the fact that you don’t ask makes me wonder if you know something you’re not telling me.”

Mick folded his arms. “I’ve told you everything I know.”

Banks leaned forward and held Mick’s gaze. “Know what? I think you’re lying, Mick. I think you’re all lying.”

“You can’t prove anything.”

“What would I need to prove?”

“That I’m lying. I told you what happened. We went for a drink in the Old-”

“No. What you told us was that you went for coffee after the film.”

“Right. Well…”

“That was lying, wasn’t it, Mick?”

“So what?”

“If you can do it once, you can do it again. In fact, it gets easier the more you practice. What really happened that night, Mick? Why don’t you tell me about it?”

“Nothing happened. I already told you.”

“Did you and Leanne have a fight? Did you hurt her? Maybe you didn’t mean to. Where is she, Mick? You know , I’m certain of it.”

And Mick’s expression told Banks that he did know, but it also told him that he wasn’t going to confess to anything. Not today, at any rate. Banks felt pissed off and culpable at the same time. It was his fault that this line of inquiry hadn’t been properly followed up. So fixated had he become on a serial killer abducting young girls that he had ignored the basics of police work and not pushed hard enough at those in the position to know best what had happened to Leanne: the people she had been with at the time she disappeared. He should have followed up, knowing of Ian Scott’s criminal record, and that it involved drugs. But no. Leanne was put down as the third victim of the unidentified serial killer, another pretty young blond victim, and that was that. Winsome Jackman had done a bit of follow-up work, but she had pretty much accepted the official story too. Banks’s fault, all of it, just like Sandra’s miscarriage. Just like bloody everything, it seemed sometimes.

“Tell me what happened,” Banks pushed again.

“I’ve told you. I’ve fucking told you!” Mick sat up abruptly. “When we left the Old Ship, Leanne set off home. That was the last any of us saw of her. Some pervert must have got her. All right? That’s what you thought, isn’t it? Why are you changing your minds?”

“Ah, so you are curious,” Banks said, standing up. “I’m sure you’ve been following the news. We’ve got the pervert who took and killed those girls – he’s dead, so he can’t tell us anything – but we found no trace of Leanne’s body on the premises, and believe me, we’ve taken the place apart.”

“Then it must’ve been some other pervert.”

“Come off it, Mick. The odds against one are wild enough, the odds against two are astronomical. No. It comes down to you. You, Ian and Sarah. The last people she was seen with. Now, I’m going to give you time to think about it, Mick, but I’ll be back, you can count on that. Then we’ll have a proper talk. No distractions. In the meantime, stick around. Enjoy the music.”

When Banks left, he paused just long enough at the garden gate to see Mick, silhouetted behind the lace curtains, jump up from the sofa and head over to the telephone.

The Monday-morning sunlight spilled through Banks’s kitchen window and glinted on the copper-bottomed pans hanging on the wall. Banks sat at his pine table with a cup of coffee, toast and marmalade, the morning newspaper spread out before him and Vaughan Williams’s Variations on a Theme by Thomas Tallis playing on the radio. But he was neither reading nor listening.

He had been awake since before four, a million details dancing around in his mind, and though he felt dog-tired now, he knew he couldn’t sleep. He would be glad when the Chameleon case was all over, when Gristhorpe was back at work, and when he could go back to his normal duties as detective chief inspector. The responsibility of command over the past month and a half had exhausted him. He recognized the signs: lack of sleep, bad dreams, too much junk food, too much booze and too many cigarettes. He was reaching the same near-burnout state as he had been in when he left the Met for North Yorkshire years ago, hoping for a quieter life. He loved detective work, but it sometimes seemed that modern policing was a young man’s game. Science, technology and changes in management structure hadn’t simplified things; they had only made life more complicated. Banks realized that he had probably come to the limits of his ambition when he actually thought that morning, for the first time, about packing in the Job altogether.

He heard the postman arrive and went out to pick up the letters from the floor. Among the usual collection of bills and circulars, there was a hand-addressed envelope from London, and Banks immediately recognized the neat, looping hand.

Sandra.

Heart beating just a little too fast for comfort, he carried the pile back into the kitchen. This was his favorite room in the cottage, mostly because he had dreamed about it before he had seen it, but what he read in Sandra’s letter was enough to darken the brightest of rooms even more than his previous mood had darkened it.

Dear Alan,

I understand that Tracy told you Sean and I are expecting a baby. I wish she hadn’t, but there it is, it’s done now. I hope this knowledge will at least enable you to understand the need for expediency in the matter of our divorce, and that you will act accordingly.

Yours sincerely,

Sandra

That was it. Nothing more than a cold, formal note. Banks had to admit that he hadn’t been responding to the matter of divorce with any great dispatch, but he hadn’t seen any need for haste. Perhaps, he was even willing to admit, deep down, he was stubbornly clinging to Sandra, and in some opaque and frightened part of his soul he was holding to the belief that it was all just a nightmare or a mistake, and he would wake up one morning back in the Eastvale semi with Sandra beside him. Not that that was what he wanted, not anymore, but he was at least willing to admit that he might harbor such irrational feelings.

Now this.

Banks put the letter aside, still feeling its chill. Why couldn’t he just let go of this and move on, as Sandra clearly had done? Was it because of what he had told Annie, about his guilt over Sandra’s miscarriage, about being glad that it happened? He didn’t know; it all just felt too strange: his wife of over twenty years, mother of their children, now about to give birth to another man’s child.

He tossed the letter aside, picked up his briefcase and headed out for the car.

He intended to go to Leeds later in the morning, but first he wanted to drop by his office, clear up some paperwork and have a word with Winsome. The drive to Eastvale from Gratly was, Banks had thought when he first made it, one of the most beautiful drives in the area: a narrow road about halfway up the daleside, with spectacular views of the valley bottom with its sleepy villages and meandering river to his left and the steeply rising fields with their drystone walls and wandering sheep to his right. But today he didn’t even notice all this, partly because he did it so often, and partly because his thoughts were still clouded by Sandra’s letter and vague depression over his job.