Peter Robinson - All the Colors of Darkness

“Car number plates? You’re not serious?”

“Sure. We used to sit on the wall by the main road and write down as many as we could.”

“Why?”

“No reason. It was a hobby. That’s the point about hobbies; you don’t need a reason.”

“But what did you do with them?”

“Nothing. When I’d filled one notebook, I started another. Sometimes I tried to jot down the make of car, too, if I recognized it and was quick enough. I tell you, it would make our job a lot easier if there were more people doing that today.”

“Nah, we don’t need it,” said Annie. “We’ve got CCTV everywhere.”

“Cynic.”

“What about the birds’ eggs?”

“Well, you had to blow them, or they went bad and started to smell. I found that out the hard way.”

“Blow them? You can’t be serious.”

“I am. You made little holes in each end with a pin and—”

“Yuk,” said Annie. “I don’t think I want to know.”

Banks studied her. “You asked.”

“Anyway,” she went on, making a dismissive gesture, “that was probably when you were about ten or eleven. Derek Wyman’s in his forties.”

“Theater’s a valid passion. There’s nothing anoraky about it. And it’s a bit more cerebral than trainspotting.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Annie. “Don’t you think there’s something rather heroic and romantic about standing there in your anorak in the wind and rain at the end of the platform, open to the elements, writing down the numbers of the diesels that zoom by?”

Banks studied her expression. “You’re winding me up again.”

Annie smiled. “Maybe just a little bit.”

“All right. Very funny. Now what do you think about Wyman? Do you think he was telling the truth?”

“He had no real reason to lie to us, did he? I mean, he knows we can check his alibi. And he got all those receipts and stubs for us before we left, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” said Banks. “They turned out to be very handy indeed.”

“They were just in his wallet. Exactly where you’d put something like that.”

“Cinema stubs, too?”

“People do.”

“I know.”

“So what is it?”

“Nothing,” said Banks. “Just my bloody scar’s itching, that’s all.”

“How did you get that scar?”

Banks ignored her. “Do you think there was something going on between them? Wyman and Hardcastle?”

“No, not really. I think he was telling the truth about that. And his wife didn’t react. If she had her suspicions, I think she would have found it hard to hide them. Not all gays are promiscuous, you know, no more than all heteros are.”

“Most blokes I know fancy plenty of women other than their wives.”

“That proves nothing,” said Annie. “Except that most blokes are bastards and your mates have probably never grown up.”

“What’s wrong with fancying? With looking?”

Annie turned away. “I don’t know,” she said. “Ask Sophia. See what she says.”

Banks was silent for a moment, then he said, “What about Derek Wyman and Laurence Silbert?”

“What about them?”

“You know.”

“Doubt it,” said Annie. “It doesn’t sound as if Silbert was much of a mixer.”

“Then what, for crying out loud, are we missing?”

Their food came and the waitress was in such a hurry that she almost dropped Banks’s lunch on his lap. She blushed and dashed away while he dabbed at the few spots of gravy that had landed on his trousers. “I swear Cyril’s help is getting younger every week.”

“It’s hard to keep them,” Annie agreed. “No kid wants to go to school every day and then work here on weekends. The pay’s rubbish, for a start, and nobody tips them. It’s no wonder they don’t last long.”

“I suppose so. Anyway, back to Derek Wyman.”

“I thought he was okay,” said Annie. “I don’t think we’re missing anything. Like I said, he’s a bit of an anorak, that’s all. He can probably name every gaffer and best boy on every film he’s seen, but I doubt that makes him a killer.”

“I didn’t say he was a killer,” Banks argued after a bite of lamb. “Just that there’s something niggling me about this whole murder-suicide business, that’s all.”

“But that’s just what it is: a murder-suicide. Don’t you think maybe we’re just taking it all a little bit too seriously? You’re annoyed because you got dragged away from your romantic weekend, and you can’t find a good mystery to make it worthwhile.”

Banks shot her a glance. “Wouldn’t you be?”

“I suppose I would.”

“It’s all so inconclusive,” said Banks. “I mean, was Hardcastle upset or wasn’t he? Some of the people he worked with said he was. Maria Wolsey, for example. Wyman said he wasn’t, but that he was generally insecure and jealous with regard to Silbert’s traveling. I don’t know. There are just too many questions.” Banks put his knife and fork down and started to count them off on his fingers as he spoke. “Why did Silbert travel so much if he’d retired? Had Hardcastle and Silbert had a fight, or hadn’t they? Did either, or both, of them play away or not? Who’s Julian Fenner, and why doesn’t his phone number connect? What was Silbert up to in Amsterdam?”

“Well, when you put it like that...” Annie said. “Maybe Edwina can help?”

“People don’t just beat their lovers to death, then hang themselves for no reason.”

“But the reason could be insignificant,” Annie argued. “If Hardcastle did it, then it could have been because of something that flared up right there and then. You know as well as I do that some of the most inconsequential of things can spark off the worst violence in people. Burning a piece of toast, breaking a valuable ornament, taking the piss at the wrong moment. You name it. Maybe Hardcastle had had too much to drink, and Silbert chastised him for it? Something as simple as that. People don’t like being told they’ve had too much to drink. Maybe Hardcastle was a little pissed, already aggressive, and before he knew it Silbert was dead? We know from Grainger’s statement that he’d been drinking when he called at the hardware shop for the clothesline.”

“Or someone else did it,” Banks said.

“So you say.”

“Look at the number of blows to Silbert after he was dead, the blood,” said Banks.

“Heat of the moment,” argued Annie. “Hardcastle lost it. Saw red. Literally. When he stopped and saw what he’d done he was horrified. That calmed him down, so when he bought the washing line off Grainger he seemed distant, resigned, his mind already made up. Then he went to the woods and...”

“But what about the damage inflicted on Silbert’s genital area? Doesn’t that suggest to you a sexual motive?”

“Perhaps.” Annie pushed her half-empty plate aside. “It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, though, is it? If there’s sexual jealousy involved, the killer will go to the area that symbolizes it. Maybe they argued about Hardcastle going to London with Wyman, or about Silbert going to Amsterdam? We might never know. It still doesn’t mean that someone else did it. Whatever the motive—jealousy, infidelity, criticism of drinking habits, some antique Hardcastle might have broken—the result’s the same: an argument turned violent and one man was left dead. The survivor couldn’t bear what he’d done, so he committed suicide. There’s nothing sinister or unusual about that at all. Sad to say, but it’s very commonplace.”

Banks put his knife and fork down and sighed. “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “Maybe I am just trying to justify losing my weekend. Or maybe you want to get this sorted quickly so we can concentrate on something really important, like all those police cones that have gone missing from the market square lately?”