Peter Robinson - Friend of the Devil

“I’m not proposing marriage, you know. But won’t you at least allow me to take you out to dinner?”

“I’m busy.”

“All the time?”

“Pretty much.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Washing my hair.”

“Wednesday?”

“Tenants association meeting.”

“Thursday?”

“School reunion.”

“Friday?”

Annie paused. “Visiting my aging parents.”

“Aha! But you hesitated there,” he said. “I distinctly heard it.”

“Look, Eric,” Annie said, adopting what she thought was a reasonable but firm tone. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to play this game anymore. It’s not going to happen. I don’t want to be rude or nasty or anything, but I’m just not interested in a relationship right now. End of story.”

“I only asked you to dinner. No strings.”

In Annie’s experience, there were always strings. “Sorry. Not interested.”

“What’s wrong? What did I do? When I woke up you were gone.”

“You didn’t do anything. It’s me. I’m sorry. Please don’t call again.”

“Don’t ring off!”

Against her better judgment, Annie held on.

“Are you still there?” he asked after a moment’s silence.

“I’m here.”

“Good. Have lunch with me. Surely you can manage lunch one day this week? How about the Black Horse on Thursday?”

The Black Horse was in Whitby’s old town, on a narrow cobbled street below the ruined abbey. It was a decent enough place, Annie knew, and not one that was frequented by her colleagues. But why was she even thinking about it? Let go with both hands.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I’ll be there at the noon,” Eric said. “You do remember what I look like?”

Annie remembered the young face with the slept-on hair, the stray lock, the night’s growth of dark beard, the strong shoulders, the surprisingly gentle hands. “I remember,” she said. “But I won’t be there.” Then she pressed the end-call button.

She held the phone in her shaking hand for a few moments, heart palpitating, as if it were some sort of mysterious weapon, but it didn’t ring again. Then a very unpleasant memory started surfacing into the light of consciousness.

She had only had her new mobile for a week. It was a Blackberry Pearl, which combined phone, text and e-mail, and she was still learning all its bells and whistles, like the built-in camera. She remembered that Eric had the same model, and he had shown her how to work one or two of its more advanced features.

Hand trembling, she clicked on her recent saved photographs. There they were: her head and Eric’s leaning toward each other, touching, almost filling the screen as they made faces at the camera with the club lights in the background. She remembered she had sent the photo to his mobile. That would be how he had got hold of her number. How could she be so stupid?

She put the phone in her handbag. What was she playing at? She ought to know she couldn’t trust her judgment in these matters. Besides, Eric was just a kid. Be flattered and let go. Enough of this crap. Why did she even let her behavior haunt her so? She picked up a slip of paper from her desk. Time to go and talk to the social worker who had got Karen Drew placed in Mapston Hall. The poor woman had to have had some kind of life before her accident.

Dr. Elizabeth Wallace’s postmortem approach was far less flamboyant and flippant than Glendenning’s, Banks discovered in the basement of Eastvale General Infirmary late that Monday morning. She seemed shy and deferential as she nodded to acknowledge Banks’s presence and made her initial preparations with her assistant, Wendy Gauge. They made sure that the equipment she would need was all at hand and the hanging microphone on which she recorded her spoken comments was functioning properly. She seemed to be holding her feelings in check, Banks noticed, and it showed in the tight set of her lips and the twitching muscle beside her jaw. Banks couldn’t imagine her smoking the way he and Glendenning had, or making bad jokes over the corpse.

Dr. Wallace first performed her external examination in a studied, methodical way, taking her time. The body had already been examined for traces and intimate samples, and everything the doctor and the SOCOs had collected from Hayley Daniels and her clothes had been sent to the lab for analysis, including the leather remnants that had been stuffed in her mouth, presumably to keep her quiet. Banks glanced at Hayley, lying on her back on the table, pale and naked. He couldn’t help to but stare at the shaved pubes. He had already been told about it at the scene, but seeing it for himself was something else entirely. Just above the mound was a tattoo of two small blue fishes swimming in opposite directions. Pisces . Her birth sign.

Dr. Wallace caught him staring. “It’s not unusual,” she said. “It doesn’t mean she was a tart or anything. It’s also not recent, not within the past few months, anyway, so the killer can’t have done it. Tattoos like that are common enough, and a lot of young girls shave or get a wax these days. They call it a Brazilian.”

“Why?” said Banks.

“Fashion. Style. They also say it increases pleasure during intercourse.”

“Does it?”

She didn’t crack a smile. “How would I know?” she said, then went back to her examination, pausing every now and then to study an area of skin or an unusual mark closely under the magnifying lens and speaking her observations into the microphone.

“What’s that brown discoloration below the left breast?” Banks asked.

“Birthmark.”

“The arms, and between the breasts?”

“Bruising. Premortem. He knelt on her.” She called to her assistant. “Let’s get her opened up.”

“Anything you can tell me so far?” Banks asked.

Dr. Wallace paused and leaned forward, her hands on the metal rim of the table. A couple of strands of light-brown hair had worked their way out of her protective head cover. “It certainly appears as if she was strangled manually. No ligature. From the front, like this.” She held her hands out and mimicked the motion of squeezing them around someone’s neck.

“Any chance of fingerprints from the skin, or DNA?”

“There’s always a chance that some of the killer’s skin, or even a drop of blood, rubbed off on her. It looks as if he cleaned her up afterward, but he might not have caught everything.”

“There was something that might have been semen on her thigh,” Banks said.

Dr. Wallace nodded. “I saw it. Don’t worry, the lab has samples of everything, but it’ll take time. You ought to know that. Fingerprints? I don’t think so. I know it’s been done, but there was so much slippage in this case. Like when you open a doorknob, your fingers slip on its surface and everything gets smeared and blurred.”

“Did she struggle?”

Dr. Wallace glanced away. “Of course she bloody did.”

“I was thinking of scratches.”

Dr. Wallace took a deep breath. “Yes. There might be DNA in the samples the SOCOs took from under her fingernails. Your killer might have scratches on his forearms or face.” She paused. “Frankly, though, I wouldn’t hold out a lot of hope. As you can see, her fingernails were bitten to the quicks.”

“Yes, I’d noticed,” said Banks. “And the bruising?”

“As I said, he knelt on her arms, and at one point on the center of her chest, probably to hold her down while he used his hands to strangle her. She didn’t have a chance.”

“You’re sure it’s a man?”

Dr. Wallace gave him a scornful glance. “Take it from me, this is a man’s work. Unless someone’s girlfriend did the strangling after the boyfriend raped and sodomized her.”