Peter Robinson: Friend of the Devil

Gilbert pulled up the collar of his waxed jacket and shivered as the damp wind hit him. The grass was slippery from a previous shower. Hagrid didn’t seem to mind. In no time he was off sniffing clumps of grass and shrubbery, Gilbert ambling behind, hands in pockets, glancing out at the choppy water and wondering what it must have been like to go out on the whaling ships from Whitby. The crews were gone for months at a time, the women waiting at home, walking along West Cliff day after day watching for signs of a sail and hoping to see the jawbone of a whale nailed to the mast, a sign that everyone was safe.

Then Gilbert saw a distant figure sitting at the cliff edge. Hagrid, ever gregarious, dashed toward it. The odd thing, as far as Gilbert was concerned, was that a seagull perched on each shoulder. The scene reminded him of an old woman he had once seen on a park bench, absolutely covered by the pigeons she was feeding. When Hagrid got close enough and barked, the seagulls launched themselves languidly and floated out over the sea, making it clear from their close circling and backward glances that this was only a temporary setback. Gilbert fancied they squawked in mockery that mere earthbound animals, like him and Hagrid, couldn’t follow where they went.

Hagrid lost interest and edged toward some bushes away from the path, where he probably sniffed a rabbit, and Gilbert walked toward the immobile figure to see if he could offer any assistance. It was a woman, he realized. At least something about the way she sat and the hair curling over her collar indicated that she was. He called out but got no response. Then he realized that she was sitting in a wheelchair, wrapped in a blanket, her head propped up by something. Perhaps she couldn’t move? There was nothing unusual about seeing a woman in a wheelchair around Larborough Head — the care home wasn’t far away, and relatives occasionally came and took parents or grandparents for walks along the coast — but what on earth was she doing there all by herself, especially on Mother’s Day, abandoned in such a precarious position? It wouldn’t take much for the chair to slip over the edge, just a change in the wind. Where the hell was her nurse or relative?

When he arrived at the figure, Gilbert was struck almost simultaneously by two odd things. The first, bloodless scratches around her ears, he noticed because he approached her from behind, and when he moved around to the front, he saw the second: the upper half of her body, including the blanket, from her neck to her upper thighs, was absolutely drenched in blood. Before he even looked into her eyes, he knew that she was dead.

Holding back the bitter taste of bile that surged in his throat, Gilbert whistled for Hagrid and started running back to the car. He knew from experience that his mobile wouldn’t get a signal out here, and that he had to drive at least a couple of miles inland before calling the police. He didn’t want to leave her just sitting there for the gulls to peck at, but what else could he do? As if reading his mind, two of the boldest gulls drifted back toward the still figure as soon as Gilbert turned his back and ran.

Banks unplugged the iPod and stuck it in his pocket halfway through Tom Waits’s “Low Down” and climbed out of the warm Porsche into the wind, which now seemed to be whipping sleet in his direction. The market square was busy with locals in their Sunday best going to the Norman church in the center of the square, the women holding their hats fast against the wind, and the bells were ringing as if all were well with the world. One or two sightseers, however, had gathered around the taped-off entrance to Taylor’s Yard. On one corner stood a pub called the Fountain, and on the other, Randall’s leather goods shop. Between them, the narrow cobbled street led into the Maze, that labyrinth of alleys called ginnels and snickets locally — tiny squares, courtyards, nooks and crannies and small warehouses that had remained unchanged since the eighteenth century.

Short of knocking the whole lot down and starting again, there was nothing much anyone could do with the cramped spaces and awkward locations other than use them for storage or let them lie empty. The alleys weren’t really a shortcut to anywhere, though if you knew your way, you could come out into the castle car park above the terraced gardens that sloped down to the river, below Eastvale Castle. Apart from a row of four tiny occupied cottages near the car park end, the buildings were mostly uninhabitable, even to squatters, and as they were also listed, they couldn’t be knocked down, so the Maze stayed as it was, a handy hideaway for a quick knee-trembler, a hit of crystal meth or skunk weed before a night on the town.

The street cleaners had complained to the police more than once about having to pick up needles, roaches, used condoms and plastic bags of glue, especially around the back of the Bar None Club or down Taylor’s Yard from the Fountain, but even though the Maze was just across the square from the police station, they couldn’t police it twenty-four hours a day. DC Rickerd and his Community Support officers, the “plastic policemen,” as the townsfolk called them, did the best they could, but it wasn’t enough. People stayed away from the Maze after dark. Most law-abiding folks had no reason to go there, anyway. There were even rumors that it was haunted, that people had got lost in there and never found their way out again.

Banks took his protective clothing from the boot of the car, signed the log for the constable on guard duty and ducked under the blue-and-white police tape. At least the sleet barely penetrated the Maze. The buildings were so high and close, like the Shambles in York, that they blocked out the sky, except for a narrow gray strip. If anyone had lived on the upper floors, they could easily have reached out and shaken hands with their neighbors across the street. The blocks of limestone from which the Maze was built were dark from the earlier rain, and a hint of peat smoke drifted through the air from the distant cottages. It made Banks think of Laphroaig, and he wondered if he might regain his taste for Islay malt whisky before long. The wind whistled and moaned, changing pitch, volume and timbre like breath blown through a woodwind. The Maze was a stonewind, though, Banks reckoned.

As promised, DS Kevin Templeton was keeping a watch on the building where the body had been found, where Taylor’s Yard crossed Cutpurse Wynde. It wasn’t much more than an outbuilding, a stone-built shed, used for storing swatches and remnants by Joseph Randall, the owner of the leather goods shop. The frontage was limestone, and there were no windows. Usually, if a building did have any ground-floor windows in the Maze, they were boarded up.

Templeton was his usual suave self, gelled black hair, expensive tan chinos, damp around the knees, and a shiny leather jacket slick with rain. His eyes were bloodshot from the previous night’s excess, and Banks imagined him at a rave or something, twitching away to a techno-pop beat, or some DJ mixing Elvis with Eminem. Whether Templeton took drugs or not, Banks wasn’t sure. He had noticed no evidence, but he was certainly keeping an eye on him ever since the overambitious DS’s attempt to ingratiate himself as the new super’s toady. That had backfired, with a little help from Banks and Annie, but it hardly seemed to have dampened Templeton’s ardor for advancement, or his apparent taste for arse-licking. The man wasn’t a team player; that was for certain. Now all they could do was keep their fingers crossed and hope he got sent as far as Cornwall or Hampshire, and put on traffic duty.

“What have we got?” Banks asked.

“Doc Burns is in with her now,” Templeton answered.

“SOCOs?”

“On their way.”