Peter Robinson - Friend of the Devil

“Something like that,” said Banks. “We’d better have a very close look at his movements since the Hayley Daniels case began.”

“We’re overstretched as it is,” said Gervaise. “First Hayley Daniels, and now this. I’ll see about bringing in extra personnel.”

“Are you sure it’s not the same investigation?” Banks asked.

“At this moment,” said Gervaise, “we don’t know enough to say one way or another. Let’s wait at least until we get some forensics and talk to the girl, then we’ll have another session.”

“I’ll talk to her now,” said Banks. “And there’s another thing.”

“What?”

“Kev’s throat was cut. You can see it clearly. That’s the same way Lucy Payne was killed out Whitby way.”

“Oh, bloody hell,” said Gervaise. “Another complication we could do without. Right, I think you’d better start trying to find some answers.” She eyed the team grimly. “I want everybody out there on the streets, all night if necessary. Knocking on doors, checking CCTV footage. Wake the whole bloody town up if you have to. I don’t care. There has to be something. Kevin Templeton may have been an arsehole, but let’s not forget he was our arsehole and he deserves our best efforts.” She clapped her hands. “Now go to it!”

Banks paid another visit to the crime scene before heading for the hospital to see Chelsea Pilton. It was about half past two in the morning, and the market square was deserted except for the police cars, the SOCO van and the constable guarding the entrance. He jotted Banks’s name down and let him through. Some bright spark had chalked yellow markings on the pavements and flagstones to guide the way. Not exactly a ball of twine, but the next best thing, and it did make the Maze a lot easier to negotiate.

The SOCOs had erected a canvas covering over the square in which Templeton’s body had been found, and it was brightly lit from all directions. Officers were walking the ginnels and connecting passages with bright torches, searching for clues of any kind. The area immediately around the body had already been thoroughly searched, and crime scene coordinator Stefan Nowak gestured for Banks to come forward into the covered area.

“Alan,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Me, too,” said Banks. “Me, too. Anything?”

“Early days yet. From what we’ve been able to gather from the blood spatter analysis so far, he was attacked from behind. He wouldn’t have known what hit him. Or cut him.”

“He would have known he was dying, though?”

“For a few seconds, yes, but there are no messages scrawled in blood, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“One lives in hope. Pocket contents?”

Stefan fetched a plastic bag. Inside it, Banks found Templeton’s wallet, some chewing gum, keys, a Swiss Army knife, warrant card, ballpoint pen and a slim notebook. “May I?” he asked, indicating the notebook. Stefan gave him a pair of plastic gloves and handed it to him. The handwriting was hard to read, perhaps because it had been written quickly, but it seemed as if Templeton liked to make brief notes, like an artist’s sketches. He hadn’t written the murderer’s name in there, either. There was nothing since the previous evening, when it appeared that he had also been haunting the Maze, to no avail, as Banks had suspected. He would examine the notebook in more detail later to see if there was anything in the theory that Templeton was following leads of his own, but for now he handed it back. “Thank you. Dr. Burns finished yet?”

“He’s over there.”

Banks hadn’t noticed the doctor in another corner of the square, dressed in navy or black, jotting in his notebook. He went over.

“DCI Banks. What can I do for you?”

“I’m hoping you can tell me a few things.”

“I can’t really tell you much at all,” said a tired Burns. “You’ll have to wait until Dr. Wallace gets him on the table.”

“Can we start with the basics? His throat was cut, wasn’t it?”

Burns sighed. “That’s the way it looks to me.”

“From behind?”

“The type of wound certainly supports DS Nowak’s blood spatter analysis.”

“Left- or right-handed?”

“Impossible to say at this point. You’ll have to wait for the postmortem, and even that might not tell you.”

Banks grunted. “Weapon?”

“A very sharp blade of some sort. Razor or scalpel, something like that. Not an ordinary knife, at any rate. From what I can see on even a cursory examination, it’s a clean, deep cut. The way it looks is that he simply bled to death. The blade cut through both the carotid and the jugular and severed his windpipe. The poor devil didn’t have a hope in hell.”

“How do you think it happened?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. I understand there was a witness?”

“Yes,” said Banks. “A girl. She saw it happen. I’m on my way to talk to her.”

“Then she might be able to tell you more. Perhaps he was following her?”

“Why? To warn her, protect her?”

“Or attack her.”

Kev Templeton, the Maze killer? Banks didn’t want to believe it, even though he had been the first to voice the possibility. “I don’t think so,” he said.

“I’m just trying to keep an open mind,” said Dr. Burns.

“I know,” said Banks. “We all are. I wonder what the killer thought Kev was doing, though?”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. I was just thinking of something else.” Annie’s case had come into his mind again. Lucy Payne sitting in her wheelchair, her throat cut with a sharp blade, a razor or a scalpel, a similar weapon to the one that had killed Templeton.

“I’m sure that Dr. Wallace will get around to the postmortem as soon as she can on this one,” Dr. Burns said. “She should be able to give you more answers.”

“Right,” said Banks. “And thanks. I’d better get to the hospital now and talk to the witness.” As he walked away, he was still thinking about Lucy Payne, and he knew that as soon as it reached a reasonable hour in the morning he would have to ring Annie in Whitby and see if they could get together to compare notes.

It wasn’t as if Annie was sleeping well, or even sleeping at all. Banks could have rung her right then, and she would have been awake enough to hold a conversation. A sound had woken her from a bad dream, and she had lain there not moving, listening hard, until she was sure it was just a creak from the old house and nothing else. Who did she think it was, anyway? Eric come to get her? Phil Keane returned? The men who had raped her? She couldn’t let her life be ruled by fear. Try as she might, by then she couldn’t remember the dream.

Unable to sleep, she got out of bed and put on the kettle. Her mouth was dry, and she realized she had polished off the better part of a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc by herself last night. It was getting to be a habit, a bad one.

She peered through the curtains across the pantile rooftops down to the harbor, where the moon frosted the water’s surface. She wondered if she should have gone home to Harkside for the night, but she liked being close to the sea. It reminded her of her childhood in St. Ives, the long walks along the cliffs with her father, who kept stopping to sketch an abandoned farm implement or a particularly arresting rock formation while she was left to amuse herself. It was then that she had learned to create her own world, a place she could go to and exist in when the real world was too tough to handle, as when her mother died. She only remembered one walk with her mother, who had died when she was six, and all the way along the rough clifftop path her mother had held her hand as they struggled against the wind and rain, and told her stories about the places they would visit one day: San Francisco, Marrakech, Angkor Wat. Like many other things in her life, that probably wasn’t going to happen.