Peter Robinson - Friend of the Devil

“What boyfriend?”

“The one you told me about the other night. The young lad.”

Annie reddened. “Oh, him. Yeah, well, have you ever had a wild night out in Whitby?”

“Many times,” said Banks, with a smile.

“Then you know more about the hidden charms of the place than I do. Anyway, I was already up and working when you rang.” She paused. “I really am sorry to hear about Kev. I wasn’t a fan, as you know, but no matter what I thought of him as a man or as a detective, I’m sorry about what happened to him.”

“He wasn’t a man, really,” said Banks. “The poor sod was just a boy. A lot of us seemed to forget that.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was headstrong, impetuous, immature.”

Annie managed a weak grin. “Those qualities are the prerogative of youth all of a sudden, are they?”

“Touché,” said Banks. “Anyway, that’s what I want to talk to you about, really. What happened to Kev.” Banks gave her a quick run-down of what he knew so far, most of which he had pieced together from Chelsea Pilton’s eyewitness account and scraps of information from PC Kerrigan, Stefan Nowak and Dr. Burns. “You’ll agree there are similarities with the Lucy Payne murder?”

“My God, yes.” Annie ran her hand through her tousled hair. “I had no idea.” She told Banks about her conversations with Sarah Bingham and Keith McLaren, and how the mysterious Kirsten Farrow’s name kept coming up. “What the hell is going on, Alan?” she asked.

“I wish I knew,” said Banks. “But whatever it is, I don’t like it.”

“You and me, neither. Any ideas on who this mystery woman is?”

“I suppose it could be this Kirsten. Anything on Maggie Forrest yet?”

“Yes. Ginger tracked her down through her publishers. She’s back in Leeds. I was thinking of paying her a visit this afternoon. But what makes you think of her? I mean, she might have had a good motive for Lucy Payne’s murder, but she had none at all for Templeton’s, as far as we know.”

“True,” said Banks. “It could be two different killers. We’ll try to keep an open mind, but my guess, like yours, is that if it’s not Maggie, it could be Kirsten Farrow somehow, and for some reason, returned, remodeled. But how or why, or who or where she is, I have no idea. I don’t even know how we can get a lead on that. She dropped out of sight years ago. It’s a pity the Australian’s memory isn’t any better.”

“The only thing I can think of,” said Annie, “is to go back to the source of the leak again.”

“Leak?”

“Yes. It was one of the first things we started thinking about when we discovered that Karen Drew was really Lucy Payne. Who knew? And how?”

“And?”

“We still don’t know. Our people have been questioning the staff at Mapston Hall, and the Nottingham police have been helping us out down there at the hospital and social services. I mean, it’s a tricky one. Anyone could be lying, and we’d be hard pushed to prove it.”

“What we need,” said Banks, “is a connection between one of the people who knew that Karen was Lucy, and someone who might possibly be Kirsten Farrow or Maggie Forrest, or know one of them.”

“Yes,” said Annie, “but how do we unearth that? And how would we know if we’d found it? We don’t even know where to start looking for Kirsten. For Christ’s sake, we don’t even know that it was her who killed those men eighteen years ago.”

“But you’ve got a pretty strong feeling that it was, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think happened to her?”

Annie thought for a moment. Her brain felt sluggish, but she recalled Les Ferris’s tale and what she had since heard from Keith McLaren and Sarah Bingham, and she tried to string her thoughts into something resembling a logical sequence. “From what I can piece together,” she said, “Kirsten must have figured out somehow the identity of her attacker, only she didn’t pass this information on to the police; she went after revenge herself. She finally tracked him down to Whitby — how, I don’t know — and after a false start — Jack Grimley, the poor unlucky sod — she killed him.”

“And the Australian?”

“I don’t know. We talked about that. It’s possible he came too close to working out what was going on. If he knew she was the same person who was in Whitby when Grimley died, and he could link her to him…? Keith McLaren did tell me that he’d noticed Kirsten staring at someone in the Lucky Fisherman — and this is something he only remembered fairly recently — so she might have figured he was a danger to her. Or…”

“Yes?”

“Well, we know he was found in some woods outside Staithes, and that he was seen with a young woman. Say they went for a walk in the woods, things went too far for Kirsten — remember, she was totally traumatized by her experiences as well as mutilated — and she killed him, or thought she had.”

“Self-defense?”

“In her eyes. Maybe overkill in ours. I really don’t believe that Keith McLaren is a rapist.”

“Okay,” said Banks. “And next?”

“I can’t imagine how she must have felt when she had done what she set out to do and finally killed Eastcote, but she couldn’t go back to her old life. She hung around the fringes of it, for a while, saw Sarah a few more times, her parents, perhaps played at being normal, then she finally dropped out of sight a couple of years later. She wasn’t a serious suspect at the time, remember. She had an alibi, and as far as anyone knew, she had no way of knowing that Greg Eastcote was her attacker. That only came out later, when the police searched his house. It’s only now that she seems to have become a suspect in four murders, two of them eighteen years after the others. Anything could have happened since then. She could have gone anywhere, become anyone, done anything.”

“So what do we know about her?” Banks said. “She’d be, what, forty by now?”

“About that, if she’d just finished uni in 1988.”

“And she could be anyone, in any walk of life?”

“Yes. But let’s not forget that she had a university degree. Only English Lit, but even so… By all accounts she was a bright girl with a great future ahead of her. I mean, the odds are that we might be dealing with a professional woman.”

“Unless her experiences completely undermined her ambitions,” Banks argued. “But it’s a good point. If she really has done what we think she’s done, she’s incredibly focused, determined and resourceful. Anyway, it narrows things down. We can certainly check university records. We’re looking for a professional woman, most likely, who could have known that Karen Drew was Lucy Payne.”

“Julia Ford, Lucy’s lawyer, for a start. Ginger went to talk to her again on Friday afternoon and she wasn’t convinced she was telling us everything she knows.”

“Lawyers are naturally tight when it comes to giving information.”

“I know,” said Annie. “But Ginger thinks it was more than that with Julia Ford. I trust her instincts.”

“Maybe I should go and have a word with Ms. Ford,” Banks said. “It’s been a while since we crossed swords.”

“Sarah Bingham’s a lawyer, too, though she says she hasn’t seen Kirsten in years.”

“Believe her?”

“I think so,” Annie said.

“Okay. Who else?”

“A doctor?” Annie suggested. “Perhaps from the hospital she was in near Nottingham. Or Mapston Hall. There are doctors and nurses there.”

“Good point,” said Banks.

“One thing still gets me, though,” said Annie. “If we’re on the right track, why would she kill Templeton?”

“Another mistake?” Banks suggested. “She thought he was the killer stalking the girl, when in fact he was protecting her, like she must have thought Grimley was her attacker eighteen years ago? But you’re right. We need much more corroboration than we’ve got so far that the murders are linked. Who’s your crime scene coordinator?”