Peter Robinson - Friend of the Devil

“Well, I’m asking you again.”

“No. Nothing. Hayley was pretty happy-go-lucky. I mean, I never saw her really down about anything.”

“Angry?”

“She had a bit of temper. Had quite a mouth on her. But it took a lot to get her riled.”

“She was upset in the Fountain, right? And she took it out on Jamie Murdoch.”

“Yeah, a bit. I mean, he was the only one there apart from us. She called him a few names. Limp dick, dickhead, stuff like that. She was way out of line.”

“How did he take it?”

“How would you take it? He wasn’t happy.”

“He told me it wasn’t a big deal.”

“Well, he would, wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t want you to think he had a motive for hurting Hayley.”

“Did he? Was he really that angry?”

“I don’t know. More like embarrassed. He rushed us out pretty quickly after that.”

“Were they ever close at all, Hayley and Jamie?”

“No way! Jamie was a loser. He dropped out of the college. I mean, look at him, stuck in the grotty pub night after night, half the time by himself while the landlord suns himself in Florida.”

“Was there anyone in any of the pubs that night — especially the Fountain — who paid undue attention to Hayley, apart from the leather-shop owner?”

“Men looked at her, yes, but nothing weird, not that I can remember. Nothing different from usual, anyway. And like I said, we were the last to leave the Fountain. Nobody followed us.”

“Okay, Stuart. Let’s get back to the Maze now.”

Stuart squirmed in his chair. “Must we?”

“It’s important.” Banks gestured to the second KitKat on the table. “Do you want that?” Stuart shook his head. Banks picked it up and began to eat it. He had forgotten how hungry he was.

“I don’t feel good about it,” Stuart said. “I’ve thought and thought since we last talked, and I know I must have heard it happening. I know I could have stopped it if I’d just done something. Made a lot of noise, banged a dustbin lid on the wall. I don’t know. But I bottled out. I got scared and ran away, and because of that Hayley died.”

“You don’t know that,” said Banks. “Stop beating yourself up over it. I’m interested in what you heard.”

“I’ve already told you.”

“Yes, but you also said you heard some music, a snatch of a song, as if from a passing car. Rap, you said it was. And familiar. You couldn’t remember what it was when I last talked to you. Do you have any idea now?”

“Oh, yeah, that. I think I do… you know, since we talked I’ve been playing it over and over in my mind, the whole thing, and I think it was the Streets, ‘Fit But You Know It.’”

“I know that one,” said Banks. “Are you sure?”

If Stuart was surprised that Banks knew the song, he didn’t show it. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ve got the CD. Just haven’t played it in a while.”

“And you’re certain you heard it around the same time you heard the other sounds?”

“Yes. Why? Is it important?”

“Maybe,” said Banks. He checked his watch. “You’ll be late for your lecture,” he said, standing up. “Thanks for your time.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.” Banks finished his latte, screwed up the KitKat wrapper, dropped it in the ashtray and left, thinking he had a pretty good idea why both Stuart Kinsey and Kevin Templeton heard the same music on different nights.

Just after dark that evening, Annie found herself wandering down Saint Ann’s Staith by the estuary, past the blackboard with the tide tables on the short bridge that linked east and west. The strings of red and yellow harbor lights had just come on and made a hazy glow in the slight evening mist. They reflected, swaying slightly, in the narrow channels of the ebbing tide. Fishing boats leaned at odd angles in the silt, their masts tilting toward the fading light and rattling in the light breeze. A ghostly moon was just visible out to sea above the wraiths of mist. The air smelled of salt and dead fish. It was chilly, and Annie was glad she was wearing a wool coat and a pashmina wrapped around her neck.

She walked along beside the railings, the shops opposite closed for the evening, a glow coming from the pubs and the two cafés still serving fish and chips. Vinegar and deep-frying fat mingled with the harbor smells. A group of Goths dressed in black, faces white, hung out smoking and talking by the sheds, near the “Dracula Experience,” and even so long before the holiday season, a few tourist couples walked hand in hand and families tried to control their unruly children. The large amusement arcade was doing plenty of business, Annie noticed, almost tempted to go in and lose a few coins on the one-armed bandits. But she resisted.

She was feeling excited because Les Ferris had phoned late in the afternoon and told her the hair and fibers expert, Famke Larsen, had matched Kirsten Farrow’s sample of eighteen years ago with a hair taken from Lucy Payne’s blanket last week. So it was Kirsten. Back and in action again. Annie’s long shot had paid off and she could trust her copper’s instincts again. It gave her the focus she needed, and it appeased Superintendent Brough for a while.

According to Famke, the similarities in color, diameter, medulla pattern and the intensity of pigment granules were enough to go on, but it wasn’t a match that would stand up in court. Annie didn’t care about that; she’d half expected it, anyway. Les Ferris had reminded her that hair was class evidence — that it was not possible to match a human hair to any single head — but for her purposes the identification was enough. Both samples were fine, Caucasian, with evenly distributed pigment and a slightly oval cross section.

An unexpected bonus was that the hair found on Lucy Payne’s blanket hadn’t been sheared off; it came complete with its root. The only drawback, Famke had explained to Liam and Les, was that it was in what she called the “telogen stage.” In other words, it hadn’t been pulled out, it had fallen out, and that meant there were no healthy root cells and attached matter. The best they could hope for, Les summed up, was mitochondrial DNA, which is material that comes from outside the nucleus of the cells, and from the mother. Even so, it could help them come up with a DNA profile of Kirsten Farrow, Lucy Payne’s killer.

The tide was out, so Annie went down the steps and on the beach. There was no one else around now, perhaps because of the late-March chill. As she walked, she wondered about Jack Grimley. Would a fall to the beach from the top of the cliffs have killed him? The beach wasn’t particularly rocky. She looked behind at the looming mass towering above her. It might have. But if he’d been lying on the sand for a while, wasn’t it likely that someone would have seen him? What if Kirsten had lured him down there, believing him to be her attacker, and killed him? There were some small caves in the bottom of the cliff face. Annie walked inside one. It was pitch-black and smelled of seaweed and stagnant rock pools. It wasn’t very deep, as far as she could tell, but you could hide a body there, behind a rock, at night especially, until the tide came and took it out to sea.

She left the beach and walked up the steps from Pier Road to the Cook statue. For a moment, she sat on the bench there and thought, This is where Keith and Kirsten sat, where he kissed her and got no response. Was she so preoccupied with her revenge that she had gone beyond the merely human? It was also near here that a woman had been seen with Jack Grimley, and though she hadn’t been identified as Kirsten, Annie was certain that was who it was. What had they talked about? Had she lured him to the beach with promises of sex and killed him? Was that also how she had got Keith McLaren into the woods?