Peter Robinson - Bad Boy

“Yes,” said Banks. “But I’m amazed you remember. You can’t have been more than six or seven.” He remembered the day well. He and Patrick Doyle were just getting to know each other then, typically enough, through their children. Patrick had said he was happy to have a police detective living in the street. Now he’d know where to go if he ever got a parking ticket or had a problem with the law. They had all walked through magical woods dappled with sunlight filtered between fluttering leaves, and at that riverside picnic Sandra had chilled a bottle of white wine in the water, and they had sipped it from colored plastic cups with chunks of old cheddar and soft Brie on baguettes.

The spot was also close to where some schoolchildren had found a man hanging earlier in the summer, and that had marked the start of the case that had almost finished Banks. But it was behind him now, along with the rest of that troubled time. “Do you remember Blackpool Illuminations?”

“Vaguely,” said Erin. “It’s not quite as clear. I think I fell asleep in the car. Brian was with us then, too, wasn’t he?”

“Yes.”

Erin shook her head sadly. “She won’t even mention his name anymore. I talk about the Blue Lamps, she doesn’t want to know.”

“Who? Why?”

“Tracy. I mean, if I had a rock star like Brian for a brother, I’d be telling, like, everyone. I do, anyway. Tell them I grew up with him. The Blue Lamps are so cool. Do you know she likes to call herself Francesca now because she thinks Tracy’s too Corrie?”

“No, I didn’t know that,” said Banks. And somehow, knowing it hurt him to the quick. Her name. The name he and Sandra had given her. “Why won’t she mention Brian?” he asked.

“She’s jealous, I’d say, but she won’t admit it. Because he’s successful and she’s…well, let’s face it, she didn’t do very well in her exams, did she? I mean, she knew how much was expected of her, and she feels she’s let everyone down, especially herself. Ever since then she’s been on hold, sort of dithering. She likes working at the bookshop well enough, but she doesn’t see it as a career, or as what she thought she’d be doing by now.”

“But she can still take her academic career further if she wants. She mentioned teaching once. Surely she could still do that?”

“Sure, if she had the will. But she’s changed. There’s a lot of negative stuff there. Anger. Low self-esteem. I don’t know. I just can’t seem to talk to her these days. I mean, you know, before…Anyway, what do you want to know?”

“It’s hard to know where to begin,” said Banks, still trying to digest what he had just heard about Tracy. He had failed her. He should have paid more attention to her when she needed it, spent more time with her, instead of getting bogged down in his own personal and professional problems and feeling sorry for himself. “I’m not sure myself, yet,” he went on. “I just arrived back from my holidays this morning, and I’m still jet-lagged. You’ll have to help me a bit.”

“Where did you go?”

“America. Arizona, Nevada and California, mostly.”

“L.A.? San Francisco?”

“Yes.”

“Wicked. I’ve always wanted to go there.”

Banks smiled. “Me, too. And it really is ‘wicked.’” Erin paused a moment, then began, “My father-”

“You don’t have to talk about him,” said Banks quickly. “That’s not my case. I mean, I’m not saying that I’m not interested, or I don’t care, but because armed police officers were involved, we have to have a special investigation, and I’m not allowed to interfere. Do you understand?”

“I understand. That makes sense.”

“But you shouldn’t blame yourself. Nobody could have foreseen that combination of circumstances.”

“Yes, I know. I’ve been trying to convince myself. It’s just that whenever I think about it I can’t help but feel that upsurge of guilt. It just floods through me like a dam’s burst, and I don’t have the strength to hold it back.”

“That’s probably a good thing,” said Banks. “My psychologist friend always told me it wasn’t a good idea to hold things back.”

“But you have to sometimes, don’t you? Anger? Hatred? Disapproval? Otherwise we’d all be at each other’s throats half the time.”

“What about love?” said Banks. “Should we hold that back too?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “It might not be a bad thing. In some circumstances. When you think about it, love probably causes more trouble than hate.”

She sounded far too wise for one so young, thought Banks, who had been patiently waiting for years now for the wisdom that was supposed to come with age; to no avail, it seemed. “Anyway,” he said, “no matter how bad things seem now, your mother’s going to need you before long. Do you think you can cope?”

“Dunno,” said Erin, waving away a troublesome wasp. “Not much I can do from jail, is there?”

“Why did you take the gun, Erin? I trust you did take it from your boyfriend Jaffar McCready, and that you hadn’t already got it from somewhere else?”

“Jaff,” Erin said. “He goes by Jaff. I was pissed off at him. I knew he had it-he’d shown it off to me once-and I thought if I took it he’d be angry. You know, like it was his favorite toy or something. I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to make him notice me, want me back.”

Now, Banks thought, she didn’t sound so wise. “But it’s not a toy. Not like an iPod or a mobile or something. Didn’t you think he might be so angry he wouldn’t want anything to do with you again? Or that maybe he’d hurt you?”

“No. I don’t suppose I was thinking all that clearly. I just took it and went back to the house and picked up some clothes and went home. I was going to give it back to him.”

“Okay,” said Banks. “Do you know why he had it in the first place?”

“Not really. Just for show, I think. I don’t think he’d ever actually used it or anything. He just liked to play at being a tough guy, that’s all. I mean, he did hang around with some pretty shifty characters, and I don’t know how he had made so much money, but I don’t think it was from working nine to five.”

“Did you meet any of these shifty characters?”

“Sometimes.”

Banks took copies of Rose’s sketches of Ciaran and Darren from his briefcase. “Did you ever see either of these two, for example?”

“They came to the flat once. Jaff told me to stay in the bedroom but the door was open a crack. I saw them and heard them. They were arguing.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Couple of months. Something like that.”

“What were they arguing about?”

“I don’t know. Money. Some delivery or other. I think maybe Jaff did a bit of dealing. Nothing serious, but he knew everyone on the scene.”

“The club scene?”

“Yeah. And the student scene.”

“Is that how you met?”

“No. It was after uni. I was working at one of those posh restaurants in The Calls, and he used to eat there regularly.”

“Alone?”

“Sometimes.”

“Ever with the two in the drawings?”

“No. If he did have company it was usually some expensive suit, not thugs like that.” She smiled. “I’m not sure they’d even get past the door, the place I worked.”

“Business?”

“It seemed that way. And he did come in by himself sometimes. He didn’t like to cook, or even to eat at home by himself. We got to chatting. You know. One thing led to another. He seemed fun. Smart, cocky, ambitious. We’d go to clubs sometimes after the restaurant closed. Like I said, everybody knew him. Mr. Big around there. Mr. Flash. Always carried a thick roll of twenties. It felt good to be seen out with him. Never boring. But it was hard to keep up with him sometimes. He always seemed to have something else going on, you know, somewhere else to be, or someone else to be with.” She shrugged. “Now I know who it was.”