“Well, excuse me.”
Banks shifted position. These hard chairs made his back ache. “What is this thing you have for rummaging around in girls’ handbags or satchels?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Do you like to take souvenirs?”
“Of what?”
“Something to focus on, help you replay what you did?”
“What did I do?”
“What did you do, Owen? You tell me how you get your thrills.”
Pierce said nothing. He seemed to shrink in his chair, his mouth clamped shut.
“You can tell me, Owen,” Banks went on. “I want to know. I want to understand. But you have to help me. Do you masturbate afterwards, reliving what you’ve done? Or can’t you contain yourself? Do you come in your trousers while you’re strangling them? Help me, Owen. I want to know.”
Still Pierce kept quiet. Banks shifted again. The chair creaked.
“Why am I here?” Pierce asked.
“You know that.”
“It’s because you think I did it before, isn’t it?”
“Did you, Owen?”
“I got off.”
“Yes, you did.”
“So I’d be a fool to admit it, wouldn’t I? Even if I had done it.”
“Did you do it? Did you kill Deborah Harrison?”
“No.”
“Did you kill Ellen Gilchrist?”
“No.”
Banks sighed. “You’re not making it easy for us, Owen.”
“I’m telling you the truth.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I am.”
“Owen, you’re lying to us. You picked up Ellen Gilchrist on King Street last night. First you knocked her unconscious, then you drove her to Skield, where you dragged her a short distance up Witch Fell and strangled her with the strap of her handbag. Why won’t you tell me about it?”
Pierce seemed agitated by the description of his crime, Banks noticed. Guilty conscience?
“What was it like, Owen?” he pressed on. “Did she resist or did she just passively accept her fate. Know what I think? I think you’re a coward, Owen. First you strangled her from behind, so you didn’t have to look her in the eye. Then you lay her down on the grass and tore her clothes away. You imagined she was Michelle Chappel, didn’t you, and you were getting your own back, giving her what for. She didn’t have a chance. She was beyond resistance. But even then you couldn’t get it up, could you? You’re a coward, Owen. A coward and a pervert.”
“No!” The suddenness with which Pierce shot forward and slammed his fist into the desk startled Banks. He saw Susan Gay stand and make towards the door for help, but waved her down.
“Tell me, Owen,” he said. “Tell me how it happened.”
Pierce flopped back in his chair again, as if the energy of his outburst had depleted his reserves. “I want my lawyer,” he said tiredly. “I want Wharton. I’m not saying another word. You people are destroying me. Get me Wharton. And either arrest me or I’m leaving right now.”
Banks turned to Susan and raised his eyebrows, then sighed. “Very well, Owen,” he said. “If that’s the way you want it.”
EIGHTEEN
I
By late Sunday evening, it was clear that the crowd wasn’t going to storm the Bastille of Eastvale Divisional HQ, and by early Monday morning, there were only a few diehards left.
Banks turned his Walkman up loud as he passed the reporters by the front doors; Maria Callas drowned out all their questions. He said hello to Sergeant Rowe at the front desk, grabbed a coffee and headed upstairs. When he got to the CID offices, he took the earphones out and walked on tiptoe, listening for that snorting-bull sound that usually indicated the presence of Chief Constable Riddle.
Silence—except for Susan Gay’s voice on the telephone, muffled behind her closed door.
Dr Glendenning’s post-mortem report on Ellen Gilchrist was waiting in Banks’s pigeon hole, along with a preliminary report from the forensic lab, who had put a rush on this one.
In the office, Banks closed his door and pulled up the venetian blinds on yet another fine day. Much more of this and life would start to get boring, he reflected. Still, there was a bit of cloud gathering to the south, and the weather forecast threatened rain, even the possibility of a thunderstorm.
He opened the window a couple of inches and watched the shopkeepers open their doors and roll down their awnings against the sunshine. Then he stretched until he felt something crack pleasantly in his back, and sat down to study the report. He tuned the portable radio he kept in his office to Radio 4 and listened to “Today” as he read.
Glendenning had narrowed the time of death to between eleven and one, confirmed that the victim had been killed in the place
where she was found, and matched the strap of her shoulder-bag to the weal in her throat.
The wound behind her ear was round and smooth, he also confirmed, about an inch in diameter, and most likely delivered by a metal hammer-head.
This time, unfortunately, there was no scratched tissue beneath her fingernails. In fact, her fingernails were so badly chewed they had been treated with some vile-tasting chemical to discourage her from biting them.
According to the lab, though there was no blood other than the deceased’s at the scene, there were several hairs on her clothing that didn’t come from her body. That was understandable, given that she had been at a crowded dance. What was damning, though, was that four of the hairs matched those found on Deborah Harrison’s school blazer—the ones that had already also been tested against the sample Owen Pierce had given almost eight months ago.
Hairs could be dodgy evidence, as Pierce’s trial had shown. Banks read through a fair bit of jargon about melanin and fragmented medullas, then considered the neutron activation analysis printout specifying the concentration of various elements in the hair, such as antimony, bromine, lanthanum, strontium and zinc.
The lab would need another sample of the suspect’s hair, the report said, because the ratios of these elements could have changed slightly since the last sample was taken, but even at this point, it was 4500 to one
against
the hair originating from anyone but Pierce.
Unfortunately, none of the hairs had follicular tissue adhering to their roots; in fact, there were no roots, so it was impossible to identify blood factors or carry out DNA analysis.
As in the Deborah Harrison murder, the swabs showed no signs of semen in the mouth, vagina or anus, and there was no other evidence of sexual activity.
But the hairs and the fingerprints Vic Manson had identified on the plastic film container would probably secure a conviction, Banks guessed. Pierce wasn’t going to slip through the cracks this time.
In a way, Banks felt sad. He had almost convinced himself that Pierce had been an innocent victim of the system and that Deborah’s killer was closer to home; now it looked as if he were wrong again.
He tuned in to Radio 3—where “Composer of the Week” featured Gerald Finzi—and started making notes for the meeting he would soon be having with Stafford Oakes.
Things started to get noisy at around eleven-thirty, with Pierce on his way to court for his remand hearing, the phone ringing off the hook and reporters pressing their faces at every window in the building. Banks decided it was time to sneak out by the side exit and take an early lunch.
He opened the door and popped his head out to scan the corridor. Plenty of activity, but nobody was really paying him much attention. Instead of going the regular way, down to the front door, he tiptoed towards the fire exit, which came out on a narrow street opposite the Golden Grill, called Skinner’s Yard.
He had hardly got to the end of the corridor, when he heard someone call out behind him. His heart lurched.
“Chief Inspector?”
Thank God it wasn’t Jimmy Riddle. He turned. It was DI Barry Stott, and he was looking troubled. “Barry. What is it? What can I do for you?”
“Can I have a word? In private.”
Banks glanced around to see if anyone else was watching them. No. The coast was clear. “Of course,” he said, putting his hand on Stott’s shoulder and guiding him towards the fire door. “Let’s go for a drink, shall we, and get away from the mêlée.”
II
It was a long time since Rebecca had been to talk to the angel, but that Monday she felt the need again. And this time she wasn’t drunk.
As she turned off the tarmac path onto the gravel, she wondered how she could have been so wrong about Owen Pierce. She
remembered how scared she was when she first saw him after his release, then how like a little boy lost he had been when he came to talk to her. When she had asked him the all-important question and he had said he would answer truthfully, she had believed him. Now it looked as if he had lied to her. How could she be sure of anything any more? Of anyone? Even Daniel?
The air around the Inchcliffe Mausoleum was warm and still, the only sounds the drone of insects and the occasional car along Kendal Road or North Market Street. The angel continued to gaze heaven-ward. Rebecca wished she knew what he could see there.
Sober, this time, and feeling a little self-conscious, she couldn’t quite bring herself to speak out loud. But her thoughts flowed and shaped themselves as she stood there feeling silly. She wondered what the policeman, Chief Inspector Banks, would think of her.
The police had claimed that Owen Pierce had killed
another
girl. That meant they also believed he had killed Deborah Harrison. There could be no way out for him now, Rebecca thought, not with public feeling as strong as it was against him.
But he had visited her at the vicarage only that Saturday afternoon, full of talk about his innocence, the need for support and understanding. She couldn’t get over that, how
convinced
she had been. Was that the behaviour of someone who was intending to go out later that night, pick up a teenage girl and murder her? Rebecca didn’t think so. But what did she know? Experts had done studies on these kinds of people—serial murderers, they called them—though she didn’t know if having killed only two people qualified Owen for that designation.
She had, however, seen enough television programmes about psychopaths to know that some could
appear
perfectly charming, live quite normal lives outside their need to kill. Ted Bundy, for example, had been a handsome and intelligent man who had killed God knew how many young women in America. Watch out for the nice, friendly, polite boy next door, the message seemed to be, not the raggedy man with the cruel eyes muttering to himself in a corner.
A fly settled on her bare forearm and she stared at its shiny blue and green carapace for a moment before brushing it off. Then she
looked up at the angel again. If only he could make things clear for her.
Perhaps the police had arrested Owen only because they still believed he had killed Deborah Harrison. Maybe they had no real evidence that he had killed the other girl. She didn’t know why she should care so much. After all, Owen was still practically a stranger to her—and for a long time she had
believed
him to be a killer. Why should she be so upset when it turned out that he really was? She still couldn’t help feeling that he had let her down somehow, silly as the idea was.
“Why?” she asked, surprised to find herself speaking out loud at last, face turned up to look at the angel. “Can you tell me why I care?”
But she got no answer.
She already knew part of the answer. Talking to Owen, taking him under her wing, had been a test for her. In a way, his presence had challenged her faith, her Christian feelings. For when it came to Christianity, Rebecca was a humanist, not one of these cold-fish theologians like some of the ministers she had met. Perhaps a better existence did await us in heaven, but to Rebecca, Christianity was useless if it forgot people and the here and now. Faith and belief, she felt, were no use without charity, love and compassion; religion was nothing if it focused entirely on the afterlife. Daniel had agreed. That was why they had done so well together. Up to last year.
“Why am I telling you this?” she asked the angel. “What do you know of life on earth? What is it I want from you? Can you tell me?”
Still the angel gazed fixedly heaven-wards. His expression looked stern to Rebecca, but she put that down to a trick of the light.
“Am I to be a cynic now?” she asked. “After I put so much faith in Owen and he turns out to be a killer after all?”
Again, she didn’t hear any answer, but she did hear a movement coming from deeper in the woods. The area behind the Inchcliffe Mausoleum was the most overgrown in the entire graveyard, all the way back to the wall at Kendal Road. The oldest yews grew there, and the wild shrubbery was so dense in places you couldn’t even
walk through it easily. If there were any graves, nobody had visited them for a long time.
It must have been a small animal of some kind, Rebecca decided. Then she remembered that she had told the police and the court that the cry she heard that November evening could have come from an animal. When she really thought about it, she knew it never could have. She had simply refused to acknowledge, either to herself or to anyone else that the scream she heard was the last cry for help of a girl about to be murdered. This sound, too, was too loud to be a dog, a cat or a bird. And there were no horses or sheep in the graveyard.
She took a step towards the back of the mausoleum, aware as she did so that this was where Deborah’s body had been found. “Is anybody there?” she called out.
No answer.
Then she heard another rustling sound, this time closer to the North Market Street wall.
Rebecca turned and wandered thigh-deep into the tangled undergrowth. She felt nettles sting her legs as she walked. “Is anyone there?” she called again.
Still no answer.
She paused and listened for a moment. All she could hear was her heart beating.
Suddenly to her left, through the trees, she saw a dark figure break into a run. It looked like a man dressed in brown and green, but she couldn’t be certain because of the way the colours blended in with the background. Whoever it was, he couldn’t get over the high wall before she caught up with him. His only alternative was to head along the wall to the North Market Street gate. If she hurried, perhaps she could catch a glimpse of him before he got away.