Everyone stared at him, dumbfounded, then Naylor, the stage worker, said, “We’ve got a Primus and a billycan back there. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Good lad.”
Naylor headed for the stage.
Chadwick turned back to Sampson. “Touch anything?” he asked.
“Only the zip. I mean, I didn’t know…I thought…”
“What did you think?”
“It felt like there was someone inside. I thought they might be asleep or…”
“On drugs?”
“Possibly. Yes.”
“After you opened the zip and saw what it was, what did you do then?”
“I called over to the stage.”
Chadwick looked at the speckled mess on the grass about a yard away. “Before or after you were sick?”
Sampson swallowed. “After.”
“Did you touch the body at all?”
“No.”
“Good. Now go over and give your statement to Detective Sergeant Enderby. We’ll probably want to talk to you again, so stick around.”
Sampson nodded.
Chadwick crouched by the blue sleeping bag, keeping his hands in his pockets so that he didn’t touch anything, even by accident. Only the upper half of the girl’s body was exposed, but it was enough. She was wearing a smocked white dress with a scooped neck, and the area under the left breast was a
mess–knife work, by the looks of it. Also, her dress was bunched up around her waist, as if she hadn’t had time to smooth it down when she got into the bag–or as if someone had shoved her in quickly
after
he’d killed her. The long dress could also have been raised for sexual purposes, if she had been sharing the sleeping bag with her boyfriend, Chadwick realized, but he would have to wait for the pathologist to find out any more about that.
She was a very pretty girl, with long blonde hair, an oval face and full lips. She looked so innocent. Not unlike Yvonne, he thought, with a sudden shudder, and Yvonne had been out all last night, too. But she had come home. Not this girl. She was perhaps a year or two older than Yvonne, and her eyeshadow emphasized the colour of her big blue eyes. Her mascara stood out in stark contrast to the paleness of her skin. She wore several strings of cheap coloured beads around her neck, and she had a corn flower painted on her right cheek.
There was nothing more Chadwick could do until the Home Office pathologist arrived, which should be very soon, McCullen had given him to understand. Standing, he scanned the ground nearby but saw only rubbish: KitKat wrappers, a soggy
International Times
, an empty pouch of Old Holborn rolling tobacco, an orange pack of Rizla cigarette papers. It would all have to be bagged and checked out, of course. He sniffed the air–moist but warm enough for the time of year–and glanced at his watch. Half past eleven. It looked like being another fine day, and a long one.
He turned his gaze back to the others. “Anybody recognize her?”
They all shook their heads. Chadwick thought he noticed a little hesitation in Rick Hayes’s reaction.
“Mr. Hayes?”
“No,” said Hayes. “Never seen her before.”
Chadwick thought he was lying about not recognizing the girl, but it would keep. He noticed a movement by the stage and looked to see Naylor coming back with a tray and, following shortly behind him, a nattily dressed man who seemed to be about as happy to find himself walking across a muddy field as Chadwick had been. But this man was carrying a black bag. The pathologist had arrived at last.
October 2005
Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks hit the play button, and after the heartbeats, the glorious sound of “Breathe” from Pink Floyd’s
Dark Side of the Moon
filled the room. He still hadn’t got the hang of the new equipment yet, but he was finding his way around it slowly. He had inherited a state-of-the-art sound system along with a DVD player, forty-two-inch plasma TV, forty-gigabyte iPod and a Porsche 911 from his brother Roy. The estate had gone to Banks’s parents, but they were set in their ways and had no use for a Porsche or a large-screen TV. The first wouldn’t last five minutes parked outside their Peterborough council house, and the second wouldn’t fit in their living room. They had sold Roy’s London house, setting them both up nicely for the rest of their lives, and passed on the things they couldn’t use to Banks.
As for Roy’s iPod, Banks’s father had taken one look at it and been about to drop it in the waste bin before Banks rescued it. Now it had become as essential to him when he went out as his wallet and his mobile. He had been able to download the software and buy new chargers and cables, along with an adapter that allowed him to play it through his car radio, and while he had kept a great deal of his brother’s music library on it, he had managed to clear a good fifteen hours’
worth of space by deleting the complete
Ring
cycle, and that was more than enough to accommodate his meagre collection at the moment.
Banks headed into the kitchen to see how dinner was getting along. All he’d had to do was remove the packaging and put the foil tray in the oven, but he didn’t want to burn it. It was Friday evening, and Annie Cabbot was coming over for dinner tonight–just as a friend–and the evening was to be a sort of unofficial housewarming, though that was a term Banks hesitated to use these days. He had been back in the restored cottage for less than a month, and tonight would be Annie’s first visit.
It was a wild October night outside. Banks could hear the wind screaming and moaning and see the dark shadows of tree branches tossing and thrashing beyond the kitchen window. He hoped Annie would make the drive all right, that there were no trees down. There was a spare bed if she wanted to stay, but he doubted that she would. Too much history for that to be comfortable for either of them, although there had been moments over the summer when he had thought it wouldn’t take much to brush all the objections aside. Best not think about that, he told himself.
Banks poured himself the last of the Amarone. His parents had inherited Roy’s wine cellar, and they had passed this on to him, too. As far as Arthur Banks was concerned, white wine was for sissies and red wine tasted like vinegar. His mother preferred sweet sherry. Their loss was Banks’s gain, and while it lasted, he got to enjoy the high life of first-growth Bordeaux and Sauternes, white and red Burgundies from major growers, Chianti Classico, Barolo and Amarone. When it was gone, of course, he would be back to boxes of Simply Chilean and Big Aussie Red, but for the moment he was enjoying himself.
Whenever he opened a bottle, though, he missed Roy, which was strange because they had never been close, and Banks felt he had only got to know his brother after his death. He would just have to learn to live with it. It was the same with the other things–the TV, stereo, car, music–they all made him think of the brother he had never really known.
Part of the way through “Us and Them” he heard the doorbell ring. Annie, half past seven, right on time. He walked through and opened the front door, flinching at the gust of wind that almost blew her into his arms. She edged back, giggling, trying to hold down her hair as Banks pushed the door shut, but even in the short trip from her car to his front door it had become a tangled mess.
“Quite the night out there,” Banks said. “I hope you didn’t have any problems getting here.”
Annie smiled. “Nothing I couldn’t handle.” She handed Banks a bottle of wine–Tesco’s Chilean Merlot, he noticed–and took out a hairbrush. As she attacked her hair, she wandered around the front room. “This is certainly different from what I expected,” she said. “It looks really cozy. I see you did go for the dark wood, after all.”
The wood for the desk had been one of the things they had talked about, and Annie had advised the darker colour, as opposed to light pine. What had been Banks’s main living room was now a small study complete with bookcases, a reproduction Georgian writing table for the laptop computer under the window and a couple of comfortable brown leather armchairs arranged around the fire, perfect for reading. A door by the side of the fireplace led into the new entertainment room, which ran the length of the house. Annie walked up and down and admired it, though she did tell Banks she thought it was a bit of a bloke’s den.
The TV hung on the wall at the front and the speakers were spread about in strategic positions around the deep plum sofa and armchairs. Storage racks on the side walls held CDs and DVDs, mostly Roy’s, apart from the few Banks had bought over the past couple of months. At the back, French windows led through to the new conservatory.
They wandered into the kitchen, which had been completely remodelled. Banks had tried to make sure it was as close to the original as possible, with the pine cupboards, copper-bottomed pans on wall hooks and the breakfast nook, where bench and table matched the cupboards but that strange, benign presence he had felt there before had gone for good, or so it seemed. Now it was a fine kitchen, but only a kitchen. The builders had run the conservatory along the entire back of the house, and there was also a door leading to it from the kitchen.
“Impressive,” Annie said. “All this and a Porsche parked outside, too. You’ll be pulling the birds like nobody’s business.”
“Some hope,” said Banks. “I might even sell the Porsche.”
“Why?”
“It just feels so strange, having all Roy’s stuff. I mean, the TV and the movies and CDs are okay, I suppose, not quite as personal, but the car…I don’t know. Roy loved that car.”
“Give it a chance. You might get to love it, too.”
“I like it well enough. It’s just…oh, never mind.”
“Mmm, it smells good in here. What’s for dinner?”
“Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.”
Annie gave him a look.
“Vegetarian lasagna,” he said. “Marks and Spencer’s best.”
“That’ll do fine.”
Banks threw a simple salad together with an oil and vinegar dressing while Annie sat on the bench and opened the wine. Pink Floyd finished, so he went and put some Mozart wind
quintets on the stereo. He’d had speakers wired into the kitchen, and the sound was good. When everything was ready, they sat opposite one another and Banks served the food. Annie was looking good, he thought. Her flowing chestnut hair still fell about her shoulders in disarray, but that only heightened her attraction for him. As for the rest, she was dressed in her usual casual style, just a touch of makeup, light-weight linen jacket, a green T-shirt and close-fitting black jeans, bead necklace and several thin silver bracelets that jingled when she moved her hand.
They had hardly got beyond the first mouthful when Banks’s telephone rang. He muttered an apology to Annie and went to answer it.
“Sir?”
It was DC Winsome Jackman. “Yes, Winsome,” Banks said. “This had better be important. I’ve been slaving over a hot oven all day.”
“Sir?”
“Never mind. Go on.”
“There’s been a murder, sir.”
“Are you certain?”
“I wouldn’t be disturbing you if I wasn’t, sir,” Winsome said. “I’m at the scene right now. Moorview Cottage in Fordham, just outside Lyndgarth. I’m standing about six feet away from him, and the back of his head’s caved in. Looks like someone bashed him with the poker. Kev’s here, too, and he agrees. Sorry, Detective Sergeant Templeton. The local bobby called it in.”
Banks knew Fordham. It was nothing but a hamlet, really, a cluster of cottages, a pub and a church. “Christ,” he said. “Okay, Winsome, I’ll get there as soon as I can. In the meantime, you can call in the SOCOs and Dr. Glendenning, if he’s available.”
“Right you are, sir. Should I ring DI Cabbot?”
“I’ll deal with that. Keep the scene clear. We’ll be there. Half an hour at the most.”
Banks hung up and went back into the kitchen. “Sorry to spoil your dinner, Annie, but we’ve got to go out. Suspicious death. Winsome’s certain it’s murder.”
“Your car or mine?”
“Yours, I think. The Porsche is a bit pretentious for a crime scene, don’t you think?”
Monday, September 8, 1969
As the day progressed, the scene around Brimleigh Glen became busy with the arrival of various medical and scientific experts and the incident van, a temporary operational headquarters with telephone communications and, more importantly, tea-making facilities. The immediate crime scene was taped off and a constable posted at the entrance to log the names of those who came and went. All work on rubbish disposal, stage dismantling and cesspit filling was suspended until further notice, much to the chagrin of Rick Hayes, who complained that every minute more spent at the field was costing him money.
Chadwick hadn’t forgotten Hayes’s possible lie earlier about not recognizing the victim, and he looked forward to the pleasure of a more in-depth interview. In fact, Hayes was high on his list of priorities. For the moment, though, it was important to get the investigation organized, get the mechanics in place and the right men appointed to the right jobs.
Detective Sergeant Enderby seemed capable enough on first impression, despite the length of his hair, and Chadwick already knew that Simon Bradley, his driver, was a bright young copper with a good future ahead of him. He also
demonstrated the same sort of military neatness and precision in his demeanour that Chadwick appreciated. As for the rest of the team, they would come mostly from the North Riding, people he didn’t know, and he would have to learn their strengths and weaknesses on the hoof. He preferred to enter into an investigation on more certain ground, but it couldn’t be helped. Officially, this was North Yorkshire’s case, and he was simply helping out.
The doctor had pronounced the victim dead and turned the body over to the coroner’s officer, in this case a local constable specially appointed to the task, who arranged for its transportation to the mortuary in Leeds. During his brief examination at the scene, Dr. O’Neill had been able to tell Chadwick only that the wounds almost certainly had been caused by a thin-bladed knife and that she had been dead less than ten hours and more than six before the time of his examination, which meant she had been killed sometime between half past one and half past five in the morning. Her body had been moved after death, he added, and she had not been in the sleeping bag when she died. Though stab wounds, even to the heart, often don’t bleed a great deal, the doctor said, he would have expected more blood on the inside of the sleeping bag had she been stabbed there.