“Fine,” said Banks. He turned to Templeton. “Well then, Kev. Where is he?”
Templeton glanced at Superintendent Gervaise again before answering. “Er…he’s in Whitby, sir.”
“That’s nice and handy, then, isn’t it?” Banks said. “I quite fancy a day at the seaside.”
The sun was out again when Banks began his descent from the North York Moors down into Whitby. It was a sight that always stirred him, even in the most gloomy weather, but today the sky was milky blue, and the sun shone on the ruined abbey high on the hill and sparkled like diamonds on the North Sea beyond the dark pincers of the harbour walls.
Retired Detective Inspector Keith Enderby lived in West Cliff, where the houses straggled east off the A174 towards Sandsend. At least his fifties pebble-dash semi had a sea view, even if it was only a few square feet between the houses opposite. Other than that, it was an unremarkable house on an unremarkable estate, Banks thought, as he pulled up behind the grey Mondeo parked at the front. “Mondeo Man.” A journalistically contrived representative of a certain kind of middle-class Briton. Was that what Enderby had become?
On the phone, Enderby had indicated that he was keen enough to talk about the Robin Merchant case, and in person he welcomed Banks into his home with a smile and a handshake, introduced his wife, Rita, a small, quiet woman with a halo of pinkish grey hair. Rita offered tea or coffee and Banks went for tea. It came with the requisite plate of chocolate digestives, arrowroots and KitKats, from which Banks was urged to help himself. He did. After a few pleasantries, at a nod from her husband, Rita made herself scarce, muttering something about errands in town, and drove off in the grey Mondeo. “Mondeo Woman,” then, Banks thought. Enderby said something about what a wonderful woman she was. Banks agreed. It seemed the polite thing to do.
“Nice place to retire to,” Banks said. “How long have you been here?”
“Going on ten years now,” Enderby said. “I put in my twenty-five years and a few more besides. Finished up as a DI in South Yorkshire Police, Doncaster. But Rita always dreamed of living by the seaside and we used to come here for our holidays.”
“And you?”
“Well, the Costa del Sol would have suited me just fine, but we couldn’t afford it. Besides, Rita won’t leave the country. Foreigners begin at Calais and all that. She doesn’t even have a passport. Can you believe it?”
“You probably wouldn’t have liked it there,” Banks said. “Too many villains.”
“Whitby’s all right,” said Enderby, “and not short of a villain or two, either. I could do without all those bloody goths, mind you.”
Banks knew that Whitby’s close association with Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
made the place a point of pilgrimage for goths, but as far as he knew, they were harmless enough kids, caused no trouble, and if they wanted to wear black all the time and drink a little of one another’s blood now and then, it was fine with him. The sun flashed on the square of sea through the houses opposite. “I appreciate your agreeing to talk to me,” Banks said.
“No problem. I just don’t know that I can add much you don’t already know. It was all in the case files.”
“If you’re anything like me,” Banks said, “you often have a feeling, call it a gut instinct or whatever, that you don’t think belongs in the files. Or a personal impression, something interesting but that seems irrelevant to the actual case itself.”
“It was a long time ago,” Enderby said. “I probably wouldn’t remember anything like that now.”
“You’d be surprised,” said Banks. “It was a high-profile case, I should imagine. Interesting times back then, too. Rubbing shoulders with rock stars and aristos and all that.”
“Oh, it was interesting all right. Pink Floyd. The Who. I met them all. More tea?”
Banks held out his cup while Enderby poured. His gold wedding band was embedded deeply in his pudgy finger, surrounded by a tuft of hair. “You’d have been how old then?” Banks asked.
“In 1970? Just turned thirty that May.”
That would be about right, Banks guessed. Enderby looked to be in his mid-sixties now, with the comfortable paunch of a man who enjoys his inactivity and a head bereft of even a hint of hair. He made up for the lack with a grey scrub-brush moustache. A delicate pink pattern of broken blood vessels mapped his cheeks and nose, but Banks put it down to blood pressure rather than drink. Enderby didn’t talk or act like a boozer, and his breath didn’t smell of Trebor Extra Strong mints.
“So what was it like working that case?” Banks asked. “What do you remember most about the Robin Merchant investigation?”
Enderby screwed up his eyes and gazed out of the window. “It must have been about ten o’clock by the time we got to the scene,” he said. “It was a beautiful morning, I do remember that. Clear. Warm. Birds singing. And there he was, floating in the pool.”
“What was your first impression?”
Enderby thought for a moment, then gave a brief, barking laugh and put his cup down on the saucer. “Do you know what
it was?” he said. “You’ll never believe this. He was on his back, naked, you know, and I remember thinking he’d got such a little prick for a famous rock star. You know, all the stuff we heard back then about groupies and orgies. The
News of the World
and all that. We assumed they were all hung like horses. It just seemed so incongruous, him floating there all shrivelled, like a shrimp or a seahorse or something. It was the water, of course. No matter how warm the day was, the water was still cold.”
“That’ll do it every time. Were the others up and around when you arrived?”
“You must be joking. The uniforms were just rousing them. If it hadn’t been for Merchant’s drowning and our arrival, they’d probably have slept until well into the afternoon. They looked in pretty bad shape, too, some of them. Hungover and worse.”
“So who phoned it in?”
“The gardener, when he arrived for work.”
“Was he a suspect?”
“Nah, not really.”
“Many hangers-on and groupies around?”
“It’s hard to say. According to their statements, everyone was a close friend of the band. I mean, no one actually
admitted
to being a groupie or a hanger-on. Most of the guys in the band were just with their regular girlfriends.”
“What about Robin Merchant? Was he with anyone that night?”
“There was a girl asleep in his bed,” said Enderby.
“Girlfriend?”
“Groupie.”
“According to what I’ve read,” Banks said, “the thinking at the time was that Merchant had taken some Mandrax and was
wandering around the pool naked when he fell in at the shallow end, hit his head on the bottom and drowned. Is that right?”
“Yes,” said Enderby. “That was what it looked like, and that’s what the pathologist confirmed. There was also a broken glass on the edge of the pool with Merchant’s fingerprints on it. He’d been drinking. Vodka.”
“Did you consider other possible scenarios?”
“Such as?”
“That it wasn’t accidental.”
“You mean somebody pushed him?”
“It would be a natural assumption. You know what suspicious minds we coppers have.”
“True enough,” Enderby agreed. “I must admit, it crossed my mind, but I soon ruled it out.”
“Why?”
“Nobody had any motive.”
“Not according to what they
told
you.”
“We dug a bit deeper than that. Give us some credit. We might not have had the resources you’ve got today, but we did our best.”
“There was no friction within the band?”
“As far as I know there’s always friction in bands. Put a group of people together with egos that big and there has to be. Stands to reason.”
Banks laughed. Then he thought of Brian and wondered if the Blue Lamps were due for a split before too long. Brian hadn’t said anything, but Banks sensed something different about him, a certain lack of excitement and commitment, perhaps, and his turning up out of the blue like that was unusual. He seemed weary. And what about Emilia? Was she the Yoko Ono figure? Still, if Brian wanted to talk, he would
get around to it in his own time; there was no use in pushing him. He’d always been that way. “Anything in particular?” he asked Enderby.
“Let’s see. They were all worried about Vic Greaves’s drug intake, for a start. His performances were getting more and more erratic, and his behaviour was unreliable. Apparently he’d missed a concert engagement not that long back, and the rest of them were still a bit pissed off at him for leaving them in the lurch.”
“Did Greaves have an alibi?”
Enderby scratched the side of his nose. “As a matter of fact, he did,” he said. “Two, actually.”
“Two?”
Enderby grinned. “Greaves and Merchant were the only two band members who didn’t have regular girlfriends. That night, Greaves happened to be in bed with two groupies.”
“Lucky devil,” said Banks. “I’d never have thought he had it in him.” He remembered the bald, bloated figure with the hollow eyes he had seen in Lyndgarth.
“According to them, he didn’t,” said Enderby. “Apparently he was too far gone to get it up. Bloody waste, if you ask me. They were lovely-looking girls.” He smiled at the memory. “Not wearing very much, either, when I interviewed them. That’s one of the little things you don’t forget in a hurry. Not so little, either, if you catch my drift.”
“Could Greaves not have sneaked away for a while during the night? They must have both slept, or passed out, at some time.”
“Look, when you get right down to it, any one of them could have done it. At least anyone who could still walk in a straight line. We didn’t really set great store by the alibis, as such. For a start, hardly any of them could remember much about the
previous evening, or even what time they finally went to bed. They might have been wandering about all night, for all I know, and not even noticed Merchant in the swimming pool.”
“So what made you rule out murder so quickly?”
“I told you. No real motive. No evidence that he’d been pushed.”
“But Merchant could have got into an argument with someone, gone a bit over the top.”
“Oh, he
could
have, yes. But no one says he did, so what are we supposed to do, jump to conclusions and pick someone? Anyone?”
“What about an intruder?”
“Couldn’t be ruled out, either. It was easy enough to get into the grounds. But again, there was no evidence of an intruder, and nothing was stolen. Besides, Merchant’s injuries were consistent with falling into a swimming pool and drowning, which was what happened. Look, if you ask me, at worst it could have been a bit of stoned and drunken larking around that went wrong. I’m not saying that’s what happened, because there’s no proof, but if they were all stoned or pissed, which they were, and they started running around the pool playing tag or what have you, and someone tagged Merchant just a bit too hard and he ended up in the pool dead…Well, what would you do?”
“First off,” said Banks, “I’d try to get him out of there. There was no way I could be sure he was dead. Then I’d probably try artificial respiration, or the kiss of life or whatever it was back then, while someone called an ambulance.”
“Aye,” said Enderby. “And if you’d had as much drugs in your system as they had, you’d probably have just stood there for half an hour twiddling your thumbs before doing anything, and then the first thing you’d have done is get rid of your stash.”
“Did the drugs squad search the premises? There was no mention in the file.”
“Between you and me, we searched the place. Oh, we found a bit of marijuana, a few tabs of LSD, some mandies. But nothing hard.”
“What happened?”
“We decided, in the light of everything else–like a body to deal with–that we wouldn’t bring charges. We just disposed of the stuff. I mean, what were we to do, arrest them all for possession?”
Disposed of?
Banks doubted that. Consumed or sold, more likely. But there was no point in opening that can of worms. “Did you get any sense that they’d cooked up a story between them?”
“No. As I said, half of them couldn’t even remember the party. It was all pretty fragmented and inconclusive.”
“Lord Jessop was present, right?”
“Right. Probably about the most coherent of the lot. That was before he got into the hard stuff.”
“And the most influential?”
“I can see where you’re going with this. Of course, nobody wanted a scandal. It was bad enough as it was. Maybe that’s why we didn’t bring drugs charges. There’d been enough of that over the past two or three years with the Stones bust, and it was all beginning to seem pretty ridiculous. Especially after the
Times
ran that editorial about breaking a butterfly on a wheel. Within hours we had them all banging at the door and jumping over the walls. The
News of the World, People, Daily Mirror
, you name it. So even if someone else had been involved in a bit of horseplay, the thinking went, then it had still been an accident, and there was no point in inviting scandal. As we couldn’t
prove
that anyone else had been involved and no one
was admitting to it, that was the end of it. Tea’s done. Fancy another pot?”
“No, thank you,” said Banks. “If there’s nothing more you can tell me, I’d better be off.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
“It wasn’t disappointing.”
“Look, you never did really tell me what it was all about. Remember, we’re in the same job, or used to be.”
Banks was so used to not giving out any more information than he needed to that he sometimes forgot to say entirely why he was asking about something. “We found a writer by the name of Nick Barber dead. You might have read about it.”
“Sounds vaguely familiar,” said Enderby. “I try to keep up.”
“What you won’t have read about is that he was working on a story about the Mad Hatters, on Vic Greaves and the band’s early days in particular.”
“Interesting,” said Enderby. “But I still don’t see why you’re asking about Robin Merchant’s death.”
“It was just something Barber said to a girlfriend,” Banks said. “He mentioned something about a juicy story with a murder.”
“Now you’ve got me interested,” said Enderby. “A murder, you say?”