Close to Home (21 page)

“Funny thing, that, isn't it?” said Dr. Cooper. “Closure. As if burying someone's remains or sending a criminal to jail actually marks the end of the pain.”

“It's very human, though, don't you think?” said Michelle, for whom closure had simply refused to come, despite all the trappings. “We need ritual, symbols, ceremonies.”

“I suppose we do. What about this, though?” She pointed to the rib on the lab bench. “It could even end up being evidence in court.”

“Well,” said Michelle, “I don't suppose the Marshalls will mind if they know Graham's being buried with a rib missing, will they? Especially if it might help lead us to his killer. I'll get their permission, anyway.”

“Fine,” said Dr. Cooper. “I'll talk to the coroner this afternoon and try to track Hilary down in the meantime.”

“Thanks,” said Michelle. She looked again at the bones on the table, laid out in some sort of semblance of a human skeleton, and then glanced back at the single rib on the bench. Strange, she thought. It didn't matter—they were only old bones—but she couldn't help but feel this odd and deep sense of significance, and the words “Adam's rib” came to mind. Stupid, she told herself. Nobody's going to create a woman out of Graham Marshall's rib; with a bit of luck, Dr. Hilary Wendell is going to tell us something about the knife that killed him.

 

A few dark clouds had blown in on a strong wind from the north, and it looked as if rain was about to spoil yet another fine summer's day when Banks drove out in his own car to the crime scene late that afternoon, listening to Luke Armitage's “Songs from a Black Room.”

There were only five short songs on the tape, and lyrically they were not sophisticated, about what you'd expect for a fifteen-year-old with a penchant for reading poetry he couldn't understand. There were no settings of Rimbaud or
Baudelaire here, only pure, unadulterated adolescent angst: “Everybody hates me, but I don't care. / I'm safe in my black room, and the fools are out there.” But at least they were Luke's own songs. When Banks was fourteen, he had got together with Graham, Paul and Steve to form a rudimentary rock band, and all they had managed were rough cover versions of Beatles and Stones songs. Not one of them had had the urge or the talent to write original material.

Luke's music was raw and anguished, as if he were reaching, straining to find the right voice, his own voice. He backed himself on electric guitar, occasionally using special effects, such as fuzz and wah-wah, but mostly sticking to the simple chord progressions Banks remembered from his own stumbling attempts at guitar. The remarkable thing was how much Luke's voice resembled his father's. He had Neil Byrd's broad range, though his voice hadn't deepened enough to handle the lowest notes yet, and he also had his father's timbre, wistful but bored, and even a little angry, edgy.

Only one song stood out, a quiet ballad with a melody Banks vaguely recognized, perhaps an adaptation of an old folk tune. The last piece on the tape, it was a love song of sorts, or a fifteen-year-old's version of salvation:

He shut me out but you took me in.
He's in the dark but you're a bird on the wing.
I couldn't hold you but you chose to stay.
Why do you care? Please don't go away.

Was it about his mother, Robin? Or was it the girl Josie had seen him with in the Swainsdale Centre? Along with Winsome Jackman and Kevin Templeton, Annie was out showing the artist's impression around the most likely places. Maybe one of them would get lucky.

The SOCOs were still at Hallam Tarn, the road still taped off, and a local TV van, along with a gaggle of reporters, barely kept their distance. As he pulled up by the side of the
road, Banks even noticed a couple of middle-aged ladies in walking gear; sightseers, no doubt. Stefan Nowak was in charge, looking suave even in his protective clothing.

“Stefan,” Banks greeted him. “How's it going?”

“We're trying to get everything done before the rain comes,” Stefan said. “We've found nothing else in the water so far, but the frogmen are still looking.”

Banks looked around. Christ, but it was wild and lonely up there, an open landscape, hardly a tree in sight, with miles of rolling moorland, a mix of yellow gorse, sandy-colored tufts of grass and black patches where fires had raged earlier that summer. The heather wouldn't bloom for another month or two, but the dark multi-branched stems spread tough and wiry all around, clinging close to the ground. The view was spectacular, even more dramatic under the lowering sky. Over in the west, Banks could see as far as the long flat bulk of the three peaks: Ingleborough, Whernside and Pen-y-ghent.

“Anything interesting?” he asked.

“Maybe,” said Stefan. “We tried to pin down the exact point on the wall where the body had been dropped over, and it matches the spot where these stones stick out here like steps. Makes climbing easy. Good footholds.”

“I see. It would have taken a bit of strength, though, wouldn't it?”

“Oh, I don't know. He might have been a big lad for his age, but he was still only a kid, and pretty skinny.”

“Could one person have done it?”

“Certainly. Anyway, we've been looking for scuff marks. It's also possible that the killer scratched himself climbing up.”

“You've found blood on the wall?”

“Minute traces. But hold your horses, Alan. We don't even know if it's human blood yet.”

Banks watched the SOCOs taking the wall apart stone by stone and packing it in the back of a van. He wondered what Gristhorpe would think of such destruction. Gristhorpe was
building a drystone wall at the back of his house as a hobby. It went nowhere and fenced in nothing. Some of these walls had been standing for centuries without any sort of cement holding them together, but they were far more than mere random piles of rocks. Gristhorpe knew all about the techniques and the patience it took to find just the right stone to fit with the others, and here the men were demolishing it. Still, if it could lead them to Luke's killer, Banks thought, that was worth a drystone wall or two. He knew Gristhorpe would agree.

“Any chance of footprints?”

Stefan shook his head. “If there was any sort of impression in the grass or the dust, you can be sure it's gone now. Don't get your hopes up.”

“Do I ever? Tire tracks?”

“Again, too many, and it's not a good road surface. But we're looking. We've got a botanist coming up from York, too. There may be some unique plant life by the roadside, especially with it being close to a body of water. You never know. If you find someone with a bit of purple-speckled ragwort sticking to the bottom of his shoe, it just might be your man.”

“Wonderful.” Banks walked back to his car.

“Chief Inspector?” It was one of the reporters, a local man Banks recognized.

“What do you want?” he asked. “We've just told you lot all we know at the press conference.”

“Is it true what we've been hearing?” the reporter asked.

“What have you been hearing?”

“That it was a botched kidnapping.”

“No comment,” said Banks, muttering, “Shit,” under his breath as he got in his car, turned around in the next lay-by and set off home.

 

After tracking down a retired detective inspector who had worked out of West End Central and persuading him to talk
to her in London the following day, Michelle had left the station and stopped off to rent the video of
The Krays
on her way home. She hoped the film would at least give her a general picture of their life and times.

She had been living in her riverside flat on Viersen Platz for two months now, but it still felt temporary, just another place she was passing through. Partly it was because she hadn't unpacked everything—books, dishes, some clothes and other odds and ends—and partly it was the job, of course. Long hours made it difficult to keep house, and most of her meals were eaten on the run.

The flat itself was cozy and pleasant enough. A modern four-story building, part of the Rivergate Centre, it faced south, overlooking the river, got plenty of light for the potted plants she liked to keep on her small balcony, and was so close to the city center as to be practically in the shadow of the cathedral. She didn't know why she hadn't settled in more; it was one of the nicest places she had ever lived in, if a bit pricey. But what else did she have to spend her money on? She particularly liked to sit out on the balcony after dark, look at the lights reflected in the slow-moving river and listen to the trains go by. On weekends she could hear blues music from Charters Bar, an old iron barge moored opposite, by Town Bridge, and the customers sometimes made a bit too much noise at closing time, but that was only a minor irritant.

Michelle had no friends to invite for dinner, nor the time or inclination to entertain them, so she hadn't even bothered to unpack her best chinaware. She had even let such basics as laundry, dusting and ironing slip, and as a consequence her flat had the air of someone who used to maintain a certain level of tidiness and cleanliness but had let things go. Even the bed was unmade since that morning.

She glanced at the answering machine, but no light flashed. It never did. She wondered why she bothered to keep the thing. Work, of course. After a quick blitz on the dishes in the sink and a run around with the Hoover, she felt
ready to sit down and watch
The Krays
. But she was hungry. As usual, there was nothing in the fridge, at least nothing edible, so she went around the corner to the Indian take-away and got some prawn curry and rice. Sitting with a tray on her lap and a bottle of South African Merlot beside her, she pressed the remote and the video began.

When it had finished, Michelle didn't feel she knew much more about the Kray twins than before it had begun. Yes, theirs was a violent world and you'd better not cross them. Yes, they seemed to have plenty of money and spend most of their time in ritzy clubs. But what exactly did they do? Apart from vague battles with the Maltese and meetings with American gangsters, the exact nature of their businesses was left unexplained. And, as far as the film was concerned, coppers might as well have not even existed.

She turned to the news, still feeling a little queasy from the violence. Or was it from the curry and wine? She didn't really believe that the Krays had anything to do with Graham Marshall's murder, no more than she believed Brady and Hindley had, and she could imagine how Shaw would laugh if he heard her suggest such a thing.

If Bill Marshall had any serious criminal aspirations, they hadn't done him much good. He never got out of the council house, though the Marshalls had bought it for four thousand pounds in 1984.

Perhaps he swore off crime. Michelle had checked subsequent police records and found no further mention of him, so he had gone either straight or uncaught. She would guess at the former, given his standard of living. Graham's disappearance must have shaken him, then. Maybe he sensed a connection to the world he had been involved in, so he severed all ties. She would have to find time to have an even closer look at the old crime reports, dig out old action books and the notebooks of the detectives involved. But that could wait until after the weekend.

She turned on her computer and tried to put her thoughts and theories into some kind of order, the way she usually did
last thing at night, then she played a couple of games of Freecell and lost.

It got dark. Michelle turned off her computer, cleared away the detritus of her lonely dinner, found there wasn't enough wine left in the bottle worth saving, so topped up her glass. As it so often did around bedtime, the depression seemed to close in on her like a dense fog. She sipped her wine and listened to rain tapping against her window. God, how she missed Melissa, even after all this time. She missed Ted, too, sometimes, but mostly she missed Melissa.

Her thoughts went back to the day it happened. It was a movie that ran in her mind, as if on a constant loop. She wasn't there—that was a big part of the problem—but she could picture Melissa outside the school gates, her golden curls, little blue dress with the flowers on it, the other kids milling around, vigilant teachers nearby, then Melissa seeing what she thought was her father's car pulling to a stop across the road, though they always picked her up on
her
side. Then she pictured Melissa waving, smiling, and, before anyone could stop her, running right out in front of the speeding lorry.

Before getting into bed, she took Melissa's dress, the same dress she had died in, from her bedside drawer, lay down, held it to her face and cried herself to sleep.

A
s Annie waited outside ACC McLaughlin's office at county headquarters the following morning, having been “summoned,” she felt the same way she had when her geography teacher sent her to the headmaster's office for defacing a school atlas with her own cartographic designs: fantastic sea creatures and warnings that “Beyond this point be monsters.”

She had little fear of authority, and a person's rank or status was something she rarely considered in her daily dealings, but somehow this summons made her nervous. Not “Red Ron” himself—he was known to be stern but fair and had a reputation for standing behind his team—but the situation she might find herself in.

It seemed that since she had decided to pursue her career again, she had made nothing but mistakes. First, sliding arse over tit down the side of Harkside reservoir in full view of several of her colleagues, and against the orders of the officer in charge; then the debacle of her excessive force investigation of probationary PC Janet Taylor during her brief (but not brief enough) spell with Complaints and Discipline; and now being blamed for the murder of Luke Armitage. Pretty soon everyone would be calling her Fuck-Up Annie, if they didn't already. “Got a case you want fucking up, mate? Give it to Annie Cabbot, she'll see you right.”

So much for a revitalized career. At least she was determined to go down with her middle finger high in the air.

It wasn't bloody fair, though, Annie thought, as she paced. She was a damn good detective. Everything she had done in all those instances had been right; it was just the spin, the way it all added up, that made her look bad.

Red Ron's secretary opened the door and ushered Annie into the presence. As befitted his rank, ACC McLaughlin had an even bigger office than Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe's, and a carpet with much thicker pile. At least he didn't have the books that intimidated her so in Gristhorpe's office.

Red Ron had done a few things to personalize it since he first came to the job about eight months ago: a framed photo of his wife Carol stood on the desk, and a print of Constable's
The Lock
hung on the wall. The glass cabinet was full of trophies and photos of Red Ron with various police athletics teams, from rowing to archery. He looked fit and was rumored to be in training for a marathon. He was also rumored to keep a bottle of fine single malt in his bottom drawer, but Annie didn't expect to see much evidence of that.

“DI Cabbot,” he greeted her, glancing over the top of his wire-rimmed glasses. “Please sit down. I'll be with you in a moment.”

Annie sat. There was something different about him, she thought. Then she realized. Red Ron had shaved off his mustache since she had last seen him. She was surprised to find that he had an upper lip. She always thought men grew mustaches and beards to hide weak jaws and thin lips. He kept his receding silver hair cut short instead of growing one side long and trying to hide a bald center by combing it over the top of the skull, the way some men did. Annie didn't understand that. What was so wrong with going bald? She thought some bald men were quite sexy. It was one of those ridiculous macho male things, she guessed, like the obsession with penis length. Were all men so bloody insecure? Well,
she would never find out because none of them would ever talk about it. Not even Banks, though he did at least try more than most. Perhaps it was something they really
couldn't
do, something they were genetically incapable of, something going back to the caves and the hunt.

Annie brought herself back to the present. The ACC had just finished signing a stack of papers and after he had buzzed his secretary to come and take them away, he leaned back in his chair and linked his hands behind his head. “I suppose you know why you're here?” he began.

“Yes, sir.”

“The chief constable got in touch with me last night—just as I was settling down to my dinner, by the way—and said he'd had a complaint about you from Martin Armitage. Would you care to explain what happened?”

Annie told him. As she spoke, she could tell he was listening intently, and every now and then he made a jotting on the pad in front of him. Nice fountain pen, she noticed. A maroon Waterman. Sometimes he frowned, but he didn't interrupt her once. When she had finished, he paused for a while, then said, “Why did you decide to follow Mr. Armitage from his house that morning?”

“Because I thought his behavior was suspicious, sir. And I was looking for a missing boy.”

“A boy he had already told you was due back that very day.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You didn't believe him?”

“I suppose not, sir.”

“Why not?”

Annie went over the Armitages' behavior on the morning in question, the tension she had felt, the brusqueness of their response to her, the haste with which they wanted rid of her. “All I can say, sir,” she said, “is that I found their behavior to be out of sync with what I'd expect from parents who'd discovered that their son was all right and was coming home.”

“All very speculative on your part, DI Cabbot.”

Annie gripped the arms of the chair hard. “I used my judgment, sir. And I stand by it.”

“Hmm.” Red Ron took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “It's a bad business,” he said. “We've had the press all over us, and needless to say they're hot to trot with this idea of a simple kidnapping gone wrong. Add police cock-up to that, and they'd like nothing better.”

“With all due respect, sir, it wasn't a simple kidnapping.” Annie gave her reasons why, as she had done before with Gristhorpe and Banks.

Red Ron stroked his chin as he listened, plucking at his upper lip as if he still expected to feel the mustache. When she had finished, he asked, as she had hoped he wouldn't, “Didn't it cross your mind just for one moment that the kidnapper might have been watching Mr. Armitage make the drop?”

“I…er…”

“You didn't think of it, did you?”

“I wanted to know what he'd left there.”

“DI Cabbot. Use your intelligence. A man's stepson is missing. He's edgy and anxious to be somewhere, annoyed that the police are on his doorstep. You follow him and see him enter a disused shepherd's shelter with a briefcase and come out without it. What do you surmise?”

Annie felt herself flush with anger at the rightness of his logic. “When you put it like that, sir,” she said through gritted teeth, “I suppose it's clear he's paying a ransom. But things don't always seem so clear cut in the field.”

“You've no need to tell me what it's like in the field, DI Cabbot. I might be an administrator now, but I wasn't always behind this desk. I've served my time in the field. I've seen things that would make your hair curl.”

“Then I'm sure you'll understand what I'm saying.” Was that a half-smile Annie spotted fleeting across Red Ron's features? Surely not.

He went on, “The point remains that you must have
known the risk of being seen by the kidnapper was extremely high, especially as you were in open countryside, and that for whatever reason you disregarded that risk and went into the shelter anyway. And now the boy's dead.”

“There's some indication that Luke Armitage might have been killed even
before
his stepfather delivered the money.”

“That would be a piece of luck for you, wouldn't it?”

“That's not fair, sir. I needed to know what was in the briefcase.”

“Why?”

“I needed to be sure. That's all. And it turned out to be a clue of sorts.”

“The low amount? Yes. But how did you know that wasn't just the first installment?”

“With respect, sir, kidnappers don't usually work on the installment plan. Not like blackmailers.”

“But how did you know?”

“I didn't
know,
but it seemed a reasonable assumption.”

“You assumed.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Look, DI Cabbot. I'm not going to beat about the bush. I don't like it when members of the public make complaints about officers under my command. I like it even less when a self-important citizen such as Martin Armitage complains to his golf-club crony, the chief constable, who then passes the buck down to me. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir. You don't like it.”

“Now, while your actions weren't exactly by the book, and while you might have lacked judgment in acting so impulsively, I don't see anything serious enough in what you did to justify punishment.”

Annie began to feel relieved. A bollocking, that was all she was going to get.

“On the other hand…”

Annie's spirits sank again.

“We don't have all the facts in yet.”

“Sir?”

“We don't know whether you
were
seen by the kidnapper or not, do we?”

“No, sir.”

“And we don't know exactly
when
Luke Armitage died.”

“Dr. Glendenning's doing the postmortem sometime today, sir.”

“Yes, I know. So what I'm saying is that until we have all the facts I'll postpone judgment. Go back to your duties, detective inspector.”

Annie stood up before he changed his mind. “Yes, sir.”

“And, DI Cabbot?”

“Sir?”

“If you're going to keep on using your own car on the job, get a bloody police radio fitted, would you?”

Annie blushed. “Yes, sir,” she mumbled, and left.

 

Michelle got off the InterCity train at King's Cross at about half past one that afternoon and walked down the steps to the tube, struck, as she always was, by the sheer hustle and bustle of London, the constant noise and motion. Cathedral Square on a summer holiday weekend with a rock band playing in the marketplace didn't even come close.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Michelle had never worked on the Met. She had thought of moving there after Greater Manchester, after Melissa had died and Ted had left, but instead she had moved around a lot over the past five years and taken numerous courses, convincing herself that it was all for the good of her career. She suspected, though, that she had just been running. Somewhere a bit more out of the way had seemed the best option, at least for the time being, another low-profile position. And you didn't get anywhere in today's police force without switching back and forth a lot—from uniform to CID, from county to county. Career detectives like Jet Harris were a thing of the past.

A few ragged junkies sat propped against the walls of the busy underpass, several of them young girls, Michelle no
ticed, and too far gone even to beg for change. As she passed, one of them started to moan and wail. She had a bottle in her hand and she banged it hard against the wall until it smashed, echoing in the tiled passage and scattering broken glass all over the place. Like everyone else, Michelle hurried on.

The tube was crowded and she had to stand all the way to Tottenham Court Road, where Retired Detective Inspector Robert Lancaster had agreed to talk to her over a late lunch on Dean Street. It was raining when she walked out onto Oxford Street. Christ, she thought,
not again!
At this rate, summer would be over before it had begun. Michelle unfurled her umbrella and made her way through the tourists and hustlers. She turned off Oxford Street and crossed Soho Square, then followed Lancaster's directions and found the place easily enough.

Though it was a pub, Michelle was pleased to see that it looked rather more upmarket than some establishments, with its hanging baskets of flowers outside, stained glass and shiny dark woodwork. She had dressed about as casually as she was capable of, in a mid-length skirt, a pink V-neck top and a light wool jacket, but she would still have looked overdressed in a lot of London pubs. This one, however, catered to a business luncheon crowd. It even had a separate restaurant section away from the smoke and video machines, with table service, no less.

Lancaster, recognizable by the carnation he told Michelle he would be wearing in his gray suit, was a dapper man with a full head of silver hair and a sparkle in his eye. Perhaps a bit portly, Michelle noticed as he stood up to greet her, but definitely well-preserved for his age, which she guessed at around seventy. His face had a florid complexion, but he didn't otherwise look like a serious drinker. At least he didn't have that telltale calligraphy of broken red and purple veins just under the surface, like Shaw.

“Mr. Lancaster,” she said, sitting down. “Thank you for agreeing to see me.”

“The pleasure's mine entirely,” he said, traces of a Cockney accent still in his voice. “Ever since my kids flew the coop and my wife died, I'll take any opportunity to get out of the house. Besides, it's not every day I get to come down the West End and have lunch with a pretty girl like yourself.”

Michelle smiled and felt herself blush a little. A
girl,
he'd called her, when she had turned forty last September. For some reason, she didn't feel offended by Lancaster's particular brand of male chauvinism; it had such a quaint, old-fashioned feel to it that it seemed only natural on her part to accept the compliment and thank him with as much grace as possible. She'd soon find out if it got more wearing as their conversation continued.

“I hope you don't mind my choice of eatery.”

Michelle looked around at the tables with their white linen cloths and weighty cutlery, the uniformed waitresses dashing around. “Not at all,” she said.

He chuckled, a throaty sound. “You wouldn't believe what this place used to be like. Used to be a real villains' pub back in the early sixties. Upstairs, especially. You'd be amazed at the jobs planned up there, the contracts put out.”

“Not anymore, I hope?”

“Oh, no. It's quite respectable now.” He spoke with a tinge of regret in his voice.

A waitress appeared with her order book.