Strange Affair
For Sheila
Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations.
– Adam Smith,
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.
– Proverbs 17:17
1
W
as she being followed? It was hard to tell at that time of night on the motorway. There was plenty of traffic, lorries for the most part, and people driving home from the pub just a little too carefully, red BMWs coasting up the fast lane, doing a hundred or more, businessmen in a hurry to get home from late meetings. She was beyond Newport Pagnell now, and the muggy night air blurred the red tail lights of the cars ahead and the oncoming headlights across the road. She began to feel nervous as she checked her rear-view mirror and saw that the car was still behind her.
She pulled over to the outside lane and slowed down. The car, a dark Mondeo, overtook her. It was too dark to glimpse faces, but she thought there was just one person in the front and another in the back. It didn’t have a taxi light on top, so she guessed it was probably a private hire-car and stopped worrying. Some rich git being ferried to a nightclub in Leeds, most likely. She overtook the Mondeo a little farther up the motorway and didn’t give it a second glance. The late-night radio was playing Old Blue Eyes singing “Summer Wind.” Her kind of music, no matter how old-fashioned people told her
it was. Talent and good music never went out of style as far as she was concerned.
When she got to Watford Gap services, she realized she felt tired and hungry, and she still had a long way to go, so she decided to stop for a short break. She didn’t even notice the Mondeo pull in two cars behind her. A few seedy-looking people hung around the entrance; a couple of kids who didn’t look old enough to drive stood smoking and playing the machines, giving her the eye as she walked past, staring at her breasts.
She went first to the ladies’, then to the café, where she bought a ham and tomato sandwich and sat alone to eat, washing it down with a Diet Coke. At the table opposite, a man with a long face and dandruff on the collar of his dark suit jacket ogled her over the top of his glasses, pretending to read his newspaper and eat a sausage roll.
Was he just a common or garden-variety perv, or was there something more sinister in his interest? she wondered. In the end, she decided he was just a perv. Sometimes it seemed as if the world were full of them, that she could hardly walk down the street or go for a drink on her own without some sad pillock who thought he was God’s gift eyeing her up, like the kids hanging around the entrance, or coming over and laying a line of chat on her. Still, she told herself, what else could you expect at this time of night in a motorway service station? A couple of other men came in and went to the counter for coffee-to-go, but they didn’t give her a second glance.
She finished half the sandwich, dumped the rest and got her travel mug filled with coffee. When she walked back to her car she made sure that there were people around – a family with two young kids up way past their bedtime, noisy and hyper-active – and that no one was following her.
The tank was only a quarter full, so she filled it up at the
petrol station, using her credit card right there, at the pump. The perv from the café pulled up at the pump opposite and stared at her as he put the nozzle in the tank. She ignored him. She could see the night manager in his office, watching through the window, and that made her feel more secure.
Tank full, she turned down the slip-road and eased in between two articulated lorries. It was hot in the car, so she opened both windows and enjoyed the play of breeze they created. It helped keep her awake, along with the hot black coffee. The clock on the dashboard read 12:35 a.m. Only about two or three hours to go, then she would be safe.
Penny Cartwright was singing Richard Thompson’s “Strange Affair” when Banks walked into the Dog and Gun, her low, husky voice milking the song’s stark melancholy for all it was worth. Banks stood by the door, transfixed.
Penny Cartwright
. He hadn’t seen her in over ten years, though he had thought of her often, even seen her name in
Mojo
and
Uncut
from time to time. The years had been kind. Her figure still looked good in blue jeans and a tight white T-shirt tucked in at the waist. The long, raven’s-wing hair he remembered looked just as glossy as ever in the stage lights, and the few threads of grey here and there made her look even more attractive. She seemed a little more gaunt than before, a little more sad around the eyes, perhaps, but it suited her, and Banks liked the contrast between her pale skin and dark hair.
When the song ended, Banks took advantage of the applause to walk over to the bar, order a pint and light a cigarette. He wasn’t happy with himself for having started smoking again after six months or more on the wagon, but there it was. He tried to avoid smoking in the flat, and he would stop again as
soon as he’d got himself back together. For the moment, it was a crutch, an old friend come back to visit during a time of need.
There wasn’t a seat left in the entire lounge. Banks could feel the sweat prickling on his temples and at the back of his neck. He leaned against the bar and let Penny’s voice transport him as she launched into “Blackwater Side.” She had two accompanists, one on guitar and the other on stand-up bass, and they wove a dense tapestry of sound against which her lyric lines soared.
The next round of applause marked the end of the set, and Penny walked through the crowd, which parted like the Red Sea for her, smiling and nodding hello as she went, and stood next to Banks at the bar. She lit a cigarette, inhaled, made a circle of her mouth and blew out a smoke ring towards the optics.
“That was an excellent set,” Banks said.
“Thanks.” She didn’t turn to face him. “Gin and tonic, please, Kath,” she said to the barmaid. “Make it a large one.”
Banks could tell by her clipped tone that she thought he was just another fan, maybe even a weirdo, or a stalker, and she’d move away as soon as she got her drink. “You don’t remember me, do you?” he asked.
She sighed and turned to look at him, ready to deliver the final put-down. Then he saw recognition slowly dawn on her. She seemed flustered, embarrassed and unsure what to say. “Oh…Yes. It’s Detective Chief Inspector Burke, isn’t it?” she managed finally. “Or have you been promoted?”
“Afraid not,” he said. “And it’s Banks, but Alan will do. It’s been a long time.”
“Yes.” Penny got her gin and tonic and raised it to Banks, who clinked it gently with his pint glass. “
Slainte
.”
“
Slainte
,” said Banks. “I didn’t know you were back in Helmthorpe.”
“Well, nobody put on a major advertising campaign.”
Banks looked around the dim lounge. “I don’t know. You seem to have a devoted following.”
“Word of mouth, mostly. Anyway, yes, I’m back in the old cottage. What brought you here?”
“I heard the music as I was passing,” Banks said. “Recognized your voice. What have you been up to lately?”
A hint of mischief came into her eyes. “Now that would be a very long story indeed, and I’m not sure it would be any of your business.”
“Maybe you could tell me over dinner some evening?”
Penny faced him and frowned, her brows knit together, searching him with those sharp blue eyes, and before she spoke, she gave a little shake of her head. “I can’t possibly do that,” she whispered.
“Why not? It’s only a dinner invitation.”
She was backing away from him as she spoke. “I just can’t, that’s all. How can you even ask me?”
“Look, if you’re worried about being seen with a married man, that ended a couple of years back. I’m divorced now.”
Penny looked at him as if he’d missed the point by a hundred miles, shook her head and melted back into the crowd. Banks felt perplexed. He couldn’t interpret the signals, decode the look of absolute horror he’d seen on her face at the idea of dinner with him. He wasn’t that repulsive. A simple dinner invitation. What the hell was wrong with her?
Banks gulped down the rest of his pint and headed for the door as Penny took the stage again, and he caught her eyes briefly across the crowded room. Her expression was one of puzzlement and confusion. She had clearly been unsettled by his request. Well, he thought, as he turned his back and left, red-faced, at least she didn’t still look so horrified.
The night was dark, the sky moonless but filled with stars, and Helmthorpe High Street was deserted, street lights smudgy in the haze. Banks heard Penny start up again back inside the Dog and Gun. Another Richard Thompson song: “Never Again.” The haunting melody and desolate lyrics drifted after him across the street, fading slowly as he walked up the cobbled snicket past the old bookshop, through the graveyard and onto the footpath that would take him home, or to what passed for home these days.
The air smelled of manure and warm hay. To his right was a drystone wall beside the graveyard, and to his left a slope, terraced with lynchets, led down step by step to Gratly Beck, which he could hear roaring below him. The narrow path was unlit, but Banks knew every inch by heart. The worst that could happen was that he might step into a pile of sheep shit. Close by he could hear the high-pitched whining of winged insects.
As he walked, he continued to think about Penny Cartwright’s strange reaction to his dinner invitation. She always had been an odd one, he remembered, always a bit sharp with her tongue and too ready with the sarcasm. But this had been different, not sarcasm, not sharp, but shock, repulsion. Was it because of their age difference? He was in his early fifties, after all, and Penny was at least ten years younger. But even that didn’t explain the intensity of her reaction. She could have just smiled and said she was washing her hair. Banks liked to think he would have got the message.
The path ended at a double-barrelled stile about halfway up Gratly Hill. Banks slipped through sideways and walked past the new houses to the cluster of old cottages over the bridge. Since his own house was still at the mercy of the builders, he had been renting a flat in one of the holiday properties on the lane to the left.
The locals had been good to him, as it turned out, and he’d got a fairly spacious one-bedroom flat, upper floor, with private entrance, for a very decent rent. The irony was, he realized, that it used to be the Steadman house, long ago converted into holiday flats, and it was during the Steadman case that he had first met Penny Cartwright.
Banks’s living-room window had a magnificent view over the dale, north past Helmthorpe, folded in the valley bottom, up to the rich green fields, dotted with sheep, and the sere, pale grass of the higher pastures, then the bare limestone outcrop of Crow Scar and the wild moors beyond. But his bedroom window looked out to the west over a small disused Sandemanian graveyard and its tiny chapel. Some of the tombstones, so old that you could scarcely read the names any more, leaned against the wall of the house.
The Sandemanian sect, Banks had read somewhere, had been founded in the eighteenth century, separating itself from the Scottish Presbyterian Church. Its members took Holy Communion, embraced communal property ownership, practised vegetarianism and engaged in “love feasts,” which Banks thought made them sound rather like eighteenth-century hippies.
Banks was a little pissed, he realized as he fiddled with his key in the downstairs lock. The Dog and Gun hadn’t been his first port of call that evening. He’d eaten dinner alone earlier in the Hare and Hounds, then had a couple of pints in the Bridge. Still, what the hell, he was on holiday for another week, and he wasn’t driving. Maybe he’d even have a glass of wine or two. He was still off the whisky, especially Laphroaig. Its distinctive taste was the only thing he could remember about the night his life nearly ended, and even at a distance, the smell made him feel sick.
Could the drinking have been what put Penny off, he wondered? Had she thought he was drunk when he asked her to dinner? But Banks doubted it. He didn’t slur his words or wobble when he walked. There was nothing in his manner that suggested he’d had too much. No, it had to be something else.
He finally opened the door, walked up the stairs and unlocked the inside door, then switched on the hall light. The place felt hot and stuffy, so he went into the living room and opened the window. It didn’t help much. After he had poured himself a healthy glass of Australian Shiraz, he walked over to the telephone. A red light was flashing, indicating messages on the answering service.