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III
It had long since turned dark when Banks got home. For hours, it seemed, he had driven around the Dales, hardly noticing where he was, or what music kept repeating on the cassette player. His knuckles still hurt, but the shaking inside had stopped. Had he really done it? Punched Jimmy Riddle? He realized he had, and he also realized that at the moment the anger had burst out of him, it was Sandra he had been thinking of, not the bloody job.
The house was quiet and empty. A different quality of silence and emptiness than he had ever felt there before. First, he had a look around to see if anything was missing. Sandra hadn’t taken very much. Most of her clothes were still in the wardrobe, the scent of her hair still lingered on the pillows, and her photograph of the misty sunset above Hawes still hung over the fireplace in the living room.
It made him think how only on Sunday, yesterday, he had wandered the Amsterdam museums in the rain, a pilgrim marveling at Rembrandt’s The Night Watch in the Rijks-museum, unsettled by Crows in the Wheatfield in the Van Gogh Museum, and, finally, elated by the bright, whimsical Chagalls in the Stedelijk Museum.
All the while thinking how Sandra would have loved it, and how he would like to treat her to a visit one weekend in spring, perhaps as a belated birthday present.
But Sandra was gone.
He noticed the red light blinking on the telephone answering machine. Thinking it might be Sandra, he got up and pressed the replay button. One call was Vic Manson, two were hang-ups, but the next four were from Tracy. On the last one, she said, “Dad, are you there? It’s Sunday now. I’ve been trying to ring you all weekend. I’m worried about you. If you are there, please answer. I talked to Mummy and she told me what happened. I’m so sorry. I love you, Daddy. Please give me a ring.”
Banks stood by the phone for a moment, head in his hands, tears burning in his eyes. Then he did what any reasonable man would do in his situation. He cranked Mozart’s Requiem up as loud as he could bear it and got rat-arse drunk.
TWELVE
I
When Banks stirred on the sofa at about four o’clock in the morning, Mozart’s Requiem was still playing on “repeat.” And a more fitting piece of music he couldn’t imagine. It was playing loudly, too, and he was surprised that none of his neighbors had called the police. Still, he was the police. Or used to be.
Wishing he were still unconscious, he groaned, rubbed his stubble, rolled off the sofa and put some coffee on, turning the volume down on the stereo as he went. Then he stumbled upstairs and swallowed a handful of aspirins, washed down with two glasses of water to irrigate his dehydrated brain cells.
Back downstairs, as the coffee dripped through the filter with frustrating slowness, he surveyed the damage: twelve cigarette ends in the ashtray; no burns on the sofa or carpet; about two fingers of Laphroaig left. If he was going to keep up this rate of drinking, he would have to start buying cheaper Scotch. Still, it could have been a lot worse, he concluded, especially as he remembered the bottle had only been about three-quarters full when he started.
When the coffee was ready, he decided to switch from the Requiem to the C Minor Mass, something to bring a little more light and hope into his bleak world, then he tried to collect his thoughts.
He had punched Jimmy Riddle; that was the first memory to come back. And he had ski
Jobless, then. Also wifeless and hung over. At least the hangover would go away. It could be worse, couldn’t it? Yes, it could, he realized. He could have been diagnosed with a terminal illness. He racked his brains to see if that had, in fact, happened, but could find no memory of it. It would probably happen today the way his lungs felt after all those cigarettes.
So what was he going to do? Become a private eye? Enter a monastery? Get a job with some security outfit? Or should he just carry on and solve the Jason Fox case on his own to run rings around Jimmy Riddle, just as Sherlock Holmes did around Inspector Lestrade? Alan Banks, Consulting Detective. Had a nice ring to it.
He poured himself a cup of black coffee and flopped back on the sofa. Looking at the misty Hawes sunset over the fireplace, for some reason he remembered Sandra telling him on Thursday that there might have been somebody else, but there wasn’t. Remembered the faraway look in her eyes when she said it.
And that made him angry. He pictured Sandra with some strapping, bearded young artist, standing in the wind on the moors doing a Cathy and Heathcliff, looking lovingly into each other’s eyes and exercising restraint. “No, my darling, we mustn’t. There’s too much at stake. Think of the children.” Grand passion collides with family values and moral responsibility. It was a scene from a cheap romance. But all the same, it made Banks clench his jaw. What might have been. And, come to think of it, he only had her word for it that she hadn’t left him to run off with someone else, someone she would only take up with publicly after a “decent” interval.
Well, two could play at that game. Banks had had his chances at infidelity in the past, too, but he hadn’t taken them. He hadn’t romanticized them, either. He thought especially of Je
So many choices. So many possibilities. Then why did he feel so bloody miserable and empty? Because, he concluded, none of them was what he wanted. What he wanted, when it came right down to it, was his job back, Sandra back and his hangover gone. Perhaps if he played a country-and-western song backward…? He couldn’t even do that, hating country and western the way he did. Still, taking stock of himself, he realized that, depressed as he was, he felt calmer now than when he was stuck at the airport yesterday contemplating his return home. Thumping Jimmy Riddle probably had something to do with that.
After the first cup of coffee, he realized he was hungry. He hadn’t eaten anything since that snack on the plane, a million years ago now. Searching through the remnants of the fridge, he managed to throw together three rashers of streaky bacon and two eggs only a week past their sell-by date. That would have to do. The one remaining slice of bread was a little stale, but it hadn’t turned green yet, and it would fry up nicely in the bacon fat. Cholesterol special. So what?
As he fried his breakfast, Banks remembered Tracy’s messages. He would have to ring her today and put her mind at rest. Should he explain to her about losing his job, too? Best not yet, he decided. It was bad enough his daughter should suddenly find herself the child of a broken marriage the minute she flew the coop, let alone the child of a disgraced copper. There would be time enough for that later. He would have to phone Brian in Portsmouth, too, and his own parents. They would all be upset.
Suddenly, the day ahead seemed full of things to do. None of them pleasant. The only bright spot was that he wouldn’t have to worry about money for a while; the suspension was with pay. And Jimmy Riddle couldn’t do a thing about that until after a disciplinary hearing.