Aftermath

There were two messages waiting for him on the machine. The first was from Tracy, saying she’d heard the news and hoped he was all right, and the second was from Lea

Banks didn’t answer either of them. For one thing, it was too late, and for another, he didn’t want to talk to anybody. He could deal with them all in the morning. Now that he was home, he was even glad that A

Instead, he poured himself a generous tumbler of Laphroaig and tried to find some suitable music. He needed to listen to something, but he didn’t know what. Usually he had no trouble finding what he wanted in his large collection, but tonight he rejected just about every CD he picked out. He knew he didn’t want to listen to jazz or rock or anything too wild and primitive like that. Wagner and Mahler were out, as were all the Romantics: Beethoven, Schubert, Rachmaninoff and the rest. The entire twentieth century was out, too. In the end, he went for Rostropovich’s rendition of Bach’s cello suites.

Outside the cottage, the low stone wall between the dirt lane and the beck bulged out and formed a little parapet over Gratly Falls, which was just a series of terraces, none more than a few feet in height, ru

The night air was still and smelled of hay and warm grass. The Dale below him was sleeping. One or two farmhouse lights shone on the far valley side, but apart from the sounds of sheep in the field across the beck and night animals from the woods, all was quiet. He could just make out the shapes of distant fell sides in the dark, humpbacked or jagged against the night sky. He thought he heard a curlew’s eerie trill from high up on the moors. The new moon gave sparse light, but there were more stars than he had seen in a long time. As he watched, a star fell through the darkness, leaving a thin milky trail.

Banks didn’t make a wish.

He felt depressed. The elation he had expected to feel on finding the killer somehow eluded him. He had no sense of an ending, of an evil purged. In some odd way, he felt, the evil was just begi

He heard a meow beside him and looked down. It was the ski

Banks lit his cigarette and leaned against the wall, resting his glass on its rough stone surface. He tried to purge his mind of the day’s terrible images. The cat rubbed against his leg and ran off back into the woods. Rostropovich played on, and Bach’s precise, mathematical patterns of sound formed an odd counterpoint to the wild roaring music of Gratly Falls, so recently swelled by the spring thaw, and for a few moments, at least, Banks succeeded in losing himself.

6

According to her parents, Melissa Horrocks, aged seventeen, who failed to return home after a pop concert in Harrogate on the eighteenth of April, was going through a rebellious phase.

Steven and Mary Horrocks had only the one daughter, a late blessing in Mary’s mid-thirties. Steven worked in the office of a local dairy, while Mary had a part-time job in an estate agent’s office in the city center. Around the age of sixteen, Melissa developed an interest in the kind of theatrical pop music that used Satanism as its main stage prop.

Though friends advised Steven and Mary that it was harmless enough – just youthful spirits – and that it would soon pass, they were nonetheless alarmed when she started altering her appearance and letting her schoolwork and athletics slip. Melissa first dyed her hair red, got a stud in her nose and wore a lot of black. Her bedroom wall was adorned with posters of ski

About a week before the concert, Melissa decided she didn’t like the red hair, so she reverted to her natural blond coloring. There was a good chance, Banks thought later, that if she’d kept it red, that might have saved her life. Which also led Banks to think that she hadn’t been stalked before her abduction – or at least not for long. The Chameleon wouldn’t stalk a redhead.

Harrogate, a prosperous Victorian-style North Yorkshire city of about seventy thousand, known as a conference center and a magnet for retired people, wasn’t exactly the typical venue for a Beelzebub’s Bollocks concert, but the band was new and had yet to win a major recording contract; they were working their way up to bigger gigs. There had been the usual calls for a ban from retired colonels and the kind of old busybodies who watch all the filth on television so they can write letters of protest, but in the end this came to no avail.

About five hundred kids wandered into the converted theater, including Melissa and her friends Je

At first there was a faint hope that Melissa might have run away from home, given the ru

Then there was the satanic element, not to be lightly dismissed when a girl had disappeared. The members of the band were interviewed, along with as many audience members as could be rounded up, but that went nowhere, too. Even Banks had to admit when examining the statements later that the whole thing had been pretty tame and harmless, the black magic merely theater, as it had been for Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper in his day. Beelzebub’s Bollocks didn’t even bite the heads off chickens on stage.

When Melissa’s black leather shoulder bag was found in some bushes two days after her disappearance, as if it had been tossed from the window of a moving car, money still intact, the case came to the attention of Banks’s Chameleon task force. Like Kelly Matthews, Samantha Foster and Lea