Playing With Fire

“Yes,” said Mrs. Aspern. “It’s fine. She sounds very sad.”

Indeed she did. Banks didn’t understand a word of the songs without the translations on the CD booklet, the print of which was daily getting too small for him to read without glasses, but there was no mistaking the sense of loss, sadness and the cruelty of fate in Mariza’s voice. You didn’t need to know what the words meant to feel that.

“I didn’t want to ask you while your husband was present,” Banks said, “but is Christine’s birth father still around?”

She shook her head. “I was very young. We didn’t marry. My parents… they were good to me. I lived with them in Roundhay until Patrick and I married.”

“We’ll still need to talk to him,” said Banks.

“He’s back home. In America. We met when he was traveling in Europe.”

“Can you give me the details?”

She looked out of the window, away from Banks, as she spoke, so that he could barely hear her. “His name is Paul Ryder. He lives in Cinci

Banks made a mental note of the name and city. It might be hard to track down this Paul Ryder after so long, but they’d have to try. “How did you and Dr. Aspern meet?” he asked.

“Patrick was a colleague of my father’s, a frequent visitor to our house when I was at home, when Christine was only a baby. My father is also a doctor. I suppose, in a way, he was Patrick’s mentor. He’s retired now, of course.”

Banks wondered how well that marriage had gone down with Mrs. Aspern’s family. “Were you both at home last night?” he asked.

She turned to look at him. “What do you expect me to say to that?”

“I expect you to tell me the truth,” Banks said.

“Ah, the truth. Yes, of course we were both at home.” She turned to look out of the window again.

“Did your husband go out at all yesterday?”

Mrs. Aspern didn’t reply.

“Is there anything else you want to say?” Banks asked. “Anything at all you want to tell me?”

Mrs. Aspern glanced at him again. He couldn’t make out the expression on her face. Then she turned back to look out of the window. “No,” she said, after a long pause. “No, I don’t think so.”

Banks gave up and drove on, Mariza singing against a backdrop of the misty Dales landscape, a song about sorrow, longing, pity, punishment and despair.

The scene looked different in the late afternoon, A

She found Detective Sergeant Stefan Nowak poking through debris on the artist’s boat. Stefan was their crime scene coordinator, and it was his job to supervise the collection of possible crime scene evidence by his highly trained team and to liaise between the special analysts in the lab and Banks’s team.

Stefan looked up as A

A

Stefan gestured toward the murky water. “One of the frogmen found an empty turps container in there,” he said. “Probably the one used to start the fire. No prints or anything, though. Just your regular, commercial turps container. Anyway, I’m finished here,” he said. “Come on, I’ll show you what we’ve found so far.”

A

About halfway to the lane, A

“How many?”

“Just the one person, by the looks of it.”

“Did the firefighters use this path?”

Stefan pointed. “No, down there. This is the path you’d take from the lay-by. They parked farther down, closer to the canal. This part of the woods is riddled with paths. I gather it’s a popular spot in summer.”

A

“Yes, but don’t get your hopes up. Anyway, they’ve all been carefully photographed, and casts have been made. They’re drying out right now, but tomorrow we’ll run them through SICAR.”

SICAR was an acronym for Shoeprint Image Capture and Retrieval, which combines a number of sca

Of course, what everyone really hoped for was something more than just class characteristics, some sort of unique markings, the kind that come from wear and tear, a nice drawing pin embedded in the sole, for example, something that could be matched with a specific shoe. Then, once you have your suspect and his shoe, you have solid evidence that links him to the scene.

They got to the lay-by, beside which the police mobile unit was parked, completely blocking the lane. It didn’t matter much, though, as the track was hardly ever used and it led only toward a narrow bridge over the canal about two miles west. Anyone wanting to get there was advised to take the next turning by a diversion sign posted at the junction of the lane and the B-road half a mile north.

A

“Impressive,” she said. “You have been busy.”

“We’ll see,” said Stefan. “Trying to process a crime scene like this is like peeling the layers off the onion, and you don’t know which layer is the important one.” He pointed to one of the imprints. “Here we’ve got parallel tire tracks,” he said. “And that should be enough to tell us who the manufacturer was. From these we can also get the track width and wheelbase measurements, which might even help us identify the make of the car. If there are a number of individual characteristics present in the tire impressions, which may be the case, then we should be able to match them to the specific tire, and vehicle, too.”

“If and when we find it,” said A

“Naturally. We’ve also collected soil samples from the entire area. No rare wildflowers at this time of year, of course, but there are some unique mineral features, and they should also help us tie in the shoes and tire to the scene, should we find them.”