Страница 21 из 101
Banks shook his head and whispered, “No.” There was no way he was getting in that bed with her, no matter how much she said she was in need of comfort. If he thought about it, he should probably throw her out and tear up the sheets, but he couldn’t do that. Instead, he managed to pull some more blankets over her, and she offered no resistance. For a while, she seemed to be muttering and murmuring as best she could with her thumb back in her mouth, then he heard her start snoring softly.
Banks knew there would be no more sleep for him tonight. In the morning, he would go to Oxford Street when the shops opened and buy her some clothes, then they would take the first train back to Eastvale. He would drive her to her father’s house and there he would leave her, leave them all to sort it out. His job would be over.
But as he sat in the chair and smoked another cigarette, listening to the wind and rain rattling the window, and to Emily’s ragged snoring, he couldn’t help but mull the situation over. It was all wrong. He was a copper; a serious offense had been committed; the law had been broken; he should be doing something, not sitting in the armchair smoking as his chief constable’s sixteen-year-old daughter slept in his bed practically starkers with her thumb in her mouth, to all intents and purposes nothing but a child in a woman’s body.
Three fifty-two. A long wait until dawn. He glanced through the curtains and saw a flash of white moon through the gray wisps of cloud. Emily stirred, turned over, farted once and started snoring again. Banks reached for his Walkman on the table beside him and put in the Dawn Upshaw tape. Songs about sleep.
Come, Sleep, and with
Thy sweet deceiving
Lock me in delight awhile.
Not much hope of that, Banks thought, not after the day he had just been through.
5
The Charlie Courage murder occurred in early December, about a month after Banks had delivered Emily Riddle to her father’s house, a little battered and shop-soiled, but not too much the worse for wear. Judging by her silence on the train journey back to Yorkshire, he imagined she might lie low for a while before taking on the world again. In the meantime, Banks had been preoccupied with major changes at Eastvale Divisional Headquarters.
The county force had been reorganized from seven divisions into just three, and Eastvale was the new headquarters of the large Western Division, which took in just about the entire county west of the A1 to the Lancashire border, and from the Durham border in the north to the border with West Yorkshire in the south. There were vast areas of wilderness and moorland, including most of the Yorkshire Dales National Park, and the main occupations were the service industry, tourism, agriculture and a smattering of light industry. There were no major urban areas, but a number of big towns such as Harrogate, Ripon, Richmond, Skipton and Eastvale itself.
There was, of course, plenty of crime, and in keeping with its new status, the Eastvale station had been extended into the adjoining building, where Vic Manson’s fingerprints unit, scenes-of-crime, computers and photography departments had all set up shop. Renovations were still going on, and the place was filled with noise and dust.
While the section stations would continue to police their areas as before – indeed, they were to be given even more autonomy – Eastvale was now to be responsible for most of the criminal investigation within the new Western Division. Nobody was sure yet how many CID officers – or Crime Management Perso
One of the first moves that the Director of Human Resources, Millicent Cummings, had made was to transfer Detective Sergeant A
Millie, of course, along with Riddle and everyone else, didn’t know about Banks’s affair with A
The county also had a new Assistant Chief Constable (Crime) in the shape of Ron McLaughlin, known jokingly as “Red Ron” because he leaned more to the left than most senior policemen. ACC McLaughlin was known to be a hard but fair man, one who believed in using his officers’ abilities to the fullest, and he was also rumored to enjoy a wee dram of malt every now and then.
It was a misty, drizzling day – what the locals called “mizzling” – when Riddle got the chance to make good on his promise to Banks. Over the last year or so, all serious crimes in the division that couldn’t be handled by Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe, Detective Sergeant Hatchley and whichever DCs happened to be assigned to Eastvale Divisional Headquarters at the time, had been passed on to other divisions, or to the Regional Crime Squad, leaving Banks free to devote all his duty hours to paperwork and administration.
Since he had done Riddle the big favor of bringing Emily back home, since the big changes around the station, and since things had finally come to an end with Sandra, the thought of moving from his Gratly cottage and starting a new job with the NCS had begun to lose its appeal, and Banks had withdrawn his application. Eastvale was starting to seem like a good bet again, and it was where he wanted to be.
Despite the drizzle and the filthy gray sky, Banks felt in a buoyant, optimistic mood. He was reading a report on the sudden increase of car theft in rural areas, and in need of a break, he went to stand by the window to smoke a proscribed cigarette and look down on the market square in the late afternoon.
The renovators were mercifully silent, no doubt pla
Brian thought he would be busy with the band over the holidays, but Tracy had phoned the previous day and promised to spend Christmas with her father before heading down to London to see her mother on Boxing Day. Banks had never been much of a fan of Christmas – far too many holiday seasons spent working and witnessing the gaudy excess of suicides and domestic murders that peaked around that time of year had taken care of that – but this called for celebration; this year he would make an effort, buy a small tree, presents, put up some decorations, cook Christmas di
Last year had been a complete washout. He had turned down all offers of meals, drinks and parties from friends and colleagues and spent the entire holiday alone in the Eastvale semi he had once shared with Sandra, wallowing in his own misery and keeping up his maintenance buzz with liberal tots of whisky. Brian and Tracy had both phoned, of course, and he had managed to bluff his way past any worries they might have had about him, but there was no denying it had been a grim time. This year would be different. Delia Smith had a book about cooking for Christmas, he remembered; perhaps he would go to Waterstone’s and buy it before going home.