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That evening at home, A
Damn Banks, she thought as she washed out her dish. How could he do this to her? Maybe she had let things cool between them romantically, but that gave him no right to treat her like some probationary DC who couldn’t be trusted with the full story. She knew that his action hadn’t been technically wrong in any way, but it had been dishonest and cowardly. As SIO, Banks was quite entitled to follow up a lead and decide whether it required action or not. Obviously, in the case of his night with Emily Riddle, he knew exactly what had occurred, so he knew that no further action was needed.
He must also have known that he was hiding the truth from A
So what to do about it? That was the question she agonized over. The way she saw it, she had two choices. She could, of course, simply do nothing, just put in for a transfer and leave the whole mess behind. That had its appeal, certainly, but it left too much up in the air. She had hidden from unpleasant things and turned her back for far too long. Now that her career had actually come to mean something to her again after the years of apathetic exile in Harkside, where she had co
On the other hand, she could confront Banks and find out what he had to say for himself. Maybe she should give him the benefit of the doubt, i
But she already knew he wasn’t i
Giving up on the television, A
It had turned into a cold night, and she got the heater going full-blast. Even so, the car took a while to warm up. The mist was crystallizing on the bare trees, sparkling as her headlights flicked across branches and twigs on her way out of Harkside. Ice-crusted puddles crackled under her wheels.
She crossed the narrow bridge over the River Rowan between the Harksmere and Linwood reservoirs. Harksmere stretched, cold and dark, to the west, and beyond it lay Thornfield Reservoir, where the remains of Hobb’s End had once more been covered with water. That was where she had first met Banks, she remembered, toward the end of the hottest, driest summer in years. He had come scrambling down the steep rim looking like a sightseer, and she had stopped him at the bridge. She had been wearing her red wellies and must have looked a sight.
He still didn’t know this, but A
And now he was her senior officer, and he had been keeping things from her.
Past the old air base, A
Except that A
And she knew that when she got to his drive she would turn into it.
Banks refilled the wineglasses and sat down again. “Go on,” he said.
Rosalind smiled. “You might find this hard to believe,” she began, “but I haven’t always been the dull, decent wife of the dull, decent chief constable.”
Banks was startled by her smile. It had so much of Emily in it, that hint of mischief, of Just watch me. “That sounds like the begi
“It is.”
“I’m all ears.”
“First, we have to go back a while. Believe it or not, my father was a vicar. He’s retired now, of course. I grew up in the vicarage in a small village in Kent, an only child, and my childhood was relatively uneventful. I don’t mean that it was bad in any way. I did all the normal things kids do. I was happy. It was just unexceptional. Dull, even. Like the way Philip Larkin described his in that poem. Then, in the mid-seventies, when I was sixteen, we moved to a parish out Ealing way. Oh, it was a very nice area – none of that i
“But?”
“But it was near the tube. You can’t imagine what wonderful new worlds that opened up to an impressionable sixteen-year-old.”
Banks thought he could. When he moved from Peterborough to Notting Hill at the age of eighteen, his life had changed in many ways. He had met Jem across the hall from his bed-sit, for a start, and had lurked at the fringes of the sixties scene – which stretched well into the early seventies – enjoying the music more than the drugs. There was an excitement and vibrancy about the capital that was missing from Peterborough, and would certainly have been missing from a vicarage in Kent.
“Let me guess: The vicar’s daughter went a little wild?”
“I was born in 1959. It was November 1975, when we moved to Ealing. While everyone else was listening to Queen, Abba and Hot Chocolate, me and my friends were taking the tube into town to listen to The Sex Pistols. This was right at the start, before anyone really knew anything about them. They’d just played their first gig the day after Bonfire Night at Saint Martin’s College of Art, and one of the girls at my new school was there. She couldn’t talk about anything else for weeks. Next time they played, she took me with her. It was fantastic.”
Punk. Banks remembered those days. He was older than Rosalind, though, and identified more closely with sixties music than that of the seventies. When he had lived in London his favorites had been Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and the various local blues bands that seemed to form and split up with amazing regularity. Still, he had responded to the angry energy of some of the punk music – especially The Clash, by far the best of the bunch in his opinion – but not enough to buy any of their records. Also, as he had been a probationary police constable back then, he had experienced the violence of punk first-hand, from the other side, and that, too, had put him off.