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Banks remembered watching as Mrs. Marshall opened the door, thin cardie wrapped around her, despite the warmth of day, and the two policemen took off their hats and followed her into the house. After that, nothing was ever quite the same on the estate.
Back in the twenty-first century, Banks opened his eyes and rubbed them. The memory had made him even more tired. He’d had a devil of a time getting to Athens the other day, and when he had got there it was only to find that he couldn’t get a flight home until the following morning. He’d had to spend the night in a cheap hotel, and he hadn’t slept well, surrounded by the noise and bustle of a big city, after the peace and quiet of his island retreat.
Now the plane was flying up the Adriatic, between Italy and the former Yugoslavia. Banks was sitting on the left and the sky was so cloudless he fancied he could see all of Italy stretched out below him, greens and blues and earth colors, from the Adriatic to the Mediterranean: mountains, the crater of a volcano, vineyards, the cluster of a village and sprawl of a large city. Soon he would be landing back in Manchester, and soon the quest would begin in earnest. Graham Marshall’s bones had been found, and Banks damn well wanted to know how and why they had ended up where they did.
A
A
A dog barked inside the house as A
This time was no exception. However, the young woman who opened the door got a firm grip on the dog’s collar before it could drool on A
“Yes, ma’m.” Josie disappeared, half-dragging the frustrated Doberma
“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “She gets so excited when we have visitors. She’s only being friendly.”
“Miata. Nice name,” said A
“Thank you.” The woman held out her hand. “I’m Robin Armitage. Please come in.”
A
The man who had been staring out of the back window over a lawn the size of a golf course turned when A
Martin Armitage was over six feet tall, handsome in a rugged, athletic sort of way, with his hair shaved almost to his skull, the way many footballers wore it. He was slim, long-legged and fit, as befitted an ex-sportsman, and even his casual clothes, jeans and a loose hand-knit sweater, looked as if they had cost more than A
“Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe told me about Luke,” A
“Yes.” Robin Armitage tried to smile, but it came out like the twentieth take of a commercial shoot. “Look, I’ll have Josie bring us some tea – or coffee, if you’d prefer it?”
“Tea would be fine, thanks,” said A
“I know how upsetting something like this can be,” A
Robin raised a finely plucked eyebrow. “Do you mean that? You’re not just saying it to make us feel better?”
“It’s true. You’d be surprised how many mispers we get – sorry, that’s police talk for missing persons – and most of them turn up none the worse for wear.”
“Most of them?” echoed Martin Armitage.
“I’m just telling you that statistically he’s likely-”
“Statistically? What kind of-”
“Martin! Calm down. She’s only trying to help.” Robin turned to A
“I wish I could answer that, I really do,” said A
Martin Armitage ran his hand over his head, sighed and flopped down on the sofa again. “Yes, of course,” he said. “And I apologize. My nerves are a bit frazzled, that’s all.” When he looked right at her, she could see the concern in his eyes, and she could also see the steely gaze of a man who usually got what he wanted. Josie came in with tea, which she served on a silver tray. A
Martin Armitage’s lip curled in a smile, as if he had noticed her discomfort. “A bit pretentious, isn’t it?” he said. “I suppose you’re wondering why a dyed-in-the-wool socialist like me employs a maid? It’s not as if I don’t know how to make a cup of tea. I grew up with six brothers in a West Yorkshire mining town so small nobody even noticed when Maggie Thatcher wiped it off the face of the earth. Bread and dripping for breakfast, if you were lucky. That sort of thing. Robin here grew up on a small farm in Devon.”
And how many millions of pounds ago was that? A