Strange Affair

Many of the names on the list matched those in the book, and he found Julian, Rupert and Cori

A woman called Je

As Banks glanced through the stack of memos and accounts, looked at all the company logos and names, he felt frustration set in. None of them meant anything to him, and he didn’t have the time or the resources to check them all out. He had no access to the Police National Computer, for a start. He could be looking at the names of dozens of criminals and not even know it. Burgess might help, but he would only tell Banks what he wanted him to know.

Banks spent half an hour having another look around the house and found nothing more of interest. Then he settled down to examine the JPEG files on the CD he had found yesterday. He sat his new laptop computer on the kitchen table, brewed himself some coffee and managed to follow the instructions and get the machine going. He slipped in the CD and found Windows Explorer tucked away at the bottom of the Accessories menu.

His computer automatically displayed the 1,232 JPEG files as thumbnails. Banks scrolled through these, all images of naked women with file names like Maya, Teresa, April, Mia and Kimmie, or of men and women engaged in sex acts. If he rested his cursor on one of them, information about file dimension, type and size would appear in a little box. Most of the JPEG images were between 25 and 75 kilobytes in size.

When he got to the 980th image, however, Banks noticed that it and the next two were different; all three were numbered with the prefix “DSC” and showed two men sitting together at what looked to be an outdoor café. When he let his cursor rest on one of them, he found that, at 650 kilobytes, it was considerably larger than the earlier images, and that it was taken on Tuesday, the eighth of June, at 3:15 P.M. by a camera identified as E4300. Roy’s Nikon was a 4300 model. According to the “details” view, the other images were all downloaded the next day, so it looked as if Roy had dragged them in from another folder.

Intrigued, Banks double-clicked on the first image of the two men. He didn’t recognize either of them. They were leaning toward each other, in earnest conversation. Both wore white open-necked shirts and light, casual trousers. One was bulkier with curly graying hair, the other younger and thi

The following two images were of the same scene, taken in rapid succession. Banks scrolled to the end of the folder, but all he found was more Larissas, Natashas, Nadias and Mitzis.

On Tuesday afternoon, then, Roy had taken three candid photographs of two men in conversation at an outdoor café, and on Wednesday he had burned them on a CD, hidden among hundreds of erotic images. He had then placed the CD in the Blue Lamps jewel case, which stood out like a sore thumb in his music collection.

So who were the men and what, if anything, did they have to do with Roy’s disappearance? Banks picked up the laptop and took it upstairs. It was time to learn how to use Roy’s printer.

DC Kevin Templeton thought he’d died and gone to heaven when he reported to Gristhorpe that morning and the boss said to take Winsome with him and pay Mr. Roger Cropley an early visit. The credit card companies were not exactly forthcoming when it came to providing information, even to the police, but the service center’s CCTV cameras showed a number plate begi

Templeton let Winsome drive the short distance to Cropley’s, sneaking a surreptitious glance at the taut black fabric stretched over her thighs whenever she changed gear. Christ, they could kill a man, he thought with wonder. Then he realized he was so randy that morning because he hadn’t shagged the redheaded clerk last night, the way he had intended. She had given him a nasty look, too, when he got to work that morning, one of those looks that said, “You’ve had your chance, mate, now on your bike.” Still, he knew he could break down her resistance again given the opportunity. He was also tired, he realized, not having slept for more than an hour or so, but that he could deal with.

As the empty Sunday-morning streets flashed by, he put his head in detective gear and pla

“How was your Saturday night?” he asked Winsome.

She gave him a sideways glance. “Fine. And yours?”

“You already know about mine, spent sampling the delights of motorway cuisine. What did you get up to, then?”

“Up to? Nothing special. Club social.”

“Club?”

“Yeah, the potholing club.”

Templeton knew that Winsome liked to climb down holes in the ground and explore underground caverns. He couldn’t think of anything more boring, or, for that matter, more terrifying, given that he suffered from claustrophobia. “Where d’you hold it?” he asked. “Gaping Gill?”

“Very fu

Was she asking him out? “The Cock and Bull?”

“No, idiot. Potholing.”

“No way,” said Templeton. “You’ll not get me down one of those black holes.”

“Coward,” she said. “Here we are.”

She pulled up in front of a neat Georgian semi, an unremarkable house with mullioned windows and beige stone-cladding. The street was on a low rise and offered a magnificent view out west to lower Swainsdale. There was a small limestone church with a square Norman tower at the end of the street and people were already filing in for the morning service.

Templeton jabbed at the doorbell, Winsome beside him. Despite, or perhaps because of, his lack of sleep, Templeton felt pepped up, excited, like the one time he had taken Ecstasy at a club. Winsome seemed cheerful enough in that cool and graceful way she had, and if she had noticed him glancing at her thighs in the car, she hadn’t said anything.

The man who answered the door didn’t look particularly like a pervert as far as Templeton could tell, except that he was wearing sandals with white socks, but he did match the description Ali had given him at Watford Gap. About forty, with thi