Strange Affair

There was a moment’s silence at the other end, then Tracy’s voice came back on again, shaking a little. “Uncle Roy? Dead? Are you serious? An accident?”

“No. I’m sorry, love, but he was killed. I don’t know how to put it any better.”

“Killed how?”

There was no point trying to save her from the knowledge, Banks realized. She would soon find out from the newspapers. “He was shot. Murdered.”

“My God,” said Tracy. “Uncle Roy. Murdered.”

“It’ll be in the papers and on the TV,” Banks said. “I just wanted you to know first.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“It’s under control. Just don’t talk to any reporters, if they track you down.”

“Do Grandma and Granddad want me to come and stay with them?”

“You get on with your studying. I’ll take care of them and I’ll try to come and see you soon. You can do me a small favor, though.”

“What?”

“Will you tell your mother?”

“Dad!”

“Please. Look, normally, I wouldn’t bother. They weren’t close or anything and she has her own life now. But it’ll be high-profile. Maybe the reporters will trace her, too. I don’t want it to come as too much of a shock to her.”

“Oh, all right. But this is silly. You’ve got to talk… Oh, never mind. I’m really sorry about Uncle Roy. I know… I mean, I know we didn’t see him often but he always sent really cool presents.”

“Yes,” said Banks. “I’ve got to go now. Keep in touch.”

“I will. I love you, Dad.”

Next Banks rang Brian, who didn’t answer. Banks left a message for him to ring as soon as he could, then phoned DI Brooke to thank him for his patience and give him the go-ahead to release Roy’s identity. Finally he rang Cori

He didn’t have Malcolm Farrow’s phone number, so that call would have to wait until he went back to Roy’s house. Then he realized he probably couldn’t go back there, as the whole place would be sealed off by the police investigating Roy’s murder. He hesitated, then he called A

“Would you close the upstairs curtains, Son?” Arthur Banks asked. “Your mother would want it that way.”

“Of course.” Banks remembered how, when he was younger, if someone in the family died his mother would always close the upstairs curtains.

Up in his old room again, Banks looked out over the backyards and the deserted alley to find that the council estate the builders had been working on during his last visit was now almost finished. Most of the houses were as yet unoccupied, and some were still without windows, but rows of them, all the same, filled the stretch of waste ground, where weeds used to grow over discarded tires and other rubbish. This was where he used to play football and cricket as a child, where he had his first kiss and first furtive feel of a girl’s breast as a teenager. He tried to remember whether Roy, too, had had such formative experiences there, but he didn’t know. Most likely, if he had, it had all happened after Banks had left home, when they hardly communicated.

He did remember one incident. When he was about thirteen and Roy eight, Banks saw an older, bigger boy of about ten or eleven bullying Roy out in the field. Poor Roy was in tears as the bigger boy punched him repeatedly in the stomach and jeered at him for being a weakling. Banks rushed over to stop it, and even though he knew that he was now the bully, he couldn’t hold himself back from giving the bastard a bloody nose and a split lip.

It came back to haunt him, too, he remembered, when the boy’s parents called at his house that night. Only because Roy corroborated his story in every detail did Banks get off with a mere admonishment to pick on people his own age in future. It could have been much worse. So he had stood up for Roy, and Roy had stood up for him. What had happened, then? What had come between them?

As he usually did on his infrequent visits home, Banks looked in the wardrobe where the boxes of his adolescence were stored. The last couple of times he had been back he had discovered a treasure trove of old records, comics, diaries, books and toys. There were even more boxes he hadn’t got around to yet, and he found himself wondering if any of them were Roy’s.

The toy box with the padlock was long gone, but he did eventually manage to dig out a cardboard box full of things that definitely weren’t his: Corgi toys – better than Dinkys, he remembered Roy arguing, because they had plastic windows and more realistic detail – a stamp album full of bright but worthless stamps, a portable chess set that folded into a box, a Scalextric set that Banks was never allowed to play with and several of those tiny submarines that came out of a cornflakes packet, the kind you stuffed with baking soda to make them submerge and surface. There were no diaries or old school reports, nothing to flesh out the vague sense of Roy that the toys implied, but down at the bottom was a Junior Driver, a toy steering wheel. Banks remembered Roy used to stick it on the dashboard on the passenger side of his father’s Morris Traveller whenever they went anywhere and pretend he was driving. Even back then Roy had been car-mad.

Banks held the plastic steering wheel in his hands for a moment, then he put it back, returned the box to the wardrobe and set about closing the curtains.

By mid-morning the whole of Western Area Headquarters in Eastvale knew about the murder of Banks’s brother. Gristhorpe went into conference with Assistant Chief McLaughlin, and a hush fell over the Major Crimes squad room. Even the telephone conversations seemed to take place in whispers. If it wasn’t exactly one of their own who had fallen in the line of duty, it was still too damn close for comfort.

“Did you ever meet him?” Winsome asked Jim Hatchley, who had known Banks the longest of all of them.

“No,” said Hatchley. “I got the idea he was a bit of a black sheep. Alan didn’t have much to do with him.”

“Still,” said Winsome, “it’s family.” She thought of her own younger brother, Wayne, a schoolteacher in Birmingham, and how rarely she saw him. She would ring him tonight, she resolved.

“Aye, it is that, lass,” said Hatchley.

Winsome chewed on her lower lip and got back to the telephone. She had had a bit of luck tracking down the Mondeo, first through the Driver and Vehicle Licencing Agency Wimbledon office and then through the Police National Computer database of stolen cars. A car matching the description, with a “ 51” registration number plate, had been stolen from a cheap long-stay parking facility near Heathrow Airport shortly before Je

If all the leads in this case led to London, as they seemed to be doing so far, it could be a while before DI Cabbot got back to Yorkshire. Winsome envied her. A nice little shopping trip down Oxford Street or Regent Street wouldn’t go amiss right now. Not that Winsome was a clothes junkie, but she liked to look fashionable and she liked to look good, even if it meant creeps like Kev Templeton ogling her. She did it for herself, not for anyone else.

Winsome was just about ready to head down to the canteen for lunch when her phone rang.