walked up, every once in a while Annie called out Silbert’s name in case he was somewhere else in the house where he hadn’t been able to hear them earlier, but she 2 6 P E T E R
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was still met with that same chill and eerie silence. The dark-patterned carpet on the landing was thick, and their feet made no noise as they padded around, checking the rooms.
It was behind the third door that they found Laurence Silbert.
Fortunately, they didn’t have to do anything more than stand at the threshold to see the body that lay spread- eagled on the sheepskin rug in front of the hearth. Silbert—or at least Annie assumed it was Silbert—lay on his back on the rug, arms spread out, making the shape of a cross. His head had been beaten to a pulp, and a dark halo of blood had soaked into the sheepskin around it. He was wearing tan chinos and a shirt that had once been white but was now mostly dark red.
The area between his legs was also bloody, whether from cuts or over-spill from the head injuries, Annie couldn’t tell.
She managed to drag her eyes away from the body and look around the room. Like the rest of the house, the upstairs drawing room, complete with Adam fireplace, was a strange mix of the antique and the contemporary. A framed picture that reminded Annie very much of Jackson Pollock hung over the empty fireplace. Maybe it
Annie became vaguely aware of Wilson’s grunt and the sound of him being sick on the landing before he managed to get to the bathroom.
Pale and trembling, she shut the door and reached for her mobile.
First she rang Detective Superintendent Gervaise at home and explained the situation. It wasn’t that Annie didn’t know what to do, but something big like this, you let the boss know immediately, or things have a nasty habit of coming back at you. As expected, Gervaise said she would call in the SOCOs, photographer, police surgeon, then she said, “And, DI Cabbot?”
“Yes?”
“I think it’s time we called DCI Banks back. I know he’s supposed to be on holiday, but things could get very messy up here, and this
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“None taken, ma’am,” said Annie, who felt she could handle the situation perfectly well with Winsome and Doug Wilson. “As you wish.”
As she leaned against the wall watching an ashen Wilson sitting on the stairs with his head in his hands and picked Banks’s mobile number from her BlackBerry’s address book, Annie thought this would certainly put the kibosh on Banks’s Saturday-morning shag. Then she chastised herself for having such evil thoughts and pressed the call button.
A L A N B A N K S stretched and almost purred as he reached for the lukewarm cup of tea on the bedside table. The sun was shining, the glorious morning warmth rolling in through the slightly open window, the net curtains f luttering. Tinariwen were singing “Cler Achel” on the alarm clock’s iPod Dock, electric guitar weaving in and out of the Bo Diddley–style riff, and all was well with the world. The little semi-circle of stained glass above the main window filtered the light red and green and gold. The first time Banks had woken up in that room he had had a bad hangover, and for a moment he had felt as if he had died and woken up in heaven.
Sophia had had to go to work, unfortunately, but just for the morning. Banks was due to meet her outside Western House and go for lunch at a little pub they liked, the Yorkshire Grey, off Great Portland Street. That evening, they were hosting a dinner party, and they would spend the afternoon shopping for ingredients at one of her favorite farmers’ markets, probably Notting Hill. Banks knew how it worked. He had been with Sophia on previous occasions, and he loved to watch her choosing strangely shaped and oddly colored fruits or vegetables, an expression of pure childlike wonder and concentration on her face as she weighed them in her hands and felt their firmness and the texture of their skin, tongue nipped gently between her teeth.
She would chat with the stall owners, ask them questions, and she always walked away with more than she intended to buy.
In the evening, he would offer to help make dinner, but he knew that Sophia would only shoo him out of the way. At best he might be 2 8 P E T E R
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allowed to chop a few vegetables, or prepare the salad, then he would be banished to the garden to read and sip his wine. The special al-chemy of cooking was reserved for Sophia alone. He had to admit that she did it with exquisite style and f lair. He hadn’t eaten so well in ages,
Banks put his cup down and lay back. He could smell the pillow where Sophia had lain beside him, her hair like the memory of apples he had picked in the orchard with his father one glorious autumn afternoon of his childhood. His fingers remembered the touch of her skin, and that brought back the one little wrinkle on the mantle of his happiness.
Last night, making love, he had told her that she had beautiful skin, and she had laughed and replied, “So I’ve been told.” It wasn’t the little vanity that bothered him, her awareness of her own beauty—he found that quite sexy—but the dark thought of the other men who had been close enough to tell her that before him. That way madness lies, he told himself, or at least misery. If he surrendered to images of Sophia naked and laughing with someone else, he didn’t know if he would be able to hang on to his sanity. No matter how many lovers she had had, whatever he and she had done together, they did for the first time. That was the only way to think of it. John and Yoko had it right:
Enough lounging around and slipping into dark thoughts, Banks told himself. It was nine o’clock, time to get up.
After he had showered and dressed, he made his way downstairs.
