“What are you doing up?” Banks whispered.
Tracy rubbed her eyes and walked into the room. She was wearing a long, sloppy nightshirt with a picture of a giant panda on the front. Though she was seventeen, it made her look like a little girl.
“I thought I heard someone in my room,” Tracy muttered. “I couldn’t get back to sleep so I came down for some milk. Oh, Dad! You’re smoking again.”
Banks put his finger to his lips. “Shhh! Your mother.” He looked at the cigarette guiltily. “So I am.”
“And you promised.”
“I never did.” Banks hung his head in shame. There was nothing like a teenage daughter to make you feel guilty about your bad habits, especially with all the anti-smoking propaganda they were brainwashed with at school these days.
“You did, too.” Tracy came closer. “Is something wrong? Is that why you’re up so late smoking and drinking?”
She sat on the arm of the sofa and looked at him, sleep-filled eyes full of concern, long blonde hair straggling over her narrow shoulders. Banks’s son, Brian, who was away studying architecture in Portsmouth, took after his father, but Tracy took after her mother.
They had come a long way since the bitter arguments over her first boyfriend, long since dumped, and too many late nights over the summer. Now Tracy had determined not to have a boyfriend at all this year, but to put all her efforts into getting good A-level results so she could go to university, where she wanted to study history. Banks couldn’t help but approve. As he looked at her perching so frail and vulnerable on the edge of the sofa his heart swelled with pride in her, and with fear for her.
“No,” he said, getting up and patting her head. “There’s nothing wrong. I’m just an old fool set in his ways, that’s all. Shall I make us both some cocoa?”
Tracy nodded, then yawned and stretched her arms high in the air.
Banks smiled. Gundula Janowitz sang Hermann Hesse’s words. Banks had listened to the songs so many times, he knew the translation by heart:
You can say that again, thought Banks. He looked back at Tracy as he walked to the kitchen. She was examining the small-print CD liner notes with squinting eyes trying to make out the words.
She would find out soon enough what had happened to Deborah Harrison, Banks thought. It would be all over town tomorrow. But not tonight. Tonight father and daughter would enjoy a quiet, innocent cup of cocoa in the middle of the night in their safe, warm house floating like an island in the fog.
Chapter 2
I
Chief Constable Jeremiah Riddle was already pacing the lino when Banks arrived at his office early the next morning. Bald head shining like a new cricket ball freshly rubbed on the bowler’s crotch, black eyes glowing like a Whitby jet, clean-shaven chin jutting out like the prow of a boat, uniform sharply creased, not a speck of fluff or cotton anywhere to be seen, and a poppy placed ostentatiously in his lapel, he looked alert, wide-awake and ready for anything.
Which was more than Banks looked, or felt for that matter. All told, he had got no more than about three hours’ uneasy sleep, especially as an early telephone call from Ken Blackstone had woken him up. Though the fog was quickly turning to drizzle this morning, he had walked the mile to work simply to get the cobwebs out of his brain. He wasn’t sure whether he had succeeded. It didn’t help that his cold was getting worse, either, filling his head with damp cotton wool.
“Ah, Banks, about bloody time,” said Riddle.
Banks removed his headphones and switched off the Jimi Hendrix tape he had been listening to. The breakneck arpeggios of “Pali Gap” were still ringing in his stuffed-up ears.
“And do you have to go around with those bloody things stuck in your ears?” Riddle went on. “Don’t you know how silly you look?”
Banks knew a rhetorical question when he heard one.
“I suppose you’re aware who the victim’s father is?”
“Sir Geoffrey Harrison, sir. I talked to him last night.”
“In that case you’ll realize how important this is. This…this…terrible tragedy.” Never at a loss for a cliche wasn’t Jimmy Riddle, Banks reflected. Riddle slid his hand over his head and went on. “I want a hundred per cent on this one, Banks. No. Two hundred per cent. Do you understand? No shirking. No dragging of feet.”
Banks nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Now what about this Bosnian fellow? Jurassic, is it?”
“Jelacic, sir. And he’s Croatian.”
“Whatever. Think he’s our man?”
“We’ll certainly be talking to him. Ken Blackstone has just reported that Jelacic’s known to the Leeds police. Drunk and disorderly, one charge of assault in a pub. And he didn’t get home until after two this morning. They’ve got his prints, so we should be able to compare them if Vic gets anything from the vodka bottle.”
“Good.” Riddle grinned. “That’s the kind of thing I like to hear. I want a quick arrest on this one, Banks. Sir Geoffrey’s a personal friend of mine. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Right. And take it easy on the family. I don’t want you pestering them in their time of grief. Am I clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
Riddle straightened his uniform, which didn’t need it, and brushed imaginary dandruff from his shoulders. Wishful thinking, Banks guessed. “Now I’m off to give a press conference,” he said. “Anything I ought to know to stop me looking a prize berk?”
Nothing could stop you from looking like a prize berk, Banks thought. “No, sir,” he said. “But you might like to drop by the murder room and see if there’s anything fresh come in.”
“I’ve already done that. What do you think I am, a bloody moron?”
Banks let the silence stretch.
Riddle kept pacing, though he seemed to have run out of things to say for the present. At last he headed for the door. “Right, then. Remember what I said, Banks,” he said, pointing a finger. “Results. Fast.”
Banks felt himself relax and breathe easier when Riddle had gone, like a Victorian lady when she takes her corsets off. He had read about “Type A” personalities in a magazine article-all push and shove, ambition and self- importance, and bloody exhausting to be in the same room with.
Banks lit a cigarette, read the reports on his desk and looked at the Dalesman calendar on his wall. November showed the village of Muker, in Swaledale, a cluster of gray limestone buildings cupped in a valley of muted autumn colors. He walked over to the window where the early morning light was leaking through the cloud cover like dirty dishwater.
The market square, with its Norman church to his left, bank, shops and cafes opposite and Queen’s Arms to the
