“Like what?”
“Suggest he hand it over to Lancashire or Derbyshire.
“I tried, but his mind was made up. He knows ACC McLaughlin. Besides, this way he thinks I can hold on to some degree of control over the investigation.”
“Well, he can bloody well think again about that.”
“Annie, you can do some good here. For yourself, for the public interest.”
“Don’t try appealing to my better nature. I haven’t got one.”
“Why are you resisting so strongly?”
“Because it’s a crap job and you know it. At least give me the courtesy of not trying to soft-soap me.”
Banks sighed. “I’m only the advance warning. Don’t kill the messenger.”
“That’s what messengers are for. You’re saying I’ve no choice?”
“There’s always a choice.”
“Yeah, the right one and the wrong one. Don’t worry, I won’t make a fuss. But you’d better be right about the consequences.”
“Trust me. I’m right.”
“And you’ll respect me in the morning. Sure.”
“Look, about the morning. I’m going back to Gratly tonight. I’ll be late, but maybe you could come over, or I could drop by your place on my way?”
“What for? A quickie?”
“Doesn’t have to be that quick. Way I’m sleeping these days it could take all night.”
“No way. I need my beauty sleep. Remember, I’ve got to be up bright and early in the morning to drive to Leeds. Bye.”
Banks held the silent mobile to his ear for a few moments, then put it back in his pocket. Christ, he thought, you handled that one really well, Alan, didn’t you?
4
Samantha Jane Foster, eighteen years old, five feet five and seven stone three pounds, was a first-year English student at the University of Bradford. Her parents lived in Leighton Buzzard, where Julian Foster was a chartered accountant and Teresa Foster a local GP. Samantha had one older brother, Alistair, unemployed, and a younger sister, Chloe, still at school.
On the evening of the twenty-sixth of February, Samantha attended a poetry reading in a pub near the university campus and left alone for her bed-sit at about eleven-fifteen. She lived just off Great Horton Road, about a quarter of a mile away. When she didn’t turn up for her weekend job in the city center Waterstone’s bookshop, one of her coworkers, Penelope Hall, became worried and called at the bed-sit during her lunch break. Samantha was reliable, she later told the police, and if she wasn’t going to come in to work because of illness, she would always ring. This time she hadn’t. Worried that Samantha might be seriously ill, Penelope managed to persuade the landlord to open the bed-sit door. Nobody home.
There was a very good chance that the Bradford Police might not have taken Samantha Foster’s disappearance seriously – at least not so quickly – had it not been for the shoulder bag that a conscientious student had found in the street and handed in after midnight the previous evening. It contained a poetry anthology called
Given the two occurrences – an abandoned shoulder bag and a missing girl – especially as the young DC who was given the assignment remembered something similar had happened in Roundhay Park, Leeds, on New Year’s Eve – the inquiry began that very morning with calls to Samantha’s parents and close friends, none of whom had seen her or heard of any change in her plans or normal routine.
For a brief time, Michael Stringer, the poet who had been reading his work at the pub, became a suspect, given the inscription he had written in his book of poems for her, but a number of witnesses said he carried on drinking in the city center and had to be helped back to his hotel around three-thirty in the morning. The hotel staff assured the police that he hadn’t seen the light of day again until teatime the following day.
Inquiries around the university turned up one possible witness, who thought she saw Samantha talking to someone through a car window. At least the girl had long blond hair and was wearing the same clothes Samantha was when she left the pub – jeans, black calf-high boots and a long, flapping overcoat. The car was dark in color, and the witness remembered the three last letters on the number plate because they formed her own initials: Kathryn Wendy Thurlow. She said she had no reason to believe that there was any problem at the time, so she crossed over to her street and carried on to her own flat.
The last two letters of a car number plate indicate the origin of its registration, and WT signifies Leeds. The DVLA at Swansea were able to supply a list of over a thousand possibles – as Kathryn hadn’t been able to narrow the search down to make or even color – and the owners were interviewed by Bradford CID. Nothing came of it.
All the searches and interviews that followed turned up nothing more about Samantha Foster’s disappearance, and rumblings were starting on the police tom-toms. Two disappearances, almost two months and about fifteen miles apart, were enough to set off a few alarm bells but not a full-blown panic.
Samantha didn’t have many friends, but those she did have were loyal and devoted to her, in particular Angela Firth, Ryan Conner and Abha Gupta, who were all devastated by her disappearance. According to them, Samantha was a very serious sort of girl, given to long reflective silences and gnomic utterances, with no time for small talk, sports and television. She had a level head on her shoulders, though, they insisted, and everyone said she wasn’t the type to go off with a stranger on a whim, no matter how much she talked about the importance of experiencing life to the full.
When the police suggested that Samantha might have wandered off under the influence of drugs, her friends said it was unlikely. Yes, they admitted, she liked to smoke a joint occasionally – she said it helped her with her writing – but she didn’t do any harder drugs; she also didn’t drink much and couldn’t have had more than two or three glasses of wine the entire evening.
She didn’t have a boyfriend at the moment and didn’t seem interested in acquiring one. No, she wasn’t gay, but she had spoken of exploring sexual experiences with other women. Samantha might appear unconventional in some ways, Angela explained, but she had a lot more common sense than people sometimes imagined on first impressions; she was just not frivolous, and she was interested in a lot of things other people laughed at or dismissed.
According to her professors, Samantha was an eccentric student with a tendency to spend too much of her time reading outside the syllabus, but one of her tutors, who had published some verse himself, said that he had hopes she might make a fine poet one day if she could cultivate a little more self-discipline in her technique.
Samantha’s interests, so Abha Gupta said, included art, poetry, nature, Eastern religions, psychic experiences and death.
Banks and Ken Blackstone drove out to The Greyhound, a low-beamed rustic pub with Toby jugs all around the plate racks in the village of Tong, about fifteen minutes from the crime scene. It was going on for two o’clock, and neither of them had eaten yet that day. Banks hadn’t eaten much in the past two days, in fact, ever since he had heard of the fifth missing teenager in the wee hours of Saturday morning.
Over the past two months, he had sometimes thought his head would explode under pressure of the sheer
