“Oh, that. I see. Yes. I’m sorry. We’re neighbors. Were.”
Annie happened to know that Banks had no neighbors anywhere close to his Gratly cottage, so she assumed that Juliet Doyle was referring to the past, perhaps when he had lived on Laburnum Way, about a mile down Market Street from the police station. But Banks hadn’t lived there for ten years. Had they kept in touch all that time? Was there something she was missing? “When was this?” she asked.
“When he and Sandra were still together. I still think it’s so tragic that they parted like that, don’t you? Such a lovely couple.”
“Yes,” said Annie, whose only experiences of Sandra had been humiliating and more than a little frightening.
“Anyway,” Juliet went on, “we were friends and neighbors. That’s why I thought he might be able to help me.”
“Mrs. Doyle,” said Annie. “If this is a police matter, you really should tell me. Are you in some sort of trouble?”
Juliet flinched as if she’d been tapped on the shoulder by surprise. “Trouble? Me? No. Of course not.”
“Then what is it?”
Juliet scanned the office as if she suspected Banks were hiding behind a filing cabinet or in a cupboard. “Are you sure Alan’s not here?”
“Positive. I told you. He’s on his holidays.”
Juliet twisted her diamond ring again and let the silence stretch. Just when Annie was about to get up and show her the door, she blurted out, “It’s about Erin.”
“Erin?”
“Yes. Our daughter. Me and my husband, that is. Patrick. He sent me. He’s stopping home with Erin.”
“Is Erin in trouble?”
“I suppose she is. Yes. You don’t know what they get up to, do you? Do you have any children?”
“No.”
“Well, you wouldn’t know, then. It’s too easy to blame the parents, the way they do in the papers and on television. But when you just don’t know…” She let the sentence trail.
“I’m going to ring for some tea,” said Annie. The good old English panacea, she thought as she picked up the phone and asked for a pot to be sent up. A nice cup of tea…This was clearly going to take some time, and if Juliet Doyle didn’t need a cuppa, Annie certainly did. Maybe they’d bring chocolate digestives, too, if she was lucky.
“Erin lives in Leeds,” Juliet said. “In Headingley. Hardly a den of iniquity, you might say, but you’d be surprised.”
“Like most big cities, it can be a dangerous place if you’re not careful,” said Annie. “But I must tell you, we’re North Yorkshire. If the problem is in Leeds, then you need to-”
“No, no. That’s not it. You don’t understand.”
Of course I don’t understand, Annie thought, gritting her teeth. I’d have to be a bloody mind reader to understand. “Tell me, then,” she said.
The tea arrived. A welcome interruption. No chocolate digestives, though. Normally, Annie would have asked or made some sort of comment to the young PC who brought in the tray, but it wouldn’t do to take up a petty issue like the lack of chocolate biscuits with Juliet Doyle sitting opposite her.
“Erin’s a good girl. I think she must have fallen in with a bad crowd,” said Juliet, accepting the cup Annie handed her, adding milk and sugar with slightly shaking hands.
“How old is she?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Working?”
“Yes. As a waitress. It’s a nice restaurant. Very upmarket. Down in The Calls, with all those fancy new boutique hotels and waterfront flats. And she makes decent enough money. But even so…” She shrugged.
“It’s not what you expected for her?”
“Not with a good upper second in psychology.”
“Times are hard. Perhaps she’s just waiting for the right job to come along.”
“I’d like to think so, but…”
“What?”
“Well, I think she’s more likely been wasting her time. It’s been two years now since she got her degree. She took a gap year before she went.”
“Does she have a boyfriend?”
“As far as I know she still does,” said Juliet. “Not that we’ve met him, or even that she’s told us much about him. Mostly we keep in touch through phone calls, texts. You know what the young are like. The last thing they think of sometimes is visiting their parents unless they need something, or it’s a special occasion.”
“Young people can be very secretive,” Annie agreed. “She’s a grown woman. I was married when I was her age.”
“But times change,” said Annie. “Kids aren’t so quick to leave the nest these days.”
“Erin’s not a parasite, if that’s what you mean. She was happy enough to get away from home in the first place. Couldn’t get out fast enough. That wasn’t the problem.”
“Then what is?” Annie said, close to the end of her patience. She was beginning to think that this was some sort of domestic matter, and she was starting to feel resentful that she wasn’t only left to do Banks’s job while he was away, but handle his personal problems, too. “Why are you here? What did you think Alan could do for you?”
Juliet’s back stiffened. “He’d know what to do, wouldn’t he?”
“About what?” Annie knew she was almost shouting, but she couldn’t help herself.
“About the gun,” said Juliet Doyle, head bowed, speaking so softly that Annie could barely hear her. “She has a gun.”
“TELL ME how it happened.”
Detective Superintendent Catherine Gervaise was sitting on the edge of her desk with her arms folded, and the way she towered over Annie and Juliet Doyle made Annie feel as if they were two truant schoolgirls brought up before the headmistress. Gervaise could have that effect when she wanted. Annie had her notebook open and her pen in her hand, waiting. No matter what action the situation warranted, there was likely to be a lot of red tape ahead, and she had to get it down right.
“I was dusting and cleaning her room,” Juliet began. “Honestly, I wasn’t prying. Erin was downstairs watching breakfast television. I like to keep a neat and clean house, and it was my morning to do the upstairs, so I didn’t see any harm in it.”
“So Erin still lives at home?” Gervaise asked.
“No. As I told Ms. Cabbot here, she lives in Leeds.”
“Would you give us the address, please?”
“Of course.” Juliet gave an address in Headingley and Annie wrote it down. She knew the area and recognized the street name.
“What is she doing in Eastvale?”
“She…she didn’t really say.”
“What did she say?”
“Just that she needed to come home for a while. I thought she might have split up with her boyfriend or something.”
“Did you ask her if she had?”
“Yes, but she just told me to mind my own business. She isn’t usually so rude. We brought her up to be polite and respectful to her elders. But she’s upset. I thought if I left her alone, she would tell me what was bothering her eventually. She usually does.”
“Are you very close?”
“I wouldn’t say very close, but I like to think that we are close, yes, that she feels she can talk to me, tell me anything. That’s why it was such a shock, finding the gun.”
“What do you know about her boyfriend?”
