Friend of the Devil

Eric lit another cigarette. He had turned pale and Annie could see that his hands were shaking. “You know,” he said, “I really believe that you would. When I met you, I thought you were a nice person.”

“Don’t give me that crap. When you met me, you thought here’s a not-too- bad- looking drunk old bitch I can get into bed without too much trouble.”

Eric’s jaw hung open.

“What’s wrong?” Annie went on. “Home truth’s not palatable to you?”

“I . . . just . . .” He shook his head in wonder. “You’re really something else, a real piece of work.”

“Believe it,” said Annie. “I take it I don’t need to say any more?”

Eric swallowed. “No.”

“On that, note, then, I’ll say good- bye.”

Annie was careful not to slam the door behind her. As angry and upset as she was, she needed to demonstrate to Eric that she was in control, even if she wasn’t. When she walked into the cool night air, she paused at the corner of the street and took a few deep breaths.

She’d done it, she told herself. Problem over. Sorted. So much for Annie Cabbot, Angel of Mercy. Why was it, though, she thought as she walked down the street and looked out at the dark glittering sea beyond, that as obnoxious as Eric was, she felt as if she had just broken a butterf ly on a wheel? But then, she reminded herself, he wasn’t a butterf ly at all, more like a snake, and she smiled.

12

CLUTCHING HIS BOTTLE OF WINE IN ONE HAND, BANKS

took a deep breath and rang the doorbell. It felt strange being back on the street where he had lived with Sandra and the kids for so many years. Now Sandra had remarried and become a mother again, Tracy had finished university, and Brian was in a successful rock band. But when Banks looked at the drawn curtains of his old home, an unremarkable semi with bay window, new door and pebble-dashed facade, the memories f looded back: sharing a late-night cup of hot chocolate with Tracy when she was twelve, having come home late and depressed from investigating the murder of a girl about her age, Strauss’s “Four Last Songs” on the stereo; Brian’s first stumbling musical attempts at playing “Sunshine of Your Love” on the acoustic guitar Banks had bought him for his sixteenth birthday; making love to Sandra as quietly as possible downstairs on the sofa after the kids had gone to bed, trying not to burst out laughing when they fell on the f loor. He also remembered his last few weeks alone there, passing out on the sofa with the bottle of Laphroaig on the f loor beside him, Blood on the Tracks on repeat on the CD player.

Before he could travel any farther down the perilous path of memory, the door opened and Harriet Weaver stood there, looking hardly a day older than when she had first welcomed Banks and his family to F R I E N D O F T H E D E V I L

2 4 3

the neighborhood twenty years ago. Banks leaned forward and kissed her on both cheeks.

“Hello, Alan,” she said. “I’m so glad you could come.” Banks handed her the wine. “You shouldn’t have. Come in.”

Banks followed her into the hall, where he hung up his coat, then they went through to the living room. Most of the guests had already arrived and were sitting in the convivial glow of orange-shaded table lamps, chatting and drinking. There were twelve people in all, and Banks knew two couples from his years next door: Geoff and Stella Hutchinson, from number twenty-four, and Ray and Max, the gay couple from across the street. The others were either Harriet’s friends from the library, or her husband David’s colleagues from the arcane and, to Banks, deadly dull, world of computers. Some of them he had met before brief ly.

He had driven straight from the station, about five minutes away, stopping only to pick up the bottle of wine from Oddbins, having spent most of the day in his office going over the statements and forensic reports on the Hayley Daniels case. He had also been occasionally distracted by the thought of Annie’s case: Lucy Payne in a wheelchair with her throat slit. He remembered Lucy lying in her hospital bed, in some ways a pitiful, fragile figure with her pale, beautiful, half-bandaged face, in other ways enigmatic, scheming, manipulative, and perhaps truly evil. Banks had never made up his mind on that score, though he was one of the few who had seen the videos, which convinced him that Lucy had been as involved as her husband, Terry, in the abduction and sexual torture of the girls. Whether she had actually killed anyone was another matter entirely, and one the courts never had to decide upon.

Everyone believed she did, no matter what. Her eyes had given nothing away and her instinct for self- preservation had been strong.

It was always difficult to make the transition from the macabre to the mundane, Banks found, but sometimes inconsequential small talk about England’s chances of scoring against Andorra after their pathetic 0–0 draw with Israel, or the Tories’ chances in the next election, were a welcome antidote to the day’s preoccupations.

Dinner parties always made him nervous, for some reason, and he 2 4 4 P E T E R

R O B I N S O N

couldn’t even drink too much to take the edge off because he had to drive home. He wasn’t going to take the kind of risk that Annie had taken the other night. She had been lucky. Thinking about Annie, he realized that he would probably have invited her as his “date” if they had been on better terms. Even though they were no longer romanti-cally involved, they gave each other moral support in social situations like this from time to time, strength in numbers. But after her odd behavior on the last two occasions they had met, he didn’t know how things stood between them, or how they would develop.

Greetings over, Banks took the glass of wine David offered and sat next to Geoff and Stella. Geoff was a paramedic, so he was hardly likely to start going on about RAM and gigs. Dead or dying bodies Banks could handle. Stella ran an antique shop on Castle Road, and she always had an interesting tale or two to tell.

As he made small talk, Banks glanced around at the others. There were a couple of supercilious prats he recognized from a previous party and didn’t particularly like, the kind who got a few drinks in them and became convinced that they could do a better job than anyone else of putting the world to rights. But the rest were okay. Most were around his age, mid-fifties, or a little younger. Harriet had put on some soft classical music in the background, Bach by the sound of it, and the smell of lamb roasting with garlic and rosemary drifted in from the kitchen.

A couple of plates of hors d’oeuvres were doing the rounds, and Banks helped himself to a small sausage roll