“Me, too,” said Banks. “Me, too. Anything?”
“Early days yet. From what we’ve been able to gather from the blood spatter analysis so far, he was attacked from behind. He wouldn’t have known what hit him. Or cut him.”
“He would have known he was dying, though?”
“For a few seconds, yes, but there are no messages scrawled in blood, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“One lives in hope. Pocket contents?”
F R I E N D O F T H E D E V I L
2 6 9
Stefan fetched a plastic bag. Inside it, Banks found Templeton’s wallet, some chewing gum, keys, a Swiss Army knife, warrant card, ball-point pen and a slim notebook. “May I?” he asked, indicating the notebook. Stefan gave him a pair of plastic gloves and handed it to him.
The handwriting was hard to read, perhaps because it had been written quickly, but it seemed as if Templeton liked to make brief notes, like an artist’s sketches. He hadn’t written the murderer’s name in there, either.
There was nothing since the previous eve ning, when it appeared that he had also been haunting The Maze, to no avail, as Banks had suspected.
He would examine the notebook in more detail later to see if there was anything in the theory that Templeton was following leads of his own, but for now he handed it back. “Thank you. Dr. Burns finished yet?”
“He’s over there.”
Banks hadn’t noticed the doctor in another corner of the square, dressed in navy or black, jotting in his notebook. He went over.
“DCI Banks. What can I do for you?”
“I’m hoping you can tell me a few things.”
“I can’t really tell you much at all,” said a tired Burns. “You’ll have to wait until Dr. Wallace gets him on the table.”
“Can we start with the basics? His throat was cut, wasn’t it?”
Burns sighed. “That’s the way it looks to me.”
“From behind?”
“The type of wound certainly supports DS Nowak’s blood spatter analysis.”
“Left- or right-handed?”
“Impossible to say at this point. You’ll have to wait for the postmortem, and even that might not tell you.”
Banks grunted. “Weapon?”
“A very sharp blade of some sort. Razor or scalpel, something like that. Not an ordinary knife, at any rate. From what I can see on even a cursory examination, it’s a clean, deep cut. The way it looks is that he simply bled to death. The blade cut through both the carotid and the jugular and severed his windpipe. The poor devil didn’t have a hope in hell.”
“How do you think it happened?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. I understand there was a witness?”
2 7 0 P E T E R
R O B I N S O N
“Yes,” said Banks. “A girl. She saw it happen. I’m on my way to talk to her.”
“Then she might be able to tell you more. Perhaps he was following her?”
“Why? To warn her, protect her?”
“Or attack her.”
Kev Templeton, The Maze killer? Banks didn’t want to believe it, even though he had been the first to voice the possibility. “I don’t think so,” he said.
“I’m just trying to keep an open mind,” said Dr. Burns.
“I know,” said Banks. “We all are. I wonder what the
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. I was just thinking of something else.” Annie’s case had come into his mind again. Lucy Payne sitting in her wheelchair, her throat cut with a sharp blade, a razor or a scalpel, a similar weapon to the one that had killed Templeton.
“I’m sure that Dr. Wallace will get around to the postmortem as soon as she can on this one,” Dr. Burns said. “She should be able to give you more answers.”
“Right,” said Banks. “And thanks. I’d better get to the hospital now and talk to the witness.” As he walked away, he was still thinking about Lucy Payne, and he knew that as soon as it reached a reasonable hour in the morning he would have to ring Annie in Whitby and see if they could get together to compare notes.
I T WA S N ’ T as if Annie was sleeping well, or even sleeping at all.
Banks could have rung her right then, and she would have been awake enough to hold a conversation. A sound had woken her from a bad dream, and she had lain there not moving, listening hard, until she was sure it was just a creak from the old house and nothing else. Who did she think it was, anyway? Eric come to get her? Phil Keane
