“She didn’t have any. You must have read her file.”
“Yes. It tells me nothing.”
“Which is about as much as I can tell you, too.” Gail stubbed out her cigarette as the food arrived. Burgers and chips for Gail and Ginger, the inevitable cheese- and-tomato sandwich for Annie. Maybe she should start eating meat again, she thought, then decided that her diet was probably the only part of her life she seemed to have much control over at the moment. The conversations ebbed and f lowed around them. At one table, a group of women laughed loudly at a bawdy joke.
The air was full of smoke tinged with hops.
“Karen lived in Mansfield before the accident, according to her file,” said Annie. “Do you know what her address was?”
“Sorry,” said Gail. “But you should be able to find out from Morton’s, the estate agents. They handled the sale for her. I do happen to know that. It was part of the financing.”
“Okay,” said Annie. “How do you know about the estate agents?”
“Her solicitor told me about them.”
“Karen Drew had a solicitor?”
“Of course. Someone had to take care of her affairs and look after her interests. She
couldn’t do it herself, could she? And a proper bloody busybody she was, too. Always ringing about this, that or the other. Voice like fingernails on a blackboard. ‘Gail, do you think you could just . . .’ ‘Gail, could you . . .’ ” She gave a shudder.
7 8 P E T E R
R
O B I N S
O N
“Do you remember her name?”
“Do I? Connie Wells. That was her name. Constance, she called herself. Insisted on it. Right bloody smarmy stuck-up bitch.”
“Do you have her phone number or address?”
“Probably, somewhere in my files. She worked for a firm in Leeds, that’s all I can remember. Park Square.”
It would be, thought Annie. Leeds. That was interesting. If Karen Drew lived in Mansfield, why was her solicitor with a firm in Leeds?
It wasn’t far away, true, just up the motorway, but there were plenty of lawyers in Mansfield or Nottingham. Well, she could Google Constance Wells easily enough once she got back to Whitby. Maybe the solicitor would be able to tell them something about Karen Drew’s mysterious past.
“ LO O K , T H E R E she goes,” said DS Kevin Templeton, pointing at the television screen. “Right there.”
They were in the viewing room on the ground f loor of Western Area Headquarters reviewing one of the CCTV tapes. It could have been a clearer image, Banks thought, and perhaps technical support could tidy it up, but even blurred in the dark, with f laws and light f lares, there was no doubt that the tall, long-legged girl, a little unsteady on her pins, heading up the alley between Joseph Randall’s leather shop and The Fountain pub was Hayley Daniels, teetering on her high heels, reaching her hands out to touch the walls on both sides as she made her way down Taylor’s Yard.
She had come out of the pub with a group of people at twelve-seventeen, said something to them, and after what looked like a bit of a heated discussion waved them away and headed into the alley at twelve-twenty. It was hard to make out exactly how many of them there were, but Banks estimated at least seven. He could see the backs of a couple of her friends as they lingered and watched her disappear, shaking their heads, then they shrugged and walked in the direction of the Bar None after the others. Banks watched as Hayley’s figure was finally swallowed up by the darkness of The Maze. Nobody waited for her.
“Anyone go down there before or after her?”
F R I E N D O F T H E D E V I L
7 9
“Not on any of the surveillance tapes we’ve seen,” said Templeton.
“It’s her, though, isn’t it, sir?”
“It’s her, all right,” said Banks. “The question is, was he waiting or did he follow her?”
“I’ve watched it through till half past two in the morning, sir, well after the doc’s estimate of time of death,” said Templeton, “and no one else went up Taylor’s Yard earlier, and no one goes up there after her.
No one comes out, either. We’ve got some footage from the Castle Road cameras to view, but this is it for the market square.”
“So whoever it was entered by some other way, an entrance not covered by CCTV,” said Banks.
“Looks that way, sir. But surely no one could have known she was going to go into The Maze? And if no one followed her . . .”
“Someone was already there, waiting for just such a likelihood?
Possibly,” said Banks.
“A serial killer?”
Banks gave Templeton a long-suffering look. “Kev, there’s only one victim. How can it be a serial killer?”
