a blast from the past.”
“Starting to ring some bells?”
“Yes, but I don’t like the sound they’re making. Julia Ford. Woman in a wheelchair. Sounds very dissonant to me.”
“It was Lucy Payne.”
“Shit,” said Banks. “I take it the media don’t know yet?”
“No, but they’ll find out soon enough. Detective Superintendent Brough’s trying to head them off at the pass. He’s called a press conference for this afternoon.”
“I hope you don’t expect me to feel any pity for her,” Banks said.
“It always struck me that you had a very complicated relationship with her,” said Annie. “That’s partly why I’ve come to you.”
“Complicated? With the ‘Friend of the Devil’? Ruined a perfectly good Grateful Dead song for me, that’s all. Now, whenever I hear it, I see her face, see those bodies in the cellar.”
“Come off it, Alan. It’s
Banks sipped some beer. Annie looked at him and tried to figure 1 0 8
P E T E R R O B I N S O N
out what he was thinking. She never could. He thought he was trans-parent, but he was really as cloudy as an unfiltered pint.
“She was a complicated woman,” Banks said. “But she was a killer.”
“A young and beautiful killer,” Annie added.
“That, too,” Banks agreed. “Are you saying that affected my judgment?”
“Oh, come on. I’ve never known a time when a woman’s beauty hasn’t affected a man’s judgment. You don’t even need to go back as far as Helen of Troy to work that one out.”
“I wasn’t her champion, you’ll remember,” said Banks. “As far as I was concerned, she was as guilty as her husband, and I wanted her put away for it.”
“Yes, I know, but you
“Not for a moment.” Banks paused. “I’m not saying I might not have wanted to, or even tried to, but it wasn’t anything to do with her beauty. She was in ban dages most of the times I saw her, anyway.
Look below the surface and there was a hell of a lot of darkness. Okay, I’ll admit she was a complex and interesting killer. We’ve both come across those.”
“Touche,” said Annie, thinking of Phil Keane, who had wreaked so much havoc on her and Banks’s lives not much more than a year ago, damage Annie had certainly not yet got over if her recent behavior was anything to go by. A charming psychopath, Keane had used Annie to monitor the investigation of a crime he had committed, and when he came close to getting caught, he had almost killed Banks.
“But Lucy Payne had a most unusual and deeply troubled childhood,” Banks went on. “I’m not saying that excuses anything she did, or even really explains it, but can you really get your head around being kept in a cage and sexually abused by your family day after day, year after year?”
“The abused becomes the abuser?”
“I know it sounds like a cliche, but isn’t that often the case? Anyway, you didn’t come to me for my theories on Lucy Payne. In a way, death was probably a blessing for her.” He raised his glass for a moment, as if in a mock toast, then drank.
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“True,” said Annie. “What I was thinking was that I have to revisit that case if I want to have a hope in hell of catching her killer.”
“And what makes you want to do that?”
“My nature,” Annie said. “I can’t even believe you’d ask me such a question.”
“Come off it, Annie. You thought she was as guilty as I did.”
“I know,” said Annie. “So what? If anything, that makes me want to solve her murder even more.”
“To prove you can overcome your own prejudices?”
“What’s so wrong with that? I might never have said it, but I was glad when she ended up paralyzed. Death would have been too easy for her. This way she suffered more, and a part of me thought that was just, given the way she’d made those poor girls suffer. Karma, if you like.”
“And the other parts of you?”
“Told me what a load of self-justifying bollocks that was. Whatever she did, whatever she was, Lucy Payne was a human being. As a soci-ety, we don’t tolerate executing people anymore, but someone has taken the law into his or her own hands and slit Lucy Payne’s throat as she sat there unable to defend herself. That goes against everything I believe in. No matter what she did, it was nobody’s right to take Lucy Payne’s life.”
“What, they should have let her go on suffering a kind of living death? Come on, Annie, someone did her a favor.”
“It wasn’t a mercy killing.”
“How do you know?”
