Friend of the Devil

seventeen, went missing during a New Year’s Eve party in F R I E N D O F T H E D E V I L

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Roundhay Park, Leeds; Samantha Jane Foster, eighteen years old, disappeared on her way home from a poetry reading at a pub near the University of Bradford; Leanne Wray, sixteen, vanished on a ten-minute walk between a pub and her parents’ house in Eastvale; Melissa Hor-rocks, aged seventeen, failed to return home from a pop concert in Harrogate. Five young girls, all victims of Terence Payne, who came to be called the “Chameleon” and, many people believed, also of his wife Lucy Payne, who later became the notorious “Friend of the Devil.”

Two police officers on routine patrol had been called to the Payne house in west Leeds after a neighbor reported hearing sounds of an argument. There they had found Lucy Payne unconscious in the hall, the apparent victim of an attack by her husband. In the cellar, Terence Payne had set upon the officers with a machete and killed PC Dennis Morrisey. Morrisey’s partner, PC Janet Taylor, had managed to get in several blows with her nightstick, and she didn’t stop hitting Terence Payne until he was no longer moving, no longer a threat. He subse-quently died of his injuries.

Banks was called to the cellar, where the local police had found the body of Kimberley Myers bound naked and dead on a mattress surrounded by candles, her body slashed around the breasts and genitals.

The other girls were found dismembered and buried in the next room, and postmortems discovered them to have been similarly tortured.

What Banks remembered most, apart from the smell, was the way their toes stuck up through the earth like tiny mushrooms. Sometimes he had nightmares about that time he had spent in the cellar at 35 The Hill.

He thought about his conversation with Annie that afternoon and decided that he had definitely been on the defensive. He remembered Lucy Payne best as she was the first time he had seen her in her hospital bed, when she hadn’t been quite as beautiful as some of the photographs the newspapers printed. Half her face had been covered in bandages, her long raven’s-wing hair had been spread out on the pillow under her head, and the one good eye that stared at him with un-nerving directness was as black as her hair.

Naturally, she had denied any involvement in or knowledge of her husband’s crimes. When Banks had talked to her, he had sensed her striding always one step ahead, or aside, anticipating the questions, 1 1 8

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preparing her answers and the requisite emotions of regret and pain, but never of guilt. She had been, by turns, vulnerable or brazen, victim or willing sexual deviant. Her history, when it came out, recounted a childhood of unimaginable horrors in a remote coastal house, where the children of two families had been subjected to ritual sexual abuse by their parents until the social workers pounced one day amid rumors of Satanic rites.

Banks got up and poured another glass of wine. It was going down far too well. As he drank, he thought of the people he had encountered during the Chameleon investigation, from the parents of the victims to neighbors and schoolfriends of some of the girls. There was even a teacher who had come brief ly under suspicion, a friend of Payne’s called Geoffrey Brighouse. It was a large cast, but at least it would give Annie and her team somewhere to start.

Thinking of the Paynes’ victims, Banks’s mind drifted to Hayley Daniels. He couldn’t let this new case of Annie’s interfere with the investigation. He owed Hayley that much. With any luck, by the time he got back from Leeds tomorrow, some of the lab results would have started to trickle in, and between them, Wilson and Templeton would have talked to most of the friends Hayley was with on Saturday night and interviewed the possible boyfriend, Malcolm Austin.

Banks knew he had made a mistake in putting Winsome and Templeton together on the Daniels-McCarthy interview. He could tell from the atmosphere when the two returned to the station that it hadn’t gone well. Neither would talk to him about it, he knew, though he sensed there was obviously more than Templeton’s overactive li- bido behind it.

The problem was that Banks knew he had been right in what he told Annie: Templeton could be a good copper, and sometimes what made him one was his brusqueness and his disregard of the rules of common decency. But he also knew that when he had had to rethink whether there was room for someone like Templeton on the team, especially with Winsome progressing so well, he had decided that there wasn’t. The transfer, then, was a good idea.

Banks tried to clear Lucy Payne and Hayley Daniels out of his mind. Maria Muldaur came to the end of “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,”

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so he went to put on a new CD. He decided on the Bill Evans Half Moon Bay concert, one he had always wished he had attended. After Evans introduced his bass player and drummer came the delightful

“Waltz for Debby.” It was still early, and Banks decided to spend the rest of the eve ning at home listening to the jazz collection that he was slowly rebuilding and reading Postwar. He was deeply into the Cold War and “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” by the time he noticed that his glass was empty for the second time.

I T S E E M E D like ages since Annie had been to a restaurant in Eastvale, and she was glad that she had accepted Winsome’s invitation, even though she knew it wouldn’t be an entirely work-free evening.

The Italian place they had picked above the shops built onto the back of the church in the market square was excellent: plenty of vegetarian choices and decent cheap plonk. She tucked into her pasta primavera and second glass of Chianti—feeling just a little guilty, but not too much, for not lasting longer on the wagon—while Winsome ate can-nelloni and went full speed ahead in her verbal assault on Templeton.

“So you told him what you thought?” Annie said, the first opening she got.

“I told him.”

“And what did he say?”

“Nothing. Not a word. I think he was so shocked that I swore at him. I mean, I was so shocked I swore at him. I never swear.” She put her hand over her mouth and laughed. Annie laughed with her.

“Don’t worry,” Annie said. “Insults are like water off a duck’s back with Templeton. He’ll be back to normal tomorrow, or what passes for normal in his case.”