drinks. If she got done for drunk driving, there’d be hell to pay in her career. He just hoped she had got home without incident, and that was the simple message he had left on her home phone.
When he got to Harkside and knocked on her door a couple of minutes early, he got no answer. He glanced up the street, where she usually parked her purple Astra, and saw it wasn’t there. That worried him, but he assured himself that if anything had happened to her, an accident or something, it would have been on the local news that morning, and it hadn’t been. Which meant that more than likely she had wanted to avoid traveling with him and had driven off by herself.
Feeling angry and resentful, Banks headed for the A1. Neil Young followed Neko Case—a blistering “Like a Hurricane” from
“Sorry I’m late,” Banks said, easing into a vacant chair. Annie avoided looking at him. Her eyes seemed swollen, he noticed, as if she had been crying or was allergic to something.
“That’s all right, Alan,” said Hartnell. “We hadn’t really started yet.
Tea? Biscuits?” He gestured to the tray sitting on his desk.
“Thanks.” Banks helped himself to tea and a couple of chocolate digestives.
Hartnell perched at the edge of his desk. “DI Cabbot was just bringing us up to speed on her investigation.”
Banks glanced at Annie again. She still wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“Right,” he said. “Well, it’s DI Cabbot’s case. I’m here merely to help out with the Chameleon angle.”
“As are we all, Alan. As are we all,” said Hartnell.
He had filled out over the past six years, as if he had stopped working out regularly, let himself go to seed. His hairline was receding, too. Age gets to us all eventually, Banks realized, and sooner than we expect, remembering when he had first noticed his own hair starting to gray at 1 3 4
P E T E R R O B I N S O N
the temples. It’ll be bloody liver spots next, he thought gloomily, and prostate cancer. That reminded him of the doctor’s appointment he hadn’t rescheduled. It was getting closer.
“You were saying about the pathologist’s report?” Hartnell, still perching, said to Annie.
“Yes, sir,” Annie said. “The postmortem didn’t really tell us anything we didn’t know already. The pathologist repeated that it’s often hard to tell handedness from slash injuries, but seemed to favor a left-to-right motion, considering pressure and depth of the wound. That gives us a right-handed killer, most likely. Again, he couldn’t commit himself to the actual weapon used but stressed that it was extremely sharp and an old-fashioned straight razor or some sort of scalpel were the most likely possibilities. Other than that, Lucy was, as we thought, a quadriplegic. In her case, that meant she couldn’t move or speak. As for time of death, that was fixed at between eight-thirty and ten-thirty a.m. As we know she left Mapston Hall at nine-thirty and was found at ten- fifteen, we can narrow that down quite a bit.”
Hartnell went behind his desk and sat down. “So what exactly can we help you with?” he asked Annie.
“It’s mostly a matter of names,” Annie said. “The people at Mapston Hall said Karen—sorry, Lucy—had no visitors other than the mysterious ‘Mary’ who picked her up on Sunday morning at nine-thirty a.m.
and, in all likelihood, killed her. It appears that nobody saw her car, and we can’t get a decent description of her because they were busy and no one really noticed her apart from one staff member.” Annie took an envelope from her briefcase and passed photocopied sheets of paper to everyone. When it came to Banks, he snatched his copy from her childishly. Annie ignored him. “This is the artist’s impression worked out with Mel Danvers, Lucy’s carer, the only person who saw ‘Mary.’
As you can see, it’s not a lot of use.”
It certainly wasn’t, Banks thought, studying the figure in the rain hat, glasses and a long baggy coat, face in shadow except for a vague sense of thin lips and an oval chin. “It seems as if she deliberately wanted to obscure her appearance,” he said.
Annie said nothing.
“True enough,” Hartnell agreed.
F R I E N D O F T H E D E V I L
1 3 5
“Yes, sir,” Annie said to him. “She didn’t really need all that gear.
It had been raining at the time, but it was clearing up by then. Mel also said she got the vague impression the woman was about forty.”
“Are you working on the assumption that whoever killed Lucy Payne knew her real identity?” Hartnell asked, after examining the drawing and putting it aside.
“It seems a reasonable assumption to make at the moment, sir,” Annie said. “Otherwise, what are we left with?”
“I see your point,” said Hartnell. “Given that Karen Drew hadn’t existed for very long, it would have been rather odd if someone wanted to kill her, unless the whole thing was random, someone who just wanted to kill a helpless victim in a wheelchair for the hell of it.”
“Yes, sir,” said Annie.
“Not entirely out of the question,” said Ken Blackstone, “but perhaps the most unlikely scenario.”
“Exactly,” Annie agreed. “Especially now we know who she really was.”
Banks watched her as she spoke. She was focused on the job, but he knew it was costing her an effort, as was
