Friend of the Devil

Banks handed her the bottle and sat on the sofa. “I assume you want to drink some of this?” she asked.

“I’ll have a glass, please, sure.”

Annie went into the kitchen for the corkscrew. The wine was a Vacqueyros she had drunk with Banks before and enjoyed. Nothing special, but nice. An understated gesture, then. She poured him a glass, filled her own with the cheap Soave and went back and sat in the armchair. Her living room suddenly seemed too small for the two of them. “Music?” she asked, more for a distraction than that she really wanted to listen to anything in particu lar.

“If you like.”

“You choose.”

Banks got on his knees by her small CD collection and picked Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda. Annie had to applaud his choice. It suited her mood and the swirling harp figures over the slow melodic bass line always soothed her when she was troubled. She remembered that John Coltrane had been playing when she visited Banks the other night, but she found him a lot harder to listen to than his wife, except on the one CD she owned, The Gentle Side.

“How was your interview with Claire Toth?” Banks asked when he had sat down again.

“Bloody awful and not very useful,” said Annie. “I mean, I didn’t think she had anything to do with it, but she . . . well, she’s angry, but I’m not even sure she’s got left enough in her to go after revenge.

What happened to her friend had an appalling effect on her too.”

“She still blames herself ?”

“To the point of deliberately making herself unattractive and underF R I E N D O F T H E D E V I L

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selling her brains and ability. The father did a bunk. That probably didn’t help. Mum seems in a bit of a Prozac haze.”

“What about the victims’ families?”

“Nothing yet. The general consensus seems to be that the justice system let them down but God didn’t, and they’re glad she’s dead. It gives them ‘closure.’ ”

“Covers a multitude of sins, that word,” said Banks, “the way it’s bandied about by everyone these days.”

“Well, I don’t suppose you can blame them,” said Annie.

“So you’re no closer?”

“I wouldn’t say that. I had a quick chat with Charles Everett before I came back here, too. He says he doesn’t know what happened to Maggie Forrest, but if she’s in the country, I’d say we’ll certainly be viewing her as a prime suspect. Lucy Payne befriended her and used her, then betrayed her, and Maggie might have come to see revenge as a way of putting her life back together, of redeeming the past.”

“Maybe,” said Banks. “Any idea where she is?”

“Not yet. Ginger’s going to check with the publishers tomorrow.

There’s something else come up, too.” Annie explained brief ly about Les Ferris’s theory, and Banks seemed to allow it far more credence than she would have expected. Still, Banks had solved his share of crimes spanning different eras, so he was less cynical about these connections than most. “And Ginger tracked down Keith McLaren, the Australian,” Annie added. “He’s back in Sydney working for a firm of solicitors. Seems he made a full recovery, so maybe he’s even got bits of his memory back. He’s not a suspect, of course, but he might be able to help fill in a few blanks.”

“Going over there?”

“You must be joking! He’s supposed to ring sometime this weekend.”

“What about the girl, Kirsten Farrow?”

“Ginger’s been trying to trace her, too. Nothing so far. It’s odd, but she seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. We’ve checked just about every source we can think of, and beyond about 1992 there’s no Kirsten Farrow. Her father’s been dead for ten years, and her mother’s in a home—Alzheimer’s—so she’s not a lot of use. We’re trying to 2 1 8

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find the old university friend she was staying with in Leeds when she disappeared: Sarah Bingham. Ginger’s discovered that she went on to study law, so we do have a line to follow, but it’s just all so bloody slow and painstaking.”

“The toughest part of the job,” Banks agreed. “Waiting, digging, checking, rechecking. Have you thought that Kirsten may be living abroad?”

“Well, if she is, she’s not the one we want, is she? Les Ferris also says he can come up with the hair samples in the 1988 murders, so we can compare Kirsten’s with the hairs found on Lucy Payne. That should tell us one way or another whether this outlandish theory has any basis in reality at all.”

“Hair matches are often far from perfect,” said Banks, “but in this case I’d say it’s good enough for rock and roll. So what’s your plan?”

“Just keep on searching. For Kirsten and for Maggie. And Sarah Bingham. For a while longer, at any rate, until we can either count them in or rule them out. It’s not as if we’ve got a lot of other lines of inquiry screaming us in the face. Still,” Annie said, after a sip of wine and a harp arpeggio that sent a shiver up her spine, “that’s not what you came all this way to talk about, is it?”

“Not exactly,” said Banks.

“Before you say anything,” Annie began, glancing away, “I’d like to apologize for the other night. I don’t know what . . . I’d had a couple of drinks with Winsome and then some more at your place, and it just all went to