“But . . . ?”
Carol reddened and turned away. “Well,” she said, “let’s just say I have no worries on
“I’m sorry for asking,” said Annie. “How is Derek doing now?”
“Oh, he’s all right. I mean, he’s still a bit upset about Mark, a bit quiet and moody. Well, you would be, wouldn’t you? It’s not every day a good friend and colleague goes and hangs himself like that. I mean, someone you’ve had over to dinner and all.”
“How did they go? The dinners?”
“Fine. Except, when we had them over to our house, I overcooked the roast beef the way my mother always used to do.”
“Mine, too,” said Annie, with a smile, though she couldn’t really dredge up a memory of her mother roasting beef. “I meant the conversation. What did you talk about? What did Mark and Laurence talk about?”
“Oh, you know, after a couple of bottles of wine, the ice gets broken, it starts to f low. And Mr. . . . Laurence told all sorts of stories.”
“About what, if you don’t mind my asking?”
A L L T H E C O L O R S O F D A R K N E S S
2 4 9
“I don’t mind. I just don’t see why it matters. About faraway places.
I haven’t traveled much—oh, we’ve been to the usual places—Majorca, Benidorm, Lanzarote, even Tunisia once, but he’d been everywhere. Russia. Iran. Iraq. Chile. Australia. New Zealand. South Africa. It must have been so exciting.”
“Yes,” said Annie. “I heard he was a well-traveled man. Did he mention Afghanistan at all?”
“As a matter of fact, he did. It came up when we were talking about . . . you know, Rick.”
“Of course. What did he say about it?”
“Just that he’d been there.”
“Did he say when?”
“No. I got the impression that he didn’t like it very much.”
“Dangerous place, I suppose,” said Annie. “Is everything else okay with your husband?”
“Yes, of course. Except I think this gang business is getting him down, too.”
“It must be,” said Annie. “I talked to him yesterday about a couple of his lads involved in that East Side Estate stabbing.”
“Did you? He didn’t say.”
Well, he wouldn’t, thought Annie. “It wasn’t important.”
“Anyway, like I said, you do it because you think you can make a difference, but sometimes . . .” She ran her finger around the rim of her cup. The nail was chipped and bitten, Annie noticed. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think maybe Rick was right. What a world to bring children into.”
“But yours are doing all right, aren’t they?”
Carol’s face brightened. “Oh, yes. They’re a handful, I can tell you that. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.” She glanced at her watch.
“Ooh, is that the time? I really must be getting back now or Sue will be going ballistic.”
“I’ll walk with you,” said Annie.
T O M A S I N A WA S sitting behind her desk when Banks arrived. She had clearly been crying, as he had heard over the telephone, but she 2 5 0
P E T E R R O B I N S O N
had stopped now. A box of tissues lay on the desk by her hand next to a large mug of milky tea. The mug was white and had little red hearts all over it.
On a cursory glance, the office looked the same as it had on his last visit, as did the reception area. Either Tomasina had already done a good job of tidying up, or her visitors had been very neat.
“I’m sorry for being such a blubberer on the phone,” she said. “I could have kicked myself when I hung up.”
“That’s all right,” said Banks. He sat opposite her.
“No, it isn’t. But you wouldn’t understand.”
She was full of contradictions, this one, Banks thought. A young beauty, tough as nails, vulnerable, but with another hard center inside the soft one. And he hadn’t spent more than half an hour with her, all told. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?” he said.
She drank some tea, holding the mug with both hands. Her hands were shaking. “They came just after I got here, about nine.”
“How many of them were there?”
“Four. Two of them searched through everything while the other two . . . well, they called it an interview.”
