All the Colors of Darkness

P E T E R R O B I N S O N

standing over her, muttering apologies and praise. She waved them aside and stood up gasping for breath. She felt lucky. One minor misjudgment and she would probably have had a knife through her chest.

They should have handcuffed and searched Kemal before bringing him out. Well, it would all go down in the reports, and bollockings would be freely handed out. For the moment, Winsome was just happy to be alive. She turned and looked over the balcony, down at the courtyard. The Bull wasn’t so lucky. He was lying on his back in a very twisted way, a darkening stain spreading slowly around his head.

Wilson was already on his mobile for an ambulance, so the best thing they could do now was get down there. In the melee, the woman Kemal lived with, Ginny Campbell, had come out of her f lat and she was hanging over the balcony, a baby clutched to her breast, looking down at her lover’s body, crying and screaming, “You’ve killed him! You’ve killed him! You filthy murdering bastards!” The crowd was picking up on her outrage, too, calling out insults. Winsome didn’t like the way she could sense the mood quickly changing.

Before things got any worse, she phoned the station for backup, and slowly the four of them made their way down the stairs to see what, if anything, they could do for Toros “the Bull” Kemal.

17

THE RAIN STARTED TO COME DOWN HARD ON SUNDAY

morning and it was still pouring on Monday, when Banks took the newspapers and his second cup of coffee into the conservatory. It had started as it usually did, with a light pattering on the glass roof, then soon it was running down the windows in thick slithering torrents, distorting the view of the dale outside like a funfair mirror.

That was the way Banks had been seeing the world lately, too, he thought, as through a glass darkly: Hardcastle and Silbert, Wyman, Sophia, the bombing—dear God, most of all the bombing—all of it nothing but a distortion of the darkness he was beginning to believe lay at the center of everything.

The weather suited Banks’s mood well enough. The music, too.

Underneath the noise the rain made, Billie Holiday was singing

“When Your Lover Has Gone” from one of her last performances, in 1959. She sounded as if she were on her last legs.

He had slept hardly at all the past three nights. The images seared in his mind’s eye wouldn’t go away; they only became more distorted. He had seen death before in all its gruesome forms. As a young patrol officer he had been called to road accidents, six-car pile-ups on the M1, with body parts strewn over a radius of almost a quarter of a mile. He had even been in his own house when it had been set on fire, though he didn’t remember much about that as he had been drugged at the time.

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P E T E R R O B I N S O N

But none of that was quite the same as what had happened on Friday. This had been different, and most of all, like the fire at his house, it hadn’t been an accident. Someone had done it deliberately to inf lict as much pain and suffering as possible on innocent people. He had met criminals who had done that before, too, of course, but not on this scale, in this random way. And none of the murderers he had ever met before had been more than happy to blow themselves to smithereens along with everyone else, women and children included.

More than once, he had wondered how the people he had led out were doing: the Asian woman, the young boy and the pretty blonde in the yellow dress. Perhaps he could make some inquiries and find out.

The music had finished and he needed more coffee, so he went first to the entertainment room and put on something a bit brighter and instrumental, a lively, jazzy string quartet called Zapp, then he refilled his mug in the kitchen. Just when he had settled down to see if he could concentrate on the crossword, his telephone rang.

He was tempted not to answer, but it might be Sophia. One day soon, he thought, he should invest in a telephone that displayed the caller’s number. Of course, that only helped if they didn’t withhold the number and if you recognized it. Most of Sunday he had contemplated phoning Sophia, and every time his telephone rang he had hoped it was her. But it never was. Brian rang once. Annie phoned with more details about Winsome’s latest death-defying escapade.

Tracy, his daughter, made her weekly report. And Victor Morton had rung, of course. But that was all.

This time it was her.

“Alan, I moved your car. You’re lucky the police didn’t impound it.

Things are still crazy around there. Anyway, it’s just down the street.

It’s safe now. I put my key in the glove box. Do you know you left your iPod in there, too?”

“Yes,” said Banks. “How are you?”

“I’m fine.”

“You sound a bit . . .”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m fine.”

A L L T H E C O L O R S O F D A R K N E S S

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“I’d like to come and see you. I’ve still got some free time and things have quietened down up here.”

“I’m glad to hear that, but I don’t know. I’m really busy this week.”

“We’ve always worked around that before.”

“I know, but . . . it’s just . . . I don’t know.”

“What don’t you know?”

“I think I just need some time, that’s all.”