All the Colors of Darkness

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“I’m sorry about that. It just sort of slipped out.”

She laughed again. “It’s all right. I’m only teasing. But you’d better be careful. Some women might not appreciate it as much as I do.”

“I know. You’re one in a million, Tomasina.” Sophia certainly wouldn’t appreciate it, though she might say, “I know” or “So I’ve been told,” Banks thought. Or Annie. In fact, just about every woman he knew would have given him shit for a comment like that. What the hell had he been thinking of ? Sometimes he would just slip from the politically correct world everyone inhabited these days back to the primeval slime without warning. Perhaps age was lowering his guard?

But he wasn’t that old, he told himself. And he was cute. “Will you tell me about it?” he asked.

“There’s not much to tell, really.”

“But Derek Wyman did come to you?”

“Yes. And he was surprised, as most people are. But not because I wasn’t some sort of tough guy. He didn’t want me to do any strong-arm work or anything like that. Anyway, I managed to convince him I could do the job.”

“What was this job?”

“Simple surveillance. Well, as simple as surveillance can be if you don’t want to be spotted. I’m sure you’ve been there.”

Over the years, Banks had spent many hours in cold cars with only a water bottle to pee in. But not for a long time. Surveillance was a young man’s job. He wouldn’t have the patience now. And the bottle would fill up a lot faster. “Do you remember when Wyman first came to you?”

“I could find out. Hang on.”

Tomasina got up and walked back out to her filing cabinets. In a moment she was back carrying a buff folder, which she consulted. “It was the beginning of May.”

“That long ago,” Banks mused. “What did he ask for?”

“He gave me an address in Bloomsbury, described a man and asked me if, on certain occasions—he would phone me first—I would watch it, follow the man who left, find out where he went and take photos of him with anyone he met.”

“Did he tell you why he wanted to do this?”

“No.”

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

“And you just assumed it was all aboveboard?”

“He seemed all right. I thought, you know, maybe he was gay and he thought his lover was having an affair. It’s happened before. All he wanted was photos. It wasn’t as if he was asking me to hurt anyone or anything.”

Images of Silbert and Hardcastle in the mortuary f lashed through Banks’s mind. “There’s more than one way of hurting someone.”

Tomasina f lushed. “You can’t blame me for what happened. You can’t do that.”

“It’s okay. I’m sorry. I’m not blaming you. I’m just saying that in the wrong hands, photos can be as deadly as a gun. Maybe they were intended for blackmail? Didn’t you think of that?”

“To be honest, I didn’t. It was just my job to take them. Like I said, he seemed nice enough.”

“You’re right,” said Banks. “It wasn’t your fault. You were simply doing your job.”

She was studying his face, he felt, looking for signs so that she could be certain he was telling the truth and not winding her up. In the end, she reached her decision and relaxed visibly. “It was easy enough,”

she said. “In the early evening, seven o’clock, the man in question would walk up to Euston Road, then across Regent’s Park. Always he would stop and sit on a bench by the Boating Lake and another man would join him.”

“How many times did you follow him?”

“Three.”

“He met the same man every time?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Go on.”

“They didn’t talk, but they’d get up and walk together to Saint John’s Wood. You know, the High Street where the cemetery is.”

“I know it,” said Banks. “And from there they would walk to Charles Lane and enter a house together.”

“Yes. You know all about it?”

“We identified the house and street from one of your photos.”

“Of course,” said Tomasina. “My, my, you do have all the resources, don’t you?”

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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