size,” he said. “If you start messing with my kid’s life, you’ll bloody well have me to answer to.”
Burgess sneered and turned away. “I’m quaking in my boots. Where’s Boyd?”
“We don’t know,” Seth said quietly. “He wasn’t a prisoner here, you know. He pays his board, he’s free to do what he wants and to come and go as he pleases.”
“Not any more he isn’t,” Burgess said. “Maybe you’d better get Gypsy Rose Lee here to ask the stars where he is, because if we don’t find him soon it’s going to be very hard on you lot.” He turned to Banks and Richmond. “Let’s have a look around. Where’s his room?”
“First on the left at the top of the stairs,” Seth said. “But you’re wasting your time. He’s not there.”
The three policemen climbed the narrow staircase. Richmond checked the other rooms while Banks and Burgess went into Paul’s. There was only room for a single mattress on the floor and a small dresser at the far end, where a narrow window looked towards Eastvale. Sheets and blankets lay rumpled and creased on the unmade bed;
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dirty socks and underwear had been left in a pile on the floor. A stale smell of dead skin and unwashed clothes hung in the air. A couple of jackets, including a parka, hung in the tiny cupboard, and a pair of scuffed loafers lay on the floor. There was nothing much in the dresser drawers besides some clean underwear, T-shirts and a couple of moth-eaten pullovers. A grubby paperback copy of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth lay open, face down on the pillow. On the cover was a picture of a semi-transparent, frog-faced monster dressed in what looked like an evening suit. Out of habit, Banks picked the book up and flipped through the pages to see if Boyd had written anything interesting in the margins or on the blank pages at the back. He found nothing. Richmond came in and joined them.
“There’s nothing here,” Burgess said. “It doesn’t look like he’s scarpered, though, unless he had a lot more clothes than this. I’d have taken a parka and a couple of sweaters if I’d been him. What was the weather like on the night Gill was stabbed?”
“Cool and wet,” Banks answered.
“Parka weather?”
“I’d say so, yes.”
Burgess took the coat from the closet and examined it. He pulled the inside of each pocket out in turn, and when he got to the right one, he pointed out a faint discoloured patch to Banks. “Your men must have missed this the other day.
Could be blood. He must have put the knife back in his pocket after he killed Gill. Hang on to this, Richmond. We’ll get it to the lab. Why don’t you two go have a look in the outbuildings? You never know, he might be hiding in the woodpile. I’ll poke around a bit more up here.”
Downstairs, Banks and Richmond went back into the kitchen and got Mara to accompany them with the keys. They left by the back door and found themselves in a large rectangular garden with a low fence. Most of the place was given over to rows of vegetables-dark empty furrows at that time of year-but there was also a small square sand-box, on which a plastic lorry with big red wheels and a yellow bucket
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and spade lay abandoned. At the far end of the garden stood a brick building with an asphalt roof, just a little larger than a garage, and to their left was a gate that led to the barn.
“We’ll have a look over there first,” Banks said to Mara, who fiddled with the key-ring as she followed them to the converted barn. It wasn’t a big place, nowhere the size of many that had been converted into bunk barns for tourists, but it followed the traditional Dales design, on the outside at least, in that it was built of stone.
Mara opened the door to the downstairs unit first, Zoe’s flat. Banks was surprised at the transformation from humble barn into comfortable living-quarters; Seth had done a really good job. The woodwork was mostly unpainted, and if it looked a little makeshift, it was certainly sturdy and attractive in its simplicity. Not only, he gathered, did each unit have its own entrance, but there were cooking and bathing facilities, too, as well as a large, sparsely furnished living-room, one master bedroom, and a smaller one for Luna. But there was no sign of Paul Boyd.
The places were perfectly self-contained, Banks noticed, and if Rick and Zoe hadn’t become friendly with Seth and Mara, they could easily have led quite separate lives there. Noting Mara’s reaction to Burgess’s threat, and remembering what Jenny had said at dinner, Banks guessed that Mara’s fondness for the children was one unifying factor-anyone would be glad of a built-in baby-sitter-and perhaps another was their shared politics.
Upstairs, the layout was different. Both bedrooms were quite small, and most of the space was taken up by Rick’s studio, which was much less tidy than Zoe’s large worktable downstairs, with books and charts spread out on its surface.
Seth had added three skylights along the length of the roof to provide plenty of light, and canvases, palettes and odd tubes of paint littered the place. From what Banks could see, Rick Trelawney’s paintings were, as Tim Fenton had said, unmarketable, being mostly haphazard splashes of colour, or collages of found objects. Sandra knew quite a bit about art, and Banks had learned from her that many paintings he
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wouldn’t even store in the attic were regarded by experts as works of genius.
But these were different, even he could tell; they made Jackson Pollock’s angry explosions look as comprehensible as Constable’s landscapes.
As he poked around among the stuff, though, Banks discovered a stack of small water-colour landscapes covered with an old sack. They resembled the one he’d noticed in the front room on his last visit, and he realized that they were, after all, Rick’s work. So that was how he made his money! Selling pretty local scenes to tourists and little old ladies to support his revolutionary art.
Mara, who all the time had remained quiet, watching them with her arms folded, locked up as they left and led the way back to the house.
“You two go ahead,” Banks said when he had closed the gate behind them. “I’m off to take a peek in the shed. It’s not locked, is it?”
