Mara shook her head and went back into the house with Richmond.
Banks opened the door. The shed was dark inside and smelled of wood shavings, sawdust, oiled metal, linseed oil and varnish. He tugged the chain dangling in front of him, and a naked bulb lit up, revealing Seth’s workshop. Planks, boards and pieces of furniture at various stages of incompletion leaned against the walls. Spider webs hung in the dark corners. Seth had a lathe and a full set of well-kept tools-planes, saws, hammers, bevels-and boxes of nails and screws rested on makeshift wooden shelves around the walls. There was no room for anyone to hide.
At the far end of the workshop, an old Remington office typewriter sat on a desk beside an open filing cabinet. Inside, Banks found only correspondence connected with Seth’s carpentry business: estimates, invoices, receipts, orders. Close by was a small bookcase. Most of the books were about antique furniture and cabinet-making techniques, but there were a couple of old paperback novels and two books on the human brain, one of which was called The Tip of the Iceberg.
Maybe, Banks thought, Seth harboured a secret 142
ambition to become a brain surgeon. Already a carpenter, he probably had a better start than most.
He walked back to the door and was about to turn off the light when he noticed a tattered notebook on a ledge by the door. It was full of measurements, addresses and phone numbers-obviously Seth’s workbook. When he flipped through it, he noticed that one leaf had been torn out roughly. The following page still showed the faint impression of heavily scored numbers. Banks took a sheet from his own notebook, placed it on top and rubbed over it with a pencil. He could just make out the number in relief: 1139. It was hard to tell if it was in the same handwriting as the rest because the numbers were so much larger and more exaggerated.
Picking up the workbook, he turned to leave and almost bumped into Seth standing in the doorway.
“What are you doing?”
“This book,” Banks said. “What do you use it for?”
“Work notes. When I need to order new materials, make measurements, note customers’ addresses. That kind of thing.”
“There’s a page missing.” Banks showed him. “What does that mean-1139?”
“Surely you can’t expect me to remember that,” Seth said. “It must have been a long time ago. It was probably some measurement or other.”
“Why did you tear it out?”
Seth looked at him, deep-set brown eyes wary and resentful. “I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t important. Maybe I’d written something on the back that I had to take with me somewhere. It’s just an old notebook.”
“But there’s only one page missing. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”
“I’ve already said it doesn’t.”
“Did you tear out the page to give to Paul Boyd? Is it a number for him to call?
Part of an address?”
“No. I’ve told you, I don’t remember why I tore it out. It obviously wasn’t very important.”
“I’ll have to take this notebook away with me.”
143
“Why?”
“There are names and addresses in it. We’ll have to check and see if Boyd’s gone to any of them. As I understand it, he did spend quite a bit of time working with you in here.”
“But it’s my notebook. Why would he be at any of those places? They’re just people who live in the dale, people I’ve done work for. I don’t want the police bothering them. It could lose me business.”
“We still have to check.”
Seth swore under his breath. “Please yourself. You’d better give me a receipt, though.”
Banks wrote him one, then pulled the chain to turn off the light. They walked back to the house in silence.
Seth sat down again to finish his meal and Mara followed Banks towards the front of the room. They could hear Burgess and Richmond still poking about upstairs.
“Mr Banks?” Mara said quietly, standing close to him near the window.
Banks lit a cigarette. “Yes?”
“What he said about the children… It’s not true, is it? Surely he can’t… ?”
Banks sat in the rocking chair and Mara pulled up a small three-legged stool opposite him. One of Zoe’s tarot decks, open at “The Moon,” lay on the table beside him. The moon seemed to be shedding drops of blood onto a path that led off into the distance, between two towers. In the foreground, a crab was crawling up onto land from a pool, and a dog and a wolf stood howling at the moon. It was a disturbing and hypnotic design. Banks shivered, as if someone had just walked over his grave, and turned his attention to Mara.
“They’re not your children, are they?” he said.
“You know they’re not. But I love them as if they were. Jenny Fuller told me she knows you. She said you’re not as bad as the rest. Tell me they can’t make us give the children up.”
Banks smiled to himself. Not as bad as the rest, eh? He’d have to remember to tease Jenny about that backhanded compliment.
He turned to face Mara. “Superintendent Burgess will do 144
