“Please. A gentleman never discusses money.”
“How much?”
Chivers shrugged. “I asked for twenty thousand pounds. We compromised on seventeen-fifty.”
“So you abducted Gemma Scupham just for money?”
“No, no. Of course not. Not just for the money.” Chivers leaned forward. “You don’t understand, do you? It sounded like fun, too. It had to be interesting.”
“So you’d heard about Gemma through Les Poole and
thought she would be the perfect candidate?”
“Oh, the fool was always moaning about her. Her mother sounded as thick as two short planks, and she clearly didn’t care much about the child anyway. They didn’t want her. Harkness did. It’s a buyer’s market. It was almost too easy. We picked her up, drove around for a while just to be on the safe side, then dropped her off at Harkness’s after dark and returned the car.” He smiled. “You should have seen his face light up. It was love at first sight.”
“Did either Johnson or Poole know about this?”
“I’m not stupid. I wouldn’t have trusted either of them.”
“So what went wrong?”
“Nothing. It was the perfect crime,” Chivers mused. “But Carl got foolish and greedy. Otherwise you’d never have gone anywhere near Harkness.”
“But we did.”
“Yes. Carl suspected something. Maybe he actually saw the child, I don’t know. Or perhaps he caught Harkness drooling over his kiddie porn and put two and two together. That surprised me, that did. I never thought him capable of that. Putting two and two together and coming up with the right answer. I must admit I underestimated him.”
“What happened?”
Chivers made a steeple with his hands and his eyes glazed over. He seemed lost in his own world. Banks repeated the question. Chivers seemed to come back from a great distance.
“What? Oh.” He gave a dismissive wave of the hand. “He tried to put the touch on Harkness. Harkness got worried and called me again. I said I’d take care of it.”
“For a fee?”
“Of course. I wouldn’t say I’m in it for the money, but
I need a fair bit to keep me in the style to which I’m accustomed. Harkness arranged to meet him at the old lead mine to pay him off and Chelsea and I gave him a lift there. Poor bastard, he never suspected a thing.”
“Chelsea?”
He stared at a spot above Banks’s left shoulder. “Yes. Silly name, isn’t it? Fancy naming someone after a flower show, or a bun. Poor Chelsea. She just couldn’t quite understand.”
“Understand what?”
“The beauty of it all.” Chivers’s eyes turned suddenly back on Jenny. They looked like a dark green whirlpool, Banks thought, with blackness at its centre, evil with a sense of humour. “She liked it at the time, you know, the thrill. And she never liked poor Carl anyway. She said he was always undressing her with his eyes. You should have seen the look in her eyes when I killed him. She was standing right next to me and I could smell her sex. Needless to say, we had a lot of fun later that night. But she got jittery, read the newspapers, began to wonder, asked too many questions …. As I said, she didn’t fully comprehend the beauty of it all.”
“Did you know she was pregnant?”
He turned his eyes slowly back to Banks. “Yes. That was the last straw. It turned her all weepy, the sentimental fool. I had to kill her then.”
“Why?”
“Wouldn’t want another one like me in this universe, would we?” He winked. “Besides, it was what she wanted. I have a knack of knowing what people really want.”
“What did she want?”
“Death, of course. She enjoyed it. I know. I was there. It was glorious, the way she thrust and struggled.” He looked over at Jenny again. “You understand, don’t you?”
“And Harkness?” Banks said.
“Oh, it was very easy to see into his dirty soul. Little children. Little kiddies. He’d had it easy before. South Africa, Amsterdam. He found it a bit difficult here. He was getting desperate, that’s all. It’s simply a matter of knowing the right people.”
Banks noticed that Chivers had dampened a part of his cuff and was rubbing at an old coffee ring on the desk. “What happened to Gemma?” he asked.
He shrugged. “No idea. I completed my side of the bargain. I suppose when the old pervert had finished with her he probably killed her and buried the body under the petunia patch or something. Isn’t that what they do? Or maybe he sold her, tried to recoup what he’d spent. There’s plenty in the market for that kind of thing, you know.”
“What about the clothing we found?”
“You want me to do your job for you? I don’t know. I suppose as soon as things got too hot for him he wanted to put you off the scent. Does that sound about right?”
“Why did you come back to Eastvale? You could probably have got away, you know.”
