“Good idea,” Banks said. “Give him a nice warm cell for the day. For his own safety.”
“Aye,” said Gristhorpe. “What’ll we charge him with?”
“We could start with indecent exposure.”
They spent another hour or so going over Poole’s statement with him, and Poole made no objections as the constable finally led him down to the charge room. He just looked anxiously right and left to make sure Hatchley wasn’t around. Banks wandered to his office for a cigarette and another cup of coffee. Gristhorpe joined him there, and a few minutes later Jim Hatchley walked in with a big grin on his face.
“Haven’t had as much fun since the last rugby club trip,” he said. “How did you know he’d be going for a piss anyway? I was getting a bit fed up stuck in there. I’d read the Sport twice already.”
“People want to urinate a lot when they’re anxious,” Banks said. “He did before. Besides, tea’s a diuretic, didn’t you know that?”
Hatchley shook his head.
“Anyway, he’d have wanted to go eventually. We’d just have kept him as long as necessary.”
“Aye,” said Hatchley, “and me in the fucking shit-house.”
Banks smiled. “Effective, though, wasn’t it? More dramatic that way.”
“Very dramatic. Thinking of doing a bit of local theatre, are you?”
Banks laughed. “Sometimes that’s what I think I am doing already.” He walked over to the window and stretched. “Christ, it’s been a long morning,” he muttered.
The gold hands against the blue face of the church clock stood at ten-twenty. Susan Gay walked in and out with the latest developments. Not much. There had been more reports of Chivers, from Welshpool, Ramsgate and
Llaneilian, and all had to be checked out by the locals.
So far, they didn’t have one clear lead. Just after eleven,
the phone rang, and Banks picked it up.
“Detective Inspector Loder here. Dorset CID.” Banks sighed. “Not another report of Chivers?” “More than that,” said Loder. “In fact, I think you’d
better get down to Weymouth if you can.” Banks sat upright. “You’ve got him?” “Not exactly, but we’ve got a dead blonde in a hotel
room, and she matches the description you put out.”
12
i
Gristhorpe sat in the passenger seat of the unmarked police
car with a road map spread out on his knees. Banks
drove. He would have preferred his own Cortina, mostly
because of the stereo system, but Sandra needed it for all
her gallery work. Besides, Gristhorpe was tone deaf; for
all his learning, he couldn’t appreciate music. Banks had
packed his Walkman and a couple of tapes in his
overnight bag; he knew it wouldn’t be easy getting to
sleep in a strange hotel room, especially after what
awaited them in Weymouth, and music would help.
They were heading down the Ml past Sheffield with its huge cooling towers, shaped like giant whalebone corsets, and its wasteland of disused steel factories. It was almost one-thirty in the afternoon, and despite the intermittent rain they were making good time.
Gristhorpe, after much muttering to himself, decided it would be best to turn off the motorway just south of Northampton and go via Oxford, Swindon and Salisbury. Banks drove as fast as he could, and just over an hour later they reached the junction with the A43. They skirted Oxford in the late afternoon and didn’t get held up until they hit Swindon at rush-hour.
270
After Blandford Forum, they passed the time reading signposts and testing one another on Hardy’s names for the places. They managed to keep abreast until Gristhorpe went ahead with Middleton Abbey for Milton Abbas.
After a traffic snarl-up in the centre of Dorchester, they approached Weymouth in the early evening. Loder had given clear directions to the hotel, and luckily it was easy to spot, one of the Georgian terraces on the Dorchester Road close to the point where it merged with The Esplanade.
A plump, curly-haired woman called Maureen greeted them in the small lobby and told them that Inspector Loder and his men had been gone for some time but had left a guard outside the room and requested she call them at the station as soon as Banks and Gristhorpe arrived. Their booking for the night had already been made: two singles on the third floor, one floor down from where the body had been discovered.
Out of courtesy, Banks and Gristhorpe waited for Loder to arrive before going up to the room. They had requested that, as far as possible, things should be left as they were when the chambermaid discovered the body that morning. Of course, Loder’s scene-of-crime men had done their business, and the Home Office pathologist had examined the body in situ, but the corpse was still there, waiting for them, in the position she been found.
Loder walked in fifteen minutes later. He was a painfully thin man with a hatchet face and a sparse fuzz of grey hair. Close to retirement, Banks guessed, and tired. His worn navy blue suit hung on him, and his wire-rimmed glasses seemed precariously balanced near the end of his long, thin nose. As he spoke, his grey-green eyes peered over the tops of the lenses.
