know why I’m crying. We were just friends really. Can we… I mean… ” She gestured around.
“Of course.” Banks took her arm and they left the pub. Fifty yards along the main road was a park. Pamela looked at her watch and said, “I’ve still got a while yet, if you don’t mind walking a bit.”
“Not at all.”
They walked past a playground where children screamed with delight as the swings went higher and higher and the roundabout spun faster and faster. A small wading-pool had been filled with water because of the warm weather and more children played there, splashing one another, squealing and shouting, all under their mother’s or father’s watchful eyes. Nobody let their kids play out alone these days, as they used to do when he was a child, Banks noticed. Being in his job, knowing what he knew, he didn’t blame them.
Pamela seemed lost in her silent grief, head bowed, walking slowly. “It’s crazy,” she said at last. “I hardly knew Robert and things had cooled off between us anyway, and here I am behaving like this.”
Banks could think of nothing to say. He was aware of the warmth of her arm in his and of her scent: jasmine, he thought. What the hell did he think he was doing, walking arm in arm in the park with a beautiful suspect? What if someone saw him? But what could he do? The contact seemed to form an important link between Pamela and something real, something she could hold onto while the rest of her world shifted under her feet like fine sand. And he couldn’t deny that the touch of her skin meant something to him, too.
“I was wrong about him, wasn’t I?” she went on. “Dead wrong. He was married, you say? Kids?”
“A son and a daughter.”
“I should know. I read it in the paper but it didn’t sink in because I was so
“Maybe he was.”
She glanced sideways at him. “What do you mean?”
They stopped at an ice-cream van and Banks bought two cornets. “It was a different life he lived with you,” he said. “I can’t begin to understand a man like that. It’s not that he had a split personality or anything, just that he was capable of existing in very different ways.”
“What ways?” Pamela stuck out her pink tongue and licked the ice-cream.
“The people in Swainsdale knew him as a quiet, unassuming sort of bloke. Bit of a dry stick really.”
“Robert?” she gasped. “A dry stick?”
“Not Robert. Keith Rothwell. The hard-working, clean-living accountant. The man who put his spent matches back in the box in the opposite direction to the unused ones.”
“But Robert was so alive. He was fun to be with. We laughed a lot. We dreamed. We danced.”
Banks smiled sadly. “There you are, then. Keith Rothwell probably had two left feet.”
“Are you saying it
“I don’t know what I’m saying. Just that your memories of Robert Calvert won’t change, shouldn’t change. He’s who he was to you, what he meant to you. Don’t let this poison it for you. On the other hand, I need to know who killed Keith Rothwell, and it looks as if there might be a connection.”
She put her arm in his again and they walked on. There was hardly any breeze at all, but they passed a boy trying to fly a red-and-green kite. He couldn’t seem to get it more than about twenty feet off the ground before it came flopping down again.
“What do you mean, a connection?” Pamela asked, shifting her gaze from the kite back to Banks.
“Maybe something in his life as Robert Calvert spilled over into his life as Keith Rothwell. Are you sure you didn’t know he was married, you didn’t suspect it?”
She shook her head. “No. I’ve been a right bloody fool, haven’t I? Muggins again.”
“But you were sure he’d found a new girlfriend?”
“Ninety-nine percent certain, yes.”
“How did you feel about that?”
“What?”
“His new girlfriend. How did you feel about her? On the one hand you tell me you shouldn’t be so upset, you hardly knew Robert Calvert, and your relationship had cooled off anyway. On the other hand, it seems to me from what you say and the way you behave that you were extremely fond of him. Maybe in love with him. What’s the truth? How did you really feel when someone else came along and stole him from you? Surely you must have felt hurt, angry, jealous?”
Pamela pulled back her arm and stepped aside from him, an expression of pain and anger shadowing her face. She dropped her ice-cream. It splattered on the tarmac path. “What’s that got to do with anything? What are you saying? What are you getting at? First you imply that I’m some kind of porn actress, and now you’re implying that
“No,” said Banks quickly. “No, nothing like that.”
But she was already backing away from him, hands held up, palms out, as if to ward him off.
“Yes, you are. How could you even…? I thought you… ”
Banks stepped toward her. “That’s not what I mean, Pamela. I’m just-”
But she turned and started to run away.
“Wait!” Banks called after her. “Please, stop.”
One or two people gave him suspicious looks. As he set off walking quickly after her, a child’s colored ball rolled in front of him, and he had to pull up sharply to avoid knocking into its diminutive owner, whose large father, fast approaching from the nearest bench, didn’t seem at all happy about things.
Pamela reached the park exit and dashed across the road, dodging her way through the traffic, back toward the hall. Banks stood there looking after her, the sweat beading on his brow. The remains of his ice-cream had started to melt and drip over the flesh between his thumb and first finger.
“Shit,” he cursed under his breath. Then louder, “Shit!”
The little boy looked up, puzzled, and his father loomed closer.
Chapter 7
1
The Merrion Centre was one of the first indoor shopping malls in Britain. Built on the northern edge of Leeds city center in 1964, it now seems something of an antique, a monument to the heady sixties’ days of slum clearance, tower blocks and council estates.
Covered on top, but open to the wind at the sides, it also suffers competition from a number of more recent, fully enclosed, central shopping centers, such as the St. John’s Centre, directly across Merrion Street, and the plush dark green and brass luxury of the Schofields Centre, right on The Headrow.
Still, the Merrion Centre does have a large Morrison’s supermarket, Le Phonographique discotheque – the longest surviving disco in Leeds – a number of small specialty shops, a couple of pubs, a flea market and the Classical Record Shop, which is how Banks had come to know the place quite well. And on a warm, windless May afternoon it can be pleasant enough.
Banks found Clegg’s Wines and Spirits easily enough. He had phoned Melissa Clegg an hour or so earlier, still smarting over his acrimonious parting with Pamela Jeffreys in the park, and she had told him she could spare a little time to talk. It was odd, he thought, that she hadn’t seemed overly curious about his call. He had said that it concerned her husband, yet she had asked for no details.
