“I’d rather be in fucking jail.”
Banks sighed. “You will be, John. You will be. It’s just a fantasy of mine. Now I’d like you to travel back in time through that addled, worm-eaten brain of yours. I’d like you, if you can negotiate through that lump of Swiss cheese you call a mind, to go back to last summer. Specifically, to last August. Can you do that?”
Spinks frowned. “Is this about that bird what got snuffed?”
“Yes,” said Banks. “This, as you so eloquently put it, is ‘about that bird what got snuffed.’ Remember her name, John? Deborah Harrison.”
“That’s right. Yeah, Debbie.”
“Good. Now something happened, didn’t it? Something nasty?”
“Don’t know what you mean.”
“Her mother and her godfather warned you off, didn’t they?”
“Oh, right. Stuck-up motherfuckers. Look, what’s this got to do with-”
“I told you, John. I’m not doing this by the book. This is unofficial, off the record. Okay?”
Spinks nodded, a look of suspicion forming in his glazed eyes.
“One day you went around to ask Lady Sylvie Harrison to give you money to leave her daughter alone. Right?”
“So? There’s no law against it. They’d got plenty. I didn’t see why I shouldn’t get some compensation. Bird wasn’t much of a fuck, really. More like a sack of potatoes. But-”
Banks gripped the back of the chair so hard his knuckles turned white. “Spare me your erotic memoirs, John,” he said. “They might make me do something I’ll regret. You might not realize it, but I’m exercising great restraint as it is.”
Spinks laughed. A little more drool dripped down his chin. Banks felt so much like clocking him one that he had to look away. “Who was in the house that day?”
“What?”
“You heard. Who else was there as well as you?”
“Oh. Didn’t I already tell you that? I seem to remember-”
“Humor me. Tell me again.”
“Right. There was Debbie’s mother, the blonde bitch. And that stuck-up prick Clayton. Fucking snobs.”
“And Deborah wasn’t there?”
“I already told you. No.” Spinks’s head started to roll from side to side. The drugs, whatever they were, wearing off. Either that or he had sustained more than superficial damage in the car crash. Just as well they had sent for Dr. Burns.
“When you went to the house and found Michael Clayton there,” Banks asked, “did you get the feeling that there was anything going on?”
Spinks closed his eyes. His head stopped lolling. “Don’t know what you mean.”
“Did you interrupt anything?”
“Interrupt?”
“Stop behaving like a parrot. Did you get the feeling there was anything going on between them?”
Spinks frowned and wiped the drool from his mouth with the back of his hand. His eyes opened again and seemed to keep shifting in and out of focus. “Going on?” he repeated. “You mean was he fucking her? You mean do I think Clayton was fucking the wicked witch?” He laughed out loud.
Banks waited patiently until he had stopped. “Well,” he said. “Do you?”
“You’ve got a dirty mind. Do you know that?”
“Do you?”
Spinks shrugged. “Could’ve been, for all I know.”
“But you didn’t notice anything special about them, the way they behaved towards one another?”
“No.”
“Were they both fully dressed?”
“Course they were.”
“Did they look disheveled at all?”
“Come again. Dish what?”
“See what I mean about the need for compulsory education? It means messed up, ruffled, untidy.”
“Oh. No. I don’t think so. Can’t really remember, though.”
“Did Deborah ever say anything about them?”
He shook his head, stopped abruptly and opened his mouth as if to say something, then carried on shaking it. “No.”
Banks leaned forward on the chair back. The two front legs raised off the floor. “What were you going to tell me, John?”
“Nothing. She never said nothing.” He coughed and a mouthful of yellow vomit dribbled down his chin onto his T-shirt. The smell was terrible: booze, cheese-and-onion crisps and tacos. Banks stood up and stepped back.
At that moment, there was a knock on the door and Susan Gay came in, followed by Dr. Burns, the police surgeon, whose surgery was just across the market square.
“Sorry, sir,” Susan said, “but the doctor’s here.”
“Right,” said Banks, shaking hands with Burns. “He’s all yours. I’ve had enough. Take good care of him, Nick. I might want to talk to him again.”
And as he walked back to his own office, he had the strange feeling that not only had Spinks been holding back, hiding something, but that he, himself, hadn’t even been asking the right questions. Something was eluding him, and he knew from experience that it would drive him around the bend until he thought of it.
Chapter 16
I
Banks took a deep breath outside Michael Clayton’s house on Saturday morning, then he got out of his car and walked up the garden path. If Chief Constable Riddle found out about this, Banks’s life probably wouldn’t be worth living.
Clayton’s house wasn’t quite as large as the Harrisons ’, but it was an impressive enough construction, solidly built of redbrick and sandstone, detached and surrounded by an unkempt garden. The lawn looked as if it hadn’t been trimmed yet this year, and weeds choked the flower-beds.
After he rang the doorbell the first time, Banks heard nothing but silence and began to suspect that Clayton was out. He tried again. About thirty seconds later, just as he was about to head off down the path, the door opened and Clayton stuck his head out.
“Yes, what is it?” he asked crossly. “Oh, it’s you, Chief Inspector.” He moved aside and opened the door fully. “You’d better come in. Sorry about the mess.”
Banks followed him through a door from the hallway into a room full of computer equipment. At least three computers, state-of-the-art, by the look of them, sat on their desks, two of them displaying similar graphic images. These were incomprehensible to Banks, and looked like a cross between circuit diagrams and the molecular structures he remembered from school chemistry. They were all multi-colored, and some of the nodes and pathways between them flashed, different on each screen. The third VDU showed a deck of cards set out in what Banks recognized as the solitaire “pyramid” fashion.
“I always have a game going when I’m working,” Clayton said, smiling. “It helps me concentrate. Don’t ask me why.”
The floor was a mass of snaking cables and Banks trod carefully not to trip over any of them.
He could almost feel the room vibrating with the electrical hum running through them.
