EIGHT
I
The Dutch coast came into view: first the dull-brown sandbars where the gray sea ended in a long white thread; then the dikes, marking off the reclaimed land, protecting it from the water level.
Banks turned off his Walkman in the middle of “Stop Breaking Down.” He always listened to loud music when flying – which wasn’t very often – because it was the only thing he could hear over the roar of the engines. And he hadn’t played
The plane banked lower over the patchwork of green and brown fields, and Banks could soon make out cars on the long straight roads, rooftops glinting in the midday sun. It was as lovely an autumn day in the Netherlands as it had been in Yorkshire.
Banks rubbed his eyes. He had spent a sleepless night in Brian’s room because Sandra had insisted it would only make things more difficult if they slept together. She was right, he knew, but still it rankled. It wasn’t even a matter of sex. Somehow it seemed so unfair, when threatened with the loss of someone you had loved for over twenty years, that you didn’t even get that one last night of warmth and companionship together to remember and cherish. It felt like all the things you had left unsaid when someone died.
No matter how long Sandra said that she had been grappling with the problem, her decision had come as a shock to Banks. Perhaps, as she had argued, that was a measure of how much he had turned his back, drifted away from the relationship, but somehow her words didn’t soften the blow. Now, more than anything, he felt numb, a pathetic figure floating around in zero gravity.
When he thought of Sandra, he thought mostly of the early days in London, where they lived together for about a year before they got married. It was the mid-seventies. Banks was just finishing his business diploma, already thinking about joining the police, and Sandra was taking a secretarial course. Every Sunday, if he didn’t have to work, they went on long walks around the city and its parks, Sandra practicing her photography and Banks developing his copper’s eye for suspicious characters. Somehow, in his memory, it was always autumn on these walks: sunny but cool, with the leaves crackling underfoot. And when they got back to the tiny Notting Hill flat, they’d play music, laugh, talk, drink wine and make love.
Then came marriage, children, financial responsibilities and a career that demanded more and more of Banks’s time and energy. Most of his friends on the force were divorced before the seventies were over, and they all asked in wonder and envy how he and Sandra managed to survive. He didn’t really know, but he put a lot of it down to his wife’s independent spirit. Sandra was right about that. She wasn’t the kind of person who simply hung around the house and waited for him to turn up, fretting and getting angrier by the minute as the dinner was ruined and the kids screamed for bedtime stories from Daddy. Sandra went her own way; she had her own interests and her own circle of friends. Naturally, more responsibility for the children fell on her shoulders, because Banks was hardly ever home, but she never complained. And for a long time, it worked.
After Banks’s near burnout on the Met and a long rocky patch in the marriage, they moved to Eastvale, where Banks thought things would settle down and the two of them would enjoy a rural, peaceful and loving drift into middle age together; the kind of thing that most couples married as long as they had been experience.
Wrong.
He looked at his watch. Sandra would be on the train to Croydon now, and whatever happened, whatever she finally decided, things would never be the same between them again. And there was nothing he could do about it. Not a damn thing.
He picked up that morning’s
Motcombe deeply regretted the “pointless death” of “war hero” Frank Hepplethwaite, he began, while pointing out how ironic it was that the poor man had died attacking the only people who dared demand justice for his grandson’s killers. Naturally, on further thought, neither he nor any member of his organization had any intention of pursuing charges against Maureen Fox, even though the head wound she gave him required five stitches; things had just got out of hand in the heat of the moment, and he could quite understand her attacking him and his friends with a plank. Grief makes people behave irrationally, he allowed.
Of course, Motcombe went on, everyone knew who had killed Jason Fox, and everyone also knew why the police were powerless to act. That was just the state of things these days. He was sympathetic, but unless the government finally decided to act and do something about immigration, then…
Jason was a martyr of the struggle. Every true Englishman should honor him. If more people listened to Motcombe’s ideas, then things could only change for the better. The reporter, to give her due credit, had managed to stop Motcombe from turning the entire interview into propaganda. Either that or the copy editor had made extensive cuts. Even so, it made Banks want to puke. If anyone was the martyr in this, it was Frank Hepplethwaite.
Frank reminded Banks of his own father in many ways. Both had fought in the war, and neither spoke very much about it. Their racial attitudes were much the same, too. Banks’s father might complain about immigrants taking over the country, changing the world he has known all his life, making it suddenly alien and unfamiliar, threatening even. And in the same way, Frank might have let slip a remark about a tight-fisted Jew. But when it came down to it, if anyone needed help, black or Jewish, Banks’s dad would have been first in line, with Frank Hepplethwaite probably a close second.
As unacceptable as even these racial attitudes were, Banks thought, they were a hell of a long way from those held by Neville Motcombe and his like. Banks’s dad’s view, like Frank’s, was based on ignorance and anxiety, on fear of change, not on hatred. Perhaps in Motcombe’s case the hatred sprang from an initial fear, but in most people it never went that far. Just like a lot of people have bad childhoods but they don’t all become serial murderers.
The wheels bumped on the runway, and soon Banks was drifting into the arrivals hall with the crowds. He was traveling light, with only one holdall, so he didn’t have to wait at the baggage claim. The place was like a small city, bustling with commerce, complete with its shops, bank, post office and tourist-information desk. A colleague had told him a while ago that even pornography was on sale openly at Schiphol. He had neither the time nor the inclination to look for it.
The first thing Banks needed when he got off a plane alive was a cigarette. He followed the signs to the bus stop and found he had a fifteen-minute wait. Perfect. He enjoyed a leisurely smoke, then got on the bus. Soon it was speeding along the motorway under grids of electrical wires and tall street lamps.
The excitement of arrival pushed Banks’s problems into the background for the moment, and he began to take some pleasure in his rebellion, his little act of irresponsibility. So that no one would feel he had disappeared completely into thin air, he had rung Susan Gay and told her he was taking the weekend off to go to Amsterdam and should be back sometime Monday. Susan had sounded puzzled and surprised, but she had made no comment. What could she say, anyway? Banks was her boss. Now, as the bus sped toward the city center, he began to savor the coming hours, whatever they might bring. It could hardly be worse than life in Eastvale right now.
He had been to Amsterdam once before, with Sandra, one summer when they were both between college and jobs. He remembered the bicycles, canals, trams and houseboats. The place was full of leftover sixties spirit back then, and they had tried it all while they could: the Paradiso, the Milky Way, the Vondelpark, the drugs – well, marijuana, at least – as well as taking in all the museums and the tourist sights.
Stationsplein looked much the same. The air was warm, tinged only faintly with the bad-drains smell from the canals. Trams clanked about in all directions. A Perspex-covered boat set off on its canal tour. Arrows of ripples hit the stone quay.
Mixed with the late-season tourists and ordinary folk were all the post-hippie youth styles: punk spikes, a green
