Aftermath

and dived through the bedroom window in a shower of glass.

Maggie screamed.

20

For someone who disliked hospitals as much as Banks did, he seemed to have spent more than enough time in the infirmary over the past couple of weeks, he thought as he walked down the corridor to Maggie Forrest’s private room on Thursday.

“Oh, it’s you,” Maggie said when he knocked and walked in. She wouldn’t look him in the eye, he noticed, but stared at the wall. The bandage over her forehead held the dressing at the back of her head in place. The wound had been a nasty one, requiring several stitches. She had also lost a lot of blood. When Banks had got to her, the pillow was soaked with it. According to the doctor, though, she was out of the woods and should be okay to go home in a day or so. Now she was being treated for delayed shock as much as anything. Looking at her, Banks thought of the day not so long ago when he first saw Lucy Payne in a hospital bed, one eye bandaged, the other assessing her situation, black hair spread out on the white pillow.

“Is that all the thanks I get?” he said.

“Thanks?”

“For bringing in the cavalry. It was my idea, you know. True, I was only doing my job, but people sometimes feel the need to add a word or two of personal thanks. Don’t worry, I don’t expect a tip or anything.”

“It’s easy for you to be flippant, isn’t it?”

Banks pulled up the chair and sat at her bedside. “Maybe not as easy as you think. How are you?”

“Fine.”

“Really?”

“I’m all right. A bit sore.”

“It’s hardly surprising.”

“Was it really you?”

“Was what really me?”

Maggie looked him in the eye for the first time. Hers were dulled with medication, but he could see pain and confusion there, along with something softer, something less definable. “Who led the rescue party.”

Banks leaned back and sighed. “I only blame myself that it took me so long,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I should have worked it out earlier. I had all the pieces. I just didn’t put them together quickly enough, not until the SOCO team found the camcorder in the pond at the bottom of The Hill.”

“That’s where it was?”

“Yes. Lucy must have dumped it there sometime over that last weekend.”

“I go there sometimes to think and feed the ducks.” Maggie stared at the wall, then turned to face him again after a few seconds. “Anyway, it’s hardly your fault, is it? You’re not a mind reader.”

“No? People sometimes expect me to be. But I suppose I’m not. Not in this case. We suspected from the start that there must have been a camcorder and tapes, and we knew she wouldn’t part with the tapes easily. We also knew that the only person she was close to was you, and that she had visited your house the day before the domestic disturbance.”

“She couldn’t have known what was going to happen.”

“No. But she knew things were coming to a head. She was working on damage control, and hiding the tapes was part of it. Where were they?”

“The loft,” Maggie said. “She knew I didn’t go up there.”

“And she knew she’d be able to get at them without too much trouble, that you were probably the only person in the whole country who’d give her house room. That was the other clue. There was really nowhere else for her to go. First we talked to your neighbors, and when Claire’s mother told us you’d just got home and another neighbor said she’d seen a young woman knocking at your back door a couple of nights ago, it seemed to add up.”

“You must think I was so stupid to take her in.”

“Foolish, maybe, naive, but not necessarily stupid.”

“She just seemed so… so…”

“So much the victim?”

“Yes. I wanted to believe in her, needed to. Maybe as much for me as for her. I don’t know.”

Banks nodded. “She played the role well. She could do that because it was partially true. She’d had a lot of practice.”

“What do you mean?

Banks told her about the Alderthorpe Seven and the murder of Kathleen Murray. When he had finished, Maggie turned pale, swallowed and lay back in silence, staring at the ceiling. It was a minute or so before she spoke again. “She killed her cousin when she was only twelve?”

“Yes. That’s partly what set us looking for her again. At last we had a bit of evidence that suggested she was more than she pretended to be.”

“But a lot of people have terrible childhoods,” said Maggie, some color returning to her face. “Perhaps not as terrible as that, but they don’t all turn into killers. What was so different about Lucy?”

“I wish I knew the answer,” said Banks. “Terry Payne was a rapist when they met, and Lucy had killed Kathleen. Somehow or other, the two of them getting together the way they did created a special sort of chemistry, acted as a trigger. We don’t know why. We’ll probably never know.”

“And if they’d never met?”

Banks shrugged. “It may never have happened. None of it. Terry finally gets caught for rape and put in jail, while Lucy goes on to marry a nice young man, have two point four children and become a bank manager. Who knows?”

“Makes sense. She’d done it before. He hadn’t.”

“She said she did it out of kindness.”

“Maybe she did. Or out of self-protection. Or out of jealousy. You can’t expect her to understand her own motives any better than we can, or to tell the truth about them. With someone like Lucy it was probably some strange sort of combination of all three.”

“She also said they met because he raped her. Tried to rape her. I couldn’t really understand. She said she raped him as much as he raped her.”

Banks shifted in his chair. He wished he could have a cigarette, even though he had determined to quit before the year was out. “I can’t explain it any more than you can, Maggie. I might be a policeman, and I might have seen a lot more of the dark side of human nature than you, but something like this… for someone with a past like Lucy’s, who knows how topsy-turvy things can get? I should imagine that after the things that had been done to her in Alderthorpe, and given her peculiar sexual tastes, Terence Payne was a bit of a pussycat to deal with.”

“She said to think of her as a five-legged sheep.”

The image took Banks back to his childhood, when the traveling fair came around at Easter and in autumn and set up on the local recreation ground. There were rides – Waltzers, Caterpillar, Dodgems and Speedway – and stalls where you could throw weighted darts at playing cards or shoot at tin figures with an air rifle to win a goldfish in a plastic bag full of water; there were flashing lights and crowds and loud music; but there was also the freak show, a tent set up on the edge of the fairground, where you paid your sixpence and went inside to see the exhibits. They were ultimately disappointing, not a genuine bearded lady, elephant man, spider woman or pinhead in sight. Those kinds of freaks Banks only saw later in Todd Browning’s famous movie. None of these freaks were alive, for a start; they were deformed animals, stillborn or killed at birth, and they floated in the huge glass jars full of preserving fluid – a lamb with a fifth leg sticking out of its side; a kitten with horns; a puppy with two heads, a calf with no eye sockets – the stuff that nightmares were made of.

“Despite what happened,” Maggie went on, “I want you to know that I’m not going to let it turn me into a cynic. I know you think I’m naive, but if that’s the choice, I’d rather be naive than bitter and untrusting.”