Aftermath

before heading home. Happy days. Or so they had seemed. And now she was pregnant with Sean’s baby.

The Schubert piano music played on, the serene and elegiac opening of the final, B-flat sonata. Banks’s headache began to subside a little. The one thing he remembered about Sandra’s pregnancies was that she hadn’t enjoyed them, hadn’t glowed with the joys of approaching motherhood. She had suffered extreme morning sickness, and though she didn’t drink or smoke much, she continued to do both because back then nobody made such a fuss about it. She also continued to go to galleries and plays and meet with friends, and complained when her condition made it difficult or impossible for her to do so.

While pregnant with Tracy, she had slipped on the ice and broken her leg in her seventh month and spent the rest of her confinement with a cast on. That more than anything had driven her crazy, unable to get out and about with her camera the way she loved to do, stuck in their poky little Kennington flat watching gray day follow gray day all that winter while Banks was working all hours, hardly ever home. Well, perhaps Sean would be around for her more often. Lord only knew, perhaps if Banks had been…

But he didn’t get to follow that thought to the particular circle of hell he was sure must be reserved for neglectful husbands and fathers. Annie Cabbot tapped at his door and popped her head around, giving him a temporary escape from the guilt and self-recrimination that seemed to be so much his lot these days, no matter how hard he tried to do the right thing.

“You did say six o’clock, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Sorry, Annie. Miles away.” Banks picked up his jacket, checking the pockets for wallet and cigarettes, then cast a backward glance at the pile of untouched paperwork on his desk. To hell with it. If they expected him to do two, three jobs at once, then they could wait for their bloody paperwork.

As Jenny drove through a shower and looked out at the ugly forest of cranes that rose up from Goole docks, she wondered for the umpteenth time what on earth had induced her to return to England. To Yorkshire. It certainly wasn’t family ties. Jenny was an only child and her parents were retired academics living in Sussex. Both her mother and father had been far too wrapped up in their work – he as a historian, she as a physicist – and Jenny had spent more of her childhood with a succession of nannies and au pairs than with her parents. Given their natural academic detachment, too, Jenny often felt that she had been far more of an experiment than a daughter.

It didn’t bother her – after all, she didn’t know any different – and it was very much the way she had lived her life, too: as an experiment. Sometimes she looked back and it all seemed so shallow and self-centered that she felt herself panic; other times it seemed just fine.

She would turn forty that coming December, was still single – had never, in fact, been married – and while a bit shop-soiled, battered and bruised, she was far from down and out for the count. She still had her looks and her figure, though she needed more and more magic potions for the former and had to work harder and harder at the university gym to keep those excess pounds from creeping on, given her taste for good food and wine. She also had a good job, a growing reputation as an offender profiler, publications to her credit.

So why did she sometimes feel so empty? Why did she always feel she was in a hurry to get somewhere she never arrived at? Even now, with the rain lashing against her windscreen, the wipers going as fast as they could go, she was doing ninety kilometers per hour. She slowed down to eighty, but her speed soon started creeping up again, along with the feeling that she was late for something, always late for something.

The shower ended. Elgar’s Enigma Variations was playing on Classic FM. To the north, a power station with its huge corset-shaped cooling towers squatted against the horizon, the steam it spewed almost indistinguishable from the low cloud. She was nearing the end of the motorway now. The east- bound M62 was like so many things in life; it left you just short of your destination.

Well, she told herself, she had come back to Yorkshire because she was running away from a bad relationship with Randy. Story of her life. She had a nice condo in West Hollywood, rented at a most generous rate by a writer who had made enough money to buy a place way up in Laurel Canyon, and she was within walking distance of a supermarket and the restaurants and clubs on Santa Monica Boulevard. She had her teaching and research at UCLA, and she had Randy. But Randy had a habit of sleeping with pretty twenty-one-year-old graduate students.

After a minor breakdown, Jenny had called it a day and come running back to Eastvale. Perhaps that explained why she was always in a hurry, she thought – desperate to get home, wherever that was, desperate to get away from one bad relationship and right into the next one. It was a theory, at any rate. And then, of course, Alan was in Eastvale, too. If he was part of the reason why she had stayed away, could he also be part of the reason why she had come back? She didn’t want to dwell on that.

The M62 turned into the A63, and soon Jenny caught a glimpse of the Humber Bridge ahead to her right, stretching out majestically over the broad estuary into the mists and fens of Lincolnshire and Little Holland. Suddenly, a few shafts of sunlight pierced the ragged cloud cover as the “Nimrod” variation reached its rousing climax. A “Yorkshire moment.” She remembered the “L.A. moments” Randy was so fond of pointing out in their early days when they drove and drove and drove around the huge, sprawling city: a palm tree silhouetted against a blood-orange sky; a big, bright full moon low over the HOLLYWOOD sign.

As soon as she could, Jenny pulled into a lay-by and studied her map. The clouds were dispersing now, allowing even more sunlight through, but the roads were still swamped with puddles and the cars and lorries swished up sheets of water as they sped by her.

Lucy’s parents lived off the A164 to Beverley, so she didn’t have to drive through Hull city center. She pressed on through the straggling western suburbs and soon found the residential area she was looking for. Clive and Hilary Liversedge’s house was a nicely maintained bay-window semi in a quiet crescent of similar houses. Not much of a place for a young girl to grow up, Jenny thought. Her own parents had moved often throughout her childhood, and though she had been born in Durham, she had at various times lived in Bath, Bristol, Exeter and Norwich, all university towns, and all full of randy young men. She had never been stuck in a dull suburban backwater like this.

A small plump man with a soft gray mustache answered the door. He was wearing a green cardigan, unbuttoned, and dark brown trousers which hugged the underside of his rounded gut. A belt wouldn’t be much good with a shape like that, Jenny thought, noticing the braces that held the trousers up.

“Clive Liversedge?”

“Come in, love,” he said. “You must be Dr. Fuller.”

“That’s me.” Jenny followed him into the cramped hall, from which a glass-paneled door led to a tidy living room with a red velour three-piece suite, an electric fire with fake coals and striped wallpaper. Somehow, it wasn’t the kind of place Jenny had imagined Lucy Payne growing up in; she couldn’t get any sense of Lucy living in this environment at all.

She could see what Banks meant about the invalid mother. Pale skin and raccoon eyes, Hilary Liversedge reclined on the sofa, a wool blanket covering her lower half. Her arms were thin and the skin looked puckered and loose. She didn’t move when Jenny entered, but her eyes looked lively and attentive enough, despite the yellowish cast of the sclera. Jenny didn’t know what was wrong with her, but she put it down to one of those vague chronic illnesses that certain types of people luxuriate in toward the ends of their lives.

“How is she?” Clive Liversedge asked, as if Lucy had perhaps suffered a minor fall or car accident. “They said it wasn’t serious. Is she doing all right?”

“I saw her this morning,” Jenny said, “and she’s bearing up well.”

“Poor lass,” said Hilary. “To think of what she’s been through. Tell her she’s welcome to come here and stay with us when she gets out of hospital.”

“I just came to get some sense of what Lucy’s like,” Jenny began. “What sort of a girl she was.”

The Liversedges looked at each other. “Just ordinary,” said Clive.

“Normal,” said Hilary.

Right, thought Jenny. Normal girls go marrying serial killers every day. Even if Lucy had nothing at all to do with the killings, there had to be something odd about her, something out of the ordinary. Jenny had even sensed that during their brief chat in the hospital that morning. She could couch it in as much psychological gobbledygook as she wanted – and Jenny had come across plenty of that in her career – but what it came down to was the feeling that Lucy Payne was definitely a sausage or two short of the full English breakfast.

“What was she like at school?” Jenny pressed on.