Aftermath

she could find anyone who knew the families before the investigation, and, as Elizabeth had suggested, to “get the feel of the place.”

12

Banks hadn’t had a break all day, had even missed his lunch interviewing Lucy Payne, so with no real plan in mind, around three o’clock that afternoon, he found himself wandering down an alley off North Market Street toward the Old Ship Inn, heavy with the recent news that the second body discovered in the back garden of 35 The Hill was definitely not Leanne Wray’s.

Lucy Payne was being held in a cell in the basement of police headquarters and Julia Ford had booked herself in at The Burgundy, Eastvale’s best, most expensive hotel. The task force and forensics people were working as fast and as hard as they could, and Jenny Fuller was probing Lucy’s past – all looking for that one little chink in her armor, that one little piece of hard evidence that she was more involved with the killings than she let on. Banks knew that if they unearthed nothing more by noon tomorrow, he’d have to let her go. He had one more visit to make today: to talk to George Woodward, the detective inspector who had done most of the legwork on the Alderthorpe investigation, now retired and running a B amp;B in Withernsea. Banks glanced at his watch. It would take him about two hours: plenty of time to head out there after a drink and a bite to eat and still get back before too late.

The Old Ship was a shabby, undistinguished Victorian watering hole with a few benches scattered in the cobbled alley out front. Not much light got in, as the buildings all around were dark and high. Its claim to fame was that it was well-hidden and known to be tolerant of underage drinkers. Many an Eastvale lad, so Banks had heard, had sipped his first pint at the Old Ship well before his eighteenth birthday. The sign showed an old clipper ship, and the windows were of smoked, etched glass.

It wasn’t very busy at that time of day, between the lunch-hour and the after-work crowd. Indeed, the Old Ship wasn’t busy very often at all, as few tourists liked the look of it, and most locals knew better places to drink. The interior was dim and the air stale and acrid with more than a hundred years’ accumulated smoke and beer spills. Which made it all the more surprising that the barmaid was a pretty young girl with short, dyed red hair and an oval face, a smooth complexion, a bright smile and a cheerful disposition.

Banks leaned against the bar. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a cheese-and-onion sandwich, is there?”

“Sorry,” she said. “We don’t serve food after two. Packet of chips – sorry, crisps – okay?”

“Better than nothing,” said Banks.

“What flavor?”

“Plain will do fine. And a pint of bitter shandy, too, please.”

As she was pouring the drink and Banks was dipping into a packet of rather soggy potato crisps, she kept glancing at him out of the corner of her eye and finally said, “Aren’t you the policeman who was here about that girl who disappeared a month or so ago?”

“Leanne Wray,” said Banks. “Yes.”

“I thought so. I saw you here. You weren’t the policeman I talked to, but you were here. Have you found her yet?”

“It’s Shannon, isn’t it?”

She smiled. “You remember my name and you never even talked to me. I’m impressed.”

Shannon, Banks remembered from the statement taken by DC Winsome Jackman, was an American student taking a year off from her studies. She had already traveled around most of Europe, and through relatives and, Banks suspected, a boyfriend, she had ended up spending a few months in Yorkshire, which she seemed to like. Banks guessed that she was working at the Old Ship, perhaps, because the manager wasn’t concerned about visas and permits, and paid cash in hand. Probably not much of it, either.

Banks lit a cigarette and looked around. A couple of old men sat smoking pipes by the window, not speaking, not even looking at one another. They seemed as if they might have been there since the place first opened in the nineteenth century. The floor was worn stone and the tables scored and wobbly. A watercolor of a huge sailing ship hung crookedly on one wall, and on the opposite one, a series of framed charcoal sketches of seagoing scenes, quite good to Banks’s untrained eye.

“I wasn’t trying to be nosy,” Shannon said. “I was only asking because I haven’t seen you since and I’ve been reading about those girls in Leeds.” She gave a little shudder. “It’s horrible. I remember being in Milwaukee – that’s where I’m from, Milwaukee, Wisconsin – when all the Jeffrey Dahmer stuff was going on. I was only a kid but I knew what it was all about and we were all scared and confused. I don’t know how people can do things like that, do you?”

Banks looked at her, saw the innocence, the hope and the faith that her life would turn out to be worth living and that the world wasn’t an entirely evil place, no matter what bad things happened in it. “No,” he said. “I don’t.”

“So you haven’t found her, then? Leanne?”

“No.”

“It’s not that I knew her or anything. I only saw her once. But, you know, when something like that happens, like you think you might be the last person to have seen someone, well…” She rested her hand on her chest. “It sort of sticks with you, if you know what I mean. I can’t get the picture out of my mind. Her sitting over there by the fireplace.”

Banks thought of Claire Toth, whipping herself over Kimberley Myers’s murder, and he knew that anyone remotely connected with what Payne had done felt tainted by it. “I know what you mean,” he said.

One of the old men came up to the bar and plunked his half-pint glass down. Shannon filled it for him; he paid and went back to his chair. She wrinkled her nose. “They’re in here every day. You can set your watch by them. If one of them didn’t turn up I’d have to call an ambulance.”

“When you say you can’t get Leanne’s image out of your mind, does that mean you’ve given any more thought to that evening?”

“Not really,” said Shannon. “I mean, I thought… you know, that she’d been taken, like the others. That’s what everyone thought.”

“I’m starting to believe that might not be the case,” said Banks, putting his fear into words for the first time. “In fact, I’m beginning to think we might have been barking up the wrong tree on that one.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Anyway,” Banks went on. “I just thought I’d drop by, see if you remembered anything you forgot to mention before, that sort of thing. It’s been a while.” And that, he knew, meant that any trail Leanne may had left would have gone cold. If they had screwed up in assuming too quickly that Leanne Wray had been abducted by the same person, or persons, as Kelly Matthews and Samantha Foster, then any clues as to what had really happened could well have vanished forever by now.

“I don’t know how I can help,” said Shannon.

“Tell me,” said Banks, “you say they were sitting over there, right?” He pointed to the table by the empty tiled fireplace.

“Yes. Four of them. At that table.”

“Did they drink much?”

“No. I told the policewoman before. They only had a drink or two each. I didn’t think she was old enough but the landlord tells us not to bother too much, unless it’s really obvious.” She put her hand over her mouth. “Shoot, I probably shouldn’t have said that, should I?”

“Don’t worry about it. We know all about Mr. Parkinson’s practices. And don’t worry about what you told us before, Shannon. I know I could go and look it all up in the files if I wanted, but I want you to start again, as if it had never happened before.”

It was hard to explain to a civilian, but Banks needed the feel of investigating Leanne’s disappearance as if it were a fresh crime. He didn’t want to start by poring over old files in his office – though it would no doubt come to that if something didn’t turn up soon – he wanted to start by revisiting the place where she had last been