“I must say,” he began, “that we’re at a bit of a loss.”
“Oh?”
“As you know, our men have been working at the Payne house for days now. They’ve recovered six bodies, four of which have been identified, but none of the six is your daughter’s. They’re running out of places to look.”
“Does that mean Leanne might still be alive?” Wray asked, a gleam of hope in his eyes.
“It’s possible,” Banks admitted. “Though I’ve got to say, after all this time without contact, especially given the nationwide appeals on TV and in the press, I wouldn’t hold out a lot of hope.”
“Then… what?”
“That’s what we’d like to find out.”
“I don’t see how I can help you.”
“Perhaps you can’t,” Banks said, “but the only thing to do when a case is stalled like this is to go right back to first principles. We’ve got to go over the ground we covered before and hope we see it from a new perspective this time.”
Wray’s wife, Victoria, appeared in the doorway and looked puzzled to see Banks and Winsome enjoying a chat and a cup of tea with her husband. Wray jumped up. “I thought you were resting, dear,” he said, giving her a peck on the cheek.
Victoria wiped the sleep from her eyes, though she looked to Banks as if she had spent at least a few minutes putting on her face before coming down. Her skirt and blouse were pure Harvey Nichols, and her accent was what she thought sounded like upper class, though he could hear traces of Birmingham in it. She was an attractive woman in her early thirties, with a slim figure and a full head of shiny, natural-brown hair that hung over her shoulders. She had a slightly retrousse nose, arched eyebrows and a small mouth, but the effect of the whole was rather more successful than one might imagine from the separate parts. Wray himself was about forty and pretty much medium in whatever category you might describe him, except for the chin, which slid down toward his throat before it even got started. They were an odd couple, Banks remembered thinking from the first time he had met them: he was a rather basic, down-to-earth bus driver, and she was an affected social climber. What had drawn them together in the first place Banks had no idea, except perhaps that people who have suffered a great loss, as Christopher Wray had, might not necessarily be the best judges of their next move.
Victoria stretched, sat down and poured herself a cup of tea.
“How are you feeling?” her husband asked.
“Not bad.”
“You know you’ve got to be careful, in your condition. The doctor said so.”
“I know. I know.” She squeezed his hand. “I’ll be careful.”
“What condition’s that?” Banks asked.
“My wife’s expecting a baby, Superintendent.” Wray beamed.
Banks looked at Victoria. “Congratulations,” he said.
She inclined her head in a queenly manner. Banks could hardly imagine Victoria Wray going through anything as messy and painful as childbirth, but life was full of surprises.
“How long?” he asked.
She patted her stomach. “Almost four months.”
“So you were pregnant when Leanne went missing?”
“Yes. As a matter of fact, I’d just found out that morning.”
“What did Leanne think of it?”
Victoria looked down into her teacup. “Leanne could be willful and moody, Superintendent,” she said. “She certainly wasn’t quite as ecstatic as we hoped she would be.”
“Now, come on, love, that’s not fair,” said Mr. Wray. “She’d have got used to it in time. I’m certain she would.”
Banks thought about the situation: Leanne’s mother dies a slow and painful death from cancer. Shortly afterward, her father remarries – to a woman Leanne clearly can’t stand. Not long after that, the stepmother announces she’s pregnant. You didn’t need to be a psychologist to see that there was a situation ripe for disaster. It was a bit close to the bone for Banks, too, though he had hardly been in Leanne’s position. Still, whether it’s your father having a baby with your new stepmother or your estranged wife having one with the bearded Sean, the resulting feelings could be similar, perhaps even more intense in Leanne’s case, given her age and her grief over her mother.
“So she wasn’t happy with the news?”
“Not really,” Mr. Wray admitted. “But it takes time to get used to things like that.”
“You have to be at least willing to try first,” said Victoria. “Leanne’s too selfish for that.”
“Leanne was willing,” Mr. Wray insisted.
“When did you tell her?” Banks asked.
“The morning of the day she disappeared.”
He sighed. “Why didn’t you tell us this when we interviewed you after Leanne’s disappearance?”
Mr. Wray looked surprised. “Nobody asked. It didn’t seem important. I mean, it was a private family matter.”
“Besides,” said Victoria, “it’s bad luck to tell strangers until after three months.”
Were they really so thick or were they just playing at it? Banks wondered. Trying to keep his tone as calm and neutral as possible, reminding himself that they were the parents of a missing girl, he asked, “What did she say?”
The Wrays looked at each other. “Say? Nothing, really, did she, dear?” said Mr. Wray.
“Acted up, is what she did,” said Victoria.
“Was she angry?”
“I suppose so,” said Mr. Wray.
“Angry enough to punish you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Listen, Mr. Wray,” Banks said, “when you told us that Leanne was missing and we couldn’t find her within a day or two, we were all of us willing to think the worst. Now, what you’ve just told us puts a different light on things.”
“It does?”
“If she was angry at you over her stepmother’s pregnancy, then she might easily have run away to strike back.”
“But Leanne wouldn’t run away,” Mr. Wray said, slack-jawed. “She loved me.”
“Maybe that’s the problem,” Banks said. He didn’t know if it was called the Electra complex, but he was thinking of the female version of the Oedipus complex: Girl loves her father, then her mother dies, but instead of devoting himself to her, the father finds a new woman, and to make things worse, he makes her pregnant, threatening the entire stability of their relationship. He could easily see Leanne doing a bunk under circumstances like that. But the problem still remained that she would have to be a very uncaring child indeed not to let them know she was still alive after all the hue and cry about the missing girls, and she wouldn’t have got far without her money and her inhaler.
“I think she’d probably be capable of it,” said Victoria. “She could be cruel. Remember that time when she put castor oil in the coffee, the evening of my first book-club meeting? Caroline Opley was sick all over her Margaret Atwood.”
“But that was early days, love,” Mr. Wray protested. “It all took a bit of getting used to for her.”
“I know. I’m only saying. And she didn’t value things as she should have. She lost that silver-”
“Do you think she might have at least been angry enough to disobey her curfew?” Banks asked.
“Certainly,” answered Victoria without missing a beat. “It’s that boy you should be talking to. That Ian Scott. He’s a drug dealer, you know.”
“Did Leanne take drugs?”
“Not to our knowledge,” said Mr. Wray.
“But she could have done, Chris,” his wife went on. “She obviously didn’t tell us everything, did she? Who knows what she got up to when she was with those sorts of people.”
Christopher Wray put his hand over his wife’s. “Don’t get excited, love. Remember what the doctor said.”
