Aftermath

In fact, he looked like a frightened kid. Clearly the prospect of spending several years in a similar or worse facility had worked on his imagination. He had also, Banks knew through the custody sergeant, had a long telephone conversation with his parents shortly after his detention, and his manner had seemed to change after that. He had not asked for a lawyer. Not yet.

“Yeah,” he said. “But first tell me what Sarah said.”

“You know I can’t do that, Mick.”

In fact, Sarah Francis had told them nothing at all; she had remained as monosyllabic and as scared and surly as she had in Ian Scott’s flat. But that didn’t matter, as she had been mainly used as a lever against Mick, anyway.

Banks, Winsome and Mick were in the largest, most comfortable interview room. It had also been painted recently, and Banks could smell the paint from the institutional-green walls. He still had nothing from the lab on Samuel Gardner’s car, but Mick didn’t know that. He said he wanted to talk, but if he decided to play coy again, Banks could always drop hints about fingerprints and hairs. He knew they had been in the car. It was something he should have checked at the time, with Ian Scott having a record for taking and driving away. Given Scott’s other offense, he also had a good idea what the four of them had been up to.

“Would you like to make a statement, then?” Banks said. “For the record.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve been made aware of all your rights?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, then, Mick. Tell us what happened that night.”

“What you said yesterday, about it going easier with me…?”

“Yes?”

“You meant it, didn’t you? I mean, whatever Sarah said, she might have been lying, you know, to protect herself and Ian.”

“The courts and the judges look favorably upon people who help the police, Mick. That’s a fact. I’ll be honest. I can’t give you the exact details of what will happen – it depends on so many variables – but I can tell you that you’ll have my support for leniency, and that should go some distance.”

Mick swallowed. He was about to rat on his friends. Banks had witnessed such moments before and knew how difficult it was, what conflicting emotions must be struggling for primacy inside Mick Blair’s soul. Self-preservation usually won out, in Banks’s experience, but sometimes at the cost of self-loathing. It was the same for him, the watcher; he wanted the information, and he had coaxed many a weak and sensitive suspect toward informing, but when he succeeded, the taste of victory was often soured by the bile of disgust.

Not this time, though, Banks thought. He wanted to know what had happened to Leanne Wray far more than he cared about Mick Blair’s discomfort.

“You did steal that car, didn’t you, Mick?” Banks began. “We’ve already recovered a lot of hair samples and fingerprints. We’ll find yours among them, won’t we? And Ian’s, Sarah’s and Leanne’s.”

“It was Ian,” Blair said. “It was all Ian’s idea. It was nothing to do with me. I can’t even fucking drive.”

“What about Sarah?”

“Sarah? Ian says jump, Sarah asks how high.”

“And Leanne?”

“Leanne was all for it. She was in a pretty wild mood that night. I don’t know why. She said something about her stepmother, but I didn’t know what the problem was. To be honest, I didn’t really care. I mean, I didn’t want to know about her family problems. We’ve all got problems, right?”

Indeed we do, thought Banks.

“You just wanted to get into her knickers, then?” said Winsome.

That seemed to shock Blair, coming from a woman, a beautiful woman at that, with a soft Jamaican accent.

“No! I mean, I liked her, yes. But I wasn’t trying it on, honest. I wasn’t trying to force her or anything like that.”

“What happened, Mick?” Banks asked.

“Ian said why don’t we take a car and do some E and smoke a couple of spliffs and maybe drive up to Darlington and go clubbing.”

“What about Leanne’s curfew?”

“She said fuck the curfew, it sounded like a great idea to her. Like I said, she was a bit wild that night. She’d had a couple of drinks. Not a lot, like, just a couple, but she didn’t usually drink, and it was just enough to loosen her up a bit. She just wanted to have some fun.”

“And you thought you might get lucky?”

Again, Winsome’s interjection seemed to confuse Blair. “No. Yes. I mean, if she was willing. Okay, I fancied her. I thought, maybe… you know… she seemed different, more devil-may-care.”

“And you thought the drugs would make her even more willing?”

“No. I don’t know.” He looked at Banks in annoyance. “Look, do you want me to go on with this or not?”

“Go on.” Banks gave Winsome the signal to keep out of it for the time being. He could imagine the scenario easily enough: Leanne a little drunk, giggly, flirting with Blair a bit, as Shannon the barmaid had said, then Ian Scott offering Ecstasy in the car, maybe Leanne unsure about it, but Blair encouraging her, egging her on, hoping all the time to get her into bed. But all that was something they could deal with later on, if necessary, when they had established the circumstances of Leanne’s disappearance.

“Ian stole the car,” Blair went on. “I don’t know anything about stealing cars, but he said he learned when he was a kid growing up on the East Side Estate.”

Banks knew all too well that stealing cars was one of the essential skills for kids growing up on the East Side Estate. “Where did you go?”

“North. Like I said, we were going to Darlington. Ian knows the club scene up there. Soon as we set off, Ian handed out the E and we all gobbled it up. Then Sarah rolled a spliff and we smoked that.”

Banks noticed that it was always someone else committing the illegal act, never Blair, but he filed that away for later. “Had Leanne taken Ecstasy or smoked marijuana before?” he asked.

“Not to my knowledge. She always seemed a bit straitlaced to me.”

“But not that night?”

“No.”

“Okay. Go on. What happened?”

Mick looked down at the table and Banks could tell he was coming to the hard part. “We hadn’t got far out of Eastvale – maybe half an hour or so – when Leanne said she felt sick and she could feel her heart was beating way too fast. She was having trouble breathing. She used that inhaler thing she carried with her, but it didn’t do any good. Made her worse, if you ask me. Anyway, Ian thought she was just panicking or hallucinating or something, so first he opened the car windows. It didn’t do any good, though. Soon she was shaking and sweating. I mean, she was really scared. Me, too.”

“What did you do?”

“We were in the country by then, up on the moors above Lyndgarth, so Ian pulled off the road and stopped. We all got out and walked out on the moor. Ian thought the open spaces would be good for Leanne, a breath of fresh air, that maybe she was just getting claustrophobic in the car.”

“Did it help?”

Mick turned pale. “No. Soon as we got out she was sick. I mean really sick. Then she collapsed. She couldn’t breathe, and she seemed to be choking.”

“Did you know she was asthmatic?”

“Like I said, I saw her use the inhaler in the car when she first started feeling weird.”

“And it didn’t enter your mind that Ecstasy might be dangerous for an asthma sufferer, or that it might cause a bad reaction with the inhalant?”

“How could I know? I’m not a doctor.”

“No. But you do take Ecstasy – I doubt this was your first time – and you must have been aware of some of the adverse publicity. The Leah Betts story, for example, the girl who died about five years