Close To Home (aka The Summer That Never Was)

catch the burglar?” she asked.

“No. He must have taken Bradford by surprise, though.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because he was a pretty tough customer himself. I wouldn’t have fancied tackling him. Way it looks is the burglar must have heard him coming and hid behind the door, then bashed the back of Bradford’s head in with a cosh of some kind.”

“You never found a weapon?”

“No.”

“No clues? No prints?”

“Nothing usable.”

“No witnesses?”

“None that we could find.”

“What was taken?”

“Wallet, a few knickknacks, by the looks of it. Place was a bit of a mess.”

“Did it appear as if someone had been looking for something?”

“I never really thought about that. As I say, though, it was a mess. Turned upside down. Why the sudden interest?”

Michelle told him a little bit about Graham Marshall.

“Yes, I’ve read about that. Terrible business. I hadn’t realized there was a connection.”

“Was Bradford married?”

“No. He lived alone.”

Michelle could sense him pause, as if he was going to add something. “What?” she asked.

“Oh, it’s nothing. Bit of a laugh, really.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“Well, afterward, you know, we had to have a look around the house and we found… well… at the time it seemed quite risque, though by today’s standards…”

Out with it, man, Michelle found herself thinking. What are you talking about?

“What was it?” she asked.

“Pornographic magazines. A bundle of them. And some blue films. I won’t go into detail, but they covered quite the range of perversions.”

Michelle found herself gripping the receiver tighter. “Including pedophilia?”

“Well, there were some pretty young-looking models involved, I can tell you that. Male and female. Not kiddie- porn, though, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Michelle supposed there was a distinction to be made. In some ways, once you had pubic hair, breasts and all the rest, you didn’t qualify as “kiddie-porn,” but you still might only be fourteen years old. Gray area.

“What happened to all this stuff?”

“Destroyed.”

But not before you and your lads had a good look at it, I’ll bet, Michelle thought.

“We didn’t let anything slip at the time,” he went on, “because it didn’t seem… well, the bloke had just been killed, after all. There seemed no point in blackening his name with that sort of thing.”

“Understandable,” said Michelle. “Who claimed the body?”

“Nobody. Mr. Bradford had no immediate family. The local authorities took care of everything.”

“Thank you, Mr. Scholes,” she said. “You’ve been a great help.”

“Think nothing of it.”

Michelle hung up and nibbled the end of her pencil as she thought about what she’d heard. She hadn’t come to any conclusions yet, but she had a lot to discuss with Banks when he arrived.

PC Flaherty, who had tracked down the mystery girl’s address, had been asking around Eastvale College, thinking that a girl who looked like she did must be a student. As it turned out, she wasn’t, but her boyfriend was, and one of the people he spoke to remembered seeing her at a college dance. The boyfriend’s name was Ryan Milne and the girl was known as Elizabeth Palmer. They lived together in a flat above a hat shop on South Market Street, the direction in which Luke Armitage had been walking when he was last seen.

Annie insisted that she felt well enough to make the call. She was damned, she told Banks, if she was going to be excluded after all the footwork she’d done just because some over-testosteroned lout had punched her in the mouth. It was her pride that hurt more than anything. After she’d cleaned up the wound, it didn’t look too bad anyway. Some women, she went on to say, paid a fortune for collagen shots to make themselves look like she did. Banks decided he would make the call with her before setting off for Peterborough. He phoned and arranged to meet Michelle in a city center pub at nine o’clock, just to be on the safe side.

Martin Armitage was cooling off in the custody suite and Norman Wells was in Eastvale General Infirmary. No doubt there would be recriminations from Armitage’s pal the chief constable, but for the moment he could stay where he was. They could also charge him with assaulting a police officer. After they had visited the mystery girl.

Within twenty minutes of getting the address, Banks and Annie climbed the lino-covered stairs and knocked on the door. The building seemed so silent that Banks couldn’t imagine anyone being at home, but only seconds later a young woman opened the door. The young woman.

“DCI Banks and DI Cabbot,” Banks said, flashing his card. “We’d like a word.”

“You’d better come in then.” She stood aside.

One reason why it had taken so long to locate her was obvious to Banks: she didn’t look anywhere near as weird as the description Josie Batty had drawn of her, which was hardly surprising when you imagined that most young people probably looked weird to Josie Batty.

The pixyish facial features were right enough, the heart-shaped face, large eyes and small mouth, but that was about all. She was far prettier than Josie Batty had indicated to the police artist, and she had a pale, flawless complexion. She also had the sort of breasts adolescent boys, and many grown men, dream about, and her smooth cleavage was shown to advantage by the laced-up leather waistcoat she wore. The small tattoo on her upper arm was a simple double helix, and there was no sign of body-piercing anywhere except the silver spiderweb earrings dangling from her ears. Her short black hair was dyed and gelled, but there was nothing weird about that.

The flat was clean and tidy, not a filthy crack house full of sprawled drug-addled kids. It was an old room with a fireplace complete with poker and tongs, which must only have been for show, as a gas fire filled the hearth. Sunlight shone through the half-open window and the sounds and smells of South Market Street drifted up: car exhaust and horns, warm tar, fresh-baked bread, take-away curry and pigeons on the rooftops. Banks and Annie walked around the small room, checking it out, while the girl arranged beanbag cushions for them.

“Elizabeth, is it?” asked Banks.

“I prefer Liz.”

“Okay. Ryan not here?”

“He’s got classes.”

“When will he be back?”

“Not till after teatime.”

“What do you do, Liz?”

“I’m a musician.”

“Make a living at it?”

“You know what it’s like…”

Banks did, having a son in the business. But Brian’s success was unusual, and even that hadn’t brought in heaps of money. Not even enough for a new car. He moved on. “You know why we’re here, don’t you?”

Liz nodded. “About Luke.”

“You could have come forward and saved us a lot of trouble.”

Liz sat down. “But I don’t know anything.”

“Let us be the judge of that,” said Banks, pausing in his examination of her CD collection. He had noticed a