in shades of gray, like whales breaking the water’s surface. Banks was playing Mariza’s
“Yes,” said Mrs. Aspern. “It’s fine. She sounds very sad.”
Indeed she did. Banks didn’t understand a word of the songs without the translations on the CD booklet, the print of which was daily getting too small for him to read without glasses, but there was no mistaking the sense of loss, sadness and the cruelty of fate in Mariza’s voice. You didn’t need to know what the words meant to feel that.
“I didn’t want to ask you while your husband was present,” Banks said, “but is Christine’s birth father still around?”
She shook her head. “I was very young. We didn’t marry. My parents… they were good to me. I lived with them in Roundhay until Patrick and I married.”
“We’ll still need to talk to him,” said Banks.
“He’s back home. In America. We met when he was traveling in Europe.”
“Can you give me the details?”
She looked out of the window, away from Banks, as she spoke, so that he could barely hear her. “His name is Paul Ryder. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. I don’t have his address or telephone number. We haven’t been in contact since… well…”
Banks made a mental note of the name and city. It might be hard to track down this Paul Ryder after so long, but they’d have to try. “How did you and Dr. Aspern meet?” he asked.
“Patrick was a colleague of my father’s, a frequent visitor to our house when I was at home, when Christine was only a baby. My father is also a doctor. I suppose, in a way, he was Patrick’s mentor. He’s retired now, of course.”
Banks wondered how well that marriage had gone down with Mrs. Aspern’s family. “Were you both at home last night?” he asked.
She turned to look at him. “What do you expect me to say to that?”
“I expect you to tell me the truth,” Banks said.
“Ah, the truth. Yes, of course we were both at home.” She turned to look out of the window again.
“Did your husband go out at all yesterday?”
Mrs. Aspern didn’t reply.
“Is there anything else you want to say?” Banks asked. “Anything at all you want to tell me?”
Mrs. Aspern glanced at him again. He couldn’t make out the expression on her face. Then she turned back to look out of the window. “No,” she said, after a long pause. “No, I don’t think so.”
Banks gave up and drove on, Mariza singing against a backdrop of the misty Dales landscape, a song about sorrow, longing, pity, punishment and despair.
The scene looked different in the late afternoon, Annie thought as she walked through the woods to the canal branch. The area was still taped off, and she had to show her warrant card and sign in before entering, but the firefighters and their equipment were gone, and in their stead was an eerie silence shrouding the two burned-out narrow boats and the scattering of men in hooded white overalls patiently searching the banks. The smell of ashes still hung in the damp air.
She found Detective Sergeant Stefan Nowak poking through debris on the artist’s boat. Stefan was their crime scene coordinator, and it was his job to supervise the collection of possible crime scene evidence by his highly trained team and to liaise between the special analysts in the lab and Banks’s team.
Stefan looked up as Annie approached. He was a handsome, elegant man – no doubt a prince, Annie thought, as so many exiled Poles were – and he looked aristocratic, even in his protective clothing. There was a certain remoteness about him, which stopped on just the polite side of aloofness, and made him seem regal in some way. He had a faint Polish accent, too, which served to heighten the mysterious effect. He was friendly enough to be on a first-name basis with both Annie and Banks, but he didn’t hang out in the Queen’s Arms with the rest of the lads, and nobody knew much about his private life.
Annie sniffled. “Found anything?” she asked.
Stefan gestured toward the murky water. “One of the frogmen found an empty turps container in there,” he said. “Probably the one used to start the fire. No prints or anything, though. Just your regular, commercial turps container. Anyway, I’m finished here,” he said. “Come on, I’ll show you what we’ve found so far.”
Annie wrapped her scarf more tightly around her sore throat as they took the narrow path through the woods. Wraiths of fog still drifted between the trees like elaborate spiderwebs, and here and there they had to step around a patch of muddy ground or a shallow puddle.
About halfway to the lane, Annie saw the plastic retaining frames around faint imprints in the mud, each with a ruler lying next to it. “Luckily, the ground was just muddy enough in places,” Stefan said. “Probably protected by the trees. Anyway, we got reasonably fresh shoe impressions, but they could be anybody’s.”
“How many?”
“Just the one person, by the looks of it.”
“Did the firefighters use this path?”
Stefan pointed. “No, down there. This is the path you’d take from the lay-by. They parked farther down, closer to the canal. This part of the woods is riddled with paths. I gather it’s a popular spot in summer.”
Annie looked down at the markings. “So they could be our man’s?”
“Yes, but don’t get your hopes up. Anyway, they’ve all been carefully photographed, and casts have been made. They’re drying out right now, but tomorrow we’ll run them through SICAR.”
SICAR was an acronym for Shoeprint Image Capture and Retrieval, which combines a number of scanned databases to match footwear files with specimens, primarily the “Sole-mate” database of over three hundred common brands of shoes and two thousand different sole patterns. Stefan’s expert would have sprayed the muddy impression with shellac or acrylic lacquer, then he would have made a cast in dental stone. Back at headquarters, he would enter the details of the shoe impression on the computer, coding by common patterns such as bars, polygons and zigzags, and by manufacturers’ logos, if any were present. From these reference databases, they could find out what type and brand of shoe caused the imprint, and they could also search the crime and suspect databases to see if it matched the shoe of a person taken into custody, or a footprint left at a previous crime scene.
Of course, what everyone really hoped for was something more than just class characteristics, some sort of unique markings, the kind that come from wear and tear, a nice drawing pin embedded in the sole, for example, something that could be matched with a specific shoe. Then, once you have your suspect and his shoe, you have solid evidence that links him to the scene.
They got to the lay-by, beside which the police mobile unit was parked, completely blocking the lane. It didn’t matter much, though, as the track was hardly ever used and it led only toward a narrow bridge over the canal about two miles west. Anyone wanting to get there was advised to take the next turning by a diversion sign posted at the junction of the lane and the B-road half a mile north.
Annie noticed more retaining frames, measures and markers on the lay-by itself.
“Impressive,” she said. “You have been busy.”
“We’ll see,” said Stefan. “Trying to process a crime scene like this is like peeling the layers off the onion, and you don’t know which layer is the important one.” He pointed to one of the imprints. “Here we’ve got parallel tire tracks,” he said. “And that should be enough to tell us who the manufacturer was. From these we can also get the track width and wheelbase measurements, which might even help us identify the make of the car. If there are a number of individual characteristics present in the tire impressions, which may be the case, then we should be able to match them to the specific tire, and vehicle, too.”
“If and when we find it,” said Annie.
“Naturally. We’ve also collected soil samples from the entire area. No rare wildflowers at this time of year, of course, but there are some unique mineral features, and they should also help us tie in the shoes and tire to the scene, should we find them.”
