“Yes. Yes, please, if it’s all right.”
Banks propped the golf club by the front door and led the way to the kitchen at the back, where he had recently sat with Annie, and offered Hunt a chair. Hunt made no comment about the club. Banks didn’t want to seem as if he was interrogating the man, but he realized he had practically forgotten the simple art of conversation after all his years in the force. His job affected the way he saw and dealt with everyone. He had even been brusque with Corinne. “Why did you want to see Roy?” he asked.
“No real reason,” Hunt said. “Only he didn’t turn up at church this morning, and that’s not like him.”
Banks nearly fell off his chair. “Church?” Wonders never cease.
“Yes. Why? What’s so strange about that?”
“Nothing,” said Banks, who hadn’t set foot inside a church since his childhood, except for weddings and funerals. He and Roy hadn’t been given a particularly religious upbringing, and neither of their parents had been regular churchgoers. At school, back in those days, there were prayers and a hymn every morning, of course, but apart from a few years of Sunday school and a brief stint in the Lifeboys and Boys’ Brigade, that had been it as far as Banks was concerned. Now this.
“Normally, I wouldn’t bother dropping by,” said Hunt, “but there was a meeting of the restoration fund committee after the service and Roy has always been a keen contributor. Not only financially, you understand, but also in terms of ideas. Very creative mind, Roy.”
“Cup of tea, Vicar?”
“Please. And call me Ian. Unless you want me to call you Chief Inspector?”
“Ian it is.” Banks put the kettle on. Tea with the vicar on a Sunday afternoon, he thought. How very genteel. This wasn’t a world he would ever have suspected Roy of inhabiting. He found the tea bags next to the coffee and put two in the flower-patterned teapot.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” said Banks as the kettle was coming to a boil, “when did Roy start going to church?”
“I don’t mind at all,” said Hunt. “He started attending services on the sixteenth of September, 2001.”
“I didn’t expect you to remember the exact date,” Banks said.
“But how could I forget? You’d be surprised how many people returned to the church, or first started attending, around that time.”
Banks had to think for a moment before he realized the significance of the date. It must have been the first Sunday after the attack on the World Trade Center. But why should that affect Roy so much? He poured boiling water into the pot. “What drew him there?” he asked.
Hunt paused. “You really don’t know much about your brother, do you?”
“No,” said Banks. “And the more I find out, the less I know.”
“That’s the universal paradox of knowledge”
“Maybe so,” said Banks, “but at the moment I’m interested in more practical knowledge. I don’t suppose you have any idea where Roy might be?”
Hunt blinked. “I was the one who came here looking for him, remember?”
“Even so.”
Hunt looked at Banks with curiosity in his eyes. “I can see you’ve been trained not to take anything at face value,” he said. “No, I have no idea where he is.”
“Why did you come here?”
“I told you. The meeting. It’s not like Roy not to even leave a message.”
“When did you last see him?”
“Last Sunday.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“We chatted briefly after the service.”
“How did he seem?”
“Fine. Quite normal.”
Banks got the milk from the fridge, giving it a quick sniff to see if it was still all right, poured the tea, then sat down opposite Hunt. “I don’t mean to seem so abrupt,” he said, “but I’m concerned. Roy left a rather disturbing message on my answering service, and when I came down here to see him he’d disappeared and the front door was unlocked.”
“I can see why you would be concerned,” said Hunt.
“So the two of you chatted often?”
“Yes,” said Hunt. “We’d often spend an hour or two together, usually at the vicarage, sometimes over lunch.”
Roy lunching at the vicarage was an image Banks found very hard to visualize. “Did he open up to you? I mean, did he…”
“I know what you mean.” Hunt shifted in his chair. “Yes, I’d say he opened up about his feelings. At least to some extent.”
“Feelings about what?”
“Many things.”
“I’m afraid that’s a bit too vague for me,” said Banks. “Do you think you could be more specific? It’s not as if you took his confession or anything.” Banks realized that he hadn’t ascertained what denomination Hunt represented. “I mean, you’re not Catholic, are you?”
“Church of England. But I don’t know how much I can help you. Roy never went into great detail about anything he did.”
“I don’t suppose he would,” said Banks. “But did you get any idea why he started attending church on the sixteenth of September, 2001, other than some vague sense of unease about the way the world was going?”
“It wasn’t that.” Hunt took a deep breath. “It’s my feeling that your brother had lost his moral compass, had become so engrossed in the making of money that how he made it no longer mattered to him.”
“He’s not unusual in that,” said Banks.
“No. But it’s my guess that what happened in New York on the eleventh brought it home to him in no uncertain terms.”
“You’re not saying he was somehow connected to the attacks, are you?”
“Oh, no,” said Hunt. “No, you’re missing the point entirely.”
“What, then?”
“Didn’t he tell you? He was there.”
Banks had to pause a moment to take this in. “Roy was in New York when the attacks took place?”
Ian Hunt nodded. “According to what he told me, he had an appointment with a banker in the second tower. He was running late and his taxi got caught up in traffic. The next thing he knew, everyone was coming to a halt and getting out of their cars, some of them pointing up. Roy got out, too, and he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The smoke and flames. People jumping out of windows. It took him three days to get on a flight home.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Banks. “Sorry. He never told me this.”
“But you’re not close, are you?”
“No.”
“Anyway, it gave him pause for thought – the enormity of it all, fate, how everything was connected, what unimaginable consequences could arise from seemingly unimportant, unrelated actions. These were all things he wanted to talk about. I had no answers, but he seemed to find something of what he wanted in the church, in prayer, Holy Communion, and in our discussions.”
Banks remembered what Burgess had said about the arms deal. Roy had found out that a shipment he had brokered had found its way into the wrong hands. Had Roy really been so naive as to think that arms dealing was just a business like any other? He probably hadn’t given it too much thought, Banks decided, lured by the money and the excitement. Warned off by Special Branch, he had backed away from that line of work immediately, but he had witnessed the attacks on the World Trade Center and he was stricken by conscience, by the fact that guns or missiles he had exported
Suicide bombers in distant desert places are one thing, but being there, in New York, on the eleventh of September, 2001, and witnessing what happened must have been devastating. It certainly made it impossible for
