“Yes?”
“Well, he was carrying a paperback book with him, as if he’d been sitting and having a read in a cafe or something. I saw him writing something in the back of it with a pencil. I couldn’t see what it was.”
“Interesting,” said Annie, remembering the Ian McEwan book Banks had found at Moorview Cottage. He had said something about some penciled numbers in the back. Maybe she should have a look. She thanked Gilchrist for his time and headed out into the wind.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Because of roadworks and poor weather on the M1, it took Banks almost three hours to drive to Tania Hutchison’s house on Friday morning, and when he got to Tania’s village he was so thoroughly pissed off with driving that the beautiful rolling country of the English heartland was lost on him.
He had spent the latter part of Thursday afternoon, and a good part of the evening, reading over the files on the Linda Lofthouse investigation and the Patrick McGarrity trial transcripts, all to little avail, so he had not been in the best of moods when he got up that morning. Brian was still in bed, but Emilia had been puttering around the place with a smile on her face and had made him a pot of coffee and some delicious scrambled eggs. He was getting used to having her around.
Tania’s house, perched on the edge of a tiny village, wasn’t especially large, but it was built of golden Cotswold stone, with a thatched roof, and it must have cost her a pretty penny. The thing that surprised Banks most was that he could drive right up to her front gate; there was no security, no high wall or fence, merely a privet hedge. He had rung earlier to let her know he was coming, to get directions, and to make sure she would be in, but he had told her nothing about the reason for his visit.
Tania greeted him at the door, and though there was no one else present, Banks knew he would have been able to pick her out of a crowd easily. It wasn’t that she looked like a rock star or anything, whatever a rock star looked like. She was more petite than he had imagined from seeing her onstage and on television, and she certainly looked older now, but it wasn’t so much the familiarity of her looks as a certain class, a presence. Charisma, Banks supposed. It wasn’t something he came across often in his line of work. For a moment, Banks felt absurdly embarrassed, remembering the teenage crush he had had on her. He wondered if she could tell from his behavior.
Her clothes were of the casual-expensive kind, understated designer jeans and a loose cable-knit sweater; she was barefoot, toenails painted red, and her dark hair, in the past so long and glossy, was now cut short and laced with delicate threads of gray. There were lines around her eyes and mouth, but otherwise her complexion seemed flawless and smooth. She wore little makeup, just enough to accentuate her full lips and her watchful green eyes, and she moved with a certain natural grace as Banks followed her through a broad arched hallway into a large living room, where a lacquered grand piano stood by the French windows, and the floor was covered with a lush Persian carpet.
The other thing Banks noticed was a heavy glass ashtray, and Tania wasted no time in lighting a cigarette once she had curled up in an armchair and gestured for Banks to sit opposite her. She held the long, tipped cigarette in the V of her index and second fingers and took short, frequent drags. He felt like smoking with her, but he suppressed the urge. There was a fragility and a wariness about her, as well as class and charisma, as if she’d been hurt or betrayed so many times that once more would cause her world to crumble. Her name had been romantically linked with a number of famous rock stars and actors over the years, and with equally famous breakups, but now, Banks had read recently, she lived alone with her two cats, and she liked it that way. The cats, one marmalade and one tabby, were in evidence, but neither showed much interest in Banks.
As he made himself comfortable, Banks had to remind himself that Tania was a suspect, and he had to put out of his mind the vivid sexual fantasies he had once entertained about her and stop acting like a tongue-tied adolescent. She had been at Brimleigh with Linda Lofthouse and had later been a member of the Mad Hatters. She had also been present at Swainsview Lodge on the night Robin Merchant drowned. She had no motive for either crime, as far as Banks knew, but motives sometimes had a habit of emerging later, once the means and the opportunity were firmly nailed in place.
“You weren’t very forthcoming over the telephone, you know,” she said, a touch of reproach in her husky voice. Banks could still hear hints of a North American accent, though he knew she had been in England since her student days.
“It’s about Nick Barber’s murder,” he said, watching for a reaction.
“Nick Barber? The writer? Good Lord. I hadn’t heard.” She turned pale.
“What is it?”
“I spoke to him just a couple of weeks ago. He wanted to talk to me. He was doing a piece on the Mad Hatters.”
“Did you agree to talk to him?”
“Yes. Nick was one of the few music journos you could trust not to distort everything. Oh, Christ, this is terrible.” She put her hand to her mouth. If she was acting, Banks thought, then she was damned good. But she was a performer by trade, he reminded himself. As if sensing her grief, one of the cats made its way over slowly and, with a scowl at Banks, leaped onto her lap. She stroked it absently and it purred.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize you were close, or I would have broken the news a bit more tactfully. I assumed you knew.”
“We weren’t close,” she said. “I just knew him in passing, that’s all. I’ve met him once or twice. And I liked his work. It’s a hell of a shock. He was planning to come by and talk to me about my early days with the band.”
“When was this?” Banks asked.
“We didn’t have a firm date. He phoned two, maybe three weeks ago and said he’d get in touch with me again soon. He never did.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“No. He said he was ringing from a public telephone, and his phone card ran out. What happened? Why would anyone murder Nick Barber?”
That explained why they hadn’t seen Tania’s number on Barber’s mobile or landline phone records, Banks thought. “I think it might be something to do with the story he was working on,” he said.
“The story? But how could it be?”
“I don’t know yet, but we haven’t been able to find any other lines of inquiry.” Banks told her a little about Barber’s movements in Yorkshire, in particular his unsatisfactory meeting with Vic Greaves.
“Poor Vic,” she said. “How is he?”
Banks didn’t know how to answer that. He’d thought Greaves was clearly off his rocker, if not clinically insane, but he seemed to function well enough, with a little help from Chris Adams, and he was certainly high on Banks’s list of suspects. “Same as usual, I suppose,” he said, though he didn’t know what was usual for Vic Greaves.
“Vic was one of the sensitive ones,” Tania said, “much too fragile for the life he led and the risks he took.”
“What do you mean?”
Tania stubbed out her cigarette before answering. “There are people in the business whose minds and bodies can take an awful lot of substance abuse – Iggy Pop and Keith Richards come to mind, for example – and there are those who go on the ride with them and fall off. Vic was one who fell off.”
“Because he was sensitive?”
She nodded. “Some people could eat acid as if it were candy and have nothing but a good time, like watching their favorite cartoons over and over again. Others saw the devil, the jaws of hell or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the horrors beyond the grave. Vic was one of the latter. He had Hammer-horror trips, and the visions unhinged him.”
“So LSD caused his breakdown?”
“It certainly contributed to it. But I’m not saying something wouldn’t have happened anyway. Certainly the emotions and some of the images were in his mind already. Acid merely released them. But maybe he should have kept the cork in the bottle.”
“Why did he keep taking it?”
