eyes beyond Erin and Tracy. She just gave a curt nod. Banks breathed a sigh of relief. He had thought Tracy was going to thump Erin and that Erin and Juliet would never speak to each other again.
18
BANKS COULD HEAR THE STRAINS OF THE ADAGIO from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata as Francoise, the au pair, led him across The Farmer’s cavernous entrance hall toward the living room. Whoever was playing hit a wrong note, then hesitated and stumbled before picking up the melody again.
“The family is watching television,” Francoise explained in precise, unaccented English. “And Miss Eloise is practicing for the piano examinations in the next week.” She opened the door and announced Banks and Winsome formally. The uniformed officers were awaiting instructions in their cars outside.
Banks had never seen Fanthorpe’s wife before. She was a beautiful woman a good few years younger than her husband, with a figure sculpted by daily workouts, long silky brown hair and a complexion that can only be achieved either through the blessings of nature or the right combination of chemical emollients. She gave her husband a puzzled look. The little girl with the long ponytail sitting next to her didn’t take her eyes from Strictly Come Dancing on the forty-two-inch TV screen.
“I see I’ve interrupted a family tradition,” said Banks.
Fanthorpe got to his feet. “What do you want this time, Banks? I’ve had just about enough of this. This is too much. I’m going to ring my solicitor.”
“Maybe you can ask him to meet you at Western Area Headquarters,” Banks said. “We’ve got a custody suite waiting for you there.”
The woman was on her feet too, now, swiftly uncurled like a cat. “What is this, George?” she asked, with a slight Eastern European accent. “Who are these people? What are they doing in my house? What’s going on?”
The Farmer put the phone down and went to rest his hands on his wife’s shoulders. “It’s all right, Zenovia. Just calm down, love. I’ll handle this.” He strode toward the door and turned to Banks. “Come on. We’ll go into the den.”
“If you like,” said Banks, following him across the hall into the room where they had talked the previous week.
“This is an outrage,” said Fanthorpe, pouring himself a large whiskey and not even bothering to offer Banks one this time. He might actually have taken it. “It’s police harassment. It’s persecution. It’s-”
“All right, all right, Farmer. I get the message,” said Banks. “Let’s just all sit down and have a nice quiet little chat before I bring the lads in.”
“Lads?”
“The search team.” Banks took some papers from his pocket. “I have here a search warrant signed by a local magistrate empowering us to conduct a full and thorough search of your premises.”
“Search my house?” Fanthorpe spluttered. “You can’t do that! You can’t just-”
“We can and we will. But first things first. I’d like to let you know just how deep the shit is that you’re in.”
“What are you talking about?” Fanthorpe flopped into his leather armchair. He slopped a little whiskey on the front of his cable-knit jumper as he did so, and dabbed at it with a handkerchief he took from the pocket of his brown cords.
Winsome sat opposite him and took out her notebook and pen. “If you think I’m going to say anything incriminating,” said Fanthorpe, pointing his finger at her, “then you’ve got another think coming.”
“It always pays to be prepared, sir,” said Winsome. “Don’t you find?”
“What do you know about the shooting of Marlon Kincaid on the fifth November, 2004?” Banks asked.
“Marlon Kincaid? Do I look like someone who’d know a person called Marlon Kincaid?”
“Why not? He was a student at Leeds Polytechnic University. Well, technically, he’d just finished his studies but he was still hanging around the student pubs in the area, the way some people do, selling drugs. Couldn’t seem to let go of the old college life.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Marlon Kincaid. Art student. His dad was a big fan of Marlon Brando, apparently, which is how he got his name. Marlon was building quite the little business for himself, selling coke and various other illegal substances to the Leeds student population at parties and in the pubs and clubs.”
“So?”
“He had his own suppliers, and you weren’t one of them.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You couldn’t allow that, could you? You were well on your way to being the local drug kingpin, and along comes some skinny, long-haired upstart and cuts right into your market. Not only that, but he makes fun of you and it gets back to you. What did you do first? Warn him? Send Ciaran and Darren to administer a beating, perhaps?”
“This is rubbish.”
“But you had another weapon waiting in the wings, didn’t you? A young lad called Jaffar McCready who was fast proving himself indispensable. And dangerous. He needed to prove himself, and you needed him to do it. That one final act of outrageous loyalty that binds forever. You gave him a gun. You loaded it for him. Perhaps you even showed him how to fire it. And Jaffar McCready shot Marlon Kincaid. What he didn’t know was that he’d been seen. A most unreliable witness, for sure, especially at the time, but he’s scrubbed up quite nicely since then, soon to be a member of the ministry, actually, and his memory seems a lot clearer now, especially given everything we’ve found out since.”
“What does any of this have to do with me?”
“What you didn’t know was that, for reasons of his own, McCready kept the gun. A trophy. A souvenir. Call it what you will. You no doubt told him to get rid of it at the time, and you probably thought he had. After all, why would he want to keep an incriminating gun around? Maybe he was just sentimental. His first kill. Or perhaps he liked the idea of having something on you? Whatever the reason, he kept the gun. Then one night he had a row with his girlfriend. To spite him, to piss him off, she took the gun and ran off, went to stay with her parents in Eastvale. Her mother found it. Maybe she just was cleaning up her daughter’s room, the way mothers do, or maybe she was curious, wanted to see if she could find anything that would explain her daughter’s unusual silences, her odd behavior, her strange cast of mind since she’d come home. Either way, she found the gun. And that’s when things started to go wrong. But that doesn’t really matter here and now. What matters is that we found a clear set of fingerprints on the magazine inside the gun. Those fingerprints are yours. Can you explain how they got there?”
Fanthorpe frowned and sipped his whiskey. “I don’t have to. You can talk to my solicitor about it.”
“I will. But there’s really only one way they could have got there, isn’t there? You handled the magazine at some time.”
“So what? You didn’t find any of my prints on the outside of the gun, did you? On the trigger guard?”
“How do you know that?”
“Oh, very clever, Banks. Is this where I say, ‘Because I wiped them off,’ then put my hand to my mouth and admonish myself for making such a gaffe? It’s not going to happen. The fact that you found my fingerprints on the magazine inside a gun proves nothing except that at one time I touched that magazine. It certainly doesn’t prove that I ever fired the gun. I don’t need a solicitor to prove that. You’re fishing.”
“Do you often go around handling magazines for prohibited weapons?”
“I can’t say as I ever remember doing such a thing. There are any number of ways it could have happened. Perhaps a vet used it to put down a sick animal.”
“A nine-millimeter Smith and Wesson automatic?”
“Maybe a copper passed it over to me once and asked me what I thought?”
“Pull the other one,” said Banks.
“And just how did you get my fingerprints for comparison in the first place? I’ve never been fingerprinted in my life. There’s no way I’m in your system.”
“That’s a terrible oversight, and I promise we’ll put the record straight as soon as possible. You did, however,
