handle a photograph of Jaff McCready that DS Jackman passed you the last time we were here. That glossy photographic paper has a wonderful sticky surface for fingerprints.”
“That’s entrapment! You’ve fitted me up.”
“Don’t be silly. It might conceivably be entrapment if they were forged documents, or a murder weapon. But it was only a photograph. It means nothing in itself.”
“I guarantee they’ll laugh you out of court.”
“Do you, really? Because I don’t think so. And I’m very glad to hear that you agree with me that it will get to court. These days the Crown Prosecution Service is very picky about the cases it allows to go to trial. They don’t like losing. They tend to choose dead certs.”
“Well, on the evidence you’ve got, there’s always a first time.”
“Then there’s the little matter of Darren Brody.”
“Darren Brody?”
“Yes. Come on. You know Darren. Your farm-hand-cum-enforcer. For some reason neither Darren nor Ciaran was involved with the Marlon Kincaid killing. Perhaps they were on another job, mucking out the stables or something. Or perhaps you just needed McCready to get his hands dirty, a blooding, like the kid’s first foxhunt. But Ciaran and Darren have been doing quite a lot of overtime for you lately, haven’t they?”
“What do you mean?”
Banks shook his head. “Ciaran’s seriously deranged. You should know what a liability it is to have someone like him on your payroll.”
“Ciaran would never say a thing against me.”
“You’re right about that. Ciaran’s a vicious psychopath who enjoys hurting people. But he’s loyal. He probably thanks you for the opportunity. He hurt Justin Peverell’s girlfriend, Martina Varakova. Killed her, in fact, very slowly and very painfully, while Justin was tied up and made to watch. Justin is catatonic now. The doctors aren’t holding out a lot of hope of his making a full recovery. Well, you wouldn’t after something like that, would you? Imagine someone doing that to your lovely wife.”
“Why are you telling me all this? What’s it all got to do with me?”
“Jaffar McCready had something of yours-two kilos of cocaine, fifty thousand pounds and a hot gun, to be exact. We have it all now, locked up safely in our evidence room.”
Fanthorpe sneered. “Safely? I’ll bet.”
“You wanted it all back. Naturally. You even told me you wanted it back. DS Jackman here is a witness to that.”
Winsome looked up from her notebook and smiled at Fanthorpe.
“You just never told me what it was,” Banks said.
“But you think you’ve worked it out for yourself?”
“It wasn’t that difficult.”
“I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong conclusion. If that’s what you found, then I was obviously mistaken, and Jaffar didn’t have what I thought he had. None of that belonged to me.”
“Darren Brody has been working with Ciaran French for a few years now. He knows what Ciaran’s like, has seen him getting progressively more violent and cruel. It’s all right with him when it’s worked as a threat and people talk, then usually go away with only a few cuts and bruises. But this time it got out of hand. Way out of hand. My guess is that Ciaran had built up such a lust for bloodletting that he couldn’t hold it back any longer. Victor Mallory. Rose Preston. Teasers. However it happened, Darren was with him, and Darren couldn’t stop him, but he didn’t like what he saw.”
“Darren’s just trying to save his own skin. They’re both psychos.”
“We’ll leave the question of why you would employ a couple of psychos aside for the moment. Jaffar McCready certainly wasn’t one. He was a greedy, cocksure, ambitious, intelligent young man with a tendency to violence when necessary. He wanted to be a player. He didn’t especially like killing. He wasn’t even particularly good at it. He had so many chips on his shoulder he could have given Harry Ramsden a run for his money. Anyway, the point is that Darren has had enough. He had to watch Justin’s face while Ciaran sliced up Martina Varakova in front of his eyes. I doubt it was a pretty sight. Darren’s a bit tougher than Justin, and he still has his faculties, but a strange thing happened to him that night. They’d found out what they wanted to know, that Justin was meeting Jaffar and Tracy on Hampstead Heath, near the Highgate Ponds, but Ciaran had already gone too far to stop. He couldn’t. Because of that, while Darren was watching him, he was suddenly struck, like Saul on the road to Damascus, with a revelation. He asked himself, Why? Why was he watching this? Why was he participating in this? True, the people Ciaran was hurting were a couple of toerags who didn’t give a damn about people’s lives themselves. But this was too much. How on earth could Darren ever extricate himself from his complicity in Ciaran’s actions, though those actions horrified and disgusted him? And do you know what? He found a way. It’s called cooperating with the police fully in their inquiries. Darren talked, Farmer. In fact he sang like the three tenors all rolled into one. The complete performances. Box set.”
The Farmer had turned pale now and seemed to shrink in his armchair, the whiskey left untouched for several minutes beside him.
“You’ve still got no proof,” he said, rallying. “It’s his word against mine, and who do you think the court will believe? An uneducated thug, or an upstanding pillar of the community?”
“Darren is no more an uneducated thug than you are a pillar of the community,” Banks said. “I reckon he’ll make a very good impression on a jury. Reformed sinner and all that. Atonement. Juries love a good redemption story. He knows where all the bodies are buried, Farmer. He also told us a few places we should be looking if we’re after evidence of some of your shadier dealings and contacts, so we’re executing these warrants simultaneously for this house and your business premises, including the mailboxes on Grand Cayman and Jersey. Winsome?”
Winsome excused herself and went to the front door, where she put her fingers to her lips and whistled loudly. Banks had always wished he could do that. Within a few moments six uniformed officers entered the house and spread out. DS Stefan Novak and DS Jim Hatchley were in charge of the search operation, and Banks said hello to both of them as he and Winsome escorted Fanthorpe, now in handcuffs, out to the car. Eloise was still practicing the adagio to the Moon-light Sonata in the piano room, and Zenovia was screaming and waving her arms at the search team. The other young girl frowned and turned up the volume with the remote as she tried to concentrate on Strictly Come Dancing amid the chaos all around her.
As they walked to the car, Banks looked down the cinder path with the topiary hedges toward the pond and fountain. “A young boy pissing,” he said to The Farmer, shaking his head. “That just about says it all, doesn’t it, Farmer? A young boy pissing.”
BANKS WALKED along the now familiar corridors of Cook Hospital early in the following week, saying hello to a couple of the nurses and general staff he had come to recognize. He had driven straight from Newhope Cottage, and while he was certainly glad to be home in some ways, he couldn’t help dwelling on what had happened there. Superintendent Gervaise had arranged for a cleaning crew after the SOCOs had finished, so he hadn’t had to face any blood, or the mess Tracy had told him about-except for a few damaged CDs and broken jewel cases-but he knew where Annie had been shot, and he couldn’t sit comfortably in the conservatory anymore. Maybe he would get over it. If not, he would have to move. He couldn’t go on living there feeling the way he did. Newhope used to be a joyous place, but since the fire, and now this, Banks was beginning to wonder.
He found Annie propped up on her pillows, fewer tubes than on his last visit, he was certain, and looking a lot better. She was flipping through the pages of one the Sunday newspaper supplements.
“A bit dated, isn’t it?” said Banks, pecking her on the cheek and sitting in the chair beside the bed.
“It’s about all I could scrounge since I’ve been alert enough to read,” Annie said.
“Well, this is your lucky day.” Banks opened the large hold-all he had brought with him and passed over a WH Smith’s bag full of women’s magazines he had seen her reading in the past, along with the latest Kate Mosse and Santa Montefiore paperbacks. “These should keep you busy for a while.”
“Thank you,” Annie said, searching through the bag. “That’s great. I thought I was going to end up being bored to death. It’s still a bit hard, reading with only one hand, though.”
“For when your arm gets tired,” Banks added, reaching into his pocket, “there’s this.”
“But it’s your iPod.”
“I got a new one in San Francisco. This one’s nearly full. I’m sure you’ll find some music you like, there’s quite a
