Next, a hunched figure shrouded in a blanket stumbled down the path, supported on each side by uniformed policemen. At first Maggie had no idea who it was. A woman, she thought, from her general outline and the cut of her dark hair. Then she thought she glimpsed the dark blue uniform. The policewoman. Breath caught in her throat. What could have happened to change her so much so fast?
By now there was far more activity than Maggie had ever thought the scene of a domestic argument could engender. At least half a dozen police cars had arrived, some of them unmarked. A wiry man with closely cropped dark hair got out of a blue Renault and walked into the house as if he owned the place. Another man who went in looked like a doctor. At least he carried a black bag and had that self-important air about him. People up and down The Hill were going to work now, driving their cars out of their garages or waiting for the bus at the temporary bus stop someone from the depot had put up. Little knots of them gathered by the house, watching, but the police came over and moved them on.
Maggie looked at her watch. Half-past six. She had been kneeling at the window for two and a half hours, yet she felt as if she had been watching a quick succession of events, as if it had been done by time-lapse photography. When she got to her feet she heard her knees crack, and the broadloom carpet had made deep red crisscross marks on her skin.
There was far less activity outside the house now, just the police guards and the detectives coming and going, standing on the pavement to smoke, shake their heads and talk in low voices. The knot of haphazardly parked cars outside Lucy’s house caused traffic backups.
Weary and confused, Maggie threw on jeans and a T-shirt and went downstairs to make a cup of tea and some toast. As she filled the kettle, she noticed that her hand was shaking. They would want to talk to her, no doubt about that. And when they did, what would she tell them?
2
Acting Detective Superintendent Alan Banks – “acting” because his immediate boss, Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe, had shattered his ankle while working on his drystone wall and would be off work for at least a couple of months – signed the first officer’s log at the gate, took a deep breath and walked into 35 The Hill shortly after six o’clock that morning. Householders: Lucy Payne, age twenty-two, loan officer at the local NatWest branch up near the shopping precinct, and her husband, Terence Payne, age twenty-eight, schoolteacher at Silverhill Comprehensive. No kids. No criminal record. To all intents and purposes an idyllic, successful young couple. Married just one year.
All the lights were on in the house, and the scene-of-the-crime were already at work, dressed – as Banks was – in the obligatory white sterile overalls, overshoes, gloves and hoods. They looked like some sort of phantom housecleaning crew, Banks thought – dusting, vacuuming, scraping up samples, packaging, labeling.
Banks paused a moment in the hall to get the feel of the place. It seemed an ordinary enough middle-class home. The ribbed coral-pink wallpaper looked new. Carpeted stairs to the right led up to the bedrooms. If anything, the place smelled a bit too much of lemon air freshener. The only thing that seemed out of place was the rust-colored stain on the cream hall carpet. Lucy Payne, currently under observation by both doctors and police in Leeds General Infirmary, just down the corridor from where her husband, Terence Payne, was fighting for his life. Banks hadn’t a lot of sympathy to spare for him; PC Dennis Morrisey had lost his struggle for life far more quickly.
And there was a dead girl in the cellar, too.
Most of this information Banks had got from Detective Chief Inspector Ken Blackstone over his mobile on the way to Leeds, the rest from talking to the paramedics and the ambulance crew outside. The first phone call to his Gratly cottage, the one that woke him from the shallow, troubled and restless sleep that seemed to be his lot these days, had come shortly after half-past four, and he had showered, thrown on some clothes and jumped in his car. A CD of Zelenka Trios had helped him keep calm on the way and discouraged him from taking outrageous risks with his driving on the A1. All in all, the eighty-mile drive had taken him about an hour and a half, and if he hadn’t had too many other things on his mind, during the first part of his journey he might have admired the coming of a beautiful May dawn over the Yorkshire Dales, rare enough so far that spring. As it was, he saw little but the road ahead and barely even heard the music. By the time he got to the Leeds Ring Road, the Monday-morning rush hour was already under way.
Circumventing the bloodstains and daffodils on the hall carpet, Banks walked to the back of the house. He noticed someone had been sick in the kitchen sink.
“One of the ambulance crew,” said the SOCO busy going through the drawers and cupboards. “First time out, poor sod. We’re lucky he made it back up here and didn’t puke all over the scene.”
“Christ, what did he have for breakfast?”
“Looks like Thai red curry and chips to me.”
Banks took the stairs down to the cellar. On his way, he noted the door to the garage. Very handy if you wanted to bring someone into the house without being seen, someone you had abducted, perhaps drugged or knocked unconscious. Banks opened the door and had a quick glance at the car. It was a dark four-door Vectra, with an “S” registration. The last three letters were NGV. Not local. He made a note to have someone run it through the DVLA at Swansea.
He could hear voices down in the cellar, see cameras flashing. That would be Luke Selkirk, their hotshot crime scene photographer, fresh from his army-sponsored training course up at Catterick Camp, where he had been learning how to photograph scenes of terrorist bombings. Not that his special skill would be needed today, but it was good to know you were working with a highly trained professional, one of the best.
The stone steps were worn in places; the walls were whitewashed brick. Someone had put more white and blue tape across the open door at the bottom. An inner crime scene. Nobody would get beyond that until Banks, Luke, the doctor and the SOCOs had done their jobs.
Banks paused at the threshold and sniffed. The smell was bad: decomposition, mold, incense, and the sweet, metallic whiff of fresh blood. He ducked under the tape and walked inside and the horror of the scene hit him with such force that he staggered back a couple of inches.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t seen worse; he had. Much worse: the disemboweled Soho prostitute, Dawn Whadden; a decapitated petty thief called William Grant; the partly eaten body parts of a young barmaid called Colleen Dickens; bodies shredded by shotgun blasts and slit open by knives. He remembered all their names. But that wasn’t the point, he had come to learn over the years. It wasn’t a matter of blood and guts, of intestines poking out of the stomach, of missing limbs or of deep gashes flapping open in an obscene parody of mouths. That wasn’t what really got you when it came right down to it. That was just the outward aspect. You could, if you tried hard, convince yourself that a crime scene like this one was a movie set or a theater during rehearsals, and that the bodies were merely props, the blood fake.
No, what got to him most of all was the pity of it all, the deep empathy he had come to feel with the victims of crimes he investigated. And he hadn’t become more callous, more inured to it all over the years, as many did, and as he had once thought he would. Each new one was like a raw wound reopening. Especially something like this. He could keep it all in check, keep the bile down in his rumbling gut and do his job, but it ate away at him from the inside like acid and kept him awake at night. Pain and fear and despair permeated these walls like the factory grime had crusted the old city buildings. Only this kind of horror couldn’t be sandblasted away.