“No! I mean, I liked her, yes. But I wasn’t trying it on, honest. I wasn’t trying to force her or anything like that.”
“What happened, Mick?” Banks asked.
“Ian said why don’t we take a car and do some E and smoke a couple of spliffs and maybe drive up to Darlington and go clubbing.”
“What about Leanne’s curfew?”
“She said fuck the curfew, it sounded like a great idea to her. Like I said, she was a bit wild that night. She’d had a couple of drinks. Not a lot, like, just a couple, but she didn’t usually drink, and it was just enough to loosen her up a bit. She just wanted to have some fun.”
“And you thought you might get lucky?”
Again, Winsome’s interjection seemed to confuse Blair. “No. Yes. I mean, if she was willing. Okay, I fancied her. I thought, maybe… you know… she seemed different, more devil-may-care.”
“And you thought the drugs would make her even more willing?”
“No. I don’t know.” He looked at Banks in annoyance. “Look, do you want me to go on with this or not?”
“Go on.” Banks gave Winsome the signal to keep out of it for the time being. He could imagine the scenario easily enough: Leanne a little drunk, giggly, flirting with Blair a bit, as Shannon the barmaid had said, then Ian Scott offering Ecstasy in the car, maybe Leanne unsure about it, but Blair encouraging her, egging her on, hoping all the time to get her into bed. But all that was something they could deal with later on, if necessary, when they had established the circumstances of Leanne’s disappearance.
“Ian stole the car,” Blair went on. “I don’t know anything about stealing cars, but he said he learned when he was a kid growing up on the East Side Estate.”
Banks knew all too well that stealing cars was one of the essential skills for kids growing up on the East Side Estate. “Where did you go?”
“North. Like I said, we were going to Darlington. Ian knows the club scene up there. Soon as we set off, Ian handed out the E and we all gobbled it up. Then Sarah rolled a spliff and we smoked that.”
Banks noticed that it was always someone else committing the illegal act, never Blair, but he filed that away for later. “Had Leanne taken Ecstasy or smoked marijuana before?” he asked.
“Not to my knowledge. She always seemed a bit straitlaced to me.”
“But not that night?”
“No.”
“Okay. Go on. What happened?”
Mick looked down at the table and Banks could tell he was coming to the hard part. “We hadn’t got far out of Eastvale – maybe half an hour or so – when Leanne said she felt sick and she could feel her heart was beating way too fast. She was having trouble breathing. She used that inhaler thing she carried with her, but it didn’t do any good. Made her worse, if you ask me. Anyway, Ian thought she was just panicking or hallucinating or something, so first he opened the car windows. It didn’t do any good, though. Soon she was shaking and sweating. I mean, she was really scared. Me, too.”
“What did you do?”
“We were in the country by then, up on the moors above Lyndgarth, so Ian pulled off the road and stopped. We all got out and walked out on the moor. Ian thought the open spaces would be good for Leanne, a breath of fresh air, that maybe she was just getting claustrophobic in the car.”
“Did it help?”
Mick turned pale. “No. Soon as we got out she was sick. I mean really sick. Then she collapsed. She couldn’t breathe, and she seemed to be choking.”
“Did you know she was asthmatic?”
“Like I said, I saw her use the inhaler in the car when she first started feeling weird.”
“And it didn’t enter your mind that Ecstasy might be dangerous for an asthma sufferer, or that it might cause a bad reaction with the inhalant?”
“How could I know? I’m not a doctor.”
“No. But you do take Ecstasy – I doubt this was your first time – and you must have been aware of some of the adverse publicity. The Leah Betts story, for example, the girl who died about five years ago? A few others since.”
“I heard about them, yes, but I thought you just had to be careful about your body temperature when you were dancing. You know, like, drink plenty of water and be careful you don’t dehydrate.”
“That’s only one of the dangers. Did you give her the inhaler again when she became worse out on the moor?”
“We couldn’t find it. It must have been back in the car, in her bag. Besides, it had only made her worse.”
Banks remembered viewing the contents of Leanne’s shoulder bag and seeing the inhaler there among her personal items, doubting that she would have run away without it.
“Didn’t it also cross your mind that she might have been choking on her own vomit?” he went on.
“I don’t know, I never really…”
“What did you do?”
“That’s just it. We didn’t know what to do. We just tried to give her some breathing space, some air, you know, but all of a sudden she sort of twitched, and after that she didn’t move at all.”
Banks let the silence stretch for a few moments, conscious only of their breathing and the soft electric hum of the tape machines.
“Why didn’t you take her to the hospital?” he asked.
“It was too late! I told you. She was dead.”
“You were certain of that?”
“Yes. We checked her pulse, felt for a heartbeat, tried to see if she was breathing, but there was nothing. She was dead. It all happened so quickly. I mean, we were feeling the E, too, we were panicking a bit, not thinking clearly.”
Banks knew of at least three other recent Ecstasy-related deaths in the region, so Blair’s account didn’t surprise him too much. MDMA, short for methylenedioxymethamphetamine, was a popular drug with young people because it was cheap and kept you going all night at raves and clubs. It was believed to be safe, though Mick was right that you had to be careful about your water intake and body temperature, but it could also be particularly dangerous to people suffering from high blood pressure or asthma, like Leanne.
“Why didn’t you take her to a hospital when you were all still in the car?”
“Ian said she’d be okay if we just got out and walked around for a while. He said he’d seen that kind of reaction before.”
“What did you do then, after you discovered she was dead?”
“Ian said we couldn’t tell anyone what had happened, that we’d all go to jail.”
“So what did you do?”
“We carried her further out on the moor and buried her. I mean, there was a sort of sinkhole, not very deep, by a bit of broken-down drystone wall, so we put her in there and we covered her up with stones and bracken. Nobody could find her unless they were really looking, and there weren’t any public footpaths nearby. Even the animals couldn’t get to her. It was so desolate, the middle of nowhere.”
“And then?”
“Then we drove back to Eastvale. We were all badly shaken up, but Ian said we ought to be seen about the place, you know, acting natural, as if things were normal.”
“And Leanne’s shoulder bag?”
“That was Ian’s idea. I mean, we’d all decided by then that we’d just say she left us outside the pub and set off home and that was the last we saw of her. I found her bag on the backseat of the car, and Ian said maybe if we dumped it in someone’s garden near the Old Ship, the police would think she’d been picked up by a pervert or something.”
And indeed we did, thought Banks. One simple, spur-of-the-moment action, added to two other missing girls whose bags had also been found close to the scenes of their disappearances, and the entire Chameleon task force had been created. But not in time to save Melissa Horrocks or Kimberley Myers. He felt sick and angry.
There was mile after mile of moorland up beyond Lyndgarth, Banks knew, none of it farmed. Blair was right about the isolation, too. Only the occasional rambler crossed it, and then usually by the well-marked paths. “Can you remember where you buried her?” he asked.