He turned up Montague Place between the British Museum and the university and found the street he wanted off Marchmont Street at the other side of Russell Square. He was in the heart of the University of London campus area now, and there was also a healthy sprinkling of hotels for the tourists. The house he wanted was divided into flats, and the names under the brass number plates still listed an L. Silbert in flat 3A. It was a well-appointed building, not dingy student accommodation, as he would have expected for a man in Silbert’s position, with dark thick-pile carpets, flocked wallpaper, framed Constable prints on the landings and a hovering scent of lavender air freshener.
Banks didn’t know what he hoped to find, if anything, after the local police, and probably Special Branch, had turned over the place. He certainly didn’t expect any messages scrawled in invisible ink or written in a fiendish code. He told himself that he was there more to get a feel for Silbert and his London habitat than anything else.
The door opened into a tiny vestibule, hardly bigger than a hall cupboard. There were three doors leading off, and a quick check told him that the one on the left led to a small bedroom, just big enough for a double bed, wardrobe and chest of drawers, the one on the right to a bathroom—new-looking walk-in shower, toilet and pedestal washbasin, toothpaste, shaving cream, Old Spice—and the door straight ahead led to the living room with a tiny kitchenette. At least there was a view of sorts through the small sash window, though the narrow alley it looked out upon wasn’t much, and the buildings opposite blocked out most of the sunlight.
Banks started in the bedroom. The blue-and-white duvet was ruffled and the pillows creased. On impulse, Banks pulled the duvet back. The linen sheets were clean but wrinkled, as if someone had slept on them. More than likely, Mark Hardcastle had spent his night in London here.
There were a few clothes in the wardrobe: sports jackets, suits, shirts, ties, a dinner jacket and trousers, designer jeans creased along the seam. Banks found nothing hidden on the top or at the back of the wardrobe.
A copy of Conrad’s Nostromo lay on the chest of drawers beside the bed, a bookmark sticking out about three quarters of the way through. The top drawer held folded polo shirts and T-shirts. In the middle drawer was an assortment of odds and ends, like his grandmother’s old rummage box, which he used to love to root around in when he visited her. None of it was of much interest: old theater ticket stubs and programs, restaurant and taxi receipts from earlier in the year, a tarnished cigarette lighter that didn’t work, a few cheap ballpoint pens. No diary or journal. No scraps of paper with telephone numbers on them. No business cards. The room had a Spartan feel about it, as if it were somewhere merely functional, a place to sleep. The restaurant receipts also indicated an appetite for fine food: Lindsay House, Arbutus, L’Autre Pied, The Connaught, J. Sheekey and The Ivy. Clearly more Silbert’s than Hardcastle’s tastes. The bottom drawer held only socks and underwear, nothing sinister hidden among them.
The bathroom held no surprises and the living room was every bit as neat and clean as the bedroom. There was a small bookcase, mostly Conrad, Waugh and Camus, mixed in with a few Bernard Cornwells and George MacDonald Frasers and a selection of hardcover biographies and histories, along with the latest Wisden. The small stack of CDs showed a predilection for Bach, Mozart and Haydn and the magazines in the rack dealt mostly with antiques and foreign affairs. In the kitchenette, Banks found an empty Bell’s whiskey bottle and an unwashed glass.
Banks heard a noise outside and stood by the window watching the street cleaners go by at the end of the alley. There was nothing here for him, he decided. Either Silbert had been very careful or someone had already removed anything of interest.
Just before Banks left, he picked up the phone and pressed redial. Nothing happened. He tried again and got the same result. In the end, he concluded that it either wasn’t working properly or had been erased—most likely, he thought, the latter.
Annie took Winsome with her when she went to talk to Nicky Haskell after school that Wednesday afternoon. She felt more than one pair of eyes following them as she drove along the winding main street of the estate past some of the better-kept terrace houses to Metcalfe House. Building permission had been granted for only two tower blocks, despite the bribes and kickbacks to local politicians that were rumored to have exchanged hands. If Eastvale had been within the boundaries of the Yorkshire Dales National Park, there would have been no question of such atrocities going up, even though they were only ten stories high, but it wasn’t. And the maisonettes that surrounded the tower blocks were just as ugly.
The Haskells lived in Metcalfe House, which had one of the worst reputations of any area on the estate, and Nicky Haskell had a reputation for antisocial behavior. He was already on an ASBO, which was more of a badge of honor among his circles than the stigma or hindrance to criminal activity it was supposed to be.
One problem was that often the parents hadn’t been around much while their kids were growing up—not because they went to work, but because they were doing much the same then as their children were doing now. The parents were often products of the Thatcher generation, who had also had no jobs and no hope for the future, a legacy they passed on to their children. Nobody had come along with that magic fix to reverse the damage. Like the homeless, they were far easier to ignore, and the drugs that helped to take the pain away demonized them even more in the eyes of society.
Nicky Haskell’s parents were a good case in point, as Annie well knew. His mother worked on the checkout at the local Asda, and his father, well known to the police, had been on the dole since the day he got thrown out of school for threatening his physics teacher with a knife. The idle days and hours that followed had left him plenty of time to indulge in his favorite pastimes, which included drinking enormous quantities of strong lager, smoking crack cocaine and having the occasional night at the dogs just to get rid of any surplus money he might have left over from his other habits. It was up to his wife to supply food, clothing, rent and utilities on her own meager salary.
It was soon clear that they needn’t have waited for the end of the school day.
“Got a cold, haven’t I?” Nicky said, turning his back after letting them in. His lank greasy hair hung over his collar.
“I don’t know,” said Annie, walking into the living room behind him. “Do you? You sound fine to me.”
Nicky sank back on the battered sofa he had probably been lying on all day, if the empty crisp packets, loud television, overflowing ashtray and can of lager were any indication. The room smelled as if he had been lying in it all day, too. The apple hadn’t fallen too far from the tree in this instance. “My throat hurts,” he said. “And I ache all over.”
“Want me to call a doctor?”
“Nah. Doctors ain’t no use.” He popped a couple of pills and drank Carlsberg Special Brew from the can. The pills could have been paracetamol or codeine for all Annie knew, or cared. Well, she did care, but she wasn’t out to change society single-handedly, or even with Winsome’s help; she was on yet another futile mission for information. Nicky reached for his cigarettes.