Tapping the newspaper against his thigh, Banks crossed the busy road and hurried back home before his bacon and eggs turned cold. The last thing he needed was to upset his mother again this morning.
Despite her late night, Michelle was at her desk long before Detective Superintendent Shaw was likely to see the light of day. If he bothered coming in at all. Maybe he would take another sick day. At any rate, the last thing she wanted was him breathing over her shoulder while Banks was in an interview room looking through the mug shots. There were people around the office, so she and Banks hadn’t had a chance to do much more than say a quick hello before they got down to business. She had given him a choice of the computer version or the plain, old-fashioned photo albums, and he had chosen the albums.
She had felt a little shy when he walked in and could still hardly believe that she had gone ahead and slept with him like that, even though she knew she had wanted to. It wasn’t as if she had been saving herself or anything, or that she was afraid, or had lost interest in sex, only that she had been far too preoccupied by the aftermath of Melissa’s death and the end of her marriage to Ted. You don’t get over something like that overnight.
Still, she was surprised at her newfound boldness and blushed even now as she thought about the way it had made her feel. She didn’t know what Banks’s personal situation was, except that he was going through a divorce. He hadn’t talked about his wife, or his children, if he had any. Michelle found herself curious. She hadn’t told him about Melissa and Ted either, and she didn’t know if she would. Not for a while, anyway. It was just too painful.
The only real drawback was that he was on the Job. But where else was she likely to meet someone? People who form relationships often meet at their places of work. Besides, North Yorkshire was a fair distance from Cambridgeshire, and after they’d got the Graham Marshall case sorted, she doubted they would ever have to work together again. But would they even see each other? That was the question. It was a long way to travel. Or perhaps it was foolish of her even to imagine a relationship, or to want one. Maybe it had just been a one-night stand and Banks already had a lover up in Eastvale.
Putting aside her thoughts, and her memories of the previous night, Michelle got down to work. She had a couple of things to do before Graham Marshall’s funeral service that afternoon, including tracking down Jet Harris’s wife and ringing Dr. Cooper. But before she could pick up the telephone, Dr. Cooper rang her.
“Dr. Cooper. I was going to ring you this morning,” said Michelle. “Any news?”
“Sorry it took me so long to get the information you wanted, but I told you Dr. Hilary Wendell’s a tough man to track down.”
“You’ve got something?”
“Hilary has. He won’t commit himself to this absolutely, so he’d be very unwilling to testify if it ever came to a court case.”
“It probably won’t,” said Michelle, “but the information might be useful to me.”
“Well, from careful measurement of the nick on the underside of the rib, he’s made a few projections and he’s pretty certain it’s a military knife of some kind. His money’s on a Fairbairn-Sykes.”
“What’s that?”
“British commando knife. Introduced in 1940. Seven-inch, double-edged blade. Stiletto point.”
“A commando knife?”
“Yes. Is that of any use?”
“It might be,” said Michelle. “Thanks a lot.”
“You’re welcome.”
“And please thank Dr. Wendell from me.”
“Will do.”
A commando knife. In 1965, the war had only been over for twenty years, and plenty of men in their early forties would have fought in it, and had access to such a knife. What worried Michelle most of all, though, was that the only person she knew had served as a Royal Naval Commando was Jet Harris; she remembered it from the brief biography she had read when she first came to Thorpe Wood. He had also been awarded a Distinguished Conduct Medal.
The thought of it sent shivers up her spine: Jet Harris himself, as killer, misdirecting the investigation at every turn, away from Bradford, perhaps because of Fiorino, as Banks had suggested, and away from himself. This was one theory she certainly couldn’t go to Shaw with, or to anyone else in the division, either. Harris was a local hero and she’d need a hell of a lot of hard evidence if she expected anyone to entertain even the remotest suspicion that Jet Harris was a murderer.
After he’d been in about an hour, Banks poked his head out of the interview room door, no doubt looking to see if Shaw was around, then carried one of the books over to Michelle.
“I think that’s him,” he said.
Michelle looked at the photo. The man was in his late twenties, with medium-length brown hair, badly cut, a stocky build, piggy eyes, and a pug nose. His name was Des Wayman, and according to his record he had been in and out of the courts ever since his days as a juvenile car thief, progressing from that to public disorder offenses and GBH. His most recent incarceration, a lenient nine months, was for receiving stolen goods, and he had been out just over a year and a half.
“What next?” Banks asked.
“I’ll go and have a word with him.”
“Want me to come along?”
“No. I think it would work better if I could question him without you there. After all, it might come to an identity parade. If any charges are brought, I want to make sure this is done right.”
“Fair enough,” said Banks. “But he looks like a tough customer.” He rubbed his jaw. “Feels like one, too.”
Michelle tapped her pen against her lips and looked across the office, where DC Collins sat talking on the phone, shirtsleeves rolled up, scribbling on the pad in front of him. She hadn’t let him in on her suspicions about Shaw yet. Could she trust him? He was almost as new as she was, for a start, and that went in his favor. She had never seen him hanging around with Shaw or with any of the other old brigade, either, another plus. In the end, she decided she had to trust someone, and Collins was it.
“I’ll take DC Collins,” she said, then lowered her voice. “Look, there’s a couple of things I need to talk to you about, but not here.”
“After the funeral this afternoon?”
“Okay,” said Michelle, jotting Des Wayman’s address down in her notebook. “I should know a bit more about Mr. Wayman’s activities by then. Oh, and guess where he lives?”
“Where?”
“The Hazels.”
Annie pored over Luke Armitage’s notebooks and computer files in her office that morning. At least she felt a bit better, despite a poor night’s sleep. Eventually, the painkillers had kicked in and she woke up at half past seven in the morning, not even having got around to putting in the second Doctor Zhivago tape. This morning, though her jaw was still throbbing a bit, it didn’t hurt anywhere near as much as it had.
The one thing that intrigued her about Luke’s jottings was the increasing eroticism mixed in with the vague classical references to Persephone, Psyche and Ophelia. Then she remembered that Ophelia wasn’t a character from classical mythology, but Hamlet’s girlfriend, driven mad by his violent rejection of her. She remembered studying the play at school and finding it rather too long and dense for her taste at the time. She had seen several film versions since then, including one with Mel Gibson as Hamlet and another with Marianne Faithfull as Ophelia, and she remembered from somewhere the image of Ophelia floating down a river surrounded by flowers. Did Luke feel guilty about rejecting someone, then? Had he been killed out of revenge, by “a woman scorned”? And if so, who? Liz Palmer? Lauren Anderson? Rose Barlow?