“You, too.”
Banks put the phone down slowly. Clough dead. He could only feel a sense of relief that something had finally gone wrong for the bastard. For a while, Clough had seemed able to get away with anything and everything and thumb his nose at the rest of the world while he was doing it. No more. It probably wasn’t very Christian to celebrate another man’s death, especially on Christmas Day, but Banks would have been a hypocrite if he hadn’t admitted to himself that he was glad Clough wouldn’t be around to wreak his peculiar brand of havoc on the world anymore.
He also imagined the pain and confusion that must have driven Amanda Khan to such an extreme act, how those six shots had probably destroyed her life, too: her future, her career. But if any death was worth celebrating, it was Barry Clough’s.
Banks stubbed out the half cigarette that remained, then went back into the kitchen and washed his hands before he started working the sausage meat into the sage-and-onion mixture. He looked at the chicken, not entirely certain which end was which.
Rubén González’s delicate, joyous piano playing on “Pueblos Nuevo” drifted through from the living room. A little sunlight spilled over the long anvil-shaped top of Low Fell into the kitchen and glinted on the copper bottoms of the pans hanging from the wall. Banks heard stirrings from upstairs, old floorboards creaking. Probably Tracy. Brian liked to sleep all morning.
Banks remembered how, when they were kids, they got up before dawn to open their presents. Once, as he had been creeping around their rooms at one o’clock in the morning filling pillowcases with presents, he was certain he had felt Brian’s eyes on him, awake to see if there really was a Santa Claus. Neither of them had ever referred to the incident, and Brian had acted as he always did when he opened his presents, but Banks suspected that from that Christmas on, his son had lost a little of his innocence.
That was probably how it happened, he mused – innocence was something you lost a bit at a time, over the years; it didn’t just happen overnight. But there were intense experiences, epiphanies of a kind, that brought about quantum leaps.
Banks remembered standing by the riverbank that day, rain pitting the water, smiling like an idiot, being polite, clutching the big stone to his chest so as not to wet the gentleman passing by. Then the struggle, the hot beery breath, his heels slipping on the muddy bank, the terror, the punch. The world had changed for him that day, and even now he could still taste the dirty, sweaty cloth of the man’s sleeve as he leaned against the kitchen counter.
He thought of Emily Riddle, of Rosalind, of Ruth Walker and Amanda Khan. When he heard Tracy’s footsteps on the staircase, he had a sudden image of Dr. Glendenning’s scalpel bisecting the spider tattoo on Emily’s midriff, and he realized with a shock that the loss of innocence never stopped happening, that he was still losing it, that it was like a wound that never healed, and he would probably go on losing it, drop by drop, until the day he died.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, many thanks to those who read and commented on the manuscript throughout its development: my wife and first reader, Sheila Halladay; my agent, Dominick Abel; my editor, Patricia Lande Grader; and my copyeditor, Erika Schmid. Also, many thanks to Robert Barnard for reading the finished manuscript and providing valuable comments.
While I frequently tweak police procedure for dramatic purposes, any accuracy I may demonstrate in the matter is owing entirely to my conversations with Area Commander Phil Gormley, Detective Inspector Alan Young and Detective Inspector Claire Stevens, all of Thames Valley Police, and Detective Sergeant Keith Wright, of Nottingham C.I.D. Any mistakes are my own.
About the Author
PETER ROBINSON’S award-winning novels have been named a Best-Book-of-the-Year by Publishers Weekly, a Notable Book by the New York Times, and a Page-Turner-of-the-Week by People magazine. Robinson was born and brought up in Yorkshire, England, but has lived in North America for nearly twenty-five years.
