Logs crackled and spit out sparks from the large stone hearth. The music was coming from an expensive stereo set up at the far end of the room. Now he was closer to the source, Banks realized he did recognize it; it was an old Joy Division album. “Heart and Soul” was playing.
He heard voices upstairs, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. At one point, a woman’s voice raised almost to the point where he could hear the defiance in her tone, then, at a barked order from the man, it stopped. A few seconds later, the door opened and in she walked. He hadn’t heard her come down the stairs, and nor did he hear her float across the Turkish carpet.
Craig Newton was right. Talk about a mix of innocence and experience. She could have been sixteen, which she was, but she could have been twenty-six just as easily, and in some ways she reminded Banks even more of her mother in the flesh than in the photographs he had seen: blue eyes, cherry lips. What he hadn’t been able to tell from those photos, though, was that she had a smattering of freckles across her small nose and high cheekbones, and that her eyes were a much paler blue than Rosalind’s. The Florida sun didn’t seem to have done much for her skin, which was as pale as her mother’s. Perhaps she had stayed indoors or walked around under a parasol like a Southern belle.
Rosalind was a little shorter and fuller-figured than her daughter, and of course her hairstyle was different. Emily had a ragged fringe, and her fine, natural-blond hair fell straight to her shoulders and brushed against them as she moved. Tall and long-legged, she also had that anorexic, thoroughbred look of a professional model. Heroin-chic. She was wearing denim capris that came halfway up her calves, and a loose cable-knit sweater. She walked barefoot, he noticed, showing off her shapely ankles and slim feet, the toenails painted crimson. For some reason, Coleridge’s line from “Christabel” flashed through Banks’s mind: “…her blue-veined feet unsandalled were.” It had always seemed an improbably erotic image to him, ever since he first came across the poem at school, and now he knew why.
Though Emily walked with style and self-possession, there was a list to her progress, and when he looked closely, Banks noticed a few tiny grains of white powder in the soft indentation between her nose and her upper lip. Even as he looked, her pointed pink tongue slipped out of her mouth and swept it away. She smiled at him. Her eyes were slightly unfocused and the pupils dilated, little random chips of light dancing in them like feldspar catching the sun.
“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” she said, stretching out her hand to him. It came at the end of an impossibly long arm. Banks stood up and shook. Her cool, soft fingers grasped his loosely for a second, then disengaged. He introduced himself. Emily sat in an armchair by the fire, legs curled under her, and toyed with a loose thread at the end of one sleeve.
“So you’re Banks?” she said. “I’ve heard of you. Detective Chief Inspector Banks. Am I right?”
“You’re right. All good, I hope?”
She smiled. “Intriguing, at least.” Then her expression turned to one of boredom. “What does Daddy want after all this time? Oh, Christ, what is this dreadfully dull music? Sometimes Barry plays the most depressing things.”
“Joy Division,” said Banks. “He committed suicide. The lead singer.”
“I’m not bloody surprised. I’d commit suicide if I sounded like him.” She got up, shut off the CD and replaced it with Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill. Alanis sang about all she really wanted. She didn’t sound a lot more cheerful than Joy Division, Banks thought, but the music was more upbeat, more modern. “He’s still an old punk at heart, is Barry. Did you know he used to be a roadie for a punk band?”
“What does he do now?” Banks asked casually.
“He’s a businessman. Bit of this, bit of that. You know the sort of thing.” She laughed. It sounded like a crystal glass shattering. “Come to think of it, I don’t really know what he does. He’s away a lot. He doesn’t talk about it much.” She put a finger to her lips. “It’s all terribly hush-hush.”
I’ll bet it is, thought Banks. As she had been speaking, he found himself trying to place her accent. He couldn’t. Riddle had probably moved counties more times than he’d had hot dinners to make chief constable by his mid-forties, so Emily had ended up with a kind of characterless, nowhere accent, not especially posh, but certainly without any of the rough edges a regional bias gives. Banks knew that his own accent was hard to place, too, as he had grown up in Peterborough, lived in London for over twenty years and in North Yorkshire for about seven.
As Emily talked now, she walked around the room touching objects, occasionally picking up an ornament, such as a heavy glass paperweight with a rose design trapped inside, and putting it back, or moving it somewhere else. She ended up standing by the fireplace, elbow leaning on the mantelpiece, fist to her cheek, one hip cocked. “Did you tell me what you’d come for?” she asked. “I don’t remember.”
“You haven’t given me a chance yet.”
She put her hand to her mouth and stifled a giggle. “Ooh, I’m sorry. That’s me, that is. Talk, talk, talk.”
Banks saw an ashtray on the table with a couple of butts crushed out in it. He reached for his cigarettes, offered Emily one, which she took, and lit one for himself. Then he leaned forward a little in his armchair and said, “I was talking to your father a couple of days ago, Emily. He’s worried about you. He wants you to get in touch with him.”
“My name’s Louisa. And I’m not going home.”
“Nobody said you were. But it wouldn’t do you any harm to get in touch with him and let him know how you’re doing, where you are, would it?”
“He’d only get angry.” She pouted, then moved away from the fireplace. “How did you find me? I didn’t tell anyone where I’m from. I didn’t even use my real name.”
“I know,” said Banks. “But, really: Louisa Gamine. You’re a clever girl, you’ve had an expensive education. It took me a little while to work it out, but I got there in the end. Gamine means a girl with mischievous charm, but ‘gamine’ is an anagram of ‘enigma,’ which means puzzle, or, in this case, Riddle. Your father said you were very good with language.”
She clapped her hands together. “Clever man. You got it. What a brilliant detective. But that still doesn’t answer my question.”
“Your little brother saw your photo on the Internet.”
Emily’s jaw dropped and she fell back onto the chair. It was hard to tell, but Banks thought her reaction was genuine. “Ben? Ben saw that?”
Banks nodded.
“Oh, shit.” She flicked her half-smoked cigarette into the fire. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“I don’t imagine it was.”
“And he told Mum?”
“That’s right.”
“She’d never have told Dad. Not in a million years. She knows what he’s like as well as I do.”
“I don’t know how he found out,” said Banks, “but he did.”
Emily laughed. “I’d love to have seen his face.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“And he sent you to look for me?”
“That’s about it.”
“Why?”