Besides, Banks thought, opening the window a few inches and lighting a cigarette, he couldn’t desert Emily now. He was responsible for what happened to her, at least in part. There was no escaping that. If he hadn’t gone down to London and stirred things up with Clough, then it was unlikely that she would have come back home and ended up dead in a crummy Eastvale nightclub. She had gone the way of Graham Marshall, of Jem and of Phil Simpkins, and he couldn’t, wouldn’t, just let it go; he had to do something.
“Let it roll, Ned,” said Banks. He was in the CCTV viewing room downstairs along with DCs Winsome Jackman and Kevin Templeton, Annie Cabbot and their civilian video technician, Ned Parker.
The screen showed the market square from the police station, including the edge of the Queen’s Arms to the right, the church front to the left and all the shops, pubs and offices directly opposite, including the entrance to the Bar None. The picture was a grainy black and white, with a slight fish-eye effect, and the glare of the Christmas lights caused one or two problems with the contrast, but it was still possible to make out figures coming and going. Whether they would be able to identify someone coming out of the Bar None from this tape alone, Banks was doubtful.
The time appeared in an on-screen display at the bottom right-hand side, and, starting at 10:00, Parker advanced it quickly so that the people crossing the market square looked like extras in a Keystone Cops chase. Somewhere around twenty-five past, Banks noticed a group of people enter the screen from the right, the exit of the Queen’s Arms, and told Parker to slow down to normal speed. He then watched Emily walk across the market square. She seemed a little unsteady on the cobbles as she crossed the square, which didn’t surprise him considering the platform heels she was wearing and the amount she had had to drink that day.
When she got to the market cross, she turned to face the police station and did a little dance, and when she finished, she bowed with a flourish to the camera, but before walking away she gave it the finger, just one, in the American style, then she turned and swung her hips exaggeratedly as she walked on to the nightclub. The others laughed. Banks himself smiled as he watched her, almost forgetting for a moment that this was a little cheeky gesture that would never be repeated.
Banks watched them enter the club and asked Parker to keep it running at normal speed as he watched others follow. As far as he could make out, there was no suspicious activity in the market square. No little packages of white powder exchanging hands. As he watched, he realized how much he wanted to be watching what was happening inside the club, but there were no cameras there.
At 10:47, two people walked out of the club and headed down York Road. Banks couldn’t make out their features, but it looked like a boy in jeans and a short leather jacket and a girl in a long overcoat and a floppy hat. He asked Parker to freeze the frame, but it didn’t help much.
After that, another three couples went in, but no one came out. When DC Rickerd and Inspector Jessup entered the frame, Banks told Parker to turn the machine off.
It was beginning to look very much as if Emily had scored her coke long before she went to the Bar None, as Banks had guessed, and that would make it all the more difficult to find out who had supplied her with the lethal concoction.
“Okay,” Banks said, standing up and stretching. “That’s all your entertainment for today. Winsome, bring in Darren Hirst, would you? Maybe he can help us with the two who left.”
“Friendly, sir?”
“Friendly. He’s not a suspect, just helping us with our inquiries.”
Winsome smiled at the hackneyed phrase. “Will do, sir.”
“Kevin, I’d like you to work with Ned here and see if you can pull a decent image of those two who left. Something we can show around.”
“Okay, Guv.”
“And, Kevin?”
“Guv?”
“Please don’t call me ‘Guv.’ It makes me feel as if I’m on television.”
Templeton grinned. “Right you are, sir.”
Then Banks looked at his watch and turned to Annie. “We’d better go,” he said. “We’ve got an appointment with Dr. Glendenning in a few minutes.”
Banks drove out to the Old Mill after Emily Riddle’s postmortem, Fauré’s Requiem playing on the stereo. He still felt angry and nauseated at what he had just seen. It wasn’t the first young girl he had watched Dr. Glendenning open up on the slab, but it was the first whose vitality he had known, whose fears and dreams had been shared with him, and watching Dr. Glendenning calmly bisecting the black spider tattoo with his scalpel as he made his “Y” incision had almost sent Banks the way Annie went down in Market Harborough. Annie had been fine this time, though. Quiet and tense, but fine, even when the saw ripped into the bone of Emily’s skull.
Dr. Glendenning had confirmed Dr. Burns’s original determination that strychnine, mixed in a high ratio with pharmaceutical cocaine, had caused Emily’s death. Glendenning had performed the simple toxicology test for strychnine himself, dissolving some of the suspect crystals in sulfuric acid and touching the edge of the solution with a crystal of potassium chromate. It turned purple, then crimson, then all color faded. Proof positive. Further tox tests would be done at Wetherby, but for now, this was enough. So far, all the media knew was that she had died of a suspected drug overdose, but it wouldn’t be long before some bright spark of a reporter sniffed out the truth. Sometimes the press seemed even more resourceful than the police.
As it turned out, Emily’s neck wasn’t broken; she had died of asphyxiation. Other than the fact that she was dead, Glendenning had also told Banks, she was in extremely good health. The drugs and drink and cigarettes clearly hadn’t had time to take their toll on her.
The Old Mill stood at the end of a cul-de-sac, like Banks’s more humble abode, so the uniformed officers on guard could stand well over a hundred yards away, where it turned off from the main road, and keep reporters away without even being seen by the Riddles. Banks showed his warrant card and the officer on duty waved him through. Rosalind answered the door and led him through to the same room where he had given Riddle the news. She was dressed in black and her eyes looked dark with lack of sleep. Banks guessed that Riddle must have awoken her as soon as he had left last night. They wouldn’t have had any sleep since then.
“Banks.” Riddle got slowly to his feet when Banks entered the room. He was dressed in the same clothes he had been wearing last night, a little more the worse for wear. He looked haggard, and there was a listlessness and a defeated air about his movements that Banks had never seen him exhibit before. He had always been energetic and abrupt. Perhaps he had taken a tranquilizer, or perhaps this was the toll that recent events had taken on his system. Whichever it was, the man looked as if he could use a doctor as well as a good night’s sleep. “Any news?” he asked, without much hope in his voice.
“Nothing yet, I’m afraid.” Banks didn’t want to mention the postmortem, though he knew Riddle would be aware that it had been conducted. He only hoped the CC had enough common sense not to bring something like that up in front of his wife.