The closer she got, the more nervous and confused Annie became. She still wasn’t physically afraid of him, but Dalton’s arrival in Eastvale, and the memories it stirred, had played havoc with her usually calm emotional center. For one thing, she didn’t know what to say to him. What did you say to a man who had been a willing accessory to your rape, a man who would have raped you himself if you hadn’t managed to wriggle free from his grasp and escape? How would he react? Perhaps, she began to think, this wasn’t such a good idea after all. It would be easy enough just to turn left at the swing bridge and walk up to Reeth, where her car was parked on the cobbles by the green, and forget the whole thing, get back to work.
But she kept on going.
It was only a small bridge. At that point, the river meandered through meadowland where cows grazed. It was, however, a genuine swing bridge and Annie experienced a frisson of fear as she walked the wooden planks and felt it sway. While not exactly phobic, she had always been a little nervous of bridges, though she didn’t know why.
Dalton had paused by the riverbank at the other side, about a hundred yards or so ahead, and he appeared to be watching her approach. Feeling a little dizzy, Annie stayed on the bridge and pretended to admire the view, waiting for him to carry on. But he didn’t. He stayed where he was and kept on looking at her. Her heart was in her mouth. Did he recognize her? Had he known she was following him all along?
There was only one thing to do if she wasn’t going to run. She walked through the gate at the far end of the bridge and along the grassy path to where he stood. All the way he kept looking at her, but she still didn’t sense any recognition on his part. Her fear was quickly turning into anger. How dare he not recognize her after what he had done? She tried to take long deep breaths to keep herself calm and centered. They helped a little.
Finally, about five or six yards away from Dalton, she stopped and took off her hat, letting her wavy chestnut hair fall free to her shoulders. She saw the recognition now. He hadn’t known who she was before, she could tell, but he did now. She even heard his sharp intake of his breath.
“You,” he said.
“Hello, Wayne,” she said. “Yes, it’s me. Nice to see you again.”
Banks awoke from a disturbing dream at about eight o’clock on Sunday morning. He had been walking in an unfamiliar landscape, which kept switching between rural and urban settings. There was a river somewhere, or perhaps a canal. Whatever it was, there was a sense in the dream that it was never far away. It was always raining and always twilight, no matter where he was or how long he seemed to walk. Other people drifted by like shadows, but nobody he knew. He had the feeling that he was supposed to be following someone, but he didn’t know whom or why.
Suddenly he found himself on a green iron bridge, and a man was walking just in front of him. At that point, Banks felt panic gather, felt as if he couldn’t breathe and wanted to wake up and break out of it. The man turned. He wasn’t a monster, though, just a perfectly ordinary-looking man.
“I know you’ve been looking for me,” he said to Banks, smiling. “My name’s Graham Marshall. I was in the army. Then I had my hair cut. Now I’m in the rain. Emily’s with me, too, but she can’t appear to you right now.” Then he went on to tell a garbled life story of which Banks could remember nothing when he woke in a cold sweat to church bells ringing in the distance.
It was still dark outside, so Banks turned on the bedside light. He was in a small hotel near king’s Cross, not the place he had stayed with Annie and Emily. Somehow, going back there hadn’t seemed like a good idea.
When he had taken stock of himself, he realized with relief that he felt only mildly hung over. That was, he remembered, because he had declined the invitation to repair to Burgess’s flat and drink whiskey all night. Surely he wasn’t getting wiser in his old age? Anyway, he was glad that all they’d done was visit a few pubs and down a few pints. It must have been a dull evening for Burgess, though; they hadn’t got into any fights or picked up any women. Mostly, Burgess had talked about Clough, and Banks got the impression that even if he didn’t manage to pin Emily’s murder on Clough himself, the man’s days of freedom were limited.
The only problem with Clough as a suspect, thought Banks, was that he stood to gain nothing by Emily’s death. Still, there was always the chance that she had stolen from him, as Ruth Walker had suggested, or that she knew too much about his business activities, though Banks thought she would have told him if that were the case. It was also possible that Clough only thought she knew something she didn’t This was assuming, of course, that the whole matter was one of logic and profit. What if it wasn’t? Clough was certainly capable of killing, and if Emily had humiliated him in any way, then he was probably capable of killing her out of sheer malice.
Banks got up and poured himself a glass of water. The dream and the drink had left him with a dry mouth. As he showered in the tiny stall, he put the Graham Marshall dream out of his mind and found himself thinking again of what Ruth had said, how her words had cast suspicion even on Riddle himself, someone Banks had completely over-looked as a suspect.
He found it hard to take it seriously that a man like Jimmy Riddle would deliberately give his daughter cocaine laced with strychnine, even if for some obscure reason he did want her dead. And her death had done nothing to free Riddle of the shame of her exploits; in fact, it had quite the opposite effect, and already the tabloids were raking up stories of the chief constable’s daughter and her wild life. That wouldn’t do his budding political career any good at all, or his standing in the force, either.
Then there was Rosalind Riddle. Banks had had a strange feeling about her right from the start, when Riddle first asked him to go to London and find Emily. Rosalind hadn’t appeared to want Emily back home for some reason. More recently, Rosalind had denied ever hearing of Ruth Walker, yet Ruth said she had spoken to her on the telephone on several occasions. That probably meant nothing, Banks realized, merely a lapse of memory, a misheard name over a poor connection, but Rosalind’s role in all this still nagged away at the back of his mind. She was holding something back; of that he was certain. Whether it was important to the investigation or not, he couldn’t say. All families have secrets that can fester away behind their protective walls.
Banks decided for the moment to concentrate on the line of inquiry he was pursuing in London, where Emily had done most of her drug-taking and mixed with a rough crowd: primarily Clough, of course, who lied about everything; then Ruth Walker, who remained a bit of an enigma to him, yet seemed a woman embittered far beyond her years; and finally Craig Newton, hurt ex-boyfriend-turned-stalker, and onetime amateur porn photographer, whom Banks was going to visit again that day.
After a quick breakfast of coffee and toast and a short walk around St. Pancras Gardens to clear his head, Banks felt ready to face the day. He was only about half a mile away from Euston, so he walked through the quiet streets of Somers Town to Eversholt Street. The train service to Milton Keynes was frequent, even on Sunday, and he only had to wait twenty minutes for an InterCity.
Watching the urban sprawl of London give way to prime commuter territory set amid rolling fields and grazing cows, Banks wrote up his notes on the previous evening’s talk with Barry Clough. Sometimes he took notes at the time, especially of important details, but that hadn’t seemed appropriate standing in the white room with Clough and Burgess. Fortunately, though his memory was average in most respects, he had excellent audio recall and could remember a conversation practically verbatim for at least a couple of days.