“Is that a threat?”
“Don’t be absurd. Look, Annie, sit down. Please.”
Annie held out for a while, glaring, then she sat.
“Can’t you see I’m trying to help you out here?” said Banks. “If there’s a problem, something personal, something to do with your family, I don’t know, then maybe we can work it out. I’m not here to supervise you twenty-four hours a day.”
“You could have fooled me.”
“But I need to be able to trust you, to leave you alone to get on with the job.”
“Then why don’t you?”
“Because I don’t think that’s what you’ve been doing.”
“I trusted you, and look what I found out.”
Banks sighed. “I’ve explained that.”
“And I’ve explained what I was doing.”
“Not to my satisfaction, you haven’t, and I don’t have to remind you that I’m SIO on this one. It’s my head on the block. So if there’s a problem, if it’s something I can help you with, then spit it out, tell me what it is, and I will. No matter what you believe, I’m not after doing you any harm because of what did or didn’t happen between us. Not everything is as personal as you think it is. Credit me with a bit more professionalism than that.”
“Professionalism? Is that what this is all about?”
“Annie, there’s something wrong. Let me help you.”
She gave a sharp jerk of her head and got to her feet again. “No.”
At that moment, DI Dalton popped his head around the door.
“What is it?” Banks asked, annoyed at the interruption. Dalton looked at Banks, then at Annie, and an expression of panic crossed his features.
“What is it, DI Dalton?”
Dalton looked at them both again and seemed to compose himself. “I thought you might like to know that the van driver died early this morning. Jonathan Fearn. Never regained consciousness.”
“Shit,” said Banks, tapping his pen on the desk. “Okay, Wayne, thanks for letting me know.”
Dalton glanced at his watch. “I’ll be off back to Newcastle now.”
“Keep in touch.”
“Will do.”
Dalton and Annie looked at one another for a split second before he left, and Banks saw right away that there was something between them, some spark, some secret. It hit him smack in the middle of the chest like a hammer blow. Dalton? So that was what she had been up to. It fit; her odd behavior coincided exactly with his arrival in Eastvale. Annie and Dalton had something going. Banks felt icy worms wriggle their way up inside his spine.
Annie stood for a few seconds, her eyes bright, glaring at Banks defiantly, then, with an expression of disgust, she turned on her heels, strode out of his office and slammed the door so hard that his filing cabinet rattled.
Sometimes trying to get a lead was like drawing teeth, Annie reflected. The bus driver had been easy enough to find – in fact, he had been eating a late breakfast in the station café before his first scheduled trip of the day – but he had been no help at all. All he’d been able to tell her was that he remembered Emily getting off at the roundabout, but there had been far too much traffic to deal with for him to notice anything more. The bus had been mostly empty, and he didn’t know who any of the other passengers were. He could, however, state with some certainty that Emily was the only person to get off at that stop.
Disappointed, Annie headed for the Jolly Roger, still fuming from her run-in with Banks. After her confrontation with Dalton, she had actually felt better, more confident, ready to get on with the job without distractions. She might even have told Banks why she had been distracted in the first place if he hadn’t taken such a high-handed attitude.
The bloody nerve of him, having her on the carpet like that. He knew she hated that sort of thing. Annie had never been able to handle authority well, which can be something of a liability in the police force, but most of the time she could pay lip service when required. Not with Banks, though. This time, he had hit her where it really hurt: her professionalism. And the fact that he was partly right hurt even more. She would show him, though. She wasn’t going to wallow in self-pity; she was going to get back on the damn horse and ride again.
Annie paused briefly at the market square to watch the awestruck expressions on the children’s faces as they gathered around the Christmas tree. It took her back to her own childhood in St. Ives. There had been few, if any, practicing Christians down at the commune where she had grown up. Most of the people who passed through had no religion at all, other than ART, and those who had tended toward the more esoteric kinds, such as Zen Buddhism and Taoism, the ones without God, where you could ponder the meaning of nothingness and the sound of one hand clapping. Annie herself, with her meditation and yoga, came closer to Buddhism than anything else, though she never professed to be a Buddhist. She wasn’t detached enough, for a start; she knew that desire caused suffering, but still she desired.
Christian or not, every Christmas had been a festive time for Annie and the other kids there. There were always some other children around, though most of them never stayed long, and she got used to her friends’ moving away, being dependent on herself, not on others. But at Christmas, someone always came up with a tree, and someone else scrounged around for some tinsel and decorations, and Annie always got Christmas presents from whoever was living there at the time, even if many of them were just sketches and small hand-carved sculptures; she still had most of them, and some were worth a bit now – not that she would ever sell them. Christmas was as much a tradition at the commune as anywhere else, and it always brought back memories of her mother. She still had a photograph of her mother holding her up to look closely at the tree decorations. She must have been two or three years old, and though she couldn’t remember the moment itself, the photograph always brought back waves of nostalgia and loss.
Shrugging off the past, she walked on to the Jolly Roger.
Eastvale didn’t have a large student population, and the college itself was an ugly mess of red brick and concrete boxes on the southern fringes of the town, surrounded by marshland and a couple of industrial estates. Nobody wanted to live out there, even if there had been anywhere to live. Most of the students lived closer to the town center, and there were enough of them to turn at least one pub into the typical student hangout, and “the Roger,” as they called it, was the one.
On first impression, Annie thought, the Jolly Roger was no different from any other Victorian-style pub on Market Street, but when she looked around inside, she noticed it was more run-down, and there was an odd selection of music on the jukebox, including far more angry, alternative stuff than pleasant pop and big-name bands. The clientele at that time in the afternoon consisted mostly of students who had finished early or had been there since lunchtime. They sat in small groups, smoking, chatting and drinking. Some favored the scruffy, Marxist look of old, while others cultivated a more clean-cut Tony Blair style, but they all seemed to mix cheerfully together. One or two loners in thick glasses sat at tables reading as they slowly sipped their pints.
Annie went to the bar and pulled out the fuzzy image taken from the CCTV video.
“I’ve been told you might know this couple,” she said to the young man behind the bar, who looked like a student himself. “One of our lads had a word yesterday.”
“Not me, love,” he said. “I wasn’t on yesterday. That’ll be Kath over there.” He pointed to a petite blonde busy pulling a pint and chatting to another girl across the bar. Annie walked over and showed her the photo.
“Any more thoughts on who this might be?” she asked, after introducing herself.