He must also have known that he was hiding the truth from Annie, though, or he would have told her about that night before, when he came clean about going to London to find Emily and having lunch with her the day she died. Annie remembered asking him then if that was all he had to tell, and he had said yes. That made him a liar.
So what to do about it? That was the question she agonized over. The way she saw it, she had two choices. She could, of course, simply do nothing, just put in for a transfer and leave the whole mess behind. That had its appeal, certainly, but it left too much up in the air. She had hidden from unpleasant things and turned her back for far too long. Now that her career had actually come to mean something to her again after the years of apathetic exile in Harkside, where she had conned herself into thinking everything was well with the world, Annie wanted to set things on the right track. And just how would an abrupt transfer look, with her inspector’s boards coming up so soon?
On the other hand, she could confront Banks and find out what he had to say for himself. Maybe she should give him the benefit of the doubt, innocent until proven guilty and all that. After all, it wasn’t as if she didn’t still have feelings for the bastard.
But she already knew he wasn’t innocent, that it was simply a matter of what he was guilty of. How much might a run-in with Banks upset her chances of making inspector? She didn’t think he was vindictive, didn’t think he would deliberately stand in her way, but everything has fallout, especially given the history Banks and Annie had between them.
Giving up on the television, Annie did what she usually did when she felt agitated and unable to find her calm center; she flung on her fleece-lined jacket and went for a drive. It didn’t matter where.
It had turned into a cold night, and she got the heater going full-blast. Even so, the car took a while to warm up. The mist was crystallizing on the bare trees, sparkling as her headlights flicked across branches and twigs on her way out of Harkside. Ice-crusted puddles crackled under her wheels.
She crossed the narrow bridge over the River Rowan between the Harksmere and Linwood reservoirs. Harksmere stretched, cold and dark, to the west, and beyond it lay Thornfield Reservoir, where the remains of Hobb’s End had once more been covered with water. That was where she had first met Banks, she remembered, toward the end of the hottest, driest summer in years. He had come scrambling down the steep rim looking like a sightseer, and she had stopped him at the bridge. She had been wearing her red wellies and must have looked a sight.
He still didn’t know this, but Annie had known who he was the minute she saw him – she had been expecting him – but she wanted a little fun first, so she had challenged him on the packhorse bridge. She had liked his manner. He hadn’t been stuffy or officious with her; he had simply made some reference to Robin Hood and Little John. After that, Annie had to admit that she hadn’t resisted him very hard.
And now he was her senior officer, and he had been keeping things from her.
Past the old air base, Annie took the left fork and headed for the open moorland that stretched for miles on the tops between there and Swainsdale. Up on the unfenced road, the full moon came out from behind the thinning cloud cover, and she could see that the ground all around her was white with rime-frost. It had an eerie beauty that suited her mood well. She could drive for hours through this lunar landscape and her mind would empty of all her problems. She would become nothing but the driver floating through space – the wheel, the car merely extensions of her being, as if she were traveling the astral plane.
Except that Annie knew now where she was going, knew that the road she was on was the one that led over the moors and down through the village of Gratly, where Banks lived.
And she knew that when she got to his drive she would turn into it.
Banks refilled the wineglasses and sat down again. “Go on,” he said.
Rosalind smiled. “You might find this hard to believe,” she began, “but I haven’t always been the dull, decent wife of the dull, decent chief constable.”
Banks was startled by her smile. It had so much of Emily in it, that hint of mischief, of Just watch me. “That sounds like the beginning of a story,” he said.
“It is.”
“I’m all ears.”
“First, we have to go back a while. Believe it or not, my father was a vicar. He’s retired now, of course. I grew up in the vicarage in a small village in Kent, an only child, and my childhood was relatively uneventful. I don’t mean that it was bad in any way. I did all the normal things kids do. I was happy. It was just unexceptional. Dull, even. Like the way Philip Larkin described his in that poem. Then, in the mid-seventies, when I was sixteen, we moved to a parish out Ealing way. Oh, it was a very nice area – none of that inner-city stuff – and the parishioners were for the most part law-abiding, reasonably affluent citizens.”
“But?”
“But it was near the tube. You can’t imagine what wonderful new worlds that opened up to an impressionable sixteen-year-old.”
Banks thought he could. When he moved from Peterborough to Notting Hill at the age of eighteen, his life had changed in many ways. He had met Jem across the hall from his bed-sit, for a start, and had lurked at the fringes of the sixties scene – which stretched well into the early seventies – enjoying the music more than the drugs. There was an excitement and vibrancy about the capital that was missing from Peterborough, and would certainly have been missing from a vicarage in Kent.
“Let me guess: The vicar’s daughter went a little wild?”
“I was born in 1959. It was November 1975, when we moved to Ealing. While everyone else was listening to Queen, Abba and Hot Chocolate, me and my friends were taking the tube into town to listen to The Sex Pistols. This was right at the start, before anyone really knew anything about them. They’d just played their first gig the day after Bonfire Night at Saint Martin’s College of Art, and one of the girls at my new school was there. She couldn’t talk about anything else for weeks. Next time they played, she took me with her. It was fantastic.”
Punk. Banks remembered those days. He was older than Rosalind, though, and identified more closely with sixties music than that of the seventies. When he had lived in London his favorites had been Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and the various local blues bands that seemed to form and split up with amazing regularity. Still, he had responded to the angry energy of some of the punk music – especially The Clash, by far the best of the bunch in his opinion – but not enough to buy any of their records. Also, as he had been a probationary police constable back then, he had experienced the violence of punk first-hand, from the other side, and that, too, had put him off.
“Pretty soon,” Rosalind went on, becoming more animated as she relived her memories, “it was in full swing. The look. The music. The attitude. Everything. My parents didn’t know me anymore. We saw The Clash, The Damned, The Stranglers, The Jam. You name them. Mostly in small clubs. We Pogoed, we hurled ourselves into one another, and we spat at each other. We dyed out hair weird colors. We wore torn clothes, safety pins in our ears and…” She paused and pulled up the sleeve of her jumper. Banks could see a number of more or less round white marks, like old scars. “We stubbed cigarettes out on ourselves.”
Banks raised an eyebrow. “How on earth did you explain all that to your husband?”