“Anyway,” Banks went on, “you’ve got some bloody nerve accusing me of screwing up on the job.”
Annie stiffened. “What do you mean?”
“What about you? Do you really think you’ve been pulling your weight lately?”
Annie flinched from the accusation. “I’ve had a few problems. That’s all. I told you. Personal problems.”
“A few problems? Is that what you call sneaking off to sleep with DI Dalton every minute my back was turned? Don’t think I didn’t notice. I’m not stupid.”
Annie shot forward and slapped him hard across the face. She could tell it hurt him, and he drew back, his cheek reddening. Hot tears brimmed in her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it to sound so harsh. But you’ve got to admit you were pretty obvious. How do you think I felt?”
Annie could feel the blood roaring through her veins and her heart knocking against her ribs, even louder and faster than when the car almost hit her earlier. She paused for what felt like hours, taking slow, deliberate breaths, trying to calm herself, get rid of the panic and rage that seemed to possess her. When she finally spoke, it was in a voice barely above a whisper. “You bloody idiot. For your information, DI Dalton was one of the men who raped me. But don’t let that bother you. I’ll go now.” She started to get up.
“Jesus Christ, Annie! No, don’t go. Please don’t go.” Banks grasped her wrist. She looked at his hand for a moment, then she sat down again, all the fight gone out of her. Banks refilled her wineglass and his own. “I don’t know what to say,” he said. “I feel like a fool. Why didn’t you say something?”
“Like what? Come crying to my boss the first week on the job?”
“Like ‘This is the man who raped me.’ Is he the one who actually-”
“One of the others. But it doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have done it, too, if I’d given him half a chance. As far as I’m concerned they’re all three of them equally guilty.”
“But you could have told me. You knew that I’d understand.”
“And what would you have done? Gone flexing your macho muscles? Beat him up? Something like that? Had a pissing competition? No, thanks. It was my problem. I preferred to handle it myself.”
“Looks like you did a good job.”
“He’s still alive, isn’t he?”
Banks smiled. “Annie, you don’t have to handle everything in life by yourself.”
“Shows what you know about it. Wasn’t anyone around to help when it happened, was there?”
“That doesn’t mean there’s no one now.”
Annie looked at him and felt herself soften. “I can’t handle this,” she said, shaking her head.
“Annie, I’m sorry. What can I say?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does. I saw the way you and Dalton tensed up when you met and I read it wrongly. I thought there was something between you.”
“There was. Just not what you thought it was.”
“I know that now. And I’m sorry. I should have trusted you.”
Annie made a sound halfway between a sniff and a laugh. “Like I trusted you?”
“I was jealous. Besides, I didn’t give you much reason to trust me, did I? I’ve handled this all wrong.”
“You can say that again.”
“Annie, I swear on my honor that nothing happened between me and Emily Riddle except she passed out in my room. What was I to do? The next day I bought her some new clothes on Oxford Street and we went home on the train.”
“And you really sat in one of those horrible hotel armchairs listening to your Walkman?”
“Yes. And smoking.”
“And smoking. Of course.”
“Yes.”
“Then you tried to sleep but her snoring kept you awake?”
“Yes. And the wind and rain.”
“And the wind and rain.” He looked so earnest that Annie couldn’t help herself; she burst into laughter. The thing was, she could just picture him there doing exactly what he said. He looked hurt. “I’m sorry, Alan. Really, I am. Nobody could make up a story as silly as that if it didn’t really happen.”
Banks frowned. “So you believe me now?”
“I believe you. I just wish you’d told me earlier. All this deception…”
“On both sides.”
“Oh, no. I didn’t deceive you. You read the situation wrongly.”
“But you kept something from me.”
“That was private business. It wasn’t to do with the case, not like your relationship with Emily Riddle. You really liked her?”
“I don’t think I could have stood being around her for very long. She could be quite exhausting. Never stopped talking. And a hell of an attitude. But, yes, I did.”
Annie tilted her head and gave him a crooked grin. “You’re a funny one. You’re so straight in some ways, but there’s a definite bohemian edge to you.”
“Is that good?”
“It’ll do. But I want you to know that I’m still seriously pissed off at you for not treating me as a professional. You’ve got a lot of making up to do.”
“Annie, I’m sorry. Really, I am. It’s been difficult, given what we had, then me thinking you and Dalton… you know. I mean, it’s not as if I don’t still…”
Annie felt her heart give a little somersault. “Don’t still what?”
“Fancy you.” The fire was waning and the air becoming chilly. Banks looked at Annie and she felt the stirrings of her feelings for him that she’d been trying to ignore since they split up. He picked up a lump of peat. “Are you staying?” he asked. “Shall I put some more on? It’s getting cold.”
Annie gave him a serious look, then bit her lip, stretched out her hand, the same hand she had slapped him with, and said, “Okay, but we’ve got a lot of talking to do.”
17
Annie pulled up in the staff car park of the red brick fire station in Salford just past eleven-thirty the next morning, after over an hour spent crawling along the M62 and getting lost in the center of Manchester. A lorry had over-turned at one of the junctions near Huddersfield, and traffic was backed up as far as the intersection with the M1. The weather hadn’t helped, either. After last night’s deep freeze, the roads were icy despite the brilliant winter sunshine that glinted on windscreens and bonnet ornaments.
The fire station stood on an arterial road near the estate of shabby Georgian semis where Ruth Walker had grown up. Banks had told Annie about Ruth’s being Rosalind Riddle’s daughter. Ruth had told a lot of lies, he said, and he thought they should find out more about her background, including the fire in which both her parents were killed eighteen months ago. It had been easy to track down the address via the Salford Fire Department, which was Annie’s first port of call. The fire-station captain, George Whitmore, said he would be pleased to talk to her.
The firemen were sitting around playing cards in a large upper room above the gleaming red engines. The place smelled of sweat, aftershave and oil. They were an odd lot, firemen, Annie had always thought. When everything was going well, they had no job to do at all, just the way the police would have nothing to do if people weren’t committing crimes. Annie had known one of the local lads back in St. Ives who spent his time at work writing Westerns under a pseudonym, selling about one a month to an American publisher. She had also been out with a fireman who ran a carpet-cleaning business on the side, and one of his friends ran an airport taxi service. They all seemed to have three or four jobs on the go. Of course, fires are as inevitable as crime, and when it came to the crunch, nobody would deny the heroism of firemen if the occasion demanded it. And no matter how politically correct you tried to be about it, no matter how much people talked about recruiting more women to the job, whether you called them Combustion Control Engineers or Flame Suppressant Units, the truth about firemen was summed up in what they always had been and always would be called as far as Annie was concerned: firemen.