“And the Australian?”
“I don’t know. We talked about that. It’s possible he came too close to working out what was going on. If he knew she was the same person who was in Whitby when Grimley died, and he could link her to him…? Keith McLaren did tell me that he’d noticed Kirsten staring at someone in the Lucky Fisherman — and this is something he only remembered fairly recently — so she might have figured he was a danger to her. Or…”
“Yes?”
“Well, we know he was found in some woods outside Staithes, and that he was seen with a young woman. Say they went for a walk in the woods, things went too far for Kirsten — remember, she was totally traumatized by her experiences as well as mutilated — and she killed him, or thought she had.”
“Self-defense?”
“In her eyes. Maybe overkill in ours. I really don’t believe that Keith McLaren is a rapist.”
“Okay,” said Banks. “And next?”
“I can’t imagine how she must have felt when she had done what she set out to do and finally killed Eastcote, but she couldn’t go back to her old life. She hung around the fringes of it, for a while, saw Sarah a few more times, her parents, perhaps played at being normal, then she finally dropped out of sight a couple of years later. She wasn’t a serious suspect at the time, remember. She had an alibi, and as far as anyone knew, she had no way of knowing that Greg Eastcote was her attacker. That only came out later, when the police searched his house. It’s only now that she seems to have become a suspect in four murders, two of them eighteen years after the others. Anything could have happened since then. She could have gone anywhere, become anyone, done anything.”
“So what do we know about her?” Banks said. “She’d be, what, forty by now?”
“About that, if she’d just finished uni in 1988.”
“And she could be anyone, in any walk of life?”
“Yes. But let’s not forget that she had a university degree. Only English Lit, but even so… By all accounts she was a bright girl with a great future ahead of her. I mean, the odds are that we might be dealing with a professional woman.”
“Unless her experiences completely undermined her ambitions,” Banks argued. “But it’s a good point. If she really has done what we think she’s done, she’s incredibly focused, determined and resourceful. Anyway, it narrows things down. We can certainly check university records. We’re looking for a professional woman, most likely, who could have known that Karen Drew was Lucy Payne.”
“Julia Ford, Lucy’s lawyer, for a start. Ginger went to talk to her again on Friday afternoon and she wasn’t convinced she was telling us everything she knows.”
“Lawyers are naturally tight when it comes to giving information.”
“I know,” said Annie. “But Ginger thinks it was more than that with Julia Ford. I trust her instincts.”
“Maybe I should go and have a word with Ms. Ford,” Banks said. “It’s been a while since we crossed swords.”
“Sarah Bingham’s a lawyer, too, though she says she hasn’t seen Kirsten in years.”
“Believe her?”
“I think so,” Annie said.
“Okay. Who else?”
“A doctor?” Annie suggested. “Perhaps from the hospital she was in near Nottingham. Or Mapston Hall. There are doctors and nurses there.”
“Good point,” said Banks.
“One thing still gets me, though,” said Annie. “If we’re on the right track, why would she kill Templeton?”
“Another mistake?” Banks suggested. “She thought he was the killer stalking the girl, when in fact he was protecting her, like she must have thought Grimley was her attacker eighteen years ago? But you’re right. We need much more corroboration than we’ve got so far that the murders are linked. Who’s your crime scene coordinator?”
“Liam McCullough.”
“He’s a good bloke,” said Banks. “Have him consult with Stefan on this. There has to be trace evidence in common: hairs, fibers, blood, the dimensions of the wound, something to link Lucy Payne and Kev. Let’s see if we can get the pathologists talking to each other, too, when Dr. Wallace has finished with Kev.”
“Okay,” said Annie. “Les Ferris has tracked down the hair samples from the Greg Eastcote case to compare Kirsten’s with the ones Liam and his team collected from Lucy Payne. He says he should be able to get a comparison fixed up for tomorrow morning. That could at least tell us once and for all whether it’s her we are dealing with or not. We also need to know why, if it is Kirsten, she started again after all this time.”
“If we’re right about her motivation,” said Banks, “then I’d guess it’s because she hasn’t been close to any other sex murderers over the past eighteen years. I’m going down to Leeds again sometime this week. While I’m there, I’ll talk to Julia Ford, see if I can push her in the right direction, and I’ll have a read through the old Chameleon postmortem reports Phil Hartnell got out. I have to check, but I seem to remember that the wounds the Paynes inflicted on their victims were similar to those that Kirsten’s attacker inflicted on her, from what you tell me. I know it can’t have been the same killer — Terence Payne is dead, and this Greg Eastcote seemed pretty definite for the killings eighteen years back — but maybe the similarity set her off.”
“But how could Kirsten know that the Paynes inflicted similar wounds on their victims?” Annie asked.
“There were plenty of media reports at the time, and later, after Lucy Payne was kicked loose. The press didn’t waste a moment in reminding people exactly what had been set free among them by our legal system, whether she could walk or not. Kirsten Farrow is also scarred physically, remember, and that could help us, too.”
“I don’t see how,” said Annie. “We can hardly ask every woman connected with the case to strip to the waist.”
“Pity,” said Banks. “But you’re right.”
Annie rolled her eyes.
“Anyway,” Banks went on, “we’ve got more than enough to be going on with. Let’s compare notes again when you’ve talked to Maggie Forrest.”
Annie stood up. “Right you are.” She paused at the door. “Alan?”
“Yes.”
“It’s good to be working together again.”
The rest of Banks’s Sunday went by in a whirl of meetings and interviews, none of which threw any more light on either the Hayley Daniels or the Kevin Templeton murders — both, apparently, killed by different people, for different reasons, in the same place.
Templeton’s parents arrived from Salford to identify their son’s body, and Banks had a brief meeting with them in the mortuary. It was the least courtesy he could offer under the circumstances. He thought it would also be a good idea to let them believe their son had been killed in the line of duty rather than acting on his own initiative. Templeton’s mother broke down in tears and talked about how they’d failed him, and how it all went back to when his sister ran away from home at seventeen, though she swore it wasn’t really their fault, that they couldn’t keep a girl who was sleeping with men the way she was in a god-fearing house. They’d tried to find her afterward, the father explained, even reported her missing to the police, but to no avail. And now they’d lost their son, too.
Banks now thought he knew who was in the photograph on Templeton’s bedside table, and why Kev had sometimes been so hard on families he interviewed. Christ, he thought, the secrets and burdens people carry around with them.
He needed to talk to Stuart Kinsey again about the snatch of music he had heard in the Maze the night Hayley was killed. Templeton said he had heard something similar in his notes, and Banks had a theory he wanted to put to the test.
As a result of all that, it was past six o’clock before he realized that he hadn’t rung Sophia about their proposed walk. It wasn’t that he hadn’t thought of her often during the day — in fact she was powerfully and frequently present in his thoughts for someone he had only just met — but time and events had conspired to push making the call out of his consciousness. It was too late for the walk now, he realized, reaching for the telephone, but at least he could apologize. He dialed the number she had given him. Her voice answered on the fourth ring.