At home, Banks had tried to reach Brian all weekend, without any luck. He knew he should call Sandra and find out what she had to say about it all, but he didn’t want to. Maybe it was something to do with sleeping with Annie, or maybe not, but he didn’t think he could handle talking to Sandra. He spent the rest of Sunday reading the papers and doing odd jobs around the cottage.
He walked over to stand by the open window. The gold hands against the blue face of the church clock stood at a quarter to eleven. Horns blared out in the street and the smell of fresh bread from the bakery mingled with the exhaust fumes. An irate van driver swore at a tourist. The tourist swore back and scurried off into the crowd. Another coach pulled up in the cobbled market square and disgorged its load of old ladies. From Worthing, Banks noticed, by the sign painted on the side. Worthing. Why couldn’t the old biddies stay down there, maybe roll up their skirts and go for a paddle, stop and smell the seaweed? Why did everyone have to come to the bloody Dales? When it came right down to it, he blamed James Herriot. If they hadn’t done that damn series on television, the place would be empty.
Banks lit a proscribed cigarette and wondered, not for the first time this past year, why he bothered with the job. There had been plenty of occasions when he felt like packing it all in. At first he hadn’t done so because he simply couldn’t be bothered. As long as people left him alone, it didn’t really matter. He knew he wasn’t working up to par, even on desk duties, but he didn’t give a damn. It was easy enough to show up and push paper around without enthusiasm, or to play computer games. The truth was that he hurt so much after Sandra left that everything else seemed meaningless.
Then, when he bought the cottage and started pulling himself together, or at least managing to distance himself a bit from the pain, he seriously considered a career change, but he couldn’t think of anything else he was qualified for, or even wanted to do. He was too young to retire, and he had no desire whatsoever to go into security work or a private detective agency. Lack of formal education had closed most other paths to him.
So he stuck with it. Now, though, partly because of this dirty, pointless, dead-end case – or so Jimmy Riddle must have seen it – Banks was finally getting back to some sense of why he had joined in the first place. When something becomes routine, mechanical, when you’re just going through the motions, you have to dig down and find out what it was that you loved about it in the first place. What drew you to it? Or what obsessed you about it? Then you have to act on that, and to hell with all the rest.
Banks had cast his memory back and thought about those questions a lot over the past few months. It wasn’t simply a matter of why he walked in the recruiting center that day, asked for information and then followed up on it a week later. He had done that partly because of his disenchantment with the bohemian scene after Jem’s death, partly because he hated business studies, and partly to piss off his parents. He and Sandra knew they were serious about one another by then, too; they wanted to get married, start a family, and he would need a steady job.
With Banks, it wasn’t some abstract notion of justice, or being on the side of “good” and putting the “bad” guys away. He wasn’t naive enough to see the police as good, for a start, or even all criminals as bad. Some people were driven to crime through desperation of one kind or another; some were so damaged inside that they were unable to make a choice. When it came right down to it, Banks believed that most violent criminals were bullies, and ever since he was a kid he had detested bullies. At school, he had always stuck up for the weaker kids against the bullies, even though he wasn’t especially big or tough. He got frequent black eyes and bloody noses for his trouble.
In some way, it all came together with Mick Slack, fifth-form bully, two years older and six inches taller than Banks. One day, in the schoolyard, for no reason, Slack started pushing and shoving a kid called Graham Marshall. Marshall was in Banks’s class and was always a bright, quiet, shy kid, the sort the others taunted by calling him a puff and a pansy, but mostly left alone. When Banks stepped in, Slack pushed him instead, and a skirmish followed. More by speed and stealth, Banks managed to wind Slack and knock him to the Tarmac before the teacher came out and stopped it. Slack swore vengeance, but he never got the chance. He was killed two days later on his way to play for the school rugby team, when his motorbike ran smack into a brick wall.
The strangest thing was, though, that about six months later, Graham Marshall disappeared and was never seen again. Police detectives came and questioned everyone in his class, asking if they had seen any strangers hanging around the school, or if Graham had told them about anyone suspicious, anyone who was bothering him. Nobody had. Banks felt especially impotent at being so useless to the police, and he remembered that feeling years later when he was on the other side of the interview table watching witnesses flounder as they tried to remember details.
The theory was that Graham had been abducted by a child molester and his body buried in some forest miles away. That made three deaths Banks had been exposed to as an adolescent, including Phil Simpkins, who had swung onto the sharp iron railings, but it was the ultimate mystery of Graham Marshall’s disappearance that haunted him most of all, until Jem’s death some years later, and in a way it was his curiosity and unaccountable feelings of guilt over it that were behind his decision to join the police years later.
All the petty duties and details of a policeman’s job aside, Banks’s obsession was with bringing down as many bullies as possible. When the victims were dead, of course, he couldn’t defend them, but he could damn well find out what had happened to them and bring the bullies to justice. It wasn’t foolproof; it didn’t always work; but it was all he had. That was what he had to get back to, or he might as well pack it all in and join Group 7 or some other private security outfit.
He went back to his desk and sat down. As he looked at Gloria’s pose again – beautiful, erotic, sensual, playful, but also challenging, mocking, as if she knew some sort of secret about the artist, or shared one with him – he felt that in this case he was needed as much as ever. He was convinced that Gloria Shackleton was the victim they had found buried at Hobb’s End, and he wanted to know what she was like, what had happened to her and why no one had reported her missing. Did people just think she had vanished into space, been abducted by aliens or something? The bully who had killed her might well be dead, but that didn’t matter a damn to Banks. He needed to know.
Dr. Glendenning’s call cut into his thoughts.
“Ah, Banks,” he said. “Glad I caught you in. You’re very lucky I happened to be in Leeds, you know. Otherwise you could have whistled for your postmortem. There are plenty of fresh cadavers craving my expert attention.”
“I’m sure there are. My apologies. I promise to do better in the future.”
“I should hope so.”
“What have you got?”
“Nothing much to add to what Dr. Williams told you, I’m afraid.”
“She was stabbed, then?”
“Oh, yes. And viciously, too.”
“How many times?”
“Fourteen or fifteen, as far as I can tell. I wouldn’t swear to that, of course, given the condition of the skeleton and the time that has elapsed since death.”
“Is that what killed her?”
“What do you think I am, laddie? A miracle worker? It’s not possible to say what killed her, though the knife wounds would have done the trick. Judging from the angles and positions of the nicks, the blade would almost certainly have pierced several vital organs.”