He bought himself another pint and went back outside. Annie wasn’t much more than a silhouette now – and a beautiful one to his eyes, with her graceful neck and strong profile – staring at the river in that peculiarly relaxed and centered way she had.
He sat down and broke the spell. Annie stirred languidly. She still had half her drink left, which she swirled in her glass a few times before sipping.
“What about her family?” Banks asked.
“Family? Whose family?”
“Gloria Shackleton’s.”
“Her family was killed in the Blitz.”
“All of them?”
“That’s what she told Alice.”
“What about this mysterious stranger and the child who turned up looking for her? You said she told Alice that it was relations.”
“I know.” Annie shook her head slowly. “That’s what I don’t understand. It does seem odd, doesn’t it?”
“If she ran off and left a husband or boyfriend stuck with her kid, that might be someone else with reason to be angry with her. He could have tracked her down and killed her.”
“Yes, but maybe whoever it was didn’t feel stuck with the kid. Maybe he loved the boy. Besides, men do that sort of thing all the time and women don’t kill them for it.”
Banks wasn’t going to jump at that one. “The point is,” he said, “did this particular man feel strongly enough to track down the wife or girlfriend who bore his child and deserted him? They did argue, according to what Alice Poole told you.”
“Gloria was still alive after he left.”
“He could have stewed for a while, gone back weeks, months later.”
“Possibly,” Annie admitted. “I’d also like to know what happened to the sister-in-law, Gwynneth. Even with your appeals on the telly, no one’s come forward with any useful leads.”
“Maybe she’s dead?”
“Maybe she is.”
“Do you see her as a suspect?”
Annie frowned. “She looked like a tall, strong woman in the photograph. Something could have happened between them.”
“Maybe DS Hatchley came up with something in London. We’ll find out tomorrow. It’s been a long day.”
A night bird called across the river in the silence. Then someone put an Oasis song on the jukebox. “The kind of crime it was ought to be telling us something,” Annie said after a slight pause.
“What does it tell you that we haven’t considered already?”
“Well, it was obviously violent, passionate. Somebody felt strongly enough about Gloria Shackleton to stab her so many times. After strangling her first.”
“You’ve said it yourself: Gloria was the kind of woman men felt passionately about, the sort to spark off strong feelings. But there are probably a lot of things we don’t know about what happened.”
“Sorry, I don’t follow.”
“It’s an old crime scene, Annie. All we’ve got is bones and a few odds and ends of corroded jewelry. We don’t know whether she was raped or sexually interfered with in any way first. Or after. For all we know, this might be a sex crime, pure and simple.”
“The SOCOs haven’t found any other victims buried in the area.”
“Not yet. Besides, sex crimes don’t always mean multiple victims.”
“Usually they do. You can’t tell me that someone raped and murdered Gloria Shackleton the way he did and never did it again before or after.”
“That’s the point,” said Banks. “Think about it. The body was buried in the outbuilding of Gloria and Matthew’s cottage. The fact that we haven’t found any other bodies in the vicinity doesn’t mean there aren’t any anywhere else. It doesn’t mean that whoever did it didn’t kill elsewhere, in exactly the same way.”
“A serial killer, then? A stranger to the area?”
“It’s possible. DS Hatchley’s already put out a request for information on crimes with similar MOs. It’ll take time, though, and that’s if anyone even bothers following it up. People can be pretty lazy, especially when what they want isn’t on the computer. Let’s face it, we’re not exactly high on anyone’s priority list with this one. Still, some curious or industrious PC might poke about and discover something. I’ll have Jim send out a reminder.”
Annie paused. “You realize we might never know who killed her, don’t you?”
Banks finished his drink and nodded. “If that’s what it comes down to, we make out a final report based on all the evidence we’ve collected and point at the most likely solution.”
“How do you think you’ll feel about that?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s become important to you, hasn’t it? Oh, I’m not saying I don’t care. I do. But for you it’s something else. It goes deeper. You have a sort of compulsion.”
Banks lit a cigarette. As he did so, he realized how often he hid behind the smoke of his cigarettes. “Somebody has to give a damn.”
“That sounds melodramatic. Besides, is it really as simple as that?”
“Nothing ever is, really, is it?”
“Meaning?”
Banks paused and tried to frame his nebulous thoughts. “Gloria Shackleton. I know what she looked like. I’ve got some idea of her character and her ambitions, who her friends were, the things she liked to do to amuse and entertain herself.” He tapped the side of his head. “She’s real enough for me in there, where it counts. Somebody took all that away from her. Somebody strangled her, then stabbed her fifteen or sixteen times, wrapped her body in blackout curtains and buried it in an outbuilding.”
“But it happened years ago. The war’s been over for ages now. Murders happen all the time. What’s so different about this one?”
Banks shook his head. “I don’t know. Nothing, really. Partly, it’s the war itself. I’m older than you. I grew up in its shadow, and it cast a long one for a long time after it was over. I was born with a ration book and a National Identity Card.” He laughed. “It’s funny, you know, the way people resist being named and counted these days, but I was proud of that card when I was a kid. It actually gave me an identity, told me who I was. Maybe I was already in training for my warrant card. Anyway, there were ruins all over the place in my hometown. I used to play in them just like Adam Kelly. And my dad had a collection of mementos I used to sneak up to the attic and play with when he was out – an SS dagger, a Nazi armband. There were pictures I used to look at, photographs of the collaborators hanging from the balustrades in Brussels. It was another age, before my time, but in a way it wasn’t; it was much closer than that. We used to play at being commandos. We even used to dig tunnels and pretend to escape from prison camps. I bought every book about fighter and bomber planes I could get my hands on. My childhood and early adolescence were saturated with the war. Somehow the idea of a vicious murder like this one being committed while all that carnage was going on in the world makes it seem even more of a travesty, if you see what I mean.”
“I think so. What else bothers you?”
“That’s the simple part. As far as we can tell, nobody reported Gloria missing; there was no hue and cry. It looks as if nobody cared. I had a friend once… one day I’ll tell you about him. Anyway, nobody cared then. Somebody has to. I seem to be good at it, overburdened with compassion, a natural.” Banks smiled. “Am I still making sense?”
Annie brushed his sleeve with her fingers. “I care, too,” she said. “Maybe not for the same reasons or in the same way, but I do.”
Banks looked into her eyes. He could tell she meant what she was saying. He nodded. “I know you do. Home?”