Finally, he plucked up the courage and picked up the phone. “How’s it going?” he asked.
“Fine.”
“You sound distracted.”
“No, I’m not. Just a bit busy. Really. It’s fine.”
Banks took a deep breath. “Look, if it’s about Sunday, I’m sorry. I had no idea Sandra was going to turn up. I also didn’t think it would have so much of an effect on you.”
“Well, you don’t always know about these things till they happen, do you? As I said, I’m fine. Except I’ve got a lot on my plate right now. What’s on your mind?”
“Okay, if that’s how you want to play it. Get onto your military contacts again and see if you can find out anything about US Air Force presence in Suffolk in 1952.”
“What about it?”
“Find out if there were any bases left, for a start. And if there were, which was the nearest one to Hadleigh. If there was one, I’d also like a list of personnel.”
“Right.”
“Can you do it today?”
“I’ll try. Tomorrow at the latest.”
“Annie?”
“What?”
“Can’t we get together and talk about things?”
“There’s nothing to talk about. Really. Look, you know I’m off home on holiday in a couple of days. I’ve got a lot to do before I go. Maybe when I get back. Okay? In the meantime, I’ll get that information to you as soon as I can. Good-bye.”
Feeling more depressed than ever after that pointless conversation, Banks glanced at the pile of paper beside the computer on his desk: SOCO search results, postmortem, forensic odontology. None of it contradicted what they had previously estimated; nor did any of it tell him anything more.
What would have happened if Gwen had done as she should and reported finding Gloria’s body? A good copper might have asked around and not simply tried to pin the murder on Matthew. And maybe not. Too late for asking questions now; they were all dead except Vivian. Poor Gloria. She saw Matthew as her penance. Somehow that told Banks more about her than anything else.
And what if Vivian’s ending was the real lie? The ultimate irony. What if Gwen herself had committed the murder?
Vivian Elmsley put her book down as the train pulled out of Wakefield Westgate on Thursday. It would only be a few more minutes to Leeds now, and built up the whole way: a typical Northern industrial landscape of shabby red brick housing estates, low-rise office buildings, sparkling new shopping centers, factory yards full of stacked pallets wrapped in polythene, kids fishing in the canal, stripped to the waist. The only untypical thing was the sticky sunlight that seemed to encase everything like sugar water.
The publisher’s rep was supposed to meet Vivian at the station and accompany her to the Metropole Hotel, where she would be staying until Sunday. She had book-signings in Bradford, York and Harrogate, as well as in Leeds, but it made no sense to move everything lock, stock and barrel from one hotel to another every day. The cities were close enough together. The rep would drive her around.
Not that Vivian needed any help to find the hotel; the Metropole wasn’t more than a couple of hundred yards from City Square, and she knew exactly where it was. She had stayed there with Charlie the time they went to Michael Stanhope’s exhibition in 1944. What an evening they had made of it. After the show, they went to a classical concert and then to the 21 Club, where they had danced until late. That was why she had asked to stay there again this trip. For memory’s sake.
She was nervous. It wasn’t anything to do with this evening’s reading at Armley Library, or the Radio Leeds interview tomorrow afternoon, but with meeting Chief Inspector Banks and his female sidekick again. She knew they would want to interview her after studying the manuscript; there was no doubt she was guilty of something. But what could she do? She was too old and too tired to run. She was also too old to go to jail. The only way now was to face up to whatever charges might be brought and hope her lawyer would do a good job.
No one, she supposed, could stop the press finding out the details eventually, and there was no doubt that they would go to town on the scandal. She wasn’t sure she could face public humiliation. Perhaps, if they didn’t arrest her, she would leave the country again, the way she had done so many times with Ronald. Why not? She could work anywhere, and she had enough money to buy a little place somewhere warm: Bermuda, perhaps, or the British Virgin Islands.
Once again Vivian cast her mind back to the events of fifty years ago. Was there something she had missed? Had she got it all wrong? Had she been so ready to suspect Matthew that she had overlooked the possibility of anyone else being guilty? Banks’s questions about Michael Stanhope and about PX, Billy Joe, Charlie and Brad had shocked and surprised her at first. Now she was beginning to wonder. Could one of them have done it? Not Charlie, certainly – he was dead by then – but what about Brad? He and Gloria had been arguing a lot toward the end; she had even seen them arguing through the flames at the VE-Day party. Perhaps the night she died he had gone to put his case forward one last time, and when she turned him down he went berserk? Vivian tried to remember whether Brad had been the kind to go berserk or not, but all she could conclude was that we all are, given the right circumstances.
Then there was PX. He had certainly lavished a lot of gifts on Gloria in that shy way of his. Perhaps he had hoped for something in return? Something she hadn’t wanted to give? And while Billy Joe seemed to have moved on to other women quite happily, Vivian remembered his bitterness at being ditched for a pilot, the smoldering class resentment that came out as gibes and taunts.
People said they didn’t have a class system in America, but Billy Joe had definitely been working-class, like the farm laborers in Yorkshire; Charlie was from a well-established Ivy League background; and Brad had come from new West Coast oil money. Vivian didn’t think the Americans lacked class distinction so much as they lacked the tradition of inherited aristocratic titles and wealth – which was probably why they all went gaga over British royalty.
The train was nearing Leeds City Station now, wheels squealing as it negotiated the increasingly complicated system of signals and points. It had been a much faster and easier journey than the one Vivian had made to London and back with Gloria. She remembered the pinprick of blue light, the soldiers snoring, her first look at the desolation of war in the pale dawn light. She had slept most of the way back to Leeds, a six- or seven-hour journey then, and after she got back to Hobb’s End, London had grown more and more distant and magical in her imagination until it might easily have been Mars or ancient Rome.
Looking back, she began to wonder if perhaps it was all just a story. As the years race inexorably on, and as all the people we know and love die, does the past turn into fiction, an act of the imagination populated by ghosts, scenes and images suspended forever in water glass?
Wearily, Vivian stood up and reached for her overnight bag. There was something else she had steeled herself to do while she was in Leeds, and she had set aside Friday afternoon, after the interview, for it. Before that, though, she would make time to call at the art gallery and see Michael Stanhope’s painting.
When the phone rang on Thursday morning, Banks snatched the receiver from its cradle so hard he fumbled it and dropped it on the desk before getting a good grip.
“Alan, what’s going on? You almost deafened me.”
“Oh, sorry.”
“It’s Jenny.”
“I know. I recognized your voice. How are you?”
“Well, don’t sound so excited to hear from me.”