“What are you on?” Banks asked.
Spinks looked away. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Banks grabbed Spinks’s chin with one hand and held his head up, staring at the pinpoint pupils. “Crack, is it, John? Or solvent? Maybe heroin?”
“I don’t do drugs.”
“Like hell you don’t. You know taking and driving away is an arrestable offense, don’t you, John?”
Spinks said nothing.
“Do you know what that means?”
Spinks gave a lopsided grin. A little drool had formed at the side of his mouth. “It means you can arrest me for it.” He giggled.
“Good,” said Banks, patting his shoulder gently. “Very good, John. Now, you might not know this, but to put it nice and simply that also means we can detain you for up to twenty-four hours, longer if the superintendent authorizes it. Which he will. But wait a minute. Do you know what day it is, John?”
“What do you mean? Course I know. It’s Friday.”
“That’s right.” Banks looked at his watch. “Pity for you, John. See, a day like this, the magistrates will all be on the golf course by now. And they don’t sit on Saturday or Sunday, so you’ll have to stay with us until Monday morning.”
“So what?”
“Your arrest also gives us powers of search, John. We don’t need a warrant. That means there’ll be coppers all over your mum’s place, if there aren’t already. Bound to turn up something. Your mum will love you for that, won’t she?”
“She doesn’t give a fuck.”
Banks turned the free chair around and sat with his arms resting on the back. “Anyway,” he said, “I’m not interested in petty stuff like car theft and drug abuse. You don’t think a detective chief inspector concerns himself with run-of-the-mill stuff like that, do you?”
Spinks sniffed. “Can’t say I care one way or another.”
“No. Course not. I don’t suppose you do. Well, I’m not doing this by the book, John. I want you to know that. Like I said, I’m not really interested in some gormless pill-popping pillock who steals a car and can’t even drive it straight.”
Spinks bristled. “I can fucking drive! I told you, the steering was fucked. Fucking owner ought to be locked up.”
“Know what they say about a poor workman, John? He always blames his tools.”
“Fuck off.”
“Look, I’m getting sick and tired of your severely limited vocabulary. Know what I think we ought to do with people like you instead of community service or jail? I think we ought to have compulsory education for gobshites like you who spent so much time blitzed on model airplane glue that they never set foot in school more than a couple of weeks a year. Know what I’d do? I’d make you read the dictionary, for a start. At least ten new words a day. And spelling tests. Every morning, first thing after slopping out. A dozen lashes for every word you get wrong. Literature, too. Lots of it. Austen, Hardy, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot. Long books. Poetry, as well-Wordsworth, Shelley, Dryden, Milton. And Shakespeare, John. Tons and tons of Shakespeare. Memorizing poems and long, lovely speeches. Analyzing the imagery in Macbeth and Othello. Sound like fun?”
“I’d rather be in fucking jail.”
Banks sighed. “You will be, John. You will be. It’s just a fantasy of mine. Now I’d like you to travel back in time through that addled, worm-eaten brain of yours. I’d like you, if you can negotiate through that lump of Swiss cheese you call a mind, to go back to last summer. Specifically, to last August. Can you do that?”
Spinks frowned. “Is this about that bird what got snuffed?”
“Yes,” said Banks. “This, as you so eloquently put it, is ‘about that bird what got snuffed.’ Remember her name, John? Deborah Harrison.”
“That’s right. Yeah, Debbie.”
“Good. Now something happened, didn’t it? Something nasty?”
“Don’t know what you mean.”
“Her mother and her godfather warned you off, didn’t they?”
“Oh, right. Stuck-up motherfuckers. Look, what’s this got to do with-”
“I told you, John. I’m not doing this by the book. This is unofficial, off the record. Okay?”
Spinks nodded, a look of suspicion forming in his glazed eyes.
“One day you went around to ask Lady Sylvie Harrison to give you money to leave her daughter alone. Right?”
“So? There’s no law against it. They’d got plenty. I didn’t see why I shouldn’t get some compensation. Bird wasn’t much of a fuck, really. More like a sack of potatoes. But-”
Banks gripped the back of the chair so hard his knuckles turned white. “Spare me your erotic memoirs, John,” he said. “They might make me do something I’ll regret. You might not realize it, but I’m exercising great restraint as it is.”
Spinks laughed. A little more drool dripped down his chin. Banks felt so much like clocking him one that he had to look away. “Who was in the house that day?”
“What?”
“You heard. Who else was there as well as you?”
“Oh. Didn’t I already tell you that? I seem to remember-”
“Humor me. Tell me again.”
“Right. There was Debbie’s mother, the blonde bitch. And that stuck-up prick Clayton. Fucking snobs.”
“And Deborah wasn’t there?”
“I already told you. No.” Spinks’s head started to roll from side to side. The drugs, whatever they were, wearing off. Either that or he had sustained more than superficial damage in the car crash. Just as well they had sent for Dr. Burns.
“When you went to the house and found Michael Clayton there,” Banks asked, “did you get the feeling that there was anything going on?”
Spinks closed his eyes. His head stopped lolling. “Don’t know what you mean.”
“Did you interrupt anything?”
“Interrupt?”
“Stop behaving like a parrot. Did you get the feeling there was anything going on between them?”
Spinks frowned and wiped the drool from his mouth with the back of his hand. His eyes opened again and seemed to keep shifting in and out of focus. “Going on?” he repeated. “You mean was he fucking her? You mean do I think Clayton was fucking the wicked witch?” He laughed out loud.
Banks waited patiently until he had stopped. “Well,” he said. “Do you?”
“You’ve got a dirty mind. Do you know that?”
“Do you?”
Spinks shrugged. “Could’ve been, for all I know.”
“But you didn’t notice anything special about them, the way they behaved towards one another?”
“No.”
“Were they both fully dressed?”
“Course they were.”
“Did they look disheveled at all?”
“Come again. Dish what?”
“See what I mean about the need for compulsory education? It means messed up, ruffled, untidy.”
“Oh. No. I don’t think so. Can’t really remember, though.”
“Did Deborah ever say anything about them?”
He shook his head, stopped abruptly and opened his mouth as if to say something, then carried on shaking it. “No.”
Banks leaned forward on the chair back. The two front legs raised off the floor. “What were you going to tell me, John?”
“Nothing. She never said nothing.” He coughed and a mouthful of yellow vomit dribbled down his chin onto his T-shirt. The smell was terrible: booze, cheese-and-onion crisps and tacos. Banks stood up and stepped back.
At that moment, there was a knock on the door and Susan Gay came in, followed by Dr. Burns, the police surgeon, whose surgery was just across the market square.
“Sorry, sir,” Susan said, “but the doctor’s here.”
“Right,” said Banks, shaking hands with Burns. “He’s all yours. I’ve had enough. Take good care of him, Nick. I might want to talk to him again.”
And as he walked back to his own office, he had the strange feeling that not only had Spinks been holding back, hiding something, but that he, himself, hadn’t even been asking the right questions. Something was eluding him, and he knew from experience that it would drive him around the bend until he thought of it.