Hairs could be dodgy evidence, as Pierce’s trial had shown. Banks read through a fair bit of jargon about melanin and fragmented medullas, then considered the neutron activation analysis printout specifying the concentration of various elements in the hair, such as antimony, bromine, lanthanum, strontium and zinc.
The lab would need another sample of the suspect’s hair, the report said, because the ratios of these elements could have changed slightly since the last sample was taken, but even at this point, it was 4500 to one against the hair originating from anyone but Pierce.
Unfortunately, none of the hairs had follicular tissue adhering to their roots; in fact, there were no roots, so it was impossible to identify blood factors or carry out DNA analysis.
As in the Deborah Harrison murder, the swabs showed no signs of semen in the mouth, vagina or anus, and there was no other evidence of sexual activity.
But the hairs and the fingerprints Vic Manson had identified on the plastic film container would probably secure a conviction, Banks guessed. Pierce wasn’t going to slip through the cracks this time.
In a way, Banks felt sad. He had almost convinced himself that Pierce had been an innocent victim of the system and that Deborah’s killer was closer to home; now it looked as if he were wrong again.
He tuned in to Radio 3-where “Composer of the Week” featured Gerald Finzi-and started making notes for the meeting he would soon be having with Stafford Oakes.
Things started to get noisy at around eleven-thirty, with Pierce on his way to court for his remand hearing, the phone ringing off the hook and reporters pressing their faces at every window in the building. Banks decided it was time to sneak out by the side exit and take an early lunch.
He opened the door and popped his head out to scan the corridor. Plenty of activity, but nobody was really paying him much attention. Instead of going the regular way, down to the front door, he tiptoed towards the fire exit, which came out on a narrow street opposite the Golden Grill, called Skinner’s Yard.
He had hardly got to the end of the corridor, when he heard someone call out behind him. His heart lurched.
“Chief Inspector?”
Thank God it wasn’t Jimmy Riddle. He turned. It was DI Barry Stott, and he was looking troubled. “Barry. What is it? What can I do for you?”
“Can I have a word? In private.”
Banks glanced around to see if anyone else was watching them. No. The coast was clear. “Of course,” he said, putting his hand on Stott’s shoulder and guiding him towards the fire door. “Let’s go for a drink, shall we, and get away from the mêlée.”
II
It was a long time since Rebecca had been to talk to the angel, but that Monday she felt the need again. And this time she wasn’t drunk.
As she turned off the tarmac path onto the gravel, she wondered how she could have been so wrong about Owen Pierce. She remembered how scared she was when she first saw him after his release, then how like a little boy lost he had been when he came to talk to her. When she had asked him the all-important question and he had said he would answer truthfully, she had believed him. Now it looked as if he had lied to her. How could she be sure of anything any more? Of anyone? Even Daniel?
The air around the Inchcliffe Mausoleum was warm and still, the only sounds the drone of insects and the occasional car along Kendal Road or North Market Street. The angel continued to gaze heaven-ward. Rebecca wished she knew what he could see there.
Sober, this time, and feeling a little self-conscious, she couldn’t quite bring herself to speak out loud. But her thoughts flowed and shaped themselves as she stood there feeling silly. She wondered what the policeman, Chief Inspector Banks, would think of her.
The police had claimed that Owen Pierce had killed another girl. That meant they also believed he had killed Deborah Harrison. There could be no way out for him now, Rebecca thought, not with public feeling as strong as it was against him.
But he had visited her at the vicarage only that Saturday afternoon, full of talk about his innocence, the need for support and understanding. She couldn’t get over that, how convinced she had been. Was that the behavior of someone who was intending to go out later that night, pick up a teenage girl and murder her? Rebecca didn’t think so. But what did she know? Experts had done studies on these kinds of people-serial murderers, they called them-though she didn’t know if having killed only two people qualified Owen for that designation.
She had, however, seen enough television programs about psychopaths to know that some could appear perfectly charming, live quite normal lives outside their need to kill. Ted Bundy, for example, had been a handsome and intelligent man who had killed God knew how many young women in America. Watch out for the nice, friendly, polite boy next door, the message seemed to be, not the raggedy man with the cruel eyes muttering to himself in a corner.
A fly settled on her bare forearm and she stared at its shiny blue and green carapace for a moment before brushing it off. Then she looked up at the angel again. If only he could make things clear for her.
Perhaps the police had arrested Owen only because they still believed he had killed Deborah Harrison. Maybe they had no real evidence that he had killed the other girl. She didn’t know why she should care so much. After all, Owen was still practically a stranger to her-and for a long time she had believed him to be a killer. Why should she be so upset when it turned out that he really was? She still couldn’t help feeling that he had let her down somehow, silly as the idea was.
“Why?” she asked, surprised to find herself speaking out loud at last, face turned up to look at the angel. “Can you tell me why I care?”
But she got no answer.
She already knew part of the answer. Talking to Owen, taking him under her wing, had been a test for her. In a way, his presence had challenged her faith, her Christian feelings. For when it came to Christianity, Rebecca was a humanist, not one of these cold-fish theologians like some of the ministers she had met. Perhaps a better existence did await us in heaven, but to Rebecca, Christianity was useless if it forgot people and the here and now. Faith and belief, she felt, were no use without charity, love and compassion; religion was nothing if it focused entirely on the afterlife. Daniel had agreed. That was why they had done so well together. Up to last year.
“Why am I telling you this?” she asked the angel. “What do you know of life on earth? What is it I want from you? Can you tell me?”
Still the angel gazed fixedly heaven-ward. His expression looked stern to Rebecca, but she put that down to a trick of the light.
“Am I to be a cynic now?” she asked. “After I put so much faith in Owen and he turns out to be a killer after all?”
Again, she didn’t hear any answer, but she did hear a movement coming from deeper in the woods. The area behind the Inchcliffe Mausoleum was the most overgrown in the entire graveyard, all the way back to the wall at Kendal Road. The oldest yews grew there, and the wild shrubbery was so dense in places you couldn’t even walk through it easily. If there were any graves, nobody had visited them for a long time.
It must have been a small animal of some kind, Rebecca decided. Then she remembered that she had told the police and the court that the cry she heard that November evening could have come from an animal. When she really thought about it, she knew it never could have. She had simply refused to acknowledge, either to herself or to anyone else that the scream she heard was the last cry for help of a girl about to be murdered. This sound, too, was too loud to be a dog, a cat or a bird. And there were no horses or sheep in the graveyard.