Sometimes they even made love, but that was hard for Tina; she was never far from the hunger and the darkness at the center of her being. The wrong word or gesture, and she was burrowing deep inside herself again, scrunching up in the fetal position with her thumb in her mouth, on the nod. And when she was like that, it didn’t matter if he was there or not. Which was why he hadn’t been there last night.
Tina wasn’t much interested in sex, partly because drugs do weird things to your sex drive, but mostly because of her stepfather. When Mark thought of Patrick Aspern, his stomach knotted and rage surged through him. One day he’d…
Despite what the policeman had said, Mark wondered if Tina could have started the fire accidentally. She heated her spoon over a candle to prepare her fix, and she’d been careless once or twice in the past. But he’d been there then, not like this time.
But no, he realized; it couldn’t have happened that way. He remembered that he had been careful to snuff out the candle himself before leaving her on the nod, in a sleeping bag, her eyes glazed, pupils dilated, to all intents and purposes lost to the world, wrapped in a warm cocoon of safety and oblivion, without a care, until it started to wear off and she started to itch and her stomach knotted up and her every pore oozed with craving for more. He’d been through it all with her so many times, and he knew he’d have gone through it again when he got home, if it hadn’t been for the fire.
He’d told Tina he was sick of her and her junkie ways, and if she didn’t get into some sort of rehabilitation center or methadone program he was leaving her. She didn’t care when he said it because the heroin was kicking in and flooding her veins and that rush, that golden warmth, was the only thing she cared about in the whole world when it spread through her like an orgasm. So he stormed out. Out to Mandy and her tantalizing, lithe young body. Tina didn’t know where he was going, of course, and she never would now. But he knew, and that was more than enough.
At least he knew the fire couldn’t have started on their boat. Did she know it was happening, that the flames were creeping closer, the smoke enveloping her? Even if she had come round when she smelled the smoke or saw the flames, would she have had time to get her head together and jump for land? Or water? Perhaps then she would have drowned. Tina couldn’t swim.
Mark curled up on the hard bunk, and the thoughts and fears tumbled around in his tired brain. When the drunk started up again with “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” he put his hands over his ears and cried.
“Is the music all right?” Banks asked Frances Aspern.
“Pardon?”
“The music. Is it okay?”
They were entering the Dales landscape beyond Ripon, and the distant shapes of the hills rose out of the mist in shades of gray, like whales breaking the water’s surface. Banks was playing Mariza’s Fado em Mim, traditional Portuguese songs, accompanied by classical guitar and bass, and he realized they might not be to everyone’s taste. Frances Aspern had been staring out of the window in silence the whole way so far, and he had almost given up trying to start a conversation. He couldn’t help but be aware of the weight of her grief beside him. Grief or guilt; he wasn’t certain which.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Aspern. “It’s fine. She sounds very sad.”
Indeed she did. Banks didn’t understand a word of the songs without the translations on the CD booklet, the print of which was daily getting too small for him to read without glasses, but there was no mistaking the sense of loss, sadness and the cruelty of fate in Mariza’s voice. You didn’t need to know what the words meant to feel that.
“I didn’t want to ask you while your husband was present,” Banks said, “but is Christine’s birth father still around?”
She shook her head. “I was very young. We didn’t marry. My parents… they were good to me. I lived with them in Roundhay until Patrick and I married.”
“We’ll still need to talk to him,” said Banks.
“He’s back home. In America. We met when he was traveling in Europe.”
“Can you give me the details?”
She looked out of the window, away from Banks, as she spoke, so that he could barely hear her. “His name is Paul Ryder. He lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. I don’t have his address or telephone number. We haven’t been in contact since… well…”
Banks made a mental note of the name and city. It might be hard to track down this Paul Ryder after so long, but they’d have to try. “How did you and Dr. Aspern meet?” he asked.
“Patrick was a colleague of my father’s, a frequent visitor to our house when I was at home, when Christine was only a baby. My father is also a doctor. I suppose, in a way, he was Patrick’s mentor. He’s retired now, of course.”
Banks wondered how well that marriage had gone down with Mrs. Aspern’s family. “Were you both at home last night?” he asked.
She turned to look at him. “What do you expect me to say to that?”
“I expect you to tell me the truth,” Banks said.
“Ah, the truth. Yes, of course we were both at home.” She turned to look out of the window again.
“Did your husband go out at all yesterday?”
Mrs. Aspern didn’t reply.
“Is there anything else you want to say?” Banks asked. “Anything at all you want to tell me?”
Mrs. Aspern glanced at him again. He couldn’t make out the expression on her face. Then she turned back to look out of the window. “No,” she said, after a long pause. “No, I don’t think so.”
Banks gave up and drove on, Mariza singing against a backdrop of the misty Dales landscape, a song about sorrow, longing, pity, punishment and despair.
The scene looked different in the late afternoon, Annie thought as she walked through the woods to the canal branch. The area was still taped off, and she had to show her warrant card and sign in before entering, but the firefighters and their equipment were gone, and in their stead was an eerie silence shrouding the two burned-out narrow boats and the scattering of men in hooded white overalls patiently searching the banks. The smell of ashes still hung in the damp air.
She found Detective Sergeant Stefan Nowak poking through debris on the artist’s boat. Stefan was their crime scene coordinator, and it was his job to supervise the collection of possible crime scene evidence by his highly trained team and to liaise between the special analysts in the lab and Banks’s team.
Stefan looked up as Annie approached. He was a handsome, elegant man – no doubt a prince, Annie thought, as so many exiled Poles were – and he looked aristocratic, even in his protective clothing. There was a certain remoteness about him, which stopped on just the polite side of aloofness, and made him seem regal in some way. He had a faint Polish accent, too, which served to heighten the mysterious effect. He was friendly enough to be on a first-name basis with both Annie and Banks, but he didn’t hang out in the Queen’s Arms with the rest of the lads, and nobody knew much about his private life.
Annie sniffled. “Found anything?” she asked.
Stefan gestured toward the murky water. “One of the frogmen found an empty turps container in there,” he said. “Probably the one used to start the fire. No prints or anything, though. Just your regular, commercial turps container. Anyway, I’m finished here,” he said. “Come on, I’ll show you what we’ve found so far.”
Annie wrapped her scarf more tightly around her sore throat as they took the narrow path through the woods. Wraiths of fog still drifted between the trees like elaborate spiderwebs, and here and there they had to step around a patch of muddy ground or a shallow puddle.