Perhaps, though Katie hated to admit it, she had last been truly happy when her grandmother died. She and Sam hadn’t seen much of the old woman after they went to live with his parents in Armley. They visited her in hospital though, where she lay dying of cancer of the colon, bearing all the pain and humiliation with the same hard courage as she had suffered life. She lay there, silver head against the white pillow, and would accept no comfort for what ‘God’s Will’ was gracing her with. It was almost, Katie thought, as if she had found true joy in the final mutiny of the flesh, of its very cells, as if dying was proof to her that life on earth really was nothing but a vale of tears. But that couldn’t be true, Katie realized, for her granny had never taken pleasure in anything in her life.
Katie fainted at her funeral and then gagged on the brandy the minister gave her to bring her round. Now all she had left of Granny was the heavy wooden cross on the living-room mantelpiece. A bare dark cross, with no representation of the crucified Christ (for such things smelled too much of popish idolatry for Granny), it symbolized perfectly the harsh arid life the old woman had chosen for herself and her granddaughter. Katie hated the thing, but she hadn’t been able to pluck up the courage to throw it out. Outbreaks of boils and plagues of locusts would surely follow such a blasphemous act.
So Stephen Collier was right — she was unhappy. There was nothing anyone could do about it though, except perhaps… But no. She had a terrible feeling of apprehension about the future, certain that her only possible escape route was cut off now. Why she should feel that way she didn’t know, but everyone was behaving oddly again — Stephen, Sam, John Fletcher. Could it really be a coincidence that Anne Ralston’s name had been mentioned to her again so recently? And that so soon after it had come up, there had been another murder in the village?
Shuddering as if someone had just stepped over her grave, Katie walked back up the path and into the house to get on with cleaning the rooms.
After leaving the lab, Banks first drove into Wetherby and bought an A to Z street atlas of Leeds. He knew the city reasonably well, but had never been to Armley, where Allen’s sister lived. He studied the area and planned a route over lunch in a small pub off the main street, where he ate a rather soupy lasagne and drank an excellent pint of Samuel Smith’s Old Brewery Bitter.
He listened to the Donovan tape as he drove. Those old songs certainly brought back memories. Why did the past always seem so much brighter than the present? Because he had been more innocent then? Surely every childhood summer couldn’t have been as sunny as he recalled. There must have been long periods of rain, just as there always seemed to be these days. What the hell, he thought, humming along with ‘Teen Angel’ as he drove — today’s beautiful, enjoy the sun while it’s here. Most of all, he wanted to put out of his mind for as long as possible what he would soon have to tell Bernard Allen’s sister.
He lit a cigarette and turned on to the Leeds Inner Ring Road, which skirted the city centre by a system of yellow-lit tunnels affording occasional flashes into the open and glimpses of church spires, tower blocks and rows of dark terraced houses. It still felt warm, but the sun was now only a blurred pearl behind a thin grey gauze of cloud.
He came out on to Wellington Road, by the Yorkshire Post building, then crossed the River Aire and, immediately afterwards, the Leeds and Liverpool Canal.
There had been a great deal of development in the area, and one or two very colourful red-and-gold barges stood moored by the quay. But the river and canal banks were still very much of a wasteland: overgrown with weeds, littered with the tyres and old prams people had dumped there.
Many of the huge Victorian warehouses still hung on, crumbling and broken-windowed, their red brick blackened by the industrial smoke of a hundred years or more. It was a little like the Thames, Banks thought, where old wharfs and warehouses, like the warrens where Fagin had run his band of child-thieves, were daily being converted into luxury apartment complexes, artists’ studios and office space. Because Leeds was in the depressed and abandoned North though, the process of regeneration would probably take quite a bit longer, if indeed it ever happened at all.
Skilfully navigating the lanes of traffic and a huge roundabout, Banks managed to get on Armley Road. Soon he was at the bottom of Town Street, where the road swung right, past the park, to Bramley and Stanningley. He turned left up Crab Lane, a narrow winding one-way street by a small housing estate built on a hill, and parked on the street near the library.
Banks soon found Esther Haines’s house. It had a blue door, freshly painted by the look of it. In the garden was an overturned plastic tricycle, green with thick yellow wheels.
Banks pressed the bell and a thin-faced woman answered. She was perhaps in her late twenties, but she seemed haggard and tired. Judging from the noise inside the house, Banks guessed that the cares of motherhood had worn her down. She frowned at him and he showed her his identification card. Immediately, she turned pale and invited him in. For people on estates like this, Banks realized, a visit from the police always means bad news. He felt his stomach muscles tighten as he walked inside.
In the living room, cluttered with children’s toys, Mrs Haines had already sat down. Hands clasped in her lap, she perched on the edge of her seat on the sofa. A dark-haired man came through from the kitchen, and she introduced him as her husband, Les. He was wearing only vest and trousers. His shoulders and chest were matted with thick black hair, and he had a tattoo of a butterfly on his right bicep.
‘We were just having our tea,’ Esther Haines said. ‘Les is on the night shift at the yeast factory.’
‘Aye,’ her husband said, pulling up a chair and facing Banks aggressively. ‘What’s all this about?’
A child with jam smeared all over his pale grinning face crawled through the open kitchen door and busied himself trying to tear apart a fluffy toy dog.
‘I’m sorry,’ Banks said, ‘but I’ve got some bad news for you.’
And the rest followed as it always did: disbelief, denial, shock, tears and finally a kind of numb acceptance. Banks was relieved to see that the first thing Mr Haines did was light a cigarette. He followed suit. Esther clutched a handkerchief to her nose. Her husband went to make tea and took the child with him.
After Mr Haines had brought in the teapot and cups, leaving the child to play in the kitchen, Banks leaned forward in his seat and said to Esther, ‘There are some questions I’ve got to ask.’
She nodded. ‘Are you sure?’ she said. ‘Are you sure it’s our Bernie?’
‘As sure as we can be at this point,’ Banks told her. He didn’t want to have to tell her what state her brother’s corpse had been in. ‘Your answers will help us a lot. When did you last see him?’
‘It was a couple of weeks ago, now,’ she said. ‘He stayed with us a week.’
‘Can you find out the exact date he left here, Mrs Haines? It’s important.’
Her husband walked over to a calendar of Canadian scenes and ran a stubby finger along the squares. ‘It was the thirteenth,’ he said, then looked over at Esther. ‘Remember, love, that morning he went to the dentist’s for that filling he needed?’
Mrs Haines nodded.
‘Did he leave immediately after his visit to Mr Jarrett’s?’
‘Yes,’ said Les Haines. ‘He was heading for the Dales, so he had to be off about eleven. He was after taking one of them trains on the Settle-Carlisle route.’
‘And that was the last time either of you saw him, at eleven o’clock on May the thirteenth?’