Wedged between Walton Street and the canal, Jericho is a maze of small nineteenth-century terraced houses, originally built for the foundry workers and navvies of the city. Most of the streets are named after Victorian battles or military heroes. It is as far away in spirit and appearance from the magnificent architectural beauty of the old university city as is Eastvale’s East End Estate from its cobbled market square and Norman church.
Banks drove slowly down Great Clarendon Street until he found the turning he wanted. His car attracted the attention of two scruffy children playing jacks on the pavement, and he was manoeuvred into paying them fifty pence to ‘protect’ it for him.
At first no one answered the cracked blue door, but eventually Banks heard someone move inside and when the door opened an old haggard face stared out. He couldn’t tell whether it was male or female until a deep man’s voice asked him roughly what he wanted.
‘It’s about your daughter, Cheryl,’ he said. ‘May I come in?’
The man blinked and opened the door a bit wider. Banks could smell boiled turnip and stale pipe smoke.
‘Our Cheryl’s been dead six years or more,’ the man said. ‘Nobody did anything then; why should they bother now?’
‘If I could just come in…?’
The man said nothing, but he opened the door wider to admit Banks. There was no hall; the door opened directly into a small living room. The curtains were half closed, cutting out most of the light, and the air felt hot and cloying. From what Banks could see, the place wasn’t dirty but it wasn’t exactly clean either. A grey-haired old woman with a blanket over her knees sat in a wheelchair by the empty grate. She looked round as he came in and gave him a blank smile.
‘It’s about our Cheryl,’ the man said, reaching for his pipe.
‘I heard.’
‘Look, Mrs Duggan,’ Banks said, perching on the arm of the settee, ‘I know it’s a long time ago, but something might have come up.’
‘You’ve found out who killed her?’
‘It’s possible. But I still don’t know that she was killed. You’ll have to help me.’
The file was still fresh in his mind. Cheryl Duggan had been fished out of the River Cherwell not too far from Magdalen Bridge and St Hilda’s College on a foggy November Sunday morning over six years ago. The coroner’s inquest said that death was due to drowning, or so it appeared. Several odd bruises indicated that her head may have been held under the water until she drowned. She had had sexual intercourse shortly before death, and the stomach contents indicated that she had been drinking heavily the previous evening. In view of all this, an open verdict was recorded and a police investigation was ordered.
To complicate matters, Cheryl Duggan, according to Folley, had been a well known local prostitute since the age of fifteen. She had been only seventeen when she died. The investigation, Folley admitted, had been cursory. This was due to other pressures, in particular the drug-related death of a peer’s daughter in which the heir to a brewery fortune was implicated as a pusher.
‘It could have been an accident,’ Banks said.
‘It warn’t no accident, Mr Banks,’ Mrs Duggan insisted.
‘There was water in the lungs,’ Banks countered weakly.
Mr Duggan snorted. ‘You’d think she were a mermaid, our Cheryl, the way she took to water.’
‘She’d been drinking.’
‘Yes, well, nobody’s saying she was perfect.’
‘Did you ever hear her mention a man by the name of Stephen Collier?’
Mr Duggan shook his head slowly.
There was a sense of defeat about the Duggans that weighed heavily in the dim and stuffy room and made Banks feel sick. Their voices were flat, as if they had repeated their stories a hundred times and nobody had listened; their faces were parchment-dry and drawn, the eyes wide and blank, with plenty of white showing between the lower lashes and the pupils. Dante’s words came into Banks’ mind: ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’ This was a house of defeat, a place without hope.
Banks lit a cigarette, which would at least give him a more concrete reason to feel sick and dizzy, and went on. ‘The other thing I’d like to know,’ he asked, ‘is if you hired anyone to look into Cheryl’s death. I know you didn’t think much of the police investigation.’
Mr Duggan spat into the grate. His wife frowned at him. ‘Why does it matter?’ she asked.
‘It could be important.’
‘We did hire someone,’ she said. ‘A private investigator from London. We looked him up in the phone book at the library. We were desperate. The police hadn’t done anything for more than a year, and they were saying such terrible things about Cheryl. We took out all our savings.’
‘What happened?’
‘He came from London, this man, and he asked us about Cheryl — who her friends were, where she liked to go out and everything — then he said he’d try and find out what happened.’
‘He never came back,’ Mr Duggan cut in.
‘You mean he ran off with your money?’
‘Not all of it, Alf,’ Mrs Duggan said. ‘Only a retainer, that’s all he’d take.’
‘He took off with the money, Jessie, let’s face it. We were had. He never meant to do anything about our Cheryl; he just took us for what he could get. And we let him.’
‘What was his name?’
‘Don’t remember.’
‘Yes you do, Alf,’ said Mrs Duggan. ‘It was Raymond Addison. I haven’t forgotten.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘What could we do?’ she said. ‘He’d got most of our money, so we couldn’t hire anyone else. The police weren’t interested. We just tried to forget, that’s all.’ She pulled the tartan blanket up higher around her hips.
‘Mr Addison didn’t report back to you at all then, after the first time you saw him?’
‘No,’ Mr Duggan said. ‘We only saw him the once.’
‘Can you remember the date?’
The old man shook his head.
‘I can’t remember the exact day,’ his wife said, ‘but it was in February, about fifteen months after Cheryl was killed. The police seemed to have given up and we didn’t know where to turn. We found him, and he let us down.’
‘If it’s any consolation, Mrs Duggan, I don’t think Mr Addison did let you down.’
‘What?’
‘He was found killed himself, probably no more than a day or so after you saw him, up in Yorkshire. That’s why you never heard from him again, not because he’d run off with your money.’
‘In Yorkshire? What was he doing there?’
‘I think he did find out something about Cheryl’s death. Something the police had missed. You’ve got to understand that we don’t have enough time or men to devote ourselves full time to every single case, Mrs Duggan. I don’t know the circumstances, but maybe the police here weren’t as active as you think they should have been. It’s only in books that policemen find the killer every time. But Mr Addison had only the one case. He must have visited every possible place Cheryl might have been that night, talked to everyone who knew her, and what he found out led him to a village in Yorkshire, and to his death.’
Mrs Duggan bit her knuckles and began to cry silently. Her husband moved forward to comfort her.
‘It never does any good raking up the past,’ he snapped at Banks. ‘Look how you’ve upset her.’
‘I can understand that you’re angry, Mr Duggan,’ Banks said, ‘but if I’m right, then we know who killed your daughter.’
Duggan looked away. ‘What’s it matter now?’