The living room was neat and tidy, as Palmer had indicated, though there was a thin layer of dust on the mantelpiece, and Banks guessed that while Quinn had kept things more or less in order, he hadn’t taken much of an interest in housework since his wife’s death. There was a small bookcase in the hall which held a number of angling, football, gardening and cooking DVDs, a few movies that had been given away in the Sunday papers over the past year or so, and several books, mostly on Quinn’s hobbies, but mixed in with book club novels with titles like Twiddling my Fingers in Timbuktu, Dwarf Throwing in Darwin, or Blowing Eggs in Uzbekistan, nestling beside a couple of well-thumbed Mills and Boons.
Upstairs were four bedrooms, the smallest of them set up as a study. The cabinets and drawers stood open, covered with fingerprint powder. A cheap inkjet printer sat on the desk. Banks glanced down at the power socket bar and saw one charger plugged in that wasn’t connected to anything. ‘Laptop?’ he asked Palmer.
‘Looks that way. If so, it’s gone.’
‘Any signs of a desktop?’
‘No. That was it.’
‘Bugger. No files, no emails, nothing.’
‘We could access the server. There could be emails stored there. But someone’s been thorough. If there were any portable storage devices, flash drives and the like, they’ve also been taken.’
‘Any prints?’
‘Only Quinn’s.’
‘I’ll have a closer look here later. Let’s move on.’
Two of the bedrooms were obviously the children’s, and had been for a number of years. Now that they were both grown up, they probably just stayed there when they came back from university for the holidays. One was a light airy space containing a storage unit stuffed with old dolls and a bookcase full of classics. Banks pulled out a copy of Middlemarch and saw the inscription, ‘To Jessica with love from Auntie Jennifer on your 15th birthday.’ Banks whistled between his teeth. Reading Middlemarch at fifteen was pretty good going; reading Middlemarch at any age was pretty good going. Like most people, Banks had watched it on TV.
The second room, which bore a plaque marking it as ‘Robbie’s Room’, was much darker in colour scheme and had little sign of childhood memorabilia other than a collection of model boats, but there were a few festival and concert posters on the walls: Green Man Festival 2010, Glastonbury 2009, Elbow, Kaiser Chiefs, Paolo Nutini. Banks noticed the electric guitar resting against a small amp in one corner. It reminded him of his own son Brian. No doubt Quinn’s son owned at least one other guitar, probably acoustic; he wouldn’t go off to university for weeks on end without one. There was also a compact CD player, but very few CDs. He probably downloaded most of his music. As for books, there were a few science-fiction and fantasy titles, old copies of MOJO, and that was it.
The third bedroom, the largest, clearly belonged to Quinn and his wife. Like the living room, it was tidy, the bed made, no discarded clothing on the floor, but there was more dust on the windowsill. The wardrobe held a hamper full of dirty laundry. Banks wondered what would happen to it now that its owner was dead. Would it ever be washed? Maybe one of Quinn’s children would wash it and give it to Oxfam.
‘Better go through that lot, too,’ Banks said to DS Palmer. ‘You never know what people leave in their pockets and put in the wash.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Palmer. ‘We have. Not even so much as a used tissue or bus ticket. And there are no signs of disturbance in any of the bedrooms.’
Banks and Palmer returned to the study. Set aside at the edge of the desk was a small heap of file folders. ‘We picked those up off the floor,’ Palmer said. ‘It’s mostly just a lot of general correspondence, day-to-day stuff, bills and so on. We’ll take it all in and go through it in detail, but these may be of more immediate interest.’
Banks doubted it. Not if someone had already been through the place first. He picked up the first folder. Harry Lake. Like most good detectives, Quinn supplemented his official notes and reports with his own observations. These often consisted of intuitions, gut feelings and imaginative ramblings that wouldn’t make it past his SIO’s scrutiny. They might be worth taking back to the station and studying, but Banks wouldn’t give them a high priority. If there had been anything of interest to him in Quinn’s study, it would be gone now. He flipped through the stack. There was nothing on Warren Corrigan or Stephen Lambert, he noticed, but also very little on Rachel Hewitt, the failure that had apparently haunted him. If Quinn had been in the habit of keeping personal files on all his cases, or at least his major cases, then what was missing would probably reveal far more than what was present, even though a clever villain would know to take a few irrelevant files along with the important one, just to muddy the waters.
Banks picked up some more folders and flipped quickly through them. He found a mix of handwritten notes and printed pages, yellow stickies and file cards, along with the occasional photocopy — a parking ticket, train ticket, passport photo, the usual odds and ends of an investigation. As a matter of routine, he checked the undersides of the drawers and backs of the filing cabinets to see if anything had been taped to them, but found nothing.
One thing he did find, in a folder stuffed with old Visa bills, was a photograph. Either the burglar had seen it and decided it was of no interest to him, or he had missed it. Curious, Banks pulled it out. It was of a young girl, aged about eighteen or nineteen, cropped from a group shot. Her arms were stretched out sideways, as if wrapped around the people on either side of her, both of whom were represented only by their shoulders.
At first Banks felt a tremor of excitement because he thought it might have been the girl in Quinn’s photos, but it clearly wasn’t her, even allowing for the possibility of disguise. This girl had fine golden-blonde hair down to her shoulders. It looked as if it had been braided then left free to tumble. She had a small nose in the centre of an oval face, an appealing overbite and light blue eyes, set in the most delicate porcelain complexion. The girl in the photo with Quinn was darker-skinned, more exotic, with fuller lips and dark eyes. This one was an English rose. So who was it? She seemed familiar, a face he had seen, perhaps more than once, and he guessed that she was Rachel Hewitt. Keith Palmer couldn’t help him. Just in case Banks was completely out on a limb he took the photo downstairs and checked it against the framed family shots he had noticed on the sideboard. It certainly wasn’t Quinn’s daughter. She had coarser brown hair, was carrying far more weight, and could by no means be said to have a porcelain complexion.
And when he looked up from the family photo, he got the shock of his life to see the same face, this time in the living, breathing flesh, standing right in front of him, a red-faced PC behind her, saying, ‘I’m sorry, sir, I couldn’t stop her. She says she’s Jessica Quinn, DI Quinn’s daughter. She lives here.’
‘I came as soon as I could,’ said Jessica, brushing past Banks into the living room, ‘What’s going on? What are all those people doing here? Have they been searching the house? Have they been in my room?’
Her voice was rising to a hysterical pitch. Banks put his arm on her shoulder, but she shook him off. ‘Jessica—’
‘You can’t do this. You just can’t do this. It’s an invasion of privacy. My father will... my father...’