‘Too true,’ said Penny. ‘Look, a few of us are going back to the house. Want to come along? No doom and gloom, I promise.’
‘I’d really love to,’ said Banks, ‘but I fear I wouldn’t last long.’ In fact, he wanted to end the evening as he ended most evenings, at home in his dark conservatory looking at the moon and stars outside, with a nightcap and some quiet music. He felt he could face it now. He didn’t feel like a party any more.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘I understand. Murderers to catch, and all that.’
Banks nodded. ‘Murderers to catch.’ If only it were that easy. ‘Goodnight.’
As Banks left, the eager young man with the theories about the folk revival took his seat, swaying and spilling a little beer as he moved. Penny said hello and smiled politely at him but immediately fell into conversation with her guitarist. Banks didn’t think she would be inviting the young man back to her house. She looked in Banks’s direction as he was leaving and smiled.
Outside, he noticed a hint of peat smoke in the cool night air, reminding him that it was still only April, no matter how pleasant the days were becoming. No music followed him into the night as he walked the half mile home, mostly along the Pennine Way, with a bright moon and a scattering of stars to light his way. The exercise and fresh air would do him good after a day hanging around in the mire of Garskill Farm.
As he walked along the path that clung to the hillside, which stepped down in a series of lynchets to Gratly Beck, he pictured the migrant worker’s body again. Somehow, no matter how many times it happened, he never got quite used to it. He thought of Penny again and knew he shouldn’t read anything into her friendly behaviour. It was just her way; she was a free spirit, a bit flirtatious, mischievous. Still, he couldn’t help but hope. It seemed that nothing had cured him of that. Not Sandra. Not Annie. Not Sophia.
Chapter 5
Banks got to the office early enough on Monday morning to listen to Today for a while as he went through his in tray. Before long, sick to death of hearing how bad the economy was and how violent things were in the Middle East, he switched over to catch the end of Breakfast on Radio 3, where a stately Haydn symphony was playing.
As expected, nothing much had happened on Sunday. Banks had called in at the station briefly, and he found Haig and Lombard working away at the escort agency websites. Doug Wilson and Gerry Masterson were out conducting interviews. He guessed that Joanna Passero would be at home, as would most of the CSIs and lab technicians they so needed to start producing results. Winsome had arranged for the Garskill Farm victim’s photo to be on the evening news that night, and it would be shown again the following morning and evening. She had spent most of Sunday asking more questions in Ingleby. There hadn’t been many calls made from the telephone box there, and the ones of interest to Banks, made around the time Mrs Boscombe had seen the man resembling the victim, had all been to mobiles. One was to Bill Quinn, another was a pay-as-you-go, impossible to trace, and the third was an Estonian number they were trying to track down.
Early on Monday morning, the upper floors of the police station were still mostly empty, and Banks enjoyed a little quiet time gazing down on the market square, the gold hands against the blue face of the church clock telling him it was a quarter past eight. He made some notes, answered a couple of emails and binned most of the official memos and circulars that had piled up. As Banks worked, he heard people arriving, footsteps on the stairs, office doors opening and closing along the corridor, good mornings, brief comments on the weekend’s football and television. A normal Monday morning.
By nine o’clock he was ready for a gathering of the troops, but before he could round them up, there was a knock at his door and Stefan Nowak, Crime Scene Manager, walked in. The two had known one another for years. Stefan was unusual among CSIs for being a detective sergeant rather than a civilian. He was working towards his inspector’s boards, and he already had a BSc and a number of forensics courses under his belt. He wasn’t a specialist, but something of a jack of all trades, and his management skills made him perfect for the job. He still spoke with a slight Polish accent, though Banks understood that he had been in England for years. He never talked much about his past or his private life, so Banks was not certain what his story was. He sensed that Stefan liked to cultivate an aura of mystery. Perhaps he thought it made him more attractive to the opposite sex. He had a reputation for being a bit of a ladies’ man, and dressed as stylishly as Ken Blackstone, though in a more casual, youthful way. He was a lot better-looking, too, with a full head of healthy, well-tended hair.‘I hope you’ve got something for me, Stefan,’ Banks said. ‘We could do with a break right now.’
Nowak sat down, pulling at his creases the way Ken Blackstone did. ‘I don’t think you’ll be disappointed,’ he said. ‘I paid a visit to Garskill Farm yesterday and had a chat with the Crime Scene Manager Mr Smedley. I must say, he’s a bit tense and prickly, isn’t he?’
‘That’s one way of describing him.’
‘Anyway, I wanted to compare some fibres and tyre tracks as soon as possible, and it seemed the best way.’
‘And were you able to?’
‘Not until just now,’ said Nowak. ‘The team worked very hard and late up at that dreadful place. The report was in my tray when I got in a little over an hour ago. Someone must have dropped it off late last night.’ Nowak spent most of his time in Scientific Support, next door, which had been taken over as an annexe when Eastvale was the headquarters of the Western Area. It would probably remain as it was, because it was damn useful, and it saved money in the long run. Like most county forces, Eastvale sent most of the evidence collected at crime scenes out to an accredited forensic laboratory for analysis, but there were one or two things they could handle in their own labs here, such as fingerprint and basic fibre analysis, photographic services and documents. Not DNA or blood, though. In the end, most trace evidence went to the official Forensic Science Service Laboratory at Wetherby, or to one of the specialist labs dealing with such matters as entomology or forensic archaeology. But having some services in-house saved time as well as money.
‘Anything useful?’
‘Depends what you mean. The book that someone left behind there was in Polish, by the way. A translation of The Da Vinci Code.’
‘That’s a promising start. Fancy a coffee?’
‘Sure.’
Banks rang down for a pot of coffee. He still needed about three cups to kick-start him in a morning, and so far he had had only one at home to wash down the slice of toast and marmalade that passed for breakfast.
Nowak shuffled the files in front of him, picking out photographs of hairs and tyre tracks that didn’t mean much to Banks. ‘The long and the short of it is that we can place the same car at both scenes,’ Nowak announced. ‘The tracks at Garskill Farm were poor because of the rain, of course, but the ground was very hard to start with, and Smedley’s lads managed to get some impressions. There’s some very distinctive cross-hatching on one of the tyres.’ He showed Banks two photographs; even he could see that the little scratches on both were the same.
‘So hang on a minute,’ said Banks. ‘These are photographs from two different scenes, right? You’re saying that the tracks from the farm lane near St Peter’s match tracks found in the old driveway at Garskill Farm?’
‘Yes.’