On better days, and when he reached his teens, Banks would spend his time searching through the secondhand bookshops for the old Pan books of horror stories or steamy bestsellers such as The Carpetbaggers and Peyton Place. When he was thirteen or fourteen, feeling way too grown-up to be on holiday with his parents, he would wander off alone for the day, hanging around in coffee bars and browsing through the latest singles in Woolworth’s or a local record shop. Sometimes he would meet a girl in the same predicament, and he had had his first adolescent kisses and tentative gropings on these holidays.
Banks parked by the seafront and, without even stopping for a look at the water, hurried to the house directly across from him, where retired DI George Woodward now ran his B amp;B. The VACANCIES sign swung in the wind and creaked like a shutter on a haunted house. By the time Banks rang the front doorbell he was cold and soaked to the skin.
George Woodward was a dapper man with gray hair, bristly mustache and the watchful eyes of an ex-copper. There was also an aura of the hangdog about him, most noticeable as he looked over Banks’s shoulder at the weather and shook his head slowly. “I did suggest Torquay,” he said, “but the wife’s mother lives here in Withernsea.” He ushered Banks in. “Ah, well, it’s not that bad. You’ve just come on a miserable day, that’s all. Early in the season, too. You should see it when the sun’s shining and the place is full. A different world altogether.”
Banks wondered on which day of the year that momentous event occurred, but he kept silent. No point antagonizing George Woodward.
They were in a large room with a bay window and several tables, clearly the breakfast room where the lucky guests hurried down for their bacon and eggs every morning. The tables were laid out with white linen, but there were no knives and forks, and Banks wondered if the Woodwards had any guests at all at the moment. Without offering tea or anything stronger, George Woodward sat at one of the tables and bade Banks sit opposite.
“It’s about Alderthorpe, is it, then?”
“Yes.” Banks had spoken with Jenny Fuller on his mobile on his way out to Withernsea and learned what Elizabeth Bell, the social worker, had to say. Now he was after the policeman’s perspective.
“I always thought that would come back to haunt us one day.”
“How do you mean?”
“Damage like that. It doesn’t go away. It festers.”
“I suppose you’ve got a point.” Like Jenny had with Elizabeth Bell, Banks decided he had to trust George Woodward. “I’m here about Lucy Payne,” he said, watching Woodward’s expression. “Linda Godwin, as was. But that’s between you and me for the moment.”
Woodward paled and whistled between his teeth. “My God, I’d never have believed it. Linda Godwin?”
“That’s right.”
“I saw her picture in the paper, but I didn’t recognize her. The poor lass.”
“Not anymore.”
“Surely you can’t think she had anything to do with those girls?”
“We don’t know what to think. That’s the problem. She’s claiming loss of memory. There’s some circumstantial evidence, but not much. You know the sort of thing I mean.”
“What’s your instinct?”
“That she’s more involved than she’s saying. Whether she’s an accessory or not, I don’t know.”
“You realize she was only a twelve-year-old girl when I met her?”
“Yes.”
“Twelve going on forty, the responsibility she had.”
“Responsibility?” Jenny had said something about Lucy taking care of the younger children; he wondered if this was what Woodward meant.
“Yes. She was the eldest. For Christ’s sake, man, she had a ten-year-old brother who was being regularly buggered by his father and uncle and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it. They were doing it to her, too. Can you even begin to imagine how all that made her feel?”
Banks admitted he couldn’t. “Mind if I smoke?” he asked.
“I’ll get you an ashtray. You’re lucky Mary’s over at her mother’s.” He winked. “She’d never allow it.” Woodward produced a heavy glass ashtray from the cupboard by the door and surprised Banks by pulling a crumpled packet of Embassy Regal from the shirt pocket under his beige V-neck sweater. He then went on to surprise him even further by suggesting a wee dram. “Nowt fancy, mind. Just Bell’s.”
“Bell’s would be fine,” said Banks. He’d have just the one, as he had a long drive home. The first sip, after they clinked glasses, tasted wonderful. It was everything to do with the cold rain lashing at the bay windows.
“Did you get to know Lucy at all?” he asked.
Woodward sipped his Bell’s neat and grimaced. “Barely spoke to her. Or any of the kids, for that matter. We left them to the social workers. We’d enough on our hands with the parents.”
“Can you tell me how it went down?”
Woodward ran his hand over his hair, then took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Good Lord, this is going back a bit,” he said.
“Whatever you can remember.”
“Oh, I remember everything as if it was yesterday. That’s the problem.”
Banks tapped some ash from his cigarette and waited for George Woodward to focus his memory on the one day he would probably sooner forget.
“It was pitch-black when we went in,” Woodward began. “And cold as a witch’s tit. The eleventh of February, it was. 1990. There was me and Baz – Barry Stevens, my DS – in one car. The bloody heater didn’t work properly, I remember, and we were almost blue with cold when we got to Alderthorpe. All the puddles were frozen. There were about three more cars and a van, for the social workers to isolate the kids, like. We were working off a tip from one of the local schoolteachers who’d got suspicious about some of the truancies, the way the kids looked and behaved and, especially, the disappearance of Kathleen Murray.”
“She’s the one who was killed, right?”
“That’s right. Anyway, there were a couple of lights on in the houses when we got there, and we marched straight up and bashed our way in – we had a warrant – and that was when we… we saw it.” He was silent for a moment, staring somewhere beyond Banks, beyond the bay window, beyond even the North Sea. Then he took another nip of whiskey, coughed and went on. “Of course, we didn’t know who was who at first. The two households were mixed up and nobody knew who’d fathered who anyway.”
“What did you find?”
“Most of them were asleep until we bashed the doors in. They had a vicious dog, took a chunk out of Baz as we went in. Then we found Oliver Murray and Pamela Godwin – brother and sister – in a bed with one of the Godwin girls: Laura.”
“Lucy’s sister.”
“Yes. Dianne Murray, the second-eldest child, was curled up safe and sound in a room with her brother Keith, but their sister, Susan, was sandwiched between the other two adults.” He swallowed. “The place was a pigsty – both of them were – smelled terrible. Someone had knocked a hole through the living-room wall so they could travel back and forth without going outside and being seen.” He paused a moment to collect his thoughts. “It’s hard to get across the sense of squalor, of depravity you could feel there, but it was tangible, something you could touch and taste. I don’t just mean the dirt, the stains, the smells, but more than that. A sort of spiritual squalor, if you catch my drift. Everyone was terrified, of course, especially the kids.” He shook his head. “Sometimes, looking back, I wonder if we couldn’t have done it some other way, some gentler way. I don’t know. Too late for that now, anyroad.”
“I understand you found evidence of satanic rituals?”
“In the cellar of the Godwin house, yes.”
“What did you find?”
“The usual. Incense, robes, books, pentagram, an altar – no doubt on which the virgin would be penetrated. Other occult paraphernalia. You know what my theory is?”