When Jenny had covered half the circle of the head, she cut back through the long grass to the car park and set off down the narrow track. As she went, she noticed a blue Citroën in her rearview mirror and felt certain that she had seen it somewhere before. Telling herself to stop being so paranoid, she left the head and drove toward Patrington. When she’d got closer to the edges of Hull, she called Banks on her mobile.
He answered on the third ring. “Jenny, where are you?”
“Hull. On my way home.”
“Find out anything interesting?”
“Plenty, but I’m not sure that it gets us any further. I’ll try to put it all together into some sort of profile, if you want.”
“Please.”
“I just heard you had to let Lucy Payne go.”
“That’s right. We got her out of a side exit without too much fuss, and her lawyer drove her straight to Hull. They did some shopping in the city center, then Julia Ford, the lawyer, dropped Lucy off at the Liversedges’. They welcomed her with open arms.”
“That’s where she is now?”
“Far as I know. The local police are keeping an eye on her for us. Where else can she go?”
“Where, indeed?” said Jenny. “Does this mean it’s over?”
“What?”
“My job.”
“No,” said Banks. “Nothing’s over yet.”
After Jenny had hung up, she checked her rearview mirror again. The blue Citroën was keeping its distance, allowing three of four other cars between them, but there was no doubt it was still back there on her tail.
“Annie, have you ever thought of having children?”
Banks felt Annie tense beside him in bed. They had just made love and were basking in the aftermath, the gentle rushing of the falls outside, the occasional night animal calling from the woods and Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks drifting up from the stereo downstairs.
“I don’t mean… well, not now. I mean, not you and me. But ever?”
Annie lay still and silent for a while. He felt her relax a little and stir against him. Finally, she said. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. It’s been on my mind. This case, the poor devils in the Murray and Godwin families, all the missing girls, not much more than kids, really. And the Wrays, her being pregnant.” And Sandra, he thought, but he hadn’t told Annie about that yet.
“I can’t say as I have,” Annie answered.
“Never?”
“Maybe I got shortchanged when it came to handing out the maternal instinct, I don’t know. Or maybe it’s to do with my own past. Anyway, it never came up.”
“Your past?”
“Ray. The commune. My mother dying so young.”
“But you said you were happy enough.”
“I was.” Annie sat up and reached for the glass of wine she had put on the bedside table. Her small breasts glowed in the dim light, smooth skin sloping down to the dark brown areolas, slightly upturned where the nipples rose.
“Then why?”
“Good Lord, Alan, surely it’s not every woman’s duty in life to reproduce or to analyze why she doesn’t want to. I’m not a freak, you know.”
“I know. Sorry.” Banks sipped some of his wine, lay back against the pillows. “It’s just… well, I had a bit of a shock the other day, that’s all.”
“What?”
“Sandra.”
“What about her?”
“She’s pregnant.” There, he’d done it. He didn’t know why it should have been so difficult, or why he had the sharp, sudden feeling that he would have been wiser to have kept his mouth closed. He also wondered why he had told Jenny straight away but delayed so long before telling Annie. Partly it was because Jenny knew Sandra, of course, but there was more to it than that. Annie didn’t seem to like the intimacy implied by details of Banks’s life, and she had sometimes made him feel that sharing any part of his past was a burden to her. But he couldn’t seem to help himself. Since splitting up with Sandra, he had become far more introspective and examined his life much more closely. He saw little point in being with someone if he couldn’t share some of that.
At first, Annie said nothing, then she asked, “Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I don’t know.”
“How did you hear the news?”
“From Tracy, when we went to lunch in Leeds.”
“So Sandra didn’t tell you herself?”
“You know as well I do we don’t communicate much.”
“Still, I would’ve thought… something like this.”
Banks scratched his cheek. “Well, it just goes to show, doesn’t it?”
Annie sipped more wine. “Show what?”
“How far apart we’ve grown.”
“You seem upset by this, Alan.”
“Not really. Not upset so much as…”
“Disturbed?”
“Perhaps.”
“Why?”
“Just the thought of it. Of Tracy and Brian having a little brother or sister. Of…”
“Of what?”
“I was just thinking,” Banks said, turning toward her. “I mean, it’s something I haven’t thought about in years, denied it, I suppose, but this has brought it all back.”
“All what back?”
“The miscarriage.”
Annie froze for a moment, then said, “Sandra had a miscarriage?”
“Yes.”
“When was that?”
“Oh, years ago, when we were living in London. The kids were small, too small to understand.”
“What happened?”
“I was working undercover at the time. Drugs squad. You know what it’s like, away for weeks at a time, can’t contact your family. It was two days before my boss let me know.”
Annie nodded. Banks knew that she understood about the pressures and stresses of undercover work firsthand; a knowledge of the Job and its effects was one of the things they had in common. “How did it happen?”
“Who knows? The kids were at school. She started bleeding. Thank God we had a helpful neighbor, or who knows what might have happened.”
“And you blame yourself for not being there?”
“She could have died, Annie. And we lost the baby. Everything might have gone just fine if I’d been there like any other father-to-be, helping out around the place. But Sandra had to do everything, for crying out loud – all the lifting, shopping, odd jobs, fetching and carrying. She was replacing a lightbulb when she first started to feel funny. She could have fallen and broken her neck.” Banks reached for a cigarette. He didn’t usually indulge in the “one after” for Annie’s sake, but this time he felt like it. He still asked, “Is it okay?”
“Go ahead. I don’t mind.” Annie sipped more wine. “But thanks for asking. You were saying?”
Banks lit up and the smoke drifted away toward the half-open window. “Guilt. Yes. But more than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was working drugs, like I said, spending most of my time on the streets or in filthy squats trying to get a lead to the big guys from their victims. Kids, for the most part, runaways, stoned, high, tripping, zonked out, whatever you care to call it. Some of them as young as ten or eleven. Half of them couldn’t even tell you their own names. Or wouldn’t. I don’t know if you remember, but it was around the time the AIDS scare was growing. Nobody knew for sure yet how bad it was, but there was a lot of scare-mongering. And everyone knew you got it through blood, from unprotected sex – mostly anal sex – and through sharing needles. Thing was, you lived in fear. You just didn’t know if some small-time dealer was going to lunge at you with a dirty needle, or if some junkie’s drool on your hand could give you AIDS.”