If they were involved, it meant they were part of the intelligence service, or paid by them to run a safe house or some such thing, and if that was true, they were hardly going to give anything away. If, as Sophia had suggested, they ran a gay brothel, then it was clearly an elite one, and the same code of silence probably applied. Charles Lane was most likely a dead end in the investigation.
Banks’s only consolation was that perhaps what had happened there didn’t really matter. The important thing was that Silbert had gone there with a man, and photographs of that visit had ended up in the possession of Mark Hardcastle, who had either misconstrued the whole business or been right on target. Perhaps the identity of the man wasn’t as important as the identity of the photographer.
Humming “Norwegian Wood” for some odd reason, Banks dried himself and dressed. He thought he heard someone at the door, but when he went down and opened it, there was nobody there. Puzzled, he went through to the kitchen and blessed Sophia for leaving some coffee in the pot. He poured himself a cup, put a slice of wholemeal bread in the toaster and sat on a stool at the island. It was a small kitchen, especially given how much Sophia loved to cook, but it was organized and modern, with various high-quality pots and pans hanging from hooks above the island, a brushed steel gas oven and burners and just about every kitchen gadget you could want, from a set of J. A. Henckel knives and a multispeed mixer to a cheap plastic carrot peeler you wore on your finger like a ring.
The toast popped out and Banks spread it with butter and grapefruit marmalade then had a quick look through that morning’s copy of The Independent Sophia had left behind. The Hardcastle-Silbert case seemed to have slipped from their radar entirely, and there wasn’t much else of interest. Amy Winehouse was in trouble over drugs again. It was a shame, Banks thought, as it made people pay less attention to her amazing talent. Or perhaps it got her name across to a wider audience. Billie Holiday had had much the same problems— and she did go to rehab—yet she had made wonderful music. A lot of musicians had trouble with drugs, and Banks worried perhaps more than he should about Brian. The only great detective with a drug problem Banks knew of was Sherlock Holmes, and he had been pretty good at his job. Pity he wasn’t real.
Banks shut the newspaper and pushed it aside. He had to work out his day. What he needed was information about Laurence Silbert, and it wasn’t going to be easy to get. Sophia’s father had come across him in Bonn in the mid-eighties. At that time Silbert would have been about forty, and given his condition when he died, probably at the height of fitness. What had he been doing in Germany? Most likely the same as everyone else in his line of work had been doing then—getting defectors over the Berlin Wall, penetrating the Eastern bloc for information about scientific, military, industrial and political goings-on, perhaps even carrying out the occasional unofficial assassination. The whole business was such a complex jumble of espionage and counterespionage, single, double and triple agents, that it was probably impossible for an outsider and layman to know where to start. In addition, much of the information on the shady activities of those times had been lost or buried. Only the Germans seemed determined to reassemble their old Stasi files, even going so far as to invent a computer program that could put together shredded documents in the blink of an eye. Everyone else just wanted to forget the dirty deeds they had done.
There was, however, one place he could start.
Banks washed off his breakfast dishes, made sure the coffeemaker was turned off and that he had everything he needed in his briefcase. At the front door he paused and set the alarm system, then he headed up to the King’s Road and turned left toward the Sloane Square tube station, cursing not for the first time that it was served only by the District and Circle lines, which meant that he would either have to go all the way round to Baker Street or change at both Victoria and Green Park. But he wasn’t in a hurry, and it wouldn’t take long to get to Swiss Cottage and find out if Laurence Silbert’s old lover Leo Westwood still lived there.
Annie was no stranger to Detective Superintendent Gervaise’s office and had no hesitation in accepting the offer of tea, which Gervaise immediately sent for. The last time Annie had sat in that chair she had been facing a lengthy torrent of both praise and censure for the way her last major case had turned out. She could understand that. Crimes solved was a good thing; dead bodies as part of the solution were not. In the end she was lucky to come out without any serious black marks against her. It was possible that Gervaise had gone easy on her because of her fragile emotional state at the time, but then Gervaise wasn’t known for making such allowances. On the whole, Annie felt that she had been fairly treated.
“How are things going?” Gervaise asked, making small talk while they waited for the tea. “That’s a nice new hairdo, by the way. It suits you.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” said Annie. “Everything’s going fine.” What else was she going to say? Besides, things were going fine. A little dull at times, but fine.
“Good. Good. Nasty business, this East Side Estate. Any ideas? What do you think about this Jackie Binns character?”
“He’s a waste of space,” Annie said. “Nicky Haskell is actually quite bright, once you get past the posturing and the imitation gangbanger talk. Despite his aversion to school, he might actually make something of himself. But Binns is a lost cause.”
“I’m not sure that it’s healthy to regard members of our community in such a negative way, DI Cabbot, particularly downtrodden members.”
“I’m sure it’s not, ma’am,” said Annie with a smile. “Just put it down to copper’s instinct.”
“Did he do it?”
“You mean did Jackie Binns stab Donny Moore?”
“That’s what I’m asking.”
“I’m not sure,” said Annie. “I don’t think so. I was talking with DS Jackman about that very thing and we agreed that Haskell is scared, and we don’t think he’d be that scared of Binns. They have a history, more a bit of mutual grudging respect than anything else. They’ve had a couple of scraps. Thing is, it’s not like Binns to take a knife to a kid like Donny Moore. I’m not saying he’s honorable or anything. It’s just...”
“Not his style?”
“That’s right.”
“Who says he did?”
“Nobody. That’s the problem. That’s what we’re trying to get someone to tell us. He’s certainly the leader of the south estate gang and if he felt Haskell and Moore were encroaching on his territory he’d probably feel he had every right to take action. He could have delegated the task. But no one has admitted to seeing anything yet.”
“So if not him, who?”
“No idea, ma’am. But we’re still investigating it. At least there haven’t been any more incidents or reprisals.”
“That’s a good thing,” said Gervaise. “Don’t want to upset the tourists, do we?”
“I doubt if any of them have even heard of the East Side Estate, unless they got lost like the Paxtons did the other night. They won’t forget it in a hurry.”
“Even so... We don’t want gangs bringing their problems into the town center. We’ve got enough problems already with weekend binge drinking.”
Despite the rape and murder of a young girl after an evening’s binge drinking a few months ago, the problem hadn’t abated much, Annie thought. Now it was almost a test of mettle among the kids involved to go walking around The Maze, that labyrinth of alleys beyond the other side of the market square where the girl was killed. Still, they had caught the killer quickly enough, and there had been no more attacks.