“Because you don’t have any clients and you can barely pay the rent?”
She glanced away, her cheeks flushed. “They’ll come. It just takes time, that’s all. I’m just starting out.”
“I’m sorry,” said Banks. “I’m not trying to browbeat you or anything. I’m really just asking for your help. To be honest, I’m rather in the same boat as you on this one.”
“You mean this isn’t an official investigation?”
“Not exactly.”
“You’re acting on your own? Oh, that’s prize, that is.” She dropped her pencil. “Not only do you come in here pushing me to give you confidential information, but it’s not even part of a sanctioned police investigation. Why don’t you stop wasting my time?”
“Because it seems to me you’ve got plenty to waste. Or would you rather get back to your filing?” Banks could swear he saw her eyes begin to shine with tears, and he felt awful. She was the kind of person you wanted to make happy, wanted good things for. If you could hurt someone like Tomasina, he thought, you really were a shit. Then he told himself not to be such a soft bastard; she had to be tough to be in the business she was in, and if she wasn’t tough enough, it was better she found out sooner rather than later. But she didn’t cry. She was tougher than she looked, and he was glad of that.
“Why?” she said. “So you can have a good ogle at my arse again? Don’t think I didn’t notice.”
“It’s a very nice arse.”
She glared at him, and for a moment he thought she was going to throw something, the heavy glass paperweight that held down what looked like a heap of bills on her desk, for example, but instead she leaned back in her chair, linked her hands behind her head and started to laugh. “Oh, you’re a prize specimen, you are,” she said.
“Does that mean you’ll help me?”
“I know the rules,” she said. “I know I’m supposed to cooperate with the police if the situation merits it. But I don’t know anything about this situation.”
“It’s hard to explain,” Banks said.
“Try. I’m bright and I’m a good listener.”
“Have you read or seen anything about the two deaths in Eastvale recently?”
“The two gay guys? Sure. Murder-suicide, wasn’t it?”
“So it would appear.”
“But you don’t believe it?”
“Oh, I believe that Mark Hardcastle beat Laurence Silbert to death with a cricket bat and then hanged himself. I just don’t believe he did it without help. A rather unusual form of help.”
“I’m listening.”
Banks tried to explain his Othello theory, aware of how absurd it sounded every time he did so. By the end he was having a hard time believing it himself. Instead of laughing at him or scoffing, though, Tomasina sat with her brow furrowed and her hands meeting in a steeple on the desk for a full minute or so after he’d finished. And that’s a long time.
“Well?” Banks said, when he could wait no longer.
“You really believe that? That that’s how it happened?”
“I think it’s likely, yes.”
“But what evidence do you have?”
“None.” Banks wasn’t going to bring the Secret Intelligence Service into his discussion with her. He had already decided on that.
“Motive?”
“None that I’m aware of right now, other than professional jealousy.”
“So the only thing even approaching evidence you have is that this Wyman character was directing Othello, that he met up with Hard-castle in London the day before the killing, that they had some professional differences and that they had been seen drinking and talking together in a pub a couple of miles out of town?”
“And that he had a memory stick with pictures of Silbert with another man. Neither Hardcastle nor Silbert had a digital camera that took such a card.”
“What about Wyman?”
“He didn’t have one, either. His is a Fuji.”
“And that’s all you’ve got?”
“Yes. I suppose if you put it like that...”
“What other way is there to put it?”
“That when you add it all up together it’s damn suspicious, that’s what. Why go two miles to a grotty teens’ pub when there are plenty of good pubs in Eastvale? A group of his bloody fifteen-year-old pupils was in there, for crying out loud. And how did he get Hard-castle upset and then calm him down? Why?”
“There’s no way anyone could have known what effect playing Iago would have on two people.”
“That’s what Annie said.”
“Annie?”
“DI Cabbot. We were working on it together.”
“And now?”
“Well, officially, we’re off it. Orders from above.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. We were just told to drop it. Anyway, aren’t I the one supposed to be asking the questions here?”
She smiled that radiant smile again, the one that made you feel you had to maintain her happiness at all costs. “I told you, I’m good at my job. That was one of my best marks, interviewing techniques. Along with surveillance and research. She’s right, though, your partner.”
“I know that. Maybe it went wrong?”
“Then it wasn’t murder. A very bad practical joke, perhaps. Some sort of malicious trick backfiring. But not murder. I suppose you know that, don’t you? At the most, you’d be able to charge him with harassment or incitement, that’s if you can prove that he did indeed incite anyone to a criminal act.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Banks said. “The result’s the same. Two men are dead. And very nastily, brutally dead, I might add. One beaten to a pulp and the other hanging from a tree near a beauty spot where children were playing.”
“You can’t intimidate me with the graphic horror of it all. I’ve seen dead bodies. I’ve even seen Saw IV and Hostel Part II.”
“Well, what will work with you?”
Tomasina studied him again for what felt like another long time, then she said, “I took those photos.”
“What?”
“The photos you’re talking about. On the memory stick. I took them.”
Banks’s jaw must have dropped. “Just like that?”
“Well, it wasn’t quite that easy. I had to stay out of sight.”
“No, I mean, you’re admitting it just like that. I appreciate what you’re doing, really I do.”
Tomasina shrugged. “When a cute man—and the father of my rock hero, no less—says nice things about my arse, I can’t very well hold out on him, can I?”
“I’m sorry about that. It just sort of slipped out.”
She laughed again. “It’s all right. I’m only teasing. But you’d better be careful. Some women might not appreciate it as much as I do.”
“I know. You’re one in a million, Tomasina.” Sophia certainly wouldn’t appreciate it, though she might say, “I know” or “So I’ve been told,” Banks thought. Or Annie. In fact, just about every woman he knew would have given him shit for a comment like that. What the hell had he been thinking of? Sometimes he would just slip from the politically correct world everyone inhabited these days back to the primeval slime without warning. Perhaps age was lowering his guard? But he wasn’t that old, he told himself. And he was cute. “Will you tell me about it?” he asked.
“There’s not much to tell, really.”
“But Derek Wyman did come to you?”
“Yes. And he was surprised, as most people are. But not because I wasn’t some sort of tough guy. He didn’t want me to do any strong-arm work or anything like that. Anyway, I managed to convince him I could do the job.”