“Tut-tut,” said Gervaise. “That’s not the way to think of it. Not the way at all. This is cooperation. We’re all fighting a common battle here, a united front against the forces of evil. They’re not ‘muscling in,’ they’re offering us their expertise and helping us find our direction, and in this case they’ve directed us to a brick wall.”
“Like my satnav usually does,” said Annie.
Gervaise laughed. They both drank more beer. “Let me tell you a story,” she went on. “A few years ago, when I was working on the Met, we sometimes had to work a lot more closely than we would have chosen with Special Branch and MI5. You’re right, Annie, they can be arrogant and devious bastards, and they usually have the ultimate argument-crusher on their side, don’t they, whether it’s 9/11 or the July bombings. There’s not much you can say when someone brings that up. Fancy another drink?”
“I shouldn’t,” said Annie.
“Oh, come on.”
“Okay. But it’s my shout.” Annie got up and went to the bar. Where the hell was Gervaise going with all this? she wondered as she ordered two more pints of Black Sheep. The pub was filling up now with its usual mix of locals and tourists, some of the latter carrying large rucksacks and walking gear, enjoying their first pint after a ten-mile hike. The pub music system was playing 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love.” Annie had always liked the song. One of her old boyfriends, an English graduate, had used it to point out to her the difference between irony and sarcasm. She still hadn’t gone to bed with him, and when she had quoted “I Get Along Without You Very Well” back at him, she hadn’t meant it ironically at all.
Ready for the next installment, she carried the drinks back to the old snug.
The tube was hot and crowded again, and Banks was relieved to get off at Sloane Square. He walked down King’s Road in the evening light past the big drab Peter Jones department store and Habitat to where the street narrowed and the posh boutiques and jewelry shops took over. As he walked, instinctively slowing down every now and then to look in a shop window and check for anyone who might be following him, he mulled over everything he had discovered that day, from Tomasina’s revelation about the photos and Hardcastle’s behavior at Zizzi’s to what Annie had told him about Nicky Haskell seeing Wyman arguing, or remonstrating, with Hardcastle at the Red Rooster, and Wyman’s reaction to her mention of it.
He hoped Annie was okay. She was usually pretty good at talking herself out of difficult situations, but Gervaise could be tenacious, not to mention wily. There was a part of him that wanted to tell the superintendent that the evidence was bearing out his theory about the Hardcastle-Silbert case, and that Derek Wyman was in it up to his neck, but he didn’t trust her that much. There was no glory to be got from this one, and it had already been made perfectly clear to him that MI5, MI6 and Special Branch didn’t want him anywhere near the Silbert case.
Sometimes Banks longed for the old days with Gristhorpe in charge. You knew where you were with Gristhorpe, as plain-speaking a York-shireman as you could find. There was also a chance that he would have stood up to the powers-that-be. Gristhorpe had been nobody’s puppet, always his own man. Which was perhaps why he had got no higher than detective superintendent. That reminded Banks that he hadn’t visited his old boss and mentor in quite some time. Another thing to put on his must-do-soon list.
He turned into Sophia’s street and tried to put the case out of his mind. If Sophia was home, perhaps they would have a glass of wine and then go to the cinema, or to a concert, as they had the other night. Even spending the evening at home together would be perfect as far as Banks was concerned. If she wasn’t home, then she would probably have left a phone message arranging to meet him somewhere later. When he got to the steps he noticed that the living room light was on, which meant she was in.
Banks and Sophia had agreed that each should come and go from the other’s house as if it were their own, so he put his key in the lock and was surprised when the door opened at his touch. It hadn’t been locked. That wasn’t like Sophia. He checked the handle and lock for any signs of forced entry and found none. The alarm system should have taken care of anything like that, anyway.
Calling out Sophia’s name, Banks turned right from the hall into the living room and stopped dead on the threshold. She was so still, with her head hanging on her chest, that at first he feared she was dead. But when he called her name again, she lifted up a tear-stained face to him and he could see that she was physically unharmed.
She was sitting on the floor leaning back against the sofa, her long legs stretched out into the heap of broken things piled at the center of the carpet. Her things. Banks couldn’t tell exactly what was there. It looked like a random selection of her cherished possessions taken from various places in the room: a slashed landscape painting that had hung on the wall above the stereo; an antique table on which she had displayed various objects, its spindly legs splintered, mother-of pearl inlay smashed; a broken Eskimo soapstone sculpture; a shattered ceramic mask; scattered beads from broken strings; a cracked painted Easter egg; dried ferns and flowers tossed willy-nilly over the whole mess like a parody of a funeral.
Sophia sat clutching a piece of exquisite gold-rimmed pottery in her hand, palm bleeding from how tightly she had clutched it. She held it out to Banks. “This belonged to my mother. Her grandmother gave it to her. God knows how long she’d had it or where she got it.” Then she suddenly flung the shard of pottery at Banks. It hit the doorjamb. “You bastard!” she screamed. “How could you?”
Banks made to move over to her but she held up her hands, palms out. “Don’t come near me,” she said. “Don’t come near me or I don’t know what I’ll do.”
She had her mother’s eyes when she was angry, Banks noticed. “Sophia, what is it?” he asked. “What happened?”
“You know damn well what happened. Can’t you see? You forgot to set the alarm and...” She gestured around the room. “This happened.”
Banks crouched across the heap from her. His knees cracked. “I didn’t forget to set the alarm,” he said. “I’ve never forgotten to set it.”
“You must have. There’s no other explanation. The alarm never went off. I came home as usual. The door hadn’t been broken open or anything. And this was what I found. How else could it have happened? You forgot to set the alarm. Someone just walked in.”
Banks didn’t see the point in questioning her logic—on how anyone might have known if he hadn’t set the alarm, for example—because she was clearly in no state for that sort of thing. “Did you check the back?” he asked.
Sophia shook her head.
Banks walked down the passage to where the back door opened off the kitchen. Nothing. No sign of forced entry, no sign of any kind of entry. For good measure, he went out into the garden and saw nothing had been disturbed there, either. The back gate was padlocked, as usual, though anyone could have climbed over it. They would still have had the alarm system to reckon with, though, as it covered the whole house.
He went back to the living room. Sophia hadn’t moved. “Have you called the police?” he asked.
“I don’t want the bloody police. What can the bloody police do? Oh, just go away. Why don’t you just go away?”
“Sophia, I’m sorry, but this isn’t my fault. I set the alarm as usual this morning.”
“So how do you explain all this?”
“Was anything taken?”
“How should I know?”
“It could be important. You should make a list for the police.”