‘What do you mean?’
‘ “You can come and listen to my Bach cantatas anytime you like, Zelda”,’ Annie mocked.
Banks laughed. ‘What’s wrong with that? I meant it innocently enough.’
‘Men.’ Annie put her foot down as they left the village for the dark unfenced road down the dale side. Banks hung on for dear life.
Fortunately, it wasn’t a long journey. Annie screeched to a halt outside Newhope Cottage, spraying gravel in all directions. The place was in darkness, but when Banks clicked his key ring, a light came on over the porch.
‘Want to come in for a coffee or something?’ he asked.
‘No, thanks.’
‘Come on, Annie. Don’t sulk. We’ve got a lot to talk about.’
‘Have we? I don’t think so.’
‘Phil Keane.’
‘It probably won’t come to anything. Besides, that business is all in the past. It happened, and it’s over and done with.’
‘Maybe for you.’
‘He was my mistake.’
‘He cost us both a lot.’
Annie leaned across him and opened the passenger door. ‘Are you going to get out now or what?’
Banks sighed and got out of the car. As he bent to thank Annie for the lift and say goodnight, she shot off in another spray of gravel and left him standing there alone in the glow of the porch light.
4
The meeting in the boardroom that Thursday morning was attended by the only four detectives remaining on the Eastvale Regional Homicide and Major Crimes squad: Detective Superintendent Alan Banks, DI Annie Cabbot, DS Winsome Jackman and DC Geraldine Masterson. Their fifth member, DC Doug Wilson, had recently left the force to pursue a teaching career. Due to budget restrictions, no replacement had yet been found for him, and Area Commander/Chief Superintendent Catherine Gervaise had warned Banks not to hold his breath waiting for one.
A few images of the victims and a number of points raised by the investigations so far graced the whiteboard, but it didn’t amount to very much. Winsome had talked to both Kirsten Brody and the van driver John Kelly again, and it was now clear that nobody involved in the accident on Belderfell Pass or the discovery of the body had placed Adrienne Munro in the passenger seat of the abandoned Ford Focus. The problem of how she had got there remained.
Banks finished his coffee, stood up and started the proceedings. ‘Basically, we’ve got two suspicious deaths,’ he began. ‘Let’s start with Adrienne Munro, aged nineteen. The way it appears is that Adrienne died from an overdose of sleeping pills, or to be more accurate, died from asphyxiating on her own vomit while unconscious from an overdose of sleeping pills.’ He waved Wednesday’s morning paper in the air. ‘Though thanks to some shoddy reporting, everyone thinks she died a drug addict’s death, probably with a needle sticking out of her arm. Jazz Singh is working on the toxicology to determine exactly what composition and brand of sleeping tablets were used. There was no physical evidence that they were forced on Adrienne in any way. The other death, a male in his mid-sixties, appears to be due to injuries sustained from a fall into a gully on Tetchley Moor.
‘Adrienne clearly had to have been taken — most likely driven — to the abandoned car she was found in after her death. The unidentified male appears to have wandered into a gully and died from the fall. But Tetchley Moor is pretty remote, so we need to know how he got there in the first place and what he was doing there dressed the way he was on such a night. It’s not impossible that someone could have pushed or tossed him over the edge of the gully. Or perhaps he was being chased.
‘In neither case do we have any evidence of injuries inflicted on the victim by another person, which means that both deaths could be accidental, or the result of suicide. What we do have is evidence of the involvement of another person or persons after death, or possibly even, for a short time, before death occurred. It’s a bit of a conundrum, to say the least.
‘As regards timing, the best I can gather from studying Dr Glendenning’s post-mortem results and Dr Burns’s crime-scene examinations is that the victims could have died at the same time, within a day of one another, or as long as two days apart. When pushed, the doctor told me that it was likely Adrienne Munro died first. Either way, we’re looking at last weekend, Friday night after midnight at the earliest, and Monday at the latest. Adrienne Munro’s parents last spoke with her on Saturday morning, and all they said was that she seemed a bit distracted, perhaps by her university workload.
‘We don’t know the identity of the deceased male yet, and needless to say that’s slowing us down. Animal activity has made arriving at a suitable image with which to go public difficult, but we have both our photographer Peter Darby and our occasional sketch artist Ray Cabbot working on it. Once we’ve identified him, we can work on finding out when and where he was last seen. He was wearing an expensive made-to-measure Hugo Boss suit and handmade leather brogues, so he was probably fairly wealthy. We hope for some results soon. In the meantime, we keep our eyes and ears open for any missing persons’ reports. Who knows, maybe he’s a Russian spy. Another Sergei Skripal. Maybe they’re both Russian spies. But somewhere, someone must be wondering where he is. Any more progress with this, Gerry?’
Gerry Masterson shook her head. ‘Nothing, sir. No missing persons of that description, no matching fingerprints in the system. Ray and Peter hope to have something for us before close of play today. I’ve spoken with Adrian Moss at media liaison, and he assures us he’ll get it on tonight’s news. Until then, there’s not much more we can do. We’re guessing that the man lived locally, or at least not too far away, so we’ve got some of the beat constables and PCSOs asking around the nearby villages.’
‘Getting anywhere with the keys in his pocket?’
‘No, sir. Just common or garden house keys. A couple of Yales, deadlock, a few smaller ones that could belong to cupboards or sheds. I doubt they’ll tell us anything more until we find a house to match them.’
‘The key ring itself?’
‘Generic. No initials or “a present from Benidorm” sort of stuff.’
‘Pity.’
‘We could use a bit more help with the door-to-door enquiries, sir. Can’t we draft in a few foot soldiers?’
Banks nodded. ‘I’ve put in for a couple more PCSOs. And if we find we’re dealing with homicide, then I’ll have to go on my knees to headquarters and beg for office staff. For the moment, we’ll work both cases out of here. What did Dr Glendenning have to say about the body on the moor?’
‘No evidence of a struggle,’ Annie Cabbot said. ‘It was much the same as Dr Burns told us at the scene. All the evidence points to the fact that he died where we found him, two or perhaps three days earlier. On further examination, we found nothing more in his pockets to help us uncover his identity, and there were no distinguishing marks on his body. There are still too many unanswered questions. What if someone did push him down that gully? A gentle push would have done it, and wouldn’t necessarily have left any traces. We’ve no way of knowing who else might have been up there at the time, no footprints or handy threads of fabric caught on the heather.’
‘Any signs of a boyfriend in the Munro case?’ Gerry asked. ‘Or someone she’d rejected recently, upset in some way?’
‘There was someone she was seeing last year, and we’ll be talking to him,’ said Banks. ‘But no one at the moment. Not according to her mother.’
‘Perhaps her parents didn’t know?’ said Gerry. ‘My parents certainly didn’t know about all my boyfriends.’
Annie looked at her. ‘All?’