‘Searching your house. Calm down. It’s quite legal. We have a warrant.’ Banks glanced at his watch. ‘The lads should be giving it a good going over right at this very moment.’
Randall half stood and spread his palms on the table. ‘You’ve no right! Do you hear me? You’ve no right. I’m an upstanding pillar of the community. Tell them, Brian.’
Liversedge just swallowed and turned pale.
‘Oh, spare me the theatrics,’ said Banks. ‘You’re a lecherous, murderous bastard. No doubt you expected something like this, so I imagine you’ve tidied up pretty well at home. Got rid of the clothing and shoes stained with Sarah’s blood. Right? Use the washing machine, did you? Well, as I said, our experts are very good, and if it’s there, even in minute quantities, they’ll find it.’
Randall raked his fingers through his curly grey hair. ‘I’ve admitted to knowing Sarah. She’s been at my house on occasion. No doubt she might have had her period, or a nosebleed or something, while she was there, which would explain any traces of blood your experts might find.’
‘Why did you phone Laurence Hadfield three times a week ago last Saturday, around the time Adrienne Munro, Sarah Chen and Hadfield himself died?’
‘I told you. To arrange a round of golf for the following day.’
‘Did Laurence Hadfield call you before eight o’clock to tell you Adrienne Munro had taken an overdose of Mandrax in his bathroom? Did he ask you to come over and see if there was anything you could do? Did you take Sarah with you and ring him on the way? What happened then?’
‘This is ridiculous.’
‘Why did you call back at half past eleven? Did you want to find out how things were, whether he’d got rid of the body?’
‘Don’t be absurd.’
‘Or did you want to tell him that you’d killed Sarah and needed his help? Does Mia know what happened that night? Is that why you tried to kill her?’
‘I was trying to save her. Can’t you understand?’
‘My client is tired, Superintendent,’ said Liversedge. ‘I suggest we take a short break now, perhaps some refreshments?’
Banks drummed his fingers on the table. He was tired, too. And he didn’t feel they would get any further with Randall tonight. Perhaps a night in the cells would change his perspective.
‘OK,’ Banks said. ‘Interview suspended at eleven thirty-five.’
Blackstone turned off the video and audio. Without looking at Randall or Liversedge, Banks said to him, ‘Ken, will you arrange for Mr Randall to be taken to the custody suite. I hear they’re quite nice and modern. Have him fingerprinted and take saliva samples for DNA analysis.’ He glanced quickly at Randall, who was turning pale. ‘Only if he consents, of course. Oh, and give the poor bugger a cup of tea and a digestive biscuit. Two sugars, I’d say.’
It was beyond late when Banks got home, and most of the lights were out in Helmthorpe when he drove through the village on his way up the hill to Gratly. Despite the lateness of the hour and the prospect of another busy day tomorrow, he was glad to be back at Newhope Cottage for the night and not in some hotel. Tired as he was, he felt too wired and on edge to go straight to bed. He’d been listening to The Doors Live at the Isle of Wight to help him stay awake on the drive home, and Jim Morrison’s dark lyric wanderings still haunted his imagination, but once in his conservatory with a glass of wine, he felt like some jazz, so he put on Miles and Coltrane live in Stockholm, from 1960, and settled back in his chair.
It had been an exhausting day, both physically and emotionally, and Banks was feeling his age. His bones ached, mostly from standing out in the damp chilly weather, and the evening’s vindaloo sat uneasily in his stomach. He was relying on Zantac more and these days, and he realised he might have to think about changing his diet. He would talk to his doctor about it on his next visit; then he remembered he hadn’t scheduled a visit in a couple of years. He was probably off the list now.
Which led to thoughts of Anthony Randall. There was no doubt in Banks’s mind that Randall had tried to kill Mia Carney that evening, and he could only hope the attempt hadn’t succeeded. Randall must have thought that Mia had known something incriminatory about his relationship with Sarah Chen in order to attempt her murder. He wanted a clean slate. Only Randall’s arrogance could have led him to believe that he would get away with it, even if Banks and Blackstone hadn’t arrived on the scene and caught him red-handed.
He thought about Mia and tried to fathom his complex and contradictory feelings towards her. In the end, he decided that he felt the way he did because of Zelda, who had had no choice about the way she had to live and the way she had been mistreated. Mia had groomed and exploited girls for the pleasure of men, for money, and two of them had died. But the girls had a choice. And Mia had seemed to care about them. A prostitute with a heart of gold? He doubted it. Both she and the girls were probably well paid. It was definitely prostitution, after a fashion, but Adrienne and Sarah hadn’t been raped and exploited by unscrupulous pimps. And although Annie had done it, he nevertheless felt equally guilty that they had planted the idea in Randall’s mind that Mia could be a liability. The moral conundrums of it all were too much for him to handle so late after such a day. He gulped down some wine and let a Coltrane solo carry him away.
Tying Randall to the attempted murder of Mia Carney would be easy now, but it might be a bit harder to nail him for the murder of Sarah Chen, unless Mia survived and really had something to tell them. They would certainly be able to link Randall and Sarah, and would no doubt find evidence of her presence at his house, in his bed, but whether their evidence would carry enough weight for a murder charge was another matter. The CSIs and scientific support were working as hard as they could. They had already found the stone they thought was used to kill Sarah, part of a pile in the corner, sheltered inside the bothy, so spared to some degree from the elements. Scientific support had found blood and a partial fingerprint on it. If the blood was matched with Sarah’s and the print with Randall, they would be on more solid ground, though they doubted there would be enough points of comparison on the prints to use in court. The pathologist at Sarah’s post-mortem earlier that day had also found traces of skin under her nails, which could be a match with Randall’s, if he had killed her. Apparently, Sarah had put up quite a fight.
As ‘So What?’ morphed into ‘On Green Dolphin Street’, Banks replenished his drink.
Just before bed, he called the hospital. It was very late, he knew, but they never slept, did they? It took him a long time to persuade the nurse who answered the phone to let him speak with one the doctors on the Mia Carney team, but in the end he was in luck, and he was put through to Dr Elaine Logan.
She sounded as exhausted as he felt. ‘How’s the patient?’ he asked.
‘She’s still unconscious,’ said Dr Logan. ‘We think we’ve managed to control the morphine, and we’ve got her on a respirator, but her heart rate is still too slow for my liking, and it appears she suffered from a slight arrhythmia. Nothing to worry about normally, but in these circumstances... She’s being closely monitored. I’ve asked to be informed of any changes in her condition. I still wouldn’t expect any news until tomorrow, though.’
‘Thank you,’ said Banks. ‘It sounds as if you should try to get some sleep, doctor.’
Banks heard a cross between a laugh and a yawn. ‘That would be nice. Not yet for a while, though, I don’t think. Is that John Coltrane and Miles Davis I hear in the background?’
Banks was stunned into silence for a moment. Out of the mouths of babes... ‘Well, yes, as a matter of fact, it is. Stockholm, 1960.’