‘If there is,’ said Banks, ‘I’m counting on you to find out what. OK, that’s it for today.’
Banks had picked up a Chinese takeaway on the road out of Eastvale and was warming it up in the microwave. The drive to Helmthorpe and Gratly hadn’t been too bad when he made it around seven o’clock, but if the rain continued to fall all night, as the forecasters predicted, then there was a good chance that the area by the bridge at the Relton turn-off in Fortford would be closed by morning. That would mean a two-mile diversion via the Lyndgarth road, if the Leas weren’t flooded, and three if they were. Still, he was getting used to it now. The same areas had flooded every time it had rained that summer, and there was no reason for them not to flood now. Neither the county nor the local councils had done a thing to change the situation, as far as Banks knew. People just learned to avoid the affected areas and wait for the water to go away, the same way they did with the snow and ice.
Still, he was home now, in his cosy cottage, with the prospect of music, perhaps a little Patrick Hamilton to read, and maybe even a DVD later — something from the new noir collection that the postman had left around the back that day. It was a long time since he’d seen Kiss Me Deadly or In a Lonely Place, for example.As he poured himself some wine and checked the chicken fried rice and Szechuan beef, which weren’t quite ready, he thought about the post-mortem he had attended earlier in the afternoon. He still felt slightly shaken by it. Some people said the more autopsies you attended, the more you got used to them, but for Banks it was the opposite. Each one was worse than the one before. It wasn’t the blood and guts, intestines and exposed fat layers, but he thought, perhaps in a fanciful way, it was the presence of death in the room that unnerved him, the aura of a violent end. He was starting to feel the same at murder scenes, too. This was no beautiful young woman raped and strangled, no innocent child killed to satisfy some paedophile’s fear of discovery; it was an emaciated, out-of-shape, unattractive man in late middle age. Nor was it a friend or acquaintance. Banks hadn’t known Miller, despite feeling some sense of kinship with him due to their closeness in age and their shared musical interests. But the older he got, the more he felt that when a man’s body is lying there twisted and abandoned on some remote railway track, or naked on the pathologist’s slab, and someone is pulling out his internal organs, it doesn’t have to be personal, it becomes somehow universal. Death with a capital D. The Reaper is in the building. He felt vaguely sick thinking about it; a healthy slug of Aussie red helped. Maybe retirement wasn’t such a bad idea. Could he really handle the extra years on the job if he got promoted? Did he really want to?
That evening, he ate in the kitchen again, this time listening to an old episode of I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again on Radio 4 Extra and half-heartedly working on a half-finished crossword from The Sunday Times on the table in front of him. He hadn’t realised before that ‘in crime scene’ was an anagram for ‘reminiscence’. Maybe the clue was trying to tell him something?
When he had finished his meal, he filled up his glass, went into the entertainment room and put on Miles Davis’s film score from Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. He loved the atmospheric music, though he had never seen the film, and he thought he might check online later to see if it was available on DVD. He carried his wine and book into the conservatory and settled down to read. The wind rattled the flimsy structure, and the rain poured down the windows and roof as if someone were throwing bucketsful of water at them. Sometimes it felt as if the little island, and Banks’s little part of it in particular, had been under assault for months. He wondered how much more the old place could take. He had thought it was a solid enough conservatory, but there had been two leaks there already that summer, in addition to one in the main roof. If the wind got much worse, it could blow the whole damn structure away. Still, not much he could do about it now.
As he listened to Miles’s haunting, muted trumpet on ‘Générique’, he thought again about his experience in the mortuary. Was it his own approaching mortality that made him feel that way? He had never really thought about it much, but Madame Gervaise’s remarks about retirement the other day had made him feel his age, as had seeing Miller’s body on the abandoned railway. It had been hard to believe they were almost the same age. He had always been reasonably healthy, even though he could have taken better care of himself. His blood pressure was a bit high, but his weight was fine, and his doctor had recently lowered the dosage of statins he took to control cholesterol, remarking that his ‘good’ cholesterol was getting much better. A bit less cheese and fewer takeaways would probably solve the problem altogether, but he would miss them too much, and would rather take a little pill every night and avoid grapefruit.
So why was it that he found himself becoming so morbid? True, friends had died recently, including Paul Major, one of his old classmates, of lung cancer just last month. They hadn’t been in touch often over the years, weren’t really close, but he remembered when he and his friends used to gather around Paul’s Dansette on summer afternoons in the mid-sixties and listen to the Who, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones.
Luckily, his elderly parents were both still alive, despite his father’s angina and his mother’s brush with cancer. They were still active, off on cruises all over the world since they had inherited his brother Roy’s fortune. Right now, while he was sitting in his rickety conservatory, they were somewhere in South-east Asia — Vietnam or Thailand, he wasn’t quite sure — spending his inheritance. And this was a couple who had thought Blackpool was a long way to go for their summer holidays when Banks was young. Banks sipped some wine. It must be his job, he thought. The homicide rate in North Yorkshire was hardly comparable to New York or even London, but one or two a year were quite enough, he found. Each death was a story, pathetic, tragic, even comic on occasion, but they accumulated and weighed him down like the snow on a rolling snowball. He became encrusted with death, heavy with it.
Enough morbid thoughts, he decided. Maybe it was time to crack out the Chicken Dance CD, open the bubbly and invite a few friends over. As if.
Miles played ‘Florence sur les Champs Élysées’ and Banks opened his Patrick Hamilton. He had hardly finished a paragraph when his mobile rang. He picked it up from the matching table beside his wicker chair and slid his thumb across the bottom.
‘Banks.’
‘Sir,’ came the familiar voice. ‘It’s me. DC Masterson. I’m sorry to bother you at home.’
Banks thought he could hear the noise of a crowd and the overexcited voices of football commentators in the background. Gerry must be watching the game on TV. He had forgotten about the European Cup match tonight. Not that he really gave a toss about Manchester United. ‘It’s all right, Gerry. I’m open all hours. What is it? Something important?’
‘It could be, sir. I’ve traced the other numbers Gavin Miller called.’
‘Anything interesting?’
‘I think so. One of them was ex-directory. That’s why it took me a bit more time.’
‘And?’
‘Veronica Chalmers, sir.’
‘As in Lady Veronica Chalmers?’
‘Er, yes, sir. Gavin Miller rang her up a week ago yesterday just before two o’clock in the afternoon. They talked for close to seven minutes.’
‘There’s no mistake?’
‘No, sir. Seven minutes, less a few seconds.’
‘That’s quite a long time.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Just a week before his death. And he was the one who rang her?’