Banks sighed. ‘It’s because I don’t know anything, ma’am. Believe me, I wish I did, and when I do, you’ll be among the first to know.’
AC Gervaise stood up and patted Banks’s arm. ‘You must be feeling unwell. You’re calling me ma’am. I’ll let you get some rest now.’
Banks breathed a sigh of relief once he was in the room alone again. Memory was definitely a funny thing, he thought. Little flashes came back, but he couldn’t put them all together into a coherent narrative. At one point when he was talking to Newry, a wave of panic had passed through him, and he heard a voice in his head shouting, ‘Run! Run!’
He did remember a fire now, and he also remembered that the voice telling him to run was a woman’s voice. And when Newry had told him about the bodies, he had felt a tremor of fear that one of them might be Zelda’s. But he couldn’t say for certain that it had been her voice, or that he had even been inside the treatment plant, let alone seen her there. Nor did he know where the fire had come from, how it had started.
And when you can’t remember something, it’s like it never happened, and you can’t believe your memory will come back, because you don’t know you ever had it to lose in the first place, no matter what the doctor said. It was all too confusing. Even thinking about it made his head hurt again. He kneaded his pillows so they propped him up comfortably and leaned back to listen to the ‘Lento’ movement of Shostakovich’s seventh string quartet.
14
‘Wouldn’t you just know it,’ said Annie on Friday morning. ‘We get a rare chance to visit a beauty spot and what happens? It fucking pours down.’
She and Gerry had arrived in Dorset late the previous evening, tired after a long drive, and were enjoying breakfast at the Castle Inn, West Lulworth. Annie, still trying hard to stick to the pescatarian course, if not total vegetarianism, had gone for the kippers, but Gerry was indulging in a rare full English. It was one of the things that annoyed Annie about her — not that she wasn’t a veggie, but that she seemed able to eat whatever she wanted and not put on any weight.
Outside, the rain sluiced down the mullioned windows, blurring the view of distant hills. They had set off from Eastvale around lunchtime the previous day, after the Timmy Kerrigan interview, and though the weather had been good, the journey had taken them close to seven hours, including heavy traffic around the M18, a quick sandwich stop near Oxford and getting lost in the winding Dorset lanes. After a brief snack and a couple of glasses of wine at the bar, they had both been ready for bed, and Annie had just managed to stay awake long enough to make a couple of phone calls before drifting off to sleep.
First, she had spoken with AC Gervaise and learned that Banks was spending the night in hospital under observation and that he seemed to be having problems with his memory. There was nothing she could do to help him right now, not from so far away, though she was glad that she had made time to deliver his mobile and headphones before she and Gerry set off for Dorset. Gervaise had also mentioned that the firefighters had discovered two unidentified charred corpses in the abandoned water treatment plant where Banks had been found. Now Annie was worried that one of them might be Zelda. Ray would fall apart if anything happened to her. She had asked Gervaise to call her again if there were any developments but had heard nothing yet. Last of all, she had called Ray to check up on him and tell him about Banks, without mentioning the burned corpses. Ray had sounded a little drunk, and there was loud music playing in the background: Led Zeppelin, ‘Dazed and Confused,’ one of Ray’s old favourites she remembered well.
Sergeant Trevelyan turned up outside the inn at ten o’clock on the dot, as he had promised. Annie and Gerry squeezed into his Land Rover, and what would have been perhaps, on a fine day, a pleasant twenty-minute walk, became a five-minute drive in the pouring rain. Luckily, Trevelyan was well-supplied with umbrellas, and when they arrived at their destination he handed one each to Gerry and Annie.
He was probably in his mid-fifties, Annie thought, maybe a bit old for a local sergeant. Most officers his age would have retired by then. He had a squarish face topped with grey hair worn in much the same style as Boris Johnson. His manner was brusque but friendly enough, Annie thought, especially as they were a couple of interlopers no doubt spoiling the rhythm of his day. She imagined that he was usually in uniform, but today he wore jeans and a light grey windcheater.
Once on the path, Annie felt the power of the wind as well as the rain. She held her umbrella close and kept her eyes on the muddy ground to make sure she didn’t trip over any undergrowth or a half-buried stone. All this meant she didn’t get to appreciate the beauty of the spot until they arrived at the cliff’s edge, because she had been staring at her feet, but once she looked up, she was impressed. She couldn’t believe she had never been there before, despite having grown up not too far away in St. Ives, Cornwall. And somehow, in the grim weather, with a rough grey sea and white breakers below, it was even more awe-inspiring than she had imagined. They stood on the top of a rugged cliff overlooking a semicircular stretch of beach, deserted at the moment. ‘Is this the spot?’ Annie asked Trevelyan, raising her voice to make herself heard over the wind and the crashing waves.
Trevelyan pointed to the west. ‘See that arch sticking out into the water there,’ he said, ‘the one with the hole in it?’
Annie saw it. From a distance it resembled a petrified brontosaurus, its long neck bent to drink from the sea. Still, she remembered, this area was supposed to be part of the Jurassic Coast, so why not? ‘From there?’ she said.
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘She ran out there and jumped right off the end, bounced off the cliff, and landed in the sea. It wasn’t as rough as it is today, but it still took a while to find her. Too late, of course.’
They stood gazing at the spot, each lost in thought, the wind howling and raging around them. Annie tried to put herself in the mind of the young girl, humiliated and shamed by a rape that was no fault of her own, standing on that edge. What thoughts must have been whirling about in her mind? Was she already determined to jump, or did she suddenly decide to do it on the spot? Spur of the moment. Bad pun, she told herself, but unintentional.
After a few minutes, Trevelyan broke the silence. ‘Seen enough?’
Both Annie and Gerry nodded.
‘Right. I know a nice little tea shop not too far away that should be opening its doors just about now. Shall we go and have a chat?’
That same morning, as Annie and Gerry were watching the rain in Dorset, an ambulance took Banks over to the Friarage hospital, in Northallerton. He didn’t think he needed it — he could have driven himself if someone had brought his car — but the rules were the rules. All his tests had shown good reflexes, and the MRI — noisy and claustrophobic, but otherwise painless — revealed no brain injury, so Banks was discharged.
Dr. Chowdhury had already given him a list of symptoms to watch out for — including problems with speaking, walking or balance, numbness, blurred vision, fits, or personality changes — and told him not to watch TV or use his iPhone, to lay off the booze, take paracetamol for his headache, and to get in touch if his memory didn’t return within a few days.
Most of all, he was supposed to avoid stress and get plenty of rest. But how was he supposed to do that, he wondered, with Zelda still missing, two burned bodies in the treatment plant, and his memory of events scrambled beyond recognition? Superintendent Newry from IOPC would no doubt be on his case again soon. If you were a policeman, you didn’t get to stumble out of a burning building leaving two bodies behind you and not remember a thing without at least a stiff interrogation.