There were still a few firefighters and CSIs at the old water treatment plant when Banks pulled up at the cordon they had erected around the main building, where all the damage had been concentrated. The control room took up the entire lower floor, and upstairs there had been a number of offices and a staff common room, where the second body had been found. Since then, searchers had looked again for any traces of a third victim, but found none. That was good news.
Banks showed his warrant card to the officer with the clipboard who guarded the scene and walked towards the entrance.
‘Better take care,’ said one of the fire investigation officers. ‘It can still be a bit dodgy in there.’
Banks thanked him, put on the hard hat the officer handed him and went inside. The smell of wet ash and burned rubber was almost overwhelming inside the building. Its acrid, gritty texture caught in his throat. He also thought he could discern an undertone of petrol, which took him right back to the night it happened and set off a surge of panic that fortunately passed quickly. A man turned from collecting samples, pulled his face mask aside and said hello. Banks recognised the lugubrious fire investigation officer Geoff Hamilton. They had worked together on a narrowboat fire set by Phil Keane some years ago.
‘Anything new?’ Banks asked.
‘Nothing startling,’ said Hamilton. ‘Your CSIs found evidence of a car parked at the side entrance, in the old staff park. The ground’s concrete, cracked and weedy, and the tracks are too faint to tell us much, but there were some oil stains and skid marks. It was definitely there. And recently.’
‘Anything else?’
‘This is where you were tied up,’ Hamilton said, pointing to an area not far from the main door. It was still possible to see what had once been ropes, now twisted and charred, on the ground, and chalk marks had been made around the area where Keane’s body had fallen. ‘You were lucky,’ he went on. ‘You can see where all the petrol was. Someone obviously cared whether you lived or died.’
‘Yes,’ said Banks, remembering Zelda’s face close to his, her breath pungent with days of bad food, fear, and a trace of vomit, the speed with which she worked at his bonds with the knife before the flames whooshed up around them. Then the shouted instruction: ‘RUN!’ He should have looked back.
‘Is this our old friend again?’ Hamilton asked.
‘Doesn’t it have his signature?’
‘There are similarities. It’s multi-seated, different spots connected by streamers. Not entirely as random as it might have seemed. I’ll have to get more analyses done, gas chromatology and so on, and compare them with the records.’
‘No need to bother, Geoff,’ said Banks. ‘It was Keane. I was there.’
‘So I heard,’ said Hamilton. ‘Don’t let it become a habit.’
‘I promise. By the way, you might check with the Met fire investigation service on a fire at a house in the Highgate area a couple of months ago. It presented as a typical chip-pan fire, but...’
‘Not his style, if this is anything to go by.’
‘He may be versatile. I’d say it’s worth a closer look, but as he was likely one of the corpses they hauled out of here, maybe there’s not much point in pinning a crime on a ghost. But there are a couple of coppers I can think of down there who wouldn’t mind knowing. Just one for the record books, maybe, if you’ve got a spare moment.’
Hamilton grunted. ‘Chance would be a fine thing.’ Then he put his face mask on again and knelt by a pile of charred rubbish.
Banks went upstairs to the other marked crime scene. There was tape across the doorway and most of the floor had collapsed, so he stood for a few moments and stared at the chain, darkened by fire, attached to the solid metal radiator, half disappeared through the burned floor. Was this where Zelda had been kept? Though the fire had only spread up there later, it had done as much damage as it had everywhere else. The walls were charred and the ceiling partially collapsed. The firefighters had been a while turning up, mostly because there had been no working alarm and no one present had been in a position to call them. So how had they been informed? Banks wondered. Who had called them? The building wasn’t very far from the A1, though it was hidden from the motorway by a stretch of woodland. The flames would possibly have been visible to a passing motorist once they had reached their apex.
He went back downstairs and found the side door that led to the small staff car park. He could see the CSIs had marked off an area with an oil stain and tyre tracks where someone had accelerated too quickly. Zelda? It made sense. She had cut Banks free then dashed off to save herself. She would have been in a hurry to get away before anybody found her. Maybe hurt and in pain, too. But where was she?
The road out wasn’t much more than an unfenced laneway, but after curving a mile or more around the woods and running parallel to the A1 for a while, it came to a roundabout that fed into the main artery. From there, she could have gone anywhere. CCTV and ANPR would be no use because they had no idea what make of car she was driving or what the number was, and the A1 was always busy. It could be the dark Ford Fiesta that Kit Riley had told them about in the Black Bull, but there were thousands of dark Fiestas on the roads. They might be able to find out, given time, but it would probably be too late by then. She would have dumped the car as soon as she could and found some other mode of transport.
Banks went back through the building and stood by the rectangular reservoir. Its bottom was covered in weeds and shrubbery after years of neglect, and that was what had cushioned Banks’s fall. If he had hit the hard bottom full on, he might have done himself even more serious damage. At least a broken limb, if not a fractured skull. He gave a shudder as he shouted farewell to Geoff Hamilton and the others and headed back to his car. Just before he got there, he turned and asked one of the investigators, ‘It’s a bit isolated around here, isn’t it? Do you know who called it in?’
The investigator scratched his head. ‘I can’t say for sure,’ he answered, ‘but I do remember the boss saying it was a woman’s voice.’
A thin drizzle had started when Gerry pulled up that afternoon outside Mrs. Pollard’s house on the outskirts of Halifax. It was a dark stone semi, millstone grit, probably, halfway up a hill, with a pub at the bottom and a fine view of the Pennines beyond, including a couple of enormous woollen mills with tall chimneys, now mostly converted into craft shops, art galleries, cafes, and local theatre venues. Misty rain hung over the valley.
Tracking Mrs. Pollard down had been easy enough — she was still at the same address listed by the General Register Office — but Gerry wasn’t quite sure how to broach the subject of her visit. She certainly didn’t want Mrs. Pollard to think she was looking for evidence of her daughter’s wrongdoing, yet she could hardly lie and say she was checking a job reference. Should anything she learned from this visit become important in a court case, then a lie like that could easily get it dismissed. The visit would have to appear to be related to Blaydon’s murder, which it was in a way, but without even the vaguest of hints that Charlotte Westlake might be responsible for that.
When Gerry introduced herself, Mrs. Pollard asked to see her identification, which she studied closely for half a minute before handing it back. ‘You can’t be too careful these days, love,’ she said. ‘I had a bloke on the phone the other day telling me my bank account had been hijacked and asking for my details. He even knew the last three transactions I’d made on my Mastercard.’
‘It’s very sensible of you to be cautious,’ said Gerry, following her inside. ‘These scammers are getting very clever these days.’