‘Not for me. And don’t you think you should leave your prejudices at the door?’
Newry looked at Gervaise. ‘Do you permit this kind of insubordination under your command, Chief Superintendent?’
Gervaise glanced between the two of them. ‘Superintendent Newry,’ she said. ‘With all due respect, I expect any officer under my command to push back when unnecessarily provoked, and when it comes to the truth, I am still inclined to believe someone is innocent until proven guilty. All in all, I prefer to take the word of one of my most trusted detectives over that of a... a...’
‘How about a jumped-up little Hitler?’ Banks suggested.
Gervaise shot him a stern glance. ‘That’s enough from you, Superintendent Banks. That’s not helpful. Let’s just all calm down and have a rational look at this situation.’
Newry sneered. ‘Well, fortunately, with respect, ma’am, what happens next doesn’t depend on what you think,’ he said.
‘Then go talk to the chief constable.’
‘Believe me, I intend to. I’m not letting go of this.’ With a hard, angry look at both Banks and Gervaise, Newry pushed his chair back roughly and stalked out. ‘We’ll be talking again. Soon.’
‘There goes a man in search of a heart attack,’ said Banks. ‘I hate to think what his blood pressure must be like.’
‘Don’t be so bloody flippant, Alan. Don’t you understand what a predicament you’re in? For Christ’s sake, Newry wants you suspended. ACC McLaughlin and I are fighting in your corner, but we’re running out of steam, and you’re not helping by giving ammunition to the opposition, if you’ll forgive me a mixed metaphor. I want you to take sick leave. As of now. Lord knows, you’re due enough.’
‘Gardening leave?’
‘It’s sick leave, Alan. Not suspension. Because you sustained an injury on the job. We’ll leave the insurance claims and whatnot for later. This is the best compromise we can come up with right now. Even the chief constable is on side with this. You know as well as I do that an officer can be suspended for months, even years, without resolution, for no reason at all. Newry hardly needs a solid case to scupper what’s left of your career. But sick leave... Your doctor also agrees it would be advantageous in combatting stress and shock.’
‘But what about Zelda? She’s still out there. I’ve got a responsibility to her. And to Ray. And what about the Blaydon—’
‘You’re not the only detective in the station. Don’t you trust your team?’
‘Of course I do, it’s just—’
‘You want to be in the know. You want to be in control. All right, I understand. We’ll keep you in the loop.’ She paused. ‘Is that good enough?’
Banks sighed and gathered his things together. ‘It’ll have to be, won’t it?’
Banks’s headache and dizziness returned with a vengeance before he had even managed to pull the Porsche into his driveway. He hurried upstairs to his medicine cabinet, took three extra-strength paracetamol and went to lie down on his bed. The dizziness soon passed, but the headache persisted until the drugs wrapped it in cotton wool and pushed it away to a far, quiet corner of his brain.
It was too early to go to sleep, and he wasn’t tired, so he got up and went back downstairs into the small study-cum-sitting room at the front, sat down at his desktop computer, answered a few long-overdue emails and browsed Apple Music for anything new. There wasn’t anything he desperately wanted, so he went through to the kitchen, made himself a toasted cheese sandwich and went into the conservatory to eat. Outside his windows, the shadows were lengthening, and clouds blanketed the peak of Tetchley Fell. He could hear sheep bleating high on the hillside.
As he ate, he considered his position. He had to accept the sick leave. Chief Superintendent Gervaise, his area commander, and ACC Ron McLaughlin were going out on a limb for him, and it would be ungrateful to do otherwise, not to mention hammering another nail in the coffin of his career. Whether you were guilty or not, suspensions and IOPC investigations had a nasty way of sticking to your record like shit to a shoe. They guaranteed entry into a Kafkaesque world from which you were bound to emerge — if you emerged at all — a changed and probably broken man. The brass bullied and lied, cliques closed ranks, punishments were decided upon and meted out before judgement was passed, hopefuls queued up at the bottom of the greasy pole leading to your job, federation or superintendents’ association reps objected and waved their hands in the air, and things marched irrevocably on towards that fateful gate where all who enter must abandon hope. The streets and shelters were littered with discarded detectives. You would have more hope of success as a refugee begging asylum from Priti Patel than you would as an honest copper dragged deep into the maw of an internal investigation.
So, sick leave. What was he going to do with himself? He wasn’t going to sit at home and be sick, that was for certain. How did things stand right now? That was the place to start. Banks finished his sandwich and poured a glass of wine. Then he put on a Jerry Garcia Band concert from Lunt-Fontanne, New York, October 1987, and settled back to relax. The nice balance of versions of old Motown numbers, Hunter/Garcia originals, and Dylan classics was just right, laid-back yet uplifting. And Jerry was in great form.
He was almost certain that he had his full memory of the lost night back now. Just to be clear, he ran through the series of events in chronological order several times in his mind until they felt right. He supposed he wouldn’t know if anything was missing unless he sensed an absence, but as he didn’t, he accepted this version as the truth.
What it meant was that Zelda was out in the wind somewhere. He had deliberately not told anyone yet about the return of his memory in order to give her as much time as possible to get as far away as she could. He knew he shouldn’t approve of her vigilantism, that people taking personal revenge for ills done to them was the beginning of a very slippery slope, but he couldn’t help himself. He also realised that in giving her time to get far away he was aiding and abetting a murderer escape, but he decided he didn’t care.
If Zelda had killed Goran and Petar Tadić, she had had good reason, and she had killed Keane in order to save Banks’s life. She didn’t have to do that. She could have crept out of some other exit, the way she had obviously done after she had cut him free and the fire started. But she had risked her own life to save Banks from Keane, just the way Annie and Winsome had done that first time, back in Newhope Cottage. Many more instances like that, he realised, and he’d be getting worried about his masculinity. Wasn’t he supposed to be the one doing the saving?
The upshot was that he couldn’t throw Zelda to the dogs, no matter what. And if he were honest with himself, he liked her too much to do that. And worried what it would do to Ray.
So should he spend his sick leave trying to find her? He thought perhaps not. Zelda was resourceful, and if she wanted to disappear, she would. No doubt, when he admitted to getting his memory back and told Newry as much of the truth as he could get away with, there would be a police search for her, perhaps involving Europol. How intense and long-lasting it would be, he had no idea. It wasn’t only the police. The Tadićs hadn’t worked alone; they weren’t even the heads of their organisation. There might be other criminal gang members on Zelda’s trail, too, and no doubt they would put a price on her head. The last thing Banks wanted to do was lead them to her. Zelda had her contacts; she knew how to disappear. And if she wanted to get in touch with Ray after some time had passed, then she would find a way.
When it came to the Tadićs, Banks realised there was one thing he could do. He remembered Burgess telling him about the arm they’d found with the Croatian gang tattoos, and the faint possibility that it might belong to the missing Goran Tadić. If Jazz Singh could get a DNA sample from the burned body in the upstairs room of the treatment plant, then it might be worth checking it against the arm.