A police patrol car cruised by and seemed to slow down a bit just ahead of him. Mark tensed. He knew the coppers weren’t going to give him a lift. Most likely beat the shit out of him and leave him lying bleeding in a field. He must have been imagining things, though, because the car carried on and disappeared into the distance.
Mark trudged on, hardly bothering to stick out his thumb. He must have walked a couple of miles, the steep edge of Sutton Bank looming before him, when he heard a car coming and remembered to stick out his thumb. The car slowed to a halt about ten yards in front of him. It was quite a posh one, he noticed, an Audi, and shiny, as if it had just been cleaned. It would make a nice change from the horse box. For a moment, Mark worried that it might be the killer, but how could anyone know where he was?
The driver leaned over and opened the passenger window. He was a middle-aged bloke, Mark saw, wearing a camel overcoat and leather driving gloves. Mark didn’t recognize him.
“Where you going?” he asked.
“Scarborough,” said Mark.
“Hop in.”
He seemed a pleasant enough bloke. Mark hopped in.
Chapter 10
Banks grabbed his leather jacket, left by the back door and slipped behind the wheel of his 1997 Renault, thinking it was about time he had a new car, maybe something a bit sportier, if he could afford it. Nothing too flashy, and definitely not red. Racing green, perhaps. A convertible wasn’t much use in Yorkshire, but maybe a sports car would do. His midlife crisis car, though he didn’t particularly feel as if he were going through a crisis. Sometimes he felt as if his life was on hold indefinitely, but that was hardly a crisis. The only thing he knew for certain was that he was getting older; there was no doubt about that.
A snippet of interesting information about Andrew Hurst had just come to his attention. Annie was showing Roland Gardiner’s Turners to Phil Keane, Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe having easily agreed to the consultation, so Banks decided to head out to the canal by himself.
He slipped in an old Van Morrison CD to dispel the January blues – not entirely convinced that they were caused by the weather – and drove off listening to “Jackie Wilson Said.” It was just over a mile to the edge of town, past the new-look college, and another couple of miles of mostly open countryside to the canal. The road wound by fields of cows and sheep, drystone walls on either side, an occasional wooded area and stiles with signposts pointing the direction for ramblers. Not that it was rambling weather. You’d soon catch a chill and probably get bogged down in the mud before you got too far in open country. To his right, he could see the far-off bulk of the hills, like the swell before the wave frozen in a gray ocean.
The landscape flattened out toward the canal, which was why the channel had been dug there, of course, and Banks soon found the lane that ran down to the side of the lockkeeper’s cottage. He parked by the towpath and turned off Van just as he was getting going on “Listen to the Lion.”
It seemed an age before Hurst answered the doorbell, and when he did he looked surprised to find Banks standing there.
“You again,” he said.
“Afraid so,” said Banks. “You weren’t expecting me?”
Hurst avoided his eyes. “I told you everything I know.”
“You must think we’re stupid. Can I come in?”
“You will anyway.” Hurst opened the door and moved aside. The hallway was quite low, and he had to stoop a little as he stood there. Banks walked into the same room they had been in before, the one with Hurst’s extensive record collection. Helen Shapiro was singing “Lipstick on Your Collar.” Hurst turned off the record as soon as he followed Banks into the room, as if it were some sort of private experience or ritual he didn’t want to share.
He was fastidious in his movements. He lifted the needle off gently, then stopped the turntable, removed the disc and slipped it lovingly inside its inner sleeve. It was an LP called Tops With Me, Banks noticed, and on the cover of the outer sleeve was a picture of the smiling singer herself. Banks had forgotten all about Helen Shapiro. Not that he had been much of a fan to start with, not enough to know about her LPs, at any rate, but he did remember buying an ex-jukebox copy of “Walkin’ Back to Happiness” at a market stall in Cathedral Square, Peterborough, when he was about ten, before the covered market opened. It was one of those 45s with the middle missing, so you had to buy a plastic thingamajig and fix it in before you could play it.
Banks perched on the edge of an armchair. He didn’t take his leather jacket off because the house was cold, the elements of the electric fire dark. Hurst was wearing a thick gray, woolly polo-neck sweater. Banks wondered if he was too poor to pay the electricity bills.
“You should have told us you had a criminal record,” Banks said. “You could have saved us a lot of trouble. We find out things like that pretty quickly, and it looks a lot worse for you.”
“I didn’t go to jail. Besides, it wasn’t-”
“I don’t want to hear your excuses,” Banks said. “And I know you didn’t go to jail. You got a suspended sentence and probation. You were lucky. The judge took pity on you.”
“I can’t see what it has to do with present events.”
“Can’t you? I think you can,” said Banks. “You were charged with conspiracy to torch a warehouse. The only reason you got such a soft sentence was because the person who co-opted you was your boss, and he was the one who actually lit the match. But you helped him, you gave him a false alibi, and you lied for him throughout the subsequent investigation.”
“It was my job! He was my boss. What else was I supposed to do?”
“Don’t ask me to solve your moral dilemmas for you. In any situation, there are a number of possible choices. You made the wrong one. You lost your job, anyway, and all you gained was a criminal record. When the insurance company got suspicious and called the police in, the company went bankrupt. Since then you’ve had a couple of short-term jobs, but mostly you’ve been on the dole.” Banks looked around. “Lucky you’d paid off most of your mortgage. Was that with the cash your boss gave you for helping with the arson?”
Hurst said nothing. Banks assumed he was right.
“Was that where you got your taste for fire?”
“I don’t have any taste for fire. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The narrow boats, Andrew. The narrow boats.”
Hurst shot to his feet. “You can’t blame that on me.” He stabbed his chest with his thumb. “I was the one who called the fire brigade, remember?”
“When it was way too late. You’ve been seen skulking around in the woods, probably spying on Tina Aspern. You have no alibi. You washed your clothes before we could get a chance to test them. Come on, Andrew, how would it look to you? Why did you do it? Was it for the thrill?”
Hurst sat down again, deflated. “I didn’t do it,” he said. “Honest, I didn’t. Look, I know it looks bad, but I’m telling you the truth. I was here by myself all evening watching videos. It’s what I do most evenings. Or sit and read a book. I hardly have an active social life, and I don’t have a job. What else am I supposed to do?”
“Do you feel inadequate, Andrew? Is that what it’s all about? Do the anger and rage just build up in you until they get so strong that you just have to go out and burn something?”
“That’s ridiculous. You’re making out that I’m some sort of pyromaniac or something.”
“Aren’t you?”
“No. Of course I’m not. That other fire, which I didn’t start, by the way, was purely a business thing. Nobody got hurt. Nobody got any weird gratification in setting it. It was just a way of dealing with a financial problem.”