Aftermath, p.9
Aftermath, page 9
“Why? Do you think I’m in danger? You said Terry—”
“Not that sort of danger. The press. They can be very persistent, and I wouldn’t want you telling them what you’ve just told me.”
5
Leanne Wray was sixteen when she disappeared from Eastvale on Friday, the thirty-first of March. She was five feet two inches tall, weighed only six stone twelve pounds, and was an only child living with her father, Christopher Wray, a bus driver, and her stepmother Victoria, who stayed home, in a terrace house just north of Eastvale town center. Leanne was a pupil at Eastvale Comprehensive.
Leanne’s parents later told police that they saw nothing wrong in letting their daughter go to the pictures that Friday night, even though they had heard of the disappearances of Kelly Matthews and Samantha Foster. After all, she was going with her friends, and they said she had to be home by half-past ten at the latest.
The one thing Christopher and Victoria might have objected to, had they known about it, was the presence in the group of Ian Scott. Christopher and Victoria didn’t like Leanne hanging around with Ian. For one thing, he was two years older than she was, and that meant a lot at her age. For another, Ian had a reputation as a bit of a troublemaker and had even been arrested twice by the police: once for taking and driving away and once for selling Ecstasy in the Bar None. Also, Leanne was a very pretty girl, slim and shapely, with beautiful golden-blond hair, an almost translucent complexion and long-lashed blue eyes, and they thought an older boy like Ian could be interested in her for only one thing. That he had his own flat was another black mark against him.
But Leanne just liked to hang out with Ian’s crowd. Ian’s girlfriend, also with them that night, was Sarah Francis, age seventeen, and the fourth in the party was Mick Blair, age eighteen, just a friend. They all said they had walked around the center for a while after the film, then gone for a coffee at the El Toro—though the police discovered on further investigation that they had actually been drinking in the Old Ship Inn, in an alley between North Market Street and York Road, and lied about it because both Leanne and Sarah were under age. When pressed, they all said that Leanne had left them just outside the pub and headed home on foot at about a quarter past ten, a journey that should have taken her no more than ten minutes. But she never arrived.
Leanne’s parents, though angry and worried, gave her until morning before calling the police, and an investigation, headed by Banks, soon went into full swing. Eastvale was papered with posters of Leanne; everyone who had been at the cinema, in the Old Ship Inn and in the town center that evening was questioned. Nothing. They even ran a reconstuction, but still nothing came of it. Leanne Wray had vanished into thin air. Not one person reported seeing her since she left the Old Ship.
Her three friends said they went to another pub, The Riverboat, a crowded place that stayed open late, and ended up at the Bar None on the market square. The closed-circuit TV cameras showed them turning up there at about half-past twelve. Ian Scott’s flat was given the full SOCO treatment to see if any evidence of Leanne’s presence could be found there, but there was nothing. If she had been there, she had left no trace.
There were hints of tension in the Wray home, Banks soon discovered, and according to a school friend, Jill Brown, Leanne didn’t get on well with her stepmother. They argued a lot. She missed her real mother, who had died of cancer two years ago, and Leanne had told her friend that she thought Victoria ought to go out and get a job instead of “sponging off her dad,” who didn’t make a lot of money anyway. Things were always a bit tough financially, Jill said, and Leanne had to wear sturdier clothes than she thought fashionable and make them last longer than she would have wished. When she was sixteen, she got a Saturday job in a town center boutique, so she was able to buy nice clothes at a discount.
There was, then, the faintest hope that Leanne had run away from a difficult situation and somehow hadn’t heard the appeals. Until her shoulder bag was found in the shrubbery of a garden she would have passed on her route home. The owners of the house were questioned, but they turned out to be a retired couple in their seventies and were soon exonerated.
After the third day, Banks contacted his assistant chief constable, Ron McLaughlin, and discussions with Area Commander Philip Hartnell of West Yorkshire Police followed. Within days, the Chameleon task force was created and Banks was put in charge of North Yorkshire’s part. It meant more resources, more man-hours and more concentrated effort. It also meant, sadly, that they believed a serial killer was at work, and this was something the newspapers lost no time in speculating about.
Leanne was an average pupil, so her teachers said. She could probably do better if she tried harder, but she didn’t want to make the effort. She intended to leave school at the end of the year and get a job, maybe in a clothes shop or a music shop like Virgin or HMV. She loved pop music, and her favorite group was Oasis. No matter what people said about them, Leanne was a loyal fan. Her friends thought her a rather shy but easygoing person, quick to laugh at people’s jokes and not given much to introspection. She also suffered from mild asthma and carried an inhaler, which had been found along with the rest of her personal things in the abandoned shoulder bag.
If the second victim, Samantha Foster, was a little eccentric, Leanne Wray was about as ordinary a lower-middle-class Yorkshire lass as you could get.
“Yeah, I’m all right to talk, sir. Really. Come on in.”
PC Janet Taylor didn’t look all right to Banks when he called at her flat after six that evening, but then anyone who had, that morning, both fought off a serial killer and cradled her dying partner’s head on her lap had every right to look a bit peaky. Janet was pale and drawn, and the fact that she was dressed all in black only served to accentuated her pallor.
Janet’s flat was above a hairdresser’s on Harrogate Road, not far from the airport. Banks could smell the setting lotion and herbal shampoo inside the ground-floor doorway. He followed her up the narrow staircase. She moved listlessly, dragging her feet. Banks felt almost as weary as Janet seemed. He had just attended Kimberley Myers’s postmortem, and while it had yielded no surprises—death by ligature strangulation—Dr. Mackenzie had found traces of semen in the vagina, anus and mouth. With any luck, DNA would link that to Terence Payne.
Janet Taylor’s living room showed signs of neglect typical to a single police officer’s dwelling. Banks recognized it all too well. He tried to keep his own cottage clean as best he could, but it was difficult sometimes when you couldn’t afford a cleaning lady and you didn’t have time yourself. When you did have a bit of free time, the last thing you wanted to do was housework. Still, the small room was cozy enough despite the patina of dust on the low table and the T-shirt and bra slung over the back of the armchair, the magazines and occasional half-empty teacups. There were three framed posters of old Bogie movies on the walls—Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen—and some photos on the mantelpiece, including one of Janet looking proud in her uniform, standing between an older couple Banks took to be her mother and father. The potted plant on the windowsill looked to be on its last legs, wilting and brown around the edges of the leaves. A television set flickered in one corner, the sound turned down. It was a local news program, and Banks recognized the scene around the Payne house.
Janet moved the T-shirt and bra from the back of the armchair. “Sit down, sir.”
“Can we have the sound on for a minute?” Banks asked. “Who knows, maybe we’ll learn something.”
“Sure.” Janet turned the volume up, but all they got was a repeat of AC Hartnell’s earlier press statement. When it was over, Janet got up and turned off the TV. She still seemed slow in her movements, slurred in her speech, and Banks imagined it was something to do with the tranquilizers the doctor would have given her. Or maybe it was the half-empty bottle of gin on the sideboard.
A plane took off from Leeds and Bradford Airport, and while the noise didn’t actually shake the flat, it was enough to rattle a glass and make conversation impossible for a minute or so. It was also hot in the small room, and Banks felt the sweat gather on his forehead and under his arms.
“It’s why the place is so cheap,” Janet said after the noise had waned to a distant drone. “I don’t mind it that much. You get used to it. Sometimes I sit here and imagine I’m up there in one of them, flying off to some exotic country.” She got up and poured herself a small gin, adding some tonic from an open bottle of Schweppes. “Fancy a drink, sir?”
“No, thanks. How are you coping?”
Janet sat down again and shook her head. “The funny thing is, I don’t really know. I’m all right, I suppose, but I feel sort of numb, as if I’ve just come around from an anesthetic and I’m still all padded in cotton wool. Or like I’m in a dream and I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning and everything will be different. It won’t, though, will it?”
“Probably not,” said Banks. “It might even be worse.”
Janet laughed. “Well, thanks for not giving me a load of bollocks.”
Banks smiled. “My pleasure. Look, I’m not here to question your actions, but I need to know what happened in that house. Do you feel up to talking about it?”
“Sure.”
Banks noticed her body language, the way she crossed her arms and seemed to draw in on herself, and guessed that she wasn’t up to it, but he had to press on nonetheless.
“I felt like a criminal, you know,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“The way the doctor examined me, bagged my clothes, scraped under my fingernails.”
“It’s routine. You know it is.”
“I know. I know. That’s not what it feels like on the receiving end, though.”
“I suppose not. Look, I’m not going to lie to you, Janet. This could be a serious problem. It could be over in no time at all, a minor bump in the road, but it could stick around, cause you problems with your career—”
“I think that’s pretty much over, don’t you, sir?”
“Not necessarily. Not unless you want it to be.”
“I must admit I haven’t given it a lot of thought since . . . you know.” She gave a harsh laugh. “Funny thing is, if this was America, I’d be a hero.”
“What happened when you first received the call?”
Janet told him about the car fire and the call and finding Lucy Payne unconscious in the hallway in short, halting sentences, occasionally pausing for a sip of gin and tonic, once or twice losing her thread and staring toward the open window. Sounds of evening traffic came up from the busy road and occasionally a plane landed or took off.
“Did you think she was seriously hurt?”
“Serious enough. Not life-threatening. But I stayed with her while Dennis checked around upstairs. He came back with a blanket and a pillow, I remember that. I thought that was nice of him. It surprised me.”
“Dennis wasn’t always nice?”
“It’s not a word I’d use to describe him, no. We disagreed a lot, but I suppose we got on okay. He’s all right. Just a bit of a Neanderthal. And full of himself.”
“What did you do next?”
“Dennis went in back, the kitchen. I mean, someone had hit her, and if it was her husband, the odds were he was still in the house somewhere. Right? Probably feeling sorry for himself.”
“You stayed with Lucy?”
“Yes.”
“Then what happened?”
“Dennis called me, so I left her. She was as comfortable as I could make her, with the blanket and the pillow. The bleeding had pretty much stopped. I didn’t think she was in any real danger. The ambulance was on its way . . .”
“You didn’t sense any danger in the house?”
“Danger? No, not at all. I mean, no more than you do in any domestic. They can turn on you. It’s happened. But no.”
“Okay. What made you go down to the cellar? Did you think her husband might be there?”
“Yes, I suppose we must have.”
“Why did Dennis call you?”
Janet paused, clearly embarrassed.
“Janet?”
Finally she looked at him. “You’ve been there? Down the cellar?”
“Yes.”
“That picture on the door. The woman.”
“I saw it.”
“Dennis called me to see it. It was his idea of a joke. That’s what I mean. Neanderthal.”
“I see. Was the door open? The door to the cellar?”
“No, it was closed. But there was light showing under it, a sort of flickering light.”
“You didn’t hear anyone in there?”
“No.”
“Did either of you call out before you went in, identifying yourselves as police officers?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Okay, Janet. You’re doing fine. Carry on.”
Janet’s knees were pressed tight together and she was twisting her hands on her lap as she spoke. “Like I said, there was this flickering light.”
“The candles.”
Janet looked at him and gave a little shudder. “There was a bad smell, too, like drains.”
“Did you have any reason to be afraid at this point?”
“Not particularly. It was creepy, but we were proceeding cautiously, as we always do in such situations. Routine. He could have been armed. The husband. We were aware of that possibility. But if you mean did we have any inkling of what we’d find in there, then no. If we had, we’d have been out of there like a shot and brought in the troops. Dennis and me, we’re neither of us the hero types.” She shook her head.
“Who went in first?”
“I did. Dennis kicked the door in and stood back, like, you know, making a bow. Taking the piss.”
“What happened next?”
She gave a sharp jerk of her head. “It was all so fast. It was a blur. I remember candles, mirrors, the girl, crude drawings on the walls, things I saw out of the corners of my eyes. But they’re like images from a dream. A nightmare.” Her breathing became sharper and she curled up on the armchair, legs under her, arms wrapped around herself. “Then he came. Dennis was right behind me. I could feel his breath warm on my neck.”
“Where did he come from?”
“I don’t know. Behind. A corner. So fast.”
“What did Dennis do?”
“He didn’t have time to do anything. He must have heard or sensed something to make him turn, and the next thing I knew he was bleeding. He screamed out. That’s when I pulled my baton. He cut Dennis again, and the blood sprayed over me. It was as if he hadn’t noticed me, or he didn’t care, he’d get to me later. But when he did, I had my baton out and he tried to slash me but I deflected it. Then I hit him . . .” She started to sob and rubbed the backs of her hands against her eyes. “Sorry. Dennis, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right,” Banks said. “Take it easy, Janet. You’re doing fine.”
“He had his head on my lap. I was trying to hold the artery closed, like they teach in First Aid. But I couldn’t do it. I’d never done it before, not with anyone real. The blood just kept seeping out. So much blood.” She sniffed and ran the back of her hand across her nose. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay. You’re doing fine, Janet. Before that. Before you tried to save Dennis, what else did you do?”
“I remember handcuffing the man to one of the pipes.”
“How many times did you hit him?”
“I don’t remember.”
“More than once?”
“Yes. He wouldn’t stop coming, so I hit him again.”
“And again?”
“Yes. He kept getting up.” She started sobbing again. When she’d calmed, she asked, “Is he dead?”
“Not yet.”
“The bastard killed Dennis.”
“I know. And when a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it, right? If you don’t, it’s bad for business, bad for detectives everywhere.”
Janet looked at him as if he were crazy. “What?”
Banks looked up at Bogart as Sam Spade. Clearly the posters were there for show, not as a result of any great passion for the films themselves, and his pathetic attempt at lightening things up fell flat. “Never mind,” he said. “I was just wondering what went through your mind.”
“Nothing. I didn’t have time to stop and think. He’d cut Dennis and he was going to cut me. Call it self-preservation if you like, but it wasn’t a conscious thought. I mean, I didn’t think I’d better hit him again or he might get up and cut me. It wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like?”
“I told you. A blur. I disabled the killer, handcuffed him to one of the pipes and then I tried to keep Dennis alive. I didn’t even look in Payne’s direction again. To be honest, I didn’t give a damn what shape he was in. Only Dennis.” Janet paused and looked down at her hands clasped around the glass. “You know what really gets me? I’d just been nasty to him. All because he’d been telling his damn sexist jokes to that fireman.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’d been arguing, that’s all. Just before we got to the house. I told him his mole was probably cancerous. It was cruel of me. I know he’s a hypochondriac. Why did I do that? Why am I such a horrible person? Then it was too late. I couldn’t tell him I didn’t mean it.” She cried again and Banks thought it best to let her get it all out. It would take more than one tearful session to purge her of her guilt, but at least it was a start.
“Have you been in touch with the Federation?”
