Friend of the Devil Read online

  Friend of the Devil

  Peter Robinson

  To Dominick Abel, my agent, with thanks

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Peter Robinson

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  SHE MIGHT HAVE BEEN STARING OUT TO SEA, AT THE blurred line where the gray water meets the gray sky. The same salt wind that rushed the waves to shore lifted a lock of her dry hair and let it fall against her cheek. But she felt nothing; she just sat there, her expressionless face pale and puffy, clouded black eyes wide open. A flock of seagulls quarreled over a shoal of fish they had spotted close to shore. One of them swooped low and hovered over the still shape at the cliff edge, then squawked and headed back to join the fray. Far out to sea, a freighter bound for Norway formed a red smudge on the horizon. Another seagull flew closer to the woman, perhaps attracted by the movement of her hair in the wind. A few moments later, the rest of the flock, tired of the squabble over fish, started to circle her. Finally, one settled on her shoulder in a grotesque parody of Long John Silver’s parrot. Still, she didn’t move. Cocking its head, it looked around in all directions like a guilty schoolboy in case someone was watching, then it plunged its beak into her ear.

  SUNDAY MORNINGS were hardly sacrosanct to Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks. After all, he didn’t go to church, and he rarely awoke with such a bad hangover that it was painful to move or speak. In fact, the previous evening he had watched The Black Dahlia on DVD and had drunk two glasses of Tesco’s finest Chilean cabernet with his reheated pizza funghi. But he did appreciate a lie-in and an hour or two’s peace with the newspapers as much as the next man. For the afternoon, he planned to phone his mother and wish her a happy Mother’s Day, then listen to some of the Shostakovich string quartets he had recently purchased from iTunes and carry on reading Tony Judt’s Postwar. He found that he read far less fiction these days; he felt a new hunger to understand, from a different perspective, the world in which he had grown up. Novels were all well and good for giving you a flavor of the times, but he needed facts and interpretations, the big picture.

  That Sunday, the third in March, such luxury was not to be. It started innocently enough, as such momentous sequences of events often do, at about eight-thirty, with a phone call from Detective Sergeant Kevin Templeton, who was on duty in the Western Area Major Crimes squad room that weekend.

  “Guv, it’s me. DS Templeton.”

  Banks felt a twinge of distaste. He didn’t like Templeton, would be happy when his transfer finally came through. There were times when he tried to tell himself it was because Templeton was too much like him, but that wasn’t the case. Templeton didn’t only cut corners; he trampled on far too many people’s feelings and, worse, he seemed to enjoy it. “What is it?” Banks grunted. “It had better be good.”

  “It’s good, sir. You’ll like it.”

  Banks could hear traces of obsequious excitement in Templeton’s voice. Since their last run-in, the young DS had tried to ingratiate himself in various ways, but this kind of phony breathless deference was too Uriah Heep for Banks’s liking.

  “Why don’t you just tell me?” said Banks. “Do I need to get dressed?” He held the phone away from his ear as Templeton laughed.

  “I think you should get dressed, sir, and make your way down to Taylor’s Yard as soon as you can.”

  Taylor’s Yard, Banks knew, was one of the narrow passages that led into The Maze, which riddled the south side of the town center behind Eastvale’s market square. It was called a “yard” not because it resembled a square or a garden in any way, but because some bright spark had once remarked that it wasn’t much more than a yard wide. “And what will I find there?” he asked.

  “Body of a young woman,” said Templeton. “I’ve checked it out myself. In fact, I’m there now.”

  “You didn’t—”

  “I didn’t touch anything, sir. And between us, PC Forsythe and me have got the area taped off and sent for the doctor.”

  “Good,” said Banks, pushing aside the Sunday Times crossword he had hardly started, and looking longingly at his still-steaming cup of black coffee. “Have you called the super?”

  “Not yet, sir. I thought I’d wait till you’d had a butcher’s. No sense in jumping the gun.”

  “All right,” said Banks. Detective Superintendent Catherine Gervaise was probably enjoying a lie-in after a late night out to see Orfeo at Opera North in Leeds. Banks had seen it on Thursday with his daughter Tracy and enjoyed it very much. He wasn’t sure whether Tracy had. She seemed to have turned in on herself these days. “I’ll be there in half an hour,” he said. “Three-quarters at the most. Ring DI Cabbot and DS Hatchley. And get DC Jackman there, too.”

  “DI Cabbot’s still on loan to Eastern, sir.”

  “Of course. Damn.” If this was a murder, Banks would have liked Annie’s help. They might have problems on a personal level, but they still worked well as a team.

  Banks went upstairs and showered and dressed quickly, then back in the kitchen, he filled his travel mug with coffee to drink on the way, making sure the top was pressed down tight. More than once he’d had a nasty accident with a coffee mug. He turned everything off, locked up and headed for the car.

  He was driving his brother’s Porsche. Though he still didn’t feel especially comfortable in such a luxury vehicle, he was finding that he liked it better each day. Not so long ago, he had thought of giving it to his son Brian, or to Tracy, and that idea still held some appeal. The problem was that he didn’t want to make one of them feel left out, or less loved, so the choice was proving to be a dilemma. Brian’s band had gone through a slight change of personnel recently, and he was rehearsing with some new musicians. Tracy’s exam results had been a disappointment to her, though not to Banks, and she was passing her time rather miserably working in a bookshop in Leeds and sharing a house in Headingley with some old student friends. So who deserved a Porsche? He could hardly cut it in half.

  Outside, he found it had turned windy and cool, so he went back to switch his sports jacket for his zip-up leather jacket. If he was going to be standing around in the back alleys of Eastvale while the SOCOs, the photographer and the police surgeon did their stuff, he might as well stay as warm as possible. Once snug in the car, he started the engine and set off through Gratly, down the hill to Helmthorpe and on to the Eastvale road. He plugged his iPod into the adapter, on shuffle, and Ray Davies’s “All She Wrote” came on, a song he particularly liked, especially the line about the big Australian barmaid. That would do for a Sunday-morning drive to a crime scene, he thought; it would do just fine.

  GILBERT DOWNIE didn’t particularly like walking the dog. He did it, but it was a chore. The whole thing was one of those typical family decisions gone wrong. His daughter Kylie had wanted a puppy, had talked about nothing else since she was eight. Finally, Gilbert and Brenda had given in and bought her one for her birthday, though Brenda wasn’t especially fond of dogs, and they sometimes made her sneeze. A few years later, Kylie had lost interest and moved on to boys and pop music, so it was now left to him, Gilbert, to take care of Hagrid.

  That Sunday morni
ng the weather was looking particularly nasty, but Gilbert knew he shouldn’t complain. At least Hagrid gave him an excuse to get out of the house while Brenda and Kylie, now fourteen, had their usual Sunday-morning row about where she’d been and what she’d been doing out so late on Saturday night. There weren’t any decent walks near the village, at least none that he wasn’t already sick to death of, and he liked the sea, so he drove the short distance to the coast. It was a bleak and lonely stretch, but he enjoyed it that way. And he would have it all to himself. More and more these days, he preferred his own company, his own thoughts. He wondered if it was something to do with getting old, but he was only forty-six. That hardly qualified as old, except to Kylie and her deadbeat friends.

  Gilbert pulled up the collar of his waxed jacket and shivered as the damp wind hit him. The grass was slippery from a previous shower. Hagrid didn’t seem to mind. In no time he was off sniffing clumps of grass and shrubbery, Gilbert ambling behind, hands in pockets, glancing out at the choppy water and wondering what it must have been like to go out on the whaling ships from Whitby. The crews were gone for months at a time, the women waiting at home, walking along West Cliff day after day watching for signs of a sail and hoping to see the jawbone of a whale nailed to the mast, a sign that everyone was safe.

  Then Gilbert saw a distant figure sitting at the cliff edge. Hagrid, ever gregarious, dashed toward it. The odd thing, as far as Gilbert was concerned, was that a seagull perched on each shoulder. The scene reminded him of an old woman he had once seen on a park bench, absolutely covered by the pigeons she was feeding. When Hagrid got close enough and barked, the seagulls launched themselves languidly and floated out over the sea, making it clear from their close circling and backward glances that this was only a temporary setback. Gilbert fancied they squawked in mockery that mere earthbound animals, like him and Hagrid, couldn’t follow where they went.

  Hagrid lost interest and edged toward some bushes away from the path, where he probably sniffed a rabbit, and Gilbert walked toward the immobile figure to see if he could offer any assistance. It was a woman, he realized. At least something about the way she sat and the hair curling over her collar indicated that she was. He called out but got no response. Then he realized that she was sitting in a wheelchair, wrapped in a blanket, her head propped up by something. Perhaps she couldn’t move? There was nothing unusual about seeing a woman in a wheelchair around Larborough Head—the care home wasn’t far away, and relatives occasionally came and took parents or grandparents for walks along the coast—but what on earth was she doing there all by herself, especially on Mother’s Day, abandoned in such a precarious position? It wouldn’t take much for the chair to slip over the edge, just a change in the wind. Where the hell was her nurse or relative?

  When he arrived at the figure, Gilbert was struck almost simultaneously by two odd things. The first, bloodless scratches around her ears, he noticed because he approached her from behind, and when he moved around to the front, he saw the second: the upper half of her body, including the blanket, from her neck to her upper thighs, was absolutely drenched in blood. Before he even looked into her eyes, he knew that she was dead.

  Holding back the bitter taste of bile that surged in his throat, Gilbert whistled for Hagrid and started running back to the car. He knew from experience that his mobile wouldn’t get a signal out here, and that he had to drive at least a couple of miles inland before calling the police. He didn’t want to leave her just sitting there for the gulls to peck at, but what else could he do? As if reading his mind, two of the boldest gulls drifted back toward the still figure as soon as Gilbert turned his back and ran.

  BANKS UNPLUGGED the iPod and stuck it in his pocket halfway through Tom Waits’s “Low Down” and climbed out of the warm Porsche into the wind, which now seemed to be whipping sleet in his direction. The market square was busy with locals in their Sunday best going to the Norman church in the center of the square, the women holding their hats fast against the wind, and the bells were ringing as if all were well with the world. One or two sightseers, however, had gathered around the taped-off entrance to Taylor’s Yard. On one corner stood a pub called The Fountain, and on the other, Randall’s leather goods shop. Between them, the narrow cobbled street led into The Maze, that labyrinth of alleys called ginnels and snickets locally—tiny squares, courtyards, nooks and crannies and small warehouses that had remained unchanged since the eighteenth century.

  Short of knocking the whole lot down and starting again, there was nothing much anyone could do with the cramped spaces and awkward locations other than use them for storage or let them lie empty. The alleys weren’t really a shortcut to anywhere, though if you knew your way, you could come out into the castle car park above the terraced gardens that sloped down to the river, below Eastvale Castle. Apart from a row of four tiny occupied cottages near the car park end, the buildings were mostly uninhabitable, even to squatters, and as they were also listed, they couldn’t be knocked down, so The Maze stayed as it was, a handy hideaway for a quick knee-trembler, a hit of crystal meth or skunk weed before a night on the town.

  The street cleaners had complained to the police more than once about having to pick up needles, roaches, used condoms and plastic bags of glue, especially around the back of the Bar None Club or down Taylor’s Yard from The Fountain, but even though The Maze was just across the square from the police station, they couldn’t police it twenty-four hours a day. DC Rickerd and his Community Support officers, the “plastic policemen,” as the townsfolk called them, did the best they could, but it wasn’t enough. People stayed away from The Maze after dark. Most law-abiding folks had no reason to go there, anyway. There were even rumors that it was haunted, that people had got lost in there and never found their way out again.

  Banks took his protective clothing from the boot of the car, signed the log for the constable on guard duty and ducked under the blue-and-white police tape. At least the sleet barely penetrated The Maze. The buildings were so high and close, like The Shambles in York, that they blocked out the sky, except for a narrow gray strip. If anyone had lived on the upper floors, they could easily have reached out and shaken hands with their neighbors across the street. The blocks of limestone from which The Maze was built were dark from the earlier rain, and a hint of peat smoke drifted through the air from the distant cottages. It made Banks think of Laphroaig, and he wondered if he might regain his taste for Islay malt whisky before long. The wind whistled and moaned, changing pitch, volume and timbre like breath blown through a woodwind. The Maze was a stonewind, though, Banks reckoned.

  As promised, DS Kevin Templeton was keeping a watch on the building where the body had been found, where Taylor’s Yard crossed Cutpurse Wynde. It wasn’t much more than an outbuilding, a stone-built shed, used for storing swatches and remnants by Joseph Randall, the owner of the leather goods shop. The frontage was limestone, and there were no windows. Usually, if a building did have any ground-floor windows in The Maze, they were boarded up.

  Templeton was his usual suave self, gelled black hair, expensive tan chinos, damp around the knees, and a shiny leather jacket slick with rain. His eyes were bloodshot from the previous night’s excess, and Banks imagined him at a rave or something, twitching away to a techno-pop beat, or some DJ mixing Elvis with Eminem. Whether Templeton took drugs or not, Banks wasn’t sure. He had noticed no evidence, but he was certainly keeping an eye on him ever since the overambitious DS’s attempt to ingratiate himself as the new super’s toady. That had backfired, with a little help from Banks and Annie, but it hardly seemed to have dampened Templeton’s ardor for advancement, or his apparent taste for arse-licking. The man wasn’t a team player; that was for certain. Now all they could do was keep their fingers crossed and hope he got sent as far as Cornwall or Hampshire, and put on traffic duty.

  “What have we got?” Banks asked.

  “Doc Burns is in with her now,” Templeton answered.

  “SOCOs?”

 
; “On their way.”

  “Then we’d better have a look now before the little Hitlers take over.”

  Templeton grinned. “It’s not very pretty in there.”

  Banks stared at him. In the ranks of pointless comments he had heard in his time, it didn’t rate particularly high, but it had its place. Templeton shrugged, didn’t even have the awareness to be embarrassed. Banks wondered if that was a psychopath’s trait, along the lines of lack of conscience, no sense of humor and zero human empathy.

  Kitted out in protective overalls and gloves, Banks pushed the green wooden door. It creaked on rusty hinges as it opened to reveal Dr. Burns kneeling over a body in the light of a naked bulb. For a split second, Banks was reminded of an image from a film he had seen, something to do with Jack the Ripper bending over one of his victims. Well, The Maze certainly had its similarities to the Ripper’s Whitechapel, but Banks hoped that was where the comparison ended.

  He turned back to Templeton. “Do you know whether the door was locked before the girl was put in there?”

  “Hard to say, guv. The wood’s so old and rotten, a quick hard shove would have done for it. It could have been broken for ages.”

  Banks turned back to the storage room. The first thing he noticed, other than the dust, whitewashed walls and spiderwebs, was the mingled smells of leather, vomit and blood, the latter faint, a distant sweet metallic undertone, but nevertheless discernible. The victim was lying on a pile of leather scraps and remnants. From what Banks could see in the dim light, they were of various colors—green, blue, red, brown—and mostly triangular or rectangular. Banks picked one up. It was very soft, pliable leather that might be useful for something down the line: an elbow patch, say, or a small item like a change purse.