Past Reason Hated Read online

  ‘Well, this one was wearing a light coat, belted, I think, because it came in at the waist, right down to mid-calves, and she definitely didn’t have any trousers on. I thought I could see the bottom of a dress or skirt, too, as if the coat was just a bit too short to cover the dress. And you could see her legs below that.’

  ‘What about height? Any idea?’

  ‘A little taller than the woman who answered the door, Caroline Hartley.’

  ‘Hair?’

  He shook his head. ‘Again, her head was covered by a scarf of some kind.’

  ‘And this woman definitely entered the house?’

  ‘Oh, yes. She was walking in when I saw her.’

  ‘So you didn’t notice Caroline Hartley’s reaction to seeing her?’

  ‘No, not at all. I didn’t even see Caroline that time, just this other woman silhouetted as she walked in the door.’

  ‘So Caroline might not have let her in?’

  ‘I suppose that’s possible. But there didn’t seem anything suspicious about it. She didn’t seem to be pushing, and I didn’t hear any noise of forced entry or anything like that. It all seemed perfectly normal to me. I try to be a responsible neighbour. If I’d thought there was any trouble I would have called the police.’

  ‘Did you see her leave?’

  ‘No. But then I didn’t look out the window again. Anybody could have arrived or left between seven thirty and the time when . . . well, you know . . . and I wouldn’t have seen them.’

  Banks finished his port and stood up. ‘Thank you for being so co-operative, Mr Farlowe. Also for the port. It was very good.’

  Farlowe smiled. ‘Yes, it is, rather, isn’t it. The sixty-three vintage, you know.’ He struggled to get out of his armchair, floundering like a seal on a beach.

  ‘Please don’t bother showing me out,’ Banks said. ‘I’ll find my own way.’

  ‘Oh, very well. Fine, then. Bye.’ And Banks saw Mr Farlowe reach for the decanter again as he left the room. A suitable case for gout, that one. A lot of tipplers, it seemed, on Oakwood Mews.

  On the way out, he met Mrs Farlowe in the hall. She had seen nothing that night, but she was able to tell him that the radio had been tuned to Radio Three, as always, when she turned it on. No, she couldn’t remember what time, but her husband was right. It was a carol service from King’s College. ‘Away in a Manger’ had been playing. Lovely tune, that one, isn’t it? Banks agreed and left.

  From Mrs Eldridge at number eight Banks got no further information. She had seen the man go in first, then the woman knocking on the door at about seven fifteen. No, she hadn’t seen the man leave in the meantime, but the woman in the short coat and tight jeans definitely didn’t enter the house. And it wasn’t the same woman as the one who called later. This one was a bit taller and dressed differently. Some kind of long dress under her coat instead of jeans. The way it looked, unless Patsy Janowski had dashed off, changed clothes and added a few inches to her height in the interim, the third visitor couldn’t possibly have been her.

  He needed to know who this third woman was. Unless someone else had come after her, someone nobody had seen arrive, or unless Claude Ivers had been in the house all the time and nobody had seen him leave, then she was the one, almost certainly, who had killed Caroline Hartley. Was it Veronica Shildon, as Susan had suggested? Banks didn’t think so – her love and grief seemed genuine – but he needed to talk to her again. There was a lot of ground yet to cover before he could hope to understand the people, and therefore the motives, involved in this case.

  There was, however, one small, practical piece of information he carried away with him. Both Mr and Mrs Farlowe had said that the third woman entered the house – bidden or otherwise – when ‘Away in a Manager’ was being played on Radio Three. It should be possible to find out from the local BBC station what time the programme started, the order of carols in the concert and the length of each one. Given that information, it would be simple to work out at exactly what time the mysterious third woman had entered Caroline Hartley’s house and, in all likelihood, stabbed her to death with a kitchen knife.

  8

  ONE

  Banks walked slowly by the river. He wore his fur-lined suede car-coat, collar up, hands thrust deep in his pockets. As he walked, he breathed out plumes of air. The river wasn’t entirely frozen over; ducks paddled as usual, apparently oblivious to the cold, in channels between the lumps of grey ice.

  As he walked, he thought about the success he had had that morning with the BBC. A keen young researcher in the local studio had taken the trouble to dig out and listen to the 22 December taped carol broadcast, using a stopwatch. The programme had started at seven sharp. ‘Away in a Manger’ began just over midway through the broadcast – 7.21, to be exact – and finished two minutes, fourteen seconds later. Banks marvelled at the precision. With such a sense of exact measurement, the young woman perhaps had a future working for the Guinness Book of Records or the Olympic Records Committee. Anyway, they now knew that Caroline’s likely killer had been let in between 7.21 and 7.24.

  They also knew that it wasn’t Charles Cooper. Richmond had talked to the regulars at Tan Hill and confirmed his alibi: Cooper had been drinking there between about six thirty and ten thirty on 22 December and on most other evenings leading up to the Christmas period. It would be more difficult for him to explain long absences to his wife at any other time, Banks thought.

  Banks started thinking about the victim, Caroline Hartley, again and realized he still didn’t know much about her. She had run away from home at sixteen, gone to London, got herself pregnant, picked up a conviction for soliciting, come back up north and shacked up first with Nancy Wood, who was out of the picture now, and then with Veronica Shildon. Attractive to both men and women – but now interested only in the latter – vivacious and enthusiastic, but given to thoughtful, secretive moods, a budding actress, a good mimic. That was about all. It covered ten years of the woman’s life, and it didn’t add up to a hell of a lot. There had to be more, and the only place to find out – as Caroline’s friends and family either wouldn’t talk or didn’t know – was in London. But where to start?

  Banks picked up a flat stone and skimmed it across the water towards the Green. Briefly, he thought of Jenny Fuller, who lived in one of the Georgian semis there. A lecturer in psychology at York, she had helped Banks before. She would be damn useful in this case, too, he thought. But she’d gone away somewhere warm for Christmas. Tough luck.

  Up ahead, near the bridge, Banks saw a boy, no older than twelve or thirteen. He had a catapult and was aiming pebbles at the ducks out on the river. Banks approached him. Before saying a word, he took out his identity card and let the boy have a good long look.

  The boy read it, then glanced up at Banks and said, ‘Are you really a copper or just one of those perverts? My dad’s warned me about blokes like you.’

  ‘Lucky for you, sonny, I’m really a copper,’ Banks said, and snatched the metal catapult from the boy’s hand.

  ‘Hey! What you doing? That’s mine.’

  ‘That’s a dangerous weapon is what that is,’ Banks said, slipping it in his coat pocket. ‘Think yourself lucky I don’t take you in. What do you want to go aiming at those ducks for anyway? What harm have they ever done you?’

  ‘Dunno,’ the kid said. ‘I wasn’t meaning to kill them or anything. I just wanted to see if I could hit one. Can I have my catapult back, mister?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Go on. It cost me a quid, that did. I saved up out of my pocket money.’

  ‘Well don’t bother saving up for another,’ Banks said, walking away.

  ‘It’s bloody daylight robbery,’ the kid called after him. ‘You’re no better than a thief!’

  But Banks ignored him, and soon the shouting died down. There was something in what the boy had said that interested him: ‘I wasn’t meaning to kill them or anything. I just wanted to see if I could hit one.’

  Could
he really divorce the action from its result as cleanly and innocently as that? And if he could, could a murderer, too? There was no doubt that whoever plunged the knife into Caroline Hartley’s body had meant her to be dead, but had that been the killer’s original intention? The bruise on the cheek indicated that she had been hit, perhaps stunned, first. How had that come about? Was it the kind of thing a woman would do, punch another woman?

  Could it have been some kind of sexual encounter gone out of control, with the original object not so much murder but just a desire to see how far things could go? A sadomasochistic fantasy turned reality, perhaps? After all, Caroline Hartley had been naked. But that was absurd. Veronica and Caroline were respectable, middle-class, conservative lesbians; they didn’t cruise the gay bars or try to lure innocent schoolgirls back to the house for orgies, like the lesbians one read about in lurid tabloids. Still, when lovers fight, no matter what sex, they can easily become violent towards one another. What happened between the punch and the stabbing? What warped sequence of emotions did the killer feel? Caroline must have been unconscious, or at least momentarily stunned, and the killer must have picked up the knife, which lay so conveniently on the table by the cake.

  What made her do it? Would she have done it if the knife hadn’t been so close to hand? Would she have gone into the kitchen and taken a knife from the drawer and still had the resolve when she got back to the living room? Impossible questions to answer – the kind that Jenny might have been able to help with – but they had to be answered or he would never find the key to his problem. Banks needed to know what happened in the dark area, what it was that pushed someone beyond argument, past reason, past sex, beyond even simple physical assault, to murder.

  He turned his back on the river and started walking up the hill by the formal gardens back around the castle to the market square. Back at the station, as soon as he turned from the stairwell to the corridor that led to his upstairs office, he saw Susan Gay come rushing towards him with a sheet of paper flapping in her hand. She looked like the cat that had got the cream. Her eyes gleamed with success.

  ‘Found her,’ she announced. ‘Ruth. It’s a small London publishing company. Sappho Press. I faxed them the photo and they said they had it taken for a dust jacket and for general publicity.’

  ‘Good work,’ Banks said. ‘Tell me, what made you call that particular press out of the dozens we had listed?’

  Susan looked puzzled. ‘I got as far as “S” in the alphabet. It took me all morning.’

  ‘Do you know who Sappho was?’

  Susan shook her head.

  Gristhorpe would have known, Banks thought, but you could hardly demand a degree in classics of everyone who wanted to join the police. On the other hand, perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea: an elite squad of literary coppers.

  ‘She was an ancient Greek poet from the isle of Lesbos,’ he said.

  ‘Is that . . .?’ Susan began.

  Banks nodded.

  She blushed. ‘Well I’d like to say I got the literary clue, like in Agatha Christie,’ she said, ‘but it was down to pure hard slog.’

  Banks laughed. ‘Well done, anyway. Tell me the details.’

  ‘Her name’s Ruth Dunne and apparently she’s published a couple of books. Doing very well for herself in the poetry scene. The woman I spoke to said one of the bigger publishers might be after her soon. Faber and Faber perhaps.’

  ‘What kind of stuff does she write?’

  ‘Well, that’s another thing. They told me she started by writing the kind of thing the Sappho Press people support. I assumed it was feminist stuff, but now you mention it . . . Anyway, she’s moved away from that, they said, and it looks like she’s shifting into a broader market, whatever that means.’

  ‘Did you mention Caroline Hartley?’

  ‘Yes. It’s a funny thing. The editor recognized the name. She went to check and then told me Ruth Dunne’s second book was dedicated to someone called Caroline. I thought it was odd we didn’t find a copy among the victim’s things, don’t you?’

  ‘She liked to travel light,’ Banks said. ‘Still, it would have made it a lot easier for us if we had. Maybe they just lost touch with one another.’

  Susan passed the paper over. ‘Anyway, she lives in Kennington. Here’s the address. What now?’

  ‘I’m going down there tomorrow. There’s a few things I want to talk to Ruth Dunne about. She’s the only link we have so far with Caroline Hartley’s child and her life down there. I think she might be able to tell us quite a lot.’

  TWO

  Perhaps I’m pushing too hard, Susan told herself later that evening. She was trying to decide what to wear for her first real date with James Conran, but she couldn’t help going over the past two days’ events in her mind. Banks had seemed so calm, so sure of himself, with Claude Ivers. Susan, left to her own devices, would have charged into his studio.

  She also doubted that she would have left Redburn without bringing both Ivers and the Janowski woman in for a lengthy interrogation at the station. After all, they had both been at the Oakwood Mews house around the time of Caroline Hartley’s murder, and both had lied about it. She couldn’t understand Banks’s obsession with the record and the meaning of the music. In her experience, criminals weren’t intelligent enough to leave erudite musical clues behind them. Things like that only happened in the detective stories she had read as a teenager. But the music had been playing, she had to admit, and that was very odd indeed.

  She decided on the blue cotton blouse and navy mid-length skirt. Neither were so close fitting that they would reveal what she thought of as an unacceptably thick waist. And she mustn’t overdress. Mario’s was a little up-market, but it wasn’t really posh.

  The more she thought about the case, the more she thought about Veronica Shildon. Susan had felt intimidated by the woman’s reserve and poise; and the mysterious transition from happily married woman to lesbian disturbed her. It just didn’t seem possible.

  Ivers could be right in blaming Caroline Hartley. Perhaps Veronica knew this too, deep down, and hated herself for allowing herself to fall so low. Then she found Caroline naked after seeing Patsy Janowski leave the house, and she hit out. That seemed as good an explanation as any to her. All they had to do was discover how Veronica had disposed of her bloody clothing. Surely if Banks put his mind to it, instead of dwelling on that damn music, he could come up with something. Gary Hartley, Susan thought, wasn’t capable of the crime. He might be bitter, but he was also weak, a captive in his father’s cold, decaying mansion.

  Banks seemed to suspect everyone except Veronica Shildon – or at least he didn’t see her as a serious contender. Perhaps it was to do with his being a man, Susan thought. Men perceived things differently; they were unsuited to spotting subtle nuances. They were basically selfish and saw things only in relation to their own egos, whereas women spun a more general net of consciousness. She knew Banks was astute enough not to get side-tracked by his feelings, at least most of the time, but maybe he was attracted to Veronica Shildon. There was something in that tension between her strait-laced exterior and inner passions that a man might find sexy. And the fact that he couldn’t have her would only add to the excitement, make her seem more of a challenge. Didn’t men always want unattainable women?

  Rubbish, Susan told herself sharply. She was letting her imagination run away with her. Time to apply a bit of lipstick.

  When she was ready, she looked again at her small tree and the few trimmings she had hastily put up on Christmas Eve. They made the place look a bit more like a home. As she looked around the room, she couldn’t really see what was missing. The wallpaper, red roses on a cream background, was nice enough; the three-piece suite arranged around the gas fireplace looked a little shabby, but nonetheless cosy; and the bookcase added a learned look. There was a beautiful pine table, too, in the corner by the window, where she ate. So what was it?

  Looking again at the Christmas trimmings, she real
ized with a shock what was missing. So simple, really. If she had been on a case looking objectively at a suspect’s apartment and had seen one just like this, she would have known immediately. But because it was her own, she hadn’t paid it the same attention. The one personal touch, the Christmas decorations, pointed out that there was nothing of her there; the room had no personality. The furniture, wallpaper, carpet could all belong to anyone. Where were the knick-knacks that people accumulate over the years? Where were the favourite prints on the walls, the framed photographs of loved ones on the mantelpiece, the ornaments on the windowsill? There were no books, only her textbooks, which she kept in the guest room she used as a study. And where was the music? She had a music centre her parents had bought for her twenty-first birthday, but all she ever listened to was the radio. She had no records or tapes at all.

  The doorbell rang. Well, she thought, slipping on her coat, perhaps it’s time I started. A nice landscape on the wall, over there, a Constable print or something, a couple of china figurines on the mantelpiece, a few books, and a record of that music Banks played in the car on the way back from Redburn yesterday. She had felt embarrassed and stupid when he had asked what she wanted to listen to, because she had no idea. She heard music on the radio, pop and classical, and enjoyed some of it, but could never remember the names of performers or titles of the pieces.

  For some reason she had asked for some vocal music, and he had played a tape of Kiri Te Kanawa singing highlights from Madama Butterfly. Even Susan had heard of Kiri Te Kanawa, the soprano from New Zealand who had sung at the wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Di. One song in particular sent shivers all the way up her spine and made the hackles at the back of her neck stand on end. Banks had told her the heroine was imagining the return of her lover in the aria, which translated as ‘One Fine Day’. Susan had taken a note of the title, and she would buy it for herself tomorrow, as a start to her collection. Perhaps she would also try to find out what happened in the story: did the lover return, as Butterfly dreamed?