Cold is the Grave Read online

  ‘You don’t sound as if you want her to.’

  Rosalind frowned, then said, ‘Perhaps you’re right. I did suggest to Jerry that we simply let her go her own way. She’s old enough, and certainly she’s smart enough to take care of herself. And she’s a troublemaker. I know she’s my daughter, and I don’t mean to sound uncaring, but . . . Well, you can see for yourself what’s happened after only six months, can’t you? That tattoo, those pictures . . . She never considers anyone else’s feelings. I can just imagine what chaos life would be like here if we had all her problems to deal with as well.’

  ‘As well?’

  ‘Nothing. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Is there anything else you think I should know?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Anything you’re not telling me.’

  ‘No. Why should there be?’

  But there was, Banks sensed by the way Rosalind glanced away from him as she spoke. There may have been family problems that neither she nor her husband wanted to discuss. And maybe they were right not to. Perhaps he should hold his curiosity in check for once and not rip open cans of worms the way he usually did. Just find the girl, he told himself, make sure she isn’t in any danger, and leave the rest well alone. Lord knows, the last thing he wanted to do was get caught up in the Riddle family dysfunctions.

  He scribbled down as much information as he could get from the website, which was run by an organization called GlamourPuss Ltd based in Soho. It shouldn’t be too difficult to track them down, he thought, and they should be able to point him towards Emily, or Louisa, as she now preferred to be called. He just hoped she wasn’t on the game, as so many teenagers who appeared on porno websites were. She didn’t sound like the type who would turn to prostitution for gain, but it sounded as if she might try anything for kicks. He would have to cross that bridge when, and if, he got to it.

  Rosalind printed the photo, took some scissors from the desk drawer and trimmed it from the navel ring down before she handed it to him. Banks followed her back into the living room, where Riddle sat staring into space. ‘All done?’ he asked.

  Banks nodded. He didn’t bother sitting. ‘Tell me something,’ he said. ‘Why me? You know damn well how things stand between us.’

  Riddle seemed to flinch slightly, and Banks was surprised at the venom in his own voice. Then Riddle paused and looked him in the eye. ‘Two reasons,’ he said. ‘First, because you’re the best detective in the county. I’m not saying I approve of your methods or your attitude, but you get results. And in an unorthodox business like this, well, let’s just say that some of your maverick qualities might actually be of real value for a change.’

  Even being damned with faint praise by Jimmy Riddle was a new experience for Banks. ‘And second?’ he asked.

  ‘You’ve got a teenage daughter yourself, haven’t you? Tracy’s her name. Am I right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Riddle spread his hands, palms out. ‘Then you know what I’m getting at. I think you can imagine something of how I feel.’

  And to his surprise, Banks could. ‘I can’t start till next week,’ he said.

  Riddle leaned forward. ‘You’ve nothing pressing on right now.’

  ‘I was planning a weekend away with Tracy. In Paris.’

  ‘Please start now. Tomorrow. In the morning. I need to know.’ There was a sense of desperation in Riddle’s voice that Banks had never heard from him before.

  ‘Why so urgent?’

  Riddle stared into the huge fireplace, as if addressing his words to the flames. ‘I’m afraid for her, Banks. She’s so young and vulnerable. I want her back. At the very least I need to know how she is, what she’s doing. Imagine how you’d feel if it happened to you. Imagine what you’d do if it was your daughter in trouble.’

  Damn it, thought Banks, seeing his weekend in Paris with Tracy start to slip beyond his grasp. Daughters. Who’d have them? Nothing but trouble. But Riddle had touched a nerve all right. Now there was no getting away from it, no declining; Banks knew he had to head off to London to find Emily Louise Riddle.

  ‘Oh, Dad! You can’t mean it! You woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me we can’t go to Paris after all?’

  ‘I’m sorry, love. We’ll just have to postpone it for a while.’

  ‘I don’t believe this. I’ve been looking forward to this weekend for ages.’

  ‘Me, too, sweetheart. What can I say?’

  ‘And you won’t even tell me why?’

  ‘I can’t. I promised.’

  ‘You promised me a weekend in Paris. It was easy enough to break that one.’

  Touché. ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t you trust me to keep my mouth shut?’

  ‘Of course I do. It’s not that.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘I just can’t tell you yet. That’s all. Maybe next week, if things work out.’

  ‘Oh, don’t bother.’ Tracy fell into one of her sulky silences for a while, the way her mother did, then said, ‘It’s not dangerous, is it?’

  ‘Of course not. It’s a private matter. I’m helping out a—’ Banks almost said ‘friend’ but managed to stop himself in time. ‘I’m helping someone out. Someone in trouble. Believe me, love, if you knew the details, you’d see it’s the right thing to do. Look, when it’s over, I’ll make it up to you. I promise.’

  ‘Heard that before. Been there. Got the T-shirt.’

  ‘Give me a little leeway here, Tracy. This isn’t easy for me, you know. It’s not just you who’s upset. I was looking forward to Paris, too.’

  ‘Okay, I know. I’m sorry. But what about the tickets? The hotel?’

  ‘The hotel’s easily cancelled. I’ll see if I can get the tickets changed.’

  ‘You’ll be lucky.’ She paused again. ‘Wait a minute! I’ve just had an idea.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, I know you can’t go, but there’s no reason I shouldn’t go, is there?’

  ‘Not that I know of. Except, would you really want to be in Paris all by yourself? And it’s not safe, especially for a young woman alone.’

  Tracy laughed. ‘I can take care of myself, Dad. I’m a big girl now.’

  Yes, Banks thought, all of nineteen. ‘I’m sure you can,’ he said. ‘But I’d be worried.’

  ‘You’re always worried. It’s what fathers do best for their daughters: worry about them. Besides, I wasn’t necessarily thinking of going by myself.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ll bet Damon would like to go. He doesn’t have any lectures tomorrow, either. I could ask him.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Banks. ‘Damon? Who on earth is Damon?’

  ‘My boyfriend. I bet he’d jump at the chance of a weekend in Paris with me.’

  I’ll bet he would, Banks thought, with that sinking feeling. This wasn’t going at all the way he had expected it to. He had expected recriminations, yes, anger, yes, but this . . .? ‘I’m not so sure that’s a good idea,’ he said weakly.

  ‘Of course it is. You know it is. We’d save money, too.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, you’ll only have to cancel one of the hotel rooms, for a start.’

  ‘Tracy!’

  She laughed. ‘Oh, Dad. Parents are so silly, you know. If kids want to sleep together it doesn’t have to be in a foreign city at night. They can do it in the student residence in the daytime, you know.’

  Banks swallowed. Now he had an answer to a question he had avoided asking. In for a penny, in for a pound. ‘Are you and Damon . . . I mean . . .?’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m a very careful girl. Now, the only problem is getting the tickets to us before tomorrow morning. I don’t suppose you’d like to drive over tonight, would you?’

  ‘No. I wouldn’t,’ said Banks. Then he weakened. After all, she was right; there was no reason to spoil her weekend just because his own was spoiled, Damon notwithstanding. ‘But as a ma
tter of fact, I have to go down to London tomorrow anyway, so I can go that far on the train with you.’ And check Damon out, too, while I’m at it, he thought. ‘I’ll give you the tickets then.’

  ‘That’s great!’

  Banks felt depressed; Tracy sounded far more thrilled at going off with Damon than with him. But she would; she was young. ‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ he said. ‘At the station. Same time as we arranged.’

  ‘Cool, Dad. Thanks a lot.’

  When he hung up the telephone, Banks fell back into his armchair and reached for his cigarettes. He had to go to London, of that there was no doubt. In the first place, he had promised, and in the second, there was something Riddle didn’t know. Tracy herself had almost run away from home once, around her thirteenth birthday, and the thought of what might have happened if she had gone through with it haunted him.

  It had happened just before they left London for Eastvale. Tracy had been upset for days about leaving her friends behind, and one night, when Banks actually happened to be home, he heard a noise downstairs. Going to investigate, he found Tracy at the door with a suitcase in her hand. In the end, he managed to persuade her to stay without forcing her, but it had been touch and go. One part of their bargain was that he had agreed not to tell her mother, and he never had. Sandra had slept through the whole thing. Remembering that night, he could imagine something of how the Riddles must feel.

  Even so, was this what he got for doing his enemy a favour? He got to go hunting for a runaway teen while his own daughter got a dirty weekend in Paris with her boyfriend. Where was the justice in that? he asked. All the answer he got was the howling of the wind and the relentless music of the water flowing over Gratly Falls.

  2

  On Friday afternoon, Banks was walking along Old Compton Street in the chilly November sunshine, having travelled down to London with Tracy and Damon that morning. After a grunted ‘Hi’ Damon had hardly spoken a word. The train was almost full, and the three of them couldn’t sit together, which seemed a relief to Tracy and Damon. Banks had to sit half the carriage away next to a fresh-faced young businessman wearing too much aftershave and playing FreeCell on his laptop computer.

  Most of the journey he spent listening to Lucinda Williams’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road and reading The Big Sleep, which he had substituted for Maigret and the Hundred Gibbets when he realized he wasn’t going to Paris. He had seen the Bogart film version a few weeks ago and enjoyed it so much it had made him want to read the book. Besides, Raymond Chandler seemed more suitable reading for the kind of job he was doing: Banks, P.I.

  Shortly before King’s Cross, his thoughts had returned to Tracy’s boyfriend.

  Banks wasn’t at all certain what to think of Damon. The grunt was no more than he would have expected from any of his daughter’s friends, and he didn’t read anything into it, except perhaps that the lad was a bit embarrassed at coming face to face with the father of the girl he was sleeping with. Even the thought of that made Banks’s chest tighten, though he told himself not to get upset, not to interfere. The last thing he wanted to do was alienate his daughter, especially as he was hoping to get back together with her mother. It wouldn’t do any good, anyway. Tracy had her own life to lead now, and she was no fool. He hoped.

  He had left the young lovers at King’s Cross and first gone to check in at the small Bloomsbury hotel he had telephoned the previous evening. Called simply Hotel Fifty-Five, after the street number, it was the place he favoured whenever he visited London: quiet, discreet, well located and relatively inexpensive. Riddle might have said he would pay any expenses, but Banks wouldn’t want to see the CC’s face if he got a bill from the Dorchester.

  The morning’s rain had dispersed during the journey, and the day had turned out windy and cool under the kind of piercingly clear blue sky you only get in November. Maybe the bonfires would dry out in time for Guy Fawkes’ Night after all, Banks thought, as he zipped his leather jacket a bit higher. He tapped his briefcase against his thigh to the rhythm of some hip-hop music that drifted out of a sex shop.

  Banks had strong feelings and memories associated with Soho ever since he used to walk the beat or drive the panda cars there out of Vine Street station, after it had been reopened in the early seventies. Certainly the area had been cleaned up since then, but Soho could never be really clean. Cleanliness wasn’t in its nature.

  He loved the whiff of villainy he got whenever he walked Old Compton Street or Dean Street, where a fiddle had been simply a hair’s breadth away from a legitimate business deal. He remembered the cold dawns at Berwick Street Market, a cigarette and mug of hot sweet tea in his hands, chatting with Sam, whose old brown collie Fetchit used to sit under the stall all day and watch the world go by with sad eyes. As the other stallholders set up their displays – fruit, crockery, knives and forks, knickers and socks, watches, egg slicers, you name it – Sam used to give Banks a running commentary on what was hot and what wasn’t. Probably dead now, along with Fetchit. They’d been old enough back then, when Banks was new to the job.

  Not that Soho was ever without its dark side. Banks had found his first murder victim there in an alley off Frith Street: a seventeen-year-old prostitute who had been stabbed and mutilated, her breasts cut off and several of her inner organs removed. ‘Homage to Jack the Ripper’, as the newspaper headlines had screamed. Banks had been sick on the spot, and he still had nightmares about the long minutes he had spent alone with the disembowelled body just before dawn in a garbage-strewn Soho alley.

  As with all the dead in his life, he had put a name to her: Dawn Wadley. Being junior at the time, Banks was given the job of telling her parents. He would never forget the choking smell of urine, rotten meat and unwashed nappies in the cramped flat on the tenth floor of an East End tower block, or Dawn’s washed-out junkie mother, apparently unconcerned about the fate of the daughter she gave up on years ago. To her, Dawn’s murder was just another in the endless succession of life’s cruel blows, as if it had happened solely in order to do her down.

  Banks turned into Wardour Street. Soho had changed, like the rest of the city. The old bookshops and video booths were still around, as was the Raymond Revuebar, but cheap sex was definitely on the wane. In its place came a younger crowd, many of them gay, who chatted on their mobiles while sipping cappuccinos at chic outdoor cafés. Young men with shaved heads and earrings flirted on street corners with clean-cut boys from Palmer’s Green or Sudbury Hill. Gay bars had sprung up all over the place, and the party never stopped.

  Banks checked the address for GlamourPuss Ltd he had got from the first place he tried: the phone book. Sometimes things really are that easy.

  From the outside, it looked like any number of other businesses operating in Soho. The building was run-down, paint flaking from the doors, the lino on the creaky corridors cracked and worn, but inside, through the second set of doors, it was all high-tech glam and potted plants, and he could still smell the fresh paint on the walls.

  ‘Can I help you, sir?’

  To Banks’s surprise, there was a female receptionist sitting behind a chest-high semicircle of black Plexiglas. Written on it, in florid pink script scattered with some sort of glitter, at about waist height, was the logo ‘GlamourPuss Ltd: Erotica and More!’ Banks had the idea, somehow, that women – right-thinking women, anyway – didn’t want anything to do with the porn business, that they wanted, in fact, to outlaw it if they could. Maybe this was a wrong-thinking woman? Or was she the respectable face of porn? If so, it was about nineteen, with short henna hair, a ghostly complexion and a stud through its left nostril. A little badge over her flat chest read ‘Tamara: Client Interface Officer’. Banks’s mind boggled. Can we interface, Tamara?

  ‘I’d like to see the person in charge,’ he said.

  ‘Do you have an appointment, sir?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What is the purpose of your visit?’

  She was starting to sound like an immigration offici
al, Banks thought, getting irritated. In the old days he would probably have just tweaked her nose-stud and walked right on in. Even these days he might do the same under normal circumstances, but he had to remember he was acting privately; he wasn’t here officially as a policeman. ‘Let’s call it a business proposition,’ he said.

  ‘I see. Please take a seat for a moment, sir. I’ll see if Mr Aitcheson is free.’ She gestured to the orange plastic chairs behind him. An array of magazines lay spread out on the coffee table in front of them. Banks lifted a couple up. Computer stuff, mostly. Not a Playboy or a Penthouse in sight. He looked up at Tamara, who had been carrying on a hushed conversation by telephone. She smiled. ‘He’ll be with you in a moment, sir.’ Did she think he was looking for a job or something? As what?

  Banks was beginning to feel more as if he were in a dentist’s waiting room than a porn emporium, and that thought didn’t give him any comfort. Clearly, things had changed a lot since he had walked the Soho beat; enough to make him feel like an old fogey when he was only in his mid-forties. In the old days, at least you knew where you were: people like GlamourPuss Ltd, as befitted their name and business, used to operate out of seedy offices in seedy basements; they didn’t run Internet websites; they didn’t have client interface officers; and they certainly didn’t come out from under their stones to meet strangers offering vague business propositions the way this young man was doing right now, smiling, hand outstretched, wearing a suit, no less.

  ‘Aitcheson,’ he said. ‘Terry Aitcheson. And you are?’

  ‘Banks. Alan Banks.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Banks. Follow me. We’ll go to the office. Far more private in there.’

  Banks followed him past Tamara, who gave a little wave and a nose twitch that looked painful. They crossed an open area filled with state-of-the-art computer equipment and went into a small office, which looked out over Wardour Street. There was nothing either on the desk or the walls to indicate that GlamourPuss Ltd dealt in pornography, which is what Banks thought they did.