Close To Home (aka The Summer That Never Was) Page 3

  Not that she couldn’t understand why Banks had gone. The poor sod had simply had enough. He needed to recharge his batteries, gird his loins before he entered back into the fray. A month should do it, Assistant Chief Constable Ron McLaughlin had agreed, and Banks had more than enough accrued leave for that. So he had buggered off to Greece, taking the sunshine with him. Lucky sod.

  At least Banks’s temporary absence meant a quick transfer for Annie from Complaints and Discipline back to CID at the rank of detective inspector, which was what she had been angling for. She didn’t have her own office anymore, however, only a semipartitioned corner in the detectives’ squad room along with DS Hatchley and six DCs, including Winsome Jackman, Kevin Templeton and Gavin Rickerd, but it was worth the sacrifice to be away from that fat sexist lecher Detective Superintendent Chambers, not to mention a welcome change from the kind of dirty jobs she had been given under his command.

  There hadn’t been much more crime than sun in the Western Area lately, either, except in Harrogate, of all places, where a mysterious epidemic of egg-throwing had broken out. Youths seemed to have taken to throwing eggs at passing cars, old folks’ windows and even at police stations. But that was Harrogate, not Eastvale. Which was why Annie, bored with looking over reports, mission statements, circulars and cost-cutting proposals, perked her ears up when she heard the tapping of Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe’s walking stick approaching the office door. She took her feet off the desk, as much so that Gristhorpe wouldn’t notice her red suede ankle boots as anything else, tucked her wavy chestnut hair behind her ears and pretended to be buried deep in the paperwork.

  Gristhorpe walked over to her desk. He’d lost quite a bit of weight since he shattered his ankle, but he still looked robust enough. Even so, rumor had it that he had been heard to broach the subject of retirement. “Owt on, Annie?” he asked.

  Annie gestured to the papers strewn over her desk. “Not a lot.”

  “Only there’s this boy gone missing. Schoolboy, aged fifteen.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Didn’t come home last night.” Gristhorpe put the misper report in front of her. “Parents have been calling us since yesterday evening.”

  Annie raised her eyebrows. “A bit soon to bring us in on it, isn’t it, sir? Kids go missing all the time. Fifteen-year-olds in particular.”

  Gristhorpe scratched his chin. “Not ones called Luke Armitage, they don’t.”

  “Luke Armitage? Not…”

  “Aye. Martin Armitage’s son. Stepson, to be accurate.”

  “Oh, shit.” Martin Armitage was an ex-football player, who in his time had been one of the major strikers of the Premier League. Since retiring from professional sport, he had become something of a country gentleman. He lived with his wife and stepson Luke in Swainsdale Hall, a magnificent manor house perched on the daleside above Fortford. Armitage was known as a “Champagne” socialist because he professed to have left-wing leanings, gave to charities, especially those supporting and promoting children’s sporting activities, and chose to send his son to East-vale Comprehensive instead of to a public school.

  His wife, Robin Fetherling, had once been a celebrated model, well enough known in her field as Martin Armitage was in his, and her exploits, including drugs, wild parties and stormy public affairs with a variety of rock stars, had provided plenty of fodder twenty years ago or more, when Annie was a teenager. Robin Fetherling and Neil Byrd had been a hot item, the beautiful young couple of the moment, when Annie was at the University of Exeter. She had even listened to Neil Byrd’s records in her student flat, but she hadn’t heard his name, or his music, in years – hardly surprising, as she had neither the time nor the inclination to keep up with pop music these days. She remembered reading that Robin and Neil had had a baby out of wedlock about fifteen years ago. Luke. Then they split up, and Neil Byrd committed suicide while the child was still very young.

  “Oh, shit, indeed,” said Gristhorpe. “I’d not like to think we give better service to the rich and famous than to the poor, Annie, but perhaps you could go and try to set the parents at ease. The kid’s probably gone gallivanting off with his mates, run away to London or something, but you know what people’s imaginations can get up to.”

  “Where did he disappear from, sir?”

  “We don’t know for certain. He’d been into town yesterday afternoon, and when he didn’t come home for tea they started to get worried. At first they thought he might have met up with some mates, but when it got dark and he still wasn’t home they started to get worried. By this morning, they were frantic, of course. Turns out the lad carried a mobile with him, so they’re sure he would have rung if anything came up.”

  Annie frowned. “That does sound odd. Have they tried ringing him?”

  “No signal. They say his phone’s switched off.”

  Annie stood up and reached for her umbrella. “I’ll go over there and talk to them now.”

  “And, Annie?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “You hardly need me to tell you this, but try to keep as low a profile as possible. The last thing we want is the local press on the case.”

  “Softly, softly, sir.”

  Gristhorpe nodded. “Good.”

  Annie walked toward the door.

  “Nice boots,” said Gristhorpe from behind her.

  Banks remembered the days surrounding Graham Marshall’s disappearance more clearly than he remembered most days that long ago, he realized as he closed his eyes and settled back in the airplane seat, though memory, he found, tended to take more of a cavalier view of the past than an accurate one; it conflated, condensed and transposed. It metamorphosed, as Alex had said last night.

  Weeks, months, years were spread out in his mind’s eye, but not necessarily in chronological order. The emotions and incidents might be easy enough to relocate and remember, but sometimes, as in police work, you have to rely on external evidence to reconstruct the true sequence. Whether he had got caught shoplifting in Woolworth’s in 1963 or 1965, for example, he couldn’t remember, though he recollected with absolute clarity the sense of fear and helplessness in that cramped triangular room under the escalator, the cloying smell of Old Spice aftershave and the way the two dark-suited shop detectives laughed as they pushed him about and made him empty his pockets. But when he thought about it more, he remembered it was also the same day he had bought the brand-new With the Beatles LP, which was released in late November 1963.

  And that was the way it often happened. Remember one small thing – a smell, a piece of music, the weather, a fragment of conversation – then scrutinize it, question it from every angle, and before you know it, there’s another piece of information you thought you’d forgotten. And another. It didn’t always work, but sometimes when he did this, Banks ended up creating a film of his own past, a film which he was both watching and acting in at the same time. He could see what clothes he was wearing, knew what he was feeling, what people were saying, how warm or cold it was. Sometimes the sheer reality of the memory terrified him and he had to snap himself out of it in a cold sweat.

  Just over a week after he had returned from a holiday in Blackpool with the Banks family, Graham Marshall had disappeared during his Sunday-morning paper round out of Donald Bradford’s newsagent’s shop across the main road, a round he had been walking for about six months, and one that Banks himself had walked a year or so earlier, when Mr. Thackeray owned the shop. At first, of course, nobody knew anything about what had happened, apart from Mr. and Mrs. Marshall and the police.

  As Banks leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes, he tried to reconstruct that Sunday. It would have started in the normal way. On weekends, Banks usually stayed in bed until lunchtime, when his mother called him down for the roast. During lunch they would listen to the radio comedies on the Light Programme: The Navy Lark and Round the Horne, until The Billy Cotton Band Show drove Banks out of doors to meet up with his friends on the estate.

 
; Sometimes, the five of them – Banks, Graham, Steve Hill, Paul Major and Dave Grenfell – would go walking in the local park, staking out an area of grass near the playing fields, and listen to Alan Freeman’s Pick of the Pops on Paul’s trannie, watching the girls walk by. Sometimes Steve would get bold and offer one of them a couple of Woodbines to toss him off, but mostly, they just watched and yearned from a distance.

  Other Sundays they’d gather at Paul’s and play records, which was what they did on the day Graham disappeared, Banks remembered. Paul’s was best because he had a new Dansette which he would bring outside on the steps if the weather was good. They didn’t play the music too loudly, so nobody complained. If Paul’s mum and dad were out, they’d sneak a cigarette or two as well. That Sunday, everyone was there except Graham, and nobody knew why he was missing, unless his parents were keeping him in the house for some reason. They could be strict, Graham’s parents, especially his dad. Still, whatever the reason, he wasn’t there, and nobody thought too much of it.

  There they would be, then, sitting on the steps, wearing their twelve-inch-bottom drainpipe trousers, tight-fitting shirts and winkle-pickers, hair about as long as they could grow it before their parents prescribed a trip to Mad Freddy’s, the local barber’s. No doubt they played other music, but the highlights of that day, Banks remembered, were Steve’s pristine copy of the latest Bob Dylan LP, Bringing It All Back Home, and Banks’s Help!

  Along with his fascination with masturbation, Steve Hill had some rather way-out tastes in music. Other kids might like Sandie Shaw, Cliff Richard and Cilla Black, but for Steve it was The Animals, The Who and Bob Dylan. Banks and Graham were with him most of the way, though Banks also enjoyed some of the more traditional pop music, like Dusty Springfield and Gene Pitney, while Dave and Paul were more conservative, sticking with Roy Orbison and Elvis. Of course, everybody hated Val Doonican, Jim Reeves and The Bachelors.

  That day, songs like “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Maggie’s Farm” transported Banks to places he didn’t know existed, and the mysterious love songs “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” and “She Belongs to Me” lingered with him for days. Though Banks had to admit he didn’t understand a word Dylan was singing about, there was something magical about the songs, even vaguely frightening, like a beautiful dream in which someone starts speaking gibberish. But perhaps that was hindsight. This was only the beginning. He didn’t become a full-fledged Dylan fan until “Like a Rolling Stone” knocked him for a loop a month or two later, and he wouldn’t claim, even today, to know what Dylan was singing about half the time.

  The girls from down the street walked by at one point, as they always did, very Mod in their miniskirts and Mary Quant hairdos, all bobs, fringes and headbands, eye makeup laid on with a trowel, lips pale and pink, noses in the air. They were sixteen, far too old for Banks or his friends, and they all had eighteen-year-old boyfriends with Vespas or Lambrettas.

  Dave left early, saying he had to go to his grandparents’ house in Ely for tea, though Banks thought it was because Dylan was getting up his nose. Steve headed off a few minutes later, taking his LP with him. Banks couldn’t remember the exact time, but he was certain that he and Paul were listening to “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” when they saw the Ford Zephyr cruising down the street. It couldn’t have been the first one, because Graham had been missing since morning, but it was the first one they saw. Paul pointed and started whistling the Z Cars theme music. Police cars weren’t a novelty on the estate, but they were still rare enough visitors in those days to be noticed. The car stopped at number 58, Graham’s house, and two uniformed officers got out and knocked on the door.

  Banks remembered watching as Mrs. Marshall opened the door, thin cardie wrapped around her, despite the warmth of day, and the two policemen took off their hats and followed her into the house. After that, nothing was ever quite the same on the estate.

  Back in the twenty-first century, Banks opened his eyes and rubbed them. The memory had made him even more tired. He’d had a devil of a time getting to Athens the other day, and when he had got there it was only to find that he couldn’t get a flight home until the following morning. He’d had to spend the night in a cheap hotel, and he hadn’t slept well, surrounded by the noise and bustle of a big city, after the peace and quiet of his island retreat.

  Now the plane was flying up the Adriatic, between Italy and the former Yugoslavia. Banks was sitting on the left and the sky was so cloudless he fancied he could see all of Italy stretched out below him, greens and blues and earth colors, from the Adriatic to the Mediterranean: mountains, the crater of a volcano, vineyards, the cluster of a village and sprawl of a large city. Soon he would be landing back in Manchester, and soon the quest would begin in earnest. Graham Marshall’s bones had been found, and Banks damn well wanted to know how and why they had ended up where they did.

  Annie turned off the B-road between Fortford and Relton onto the gravel drive of Swainsdale Hall. Elm, sycamore and ash dotted the landscape and obscured the view of the hall itself until the last curve, when it was revealed in all its splendor. Built of local limestone and millstone grit in the seventeenth century, the hall was a long, two-story symmetrical stone building with a central chimney stack and stone-mullioned windows. The Dale’s leading family, the Blackwoods, had lived there until they had died out in the way many old aristocratic families had died out: lack of money and no suitable heirs. Though Martin Armitage had bought the place for a song, so the stories went, the cost of upkeep was crippling, and Annie could see, as she approached, that parts of the flagstone roof were in a state of disrepair.

  Annie parked in front of the hall and glanced through the slanting rain over the Dale. It was a magnificent view. Beyond the low hump of the earthworks in the lower field, an ancient Celtic defense against the invading Romans, she could see the entire green valley spread out before her, from the meandering river Swain all the way up the opposite side to the gray limestone scars, which seemed to grin like a skeleton’s teeth. The dark, stubby ruins of Devraulx Abbey were visible about halfway up the opposite daleside, as was the village of Lyndgarth with its square church tower and smoke rising from chimneys over roofs darkened by the rain.

  A dog barked inside the house as Annie approached the door. More of a cat person herself, she hated the way dogs rushed up when visitors arrived and barked and jumped at you, slobbered and sniffed your crotch, created chaos in the hall while the apologetic owner tried to control the animal’s enthusiasm and explain how it really was just very friendly.

  This time was no exception. However, the young woman who opened the door got a firm grip on the dog’s collar before it could drool on Annie’s skirt, and another woman appeared behind her. “Miata!” she called out. “Behave! Josie, would you take Miata to the scullery, please?”

  “Yes, ma’m.” Josie disappeared, half-dragging the frustrated Dobermann along with her.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said. “She gets so excited when we have visitors. She’s only being friendly.”

  “Miata. Nice name,” said Annie, and introduced herself.

  “Thank you.” The woman held out her hand. “I’m Robin Armitage. Please come in.”

  Annie followed Robin down the hall and through a door on the right. The room was enormous, reminiscent of an old banquet hall, with antique furniture scattered around a beautiful central Persian rug, a grand piano, and a stone fireplace bigger than Annie’s entire cottage. On the wall over the mantelpiece hung what looked to Annie’s trained eye like a genuine Matisse.

  The man who had been staring out of the back window over a lawn the size of a golf course turned when Annie entered. Like his wife, he looked as if he hadn’t slept all night. He introduced himself as Martin Armitage and shook her hand. His grip was firm and brief.

  Martin Armitage was over six feet tall, handsome in a rugged, athletic sort of way, with his hair shaved almost to his skull, the way many footballers wore it. He was slim, long-legged and fit, as
befitted an ex-sportsman, and even his casual clothes, jeans and a loose hand-knit sweater, looked as if they had cost more than Annie’s monthly salary. He glanced down at Annie’s boots, and she wished she’d gone for something more conservative that morning. But how was she to know?

  “Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe told me about Luke,” Annie said.

  “Yes.” Robin Armitage tried to smile, but it came out like the twentieth take of a commercial shoot. “Look, I’ll have Josie bring us some tea – or coffee, if you’d prefer it?”

  “Tea would be fine, thanks,” said Annie, perching carefully on the edge of an antique armchair. One of the most civilized things about being a policewoman, she thought, especially working in plainclothes, was that the people you visited – witnesses, victims and villains alike – invariably offered you some sort of refreshment. Usually tea. It was as English as fish and chips. From what she had read, or seen on television, she couldn’t imagine anything like it happening anywhere else in the world. But for all she knew, perhaps the French offered wine when a gendarme came to call.

  “I know how upsetting something like this can be,” Annie began, “but in ninety-nine percent of cases there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.”

  Robin raised a finely plucked eyebrow. “Do you mean that? You’re not just saying it to make us feel better?”

  “It’s true. You’d be surprised how many mispers we get – sorry, that’s police talk for missing persons – and most of them turn up none the worse for wear.”

  “Most of them?” echoed Martin Armitage.

  “I’m just telling you that statistically he’s likely-”