Aftermath, p.13
Aftermath, page 13
Maggie picked up the studio extension. “Yes?”
“Margaret Forrest?” It was a woman’s voice. “Am I speaking to Margaret Forrest?”
“Who’s asking?”
“Is that you, Margaret? My name’s Lorraine Temple. You don’t know me.”
“What do you want?”
“I understand that it was you who dialed in the emergency call on The Hill yesterday morning? A domestic disturbance.”
“Who are you? Are you a reporter?”
“Oh, didn’t I say? Yes, I write for the Post.”
“I’m not supposed to talk to you. Go away.”
“Look, I’m just down the street, Margaret. I’m calling on my mobile. The police won’t let me near your house, so I wondered if you’d care to meet me for a drink or something. It’s almost lunch-time. There’s a nice pub—”
“I’ve nothing to say to you, Ms. Temple, so there’s no point in our meeting.”
“You did report a domestic disturbance at number thirty-five The Hill early yesterday morning, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but—”
“Then I have got the right person. What made you think it was a domestic?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand. I don’t know what you mean.”
“You heard noises, didn’t you? Raised voices? Breaking glass? A thud?”
“How do you know all this?”
“I’m just wondering what made you jump to the conclusion that it was a domestic disturbance, that’s all. I mean, why couldn’t it have been someone grappling with a burglar, for example?”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
“Oh, come on, Margaret. It’s Maggie, isn’t it? Can I call you Maggie?”
Maggie said nothing. She had no idea why she didn’t just hang up on Lorraine Temple.
“Look, Maggie,” Lorraine went on, “give me a break here. I’ve got my living to make. Were you a friend of Lucy Payne’s, is that it? Do you know something about her background? Something the rest of us don’t know?”
“I can’t talk to you anymore,” Maggie said, and then she did hang up. But something Lorraine Temple had said struck a chord, and she regretted doing so. Despite what Banks had told her, if she were to be Lucy’s friend, then the press might prove an ally, not an enemy. She might have to speak to them, to mobilize them in Lucy’s support. Public sympathy would be very important, and in that the media might be able to help her. Of course, all this depended on the approach the police took. If Banks believed what Maggie had told him about the abuse, and if Lucy confirmed it, as she would, then they would realize that she was more of a victim than anything else and just let her go as soon as she was well again.
Lorraine Temple was persistent enough to call back a couple of minutes later. “Come on, Maggie,” she said. “Where’s the harm?”
“All right,” said Maggie, “I’ll meet you for a drink. Ten minutes. I know the place you mean. It’s called The Woodcutter. At the bottom of The Hill, right?”
“Right. Ten minutes. I’ll be there.”
Maggie hung up. While she was still close to the phone, she took out the yellow pages and looked up a local florist. She arranged to have some flowers delivered to Lucy in her hospital bed, along with a note wishing her well.
Before she left, she had one last quick look at her sketch and noticed something curious about it. Rapunzel’s face. It wasn’t the all-purpose fairy-tale princess sort of face you saw in so many illustrations; it was individual, unique, something Maggie prided herself on. More than that, though, Rapunzel’s face, half-turned to the viewer, resembled Claire Toth’s, even down to the two spots on her chin. Frowning, Maggie picked up her rubber and erased them before she went off to meet Lorraine Temple from the Post.
Banks hated hospitals, hated everything about them, and he had done so ever since he’d had his tonsils out at the age of nine. He hated the smell of them, the colors of the walls, the echoing sounds, the doctors’ white coats and the uniforms the nurses wore, hated the beds, thermometers, syringes, stethoscopes, IVs, and the strange machines glimpsed behind half-open doors. Everything.
If truth be told, he had hated it all since well before the tonsil experience. When his brother, Roy, was born, Banks was five, seven years too young to be allowed inside a hospital at visiting time. His mother had some problems with the pregnancy—those unspecified adult problems that grown-ups always seemed to be whispering about—and spent an entire month there. Those were the days when they’d let you hang on to a bed that long. Banks was sent away to live with his aunt and uncle in Northampton and went to a new school for the whole period. He never settled in, and being the new boy, he had to stick up for himself against more than one bully.
He remembered his uncle driving him to the hospital to see his mother one dark, cold winter’s night, holding him up to the window—thank God she was on the ground floor—so he could wipe the frost off with his wool mitten and see her swollen shape halfway along the ward and wave to her. He felt so sad. It must be a horrible place, he remembered thinking, that would keep a mother from her son and make her sleep in a room full of strange people when she was so poorly.
The tonsillectomy had only confirmed what he already knew in the first place, and now he was older, hospitals still scared the shit out of him. He saw them as last resorts, places where one ends up, where one goes to die, and where the well-intentioned ministrations, the probing, pricking, slicing and all the various ectomies of medical science only postpone the inevitable, filling one’s last days on earth with torture, pain and fear. Banks was a veritable Philip Larkin when it came to hospitals, could think only of “the anesthetic from which none come round.”
Lucy Payne was under guard at Leeds General Infirmary, not far from where her husband lay in intensive care after emergency surgery to remove skull splinters from his brain. The PC sitting outside her room, a dog-eared Tom Clancy paperback on the chair beside him, reported no comings or goings other than hospital staff. It had been a quiet night, he said. Lucky for some, Banks thought as he entered the private room.
The doctor was inside waiting. She introduced herself as Dr. Landsberg. No first name. Banks didn’t want her there, but there was nothing he could do about it. Lucy Payne wasn’t under arrest, but she was under the doctor’s care.
“I’m afraid I can’t give you very long with my patient,” she said. “She has suffered an extremely traumatic experience, and she needs rest more than anything.”
Banks looked at the woman in the bed. Half her face, including one eye, was covered with bandages. The eye that he could see was the same shiny black as the ink he liked to use in his fountain pen. Her skin was pale and smooth, her raven’s-wing hair spread out over the pillow and sheets. He thought of Kimberley Myers’s body spread-eagled on the mattress. That had happened in Lucy Payne’s house, he reminded himself.
Banks sat down beside Lucy, and Dr. Landsberg hovered like a lawyer waiting to interrupt when Banks overstepped his PACE bounds.
“Lucy,” he said, “my name’s Banks, Acting Detective Superintendent Banks. I’m in charge of the investigation into the five missing girls. How are you feeling?”
“Not bad,” Lucy answered. “Considering.”
“Is there much pain?”
“Some. My head hurts. How’s Terry? What’s happened to Terry? Nobody will tell me.” Her voice sounded thick, as if her tongue were swollen and her words were slurred. The medication.
“Perhaps if you just told me what happened last night, Lucy. Can you remember?”
“Is Terry dead? Someone told me he was hurt.”
The concern of the abused wife for her abuser—if that was what he was witnessing—didn’t surprise Banks very much at all; it was an old sad tune, and he had heard it many times before, in all its variations.
“Your husband was very badly injured, Lucy,” Dr. Landsberg cut in. “We’re doing all we can for him.”
Banks cursed her under his breath. He didn’t want Lucy Payne to know what kind of shape her husband was in; if she thought he wasn’t going to survive, she could tell Banks whatever she wanted, knowing he’d have no way of checking whether it was true or not. “Can you tell me what happened last night?” he repeated.
Lucy half closed her good eye; she was trying to remember, or pretending she was trying to remember. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
Good answer, Banks realized. Wait and see what happens to Terry before admitting to anything. She was sharp, this one, even in her hospital bed, under medication.
“Do I need a lawyer?” she asked.
“Why would you need a lawyer?”
“I don’t know. When the police talk to people . . . you know, on television . . .”
“We’re not on television, Lucy.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I know that, silly. I didn’t mean . . . never mind.”
“What’s the last thing you remember about what happened to you?”
“I remember waking up, getting out of bed, putting on my dressing gown. It was late. Or early.”
“Why did you get out of bed?”
“I don’t know. I must have heard something.”
“What?”
“A noise. I can’t remember.”
“What did you do next?”
“I don’t know. I just remember getting up and then it hurt and everything went dark.”
“Do you remember having an argument with Terry?”
“No.”
“Did you go in the cellar?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t remember. I might have done.”
Covering all the possibilities. “Did you ever go in the cellar?”
“That was Terry’s room. He would have punished me if I went down there. He kept it locked.”
Interesting, Banks thought. She could remember enough to distance herself from whatever they might have found in the cellar. Did she know? Forensics ought to be able to confirm whether she was telling the truth or not about going down there. It was the basic rule: wherever you go, you leave something behind and take something with you.
“What did he do down there?” Banks asked.
“I don’t know. It was his own private den.”
“So you never went down there?”
“No. I didn’t dare.”
“What do you think he did down there?”
“I don’t know. Watched videos, read books.”
“Alone?”
“A man needs his privacy sometimes. That’s what Terry said.”
“And you respected that?”
“Yes.”
“What about that poster on the door, Lucy? Did you ever see it?”
“Only from the top of the steps, coming in from the garage.”
“It’s quite graphic, isn’t it? What did you think of it?”
Lucy managed a thin smile. “Men . . . men are like that, aren’t they? They like that sort of thing.”
“So it didn’t bother you?”
She did something with her lips that indicated it didn’t.
“Superintendent,” Dr. Landsberg cut in, “I really think you ought to be going now and let my patient get some rest.”
“Just a couple more questions, that’s all. Lucy, do you remember who hurt you?”
“I . . . I . . . it must have been Terry. There was no one else there, was there?”
“Had Terry ever hit you before?”
She turned her head sideways, so the only side Banks could see was bandaged.
“You’re upsetting her, Superintendent. I really must insist—”
“Lucy, did you ever see Terry with Kimberley Myers? You do know who Kimberley Myers is, don’t you?”
Lucy turned to face him again. “Yes. She’s the poor girl that went missing.”
“That’s right. Did you ever see Terry with her?”
“I don’t remember.”
“She was a pupil at Silverhill, where Terry taught. Did he ever mention her?”
“I don’t think so . . . I . . .”
“You don’t remember.”
“No. I’m sorry. What’s wrong? What’s happening? Can I see Terry?”
“I’m afraid you can’t, not at the moment,” said Dr. Landsberg. Then she turned to Banks. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave now. You can see how agitated Lucy is becoming.”
“When can I talk to her again?”
“I’ll let you know. Soon. Please.” She took Banks by the arm.
Banks knew when he was beaten. Besides, the interview was going nowhere. He didn’t know whether Lucy was telling the truth about not remembering or whether she was confused because of her medication.
“Get some rest, Lucy,” Dr. Landsberg said as they left.
“Mr. Banks? Superintendent?”
It was Lucy, her small, thick, slurred voice, her obsidian eye fixing him in its gaze.
“Yes?”
“When can I go home?”
Banks had a mental image of what home would look like right now, and probably for the next month or more. Under construction. “I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll be in touch.”
Outside in the corridor, Banks turned to Dr. Landsberg. “Can you help me with something, Doctor?”
“Perhaps.”
“Her not remembering. Is that symptomatic?”
Dr. Landsberg rubbed her eyes. She looked as if she got about as much sleep as Banks did. Someone paged a Dr. Thorsen over the PA system. “It’s possible,” she said. “In cases like this there’s often post-traumatic stress disorder, one of the effects of which can be retrograde amnesia.”
“Do you think that’s the case with Lucy?”
“Too early to say, and I’m not an expert in the field. You’d have to talk to a neurologist. All I can say is that we’re pretty certain there’s no physical brain damage, but emotional stress can be a factor, too.”
“Is this memory loss selective?”
“What do you mean?”
“She seems to remember her husband was hurt and that he was the one who hit her, but nothing else.”
“It’s possible, yes.”
“Is it likely to be permanent?”
“Not necessarily.”
“So her complete memory might come back?”
“In time.”
“How long?”
“Impossible to say. As early as tomorrow, as late as . . . well, maybe never. We know so little about the brain.”
“Thank you, Doctor. You’ve been very helpful.”
Dr. Landsberg gave him a puzzled glance. “Not at all,” she said. “Superintendent, I hope I’m not speaking out of turn, but I had a word with Dr. Mogabe—he’s Terence Payne’s doctor—just before you came.”
“Yes.”
“He’s very concerned.”
“Oh?” This was what DC Hodgkins had told Banks the day before.
“Yes. It seems as if his patient was assaulted by a policewoman.”
“Not my case,” said Banks.
Dr. Landsberg’s eyes widened. “Just like that? You’re not at all concerned?”
“Whether I’m concerned or not doesn’t enter into it. Someone else is investigating the assault on Terence Payne and will no doubt be talking to Dr. Mogabe in due course. My interest is in the five dead girls and the Paynes. Good-bye, Doctor.”
And Banks walked off down the corridor, footsteps echoing, leaving Dr. Landsberg to her dark thoughts. An orderly pushed a whey-faced, wrinkled old man past on a gurney, IV hooked up, on his way to surgery, by the look of things.
Banks shuddered and walked faster.
7
One good thing about the family-style chain pubs, thought Maggie, was that nobody raised an eyebrow if you only ordered a pot of tea or a cup of coffee, which was all she wanted when she met Lorraine Temple at The Woodcutter’s that Tuesday lunchtime.
Lorraine was a plump, petite brunette with an easy manner and an open face, a face you could trust. She was about Maggie’s age, early thirties, wearing black jeans and a jacket over a white silk blouse. She bought the coffees and put Maggie at ease with some small talk and sympathetic noises about the recent events on The Hill, then she got down to business. She used a notebook rather than a tape recorder, Maggie was glad to see. For some reason, she didn’t like the idea of her voice, her words, being recorded as sounds; but as squiggles on the page, they hardly seemed to matter.
“Do you use shorthand?” she asked, thinking nobody used that anymore.
Lorraine smiled up at her. “My own version. Would you like something to eat?”
“No, thanks. I’m not hungry.”
“Okay. We’ll start, then, if that’s all right with you?”
Maggie tensed a little, waiting for the questions. The pub was quiet, mostly because it was a weekday and the bottom of The Hill was hardly a tourist area or a business center. There were a couple of industrial estates nearby, but it wasn’t quite lunchtime yet. Pop music played on the jukebox at an acceptable level, and even the few children in the family room seemed more subdued than she would have expected. Maybe the recent events had got to everyone in one way or another. It felt as if a pall lay over the place.
“Can you tell me how it happened?” Lorraine asked first.
Maggie thought for a moment. “Well, I don’t sleep very well, and maybe I was awake or it woke me up, I’m not sure, but I heard noises across the street.”
“What noises?”
“Voices arguing. A man’s and a woman’s. Then a sound of glass breaking and then a thud.”
“And you know this was coming from across the street?”
“Yes. When I looked out of the window, there was a light on and I thought I saw a shadow pass across it.”
