Dead Right (22 page)

“And what about you? Are you happy with your gallery, your photography, your committee meetings, your social evenings?”

Sandra paused a long time, long enough for Banks to pour them both a stiff Laphroaig, before she answered. “Yes,” she said finally, in a soft voice. “That’s just it. Yes. Maybe I am. For a while I’ve been
thinking they’re all I do have. You just haven’t been here, Alan. Not as a real factor.”

Banks felt as if a hand made of ice had slid across his heart. It was such a palpable sensation that he put his hand to his chest. “Is there someone else?” he asked. On the stereo, Fiordiligi was singing quietly about being as firm as a rock.

Suddenly Sandra smiled, reached out and ran her hand over his hair. “Oh, you sweet, silly man,” she said. “No, there’s no-one else.” Then her eyes clouded and turned distant. “There could have been … perhaps … but there isn’t.” She shrugged, as if to cast off a painful memory.

Banks swallowed. “Then what?”

She paused. “As I said, I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and I’ve come to the conclusion that we should go our separate ways. At least for a while.” She reached forward and held his hand as she spoke, which seemed to him, like the smile, an out-of-place gesture. What the hell
was
wrong?

Banks snatched his hand back. “You can’t be serious,” he said. “We’ve been married over twenty years and all of a sudden you just decide to up and walk out.”

“But I
am
serious. And it’s not all of a sudden. Think about it. You’ll agree. This has been building up for a long time, Alan. We hardly ever see one another anyway. Why continue living a lie? You know I’m right.”

Banks shook his head. “No. I don’t. I still think you’re overre-acting to Tracy’s leaving and to Saturday night. Give it a little time. Maybe a holiday?” He sat forward and took her hand now. It felt limp and clammy. “When this case is over, let’s take a holiday, just you and me. We could go to Paris for a few days. Or somewhere warm. Back to Rhodes, maybe?”

He could see tears in her eyes. “Alan, you’re not listening to me. You’re making this really difficult, you know. I’ve been trying to pluck up courage to say this for weeks now. It’s not something I’ve just come up with on the spur of the moment. A holiday’s not going to solve our problems.” She sniffled and ran the back of her hand under her nose. “Oh, bugger,” she said. “Look at me, now. I didn’t want this to happen.” She grabbed his hand and gripped it tightly
again. This time he didn’t snatch it away. He didn’t know what to say. The icy touch was back, and now it seemed to be creeping into his bones and inner organs.

“I’m going away for a while,” Sandra said. “It’s the only way. The only way both of us can get a chance to think things over.”

“Where are you going?”

“My parents’. Mum’s arthritis is playing her up again, and she’ll appreciate an extra pair of hands around the place. But that’s not the reason. We need time apart, Alan. Time to decide whether there’s anything left to salvage or not.”

“So this is just a temporary separation you have in mind?”

“I don’t know. A few weeks, anyway. I just know I need to get away. From the house. From Eastvale. From you.”

“What about the community centre, your work?”

“Jane can take over for a while, till I decide what to do.”

“Then you might not come back?”

“Alan, I’m telling you I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. Don’t make it harder for me. I’m at my wits’ end already. The only sensible thing is for me to get away. Then … after a while … we can talk about it. Decide where we want to go next.”

“Why can’t we talk now?”

“Because it’s all too
close
here. That’s why. Pressing in on me. Please believe me, I don’t want to hurt you. I’m scared. But we’ve got to do it. It’s the only chance we’ve got. We can’t go on like this. For crying out loud, we’re both still young. Too bloody young to settle for anything less than the best.”

Banks sipped more Laphroaig, but it failed to warm the icy hand now busy caressing the inside of his spine. “When are you going?” he asked, his voice curiously flat.

Sandra avoided his eyes. “As soon as possible. Tomorrow.”

Banks sighed. In the silence, he heard the letterbox open and close. Odd, at that time of night. It seemed like a good excuse to get out of the room for a moment, before he started crying himself or said things he would regret, so he went to see what it was. On the mat lay an envelope with his name typed on the front. He opened the door, but it was quiet outside in the street, and there was no-one in sight.

He opened the envelope. Inside he found a plane ticket from Leeds and Bradford Airport to Amsterdam Schiphol, leaving late the following morning, a reservation for a hotel on Keizersgracht, and a single sheet of paper on which were typed the words: “JASON FOX: SHHHHH.”

EIGHT

I

The Dutch coast came into view: first the dull brown sandbars where the grey sea ended in a long white thread; then the dykes, marking off the reclaimed land, protecting it from the water level.

Banks turned off his Walkman in the middle of “Stop Breaking Down.” He always listened to loud music when flying—which wasn’t very often—because it was the only thing he could hear over the roar of the engines. And he hadn’t played
Exile on Main Street
in so long he’d forgotten just how good it was. The Rolling Stones’ raucous rhythm and blues, he found, also had the added advantage of blocking out depressing thoughts.

The plane banked lower over the patchwork of green and brown fields, and Banks could soon make out cars on the long straight roads, rooftops glinting in the midday sun. It was as lovely an autumn day in the Netherlands as it had been in Yorkshire.

Banks rubbed his eyes. He had spent a sleepless night in Brian’s room because Sandra had insisted it would only have made things more difficult if they’d slept together. She was right, he knew, but still it rankled. It wasn’t even a matter of sex. Somehow it seemed so unfair, when threatened with the loss of someone you had loved for over twenty years, that you didn’t even get that one last night of warmth and companionship together to remember and cherish. It felt like all the things you had left unsaid when someone died.

No matter how long Sandra said that she had been grappling with the problem, her decision had come as a shock to Banks. Perhaps, as she had argued, that was a measure of how much he had turned his back, drifted away from the relationship, but somehow
her words didn’t soften the blow. Now, more than anything, he felt numb, a pathetic figure floating around in zero gravity.

When he thought of Sandra, he thought mostly of the early days in London, where they lived together for about a year before they got married. It was the mid-seventies. Banks was just finishing his business diploma, already thinking about joining the police, and Sandra was taking a secretarial course. Every Sunday, if he didn’t have to work, they went on long walks around the city and its parks, Sandra practising her photography and Banks developing his copper’s eye for suspicious characters. Somehow, in his memory, it was always autumn on these walks: sunny but cool, with the leaves crackling underfoot. And when they got back to the tiny Notting Hill flat, they’d play music, laugh, talk, drink wine and make love.

Then came marriage, children, financial responsibilities and a career that demanded more and more of Banks’s time and energy. Most of his friends on the force were divorced before the seventies were over, and they all asked in wonder and envy how he and Sandra managed to survive. He didn’t really know, but he put a lot of it down to his wife’s independent spirit. Sandra was right about that. She wasn’t the kind of person who simply hung around the house and waited for him to turn up, fretting and getting angrier by the minute as the dinner was ruined and the kids screamed for bedtime stories from daddy. Sandra went her own way; she had her own interests and her own circle of friends. Naturally, more responsibility for the children fell on her shoulders, because Banks was hardly ever home, but she never complained. And for a long time, it worked.

After Banks’s near burn-out on the Met and a long rocky patch in the marriage, they moved to Eastvale, where Banks thought things would settle down and the two of them would enjoy a rural, peaceful and loving drift into middle age together; the kind of thing experienced by most couples married as long as they had been.

Wrong.

He looked at his watch. Sandra would be on the train to Croydon now, and whatever happened, whatever she finally decided, things would never be the same between them again. And there was nothing he could do about it. Not a damn thing.

He picked up that morning’s
Yorkshire Post
from the empty seat beside him and looked at the headline again: “WORLD WAR TWO HERO DIES AT GRANDSON’S FUNERAL”: Neo-Nazis responsible, says granddaughter.” There was no photograph, but the basic facts were there: the Nazi salute; Frank Hepplethwaite’s attack; Maureen Fox’s spirited defence. All in all, it made depressing reading. And then there was the brief sidebar interview with Motcombe himself.

Motcombe deeply regretted the “pointless death” of “war hero” Frank Hepplethwaite, he began, while pointing out how ironic it was that the poor man had died attacking the only people who dared demand justice for his grandson’s killers. Naturally, on further thought, neither he nor any member of his organization had any intention of pursuing charges against Maureen Fox, even though the head wound she gave him required five stitches; things had just got out of hand in the heat of the moment, and he could quite understand her attacking him and his friends with a plank. Grief makes people behave irrationally, he allowed.

Of course, Motcombe went on, everyone knew who had killed Jason Fox, and everyone also knew why the police were powerless to act. That was just the state of things these days. He was sympathetic, but unless the government finally decided to act and do something about immigration, then …

Jason was a martyr of the struggle. Every true Englishman should honour him. If more people listened to Motcombe’s ideas, then things could only change for the better. The reporter, to give her due credit, had managed to stop Motcombe turning the entire interview into propaganda. Either that or the copy editor had made extensive cuts. Even so, it made Banks want to puke. If anyone was the martyr in this, it was Frank Hepplethwaite.

Frank reminded Banks of his own father in many ways. Both had fought in the war, and neither spoke very much about it. Their racial attitudes were much the same, too. Banks’s father might complain about immigrants taking over the country, changing the world he had known all his life, making it suddenly alien and unfamiliar, threatening even. And in the same way, Frank might have let slip a remark about a tight-fisted Jew. But when it came down to it,
if anyone needed help, black or Jewish, Banks’s dad would be first in line, with Frank Hepplethwaite probably a close second.

As unacceptable as even these racial attitudes were, Banks thought, they were a hell of a long way from those held by Neville Motcombe and his like. Banks’s dad’s view, like Frank’s, was based on ignorance and anxiety, on fear of change, not on hatred. Perhaps in Motcombe’s case the hatred sprang from an initial fear, but in most people it never went that far. Just like a lot of people have bad childhoods but they don’t all become serial murderers.

The wheels bumped on the runway, and soon Banks was drifting into the arrivals hall with the crowds. He was travelling light, with only one holdall, so he didn’t have to wait at the baggage claim. The place was like a small city, bustling with commerce, complete with its shops, bank, post office and tourist information desk. A colleague had told him a while ago that even pornography was on sale openly at Schiphol. He had neither the time nor the inclination to look for it.

The first thing Banks needed when he got off an aeroplane alive was a cigarette. He followed the signs to the bus stop and found he had a fifteen-minute wait. Perfect. He enjoyed a leisurely smoke, then got on the bus. Soon it was speeding along the motorway under grids of electrical wires and tall street-lamps.

The excitement of arrival pushed Banks’s problems into the background for the moment, and he began to take some pleasure in his rebellion, his little act of irresponsibility. So that noone would feel he had disappeared completely into thin air, he had rung Susan Gay and told her he was taking the weekend off to go to Amsterdam and should be back sometime Monday. Susan had sounded puzzled and surprised, but she had made no comment. What could she say, anyway? Banks was her boss. Now, as the bus sped towards the city centre, he began to savour the coming hours, whatever they might bring. It could hardly be worse than life in Eastvale right now.

He had been to Amsterdam once before, with Sandra, one summer when they were both between college and jobs. He remembered the bicycles, canals, trams and houseboats. The place
was full of leftover sixties spirit back then, and they had tried it all while they could: the Paradiso, the Milky Way, the Vondelpark, the drugs—well, marijuana, at least—as well as taking in all the museums and the tourist sights.

Stationsplein looked much the same. The air was warm, tinged only faintly with the bad-drains smell from the canals. Trams clanked about in all directions. A Perspex-covered boat set off on its canal tour. Arrows of ripples hit the stone quay.

Mixed with the late-season tourists and ordinary folk were all the post-hippie youth styles: punk spikes, a green Mohican, studded leather vests, short bleached hair, earrings, nose-rings, pierced eyebrows.

Banks found the taxi rank nearby. He would have preferred to walk after being cooped up on the plane and the bus, but he hadn’t got his bearings yet. He didn’t even know how to get to the hotel, or how far it was.

The taxi was clean and the driver seemed to recognize the name of the hotel. Soon, he had negotiated his way out of the square and they were heading along a broad, busy street lined with trees, arcades, shops and cafés. The pavements were crowded with tourists, even in early October, and Banks noticed that some of the cafés and restaurants had tables out on the street. He opened the window a little and the smell of fresh-brewed coffee came in. God, it was like a summer’s day.