Past Reason Hated (31 page)

How did that poem end? Banks wondered. The one Veronica had quoted earlier that evening. Then he remembered. After its haunting summary of the horrors of lust, it finished, ‘All this world well knows; yet none knows well / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.’ Certainly knew his stuff, did old Willie. They didn’t call him ‘the Bard’ for nothing, Banks reflected, as he turned up Sutton Row towards the bright lights of Charing Cross Road.

The next morning, after a chat with Barney over bacon and eggs, Banks set out to find Colm Grey. He had arranged to have lunch with Veronica, and had asked Barney to check Ruth Dunne’s alibi and to see what he could find on the stabbing of Caroline’s pimp, Reggie, just to cover all the angles.

The rush-hour crowd had dwindled by the time he got a train, and he was even able to grab a seat and read the
Guardian,
the way he used to.

He got off at Westbourne Park and walked towards Notting Hill until he found the address on St Luke’s Road Five names matched the bells beside the front door, and he was in luck: C. Grey was one of them, flat four.

Banks pushed the bell and stood by the intercom. No response. He tried again and waited a couple of minutes. It looked like Grey was out. The way things stood at the moment, Grey was hardly a prime suspect, but he was a loose end that had to be tied up. He was the only one who knew the full story about Caroline Hartley’s child. Just as Banks started to walk away, he thought he heard a movement behind the door. Sure enough, it opened and a young man stood there, hair standing on end, eyes bleary, stuffing a white shirt in the waist of his jeans.

He frowned when he saw Banks. ‘Wharrisit? What time is it?’

‘Half past nine. Sorry to disturb you.’ Banks introduced himself and showed his identification. ‘It’s about Caroline Hartley.’

The name didn’t register at first, then Grey suddenly gaped and said, ‘Bloody hell! You’d better come in.’

Banks followed him upstairs to a two-room flat best described as cosy. The furniture needed re-upholstering and the place needed dusting and a damn good tidying up.

‘I was sleeping,’ Grey said as he bent to turn on the gas fire. ‘Excuse me a minute.’ When he came back he had washed his face and combed his hair and he carried a cup of instant coffee. ‘Want some?’ he asked Banks.

‘No. This shouldn’t take long. Mind if I smoke?’

‘Be my guest.’

Grey sat opposite him, leaning forward as if hunched over his steaming coffee cup. He was lanky with a long pale face pitted from ancient acne or chicken-pox. He needed a shave and a trim, and his slightly protruding eyes were watery blue.

‘Is it bad news?’ he asked, as if he were used to life being one long round of bad news.

‘You mean you don’t know?’

‘Obviously, or I wouldn’t be asking. Well?’

Banks took a deep breath. He had assumed Grey would have read about the murder in the papers. ‘Caroline Hartley was murdered in Eastvale on December the twenty-second,’ he said finally.

At first, Grey didn’t seem to react. He couldn’t have been much paler, so losing colour would have been no indication, and his eyes were already watery enough to look like they were on the verge on tears. All he did was sit silent and still for about a minute, completely still, and so silent Banks wondered if he were even breathing. Banks tried to imagine Grey and Caroline Hartley as a couple, but he couldn’t.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘Can I have one?’ Grey indicated the cigarettes. ‘Supposed to have chucked it in, but . . .’

Banks gave him a cigarette, which he lit and puffed on like a dying man on oxygen. ‘I don’t suppose this is a social call, either?’ he said.

Banks shook his head.

Grey sighed. ‘I haven’t seen Caroline for about eight years. Ever since she started running with the wrong crowd.’

‘Tuffy Telfer?’

‘That’s the bastard. Just like a father to her, he was, to hear her speak.’

Banks hoped not. ‘Did you ever meet him?’

‘No. I wouldn’t have trusted myself with him for ten seconds. I’d have swung for the bastard.’

Not a chance, Banks thought. Colm Grey couldn’t have got within a hundred yards of Tuffy Telfer without getting at least both arms and legs broken. ‘What caused you and Caroline to split up?’ he asked.

‘Just about everything.’ Grey flicked some ash onto the hearth by the fire and reached for his coffee again. ‘I suppose it really started going downhill when she got pregnant.’

‘What happened? Did you try to give her the push?’

Grey stared at Banks. ‘Couldn’t be further from it. We were in love. I was, anyway. When she got pregnant she just turned crazy. I wanted to have it, the kid, even though we were poor, and she didn’t want rid of it at first. At least I don’t think she did. Maybe I pushed her too hard, I don’t know. Maybe she was just doing it to please me. Anyway, she was miserable all the time she was carrying, but she wouldn’t have an abortion either. There was time, if she’d wanted, but she kept putting it off until it was too late. Then she was up and down like a yo-yo, one day wishing she could have a miscarriage, taking risks walking out in icy weather, maybe hoping she’d just slip and fall, the next day feeling guilty and hating herself for being so cruel. Then, as soon as the child was born, she couldn’t wait to get shot of the blighter.’

‘Where is the child now?’

‘No idea. Caroline never even wanted to see it. As soon as it was born it was whisked off to its new parents. She didn’t even want to know whether it was a girl or a boy. Then things started getting worse for us, fast. Caroline worked at getting her figure back, like nothing had ever happened. As soon as she got introduced to Telfer’s crowd, that was it. She seemed hell-bent on self-destruction, don’t ask me why.’

‘Who introduced her to Telfer?’

Colm bit his lower lip, then said, ‘I blamed myself, after I found out. You know what it’s like, a man doesn’t always choose his friends well. The crowd we went about with, Caroline and me, it was a pretty mixed bunch. Some of them liked to go up West on a weekend and do the clubs. We went along too a few times. Caroline seemed fascinated by it all. Or horrified, I never could make out which. She was well into the scene before I even found out, and there was nothing I could do to stop her. She was a good-looking kid, a real beauty, and she must have caught someone’s eye. I should think they’re always on the look out for new talent at those places.

‘One night she came home really late. I was beside myself with worry and it came out as anger – you know, like when your mother always yelled at you if you were late. We had a blazing row and I called her all the names under the sun. It was then she told me. In detail. And she rubbed my face in it, laughed at me for not catching on sooner. Where did I think her new clothes were coming from? How did I think we could afford to go out so often? I was humiliated. I should have walked out there and then, but I was a fool. Maybe it was just a wild phase, maybe it would go away. That’s what I tried to convince myself. But it didn’t go away. The trouble was, I still loved her.’ Colm rested his chin in his hand and stared at the floor. ‘A couple of months later we split up. She left. Just walked out one evening and never came back. Didn’t even take her belongings with her, what little she had.’ He smiled sadly. ‘Never much of a one for possessions, wasn’t Caroline. Said they only tied her down.’

‘Had you been fighting all that time?’

‘No. There was only the one big row, then everything was sort of cold. I was trying to accept what she was up to, but I couldn’t. It just wasn’t working with her coming in at all hours – or not at all – and me knowing what she’d been up to, imagining her in bed with fat, greasy punters and dancing naked in front of slobbering businessmen.’

‘Where did she go?’

‘Dunno. Never saw or heard from her again. She was a great kid and I loved her, but I couldn’t stand it. I was heading for a breakdown. She was living life in the fast lane, heading for self-destruct. I tried to stop her but she just laughed at me and told me not to be such a bore.’

‘Did she ever tell you anything about her past?’

‘Not a lot, no. Didn’t get on with her mum and dad so she ran off to the big city. Usual story.’

‘Ever mention her brother?’

‘No. Didn’t know she had one.’

‘Did she ever tell you about her dreams?’

‘Dreams?’ He frowned. ‘No, why?’

‘It doesn’t matter. What about you? What did you do after she’d gone?’

‘Me? Well, I didn’t exactly join the Foreign Legion, but I did run away and try to forget. I sublet the flat for a year and drifted around Europe. France mostly, grape picking and all that. Came back, got a job as a bicycle courier, and now I’m doing ‘the Knowledge’. Nearly there, too. With a bit of luck I’ll “Get Out” and have my “Bill and Badge” inside a year.’

‘Good luck.’ Banks had heard how difficult it was riding around on a moped day after day in the traffic fumes, memorizing over eighteen thousand street names and the numerous permutations of routes between them. But that was what one had to do to qualify as a London taxi driver. ‘Did you forget her?’ he asked.

‘You never do, do you, really? What did she do after she left me? Do you know?’

Banks gave him a potted history of Caroline’s life up to her death, and again Grey sat still after he’d finished.

‘She always was funny about sex,’ he said. ‘Not that I’d have guessed, like, that she was a lezzie. I’ve nothing against them – live and let live, I say – but sex always seemed like some kind of trial or test with her, you know, as if she was trying to find out whether she really liked it or not. I suppose not liking it made it easier for her to live on the game, in a way. It was just a job. She didn’t have to like it.’

Banks nodded. It was common knowledge that a lot of prostitutes were lesbians.

There was nothing more to say. He stood up and held out his hand. Grey leaned forward and shook it.

‘Were you working on the twenty-second?’ Banks asked.

Grey smiled. ‘My alibi? Yes, yes I was. You can check And I’ve got to get started today, too. When you’re doing “the Knowledge” you eat, breathe and sleep it.’

‘I know.’

‘Besides, I don’t even know where Eastvale is.’

On his way out, Banks offered Grey another cigarette, but he declined. ‘It didn’t taste all that good, and I couldn’t justify starting again. Thanks for telling me . . . you know. . . about her life. At least someone seemed to make her happy. She deserved that.’ He shook his head. ‘She was just one fucked-up kid when I knew her. We never had a chance.’

Outside, Banks turned up his collar and walked through the squares and side streets towards Notting Hill Gate. This area had been his first home in London when he had come as a student. Back then, the tall houses with their white facades had been in poor repair, and small flats were just about affordable. Banks had paid seven pounds a week for an L-shaped room, with free mice, in a house that included one out of work jazz trumpeter, an earnest social worker, a morose and anorexic-looking woman on the second floor who wore beads and a kaftan and never spoke to anyone, and Jimmy, the cheerful and charming bus driver who Banks suspected of selling marijuana on the side.

He passed the house, on Powis Terrace, and felt a twinge of nostalgia. That small room, now with lace curtains in the window, was where he and Sandra had first made love in those carefree days when he had been unhappy with his business studies courses but still hadn’t quite known what to do with his life.

Back then, the area had been very much a swinging sixties enclave with its requisite mixture of musicians, poets, artists, dopers, revolutionaries and general dropouts. It had suited Banks at the time. He enjoyed the music, the animated discussions and the aura of spontaneity, but he could never wholeheartedly turn on, tune in and drop out. He had wanted to get away from home, from the dull routine of Peterborough, and the Notting Hill flat had been both a cheap and exciting way of finding out what life was all about. Ah, to be eighteen again . . .

He walked up to the main intersection and took the Underground at Notting Hill Gate. He was on the Central line, and he still had some time to kill, so he got off at Tottenham Court Road, in the same general area he’d been in the previous evening. He was feeling vaguely depressed after his talk with Colm Grey, which had reduced a couple of his favourite theories to shreds, and thought a city walk in the bracing air might help blow away the blues.

Soho was another world in the daytime. The clubs and love shops and peep shows were still there, but somehow the glitz and sleaze only managed to look anaemic in daylight. The gaudy lights held no allure; they were washed out, paled by even the grey winter light. In the daytime, the siren-song of sex for hire was muted to a distant, nagging whine; there was no hiding the cheap, shabby reality of the product.

But another kind of vital street life took the ascendant – the world of markets, of business. Banks wandered among the stalls on Berwick Street, which seemed to sell everything from pineapples and melons to cotton panties, cups and saucers, watches, mixed nuts and egg cutters. Under one stall, a big brown dog lay sheltered watching the passers-by with mournful eyes.

Feeling better, he found a phone booth on Great Marlborough Street and called Barney Merritt at Scotland Yard. As Banks had expected, and hoped, Ruth Dunne’s alibi checked out.

The stabbing of Reggie Becker was also as clear cut as could be. The killer, a seventeen-year-old prostitute called Brenda Meers, had stabbed Becker five times in broad daylight on Greek Street. At least two of the wounds had nicked major arteries and he had bled to death before the ambulance got there. Eyewitnesses abounded, though fewer came forward later than were present at the time. When asked why she had done it, Brenda Meers said it was because Reggie was trying to make her go with a man who wanted her to drink his urine and eat his faeces. She had been with him before and didn’t think she could stand it again. She had begged Reggie all morning not to make her go, but he wouldn’t relent, so she walked into Woolworth’s, bought a cheap sheath knife and stabbed him. As far as the police were concerned, Reggie Becker was no great loss, and Brenda would at least get the benefit of psychiatric counselling.