Free Gallows View by Peter Robinson Page B

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FIVE
     
I
     
    Wednesday was a difficult morning for Banks. His desk was littered with reports, and he couldn’t get Jenny Fuller out of his mind. There was nothing wrong with his marriage—Sandra was all, if not more than, he had ever expected in a partner—so there was no reason, Banks told himself, why he should find himself interested in another woman.
    It was Paul Newman, he remembered, who had said, “Why go out for hamburger if you can get steak at home?” But Banks couldn’t remember the name of the subversive wit who had countered, “What if you want pizza?”
    At thirty-six, he surely couldn’t have hit middle-age crisis point, but there was no doubt that he was strongly attracted to the bright, red-headed Doctor of Philosophy. The sensation had been immediate, like a mild electric shock, and he was certain that she had felt it, too. Their two meetings had been charged with a strong undercurrent, and Banks didn’t know what to do about it. The sensible thing would be to walk away and avoid seeing her anymore, but his job made that impractical.
    He slugged back some hot, bitter station coffee and told himself not to take the matter so seriously. There was nothing to feel guilty about in fancying an attractive woman. He was, after all, a normal, heterosexual male. Another mouthful of black coffee tightened him back into the job at hand: reports.
    He read over Richmond’s interview statements and thought about the young detective’s reservations for a while before deciding thatthey should be pursued. He also remembered Trevor Sharp, who had been a suspect in a tourist mugging shortly after Banks had arrived in Eastvale. The boy hadn’t been charged because his father had given him a solid alibi, and the victim, an “innocent abroad” from Oskaloosa, Iowa, wasn’t able to give a positive identification when the case relied solely on his word.
    Hatchley had wasted his time at The Oak. He had talked to the bar staff and to the regular customers (and would no doubt be putting in a lengthy expenses claim), but nobody remembered anything special about Carol Ellis that night. It had been a quiet evening, as Mondays usually were, and she had sat at a corner table all evening talking to her friend, Molly Torbeck. Both had left before closing time and had, presumably, gone their separate ways. Nobody had tried to pick either of them up, and nobody had spent the evening giving them the eye.
    The sergeant had also talked to Carol, Molly and the three other victims. When it was all added up, two of the four, Josie Campbell and Carol Ellis, had been in The Oak on the nights in question, and the other two in pubs at opposite ends of Eastvale. It wasn’t the kind of pattern Banks had been hoping to find, but it was a pattern: pubs. Jenny Fuller might have something to say about that.
    Skipping his morning break at the Golden Grill, Banks tidied up his own report on the interview with Crutchley and left the file in his pending tray to await the artist’s impression.
    He missed his lunch, too, looking over the preliminary post mortem report on Alice Matlock, which offered no new information but confirmed Glendenning’s earlier opinions about time and cause. The bruises on her wrists and arms indicated that there had been a struggle in which the woman had been pushed backwards, catching the back of her head on the table corner.
    Glendenning was nothing if not thorough, and he had a reputation as one of the best pathologists in the country. He had looked for evidence of a blow by a blunt instrument prior to the fall, which might then have been engineered to cover up the true cause, but had discovered only a typical
contre-coup
head injury. Though the skull had splintered into the brain tissue at the point of impact, the occipital region, there was also damage to the frontal lobes, and that onlyoccurs when the body is falling. The effect, Glendenning had noted, is similar to that of a passenger bumping his