Strange Affair (5 page)

Occasionally, a car would pass by the archway, on Old Brompton Road, but otherwise the area was quiet. After knocking one last time, Banks tried the door. To his surprise, it opened. Banks could hardly believe it. From what he remembered, Roy had always been security-conscious, fiercely
protective of his possessions, had probably been born that way. One of the first things he had done, as soon as he was old enough, was save up his pocket money to buy a padlock for his toy-box, and woe bedtide anyone caught touching his bike or his scooter.

Banks examined the lock and saw that it was the deadbolt kind, which you had to use a key both to open
and
to close. Behind the door was a copy of that morning’s
Times
and a few letters, bills or junk. There was the keypad of a burglar-alarm system just inside the hall, but it hadn’t been activated.

To the left was a small sitting room, rather like a doctor’s waiting room, with a beige three-piece suite and a low glass-topped coffee table, on which lay a neat pile of magazines. Banks flipped through them. Mostly business and hi-tech. Between the sitting room and the kitchen, at the back of the house, ran a narrow passage, with a door on the right, near the front, leading to the garage. Banks peeked in and saw that Roy’s Porsche 911 was parked there. The car was locked, the bonnet cold.

Back in the house, Banks opened the door that led to a narrow flight of stairs and called Roy’s name. No reply. The house was silent except for the myriad daily sounds we usually tune out: distant traffic, the hum of a refrigerator, the ticking of a clock, a tap dripping somewhere, old wood creaking. Banks shuddered. Someone had just walked over his grave, his mother would say. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was, but he felt a distinct tingling up his spine. Fear. There was no one in the house; he was reasonably sure of that. But perhaps someone was watching the place? Banks had learned to trust his instincts over the years, even if he hadn’t always acted on them, and he sensed that he would have to move carefully.

He walked into the kitchen, which looked as if it had never been used for anything but making tea and toast. The whole downstairs – sitting room, passage and kitchen – was painted in shades of blue and grey. The paint smelled fresh. A couple of framed photographs in high-contrast black and white hung in the passage. One was a female nude curled on a bed, the other a hill of brick-terraced houses leading down to a factory, its chimneys smoking, cobbles and slate roofs gleaming after rain. Banks was surprised. He hadn’t known that Roy was interested in photography, or in art of any kind. But then there was so much he didn’t know about his estranged brother.

In the kitchen stood a small rustic wooden table with two matching chairs, surrounded by the usual array of counter-tops, toaster, storage cupboards, fridge, oven and microwave. The table was clear apart from an opened bottle of Amarone with the cork stuck back in, and, half hidden behind the bottle, a mobile phone. Banks picked up the phone. It was off, so he turned it on. It was an expensive model, the kind that sends and receives digital images, and there was plenty of battery power left. He tried the voice mail and text functions, but the only messages were the ones he had left. Was Roy the kind of person who would forget to take his mobile with him when he went out under normal circumstances, especially as he had given Banks the number? Banks doubted it the same way he doubted that Roy would deliberately leave his front door unlocked or forget to turn on his burglar alarm unless he was really rattled by something.

A wine rack stood on one of the counters, and even Banks could tell that the wines there were very high-end clarets, chiantis and burgundies. Above the rack hung a ring of keys on a hook. One of them looked like a car key. Banks put them in his pocket. He checked the fridge. It was empty except for some
margarine, a carton of milk and a piece of mouldy cheddar. That confirmed it. Roy was no gourmet cook. He could afford to eat out, and there were plenty of good restaurants on Old Brompton Road. The back door was locked, and the window looked out on a small backyard and an alley beyond.

Before going upstairs, Banks went back to the garage to see if the car key on the ring fit the Porsche. As he had suspected, it did. Banks opened the driver’s door and got in.

He had never sat in such a car before, and the luxurious leather upholstery embraced him like a lover. He felt like putting the key in the ignition and driving off somewhere, anywhere. But that wasn’t why he was here. The car’s interior smelled clean and fresh, with that expensive hint of leather. From what Banks could see, there were no empty crisp packets or pop cans on the back seat or cellophane wrappers on the floor. Nor was there one of those fancy GPS gadgets that would tell Banks what Roy’s last destination was. In the side pocket was a small AA road atlas open to the page with Reading in the bottom right and Stratford-upon-Avon at the top left. There was nothing else except the car’s manual and a few CDs, mostly classical. Banks got out and checked the boot. It was empty.

Next, Banks ventured upstairs, a much larger living space than downstairs because it extended over the garage. At the top of the stairs, he found himself on a small landing with five doors leading off. The first led to the toilet, the second to a modern bathroom, complete with Power Shower and whirlpool bath. There were the usual shaving and dental care implements, Paracetamol and Rennies, and rather more varieties of shampoo, conditioner and body lotion than Banks imagined Roy would need. He also wouldn’t need the pink plastic disposable razor that sat next to the gel for sensitive skin, not unless he shaved his legs.

At the back was a bedroom, simple and bright, with flower-patterned wallpaper: double bed, duvet, dressing-table, drawers and a small wardrobe full of clothes and shoes, everything immaculate. Roy’s clothing ran the gamut from expensive-casual to expensive-business, Banks noticed – looking at the labels: Armani, Hugo Boss, Paul Smith – and there were also a few items of women’s clothing, including a summer dress, a black evening gown, Levis, an assortment of short-sleeved tops and several pairs of shoes and sandals.

The drawers revealed a few items of jewellery, condoms, tampons and a mix of men’s and women’s underwear. Banks didn’t know whether Roy was into cross-dressing, but he assumed the feminine items belonged to his girlfriend of the moment. And as there was nowhere near enough women’s paraphernalia to indicate that a woman actually
lived
there, she probably just kept a few clothes, along with the items in the bathroom, for when she stayed over.

Banks remembered the young girl who had been with Roy the last time they met. She had looked about twenty, shy, with short, shaggy black hair streaked with blond, a pale, pretty face and beautiful eyes the colour and gleam of chestnuts in October. She also had a silver stud just below her lower lip. She had been wearing jeans and a short woolly jumper, exposing a couple of inches of bare, flat midriff and a navel with a ring in it. They were engaged, Banks remembered. Her name was Colleen or Connie, something like that. She might know where Roy had gone. Banks could probably trace her from Roy’s mobile’s phone book. Of course, there was no guarantee that she was still Roy’s fiancée, or that the clothes and toiletry items were hers.

Next to the bedroom, and quite a bit larger, was what appeared to be Roy’s office, furnished with filing cabinets, a
computer monitor, fax machine, printer and photocopier. Again, everything was shipshape, no untidy piles of paper or yellow Post-it notes stuck on every surface, like in Banks’s office. The desk surface was clear apart from an unused writing tablet and an empty glass of red wine, the dregs hardening to crystal. On a bookcase just above the desk were the standard reference books – atlas, dictionary, Dunn and Bradstreet,
Who’s Who
.

Roy certainly kept his life in order, and Banks remembered that he had been a tidy child, too. After playing, he had always put his toys carefully away in their box and locked it. His room, even when he was a teenager, was a model of cleanliness and tidiness. He could have been in the army. Banks’s room, on the other hand, had been the same sort of mess he’d seen in most teens’ bedrooms on missing persons cases. He’d known where everything was – his books were in alphabetical order, for example – but he had never fussed much about making his bed or tidying the pile of discarded clothes left on the floor. Another reason his mother had always favoured Roy.

Banks wondered if Roy’s computer would tell him anything. The flat-panel monitor stood on the desk, but Banks was damned if he could find the computer itself. It wasn’t on or under the desk, or on the shelf behind. There was a keyboard and a mouse, but keyboard, mouse and monitor were no use without the computer. Even a novice like Banks knew that.

Given Roy’s interest in electronic gadgets Banks would have expected a laptop, too, but he could find no signs of one. Nor a handheld. He remembered Roy showing off a flashy new Palm Pilot – one of those gadgets that do everything but fry your eggs in a morning – at the party last year.

Needless to say, there was nothing so remotely useful as a Filofax. Roy would keep all that information on his computer and his Palm, and it seemed that they were both gone. Still,
Banks had the mobile, and that ought to prove a fruitful source of contact numbers.

There was a Nikon Coolpix 43000 digital camera in one of the pigeonholes behind the computer desk. Banks knew a little about digital cameras, though his cheap Canon was well below Roy’s range. He managed to switch it on and figured out how to look at the images on the LCD screen, but there was no memory card in it, no images to see. He searched around the adjoining pigeonholes for some sort of image storage-device but found nothing. That was another puzzle, he realized. All the things you expect to find around a computer – zip drive, tape backups or CDs – were all conspicuous in their absence. There was nothing left but the monitor, mouse and keyboard and an empty digital camera.

One other gadget remained: a 40G iPod, another little electronic toy Banks had thought of buying. He dipped in at random, hearing snatches of arias here and a bit of an overture there. Banks had always thought his brother a bit of a philistine, didn’t know he was an opera buff, that they might have something in common. From what he could remember, when Banks had been into Dylan, The Who and the Stones, Roy had been a Herman’s Hermits fan.

One of the songs Banks stumbled across was “Dido’s Lament” from Purcell’s
Dido and Aeneas
, and he found himself listening for just a little longer than he needed, feeling a lump in his throat and that burning sensation at the back of his eyes he always got when he heard “When I am laid in earth.” The upsurge of emotion surprised him. Another good sign. He had felt little or nothing since the fire and thought that was because he had nothing left to feel with. It was encouraging to have at least a hint that there was life in the old boy yet. He browsed
through the iPod’s contents and found a lot of good stuff: Bach, Beethoven, Verdi, Puccini, Rossini. There was a complete
Ring
cycle, but nobody’s perfect, thought Banks. Least of all Roy. Still, the extent of his good taste was a surprise.

The telephone was like a mini computer system in itself. Banks managed to dial 1471 and find out that the last incoming call was the one he had made himself that morning before setting off for London. Roy hadn’t subscribed to the extra service that gave the numbers of the last five callers. Banks realized it probably didn’t matter, as he had called at least five times himself. The phone was hooked up to a digital answering machine, and after a bit of dodgy business with the buttons Banks discovered three messages, all from him. The other times he had called he hadn’t bothered leaving one.

Banks thought he heard a sound from somewhere inside the house. He sat completely still and waited. What if Roy came back and found Banks going through his personal things and business records? How would Banks talk his way out of that one? On the other hand, Banks would be relieved to see Roy, and surely Roy would understand how his phone call had set off alarm bells in the mind of his policeman brother? Nevertheless, it would be embarrassing all around. A minute or two passed and he heard nothing more so he put it down to one of the many sounds an old house makes.

Banks opened the desk drawers. The two bottom ones held folders full of bills and tax records, none of which seemed in any way unusual at a casual glance, and the top drawers were filled with the usual stuff of offices: Sellotape, rubber bands, paper clips, scissors, scratch pads, staplers and printer cartridges.

The shallow central drawer contained pens and pencils of all shapes and sizes. Banks stirred them around with his hand,
and one struck his eye. It was thicker and shorter than most of the other pens, squat and rectangular in shape, rather than round. Thinking it might be some kind of marker, he picked it up and unclipped the top. It wasn’t a pen. Where the nib should have been, instead there was a small rectangle of metal that looked as if it plugged into something. But what? A computer, most likely. Banks put the top back on and clipped it in the pocket of his shirt.

The last door led to a large living room above the garage. It was the front room with the bay window Banks had noticed from the street. The colour scheme here was different, reds and earth colours, a desert theme. There were more framed black-and-white photographs on the walls, too, and Banks found himself wondering if Roy had taken them himself. He didn’t know whether you could take black-and-white photos of that quality with a digital camera, but maybe you could. He could still dredge up no memory of his brother’s interest in photography; as far as Banks knew, Roy hadn’t even belonged to the camera club at school, and most kids did that at some time in the vain hope that whoever ran it would sneak in a nude model one day.

This room, like the rest of house, was clean and tidy. Not a speck of dust or an abandoned mug anywhere. Banks doubted Roy cleaned it himself; more likely he employed a cleaning lady. Even the entertainment magazines on the table were stacked parallel to the edge, Hercule Poirot–style. A luxurious sofa bed sat under the window, facing the other wall, where a forty-two-inch wide-screen plasma TV hung, wired up to a satellite dish and a DVD player. On looking more closely, Banks noticed that the player also recorded DVDs. Under the screen stood a subwoofer and a front centre speaker, and four smaller speakers were strategically placed around the room. It
was an expensive set-up, one that Banks had often wished he could afford.