So you can quote Latin, Banks thought to himself. Big deal. “Look,” he said, “I’ve cut a few corners, I admit it. You have to in this job if you’re to keep ahead of the villains. But I’ve never perjured myself, I’ve never faked the evidence and I’ve never used force to get a confession. I admit I lost it in London last summer, but, like you said, a personal tragedy. You’re the new broom, I understand that. You want to make a clean sweep. Fair enough. If I’m a transfer waiting to happen, then let’s get on with it.”

“What on earth makes you think that?”

“Maybe something you said?”

She regarded him through narrowed eyes. “You got on very well with my predecessor, Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe, didn’t you?”

“He was a good copper.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What I said. Mr. Gristhorpe was an experienced officer.”

“And he gave you free rein.”

“He knew how to get the job done.”

“Right.” Superintendent Gervaise leaned forward and clasped her hands on the desk. “Well, let me tell you something that may surprise you. I don’t want you to change. I want you to get the job done, too.”

“What?” said Banks.

“I thought that might surprise you. Let me tell you something. I’m a woman in a man’s world. Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I don’t know how many people resent me because of it, how many are waiting in the wings just to see me fail? But I’m also ambitious. I see no reason why I shouldn’t make chief constable in a few years. Not here, necessarily, but somewhere. Maybe they’ll give me the position because I’m a woman. I don’t care. I’ve got nothing against positive discrimination. We’ve had it coming for centuries. It’s well overdue. My predecessor wasn’t ambitious. He didn’t care. He was close to retirement. But I’m not, and I still see a career ahead of me, a long career, and a great one.”

“And my role in all this is?”

“You know as well as I do that we’re judged by results, and one thing I’ve noticed as I’ve studied your checkered career, is that you do get results. Maybe not in the traditional ways, maybe not always in the legally prescribed ways, but you get them. And it may also interest you to know that there are relatively few black marks against you. That means you get away with it. Most of the time.” She sat back and smiled again. “When the doctor asks you how much you drink, what do you tell him?”

“Pardon?”

“Come on. This isn’t about drinking. What do you tell him?”

“You know, a couple of drinks a day, something like that.”

“And do you know what your doctor does?”

“Tell me.”

“He immediately doubles that figure.” She leaned forward again. “My point is that we all lie about things like that, and this” – she tapped the folders in front of her – “simply tells me that the number of times you got caught out in something not exactly kosher is the tip of the iceberg. And that’s good.”

“It is?”

“Yes. I want someone who gets away with it. I don’t want black marks against you because they’ll reflect on me, but I do want results. And, as I said, you get results. It looks good on me, and when I leave this godforsaken wasteland of sheep-shaggers and Saturday-night pub brawlers, I want to take a shining record with me. And that might be sooner than we think if the Home Office has its way. I assume you’ve been reading the newspapers?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Banks. Many of the smaller county forces, such as North Yorkshire, had recently been deemed by the Home Office as not up to the task of policing the modern world. Consequently, there was talk of them being merged with larger neighboring forces, which meant that the North Yorkshire Constabulary might be swallowed up by West Yorkshire. Nobody was saying what would happen to the present personnel if such a shake-up actually went ahead.

“You can give me that shining record,” Superintendent Gervaise went on, “and in return I can give you enough rope. Drink on duty, follow leads on your own, disappear for days without reporting in. I don’t care. But all the while you’re doing those things, they’d damn well better be for the sake of solving the case, and you’d damn well better solve it quick, and I’d damn well better get all the reflected glory. No slacking. Am I still making myself clear?”

“You are, ma’am,” said Banks, struck with admiration and awe for the spectacle of naked ambition unfolding before him, and working in his favor.

“And if you do anything over the top, make damn sure you don’t get caught or you’ll be out on your arse,” she said. Then she straightened the collar of her white silk blouse and leaned back in her chair. “Now,” she said, “don’t you have a train to catch?”

Banks got up and walked to the door.

“DCI Banks?”

“Yes?”

“That Opera North production of Lucia di Lammermoor. Don’t you think it was just a little lackluster? And wasn’t Lucia just a little too shrill?”

Monday, 15th September, 1969

After a meeting with Bradley, Enderby and Detective Chief Superintendent McCullen later on Monday morning, Chadwick invited Geoff Broome for a lunchtime sandwich and pint at the pub across from Park Lane College. Most of the students hung out in the slightly more posh lounge, but the public bar was Chadwick’s domain, and that of a few old-age pensioners who sat quietly playing dominoes over their halves of mild. With a couple of pints of Webster’s Pennine Bitter beside them, and a plate of roast beef sandwiches each, Chadwick brought Broome up-to-date on the Linda Lofthouse murder.

“I don’t know why you’re telling me all this, Stan,” said Broome, finishing his sandwich and taking out a packet of ten Kensitas, tapping one on the table and lighting it. “It doesn’t sound like a drug-related killing to me.”

Chadwick watched Broome inhale and exhale and felt the familiar urge he thought he’d vanquished six years ago when the doctor found a shadow on his lung that turned out to be tuberculosis and cost him six months in a sanitarium.

“Smoke bothering you?” Broome asked.

“No, it’s all right.” Chadwick sipped some beer. “I’m not saying it’s a drug-related murder, but drugs might play a part in it, that’s all. I was just wondering whether you might be able to help me find out who the girl’s contacts in Leeds were. You know that scene far better than I do.”

“Of course, if I can,” said Broome. As usual, his hair looked disheveled and his suit looked as if it had been slept in. All of which might have masked the fact that he was one of the best detectives in the county. Perhaps not good enough to detect that his wife had been having it off with a vacuum-cleaner salesman behind his back, but good enough to reduce significantly the amount of illegal drugs entering into the city. He also ran one of the most efficient networks of undercover officers, and his many paid informants within the drugs community knew they could depend on absolute anonymity.

Chadwick told him what Donald Hughes had said about visiting the house in one of the Bayswaters.

“I can’t say anything springs immediately to mind,” said Broome, “but we’ve had call to visit that neighborhood once in a while. Let me do a bit of fishing.”

“Bloke called Dennis,” said Chadwick. “And it’s maybe Terrace or Crescent. That’s all I know.”

Broome jotted the name and streets down. “You really think it’s not just some random nutcase?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Chadwick answered. “If you look at the crime, what we know of it, that’s certainly a possibility. Until we know more about the girl’s background and movements and whether she was drugged or not, for example, we can’t really say much more. She was stabbed five times, so hard that the knife hilt bruised her chest and the blade cut off a piece of her heart. But there were no signs of any sort of struggle in the surrounding grass, and the bruising around her neck is minimal.”