“Charlie Courage, small-time villain. Fits him to a tee.”

“Exactly.”

“Except that he was supposed to be going straight, and there aren’t any major crime bosses in Eastvale.”

“Maybe he wasn’t going as straight as we thought. Maybe he was just avoiding drawing our attention. And they don’t have to be that big. I’m not talking about the Mafia or the Triads here. There are plenty of minor villains who think life is pretty cheap. Maybe Charlie fell afoul of one of them. Think about it. Charlie worked as a night watchman. He put a thousand quid in the bank – above and beyond his wages – over the past month. What does that tell you, Annie?”

“That he was either selling information, blackmailing someone or he was being paid off to look the other way.”

“Right. And he must have been playing way out of his league. Maybe we’ll get a better idea when we talk to the manager up there tomorrow. Nearly there now.”

Banks negotiated his way around Leicester toward Market Harborough, about thirteen miles south. When they got to the High Street there, it was almost noon, and it took Banks another ten minutes to find the police station.

Before they got out of the car, Banks turned to Annie. “Are we going to be okay?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. This. Working together.”

She flashed him a smile. “Well, we seem to be doing all right so far, don’t we?” she said, and slipped out of the car.

DI Collaton turned out to be a big bear of a man with thinning gray hair, a red face and a slow, country manner. A year or so away from retirement, Banks guessed. No wonder he didn’t want to get involved in a murder inquiry. He looked at his watch and said, “Have you two eaten at all?”

They shook their heads.

He grabbed his raincoat from the stand in the corner of his office. “I know a place.”

They followed him to a small pub about two streets away. Judging by the smiles and hellos exchanged, Collaton was well-known there. He led them to a corner table, which gave a little privacy, then offered the first round of drinks. Annie asked for a tomato juice, though Banks knew she enjoyed beer. He ordered a pint of the local best bitter. A fire burned in the hearth and Christmas decorations festooned the walls and ceiling. Apart from the buzz of conversation around the bar, the place was quiet, which was the way Banks liked his pubs, and all too rare these days. As was Annie’s habit in pubs, she seemed to mold herself to the hard chair and stretch her legs out, crossing them at the ankles. DI Collaton raised his eyebrows at her red winkle-pickers, but said nothing.

After Banks had ordered game pie, on Collaton’s recommendation, and Annie, being a vegetarian, went for the Ploughman’s Lunch, he lit what he realized with some surprise was his first cigarette of the day.

“We don’t get a lot of murders down here,” said Collaton after his first sip.

That didn’t surprise Banks. From what he had seen, he supposed Market Harborough to be a bit smaller than Eastvale – maybe seventeen or eighteen thousand people – and Charlie Courage was Eastvale’s first murder victim of the entire year so far. In December, no less. “Any idea why they might have chosen your patch?” he asked.

Collaton shook his head. “Not really. It’s handy for the M1,” he said, “but a bit off the beaten track. If they were taking him somewhere, and he got troublesome…”

“Any witnesses?”

“Nobody saw or heard a thing. It’s out Husbands Bosworth way, toward the motorway, and at this time of year there’s nobody around. More in summer, tourist season, like.”

Banks nodded. Same as Eastvale. “Any physical evidence?”

“Tire tracks. That’s about all.”

“Anything interesting or unusual on his person?”

“Just the usual. Except his wallet was missing.”

“I doubt robbery was the motive,” Banks mused. “Maybe a London mugger might blow away someone with a shotgun, but not in some leafy Midlands lane.”

“My thoughts exactly,” said Collaton. “I thought maybe they’d taken it to help keep his identity unknown a bit longer. Maybe they didn’t know he’d got form and we’d find out that way.”

“Possibly.”

“Had he been up to anything lately?”

“We don’t know yet,” said Banks. “Rumor has it he’s been going straight. Had a job as a night watchman. We know he made five cash deposits of two hundred quid each over the past month, though, and I doubt that he came by the money honestly.”

Their food arrived. Collaton was right about the game pie. Annie nibbled at her cheese and pickled onion. Collaton kept looking at her out of the corner of his eye, when he thought no one noticed. At first Banks thought he was simply puzzled by her, as people often were, then he realized the dirty old bugger fancied her. And him old enough to be her father.

Suddenly, Banks felt himself struck almost as physically as by a blow by the memory of Emily Riddle in his hotel room. Not so much by her white and slender nakedness, the spider tattoo or the feel of her body pressing against his as by her torn dress, her fear, the little question mark of blood, and Barry Clough. Why on earth hadn’t he followed up on that? The next morning he had simply gone out to Oxford Street as soon as the shops opened and, not being skilled at shopping for women’s clothing, bought her a tracksuit because it seemed easiest. Though he had questioned her about the previous night, she had given away nothing, maintaining a surly silence all the way home. Did she even remember how she got to his hotel room and her awkward attempt at seducing him?

When he had driven her home from the station and left her with her parents, she had given him a look he found hard to interpret. Sad, yes, partly, and perhaps also a little let-down; defeated, a little hurt, but not completely without affection, a sort of complicit recognition that they had shared something together, been through an adventure. Banks had decided on the way that he had no reason to tell Riddle what happened down there. If Emily wanted to do so, that was fine, but his part of the bargain was over; she was Riddle’s problem now.

Still, it had gnawed at him over the past few weeks – Clough especially. Perhaps, if he had time over the next couple of days, he could make a few discreet inquiries of old friends on the Met, see if Clough had form, find out what his particular line of work was. Dirty Dick Burgess ought to know; he had been working with one of the top-level criminal intelligence departments for a while now. But Riddle had asked Banks to be discreet, and sometimes, when you set things in motion, you couldn’t always stop them as easily as you wanted to, and you didn’t know in which direction they would spin. That was Banks’s problem, as Riddle had told him more than once: he had never learned when to leave well enough alone.

“Sir?”

Banks snapped back from a long distance when he felt Annie’s elbow in his ribs. “Sorry. Miles away.”

“DI Collaton asked if we wanted to have a look at the scene after lunch.”

Banks looked at Collaton, who showed concern in his eyes, whether for Banks’s health or the lapse in attention wasn’t clear. “Yes,” he said, pushing his empty plate aside. “Yes, by all means let’s go have a look at poor old Charlie’s final resting place.”

After viewing the spot where Charlie Courage’s body had been discovered, just off a muddy track in some woods near Husbands Bosworth, they attended the postmortem in Market Harborough Hospital.

Courage’s body had already been photographed, finger-printed, weighed, measured and X-rayed the previous day. Now, the Home Office pathologist, Dr. Lindsey, and his assistants, worked methodically and patiently through a routine they must have carried out many times. Lindsey began with a close external examination, paying special attention to the gunshot pattern.