While Banks went to pay another visit to the Riddle house, Annie wandered into the incident room to see what was going on. It was a hive of activity; most of the phone lines were busy and the fax machines were churning stuff out. DC Rickerd held sway over it all, a man who had truly found himself. He blushed when Annie gave him a wink.

Poor Winsome was back at the computer, a stack of green sheets for input and another stack she had already entered.

“How’s it going?” Annie asked, picking up the entered stack and idly leafing through it. Just because everything went into HOLMES didn’t mean any of it was ever seen again, not unless some sort of link or connection came up, and then you had to be looking for it.

Winsome smiled. “Okay, I suppose. Sometimes I wish I’d never done that damn course, though.”

“I know what you mean,” said Annie. “Still, it’ll come in useful when you sit your boards.”

“I suppose so.”

Annie was hardly reading the information on the entered sheets, more just letting her gaze slip over them, but something she saw on one of them reached out and smacked her right between the eyes. “Winsome,” she said, picking it out and putting it on the desk. “What happened with this?”

Winsome scrutinized the sheet. “DCI Banks signed off on it yesterday,” she said. “No further action.”

“‘No further action,’” Annie repeated under her breath.

“Something wrong?”

“No,” said Annie quickly, replacing the sheet in the pile. “Nothing. Just curious, that’s all. See you later.”

Annie hurried back to her office, aware of Winsome’s puzzled gaze, noticed she had it all to herself, picked up the telephone and dialed an outside line.

“Hotel Fifty-Five,” the answering voice said. “Can I help you?”

“Mr. Poulson?”

“Oh, you want Roger. Just a minute.”

Annie waited a minute and another voice came on the line. “Roger Poulson here. Can I help you?”

“Detective Sergeant Cabbot, Eastvale CID. I understand you phoned our incident room yesterday with information relating to the death of Emily Riddle?”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Poulson said. “It was just an odd coincidence, that’s all.”

“Tell me about it anyway, Mr. Poulson.”

“Well, as I said to the gentleman yesterday-”

“What gentleman?”

“The policeman who called me back yesterday. I didn’t catch his name.”

I’ll bet you didn’t, thought Annie, and we’d have heard no more about it if I hadn’t come across the name and number by accident. Hotel Fifty-Five. It was where she had stayed with Banks when they visited London in connection with the Gloria Shackleton case. When they were lovers.

“What did he say?” Annie asked.

“He simply took the details and thanked me for calling. To be honest, I didn’t expect to hear any more of it. He didn’t sound very interested. Why? Has something turned up?”

Annie felt a tightness in her chest. “No,” she said. “Nothing like that. It’s just down to me to keep the paperwork up-to-date. You know what it’s like.”

“Tell me about it,” said Poulson. “How can I help you?”

“If you’d just go over the information again briefly…?”

“Of course. As I said, it’s nothing, really. It was about a month ago, when I was on night duty. I think I saw her, the girl who was killed.”

“Go on.”

“At least, she looked sort of like the girl in the newspaper photo yesterday, with her hair up, a nice evening gown. Mostly it’s the eyes and lips, though. I’d almost swear it was her.”

“You say you saw her at the hotel?”

“Yes.”

“Was she a guest?”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, she walked in – I think she’d just got out of a taxi – and said she wanted to see her father.”

“Her father?” Annie was confused. She didn’t know that Jimmy Riddle had been down to London looking for his daughter, only Banks. She felt icy water rising fast around her ankles.

“That’s right. She said he was staying here. I had no reason not to believe her.”

“Of course not. What did you do?”

“I called his room and told him his daughter was in the lobby, wanting to see him, and she was in a bit of a state. Naturally, he told me to send her up. The thing was, you see, she looked very disheveled, as if she’d been attacked or involved in some rough stuff. Natural to come to Daddy under such circumstances, even if it was three o’clock in the morning.”

“When you say rough stuff, what exactly do you mean?”

“Nothing really serious, but there was a tear in her dress and a little blood at the corner of her lip.”

“What happened after she’d gone up?”

“Nothing. I mean, I didn’t see anything. I was on duty until eight o’clock the next morning, and I didn’t see either of them again.”

“So she stayed in his room the rest of the night?”

“Yes.”

The cold water was up to Annie’s navel by now and she decided to plunge right in. Sometimes it was the best way. “What was her father’s name?”

“Well, it wasn’t Riddle, like it says in the paper. As I said to your colleague yesterday, that’s why I thought it was funny. So I pulled the credit card slip. He’s stayed with us here before, I remember. Once with a very attractive young lady. His name is Banks. Alan Banks.”

The shock numbed Annie’s blood, even though she had been half expecting it. She thanked Mr. Poulson, then hung up in a daze. Banks. In a hotel room with Emily Riddle half the night. The same hotel he’d taken Annie to. And he hadn’t told her. This put a new complexion on things indeed.

Banks slipped the tape he had made of Brian’s band’s CD in the cassette player and reflected on his interview with Clough as he drove out to the Old Mill. Clough was still cooling his heels in the holding cells, but they wouldn’t really be able to hold him much after the following morning. Gallagher was right about that. Any infringement of PACE because Clough was a suspect in the murder of the chief constable’s daughter would go down very badly indeed and only increase his chances of getting off scot-free. That was how things were now. In the old days, they used to be different, of course, and Banks still wasn’t certain which was best. He just hoped to hell that some of the information he was desperate for arrived before the deadline.

The question he always came back to, though, was that if Clough had killed Emily, what was his motive? Clough was an astute gangster, surely smart enough not to let an affair with a sixteen-year-old girl ruin the rest of what was clearly a charmed and profitable life. Still, Banks thought, remembering the famous gangsters of movieland – James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson – there were plenty of mob bosses who were also psychopaths and killed for reasons other than pure business. If Banks were Clough, though, when he found out that Emily had gone and then discovered she was a chief constable’s daughter, he would have cut his losses and left well enough alone. But perhaps that was why Banks wasn’t Clough.

Had Emily really been doing something foolish, like trying to blackmail Clough? Banks didn’t think so. She was a mixed-up kid, but he didn’t think she was a blackmailer. He had also got the feeling from talking to her that she was genuinely scared of Clough, and that the more permanent distance there was between them, the better. Besides, her family didn’t lack for money, and as Riddle had pointed out at the start, they had spoiled her rotten. Even so, the idea of an undisclosed income of her very own might appeal. But would it overcome her fear?

Also, why would Clough wait so long to kill her if he was after revenge for her leaving? It was over a month since Banks had brought Emily back from London. Perhaps it had taken him that long to find out who and where she was. Or perhaps it had taken her that long to start blackmailing him. There had been no telephone calls to Clough on Riddle’s phone records, but that didn’t necessarily mean Emily hadn’t called him from a public box. Something about the sparse phone records nagged at his mind, but he couldn’t quite grasp it. Never mind. As his mother always said, if it was that important, it would come to the surface soon enough.