When the Music's Over by Peter Robinson Page B

gutted cottage restored, but to enlarge the kitchen, add a conservatory at the back and an entertainment room along one side. That was where he usually watched TV or DVDs, kept his audio and video equipment and entertained visitors. He had speakers rigged up all over the house, so he could listen to music in just about every room. And now there was an extra en suite bedroom upstairs for when Brian or Tracy wanted to stay.
    The problem was that Banks rarely saw his children these days. Brian was either on the road with his band, the Blue Lamps, or in the recording studio, and Tracy was studying for a master’s degree in Newcastle, working part-time as a research assistant to one of the profs. She also had a boyfriend, Geoff, who lived in St. Andrews, and she spent most of her spare time up there with him. Still, they both phoned from time to time, and both were happy and doing fine as far as Banks knew. For a while, Banks’s last girlfriend, Oriana, had lived with him on and off, but they had split up, amicably enough, a month ago and all vestiges of her presence were gone. Definitely off. She was a beautiful, intelligent and desirable young woman, and he missed her. But he was used to living alone, and he soon settled back into his old routines.
    Banks first went upstairs to his bedroom, took off his suit and shirt and put on jeans and a T-shirt. It was another sultry evening, and back downstairs he opened the windows in the conservatory before pouring himself a large glass of Barossa’s best shiraz and raising a silent toastto Peter Lehmann, his favorite winemaker, who had died not so long ago. He felt like listening to something a bit different from the string quartets and trios he had been playing lately, so he flipped through his CDs in the entertainment room and put on Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence . He hadn’t expected to like her after all the hype over her first album, but he’d seen a performance clip from Glastonbury and had enjoyed both the sound and the summer dress she was wearing. He took easily to the spaced-out music, the sound wash of distant, distorted, swirling guitars and haunting background vocals of her second album, and her delivery, attitude and lyrics intrigued him. She seemed curiously disengaged yet full of disturbed and conflicting emotions and imagery, the voice both vulnerable and threatening. It was often uncomfortable listening. Anyone who dared quote the old Crystals song “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)” in this day and age had a lot of nerve. And if Del Rey’s version of Jessie Mae Robinson’s “The Other Woman” wasn’t as powerful as Nina Simone’s, it was still pretty damn good.
    Naturally, the title track “Ultraviolence” got Banks thinking about the Caxton case, as well as the unidentified victim on Bradham Lane Annie had told him about. As detective superintendent, he was head of the Homicide and Major Crimes Unit, so in addition to the Caxton investigation, he also had to keep on top of any other cases the squad was handling. He knew he could trust Annie to do a thorough job, and he had no intentions of dogging her every footstep. Yes, she herself had been raped—he remembered the shock he had felt when she had first recounted the experience to him in a cozy Soho bistro—but she would use her anger to fuel her search for who had beaten the poor girl to death. And if her foot slipped and somehow connected with his wedding tackle when she found him . . . well, these things happen to the best of us. Even in this day and age. Banks would probably be too busy to be of much use to her, but he would keep an eye on the case and try to be there if she needed him.
    When Banks thought about his own assignment, he realized that he felt differently about Danny Caxton since he and Winsome had talked with Linda Palmer. It wasn’t simply that he believed her story—though he did—but that he had found her