Peter Robinson
Strange Affair
Book 15 in the Inspector Banks series, 2005
For Sheila
Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations.
ADAM SMITH, THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS
A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.
PROVERBS 17:17
CHAPTER ONE
Was she being followed? It was hard to tell at that time of night on the motorway. There was plenty of traffic, lorries for the most part, and people driving home from the pub just a little too carefully, red BMWs coasting up the fast lane, doing a hundred or more, businessmen in a hurry to get home from late meetings. She was beyond Newport Pagnell now, and the muggy night air blurred the red taillights of the cars ahead and the oncoming headlights across the road. She began to feel nervous as she checked her rearview mirror and saw that the car was still behind her.
She pulled over to the outside lane and slowed down. The car, a dark Mondeo, overtook her. It was too dark to glimpse faces, but she thought there was just one person in the front and another in the back. It didn’t have a taxi light on top, so she guessed it was probably a chauffeured car and stopped worrying.
Some rich git being ferried to a nightclub in Leeds, most likely.
She overtook the Mondeo a little farther up the motorway and didn’t give it a second glance. The late-night radio was playing Old Blue Eyes singing “Summer Wind.” Her kind of music, no matter how old-fashioned people told her it was. Talent and good music never went out of style as far as she was concerned.