Wednesday's Child ib-6

by Peter Robinson

  “Is this about the young lass, sir?”

  “Yes. But for Christ’s sake don’t spread it around.”

  Weaver looked hurt. “Of course not, sir.”

  “Good. Let me know if you see or hear anything out of the ordinary, and try not to let him know you’re watching. He’s a canny bugger, that one is.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Gristhorpe walked outside and headed for his car. Westman was probably telling the truth, he thought, but there had been so many revelations about the links between child abuse and satanic rituals in the past few years that he had to check out the possibility. It couldn’t

  happen here, everyone said. But it did. His stomach rumbled. Definitely time to head back to Eastvale.

  Ill

  Banks believed you could tell a lot about people from

  their homes. It wasn’t infallible. For example, a normally

  fastidious person might let things go under pressure. On

  the whole, though, it had always worked well for him.

  When he stood in the tiny living-room of Flat 6, 59 Calvin Road and tried to figure out Carl Johnson, he found very little to go on. First, he sniffed the air: stale, dusty, with an underlying hint of rotting vegetables. It was just what one would expect of a place unoccupied for a couple of days. Then he listened. He didn’t expect to hear ghosts or echoes of the dead man’s thoughts, but homes had their voices, too, that sometimes whispered of past evils or remembered laughter. Nothing. His immediate impression was of a temporary resting-place, somewhere to eat and sleep. What furniture there was looked second-hand, OXFAM or jumble-sale stuff. The carpet was worn so thin he could hardly make out its pattern. There were no photos or prints on the cream painted walls; nor was there any evidence of books, not even a tattered bestseller.

  The kitchen was simply a curtained-off portion of the room, with a hotplate, toaster and a little storage space. Banks found a couple of dirty pans and plates in the sink. The cupboards offered nothing more than tea-bags, instant coffee, sugar, margarine and a few cans of baked beans. There was no refrigerator, and a curdled bottle of milk stood by the sink next to some mouldy white bread and three cans of McEwan’s lager.

  The bedroom, painted the same drab cream as the

  living-room, was furnished with a single bed, the covers in disarray, pillow greasy and stained with sweat or hair-cream. Discarded clothes lay in an untidy heap on the floor. The dresser held socks and underwear, and apart from a couple of checked shirts, sneakers, one pair of Hush Puppies, jeans and a blouson jacket, there was little else in the closet. Banks could spot no evidence of Johnson having shared his flat or bed with anyone.

  Banks had never seen a place that told so little about its occupier. Of course, that in itself indicated a number of things: Johnson clearly didn’t care about a neat, clean, permanent home; he wasn’t sentimental about possessions or interested in art and literature. But these were all negatives. What did he care about? There was no indication. He didn’t even seem to own a television or a radio. What did a man do, coming home to such surroundings? What did he think about as he sat in the creaky winged armchair with the threadbare arms and guzzled his baked beans on toast? Did he spend every evening out? At the pub? With a girlfriend?

  From what Banks knew of his criminal record, Carl Johnson was thirty years old and, after a bit of trouble over “Paki-bashing” and soccer hooliganism in Bradford as a lad, he had spent three years of his adult life in prison for attempted fraud. It wasn’t a distinguished life, and it seemed to have left nothing of distinction to posterity.

  Banks felt oppressed by the place. He levered open a window and let some fresh air in. He could hear a baby crying in a room across the street.

  Next, he had to do a more thorough search. He had found no letters, no passport, no bills, not even a birth certificate. Surely nobody could live a life so free of bureaucracy in this day and age? Banks searched under the sofa cushions, under the mattress, over the tops of the

  doors, deep in the back of the kitchen and bedroom cupboards. Nothing. There aren’t many hiding places in a flat, as he had discovered in his days on the drug squad, and most of them are well known to the police.

  Carl Johnson’s flat was no exception. Banks found the thick legal-sized envelope taped to the underside of the cistern lid—a fairly obvious place—and took it into the front room. He had been careful to handle only the edges. Now he placed it on the card table by the window and slit a corner with his penknife to see what was inside. Twenty-pound notes. A lot of them, by the looks of it. Using the knife, he tried to peel each one at a time back and add it up. It was too awkward, and he kept losing his place. Patience. He took an evidence bag from his pocket, dropped the money in and took one last look around the room.

  The whole place had a smell of petty greed about it, but petty criminals of Johnson’s kind didn’t usually end up gutted like a fish in old lead mines. What was different about Johnson? What had he been up to? Blackmail? Banks could read nothing more from the flat, so he locked up and left.

  Across the hallway, he noticed a head peeping out of Flat 4 and walked over. The head retreated and its owner tried to close the door, but Banks got a foot in.

  “I didn’t see anything, honest, mister,” the woman said. She was about twenty-five, with straight red hair and a pasty, freckled complexion.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I didn’t see you. You weren’t here. I’ve got nothing. Please—”

  Banks took out his warrant card. The woman put her hand to her heart. “Thank God,” she said. “You just never know what might happen these days, the things you read in the papers.”

  “True,” Banks agreed. “Why were you watching?”

  “I heard you in there, that’s all. It’s been quiet for a while.”

  “How long?”

  “I’m not sure. Two or three days, anyway.”

  “Do you know Carl Johnson?” Johnson’s identity hadn’t been revealed in the press yet, so the woman couldn’t know he was dead.

  “No, I wouldn’t say I knew him. We chatted on the stairs now and then if we bumped into each other. He seemed a pleasant enough type, always a smile and a hello. What are you after, anyway? What were you doing up there? Has he done a moonlight flit?”

  “Something like that.”

  “He didn’t look like a criminal type to me.” She hugged herself and shuddered. “You just can’t tell, can you?”

  “What did you talk about, when you met on the stairs?”

  “Oh, this and that. How expensive things are getting, the weather … you know, just ordinary stuff.”

  “Did you ever meet any of his friends?”

  “No. I don’t really think he had any. He was a bit of a loner. I did hear voices a couple of times, but that’s all.”

  “When? Recently?”

  “Last couple of weeks, anyway.”

  “How many people do you think were talking?”

  “Only two, I’d say.”

  “Could you describe the other voice?”

  “I’m sorry, I wasn’t really listening. I mean, it’s muffled anyway, you couldn’t actually hear what anyone was saying. And I had the telly on. I could only hear them in the quiet bits.”

  “Was it a man?”

  “Oh, yes, it was another man. I’m certain about that.

  At least, he had a sort of deep voice.”

  “Thank you, Mrs … ?”

  “Gerrard. Miss.”

  “Thank you, Miss Gerrard. Do you know if Mr Johnson owned a car?”

  “I don’t think he did. I never saw him in one, anyway.”

  “Do you have any idea what he did for a living?”

  She looked away. “Well, he …”

  “Look, Miss Gerrard, I don’t care if he was cheating on the social or the taxman. That’s not what I’m interested in.”

  She chewed her lower lip a few seconds, then smiled. “Well, we all do it a bit don’t we? I suppose even cop
pers cheat on their income tax, don’t they?”

  Bank smiled back and put a finger to the side of his nose.

  “And an important detective like yourself wouldn’t be interested in something as petty as that, would he?”

  Banks shook his head.

  “Right,” she said. “I only know because he mentioned the weather once, how nice it was to have outdoor work.”

  “Outdoor work?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like what? Road work, construction?”

  “Oh, no, he weren’t no ditch-digger. He was a gardener, Mr Johnson was, had real green fingers.”

  It was amazing the skills one could learn in prison these days, Banks thought. “Where did he work?”

  “Like I say, I only know because we got talking about it, how some people are so filthy rich and the rest of us just manage to scrape by. He wasn’t no communist, mind you,he—”

  “Miss Gerrard, do you know who he worked for?”

  “Oh, yes. I do go on a bit, don’t I? It was Mr Harkness, lives in that nice old house out Fortford way. Paid quite well, Mr Johnson said. But then, he could afford to, couldn’t he?”

  The name rang a bell. There had been a feature about him in the local rag a year or two ago. Adam Harkness, Banks remembered, had come from a local family that had emigrated to South Africa and made a fortune in diamonds. Harkness had followed in his father’s footsteps, and after living for a while in Amsterdam had come back to Swainsdale in semiretirement.

  “Thank you,” Banks said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  “Have I?” She shrugged. “Oh well, always a pleasure to oblige.”

  Banks walked out into the street and mulled over what he had learned from Miss Gerrard. Johnson had been working for Adam Harkness, probably for cash in hand, no questions asked. That might explain the thousand or so pounds in the envelope. On the other hand, surely gardening didn’t pay that much? And why did he hide the money? To guard against thieves, perhaps? Having sticky fingers himself, Johnson would probably be all too aware of the danger of leaving large sums of money lying around the place. Maybe he didn’t have a bank account, was the kind who hid his fortune in a mattress or, in this case, under the cistern lid. But it still didn’t ring true. Banks looked at his watch. Almost four in the afternoon. Time to pay Adam Harkness a visit before dinner.

  IV

  Detective Sergeant Philip Richmond’s eyes were beginning

  to ache. He saved his data, then stood up and

  stretched, rubbing the small of his back. He’d been at it

  for four hours, much too long to sit staring at a screen. Probably get cancer of the eyeballs from all the radiation it emitted. They were all very well, these computers, he mused, but you had to be careful not to get carried away with them. These days, though, the more courses he took, the more he learned about computers, the better his chances of promotion were.

  He walked over to the window. Luckily, the new computer room faced the market square, like Banks’s office, but the window was tiny, as the place was nothing but a converted storage room for cleaners’ materials. Anyway, the doctor had told him to look away from the screen into the distance occasionally to exercise his eye muscles, so he did.

  Already many of the tourists were walking back to their cars—no doubt jamming up many of Eastvale’s sidestreets and collecting a healthy amount in tickets— and some of the market stalls were closing.

  He’d knock off soon, and then get himself ready for his date with Rachel Pierce. He had met her last Christmas in Barnard Castle, at the toy shop where she worked, while checking an alibi on a murder case, and they had been going steady ever since. There was still no talk of wedding bells, but if things continued going as well as they had been for much longer, Richmond knew he would seriously consider tying the knot. He had never met anyone quite as warm and as funny as Rachel before. They even shared a taste for science fiction; they both loved Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny. Tonight they would go and see that new horror film at the Crown—new for Eastvale, anyway, which was usually a eood few months behind the rest of the country. Rachel loved scary films, and Richmond loved the way they made her cling to him. He looked at his watch. Barring rmergencies. he would be with her in a couple of hours.

  The phone rang.

  Richmond cursed and answered it. The switchboard operator told him it was someone calling for Superintendent Gristhorpe, who was out, so she had put the call through to Richmond.

  “Hello?” a woman’s voice came on the line.

  Richmond introduced himself. “What can I do for you?”

  “Well,” she said hesitantly, “I really wanted the man in charge. I called that temporary number, you know, the one you mentioned in the paper, and the constable there told me to call this number if I wanted to talk to Superintendent Gristhorpe.”

  Richmond explained the situation. “I’m sure I can help you,” he added. “What’s it about?”

  “All right,” she said. “The reason I’m calling you so late is that I’ve only just heard it from the woman who does the cleaning. She does it once a week, you see, on Saturday mornings.”

  “Heard what?”

  “They’ve gone. Lock, stock and barrel. Both of them. Oh, don’t get me wrong, it’s not as if they aren’t fully paid up or anything, and I wouldn’t say they looked exactly like the couple the papers described, but it is funny, isn’t it? People don’t usually just take off like that without so much as a by-your-leave, not when they’ve paid cash in advance.”

  Richmond held the receiver away from his ear for a moment and frowned. Why didn’t this make any sense? Was he going insane? Had the computer radiation finally eaten its way into his frontal lobes?

  “Where are you calling from?” he asked.

  She sounded surprised. “Eastvale, of course. My office. I’m working late.”

  “Your name?”

  “Patricia. Patricia Cummings. But—”

  “One thing at a time. You said your office. What kind of office?”

  “I’m an estate agent. Randall and Palmer’s, just across the square from the police station. Now—”

  “All right,” Richmond said. “I know the place. What are you calling about?”

  “I thought I’d made myself perfectly clear, but apparently you need it spelled out.”

  Richmond grinned. “Yes, please. Spell it out.”

  “It’s about that girl who disappeared, Gemma Scupham. At least it might be. That’s why I wanted to speak to the man in charge. I think I might know something about the couple you’re looking for, the ones who did it.”

  “I’ll be right over,” Richmond said, and hung up. He left a message at the front desk for Gristhorpe and dashed out into the market square.

  I

  As Banks drove west towards Fortford again, the low sun

  silhouetted the trees ahead. Some of them, stripped bare

  by Dutch elm disease, looked like skeletal hands clawing

  their way out of the earth. An evening haze hung over

  Fortford and softened the edges of the hills beyond the

  village. It muted the vibrant greens of the ryegrass on the

  lower dalesides and washed out the browns and greys of

  the upper pastures.

  Banks drove into the village and passed the green, to his left, where a group of elderly locals sat gossiping and passing the time on a bench below the partially excavated Roman fort on the round hillock opposite. Smoke from their pipes drifted slowly on the hazy evening air.

  It felt like a summer evening, Banks thought, and wondered just how long the fine weather would last; not long, if you believed the forecasters. Still, at least for now he could drive with his window down and enjoy the fresh air, except when it was permeated by the overripe tang of manure. Sometimes, though, a different smell would drift in, a garden bonfire, burning vegetation acrid on the air. He listened to Gurney’s “Preludes” and felt that the piano music possessed the same starkly
beautiful

  106

  quality as the songs, unmistakably Gurney, heartrending in the way it snatched moments of order from chaos.

  At the corner, by the whitewashed sixteenth-century pub, he turned right onto the Lyndgarth road. Way ahead, about halfway up the daleside, he could see Lyndgarth itself, limestone cottages clustered around a small green, and the stubby, square tower of St Mary’s. About half a mile north of the village, he could make out Gristhorpe’s old grey farmhouse. Just to the left of Lyndgarth, a little lower down the hillside, stood the dark ruin of Devraulx Abbey, partially hidden by trees, looking eerie and haunted in the smoky evening light.

  Banks drove only as far as the small stone bridge over the River Swain and turned left into a gravelled drive. Sheltered on all sides but the water by poplars, “Leasholme” was an ideal, secluded spot for a reclusive millionaire to retire to. Banks had phoned Adam Harkness earlier and been invited that very evening. He doubted he would find out much from Carl Johnson’s employer, but he had to try.

  He parked at the end of the drive beside Harkness’s Jaguar. The house itself was a mix of Elizabethan and seventeenth-century styles, built mostly of limestone, with grit-stone lintels and cornerstones and a flagged roof. It was, however, larger than most, and had clearly belonged to a wealthy, landowner. Over the door, the date read 1617, but Banks guessed the original structure had been there earlier. The large garden had little to show but roses that time of year, but it looked well designed and cared for. Carl Johnson’s green fingers, no doubt.

  Finally, irritated by the cloud of gnats that hung over him, Banks rang the bell.

  Harkness opened the door a few moments later and beckoned him inside, then led him along a cavernous hallway into a room at the back of the house, which

  turned out to be the library. Bookcases, made of dark wood, covered three walls, flanking a heavy door in one and a stone hearth in another. A white wicker armchair faced the fourth wall, where french windows opened into the garden. The well-kept lawn sloped down to the river bank, fringed with rushes, and just to the left, a large copper beech framed a view of the Leas, with Lyndgarth and Aldington Edge beyond, just obscuring Devraulx Abbey behind its thick foliage. The river possessed a magical quality in the fading light; slow-moving, mirror-like, it presented a perfect reflection of the reeds that grew by its banks.