Hanging Valley ib-4

by Peter Robinson

  ‘And Collier?’

  ‘I’m sure he didn’t go in for that kind of thing. If there had been any incidents of an unsavoury nature, they would have appeared in my assessment file.’

  ‘Did he drink much?’

  ‘Never had any trouble with him.’

  ‘Drugs?’

  ‘Chief Inspector Banks,’ Barber said slowly, ‘I do realize that the university has been getting a bad reputation lately for drugs and the like, and no doubt such things do happen, but if you take the word of the media, you’d be seriously misled. I don’t think Stephen Collier was involved in drugs at all. I remember that we did have some trouble with one student selling cannabis around that time - most distressing - but there was a full investigation, and at no point was Stephen Collier implicated.’

  ‘So, as far as you can say, Collier was a model student, if not quite as brilliant as some of his fellows?’

  ‘I know it sounds hard to believe, but yes, he was. Most of the time you’d hardly have known he was here.

  I’m having great difficulty trying to guess what you’re after. You say that Stephen Collier’s death might have been suicide or it might have been an accident, but if you don’t mind my saying so, the questions you’re asking seem preoccupied with unearthing evidence that Collier himself was some kind of hell-raiser.’

  Banks frowned and looked out of the window again. The shadow of a cloud passed over the quadrangle.

  He drained his sherry and lit a cigarette. Sergeant Hatchley, quietly smoking in a chair in the corner, had emptied his glass a while ago and sat fidgeting with it as if he hoped Barber would notice and offer a refill.

  He did, and both policemen accepted. Banks liked the way the dry liquid puckered his taste buds.

  ‘He’s a suspect,’ Banks said. ‘And I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you. We have no proof that Collier was guilty of anything, but there’s a strong possibility.’

  ‘Does it matter,’ Barber asked, ‘now that he’s dead?’

  ‘Yes, it does. If he was guilty, then the case is closed. If not, we still have a criminal to catch.’

  ‘Yes. I see. Well, I’m afraid I can’t offer you any evidence at all. Seemed a thoroughly pleasant hard-working nondescript fellow to me as far as I can remember.’

  ‘What about six years ago? It would have been his third year, his last. Did anything unusual happen then, around early November?’

  Barber frowned and pursed his lips. ‘I can’t recall anything… Wait a minute…’ He walked back over to his ancient filing cabinet and riffled through the papers. ‘Yes, yes, I thought so,’ he announced finally.

  ‘Stephen Collier didn’t finish his degree.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He didn’t finish. Decided history wasn’t for him and left after two years. Went to run a business, as far as I know. I can confirm with the registrar’s office, of course, but my own records are quite thorough.’

  ‘Are you saying that Stephen Collier wasn’t here, that he wasn’t in Oxford in November six years ago?’

  ‘That’s right. Could it be you’ve got him mixed up with his brother, Nicholas? He would have just been starting his second year then, you know, and I certainly remember him, now I cast my mind back. Nicholas Collier was a different kettle of fish, a different kettle of fish entirely.’

  14

  ONE

  Katie stared at her reflection in the dark kitchen window as she washed the crystal glasses she couldn’t put in the machine. The radio on the table played soothing classical music, quiet enough that she could even hear the beck at the bottom of the back garden rippling over its stones.

  Now that Stephen was dead and she had unburdened herself to Banks, she felt empty. None of her grandmother’s maxims floated around her mind, as they had been doing lately, and that tightness in her chest that had seemed to squeeze at her very heart itself had relaxed. She even noticed a half-smile on her face, a very odd one she’d not seen before. Nothing hurt now; she felt numb, just like her mouth always did after an injection at the dentist’s.

  Chief Inspector Banks had told her that if she remembered anything else, she should get in touch with him.

  Try as she might though, she couldn’t remember a thing. Looking back over the years in Swainshead, she had noticed hints that all wasn’t well, that some things were going on about which she knew nothing. But there was no coherent narrative, just a series of unlinked events. She thought of Sam’s behaviour when Raymond Addison first appeared. She hadn’t heard their conversation, but Sam had immediately left everything to her and gone running off across the street to the Collier house. Later, Addison had gone for a walk and never returned. When they found out the man had been murdered, Sam had been unusually pale and quiet for some days.

  She remembered watching Bernie pause and glance towards the Collier house before going on his way the morning he left. She had also seen him call there one evening shortly after he’d arrived and thought it odd because of the way he usually went on about them being so rich and privileged.

  None of it had meant very much at the time. Katie wasn’t the kind of woman to look for bad in anyone but herself. She had had far more pressing matters to deal with and soon forgot the suspicious little things she’d noticed. Even now, she couldn’t put it all together. When she told Banks that she had killed Bernie and Stephen, she meant it. She hadn’t physically murdered them, but she knew she was responsible.

  The things she remembered often seemed as if they had happened to someone else. She could view again, dispassionately, Bernard Allen sating himself on her impassive body, as if she were watching a silent film from the ceiling. And Stephen’s chaste kiss left no trace of ice or fire on her lips. Sam had taken her roughly the previous evening, but instead of fear and loathing she had felt a kind of power in her subservience. It wasn’t pleasure; it was something new, and she felt that if she could only be patient enough it would make itself known to her eventually. It was as if he had possessed her body, but not her soul. She had kept her soul pure and untainted, and now it was revealing itself to her. Somehow, these new feelings were all connected with her sense of responsibility for the deaths of Bernie and Stephen. She had blood on her hands; she had grown up.

  The future was still very uncertain. Life would go on, she supposed, much as it had done. She would clean the rooms, cook the meals, submit to Sam in bed, do what she was told, and try to avoid making him angry. Everything would continue just as it had done, except for the new feelings that were growing in her.

  If she stayed patient, change would come in its own time. She wouldn’t have to do anything until she knew exactly what to do.

  For the moment, nothing touched her; nothing ruffled the calm and glassy surface of her mind. Caught up in her dark reflection, she dropped one of a set of six expensive crystal glasses. It shattered on the linoleum. But even that didn’t matter. Katie looked down at the shards with an indulgent pitying expression on her face and went to fetch the brush and dustpan.

  As she moved, she heard a sound out at the back. Hurrying to the window, she peered through her own reflection and glimpsed a shadow slipping past her gate. A moment later - before she could get to the unlocked door - she heard a cursory tap. The door opened and Nicholas Collier popped his head round and smiled. ‘Hello, Katie. I’ve come to visit.’

  TWO

  The sun was a swollen red ball low on the western horizon. It oozed its eerie light over the South Yorkshire landscape, silhouetted motionless pit wheels and made the slag heaps glow. On the cassette, Nick Drake was singing the haunting ‘Northern Sky’.

  Much of the way, the two had sat in silence, thinking things out and deciding what to do. Finally, Hatchley could stand it no longer. ‘How can we nail the bastard?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Banks answered. ‘We don’t have much of a case.’

  Hatchley grunted. ‘We might if we hauled him in and you and me had a go at him.’

  ‘He’s clever, Jim,’ Ba
nks said. The sergeant’s first name didn’t feel so strange to his lips after the first few times. ‘Look how he’s kept out of it so long. He’s not going to break down just because you and I play good-cop-bad-cop with him. That’ll be a sign of our weakness to him. He’ll know we need a confession to make anything stick, so it will only strengthen his position. No, Nicholas Collier’s a cool one. And don’t forget he’s got pull around Swainsdale. We’d no sooner get started than some fancy lawyer would waltz in and gum up the works.’

  ‘What I’d give for a bloody good try, though!’ Hatchley thumped the dashboard. ‘Sorry. No damage done.

  It just makes me angry, a stuck-up bastard like Nicholas Collier getting away with it. How many people has he killed?’

  ‘Three, maybe four if we count Stephen. And he hasn’t got away with it yet. The trouble is, we don’t know if he killed anyone apart from the girl, Cheryl Duggan. We can’t even prove that he killed her. Just because Dr Barber told us he had a reputation for pestering the town’s working girls doesn’t make him guilty. It certainly doesn’t give us grounds for a conviction.’

  ‘But it was Cheryl Duggan’s death that sent Addison up to Swainshead.’

  ‘Yes. But even that’s circumstantial.’

  ‘Who do you think killed Addison and Allen?’

  ‘At a guess, I’d say Stephen. He’d do it to protect his little brother and his family’s reputation. But we don’t know, and we never will if Nicholas doesn’t talk. I’ll bet, for all his cleverness, Nicholas is weak. I doubt he has the stomach for cold-blooded murder. They might both have been at the scene - certainly neither had a good alibi - but I’d say Stephen did the killing.’

  ‘What do you think happened with the Duggan girl?’

  Banks shifted lanes to overtake a lorry. ‘I think he picked her up in a pub and took her down by the river.

  She was just a prostitute, a working-class kid, and he was from a prominent family, so what the hell did it matter to him what he did? I think he got overexcited, hurt her perhaps, and she started to protest, threatened to scream or tell the police. So he panicked and drowned her. Either that or he did it because he enjoyed it.’

  The tape finished. Banks lit a cigarette and felt around in the dark for another cassette. Without looking at the title, he slipped in the first one he got hold of. It was the 1960s anthology tape he’d taken to Toronto with him. Traffic came on singing ‘No Face, No Name and No Number’.

  ‘I think Addison was a conscientious investigator,’ Banks went on. ‘He more than earned his money, poor sod. He did all the legwork the police didn’t do and found a connection between Cheryl Duggan and Nicholas Collier. Maybe they’d been seen leaving a pub together, or perhaps her friends told him Collier had been with her before. Anyway, Addison prised the name out of someone, or bought the information, and instead of reporting in he set off for Swainshead. That was his first mistake.

  ‘His second was to ask Sam Greenock about Nicholas Collier. Greenock was anxious to get in with the local gentry and he was a bit suspicious of this stranger asking questions, so he stalled Addison and took the first opportunity to run over the bridge and tell Collier about it. There must have been real panic in the Collier house that evening. Remember, it was about fifteen months after the girl’s death and the Colliers must’ve thought all was well. I don’t know the details. Maybe Sam arranged for Addison to go over to the house when the village was quiet, or maybe he even arranged for the Colliers to go up to Addison’s room and kill him there. I don’t know how it happened, but I think it was Stephen who struck the blow. That would explain the state he was in when he met Anne Ralston later that night.’

  ‘What about Bernard Allen?’ Hatchley asked.

  ‘At first I thought he was just unlucky,’ Banks said. ‘He told Katie Greenock that he knew Anne Ralston in Toronto. She told Sam, who did his usual town crier routine. Not that it mattered this time, if Allen was intent on blackmail. Stephen Collier was an odd kind of bloke from what I can make out - a real combination of opposites. When he’d killed Addison, he had to unburden himself to his girlfriend, but I’m sure he soon regretted it. He must have had a few sleepless nights after Anne first disappeared. Anyway, Bernard Allen knew that Stephen was involved in Addison’s murder and that it was something to do with an incident back in Oxford. He obviously assumed that if the police knew that they could put the whole thing together. Which we did, rather too late.’

  ‘You said you thought Allen was unlucky at first,’ Hatchley said. ‘What about now?’

  ‘I think he was going to blackmail the Colliers. I’ve not had time to tell you much about Toronto, but I met a few people there who said that Bernard Allen really wanted to come home to Swainshead. His sister mentioned it too, but the others all played it down. He’d even let on to Katie Greenock that he’d send for her when he got back to Canada. That was because she wanted to escape Swains-dale and he wanted to get into her pants.

  ‘I wondered why I was getting so many conflicting pictures of Allen’s state of mind, so many contradictions. But that was his motive. He was blackmailing the Colliers to get himself home. A job at the school, money in the bank… I don’t know what he’d asked for, but I’m certain that was his reason. And it got him killed. I don’t doubt that whoever said “You can’t go home again” meant it as literally as that.

  Anyway, the Colliers decided they couldn’t live with the threat, so one or both of them waited for him in the hanging valley that morning. They knew he’d be there because he’d often talked about it and he was heading that way.’

  ‘And what happened to Stephen? Why would Nicholas kill him, if he did?’

  ‘Stephen was getting too jittery. Nicholas knew it was just a matter of time before his brother broke down completely, and he couldn’t allow him to remain alive when I got back from Toronto after talking to Anne Ralston. Stephen must have told his brother that he didn’t give anything away to Anne about the Oxford business, but that he’d made a serious mistake in hinting at his own involvement in Addison’s killing.

  Nicholas knew that what Anne had to tell me would give me enough grounds to bring Stephen in, and he couldn’t trust his brother to stand up under questioning. If we could discover the motive behind Addison’s murder, then we’d know everything. Nicholas couldn’t allow that.

  ‘What he did was risky, but there was a lot at stake: not just the family name now, but Nicholas’s own freedom, his home, his career. He had to kill his own brother to survive. And if he succeeded, it would look like the accidental death of a disturbed man or the suicide of a guilty one.’

  It was dark when Banks negotiated the tricky connections on to the A1 east of Leeds. Cream were singing

  ‘Strange Brew’ on the tape and Hatchley had fallen silent.

  Banks still didn’t understand it all. Stephen had killed to preserve what was important to him, but Nicholas Collier remained something of an enigma. In all likelihood he had drowned Cheryl Duggan, but what bothered Banks was why. Had he done it from pleasure, accident or desperation? And was he also responsible for the bruising and marks of sexual abuse found on her body? Dr Barber had said that Nicholas had been in trouble once or twice over consorting with prostitutes and offering Oxford factory girls money for sex. Banks wondered why. Nicholas had all the advantages. Why hadn’t he hung around with his own set, girls of his own social class?

  ‘Let’s call in at the station first,’ Banks said. ‘Something might have turned up.’ They were approaching the turn-off on to a minor road that would take them over the moors to Helmthorpe and the main valley road. ‘We can always drive to Swainshead later if there’s nothing new.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s not late, only nineish.’

  Hatchley nodded and Banks drove past the exit ramp and on to the Eastvale road.

  The station was quiet. There had been no serious crimes while Banks and Hatchley had been gone. There was, however, a message from John Fletcher timed at five o’clock that evening asking if they wou
ld call and see him as soon as possible. He said it was important - something to do with Stephen Collier’s death -

  and he would be at home all evening.

  There was also a copy of Dr Glendenning’s preliminary post-mortem report on Stephen Collier. The doctor had found the equivalent of about five capsules of Nembutal in Collier’s system - not enough in itself to cause death but potentially lethal when mixed with alcohol. And his alcohol level had been far higher than the amount five or six pints would account for. It looked as if Banks was right and Collier had been slipped vodka in the pub and more drinks back at the house.

  ‘Should we go to see Fletcher tonight?’ Banks asked Hatchley. ‘Or leave it until tomorrow?’