Close To Home (aka The Summer That Never Was)

by Peter Robinson

  Something moved in the back of the shop and a pile of books fell over. Annie thought she glimpsed a tabby cat slinking away into the deeper shadows.

  Wells sighed. “Familiar’s gone and done it again.”

  “Familiar?”

  “My cat. No bookshop’s complete without a cat. After witch’s familiar. See?”

  “I suppose so. Did Luke ever come in here with anyone else?”

  “No.”

  Annie took her copy of the artist’s impression out and set it on the table in front of him. “What about her?”

  Wells leaned forward, put his glasses on again and examined the sketch. “It looks like her,” he said. “I told you I never forget a face.”

  “But you told me Luke never came in with anyone else,” Annie said, feeling a tingle of excitement rise up her spine.

  Wells looked at her. “Who said she was with him? No, she came in with another bloke, same sort of clothing and body-piercing.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I don’t know. They must have been a bit short of money, though.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because they came in with an armful of brand-new books to sell. Stolen, I thought. Plain as day. Stolen books. I don’t have any truck with that sort of thing, so I sent them packing.”

  Chapter 11

  Before he cut into Luke Armitage’s flesh, Dr. Glendenning made a thorough examination of the body’s exterior. Banks watched as the doctor examined and measured the head wound. Luke’s skin was white and showed some wrinkling from exposure to the water, and there was a slight discoloration around the neck.

  “Back of the skull splintered into the cerebellum,” the doctor said.

  “Enough to kill him?”

  “At a guess.” Glendenning bent over and squinted at the wound. “And it would have bled quite a bit, if that’s any use.”

  “Could be,” said Banks. “Blood’s a lot harder to clean up than most people think. What about the weapon?”

  “Looks like some sort of round-edged object,” the doctor said. “Smooth-sided.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, it’s not got a very large circumference, so I’d rule out something like a baseball bat. I can’t see any traces – wood splinters or anything – so it could have been metal or ceramic. Hard, anyway.”

  “A poker, perhaps?”

  “Possible. That would fit the dimensions. It’s the angle that puzzles me.”

  “What about it?”

  “See for yourself.”

  Banks bent over the wound, which Dr. Glendenning’s assistant had shaved and cleaned. There was no blood. A few days in the water would see to that. He could see the indentation clearly enough, about the right size for a poker, but the wound was oblique, almost horizontal.

  “You’d expect someone swinging a poker to swing downward from behind, or at least at a forty-five-degree angle, so we’d get a more vertical pattern,” Dr. Glendenning said. “But this was inflicted from sideways on, not from in front or behind, by someone a little shorter than the victim, if the angle’s to be believed. That means whoever did it was probably standing beside him. Unusual angle, as I said.” He lit a cigarette, strictly forbidden in the hospital, but usually overlooked in Glendenning’s case. Everyone knew that when you were dealing with the smells of a postmortem, a ciggie now and then was a great distraction. And Glendenning was more careful these days; he rarely dropped ash in open incisions.

  “Maybe the victim was already bent double from a previous blow?” Banks suggested. “To the stomach, say. Or on his knees, head bent forward.”

  “Praying?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” Banks said, remembering that more than one executed villain had died on his knees praying for his life. But Luke Armitage wasn’t a villain, as far as Banks knew.

  “Which side did the blow come from?” Banks asked.

  “Right side. You can tell by the pattern of indentation.”

  “So that would indicate a left-handed attacker?”

  “Likely so. But I’m not happy with this, Banks.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, in the first place, it’s hardly a surefire way to kill somebody. Head blows are tricky. You can’t count on them, especially just one.”

  Banks knew that well enough. On his last case a man had taken seven or eight blows from a side-handled baton and still survived a couple of days. In a coma, but alive. “So our killer’s an amateur who got lucky.”

  “Could be,” said Glendenning. “We’ll know more when I get a look at the brain tissue.”

  “But could this blow have been the cause of death?”

  “Can’t say for certain. It could have killed him, but he might have been dead already. You’ll have to wait for the full toxicology report to know whether that might have been the case.”

  “Not drowned?”

  “I don’t think so, but let’s wait until we get to the lungs.”

  Banks watched patiently, if rather queasily, as Dr. Glendenning’s assistant made the customary Y-shaped incision and peeled back the skin and muscle from the chest wall with a scalpel. The smell of human muscle, rather like raw lamb, Banks had always thought, emanated from the body. Next, the assistant pulled the chest flap up over Luke’s face and took a bone-cutter to the rib cage, finally peeling off the chest plate and exposing the inner organs. When he had removed these en bloc, he placed them on the dissecting table and reached for his electric saw. Bank knew what was coming next, that unforgettable sound and burned-bone smell of the skull, so he turned his attention to Dr. Glendenning, who was dissecting the organs, paying particular attention to the lungs.

  “No water,” he announced. “Or minimal.”

  “Meaning Luke was dead when he went in the water?”

  “I’ll send the tissues for diatomic analysis, but I don’t expect they’ll find much.”

  The electric saw stopped, and seconds later Banks heard something rather like a combination grating and sucking sound, and he knew it was the top of the skull coming off. The assistant then cut the spinal cord and the tentorium and lifted the brain out. As he carried it to the jar of formalin, in which it would hang suspended for a couple of weeks, making it firmer and easier to handle, Dr. Glendenning had a quick look.

  “Aha,” he said. “I thought so. Look, Banks, do you see that damage there, to the frontal lobes?”

  Banks saw it. And he knew what it meant. “Contre coup?”

  “Exactly. Which might explain the unusual angle.”

  If a blow is delivered while the victim’s head is stationary, then the damage is limited to the point of impact – bones splintered into the brain – but if the victim’s head is in motion, then the result is a contre coup injury: additional damage opposite the point of impact. Contre coup injuries are almost always the result of a fall.

  “Luke fell?”

  “Or he was pushed,” said Glendenning. “But as far as I can tell, there are no other injuries, no broken bones. And as I said, if there was bruising, if someone hit him, say, knocked him over, then, unless there are any small bones in the cheek broken, we won’t be able to tell. We’ll be checking, of course.”

  “Can you give me any idea about time of death? It’s important.”

  “Aye, well… I’ve looked over Dr. Burns’s measurements at the scene. Very meticulous. He’ll go far. Rigor’s been and gone, which indicates over two days at the temperatures noted.”

  “What about the wrinkling and whitening?”

  “Cutis anserina? Three to five hours. Water preserves, delays putrefaction, so it makes our job a little harder. There’s no lividity, and I’m afraid it’ll be almost impossible to tell whether there was any other bruising. The water takes care of that.” He paused and frowned. “But there’s the discoloration around the neck.”

  “What about it?”

  “That indicates the beginnings of putrefaction. In bodies found in water, it always starts at
the root of the neck.”

  “After how long?”

  “That’s just it,” Dr. Glendenning said, looking at Banks. “You understand I can’t be more specific, I can’t give you less than a twelve-hour margin of error, but not until at least three or four days, not at the temperatures Dr. Burns recorded.”

  Banks made a mental calculation. “Bloody hell,” he said. “Even at the outside, that means Luke had to have been killed just after he went missing.”

  “Sometime that very night, by my calculations. Taking everything into account, between about eight P.M. and eight A.M.”

  And Dr. Glendenning’s calculations, perhaps because of his insufferable habit of being unwilling to commit himself to a specific time, were usually not far from the truth. In which case, Banks thought, Luke had died before Annie had even paid her first visit to Swainsdale Hall, let alone before she had followed Martin Armitage to the site of the drop.

  Before she went off duty – though such a thing was somewhat of an illusion in the thick of a major murder investigation – Annie had made a few inquiries around the bookshops, asking after the couple who had tried to sell Norman Wells books he believed were stolen, but she drew a blank. Before meeting Banks for a drink at the Queen’s Arms, she had also checked recent shoplifting reports but turned up nothing there, either. The artist’s impression would be in the evening paper, so she would see what happened after that. There was something else she had intended to do, but it was like that name you can’t quite remember, the one on the tip of your tongue. If she put it out of her mind, it would come to her eventually.

  Banks was already waiting for her at a corner table, and she saw him before he saw her. He looked tired, Annie thought, and distracted, smoking and staring into the distance. She tapped him on the shoulder and asked him if he wanted a refill. He came back from a long way and shook his head. She bought herself a pint of Theakston’s bitter and walked over to join him. “So what was that mysterious message about your wanting to see me?” she asked.

  “Nothing mysterious about it at all,” Banks said, brightening up a little. “I just wanted to deliver a message myself, in person.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “It looks as if you’re off the hook as far as Luke Armitage’s death is concerned.”

  Annie felt her eyes open wide. “I am? How?”

  “Dr. Glendenning pegs time of death at least three or four days ago.”

  “Before-”

  “Yes. Before the kidnap call even came in.”

  Annie raised her eyes to the ceiling and clapped her hands. “Yes!”

  Banks smiled at her. “Thought you’d be pleased.”

  “How? He didn’t drown, did he?”

  Banks sipped some beer. “No,” he said. “Pending tox results, it looks as if cause of death was a blow to the cerebellum, quite possibly the result of a fall.”

  “A struggle of some sort, then?”

  “Exactly what I thought. Perhaps with the kidnapper, very early on. Or whoever he was with.”

  “And that person decided to try and collect anyway?”

  “Yes. But that’s pure speculation.”

  “So Luke died somewhere else and was dumped in the tarn?”

  “Yes. Probably wherever he was being held – if he was being held. Anyway, there’d have been a fair bit of blood, the doc says, so there’s every chance of our still finding evidence at the original scene.”

  “If we can find the scene.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So we are making progress?”

  “Slowly. What about the girl?”

  “Nothing yet.” Annie told him about her meeting with Norman Wells.

  She noticed Banks was watching her as she spoke. She could almost see his mind moving, making the connections, taking a shortcut here and filing this or that piece of information away for later. “Whoever they are,” he said when she’d finished, “if Wells is right and they had been shoplifting, then that tells us they’re short of money. Which gives them a motive for demanding a ransom if they were somehow responsible for Luke’s death.”

  “More speculation?”

  “Yes,” Banks admitted. “Let’s assume they got into a fight over something or other and Luke ended up dead. Maybe not intentionally, but dead is dead. They panicked, thought of a suitable spot and drove out and dumped him into Hallam Tarn later that night, under cover of darkness.”

  “They’d need a motor, remember, which might be a bit of a problem if they were broke.”

  “Maybe they ‘borrowed’ one?”

  “We can check car-theft reports for the night in question. No matter how much they covered up the body, there might still be traces of Luke’s blood.”

  “Good idea. Anyway, they know who Luke’s parents are, think they might be able to make a few bob out of them.”

  “Which would explain the low demand.”

  “Yes. They’re not pros. They’ve no idea how much to ask. And ten grand is a bloody fortune to them.”

  “But they were watching Martin Armitage make the drop, and they saw me.”

  “More than likely. Sorry, Annie. They might not be pros, but they’re not stupid. They knew the money was tainted then. They’d already dumped Luke’s body, remember, so they must have known it was just a matter of time before someone found it. They could expect the footpath restrictions to work in their favor for a while, but someone was bound to venture over Hallam Tarn eventually.”

  Annie paused to digest what Banks had said. She had made a mistake, had scared the kidnappers off, but Luke had already been dead by then, so his death wasn’t down to her. What else could she have done, anyway? Stayed away from the shepherd’s shelter, perhaps. Red Ron was right about that. She had guessed that the briefcase contained money. Did she need to know exactly how much? So she had behaved impulsively, and not for the first time, but it was all salvageable – the case, her career, everything. It could all be redeemed. “Have you ever thought,” she said, “that they might have planned on kidnapping Luke right from the start? Maybe that was why they befriended him in the first place, and why they had to kill him. Because he knew who they were.”

  “Yes,” said Banks. “But too many things about this seem hurried, spontaneous, ill-thought-out. No, Annie, I think they just took advantage of an existing situation.”

  “So why kill Luke, then?”

  “No idea. We’ll have to ask them.”

  “If we find them.”

  “Oh, we’ll find them, all right.”

  “When the girl sees her picture in the paper she might go to ground, change her appearance.”

  “We’ll find them. The only thing is…” Banks said, letting the words trail off as he reached for another cigarette.

  “Yes?”

  “That we need to keep an open mind as regards other lines of inquiry.”

  “Such as?”

  “I’m not sure yet. There might be something even closer to home. I want to talk to a couple of teachers who knew Luke fairly well. Someone should talk to the Battys again, too. Then there’s all the people we know he came into contact with the day he disappeared. Put a list together and get DCs Jackman and Templeton to help with it. We’ve still got a long way to go.”

  “Shit,” said Annie, getting to her feet. She had remembered the task that had been eluding her all evening.

  “What?”

  “Just something I should have checked out before.” She looked at her watch and waved good-bye. “Maybe it’s not too late. See you later.”

  Michelle sat back in her seat and watched the fields drift by under a gray sky, rain streaking the dirty window. Every time she took a train she felt as if she were on holiday. This evening, the train was full. Sometimes she forgot just how close Peterborough was to London – only eighty miles or so, about a fifty-minute train ride – and how many people made the journey every day. That was, after all, what the new town expansion had been about. Basildon, Bracknell, Hemel Hempstead, Hatfie
ld, Stevenage, Harlow, Crawley, Welwyn Garden City, Milton Keynes, all in a belt around London, even closer than Peterborough, catchment areas for an overflowing capital, where it was fast becoming too expensive for many to live. She hadn’t been around back then, of course, but she knew that the population of Peterborough had risen from about 62,000 in 1961 to 134,000 in 1981.

  Unable to concentrate on The Profession of Violence, which she had to remember to post back to Banks, she thought back to her lunch with Ex-Detective Inspector Robert Lancaster. He had quite a few years on Ben Shaw, but they were both very much cut from the same cloth. Oh, no doubt about it, Shaw was ruder, more sarcastic, a far more unpleasant personality, but underneath they were the same kind of copper. Not necessarily bent – Michelle took Lancaster’s word on that – but not above turning a blind eye if it was to their advantage, and not above fraternizing with villains. As Lancaster had also pointed out, he had grown up shoulder to shoulder with criminals like the Krays and smaller fry like Billy Marshall, and when it came to future career choices it was often very much a matter of “There but for the grace of God go I.”

  It was interesting what he had said about Graham Marshall, she thought. Interesting that he should even remember the boy at all. She had never considered that it might have been Graham’s own criminal activities that got him killed, and even now she found it hard to swallow. Not that fourteen-year-olds were immune to criminal activity. Far from it, especially these days. But if Graham Marshall had been involved in something that was likely to get him killed, wouldn’t somebody have known and come forward? Surely Jet Harris or Reg Proctor would have picked up the scent?

  The real problem, though, was how she could gather any more information about Graham. She could go through the statements again, read the investigating detectives’ notebooks and check all the actions allocated, but if none of them focused on Graham himself as a possible line of inquiry, then she would get no further.

  The train slowed down for no apparent reason. It was an InterCity, not a local train, so Michelle went to the buffet car and bought herself a coffee. The paper cup was far too hot, even when she used three or four serviettes to hold it. If she took the top off, it would spill when the train started moving again, so she tore a small hole in the plastic top and decided to wait a little while till it cooled.