by J. R. Ellis
‘What case? I’ve killed two men; one was innocent. I’d go down for the rest of my life.’
Carter desperately tried to think of something else to say. The man was inches away from plunging over the edge.
‘What about your wife?’
‘She’s not to blame. I talked her into it. It’s my responsibility.’ He paused and shook his head. ‘We tried hard but it was all against us.’ He looked up at Carter. ‘I’m sorry about John Baxter, but I’m not sorry about that bastard Atkins. May he rot in hell for all the lives he’s ruined!’
Carter could see that he was crying.
‘Tell Caroline I love her. Tell the court it was my fault, do you hear? It was my plan and my mistakes.’
‘Sir, you don’t want to die like this.’
To Carter’s horror, Hardiman struggled to his feet. He was standing with his back to Alum Pot on the very edge. He laughed.
‘Oh, but I do,’ he said and made a strange gesture with his hands. ‘Look at these fells, the wild beauty of it all. I can’t go to prison; I’d go mad cooped up in a cell. I can’t leave these hills and these caves; I’d rather die in them.’
As Carter clung on the bank, time seemed to slow down. Hardiman stood up straight and fell backwards. The body appeared to fall in slow motion, silently away from Carter, diminishing in size until it disappeared from view. An agonisingly long time seemed to pass before a muffled thump was heard far below.
Carter felt dizzy and Robinson had to help him back up to the top of the bank.
He found it impossible to say anything for several minutes. Finally, he looked at Robinson.
‘Did you hear what he said?’
‘Yes. To be honest, I can understand it.’
Carter stared again at the fells. The eerie silence that had fallen was broken by the poignant bubbling cry of a curlew. Large white clouds drifted over, creating patches of light and shade on the limestone pavements leading over to Gaping Ghyll. He turned to Robinson.
‘So can I.’
Steph and DC Jones were leading Caroline Hardiman out of Garthwaite Hall. Oldroyd was waiting for Carter to ring.
‘You won’t arrest Simon,’ she said. ‘He couldn’t stand being in prison.’ She seemed to accept it now.
‘What did he say?’
She stopped as she was getting into the car.
‘When we saw your police cars we knew it was over. Simon held me tight and told me he loved me and . . .’ She started to cry again. ‘Then he said it was all his fault and I was to blame him, but he had to go and I knew why. Then he said goodbye.’
She nearly broke down but struggled into the car. She looked up at the hall for the last time with a tear-stained expression of agony.
‘God, I hate this place!’ she cried, and then slumped into the seat as the door was shut.
Oldroyd usually felt some satisfaction in bringing the criminal to justice, but now he found himself feeling some sympathy for this tragic couple and their broken dreams. And he felt contempt for the first victim: a despicable man who’d destroyed so much.
DC Robinson led a very shaken Carter back to their police car, where they radioed for help.
‘They’re calling the Cave Rescue team and ambulance out, Sarge. Not that they’ll be able to do anything.’
‘No.’
‘Chief Inspector Oldroyd’s driving over here to meet us.’
‘Right.’
Carter was uncharacteristically quiet. He was too stunned to do anything; he just had to let Robinson get on with it. He sat on a grassy bank by the car and tried to forget the image of Hardiman disappearing into that appalling hole.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes.’
‘You did all you could. He didn’t want to live.’
‘I know.’
Carter remained still and silent until he heard the sound of the second police car arriving. He got up, not wanting Oldroyd to think he was weak.
Oldroyd, however, was impossible to deceive. As soon as he saw Carter’s white face, he knew he’d been through something pretty bad. He sensed he might not be the right person to talk to Carter at the moment. He motioned to Steph to go over while he spoke to DC Robinson.
‘Hey, how are you?’ she asked softly. Carter looked up and saw the warmth in her expression.
‘Not brilliant. I’ve seen a lot of bad stuff, you know, but nothing like that.’
‘What happened?’
‘We got right to the edge of that bloody pothole or whatever it is, and he just fell back deliberately into it. One second I was talking to him, and the next he was gone. He just sort of fell away; it was horror-movie stuff.’
He looked down and shook his head. She put her hand on his arm.
‘That’s horrible, but I’m so glad you’re OK. I was worried when you drove off.’
Carter looked up at her again.
‘I knew Hardiman was desperate; I thought he might pull a gun on you or something.’
‘So was that just a professional concern?’
Steph moved closer to him. This was her chance to show what she felt and she wasn’t going to miss it.
‘No, it wasn’t; you know that. I . . . I care for you, Andy.’ Though she knew she definitely shouldn’t while on duty, she leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek.
‘That’s nice to know,’ he said. ‘I feel the same. I kept remembering when I pulled you out of that hole when we went down with the boss and how awful it would have been if . . .’ He put his head in his hands.
‘Let’s talk about it later. I think Sir wants us now.’
From across the lane Oldroyd saw the brief bit of unprofessional behaviour, but decided to overlook it in the circumstances. He walked over.
‘Well, come on then, we’d better get this poor woman back to headquarters.’
He smiled at them knowingly.
‘I’m glad some good has come out of today.’
That evening, Oldroyd was back in the rectory at Kirkby Underside. He and Alison were again sitting in the kitchen, which, though spacious by normal standards, was still the cosiest room in the house. The rectory was absurdly too large for his sister and a testimony to the luxury in which the clergy once lived. Up on the wall near the door were a number of defunct bells that would have rung to summon servants to various rooms. He reflected on how different his sister’s conception of her role was: she saw herself as the servant to her parishioners and to anyone else who needed her help, for that matter.
Oldroyd sipped his tea and ate one of the scones which Alison somehow found time to bake.
‘You actually gave me an idea on this one, you know.’
Alison was putting dirty pots in the dishwasher but stopped and turned to look at him when she heard this. She was always delighted when she’d helped, even if it was usually inadvertently through some comment she made on the people or the situation.
‘It was when you were talking about how people can turn on their tormentors. It made me think that maybe the motive behind the murder was something deeper than the jealousy of a cheated husband. That might have explained Atkins getting beaten up or even killed in a fit of rage, but this was a well-planned murder with more than one person involved. There must have been more at stake. He was a serious threat to someone so I started to think about blackmail and who had the most to lose. The Hardimans struck me as being vulnerable; they were struggling to keep their business and their lives afloat.’
Alison sat down looking thoughtful.
‘Attachment,’ she muttered.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s the old problem of attachment to material things; it’s a fundamental aspect of all the world’s faiths. That poor couple, so attached to that place and their life that they killed to preserve it.’
‘We’re all attached to our possessions like that, aren’t we?’
‘Oh yes; we all like to think we could give them up if necessary, but it’s all nonsense. They control us, not the other wa
y round. The gospels are very strong on warning us about that.’
‘So we shouldn’t judge the Hardimans?’
‘We should never judge, really; we never know the full circumstances and it’s easy to become self-righteous. We should always think: “There but for the grace of God”.’
‘So are you saying we’re all capable of murder?’
‘I’d say yes, in certain circumstances. For most people those circumstances would have to be very extraordinary, but we’re all capable of lashing out and hurting others. In some cases, it just goes a bit further. Some people act out what others only think, but it’s merely a difference of degree. Murderers aren’t a separate order of being, evil monsters, despite what the tabloids say.’
‘I can see that in the case of the Hardimans. They just seemed an ordinary couple to me. They’d got desperate and one thing led to another.’
‘That’s what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil”. She was talking about Adolf Eichmann, an unremarkable bureaucrat whose day at the office involved organising the transportation of Jews from Budapest to Auschwitz. Evil’s very ordinary; it’s close to us all the time, just as goodness is. It’s a dangerous illusion to preen ourselves up on our feelings of superiority to those who commit these awful crimes.’
‘To me the Hardimans were like the Macbeths,’ said Oldroyd. ‘They embarked on an evil course together, and they still loved each other, right to the end. They suffered so much because of what they’d done, and they’re still human and normal in many ways. I think that’s what Macbeth is about. Shakespeare never lets us forget that Macbeth is human, however evil he becomes. We never entirely lose sympathy with him because he’s still connected to us; we still recognise him.’
‘Exactly. We must never forget that we’re all connected.’
This made Oldroyd think about all the interconnected tunnels and passageways under the Dales and the hated figure of Atkins, who himself ended up immured in that dark far below.
The next day Oldroyd arrived at West Riding Police HQ feeling the sense of anticlimax that nearly always came to him at the end of a case. All the odds and ends were tied up. The murder weapon had been found at Garthwaite Hall and traces of Atkins’s blood in the van.
As he entered the office, the phone rang. It was Tom Walker.
‘Just wanted to say good work, Jim, spoke to the new lad earlier; turned out to be blackmail, I hear?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Bloody amazing, isn’t it, what goes on in those little villages? And they say all the trouble’s in Gipton and Chapeltown.’
‘I know.’ Oldroyd didn’t really have the energy to listen to one of Walker’s rants.
‘Anyway, you did a bloody good job. Chief Constable Watkins, of course, doesn’t think so.’
‘Why, what’s wrong?’
‘The press are having a field day with that bloke throwing himself into Alum Pot.’
‘Carter did his best to stop him.’
‘Don’t think I don’t know that, but Watkins was bleating on to me saying it makes the police look fools when the perpetrator escapes and commits suicide.’
‘That’s not fair, Tom.’
‘Jim, I know. You don’t need to tell me; the man’s a complete bastard, knows nothing about real policing.’
Walker didn’t worry about loyalty or protocol where Watkins was concerned.
‘I sometimes think he never did any police work, just went on the bloody fast track to the top.’ He laughed. ‘Somebody ought to have derailed the bugger. Anyway, tell everyone involved they did an excellent job. It can’t have been easy for any of you. I know you had to go down into those caves.’
‘We enjoyed it, it made a nice change from interviewing people in their living rooms.’
Walker grunted sceptically.
‘They’re bad news, those bloody potholes. I remember Blackfell Caverns, 1976. Five cavers got drowned; Cave Rescue couldn’t get to them. I was just a young bloke. Press were saying why didn’t the police stop people going down, as if it was our bloody fault. Then if you do try to stop people doing things, the same newspapers complain the police are interfering with people’s rights and we’re living in a nanny state.’
There was a pause. Oldroyd stayed silent so as not to encourage him.
‘Right, well, I’m sure you’ve got work to do. I’ll read your report and make it right with Watkins, don’t worry. Are we still OK for that drink tonight?’
Oldroyd’s heart sank.
‘Er, yes, absolutely; looking forward to it,’ he lied.
He put down the phone and sat for a while. Then he picked it up again. The number he dialled rang for a long time and he almost put the receiver down. Then suddenly he heard a voice.
‘Hello?’
‘Julia. It’s me.’
‘Oh, Jim.’
‘Yes, I, well, I didn’t think you’d be in, but, you know.’
‘I’m not going to work today; don’t feel brilliant.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing, just a bit headachy and stuff. Classes don’t start until next week. How about you?’
‘Fine. Well, a bit down actually, you know what I’m like at the end of a case. The adrenalin flows and then it’s the big let-down.’
‘Yes, I remember.’ She paused. ‘Still the brilliant detective then. I saw it all on the local news. That must have been traumatic for that sergeant of yours. Isn’t he new?’
‘Andy Carter? Yes, he is. He’ll be good, very keen. Look, I was wondering if you fancied going to the theatre. Hedda Gabler’s on at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.’
There was another pause.
‘Well, thanks, but I saw that last week with some college friends.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘Maybe another time.’
‘OK.’
Another pause. Oldroyd found it excruciating.
‘I’d better go. I’ve got to get a bit of housework done, then I’m going to lie down for a while.’
‘OK, I hope you feel better.’
‘Thanks, bye.’
Oldroyd sighed as he put down the receiver for the second time. And so crashed his latest attempt at wooing his wife back, as his sister had encouraged him to do. It was going to be an uphill struggle.
Epilogue
Several weeks later, on a crisp and clear autumn day on the fells north of Burnthwaite, two figures were moving up a path that climbed directly and uncompromisingly up the hillside. Oldroyd was slightly ahead of Carter, who wore a new pair of walking boots that Oldroyd had persuaded him to buy. As these were slightly stiff, he was hobbling a little and felt as if he was developing blisters.
Oldroyd turned to him.
‘Not far now, just round that spur.’
Carter looked back and was surprised how quickly they’d climbed from the dale bottom. Oldroyd had persuaded him to go fell walking with him and he’d never walked on paths like this, which rose steeply out of pastoral softness into the different world of a wild moorland terrain. He looked down at the boots and smiled. Who would have expected that he would have exchanged his stylish shoes for a pair of walking boots? What would Jason say if he could see him now? He didn’t care; he liked it here and he liked his new boss. He looked around; police work here was so different and fascinating and somehow this landscape was part of it.
Suddenly his phone rang. It was Jason. There was a lot of background noise.
‘Hey, Andy my old mate!’
‘Jason! I was just thinking about you. Where are you? Obviously getting wasted, as usual; how come, in the middle of the day?’
‘Long lunch hour, you know how it is; did some good work this morning, you know, pushed some money around; here with the team to celebrate, might go back later if we feel like it.’ He laughed in his usual raucous way. ‘Anyway, I’ve done over seventy hours this week already so they can piss off. What’re you up to?’
Carter looked around him and felt the contrast between the
world he was glimpsing through the phone and the world he was standing in. Would he like to be with Jason now? Did he miss the buzz, the camaraderie, the excitement of the city? He looked down over the green fields and limestone walls and thought of Steph. To be honest: no.
‘I’m climbing up a fellside in a pair of walking boots.’
‘What the fuck!’ Jason laughed again. ‘Up a what?’
‘A fellside; a hill to you.’
‘What for? Is there a free lap dancing club at the top? Hey, Alex, have you heard this? Andy Carter’s up a hill in Yorkshire in a pair of walking boots.’
Carter heard roars of laughter in the background and he could just make out someone say, ‘Oo, Andy’s doing it in walking boots; is that how they do it in Yorkshire?’ to the sound of bawdy laughter.
‘That northern air’s getting to you, mate, or is it all the gas in the beer? Have you got that bit with you? Has she got her boots on as well? Give her one from me when you get to the summit!’
Another explosion of laughter in the background.
Carter could only shake his head. They would never understand. Before he could reply, the signal faltered and the London world faded away.
He stuffed the phone back in his pocket as they rounded the corner and Carter saw another of those strange disappearing streams. This one seemed to come down a rocky course and plunge into a hole at the base of a cliff. Oldroyd contemplated the water and then turned to Carter. They both looked out over the desolate moorland beyond. Where the stream met the limestone, it plunged underground to carve caves out of the softer rock.
‘There’s something over here, Carter, which I think you’d find interesting, but are you fully recovered after that do at Alum Pot?’
Carter still found the memory quite disturbing, but didn’t want to admit it to Oldroyd.
‘I’m OK. It shook me up, you know, but I can cope.’
‘Well, look at this over here.’
He led the way to a flat slab of stone on a grassy bank and Carter saw there was writing on it. It was a memorial to a group of cavers who’d died underground.