Sleeping in the Ground: An Inspector Banks Novel (Inspector Banks Novels)

by Peter Robinson

  Dedication

  Dedicated to the memory of my father

  clifford robinson

  31st December, 1923–27th May, 2016

  Epigraph

  “And to me, though Time’s unflinching rigour,

  In mindless rote, has ruled from sight

  The substance now, one phantom figure

  Remains on the slope, as when that night

  Saw us alight.

  I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,

  I look back at it amid the rain

  For the very last time, for my sand is sinking,

  And I shall traverse old love’s domain

  Never again.”

  Thomas Hardy, “At Castle Boterel”

  “They are all gone into the world of light!

  And I alone sit ling’ring here;

  Their very memory is fair and bright,

  And my sad thoughts doth clear.”

  Henry Vaughan, “Silex Scintillans, Part II”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Peter Robinson

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  If the incident had been a scene in a film, it would have looked beautiful. The violence would have taken place in elegantly choreographed silence and slow motion. Perhaps it would have started with the wedding party milling around outside the picturesque country church, then the camera would zoom in on a rose of blood blossoming from the bride’s white gown as she looks up, surprised, and floats serenely to the ground, arms reaching out, grasping for something too insubstantial to hold. She would toss her bouquet high in the air, pink and purple flowers against a backdrop of blue sky, and it would fall into the arms of a pretty bridesmaid. Then the bridesmaid’s head would disintegrate. Strings of blood would snake through the air like drops of ink in water.

  But the way Terry Gilchrist saw it—and he was there—it was as swift as it was brutal. A crack, loud enough to be heard above the church bells, was followed by a dull thud, then a patch of blood spread over the bride’s chest. Her body arched, and she spun half around and crumpled in an untidy heap of blood-soaked white chiffon and lace, her mouth open, the scream forever stuck in her throat. Another crack, and her groom fell beside her. A frightened child clung tightly to his mother’s legs. The bridesmaids clutched their posies, eyes wide with horror. A third bullet hit the maid of honor before she could run for cover. She fell beside the bride and groom, half her face shot away. The men in their gray pinstripe suits and the women in difficult shoes and wide-brimmed hats bumped into one another as they ran around in panic and confusion. A bullet chipped the corner off an ancient tombstone and a sliver of stone entered the photographer’s eye. A guest fell, clutching his thigh. The quickest to react reached the church door as another bullet slammed into the centuries-old wood. Someone managed to pull the heavy door open, and those who could rushed inside. They jammed the doorway, and another bridesmaid arched backward and dropped to the ground, blood oozing from her back. People trampled over her body in an attempt to get into the sanctuary of the church.

  It was all finished in less than a minute.

  Terry Gilchrist reacted as quickly as he could. He was no stranger to sudden death and violence. He had been under fire before, but nothing had quite prepared him for this. Even so, his soldier’s instinct kicked in. He glanced up at the hill where he thought the shots were coming from and saw a dark figure scurrying away, over the grassy summit and down the slope.

  Gambling that the assault was over and that there was no one else up there, Terry tried to shepherd the stunned and dazed stragglers into the safety of the church, desperately searching for Winsome. There were no more shots. The church bells stopped ringing. Tentatively, one by one, the birds started singing again.

  Terry stood alone in the bright December sunlight and called the police and ambulance on his mobile. One of the fallen guests was moaning with pain. Nearby, a bridesmaid sat propped up against a gravestone crying, her hands pressed to her bloody midriff where something wet and shiny rested in her lap. Terry was no medic, but he had picked up some basic first-aid training in the military, and he visited all the fallen to see if there was anyone he could help before the ambulances arrived. The groom was his mate, Ben, and he had been shot just above his stomach, around the location of his liver. He was still alive, though barely conscious, and the best Terry could do was tear off and wad up part of Ben’s bloodstained shirt and have him press it against the wound. Tears came to his eyes as he passed the dead bride and cast a glance down at her crumpled body. He knelt to touch her still-warm cheek and closed her staring eyes. It seemed that all he could see were bodies strewn around the graveyard. Then he turned and went into the church to find Winsome.

  Banks left the crematorium ahead of the others, David Bowie’s “Starman” playing over the tinny PA system, and hurried away from the knots of people gathering behind him, down the graveled drive to the iron gates.

  “It always made her feel happy, that song,” he heard someone say between sniffles. Earlier in the brief service, a friend had read a Christina Rossetti poem: “When I am dead, my dearest, / Sing no sad songs for me.” “Starman” was certainly no sad song, but it still had people in tears. And even David Bowie was dead now.

  Banks moved on quickly. He didn’t want to hang around and make small talk about death and loss with people he didn’t know. He had seen the mourners crying in the front row: two young couples, probably daughters or daughters-in-law, with small children, grandchildren, most likely; he had spotted her parents, father in a wheelchair, his head nodding and arm twitching. The others would be friends, work colleagues, nephews and nieces. The eulogy had mentioned the deceased’s tireless work for Médecins Sans Frontières, so some of the guests would be from that organization.

  But for Banks, this was his death, not something he wanted to share. He wanted to hold it to himself, to take it into him, if he could, let the grief become a part of him, and join with the grief of long ago.

  The taxi he had ordered was waiting across the road. He slid into the backseat and told the driver to head for the train station. It wasn’t a long journey, and it passed in silence. When he checked his watch against the timetable just inside the station entrance, he saw that he had almost an hour until the next train. He walked back to the street and scoped out the area. There was a Waitrose supermarket with a café to his left, but that wasn’t much use. He didn’t feel like a coffee or a cup of tea. Far more tempting was the Great Northern Hotel, almost directly opposite. It was a three-story brick building with the ground-floor facade covered in white stucco, A blackboard listing the daily specials stood by the door. Banks crossed the street, walked in toward the reception desk and saw the bar to his left. He didn’t normally drink so soon after eleven in a morning, but after the funeral he felt in need of something to take the edge off. It sounded as if some sort of function was going on to his right. Banks could hear someone making a speech, punctuated now and then by hearty laughter.

  The bar was almost empty. One elderly couple
sat at a table sipping white wine and that was it, apart from the pretty brunette barmaid. There was a rugby game on the large screen TV at the far end of the room. Banks sat on a barstool, from which he would be able to watch the game as he enjoyed his drink. He was about to order a pint but decided that he’d have wine instead. Less liquid. He had a two-hour train journey ahead of him, and the toilets on trains were generally a health hazard, littered with soggy paper and awash with spillage. Usually the taps didn’t work, either, which didn’t matter much as the paper towels were scattered all over the floor.

  The barmaid smiled at him as he sat down. Banks ordered a large Shiraz and settled on his stool. He wasn’t a great rugby fan, and he had no idea who was playing, but he did enjoy watching a game now and then. He’d played rugby union at school, had even been good enough to make the school team as fly-half, being wiry, slippery and reasonably fast. Nevertheless, sometimes he wasn’t quite fast enough to prevent one of the hulking prop forwards from flattening him. He played once a week in regular games periods, and once on a Saturday morning for the school, no matter what the weather. Some weeks he was sloshing about in the mud, others slipping on the frozen earth.

  It felt odd being back in his hometown and not visiting his parents, but they had sold the council house he had grown up in and moved into a private care home near Durham to be closer to Banks and their granddaughter Tracy, who lived in Newcastle. They were well into their eighties, and still healthy enough, but slowing down. Banks’s father told him before the move that their cruising days were over; his angina bothered him and he had suffered a minor heart attack only a few months ago. Also, most of their friends on the estate had either died or moved away, so there was nothing to keep them there. Moving wasn’t as much of a wrench as it would have been a few years earlier. With the money left to them by Roy, Banks’s brother, they could afford the best care in a beautifully restored Victorian manor house with a fine view over the River Wear. They still had their independence. The one-bedroom flat had a large well-equipped kitchen, and Banks’s mother still prepared the meals. They could come and go as they pleased, and there was always a registered nurse on duty, just in case. They said they had everything they needed and seemed happy enough, though Banks’s father complained that some of the other tenants were either too posh or too gaga for his liking. He also wasn’t much of a joiner and didn’t sign up for quiz night, sing-alongs or exercise classes. Banks’s mother got along just fine with the posh folk; she had always had aspirations beyond her class.

  Just then, a small group from the party across the hall came in and clustered around the bar. A wedding group, Banks noticed. The men wore ill-fitting tuxedos with buttonholes, and the women were resplendent in lush cream satin gowns of ivory or peach. The bride and groom stood at the center of the group. Someone ordered a round of pints and G&Ts. One of the men had a loud grating voice and, of course, he was the one who talked the most. The bride had a laugh like a braying horse. The loud-voiced man told a dirty joke and they all doubled up laughing. Someone else made a witty comment about the groom’s mother-in-law, which raised more guffaws, especially from the mother-in-law herself, who seemed well in her cups. Fortunately for Banks, it was a short break. They downed their drinks quickly and headed back to the reception. The barmaid glanced at Banks and pulled a face.

  Banks drank some more wine and saw that he had almost finished the glass. Checking his watch, he calculated that he had enough time to get another one down and asked for a refill. He took a long slug of Shiraz, and though his eyes were fixed on the rugby game, he wouldn’t have said he was actually following it. He was thinking about those Saturday mornings long ago, toward the end of the sixties, when he still cared enough about being one of the lads to run around in the terrible weather week after week, risking a broken arm, cartilage damage or a wet rugby ball between the legs. It wasn’t so bad, he reflected. You got a hot shower at the end of the game, and most Saturday afternoons he went into town record-shopping with his mates Dave, Graham, Steve and Paul. All dead now, except Dave. You could buy used 45s at a stall in the open-air market, he remembered, but the discs were recycled from jukeboxes and the middles had been punched out, so you had to buy flimsy plastic inserts which didn’t always work. The 45s were often scratched, too, and they tended to skip. Caveat emptor. There was a secondhand bookstall in the market, too, where he had hunted down old Saint, Toff and James Bond paperbacks with lurid covers.

  But the best thing about Saturdays back then was the nights. On Saturday nights he would usually go to the pictures with Emily: Emily Hargreaves, the first girl he had ever loved, the girl whose coffin he had just seen rolling toward the flames.

  “It wouldn’t be for long,” Ray Cabbot was saying. “A week or so at the most. Just until I find somewhere suitable.”

  Annie Cabbot put her knife and fork aside. “I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, you know how small the cottage is.”

  “I wouldn’t get in your way, love. I promise. I wouldn’t cramp your style.”

  Annie laughed. “My style? What’s that supposed to mean? I don’t think I have one. Anyway, it’s not that . . .” But she was a bit worried about the effect a houseguest might have on her relationship with Nick Fleming, a DI from County HQ. It was relatively new and had come after a lengthy drought. But she wasn’t going to tell her father about that. “What’s wrong with the colony?”

  “Nothing. I just feel like I’m getting a bit too old for all that sort of thing. These young turks.” He grinned. “Nobody paints or sculpts anymore. It’s all concepts and attitudes. You could walk in an art gallery and piss on the floor and claim it was a work of art these days. Next thing they’ll be wanting is a bloody lathe or a 3-D printer for making installations. No, love, it’s time to move on.”

  “And you used to be so bohemian, so avant-garde. Getting conservative in your old age?”

  Ray Cabbot huffed. “Everyone has to draw the line somewhere.”

  “You’re not in any trouble, are you?”

  “What do you mean, trouble? Of course not.”

  “It just seems so sudden.”

  “Believe me, I’ve been thinking about it for some time.”

  “Besides,” Annie added after a swig of beer. “You’re not old.” She thought Ray seemed a lot younger than his seventy-plus years.

  “Thanks for saying that, love.” Ray ran his hand over his hair. It was silvery gray, the same color as his straggly beard, but he still had enough of it to wear in a ponytail. “Maybe I’m just tired.”

  “But why Yorkshire? You’ve always lived in Cornwall. It’s home.”

  “I know. It’s just . . . well, you’re here.”

  “Don’t be so soft, Dad.” It was rare that Annie called Ray “Dad.” Ever since she’d been a little girl, after her mother died, she had got into the habit of calling him Ray, and he had seemed to like it. It was all part of the bohemian atmosphere of the artists’ colony outside St Ives, where she had grown up.

  “It’s true. You’re all I’ve got, Annie. All that’s left of . . . It’s all right. I’m still fit and healthy. I don’t have cancer or anything. There’s nothing physically wrong with me. I’m not moving up here so I can use you as my nursemaid, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “It’s not. And I wouldn’t make a good nursemaid.”

  “No bedside manner?”

  Annie grinned. “That’s right. It has been criticized, at any rate.” She picked up her fork and speared some more salad. They were having lunch in the Black Swan, in the village of Harkside, where she lived. It was a small, quiet pub behind its whitewash and timber facade. Annie didn’t eat there often, but she had to admit that, as salads went, this one was a cut above the usual: avocado, quinoa, grape tomatoes. It didn’t go with the pint of Swan’s Down bitter very well at all, but that was something she could live with.

  “When would you want to start this house hunt, then?” she asked.

  “Soon as possible. Right away
.”

  Annie dropped her fork. “You mean . . . like now? Today?”

  “That’s what right away usually means. Not today, perhaps, but after the weekend. Monday. Why? Is there some problem?”

  “No. No. It’s just that I could have used a little warning, that’s all. I thought this was a preliminary visit. A recce, like. I mean, don’t you have to go back and turn off the water or pack a bag or something?”

  “Sorry, love. All done. At least until I find somewhere.”

  “Can’t be helped, I suppose. What about your paintings?”

  “Zelda’s taking care of them. I can trust her.”

  “Zelda?”

  “Long story. So it’s OK, then? I can stay?”

  “Of course you can. As if there was ever any question.” There was no way Annie could turn him away. He was her father. He had brought her up, had always been there for her—well, almost always—had loved her and cared for her, even if he hadn’t made a lot of personal sacrifices to do so. He hadn’t changed his lifestyle, for one thing, which had made her childhood interesting, to say the least.

  But her cottage was so tiny, and the walls were so thin. It would mean an end to nights with Nick until . . . well, who knew how long it would take Ray to find a suitable Yorkshire cottage? He was an artist, after all, and he would need a studio, somewhere the light was right, preferably with a fine panorama. He could be fussy, demanding and hard to please, despite his laissez-faire demeanor. It was a lot to ask, and it would be expensive. Still, she also knew that he was successful and not without funds. He did a brisk trade in Cornwall during tourist season—landscapes, seascapes and portraits—but his more serious Impressionist-influenced work hung in respectable galleries and fetched ever-increasing prices. At least he wouldn’t be a financial burden.

  “Of course,” he said, as if reading her mind, “I could always afford a hotel or a B and B, if that’s what you’d prefer?”