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

by Peter Robinson

  Banks followed her gaze and, sure enough, the sea had stopped battering the wall, and there were even one or two gaps in the clouds toward the horizon, like tears in fabric, where the stars and a hint of moonlight shone through. Banks thought he could see the lights of a fishing boat far out at sea, but he realized it must be a buoy of some sort; it would be madness for anyone to go out fishing in this weather.

  “Someone mentioned at the funeral that Emily worked for Médecins Sans Frontières,” he said. “How did that come about?”

  “It was just something she wanted to do. She traveled through most of her twenties and early thirties, did temp office work to make money, then she married Luke and raised two children. She and Luke were happy for many years, but they split up when the kids went to university. That’s when she took the job.”

  “But she didn’t train as a doctor, did she?”

  Julie laughed. “Good lord, no. She wasn’t a doctor. She worked in administration. The doctors” doctor, she called herself. They need someone to keep the wheels rolling—food, supplies, medicines, personnel, soap, towels, accommodation and so on. Training local people to do the job. That was Emily’s job. She worked in every hellhole in the world, from South Sudan to Afghanistan. I can’t imagine how awful a lot of it must have been. But her letters and emails were funny and insightful. Never self-pitying. I wish I’d kept them. She loved what she was doing, though it took its toll on her. Depression was never very far from the horizon. Witnessing so much of man’s inhumanity to man can do that to you. But it didn’t break her spirit.”

  Banks took in what Julie had said, tried to imagine Emily under fire in a tent in a desert somewhere. “Why tell me about the pregnancy now?” he asked. “After all these years. You said you knew all along.”

  “Yes, but it was my secret to keep, not to spread around. In the end, it was something Emily wanted, a favor she asked of me. Her last wish, if you like. Not to hurt you. She’d just felt guilty about it her whole life. She wanted you to know. That’s all. I think because she knew she was dying she got caught up in the past, her youth, and you were a big part of that, an unresolved issue, if you like. Unfinished business. She wanted to put things right. She knew she couldn’t turn back the clock, but she wanted to do what she could to reveal what happened. Believe me, she didn’t ask me to do this to hurt you. That was the last thing on her mind. I think she wanted your forgiveness. She talked most of all about the good times and good feelings. She said people often forget about that as love grows older and colder over time. That first-days feeling. The sheer joy and ecstasy of falling in love, when everything seems new and possible. Do you forgive her, Alan?”

  “Of course I do,” said Banks. “I would never have wanted to hold her back, to stand in her way. I just wish things . . .” He felt his eyes prickling and swigged more wine. “Oh, never mind.”

  “Wish things had been different?” Julie paused. “Let me ask you a question. Where would you have gone from there? If things had been different. If she had told you at the time. If you had persuaded her against having the abortion. If you had got married. Where would you have gone from there?”

  “I don’t know. I tried to imagine it just now, our life together, but I couldn’t.”

  “Whatever it would have been, Alan, the moment’s gone. You had your time, you and Emily.” She got up and walked over to the bar, took something out of a drawer. “And don’t forget it was good time. She wanted me to give you this to remind you.”

  It was a photograph. Banks held it by the candlelight. He and Emily in the early seventies. He was wearing a denim jacket over a T-shirt, and bell bottoms, and his hair was much longer than it was now. Emily was wearing the embroidered white cheesecloth top she had favored so much, along with her jeans, also bell-bottoms. Banks had his arm around her and her head rested on his shoulder, her long blond hair hanging over his chest, that little sleepy satisfied smile on her face. Banks felt a lump in his throat.

  “Turn it over,” Julie said.

  Banks turned it over. Written on the other side, in shaky handwriting, were the words, “Better by far you should forget and smile / Than that you should remember and be sad.”

  “Christina Rossetti again,” Banks said.

  “Yes, that’s the one,” Julie whispered. “Forget and smile.”

  12

  “I love that line, ‘with magic in my eyes,’” said Banks, sitting in the Low Moor Inn with Linda Palmer on Sunday lunchtime. They both had the traditional roast-beef-and-Yorkshire-pudding lunch before them, but while Linda sipped at a glass of red wine and tucked in with gusto, Banks stuck to copious amounts of water and picked at his food.

  The Low Moor Inn, which Banks had discovered by accident a couple of years ago, was one of those old sturdy and badly lit Dales pubs high on the moors, well off the beaten track. Its enormous fireplace blazed like a smithy’s forge, quickly erasing memories of the damp and chill weather outside. Prints and framed paintings of the local hunt and sheep-shearing scenes hung here and there on the rough stone walls. Some were for sale and had price tags stuck below them. Bottles of spirits stood on shelves behind the polished bar and reflected in the long mirror behind them. A brass footrest ran along the bottom. The legs of the old wooden chairs scraped on the flagstone floor when anyone moved.

  Banks had woken early, disoriented and hungover in Filey, to the squealing of seagulls and the smell of bacon and eggs. Marcel, of course, had provided a hearty full English breakfast, including black pudding and baked beans. At first Banks hadn’t thought he would be able to manage it all, but he found himself staring at an empty plate when he was on his second cup of coffee. He thanked Marcel, gave Julie a quick peck on the cheek and left. “Don’t be a stranger,” Julie had called out after him. But he didn’t think he would be back there again, no matter how good the food.

  “It is magnificent, isn’t it? Magic,” said Linda. They were talking about Hardy’s Poems of 1912–1913, which Banks had read over the new year, before his meeting with Dr. Glendenning in the Unicorn, though the quotation that appealed so much to Banks came from a musical setting of an earlier Hardy poem, “When I Set Out for Lyonnesse,” by Gerald Finzi. Banks was feeling a little better after his long drive, but he was still finding it difficult to concentrate. The things Julie had told him the night before kept running through his head. Emily. A baby. Abortion. But Emily was dead now, and she had wanted his forgiveness. Thinking back to the first flush of love with Emily made Banks think of Sandra, whom he had married a few years after the split. Sandra. His ex-wife. Mother of Tracy and Brian. Now remarried to Sean, and a mother again. He tried hard to remember the early days, when they were poor but happy, living in Kennington, but the details eluded him. Their breakup had been acrimonious, and relations were still strained between them, so much so that they rarely met unless it was an important event involving Brian or Tracy.

  Hardy captured that sense of first love so well, Banks thought, yet his relationship with Emma Gifford had been troublesome, and the couple had grown more distant over the years. Only when she died could he resurrect the magic of those early days, the places they had been and emotions connected with them. That was the thread that ran through the sequence. The poems were a true marriage of place and memory, Linda had said, and Banks had to agree, though he found Hardy’s syntax and diction rather awkward sometimes, as if he were willing to twist the English language into any shape just for the sake of a rhyme or a rhythm. Not like the relaxed conversational flow of Larkin, for example, whom they had discussed at their last meeting, where Banks hardly even noticed the rhymes and meter.

  “You seem a bit distracted today, Alan,” said Linda. “Is it the hangover or the case you’re working on?”

  “Sorry,” said Banks. “Bit of both. Is it so obvious? I am having difficulty concentrating. Other things. The poems . . . I mean, I’ve just lost someone and . . . I mean, it ended very abruptly, without explanation. A long time ago. I hadn’t seen her in over forty y
ears, and she died last December. It’s not the same situation as Hardy and Emma at all, but the feelings. Somehow they seem similar. I’m remembering things we used to do, the way she looked, her clothes, places we used to go.”

  Linda closed her book and put it down on the table. “In some ways Hardy felt he hadn’t seen Emma for forty years, either,” she said. “They were hardly talking by the time she died. You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want.”

  “I know,” said Banks. “This isn’t a therapy session. Poetry isn’t therapy. That’s what you told me the first time we talked like this.”

  “This person you lost. It was serious, at the time?”

  “Yes. First girl I ever loved, as the song goes.”

  “And the case you’re working on?” Linda asked.

  “No connection. Except I think it reaches back into the past, too. For different reasons, with different intentions.” Banks gulped down some water. “In fact, I’ve been thinking that it might be something you can help me with.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. If you don’t mind thinking back.”

  Linda narrowed her eyes and gave him that “don’t treat me with kid gloves” look.

  Banks held up his hands in surrender. He knew that he sometimes avoided certain topics with her because she had been raped by a well-respected TV celebrity at the age of fourteen. But he also knew that she had not let it ruin her life. She had even written up her recollection of events for him in a journal during the case they had met through. “OK, OK,” he said. “I know you told me not to pussyfoot around the past. It’s just that in my job I come across some of the worst things people do to each other.”

  “I know that. How do you manage it?”

  “You should know. You visit the dark side often enough. I’ve read your poetry.”

  “I’ve been there,” said Linda, “but it’s different.”

  “Why? Because I see real dead bodies and you see only imaginary ones? You know as well as I do it’s not the bodies but the people who do such things. They’re in your poems as much as they’re in my life. We both spend far too much time down there in the dark. Alone.”

  “You know I have my reasons,” said Linda softly.

  “So do I,” said Banks. After a short pause he went on. “Anyway, I seem to remember you told me you went to Silver Royd girls” school in Wortley.”

  “That’s right. Why?”

  “Does the name Wendy Vincent mean anything to you?”

  “Yes, of course. She was the girl who was murdered when I was at school. She was raped and stabbed. It was terrible.”

  Banks looked away. He couldn’t help it, knowing the things that had happened to Linda, but she seemed unfazed. “That’s right,” he said.

  “And there was something about her in the papers a couple of years ago. The fiftieth anniversary. Right?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “It seems a strange sort of anniversary to celebrate. A murder.”

  “Media. What can I say? It wasn’t a celebration of the murder, as such, and it did lead to the reopening of the investigation, the identity of the killer and his eventual capture. So we can’t complain. One of the triumphs of DNA evidence in cold-case work. Turns out Frank Dowson, the killer, was on leave from the merchant navy at the time of the killing, and nobody knew he was in the area. Of course, some people might have known and been lying to protect him. His family, for example.”

  “Dowson? I can’t say I remember anyone by that name.”

  “What about Wendy Vincent? And Maureen Grainger?”

  “If they’re the right ones I’m thinking of, they were ahead of me. I didn’t know either of them. I was just starting in the first form, and they’d have been in the third or fourth. Older girls like them wanted nothing to do with us younger ones back then.”

  “I don’t doubt it’s still the same. Boys, too. Except for a bit of bullying.”

  “Well, I certainly don’t remember either of them being spoken of as bullies. Wendy Vincent was famous for hockey. She was the star of the school team. I saw her play lots of times. Do you remember The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, where all the girls were ‘famous’ for something?”

  “What was Maureen Grainger famous for?”

  “I don’t know if she was famous for anything. I didn’t know her. I only remember Wendy Vincent because she was murdered. Isn’t that a terrible thing?”

  “It’s perfectly normal.”

  “Now, do you want to talk about Hardy or don’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’ve done my homework.” Banks glanced through the window. “I liked that line about the rain being like ‘silken strings.’ Here, it’s more like rough old rope.”

  Linda laughed. But even as they talked about the poems, about the mysterious ghost figure and the way Hardy revisited places where he and Emma had been happy years ago, Banks couldn’t get Maureen Grainger and Wendy Vincent out of his mind. Was Gerry right, and was that crime of over fifty years ago linked to the St. Mary’s shootings in any way at all?

  Banks wasn’t the only one feeling the effects of Saturday night that Sunday morning. Gerry had been reasonably abstemious back at Annie’s cottage—she could be annoying that way—leaving Annie to polish off most of the wine by herself. At least Gerry had made tea and toast in the morning before leaving, after what must have been an uncomfortable night on the living room sofa, and she had the good sense to keep small talk and noise in general to a minimum when Annie finally lumbered downstairs. And she left as soon as she decently could after breakfast.

  Annie was never much of a morning person, and on Sundays she usually hunkered down with the papers, at least with the Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Express. She missed the old News of the World—nothing like a bit of gossip and scandal with your Sunday-morning hangover—but that was long gone now.

  By midday, she remembered she was going to interview Maureen Tindall with Jenny Fuller, and her spirits fell. It was an important interview, too, so she needed to be at the top of her game. Maureen Tindall might hold the key, or one of the keys, to the events that had happened in Fortford last December, though as yet nobody could quite imagine how. She had certainly been nervous when the talk got around to past events in their last interview. Annie took a quick hot shower and threw on some jeans and a sweatshirt before going out to her car. She hoped Jenny Fuller would stay in the background and keep her mouth shut. The last thing she wanted was some damn uppity profiler interrupting with pointless questions whenever she felt she was getting somewhere.

  Annie phoned Jenny to tell her she was on her way and picked her up outside her posh house in the Green, then drove on to the Tindalls’ posh house opposite the Heights. That was about as much posh as Annie could handle for one day. Fortunately, it was all she had signed up for. Naturally, Jenny Fuller was as well turned out as usual in closely fitting black silk trousers and loose white top and tailored jacket. Why did she always make Annie feel like such a slob? It wasn’t as if her own outfit was especially cheap, just that she dressed casually and Jenny had a way of wearing clothes as if they were made for her. Some women had it, and some didn’t. Annie felt that she didn’t. No matter what she wore—Primark or Versace, jeans or a skirt—she felt as if she’d just come out of the Oxfam shop.

  Annie had wanted to catch Maureen Tindall off guard, so she hadn’t phoned ahead to say they were coming. It was a risk, she knew; people often go out to visit friends or relatives on a Sunday. But this time it paid off far better than she could have hoped. When Maureen eventually opened the door on the chain and peered nervously through the crack, it became clear that she was alone. Her husband was at a church meeting, she explained, when Annie had finally persuaded her to open up and let them in.

  To Annie’s relief, Jenny Fuller settled herself at the far end of the sofa, out of Annie’s line of sight, and took out a large Moleskine notebook. She would, Annie thought, putting her regulation police notebook on the arm of the sofa beside her. S
he didn’t trust Jenny to make the right sort of notes, and two people in her house were almost more than Maureen Tindall could bear.

  Though it was afternoon, Maureen was still wearing a pink quilted dressing gown over her nightdress and her hair was flattened on one side where she had clearly been lying down. Annie tried to dredge up some sympathy for her; after all, it wasn’t long since Laura’s murder. It was difficult, though, as she seemed so full of self-pity to start with. It was a nasty thought, and Annie immediately felt ashamed for having it, but she couldn’t help herself. Maureen didn’t offer any refreshment, even though it was a damp and chilly day. Annie thought herself lucky that there was a fire in the hearth, no doubt started by her husband, and that Maureen herself was obviously cold enough to add a couple of logs.

  Maureen sat closest to the fire and leaned forward in her armchair, hugging her knees. “I’ve not been very well,” she said. “I’m not sure I’ll be up to this. I took one of my pills and fell asleep. What time is it?”

  “Half-past two,” Annie said.

  Maureen seemed to relax a bit at that piece of news. “Robert will be back soon,” she said. “He said he would be home by half-past three, and he’s never late.”

  Wouldn’t dare be, Annie bet, given Maureen’s obsession with punctuality.

  “Would you like me to make you a cup of tea or coffee or something?” Jenny Fuller asked from the far end of the sofa. There was a note of kindness and concern in her voice that even Annie noticed.

  Maureen’s face brightened. “Would you?” She fingered the collar of her dressing gown. “I’d do it myself, you know, but . . .”

  “No problem,” said Jenny with a smile. “Annie?”

  “’Er, whatever’s going, please,” Annie said.

  “I’ll make a nice pot of tea,” said Jenny, and patted Maureen’s shoulder before heading into the kitchen. She seemed to know instinctively where it was, Annie noticed. Maybe these posh houses were all the same inside.