Cold is the Grave

by Peter Robinson

  ‘Why did you leave the club so early?’

  They looked at one another, then Carly lisped, ‘We didn’t like the music.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘It’s enough, isn’t it. I mean, you wouldn’t like to have to listen to that crap all night, would you?’

  Annie smiled. She certainly wouldn’t. ‘So why go in the first place?’

  ‘We didn’t know what sort of music they played,’ Alex answered. ‘Someone at college said it was a pretty good place to have a few drinks and dance and, you know . . . unwind.’

  ‘And buy drugs?’

  Carly reddened. ‘We don’t do drugs.’

  ‘Is that why you went? To buy drugs? And when you’d bought them you left.’

  ‘She said we don’t do drugs and we don’t,’ said Alex. ‘Why can’t you just believe us? Not every young person’s some sort of drug addict, you know. I knew the cops were prejudiced against blacks and gays, but I didn’t think they were prejudiced against the young in general.’

  Annie sighed. She’d heard it all before. ‘I’d love to believe you, Alex,’ she said. ‘In a perfect world, maybe. But a girl died a very nasty death after taking some adulterated cocaine in the Bar None not more than half an hour after you left and, as yet, we don’t know when she got it or where she got it from. If you can give me any help at all, then surely that gives me the right to come here and ask you a few simple questions, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It still doesn’t give you the right to accuse us of being druggies,’ said Alex.

  ‘Oh, for crying out loud! Grow up, Alex. If I were accusing the two of you of being junkies, you’d be down in the cells now waiting for your legal aid solicitor.’

  ‘But you said—’

  ‘Let’s move on, shall we?’

  They both sulked for a moment, then nodded.

  ‘What kind of music do you like?’

  Alex shrugged. ‘All sorts, really. Just not that techno-rave-disco crap they play at the Bar None. It gives me a headache.’

  Annie got up and wandered over to look at their CD collection to see for herself. Hole, Nirvana, the Dancing Pigs, even an old Van Morrison. There was quite a variety, but certainly no dance music. One odd thing she noticed was that some of the CDs had no covers, only typed labels stuck on the cases identifying the contents. When she looked more closely, she also saw that the CDs themselves didn’t all have record company logos. She glanced at the desk and saw a couple of popular computer software programmes and games there. Again, there was no form of official identification.

  ‘Where did you get these?’ she asked, noticing that Carly had reddened when she picked up one of the cases.

  ‘Shop.’

  ‘What shop?’

  ‘Computer shop.’

  ‘Come on, Carly. You think I’m stupid just because I’m an old fogey? Is that it? You didn’t buy this in any legitimate computer shop. It’s a knock-off, like the music CDs. Where did you buy them?’

  ‘It’s not illegal.’

  ‘We won’t go into the ins and outs of breach of copyright just now. I just want to know where you bought them.’

  After letting the silence stretch for almost a minute, Alex answered. ‘Bloke in the used bookshop down by the castle sells them.’

  ‘Castle Hill Books?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  Annie made a note. It probably wasn’t important, and it wasn’t her case, but she couldn’t dismiss the connection she felt with the empty CD case she had found at PFK. She would pass the information on to Sergeant Hatchley.

  ‘Are you going to arrest us?’ Carly asked.

  ‘No. I’m not going to arrest you. But I do want you to answer a few more questions. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘While you were in the club, did you notice anyone selling drugs or behaving suspiciously?’

  ‘There weren’t many people in the place,’ Carly said. ‘Everyone was just getting in drinks or sitting down.’

  ‘A few people were dancing,’ Alex added. ‘But things hadn’t really got going by then.’

  ‘Did you notice this girl?’

  Annie showed them a picture of Emily.

  ‘I think that’s the girl who came in with some friends just after us,’ Carly said. ‘At least it looks like her.’

  ‘About five foot six, taller in her platforms. Flared jeans.’

  ‘That’s the one,’ Carly said. ‘No, I didn’t see her doing anything odd at all. They sat down. Someone went for drinks. I think she was dancing at one point. I don’t know. I wasn’t really paying attention. The music was already driving me crazy.’

  ‘You didn’t notice her talk to anyone outside her immediate group?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you see her go to the toilet?’

  ‘We weren’t watching people coming and going from the toilets.’

  ‘So you didn’t notice her go?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘All right. Did you recognize her? Have you ever seen her before?’

  ‘No,’ Alex answered, with a sly glance at Carly. ‘And I think I’d remember.’

  Carly threw a cushion at him. He laughed.

  ‘She was too young for you, Alex,’ said Annie. ‘And by all accounts you’d have been far too young for her.’ She thought again of Banks and his lunch with Emily the day she died. Was there any more to it than that? She still got the impression he was holding back, hiding something.

  Things were going nowhere fast with Carly and Alex, so she decided to wrap up the interview and call it a day. ‘Okay,’ she said, standing up and stretching her back. ‘If either of you remembers anything about that evening, no matter how insignificant it might seem to you, give me a ring at this number.’ She handed her card to Carly who put it on the computer desk, then left the flat, ready to head home. It had been a rough day. Maybe she could treat herself to a book and a long hot bath and put Banks and Dalton out of her mind.

  13

  The postman came before Banks set off for work on Wednesday morning, and in addition to the usual bills and another letter from Sandra’s lawyer, which Banks put aside for later, he also brought with him a small oblong package. Noting the return address, Banks ripped open the padded envelope and held in his hand his son’s first officially recorded compact disc, Blue Rain, along with a thank-you note for the three-hundred-pound cheque Banks had sent him, and which had cut severely into his Laphroaig budget.

  There was a photograph of the band on the cover, Brian at the centre in a practised, cool sort of slouch, torn jeans, T-shirt, a lock of hair practically covering one eye. Andy, Jamisse and Ali flanked him. It was a poor-quality photograph, Banks noticed – Sandra certainly wouldn’t approve – and looked more like a grainy black-and-white photocopy of a colour original. Banks didn’t much like the band’s name, either; Jimson Weed sounded far too sixtyish and druggie, but what did he know?

  The music was what counted, and Banks was pleased to see that they had recorded their cover version of Dylan’s ‘Love Minus Zero / No Limit’, a song he had been surprised to hear them play on the only occasion he had seen them perform live. The rest of the songs were all originals, with Brian and Jamisse sharing most of the writing credits, apart from an old Mississippi John Hurt number, ‘Avalon Blues’. They weren’t a blues band, but blues was an underlying influence on their music, sometimes overlaid with rock, folk and hip-hop elements: the Grateful Dead meet Snoop Doggy Dogg. Banks was also absurdly pleased to see that in the liner notes Brian had credited him with nurturing an interest in music. Hadn’t mentioned that his dad was a copper, though; that wouldn’t go down too well in the music business.

  He didn’t have time to listen to the CD before heading off to the office. If he expected his team to put in a full day on Emily’s murder, then he had to set an example. Thoughts of work soon led into thoughts of Annie, who had contributed towards yet another sleepless night. He couldn’t understand what she saw in Dalton, who seemed such a dull
, unprepossessing type to Banks. Not particularly good-looking, either. But, as he well knew, there was neither rhyme nor reason in matters of sex and love.

  He just wished he could get the images of them out of his mind. Last night he had tossed and turned, unable to stop himself from imagining them making love in all sorts of positions, Dalton pleasing her far more than he had ever done, making her cry out in ecstasy as she climaxed, riding him wildly. The morning, dark and wet as it was, brought a respite from the images, but not from the feelings that had generated them. Working with her was turning out to be far more difficult than he had imagined it would be. Maybe she was right, and he just couldn’t hack it.

  As he turned towards the town centre and slowed in the knot of traffic on North Market Street, which was just opening up for the day, he wondered if everyone suffered from jealousy as much as he did. It had always been that way for him; jealousy had wrecked his relationship with the first girl he had ever slept with.

  Her name was Kay Summerville, and she lived on the same Peterborough estate as he did. For weeks he had lusted after her as he watched her walk by in her jeans and yellow jacket, long blonde hair trailing halfway down her back. She seemed unobtainable, ethereal, like most of the women he lusted after, but he was surprised when one day, walking back from the newsagent’s over the road with her, he plucked up the courage to ask her out, and she said yes.

  Everything went well until Kay left school and got an office job in town. She made new friends, started going for drinks with the crowd regularly after work on a Friday. Banks was still at school, having stayed on for his A levels, and a schoolboy had far less appeal than these slightly older, better dressed, more sophisticated men of the world at the office. They had more money to flash around and, even more important, some of them had cars. Kay insisted there was no hanky-panky going on, but Banks became tortured with jealousy, wracked by imagined infidelities, and in the end, Kay walked away. She couldn’t stand his constant harping on who she was seeing and what she was doing, she said, and the way he got stroppy if she ever so much as looked at another man.

  Shortly after, Banks moved to London and went to college there. A year or two and several casual relationships later, he met Sandra. After a rocky few months at the start, when he realized he wanted her so much he couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else being with her, he saw that if he played his cards right, nobody else but him was going to be, and for the next twenty years or so he had very few problems with jealousy. Then she left him and Sean came on the scene, or vice versa. Now this with Annie. He was beginning to feel like a sex-obsessed, acne-plagued teenager again, and he didn’t like it at all.

  Though he couldn’t play it, Banks had Brian’s CD on the passenger seat beside him, feeling pride every time he managed to break off his miserable thoughts and look down to see his son’s face on the cover. The marriage might have ended badly, but at least it had produced Brian and Tracy, Banks told himself, and the world was a better place for having them in it. He picked up the CD and dashed through the rain with it into the station. Once in his office, he set it on his desk, hoping that anyone who dropped by would ask about it.

  Because Tuesday had been a day of paperwork, phonework and legwork, Banks was expecting that some of it would pay off today. Teams of uniformed and plain-clothes officers had been sent out with photos of Gregory Manners, Andrew Handley, Jamie Gilbert and Barry Clough. If any of those four had been up to no good in the Eastvale area over the past month or so, then someone would recognize them. Also, as he had looked at the cover of the Jimson Weed CD and thought about some of the things he had discovered lately, a number of disparate strands had started to come together, and he made an appointment to have lunch at half past one in the Queen’s Arms with Granville Baird, of North Yorkshire Trading Standards.

  Annie was surprised to find herself feeling so good on Wednesday morning, the best she’d felt in a long time. She had awakened after a long, deep and dreamless sleep feeling that old calm, had done her meditation and yoga and seemed to be getting back in the groove. Agitated voices still muttered in the distance of her mind and talons raked at the raw edges of her emotions, but even so, she felt much better. All would be well.

  She wondered if it was anything to do with Dalton having gone back to Newcastle, and decided that was only partly it. Certainly it was a blessing not to have him around the place, constantly reminding her, whether he intended to or not, of that terrible night two years ago. In a way, though, she had exorcized all that by confronting him by the swing bridge. Anyway, she didn’t intend to dwell on why she was feeling so good. One thing she had learned from her meditation was that sometimes it’s best to let go, simply to accept the feelings you have and ride with them.

  Banks had been cool and distant towards her since their blow-up on Monday afternoon, and, while a little warmth wouldn’t go amiss, that suited her perfectly well at the moment, because all she wanted to do was get on with the job.

  And early that Wednesday afternoon, she was doing exactly that, heading for Scarlea House. The manager there had said he recognized Barry Clough’s photograph when one of the DCs turned up on the doorstep showing it around.

  It was a dull afternoon, and Annie needed to turn her headlights on. The heavy grey cloud was so low it seemed to rest on top of Fremlington Hill, a high limestone scar which curved like bared teeth around the junction of Swainsdale and the smaller Arkbeckdale, which ran north-west.

  She drove through sleepy Lyndgarth, with its village green, its chapel, church and three pubs. Smoke drifted from the chimneys and lost itself in the clouds like her thoughts when she meditated. She passed through the remote hamlet of Longbridge, a name most found funny as it had the smallest, shortest bridge in the Dale. She remembered it was supposed to be famous because someone drove over it in the opening credits of a television programme, but that had been before her time up north. Not a soul stirred; the hamlet looked deserted, its shop closed, rough stone cottages shut up. Only a glimmer of light from the pub showed that anyone lived there at all. It was an eerie feeling, especially in the half-light. Annie felt that if she got out of her car and walked around she would find everything in order – meals on the table, today’s newspapers lying open, kettles boiling on the cookers – and nobody there, like on the Marie Celeste.

  Scarlea House loomed ahead, a huge, dark Gothic limestone pile. None of the windows seemed to have any curtains. It stood on a slight rise at the end of a broad gravel drive, and in the weak light, against the backdrop of the rising, dull-green daleside, it looked like a vampire’s castle from an old horror film. All that was needed to complete the effect was a few flickers of lightning and the distant rumble of thunder. But when Annie pulled up outside and turned off her engine, everything was silent apart from the occasional bird call and the burbling of the River Arkbeck on its way to join the Swain along the valley bottom.

  Christ, Annie, she thought, you’re about to enter one of the most upmarket shooting lodges in the Dales and just look at you; you’re a mess. She hadn’t dressed for upmarket when she climbed into her jeans and flung on a red roll-neck jumper that morning. Even less so when she picked up her denim jacket on her way out. They’ll just have to take me as they find me, she told herself, opening the heavy front door and walking over to the reception area.

  The ceiling in the hall was taller than her entire cottage, and, if it wasn’t quite the Sistine Chapel, it was certainly ornate, complete with gilded panels and a chandelier. The walls were all dark wood wainscoting, and here and there hung overlarge oil paintings of men with bulbous noses wearing their collars too tight, faces the colour and texture of rare roast beef, like Jim Hatchley’s – the kind of paintings that her father called ‘optical egotism’. They paid the rent, though. If a local artist got one of those self-styled bigwigs to commission such a portrait, it would probably keep him in paint and canvas for a few years. Even her father knew the value of that.

  ‘Can I help you, miss?’


  An elegant silver-haired man in a black suit came forward to greet her. Annie’s first impression was that he looked like an undertaker.

  ‘Actually,’ she said, feeling a bit snotty and more than a trifle intimidated by her surroundings, ‘it’s not miss, it’s Detective Sergeant Cabbot.’

  ‘Ah, yes, Sergeant, we’ve been expecting you. My name’s Lacey. George Lacey. General Manager. Please, come this way.’

  He gestured towards a door with his name on it, and, when they went inside, Annie saw it was a modern office, complete with fax machine, computer, laser printer, the works. She would never have expected it from the old-fashioned décor, but the paying guests would be well-off businessmen, and they would demand all the modern conveniences of the electronic age as well as the primitive excitement of blood lust. And why not? They could afford it all.

  Annie sat in a swivel chair and took out her notebook. ‘I don’t know if I can tell you any more than I told the other officer,’ Lacey said, making a steeple of his hands on the desk. He had prissy sort of lips, Annie noticed, shaped in a cupid’s bow and far too red. They irritated her when he talked. She tried to keep her eyes on the knot of his regimental tie.

  ‘I’m just here to confirm that it really was the man in the photograph who stayed here.’ She laid her copy of Clough’s photo on the desk in front of him. ‘This man.’

  Lacey nodded. ‘Mr Clough. Yes. That was, indeed, him.’

  ‘Has he been here before?’

  ‘Mr Clough is a frequent guest during the season.’

  ‘Can you tell me the dates he was here?’

  ‘Just a moment.’ Lacey tapped a few keys on the computer and frowned at the screen. ‘He stayed here from Saturday, the fifth of December, until Thursday the tenth.’

  ‘It’s a bit late in the year for a holiday in the Dales, isn’t it?’

  ‘This is a shooting lodge, Sergeant. People do not come here for holidays. They come here to shoot grouse. This was the last weekend of the season and we were full to capacity.’