Cold is the Grave

by Peter Robinson

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said that he knew Emily in London – as Louisa Gamine, of course – that they had lived together for two or three months and that he had compromising photographs and all sorts of interesting stories he could give to the newspapers about her, things that would spoil my chances of election, should I ever get that far, and things that would even call into doubt my fitness to stay on as chief constable, should I not. He made a few obscene comments about her, and he also indicated that he could probably persuade her to go back with him any time he wanted. He seemed to believe that all he would have to do was whistle.’

  ‘What did you say to him?’

  ‘I told him to sod off. What do you think?’

  ‘What did he say to that?’

  ‘He said he could perfectly understand my reaction and that he’d give me a couple of weeks to think it over, then get in touch again.’

  ‘Is that when you got up and walked away?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you hear anything else from him after that?’

  ‘No. It’s only been a week and a half.’

  ‘No threats or anything?’

  ‘Nothing. And I don’t expect to.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, he’s hardly going to draw attention to himself by making good on his blackmail threat to me now, is he? Not after the murder.’

  ‘You don’t think the murder was a sort of warning for you, a signal?’

  ‘Don’t be absurd. Things were delicately balanced. Clough had everything to lose by harming Emily and everything to gain by keeping her alive. He’s not a stupid man, Banks. What do you imagine he’d guess my reaction to be if I thought for a moment that he’d murdered my daughter? It just doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that.’ Banks really wanted a cigarette, but he knew he couldn’t have one, not in Riddle’s house. ‘You must have known we’d find out sooner or later,’ he said. ‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘It was a calculated risk. Why should I tell you? It was my personal business. My problem. It’s up to me to deal with it.’

  ‘This wasn’t a personal problem. It stopped being that the minute someone murdered Emily, for Christ’s sake. Maybe Clough. You were withholding evidence.’

  ‘What evidence?’

  ‘That he was in the area around the time of her death, for a start. He could have easily given her the drugs.’

  ‘I’ve tried not to interfere with the investigation in any way. I would like to have steered you away from Clough as a suspect, but I obviously couldn’t do that without raising suspicion.’ Riddle leaned forward and rested his hands on his knees. ‘Think about it for a minute, Banks, before you go off half-cocked on this. What possible reason could Clough have for wanting to kill Emily when she represented his hold over me?’

  ‘She didn’t need to be alive for him to make good on his threat.’

  ‘But it wasn’t just the threat of revelations he made, remember. He also said he could take her back with him whenever he wanted. He knew I wouldn’t be able to bear the thought of her being with him. You should have told me, Banks. When you brought her back. You should have told us the sort of trouble she’d been getting herself into. You blame me for withholding evidence, but neither of you said a word about what Emily had been up to in London.’

  Banks sighed. ‘What good would it have done?’ Though maybe he should have, he thought miserably. He had believed that in keeping quiet he was saving the Riddles from unnecessary pain, and saving Emily perhaps from their disciplinarian backlash. But look what had happened. Emily was dead and Jimmy Riddle was in deep trouble himself. Trouble from which he might never fully recover. Banks remembered what Emily had told him about Riddle being a poor detective, always coming up with the wrong killer in the crime novels he read as an adolescent. He could believe it. ‘It’s no use blaming me,’ he went on. ‘Believe me, there are times I wish I’d done things differently. But you. You’re a professional copper. You’re a bloody chief constable, for crying out loud. I can’t believe you’d be so stupid and stubborn and proud not to tell me that a man I’ve been seriously suspecting as your daughter’s killer actually approached you as a blackmail target only four days before she was murdered.’

  Riddle’s expression hardened. ‘I told you. It was a private matter. It has nothing to do with Emily’s death. He had no motive for killing her. Don’t you think that if I really believed Clough had killed Emily I’d have throttled him with my bare hands by now? You might not understand this, Banks, but I loved my daughter.’

  ‘Who can really know with someone like Clough?’ Banks argued. ‘Perhaps from a business standpoint he would be better off with Emily alive, but he’s also a violent man, from what I’ve heard, and a possessive one. He doesn’t like people walking out on him. Maybe that’s why he killed her. Besides, I don’t believe she would have gone back to him that easily. She was frightened of him.’

  ‘Well, that might be one good reason for going back to him, mightn’t it? Men like him might have a certain fascination for girls like . . . like Emily.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Precocious, mischievous, rebellious. She’s always been like that. You know that she and I didn’t get on, no matter how much I cared about her. It always came out wrong. And Clough. He’s about my age, but he’s a criminal. Policeman – criminal. Don’t you see that she was doing this to hurt me?’

  ‘If she’d wanted to hurt you, she’d have made sure you knew about it.’

  Riddle just shook his head.

  ‘Did Clough say anything about his business interests at this dinner?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he mention PKF Computer Systems?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Charlie Courage? Gregory Manners? Jamie Gilbert?’

  ‘No. I’ve told you what he said. Don’t you think that if he’d told me anything incriminating I would have passed it along to you?’

  ‘After what I’ve just heard, I don’t know about that.’

  ‘There was nothing, Banks. Just his not-so-subtle blackmail hints.’

  ‘But he was here, in the Eastvale area, when both Charlie Courage and your daughter were killed. Doesn’t that make you stop and think?’

  ‘The first thing it makes me think is that he can’t have been responsible for the murders. He’s not so stupid as to be on the doorstep when they went down.’

  ‘Stop defending him. For crying out loud, anyone would think you had . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘What are you going to do about it?’

  Banks shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Whatever it is, please have the decency to wait until after the funeral, would you?’

  Banks said he would, but his mind was elsewhere, with what he had left unsaid. He could think of only one good reason why Riddle would be so unprofessional as to conceal the details about his secret meeting with Clough: that he was at least considering capitulating to Clough’s request. Which brought Banks to consider an even greater problem. With Emily’s death, clearly a large part of Clough’s hold over Riddle had been extinguished. If Clough hadn’t killed her, then who did want Emily Riddle dead, and why?

  14

  A lot of people, Banks mused, thought that the police attended the funerals of murder victims in the hope of finding the killer there. They didn’t. That only happened in books and on television. On the other hand, given that a victim’s close relatives were likely to be at the funeral, and given that by far the largest percentage of murders were committed by close family members, then the odds were pretty good that the murderer would be at the funeral.

  Not this one, though. Barry Clough wasn’t there, for a start, and he was the closest they had to a suspect so far, even though Riddle was probably right about Emily being of far more value to him alive. Was Banks wearing blinkers when it came to Clough, or was he going off h
alf-cocked, as Gristhorpe and Riddle had warned him against doing? He didn’t think so. He knew it didn’t make sense for Clough to kill Emily just after he had used her to attempt to blackmail her father, but he was sure there must be something he was missing, some angle he hadn’t considered yet. The only thing he had thought of, but didn’t really believe in, was that Clough was some sort of psychopath and simply hadn’t been able to stop himself. If that had been the case, he would have made damn sure he was there to watch and participate in Emily’s murder.

  Craig Newton and Ruth Walker had travelled up together; they stood looking puzzled and miserable in the rain as the vicar intoned the Twenty-third Psalm. Banks caught their eyes; Craig gave him a curt nod and Ruth gave him a dirty look.

  ‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.’ There was nothing green about the Dales pastures that morning; everything, from sky to houses to the unevenly shaped fields and drystone walls, was a dull slate-grey or mud-brown. Nor was there anything still about the River Swain, which tumbled over a series of small waterfalls beside the graveyard and, along with the wind screaming through the gaps in the drystone wall like a Stockhausen composition, almost drowned out the vicar’s words. The wind also drove the rain hard across the churchyard, and the mourners seemed to draw as deeply into their heavy overcoats, gloves and hats as they could.

  At least the vicar was using the old version, Banks noticed. ‘The Lord is my shepherd; therefore can I lack nothing’ had about as much resonance as ‘as in a mirror, dimly’, he thought. Not that he went to Church very often, but like many people, he remembered the powerful church language of his youth and anything less fell far short. He hadn’t known what half of it meant, either then or now, but it never seemed to matter; religion, he thought, was mostly a matter of mumbo-jumbo, anyway. Chants, mantras, whatever. Comforting mumbo-jumbo, in this case, though nobody was fooled. Rosalind Riddle dabbed at her eyes with a white hanky every now and then, Benjamin stood next to her looking confused, and her husband looked as if he had been up all night staring the Grim Reaper himself in the face.

  When Riddle caught Banks’s eye briefly on the way out to the graveside, he looked away guiltily. And well he might, thought Banks, who still felt a residue of anger towards him for stalling the investigation. He had realized after his interview with Riddle the previous day, though, that he had also been guilty of hiding too many things; he hadn’t told Annie about the lunch with Emily at first, and he still hadn’t told her about the night in the hotel room. With any luck now, she wouldn’t find out about that. Of course, he could rationalize his own shortcomings a lot more easily than he could Riddle’s, but he could at least understand why Riddle might not like to admit to him that he had kept a dinner engagement with his daughter’s lover, a man who also happened to have a criminal reputation. Would Riddle have capitulated with whatever Clough wanted from him in order to protect himself and Emily? What kind of man was he when it came to the crunch? He would never have the chance to find out now. Virtue can’t prove itself until it’s tested.

  ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .’ The valley of the shadow of death was a phrase that had always moved Banks, sent a shiver up his spine, though he would have been hard-pressed to explain what it meant to him. It was one phrase they hadn’t got rid of in the new translation, too. He thought of poor Graham Marshall all those years ago, walking through the valley of the shadow of death. They had never found his body, so he never had a funeral like Emily. There had been some sort of memorial service at school, Banks remembered, or a remembrance service, he wasn’t sure which. The headmaster had recited the Twenty-third Psalm. So much death. Sometimes his head seemed full of the voices of the dead and he felt he had so much blood on his hands.

  Banks found himself wishing the funeral would soon be over. It wasn’t only the weather, the rain dripping down the back of his neck and the wet, cold wind that cut right through three layers of clothing to the bone, but the sight of the coffin perched at the graveside ready to be lowered, knowing that Emily was in there, the once vital, mischievous spirit who had once curled up and slept like a little child with her thumb in her mouth in a hotel room, with him sitting in the chair listening to Dawn Upshaw’s song about sleep. Cold, cold is the grave, line from an old folk ballad, passed through his mind. The grave looked cold indeed, but the only one not feeling it now was Emily.

  When it was over, the body lowered into its final resting place, people started drifting towards the car park. Ruth and Craig approached the Riddles. The chief constable seemed oblivious to them, and Craig hung back. Ruth said something to Rosalind, something that looked deeply earnest. Rosalind uttered a few words and touched her arm. Then Rosalind saw Banks alone and walked over to him with an elderly couple in tow.

  ‘My mother and father,’ she said, introducing them.

  Banks shook their hands and offered his condolences.

  ‘Are you coming to the house?’ Rosalind asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I can’t. Too much work.’ He could probably have spared half an hour or so, but the truth was that he didn’t fancy making small talk with the Riddle family. ‘What did Ruth want?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, so that’s who it is,’ said Rosalind. ‘I wondered. She said she was a friend of Emily’s and wondered if she might have some sort of keepsake.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I suggested she drop by the house and I’d see what I could do. Why?’

  ‘No reason. The boy with her’s Craig Newton. Emily’s ex-boyfriend.’

  ‘Is he a suspect?’

  ‘Technically, yes. He pestered her after they split up, and he doesn’t have an alibi.’

  ‘But realistically?’

  Banks shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  Rosalind glanced over at the two of them. ‘Then I suppose I should invite them both back to the house, shouldn’t I?’

  ‘They’ve come a long way.’

  ‘How did they know it was today?’

  ‘I phoned Craig last night. The last time I interviewed him he said he’d like to be there, and I could see no reason why not. He must have contacted Ruth.’

  Rosalind shook Banks’s hand and walked over with her mother and father towards Ruth’s car. Banks also saw Darren Hirst and the others who had been in the Bar None with Emily on the night of her death, Tina and Jackie. They all looked shell-shocked. Darren nodded and walked by. That reminded Banks of a glimmer of an idea he’d had, something he wanted to ask Darren. Not now, though; it would keep. Leave the poor lad to his grief for a while.

  Back at the office, before Banks could even get his overcoat off and sit down, DS Hatchley knocked on his door and entered.

  ‘How’s it going, Jim?’ Banks asked.

  ‘Fine. The funeral?’

  ‘What you’d expect.’

  Hatchley shut the door behind him and sat down. He was the opposite of Annie when it came to looking comfortable, always perched at the edge of the chair, squirming as if something sharp were digging into his arse. He took his cigarettes out and glanced at Banks for permission. Banks got up and opened the window, despite the cold, and both of them lit up.

  ‘It’s about Castle Hill Books,’ said Hatchley. ‘I sent young Lose Some out there yesterday afternoon and she came back with an interesting haul.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘The owner’s a slimy little sod called Stan Fish. He’s been selling porn on the side for years. Anyway, it turns out he’s got a whole cupboardful of pirated computer software, games and music CDs. He says he got them from a chap he knows only as Greg. This Greg comes around every couple of weeks in a white van with a selection. So Lose Some whips out her picture of Gregory Manners, and Bob’s your uncle.’

  ‘Good,’ said Banks. ‘That’ll give us a bit of extra ammunition.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Manners is on his way here as we speak.’

 
‘Lose Some also brought in a few samples of the goods,’ Hatchley went on. ‘Vic Manson’s checking them for prints now. I’ll get him to put a rush on it. If he can match them with Manners’s . . .’

  ‘It still doesn’t give us much, though,’ said Banks. ‘Even if we can do Manners for pirating and distributing copyrighted software, it’s hardly a serious charge.’

  ‘It might give you a handle on this other villain you’re after, though.’

  ‘Barry Clough?’

  ‘Aye.’ Hatchley stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Yon Lose Some has also been showing Manners’s picture around Daleview and a couple of people recognized him.’

  ‘Nobody’s seen Clough, Andy Pandy or Jamie Gilbert around there, though?’

  ‘Not yet, but we’re still asking.’ Hatchley got up to leave. Before he could go, the door opened and Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe barged in brandishing one of the more notorious London tabloids. Gristhorpe sniffed the air, scowled at both of them, then said, ‘Seen the papers this morning, Alan?’

  Banks looked at the newspaper. ‘Even if I’d had time,’ he said, ‘it wouldn’t have been that one.’

  A smile split Gristhorpe’s ruddy, pockmarked face. ‘Wouldn’t be my first choice either,’ he said. ‘More the sort of thing you’d be reading, eh, Sergeant Hatchley?’

  ‘If I’d time, sir,’ muttered Hatchley, edging his way out of the office, winking at Banks as he shut the door behind him.

  Gristhorpe dropped the tabloid on Banks’s desk. ‘You’d better have a gander, Alan,’ he said. ‘It looks as if I’m going to be on damage control for the rest of the day.’ Then he left as abruptly as he’d entered.

  The front-page colour photo in itself was almost enough to give Banks a heart attack. There were two photos, actually: one of Barry Clough leaving a Soho restaurant, thrusting his palm towards the cameraman, and one of Jimmy Riddle leaving police headquarters. The way the photos were arranged together made it look as if the two men were meeting face to face. Centred below them was a photograph of Emily. It was a good one, professional, and it featured her ‘sophisticated’ heroin-chic look. She had her blonde hair piled up in an expensive mess and wore a strapless black evening gown. Not the same dress she’d been wearing the night of the hotel room, but a similar one. Banks had seen the picture before, or one very much like it, in Craig Newton’s house. Could Craig have sold it to the newspapers? Was he still that bitter over his split-up with Emily? More likely, Banks thought, that Barry Clough had got hold of some copies when Emily was living with him and that this was his response to Emily’s death and Riddle’s silence.