Cold is the Grave

by Peter Robinson

  Rosalind gave him a sharp look. ‘You? Don’t be silly. Jerry was a very determined man. If he wanted to kill himself, he’d damn well do it, one way or another. There was nothing you could have done except perhaps postpone the inevitable.’

  ‘Even so . . . I keep thinking if only I hadn’t put off the visit. If only I hadn’t . . . I don’t know.’

  ‘Disliked him so much?’

  Banks looked away. ‘I suppose that’s part of it.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Jerry wasn’t a very likeable man. Even death won’t change that. There’s no sense in your feeling guilty.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about what might have caused him to do it,’ Banks said after a short pause. ‘I know you said he was depressed over Emily’s death and all the fallout that engendered, but somehow, even all that just didn’t seem enough in itself.’

  ‘He was upset about those lies in the newspaper.’

  Banks paused. He knew he shouldn’t be telling Rosalind about her husband’s problems with Barry Clough, but he felt she deserved something from him; he also thought it might put Riddle’s death in perspective for her a little more clearly. Call it guilt talking. He took a deep breath, then said, ‘I was out at a place called Scarlea House yesterday afternoon. Ever heard of it?’

  ‘I’ve heard of it, yes. It’s an upmarket shooting lodge, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. According to the barman, your husband had dinner with Barry Clough there the Sunday before last.’

  Rosalind paled. ‘Barry Clough?’

  ‘Yes. The man Emily lived with for a while in London.’

  ‘I remember the name. And you’re telling me that Jerry had dinner with him?’

  ‘Yes. Are you sure you didn’t know?’

  ‘No. Jerry never said anything to me about it. I knew he was out for dinner that night, yes, but I thought it was just one of his political things. I stopped asking him where he went a long time ago. How would a newspaper find out about that anyway, even if it is true?’

  ‘They didn’t have to know about that specific meeting,’ said Banks. ‘Remember, the article never made any direct assertions; it was all innuendo. It’s even possible that someone on the staff at Scarlea House – one of the waiters, perhaps – talked to a reporter but refused to be quoted as a source. I don’t know. These journalists have their tricks of the trade. The point is that it happened. Did you have any idea at all that your husband had talked to or met Clough?’

  ‘No. Absolutely none.’

  Banks believed her. For one thing, Riddle wasn’t stupid enough to tell his wife he was having dinner with the man suspected of murdering their daughter. ‘Your husband told me that Clough was trying to blackmail him. Using Emily.’

  ‘But Jerry would never agree to anything like that.’

  ‘I think that was his dilemma. That was what tore him apart. Certainly Emily’s murder hurt him deeply, but this was what finally pushed him over the edge. There he was, a man of honour, who has to decide whether he wants to fall into the hands of a gangster or have his daughter and, by extension, his entire family, vilified in public.’

  ‘Are you saying that he didn’t know whether he would have done what Clough asked or not, and he couldn’t face making the decision?’

  ‘Possibly. But going by the tabloid article, it looks as if he had already turned Clough down, or that Clough had lost patience waiting.’

  ‘If Clough was behind it.’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Rosalind leaned forward. ‘But, if all you’re saying is true, it doesn’t make sense . . .’

  ‘For Clough to kill Emily?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s true. That’s what your husband said, too, when I asked him about it. Clough had nothing to gain. I still think he’s a strong candidate, but I must admit the whole thing’s been puzzling me a lot.’

  ‘Who, then?’

  ‘I don’t know. I feel as far away from a solution as I ever have.’

  ‘What will you do about Clough?’

  ‘Keep at him. There are other things we want to talk to him about, too. I’ve got to tell you, though, that I’m not at all hopeful about convicting Clough of anything, no matter what he’s done.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘A man like him? If he can blackmail a chief constable, imagine what else he’s got going, who he might have in his pocket. Besides, he never does anything himself. He delegates, keeps his hands clean. Even if, for some reason we haven’t considered, he was responsible for Emily’s murder, he’d have got one of his minions like Andrew Handley or Jamie Gilbert to do the dirty work. And he’s rich. That means he’ll be able to afford the best defence.’

  ‘Sometimes I wish I was in criminal law,’ Rosalind said, her eyes burning. ‘I’d love to take on his prosecution.’

  Banks smiled. ‘First we’d have to persuade the CPS it was worth pursuing, and that’s a Herculean effort in itself. In the meantime, we’ve still got a murderer to catch.’

  Rosalind sipped some wine. At least she didn’t pull a face and spit it out. ‘You’ve probably deduced this already,’ she said, ‘but our marriage was very much a matter of convenience. He gave me the things I wanted and I didn’t embarrass him in public. I like to think I might even have helped him advance. Other than that, we went our separate ways.’

  ‘Affairs?’

  ‘Jerry? I don’t think so. For one thing, he didn’t have the time. He was married to his work and his political ambitions.’ She looked Banks straight in the eye. ‘Me? A few. Nothing important. All discreet. None recently.’

  They sat quietly for a few seconds. A gust of wind rattled the loose window upstairs. ‘You said you wanted to talk to me?’ Banks said.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing to do with the murder. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to mislead you in any way. It’s just that, well, you think I’ve been holding something back, not telling you everything.’

  Banks nodded. ‘Yes. I do think that. I have done from the start.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘And now you’re going to tell me?’

  ‘No reason not to, now. But first, do you think I might have another glass of wine?’

  That evening at home, Annie reheated some vegetable curry and sat in front of the television, hoping the flickering images would take her mind off her problem. No such luck. There seemed to be nothing on but nature programmes, current events or sports, and nothing she watched had the power to absorb or distract her at all. She flipped through her meagre collection and briefly entertained the idea of watching a comfort video, Doctor Zhivago or The Wizard of Oz, but she even felt too agitated to concentrate on a movie.

  Damn Banks, she thought as she washed out her bowl. How could he do this to her? Maybe she had let things cool between them romantically, but that gave him no right to treat her like some probationary DC who couldn’t be trusted with the full story. She knew that he hadn’t been technically wrong in any way, but he had been dishonest and cowardly. As SIO, Banks was quite entitled to follow up a lead and decide whether it required action or not. Obviously, in the case of his night with Emily Riddle, he knew exactly what had occurred, so he knew that no further action was needed.

  He must also have known that he was hiding the truth from Annie, though, or he would have told her about that night when he came clean about going to London to find Emily and having lunch with her the day she died. Annie remembered asking him then if that was all he had to tell, and he had said yes. That made him a liar.

  So what to do about it? That was the question she agonized over. The way she saw it, she had two choices. She could, of course, simply do nothing, just put in for a transfer and leave the whole mess behind. That had its appeal, certainly, but it left too much up in the air. She had hidden from unpleasant things and turned her back for far too long. Now that her career had actually come to mean something to her again after the years of apathetic exile in Harkside, where she had conned herself into thinking everythi
ng was well with the world, Annie wanted to set things on the right track. And just how would an abrupt transfer look, with her inspector’s boards coming up so soon?

  On the other hand, she could confront Banks and find out what he had to say for himself. Maybe she should give him the benefit of the doubt, innocent until proven guilty and all that. After all, it wasn’t as if she didn’t still have feelings for the bastard.

  But she already knew he wasn’t innocent, that it was simply a matter of what he was guilty of. How much might a run-in with Banks upset her chances of making inspector? She didn’t think he was vindictive, didn’t think he would deliberately stand in her way, but everything has fallout, especially given the history Banks and Annie had between them.

  Giving up on the television, Annie did what she usually did when she felt agitated; she flung on her fleece-lined jacket and went for a drive. It didn’t matter where.

  It had turned into a cold night, and she had the heater going full blast. Even so, the car took a while to warm up. The mist was crystallizing on the bare trees, sparkling as her headlights flicked across branches and twigs on her way out of Harkside. Ice-crusted puddles crackled under her wheels.

  She crossed the narrow bridge over the River Rowan between the Harksmere and Linwood reservoirs. Harksmere stretched, cold and dark, to the west, and beyond it lay Thornfield Reservoir, where the remains of Hobb’s End had once more been covered with water. That was where she had first met Banks, she remembered, towards the end of the hottest, driest summer in years. He had come scrambling down the steep rim looking like a sightseer, and she had stopped him at the bridge. She had been wearing her red wellies and must have looked a sight.

  He still didn’t know this, but Annie had known who he was the minute she saw him – she had been expecting him – but she wanted a little fun first, so she had challenged him on the pack-horse bridge. She had liked his manner. He hadn’t been stuffy or officious with her; he had simply made some reference to Robin Hood and Little John. After that, Annie had to admit that she hadn’t resisted him very hard.

  And now he was her senior officer, and he had been keeping things from her.

  Past the old airbase, Annie took the left fork and headed for the open moorland that stretched for miles on the tops between there and Swainsdale. Up on the unfenced road, the full moon came out from behind the thinning cloud cover, and she could see that the ground all around her was white with rime. It had an eerie beauty that suited her mood well. She could drive for hours through this lunar landscape and her mind would empty of all her problems. She would become nothing but the driver floating through space; the wheel, the car merely extensions of her being, as if she were travelling the astral plane.

  Except that Annie now knew where she was going, knew that the road she was on was the one that led over the moors and down through the village of Gratly, where Banks lived.

  And she knew that when she got to his drive she would turn into it.

  Banks refilled the wineglasses and sat down again. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  Rosalind smiled. ‘You might find this hard to believe,’ she began, ‘but I haven’t always been the dull, decent wife of the dull, decent chief constable.’

  Banks was startled by her smile. It had so much of Emily in it, that hint of mischief, of just watch me. ‘That sounds like the beginning of a story,’ he said.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘I’m all ears.’

  ‘First, we have to go back a while. My father was a vicar; he’s retired now, of course. I grew up in a small village in Kent, an only child, and my childhood was relatively uneventful. I don’t mean that it was bad in any way. I did all the normal things kids do. I was happy. It was just unexceptional, dull, even. Like the way Philip Larkin described his in that poem. Then, in the mid-seventies, when I was sixteen, we moved to a parish in Ealing, London. Oh, it was a very nice area – none of that inner-city stuff – and the parishioners were for the most part law-abiding, reasonably affluent citizens.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But it was near the tube. You can’t imagine what wonderful new worlds that opened up to an impressionable sixteen-year-old.’

  Banks thought he could. When he moved from Peterborough to Notting Hill at the age of eighteen, his life had changed in many ways. He had met Jem across the hall from his bedsit, for a start, and had lurked at the fringes of the sixties scene – which stretched well into the early seventies – enjoying the music more than the drugs. There was an excitement and vibrancy about the capital that was missing from Peterborough, and would certainly have been missing from a vicarage in Kent.

  ‘Let me guess: the vicar’s daughter went a little wild?’

  ‘I was born in 1959. It was November 1975 when we moved to Ealing. While everyone else was listening to Queen, Abba and Hot Chocolate, my friends and I were taking the tube into town to listen to the Sex Pistols. This was right at the start, before anyone really knew anything about them. They’d just played their first gig the day after Bonfire Night at St Martin’s College of Art, and one of the girls at my new school was there. She couldn’t talk about anything else for weeks. Next time they played, she took me with her. It was fantastic.’

  Punk. Banks remembered those days. He was older than Rosalind, though, and identified more closely with sixties music than that of the seventies. When he had lived in London his favourites had been Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and the various local blues bands that seemed to form and split up with amazing regularity. Still, he had responded to the angry energy of some punk music – especially the Clash, by far the best of the bunch in his opinion – but not enough to buy any of their records. Also, as he had been a probationary police constable back then, he had experienced the violence of punk first hand, from the other side, and that, too, had put him off.

  ‘Pretty soon,’ Rosalind went on, becoming more animated as she relived her memories, ‘it was in full swing. The look. The music. The attitude. Everything. My parents didn’t know me any more. We saw the Clash, the Damned, the Stranglers, the Jam. You name them. Mostly in small clubs. We pogoed, we hurled ourselves into one another, and we spat at each other. We dyed our hair weird colours. We wore torn clothes, safety pins in our ears and . . .’ She paused and pulled up the sleeve of her sweater. Banks could see a number of more or less round white marks, like old scars. ‘We stubbed cigarettes out on ourselves.’

  Banks raised an eyebrow. ‘How on earth did you explain all that to your husband?’

  ‘He was never that curious. I just told him it was an old burn scar.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘You can’t imagine how exhilarating it was after that stuffy boring childhood in a village in Kent. We went wild. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I was just seventeen, and I got pregnant. It doesn’t matter who the father was; his name was Mal, and he was long gone before I even knew myself. It happened in someone’s poky bedsit after the Pistols did one of their gigs at the 100 Club, the summer of 1976. This is what I could never tell Jerry. He was a terrible prude, as if you didn’t know. I don’t know if he actually believed I was a virgin when we married, but I’m certain he was. If he’d ever found out, well . . . who can say? I kept it from him.’

  Banks remembered the 100 Club well. On Oxford Street, it had been part of his patch, and he had been inside the cavernous cellar more than once trying to stop fights and get rid of unruly customers. It turned into a jazz club some years later, he remembered. ‘I can understand why you might not have wanted him to know,’ he said. ‘Even in this day and age, some people are funny about that sort of thing, and it doesn’t surprise me that Jimmy – I mean the chief constable – was. But why is that important now?’

  ‘He knew you all called him Jimmy Riddle, you know.’

  ‘He did? He never said anything.’

  ‘He didn’t care. Something like that, it didn’t bother him, wasn’t even of passing interest to him. He was strangely impervious to criticism or having the piss taken. He really didn’
t have much of a sense of humour, you know. Anyway, I haven’t told you the full story yet. You’ll see why it’s important.’ She moved forward in her chair and clasped her hands on her knees. When she spoke, she almost whispered, as if she thought someone were eavesdropping on them. ‘My first thought was to have an abortion, but . . . I don’t know . . . I didn’t really know how to go about it, if you can believe that. A fully fledged punk, pregnant, but I was still a naïve country girl in a lot of ways. Then there was my religious background. When it came down to it, I hadn’t the nerve to face it all by myself, and the boy, well, as I said, he was long gone. My father’s a good man. He had been preaching grace, mercy and Christian charity all his life.’

  ‘So you went to your parents?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They took it well, considering. They were upset, naturally, but they were good to me. They persuaded me to have the baby, of course, as I knew they would. Father doesn’t believe in abortion. It’s not only Catholics who don’t, you know. Anyway, we did it the way they used to do it years ago. A spell with Aunt So-and-So in Tiverton for the last few months, when it started to show, a quick adoption, and it was as if nothing had ever happened. In the meantime, if I happened to get cured of punk, so much the better.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Get cured of punk?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘By the time I’d had my baby I was about to sit my A levels. It was 1977. I don’t know if you remember, but punk had become very popular and the big bands were being signed up by major labels. The whole scene had got very commercial. Now it seemed that everybody was talking about it, adopting the look. Somehow, it just wasn’t the same. They weren’t ours any more. Besides, I was older and wiser. I was a mother, even if I wasn’t a practising one. Yes, I was cured. I spent the summer at home, and in October I went to the University of Bath to study English Literature, became an intellectual snob and switched to new wave, which I’d always secretly preferred, anyway. Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, Roxy Music, Television, Patti Smith. Art-school music. I did one year of English, then changed to law.’