Cold is the Grave

by Peter Robinson

  17

  Annie pulled up in the staff car park of the red-brick fire station in Salford just after eleven thirty the next morning, after more than an hour spent crawling along the M62 and getting lost in the centre of Manchester. A lorry had overturned at one of the junctions near Huddersfield, and traffic was backed up as far as the intersection with the M1. The weather hadn’t helped either. After last night’s heavy frost, the roads were icy despite the brilliant winter sunshine that glinted on windscreens and bonnets.

  The fire station stood on an arterial road near the estate of shabby mock-Georgian semis where Ruth Walker had grown up. Banks had told Annie about Ruth being Rosalind Riddle’s daughter. Ruth had told a lot of lies, he said, and he thought they should find out more about her background, including the fire in which both her parents had been killed eighteen months ago. It had been easy to track down the address via the Salford Fire Brigade, which was Annie’s first port of call. The fire-station chief, George Whitmore, said he would be pleased to talk to her.

  The firemen were sitting around playing cards in a large upper room above the gleaming red engines. The place smelled of sweat, aftershave and oil. They were an odd lot, firemen, Annie had always thought. When everything was going well, they had no job to do at all, just the way the police would have nothing to do if people weren’t committing crimes. Annie had known one of the local lads back in St Ives who had spent his time at work writing Westerns under a pseudonym, selling about one a month to an American publisher. She had also been out with a fireman who ran a carpet-cleaning business on the side, and one of his friends ran an airport taxi service. They all seemed to have three or four jobs on the go. Of course, fires are as inevitable as crime, and when it came to the crunch, nobody would deny the heroism of firemen if the occasion demanded it. And no matter how politically correct you tried to be about it, no matter how much people talked about recruiting more women to the job, whether you called them Combustion Control Engineers or Flame Suppressant Units, the truth about firemen was summed up in what they always had been and always would be as far as Annie was concerned: firemen.

  ‘Mr Whitmore around?’ she asked one of the card players.

  He gave her the once-over, smiled as if he thought she was sexy and pointed with his thumb. ‘Office back there.’

  Annie felt his eyes on her behind as she walked away, heard a whisper, then men’s laughter. She thought of turning and making some comment about how childish they were but decided they weren’t worth the effort.

  George Whitmore turned out to be a pleasant man with cropped grey hair, not far from retirement age by the look of him. He had a framed photo of his family, including grandchildren, on his desk.

  ‘You’re the lass who phoned earlier, are you?’ he said, bidding Annie to sit down.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I should’ve told you; you’ve probably made a long journey for nothing.’

  Annie smiled at him. ‘I don’t mind. It’s nice to get out of the office for a while.’ She took out her notebook. ‘You remember the Walker fire?’

  ‘Yes. I was on the crew back then, before my bad back put me on office duties a year ago.’

  ‘You were at the scene?’

  ‘Yes. It happened, oh, about three or four in the morning, or a bit after. I could look it up if you want the exact time.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter for the moment. Just your impressions will do.’

  He paused and frowned. ‘If you don’t mind me asking, love, why do the police want to know about the Walker fire now, after all this time?’

  ‘It’s just a background check,’ Annie said. ‘Routine.’

  ‘Because there was nothing funny about it.’

  ‘I understand there was no police investigation?’

  ‘Not beyond what’s required by law and the insurance company. No reason for one.’

  ‘What was the cause of the fire?’

  ‘A smouldering cigarette end down the side of the sofa.’

  Another reason smoking’s bad for your health, thought Annie. ‘And you ruled out arson?’

  Whitmore nodded. ‘Early on. There were no signs of forced entry, of anything being disturbed, for a start. There was also no evidence of accelerants being used, and, quite honestly, nobody had any reason to harm the Walkers.’

  ‘You knew them?’

  ‘Only in passing. To say hello to. They were active in chapel. Everyone knew that. I’m not a particularly religious sort myself. Nice, God-fearing couple, though, by all accounts. Nice daughter they had, too. Poor lass barely escaped with her life.’

  ‘That’d be Ruth?’

  ‘Aye. They only had the one.’

  ‘So what happened from the moment the alarm went off?’

  ‘They didn’t have a smoke detector. If they’d had one, it’s likely they wouldn’t have died. A neighbour saw the smoke and flames and phoned us. By the time we got there, most of the neighbours were already out in the street. See, a cigarette can smoulder for hours and generate a lot of heat. When it takes hold, it really goes. The fire had taken hold by then, and it took us a good hour or so to put it out completely. At least we managed to stop it spreading.’

  ‘Where was Ruth at this time?’

  ‘They’d taken her to hospital. She jumped out of her bedroom window in the nick of time. Broke her ankle and dislocated her shoulder.’

  ‘Nasty.’

  ‘The ankle was the worst. Bad fracture, apparently. Took her weeks before she could walk again without crutches or a stick. Anyway, it wasn’t nearly as nasty as what happened to her mum and dad. She was the lucky one. There’d been a shower earlier in the evening, and the ground was soft, or she might have broken more bones.’

  ‘How did her parents die?’

  ‘Smoke inhalation. That’s what the post-mortem showed. Never even had time to get out of bed. Ruth had inhaled some smoke, too, before she jumped, but not enough to do her much harm. A whiff of oxygen and she was right as rain.’

  ‘Why did she have time to escape and her parents didn’t?’

  Whitmore shrugged. ‘Younger, stronger, quicker reflexes. Also, her room was at the front, and the fire was worse farther back. Her parents were probably dead when she jumped.’

  ‘Can you tell me anything else?’

  ‘That’s about it, really, love. Told you you’d probably had a wasted journey.’

  ‘Well, you know what it’s like,’ said Annie. ‘Was the house completely destroyed?’

  ‘Pretty much. Inside, at any rate.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Oh, someone bought it and had it renovated. To look at it now you’d never know such tragedy happened there.’

  Annie stood up. ‘Where is it from here, exactly?’

  ‘Carry on along the main road, go left at the next lights and it’s the second street on the right.’

  ‘Thanks very much.’ Annie left Whitmore’s tiny office and walked back past the card players. This time one of them whistled at her. She smiled to herself. It felt quite nice, actually. Thirty-something and she still got whistled at. She’d have to tell Alan about that.

  Alan. They had talked most of the night while the peat fire blazed in the hearth and soft jazz played in the background. He told her about Rosalind’s visit, about Emily and Ruth, about the guilt he felt on finding Riddle dead in his garage, and she told him about how Dalton’s appearance had knocked her out of kilter, brought back feelings she didn’t know she still harboured, and how she had confronted him on Sunday morning.

  Had it been summer, they would have been up talking until dawn, but because it was December, the only light that shone through the windows at four o’clock in the morning came from a full moon as white as frost. Even then they continued to talk, and the way Annie remembered it, she thought she had probably fallen asleep in mid-sentence.

  It wasn’t until both had slept for about three hours that they made love – tentatively and tenderly – and in the morning they had to scrape t
he ice off their car windows and drive like hell to get to work on time.

  Now, it seemed to Annie as if there were no more secrets, as if nothing stood between them. She still worried about their working together, especially now that she was stationed at Western Divisional HQ, too; and she could never quite get over her fear of commitment, of rejection. But Banks hadn’t asked her for commitment, and if anything, it was she who had rejected him last time, out of fear of his past impinging on her life.

  All she really knew, she decided, was that whatever it was they had, she wanted it. It was time again to take a lesson from her father’s synthesis of Eastern philosophy – go with the flow.

  Annie smiled as she touched up her make-up using the rear-view mirror, then she headed off to see if she could discover anything from the Walkers’ neighbours.

  The atmosphere that had hung over the death scene at the Riddles’ garage the previous day seemed to have permeated the entire station, Banks thought as he looked out of his window at the market square. The place had all the atmosphere of an undertaker’s. While Riddle might not have been the most loved or admired chief constable they had ever had, he had been one of them, and he was dead. It was like losing a member of the family. A distant and austere uncle perhaps, but still a family member. Even Banks felt heavy-hearted as he sipped his bitter black coffee.

  The dark mood reminded him of the days after Graham Marshall’s disappearance, when everyone in the school seemed to be going around walking on eggs and conversations all seemed to be carried out in whispers. Those days had given Banks his first real taste of guilt, a sense of being responsible for people that was one of the things that spurred him on now in his job. He knew deep down that he was no more responsible for Graham Marshall’s disappearance than he was for Phil Simpkins’s bleeding to death on the railings, or Jem’s overdose of heroin, but he seemed to attract the guilt, draw it to him and wrap it around himself like a comforting mantle.

  When he thought of Annie, though, he felt his spirits rise. He knew not to expect too much – she had made that quite clear – but at least they had got beyond the rumours and fears they had been bogged down with in the past week. Banks sensed the possibility of a new, deeper trust. It would have to develop naturally, though; there could be no pushing, not with someone as scared of intimacy as Annie was, or someone as recently battle-scarred as himself. Sandra’s asking for a divorce and telling him she wanted to marry Sean might have given him a sense of finality, of liberation, but the old wounds were still there. Which reminded him: he ought to respond to the second solicitor’s letter, or Sandra would think he had changed his mind.

  Banks could see a knot of reporters outside the station. He looked at his watch: almost opening time. Pretty soon they’d all be ensconced in the Queen’s Arms padding out their expense accounts. Riddle’s suicide was the kind of thing that got the London dailies this far north. No official statements had been issued yet, and the Riddle house was still under secure guard. Of course, they could have a field day with this one: CHIEF CONSTABLE COMMITS SUICIDE WITH POLICE GUARD ONLY YARDS AWAY. They could spin that to read whichever way they wanted.

  Rosalind was going down to stay with her parents in Barnstaple after she had made the funeral arrangements. Then, she had told Banks just before she left the previous evening, she would sell the house and decide what to do next. There was no hurry – she would be well off – but she would move as far away from Yorkshire as possible. Banks felt for her; he had absolutely no conception of how awful it must feel to lose a daughter and a spouse in the space of only a few days. He couldn’t even imagine how terrible it would be to lose Brian or Tracy.

  Banks’s ancient heater hissed and spluttered as he sat down and thought over the previous evening’s conversation with Rosalind. One obvious point was that, by telling him what she had, she had inadvertently supplied him with a motive for getting rid of Emily. Or was it inadvertent? He had no doubt that Rosalind could be devious when she wanted to – after all, she was a lawyer – but he had no idea why she would want to incriminate herself that way. Put simply, though, if Rosalind wanted to keep Ruth’s existence from her husband, and if Emily was a loose cannon on deck, then Rosalind had a motive for getting Emily out of the way.

  And, by extension, she had an even better motive for wanting Ruth Walker out of the way, permanently.

  Since Riddle’s suicide, though, it was all academic. The money, the status, the celebrity, the possibility of a political career – they had all vanished into thin air. Nothing remained for Rosalind except Benjamin and Ruth, and Banks doubted she would have anything more to do with Ruth after all that had happened. It was enough to prove the writer of Ecclesiastes right when he wrote that all is vanity.

  Banks couldn’t bring himself to believe that Rosalind had actually given her own daughter cocaine laced with strychnine, or that she was right now plotting the demise of her other daughter, but at the same time he had to bear in mind that there was no love lost between any of them and that, once, Rosalind had given her child away to strangers and moved on to the wealth and power and their trappings she seemed to need so much. And when it came right down to it, no matter what Banks’s gut instinct told him, we are all capable of murder given the right incentive.

  Whichever way he looked at it, Ruth Walker’s sudden prominence in the case was a complication he could do without. While Annie dug up information on Ruth’s background in Salford, Banks was trying to find out as much as he could about her present life in Kennington while he waited for a call from Burgess. He had already made several phone calls and had two pages of notes.

  When his telephone rang, he thought it was Ruth’s boss calling him back, but it was the other phone call he’d been waiting for, Burgess’s, the one that gave a green light for the second interview with Barry Clough. And not before time, too; they could only hang on to him for another couple of hours at most.

  It seemed a pleasant enough neighbourhood, Annie thought, standing by the side of the road looking at the houses. Not at all the sort of place you would expect in Salford, though if she were honest she would have to admit she had never been to Salford before and had no idea what to expect. Semi-detached houses lined both sides of the quiet road, each with a fair-sized front lawn tucked away behind a privet hedge. The cars parked in the street were not ostentatious, but they weren’t clapped-out ten-year-old Fiestas, either. Most of them were Japanese or Korean, and Annie’s Astra didn’t look too out of place. Crime-wise, she guessed, the biggest problems would be the occasional break-in or car theft.

  Number 39 was much like the other houses. As Whitmore had said, there was no indication whatsoever of the tragedy that had taken place there. Annie tried to imagine the flames, the smoke, the screams and neighbours standing out in their slippers and dressing gowns watching, helpless, as Ruth jumped from the upstairs window and her parents suffocated, unable even to get out of their beds.

  ‘Help you, dearie?’ Annie turned and saw an elderly woman clutching a carrier bag with arthritis-crippled fingers. ‘Only you look like you’re lost or something.’

  ‘No,’ said Annie, smiling to reassure the woman she wasn’t crazy or anything. ‘Just lost in thought, maybe.’

  ‘Did you know the Walkers?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Only you were looking at their house.’

  ‘Yes. I’m a policewoman.’ Annie introduced herself.

  ‘Tattersall. Gladys Tattersall,’ the woman said. ‘Pleased to meet you, I’m sure. Don’t tell me you’re opening an investigation into the fire after all this time?’

  ‘No. Do you think we should be?’

  ‘Why don’t you come inside. I’ll put the kettle on. I’m at number thirty-seven here.’

  It was the semi adjoining the Walker house. ‘It must have been frightening for you,’ Annie said as she followed Mrs Tattersall down the path and into the hall.

  ‘I was more frightened during the bombing in the war. Mind you, I was just a lass then. Come i
n. Sit down.’

  Annie entered the living room and sat on a plum velour armchair. A gilt-framed mirror hung over the fireplace and the inevitable television sat on its stand in the corner. At the far end of the room was a dining table with four chairs arranged around it. Mrs Tattersall went into the kitchen and came back. ‘Won’t be long,’ she said, sitting on the sofa. ‘You’re right, though. It was a frightening night.’

  ‘Was it you who called the fire brigade?’

  ‘No. That was the Hennessy lad over the road. He was coming home late from a club and he saw the flames and smoke. It was him came knocking on our door and told us to get out fast. That’s me and my husband, Bernard. He passed away last winter. Cancer.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it.’

  ‘Oh, it’s all right, lass. It was a blessing, really. It was in his lungs, though he was never a smoker. The painkillers weren’t doing him much good towards the end.’

  Annie paused for a moment. It seemed appropriate after the mention of the late Mr Tattersall. ‘Was your house damaged?’

  Mrs Tattersall shook her head. ‘We were lucky. The walls got a bit warm, I can tell you, but the fire brigade sprayed the exterior with enough water to fill a swimming pool. It was August, you see, warm weather, and we’d left a window open, so a bit of it got inside and did some damage to the walls – peeling paper, stains, that sort of thing. But nothing serious. The insurance paid for it. Perhaps the worst that came out of it for us was having to live here while the people that bought the Walker house after the fire hammered and banged away all hours of the day and night.’

  ‘The renovators?’

  ‘Yes.’ The kettle boiled. Mrs Tattersall disappeared for a few minutes and returned with the tea on a tray, which she set down on the low table in front of the electric fire. ‘You haven’t told me why you’re asking,’ she said.

  ‘It’s just a routine check. Nothing to do with the fire, really. It just seemed like an easy place to start.’