Blood At The Root
Peter Robinson
Inspector Alan Banks' ninth case sees him investigating the murder of a young racist. A man who, it seems, has lived by the sword and now died by the sword. But it is never that simple… A night at the opera had offered Chief Inspector Alan Banks a temporary respite from his troubles – both at work and at home. But the telephone call summoning him to Easlvale brings him back to reality with a bump. For the body of teenager Jason Fox has been found in a dirty alleyway. He has been kicked to death. At first it looks like an after-hours pub fight gone wrong – until Banks learns that Jason was a member of a white power organisation known as the Albion League. So who wanted him dead? The Pakistani youths he had insulted in the pub earlier that evening? The shady friends of his business partner Mark Wood? Or someone within the Albion League itself? Someone who resented the teenager's growing power in a brutal and unforgiving organisation…?
Peter Robinson
Blood At The Root
An Inspector Banks Mystery
For Sheila
ONE
I
The boy’s body sat propped against the graffiti-scarred wall in a ginnel off Market Street, head lolling forward, chin on chest, hands clutching his stomach. A bib of blood had spilled down the front of his white shirt.
Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks stood in the rain and watched Peter Darby finish photographing the scene, bursts of electronic flash freezing the raindrops in mid-air as they fell. Banks was irritated. By rights, he shouldn’t be there. Not in the rain at half past one on a Saturday night.
As if he didn’t have enough problems already.
He had got the call the minute he walked in the door after an evening alone in Leeds at Opera North’s The Pearl Fishers. Alone because his wife, Sandra, had realized on Wednesday that the benefit gala she was supposed to host for the Eastvale community center clashed with their season tickets. They had argued – Sandra expecting Banks to forgo the opera in favor of her gala – so, stubbornly, Banks had gone alone. This sort of thing had been happening a lot lately – going their own ways – to such an extent that Banks could hardly remember the last time they had done anything together.
The limpid melody of the “Au fond du temple saint” duet still echoed around his mind as he watched Dr. Burns, the young police surgeon, start his in situ examination under the canvas tent the scene-of-crime officers had erected over the body.
Police Constable Ford had come across the scene at eleven forty-seven while walking his beat, community policing being a big thing in Eastvale these days. At first, he said, he thought the victim was just a drunk too legless to get all the way home after the pubs closed. After all, there was a broken beer bottle on the ground beside the lad, he seemed to be holding his stomach, and in the light of Ford’s torch, the dark blood could easily have passed for vomit.
Ford told Banks he didn’t know quite what it was that finally alerted him this was no drunk sleeping it off; perhaps it was the unnatural stillness of the body. Or the silence: there was no snoring, no twitching or muttering, the way drunks often did, just silence inside the hiss and patter of the rain. When he knelt and looked more closely, well, of course, then he knew.
The ginnel was a passage no more than six feet wide between two blocks of terrace houses on Carlaw Place. It was often used as a short cut between Market Street and the western area of Eastvale. Now onlookers had gathered at its mouth, behind the police tape, most of them huddled under umbrellas, pajama bottoms sticking out from under raincoats. Lights had come on in many houses along the street, despite the lateness of the hour. Several uniformed officers were circulating in the crowd and knocking on doors, seeking anyone who had seen or heard anything.
The ginnel walls offered some protection from the rain, but not much. Banks could feel the cold water trickling down the back of his neck. He pulled up his collar. It was mid-October, the time of year when the weather veered sharply between warm, misty, mellow days straight out of Keats and piercing gale-force winds that drove stinging rain into your face like the showers of Blefuscuan arrows fired at Gulliver.
Banks watched Dr. Burns turn the victim on his side, ease down his trousers and take the rectal temperature. He had already had a glance at the body himself, and it looked as if someone had beaten or kicked the kid to death. The features were too severely damaged to reveal much except that he was a young white male. His wallet was missing, along with whatever keys and loose change he might have been carrying, and there was nothing else in his pockets to indicate who he was.
It had probably started as a pub fight, Banks guessed, or perhaps the victim had been flashing his money about. As he watched Dr. Burns examine the boy’s broken features, Banks imagined the scene as it might have happened. The kid scared, running perhaps, realizing that whatever had started innocently enough was quickly getting out of control. How many of them were after him? Two, probably, at least. Maybe three or four. He runs through the dark, deserted streets in the rain, splashing through puddles, oblivious to his wet feet. Does he know they’re going to kill him? Or is he just afraid of taking a beating?
Either way, he sees the ginnel, thinks he can make it, slip away, get home free, but it’s too late. Something hits him or trips him, knocks him down, and suddenly his face is crushed down against the rainy stone, the cigarette ends and chocolate wrappers. He can taste blood, grit, leaves, probe a broken tooth with his tongue. And then he feels a sharp pain in his side, another in his back, his stomach, his groin, then they’re kicking his head as if it were a football. He’s trying to speak, beg, plead, but he can’t get the words out, his mouth is too full of blood. And finally he just slips away. No more pain. No more fear. No more anything.
Well, maybe it had happened like that. Or they could have been already lying in wait for him, blocking the ginnel at each end, trapping him inside. Some of Banks’s bosses had said he had too much imagination for his own good, though he found it had always come in useful. People would be surprised if they knew how much of what they believed to be painstaking, logical police work actually came down to a guess, a hunch, or a sudden intuition.
Banks shrugged off the line of thought and got back to the business in hand. Dr. Burns was still kneeling, shining a penlight inside the boy’s mouth. It looked like a pound of raw minced meat to Banks. He turned away.
A pub fight, then? Though they didn’t usually end in death, fights were common enough on a Saturday night in Eastvale, especially when some of the lads came in from the outlying villages eager to demonstrate their physical superiority over the arrogant townies.
They would come early to watch Eastvale United or the rugby team in the afternoon, and by pub chucking-out time they were usually three sheets to the wind, jostling each other in the fish-and-chip-shop queues, slagging everyone in sight, just looking for trouble. It was a familiar pattern: “What are you looking at?” “Nothing.” “You calling me nothing!” Get out of that if you can.
By midnight, though, most of the boozers had usually gone home, unless they had moved on to one of Eastvale’s two nightclubs, where for a modest entrance fee you got membership, an inedible battered beefburger, a constant supply of ear-splitting music and, most important of all, the chance to swill back watery lager until three in the morning.
It wasn’t that Banks had no sympathy for the victim – after all, the boy was somebody’s son – but solving this case, he thought, would simply be a matter of canvassing the local pubs and finding out where me-laddo had been drinking, whom he’d been upsetting. A job for Detective Sergeant Hatchley, perhaps; certainly not one for a wet detective chief inspector with Bizet’s melodies still caressing his inner ear; one whose only wish was to crawl into a nice warm bed be
side a wife who probably still wasn’t speaking to him.
Dr. Burns finished his examination and walked over. Burns did on-scene examinations when the local Home Office pathologist, Dr. Glendenning, was unavailable. He looked far too young and innocent for the job – in fact, he looked more like a farmer with his round face, pleasant, rustic features and mop of chestnut hair – but he was quickly becoming conversant with the different ways in which man could dispatch his fellow man to the hereafter.
“Well, it certainly looks like a boot job,” he said, putting his black notebook back in his pocket. “I can’t swear to it, of course – that’ll be for Dr. Glendenning to determine at the postmortem – but it looks that way. From what I can make out on first examination, one eye’s practically hanging out of its socket, the nose is pulped and there are several skull fractures. In some places the bone fragments might possibly have punctured the brain.” Burns sighed. “In a way, the poor bugger’s lucky he’s dead. If he’d survived, he’d have been a one-eyed vegetable for the rest of his days.”
“No sign of any other injuries?”
“A few broken ribs. And I’d expect some severe damage to the internal organs. Other than that…” Burns glanced back at the body and shrugged. “I’d guess he was kicked to death by someone wearing heavy shoes or boots. But don’t quote me on that. It also looks as if he was hit on the back of the head – maybe by that bottle.”
“Just one person?”
Burns ran his hand over his wet hair and rubbed it dry on the side of his trousers. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that. It was more likely two or three. A gang, perhaps.”
“But one person could have done it?”
“As soon as the victim was down on the ground, yes. Thing is, though, he looks pretty strong. It might have taken more than one person to get him down. Unless, of course, that was what the bottle was used for.”
“Any idea how long he’s been there?”
“Not long.” Burns looked at his watch. “Allowing for the weather conditions, I’d say maybe two hours. Two and a half at the outside.”
Banks made a quick back-calculation. It was twenty to two now. That meant the kid had probably been killed between ten past eleven and eleven forty-seven, when PC Ford found the body. A little over half an hour. And a half hour that happened to coincide with pub-closing time. His theory was still looking good.
“Anyone know who he is?” Banks asked.
Dr. Burns shook his head.
“Any chance of cleaning him up enough for an artist’s impression?”
“Might be worth a try. But as I said, the nose is pulped, one eye’s practically-”
“Yes. Yes, thank you, Doctor.”
Burns nodded briskly and walked off.
The coroner’s officer directed two ambulance attendants to bag the body and take it to the mortuary, Peter Darby took more photographs and the SOCOs went on with their search. The rain kept falling.
Banks leaned back against the damp wall and lit a cigarette. It might help concentrate his mind. Besides, he liked the way cigarettes tasted in the rain.
There were things to be done, procedures to be set in motion. First of all, they had to find out who the victim was, where he had come from, where he belonged, and what he had been doing on the day of his death. Surely, Banks thought, someone, somewhere must be missing him. Or was he a stranger in town, far from home?
Once they knew something about the victim, then it would simply be a matter of legwork. Eventually, they would track down the bastards who had done this. They would probably be kids, certainly no older than their victim, and they would, by turn, be contrite and arrogant. In the end, if they were old enough, they would probably get charged with manslaughter. Nine years, out in five.
Sometimes, it was all so bloody predictable, Banks thought, as he flicked his tab-end into the gutter and walked to his car, splashing through puddles that reflected the revolving lights of the police cars. And at that point, he could hardly be blamed for not knowing how wrong he was.
II
The telephone call at eight o’clock on Sunday morning woke Detective Constable Susan Gay from a pleasant dream about visiting Egypt with her father. They had never done anything of the kind, of course – her father was a cool, remote man who had never taken her anywhere – but the dream seemed real enough.
Eyes still closed, Susan groped until her fingers touched the smooth plastic on her bedside table, then she juggled the receiver beside her on the pillow.
“Mmm?” she mumbled.
“Susan?”
“Sir?” She recognized Banks’s voice and tried to drag herself out of the arms of Morpheus. But she couldn’t get very far. She frowned and rubbed sleep from her eyes. Waking up had always been a slow process for Susan, ever since she was a little girl.
“Sorry to wake you so early on a Sunday,” Banks said, “but we got a suspicious death after closing time last night.”
“Yes, sir.” Susan raised herself from the sheets and propped herself against the pillows. “Suspicious death.” She knew what that meant. Work. Now. The thin bedsheet slipped from her shoulders and left her breasts bare. Her nipples were hard from the morning chill in the bedroom. For a moment, she felt exposed talking to Banks while she was sitting up naked in bed. But he couldn’t see her. She told herself not to be so daft.
“We’ve got scant little to go on,” Banks went on. “We don’t even know the victim’s name yet. I need you down here as soon as you can make it.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll be right there.”
Susan replaced the receiver, ran her fingers through her hair and got out of bed. She stood on her tiptoes and stretched her arms toward the ceiling until she felt the knots in her muscles crack, then she padded to the living room, pausing to note the thickness of her waist and thighs in the wardrobe mirror on her way. She would have to start that diet again soon. Before she went to take a shower, she started the coffeemaker and put some old Rod Stewart on the CD player to help her wake up.
As the hot water played over her skin, she thought of last night’s date with Gavin Richards, a DC from Regional Headquarters. He had taken her to the Georgian Theatre in Richmond to see an Alan Bennett play, and after that they had found a cozy pub just off Richmond market square, where she had eaten cheese and onion crisps and drunk a half pint of cider.
Walking to her car, both of them huddled under her umbrella because it was raining fast and, like a typical man, Gavin hadn’t bothered to carry one, she had felt his warmth, felt herself responding to it, and when he had asked her back to his house for a coffee she had almost said yes. Almost. But she wasn’t ready yet. She wanted to. Oh, she wanted to. Especially when they kissed good-night by her car. It had been too long. But they had only been out together three times, and that was too soon for Susan. She might have sacrificed her personal life for her career over the last few years, but she wasn’t about to hop into bed with the first tasty bloke who happened to come along.
When she noticed she had been standing in the shower so long that her skin had started to glow, she got out, dried herself off briskly and threw on a pair of black jeans and a polo-neck jumper that matched her eyes. She was lucky that her curly blond hair needed hardly any attention at all. She added a little gel to give it luster, then she was ready to go. Rod Stewart sang “Maggie Mae” as she sipped the last of her black, sugarless coffee and munched a slice of dry toast.
Still eating, she grabbed a light jacket from the hook and dashed out the door. It was only a five-minute drive to the station, and on another occasion she might have walked for the exercise. Especially this morning. It was a perfect autumn day: scrubbed blue skies and only the slightest chill in the air. The recent winds had already blown a few early lemon and russet leaves from the trees, and they squished under her feet as she walked to her car.
But today Susan paused only briefly to sniff the crisp air, then she got in her car and turned the key in the ignition. Her red Golf started on the first
try. An auspicious beginning.
III
Banks leaned by his office window, his favorite spot, blew on the surface of his coffee and watched the steam rise as he looked out over the quiet market square. He was thinking about Sandra, about their marriage and the way it all seemed to be going wrong. Not so much wrong, just nowhere. She still hadn’t spoken to him since the opera. Not that she’d had much chance, really, with him being out so late at the crime scene. And this morning she had barely been conscious by the time he left. But still, there was a discernible chill in the house.
Last night’s rain had washed the excesses of Saturday night from the cobbles, just as the station cleaning staff disinfected and mopped out the cells after the overnight drunk-and-disorderlies had been discharged. The square and the buildings around it glowed pale gray-gold in the early light.
Banks had his window open a couple of inches, and the sound of the church congregation singing “We plough the fields, and scatter” drifted in. It took him back to the harvest festivals of his childhood, when his mum would give him a couple of apples and oranges to put in the church basket along with everyone else’s. He often wondered what happened to all the fruit after the festival was over.
The “Dalesman” calendar on his wall showed Healaugh Church, near York, through a farm gate. It wasn’t a particularly autumnal shot, Banks was thinking, as he heard the tap on his door.
It was Susan Gay, first to arrive after Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe, who was already busy coordinating with Regional HQ and arranging for local media coverage.
As usual, Susan looked fresh as a daisy, Banks thought. Just the right amount of makeup, blond curls still glistening from the shower. While no one would describe Susan Gay as an oil painting, with her small button nose and her serious, guarded expression, her clear, blue-gray eyes were intriguing, and she had a beautiful, smooth complexion.
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