The Hanging Valley

by Peter Robinson

  It was the most eloquent and lengthy speech Banks had ever heard Glendenning deliver. There was obviously a potential teacher in the brusque chain-smoking Scot with the trail of ash like the Milky Way down his waistcoat.

  The doctor smiled at his audience. ‘Simpson,’ he said.

  ‘Pardon?’ Banks asked.

  ‘Simpson. Keith Simpson. I studied under him. Our equivalent of Sherlock Holmes, only Simpson’s real.’

  ‘I see,’ said Banks, who had learned to tease after so long in Yorkshire. ‘A kind of real-life Quincy, you mean?’ He felt Gristhorpe nudge him in the ribs.

  Glendenning scowled and a half-inch of ash fell off the end of his cigarette. ‘Quite,’ he said, and put the test tube in his bag. ‘I hope that glorified truss over there can get me back down safely.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Gristhorpe assured him. ‘It will. And thank you very much.’

  ‘Aye. Now I have first-hand knowledge of what it feels like to have my arse in a sling,’ Glendenning said as he walked away.

  Banks laughed and turned back to watch the experts at work. The photographs had been taken, and the team were busy searching the ground around the body.

  ‘We’ll need a more thorough search of the area,’ Gristhorpe said to Hatchley. ‘Can you get that organized, Sergeant?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Hatchley took out his notebook and pen. ‘I’ll get some men in from Helmthorpe and Eastvale.’

  ‘Tell them to look particularly for evidence of anything recently buried or burned. He must have been carrying a rucksack. We’re also looking for the weapon, a knife of some kind. And I think, Sergeant,’ Gristhorpe went on, ‘we’d better bring DC Richmond in on this after all. Get him to check on missing persons with the Police National Computer.’

  Vic Manson, the fingerprint expert, approached them, shaking his head. ‘It’ll not be easy,’ he complained. ‘There might be prints left on three or four fingers but I can’t promise anything. I’ll try wax injections to unwrinkle the skin, and if they don’t work, it’ll have to be formaldehyde and alum.’

  ‘It’ll be a devil of a job finding out who he was,’ Banks said. ‘Even if we can get prints, there’s no guaranteeing they’ll be on record. And someone’s gone to great lengths to make sure we can’t recognize him by his face.’

  ‘There’s always the clothes,’ Gristhorpe said. ‘Or teeth. Though I can’t say I’ve ever had much luck with them myself.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Banks agreed. He always thought it amusing when he watched television detectives identify bodies from dental charts. If they really knew how long it would take every dentist in the country to search through every chart in his files . . . Only if the police already had some idea who the body was could dental charts confirm or deny the identity.

  ‘He might even be German,’ Hatchley added. ‘Or an American. You get a lot of foreigners walking the fells these days.’

  Across the beck, two men wearing face masks slid the body into the large zip-up bag they had brought. Banks grimaced as he watched them brush off the maggots, shed in all directions, before they were finally able to secure the zip. They then started to carry their burden along the valley towards the winch.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Gristhorpe said. ‘It’s getting late. There’s nothing more to be done here till we can start a search. We’d better post a couple of men here for the night though. If the killer knows we’ve discovered the body and he’s buried important evidence nearby, he might come back after dark.’

  Hatchley nodded.

  ‘We’ll arrange to send someone up,’ Gristhorpe went on. ‘You’d better stick around till they get here, Sergeant. See if you can persuade the rescue people to wait for them with the winch. If not, they’ll just have to come the long way, like we did.’

  Banks saw Hatchley glance towards where the corpse had lain and shiver. He didn’t envy anyone stuck with the job of staying in this enchanted valley after dark.

  FOUR

  Sam took Katie as roughly as usual in bed that night. And as usual she lay there and gave the illusion of enjoying herself. At least it didn’t hurt any more like it had at first. There were some things you had to do, some sins you had to commit because men were just made that way and you needed a man to take care of you in the world. The important thing, Katie had learned from her grandmother, was that you must not enjoy it. Grit your teeth and give them what they want, yes, even cheat a little and make them think you like it – especially if they treat you badly when you don’t seem enthusiastic – but under no circumstances should you find pleasure in it.

  It never lasted long. That was one consolation. Soon Sam started breathing quickly, and she clung to him tighter and mouthed the sounds he liked to hear, told him the things he liked to know. At last he grunted and made her all wet. Then he rolled over on his side and quickly began snoring.

  But sleep didn’t come so easily for Katie that night. She thought about the body on the fell and pulled the sheets up tighter around her chin. Last time it had been awful: all those questions, all the trouble there’d been – especially when the police tried to connect the dead man with the missing girl, Anne Ralston. They’d acted as if Stephen or one of his friends might have killed both of them. And what had they found out? Nothing. Raymond Addison seemed to have come from nowhere.

  Katie had hardly known Anne, for she and Sam hadn’t been in Swainshead long when all the trouble started five years ago. The only reason they had met her at all was because Sam wanted to seek out the ‘best people’ in the village. He latched on to the Colliers, and Anne Ralston had been going out with Stephen at the time.

  She hadn’t been Katie’s type though, and they’d never have become good friends. Anne, she remembered, had seemed far too footloose and fancy-free for her taste. She had probably just run off with another man; it would have been typical of her to go off without a word and leave everyone to worry about her.

  Katie turned on her side to reach for some Kleenex from the bedside table, dragging the sheets with her. Sam stirred and yanked back his half. Gently, she wiped herself. She hated that warm wetness between her legs. More and more every time she hated it, just as she had come to loathe her life with Sam in Swainshead.

  And things had been getting worse lately. She had been under a black depression for a month or more. She knew it was a woman’s place to obey her husband, to stay with him for better, for worse, to submit to his demands in bed and slave for him all day in the house. But surely, she thought, life shouldn’t be so bleak. If there was any chance of escape from the drudgery that her life had become and from the beatings, would it really be such a sin to take it?

  Things hadn’t always been so bad. When they had met, Katie had been working as a chambermaid at Queen’s Hotel in Leeds, and Sam, an apprentice electrician, had turned up one day to check the wiring. It had hardly been love at first sight; for Katie, love was what happened in the romantic paperbacks she read, the ones that made her blush and look over her shoulder in case her granny could see her reading them. But Sam had been presentable enough – a cocky young bantam with curly chestnut hair and a warm boyish smile. A real charmer.

  He had asked her out for a drink three times, and three times she had said no. She had never set foot in a pub. Her granny had taught her that they were all dens of iniquity, and Katie herself held alcohol responsible for her father’s wickedness and for the misery of her mother’s life. Katie didn’t realize at the time that her refusal of a drink was taken as a rejection of Sam himself. If only he would ask her to go for a walk, she had thought, or perhaps to the Kardomah for a coffee and a bite to eat after work.

  Finally, in exasperation, he had suggested a Saturday afternoon trip to Otley. Even though Katie was over eighteen, she still had a difficult time persuading her grandmother to let her go, especially as she was to ride pillion on Sam’s motorbike. But in the end the old woman had given in, muttering warnings about the Serpent in Eden and wolves in sheep’s clothing.

  In Otley th
ey had, inevitably, gone for a drink. Sam had practically dragged her into the Red Lion, where she had finally broken down and blurted out why she had refused to go for a drink before. He laughed and touched her shoulder gently. She drank bitter lemon and nothing terrible happened to either of them. After that she went to pubs with him more often, though she always refused alcohol and never felt entirely comfortable.

  But now, she thought, turning over again, life had become unbearable. The early days, just after their marriage, had been full of hope after Katie had learned how to tolerate Sam’s sexual demands. They had lived with his parents in a little back-to-back in Armley and saved every penny they earned. Sam had a dream, a guest house in the Dales, and together they had brought it about. Those had been happy times, despite the hours of overtime, the cramped living quarters and the lack of privacy, for they had had something to aim towards. Now it was theirs, Katie hated it. Sam had changed; he had become snobbish, callous and cruel.

  Like every other night for the past few months, she cried quietly to herself as she tried to shut out Sam’s snoring and listen to the breeze hiss through the willows by the nameless stream out at the back. She would wait and keep silent. If nothing happened, if nothing came of her only hope of escape, then one night she would sneak out of the house as quiet as a thief and never come back.

  FIVE

  In room five, Neil Fellowes knelt by the side of the bed and said his prayers.

  He had woken from his drunken stupor in time to be sick in the washbasin, and after that he had felt much better. So much so, in fact, that he had gone down and eaten the lamb chops with mint sauce that Mrs Greenock had cooked so well. Then he spent the rest of the evening in his room reading.

  And now, as he tried to match the words to his thoughts and feelings, as he always did in prayer, he found he couldn’t. The picture of the body kept coming back, tearing aside the image of God that he had retained from childhood: an old man with a long white beard sitting on a cloud with a ledger on his lap. Suddenly, the smell was in his nostrils again; it was like trying to breathe at the bottom of a warm sewer. And he saw again the bloody maggot-infested pulp that had once been a face, the white shirt rippling with corruption, the whole thing rising and falling in an obscene parody of breathing.

  He tried to force his mind back to the prayer but couldn’t. Hoping the Lord would understand and give him the comfort he needed, he gave up, put his glasses on the table and got into bed.

  On the edge of sleep, he was able to reconstruct the sequence of events in his mind. At the time, he had been too distraught, too confused to notice anything. And very soon his head had been spinning with the drink. But he remembered bursting into the pub and asking for help. He remembered how Sam Greenock and the others at the table had calmed him down and suggested what he should do. But there was something else, something wrong. It was just a vague feeling. He couldn’t quite bring it to consciousness before sleep took him.

  3

  ONE

  ‘What is it?’ Banks asked, examining the faded slip of paper that Sergeant Hatchley had dropped on the desk in front of him.

  ‘Forensic said it’s some kind of receipt from a till,’ Hatchley explained. ‘You know, one of those bits of paper they give you when you buy something. People usually just drop them on the floor or shove them in their pockets and forget about them. They found it in his right trouser pocket. It’d been there long enough to go through the washer once or twice, but you know what bloody wizards they are in the lab.’

  Banks knew. He had little faith in forensic work as a means of catching criminals, but the boffins knew their stuff when it came to identification and gathering evidence. Their lab was just outside Wetherby, and Gristhorpe must have put a ‘rush’ on this job to get the results back to Eastvale so quickly. The body had been discovered only the previous afternoon, and it was still soaking in a Lysol bath.

  Banks looked closely again at the slip, then turned to its accompanying transcription. The original had been too faint to read, but forensic had treated it with chemicals and copied out the message exactly:

  ‘Wendy’s,’ Banks said. ‘That’s a burger chain. There’s a few branches in London. Look at those prices, though.’

  Hatchley shrugged. ‘If it was in London . . .’

  ‘Come on! Even in London you don’t pay two pounds sixty-nine just for a bloody hamburger. At least not at Wendy’s you don’t. You don’t pay eighty-five pence for a Coke, either. What does that tax work out at?’

  Hatchley took out his pocket calculator and struggled with the figures. ‘Eight per cent,’ he announced finally.

  ‘Hmm. That’s an odd amount. You don’t pay eight per cent VAT on food in England.’

  ‘I suppose it’s an American company,’ Hatchley suggested, ‘if they sell hamburgers?’

  ‘You mean our man’s an American?’

  ‘Or he could have just come back from a trip there.’

  ‘He could have. But that’d make it a bit soon for another holiday, wouldn’t it? Unless he was a businessman. What about the labels on his clothes?’

  ‘Torn off,’ Hatchley said. ‘Trousers and underpants seem to be ordinary Marks and Sparks cotton and polyester. Same with the shirt. The boots were Army and Navy. They could have been bought at any of their branches.’

  Banks tapped his ballpoint on the edge of the desk. ‘Why is it that somebody doesn’t want us to know who he is or where he’s from?’

  ‘Maybe because if we knew that we’d have a good idea who the killer was.’

  ‘So the quicker we identify the body, the better our chances. Whoever did it was obviously counting on no one finding it for months, then being unable to identify it.’ Banks sipped some lukewarm coffee and pulled a face. ‘But we’ve got a lead.’ He tapped the receipt. ‘I want to know where this Wendy’s is located. It shouldn’t take you long. There’s a store code to go on.’

  ‘Where do I go for that kind of information?’ Hatchley asked.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Banks said. ‘You’re a detective. At least I hope you are. Start detecting. First, I’d suggest you call Wendy’s UK office. It’s going to be a couple of days before we get anything from Glendenning and Vic Manson, so let’s use every break we get. Did Richmond come up with anything from missing persons?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘I suppose our corpse is still supposed to be on holiday then, if no one’s reported him missing. And if he’s not English it could be ages before he gets into the files. Check the hotels and guest houses in the area and see if any Americans have registered there lately. If they have, try and track them down.’

  Dismissed, Hatchley went to find Richmond, to whom, Banks knew, he would pass on as much of the load as possible. Still, he reasoned, the sergeant’s work was solid enough once he built up a bit of momentum, and the pressure would serve as a test of Richmond’s mettle.

  Since passing his computer course with flying colours, the young detective constable looked all set for promotion. That would cause problems with Hatchley though. There was no way, Banks reflected, that the sergeant could be expected to work with Richmond at equal rank. Things had been bad enough when Banks came from the Metropolitan force to fill the position Hatchley had set his own sights on. And Hatchley was destined to stay a sergeant; he didn’t have the extra edge needed to make inspector, as Richmond did.

  Grateful that promotion was not his decision, Banks glanced at his watch and headed for the car. Neil Fellowes was waiting in Swainshead, and the poor sod had already had to arrange for one extra day off work.

  TWO

  As he drove along the dale, Banks marvelled at how familiar some of its landmarks had become: the small drumlin with its four sick elms all leaning to the right like an image in one of those Chinese watercolours that Sandra, his wife, liked so much; the quiet village of Fortford with the foundations of a Roman fort laid bare on a hillock by the green; the busy main street of Helmthorpe, Swainsdale’s largest village; and above Helmthorpe
, the long limestone edge of Crow Scar gleaming in the sun.

  The Kinks sang ‘Lola’, and Banks tapped his fingers on the steering wheel in time with the music as he drove. Though he swore to Sandra that he still loved opera, much to her delight he hadn’t played any lately. She had approved of his recent flirtation with the blues, and now he seemed to be going through a nostalgic phase for the music he had listened to during his last days at school and first year at London Polytechnic: that idyllic halcyon period when he hadn’t known what to do with his life and hadn’t much cared.

  It was also the year he had met Sandra, and the music brought it all back: winter evenings drinking cheap wine and making love in his draughty Notting Hill bedsit listening to John Martyn or Nick Drake; summer boat trips for picnics in Greenwich Park, lying in the sun below Wren’s observatory looking down on the gleaming palace, the Thames and London spread out to the west, the Beatles, Donovan, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones on the radio . . . All gone now, or almost all. He had lost interest in pop music shortly after the Beatles split up and the glitter boys took over the scene in the early 1970s, but the old songs still worked their magic on him.

  He lit a cigarette and rolled down the window. It felt good to be on his own in his own car again. Much as he loved the superintendent, Banks was glad that Gristhorpe had reverted to his usual role of planner and coordinator. Now he could smoke and listen to music as he drove.

  More important still, he liked working alone, without the feeling that someone was always looking over his shoulder. It was easy enough to deal with Hatchley and Richmond, but with a superior heading the field investigation, it was difficult to avoid the sensation of being under constant scrutiny. That had been another reason for leaving London – too many chiefs – and for pinning his hopes on the Eastvale job after a preliminary chat with Superintendent Gristhorpe about the way he liked to run things.