The Hanging Valley

by Peter Robinson

  Well, Katie concluded dismally, working on Sundays could only add to the weight of sin she carried already. She picked up the black plastic bag. There were still three more rooms to do, then there was dinner to see to. When, she wondered, was it all going to end?

  She went downstairs to put the roast in and immediately recognized the new guest standing over the registration book in the hall. He signed himself in as Philip Richmond, from Bolton, Lancashire, and he told Sam, who was dealing with the details, that he was simply after a few relaxing days in the country. But Katie remembered the moustache and the athletic spring in his step; it was the man she had seen with Chief Inspector Banks and Sergeant Hatchley the day she had run away to Eastvale.

  Seeing him there brought back the whole day. Nothing had come of it really, except that she had caught a minor cold. The housework got done. Not on time, but it got done. Sam never even found out, so there was no retribution at his hands. Nor were there any outbreaks of boils, thunderbolts from heaven, plagues of locusts or other such horrors her grandmother had assured her would happen if she strayed from the path.

  She felt as if she had lost sight of the path completely now. That was all she really knew about what was happening to her. The conflicting voices in her mind seemed to have merged into one incomprehensible rumble, and much of the time she felt as if she had no control over her thoughts or deeds.

  There were clear moments though. Like now. Outside, the landscape was fresh after the previous few days’ rain, which was now rising in sun-charmed wraiths of mist from the lower fell sides and the valley bottom. And here, in their hall, stood a man she recognized as having a close association with the police.

  She hadn’t seen what all the fuss was about the previous evening, when Sam had stumbled home from the White Rose in a very bad mood.

  ‘He’s gone to find her,’ he had said, scowling. ‘All the way to bloody Canada. Just to find her.’

  ‘Who?’ Katie had asked quietly, confused and frightened of him. In moods like this he was likely to lash out, and she could still feel the pain in her breast from the last time.

  ‘Anne Ralston, you silly bitch. That copper’s taken off to Toronto after her.’

  ‘Well, what does it matter?’ Katie had argued cautiously. ‘If she killed that man all those years ago, they’ll put her in jail, won’t they?’

  ‘You don’t know nothing, woman, do you? Nothing at all.’ Sam hit out at her and knocked the wooden cross off the mantelpiece.

  ‘Leave it,’ he snarled, grabbing Katie by the arm as she bent to pick it up. ‘Can’t you think of anything but bloody cleaning up?’

  ‘But I thought you wanted me—’

  ‘Oh, shut up. You don’t know nothing.’

  ‘Well, tell me. What is it? Why does it matter so much that he’s gone chasing after Anne Ralston in Canada? You hardly knew her. Why does it matter to us?’

  ‘It doesn’t,’ Sam said. ‘But it might to Stephen. She might make things difficult for him.’

  ‘But Stephen hasn’t done anything, has he? How could she harm him?’

  ‘She was his fancy woman, wasn’t she? Then she ran off and left him. She could tell lies about his business, about . . . hell, I don’t know! All I know is that it’s all your bloody fault.’

  Katie said nothing. Sam’s initial rage was spent, she could tell, and she knew she would remain fairly safe if she kept quiet. It was tricky though, because he might get angry again if she didn’t give the proper response to his ranting.

  Sam sat heavily on the sofa and turned on the television. There was an old black and white film about gangsters on. James Cagney shot Humphrey Bogart and ran for it.

  ‘Get me a beer,’ Sam said.

  Katie got him a can of Long Life from the fridge. She knew it was no good telling him he’d had enough already. Besides, on nights like this, when he’d had a bit more than usual, he tended to fall asleep as soon as he got to bed.

  ‘And don’t forget the Colliers’ party next week,’ he added, ripping open the can. ‘I want you looking your best.’

  Katie had forgotten about the garden party. The Colliers had two or three every summer. She hated them.

  In the morning, Sam had a thick head and remembered very little about the night before. He sulked until after breakfast, then managed a welcome for the new guest before disappearing somewhere in the Land Rover. Katie showed Richmond his room, then went to get on with her work.

  So there was a policeman in the house. She wondered why he was there. Perhaps he was on holiday. Policemen must have holidays too. But if he was from Eastvale, he was hardly likely to travel only twenty-five miles to Swainshead. Not these days. He’d be off to Torquay, or even the Costa del Sol. Katie didn’t know how much policemen got paid, so she couldn’t really say. But he wouldn’t come to Swainshead, that was for sure. He was a spy, then. He thought nobody would recognize him, so he could keep an eye on their comings and goings while the little one with the scar was in Toronto and the big one was God knows where.

  And Katie knew who he was. The problem now was what to do with her knowledge. Should she tell Sam, put him on his guard? He’d spread the word then, like he always did, and maybe he’d be grateful to her. But she couldn’t remember anything about Sam’s gratitude. It just didn’t stand out in her memory like the other things. Did she need it? On the other hand, if Sam had done something wrong – and she didn’t know whether he had or not – then the policeman, Richmond, if that was his real name, might find out and take him away. She’d be free then. It was an evil thought, and it made her heart race, but . . .

  Katie paused and looked out of the back window at the gauze of mist rising like breath from the bright green slopes of Swainshead Fell. It would take a bit of thinking about, this dilemma of hers. She knew she mustn’t make a hasty decision.

  TWO

  ‘I’m afraid there’s hardly anybody here to talk to, Mr . . . er . . .?’

  ‘Banks. Alan Banks. I was a friend of Bernard Allen’s.’

  ‘Yes, well, the only person I can think of who might be able to help you is Marilyn Rosenberg.’ Tom Jordan, head of the Communications Department at Toronto Community College, looked at his watch. ‘She’s got a class right now, but she should be free in about twenty minutes, if you’d like to wait?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  Jordan led him out of the office into a staff lounge just big enough to hold a few chairs and a low coffee table littered with papers and teaching journals. At one end stood a fridge and, on a desk beside it, a microwave oven. The coffee machine stood on a table below a connecting window to the secretary’s office, beside a rack of pigeonholes for staff messages. Banks poured himself a coffee and Jordan edged away slowly, mumbling about work to do.

  The coffee was strong and bitter, hardly the thing to drink in the thirty-three-degree heat. What he really needed was a cold beer or a gin and tonic. And he’d gone and bought Scotch at the duty-free shop. Still, he could leave it as a gift for Gerry Webb. It would surely come in handy in winter.

  It was Monday morning. On Sunday, Banks had slept in and then gone for a walk along the Danforth. He had noticed the signs of yuppification that Gerry had mentioned, but he had found a pleasant little Greek restaurant which had served him a hearty moussaka for lunch. Unlike Gerry, Banks enjoyed Greek food.

  After that, he had wandered as far as Quinn’s. Over a pint, he had asked around about Bernie Allen and shown Anne Ralston’s photograph to the bar staff and waitresses. No luck. One down, two dozen to go. He had wandered back along the residential streets south of Danforth Avenue and noticed that the small brick house with the green and white porch fence and columns was a sort of Toronto trademark.

  Too tired to go out again, he had stayed in and watched television that evening. Oddly enough, the non-commercial channel was showing an old BBC historical serial he’d found boring enough the first time around, and – much better – one of the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes episodes. The only alternatives
were the same American cop shows that plagued British TV.

  He had woken at about nine o’clock that Monday morning. Still groggy from travel and culture shock, he had taken a shower and had had orange juice and toast for breakfast. Then it was time to set off. He slipped a 1960s anthology tape of Cream, Traffic and Rolling Stones hits in the Walkman and put it in the right-hand pocket of his light cotton jacket. In the left, he placed cigarettes and Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the only book he’d brought with him.

  Jacket slung over shoulder, he set off, following Gerry’s directions. A rolling rattling streetcar ride took him by the valley side, rife with joggers. The downtown towers were hazy in the morning heat. Finding the westbound platform at Broadview subway station was every bit as straightforward as Gerry had said, but changing trains at Yonge and getting out to the street at St Clair proved confusing. All exits seemed to lead to a warren of underground shopping malls – air-conditioned, of course – and finding the right way out wasn’t easy.

  Still, he’d found St Clair Avenue after only a momentary diversion into a supermarket called Ziggy’s, and the college was only a short walk from the station.

  Now, from the sixth floor, he looked out for a while on the office buildings opposite and the cream tops of the streetcars passing to and fro below him, then turned to the pile of journals on the table.

  Halfway through an article on the teaching of ‘critical thinking’ he heard muffled voices in the corridor, and a young woman with a puzzled expression on her face popped around the door. Masses of curly brown hair framed her round head. She had a small mouth and her teeth, when she smiled, were tiny, straight and pearly white. The greyish gum she was chewing oozed between them like gum disease. She carried a worn overstuffed leather briefcase under her arm, and wore grey cords and a checked shirt.

  She stretched out her hand. ‘Marilyn Rosenberg. Tom tells me you wanted to talk to me.’

  Banks introduced himself and offered to pour her a cup of coffee.

  ‘No thanks,’ she said, grabbing a Diet Coke from the fridge. ‘Far too hot for that stuff. You’d think they’d do something about the air-conditioning in this place, wouldn’t you?’ She pulled the tab and the Diet Coke fizzed. ‘What do you want with me?’

  ‘I want to talk about Bernard Allen.’

  ‘I’ve been through all that with the police. There wasn’t really much to say.’

  ‘What did they ask you?’

  ‘Just if I thought anyone had a reason to kill him, where my colleagues were over the last few weeks, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Did they ask you anything about his life here?’

  ‘Only what kind of person he was.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I told them he was a bit of a loner, that’s all. I wasn’t the only one they talked to.’

  ‘You’re the only one here now.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess.’ She grinned again, flashing her beautiful teeth.

  ‘If Bernard didn’t have much to do with his colleagues here, did he have a group of friends somewhere else, away from college?’

  ‘I wouldn’t really know. Look, I didn’t know Bernie that well . . .’ She hesitated. ‘Maybe it’s none of your business, but I wanted to. We were getting closer. Slowly. He was a hard person to get to know. All that stiff-upper-lip Brit stuff. Me, I’m a simple Irish-Jewish girl from Montreal.’ She shrugged. ‘I liked him. We did lunch up here a couple of times. I was hoping maybe he’d ask me out sometime but . . .’

  ‘It never happened?’

  ‘No. He was too damn slow. I didn’t know how much clearer I could make it without ripping off my clothes and jumping on him. But now it’s too late, even for that.’

  ‘How did he seem emotionally before he went to England?’

  Marilyn frowned and bit her bottom lip as she thought. ‘He hadn’t quite got over his divorce,’ she said finally. ‘So I guess he might have been off women for a while.’

  ‘Did you know his ex-wife?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘What about her lover?’

  ‘Yeah, I knew him. He used to work here. He’s a louse.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Every way. Strutting macho peacock. And she fell for it. I don’t blame Bernie for feeling bad, but he’d have been well rid of her anyway. He’d have got over it.’

  ‘But he was still upset?’

  ‘Yeah. Withdrawn, sort of.’

  ‘How did he get on with his students?’

  ‘Well enough, considering.’

  ‘Considering what?’

  ‘He cared about literature, but most of the students don’t give a damn about James Joyce or George Orwell. They’re here to learn about business or computers or electrical engineering – you know, useful stuff – and then they think they’ll walk into top high-paying jobs. They don’t like it when they find they all have to do English, so it makes our job a bit tough. Some teachers find it harder than others to adjust and lower their expectations.’

  ‘And Bernie was one?’

  ‘Yeah. He complained a lot about how ignorant they were, how half of them didn’t even know when the Second World War was fought or who Hitler was. And, even worse, they didn’t care anyway. Bernie couldn’t understand that. He had one guy who thought Shakespeare was a small town in Saskatchewan. That really got to him.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Banks said. ‘How could someone like that get accepted into a college?’

  ‘We have an open-door policy,’ Marilyn said. ‘It’s a democratic education. None of that elitist bullshit you get in England. We don’t send our kids away to boarding schools to learn Latin and take a lot of cold showers. All that Jane Eyre stuff.’

  Banks, who had not attended a public school himself, along with the majority of English children, was confused. ‘But don’t a lot of them fail?’ he asked. ‘Doesn’t it waste time and money?’

  ‘We don’t like to fail people,’ Marilyn said. ‘It gives them a poor self-image.’

  ‘So they don’t need to know much to get in, and they aren’t expected to know much more when they leave, is that it?’

  Marilyn smiled like a nurse with a particularly difficult patient.

  ‘What did Bernie think about that?’ Banks hurried on.

  She laughed. ‘Bernie loved youth, young people, but he didn’t have much respect for their intelligence.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like they had much.’

  ‘There, you see. That’s exactly the kind of thing he’d say. You’re so sarcastic, you Brits.’

  ‘But you liked him?’

  ‘Yeah, I liked him. We might have disagreed on a few things, but he was cute and I’m a sucker for an English accent. What can I say? He was a nice guy, at least as far as I could tell. I mean, he might not have thought much of his students, but he treated them well and did his damnedest to arouse some curiosity in them. He was a good teacher. What are you getting at, anyway? Do you think one of his students might have killed him over a poor grade?’

  ‘It sounds unlikely, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Not as much as you think,’ Marilyn said. ‘We once had a guy come after his English teacher here with a shotgun. Luckily, security stopped him before he got very far. Still,’ she went on, ‘I shouldn’t think an irate student would go to all the trouble of following him over to England and killing him there.’

  ‘What did Bernie do when he went home after work? Did he ever mention any particular place he went to?’

  Marilyn shook her head and the curls danced. ‘No. He did once say he’d had a few pints too many in the pub the night before.’

  ‘The pub?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He didn’t say which pub?’

  ‘No. He just said he’d had six pints when five was his limit these days. Look, what is all this? What are you after? You’re not one of those private eyes, are you?’

  Banks laughed. ‘No. I told you, I’m a friend of Bernie’s from England. Swainsdale, w
here he grew up. I want to piece together as much of his life as I can. A lot of people over there are hurt and puzzled by what happened.’

  ‘Yeah, well . . . me too. He wasn’t the kind of guy who gets himself killed. Know what I mean?’

  Banks nodded.

  ‘Swainsdale, you said?’ she went on. ‘Bernie was always going on about that place. At least the couple of times we talked he was. Like it was some paradise on earth or something. Especially since the divorce, he started to get homesick. He was beginning to feel a bit lost and out of place here. It can happen, you know. So he took the thousand-dollar cure.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The thousand-dollar cure. I guess it’s gone up now with inflation, but it’s when Brits take a trip back home to renew their roots. Used to call it the thousand-dollar cure. For homesickness.’

  ‘Did he ever talk of going back to Swainsdale to stay?’

  ‘Yeah. He said he’d be off like a shot if he had a job, or a private income. He said there was nothing for him here after he split up with Barbara. Poor guy. Like I said, he got withdrawn, dwelled on things too much.’

  Banks nodded. ‘There’s nothing else you can tell me? You’re sure he didn’t name any specific pub or place he used to hang out?’

  ‘Sorry.’ Marilyn grinned. ‘I’d remember if he had because I’d have probably dropped in there one evening. Just by chance, you know.’