A Necessary End

by Peter Robinson

Jerry Garcia played on. Seth stirred, opened one bloodshot eye, then closed it again.

  Mara poured herself and Zoe some more white wine, then her mind wandered back to Paul. As if she weren’t confused enough already, the hostility he’d shown tonight and the new information about his feelings for his parents muddied the waters even more. She was scared of approaching him about the blood on his hand, and she was beginning to feel frightened to go on living in the same house as someone she suspected of murder. But she hated herself for feeling that way about him, for not being able to trust him completely and believe in him.

  What she needed was somebody to talk to, somebody she could trust from outside the house. She felt like a woman with a breast lump who was afraid to go to the doctor and find out if it really was cancer.

  And what made it worse was that she’d noticed the knife was missing: the flick-knife Seth said he had bought in France years ago. Everybody else must have noticed, too, but no one had mentioned it. The knife had been lying on the mantelpiece for anyone to use ever since she’d been at Maggie’s Farm, and now it was gone.

  IV

  Banks ate the fish and chips he had bought on the way home, then went into the living-room. Screw gourmet cooking, he thought. If that irritating neighbour, Selena Harcourt, didn’t turn up with some sticky dessert to feed him up “while the little woman’s away,” he’d have the evening to relax instead of mixing up sauces that never turned out anyway.

  He had calmed down soon after leaving Burgess at the station. The bastard had been right. What had happened at Osmond’s, he realized, had not been particularly serious, but his shock at finding Jenny there had made him exaggerate things. His reaction had been extreme, and for a few moments, he’d lost his detachment. That was all. It had happened before and it would happen again. Not the end of the world.

  He poured a drink, put his feet up and turned on the television. There was a special about the Peak District on Yorkshire TV. Half-watching, he flipped through Tracy’s latest copy of History Today and read an interesting article on Sir Titus Salt, who had built a Utopian community called Saltaire, near Bradford, for the workers in his textile mills. It would be a good place to visit with Sandra and the kids, he thought. Sandra could take photographs; Tracy would be fascinated; and surely even Brian would find something of interest. The problem was that Sir Titus had been a firm teetotaller. There were no pubs in Saltaire. Obviously one man’s Utopia is another man’s Hell.

  The article made him think of Maggie’s Farm. He liked the place and respected Seth and Mara. They had shown antagonism towards him, but that was only to be expected. In his job, he was used to much worse. He didn’t take it personally. Being a policeman was like being a vicar in some ways; people could never be really comfortable with you, even when you dropped into the local for a pint.

  The TV programme finished, and he decided there was no point putting off the inevitable. Picking up the phone, he dialled Jenny’s number. He was in luck; she answered on the third ring.

  “Jenny? It’s Alan.”

  There was a pause at the other end. “I’m not sure I want to talk to you,” she said finally.

  “Could you be persuaded to?”

  “Try.”

  “I just wanted to apologize for this afternoon. I hadn’t expected to see you there.”

  Only the slight crackle of the line filled the silence. “It surprised me, too,” Jenny said. “You keep some pretty bad company.”

  I could say the same for you, too, Banks thought. “Yes,” he said, “I know.”

  “I do think you should keep him on a leash in future. You could maybe try a muzzle on him as well.” She was obviously warming to him again, he could tell.

  “Love to. But he’s the boss. How did Osmond take it?” The name almost stuck in his throat.

  “He was pissed off, all right. But it didn’t last. Dennis is resilient. He’s used to police harassment.”

  There was silence again, more awkward this time.

  “Well,” Banks said, “I just wanted to say I was sorry.”

  “Yes. You’ve said that already. It wasn’t your fault. I’m not used to seeing you in a supporting role. You’re not at your best like that, you know.”

  “What did you expect me to do? Jump up and hit him?”

  “No, I didn’t mean anything like that. But when he said what he did about us I could see you were ready to.”

  “Was it so obvious?”

  “It was to me.”

  “I blew up at him in the car.”

  “I thought you would. What did he say?”

  “Just laughed it off.”

  “Charming. I could have killed him when he said that about my shirt being undone.”

  “It was, though.”

  “I dressed in a hurry. I wanted to know what was going on.”

  “I know. I’m not trying to make out you did it on purpose or anything. It’s just that, well, with a bloke like him around you’ve got to be extra careful.”

  “Now I know. Though I hope I won’t have the pleasure again.”

  “He doesn’t give up easily,” Banks said gloomily.

  “Nor do I. Where are you? What are you doing?”

  “At home. Relaxing.”

  “Me, too. Is Sandra back?”

  “No.” The silence crackled again. Banks cleared his throat. “Look,” he said, “when I mentioned dinner the other day, before all this, I meant it. How about tomorrow?”

  “Can’t tomorrow. I’ve got an evening class to teach.”

  “Tuesday?”

  Jenny paused. “I suppose I can break my date,” she said. “It had better be worth it, though.”

  “The Royal Oak is always worth it. My treat. I need to talk to you.”

  “Business?”

  “I’m hoping you can help me get a handle on some of those Maggie’s Farm people. Seth and Mara are about my age. It’s funny how we all grew up in the sixties and turned out so different.”

  “Not really. Everybody’s different.”

  “I liked the music. I just never felt I fit in with the longhaired crowd. Mind you, I did try pot once or twice.”

  “Alan! You didn’t?”

  “I did.”

  “And here’s me thinking you’re so strait-laced. What happened?”

  “Nothing, the first time.”

  “And the second?”

  “I fell asleep.”

  Jenny laughed.

  “Still,” Banks mused, “Burgess is about my age, too.”

  “He was probably sitting around in jackboots and a leather over-coat pulling the wings off flies.”

  “Probably. Anyway, dinner. Eight o’clock all right?”

  “Fine.”

  “I’ll pick you up.”

  Jenny said good night and hung up. Still friends. Banks breathed a sigh of relief.

  He went back to his armchair and his drink, but he suddenly felt the need to call Sandra.

  “How’s your father?” he asked.

  Sandra laughed. “Cantankerous as ever. But mother’s coping better than I’d hoped.” The line was poor and her voice sounded far-away.

  “How much longer will you be down there?”

  “A few more days should do it. Why? Are you missing us?”

  “More than you know.”

  “Hang on a minute. We had a day in London yesterday and Tracy wants to tell you about it.”

  Banks talked to his daughter for a while about St Paul’s and the Tower of London, then Brian cut in and told him how great the record shops were down there. There was exactly the guitar he’d been looking for. . . . Finally, Sandra came back on again.

  “Anything happening up there?”

  “You could say that.” Banks told her about the demo and the killing.

  Sandra whistled. “I’m glad I’m out of it. I can imagine how frantic things are.”

  “Thanks for the support.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Remember Dick
Burgess? Used to be a chief inspector at the Yard?”

  “Was he the one who pawed the hostess and threw up in the geraniums at Lottie’s party?”

  “That’s the one. He’s up here, in charge.”

  “God help you. Now I’m really glad I’m down here. He had his eyes on me, too, you know, if not his hands.”

  “I’d like to say it was good taste, but don’t flatter yourself, love. He’s like that with everyone in a skirt.”

  Sandra laughed. “Better go now. Brian and Tracy are at it again.”

  “Give them my love. Take care. See you soon.”

  After he’d hung up, Banks felt so depressed that he almost regretted phoning in the first place. Why, he wondered, does a phone call to a distant loved one only intensify the emptiness and loneliness you were feeling before you called?

  At a loose end, he turned off the television in the middle of a pop-music special that Brian would have loved and put on the blues tape an old colleague had sent him from London. The Reverend Robert Wilkins sang “Prodigal Son” in his eerie voice, unusually thin and high-pitched for a bluesman. Banks slouched in the armchair by the gas fire and sipped his drink. He often did his best thinking while drinking Scotch and listening to music, and it was time to put some of his thoughts about Gill’s murder in order.

  A number of things bothered him. There were demonstrations all the time, much bigger than the one in Eastvale, and while opposing sides sometimes came to blows, policemen didn’t usually get stabbed. Call it statistics, probability or just a hunch, but he didn’t believe in Burgess’s view of the affair.

  And that was a problem, because it didn’t leave much else to choose from. He still had uneasy feelings about some of the Maggie’s Farm crowd. Paul Boyd was a dangerous character if ever he’d met one, and Mara had seemed extremely keen to come to his defence. Seth and Zoe had been especially quiet, but Rick Trelawney had expressed more violent views than Banks had expected. He didn’t know what it added up to, but he felt that somebody knew something, or thought they did, and didn’t want to communicate their suspicions to the police. It was a stupid way to behave, but people did it all the time. Banks just hoped that none of them got hurt.

  As for Dennis Osmond, putting personal antipathy aside, Banks had caught him on two lies. Osmond had said he didn’t know Paul Boyd, when he clearly did, and Banks had also suspected him of lying when he denied knowing PC Gill. It was easy enough to see why he might have lied: nobody wants to admit a connection with a murdered man or a convicted criminal if he doesn’t have to. But Banks had to determine if there was anything more sinister to it than that. How could Osmond have known PC Gill? Maybe they’d been to school together. Or perhaps Gill had had occasion to arrest Osmond at some previous anti-nuclear protest. If so, it should be on the files. Richmond would have the gen from Special Branch in the morning.

  Nothing so far seemed much like a motive for murder, though. If he was really cautious, he might be able to get something out of Jenny on Tuesday. She didn’t usually resent his trying to question her, but she was bound to be especially sensitive where Osmond was concerned.

  Perhaps he had reacted unprofessionally on finding Jenny in Osmond’s bedroom and to Burgess’s approach to interrogation. But, he reminded himself, Dirty Dick had made him look a proper wally, and what was more, he had insulted Jenny. Sometimes Banks thought that Burgess’s technique was to badger everyone involved in a case until someone was driven to try to throttle him. At least then he could lay a charge of attempted murder.

  Halfway through his third Laphroaig and the second side of the tape, Banks decided that there was only one way to get back at the bastard, and that was to solve the case himself, in his own way. Burgess wasn’t the only one who could play his cards close to his chest. Let him concentrate on the reds under the bed. Banks would do a bit of discreet digging and see if he could come up with anyone who had a motive for wanting PC Edwin Gill, and not just any copper, dead.

  But if Gill the person rather than Gill the policeman was the victim, it raised a number of problems. For a start, how could the killer know that Gill was going to be at the demo? Also, how could he be sure that things would turn violent enough to mask a kill? Most puzzling of all was how could he have been certain of an escape? But at least these were concrete questions, a starting point. The more Banks thought about it, the more the thick of a political demonstration seemed the ideal cover for murder.

  FIVE

  I

  The funeral procession wound its way from Gordon Street, where Edwin Gill had lived, along Manor Road to the cemetery. Somehow, Banks thought, the funeral of a fellow officer was always more solemn and grim than any other. Every policeman there knew that it could just as easily have been him in the coffin; every copper’s wife lived with the fear that her husband, too, might end up stabbed, beaten or, these days, shot; and the public at large felt the tremor and momentary weakness in the order of things.

  For the second time in less than a week, Banks found himself uncomfortable in a suit and tie. He listened to the vicar’s eulogy, the obligatory verses from the Book of Common Prayer, and stared at the bristly necks in front of him. At the front, Gill’s immediate family—mother, two sisters, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces—snuffled and slipped each other wads of Kleenex.

  When it was over, everyone filed out and waited for the cars to take them to the funeral lunch. The oaks and beeches lining the cemetery drive shook in the brisk wind. One moment the sun popped out from behind the clouds, and the next, a five-minute shower took everyone by surprise. It was that kind of day: chameleon, unpredictable.

  Banks stood with DC Richmond by the unmarked black police Rover—his own white Cortina was hardly the thing for a funeral—and waited for someone to lead the way. He wore a light grey raincoat over his navy-blue suit, but his head was bare. With his close-cropped black hair, scar beside the right eye, and lean, angular features, he thought he must look a suspicious figure as he held his raincoat collar tight around his throat to keep out the cold wind. Richmond, rangy and athletic, wearing a camel-hair overcoat and trilby, stood beside him.

  It was early Tuesday afternoon. Banks had spent the morning reading over the records Richmond had managed to gather on Osmond and the Maggie’s Farm crowd. There wasn’t much. Seth Cotton had once been arrested for carrying an offensive weapon (a bicycle chain) at a mods-and-rockers debacle in Brighton in the early sixties. After that, he had one marijuana bust to his credit—only a quid deal, nothing serious—for which he had been fined.

  Rick Trelawney had been in trouble only once, in St Ives, Cornwall. A tourist had taken exception to his drunken pronouncements on the perfidy of collecting art, and a rowdy argument turned into a punch-up. It had taken three men to drag Rick off, and the tourist had ended up with a broken jaw and one permanently deaf ear.

  The only other skeleton in Rick’s cupboard was the wife from whom he had recently separated. She was an alcoholic, which made it easy enough for Rick to get custody of Julian. But she was now staying with her sister in London while undergoing treatment, and there was a legal battle brewing. Things had got so bad at one point that Rick had applied for a court order to prevent her from coming near their son.

  There was nothing on Zoe, but Richmond had checked the birth registry and discovered that the father of her child, Luna, was one Lyle Greenberg, an American student who had since returned to his home in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

  On Mara there was even less. Immigration identified her as Moira Delacey, originally from Dublin. With her parents, she had come to England at the age of six, and they had settled in Manchester. No known Republican connections.

  Most interesting and disturbing of all was Dennis Osmond’s criminal record. In addition to arrests for his part in anti-government demonstrations—with charges ranging from breach of the peace to theft of a police officer’s helmet—he had also been accused of assault by a live-in girl-friend called Ellen Ventner four years ago. At the woman’s insiste
nce, the charges had later been dropped, but Ventner’s injuries—two broken ribs, a broken nose, three teeth knocked out and concussion—had been clearly documented by the hospital, and Osmond came out of the affair looking far from clean. Banks wasn’t sure whether to bring up the subject when he met Jenny for dinner that evening. He wondered if she already knew. If she didn’t she might not take kindly to his interference. Somehow, he doubted that Osmond had told her.

  They were still waiting for the information from Special Branch, who had files on Osmond, Tim Fenton, the student leader, and five others known to have been at the demo. Apparently, the Branch needed Burgess’s personal access code, password, voice-print and genetic fingerprint, or some equally ludicrous sequence of identification. Banks didn’t expect much from them, anyway. In his own experience, Special Branch kept files on everyone who had ever bought a copy of Socialist Weekly.

  Today, while Banks and Richmond were attending Gill’s funeral, Burgess was taking Sergeant Hatchley to do the rounds again. They intended to revisit Osmond, Dorothy Wycombe, Tim Fenton and Maggie’s Farm. Banks wanted to talk to the students himself, so he decided to call on them when he got back that evening—if Burgess hadn’t alienated them beyond all communication by then.

  Burgess had been practically salivating at the prospect of more interrogations, and even Hatchley had seemed more excited about work than usual. Perhaps it was the chance to work with a superstar that thrilled him, Banks thought. The sergeant had always found “The Sweeney” much more interesting than the real thing. Or maybe he was going to suck up to Dirty Dick in the hope of being chosen for some special Scotland Yard squad. And the devil of it was, perhaps he would be, too.

  Banks had mixed feelings about that possibility. He had got used to Sergeant Hatchley sooner than he’d expected to, and they had worked quite well together. But Banks had no real feeling for him. He couldn’t even bring himself to call Hatchley by his first name, Jim.

  In Banks’s mind, Hatchley was a sergeant and always would be. He didn’t have that extra keen edge needed to make inspector. Phil Richmond did, but unfortunately there wasn’t anywhere for him to move up to locally unless Hatchley was promoted, too. Superintendent Gristhorpe wouldn’t have that, and Banks didn’t blame him. If Burgess liked Hatchley enough to suggest a job in London, that would solve all their problems. Richmond had already passed his sergeant’s exams—the first stage on the long road to promotion—and perhaps PC Susan Gay, who had shown remarkable aptitude for detective work, could be transferred in from the uniformed branch as a new detective constable. PC Craig would be opposed, of course. He still called policewomen “wopsies,” even though the gender-specific designation, WPC, had been dropped in favour of the neutral PC as far back as 1975. But that was Craig’s problem; Hatchley was everyone’s cross to bear.