A Necessary End

by Peter Robinson

  That was what she had been thinking about when the number had been mentioned. And she had been in the kitchen, too, because she clearly recalled the earthy feel of the potatoes she’d been peeling. Wasn’t it odd how the mind worked? All the components of the experience were there, clear as day, but she couldn’t remember who had mentioned the number, or in what context. And people had been in and out of the kitchen all afternoon.

  Worrying about Paul again, wondering where he was, she lowered her head against the wind and marched on through the rough grass and heather.

  III

  There was little else to do but wait for Boyd to turn up. Whatever his suspicions, Banks had nothing concrete to go on, and he wasn’t likely to have until he’d questioned Boyd. Dirty Dick was still sleeping last night’s beer and Scotch off in his hotel room and Richmond was running around putting together as much information as he could get on the suspects. Criminal records weren’t enough; they tended to leave out the all-too-important human factor, the snippet that gives a clue to motivation and makes the pattern clear.

  Mostly Banks smoked too much and stared gloomily out of his window onto the grey market square. At four o’clock, he heard a knock on his door and called, “Come in.”

  PC Craig stood there looking as pleased as Punch. “We’ve got a line on Boyd, sir,” he said, ushering in a stout middle-aged woman with curlers in her hair.

  Banks pulled out a chair for her.

  “This is Mrs Evans,” Craig said. “I went knocking on doors on Cardigan Road to find out if anyone had seen Boyd, and Mrs Evans here said she had. She kindly offered to come in with me and talk to you, sir.”

  “Good work,” Banks said. Craig smiled and left.

  Banks asked Mrs Evans what she’d seen.

  “It was about three o’clock yesterday afternoon,” she began. “I know the time because I’d just got back from Tesco’s with the shopping and I were struggling to get off t’bus.”

  “Which bus was that?”

  “A forty-four. Two forty-six from t’bus station.”

  Banks knew the route. The bus took the long way around Cardigan Road for the benefit of local passengers, then carried on to York.

  “And you saw Paul Boyd?”

  “I saw a lad what looked like that photo.” PC Craig had taken a prison photograph of Boyd to show from door to door. “His hair’s different now, but I know it was him. I’ve seen him before.”

  “Where?”

  “Around town. More often than not coming out of t’dole office. I always hold my handbag tighter when I see him. I know it’s not fair to judge a book by its cover, but he looks like a bad sort to me.”

  “Where did you see him this time?”

  “He was running up Gallows View from t’fields.”

  “From Relton way?”

  “Aye, as t’crow flies.”

  “And where did he go?”

  “Go? He didn’t go anywhere. He were running for t’bus. Just caught it an’ all. Nearly knocked me over, and me carrying two heavy shopping bags.”

  “What was he wearing? Do you remember?”

  “Aye, that I do. A red anorak. I noticed because it looked too small for him. A bit short in t’sleeves and tight around t’armpits.”

  Why, Banks asked himself, wasn’t he surprised that Mara had lied about Boyd’s clothes?

  “Was he carrying anything?”

  “One of those airline bags—British Airways, I think.”

  “Do you remember anything else?”

  “Just that he seemed in such a hurry and looked worried. I mean, as a rule, like I said, it’d be me who’d be frightened of him, but this time he looked like he were scared out of his wits.”

  Banks went over to the door and called Craig back. “Thanks, Mrs Evans,” he said. “We appreciate your coming in like this. PC Craig here will drive you home.” Mrs Evans nodded gravely and Craig escorted her out.

  As soon as he was alone, Banks checked the bus timetable and found that the two forty-six from Eastvale was indeed the milk run to York; it didn’t get there until 4:09. Next he phoned the York railway station and, after speaking to a succession of surly clerks, finally got put through to a pleasant woman in charge of information. From her, he discovered that Boyd could have taken a train almost anywhere between four-fifteen and five o’clock: Leeds, London, Newcastle, Liverpool, Edinburgh, plus points in between and anywhere else that connections might take him. It didn’t seem much of a help, but he called Sergeant Hatchley in and put him on tracking down the train-catering crews and ticket collectors. It would mean a trip to York, and it might take a long time, but at least it was action. Of course, Hatchley pulled a long face—it seemed he had plans for the evening—but Banks ignored him. It wasn’t as if Hatchley had any other work to do. Why wag your own tail when you’ve got a dog?

  At home that evening, Banks ate a tin of Irish stew and pottered restlessly about the house waiting to hear from Hatchley. At nine o’clock, unable to concentrate on reading and almost wishing he’d gone to York himself, he turned on the TV and watched a beautiful blonde policewoman and her loud-mouthed American partner dash around spraying London with lead. It was background noise, something to fill the emptiness of the house. Finally, he could stand his own company no longer and phoned Sandra.

  This time he felt even more lonely after he hung up, but the feeling didn’t last as long. Twenty minutes later Hatchley phoned from York. He had managed to get the addresses of most of the ticket collectors and catering staff on the trains out of York, but none of them lived locally. All in all, the first lead seemed to be petering out. That happened sometimes. Banks told Hatchley to go over to York CID headquarters and phone as many of the crew members as he could get through to, and to call back if he came up with anything. He didn’t. At eleven-thirty Banks went to bed. Maybe tomorrow morning, after Boyd’s photograph appeared in all the national dailies, they would get the break they needed.

  TEN

  I

  The big break came early Friday morning. The Rossghyll Guest House proved to be a dead end, and all the train crews out of York had been too busy to remember anyone, but an Edinburgh barber phoned to say he recognized Paul Boyd’s photograph in the morning paper. Though Banks found the man’s accent difficult to understand, he managed to learn what Paul’s new haircut looked like. Even more important, he discovered that Paul had ditched his red anorak for a new grey duffle coat.

  As soon as he hung up, Banks checked the map. Paul had headed north rather than to London or Liverpool. That had been a clever move; it had gained him time. But now that his photograph was on the front page of all the tabloid dailies, his time was running out. In addition to getting the photo in the papers as soon as possible, Banks and his men had also circulated Boyd’s description to police in all major cities, ports and airports. It was routine, the best they could do with limited knowledge, but now there was somewhere concrete to start.

  Assuming that Paul would ultimately want to leave the country, Banks took out his AA road map and ran his finger up the outline of the Scottish coast looking for ways out. He could find only two ferry routes north of Edinburgh on the east coast. The first, from Aberdeen to Lerwick, on the Shetlands, could take Boyd eventually to Bergen and Torshavn, in Norway, or to Seydhisfjordhur, in Iceland. But looking at the fine print, Banks saw that those ferries ran only in summer—and as the grey sky and drizzle outside testified, it certainly wasn’t summer.

  Another ferry ran from Scrabster, further north, to Stromness, on mainland Orkney, but that hardly seemed like a place to run and hide. Boyd would stand out there like an Eskimo in the tropics.

  Turning to the west coast, Banks saw dozens of broken red lines leading to such places as Brodick, on the Isle of Arran; Port Ellen, on Islay; and Stornaway, on Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides. The whole map was a maze of small islands and ferry routes. But, Banks reasoned, none of those isolated places would suit Boyd. He would be trapped, as well as conspicuous, on any of Scotland�
��s islands, especially at this time of year.

  The only trip that made any sense in the area was Stranraer to Lame. Then Boyd would be in Northern Ireland. From there, he didn’t need a passport to cross the border to the Republic. Boyd was from Liverpool, Banks remembered, and probably had Irish friends.

  So the first call he made, after giving Richmond and Hatchley the task of informing the other Scottish ferry ports just in case, was to the police at Stranraer. He was told that there had been no sailings the previous day because of a bad storm at sea, but this morning was calm. There were sailings at 1130, 1530, 1900 and 0300, all with easy connections from Edinburgh or Glasgow. Banks gave Boyd’s description and asked that the men there keep a special watch for him, especially at ferry boardings. Next he issued the new description to police in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness, Aberdeen and Dundee, and passed a list of smaller places to PCs Craig and Tolliver downstairs. Then he phoned Burgess, who had been keeping a low profile in his hotel room since their drunken night, and gave him the news.

  Banks knew from experience that leads like this could bring results in a matter of minutes or days. He was impatient to have Boyd in and get the truth out of him, as much to test his own theories as anything else, but he’d get nowhere pacing the room. Instead, he sent for some coffee and went over the files Richmond had put together.

  Information is a policeman’s life-blood. It comes in from many sources: interviews, gossip, criminal records, informers, employers, newspaper reporters, and registries of births, marriages and deaths. It has to be collated, filed and cross-referenced in the hope that one day it will prove useful. DC Richmond was the best ferret they had at Eastvale, in addition to being practically invisible on surveillance and handy in a chase. Sergeant Hatchley, though tough, tenacious and good at interrogation, was too lazy and desultory to tie everything together. He overlooked minor details and took the easy way out. Put more simply, Richmond enjoyed gathering and collating data, whereas Hatchley didn’t. It made all the difference.

  Banks spread out the sheets in front of him. He already knew a bit about Seth Cotton, but he had to be thorough in his revision. In the end, though, the only extra knowledge he gleaned was that Cotton had been born in Dewsbury and that in the mid-seventies he had settled in Hebden Bridge and led a quiet life, as far as the local police were concerned. Richmond had picked up the accident report on Alison Cotton, which didn’t say very much. Banks made a note to look into it further.

  There was nothing new on Rick Trelawney, either, apart from the name and address of his wife’s sister in London. It might be worth a call to get more details on the divorce.

  Zoe Hardacre was a local girl. Or near enough. As Jenny had said, she hailed from Whitby on the east coast, not far from Gill’s home town, Scarborough. After school she had tried secretarial work, but drifted away. Employers had complained that she couldn’t seem to keep her mind on the important tasks they gave her, and that she always seemed to be in another world. That other world was the one of the occult: astrology, palmistry and tarot card readings. She had studied the subjects thoroughly enough to be regarded as something of an expert by those who knew about such things. Now that the occult seemed to have come into fashion among the New Age yuppie crowd, she made a living of sorts producing detailed natal charts and giving tarot readings. Everyone seemed to agree that Zoe was harmless, a true flower child, though too young to have been part of the halcyon days of the sixties. She seemed about as political as a flower, too: she supported human rights, and she wanted the bomb banned, but that was as far as it went.

  As far as Banks could make out, she had never come into contact with PC Gill. Banks imagined him bursting into her booth at Whitby, truncheon raised, and arresting her for charlatanism; or perhaps she had read his palm and told him he was a repressed homosexual. The absurdity of Banks’s theories served only as a measure of his frustration over motive. The connection between one of the suspects and Gill’s murder was there somewhere, but Banks didn’t have enough data yet to see it. He felt as if he were trying to do a join-the-dots drawing with too few dots.

  While Banks was almost convinced that Mara Delacey had been at the farm looking after the children at the time PC Gill was stabbed, he glanced over her file anyway. She had started out as a bright girl, a promising student, gaining a good degree in English, but she had fallen in with the hippie crowd when LSD, acid rock, bandanas and bright caftans were all the rage. The police knew she took drugs, but never suspected her of dealing in them. Despite one or two raids on places where she happened to be living, they had never even been able to find her in possession.

  Like Zoe, Mara had done occasional stints of secretarial work, most often as a temp, and she had never really put her university education to practical use. She’d spent some time in the USA in the late seventies, mostly in California. Back in England, she had drifted for a while, then become involved with a guru and ended up living in one of his ashrams in Muswell Hill for a couple of years. After that, the farm. There was nothing to tie Mara to PC Gill, unless he had crossed her path during the two years she had been in Swainsdale.

  Banks walked over to the window to rest his eyes and lit a cigarette. Outside, two elderly tourists, guidebooks in hand, paused to admire the Norman tower, then walked into the church.

  Nothing in what Banks had read seemed to get him any further. If Gill did have a connection with someone at the farm, it was well buried and he’d have to dig deep for it. Sighing, he sat down again and flipped open the next folder.

  Tim Fenton had been born in Ripon and was now in his second year at Eastvale College of Further Education. With Abha Sutton, he ran the Students Union there. It was a small one, and usually stuck to in-college issues, but students were upset about government health and education policies—especially as far as they were likely to affect grants—and took every opportunity to demonstrate their displeasure. Tim, whose father was an accountant, was only nineteen and had no blots on his copy-book except for attending the seminar that got him into Special Branch’s files.

  Abha Sutton was born in Bradford of an Indian mother and a Yorkshire father. Again, her upbringing had been solidly middle-class, and like Tim, as Richmond had tried to tell Burgess, she had no history of violence or involvement in extremist politics. She had been living with Tim for six months now, and together they had started the college Marxist Society. It had very few members, though; many of the college students were local farmers’ sons studying agriculture. Still, the Social Sciences department and the Arts faculty were expanding, and they had managed to recruit a few new members among the literary crowd.

  Banks read even more closely when he got to Dennis Osmond’s file. Osmond was thirty-five, born in Newcastle-on-Tyne. His father had worked in the shipyards there, but unemployment had forced the family to move when Osmond was ten. Mr Osmond had found a job at the chocolate factory, where he’d been known as a strong union man, and he had been involved in the acrimonious and sometimes violent negotiations that marked its last days. Osmond himself, though given at first to more intellectual pursuits, had followed his father politically.

  A radical throughout university, he had dropped out in his third year, claiming that the education he was being given was no more than an indoctrination in bourgeois values, and had taken up social work in Eastvale, where he’d been working now for twelve years. During that period, he had become one of the town’s chief spokesmen, along with Dorothy Wycombe, for the oppressed, neglected and unjustly treated. He had also beat up Ellen Ventner, a woman he had lived with. Some of his cronies were the kind of people that Burgess would want shot on sight—shop stewards, feminists, poets, anarchists and intellectuals.

  Whatever good Osmond had done around the place, Banks still couldn’t help disliking the man and seeing him, somehow, as a sham. He couldn’t understand Jenny’s attraction to him, unless it was purely physical. And Jenny, of course, still didn’t know that Osmond had once assaulted a woman.

  It was af
ter one o’clock, time for a pie and a pint in the Queen’s Arms. But no sooner had Banks settled down in his favourite armchair by the fire to read the Guardian than PC Craig came rushing into the pub.

  “They’ve got him, sir,” he said breathlessly. “Boyd. Caught him trying to get on the half-past eleven ferry to Larne.”

  Banks looked at his watch. “It’s taken them long enough to get onto us. Are they holding him?”

  “No, sir. They’re bringing him down. Said they should be here late this afternoon.”

  “No hurry, then, is there?” Banks lit a cigarette and rustled his paper. “Looks like it’s all over.”

  But it didn’t feel as if it was all over; it felt more like it was just beginning.

  II

  Burgess paced the office like an expectant father, puffing on his cigar and glancing at his watch every ten seconds.

  “Where the bloody hell are they?” he asked for what seemed to Banks like the hundredth time that afternoon.

  “They’ll be here soon. It’s a long drive and the roads can be nasty in this weather.”

  “They ought to be here by now.”

  The two of them were in Banks’s office waiting for Paul Boyd. Scenting the kill, Burgess didn’t seem able to relax, but Banks felt unusually calm. Along Market Street the shopkeepers were shutting up for the day, and it was already growing dark. In the office, the heater coughed and the fluorescent light hummed.