A Necessary End

by Peter Robinson

  “Like what?”

  “A phone number. They still have four digits around here, you know. Or it could be part of a measurement, a sum of money, almost anything.”

  “It’s not a phone number,” Banks said. “Do you think I haven’t checked? It is PC Gill’s number, though.”

  “Coincidence.”

  “Possibly. But I’m not convinced.”

  “That’s your problem.” Seth picked up the plane again and began working more vigorously.

  “It could be your problem, too, Seth.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “No. I leave those to Superintendent Burgess. What I mean is, it would be very convenient if someone else had killed Gill—you, say—and Paul Boyd took the blame. He really doesn’t have a leg to stand on, you know.”

  “What do you mean?” Seth paused again.

  “I mean the odds are that he’ll go down for it.”

  “Are you saying he’s confessed?”

  “I’m not free to talk about things like that. I’m just saying it looks bad, and if you know of anything that might help him you’d better tell me pretty damn quick. Unless it’s to your advantage that Boyd gets charged with murder.”

  “I don’t know anything.” Seth bent over the length of pine and caressed the surface. His voice was tight, and he kept his face averted.

  “I can understand it if you’re protecting someone,” Banks went on. “Like Mara tried to protect Paul. But think about what you’re doing. By covering for someone else, you almost certainly condemn Paul. Does he mean so little to you?”

  Seth slammed down the plane. He turned to face Banks, his face red and eyes bright. The vein by his temple throbbed. “How can you talk like that?” he said in a shaky voice. “Of course Paul means a lot to us. He’s not been tried yet, you know. It’s only you bastards who’ve convicted him so far. If he didn’t do it, then he’ll get off, won’t he?”

  Banks lit a Silk Cut. “I’m surprised you’ve got such faith in justice, Seth. I’m afraid I haven’t. The way things are these days, he may well be made an example of.”

  Seth snorted. “What would you do? Fix the jury?”

  “We wouldn’t need to. The jury’s made up of ordinary men and women—law-abiding, middle-class citizens for the most part. They’ll take one look at Boyd and want to lock him up and throw away the key.”

  “He’ll manage. And we’ll stick by him. We won’t let him down.”

  “Admirable sentiments. But it might not be enough. Where did you live before you bought this place?”

  Surprised, Seth had to think for a moment. “Hebden Bridge. Why?”

  “Where did you get the money from, for the farm?”

  “If it’s any of your business, I saved some and inherited a little from a dotty aunt. We . . .I also had a small business there, which I sold—a second-hand bookshop.”

  “What kind of work did you do?”

  “This kind.” Seth gestured around the workshop. “I was a jack-of-all-trades, showed the true Thatcherite entrepreneurial spirit. I made good money for good work. I still do.”

  “Who ran the bookshop, then?”

  “My wife.” Seth spoke between his teeth and turned back to his wood.

  “There was some kind of accident, wasn’t there?” Banks said. “Your wife?” He knew some of the details but wanted to see how Seth reacted.

  Seth took a deep breath. “Yes, there was. But it’s still none of your business.”

  “What happened?”

  “Like you said. I had a wife. There was an accident.”

  “What kind?”

  “She was hit by a car.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Seth turned on him. “Why? Why the bloody hell should you be sorry? You didn’t even know Alison. Just get the fuck out and let me get on with my work. I’ve nothing more to say to you.”

  Banks lingered at the doorway. “One more thing: Elizabeth Dale. Is that name familiar to you?”

  “I know someone called Liz Dale, yes.”

  “She’s the woman who ran off from the mental hospital and ended up here, isn’t she?”

  “Why ask if you know already?”

  “I wasn’t sure, but I thought so. Do you know anything about a complaint she made against PC Gill?”

  “No. Why should I?”

  “She used his number: 1139.”

  “So?”

  “Bit of a coincidence, that’s all: her complaint, his number in your notebook. Could she have written it?”

  “I suppose so. But so could anyone else. I really don’t know anything about it.” Seth sounded tired.

  “Have you seen her recently? Has she been up here in the past few weeks?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “We’ve lost touch. It happens.”

  Seth bent over the pine again and Banks left, avoiding the house by using the side gate. In the car, he contemplated going to the barn to talk to Rick and Zoe. But they could wait. He’d had enough of Maggie’s Farm for one day.

  II

  Burgess winked at Glenys, who smiled and blushed. Banks was the only one to notice Cyril’s expression darken. They carried their drinks and ploughman’s lunches back to the table.

  “How’s Boyd?” Burgess asked.

  “He’s all right. I didn’t know you cared.”

  Burgess spat the remains of a pickled onion into his napkin:

  “Bloody awful stuff. Gives me heartburn.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re developing an ulcer,” Banks said, “the way you go at life.” Burgess grinned. “You only live once.”

  “Are you going to stick around and see what happens?”

  “I’ll stay a few more days, yes.” He eyed Glenys again. “I’m not quite finished up here yet.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re getting to like the north?”

  “At least the bloody weather’s improved, even if the people haven’t.”

  “Friendliest lot in the country, when you get to know them.”

  “Tell me about it.” Burgess shoved in a chunk of Wensleydale and washed it down with Double Diamond.

  Banks grimaced. “No wonder you get heartburn.”

  Burgess pushed his plate aside and lit a cigar. “Tell me honestly,

  Banks. What do you make of Boyd? Guilty or not?”

  “He’s obviously involved. Deeply involved. But if you’re asking do I think he killed Gill, the answer’s no, I don’t.”

  “You could be right. He certainly stuck to his guns under pressure, and I don’t think he’s that tough.” Burgess prodded the air with his cigar. “Personally, I don’t give a damn what happens to Boyd. I’d rather see him go down for it than no one at all. But give me some credit. I’m not a bloody idiot, and if I’m not satisfied everything’s wrapped up I like to know why. I get nagging feelings like every copper.”

  “And you have one about Boyd?”

  “A little one.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Consider the alternatives. You heard what he said last night, about the others going up to the farm on Friday afternoon. That covers just about everyone we’ve had our eye on since this business started. Who do you reckon?”

  Banks sipped some beer to wash down his lunch. “It depends,” he said. “Any of the people Boyd mentioned could have got access to the knife, and so could anyone else who went up there a few days before the demo. Nobody had noticed whether it was missing or not—at least, nobody admits to noticing. If you’re convinced it was a terrorist act, then obviously you’re best starting with the most politically active of them: Osmond. Trelawney and the students. On the other hand, if you accept that there could have been some other motive, then you have to rethink the whole thing in more human terms: revenge, hatred, that kind of thing. Or maybe someone was trying to put the blame on the farm people, someone who had a reason to hate them or want them off their land.”

  Burgess sigh
ed. “You make it sound so bloody complicated. Do you really think that’s where the answer lies?”

  “It’s possible, yes.” Banks took a deep breath. “Gill was a bastard,” he said. “He liked thumping people, bashing heads. He’s volunteered for more crowd control duties than I’ve had hot dinners. And another thing: Osmond made an official complaint about him for using undue force in another demo a couple of years back. So did a woman called Elizabeth Dale, in a separate incident. And she’s got some connection with the farm crowd.”

  Burgess drank some more beer and sucked his lips. “How do you know?” he asked quietly.

  Banks had been expecting this. He remembered Burgess’s order not to look into Gill’s record. “Anonymous tip,” he said.

  Burgess narrowed his eyes and stared as Banks took out a cigarette and lit it.

  “I don’t know if I believe you,” he said finally.

  “It doesn’t bloody matter, does it? It’s what I’m telling you that counts. Do you want to get to the bottom of this or don’t you?”

  “Go on.”

  “I’m saying we’ve got two options: terrorism or personal motive.

  Maybe they’re both mixed up as well, I don’t know.”

  “And where does Boyd come in?”

  “Either he did exactly as he told us, or he was an accomplice. So we dig deeper into his political background. Richmond’s doing all he can at the computer, checking people Boyd knew in jail and any others he hung about with when the local police were keeping an eye on him. He spent some time in Ireland, which is where he was heading when we caught him, and some of the people he knew had connections with the IRA. We can’t prove it, but we’re pretty damn sure. We also have to consider the personal motive. Gill was the kind of person to make enemies, and it looks like Osmond was one of them.”

  “In the meantime,” Burgess said, “we hang onto Boyd.” Banks shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Let him go?”

  “Yes. Why not?”

  “He scarpered last time. What’s to stop him doing it again?”

  “I think he found out that he’d nowhere to go. If you let him out, he’ll go back to the farm and stay there.”

  “But why let him out at all?”

  “Because it might stir something up. If he’s not guilty, there’s still a chance he might know who is. He might slip up, set something moving.”

  Burgess swirled the beer in his glass. “So we charge him with tampering with evidence, wasting police time, and let him out. Is that what you’re suggesting?”

  “For the time being, yes. Have you got a better idea?”

  “I’m not convinced,” Burgess said slowly, “but I’ll go along with it.

  And,” he added, poking his cigar in Banks’s direction, “on your head be it, mate. If he buggers off again, you’ll answer for it.”

  “All right.”

  “And we’ll keep him in another night, just so he gets the message.

  I’ll have another little chat with him, too.”

  It was a compromise. Burgess was not the kind of man to give way completely to someone else’s idea. It was the best deal he would get, so Banks agreed.

  Burgess smiled over at Glenys. Down at the far end of the bar, a glass broke. “I’ll go get us a couple more, shall I?”

  “Let me.” Banks stood up quickly. “It’s my round.” It wasn’t, but the last thing they needed was a lunch-time punch-up between the landlord of the Queen’s Arms and a detective superintendent from Scotland Yard.

  “I’ll take Osmond again, too,” Burgess said, when Banks got back. “I don’t trust you when that bird of his is around. You go all gooey-eyed.”

  Banks ignored him.

  “Can I take DC Richmond with me?” Burgess asked.

  “What’s wrong with Sergeant Hatchley?”

  “He’s a lazy sod,” Burgess said. “How he ever made sergeant I don’t bloody know. Every time he’s been with me he’s just sat there like a stuffed elephant.”

  “He has his good points,” Banks said, surprised to find himself defending Hatchley. He wondered if the sergeant really had been nurturing a dream of Burgess’s inviting him to join some elite Yard squad just because they both believed in the privatization of everything and in an England positively bristling with nuclear missiles. If he had, tough titty.

  The difference between them, Banks thought, was that Hatchley just assumed attitudes or inherited them from his parents; he never thought them out. Burgess, on the other hand, really believed that the police existed to hold back the red tide and keep immigrants in their place so that the government could get on with the job of putting the Great back in Britain. He also believed that people like Paul Boyd should be kept off the streets so that decent citizens could rest easy in their beds at night. It never occurred to him for a moment that he might not pass for decent himself.

  Banks followed Burgess back to the station and went up to his office. He had a phone call to make.

  TWELVE

  I

  South of Skipton, the landscape changes dramatically. The limestone dales give way to millstone grit country, rough moorland for the most part, bleaker and wilder than anything in Swainsdale. Even the dry-stone walls are made of the dark purplish gritstone. The landscape is like the people it breeds: stubborn, guarded, long of memory.

  Banks drove through Keighley and Haworth into open country, with Haworth Moor on his right and Oxenhope Moor on his left. Even in the bright sun of that springlike day, the landscape looked sinister and brooding. Sandra hated it; it was too spooky and barren for her. But Banks found something magical about the area, with its legends of witches, mad Methodist preachers and the tales the Brontë sisters had spun.

  Banks slipped a cassette in the stereo and Robert Johnson sang “Hellhound on My Trail.” West Yorkshire was a long way from the Mississippi delta, but the dark, jagged edges of Johnson’s guitar seemed to limn the landscape, and his haunted, doom-laden lyrics captured its mood.

  Dominated by mill-towns at the valley bottoms and weaving communities on the heights, the place is a product of the Industrial Revolution. Majestic old mills with their tall chimneys of dark, grainy millstone grit still remain. Many have now been scoured of two hundred years’ soot and set up as craft and antique markets.

  Hebden Bridge is a mill-town turned tourist trap, full of book-shops and antique shops. Not so long ago, it was a centre of trouser and corduroy manufacturing, but since the seventies, when the hippies from Leeds and Manchester invaded, it has been more of a place for arts festivals, poetry readings in pubs and other cultural activities.

  Banks drove down the steep hill from the moors into the town itself. Rows of tall terraced houses run at angles diagonally along the hillside and overlook the mills at the valley bottom. They look like four-storey houses, but are actually rows of two-storey houses built one on top of the other. You enter the lower house from a street or ginnel at one level, and the upper from a higher one at the back. All of which made it very difficult for Banks to find Reginald Lee’s house.

  Lee, Banks had discovered from his phone call to PC Brooks of the Hebden Bridge police, was a retired shop owner living in one of the town’s two-tiered buildings. Just over three years ago he had been involved in an accident on the town’s busy main street—a direct artery along the Calder valley from east to west—which had resulted in the death of Alison, Seth Cotton’s wife.

  Banks had also discovered from the police that there had been nothing suspicious about her death, and that Mr Lee had not been at fault. But he wanted to know more about Seth Cotton’s background, and it seemed that the death of his wife was a good place to start. He was still convinced that the number written so boldly in the old notebook was PC Gill’s and not just part of a coincidentally similar calculation. Whether Seth himself had written it down was another matter.

  Lee, a small man in a baggy, threadbare pullover, answered the door and frowned at Banks. He clearly didn’t get many vis
itors. His thinning grey hair was uncombed, sticking up on end in places as if he’d had an electric shock, and the room he finally showed Banks into was untidy but clean. It was also chilly. Banks kept his jacket on.

  “Sorry about the mess,” Lee said in a high-pitched, whining voice. “Wife died two years back and I just can’t seem to get the hang of housework.”

  “I know what you mean.” Banks moved some newspapers from a hard-backed chair. “My wife’s been away at her mother’s for two weeks now and the house feels like it’s falling apart. Mind if I smoke?”

  “Not at all.” Lee shuffled to the sideboard and brought an ashtray. “What can I help you with?”

  “I’m sorry to bring all this up again,” Banks said. “I know it must be painful for you, but it’s about that accident you were involved in about three years ago.”

  Lee’s eyes seemed to glaze over at the mention. “Ah, yes,” he said. “I blame that for Elsie’s death, too, you know. She was with me at the time, and she never got over it. I retired early myself. Couldn’t seem to . . .” He lost his train of thought and stared at the empty fireplace.

  “Mr Lee?”

  “What? Oh, sorry, Inspector. It is Inspector, isn’t it?”

  “It’ll do,” Banks said. “The accident.”

  “Ah, yes. What is it you want to know?”

  “Just what happened, in as much detail as you can remember.”

  “Oh, I can remember it all.” He tapped his forehead. “It’s all engraved there in slow motion. Just let me get my pipe. It seems to help me concentrate. I have a bit of trouble keeping my mind on track these days.” He fetched a briar from a rack by the fireplace, filled it with rubbed twist and put a match to it. The tobacco flamed up and blue smoke curled from the bowl. A child’s skipping rhyme drifted in from the street:

  Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie,

  Kiss the girls and make them cry.

  “Where was I?”

  “The accident.”

  “Ah, yes. Well, it happened on a lovely summer’s day. The six-teenth of July. One of those days when you can smell the moorland heather and the wild flowers even here in town. Not a cloud in the sky and everyone in that relaxed, dozy mood you get in summer. Elsie and I were going for a ride to Hardcastle Crags. We used to do a lot of our courting up there when we were youngsters, like. So whenever the weather was good, off we went. I wasn’t doing more than thirty—and I hadn’t a drop of drink in me, never touch the stuff—when I came upon this lass riding along on her bicycle on my inside.” He faltered, sucked at his pipe as if it were an oxygen mask, and carried on. “She was a bit wobbly, but then a lot of cyclists are. I always took special care when there were cyclists around. Then it happened. My front wheels were a foot or two away from her back.