A Necessary End

by Peter Robinson

  Paul sat forward and hugged his knees. “It was for all of us,” he said. “Can’t you see? To keep the police off our backs. It’s what Seth would have done.”

  “But he didn’t,” Banks said. “Seth had no idea that Paul would forge a note. As far as he was concerned, his suicide would be accepted for what it was. He’d never imagined that we’d see it as murder. If his death led us to the truth, so be it, but he wasn’t going to explain. He never did while he was alive, so why should he when he was about to die?”

  “The truth?” Mara said. “Is that what you’re going to tell us now?”

  “Yes. If you want me to.”

  Mara nodded.

  “You might not like it.”

  “After all we’ve been through,” she said, “I think you owe it to us.”

  “Very well. I think Seth killed himself out of shame, among other reasons. He felt he’d let everyone down—including himself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that Seth stabbed PC Gill and he couldn’t live with what he’d done. Paul had already suffered for it. Seth would never have let him take the blame. He’d have confessed himself rather than that. When Paul was released, he was happy for him. What it meant for Seth, though, was that the police would get even closer to him now. It was just a matter of time. I’d already seen PC Gill’s number in his notebook, and those books in his workshop. I knew it was his knife, too. I’d asked him about Elizabeth Dale, and he knew how unstable she was. All I had to do was find her and get her to talk. Seth knew all this. He knew it would soon be all over for him.”

  Mara was pale. Her hands trembled as she tried to roll a cigarette. Banks offered her a Silk Cut and she took it. Zoe went around and poured tea for everyone.

  “I can’t believe this, you know,” Mara said, shaking her head. “Not Seth.”

  “It’s true. I’m not saying that he intended to kill PC Gill. He couldn’t be sure that the demo would turn nasty, even though Gill was supposed to be there. But he went prepared. He knew very well the kind of things that were likely to happen if Gill was around. That’s why I asked you if you’d heard anyone mention Gill’s number that afternoon. Someone had it in for him and knew he’d be there.”

  “I thought it sounded vaguely familiar,” Mara said, speaking quietly as if to herself. “I was in the kitchen, I think, with Seth.”

  “And Osmond mentioned the number.”

  “I . . .It could have been like that. But why Seth? He wasn’t like that. He was a gentle person.”

  “I agree, on the whole,” Banks said. “But the circumstances are very unusual. I had to find Liz Dale to put it all together. She told me a very curious thing, and that was that Alison, Seth’s wife, was murdered. Now that didn’t make sense to me, because I’d spoken to the local police and to the man who ran her over. It was an accident. He hadn’t killed her deliberately. It had ruined his life, too.

  “Seth tried to commit suicide after Alison’s death, but he failed. He got on with his life but he never got over his grief, and that’s partly because he never expressed it. You know he didn’t like to talk about the past, he kept it all bottled up inside, all those feelings of grief and guilt. We always blame ourselves when someone we love dies, because maybe, just in a fleeting moment, we’ve wished them dead, and we tell ourselves that if things had been just a little different—if Seth had ridden to the shops that day instead of Alison—then the tragedy would never have happened. Liz was the only one who really knew about what went on, and that was only because she was a close friend of Alison’s. According to the Hebden Bridge police, Alison was more outgoing, spirited and communicative than Seth. Because he was the ‘strong silent type,’ everyone thought he was really in control, calm and cool, but he was torturing himself inside.”

  “I still don’t see,” Mara said. “What does all this have to do with that policeman who got killed?”

  Banks blew gently on the surface and sipped some tea. It tasted of apple and cinnamon. “Liz Dale filed a complaint about PC Gill’s vicious behaviour during a demo she went to with Alison Cotton. Seth hadn’t been there himself. During the demo, Liz told me, Alison was struck a glancing blow on her temple by Gill. It was just one of many such incidents that afternoon. Alison didn’t want to make a fuss and attract police attention by making a complaint, but Liz was far more political at that time. She made a complaint about Gill’s behaviour in general. When nothing came of it, she didn’t pursue it any further. She’d lost interest by then—heroin made her forget politics—and like you, she assumed that the police wouldn’t listen to someone like her.”

  “Can you blame her?” Rick said. “They obviously didn’t, did they? It hardly seems that—”

  “Shut up,” Banks said. He spoke quietly, but forcefully enough to silence Rick.

  “Over the next few months,” he went on, “Alison started to show some unusual symptoms. She complained of frequent headaches, she was becoming forgetful, and she suffered from dizzy spells. Shortly afterwards, she became pregnant, so she put her other troubles out of her mind for a while.

  “One time, though, she really scared Seth and Liz. She started speaking as if she were a fourteen-year-old girl. Her family had been on holiday in Cyprus then, staying with an army friend of her father’s who was stationed there, and she started describing a warm evening walk by the Mediterranean in Famagusta in great detail. Apparently, even her voice was like that of a fourteen-year-old. Finally she snapped out of it and recalled nothing. She just laughed when the others told her what she’d been talking about.

  “But that did it as far as Seth was concerned. He was worried she might have a brain tumour or something, so he insisted she tell the doctor. According to Liz, the doctor had nothing much to say except that pregnancy can do strange things to a woman’s mind as well as her body. Alison told him that the symptoms started before she got pregnant, but he just said something about people having funny spells, and that was that.

  “A few weeks later, she went to the local shop one evening and got lost. It was about a two-minute walk away, and she couldn’t find her way home. Seth and Liz found her wandering the streets an hour later. Anyway, things didn’t get much better and she went to see the doctor again. At first, he tried to blame the pregnancy again, but Alison stressed the terrible headaches, lapses of memory, and slipping in and out of time. He said not to worry, but he arranged for a CAT scan, just to be on the safe side. Well, you know the National Health Service. By the time her appointment came around, she was already dead. And they couldn’t do a proper autopsy later because of the accident—her head was crushed.

  “Seth had his breakdown, attempted suicide, put himself back together and bought the farm, where he lived in isolation for a while—until you came along, Mara. He proved himself capable of moving on, but he carried all the weight of the past with him. He was always a serious person, a man of strong feelings, but there was a new darker dimension to him after the shock of Alison’s death.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Mara said. “If all that’s true, why did he wait so long before doing what you say he did?”

  “Two reasons really. First, he wasn’t convinced until about a year ago. That’s around the time he made his will. According to Liz, about eighteen months ago he’d read an article in a magazine about a similar case. A woman showed symptoms like Alison’s after receiving a relatively mild blow to the head, and she later crashed her car. Just after he’d read this and started thinking about the implications, Liz ran off from the hospital and came to stay. He talked to her about it, and she agreed it was a definite possibility. After all, Alison’s attacks only began to occur shortly after the demo. Liz hadn’t been a very good nurse—not good enough to come up with a diagnosis at the time—but she knew something about the human body, and once Seth had put the idea into her head, she helped to convince him.”

  “That’s when they were up talking all the time,” Mara said. “Is that what they were talking about?”
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  “Mostly, yes. Next, Seth went on to study the subject himself. I even saw two books on the human brain in his workshop, though I’d no idea what significance they had. One was called The Tip of the Iceberg. Seth just left them there; he never really tried to cover his tracks at all. And then there was PC Gill’s number in his notebook. Liz said she wrote it down for him the last time she was here. He must have torn it out in anger after he’d heard Gill would be at the demo.”

  “You said there were two reasons he didn’t act straight away,” Mara said. “What’s the other one?”

  “Seth’s character, really. You know he wasn’t normally quick-tempered or impatient. Far from it, he needed lots of patience in his line of work. He wasn’t the type to go out seeking immediate vengeance, either. And remember, he’d never really got over his grief and his guilt. I imagine he repressed his anger in the same way, and it all festered together, under the surface, and finally turned into hatred—hatred for the man who had robbed him of his wife and child. And it wasn’t just a man, it was a policeman, an enemy of freedom.” He glanced at Rick, who was listening closely and sucking on a strand of his beard.

  “But there was nothing he could do. It had happened so long ago, and there was no evidence—even if he had believed that the police would listen to his story. I don’t think he really considered revenge, but when Osmond mentioned the number that afternoon, something gave. The whole business had been eating away at him for so long, and he felt so impotent.

  “He snatched up the knife, expecting trouble. I shouldn’t imagine he really believed he would kill Gill, but he wanted to be prepared. When he dropped the knife later and it got kicked away, he must have been surprised to find no blood on him. Most of Gill’s bleeding was internal. So he kept quiet. There were over a hundred people at that demo. As far as Seth was concerned, that seemed to mean we hadn’t a snowball in hell’s chance of finding the killer. Besides, we’d be after the politicos, and he wasn’t especially active that way.” Banks paused and sipped some more tea. “If Paul hadn’t taken the knife and thrown it away, we might never have known where it came from. None of you would ever have told us it was missing, that’s for certain. Liz had described Gill to him as well—a big man with his teeth too close to his gums—and he was easy to spot up there on the steps. That’s where the most light was, above the doors. And Seth was near the front of the crowd. When they got close in the scuffles, Seth saw the number on Gill’s epaulette and—”

  “My God!” Zoe said. “So that’s it!”

  “What?”

  “When the police started to charge, I was next to Seth, right at the front, and the first thing that policeman did was lash out at a woman standing on my other side. She looked a bit like you, Mara.”

  “What happened next?” Banks asked.

  “I didn’t really see. I was frightened. I got pushed away. But I looked up at Seth and I saw an expression on his face. It was . . . I can’t really describe it, but he was pale and he looked so different . . . so full of hate.”

  They all remained silent as they digested what Zoe had said. She couldn’t have known at the time, but what Seth was seeing was a replay, an echo of what happened to Alison. Given that, Banks thought, what Seth had done was even more understandable. He had been pushed far beyond breaking point.

  “Liz Dale told you all about his background?” said Mara finally. “Yes. Everything else made sense then: Seth’s behaviour, the knife, the number, the books.”

  “If . . .if you’d found her earlier, talked to her, would that have saved Seth?”

  “I don’t think so. It’s not as easy as that. It was actually carrying out the crime that finished him. He’d spent all his hate and anger, and he felt empty. He might have committed suicide sooner if he hadn’t been lucky and got away from the demo clean. I imagine he thought he could live with what he’d done at first, but as the investigation went on, he realized he couldn’t. I don’t think he could have faced prison, either, and he knew that we’d find him. All that talking to Liz Dale has done is put things in perspective and make the motive clear.

  “And Liz is a difficult person. Her grasp on reality is pretty tenuous, for a start. She knew nothing of the demo or of Gill’s murder. And I honestly don’t think she’d have told me about Seth unless I’d told her he was dead. I probably wouldn’t even have known the right questions to ask. I’m not making excuses, Mara. We make mistakes in this job, and usually someone suffers for them. But the rest of you lie, evade and treat us with hostility. There’s good and bad on both sides. You can’t look back and say how things might have been. That’s no good.”

  Mara nodded slowly. “Do you think Seth was right?”

  “Right about what?”

  “About Gill being responsible for Alison’s death.”

  “I think there’s a good chance, yes. I’ve spoken to the police doctor about it, too, and he agrees. But we’ll never know for sure. Liz Dale was wrong, though—Alison wasn’t murdered. Gill might not have been a good policeman, but he didn’t intend to kill her.

  “But look at it from Seth’s point of view. He’d lost everything he valued—in the most horrible way—and he’d lost it all to a man who abused the power the state gave him. Seth came of age in the late sixties and early seventies. He was anti-authoritarian, and he lost his wife and unborn child to a representative of what he saw as oppressive authority. It’s no wonder he had to hit back eventually, especially considering what Zoe just told us, or go mad. That’s why he made the will when he did, I think, because knowing what had happened to Alison—knowing the real cause of her death—changed things, and he wasn’t sure he could be responsible for his actions any more. He wanted to make certain you got the house.”

  Mara covered her face with both hands and started to cry. Zoe went over to comfort her and the children looked on, horror-stricken. Paul and Rick seemed rooted where they sat. Banks rose from the chair. He’d done his job, solved the crime, but it didn’t end there for Mara. For her, this was only the beginning of the real pain.

  “But why couldn’t he be happy here?” she cried from behind her hands. “With me?”

  Banks had no answer to that.

  He opened the door and late-afternoon sunshine flooded in. At the car, he turned and saw Mara standing in the doorway watching him, arms folded tightly across her chest, head tilted to one side. The sunlight caught the tears in her eyes and made them sparkle like jewels as they trickled down her cheeks.

  All the way home through the wraiths of mist, Banks could hear the damn wind chimes ringing in his ears.

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