Anne’s pale eyes widened behind her thick lenses. ‘A murder! Is that what those men are doing up there?’
‘They’re conducting a search of the scene,’ Sally announced, hoping she’d got the phrasing right. ‘The scene of the crime. And the forensic team was there too, taking blood samples and tissue. And the police photographer and the Home Office pathologist. All of them.’
Kathy slid back into her seat, forgetting the game. ‘A murder? In Helmthorpe?’ She gasped in disbelief. ‘Who was it?’
Here Sally had to admit lack of information, which she disguised neatly by assuming that Kathy meant ‘Who was the murderer?’ ‘They don’t know yet, you fool,’ she replied scornfully. ‘It’s only just happened.’ Then she hurried on, keen not to lose their attention to further fleets of aliens. ‘I saw the superintendent close up. Quite a dish, actually. Not at all what you’d expect. And I could see the body. Well, some of it. It was buried by the wall up in Tavistock’s field. Somebody had scraped away some of the loose soil and then covered it with stones. There was a hand and a leg sticking out.’
Hazel Kirk tossed back a glossy raven’s wing of hair. ‘Sally Lumb, you’re a liar,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t see that far. The police wouldn’t have let anyone get that close.’
‘I did,’ Sally countered. ‘I could even see the wet patches under the superintendent’s arms.’ She realized too late that this outburst clashed with her more romantic image of the ‘superintendent’ and rushed on, hoping nobody would notice. Only Anne wrinkled her nose. ‘And old man Tavistock was there. I think he discovered the body. And all the policemen from miles around. Geoff Weaver was there.’
‘That pink-faced pansy,’ Kathy cut in.
‘It wasn’t so pink today, I can tell you. I think he’d been sick.’
‘Well, wouldn’t you be if you’d just found a dead body?’ Anne asked, coming to the defence of young Weaver, on whom she had had a schoolgirl crush for nearly six months. ‘It was probably all decomposed and rotten.’
Sally ignored her. ‘And there was another inspector, or whatever they call them. He wasn’t in uniform anyway. Tall, strawy hair – a bit like your dad, Kathy.’
‘That’ll be Jim Hatchley,’ Anne said. ‘Actually, he’s only a sergeant. My father knows him. Remember when the social club was broken into last year? Well, they sent him from Eastvale. He even came to our house. My dad’s treasurer, you know. Hatchley’s a coarse pig. He’s even got hairs up his nose and in his ears. And I’ll bet that other chap was Chief Inspector Banks. He had his picture in the paper a while back. Don’t you ever read the papers?’
Anne’s stream of information and opinion silenced everyone for a moment. Then Sally, who read nothing but Vogue and Cosmopolitan, picked up the thread again. ‘They’re here now. In the village. They drove down before I came.’
‘I’m surprised they didn’t give you a lift,’ Hazel said, ‘seeing as how you’re on such good terms.’
‘Shut up, Hazel Kirk!’ Sally said indignantly. Hazel just smirked. ‘They’re here. They’ll be questioning everybody, you know. They’ll probably want to talk to all of us.’
‘Why should they want to do that?’ Kathy asked. ‘We don’t know anything about it.’
‘It’s just what they do, stupid,’ Sally retorted. ‘They do house-to-house searches and take statements from everyone. How do they know we don’t know anything till they ask us?’
Sally’s logic silenced Kathy and Hazel.
‘We don’t even know who the victim was yet,’ Anne chimed in. ‘Who do you think it was?’
‘I’ll bet it was that Johnnie Parrish,’ Kathy said. ‘He looks like a man with a past to me.’
‘Johnnie Parrish!’ Sally sneered. ‘Why, he’s about as interesting as a . . . a . . .’
‘A dose of clap?’ Anne suggested. They all laughed.
‘Even that would be more interesting than Johnnie Parrish. I’ll bet it was Major Cartwright. He’s such a miserable, bad-tempered old bugger there must be lots of people want to kill him.’
‘His daughter, for one,’ Hazel said, and giggled.
‘Why?’ Sally asked. She didn’t like to think she was excluded from what appeared to be common knowledge.
‘Well, you know,’ Kathy stalled. ‘You know what people say.’
‘About what?’
‘About Major Cartwright and his daughter. How he keeps such a tight rein on her since she came back to the village. Why she ran off in the first place. It’s unnatural. That’s what people say.’
‘Oh, is that all,’ Sally said, not quite sure she understood. ‘But she’s got her own place, that cottage by the church.’
‘Maybe it was Alf Pringle,’ Hazel suggested. ‘Now there’s a nasty piece of work. Be doing us all a favour if somebody did away with him.’
‘Wishful thinking.’ Kathy sighed. ‘Do you know, he chased me off his land the other day. I was only picking wild flowers for that school project. He had his shotgun with him, too.’
‘He sounds more like a murderer than a victim,’ Anne chipped in. ‘Who do you think did it?’
‘Well, it might not be anyone from around here,’ Kathy answered. ‘I mean, we don’t know, do we? It could have been a stranger.’
‘Of course it was someone from around here,’ Sally said, annoyed at the way her discovery seemed to have become common property. ‘You don’t think somebody would drive a body all the way from Leeds or somewhere like that just to dump it under Crow Scar, do you?’
‘They could have done.’ Kathy defended herself without much conviction.
‘Well, I’m not going out after dark until he’s been caught.’ Hazel hugged herself and shuddered. ‘It might be one of those sex murderers, another Ripper. It could even be Major Cartwright’s daughter up there, for all we know. Or that Mrs Caret, the new barmaid at the Dog and Gun.’
‘I shouldn’t worry,’ Kathy said. ‘Nobody would want to sex murder you.’ She spoke in the usual spirit of friendly banter, but somehow her joke flopped and the girls seemed distracted, each wrapped in her own thoughts. Kathy blushed. ‘Still,’ she said, ‘we’d better be careful.’
‘I’ll bet it was Jack Barker that did it,’ Anne suggested.
‘Who? That writer bloke?’ Sally said.
‘Yes. You know what kind of books he writes.’
‘I’ll bet you haven’t read any,’ Kathy taunted her.
‘Yes, I have. I’ve read The Butcher of Redondo Beach and The San Clemente Slasher. They’re lurid.’
‘I’ve read one too,’ Hazel said. ‘I can’t remember what it was called but it was about this man who went to his beach house somewhere in America and he found two people he’d never seen before chopped to pieces in his living room. It was grisly. I only read it because he lives here.’
‘That’s The Butcher of Redondo Beach,’ Anne informed her patiently. ‘That’s what it’s called.’
Sally was bored by the direction the conversation was taking, and, besides, she thought Jack Barker looked far too handsome and debonair to be a murderer. He was a bit like one of those old film stars her mother was always going on about – Errol Flynn, Clark Gable or Douglas Fairbanks – the ones who all looked the same with their oily, slicked-down hair and little moustaches. He was the type, she thought, who might shoot his adulterous wife (if he had one) in a fit of passion, but he certainly wouldn’t carry her body all the way up to Crow Scar afterwards, that was for sure. He was far too much of a gentleman to do that, whatever kind of books he wrote.
Sally finished her Coke and turned to leave, but before she did so she whispered, ‘The police will see me. I can tell you that for sure. I know something. I don’t know who’s dead or who the killer is yet, but I know something.’
And with that she exited quickly, leaving the others to gape after her and debate whether she was telling the truth or simply trying to draw attention to herself.
THREE
There are two routes to York from Helmthorp
e. The first winds up through Gratly, continues diagonally across the dales, more or less as the crow flies, and eventually joins the main road a couple of miles outside the city; the second, longer but quicker, involves taking the main road back to Eastvale, then driving south-east on the busy York Road. Because it was a beautiful day and he was in no real hurry, Banks took the first route on his visit to Ramsden.
He slipped the cassette back into the player and to the strains of ‘O, Sweet Woods’ drove up the hill, turned left past the Steadman house and followed the road as it climbed the dale side slowly. He passed through the tiny hamlet of Mortsett and paused with his window down to look at an attractive cottage with a post office sign above its door and a board advertising Wall’s Ice Cream propped outside. Insects hovered and hummed in the still, warm air; it seemed unreal, an image of England from before the First World War.
Beyond Relton, at the junction with the Fortford road, he seemed to leave civilization behind. Soon, the greens of the hillsides gave way to the darker hues of the heather-covered moors, which continued for about two miles before dropping slowly into the next dale. It was like a slow roller coaster ride, and the only obstacles were the sheep that sometimes strayed on to the unfenced road, itself only a thin band hardly distinguishable from the landscape around it. Banks saw a few hikers, who stepped on to the rough grass when they heard his car, smiling and waving as he drove by.
The main road, busy with lorries and delivery vans, came as a shock. Following Mrs Steadman’s directions, Banks found the turn-off, a narrow track with a lonely red phone box on the corner, about a mile from York’s boundary. He turned left and, after a quarter of a mile, came to the converted farmhouse. He pulled into the smooth dirt driveway and stopped outside the new-looking garage.
Ramsden answered the door shortly after the first ring and asked who he was. When Banks showed some identification, he slipped off the chain and invited him in.
‘Can’t be too careful,’ he apologized. ‘Especially in such an isolated place as this.’
Ramsden was tall and pale, with the melancholic aspect of a Romantic poet. He had light-brown hair and, Banks soon noticed, a nervous habit of brushing back the stray forelock even when it hadn’t slid down over his brow. The jeans and sweatshirt he wore seemed to hang on him as if they were a size too big.
‘Please excuse the mess,’ he said as he led Banks into a cluttered living room and installed him by the huge empty fireplace. ‘As you can see I’m decorating. Just finished the first coat.’ A clear polythene sheet covered half the floor, and on it stood a stepladder, a gallon of pale blue paint, brushes, tray and rollers. ‘It’s not about that woman, is it?’ he asked.
‘What woman?’
‘An old lady not far from here was murdered by thugs a few months ago. I had a policeman around then.’
‘No, sir, it’s not about the woman. That would have been York Region. I’m from Eastvale CID.’
Ramsden frowned. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand then. Pardon me, I don’t mean to seem rude, but . . .’
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Banks apologized, accepting the whisky and soda Ramsden had poured for him without asking. ‘This isn’t easy for me. Would you care to sit down?’
Ramsden looked alarmed. ‘What is it?’ he asked, fitting himself awkwardly into a small armchair.
‘You were expecting Mr Steadman to visit you last night?’
‘Harry? That’s right. We had some notes to go over before today’s field trip. Why? Has something happened?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid it has,’ Banks said as gently as he could, aware of the muscles in his stomach clenching tightly. ‘Mr Steadman is dead.’
Ramsden brushed back the phantom forelock. ‘I don’t follow. Dead? But he was coming here.’
‘I know that, Mr Ramsden. That’s why I wanted to tell you myself. Weren’t you surprised when he didn’t show up? Weren’t you worried?’
Ramsden shook his head. ‘No, no, of course I wasn’t. It wasn’t the first time he hadn’t come. But are you sure? About Harry, I mean. Can’t there have been some mistake?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘What on earth happened?’
‘We’re not certain about that yet, sir, but a farmer found his body this morning in a field under Crow Scar. It looks as if he was murdered.’
‘Murdered? Good God! Harry? I can’t believe it.’
‘You know no one who’d have a reason?’
‘Absolutely not. Nobody. Not Harry.’ He rubbed his face and stared at Banks. ‘I’m sorry, Chief Inspector, I can’t really think straight. I’m having trouble taking this all in. I’ve known Harry for a long time. A long time. This is such a shock.’
‘I realize it must be, sir,’ Banks persisted, ‘but if you could just spare the time to answer a couple of questions, I’ll be on my way.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Ramsden got up and made a drink for himself.
‘You said it had happened before, that he hadn’t turned up?’
‘Yes. It wasn’t a formal arrangement. More casual, really.’
‘Why didn’t he come?’
‘Once when Emma wasn’t too well he couldn’t make it. And one time he had a stomach upset. Things like that. We were very close, Chief Inspector. There was always a bed made up for him, and he had a key in case I had to go out.’
‘Didn’t it cross your mind to phone and ask what was wrong?’
‘Not at all. I’ve already told you our arrangement was casual. I don’t have a phone. I spend enough time on the blasted thing at work. The nearest public call box is on the main road.’ He shook his head. ‘I just can’t believe this is happening. It’s like a bad dream. Harry, dead?’
‘Did you go out last night?’
Ramsden looked at him blankly.
‘You said Mr Steadman had a key in case you were out,’ Banks pressed on. ‘Were you out last night?’
‘No, I wasn’t. Actually, when Harry hadn’t arrived by eleven o’clock, I was rather – I mean, don’t get me wrong – a little relieved. You see, I’m working on a book of my own. A historical novel. And I was glad of the opportunity to get some writing done.’ He looked embarrassed about it.
‘Didn’t you like working with Mr Steadman?’
‘Oh, of course I did. But it was his baby, really. I was just the editor, the research assistant.’
‘Where were you planning to go today?’
‘We were going to visit an old lead mine in Swaledale. Quite a distance really, so we wanted to get an early start. Emma!’ he exclaimed suddenly. ‘Emma must be in a terrible state.’
‘She’s upset, of course,’ Banks said. ‘Mrs Stanton, the neighbour, is looking after her.’
‘Should I go?’
‘That’s up to you, Mr Ramsden, but I’d say best leave her for today at least. She’s in good hands.’
Ramsden nodded. ‘Of course, of course . . .’
‘What about you? Will you be all right?’
‘Yes, I’ll be fine. It’s just the shock. I’ve known Harry for more than ten years.’
‘Would it be possible to talk to you again about this? Just to get some background, that kind of thing?’
‘Yes, I suppose so. When?’
‘The sooner the better, really. Tuesday morning, perhaps? We might know a bit more by then.’
‘I’ll be at work. Fisher and Faulkner. We’re not terrifically busy at the moment. If you want to drop by . . .’
‘Yes, that’ll be fine.’
Banks asked directions to the publishers, then left Ramsden and returned to Eastvale by the quickest route. At the station, an invitation to call at Superintendent Gristhorpe’s for tea awaited him. He phoned Sandra, who wasn’t at all surprised at his absence, checked that no important news had come in while he had been at Ramsden’s, and set off for Helmthorpe for the second time that day. It was only three o’clock, and, as he wasn’t expected at Gristhorpe’s until five, he would have plenty of time to see how the loc
als were coping.
The Helmthorpe police station was a converted cottage on a narrow cobbled road that forked from the eastern end of the High Street towards the river. There, Weaver, who was running off more copies of the request for information, told him that three constables were still making door-to-door enquiries along Hill Road and another had been dispatched to the campsite.
That was the biggest headache, Banks realized. They would have to try and find out who had been staying at the campsite on Saturday night. Most of the campers would have moved on by now and it would be damn near impossible to get comprehensive or reliable information.
There was also the press to deal with. Besides Reg Summers of the local weekly, two other reporters were still hanging around outside the station, as Hatchley had warned, thrusting their notebooks at everyone who entered or left. Banks certainly liked to maintain good relations with the press, but at such an early stage in the investigation he could give them little of value. However, to gain and keep their goodwill – because he knew they would be useful eventually – he told them what he could in as pleasant a manner as possible.
At twenty to five, he left Weaver in charge and drove off to see Gristhorpe. On the way, he decided he would visit the Bridge that evening to see what he could get out of Steadman’s cronies. More, he hoped, than he’d managed to pick up so far.
3
ONE
Banks pulled into the rutted drive at five to five and walked towards the squat stone house. Gristhorpe lived in an isolated farmhouse on the north dale side above the village of Lyndgarth, about halfway between Eastvale and Helmthorpe. It was no longer a functioning farm, though the superintendent still held on to a couple of acres where he grew vegetables. Since his wife had died five years ago, he had stayed on there alone, and a woman from the village came up to do for him every morning.
A Dedicated Man Page 4