Sleeping in the Ground

by Peter Robinson

  ‘I can hardly believe it,’ said Farrow. ‘Katie. Dead.’

  ‘Didn’t you know about the wedding this weekend?’

  ‘I knew she was going to a wedding, but to be honest I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the details.’

  ‘You weren’t invited?’

  ‘I had a business meeting.’

  ‘On Saturday?’

  ‘I’m self-employed, Mr Banks. I take my meetings when I can get them.’

  ‘What business are you in, if you don’t mind my asking?’

  ‘Not at all. I’m in website design and social media.’

  ‘How did you meet Katie?’

  ‘She’s with a small publishing firm in Leeds, and they wanted to up their profile. The full package. Website, Facebook page, Instagram and Twitter accounts. We met, we hit it off . . .’ He put his head in his hands. ‘My God. Katie. What am I going to do?’

  ‘How long had you been together?’

  ‘Not long. Just six months.’

  ‘Did you live together?’

  ‘No. We hadn’t got to that stage yet.’

  Banks glanced at Annie, who raised her eyebrows. He shook his head almost imperceptibly. Not yet.

  ‘So Katie had her own flat and you have yours?’

  ‘Katie rented a flat, yes. I own a house. Well, a mortgage, I should say.’

  ‘And you lived separate lives?’

  ‘We spent as much time together as we could, but . . . well, she had her work. I’m afraid I don’t know many of her friends. We preferred spending time together rather than socialising.’

  ‘Of course.’ Banks paused. ‘My DC tells me that you seemed rather reluctant when she offered to drive down and talk to you in Leeds.’

  ‘I don’t mind the drive. It can be relaxing after a day at the office.’

  Banks gave Annie the most discreet of signals.

  ‘Did you know that Katie was almost eight weeks pregnant?’ she asked.

  Farrow spluttered and seemed set to deny everything, then he folded in on himself. ‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘She told me.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Ten days ago.’

  ‘A joyous occasion?’ Banks asked.

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘You mean you didn’t want children together?’

  ‘This has absolutely nothing—’

  ‘Please answer the questions, Mr Farrow,’ Annie said. ‘It’ll be over sooner that way.’

  ‘But why aren’t you out there catching Katie’s killer?’

  ‘Believe me,’ Banks answered, ‘there are more than enough people out there after Katie’s killer. They’ve been out there in the wind and rain since Saturday afternoon. Besides, according to most of the TV cop programmes I’ve watched, it’s almost always someone with something to hide who asks that question. What is it you have to hide, Mr Farrow?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I just don’t—’

  ‘The baby, Mr Farrow,’ Banks went on. ‘You didn’t want it? Neither of you?’

  ‘Katie . . . she . . . perhaps more than me. But she saw it couldn’t be. Not yet. We weren’t ready. She understood that.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound as if you were ready for anything. I should imagine you could have made a few adjustments to your lifestyles if you’d tried. You certainly can’t claim you were too young for such a responsibility.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘What am I missing?’

  Farrow stared down at the table. ‘It just wasn’t possible, that’s all.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Oh, come on, man, isn’t it fucking obvious? Because I’m married, that’s why. That’s what you’ve been wanting me to say, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’ve been wanting you to tell me the truth, Mr Farrow,’ said Banks. ‘So you were having an affair with Katie Shea?’

  ‘It wasn’t a . . . it wasn’t sordid like that. We were in love. We were going to get married as soon as I divorced my wife.’

  ‘And when were you going to do that?’

  ‘I’d been trying to broach the subject, then this came up.’

  ‘How bloody inconvenient,’ said Banks. ‘So what were you going to do?’

  ‘Well, we couldn’t have the baby, could we? Not yet. Not when things were like they were. Katie was going to have a termination.’

  ‘Well, she’s certainly had one now, hasn’t she?’ said Banks.

  He noticed out of the corner of his eye that Annie gave him a puzzled and concerned glance. Farrow reeled as if he’d been thumped and started whimpering and chewing on his thumb. ‘That’s cruel. That’s not fair.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s not fair,’ Banks went on, ‘and that’s a married man getting a young girl pregnant then persuading her to have a termination. I’m assuming it was your idea? And that you were paying?’

  ‘She didn’t want the child, either!’

  ‘How do you know that? She obviously wanted to please you. I suppose she believed you when you said you were going to ask your wife for a divorce so you could marry her?’

  Farrow slapped the table. ‘It’s true.’

  ‘Bollocks. It’s the oldest trick in the book. You had no intention of asking for a divorce, did you?’

  Farrow hung his head.

  ‘How many children do you and your wife have?’ Banks went on.

  ‘Two.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Seven and five.’

  ‘The last thing you wanted was another, wasn’t it? You’d already been through it with two. Even if you did plan on getting a divorce and marrying Katie, which I doubt, you weren’t signing up for dirty nappies and sleepless nights, were you? But I’ll bet she wanted children, didn’t she?’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s none of your business. She was no angel. She knew what she was doing. What are you, pro-life or something?’

  ‘That takes the bloody biscuit, that does,’ said Banks, standing up. ‘If you’d seen just half of what I’ve seen these past two days . . . And that included your Katie, the woman you say you love, sitting propped—’

  ‘Alan, that’s enough!’

  It was Annie. Banks was so shocked by her sharp tone and the way she was glaring at him that he stopped mid-sentence and turned to face the window, arms folded. His breath was coming in short sharp gasps, and he was certain his blood pressure had gone way over the limit. He could feel his heart thumping in his chest. He took a few paces and looked out over the dark market square. Car headlights reflected in the puddles among the cobblestones. He’d lost his cool, and he knew it.

  After an uncomfortable silence, Annie picked up the questioning in relatively gentle tones. Banks didn’t trust himself to turn around just yet. He had not felt such anger, such revulsion for someone, in a long time. He wanted to pick Farrow up by his neck and shake him. Slowly, his heart rate returned to normal.

  ‘Did your wife know about the affair?’ he heard Annie ask.

  ‘She suspected that I was seeing someone else. I think she might have followed me once and seen us meet up.’

  ‘She never broached the subject with you?’

  ‘Rosie doesn’t work like that. She stores it all up until the dam bursts, and then there’s no stopping her.’

  ‘But she hadn’t reached that stage yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Though you think she knew?’

  ‘Suspected.’

  ‘Boyd,’ Annie said. ‘This isn’t a personal inquisition into your morals. It’s a murder inquiry. Do you think Rosie knew enough about the affair, was angry enough about it, to harm Katie?’

  ‘Good God, no. She wouldn’t do anything like that. If anyone was going to suffer for it, it would have been me.’

  ‘OK. Where was she on Saturday?’

  ‘At home with the kids. Like I said, I had a business meeting. It was in Wakefield, by the way, and I can tell you the names of the clients. You can check.’

  ‘That might be useful,’
said Annie. ‘And we’ll need some corroboration of your wife’s whereabouts. Would anyone else have been there? Might she have taken the children shopping or to the playground? Would anyone be likely to have seen her?’

  ‘It’s possible. I’m sure someone would, but . . . oh, God . . .’ He buried his face in his hands. ‘You’re going to have to ask her, aren’t you? You’re going to have to tell her everything. I’ve lost Katie, and now I’m going to lose Rosie and the kids. Please can’t you—’

  Banks couldn’t tolerate any more. He walked away from the window and left his office. He didn’t trust himself to stand there and listen to Farrow’s cringing self-pity. When he found himself out in the corridor, he didn’t know what to do, so he just stood at the far end looking out over the car park at the back of the station.

  He didn’t know how long he’d been standing like that when he heard his office door open and shut behind him. He turned to see Annie standing there with Farrow. A few seconds later, a uniformed constable entered from the stairwell to show Farrow out.

  ‘What the hell was all that about?’ Annie demanded, following Banks back into his office.

  ‘Don’t you start, Annie.’

  ‘What you do you mean, “don’t you start”? What the hell did you think you were up to?’

  ‘I was trying to push him,’ Banks said, sitting behind his desk.

  ‘You mean you seriously think he had something to do with the massacre?’

  ‘I’m not saying that. I—’

  ‘You were out of bounds, Alan.’ Annie’s tone softened. ‘No matter what you think of him, Farrow is a witness and a victim, not a suspect. You had no right to treat him like that. I don’t know what it was all about, what’s going on in your mind, but you were way out of bounds. What were you thinking of?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Banks. ‘He just pushed all the wrong buttons.’

  ‘Oh, bugger it, come here, you daft sod.’ Banks stood up and walked over to her. She took him in her arms and gave him a firm hug then held on to his shoulders and faced him.

  Banks felt himself relax a little. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You’re right. I lost it in there. Is Farrow planning on making a formal complaint?’

  ‘No. He feels far too guilty for that. And I think I managed to calm him down after you’d left the office. In the end, he was more worried about what he was going to say to his wife when he gets home than about anything you might have said to him. You surprised me, though. You were cruel, Alan. I never thought of you as cruel.’

  ‘I suppose we can all act a little out of character at times. Forgive me?’

  ‘Of course.’ Annie went over to the coffee machine. ‘Want some?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Feeling OK now?’

  ‘Much better.’

  Annie handed him the coffee and they sat down at the glass table again. ‘Farrow might be a creep,’ she said, ‘but he didn’t do it. Or his wife.’

  ‘I know that. It’s just . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, never mind.’

  ‘You never struck me as being the moralistic kind. I mean, he’s not the only married bloke to have an affair. I’ve been with a married man or two in my time, and you—’

  ‘It was once, before I came up here.’

  ‘I know. You did it, though, didn’t you?’

  ‘You’re saying people in glass houses . . .’

  ‘Or “let him who is without sin . . .” Pick your cliché.’

  Banks laughed. ‘It’s a fair cop.’ He put his coffee cup on the table. ‘And thanks for the pep talk. I wasn’t being moralistic, really, though. I was trying to get his goat. I’m sorry, I just lost it. It won’t happen again. And now I think I’m going to go home and have an early night.’

  ‘Not if Ray has anything to do with it, you won’t,’ said Annie.

  When Banks got home to Newhope Cottage later that evening, the rain was still pouring down, and Gratly Beck was close to full spate. Normally a steady, soothing trickle of water over the terraced falls outside his cottage, tonight it roared down the daleside, swollen with the flow of countless becks, burns and rills from higher up in the hills, flecked with foam that caught the light of the half moon like whitecaps out at sea. But the beck was deep and its banks were high. He knew he would be safe from flooding here, so far up the side of the valley, but Helmthorpe and The Leas below might have serious problems. It wouldn’t be the first time. The worst his cottage had ever suffered from protracted wind and heavy rain was a leak where the conservatory joined the older part of the building, which he had caulked the previous spring, and a little dampness had managed to seep its way through the thick stone walls to darken the bedroom wall in patches. After the previous winter, he’d had one of the local handymen around to fix a few gaps in the flagstone roof and spray the back wall with silicon, which was supposed to seal the porous limestone against the elements. The way things were going, he would soon find out whether it worked.

  The cottage felt more welcoming than it had on Saturday night, with smoke coming out of the chimney, a light visible from the entertainment room and Ray’s ancient Honda Civic parked outside. As soon as Banks got inside, he could hear Billie Holiday singing ‘Lover Man’. Even though it was his own home, he tapped gently on the entertainment room door before entering, so as not to surprise Ray if he happened to be asleep or lost in thought.

  ‘Alan, nice to see you,’ Ray said, rising and shaking hands. ‘As you can see, I’m making myself at home. I do appreciate this. I’m not a particularly large man, but I must confess that in Annie’s place, I felt rather like Alice when she was ten feet tall after taking that pill.’

  ‘No problem.’ Banks dropped his keys on the sideboard beside an open bottle of Laphroaig. Ray must have bought it, he realised, as he hadn’t had any in the house for ages. Ray had also managed to light the wood stove, and the room felt warm and cosy.

  ‘Why don’t you join me?’ Ray said, pointing to the bottle. ‘Nightcap.’

  Banks hesitated. He had lost his taste for the peaty whisky since he had come to associate it with a fire at the cottage, but he had tried a drop now and then over the past couple of years, and his tolerance was improving. Besides, after the day he’d had, he felt he needed a drink or two to help him unwind. He helped himself to a wee dram and topped up Ray’s glass.

  ‘Slainte,’ Banks said, clinking glasses.

  ‘Slainte. Hope you don’t mind the music.’

  ‘Billie? Never,’ said Banks.

  ‘They said she could tell a story in a song, but as far as I’m concerned she can tell a story in just one note.’

  ‘She had what it takes,’ Banks agreed.

  ‘Frank Sinatra said he’d once kissed her as she ought to be kissed,’ Ray mused. ‘I’ve often wondered what that was like.’

  Banks flopped down in his armchair. ‘Perhaps a mixture of bourbon, gardenias and cigarette smoke.’ He tasted the Laphroaig, and it burned nicely as it went down. Billie Holiday was singing ‘Solitude’ now in her husky, booze-soaked late-career voice, the one Banks loved best, the one that expressed clearly in every broken note how much she had lived and loved and suffered, but also how she had come through, survived. He inhaled the peat and iodine fumes from his whisky and revelled in the music.

  ‘Tough day?’ Ray asked.

  ‘Yes, it was tough.’

  ‘Want to talk about it?’

  It was strange having someone else in the house. Banks knew Ray reasonably well from previous visits, but he wouldn’t say they were especially close friends. And he wasn’t one for talking things through. Oddly enough, though, he felt like talking to someone tonight. ‘And I was at a funeral on Saturday,’ he said, ‘just before . . . well . . . before the shit hit the fan up here.’

  ‘That must have been hard. Someone close?’

  ‘No. Not for years. That’s the thing. I can’t seem to stop thinking about her, even with all this chaos going on up here. We went out
together for a while when we were kids back in Peterborough. You know, just a bit of necking on the back row, reaching for a blouse button and getting your hand slapped. That sort of thing. Then we met up again quite by chance a few years later, when I was at London Poly and she was at the university. It was the early seventies, and we were both away from home for the first time, footloose and fancy-free.’

  ‘Exciting times. And it developed into something serious?’

  ‘It did. Yes. But for Christ’s sake, that was over forty years ago, and I haven’t seen her since. My children are older now than Emily was when I knew her. It just all came rushing back at the funeral.’

  ‘Doesn’t make it any easier, though, does it, the passage of time?’

  ‘You were pretty young when your wife died, weren’t you? Annie’s mother. That must have been hard.’

  Ray slugged back some whisky. ‘Hard? I was thirty-seven, and Annie would have been about seven. I don’t know how we made it through those first few years, to be honest. The colony, I suppose. People took care of each other. Without the others . . . I don’t know. I do know Annie’s never got over losing her mother.’

  ‘You never thought of remarrying?’

  ‘Me? No. Oh, maybe once or twice.’ Ray grinned. ‘Fleetingly. I’m not saying there haven’t been other women, but I’ve never been able to give myself to any of them the way I had with Judy. I’ve always held something back. The part of me I probably shouldn’t have held back if I wanted any sort of meaningful relationship. The part that won’t let you get close to anyone ever again because you know you’re going to lose them, and you know how bad it feels. Because they’re going to die.’ He waved his glass. ‘Maybe that’s why I’ve been a bit distant from Annie over the years, too. Not because I associate her with Judy’s death, or blame her, or any of that psychological claptrap, but because I don’t know if I could take that sort of blow again. When she got shot . . . well, you remember what it was like. Lovers leave you, and it hurts, of course, but you can get them back, sometimes, if you try, if you want to, if you know how. But death’s the final thing. At least, I think it is. I don’t know about you, maybe you’re religious, but I don’t believe there’s anything after death. I reckon you should think about your first serious girlfriend. It’s a major emotional turning point in your life. Remember her. There’s not a day goes by when I don’t think about Judy, no matter how many years have passed. But if you can take a bit of advice from an old fool like me, save your best efforts for the living, because one day they’ll be dead, too, and you’ll end up feeling guilty for neglecting them while they were alive. That’s the paradox. Damned if you do and double-damned if you don’t.’