In a Dry Season

by Peter Robinson

  There was already a crowd at quarter past. Still, it was only to be expected. All of a sudden, after twenty novels in as many years, Vivian Elmsley was a success.

  Though her reputation and her sales had grown steadily over the years, her Detective Inspector Niven series, which accounted for fifteen of the twenty books, had recently made it to the small screen with a handsome lead actor, glossy production values and a big budget. The first three episodes had been shown, to great critical acclaim— especially given how bored many television critics had grown with police dramas recently—and as a result Vivian had become, over the past month or so, about as familiar a face to the general public as a writer ever is.

  She had been on the cover of Night & Day and had been interviewed by Melvyn Bragg on the “South Bank Show” and featured prominently in Woman’s Own magazine. After all, becoming an “overnight success” in one’s seventies was quite newsworthy. Some people even recognized her in the street.

  Adrian, the event organizer, gave her a glass of red wine, while Thalia arranged the books on the low table in front of the settee. At half past six on the dot, Adrian introduced her by saying that she needed no introduction, and to a smattering of applause she picked up her copy of the latest Inspector Niven story, Traces of Sin, and began to read from the opening section.

  About five minutes was enough, Vivian reckoned. Anything less made her look as if she couldn’t wait to get away; anything more risked losing the audience’s attention. The settee was so soft and deep that it seemed to enfold her as she read. She wondered how she would ever get out of it. She was hardly a spry young thing any more.

  After the reading, people formed an orderly queue, and Vivian signed their books, pausing to chat briefly with everyone, asking if they wanted any specific sort of dedication and making sure she spelled their names right. It was all very well if someone said he was called “John,” but how were you to know it wasn’t spelled “Jon”? Then there were the more complex variations: “Donna,” or “Dawna”? “Janice” or “Janis”?

  Vivian looked down at her hand as she signed. Talon-like, she thought, almost skeletal, dotted with liver spots, skin shrivelled and wrinkled over the knuckle joints, puffs of flesh around the wedding ring she could never remove even if she wanted to.

  Her hands were the first to go, she thought. The rest of her was remarkably well preserved. For a start, she had remained tall and lean. She hadn’t shrunk or run to fat like so many elderly women, or generated that thick, hard, matronly carapace.

  Steel-grey hair pulled back tightly and fastened at the back created a widow’s peak over her strong, thin face; her deep blue eyes, networked with crow’s feet, were almost Oriental in their slant, her nose was slightly hooked and her lips thin. Not a face that smiled often, people thought. And they were right, even though it had not always been so.

  “A steely, unblinking gaze into the depths of evil,” one reviewer had written of her. And was it Graham Greene who had noted that there was a splinter of ice in the heart of the writer? How right he was, though it hadn’t always been there.

  “You used to live up north, didn’t you?”

  Vivian looked up, startled at the question. The man appeared to be about sixty, thin to the point of emaciation, with a long, gaunt pale face and lank fair hair. He was wearing faded jeans and the kind of gaudy, short-sleeved shirt you would expect to see at a seaside resort. As he held the book out for her to sign, she noticed that his hands were unnaturally small for a man’s. Something about them disturbed her.

  Vivian nodded. “A long time ago.” Then she looked at the book. “Who would you like me to sign this to?”

  “What was the name of the place where you lived?” “It was a long time ago.”

  “Did you go by the same name then?”

  “Look, I—”

  “Excuse me, sir.” It was Adrian, politely asking the man to move along. He did as he was asked, cast one backward glance at Vivian, then he slapped her book down on a pile of Ian Rankins and left.

  Vivian carried on signing. Adrian brought her another glass of wine, people told her how much they loved her books, and she soon forgot about the strange man and his prying questions.

  When it was all over, Adrian and the staff suggested dinner, but Vivian was tired, another sign of her advancing years. All she wanted to do was go home to a long, hot bath, a gin and tonic and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, but first she needed a little exercise and some air. Alone.

  “I’ll drive you home,” said Wendi.

  Vivian lay her hand on Wendi’s forearm. “No, my dear,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I’d just like a little walk by myself first, then I’ll take the tube.”

  “But, really, it’s no trouble. That’s what I’m here for.” “No. I’ll be perfectly all right. I’m not over the hill yet.”

  Wendi blushed. She had probably been told that Vivian was prickly. Someone always warned the publicists and media escorts. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to suggest anything like that. But it’s my job.”

  “A pretty young girl like you must have far better things to do than drive an old lady home in the London traffic. Why don’t you go to the pictures with your boyfriend, go dancing, or something?”

  Wendi smiled and looked at her watch. “Well, I did tell Tim I wouldn’t be able to meet him until later. Perhaps if I phoned him now and went to queue at the half-price ticket booth, we could get some last-minute theatre tickets. But only if you’re sure.”

  “Quite sure, my dear. Good night.”

  Vivian walked out into the warm autumn dusk on Bedford Street.

  London. She still sometimes found herself unable to believe that she actually lived in London. She remembered her first visit, how vast, majestic and overwhelming the city had felt. She had gazed in awe at landmarks she had only heard of, read about or seen in pictures: Piccadilly Circus, Big Ben, St Paul’s, Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square. Of course, that was a long time ago, but even today she felt that same magic when she recited the names or walked the famous streets.

  Charing Cross Road was crowded with people leaving work late or arriving early for the theatres and cinemas, meeting friends for a drink. Before getting on the tube, Vivian crossed the road carefully, waiting for the pedestrian signal, and strolled around Leicester Square.

  A small choir was singing “Men of Harlech” just beside the Burger King. How it had all changed: the fast-food places, the shops, even the cinemas. It wasn’t far from here, on Haymarket, that she had been to her first London cinema, the Carlton. What had she seen? For Whom the Bell Tolls. Of course, that was it.

  As she walked back to the Leicester Square tube entrance, Vivian thought again about the strange man in the bookshop. She didn’t like to dwell on the past, but he had pushed her into a reminiscent mood, as had the recent newspaper photographs of the dried-up Thornfield Reservoir.

  The ruins of Hobb’s End were exposed to the light of day for the first time in more than forty years, and the memories of her life there had come crowding back. Vivian shuddered as she walked down the steps to the underground.

  Two

  Banks paused for breath after his walk through the woods. From where he stood on the edge of Thornfield Reservoir, the entire elongated bowl of ruins lay open below him like a cupped hand, about a quarter of a mile wide and half a mile long. He didn’t know the full story, but he knew that the site had been covered with water for many years. This was its first reappearance, like an excavated ancient settlement, or a sort of latter-day Brigadoon.

  On the opposite embankment, he could see tangles of tree roots sticking out of the slope. The difference in soil colours showed where the water-line had been. Beyond the high bank, Rowan Woods straggled away to the north.

  The most dramatic part of the scene lay directly below: the sunken village itself. Bracketed by a ruined mill on a hillock to the west, and by a tiny pack-horse bridge to the east, the whole thing resembled the skeleton of a giant’s torso. The b
ridge formed the pelvic bone, and the mill was the skull, which had been chopped off and placed slightly to the left of the body. The river and high street formed the slightly curving backbone, from which the various ribs of side streets branched off.

  There was no road surface, but the course of the old High Street by the river was easy enough to make out. It eventually forked at the bridge, one branch turning towards Rowan Woods, where it soon narrowed to a footpath, and the other continuing over the bridge then out of the village along the Harksmere Reservoir embankment, presumably all the way to Harkside. It struck Banks as especially odd that there should have been a fully intact bridge there, under water for all those years.

  Below him, a group of people stood by the other side of the bridge, one of them in uniform. Banks scampered down the narrow path. It was a warm evening, and he was sweating by the time he got to the bottom. Before approaching the group, he took a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow and the back of his neck. There was nothing he could do about the damp patches under his arms.

  He wasn’t overweight, or even especially unfit. He smoked, he ate lousy food and he drank too much, but he had the kind of metabolism that had always kept him lean. While he didn’t go in for strenuous exercise, since Sandra left he had got into the habit of taking long, solitary walks every weekend, and he swam half a mile at the Eastvale public baths once or twice a week. It was this damn hot weather that made him feel so out of shape.

  The valley bottom wasn’t as muddy as it looked. Most of the exposed reddish brown earth had been caked and cracked by the heat. However, there were some marshy patches with reeds growing out of them, and he had to jump several large puddles on his way.

  As he crossed the pack-horse bridge, a woman walked towards him and stopped him in the middle. “Excuse me, sir,” she said, arm extended, palm out. “This is a crime scene. I’m afraid you can’t come any further.” Banks smiled. He knew he didn’t look like a DCI. He had left his sports jacket in the car and wore a blue denim shirt, open at the neck, with no tie, light tan trousers and black wellington boots.

  “Why isn’t it taped off, then?” he asked.

  The woman looked at him and frowned. She was in her late twenties or early thirties, by the look of her, long-legged, tall and slim—probably not much more than an inch shorter than Banks’s five-foot-nine. She was wearing blue jeans and a white blouse made of some silky material. Over the blouse she wore a herringbone jacket that followed the contours of her waist and the gentle outward curve of her hips. Her chestnut hair was parted in the middle and fell in layered, casual waves to her shoulders. Her face was oval, with a smooth, tanned complexion, full lips, and a small mole to the right of her mouth. She was wearing black-rimmed sunglasses, and when she took them off, her serious almond eyes seemed to appraise Banks as if he were a hitherto undiscovered species.

  She wasn’t conventionally good-looking. Hers wasn’t the kind of face you’d find on the pages of a magazine, but her looks showed character and intelligence. And the red wellies set it all off nicely.

  Banks smiled. “Do I have to throw you off the bridge into the river before I can cross, like Robin Hood did to Little John?”

  “I think you’ll find it was the other way round, but you could try it,” she said. Then, after they had scrutinized one another for a few seconds, she squinted, frowned, and said, “You’ll be DCI Banks, then?”

  She didn’t appear nervous or embarrassed about mistaking him for a sightseer; there was no hint of apology or deference in her tone. He didn’t know whether he liked that. “DS Cabbot, I presume?”

  “Yes, sir.” She smiled. It was no more than a twitch of one corner of her mouth and a brief flash of light behind her eyes, but it left an impression. Many people, Banks mused, probably thought it was nice to be smiled at by DS Cabbot. Which made him all the more suspicious of Jimmy Riddle’s motives for sending him out there.

  “And these people?” Banks pointed to the man and woman talking to the uniformed policeman. The man was aiming a video camera at the outbuilding.

  “Colleen Harris and James O’Grady, sir. They were scouting the location for a TV programme when they saw the boy fall through the roof. They ran to help him. Seems they also had their camera handy. I suppose it’ll make a nice little item on the evening news.” She scratched the side of her nose. “We’d run out of crime-scene tape, sir. At the section station. To be honest, I’m not sure we ever had any in the first place.” She toyed with the sunglasses as she spoke, but Banks didn’t think it was out of nervousness. She had a slight West Country burr, not very pronounced, but clear enough to be noticeable.

  DS Cabbot nodded. “Adam Kelly. He’s thirteen.” “Where is he?”

  “I sent him home. To Harkside. He seemed a bit shaken up, and he’d bruised his wrist and elbow. Nothing serious. Anyway, he wanted his mummy, so I got PC Cameron over there to drive him and then come back.

  Poor kid’ll be having nightmares for months as it is.”

  “What happened?”

  “Adam was walking on the roof and it gave way under him. Lucky he didn’t break his back, or get crushed to death.” She pointed at the outbuilding. “The rafters that helped support the flagstones must have rotted, all those years under water. It didn’t take much weight. I should think the demolition men were supposed to pull the whole place down before it was flooded, but they must have knocked off early that day.”

  Banks looked around. “It does seem as if they cut a few corners.”

  “Why not? They probably thought no one would ever see the place again. Who can tell what’s there when it’s all under water? Anyway, the mud broke Adam’s fall, his arm got stuck in it, and he pulled up a skeleton of a hand.”

  “Human?”

  “Don’t know, sir. I mean, it looks human to me, but we’ll need an expert to be certain. I’ve read that it’s easy to mistake bear paws for human hands.”

  “Bear paws? When was the last time you saw a bear around these parts?”

  “Why, just last week, sir.”

  Banks paused a moment, saw the glint in her eye and smiled. There was something about this woman that intrigued him. Nothing in her tone hinted at self-doubt or uncertainty about her actions. Most junior police officers, when questioned about their actions by a senior, generally either let a little of the “did I do the right thing, sir?” creep into their tone, or they became defensive. Susan Gay, his old DC, had been like that. But there was none of this with DS Cabbot. She simply stated things as they had occurred, decisions as she had made them, and something about the way she did it made her sound completely self-assured and self-possessed without being at all arrogant or insubordinate. Banks found her disconcerting.

  “Right,” he said, “let’s go have a look.”

  DS Cabbot folded up her sunglasses, slipped them in her shoulder-bag and led the way. Banks followed her to the outbuilding. She moved with a sort of loose-limbed grace, the way cats do whenever it’s not feeding time.

  On his way, he stopped and talked briefly to the TV people. They couldn’t tell him much, except that they’d been exploring the area when they saw the lad fall through the roof. They rushed over immediately, and when they got to him they saw what he’d pulled up out of the earth. He hadn’t seemed particularly grateful for their assistance, they said, or even pleased to see them, but they were relieved he wasn’t seriously hurt. True to their profession, they asked Banks if he would mind giving them a comment for the tape. He declined politely, citing lack of information. As soon as he had turned away, the woman was on her mobile to the local news channel. It didn’t sound like the first time she’d called, either.

  The outbuilding was about six or seven feet square. Banks stood in the doorway and looked at the depression in the mud where the boy had landed, then at the two heavy slabs of stone on either side. DS Cabbot was right; Adam Kelly had been very lucky indeed. There were more slabs strewn around on the floor, too, many of them broken, some just fragments stickin
g up out of the mud. He could easily have landed on one and snapped his spine. Still, when you’re that young, you think you’re immortal. Banks and his friends certainly had, even after Phil Simpkins wrapped his rope around a tree trunk, jumped off the top branch and spiralled all the way down onto the pointed metal railings.

  Banks shook off the memory and concentrated on the scene before him. The sun shone on the top part of the far wall; the stone glistened, moist and slimy. There was a brackish smell about the place, Banks noticed, though there was no salt water for miles, and a smell of dead fish, which were probably a lot closer.

  “See what I mean, sir?” said DS Cabbot. “Because the roof kept the sun out, it’s a lot more muddy in here than outside.” She swept some stray tresses from her cheek with a quick flick of her hand. “Probably saved the kid’s life.”

  Banks’s gaze lighted on the skeletal hand curled around the edge of a broken stone slab. It looked like a creature from a horror film trying to claw its way out of the grave. The bones were dark and clotted with mud, but it looked like a human hand to Banks.

  “We’d better get some experts in to dig this place out,” he said. “Then we’ll need a forensic anthropologist. In the meantime, I haven’t had my tea yet. Is there somewhere nearby we might be able to get a bite?”

  “The Black Swan in Harkside’s your best bet. Will you be wanting Adam Kelly’s address?”

  “Have you eaten?”

  “No, but—”

  “You can come with me, then, fill me in over a meal. I can have a chat with young Adam in the morning, when he’s had time to collect himself. PC Cameron can hold the fort here.”

  DS Cabbot glanced down at the skeletal hand.

  “Come on,” Banks said. “There’s nothing more we can do here. This poor bugger’s probably been dead longer than we’ve been alive.”

  Vivian Elmsley felt bone-weary when she finally got home from the signing. She put her briefcase down in the hall and walked through to the living-room. Most people would have been surprised at the modern chrome-and-glass decor in the home of a person as old as Vivian, but she far preferred it to all the dreadfully twee antiques, knick-knacks and restored woodwork that cluttered up most old people’s houses—at least the ones she had seen. The only painting that adorned her plain white walls hung over the narrow glass mantelpiece, a framed print of a Georgia O’Keeffe flower, overwhelming in its yellowness and intimidating in its symmetry.