In a Dry Season

by Peter Robinson

  How could so many people have read Banks wrong? she wondered. Gossip distorts the truth, certainly, but to such an extent? Perhaps he was the empty canvas people used to project their fantasies onto. Whatever he was, she hoped he wasn’t the kind who felt a moral obligation to fall in love just because he slept with a woman. When it came right down to it, she hadn’t a clue what she wanted from the relationship, if indeed there was a relationship yet. She wanted to see more of him, yes; she wanted to sleep with him again, yes; but beyond that, she didn’t know. Still, maybe it would be nice if he did fall a little bit in love with her. Just a little bit.

  Most of all, she hoped to hell that he wouldn’t regret what they had done for her sake, wouldn’t feel that he had taken advantage of her vulnerability or her tipsiness or any of that male rubbish. As for the career business, surely he couldn’t imagine she had only slept with him because he was her boss or because she was after advancement? Annie laughed as she pulled on her jeans. Sleeping with DCI Banks was hardly likely to advance anyone’s career these days. Probably quite the opposite.

  For the moment, another beautiful summer’s day beckoned, and it was a great luxury not to have to make any more serious choices than whether to go do her washing or drive to Harrogate and go shopping. She liked Harrogate town centre; it was compact and manageable. The cottage needed a tidy-up, true. But that could wait. Annie didn’t mind a little mess; as usual, there were far more interesting things to do than housework. She could put the washing in before she went; there wasn’t much.

  Before going anywhere, though, she picked up the phone and dialled a number she knew by heart.

  It rang six times before a man’s voice answered.

  “Ray?”

  “Annie? Is that you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How are you doing, my love? What’s happening?

  Having fun?”

  “You certainly sound as if you are.”

  “We’re having a bit of a party for Julie.”

  Annie could hear laughter and music in the back ground. Some retro sixties rock like the Grateful Dead or the Jefferson Airplane. “But it’s only ten o’clock in the morning,” she said.

  “Is it? Oh, well, you know how it goes, love. Carpe diem and all that.”

  “Dad, when are you going to grow up? For crying out loud, you’re fifty-two years old. Haven’t you realized yet that we’re in the nineties, not the sixties?”

  “Oh-oh. I can tell you’re angry at me. You only call me ‘Dad’ when you’re angry at me. What have I done now?”

  Annie laughed. “Nothing,” she said. “Really. You’re incorrigible. I give up. But one day the police will come and bust the lot of you, mark my words. It’ll be bloody embarrassing for me. How am I supposed to explain that to my boss? My father, the dope-smoking old hippie?”

  “Police? They’re not interested in a couple of teeny-weeny joints, are they? At least they shouldn’t be. Ought to have better things to do. And a bit less of the ‘old’ thank you very much. Anyway, how is my little WPC Plod? Getting any, lately?”

  “Dad! Let’s lay off that subject, shall we, please? I thought we’d agreed that my sex life is my own business.”

  “Oh, you have been! You are! I can tell by your tone. Well, that’s wonderful news, love. What’s his name? Is he a copper?”

  “Dad!” Annie felt herself blushing.

  “All right. Sorry. Just showing a bit of fatherly concern, that’s all.”

  “Much appreciated, I’m sure.” Annie sighed. Really, it was like talking to a child. “Anyway, I’m fine,” she said. “What’s Julie got to celebrate? Something I should know about?”

  “Didn’t I tell you? She’s finally got a publisher for that novel of hers. After all these years.”

  “No, you didn’t. That’s great news. Tell her I’m really happy for her. How about Ian and Jo?”

  “They’re away in America.”

  “Nice. And Jasmine?”

  “Jasmine’s fine.” Annie heard a voice in the back-ground. “She sends her love,” her father said. “Anyway, wonderful as it is to talk to you, it’s not like you to phone before discount time. Especially since you moved to Yorkshire. Anything I can help you with? Like me to beat up a couple of suspects for you? Fake a confession or two?”

  Annie fitted the receiver snugly between her ear and shoulder and curled her legs under her on the settee. “No. But as a matter of fact,” she said, “there is something you might be able to help me with.”

  “Ask away.”

  “Michael Stanhope.”

  “Stanhope . . . Stanhope . . . Sounds familiar. Wait a minute . . . Yes, I remember. The artist. Michael Stanhope. What about him?”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “Not much, really. Let me see. He didn’t live up to his early promise. Died in the sixties sometime, I think. Last few years pretty unproductive. Why do you want to know?”

  “I saw a painting of his in connection with a case I’m working on.”

  “And you think it might be a clue?”

  “I don’t know. It just made me want to know more about him.”

  “What was it? The painting.”

  Annie described it to him. “Yes, that’d be Stanhope. He had a reputation for Brueghel-esque village scenes. Touch of Lowry thrown in for good measure. That was his problem, you know: too derivative and never developed a uniform style of his own. All over the map. A bit Stanley Spencer-ish, too. Haute symbolism. Very much out of vogue today. Anyway, what could Michael Stanhope possibly have to do with a case you’re working on?”

  “Maybe nothing. Like I said, he just grabbed my curiosity. Do you know where I can find out more about him? Is there a book?”

  “I don’t think so. He wasn’t that important. Most of his stuff will be in private collections, maybe spread around the galleries, too. Why don’t you try Leeds? They’ve got a half-decent collection there, if you can stand the Atkinson bloody Grimshaws. I’d say they’re bound to have a few Stanhopes, what with him being local and all.”

  “Good idea,” Annie said, kicking herself for not thinking of it first. “I’ll do that. And, Ray?”

  “Yes?”

  “Take care of yourself.”

  “I will. Promise, love. Come see us soon. Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  Annie looked at her watch. Not long after ten. She could be in Leeds in an hour, spend a bit of time in the art gallery, have lunch, and do her shopping there instead of in Harrogate. Ten minutes later, she picked up her car keys and her shoulder-bag from the sideboard and set off through the labyrinth to her car, which was still parked outside the section station. She wondered if Inspector Harmond would make anything of that. Not unless he also knew that Banks’s car had remained parked by the village green all night. Besides, she didn’t care.

  And friends we remained. We saw the New Year in together, linked arms and sang “Auld Lang Syne.” Hong Kong had fallen to the Japanese on Christmas Day and the fighting in North Africa and in Russia went on as bitterly as ever. As the winter weather continued through January, British troops withdrew down the Malayan peninsula to Singapore.

  Though I often thought about what I had witnessed, I didn’t begin to understand what had gone on against the outbuilding wall that Christmas night until much later, and even then I had no way of knowing how culpable Gloria had been. What had Mark been trying to do to her? To me, at the time, Gloria had seemed to be resisting, struggling, but when I discovered the act of sex for myself not so very much later, I found it could often be misleading that way; one often seemed to be struggling and resisting, especially during the wildest moments. Looking back now, I’d call it attempted rape, but memory, over time, has a way of altering its content.

  So I did the best I could to put the whole episode out of my mind. I certainly agreed that Gloria was right not to involve Matthew. That would only have started a fight and upset everyone. His going away soon would have made it worse, too; he would
be worried enough to leave her behind as it was.

  Sometimes, though, at night in bed as I listened to the bombers drone over Rowan Woods, I would remember the scene, with Gloria’s bare white thighs above the stocking-tops, and those strange muffled sounds she was making that seemed lost somewhere between pain and acquiescence, and I would feel a strange, fluttering excitement inside me, as if I were on the verge of some great discovery that never quite came.

  On 15 January 1942, Sergeant Matthew Shackleton shipped out. He didn’t know where he was headed, but we all assumed he would be going to North Africa to fight with the Eighth Army.

  Imagine our surprise when Gloria got a letter from Matthew in Cape Town, South Africa, three weeks later. Of course, they could hardly sail through the Mediterranean, but even so, Cape Town seemed a long way around to go to North Africa. Then we got another letter from Colombo, in Ceylon, then Calcutta, India. What a fool I was! I could have kicked myself for not guessing earlier. They didn’t need bridges and roads in the desert, of course, but they needed them in the jungles of the Far East.

  The drive to Leeds took less time than Annie had expected. She parked north of the city centre and walked down New Briggate to The Headrow. The place was busy, pavements jammed with shoppers, all wearing thin, loose clothing to alleviate the blistering heat, which seemed even more oppressive in the city than it did out Harkside way. A juggler performed for children in Dortmund Square. The sun dazzled Annie, reflecting on shop windows, making it hard to see what was inside. She put on her sunglasses and set off through the crowds towards Cookridge Street. A little research after her chat with Ray had revealed that Leeds City Art Gallery had in its collection several works by Michael Stanhope, and Annie wanted to see them.

  Once inside, she picked up a guidebook at the reception area. The Stanhopes were on the second floor. Four of them. She started up the broad stone staircase.

  Annie had never liked art galleries, with their rarefied atmosphere, uniformed custodians and stifling aura of hush. No doubt this dislike was largely due to her father’s influence. Though he loved the great artists, he despised the barren way their works were put on display. He thought great art ought to be exhibited on a constant rotation in pubs, offices, trattorias, cafés, churches and bingo parlours.

  He approved of the Henry Moores standing out in open weather on the Yorkshire Moors; he also approved of David Hockney’s faxes, photo collages and opera set designs. Annie had grown up in an atmosphere of irreverence towards the established art world, with its stuffy galleries, plummy accents and inflated prices. Because of this, she always felt selfconscious in galleries, as if she were an interloper. Maybe she was being paranoid, but she always thought the guards were watching her, from one room to the next, just waiting for her to reach out and touch something and set off all the alarms.

  When she found the Stanhopes, she was at first disappointed. Two of them were rather dull landscapes, not of Hobb’s End, but other Dales scenes. The third, a little more interesting, showed a distant view of Hobb’s End in its hollow, smoke drifting from chimneys, the bright ver-milions and purples of sunset splashed across the sky. A fine effect, but it told Annie nothing she didn’t know.

  The fourth painting, though, was a revelation.

  Titled Reclining Nude, according to the catalogue, the painting reminded Annie of Goya’s Naked Maja, which she had seen with Ray when it came briefly to the National Gallery in 1990. No matter what his opinions about galleries were, Ray certainly never missed the opportunity to view a great work.

  The woman reclined on a bed in much the same pose as Goya’s original, propped on a pillow, hands behind her head, looking directly at the painter with some sort of highly charged erotic challenge in her expression, bed sheets ruffled beneath her. Also, like the Maja’s, her round breasts were widely spaced and her legs bent a little, awkwardly placed as her lower half twisted slightly towards the viewer. Her waist was thin, her hips in perfect proportion, and a little triangle of golden hair showed between her clasped legs, connected to the navel by a barely perceptible line of fair down.

  There were differences, though. Stanhope’s model had golden-blonde hair rather than black, her nose was shorter, her large eyes a striking blue, her lips fuller and redder. Even so, the resemblance was too close to be accident, especially the frank eroticism of her expression and the hint of pleasures recently enjoyed, conveyed by the rumpled sheets. Stanhope had obviously been strongly affected by Goya’s original, and when he had encountered the same sort of sensual power in a model, he had remembered this and painted it.

  But there was more to Stanhope’s vision. As Annie remembered, the background of the Naked Maja was dark and impenetrable; it seemed as if the bed were floating in space, the only important thing in the universe.

  Stanhope hadn’t given his model a realistic background either, but if you looked very closely, you could see images of tanks, aeroplanes, armies on the march, explosions and swastikas. In other words, he had painted the war into the background. It was subtle; the images didn’t jump right out at you and dominate the work, but they were there, and when you looked closely, you couldn’t ignore them: eroticism and weapons of mass destruction. Make of it what you would.

  Annie glanced at the note on the wall beside the painting, then she stepped back with a gasp that made one of the custodians look up from his newspaper.

  “Everything all right, Miss?” he called out.

  Annie put her hand over her heart. “What? Yes. Oh, yes. Sorry.”

  He eyed her suspiciously and went back to his paper. Annie looked again. It wasn’t mentioned in the catalogue, but there it was, plain as day, below Reclining Nude. A subtitle: Gloria, Autumn 1944.

  Seven

  On Monday morning, Banks looked again at the postcard reproduction of Reclining Nude: Gloria, Autumn 1944 that lay on his desk. It was an uncanny and disconcerting experience to see an artist’s impression of the flesh that had possibly once clothed the filth-covered bones they found last week, and to feel aroused by looking at it. Banks felt an exciting flush of adolescent guilt, the same as he had on looking at his first pictures of naked women in Swank or Mayfair.

  Annie had picked up several copies of the postcard at the art gallery and, thrilled by her discovery, phoned him late on Saturday afternoon. They met for dinner at Cock-ett’s Hotel, in Hawes, with every intention of going their separate ways later, both having agreed that they shouldn’t rush things, that they needed their time alone. After the second bottle of wine, though, instead of leaving, they took a room and woke to Sunday-morning church bells. After a leisurely breakfast, they left, agreeing to restrict their trysts to weekends.

  At home, Banks had tried to reach Brian all weekend, without any luck. He knew he should call Sandra and find out what she had to say about it all, but he didn’t want to. Maybe it was something to do with sleeping with Annie, or maybe not, but he didn’t think he could handle talking to Sandra. He spent the rest of Sunday reading the papers and doing odd jobs around the cottage.

  He walked over to stand by the open window. The gold hands against the blue face of the church clock stood at a quarter to eleven. Horns blared out in the street and the smell of fresh bread from the bakery mingled with the exhaust fumes. An irate van driver swore at a tourist. The tourist gave him the V sign and scurried off into the crowd. Another coach pulled up in the cobbled market square and disgorged its load of old ladies. From Worthing, Banks noticed, by the sign painted on the side. Worthing. Why couldn’t the old biddies stay down there, maybe roll up their skirts and go for a paddle, stop and smell the seaweed? Why did everyone have to come to the bloody Dales? When it came right down to it, he blamed James Herriot. If they hadn’t done that damn series on television, the place would be empty.

  Banks lit a proscribed cigarette and wondered, not for the first time this past year, why he bothered with the job. There had been plenty of occasions when he felt like packing it all in. At first he hadn’t done so because he sim
ply couldn’t be bothered. As long as people left him alone, it didn’t really matter. He knew he wasn’t working up to par, even on desk duties, but he didn’t give a damn. It was easy enough to show up and push paper around without enthusiasm, or to play computer games. The truth was that he hurt so much after Sandra left that everything else seemed meaningless.

  Then, when he bought the cottage and started pulling himself together, or at least managing to distance himself a bit from the pain, he seriously considered a career change, but he couldn’t think of anything else he was qualified for, or even wanted to do. He was too young to retire, and he had no desire whatsoever to go into security work or a private detective agency. Lack of formal education had closed most other paths to him.

  So he stuck with it. Now, though, partly because of this dirty, pointless, dead-end case—or so Jimmy Riddle must have seen it—Banks was finally getting back to some sense of why he joined in the first place. When something becomes routine, mechanical, when you’re just going through the motions, you have to dig down and find out what it was that you loved about it in the first place. What drew you to it? Or what obsessed you about it? Then you have to act on that, and to hell with all the rest.

  Banks had cast his memory back and thought about those questions a lot over the past few months. It wasn’t simply a matter of why he had walked into the recruiting centre that day, asked for information and then followed up on it a week later. He had done that partly because he hated business studies, and partly to piss off his parents. He and Sandra knew they were serious about one another by then, too; they wanted to get married, start a family, and he would need a steady job.

  With Banks, it wasn’t some abstract notion of justice, or being on the side of “good” and putting the “bad” guys away. He wasn’t naïve enough to see the police as good, for a start, or even all criminals as bad. Some people were driven to crime through desperation of one kind or another; some were so damaged inside that they were unable to make a choice. When it came right down to it, Banks believed that most violent criminals were bullies, and ever since he was a kid he had detested bullies. At school, he had always stuck up for the weaker kids against the bullies, even though he wasn’t especially big or tough himself. He got frequent black eyes and bloody noses for his trouble.