A Dedicated Man (32 page)

Penny put her head in her hands and Barker put his arms around her.

‘I’m sorry, Penny,’ Banks said. ‘I know it sounds brutal, but it was.’

Penny nodded and took a sip of her drink, then reached for a cigarette. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s not your fault. I’m sorry to be such a crybaby. It’s just
the shock. Please go on.’

‘It was well after midnight and the village was deserted. He put Steadman’s car back in the car park, cut through the graveyard and over the beck, then drove his own car home to
York. All he had to worry about was getting stopped on the way, but the road he chose made that most unlikely. As I said, the whole thing was carefully planned to throw all suspicion away from
Ramsden and Emma Steadman, who had the best motive. It even helped them that Steadman’s car was a beige Sierra. They’re quite common around here. I looked in the car park myself
yesterday and saw three of them. And there are others that look much the same, especially in dim light – Allegros, for example. Of course there were minor risks, but there was a hell of a lot
at stake. It was worth it.’

‘What about Sally then?’ Sandra asked. ‘How does she fit into it?’

‘She wasn’t part of the plan at all,’ Banks said. ‘She was just one of the innocent bystanders whose memory got jogged too much for her own good. Like Penny
here.’

‘There but for the grace of God,’ Penny muttered.

‘Too true,’ Banks agreed. ‘Whatever you believe, Emma would have convinced Ramsden it was necessary to get rid of you. She’d probably have had to do it herself, but he
wouldn’t have stopped her. He was too far gone.’

‘You said he seemed almost glad when you arrived,’ Penny said.

‘Yes, in a way. It was the end; he was free. I really think he was relieved. Anyway, according to Ramsden, Sally said she saw him and Emma together in Leeds. They were very careful;
they’d never think of going out in York or Eastvale, but Leeds seemed safe enough. None of Steadman’s old colleagues would have recognized Emma, and she knew the kind of places they
went to, the places to avoid. Sally was there with her boyfriend. I’ve talked to him again and he said they did go to Leeds once when he borrowed a friend’s car, and Sally pulled him
out of a pub, Whitelock’s, pretty sharpish when she spotted someone she knew. But she didn’t realize who it was at the time. She was more concerned with Ramsden not seeing her than
about who he was with. I suspect she and Kevin went to quite a few pubs. Sally certainly looked old enough to pass for eighteen, but she was under age, so she couldn’t afford to get
caught.

‘Now, most people would have just thought that Michael Ramsden had got himself a good-looking girlfriend, and I’m sure that’s what Sally believed until events in Helmthorpe
made her start re-examining little things like that. She was perceptive and imaginative. But it wasn’t until I’d managed to link Emma and Ramsden that I knew how Sally fitted in at all.
One thing I noticed when I saw her was that she seemed very skilled with make-up for a girl of her age, and she was interested in acting, the theatre. She had seen Ramsden in Leeds with an
attractive woman, forgotten about it, then seen the image again when her mind was on the Steadman business – maybe at the funeral, when she had plenty of time to examine what everyone was
wearing and how they looked. I was there too, and I noticed how she seemed to be scrutinizing us all, though it didn’t mean anything to me at the time. However it happened, she remembered,
and she became convinced it was Emma, carefully made up, she had seen with Ramsden. So Sally phoned her.

‘That was where she went wrong. Emma Steadman told Ramsden later that Sally had gone on about
Wuthering Heights
on the phone, and about how she thought Ramsden had killed Harold
Steadman so he could marry Emma just to get his hands on the house and money. Sally was convinced that Ramsden would murder Emma too, after he had married her. She seemed to think the Ramsdens had
gone down in the world and that Michael must resent Steadman tremendously for buying the house from his family and taking over. She suggested a secret meeting to discuss things and see if they
could find a way to deal with the situation. She thought that, together, they could solve the case and make the police look silly. Emma was terrified of anything that could link her with Ramsden,
so she killed the girl.’

‘Emma killed Sally Lumb?’ Penny repeated numbly.

‘Yes. Up by the packhorse bridge on Friday night. She hid the body under the bridge – the water was low then – and piled stones on it.’

‘But why on earth did Sally meet her like that?’ Barker asked. ‘She must have known it might be dangerous.’

‘Not at all. As far as Sally was concerned, she was simply warning Emma, saving her life. Besides, even if she did have second thoughts, ask Penny. She was about to do much the same thing,
and she never seriously considered that Ramsden would harm her.’

‘But that was different,’ Penny argued. ‘I’d known Michael all my life. I knew he wouldn’t hurt me, even if what I thought was true.’

‘Somebody would have hurt you,’ Banks replied. ‘You wouldn’t find much comfort in being right about Ramsden while Emma was killing you. It wouldn’t matter then,
would it?’

‘Only to the police, I suppose.’

‘You’re wrong about that,’ Banks said, leaning forward and looking straight into her eyes. ‘It matters to everyone except the corpse. Murder is the one crime that
can’t be put right. It upsets the balance. The dead can’t be restored like stolen property; death doesn’t heal like physical or emotional scars left by assault or rape. It’s
final. The end. Sally Lumb made a mistake and she died for it.’

‘She was reading the wrong book,’ Barker said. ‘And misreading it, at that. She should have been reading
Madame Bovary
. That’s about a woman who considers
murdering her husband.’

Banks hadn’t read
Madame Bovary
but made a mental note to do so as soon as possible. When the waiter reappeared, Banks and Penny were the only ones to order more drinks.

Banks lit another cigarette. ‘Ramsden got really scared after Emma killed Sally,’ he said. ‘But life went on and no thunderbolts from heaven struck him down. Then Penny started
to figure things out. You know the rest.’

Penny shivered and draped her shawl over her shoulders.

‘Emma Steadman was far more powerful than any of us had imagined,’ Banks said. ‘She also had a solid alibi for her husband’s murder. There was no way she could have done
that, and though I flirted with the idea that she might have paid someone, it didn’t seem likely. Sergeant Hatchley was right – she wouldn’t have known how to contact a hired
killer. Besides, if she had, it would have meant someone else to fear, someone who knew about her and what she’d done. Ramsden was ideal; Emma could control him, and he stood to gain too.
Sally knew that Mrs Steadman couldn’t have carried the body up Tavistock’s field – another reason not to fear her – but she didn’t know that Ramsden seemed to have a
perfect alibi. I certainly didn’t tell her, and I don’t think anyone else did.

‘I was thinking about all the wrong combinations,’ he said to Penny. ‘You and Steadman, you and Ramsden, you and Barker here. For a while I even wondered whether Ramsden and
Steadman were homosexually involved. Like everyone else, I was taken in by Emma Steadman’s outer drabness. I just couldn’t picture her as a woman of passion and power. I didn’t
even try. But she had the most dangerous combination of all, a passionate and calculating nature.’

‘What did make you think of her?’ asked Barker. ‘I’d never have got it in a million years.’

‘That’s because you only write books,’ Banks joked, ‘while I do the real work.’

‘Touché. But really? I’m curious.’

‘Tell me, didn’t you ever notice anything odd about Emma Steadman?’

Barker thought for a while. ‘No,’ he answered. ‘I can’t say I did. I didn’t really see a lot of her. When I did I always felt a bit uneasy.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. There are some women just make you feel like that.’

‘You didn’t tell me that when I asked you about her.’

‘Never really thought of it till you mentioned it just now,’ Barker said. ‘Besides, what difference would it have made?’

‘None, I suppose,’ Banks admitted. ‘It’s just that I felt uneasy with her too. Claustrophobic even. It was a kind of gut reaction, and I ought to know better than
that.’

‘But what did it mean?’ Barker asked.

‘This is all hindsight,’ Banks said, ‘so it did me no good until it was too late, but I think I was responding to her sexual power unconsciously and I was put off by her
appearance. I couldn’t accept being attracted to her so I felt dislike, revulsion. It might sound silly, but I couldn’t see beneath the surface. Still, that was the last thing I
realized. First of all there was something Darnley had said in Leeds that I couldn’t for the life of me remember. It was just the kind of casual, throwaway remark anyone might
overlook.’

‘What was it?’ Penny asked.

‘He said that Emma had been a pretty little thing at first in Leeds. Of course, that meant nothing at the time. Then Sally disappeared. I thought she must be connected in some way to the
Steadman business but I couldn’t figure out how. I knew about her theatrical interests, but there was no way of getting from that to seeing Michael Ramsden as Steadman’s killer.
Besides, I was still too busy looking in every direction but the right one. I was blinded by Emma’s alibi, too.

‘Finally, Sandra said she’d seen Emma and noticed that she still looked pretty good. That was when the bits and pieces seemed to fit together: a pretty young thing, Sally’s
skill at make-up – which is just altering appearances when you get right down to it – and Emma Steadman as the outline, still, of an attractive woman. And she did tell me she’d
been involved in amateur dramatics. When I thought about what others had told me about Emma, I realized that nobody had ever mentioned her being attractive. Penny wouldn’t of course –
like her husband, I don’t think you ever really noticed Emma – and Jack here hadn’t known her that far back. Ramsden never said that she was attractive either, and that, finally,
seemed odd. Then I got to thinking about Ramsden alone with her at the house that summer, about how he suddenly seemed to drift away from Penny. I’d always seen him as a kind of pale
loiterer, but it took me a long time to see Emma Steadman as a
belle dame
. My view of the past was wrong, just like Teddy Hackett said Steadman’s was, and everyone else seemed to look
back on that summer through rose-tinted glasses. If truth be told, it was a period of desire, greed, deception, adultery – hardly an idyll at all. Even Sally got it wrong.

‘When I asked my questions, I never had Ramsden and Emma in mind, but it was easy enough to review what I’d learned in the light of a new perspective. Once I’d got that far, it
seemed possible. Two people working together could have handled the Steadman killing, while both seeming to have solid alibis. Sally could have posed a threat to Emma if she had seen her
transformed from the drab housewife into the sexy siren with Michael Ramsden. All I had to do then was go and push even harder. At least I knew I was going in the right direction. But events turned
out differently.’

‘You were certainly fixed in your ideas about me and Harry,’ Penny said.

‘Yes,’ Banks agreed. ‘Maybe Ramsden and Emma was a combination I shouldn’t have overlooked. But it’s easy to say that now it’s over. Whenever I thought of
that summer I knew there was something missing, so I assumed that people had been lying to me, hiding something. They hadn’t. As far as you knew, it had all happened the way you told me.
Almost all, anyway.’

‘Don’t blame yourself,’ Sandra said to him, winking at Penny. ‘After all, you’re only a man.’

‘I’ll drink to that,’ Penny said, raising her glass and nudging Jack Barker.

While Banks joined in the toast and the chit-chat that followed, he thought deep guilty thoughts about Sally Lumb, who had seen beneath the surface only to find yet another romantic illusion.
Above them, as all traces of the sun disappeared, Crow Scar began to gleam like bone in the light of the rising moon.