A Necessary End (29 page)

“For the time being, yes. Have you got a better idea?”

“I'm not convinced,” Burgess said slowly, “but I'll go along with it.

And,” he added, poking his cigar in Banks's direction, “on your head be it, mate. If he buggers off again, you'll answer for it.”

“All right.”

“And we'll keep him in another night, just so he gets the message.

I'll have another little chat with him, too.”

It was a compromise. Burgess was not the kind of man to give way completely to someone else's idea. It was the best deal he would get, so Banks agreed.

Burgess smiled over at Glenys. Down at the far end of the bar, a glass broke. “I'll go get us a couple more, shall I?”

“Let me.” Banks stood up quickly. “It's my round.” It wasn't, but the last thing they needed was a lunch-time punch-up between the landlord of the Queen's Arms and a detective superintendent from Scotland Yard.

“I'll take Osmond again, too,” Burgess said, when Banks got back. “I don't trust you when that bird of his is around. You go all gooey-eyed.”

Banks ignored him.

“Can I take DC Richmond with me?” Burgess asked.

“What's wrong with Sergeant Hatchley?”

“He's a lazy sod,” Burgess said. “How he ever made sergeant I don't bloody know. Every time he's been with me he's just sat there like a stuffed elephant.”

“He has his good points,” Banks said, surprised to find himself defending Hatchley. He wondered if the sergeant really had been nurturing a dream of Burgess's inviting him to join some elite Yard squad just because they both believed in the privatization of everything and in an England positively bristling with nuclear missiles. If he had, tough titty.

The difference between them, Banks thought, was that Hatchley just assumed attitudes or inherited them from his parents; he never thought them out. Burgess, on the other hand, really believed that the police existed to hold back the red tide and keep immigrants in their place so that the government could get on with the job of putting the Great back in Britain. He also believed that people like Paul Boyd should be kept off the streets so that decent citizens could rest easy in their beds at night. It never occurred to him for a moment that he might not pass for decent himself.

Banks followed Burgess back to the station and went up to his office. He had a phone call to make.

TWELVE

I

South of Skipton, the landscape changes dramatically. The limestone dales give way to millstone grit country, rough moorland for the most part, bleaker and wilder than anything in Swainsdale. Even the dry-stone walls are made of the dark purplish gritstone. The landscape is like the people it breeds: stubborn, guarded, long of memory.

Banks drove through Keighley and Haworth into open country, with Haworth Moor on his right and Oxenhope Moor on his left. Even in the bright sun of that springlike day, the landscape looked sinister and brooding. Sandra hated it; it was too spooky and barren for her. But Banks found something magical about the area, with its legends of witches, mad Methodist preachers and the tales the Brontë sisters had spun.

Banks slipped a cassette in the stereo and Robert Johnson sang “Hellhound on My Trail.” West Yorkshire was a long way from the Mississippi delta, but the dark, jagged edges of Johnson's guitar seemed to limn the landscape, and his haunted, doom-laden lyrics captured its mood.

Dominated by mill-towns at the valley bottoms and weaving communities on the heights, the place is a product of the Industrial Revolution. Majestic old mills with their tall chimneys of dark, grainy millstone grit still remain. Many have now been scoured of two hundred years' soot and set up as craft and antique markets.

Hebden Bridge is a mill-town turned tourist trap, full of book-shops and antique shops. Not so long ago, it was a centre of trouser and corduroy manufacturing, but since the seventies, when the
hippies from Leeds and Manchester invaded, it has been more of a place for arts festivals, poetry readings in pubs and other cultural activities.

Banks drove down the steep hill from the moors into the town itself. Rows of tall terraced houses run at angles diagonally along the hillside and overlook the mills at the valley bottom. They look like four-storey houses, but are actually rows of two-storey houses built one on top of the other. You enter the lower house from a street or ginnel at one level, and the upper from a higher one at the back. All of which made it very difficult for Banks to find Reginald Lee's house.

Lee, Banks had discovered from his phone call to PC Brooks of the Hebden Bridge police, was a retired shop owner living in one of the town's two-tiered buildings. Just over three years ago he had been involved in an accident on the town's busy main street—a direct artery along the Calder valley from east to west—which had resulted in the death of Alison, Seth Cotton's wife.

Banks had also discovered from the police that there had been nothing suspicious about her death, and that Mr Lee had not been at fault. But he wanted to know more about Seth Cotton's background, and it seemed that the death of his wife was a good place to start. He was still convinced that the number written so boldly in the old notebook was PC Gill's and not just part of a coincidentally similar calculation. Whether Seth himself had written it down was another matter.

Lee, a small man in a baggy, threadbare pullover, answered the door and frowned at Banks. He clearly didn't get many visitors. His thinning grey hair was uncombed, sticking up on end in places as if he'd had an electric shock, and the room he finally showed Banks into was untidy but clean. It was also chilly. Banks kept his jacket on.

“Sorry about the mess,” Lee said in a high-pitched, whining voice. “Wife died two years back and I just can't seem to get the hang of housework.”

“I know what you mean.” Banks moved some newspapers from a hard-backed chair. “My wife's been away at her mother's for two weeks now and the house feels like it's falling apart. Mind if I smoke?”

“Not at all.” Lee shuffled to the sideboard and brought an ashtray. “What can I help you with?”

“I'm sorry to bring all this up again,” Banks said. “I know it must be
painful for you, but it's about that accident you were involved in about three years ago.”

Lee's eyes seemed to glaze over at the mention. “Ah, yes,” he said. “I blame that for Elsie's death, too, you know. She was with me at the time, and she never got over it. I retired early myself. Couldn't seem to . . .” He lost his train of thought and stared at the empty fireplace.

“Mr Lee?”

“What? Oh, sorry, Inspector. It is Inspector, isn't it?”

“It'll do,” Banks said. “The accident.”

“Ah, yes. What is it you want to know?”

“Just what happened, in as much detail as you can remember.”

“Oh, I can remember it all.” He tapped his forehead. “It's all engraved there in slow motion. Just let me get my pipe. It seems to help me concentrate. I have a bit of trouble keeping my mind on track these days.” He fetched a briar from a rack by the fireplace, filled it with rubbed twist and put a match to it. The tobacco flamed up and blue smoke curled from the bowl. A child's skipping rhyme drifted in from the street:

“Where was I?”

“The accident.”

“Ah, yes. Well, it happened on a lovely summer's day. The six-teenth of July. One of those days when you can smell the moorland heather and the wild flowers even here in town. Not a cloud in the sky and everyone in that relaxed, dozy mood you get in summer. Elsie and I were going for a ride to Hardcastle Crags. We used to do a lot of our courting up there when we were youngsters, like. So whenever the weather was good, off we went. I wasn't doing more than thirty—and I hadn't a drop of drink in me, never touch the stuff—when I came upon this lass riding along on her bicycle on my inside.” He faltered, sucked at his pipe as if it were an oxygen mask, and carried on. “She was a bit wobbly, but then a lot of cyclists are. I always took special care when there were cyclists around. Then it happened. My front wheels were a foot or two away from her back.

She was over by the kerb, like, not directly in front of me, and she just keeled over.”

“Just like that?”

“Aye.” He seemed amazed, even though he must have told the story dozens of times to the police. “As if she'd hit a jutting stone. But there wasn't one. She might have bounced off the kerb or something. And she fell right in front of the car. I'd no time to stop. Even if I'd only been going five miles an hour I wouldn't have had time. She went right under the wheels. Keeled over, just like that.”

Banks let the silence stretch. Tobacco crackled in the pipe bowl and the repetitive chant continued outside. “You said she was wobbling a bit,” he asked finally. “Did she seem drunk or anything?”

“Not especially. Just like she was a learner, maybe.”

“Have you ever come across a policeman by the name of Edwin Gill. PC 1139?”

“Eh? Pardon me. No, the name and number aren't familiar. It was PC Brooks I dealt with at first. Then Inspector Cummings. I don't remember any Gill. Is he from around here?”

“Did you ever meet Seth Cotton?”

“Yes,” Lee said, relighting his pipe. “I plucked up the courage to go and see him in the hospital. He knew all the details and said he didn't blame me. He was very forgiving. Of course, he was in a shocking state, still beside himself with grief and anger. But not at me. I only went the once.”

“In hospital? What was he doing there?”

Lee looked surprised. “I thought you'd have known. He tried to kill himself a couple of days after the hospital phoned him about the accident. Slit his ankles. And they say he smashed the phone to bits. But someone found him before it was too late. Have you seen the lad lately?”

“Yes.”

“And how is he?”

“He seems to be doing all right.” Banks told him about the farm and the carpentry.

“Aye,” Lee said. “He mentioned he were a carpenter.” He shook his head slowly. “Terrible state he were in. Bad enough losing the lass, but the baby as well. . . .”

“Baby?”

“Aye. Didn't you know? She were pregnant. Five months. The police said she might have fainted, like, had a turn, because of her condition. . . .”

Lee seemed to drift off again, letting his pipe go out. Banks couldn't think of any more questions, so he stood up to leave. Lee noticed and snapped out of his daze.

“Off, are you?” he said. “Sure you won't stay for a cup of tea?”

“No, thank you, Mr Lee. You've been very helpful. I'm sorry I had to put you through it all again.”

“There's hardly a day goes by when I don't think on it,” Lee said. “You shouldn't keep torturing yourself that way,” Banks told him.

“Whichever way you look at it, no blame can possibly attach itself to you.”

“Aye, no blame,” Lee repeated. And his piercing inward gaze put Banks in mind of the actor Trevor Howard at his conscience-stricken best. There was nothing more to say. Feeling depressed, Banks walked back out to the street in the chilly spring sunshine. The children paused and stared as he passed by.

It was after five o'clock and the people down in the town were hurrying home from work. All Banks had to look forward to was a tin of ravioli on toast—which he would no doubt burn—and another evening alone.

Looking up the hillside to the west, he thought of Heptonstall, a village at the summit. He'd heard that the pub there served Timothy Taylor's beer, something he'd never tried. It had been a wasted and depressing afternoon as far as information was concerned, so he might as well salvage it somehow.

Alison Cotton's death had obviously been a tragic accident, and that was all there was to it. She had either rubbed against the kerb and lost her balance, or she had fainted, perhaps due to the effects of her pregnancy. Banks could hardly blame Seth for not wanting to talk about it.

He got in his car and drove up the steep hill to Heptonstall. It was a quiet village at that time of day: narrow winding terraces of small dark cottages, many with the tell-tale rows of upper windows where weavers had once worked.

He lingered over his food and beer in the window seat of the
Cross Inn, planning what to do next. The Timothy Taylor's bitter was good, smooth as liquid gold. Shadows lengthened and the fronts of the gritstone houses over the narrow street turned even darker.

It was late when he got home—almost ten—and he'd hardly had time to put his slippers on and sit down before the phone rang.

“Alan, thank God you're back. I've been trying to call you all evening.” It was Jenny.

“Why? What's wrong?”

“It's Dennis. His flat has been broken into.”

“Has he reported it?”

“No. He wants to see you.”

“He should report it.”

“I know, but he won't. Will you go and see him? Please?”

“Was he hurt?”

“No, he was out when it happened. It must have been sometime earlier this evening.”

“Was anything taken?”

“He's not clear about that. Nothing important, I don't think. Will you see him? Please?”

Banks could hardly refuse. In the first place, Jenny was clearly distraught on Osmond's behalf, and in the second, it might have a bearing on the case. If Osmond refused to come to him, then he would have to go to Osmond. Sighing, he said, “Tell him I'll be right over.”

II

“You don't like me very much, do you, Chief Inspector?” said Osmond as soon as Banks had made himself comfortable.

“I'm not bowled over, no.”

Osmond leaned back in his armchair and smiled. “You're not jealous, are you? Jenny told me how close you two got during that Peeping Tom business.”