A Necessary End (42 page)

“Don't come that. You were out of line and you know it. You just thought you could get away with it.”

“I still can.”

Banks shook his head.

“You're forgetting that I'm your superior officer. I can order you to hand over whatever evidence you've got.”

“Balls,” said Banks. “Why don't you send Cranby and Stickley in to steal it?”

“Look,” Burgess said, reddening with anger, “you don't want to cross me. I can be a very nasty enemy. Do you really think anyone's going to take any notice of your accusations? What do you think they'll do? Kick me off the force? Dream on.”

“I don't really care what they do to you. All I know is that the press will make a field-day of it.”

“You'd be sawing off the branch you're sitting on. Think about where your loyalty lies. We do a difficult enough job as it is without taking an opportunity to set everyone against us. Have you considered that? What effect it would have on you lot up here if it did get out? I don't have to live here, thank God, but you do.”

“Damn right I do,” said Banks. “And that's the point. You can come here and make a bloody mess then bugger off back to London. I have to live and work with these people. And I like it. It took me long enough to get accepted as far as I have been, and you come along and set back relations by years. Take it or leave it. Give back the files, call off your goons, and it's forgotten, another unsolved break-in.”

“Oh, what a bleeding hero we are! And what if I put on a bit more pressure, got a couple of higher-ups to order you to hand over your evidence? What then, big man?”

“I've already told you,” Banks said. “It's not me you need to worry about, it's the press, Osmond and the students.”

“I can handle them.”

“It's up to you.”

“That's it?”

“That's it. Take your pick.”

“Who's going to believe a couple of loony lefties anyway? And everyone knows the press is biased.”

Banks shrugged. “Maybe nobody. We'll see.”

Burgess jerked to his feet. “I won't forget this, Banks,” he snarled.

“When I make my report on this investigation—”

“It's over,” Banks said wearily.

“What is?”

“The investigation.” Banks told him briefly about his conversation with Elizabeth Dale.

“So what happens now?”

“Nothing. Except maybe you piss off back home.”

“You're not going to go blabbing the whole bloody story to the press?”

“No point, no. But I think Mara and the others have a right to know.”

“Yes, you would.” Burgess strode over to the door. “And don't think you've won, because you haven't. You won't get out of it as easily as all that.”

And he left, the threat hanging in the air.

Banks stretched out his hands in front of him and noticed they were shaking. Even though the office was cool, his neck felt sweaty under the collar. His legs were weak, too, as he found out when he grabbed another cigarette and walked over to the window. It wasn't every day you got the chance to be high-handed with a senior officer, especially a whiz-kid like Dirty Dick Burgess. And it was the first time Banks had ever seen him ruffled.

Maybe he
had
made a dangerous enemy for life. Perhaps Burgess had even been right and he was overplaying the crusader role. After all, he played it a bit close to the edge himself sometimes. But to hell with it, he thought. It wasn't worth dwelling on. He picked up his coat, pocketed his cigarettes and set off for the car-park.

III

The rain had stopped and the afternoon sun was charming wraiths of mist from the river-meadows and valleysides. Banks's Cortina crackled up the track and pulled up outside the farmhouse.

Mara answered the door on his second knock and let him in.

“I suppose you want to sit down?” she asked.

“It might take a while.” Banks made himself comfortable in the rocking chair. The children sat at the table colouring, and Paul slouched on the beanbag cushions reading a science-fiction book.

“Where are Rick and Zoe?” Banks asked.

“Working.”

“Can you go get them, please? I'd like to talk to all of you. And would it be too much to ask for some tea?”

Mara put the kettle on first, then went out to the barn to fetch the others. When she came back, she saw to the tea while Rick and Zoe sat down.

“What the bloody hell is this?” Rick demanded. “Haven't we had enough? Where's your friend?”

“He's packing.”

“Packing?” Mara said, walking in slowly with the teapot and mugs on a tray. “But—”

“It's all over, Mara. Almost over, anyway.”

Banks poured himself some tea, lit a cigarette and turned to Paul.

“You wrote that suicide note, didn't you?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Come off it, the time for messing around is over. The pressure on the keys was different from that on the letters Seth typed, and his style was a hell of a lot better than yours. Why did you do it?”

“I've told you, I didn't do anything.” They were all staring at him now and he began to turn red.

“Shall I tell you why you did it?” Banks went on. “You did it to deflect the blame from yourself.”

“Wait a minute,” Mara said. “Are you accusing Paul of killing Seth?”

“Nobody killed Seth,” Banks said quietly. “He did it himself.”

“But you said—”

“I know. And that's what we thought. It was the note that confused me. Seth didn't write it; Paul did. But he didn't kill anyone. When Paul found him, Seth was already dead. Paul just took the opportunity to type out a note of confession, hoping it would get him off the hook. It didn't seem like such a bad thing to do, I'm sure. After all, Seth was dead. Nothing could affect him any more. Isn't that right, Paul?”

Paul said nothing.

“Paul?” Mara turned to face him sternly. “Is it true?”

“So what if it is? Seth wouldn't have minded. He wouldn't have wanted us to go on being persecuted. He was dead, Mara. I swear it. All I did was type out a note.”

“Had he written anything himself?” Banks asked.

“Yes, but it said nothing.” He pulled a scrap of paper out of the back pocket of his jeans and passed it over. It read, “Sorry, Mara.” Just that. Banks passed it to Mara, and tears filled her eyes. She wiped them away with the back of her hand. “How could you, Paul?” she said.

Paul sat forward and hugged his knees. “It was for all of us,” he said. “Can't you see? To keep the police off our backs. It's what Seth would have done.”

“But he didn't,” Banks said. “Seth had no idea that Paul would forge a note. As far as he was concerned, his suicide would be accepted for what it was. He'd never imagined that we'd see it as murder. If his death led us to the truth, so be it, but he wasn't going to explain. He never did while he was alive, so why should he when he was about to die?”

“The truth?” Mara said. “Is that what you're going to tell us now?”

“Yes. If you want me to.”

Mara nodded.

“You might not like it.”

“After all we've been through,” she said, “I think you owe it to us.”

“Very well. I think Seth killed himself out of shame, among other reasons. He felt he'd let everyone down—including himself.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that Seth stabbed PC Gill and he couldn't live with what
he'd done. Paul had already suffered for it. Seth would never have let him take the blame. He'd have confessed himself rather than that. When Paul was released, he was happy for him. What it meant for Seth, though, was that the police would get even closer to him now. It was just a matter of time. I'd already seen PC Gill's number in his notebook, and those books in his workshop. I knew it was his knife, too. I'd asked him about Elizabeth Dale, and he knew how unstable she was. All I had to do was find her and get her to talk. Seth knew all this. He knew it would soon be all over for him.”

Mara was pale. Her hands trembled as she tried to roll a cigarette. Banks offered her a Silk Cut and she took it. Zoe went around and poured tea for everyone.

“I can't believe this, you know,” Mara said, shaking her head. “Not Seth.”

“It's true. I'm not saying that he intended to kill PC Gill. He couldn't be sure that the demo would turn nasty, even though Gill was supposed to be there. But he went prepared. He knew very well the kind of things that were likely to happen if Gill was around. That's why I asked you if you'd heard anyone mention Gill's number that afternoon. Someone had it in for him and knew he'd be there.”

“I thought it sounded vaguely familiar,” Mara said, speaking quietly as if to herself. “I was in the kitchen, I think, with Seth.”

“And Osmond mentioned the number.”

“I . . .It could have been like that. But why Seth? He wasn't like that. He was a gentle person.”

“I agree, on the whole,” Banks said. “But the circumstances are very unusual. I had to find Liz Dale to put it all together. She told me a very curious thing, and that was that Alison, Seth's wife, was murdered. Now that didn't make sense to me, because I'd spoken to the local police and to the man who ran her over. It was an accident. He hadn't killed her deliberately. It had ruined his life, too.

“Seth tried to commit suicide after Alison's death, but he failed. He got on with his life but he never got over his grief, and that's partly because he never expressed it. You know he didn't like to talk about the past, he kept it all bottled up inside, all those feelings of grief and guilt. We always blame ourselves when someone we love dies, because maybe, just in a fleeting moment, we've wished them dead,
and we tell ourselves that if things had been just a little different—if Seth had ridden to the shops that day instead of Alison—then the tragedy would never have happened. Liz was the only one who really knew about what went on, and that was only because she was a close friend of Alison's. According to the Hebden Bridge police, Alison was more outgoing, spirited and communicative than Seth. Because he was the ‘strong silent type,' everyone thought he was really in control, calm and cool, but he was torturing himself inside.”

“I still don't see,” Mara said. “What does all this have to do with that policeman who got killed?”

Banks blew gently on the surface and sipped some tea. It tasted of apple and cinnamon. “Liz Dale filed a complaint about PC Gill's vicious behaviour during a demo she went to with Alison Cotton. Seth hadn't been there himself. During the demo, Liz told me, Alison was struck a glancing blow on her temple by Gill. It was just one of many such incidents that afternoon. Alison didn't want to make a fuss and attract police attention by making a complaint, but Liz was far more political at that time. She made a complaint about Gill's behaviour in general. When nothing came of it, she didn't pursue it any further. She'd lost interest by then—heroin made her forget politics—and like you, she assumed that the police wouldn't listen to someone like her.”

“Can you blame her?” Rick said. “They obviously didn't, did they? It hardly seems that—”

“Shut up,” Banks said. He spoke quietly, but forcefully enough to silence Rick.

“Over the next few months,” he went on, “Alison started to show some unusual symptoms. She complained of frequent headaches, she was becoming forgetful, and she suffered from dizzy spells. Shortly afterwards, she became pregnant, so she put her other troubles out of her mind for a while.

“One time, though, she really scared Seth and Liz. She started speaking as if she were a fourteen-year-old girl. Her family had been on holiday in Cyprus then, staying with an army friend of her father's who was stationed there, and she started describing a warm evening walk by the Mediterranean in Famagusta in great detail. Apparently, even her voice was like that of a fourteen-year-old. Finally she
snapped out of it and recalled nothing. She just laughed when the others told her what she'd been talking about.

“But that did it as far as Seth was concerned. He was worried she might have a brain tumour or something, so he insisted she tell the doctor. According to Liz, the doctor had nothing much to say except that pregnancy can do strange things to a woman's mind as well as her body. Alison told him that the symptoms started
before
she got pregnant, but he just said something about people having funny spells, and that was that.

“A few weeks later, she went to the local shop one evening and got lost. It was about a two-minute walk away, and she couldn't find her way home. Seth and Liz found her wandering the streets an hour later. Anyway, things didn't get much better and she went to see the doctor again. At first, he tried to blame the pregnancy again, but Alison stressed the terrible headaches, lapses of memory, and slipping in and out of time. He said not to worry, but he arranged for a CAT scan, just to be on the safe side. Well, you know the National Health Service. By the time her appointment came around, she was already dead. And they couldn't do a proper autopsy later because of the accident—her head was crushed.

“Seth had his breakdown, attempted suicide, put himself back together and bought the farm, where he lived in isolation for a while—until you came along, Mara. He proved himself capable of moving on, but he carried all the weight of the past with him. He was always a serious person, a man of strong feelings, but there was a new darker dimension to him after the shock of Alison's death.”

“It doesn't make sense,” Mara said. “If all that's true, why did he wait so long before doing what you say he did?”

“Two reasons really. First, he wasn't convinced until about a year ago. That's around the time he made his will. According to Liz, about eighteen months ago he'd read an article in a magazine about a similar case. A woman showed symptoms like Alison's after receiving a relatively mild blow to the head, and she later crashed her car. Just after he'd read this and started thinking about the implications, Liz ran off from the hospital and came to stay. He talked to her about it, and she agreed it was a definite possibility. After all, Alison's attacks only began to occur shortly after the demo. Liz hadn't been a very
good nurse—not good enough to come up with a diagnosis at the time—but she knew something about the human body, and once Seth had put the idea into her head, she helped to convince him.”