Cold is the Grave Read online

  ‘Is there anything else you can help me with, Mr Knightley?’

  ‘I don’t think there is. And it’s no use asking Mrs Ford on the other side. She’s deaf as a post.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you have a key to Mr Courage’s house, do you?’ he asked.

  ‘Key? No. Like I said, we didn’t do much more than pass the time of day together out of politeness’s sake.’

  Banks stood up. ‘I’m going to have to have a good look around the place. If there’s no key, I’ll have to break in somehow, so don’t be alarmed if you hear a few strange noises next door.’

  Knightley nodded. ‘Right. Right, you are. Charlie Courage. Murdered. Bloody hell, who’d credit it?’

  Banks walked around the back of the terrace block to see if he could find an easy way into Charlie’s place. A narrow cobbled alley ran past Charlie’s backyard. Each house had a high wall and a tall wooden gate. Some of the walls were topped with broken glass, and some of the gates swung loose on their hinges. Banks lifted the catch and pushed at Charlie’s gate. It had scratched and faded green paint and one of the rusty hinges had broken, making it grate against the flagstone path as he opened it. It wasn’t much of a backyard, and most of it was taken up by a murky puddle that immediately found its way through his shoes. First, out of habit, Banks tried the doorknob.

  The door opened.

  Perhaps Charlie hadn’t had time to lock up properly before being abducted, Banks thought, as he made his way inside the dark house. He found a light switch on the wall to his right and clicked it on. He was in the kitchen. Nothing much there except for a pile of dirty dishes waiting to be washed. They never would be now.

  He walked through to the living room, which was tidy and showed no signs of a struggle. Noting the new-looking television and DVD set-up, not what you could afford on a nightwatchman’s salary, Banks got some idea of what Charlie had done with his money. He went upstairs.

  There were two small bedrooms, a bathroom with a stained tub and a tiny WC with a ten-year-old Playboy magazine on the floor and a copy of Harold Robbins’s The Carpetbaggers resting on a toilet roll. One bedroom was empty except for a few cardboard boxes filled with magazines – mostly soft porn – and second-hand paperbacks, and the other, Charlie’s, revealed only an unmade bed and a few clothes.

  Downstairs, in one of the sideboard drawers, Banks found the only items of interest: the title deed to the house, Charlie’s driving licence, a chequebook and a bankbook that indicated Charlie had made five cash deposits of £200 each over the past month, in addition to what seemed to be his regular pay cheque. A thousand quid. Interesting, Banks thought. That would at least account for the new TV and DVD set-up. What had the crooked little devil been up to? And had it got him killed?

  Wednesday morning dawned every bit as dismal as Tuesday. It was still dark when Banks drove into Eastvale, sipping hot black coffee from a specially designed carrying mug on the way. The other CID officers were already in the office when he got there, and DS Hatchley, in particular, looked downhearted that he had missed the opportunity of a day trip to Leicestershire. Or perhaps he was jealous that Banks had Annie’s company. He gave Banks the kind of bitter, defeated look that said rank pulled the birds every time, and what was a poor sergeant to do? If only he knew.

  ‘You’ll be driving, I suppose?’ Annie said when they got out back to the car park.

  That was another thing Banks appreciated about Annie: she was a quick learner with a good memory. It was unusual for a DCI to drive his own car. Having a driver was one of the perks of his position, but Banks liked to drive, even in this weather. He liked to be in control. Every time he let someone else drive him, no matter how good they were, he felt restless and irritated by any minor mistakes they made, constantly wanting to get his own foot on the clutch or the brake. It seemed much simpler to do the driving himself, so that was what he did. Annie understood that and didn’t question his idiosyncrasy.

  Banks slipped a tape of Mozart wind quintets in the Cavalier’s sound system as he turned out of the car park. ‘Mmm, that’s nice,’ said Annie. ‘I like a bit of Mozart.’ Then she settled back into the seat and lapsed into silence. It was another thing Banks liked about her, he remembered, the way she seemed so centred and self-contained, the way she could appear comfortable and relaxed in the most awkward positions, at ease with silence. It had also taken him a while to get used to her complete lack of deference to senior ranks, especially his, as well as to her rather free and easy style of dress, learned from growing up in an artists’ commune surrounded by bearded artistic types such as her painter father, Ray Cabbot. Today she was wearing red winkle-picker boots that came up just above her ankles, black jeans and a Fair Isle sweater under her loose suede jacket. Rather conservative for Annie.

  ‘How are you liking it at Eastvale?’ Banks asked as they joined the stream of traffic on the A1.

  ‘Hard to say yet. I’ve hardly got my feet under the desk.’

  ‘What about the travelling?’

  ‘Takes me about three-quarters of an hour each way. That’s not bad.’ She glanced sideways at him. ‘It’s about the same for you, as I remember.’

  ‘True. Have you thought of selling the Harkside house?’

  ‘I’ve thought of it, but I don’t think I will. Not just yet. Wait and see what happens.’

  Banks remembered Annie’s tiny cramped cottage at the centre of a labyrinth of narrow, winding streets in the village of Harkside. He remembered his first visit there, when she had asked him on impulse for dinner and cooked a vegetarian pasta dish as they drank wine and listened to Emmylou Harris, remembered standing in the backyard for an after-dinner smoke, putting his arm around her shoulders and feeling the thin bra strap. Despite all the warning signs . . . he also remembered kissing the little rose tattoo just above her breast, their bodies, sweaty and tired, the unfamiliar street sounds the following morning.

  He negotiated his way from the A1 to the M1. Lorries churned up oily rain that coated his windscreen before the wipers could get through it; there were more long delays at roadwork signs where nobody was working; a maniac in a red BMW flashed his lights about a foot from his rear end and then, when Banks changed lanes to accommodate him, zoomed off at well over a ton.

  ‘What did you find out about Charlie?’ he asked Annie when he had got into the rhythm of motorway driving.

  Annie’s eyes were closed. She didn’t open them. ‘Not much. Probably not more than you know already.’

  ‘Tell me anyway.’

  ‘He was born Charles Douglas Courage in February 1946—’

  ‘You don’t have to go that far back.’

  ‘I find it helps. It makes him one of the generation born immediately after the war, when the men came home randy and ready to get on with their lives. He’d have been ten in 1956, too young for Elvis, perhaps, but twenty in 1966, and probably just raring for the all the sex, drugs and rock and roll you lot enjoyed in your youth. Maybe that was where he got his start in crime.’

  Banks risked a glance away from the road at her. She still had her eyes closed, but there was a little smile on her face. ‘Charlie wasn’t into dealing drugs,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe it was the rock and roll, then. He was first arrested for distribution of stolen goods in August 1968 – to wit, long-playing records. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, to be exact, stolen directly from a factory just outside Manchester.’

  ‘A music lover, our Charlie,’ he said. ‘Carry on.’

  ‘After that comes a string of minor offences – shoplifting, theft of a car stereo – then, in 1988, he was arrested for theft of livestock. To be exact, seventeen sheep from a farm out Relton way. Did eighteen months.’

  ‘Conclusion?’

  ‘He’s a thief. He’ll steal anything, even if it walks on four legs.’

  ‘And since then?’

  ‘He appears to have gone straight. Helped Eastvale police out on a number of occasions, mostly minor stuff he found out abo
ut through his old contacts.’

  ‘Got a list?’

  ‘DC Templeton’s working on it.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Banks. ‘What next?’

  ‘A number of odd jobs, most recently working as a nightwatchman at the Daleview Business Park. Been there since September.’

  ‘Hmm. They must be a trusting lot at Daleview,’ said Banks. ‘I think one of us might pay them a visit tomorrow. Anything else?’

  ‘That’s about it. Single. Never married. Mother and father deceased. No brothers or sisters. Funny, isn’t it?’

  ‘What is?’

  Annie stirred in the car seat to face him. ‘A small-time villain like Charlie Courage getting murdered so far from home.’

  ‘We don’t know where he was murdered yet.’

  ‘An inspired guess. You don’t shoot someone in the chest with a shotgun and then drive him around bleeding in a car for three hours, do you?’

  ‘Not without making a mess, you don’t. You know, it strikes me that Charlie might have been taken on the long ride.’

  ‘The long ride?’

  Banks glanced at her. She looked puzzled. ‘Never heard of the long ride?’

  Annie shook her head. ‘Can’t say as I have.’

  ‘Just a minute . . .’ A slow-moving local delivery van in front of them was sending up so much spray that the windscreen wipers couldn’t keep up with it. Carefully, Banks changed lanes and overtook it. ‘The long ride,’ he said, once he could see again. ‘Let’s say you’ve upset someone nasty – you’ve had your fingers in the till, or you’ve been telling tales out of school – and he’s decided he has to do away with you, right?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘He’s got a number of options, all with their own pros and cons, and this is one of them. What he does – or rather, what his hired hands do – is they pick you up and take you for a ride. A long ride. It’s got two main functions. The first is that it confuses the local police by taking the crime away from the patch that gave rise to it. Follow?’

  ‘And the second? Let me guess.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘To scare the shit out of him.’

  ‘Right. Let’s say you’re driven from Eastvale to Market Harborough. You know exactly what’s going to happen at the end of the journey. They make sure you have no doubt about that whatsoever, that there’s going to be no reprieve, no commuting of the death sentence, so you’ve got three hours or thereabouts to contemplate your life and its imminent and inevitable end. An end you can also expect to be painful and brutal.’

  ‘Cruel bastards.’

  ‘It’s a cruel world,’ said Banks. ‘Anyway, from their perspective, it acts as a deterrent to other would-be thieves or snitches. And, remember, it’s not as if we’re dealing with lily-whites here. The victim is usually a small-time villain who’s done something to upset a more powerful villain.’

  ‘Charlie Courage, small-time villain. Fits him to a T.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Except that he was supposed to be going straight, and there aren’t any major crime bosses in Eastvale.’

  ‘Maybe he wasn’t going as straight as we thought. Maybe he was just avoiding drawing our attention. And they don’t have to be that big. I’m not talking about the Mafia or the Triads here. There are plenty of minor villains who think life is pretty cheap. Maybe Charlie fell foul of one of them. Think about it. Charlie worked as a nightwatchman. He put a thousand quid in the bank – above and beyond his wages – over the past month. What does that tell you, Annie?’

  ‘That he was either selling information, blackmailing someone or he was being paid off to look the other way.’

  ‘Right. And he must have been playing way out of his league. Maybe we’ll get a better idea when we talk to the manager at Daleview tomorrow. Nearly there now.’

  Banks negotiated his way around Leicester towards Market Harborough, about thirteen miles south. When they got to the high street there, it was almost noon, and it took Banks another ten minutes to find the police station.

  Before they got out of the car, Banks turned to Annie. ‘Are we going to be okay?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean. This. Working together.’

  She flashed him a smile. ‘Well, we seem to be doing all right so far, don’t we?’ she said, and slipped out of the car.

  DI Collaton turned out to be a big bear of a man with thinning grey hair, a red face and a slow, country manner. A year or so away from retirement, Banks guessed. No wonder he didn’t want to get involved in a murder inquiry. He looked at his watch and said, ‘Have you two eaten at all?’

  They shook their heads.

  He grabbed his raincoat from the stand in the corner of his office. ‘I know a place.’

  They followed him to a small pub about two streets away. Judging by the smiles and hellos exchanged, Collaton was well known there. He led them to a corner table, which gave a little privacy, then offered the first round of drinks. Annie asked for a tomato juice, though Banks knew she enjoyed beer. He had a pint of the local best bitter. A fire burnt in the hearth and Christmas decorations festooned the walls and ceiling. Apart from the buzz of conversation around the bar, the place was quiet, which was the way Banks liked his pubs. As was Annie’s habit in pubs, she seemed to mould herself to the hard chair and stretch her legs out, crossing them at the ankles. DI Collaton raised his eyebrows at her red winkle-pickers, but said nothing.

  After Banks had ordered game pie, on Collaton’s recommendation, and Annie, being a vegetarian, went for the Ploughman’s Lunch, he lit what he realized with some surprise was his first cigarette of the day.

  ‘We don’t get a lot of murders down here,’ said Collaton after his first sip.

  That didn’t surprise Banks. From what he had seen, he supposed Market Harborough to be a bit smaller than Eastvale – maybe seventeen or eighteen thousand people – and Charlie Courage was Eastvale’s first murder victim of the entire year so far. In December, no less. ‘Any idea why they might have chosen your patch?’ he asked.

  Collaton shook his head. ‘Not really. It’s handy for the M1,’ he said, ‘but a bit off the beaten track. If they were taking him somewhere, and he got troublesome . . .’

  ‘Any witnesses?’

  ‘Nobody saw or heard a thing. It’s out Husbands Bosworth way, towards the motorway, and at this time of year there’s nobody around. More in summer, tourist season, like.’

  Banks nodded. Same as Eastvale. ‘Any physical evidence?’

  ‘Tyre tracks. That’s about all.’

  ‘Anything interesting or unusual on his person?’

  ‘Just the usual. Except his wallet was missing.’

  ‘I doubt robbery was the motive,’ Banks mused. ‘Maybe a London mugger might blow away someone with a shotgun, but not in some leafy Midlands lane.’

  ‘My thoughts exactly,’ said Collaton. ‘I thought maybe they’d taken it to help keep his identity unknown a bit longer. Maybe they didn’t know he’d got form and we’d find out that way.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Had he been up to anything lately?’

  ‘We don’t know yet,’ said Banks. ‘Rumour has it he’s been going straight. Had a job as a nightwatchman. We know he made five cash deposits of two hundred quid each over the past month, though, and I doubt that he came by the money honestly.’

  Their food arrived. Collaton was right about the game pie. Annie nibbled at her cheese and pickled onion. Collaton kept looking at her out of the corner of his eye, when he thought no one noticed. At first Banks thought he was simply puzzled by her, as people often were, then he realized the dirty old bugger fancied her. And him old enough to be her father.

  Suddenly, Banks felt himself struck almost physically with the memory of Emily Riddle in his hotel room. Not so much by her white and slender nakedness, the spider tattoo or the feel of her body pressing against his as by her torn dress, her fear, the little question mark of blood
and Barry Clough. Why on earth hadn’t he followed up on that? The next morning he had simply gone out as soon as the shops had opened and, not being skilled at shopping for women’s clothing, bought her a track suit because it seemed easiest. Though he had questioned her about the previous night, she had given away nothing, maintaining a surly silence all the way home. Did she even remember how she got to his hotel room and her awkward attempt at seducing him?

  When he had driven her home from the station and left her with her parents, she had given him a look he found hard to interpret. Sad, yes, partly, and perhaps also a little let down, defeated, a little hurt, but not completely without affection, a sort of complicit recognition that they had shared something together, been through an adventure. Banks had decided on the way that he had no reason to tell Riddle what happened down there. If Emily wanted to do so, that was fine, but his part of the bargain was over; she was Riddle’s problem now.

  Still, it had gnawed at him over the past few weeks – Clough especially. Perhaps, if he had time over the next couple of days, he could make a few discreet enquiries of old friends in the Met, see if Clough had form, find out what his particular line of work was. Dirty Dick Burgess ought to know; he had been working with one of the top-level Criminal Intelligence departments for a while now. But Riddle had asked Banks to be discreet, and sometimes, when you set things in motion, you couldn’t always stop them as easily as you wanted to, and you didn’t know in which direction they would spin. That was Banks’s problem, as Riddle had told him more than once: he had never learned when to leave well alone.

  ‘Sir?’

  Banks snapped back from a long distance when he felt Annie’s elbow in his ribs. ‘Sorry. Miles away.’

  ‘DI Collaton asked if we wanted to have a look at the scene after lunch.’

  Banks looked at Collaton, who showed concern in his eyes, whether for Banks’s health or the lapse in attention wasn’t clear. ‘Yes,’ he said, pushing his empty plate aside. ‘Yes, by all means let’s go have a look at poor old Charlie’s final resting place.’