A Dedicated Man Page 2

  Banks was dubious about the ‘ran’ but he was glad that Tavistock had acted quickly. He turned away and gave instructions to the photographer and the forensic team, then took off his jacket and leaned against the warm stone wall while the boffins did their work.

  THREE

  Sally slammed down her knife and fork and yelled at her father: ‘Just because I go for a walk with a boy it doesn’t mean I’m a tramp or a trollop or any of those things!’

  ‘Sally!’ Mrs Lumb butted in. ‘Stop shouting at your father. That wasn’t what he meant and you know it.’

  Sally continued to glare. ‘Well that’s what it sounded like to me.’

  ‘He was only trying to warn you,’ her mother went on. ‘You have to be careful. Boys try to take advantage of you sometimes. Especially a good-looking girl like you.’ She said it with a mixture of pride and fear.

  ‘You don’t have to treat me like I’m a baby, you know,’ Sally said. ‘I’m sixteen now.’ She gave her mother a pitying glance, cast another baleful look at her father, and went back to her roast beef.

  ‘Aye,’ said Mr Lumb, ‘and you’ll do as you’re told till you’re eighteen. That’s the law.’

  To Sally, the man sitting opposite her was at the root of all her problems, and, of course, Charles Lumb fitted easily into the role his daughter had assigned him: that of an old-fashioned, narrow-minded yokel whose chief argument against anything new and interesting was, ‘What was good enough for my father and his father before him is good enough for you too, young lady.’ There was a strong conservative streak in him, only to be expected of someone whose family had lived in the area for more generations than could be remembered. A traditionalist, Charles Lumb often said that the dale as he had loved it was dying. He knew that the only chance for the young was to get away, and that saddened him. Quite soon, he was certain, even the inhabitants of the dales villages would belong to the National Trust, English Heritage or the Open Spaces Society. Like creatures in a zoo, they would be paid to act out their quaint old ways in a kind of living museum. The grandson of a cabinetmaker, Lumb, who worked at the local dairy factory, found it hard to see things otherwise. The old crafts were dying out because they were uneconomic, and only tourists kept one cooper, one blacksmith and one wheelwright in business.

  But because Lumb was a Yorkshireman through and through, he tended to bait and tease in a manner that could easily be taken too seriously by an ambitious young girl like Sally. He delivered the most outrageous statements and opinions about her interests and dreams in such a deliberately deadpan voice that anyone could be excused for not catching the gentle, mocking humour behind them. If he had been less sarcastic and his daughter less self-centred, they might have realized that they loved each other very much.

  The thing was, though, Charles Lumb would have liked to see more evidence of common sense in his daughter. She was certainly a bright girl, and it would be easy for her to get into university and become a doctor or a lawyer. A damn sight easier, he reflected, than it was in his day. But no, it had to be this bloody academy, and for all he tried, he could see no value in learning how to paint faces and show off swimsuits. If he had thought she had it in her to become a great actress, then he might have been more supportive. But he didn’t. Maybe time would prove him wrong. He hoped so. At least seeing her on the telly would be something.

  Sally, after a few minutes’ sulking, decided to change the topic of conversation. ‘Have you seen those men on the hill?’ she asked. ‘I wonder what they’re doing?’

  ‘Looking for something, I shouldn’t wonder,’ her father replied dryly, still not recovered from the argument.

  Sally ignored him. ‘They look like policemen to me. You can see the buttons of their uniforms shining. I’m going up there to have a look after dinner. There’s already quite a crowd along the road.’

  ‘Well, make sure you’re back before midnight,’ her mother said. It cleared the air a bit, and they enjoyed the rest of their meal in peace.

  Sally walked up the hill road and turned right past the cottages. As she hurried on she danced and grabbed fistfuls of dry grass, which she flung up high in the air.

  Several cars blocked the road by the field, and what had looked from a distance like a large crowd turned out to be nothing more than a dozen or so curious tourists with their cameras, rucksacks and hiking boots. It was open country, almost moorland despite the drystone walls that criss-crossed the landscape and gave it some semblance of order. They were old and only the farmers remembered who had built them.

  There was more activity in the field than she could recollect ever seeing in such an isolated place. Uniformed men crawled on all fours in the wild grass, and the area by the wall had been cordoned off with stakes and rope. Inside the charmed circle stood a man with a camera, another with a black bag and, seemingly presiding over the whole affair, a small wiry man with a brown jacket slung over his shoulder. Sally’s eyesight was so keen that she could even see the small patches of sweat under his arms.

  She asked the middle-aged walker standing next to her what was going on, and the man told her he thought there’d been a murder. Of course. It had to be. She’d seen similar things on the telly.

  FOUR

  Banks glanced back towards the road. He’d noticed a flashing movement, but it was only a girl’s blonde hair catching the sun. Dr Glendenning, the tall, white-haired pathologist, had finished shaking limbs and inserting his thermometer in orifices; now he stood, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, muttering about what a warm night it had been as he made calculations in his little red notebook.

  It was just as well, Banks thought as he looked over at the spectators, that two of the forensic team had first examined the roadside. They had found nothing – no skid marks or tyre tracks on the tarmac, no clear footprints on the grassy verge – but it looked as if someone or something had been dragged up the field from the road.

  Glendenning confirmed that the victim had been killed elsewhere and merely dumped in this isolated spot. That would cause problems. If they had no idea where the man had been killed, they wouldn’t know where to start looking for the killer.

  The doctor rambled on, adjusting his column of figures, and Banks sniffed the air, feeling again that it was too fine a day and too beautiful a spot for such unpleasant business. Even the young photographer, Peter Darby, as he snapped the body from every conceivable angle, said that normally on such a day he would be out photographing Rawley Force at a slow shutter speed, or zooming in on petals with his macro lens, praying that a bee or a butterfly would remain still for as long as it took to focus and shoot. He had photographed corpses before, Banks knew, so he was used to the unpleasantness. All the same, it was worlds away from butterflies and waterfalls.

  Glendenning looked up from his notebook and screwed up his eyes in the sunlight. A half-inch of ash floated to the ground, and Banks found himself wondering whether the doctor performed surgery with a cigarette in his mouth, letting ash fall around the incision. Smoking was strictly prohibited at the scene of a crime, of course, but nobody dared mention this to Glendenning.

  ‘It was a warm night,’ he explained to Banks, with a Scottish lilt to his nicotine-ravaged voice. ‘I can’t give an accurate estimate of time of death. Most likely, though, it was after dark last night and before sunrise this morning.’

  Bloody wonderful! Banks thought. We don’t know where he was killed but we know it was sometime during the night.

  ‘Sorry,’ Glendenning added, catching Bank’s expression.

  ‘Not your fault. Anything else?’

  ‘Blow to the back of the head, if I may translate the cumbersome medical jargon into layman’s terms. Pretty powerful, too. Skull cracked like an egg.’

  ‘Any idea what weapon was used?’

  ‘Proverbial blunt instrument. Sharp-edged, like a wrench or a hammer. I can’t be more specific at this point but I’d rule out a brick or a rock. It’s too neat and I can’t find any trace of pa
rticles. Full report after the autopsy, of course.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Yes. You can have him taken to the mortuary now if you’ve finished with the pictures.’

  Banks nodded. He asked a uniformed constable to send for an ambulance, and Glendenning packed his bag.

  ‘Weaver! Sergeant Hatchley! Come over here a minute,’ Banks called, and watched the two men walk over. ‘Any idea who the dead man was?’ he asked Weaver.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the pale constable answered. ‘His name’s Harry Steadman. Lives in the village.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then we’d better get in touch with his wife. Sergeant, would you go over to Mr Tavistock’s house and take an official statement?’

  Hatchley nodded slowly.

  ‘Is there a decent pub in Helmthorpe?’ Banks asked Weaver.

  ‘I usually drink at the Bridge, sir.’

  ‘Food?’

  ‘Not bad.’

  ‘Right.’ Banks turned to Hatchley. ‘We’ll go and see Mrs Steadman while you attend to Tavistock. Let’s meet up in the Bridge for a bite to eat when we’ve done. All right?’

  Hatchley agreed and lumbered off with Tavistock.

  There was no chance of a roast beef dinner at home now. In fact, there would be few meals at home until the crime was solved. Banks knew from experience that once a murder investigation begins there is no stopping and little slowing down, even for family life. The crime invades meal times, ablutions and sleep; it dominates conversation and puts up an invisible barrier between the investigator and his family.

  He looked down at the village spread out crookedly by a bend in the river, its grey slate roofs gleaming in the sun. The clock on the square church tower said twelve thirty. Sighing, he nodded to Weaver, and the two of them set off towards the car.

  They passed through the small crowd, ignoring the local reporter’s tentative questions, and got into the Cortina. Banks cleared the cassettes from the passenger seat so that Weaver could sit beside him.

  ‘Tell me what you know about Steadman,’ Banks said as he reversed into a gateway and turned around.

  ‘Lived here about eighteen months,’ Weaver began. ‘Used to come regular for holidays and sort of fell in love with the place. He inherited a fortune from his father and set himself up here. Used to be a university professor in Leeds. Educated chap, but not stuck-up. Early forties, bit over six-foot tall, sandy hair. Still quite young-looking. They live in Gratly.’

  ‘I thought you said they lived in the village.’

  ‘Same thing really, sir,’ Weaver explained. ‘You see, Gratly’s just a little hamlet, a few old houses off the road. Doesn’t even have a pub. But now the newer houses have spread up the hill, the two are as near as makes no difference. The locals like to keep the name, though. Sense of independence, I suppose.’

  Banks drove down the hill towards the bridge. Weaver pointed ahead over the river and up the opposite valley side: ‘That’s Gratly, sir.’

  Banks saw the row of new houses, some still under construction; then there was a space of about a hundred yards before the crossroads lined with older cottages.

  ‘I see what you mean,’ Banks said. At least the builders were doing a tasteful job, following the design of the originals and using the same local stone.

  Weaver went on making conversation no doubt intended to help him forget the sight of his first corpse. ‘Just about all the new houses in Helmthorpe are at this side of the village. You’ll get nothing new on the east side. Some bright sparks say it’s because it was settled from the east. Vikings, Saxons, Romans and whatnot. Course, you don’t find many traces of them now, but the place stills seems to spread westwards.’ He thought about what he’d said for a moment and added with a smile, ‘Spreads slowly, that is, sir.’

  Much as Banks was interested in snippets of local history, he lost track of Weaver’s words as he drove over the low stone bridge and crossed Helmthorpe High Street. He cursed to himself. It was early Sunday afternoon and, from what he could see around him, that meant car-washing time in the village. Men stood in driveways in front of garages with their sleeves rolled up and buckets of soapy water by their sides. Shiny car roofs gleamed and water dripped from doors and bumpers. Polished chrome shone. If Harry Steadman had been dumped from a local car, all traces of that grisly journey would have been obliterated by now in the most natural way: soaped and waxed over, vacuumed and swept out.

  Steadman’s house, last in a short block running left from the road, was larger than Banks had imagined. It was solidly built and looked weather-beaten enough to pass for a historic building. That meant it would sell for a historic price, too, he noted. A double garage had been built on the eastern side, and the large garden, bordered by a low wall, consisted of a well-kept lawn with a colourful flower bed at its centre and rose bushes against the house front and the neighbour’s fence. Leaving Weaver in the car, Banks walked down the crazy paving and rang the doorbell.

  The woman who answered, holding a cup of tea in her hand, looked puzzled to find a stranger standing before her. She was plain-looking, with stringy, lifeless brown hair, and wore a pair of overlarge, unbecoming spectacles. She was dressed in a shapeless beige cardigan and baggy checked slacks. Banks thought she might be the cleaning lady, so he phrased his greeting as a question: ‘Mrs Steadman?’

  ‘Yes,’ the woman answered hesitantly, peering at him through her glasses. He introduced himself and felt the familiar tightening in his stomach as he was ushered into the living room. It was always like that. No amount of experience purged that gut-wrenching feeling of sympathy that accompanied the soothing, useless words, the empty gestures. For Banks there was always a shadow: it could be my wife, it could be someone telling me about my daughter. It was the same as that first glimpse of the murder victim. Death and its long aftermath had never become a matter of routine for him but remained always an abomination, a reminder one hardly needed of man’s cruelty to his fellow man, his fallen nature.

  Although the room was messy – a low table littered with magazines, knitting spread out on a chair, records out of their sleeves by the music centre – it was clean, and sunlight poured over the red and yellow roses through spotless mullioned windows. Above the large stone fireplace hung a romantic painting of what Swainsdale must have looked like over a hundred years ago. It hadn’t changed all that much, but somehow the colours seemed brighter and bolder in the picture, the contours more definite.

  ‘What is it?’ Mrs Steadman asked, pulling a chair forward for Banks. ‘Has there been an accident? Is something wrong?’

  As he broke the news, Banks watched Mrs Steadman’s expression change from disbelief to shock. Finally, she began to weep silently. There was no sobbing; the tears simply ran down her pale cheeks and dripped on to the wrinkled cardigan as she stared blankly ahead. They could have been caused by an onion, Banks found himself thinking, disturbed by her absolute silence.

  ‘Mrs Steadman?’ he said gently, touching her sleeve. ‘I’m afraid there are a few questions I have to ask you right away.’

  She looked at him, nodded and dried her eyes with a screwed-up Kleenex. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Why didn’t you report your husband missing, Mrs Steadman?’

  ‘Missing?’ She frowned at him. ‘Why should I?’

  Banks was taken aback, but he pressed on gently. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to tell me that. He can’t have come home last night. Weren’t you worried? Didn’t you wonder where he was?’

  ‘Oh, I see what you mean,’ she said, dabbing at her damp, reddened cheeks with the crumpled tissue. ‘You weren’t to know, were you? You see, I wasn’t expecting him home last night. He went out just after seven o’clock. He said he was calling for a pint at the Bridge – he often went there – and then driving on to York. He had work to do there and he wanted to make an early start.’

  ‘Did he often do that?’

  ‘Yes, quite often. Sometimes I went
with him, but I was feeling a bit under the weather last night – summer cold, I think – and besides, I know they get much more done without me. Anyway, I watched television with Mrs Stanton next door and let him go. Harry stayed with his publisher. Well, more of a family friend really. Michael Ramsden.’

  ‘What kind of work did they do on a Sunday?’

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t what you or I would understand by work. They were writing a book. Harry mostly, but Michael was interested and helped him. A local history book. That was Harry’s field. They’d go off exploring ruins – Roman forts, old lead mines, anything.’

  ‘I see. And it was normal for him to go the night before and stay with Mr Ramsden?’

  ‘Yes. As I’ve said, they were more like friends than anything else. We’ve known the family for a long time. Harry was terrible at getting up in the morning, so if they wanted a full day, he’d go over the night before and Michael would be sure to get him up on time. They’d spend the evening going over notes and making plans. I’d no reason to report him missing. I thought he was in York.’ Her voice faltered and she started to cry again.

  Banks waited and let her dry her eyes before asking his next question. ‘Wouldn’t Mr Ramsden be worried if he didn’t arrive? Didn’t he call you to find out what had happened?’

  ‘No.’ She paused, blew her nose and went on. ‘I told you, it wasn’t that kind of work. More like a hobby, really. Anyway, Michael doesn’t have a telephone. He’d just assume that something had come up and Harry couldn’t make it.’

  ‘Just one more thing, Mrs Steadman, then I won’t bother you any further today. Could you tell me where your husband might have left his car?’

  ‘In the big car park by the river,’ she replied. ‘The Bridge hasn’t got a car park of its own so the customers use that one. You can’t really leave cars in the street here; there’s not room enough.’