The Price of Love and Other Stories Read online

  “You should go if you get a chance. Bill and I visited him there five years ago. It’s a lovely city. I’m sure Tony and Carol would be happy to have you stop with them. They’ve got a big house.”

  “Maybe I will,” said Banks.

  “We don’t see you down here very often, do we?”

  “Well,” said Banks, feeling guilty he hadn’t made time for Mrs. Green on his previous visit, “I keep pretty busy up north. You know how it is.” He sipped some tea.

  “Your parents are really very proud of you, you know.”

  Banks almost choked on his tea. Where had that come from?

  Mrs. Green considered him through her tortoiseshell glasses. “You might not think so,” she said, “and they might not admit it, but they are. Especially since that business last summer.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Oh, don’t think I don’t know about your differences. They never did approve of what you chose to do with your life, did they? Your dad thought you’d joined the enemy, and your mother thought you’d let her down. That was clear enough to anyone who knew them.”

  “Was it?”

  “Oh, yes. And I knew where they were coming from, of course.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She smiled. “Oh, don’t be so obtuse, Alan. You always did have that infuriating habit of pretending not to see the obvious. You wouldn’t have gotten far in your chosen career if you couldn’t even add together the basics. You had all the opportunities; they had none. They had to settle for their lot in life. And the Thatcher years were pretty tough around here. How do you think your dad felt when he saw coppers laying into workers on the news? Miners, whatever they were, they were still workingmen, like himself. How do you think he felt when he saw the police in riot gear waving their overtime pay in the faces of men who’d lost everything? Do you think he actually enjoyed working at that factory every day of his life? I’d say it was a cause for celebration when they made him redundant, but for him it was a blow to his pride. And your mother, cleaning up other folks’ messes? They made a lot of sacrifices for you, so you could do better than they had. And what did you do? You joined the police force. You must have known how people around here felt about the police.”

  “I’d say they expect us to make sure their cars are safe and keep the muggings and gang fights to a minimum.”

  “You always were a cheeky young beggar, Alan Banks. Perhaps now they do. But not back then.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Banks.

  “But what I’m telling you is they know you’ve done well for yourself now. Every time you got a promotion they told me, and you should have heard the pride in their voices. ‘Our Alan’s a detective sergeant now,’ they’d say. Or ‘They’ve made Alan detective chief inspector now!’ I got sick of hearing about you. It just took them a long time to work it out, and they don’t find it easy to express. It also helped that you came down on the right side last time you were here. Of course, they always did dote on that useless brother of yours.”

  “Roy.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry, but you know I’ve always spoken my mind, and I can’t say I ever took to him. Sly, he seemed to me, two-faced, always up to something behind your back. You were no angel, mind, but you weren’t sly.”

  Banks smiled as he buttered his scone, thinking about the time he had orchestrated going to bed with Kay while his parents were visiting his granny, and the time he and Tony Green had drunk some of Mr. Green’s whiskey and topped the bottle up with water. Whether he ever spotted it or not they never knew. Sly? All kids are sly, Banks thought; they have to be in their constant struggle with the inexplicable and unreasonable rules and regulations imposed on them by adults. But Banks knew how to take a compliment when he was offered one, even at the expense of his brother.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Roy could be a bit of a handful.”

  “To say the least. Anyway, I don’t see much of your mum and dad anymore, except when I bump into Ida on the street,” Mrs. Green went on. “That’s how I knew about the golden wedding. She invited me. It’s sad, though. People seem to isolate themselves when they get old. They don’t get out as much, and I don’t go to the Coach and Horses. How are they?”

  “Same as ever,” said Banks. “Mum’s complaining about varicose veins and her bunions, but she doesn’t seem to do too badly. Dad’s still got his angina, but it doesn’t seem any worse. There’s a neighbor helps out. Bloke called Geoff Salisbury. Know him?”

  Banks couldn’t swear to it, but he thought Mrs. Green’s expression darkened for a moment. Her lips certainly tightened.

  “I know him,” she said.

  Banks leaned forward in his armchair. “You don’t sound so thrilled about it.”

  “Can’t say as I am. Oh, he’s a charmer all right is Geoff Salisbury. Bit too much so for my liking.”

  “How did you meet him?”

  “He seems to have some sort of radar for all the old folks in trouble on the estate. He turns up everywhere at one time or another. Usually when you need help.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “More tea?”

  “Please.” Banks held out his cup.

  “You know, you can smoke if you like.” She smiled. “If I let you do it when you were fifteen, I can hardly stop you now you’re…what would it be?”

  “A lot older.” Banks put his hand to his left temple. “Can’t you tell by the gray?”

  Mrs. Green laughed and touched her own head. “You call that gray?” It was true, she had an entire head of fluffy gray hair.

  “Anyway,” Banks said, remembering what Mr. Green had died of. “Thanks, but I’ve stopped.”

  “I won’t say that’s not good news. If only we’d all known all along what it was doing to us.”

  “You were saying? About Geoff Salisbury.”

  “I was, wasn’t I?” She sat back in her chair, tea and saucer resting on her lap. “Oh, you know me. I tend to go off half-cocked on things.”

  “I’d still be interested to hear your thoughts,” said Banks. “To be honest, I haven’t really taken to him myself, and he seems to be spending an awful lot of time around Mum and Dad.”

  She waved a hand. “It’s nothing, really. He started coming around when Bill was sick. It was near the end, and he was in a wheelchair, breathing from that horrible oxygen tank.”

  “What did he want?”

  “Want? Nothing. He never asked for a thing. Only to help. Give him his due, he’s a hard and willing worker, and he was certainly useful at the time. He fixed a few things around the house, ran errands.”

  “So what was the problem?”

  “You’ll think I was imagining things.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Well, it wasn’t any one thing, really. Just little things. The wrong change, or one of Bill’s tools would go missing. Nothing you could really put your finger on.”

  Banks remembered the short change Geoff Salisbury had handed his mother yesterday evening. “Anything else?”

  “Ooh, just listen to us,” said Mrs. Green, refilling her teacup. “I’m being questioned by a policeman.”

  Banks smiled. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it to seem like that. Comes with the territory, I suppose.”

  She laughed. “It’s all right, Alan. I was only teasing. But it’s hard to talk about. It was only a feeling.”

  “What feeling?”

  She clasped the collar of her frock. “That he was…hovering…like the Angel of Death or something. Listen to me now. What a fool I sound.”

  “You don’t think Geoff Salisbury had anything to do with your husband’s death, do you?”

  “Of course not. No, it’s nothing like that. It was a faulty valve, they said, on the oxygen tank.” She gave a harsh laugh. “Someone told me if we’d been living in America I’d have got millions of dollars in compensation.”

  “That’s probably true.”

  “Yes, well, if we’d been living in Amer
ica we probably wouldn’t have been able to afford the medical treatment in the first place, and Bill would have died a lot sooner.”

  “Also true,” said Banks. “Can you explain a bit more clearly? About this feeling you had.”

  “I’m not sure. I felt as if he were, you know, waiting, waiting in the wings until Bill died.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know. So he could take over more, maybe, manipulate me more.”

  Banks smiled at her. “He obviously didn’t know who he was dealing with.”

  She didn’t smile back. “You’d be surprised how easy it is to take advantage when people are vulnerable.” She looked at him. “Or maybe you wouldn’t. You probably see a lot of it in your job. Anyway, I felt as if he was hovering, waiting for Bill to die so that he could be more in control.”

  “But what could possibly have been in it for him?”

  “I don’t know. Like I said, I was probably imagining things anyway.”

  “I don’t suppose you won the lottery recently?”

  “Never bought a ticket.”

  “And you don’t have a million pounds hidden in the mattress, or anything?”

  She laughed. “Wish I had. No, there’s nothing, really. Bill’s insurance policy. Old-age pension. I’m not complaining, mind you. It’s enough to get by on.”

  “What happened?”

  “After Bill died, I gave Geoff Salisbury his marching orders. I was nice about it. I thanked him for his help, but said I was perfectly capable of managing by myself and I’d prefer it if he didn’t come around anymore. It wasn’t that I couldn’t still have used the sort of help he had to offer, but I just didn’t feel comfortable having him around. Maybe I was being oversensitive as well as ungrateful.”

  “I don’t know,” said Banks. “As I said, I haven’t taken to him myself and I’m not sure why.”

  “You’ll be feeling guilty because he’s looking after your parents while you’re not there to do it.”

  “Perhaps. Partly, yes. But there’s more. I don’t trust him. I don’t know what he’s up to, but I don’t trust him. Maybe it’s copper’s instinct.”

  “Well, I can tell you one thing for a start: you’ll get no thanks around these parts for going after Geoff Salisbury.”

  “Popular, is he?”

  “To hear some talk, you’d think the sun shone out of his…well, you know what.”

  Banks smiled. “I think I can guess. How did he take your rejection?”

  Mrs. Green shrugged. “Well enough, I suppose. At least he didn’t bother me after that. Oh, I see him around now and then, and he always smiles and says hello as if nothing ever happened. It’s just that…”

  “What?”

  “Oh, probably me being silly again. But it feels just skin deep, as if underneath it all, if you were just to strip off the surface that, well, you’d find something else entirely under there. Something very nasty indeed.”

  IX

  Banks decided to pay a quick visit to the city center that afternoon. He needed to pick up a couple of things from the shops for tomorrow, such as a nice anniversary card and some candles. He asked his parents if they needed anything, but they said no (implying, Banks thought, that Geoff Salisbury was taking care of everything), so off he went. Rather than search the side streets for a vacant parking space, he parked in the short stay behind the town hall and walked through to Bridge Street.

  Of course, the city center had changed quite a lot since his schooldays. Most cities had changed a lot in the past thirty years, but Peterborough more so than many others. Gone were the small record shop in the back alley where he used to buy a new single nearly every week and LPs whenever he could afford them—usually only Christmas and birthdays—and the musty used bookshop where he used to browse for hours among the dog-eared paperbacks, the one where the sour-faced woman behind the counter used to watch him like a hawk the entire time he was in there. The open-air market had closed; some of the pubs he used to drink in when he was sixteen and seventeen had disappeared and new ones had sprung up; an old cinema, after several years as a bingo hall, was now a nightclub; department stores had disappeared, moved or been given face-lifts; Cathedral Square was now a pedestrian precinct.

  Only yards from the Queensgate Center stood the ancient cathedral itself. Throughout Banks’s childhood, the majestic structure had simply been there. It didn’t dominate the city, the way York Minster did, and like most of the other local kids, he had paid it scant attention unless school projects and organized visits demanded otherwise. After all, what kid was interested in a boring old cathedral where boring old farts had gone to pray and where even more boring ones were buried? But now he found himself admiring the west front, with its three soaring Gothic arches flanked by twin pinnacled towers, the stone cream colored in the autumn sunshine.

  In the Queensgate Center, Banks bought an expensive golden anniversary card and some gold candles, then he browsed around for a while and picked up a CD he thought Kay would enjoy listening to on their way to dinner. It was one oldie he didn’t have, and he had been aware of the gap in his collection for some time. Luckily, it was even on sale.

  He looked at his watch. Four o’clock. He thought he just had time for a quick walk by the river before driving back to his parents’ house.

  As he walked down Bridge Street past the Magistrates Court and the police station, he realized that he hadn’t quite been able to put Geoff Salisbury out of his thoughts completely. Something about the man was still nagging away at him. Mrs. Green had been partly right; of course he felt guilty that Geoff was doing all the things for his aging parents that a good and dutiful son ought to be doing. But also, as the astute Mrs. Green had realized, there was more to it than that. If nothing worse, he certainly got the impression that Geoff Salisbury was a petty thief.

  He glanced toward the old Customs House with its light on top to guide the ships navigating the River Nene, then he made his way down to the footpath that ran along the Nene Way. There, he found a bench and, away from the crowds, took out his mobile and phoned the detectives’ room back at Eastvale. Detective Inspector Annie Cabbot and Detective Constable Winsome Jackman were on weekends at Western Area HQ, and it was Annie who answered.

  “DCI Banks, what a pleasant surprise. Can’t leave us alone for a minute, can you, sir?”

  “I take it you’re not alone in the office?”

  “That’s right, sir. Just Winsome and I, as per the duty roster.”

  “Everything all right?”

  “Fine. Business as usual. Couple of fights after closing time last night and a sexual assault on the East Side Estate. We’ve got a man in for questioning.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Honestly, we’re on top of it. Relax. Enjoy yourself.”

  “I’m trying, Annie, I’m trying. Actually, I wasn’t calling to check up on you. I’m sure everything’s under control. I need you to do a little detective work for me.”

  “Detective work?”

  “Yes. I want you to check on a name for me. See if you come up with anything.”

  “I don’t believe it. Even at your parents’ golden wedding anniversary you’re still on the job?”

  “You know the rules, Annie, we can’t ignore wrongdoing whether we’re on or off duty.”

  “Oh, what a load of bollocks. Okay. Go ahead.”

  Banks gave her Geoff Salisbury’s name and address, along with the number of his Fiesta, which he had memorized for good measure.

  “What’s it about?” Annie asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” said Banks. “Probably nothing. Just a suspicious character in the neighborhood. I want to know if he’s got form, first of all, then anything else you can dig up on him.”

  “Will do. Where can I get in touch with you?”

  “Call my mobile number. I’ll leave it switched on.” Banks didn’t want the call arriving at his parents’ house. “If there’s no answer, don’t worry. Leave a message and I’ll ge
t back to you.”

  “Okay. Will do.”

  Feeling vaguely guilty, though he had done nothing to feel in the least bit guilty about, Banks put the phone back in his pocket and walked back toward his car.

  X

  Bathwater was always at a premium, even now they had a house with a real bathroom, and Banks had to be careful not to use all the hot water. After a short soak and a shave, he was ready. Not expecting to be going out on a date, he hadn’t brought a great selection of clothes with him, so he had to settle for some gray, casual cotton trousers and a blue button-down Oxford shirt. He first checked the pockets of his sports jacket for car keys and wallet, then slipped in the copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover he had found in his bookcase before he went downstairs.

  Annie hadn’t rung back yet, and given that it was past seven on a Saturday evening, Banks guessed she probably wouldn’t until tomorrow. He certainly didn’t want his mobile ringing in the restaurant, so he turned it off for the evening. There was no real urgency about the matter, anyway; he just wanted to know if Geoff Salisbury had form.

  “Here,” his mother said, “you’d better take a key. You’ll probably be late back.”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” said Banks.

  “Take one anyway. I don’t want you hammering on the door waking us up at some ungodly hour in the morning.”

  Banks pocketed the key. “We’re only going out for dinner.”

  “And be quiet when you do come in,” his mother went on. “You know your father’s a light sleeper.”

  The only thing Banks knew was his mother had always complained of being a light sleeper, but he said nothing except good night and that he wouldn’t be late.

  XI

  Kay came to the door in a long, dark, loose skirt, white blouse tucked in the waistband, soft suede jacket on top. Banks complimented her on her appearance, feeling for all the world like that awkward teenager taking her to the ABC to see Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, on their first date. The film had only exacerbated his teenage angst about living in a provincial town—and a “New Town,” at that—but the music, mostly by Traffic and the Spencer Davis Group, was as good as it got, and what’s more, a young and lovely Judy Geeson starred in it.