A Dedicated Man Read online

  ‘Aye,’ added Mrs Heseltine. ‘I saw ’im, too. Looked too short for a copper.’

  ‘’E’s a southerner,’ said Mrs Anstey, as if that settled the matter of height once and for all.

  At that moment, the bell jangled as Jack Barker walked in to send off a short story to one of the few magazines that helped him eke out a living. He beamed at the assembled ladies, who all stared back at him like frightened prunes, bid them good morning, conducted his business, then left.

  ‘Well,’ sighed Miss Sampson indignantly. ‘And ’im a friend of Mr Steadman’s too. I’d like to see what the poor man’s enemies is doing.’

  ‘He’s an odd one, all right,’ Letitia Stanford agreed. ‘Not the killing type, though.’

  ‘And how would you know?’ asked Mrs Dent sharply. ‘You should read some of ’is books. Fair make you blush, they would. And full of murder, too.’ She shook her head and clucked her tongue slowly at the sprightly figure disappearing down the street.

  TWO

  Sally Lumb sat in her best underwear before the dressing table mirror. Her long honey-blonde hair was parted in the middle and brushed neatly over her white shoulders. A short, carefully maintained fringe covered just enough of her high forehead. As she studied her milky skin, she decided it was about time she did some sunbathing. Not too much, because she was so fair and it made her red and sore, but just an hour or so each day to give her skin a deep golden hue.

  She had a good face, and she knew all her weak points. Her eyes were fine – big, blue and beguiling – and her nose was perfectly in proportion, with just a hint of a bob at its tip. If anything was wrong, it was her cheeks; they were a little too plump and her cheekbones weren’t well enough defined. It was only puppy fat, though. Like that around her hips and thighs, it would disappear completely in time. Nevertheless, there were ways to play down its effect right now, so why wait? The same with her mouth. It was too full – voluptuous would be the kindest word – and that wasn’t likely to change by itself.

  Sally studied the array of tubes, palettes, brushes, sticks and bottles in front of her, then made her skilful choice of the correct shades and tints calculated to highlight the best and obscure the worst of her facial features. After all, Chief Inspector Banks was from London, so she’d heard, and he would naturally expect a woman always to look her best.

  As she applied the cosmetics, she ran through the scene in her mind, imagining what she would say, and how he would jump up and dash off to make an arrest. Her name would be in all the papers; she would be famous. And what better start could an aspiring star wish for? The only thing better than that, she thought, carefully drawing her eyeliner, would be to catch the killer herself.

  THREE

  Banks sat in his office and gazed out over the market square with its ancient cross and uneven cobbles. The gold hands of the blue-faced clock on the church stood at ten fifteen. A small group of tourists stood in front of the plain sturdy building taking photographs, and shoppers in twos and threes ambled along narrow Market Street. Banks could hear occasional calls of greeting through his open window. He had been at the office for almost two hours, keen to read and digest all the information on the Steadman case as it came in.

  After leaving Barker and company at the Bridge the previous evening, he had driven straight home, enjoyed a mug of hot chocolate and gone to bed. Consequently, on Monday morning he felt unnaturally fresh and wide awake, much to the surprise of Sandra and the children, who had been half asleep at the breakfast table as usual.

  On his arrival at Eastvale station, he first found a message from Constable Weaver informing him that the house-to-house had produced negligible results. One person reported hearing a motorcycle at about eleven thirty and two cars between midnight and twelve forty-five (he had been eating Indian food in Harrogate and the resulting heartburn kept him awake later than usual). Everybody else was either away on holiday or fast asleep. One woman, who had spotted the request for information in Helmthorpe parish church at evening service, had dropped in early to rant about the Devil, Hell’s Angels, skinheads and the price of local produce. When the patient Weaver had tried to pin her down to specifics, so the laughing Sergeant Rowe reported to Banks, it turned out that she had spent all Saturday, including the night, with her married daughter in Pocklington.

  Banks fiddled with his pipe and frowned, annoyed at how little there was to go on. Every good policeman knew that the first twenty-four hours of an investigation were the most crucial ones. As time went on, the trail cooled. The press, of course, had been pestering him again on his way in, and he regretted that he had nothing to tell them. As a rule, for every piece of information he passed on to the papers, he had four more up his sleeve.

  There was always the chance that visitors at the campsite might have seen something. Banks doubted it, though. Most of the ones questioned on Sunday afternoon and evening had either just arrived that day or had heard nothing at all. Many of Saturday’s guests had left before the discovery of the body, according to the site manager, who explained that they had to be out by ten o’clock in the morning or pay an extra day’s rent. Unfortunately, he kept no register of names and addresses, and he hadn’t noticed anyone running around waving a bloodstained candlestick or hammer.

  Banks had asked Sergeant Hatchley to check Dr Barnes’s alibi and to issue an appeal for information in the Yorkshire Post, but his hopes were slim. One problem was that the campsite was on the northern bank of the River Swain, next to the cricket pitch, and the car park was on the south side, well set back from High Street and practically surrounded by trees and tall hedges. It was an ideal secluded place for a murder after dark, except between eleven and half past, when the pubs were emptying. It was possible, according to Dr Glendenning’s unchanged estimation of the time of death, that Steadman had been killed between nine and ten o’clock, shortly after he left the Bridge. At that time it would have been just about dark enough, and the car park would have been quiet. Drinking hours being what they were, most people arrived between eight and nine and stayed until closing time.

  So far, a thorough search had failed to find any traces of blood on the car park’s pitted macadam surface. In fact, forensic had turned up little of interest at all. Glendenning, however, had proved as conscientious as usual. He had spent half the night on a thorough autopsy, and a clear, jargon-free report was waiting in Banks’s in tray at eight a.m.

  The wound had been made by a metal object with at least one sharp edge, and was indeed the cause of death. Stomach contents revealed a low alcohol level, consistent with the evidence of the Bridge crowd, and the remains of an earlier dinner. The blow itself could have been inflicted by either a man or a woman, Glendenning had added, as the actual strength required to kill with such a weapon was minimal. Also, the killer was probably right-handed, so it would do Banks no good to follow the fictional detective’s procedure of watching out for a left-handed suspect. It did, however, appear to rule out Emma Steadman, who was left-handed, but she had a solid alibi anyway.

  Hypostasis indicated, as Banks had suspected, that Steadman had been killed elsewhere and his body driven to the field. Much of the lividity had formed on his right side but he had been buried on his back.

  There were no traces of blood in the car, but Vic Manson found plenty of prints. The trouble was that the few clear ones proved to be Steadman’s. The prints on the steering wheel and the door handle were smudged, as they almost always were. When people drive or open and close doors, their fingerprints slide against the smooth plastic or metal surface of the handle, and the result is a mess.

  What fibres remained on the vinyl-covered seats were so common as to implicate half the dale, if taken seriously. They indicated nothing so unique as a personally imported Italian suit or a yak’s-wool sweater supplied by an exclusive local outfitter. Nor was there, on the tyres, any trace of mud, soil or clay that could only be found in one specific place. There wasn’t even, wedged in the tread, a chip of gravel from an easily
identifiable driveway.

  Banks had little faith in forensic evidence, anyway. Like most detectives, he had convicted criminals on fingerprints and blood groups, but he had found that if the criminal had any brains at all, forensic evidence, though it might narrow the field of suspects, was useless until he had been caught by other means; then it might help to ensure a guilty verdict. It was surprising how many jury members still seemed to trust the experts, even though a skilled defence lawyer could easily discredit almost any scientist’s testimony. Still, Banks supposed, if the public were willing to accept the ‘scientifically proven’ superiority of certain toothpastes or breakfast cereals that advertisers claimed, then nothing was surprising.

  Just after eleven o’clock, Sergeant Hatchley poked his head around the door. Although the station coffee had improved greatly since the introduction of an automatic filter system, the two men had established a tradition of walking across to the Golden Grill for their morning break.

  They weaved through the groups of strolling tourists, called hellos to the few locals they recognized, and walked into the café. The only available table was at the back, by the toilets. The petite waitress shrugged apologetically when she saw them take it.

  ‘Usual?’ she called out.

  ‘Yes please, Gladys love,’ Hatchley boomed back.

  The usual was coffee and toasted teacakes for both of them.

  Hatchley put his buff folder on the red checked tablecloth and ran his hand through his hair. ‘Where the bloody hell’s Richmond these days?’ he asked, fishing for a cigarette.

  ‘He’s on a course. Didn’t you know?’

  ‘Course? What bloody course?’

  ‘The super sent a memo round.’

  ‘Never read them.’

  ‘Maybe you should.’

  Hatchley scowled. ‘Anyway, what course is this?’

  ‘Something to do with computers. It’s down in Surrey.’

  ‘Jammy bastard. Probably at the seaside with his bucket and spade.’

  ‘Surrey doesn’t have a coast.’

  ‘He’ll find one. When’s he due back?’

  ‘Two weeks.’

  Hatchley cursed, but their order arrived before he could say anything else. He would have, Banks knew, two objections to Richmond’s absence: in the first place, the sergeant had often said that he thought education was about as useful as a rubber with a hole in it; and secondly, even more serious, with Detective Constable Richmond away, Hatchley would have to do most of the legwork on the Steadman case himself.

  ‘I checked on Doc Barnes’s alibi this morning, like you asked,’ Hatchley said, reaching for his teacake.

  ‘And?’

  ‘It’s true – he was there with that Mrs Gaskell, all right. Seems she’s having a difficult pregnancy.’

  ‘What times?’

  ‘Arrived about nine thirty, according to the husband, and left at ten fifteen.’

  ‘So he could still have easily killed Steadman first and stuffed him in the boot of his car, or done it later.’

  ‘No motive,’ Hatchley said.

  ‘Not that we know of yet. What’s that?’ Banks pointed at the folder.

  ‘Gen on Steadman,’ Hatchley mumbled, his mouth half full of toasted teacake.

  Banks browsed through the report as he ate. Steadman had been born in Coventry almost forty-three years ago, at a time when his father was busy setting up his electronics business. Educated at a local grammar school, he won a scholarship to Cambridge, where he got a first in history. After that, he did postgraduate work at Birmingham and Edinburgh, then landed a teaching job at Leeds University at the age of twenty-six. There he began to develop and pursue his interest in industrial archaeology, a new field then, and in local history. In his first year of teaching, two important things happened. First, just before Christmas that year his mother died, and second, at the end of the final term he married Emma Hartley, whom he had known for two years. Emma was the only daughter of a Norwich shopkeeper, and she had been working as a librarian in Edinburgh when Steadman was studying there. She was five years younger than her husband. They had no children.

  The couple honeymooned in Gratly, staying at the house they now owned. Hatchley had put an asterisk by this piece of information, and when Banks turned to the note at the bottom of the page, it read: ‘Check with Ramsden. The house belonged to his parents.’ Banks knew this already, but he praised Hatchley’s thoroughness; it was so unusual it deserved encouragement.

  As Steadman’s career continued to flourish – publications, praise, promotion – his father’s health steadily declined. When the old man had finally died two years ago, the son inherited a considerable fortune. He first took his wife on a European tour, then, after seeing out the university year, he bought the house in Gratly, left his job and began to concentrate on his own interests.

  ‘What do you make of it?’ Banks asked Hatchley, who had finished eating and was now picking his teeth with his fingernails.

  ‘Well, what would you do with all that money?’ the sergeant said. ‘I’m damned if I’d buy a house around here and spend all my time poking about ruins.’

  ‘You think it was foolish of him?’

  ‘Not much of a life, is it?’

  ‘But it’s what he wanted: independence to pursue his own studies.’

  Hatchley shrugged as if there were no answer to such a silly statement. ‘You asked what I’d do.’

  ‘But you didn’t tell me.’

  Hatchley slurped down the last of his coffee; it was syrupy at the bottom with undissolved sugar. ‘I reckon I’d make a few choice investments first. Just enough so I could live comfortably off the interest, like. Nothing risky. Then I’d take a few thousand and have a bloody good holiday.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Everywhere. Fleshpots of the world.’

  Banks smiled. ‘And then?’

  ‘Then I’d come back and live off the interest.’

  ‘But what would you do?’

  ‘Do? Nowt much. Bit of this, bit of that. Might even go and live in Spain or the south of France. Or maybe one of those tax havens like Bermuda.’

  ‘You’d leave your job then?’

  Hatchley looked at Banks as if he was insane. ‘Leave my job? Course I’d leave my job. Wouldn’t anyone?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ But Banks wasn’t sure what he would do himself. A holiday, yes. But afterwards? To him, Steadman had made an admirable choice; he had extricated himself from the pedestrian and stultifying elements of his work and turned to concentrate on its essence. Perhaps I’d set myself up like Sherlock Holmes – a dalesman, himself – Banks thought, if I suddenly found myself with a private income. Take only the most interesting cases . . . wear a deerstalker.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, shaking off the fantasy. ‘It’ll be a cold day in hell before you and I have to worry about problems like that.’

  When Banks got back to his office, he found Emma Steadman waiting for him. She had just been to identify her husband’s body and was still distraught. There was little expression in her pale face, but the owlish eyes magnified by the lenses of her spectacles showed traces of recent tears. She sat upright on the hard chair, her hands clasped together on her lap.

  ‘I won’t keep you long,’ Banks said as he took his seat opposite her and started filling his pipe. ‘First, I’d like to know if your husband had any enemies. Is there anyone you can think of who might have wanted to do him harm?’

  ‘No,’ she answered quickly. ‘Not that I can think of. Harold wasn’t the kind of man who made enemies.’

  Banks decided not to point out the lack of reason in that statement; the bereaved relatives of murder victims frequently assumed that there could be no possible motive for the crime.

  ‘Was there anybody he argued with, then? Even a slight disagreement? It could be important.’

  She shook her head, frowning. ‘No, I told you. He wasn’t . . . Just a minute. There was something. I don’t know how important it
was though.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘He had complained a bit about Teddy Hackett recently.’

  ‘Hackett? When was this?’

  ‘About a week ago. They were friends really, I know, but they had some kind of ongoing feud about land. Oh, I suppose it was just silly. Men often are, you know. Just like little boys. Anyway, I’m afraid I don’t know all the details. You’ll have to ask Mr Hackett.’

  ‘Do you have any idea what it was about?’

  Mrs Steadman frowned again, this time in concentration. ‘I think it might have been something to do with Crabtree’s Field. That’s just a bit of overgrown land by the river. Harold was certain he’d located some Roman ruins there – he had some coins and bits of pottery he said were evidence – but Teddy Hackett was trying to buy the land.’

  ‘Why? What did he want with it?’

  ‘Knowing Hackett, it would be some vulgar project for making money. I don’t know exactly what he had in mind – a discotheque perhaps, or a fairground, video arcade, supermarket . . .’

  ‘Let me get this clear.’ Banks said, leaning forward. ‘What you’re saying is that Hackett wanted some land for development and your husband was trying to get it preserved as a historic site? Is that right?’

  ‘Yes. It wasn’t the first time, either. Last year, Harold wanted to start a small local museum in a shopfront on High Street, but Hackett bought the place up quickly and turned it into a gift shop. They argued about that, too. Harold was too trusting, too . . . nice. He wasn’t aggressive enough.’

  ‘There’s no one else you can think of? What about Dr Barnes? Did your husband ever say anything about him?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Jack Barker?’

  ‘No. He thought Jack Barker was a bit of a cynic, a bit too flippant, but that’s all.’

  ‘What about visitors to the house? Did you have many?’