A Dedicated Man (2 page)

‘I suppose the super’s been informed?’

‘Yes, sir. It was him as said to tell you.’

‘It would be,’ Banks complained. ‘I don’t suppose he wanted to miss
his
Sunday dinner.’ But he spoke with humour and affection. Superintendent Gristhorpe, of
all his new colleagues, was the one who had given him the most support and encouragement during the difficult transition from city to country.

Banks hung up and slipped on his worn brown jacket with the elbow patches. He was a small, dark man, in appearance rather like the old Celtic strain of Welshman, and his physique certainly
didn’t give away his profession.

Sandra, Banks’s wife, emerged from the kitchen as he was preparing to leave. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Looks like a murder.’

She wiped her hands on her blue checked pinafore. ‘So you won’t be in for dinner?’

‘Sorry, love. Doesn’t look like it.’

‘And I don’t suppose there’s any point in keeping it warm?’

‘Shouldn’t think so. I’ll grab a sandwich somewhere.’ He kissed her quickly on the lips. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll give you a call as soon as I know
what’s happening.’

Banks drove his white Cortina west along the valley bottom by the riverside. He was entitled to a police car and driver, but he actually enjoyed driving and preferred his own company when
travelling to and from a case. A generous mileage allowance more than compensated for the cost.

With one eye on the road and one hand on the wheel, he flipped through an untidy pile of cassette tapes on the passenger seat, selected one and slipped it into the deck.

Though he swore that his passion for opera had not waned over the winter, he had to admit that he had been sidetracked into the world of English vocal and choral music. It was a change Sandra
heartily approved of; she had never liked opera much in the first place, and Wagner had been the last straw for her. After she had finally gone so far as to attack one of his tapes with a magnet
– the one with ‘Siegfried’s Funeral March’ on it, Banks remembered sadly – he had got the message. With Ian Partridge singing Dowland’s ‘I Saw My Lady
Weepe’, he drove on.

Like the larger and more famous Yorkshire Dales, Swainsdale runs more or less from west to east, with a slight list towards the south, until the humble river loses itself in the Ouse. At its
source near Swainshead, high in the Pennine fells, the River Swain is nothing more than a trickle of sparkling clear water, but in carving its way down towards the North Sea it has formed, with the
help of glaciers and geological faults, a long and beautiful dale which broadens out as it approaches the Vale of York. The main town, Eastvale, dominated by its Norman castle, sits at the extreme
eastern edge of the dale and looks out over the rich, fertile plain. On a clear day, the Hambleton Hills and the North York Moors are visible in the distance.

He saw Lyndgarth on the valley side to the north, near the dark ruins of Devraulx Abbey, and passed through peaceful Fortford, where the remains of a Roman fort were still under excavation on a
hillock opposite the village green. Ahead, he could see the bright limestone curve of Crow Scar high up on his right, and, as he drew closer, he noticed the local police searching a field marked
off by irregular drystone walls. The limestone shone bright in the sun, and the walls stood out against the grass like pearl necklaces on an emerald velvet cushion.

To get to the scene, Banks had to drive through Helmthorpe, the dale’s central market village, turn right at the bridge on to Hill Road, and then turn right again on to a narrow road that
meandered north-eastwards about halfway up the valley side. It was a miracle that the track had ever been tarmacked – probably a gesture towards increasing tourism, Banks guessed. No good for
tyre tracks, though, he thought gloomily.

Being more used to getting around in the city than in the countryside, he scraped his knee climbing the low wall and stumbled over the lumpy sods of grass in the field. Finally, out of breath,
he got to where a uniformed man, presumably Constable Weaver, stood talking to a gnarled old farmer about fifty yards up the slope.

By the side of the north-south wall, loosely covered with earth and stones, lay the body. Enough of its covering had been removed to make it recognizable as a man. The head lay to one side, and,
kneeling beside it, Banks could see that the hair at the back was matted with blood. A jolt of nausea shot through his stomach, but he quickly controlled it as he began to make mental notes about
the scene. Standing up, he was struck by the contrast between the beautiful, serene day and the corpse at his feet.

‘Anything been disturbed?’ he asked Weaver, stepping carefully back over the rope.

‘Not much, sir,’ the young constable replied. His face was white and the sour smell on his breath indicated that he had probably been sick over the wall. Natural enough, Banks
thought. Probably the lad’s first corpse.

‘Mr Tavistock here’ – he gestured towards the whiskered farmer – ‘says he just moved those stones around the head to see what his dog was scratting at.’

Banks looked at Tavistock, whose grim expression betrayed a man used to death. Ex-army, most likely, and old enough to have seen action in two world wars.

‘I were lookin’ fer one ’o my sheep,’ Tavistock began in a slow, thick Yorkshire accent, ‘and I saw that there damage to t’ wall. I thought there’d bin
a c’lapse.’ He paused and rubbed his grizzly chin. ‘There shouldn’t a bin no c’lapse in a Bessthwaite wall. Bin there sin’ eighteen thirty, that ’as. Any
road, old Ben started scratting. At first I thought nowt on it, then . . .’ He shrugged as if there was nothing more to be said.

‘What did you do when you realized what it was?’ Banks asked.

Tavistock scratched his turkey neck and spat on the grass. ‘Just ’ad a look, that’s all. I thought it might a bin a sheep somebody’d killed. That ’appens sometimes.
Then I ran ’ome’ – he pointed to a farmhouse about half a mile away – ‘and I called young Weaver ’ere.’

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.

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.

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 particles. Full report after the autopsy, of course.’