A Dedicated Man (5 page)

Kathy slid back into her seat, forgetting the game. ‘A murder? In Helmthorpe?’ She gasped in disbelief. ‘Who was it?’

Here Sally had to admit lack of information, which she disguised neatly by assuming that Kathy meant ‘Who was the murderer?’ ‘They don’t know yet, you fool,’ she
replied scornfully. ‘It’s only just happened.’ Then she hurried on, keen not to lose their attention to further fleets of aliens. ‘I saw the superintendent close up. Quite a
dish, actually. Not at all what you’d expect. And I could see the body. Well, some of it. It was buried by the wall up in Tavistock’s field. Somebody had scraped away some of the loose
soil and then covered it with stones. There was a hand and a leg sticking out.’

Hazel Kirk tossed back a glossy raven’s wing of hair. ‘Sally Lumb, you’re a liar,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t see that far. The police wouldn’t have let
anyone get that close.’

‘I did,’ Sally countered. ‘I could even see the wet patches under the superintendent’s arms.’ She realized too late that this outburst clashed with her more
romantic image of the ‘superintendent’ and rushed on, hoping nobody would notice. Only Anne wrinkled her nose. ‘And old man Tavistock was there. I think he discovered the body.
And all the policemen from miles around. Geoff Weaver was there.’

‘That pink-faced pansy,’ Kathy cut in.

‘It wasn’t so pink today, I can tell you. I think he’d been sick.’

‘Well, wouldn’t you be if you’d just found a dead body?’ Anne asked, coming to the defence of young Weaver, on whom she had had a schoolgirl crush for nearly six months.
‘It was probably all decomposed and rotten.’

Sally ignored her. ‘And there was another inspector, or whatever they call them. He wasn’t in uniform anyway. Tall, strawy hair – a bit like your dad, Kathy.’

‘That’ll be Jim Hatchley,’ Anne said. ‘Actually, he’s only a sergeant. My father knows him. Remember when the social club was broken into last year? Well, they sent
him from Eastvale. He even came to our house. My dad’s treasurer, you know. Hatchley’s a coarse pig. He’s even got hairs up his nose and in his ears. And I’ll bet that other
chap was Chief Inspector Banks. He had his picture in the paper a while back. Don’t you ever read the papers?’

Anne’s stream of information and opinion silenced everyone for a moment. Then Sally, who read nothing but
Vogue
and
Cosmopolitan
, picked up the thread again.
‘They’re here now. In the village. They drove down before I came.’

‘I’m surprised they didn’t give you a lift,’ Hazel said, ‘seeing as how you’re on such good terms.’

‘Shut up, Hazel Kirk!’ Sally said indignantly. Hazel just smirked. ‘They’re here. They’ll be questioning everybody, you know. They’ll probably want to talk to
all of us.’

‘Why should they want to do that?’ Kathy asked. ‘We don’t know anything about it.’

‘It’s just what they do, stupid,’ Sally retorted. ‘They do house-to-house searches and take statements from everyone. How do they know we don’t know anything till
they ask us?’

Sally’s logic silenced Kathy and Hazel.

‘We don’t even know who the victim was yet,’ Anne chimed in. ‘Who do you think it was?’

‘I’ll bet it was that Johnnie Parrish,’ Kathy said. ‘He looks like a man with a past to me.’

‘Johnnie Parrish!’ Sally sneered. ‘Why, he’s about as interesting as a . . . a . . .’

‘A dose of clap?’ Anne suggested. They all laughed.

‘Even that would be more interesting than Johnnie Parrish. I’ll bet it was Major Cartwright. He’s such a miserable, bad-tempered old bugger there must be lots of people want to
kill him.’

‘His daughter, for one,’ Hazel said, and giggled.

‘Why?’ Sally asked. She didn’t like to think she was excluded from what appeared to be common knowledge.

‘Well, you know,’ Kathy stalled. ‘You know what people say.’

‘About what?’

‘About Major Cartwright and his daughter. How he keeps such a tight rein on her since she came back to the village. Why she ran off in the first place. It’s unnatural. That’s
what people say.’

‘Oh, is that all,’ Sally said, not quite sure she understood. ‘But she’s got her own place, that cottage by the church.’

‘Maybe it was Alf Pringle,’ Hazel suggested. ‘Now there’s a nasty piece of work. Be doing us all a favour if somebody did away with him.’

‘Wishful thinking.’ Kathy sighed. ‘Do you know, he chased me off his land the other day. I was only picking wild flowers for that school project. He had his shotgun with him,
too.’

‘He sounds more like a murderer than a victim,’ Anne chipped in. ‘Who do you think did it?’

‘Well, it might not be anyone from around here,’ Kathy answered. ‘I mean, we don’t know, do we? It could have been a stranger.’

‘Of course it was someone from around here,’ Sally said, annoyed at the way her discovery seemed to have become common property. ‘You don’t think somebody would drive a
body all the way from Leeds or somewhere like that just to dump it under Crow Scar, do you?’

‘They could have done.’ Kathy defended herself without much conviction.

‘Well, I’m not going out after dark until he’s been caught.’ Hazel hugged herself and shuddered. ‘It might be one of those sex murderers, another Ripper. It could
even be Major Cartwright’s daughter up there, for all we know. Or that Mrs Caret, the new barmaid at the Dog and Gun.’

‘I shouldn’t worry,’ Kathy said. ‘Nobody would want to sex murder you.’ She spoke in the usual spirit of friendly banter, but somehow her joke flopped and the girls
seemed distracted, each wrapped in her own thoughts. Kathy blushed. ‘Still,’ she said, ‘we’d better be careful.’

‘I’ll bet it was Jack Barker that did it,’ Anne suggested.

‘Who? That writer bloke?’ Sally said.

‘Yes. You know what kind of books he writes.’

‘I’ll bet you haven’t read any,’ Kathy taunted her.

‘Yes, I have. I’ve read
The Butcher of Redondo Beach
and
The San Clemente Slasher
. They’re lurid.’

‘I’ve read one too,’ Hazel said. ‘I can’t remember what it was called but it was about this man who went to his beach house somewhere in America and he found two
people he’d never seen before chopped to pieces in his living room. It was grisly. I only read it because he lives here.’

‘That’s
The Butcher of Redondo Beach
,’ Anne informed her patiently. ‘That’s what it’s called.’

Sally was bored by the direction the conversation was taking, and, besides, she thought Jack Barker looked far too handsome and debonair to be a murderer. He was a bit like one of those old film
stars her mother was always going on about – Errol Flynn, Clark Gable or Douglas Fairbanks – the ones who all looked the same with their oily, slicked-down hair and little moustaches.
He was the type, she thought, who might shoot his adulterous wife (if he had one) in a fit of passion, but he certainly wouldn’t carry her body all the way up to Crow Scar afterwards, that
was for sure. He was far too much of a gentleman to do that, whatever kind of books he wrote.

Sally finished her Coke and turned to leave, but before she did so she whispered, ‘The police will see me. I can tell you that for sure. I know something. I don’t know who’s
dead or who the killer is yet, but I know something.’

And with that she exited quickly, leaving the others to gape after her and debate whether she was telling the truth or simply trying to draw attention to herself.

There are two routes to York from Helmthorpe. The first winds up through Gratly, continues diagonally across the dales, more or less as the crow flies, and eventually joins the
main road a couple of miles outside the city; the second, longer but quicker, involves taking the main road back to Eastvale, then driving south-east on the busy York Road. Because it was a
beautiful day and he was in no real hurry, Banks took the first route on his visit to Ramsden.

He slipped the cassette back into the player and to the strains of ‘O, Sweet Woods’ drove up the hill, turned left past the Steadman house and followed the road as it climbed the
dale side slowly. He passed through the tiny hamlet of Mortsett and paused with his window down to look at an attractive cottage with a post office sign above its door and a board advertising
Wall’s Ice Cream propped outside. Insects hovered and hummed in the still, warm air; it seemed unreal, an image of England from before the First World War.

Beyond Relton, at the junction with the Fortford road, he seemed to leave civilization behind. Soon, the greens of the hillsides gave way to the darker hues of the heather-covered moors, which
continued for about two miles before dropping slowly into the next dale. It was like a slow roller coaster ride, and the only obstacles were the sheep that sometimes strayed on to the unfenced
road, itself only a thin band hardly distinguishable from the landscape around it. Banks saw a few hikers, who stepped on to the rough grass when they heard his car, smiling and waving as he drove
by.

The main road, busy with lorries and delivery vans, came as a shock. Following Mrs Steadman’s directions, Banks found the turn-off, a narrow track with a lonely red phone box on the
corner, about a mile from York’s boundary. He turned left and, after a quarter of a mile, came to the converted farmhouse. He pulled into the smooth dirt driveway and stopped outside the
new-looking garage.

Ramsden answered the door shortly after the first ring and asked who he was. When Banks showed some identification, he slipped off the chain and invited him in.

‘Can’t be too careful,’ he apologized. ‘Especially in such an isolated place as this.’

Ramsden was tall and pale, with the melancholic aspect of a Romantic poet. He had light-brown hair and, Banks soon noticed, a nervous habit of brushing back the stray forelock even when it
hadn’t slid down over his brow. The jeans and sweatshirt he wore seemed to hang on him as if they were a size too big.

‘Please excuse the mess,’ he said as he led Banks into a cluttered living room and installed him by the huge empty fireplace. ‘As you can see I’m decorating. Just
finished the first coat.’ A clear polythene sheet covered half the floor, and on it stood a stepladder, a gallon of pale blue paint, brushes, tray and rollers. ‘It’s not about
that woman, is it?’ he asked.

‘What woman?’

‘An old lady not far from here was murdered by thugs a few months ago. I had a policeman around then.’

‘No, sir, it’s not about the woman. That would have been York Region. I’m from Eastvale CID.’

Ramsden frowned. ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand then. Pardon me, I don’t mean to seem rude, but . . .’

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Banks apologized, accepting the whisky and soda Ramsden had poured for him without asking. ‘This isn’t easy for me. Would you care to sit
down?’

Ramsden looked alarmed. ‘What is it?’ he asked, fitting himself awkwardly into a small armchair.

‘You were expecting Mr Steadman to visit you last night?’

‘Harry? That’s right. We had some notes to go over before today’s field trip. Why? Has something happened?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid it has,’ Banks said as gently as he could, aware of the muscles in his stomach clenching tightly. ‘Mr Steadman is dead.’

Ramsden brushed back the phantom forelock. ‘I don’t follow. Dead? But he was coming here.’

‘I know that, Mr Ramsden. That’s why I wanted to tell you myself. Weren’t you surprised when he didn’t show up? Weren’t you worried?’

Ramsden shook his head. ‘No, no, of course I wasn’t. It wasn’t the first time he hadn’t come. But are you
sure
? About Harry, I mean. Can’t there have been
some mistake?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘What on earth happened?’

‘We’re not certain about that yet, sir, but a farmer found his body this morning in a field under Crow Scar. It looks as if he was murdered.’

‘Murdered? Good God! Harry? I can’t believe it.’

‘You know no one who’d have a reason?’

‘Absolutely not. Nobody. Not Harry.’ He rubbed his face and stared at Banks. ‘I’m sorry, Chief Inspector, I can’t really think straight. I’m having trouble
taking this all in. I’ve known Harry for a long time. A long time. This is such a shock.’

‘I realize it must be, sir,’ Banks persisted, ‘but if you could just spare the time to answer a couple of questions, I’ll be on my way.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Ramsden got up and made a drink for himself.

‘You said it had happened before, that he hadn’t turned up?’

‘Yes. It wasn’t a formal arrangement. More casual, really.’

‘Why didn’t he come?’

‘Once when Emma wasn’t too well he couldn’t make it. And one time he had a stomach upset. Things like that. We were very close, Chief Inspector. There was always a bed made up
for him, and he had a key in case I had to go out.’

‘Didn’t it cross your mind to phone and ask what was wrong?’

‘Not at all. I’ve already told you our arrangement was casual. I don’t have a phone. I spend enough time on the blasted thing at work. The nearest public call box is on the
main road.’ He shook his head. ‘I just can’t believe this is happening. It’s like a bad dream. Harry, dead?’

‘Did you go out last night?’

Ramsden looked at him blankly.

‘You said Mr Steadman had a key in case you were out,’ Banks pressed on. ‘Were you out last night?’

‘No, I wasn’t. Actually, when Harry hadn’t arrived by eleven o’clock, I was rather – I mean, don’t get me wrong – a little relieved. You see, I’m
working on a book of my own. A historical novel. And I was glad of the opportunity to get some writing done.’ He looked embarrassed about it.

‘Didn’t you like working with Mr Steadman?’

‘Oh, of course I did. But it was his baby, really. I was just the editor, the research assistant.’

‘Where were you planning to go today?’

‘We were going to visit an old lead mine in Swaledale. Quite a distance really, so we wanted to get an early start. Emma!’ he exclaimed suddenly. ‘Emma must be in a terrible
state.’

‘She’s upset, of course,’ Banks said. ‘Mrs Stanton, the neighbour, is looking after her.’

‘Should I go?’

‘That’s up to you, Mr Ramsden, but I’d say best leave her for today at least. She’s in good hands.’