The Hanging Valley (17 page)

“That’s not for you to say,” Sam argued. He threw up his hands. “You stupid bloody bitch, have you any idea what trouble you might have caused?”

Though she was scared, Katie still felt defiant. “What do you mean, trouble?” she asked, her lower lip trembling. “Trouble for who?”

“For everyone, that’s for who.”

“For your precious Colliers, I’ll bet.” As she said it, her image was of Nicholas, not Stephen.

And that was when Sam hit her the first time, a short sharp blow to the stomach. She doubled up in pain, and when she was able to stand again he thumped her left breast. That hurt even
more. She collapsed on the sofa and Sam stood over her. His face was red and he was breathing funny, in short gasps that seemed to catch in his throat. “If we make something of ourselves in this place,” he said, “it won’t be any thanks to you.”

He didn’t hit her any more. He knew when enough was enough. But later that night, in bed, the same cruel hands grasped the same wounded breast. He pulled her roughly to him, and there was nothing she could do about it. Katie shuddered, trying to shake off the memory.

“Will that be all?” the waitress asked, standing over her again.

 “Oh, yes. Yes, thank you,” Katie said, paying the bill. Awkwardly, aware of the ache in her breast and the Black Forest gâteau sitting uneasily in her sore stomach, she made her way out into the street. She had one more hour of freedom to wander in the rain before meeting Beryl near the bus station at two-thirty. Then she would have to go home and face the music.

V

After a pub lunch in the Queen’s Arms and a chat with Hatchley and Richmond about the case, Banks was no further ahead. Back in his office, he sat down, sent for some coffee, and put his feet up on the desk to think things out. When PC Craig arrived with the coffee—looking very put out, no doubt because Susan Gay had coerced him into carrying it up—Banks lit a Silk Cut and went over what he’d got.

Richmond had discovered that Les Haines, Bernie Allen’s brother-in-law, had done a brief stretch in Armley Jail for receiving stolen goods (i.e. two boxes of Sony E-120 video cassette tapes). It was his second offence, hot on the heels of an assault charge against a man in the alley outside a Leeds bier-keller. But Haines had been at work on the day of Allen’s murder, so he would have had no opportunity to get to Swainshead and back, even if there had been some obscure family motive. Besides, as Banks well knew, just because a man has a record as a petty thief, it doesn’t make him a murderer. Esther had been home with the kids, as usual, and
Banks could hardly visualize her trailing them up to the hanging valley and knocking off her brother.

Most interesting of all were the Colliers’ alibis, or lack of them. Nicholas never taught classes on Friday mornings, but he usually went in anyway and used the time for paperwork. On the Friday in question, however, the headmaster’s administrative assistant remembered seeing him arrive late—at around eleven o’clock. This was nothing unusual—it had happened often enough before—but it did leave him without a valid alibi.

Stephen Collier, it turned out, had no meetings scheduled for that day, again quite normal in itself, and nobody could remember whether he had been in or not. Work days, the world-weary secretary had explained to Sergeant Hatchley, are so much the same that most office workers have difficulty remembering one from another. Mr Collier was often off the premises anyway, and the people who actually ran the business never saw much of him.

PC Weaver from Helmthorpe, who had been questioning people in Swainshead that morning, reported that nobody remembered seeing Bernard Allen out there on the morning in question, let alone noticed anyone follow him.

At about two o’clock, Richmond popped his head around the door. He’d been using the computer to check with various business agencies and immigration offices, but so far he’d found no-one in Swainshead with Canadian connections. Except for Stephen Collier, who dealt with a Montreal-based food-products corporation.

“What’s a food product, do you think?” Banks asked Richmond.

“I wouldn’t know, sir. Something that’s not real food, I’d imagine.”

“And I thought he was trading Wensleydale cheese for maple syrup. That reminds me: what time is it in Toronto?”

Richmond looked at his watch. “It’ll be about nine in the morning.”

“I’d better phone the Mounties.”

“Er . . . they won’t be Mounties, sir. Not in Toronto.” Richmond stroked his moustache.

“Oh? What will they be?”

“The Toronto Metropolitan Police, sir. The RCMP’s federal. These days they mostly do undercover work and police the more remote areas.”

Banks grinned. “Well, you learn something new every day.”

 When Richmond had left, he lit a cigarette and picked up the phone. There was a lot of messing about with the switchboard, but after a few minutes of clicks and whirrs, the phone started ringing at the other end. It wasn’t the harsh and insistent sound of an English telephone, though; the rings were longer, as were the pauses between them.

When someone finally answered, it took Banks a while to explain who he was and what he wanted. After a few more clicks, he finally got through to the right man.

“Chief Inspector Banks? Staff Sergeant Gregson here. And how’s the old country?”

“Fine,” said Banks, a little perplexed by the question.

“My father was a Brit,” Gregson went on. “Came from Derbyshire.” He pronounced the “e” as in “clergy,” and “shire” came out as “sheer.”

“Do you know it?” he asked.

“Oh, yes. It’s just down the road.”

“Small country.”

“Right.”

Gregson cleared his throat and Banks could hear papers rustling three thousand miles away. “I can’t say we’ve got any good news for you,” the Canadian said. “We’ve had a look around Allen’s apartment, but we didn’t find anything unusual.”

“Was there an address book?”

“Address book . . . let me see . . .” More paper rustled. “No. No address book. No diary.”

“Damn. He must have taken them with him.”

“Makes sense, doesn’t it? If he was going on vacation he’d be sure to want to send pretty postcards to all his buddies back home.”

“What about his friends? Have you seen any of them?”

“We talked to his colleagues at work. There’s not many of them around. College finishes in early May, so teachers are pretty thin on the ground at this time of year. Nice work if you can get it, eh? Now they’re all off swimming in the lake and
sunning themselves on the deck up at their fancy summer cottages in Muskoka.”

“Is that like a villa in Majorca?”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. What did they have to say?”

“Said he was a bit aloof, stand-offish. Course, a lot of Brits over here are like that. They think Canada’s still part of the Empire, so they come on like someone out of ‘The Jewel in the Crown.’”

“Did you find his ex-wife?”

“Yup. She’s been in Calgary for the past six months, so you can count her out.”

“Apparently, there was a lover,” Banks told him. “Someone at the college. That’s why they got divorced.”

“Have you got a name?”

“Sorry.”

Gregson sighed. “I’d like to help you, Chief Inspector, I really would,” he said. “But we can’t spare the men to go tracking down some guy who ran off with Allen’s wife. We just don’t have the manpower.”

“No, of course not.”

“Besides, people don’t usually steal a man’s wife and then kill him.”

“They might if he was causing them problems. But you’re right, it’s not likely. Did he have any girlfriends?”

“As I said, his colleagues thought he was a bit stuck-up. One of them even thought he was gay, but I wouldn’t pay much mind to that. Sometimes, with their accents and mannerisms and all, Brits do seem a bit that way to us North Americans.”

“Yes,” Banks said, gritting his teeth. “I think that just about covers it all. I can see now why they say you always get your man.” And he hung up. Nothing. Still nothing. He obviously couldn’t expect any help from across the Atlantic.

Still feeling a residue of irrational anger at Gregson’s sarcasm, he stalked over to the window and lit a cigarette. The drizzle had turned into steady rain now and the square below was bright with open umbrellas. As he gazed down on the scene, one woman caught his eye. She walked in a daze, as if she wasn’t sure where she
was heading. She looked soaked to the skin, too; her hair was plastered to her head and the thin white blouse she wore was moulded to her form so that the outline of her brassiere stood out in clear relief. It took Banks a few moments to recognize Katie Greenock.

He grabbed his raincoat and made a move to go down and make sure she was all right, but when he looked out for her one last time, she was nowhere in sight. She had disappeared like a phantom. There was no sense in searching the town for her just because she was walking in the rain without an umbrella. Still, he was strangely disturbed by the vision. It worried him. For the rest of the wet afternoon he felt haunted by that slight and sensuous figure staring into an inner distance, walking in the rain.

PART TWO:

THE

THOUSAND-DOLLAR

CURE

EIGHT

I

The powerful jet engines roared and Banks felt himself pushed back in his seat. It was his first time in a Jumbo. The plane lumbered along the runway at Manchester International Airport, fixtures and fittings shaking and rattling, as if defying anyone to believe that a machine of such bulk could fly. But it did. Soon, Lancashire was a checkerboard of wet fields, then it was lost completely under the clouds. The NO SMOKING sign went off and Banks lit up.

In a few moments, the blue-uniformed flight-attendant with her shocking pink lipstick and impossibly white teeth—the same one who had managed to put such drama into the routine demonstration of the use of the life-jacket—came around with more boiled sweets and personal headphones in plastic bags. Banks took a set, as he knew there would be a film later on, but he gave the designer music a miss and took out his own Walkman. Soon the plane was over Ireland, an occasional flash of green between the clouds, the Beatles were singing “Dear Prudence,” and all was well with the world.

Banks ordered Scotch on the rocks when the trolley came around and relaxed with his miniature Johnny Walker Red. Closing his eyes, he settled back to reconsider the events that had led to his present unnatural position—about 35,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean, hurtling at a speed of roughly 600 miles an hour towards a strange continent.

It was Saturday, July 3, almost a month since the Bernard Allen case had stalled. Banks had visited Swainshead once or twice and found things relatively quiet. Stephen and Nicholas Collier had
remained polite in their arrogant way; Sam Greenock had been surly, as usual; Katie Greenock still seemed troubled and distracted; and John Fletcher had expressed passing interest in the progress of the case.

The problem was that there really wasn’t a case any more. Enquiries had turned up neither new witnesses nor motives. A number of people had the opportunity to kill Bernard Allen, but no-one had a clear reason. As long as the suspects stuck to their stories, it didn’t matter whether they were lying or telling the truth; there was no solid evidence to break the case. That was why it was vital for Banks to find Anne Ralston—she was the link between the Addison and Allen murders—and he had convinced Gristhorpe he could do it in a week.

“How?” the superintendent had asked. “Toronto’s a strange city to you. A big one, too.”

“Where would you head if you were an Englishman living abroad?”

Gristhorpe rubbed his chin. “I’d seek out the expatriate community, I suppose. The ‘club.’ I’d want to be among my own.”

“Right. So, given we’re not dealing with the gentry, I’d expect Allen to hang around the English-style pubs. Every big city has them. His brother-in-law, Les Haines, told me Allen liked his ale and had found a pub where he could get imported British beer. There can’t be all that many of them in Toronto.”

“But it’s Anne Ralston we’re looking for, remember that.”

“I know. I’m just assuming that if Allen was a bit stand-offish with his mates at work, he had a crowd of fellow
émigrés
he hung around with in his spare time. The odds are they’d meet up in a pub and stand at the bar quaffing pints. They might know the Ralston woman.”

“So you want to go on a pub-crawl of Toronto?”

“Looks like it, doesn’t it?”

“Better not tell Jim Hatchley or you’ll get nowt out of him for a month or more. Why can’t you get the Toronto police to find her?”

“For a start, I got the impression on the phone that they didn’t have time or didn’t give a damn, or both. And anyway, they wouldn’t know how to question her, what to ask. Someone would
have to brief them on two murder investigations, the sociology of the Yorkshire village, the history of—”

Gristhorpe held up his hand. “All right, all right, I get the point.”

“And I think they’d scare her off, too,” Banks added. “She was nervous enough about what she knew to warn Allen not to spread it around, so if she thinks the police are after her, the odds are she’ll scarper.”

“Have you considered that she might not be using her own name?”

“Yes. But I’ve got her photograph from our missing person files—it’s a bit old, but it’s all we’ve got—and I think I know where to look. Being English myself gives me an advantage in that kind of environment, too. Do you think it makes sense?”

“It’s all a bit iffy, but yes, yes I do, on the whole. If you can track down Allen’s drinking companions, there’s a good chance he’ll have told them about Anne Ralston. She might even drop in at his local herself from time to time, if she’s the kind that likes to be among her own.”

“So you’ll see what you can do about getting me over there?” Gristhorpe nodded. “Aye. I’ll see what I can do.”

About a week later, on a Thursday morning, the superintendent had asked Banks to drop by his office. Banks stubbed out his cigarette and carried his full coffee mug carefully along the corridor. As usual, Gristhorpe’s door was slightly ajar. Banks nudged it open with his shoulder and entered the cosy, book-lined room. He took his usual seat and put his coffee on the desk in front of him.