Unti Peter Robinson #22

by Peter Robinson

  “I’m not sure,” said Banks. “There are too many coincidences, and we detectives don’t like coincidences.”

  “Then you’ll just have to learn to live with them like the rest of us.” Beddoes stood up. “And now, if you don’t mind, it’s late. I think it’s time you left.”

  “Of course.” Banks got out of his armchair. “Do you know Caleb Ross?”

  “Know him, no. But I know who he is. Was. You already know that. All the local farmers were acquainted with him. Look, you said leaving aside the thefts, threats and murder. A while ago, you said that. What do you mean? What has any of it got to do with me?”

  “Nothing, I shouldn’t think,” said Banks. “Has it?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Just a few more names to conjure with before I go, Mr. Beddoes. Kieran Welles, Ronald Tanner and Carl Utley. Ring any bells?”

  “None at all.”

  “Thought not. But if you should suddenly remember that you did know one of them, no matter how long ago, or how well, do let me know. Thanks for your time, Mr. Beddoes, and thanks for the coffee, Mrs. Beddoes. Good evening.”

  And Banks left, smiling. That cat was well and truly among the pigeons now. As he turned out of sight of the farm, he pulled up next to a car parked in a lay-­by and rolled down his window. “Keep an eye on them, Doug,” he said, to DC Doug Wilson, who was sitting behind the wheel. “But don’t get too close.”

  “No problem, guv,” said Wilson, and wound up his window. Banks drove off.

  ALEX’S HEART leaped into her throat and waves of panic swept through her. She was in a brightly lit supermarket, for crying out loud. There were ­people around. Why did no one come to her aid? This couldn’t be happening. And where were the police? She tried to bite down on the hand over her mouth but she couldn’t open it wide enough to engage her teeth. Finally he let go slowly, grasped her shoulder so hard it hurt and turned her around to face him. The hoodie confused her at first, but the eyes gave him away. It was Michael. She was looking at Michael. Her immediate desire was to hold him to her and never let him go, but her survival instincts took over. A young ­couple reached the end of the aisle and passed by them on the way to the next, hardly giving them a glance. She rubbed her shoulder. “That hurt.”

  “I’m sorry for the drama, love,” Michael said in a quiet voice. “You never know how someone’s going to react to a shock.”

  “Michael, you have to go. Right now. It’s not safe.”

  “They can’t look everywhere for me. And this is probably the last place they’d expect to find me. I’ve been careful. I’ve been watching, just waiting for a moment like this.” They moved to the far back corner, by a rack of crisps. “I had to see you. I’ve missed you so much.”

  Alex ran her hands over his cheeks, tears in her eyes, and kissed him hard on the lips. “And I’ve missed you, too. More than I can say. I love you, Michael. But you really must hurry. You don’t understand.”

  Michael smiled that heart-­melting smile of his, but Alex noticed the hint of puzzlement and fear in his eyes. “I don’t understand what?”

  “It’s not you they’re watching.”

  The smile disappeared. “I don’t—­”

  It all seemed to happen at once. A loud voice shouted for everyone to leave the shop as two armed police officers in protective gear appeared around the end of the nearest aisle. “Armed police!” a stern voice shouted. “Don’t move. Stay where you are.”

  Alex cowered in the corner, knocking over the rack of the crisps. It acted as a signal for Michael to dash off down the aisle past the checkout. Alex couldn’t move; her muscles were locked with fear. She wanted to shout after him, but she couldn’t find her voice. The police officers didn’t seem overly concerned about Michael running off. They put away their guns. One of them approached Alex and took her arm firmly, saying in a gentle voice, “Come on, love. Come with us. You’ll be all right now.”

  She wanted to tell them she was already all right. That all she wanted to do was stay with Michael and go back to Ian, and the rest of the world could leave them alone. Slowly, she let herself be led, surprised that she could even walk. She heard a commotion at the front of the store, more racks being knocked over, crashes, loud voices.

  When she got to the checkout area she could see flashing lights outside, through the windows. Then she saw Michael, his hands cuffed behind his back, being shoved into the back of a police car, one of the officers pushing his head down, just like they do on television. The supermarket doors slid open. She called his name, and he looked over his shoulder at her, such a desolate, lost expression, she thought. She just wanted to take him in her arms again, but the next moment he was gone, and the stern young policeman who had her in his grasp was talking about taking her home. She realized as she walked limply by his side, still in his friendly but firm grip, that she hadn’t even had a chance to buy anything. She had no milk, no bread, no wine, and she hadn’t the heart to go back. Next to Michael and Ian, she realized, she wanted to see Annie Cabbot. Wanted to rage at her, blame her, and to ask her for comfort and help, ask her to explain what was happening.

  14

  WINSOME AND GERRY MASTERSON WERE THE ONLY ones left in the squad room that Saturday morning. Annie Cabbot was with Alex Preston and her son, and Doug Wilson was back watching the Beddoes farm after being relieved by a PC overnight. Gerry had her hair tied back in a ponytail, her neck craned toward the computer screen and her fingers on the keyboard. Whatever it was she was up to, Winsome thought, it was certainly intriguing her.

  Winsome looked again at Caleb Ross’s delivery schedule spread out on her desk, along with her notes from her visits to the farms where he had collected on the morning of his death. She couldn’t come up with any point at which a substitution could have easily been made or an extra load added. All the farmers had stood in the yard with Caleb and chatted and had helped him load the bags in the van. The bags themselves had been locked overnight, or longer, in secure buildings. There was nothing extra, nothing last moment, nothing suspicious, nothing that appeared to have been tampered with.

  So where had Ross picked up his load of human remains?

  Winsome knew she was missing something, and it irked her. Ross had started his round at nine o’clock and had visited ten farms before his crash at five past two in the afternoon. The distances between the farms accounted for most of the time, and the job itself, along with the few minutes of gossip at each stop, seemed to account for the rest. Except that, however often she added it up, Winsome was left with about one hour unaccounted for. She had assumed that Caleb must have stopped for lunch at one of the many watering holes along the way, whether it was discouraged or not, but inquiries at all the pubs he could possibly have called at for his giant Yorkshire puddings yielded not one positive response. They knew him, but they hadn’t seen him that day.

  Then she remembered as her finger touched the last name on the list. Mr. Wythers, of Garsley Farm, the last place Ross had called at before his accident, had let drop in passing that Ross had refused a cup of tea and a biscuit because he said he had just eaten his lunch. Winsome had checked all the places on his route, and he hadn’t eaten in a pub, so he must have taken a sandwich and flask with him, as Vaughn said he often did. Assuming that Ross had already eaten before he arrived at Wythers’s farm, which he left just after one o’clock, what was he doing between one and two? Garsley was the end of the road, as Winsome had seen for herself. “Beyond this point be monsters,” she thought, remembering the old maps on the classroom walls at school. Well, perhaps there were. Or perhaps there was at least one monster who shot a young man with a bolt pistol and skinned and dressed him like a slaughtered lamb.

  She headed for the station library, where they kept the Ordnance Survey maps of the county.

  Alex: You’ve got to talk to them, Michael, tell them everything. A clean slate, it’s the only way
.

  Michael: I can’t. Don’t you see? Whatever I say, they’re bound to pin something on me. I’ve got a record. I’d be a perfect fit-­up. Case closed.

  A: Not if you tell the truth. I’ve spent a bit of time with one of them. Annie Cabbot. She was looking after me when you were away and . . . you know . . . that man came. She’s not bad. She helped me. Talk to her. You’ll get a fair deal.

  M (snorts): That’s what I love about you, Al. All the knocks life’s given you, and you’re still the eternal optimist. Pollyanna.

  A: Don’t, Michael. You know I don’t like it when you call me that. And I’m not. I’m being realistic. If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear from them. It’s the others they’re after, the ones that killed Morgan, that stole Beddoes’s tractor. Not you. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. You saw something you shouldn’t have.

  M: You can say that again. And heard. But try and get them to believe that. Especially after I ran. (He reaches out and takes her hand. No physical object passes between them.) I’m sorry. It’s my fault that man came and hurt you. I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you.

  A (smiles): Nothing’s going to happen, silly. Not if you tell them the truth. They already got the man who came to the flat. You can help them catch the others.

  M: But they had to let him go, didn’t they? I mean, he’s still out there, on the streets. Maybe there is a court order against him coming anywhere near the flat again, I don’t know, and maybe he is on bail until his trial, but that doesn’t stop ­people like him, ­people like them. He’ll be back.

  A: And a fat lot of use you’ll be if you’re still in here. Besides, the police will get them.

  M: And let them go, and lock up ­people like me. (Shakes his head.) No, love. My best chance is to keep shtum. Say nothing. Get a good brief. If I do that, they’ve got nothing on me.

  A: Don’t be childish. You’re acting like a fool. You can’t keep silent forever.

  M: It’s my right.

  A: But they hold it against you now. I’ve heard that. And you know we can’t afford a good lawyer. If you don’t explain yourself and then you try to get out of it later, it looks bad in court.

  M: It doesn’t matter.

  A: Don’t be so negative. (She squeezes his hand.) Look, let’s put all this behind us. A brand-­new start. Me, you and Ian. We can go on a holiday or something first. I’m sure Mr. Evans at the agency will give us a deal on something. Then we can move if you want, a new life. Somewhere else. By the sea.

  M: But we’re just getting started on this life.

  A (snatches back her hand): Oh, for God’s sake, Michael. Anyone would think you didn’t want us to be together again, that you didn’t want things to be right again. Sometimes I even wonder whether you weren’t up to something, whether you don’t have something to hide. Is that why you don’t want to talk to them? Afraid they’ll find out your secret?

  M: I don’t have any secrets. I just think they’ll do me for it anyway. That’s what they’re like. ­People like me, we’re scum to them.

  A: You’re doing it again, behaving like a child.

  M: And you’re being all Pollyanna.

  A: Pollyanna didn’t get such a great deal, you know.

  M: Whatever.

  A: Stop sulking. Do you want to get out of here and be with us again? Wherever we are, it doesn’t matter to me, as long as the three of us are together.

  M: I . . .

  A: Do you?

  M: Of course I do. You know I do.

  A: Then act like it. Talk to them.

  M (hangs head. Seconds pass. Finally he looks up again, into Alex’s eyes): All right. (resignedly) All right, I’ll talk to them. I’ll tell them what I know.

  A (takes his hand): I’ll stand by you, Michael. Whatever happens, we’ll stand by you, Ian and me.

  M (nods): I said I’ll talk to them.

  END

  Banks turned off the computer display. After letting Michael Lane stew in a holding cell overnight, he and Annie had granted his request that he be allowed to talk to Alex and had listened to their conversation. Now they wanted to review the video recording for body language before starting the interview.

  “Well,” said Banks, leaning back in his office chair. “If they’ve got some kind of secret code, I’d have to say it’s a damn good one. I didn’t see anything in there that struck me as suspicious.”

  “Me, neither,” said Annie. “Though I should imagine they knew we’d be listening, if not watching, too. It’s hardly a hidden camera.”

  “True. But it didn’t look like acting to me. He’s obviously terrified. For himself, of course, but for her and the kid, too.”

  “Alex and Ian.”

  “What I meant. Sometimes he seems more afraid of us than of them.”

  “Seems reasonable for him to be,” said Annie. “We can be scary. Everyone knows we’re evil bastards who go around fitting up innocent ­people to fudge the crime statistics.”

  Banks smiled. “Of course. I’d forgotten.”

  “Alex already knows what to be afraid of. I’ll bet her finger still hurts.”

  “He knows what they’re capable of, too, if he witnessed Morgan Spencer’s murder.”

  “Terry Gilchrist saw a car matching the description of Michael Lane’s Peugeot driving away from the scene.”

  “Which also means he could have done it.”

  “Oh, come on, Alan. You’re playing devil’s advocate for the hell of it. Where’s that famous gut instinct of yours? That kid’s no killer.”

  Banks scratched his chin. He needed a shave. He had gone a ­couple of days without. His gut instinct did tell him that Michael Lane hadn’t killed anyone, Lane could help them find out who had and his girlfriend had persuaded him to talk. Now they had to act.

  “OK,” said Banks. “We send Gerry Masterson over to babysit Alex Preston, and we go in with an open mind. We don’t waste time throwing accusations at him. All right?”

  “Fine with me,” said Annie.

  “And Alex and Ian are our trumps. You saw the two of them there; he’d do anything for her. Even lie.”

  “Look,” said Annie, “maybe he helped Morgan occasionally. I don’t know. But are we going after him for that, or are we after the ­people who killed Spencer?”

  “Mainly the latter, of course. But we’ll take what we can get.”

  Annie stood up. “Fine. I’m ready.”

  Banks followed suit. “Let’s go, then.”

  THE LIBRARY at Eastvale Police HQ wasn’t much more than a standard-­size office with a few bookshelves mostly full of law reference books and a desk and chair. There was no librarian, and everyone was responsible for reshelving whatever reference they had used. As a result, the shelves were chaotically arranged, and it was hard to find anything. Winsome sometimes even wondered how many of her colleagues knew the alphabet. The library did, however, boast a magnificent selection of local Ordnance Survey maps in just about every scale you could imagine.

  Winsome knew she could access maps on her computer, that digital was all the rage these days, but she still preferred the real thing: the well-­worn folds, the thick and serious texture of the older cloth maps, the colors, contours, dots and dashes. She had a strong memory of the detailed map of the Springfield area on the wall of her father’s office back in Jamaica, showing just about every homestead. Winsome could still remember gazing at that map as a child and naming in her mind the ­people who lived in every marked dwelling. She had learned to read other maps only later, in the potholing club at university, and it was a skill that occasionally came in useful in the course of her work. Homicide and Major Crimes covered the whole of North Yorkshire, as opposed to the smaller patch of the old Western Area, and that meant a lot of moorland and open countryside as well as a few larger towns,
such as Harrogate and Scarborough. She certainly couldn’t name everyone who lived at every farm, but the two-­and-­a-­half-­inch-­to-­a-­mile map should show her some possibilities as to where Caleb Ross may have been during the missing hour before his death.

  With the map unfolded and covering the table, she stood and leaned over it, pinpointing Garsley Farm with the magnifying glass that hung on a chain from the table. That was Ross’s last stop, only about a fifteen-­minute drive from Belderfell Pass. She had driven that road just yesterday, and there was nothing on it to detain anyone: no houses, no farm, no shops, no pub. She also ruled out everywhere east of the farm. If Ross had wanted to make a longer stop anywhere there, he would most likely have done so before visiting Mr. Wythers to avoid retracing his tracks. She concentrated on the western and northern moorlands.

  There wasn’t much to see. She could follow the heights of the various mountains from the way the contour lines grew closer, traced the dotted lines of footpaths that seemed to disappear in the middle of nowhere, spotted ancient stone circles, deep gullies, old riverbeds, abandoned lead mines and slate quarries. She saw Woadly Edge, which she knew to be a rock face rising steeply at a right angle from the landscape and framing an entrance to the cave system she had explored on numerous occasions. She knew the place well and didn’t remember any buildings in the vicinity, which was why the tiny words “High Point Farm” caught her attention. When she looked more closely at the map, the contours showed it was hidden from Woadly Edge and the access road the club had used by a small hill, perhaps a drumlin left by the retreating glacier thousands of years ago. In fact, the farm was set in a hollow all of its own, a sort of dimple in the landscape, or so it seemed on the map. It was odd to call a farm in a hollow High Point, but then Winsome realized the hollow itself was on fairly high ground.

  Carefully, Winsome scoured the map within the range she estimated Ross could have driven in the time he had, perhaps picked up an unauthorized load, and stopped for a brief chat, then made it to the point on Belderfell Pass where he met his death. High Point Farm was the only place that fit the bill. It hadn’t been on Ross’s official pickup list, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t had business of his own there. Ross smoked marijuana, Winsome remembered, and there were plenty of hydroponic growers tucked away in the rolling dales and remote moorland. Maybe High Point Farm was such a place.