Hanging Valley ib-4

by Peter Robinson

  Metcalfe scratched his shiny red scalp and answered slowly. ‘Let me see… There aren’t no bobbies in T’

  Head itself. Nearest’s Helmthorpe, I reckon. Sergeant Mullins and young Weaver. That’s nigh on ten miles off.’

  Neil bought himself another double brandy while Metcalfe screwed up his weather-beaten face and thought.

  ‘They’ll be no bloody use, Freddie,’ Sam called over. ‘Not for something like this. It’s CID business, this is.’

  ‘Aye,’ Metcalfe agreed, ‘I reckon tha’s right, Sam. In that case, young feller mi’ lad,’ he said to Neil, ‘it’ll be that chap in Eastvale tha’ll be after. T’ one who were out ’ere last time we ’ad a bit o’ bother.

  Gristhorpe, Chief Inspector Gristhorpe. Years back it was though. Probably dead now. Come on, lad, you can use this phone, seeing as it’s an emergency.’

  FOUR

  ‘Chief Inspector’ Gristhorpe, now Superintendent, was far from dead. When the call came through, he was on another line talking to Redshaw’s Quarries about a delivery for the drystone wall he was building.

  Despite all the care he had put into the endeavour, a section had collapsed during an April frost, and rebuilding seemed a suitable spring project.

  The telephone call found its way instead to the office of Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, who sat browsing through the Guardian arts pages, counting his blessings that crime had been so slack in Eastvale recently. After all, he had been transferred from London almost two years ago for a bit of peace and quiet.

  He liked detective work and couldn’t imagine doing anything else, but the sheer pressure of the job -

  unpleasant, most of it - and the growing sense of confrontation between police and citizens in the capital had got him down. For his own and his family’s sake, he had made the move. Eastvale hadn’t been quite as peaceful as he’d expected, but at the moment all he had to deal with were a couple of minor break-ins and the aftermath of a tremendous punch-up in the Oak. It had started when five soldiers from Catterick camp had taunted a group of unemployed miners from Durham. Three people ended up in hospital with injuries ranging from bruised and swollen testicles to a bitten-off earlobe, and the others were cooling off in the cells waiting to appear before the magistrate.

  ‘Someone asking for the super, sir,’ said Sergeant Rowe, when Banks picked up the phone. ‘His line’s busy.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Banks said. ‘I’ll take it.’

  A breathless, slightly slurred voice came on the line. ‘Hello, is that Inspector Gristhorpe?’

  Banks introduced himself and encouraged the caller, who gave his name as Neil Fellowes, to continue.

  ‘There’s a body,’ Fellowes said. ‘Up on the fells. I found it.’

  ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘A pub. The White Rose.’

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘What? Oh, I see. In Swainshead.’

  Banks wrote the details down on his scrap pad.

  ‘Are you sure it’s a human body?’ he asked. There had been mistakes made in the past, and the police had more than once been dragged out to examine piles of old sacks, dead sheep or rotten tree trunks.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’m sure.’

  ‘Male or female?’

  ‘I… I didn’t look. It was-’

  The next few words were muffled.

  ‘All right, Mr Fellowes,’ Banks said. ‘Just stay where you are and we’ll be along as soon as possible.’

  Gristhorpe had finished his call when Banks tapped on the door and entered his office. With its overflowing bookcases and dim lighting, it looked more like a study than part of a police station.

  ‘Ah, Alan,’ Gristhorpe said, rubbing his hands together. ‘They said they’ll deliver before the weekend, so we can make a start on the repairs on Sunday, if you’d care to come?’

  Working on the drystone wall, which fenced in nothing and was going nowhere, had become something of a ritual for the superintendent and his chief inspector. Banks had come to look forward to those Sunday afternoons on the north daleside above Lyndgarth, where Gristhorpe lived alone in his farmhouse. Mostly they worked in silence, and the job created a bond between them, a bond that Banks, still an incomer to the Yorkshire Dales, valued greatly.

  ‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘Very much. Look, I’ve just had a rather garbled phone call from a chap by the name of Neil Fellowes. Says he’s found a body on the fell near Swainshead.’

  Gristhorpe leaned back in his chair, linked his hands behind his head and frowned. ‘Any details?’

  ‘No. He’s still a bit shook up, by the sound of it. Shall I go?’

  ‘We’ll both go.’ Gristhorpe stood up decisively. ‘It’s not the first time a body has turned up in The Head.’

  ‘The Head?’

  ‘That’s what the locals call it, the whole area around Swainshead village. It’s the source of the River Swain, the head of the dale.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s about twenty-five miles, but I’m sure we’ll make it before closing time if I remember Freddie Metcalfe.’

  Banks was puzzled. It was unusual for Gristhorpe to involve himself so much in an actual field investigation. As head of Eastvale CID, the superintendent could use his discretion as regards his role in a case. Theoretically, he could, if he wanted to, take part in searches and house-to-house enquiries, but of course he never did. In part, his job was administrative. He tended to delegate casework and monitor developments from his office. This was not due to laziness, Banks realized, but because his talent was for thinking and planning, not for action or interrogation. He trusted his subordinates and allowed them far greater leeway with their cases than many superintendents did. But this time he wanted to come along.

  They made an incongruous couple as they walked to the car park at the back: the tall bulky Gristhorpe with his unruly thatch of grey hair, bristly moustache, pockmarked face and bushy eyebrows; and Banks, lean, slight, with angular features and short almost cropped black hair.

  ‘I can’t see why you keep on using your own car, Alan,’ Gristhorpe said as he eased into the passenger seat of the white Cortina and grappled with the seat belt. ‘You could save a lot of wear and tear if you took a department vehicle.’

  ‘Have they got radio-cassettes?’ Banks asked.

  ‘You know damn well they haven’t.’

  ‘Well, then.’

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘I like to listen to music while I’m driving. You know I do. It helps me think.’

  ‘I suppose you’re going to inflict some on me, too?’

  It had always surprised Banks that so well read and cultured a person as Gristhorpe had absolutely no ear for music at all. The superintendent was tone-deaf, and even the most ethereal Mozart aria was painful to his ears.

  ‘Not if you don’t want,’ Banks said, smiling to himself. He knew he wouldn’t be able to smoke on the way, either. Gristhorpe was a non-smoker of the most rabid kind - reformed after a twenty-year, twenty-a-day habit.

  Banks pulled into the cobbled market square, turned left on to North Market Street, and headed for the main Swainsdale road, which ran by the river along the valley bottom.

  Gristhorpe grunted and tapped the apparatus next to the dashboard. ‘At least you’ve had a police radio fitted.’

  ‘What was it you said before?’ Banks asked. ‘About this not being the first body in Swainshead.’

  ‘It was before your time.’

  ‘Most things were.’ Banks made the sharp westward turn, and soon they were out of the town, driving by the river meadows.

  Gristhorpe opened his window and gulped in the fresh air. ‘A man had his skull fractured,’ he said. ‘It was murder, no doubt about that. And we never solved it.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Some Boy Scouts found the body dumped in an old mineshaft on the fell side a couple of miles north of the village. The doctor said it had been there about a week.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Just o
ver five years ago.’

  ‘Was it a local?’

  ‘No. The victim was a private detective from London.’

  ‘A private investigator?’

  ‘That’s right. Name of Raymond Addison. A solo operator. One of the last of the breed, I should imagine.’

  ‘Did you find out what he was doing up here?’

  ‘No. We had his office searched, of course, but none of his files had any connection with Swainsdale. The Yard asked around among his friends and acquaintances - not that he had very many - but they turned up nothing. We thought he might have been on holiday, but why choose Yorkshire in February?’

  ‘How long had he been in the village?’

  ‘He’d arrived fairly late in the day and managed to get a room in a guest house run by a chap named Sam Greenock, who told us that Addison said nothing except for some remarks about the cold. He wrapped up well and went out for a walk after the evening meal, and that was the last anyone saw of him. We made enquiries, but nobody had seen or heard him. It was dark when he went out, of course, and even the old men who usually hang about chatting on the bridge come rain or shine had gone in by then.’

  ‘And as far as you could find out he had no connection with the area at all?’

  ‘None. And, believe me, we dug and dug. Either nobody knew or, more likely, someone wasn’t talking. He was an ex-serviceman, so we checked up on old army pals, that kind of thing. We ended up doing a house-to-house of the entire village. Nothing. It’s still unsolved.’

  Banks slowed down as he drove through Helmthorpe, one of the dale’s largest villages. Beyond there, the landscape was unfamiliar to him. Though still broader than most of the dales, thanks to a glacier of particularly titanic proportions, the valley seemed to narrow slightly as they got closer to The Head, and the commons sloped more steeply up the fell sides. There were none of the long limestone scars that characterized the eastern part of Swainsdale, but the hills rose to high rounded summits of moorland.

  ‘And that’s not all,’ Gristhorpe added after a few moments of silence. ‘A week before Addison’s body was found - the day after he was killed, as far as the doctors could make out - a local woman disappeared.

  Name of Anne Ralston. Never been seen since.’

  ‘And you think there must have been a connection?’

  ‘Not necessarily. At the time she went, of course, the body hadn’t been discovered. The whole thing could have been a coincidence. And the doctor admitted he could have been wrong about the exact day of death, too. It’s hard to be accurate after a body’s been buried that long. But we’ve no idea what happened to her.

  And you’ve got to admit it’s damned odd to get a missing person and a murder in the same village within a week of each other. She could have been killed and buried, or maybe she simply ran off with a fellow somewhere. We’d hardly cause to block all the ports and airports. Besides, she could have been anywhere in the world by the time the body was found. At best we’d have liked her to answer a few questions, just to put our minds at rest. As it was, we did a bit more poking around the landscape but found no traces of another body.’

  ‘Do you think she might have murdered Addison and run off?’

  ‘It’s possible. But it didn’t look like a woman’s job to me. Too much muscle work involved, and Anne Ralston wasn’t one of those female bodybuilders. We questioned her boyfriend pretty closely. He’s Stephen Collier, managing director of the company she worked for. Comes from a very prominent local family.’

  ‘Yes,’ Banks said. ‘I’ve heard of the Colliers. Did he cause any problems?’

  ‘No. He was cooperative. Said they hadn’t been getting on all that well lately, but he’d no idea where she’d gone, or why. In the end we’d no reason to think anything had happened to her so we had to assume she’d just left. People do sometimes. And Anne Ralston seemed to be a particularly flighty lass, by all accounts.’

  ‘Still…’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ Gristhorpe sighed. ‘It’s not at all satisfactory, is it? We reached nothing but dead ends whichever direction we turned.’

  Banks drove on in silence. Obviously failure was hard for Gristhorpe to swallow, as it was for most detectives. But this murder, if that’s what it really turned out to be, was a different case, five years old. He wasn’t going to let the past clutter up his thinking if he could help it. Still, it would be well to keep Raymond Addison and Anne Ralston in mind.

  ‘This is it,’ Gristhorpe said a few minutes later, pointing to the row of houses ahead. ‘This is Lower Head, as the locals call it.’

  ‘It hardly seems a big enough place to be split into two parts,’ Banks observed.

  ‘It’s not a matter of size, Alan. Lower Head is the newest part of the village, the part that’s grown since the road’s become more widely used. People just stop off here to admire the view over a quick cup of tea or a pint and a pub lunch. Upper Head’s older and quieter. A bit more genteel. It’s a little north-south dale in itself, wedged between two fells. There’s a road goes north up there too, but when it gets past the village and the school it gets pretty bad. You can get to the Lake District if you’re willing to ride it out, but most people go from the Lancashire side. Turn right here.’

  Banks turned. The base of a triangular village green ran beside the main road, allowing easy access to Swainshead from both directions. The first buildings he passed were a small stone church and a village hall.

  Following the minor road north beside the narrow River Swain, Banks could see what Gristhorpe meant.

  There were two rows of cottages facing each other, set back quite a bit from the river and its grassy banks.

  Most of them were either semis or terraced, and some had been converted into shops. They were plain sturdy houses built mostly of limestone, discoloured here and there with moss and lichen. Many had individualizing touches, such as mullions or white borders painted around doors and windows. Behind the houses on both sides, the commons sloped up, criss-crossed here and there by drystone walls, and gave way to steep moorland fells.

  Banks parked the car outside the whitewashed pub and Gristhorpe pointed to a large house farther up the road.

  ‘That’s the Collier place,’ he said. ‘The old man was one of the richest farmers and landowners around these parts. He also had the sense to invest his money in a food-processing plant just west of here. He’s dead now, but young Stephen runs the factory and he shares the house with his brother. They’ve split it into two halves. Ugly pile of stone, isn’t it?’

  Banks didn’t say so, but he rather admired the Victorian extravagance of the place, so at odds with the utilitarian austerity of most Dales architecture. Certainly it was ugly: oriels and turrets cluttered the upper half, making the whole building look top-heavy, and there was a stone porch at each front entrance. They probably had a gazebo and a folly in the back garden too, he thought.

  ‘And that’s where Raymond Addison stayed,’ Gristhorpe said, pointing across the beck. The house, made of two knocked-together semis, was separated from the smaller terraced houses on either side by only a few feet. A sign, GREENOCK GUEST HOUSE, hung in the colourful well-tended garden.

  ‘’Ey up, lads,’ Freddie Metcalfe said as they entered, ‘t’ Sweeney’s ’ere.’

  ‘Hello again, Freddie,’ Gristhorpe said, leading Banks over to the bar. ‘Still serving drinks after hours?’

  ‘Only to the select few, Mr Gristhorpe,’ Metcalfe replied proudly. ‘What’ll you gents be ’aving?’ He looked at Banks suspiciously. ‘Is ’e over eighteen?’

  ‘Just,’ Gristhorpe answered.

  Freddie burst into a rasping smoker’s laugh.

  ‘What’s this about a body?’ Gristhorpe asked.

  Metcalfe pursed his fleshy lips and nodded towards the only occupied table. ‘Bloke there says he found one on t’ fell. ’E’s not going anywhere, so I might as well pull you gents a pint before you get down to business.’

  The superintendent asked for a pin
t of bitter and Banks, having noticed that the White Rose was a Marston’s house, asked for a pint of Pedigree.

  ‘’E’s got good taste, I’ll say that for ’im,’ Metcalfe said. ‘Is ’e ’ouse-trained an’ all?’

  Banks observed a prudent silence throughout the exchange and took stock of his surroundings. The walls of the lounge bar were panelled in dark wood up to waist height and above that papered an inoffensive dun colour. Most of the tables were the old round kind with cast-iron knee-capper legs, but a few modern square ones stood in the corner near the dartboard and the silent jukebox.

  Banks lit a Silk Cut and sipped his pint. He’d refrained from smoking in the car in deference to Gristhorpe’s feelings, but now that he was in a public place he was going to take advantage of it and puff away to his heart’s and lungs’ content.