In a Dry Season

by Peter Robinson

  “Got a minute?”

  “Aye. Sit down.”

  Annie sat. Harmond’s was a plain office, with only his merit awards on the wall for decoration, and framed photos of his wife and children on the desk. In his early fifties, he seemed perfectly content to be a rural inspector for the rest of his working life. His head was too large for his gangly frame, and Annie always worried it would fall off if he tilted it too far to one side. It never had; not yet. He had a pleasant, round, open face. The features were a bit coarse, and a few black hairs grew out the end of his misshapen, potato nose, but it was the kind of face you could trust. If eyes really were the windows of the soul, then Inspector Harmond had a decent soul.

  “It’s this skeleton thing,” she said, crossing her legs and cradling her coffee mug on her lap.

  “What about it?”

  “Well, that’s just it, sir. We don’t know anything about it yet. DCI Banks wanted to know how many doctors and dentists lived in Hobb’s End, and if anyone who used to live there lives here now.”

  Harmond scratched his temple. “I can answer your last question easily enough,” he said. “You remember Mrs Kettering, the one whose budgie escaped that time she was having a new three-piece suite delivered?”

  “How could I forget?” It was one of Annie’s first cases in Harkside.

  Inspector Harmond smiled. “She lived in Hobb’s End. I don’t know exactly when or for how long, but I know she lived there. She must be pushing ninety if she’s a day.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Not that I can think of. Not offhand, at any rate.

  Leave it with me, I’ll ask around. Remember where she lives?”

  “Up on The Edge, isn’t it? The corner house with the big garden?”

  The Edge was what the locals called the fifty-foot embankment that ran along the south side of Harksmere Reservoir, the road that used to lead over the pack-horse bridge to Hobb’s End. Its real name was Harksmere View, and it didn’t lead anywhere now. Only one row of cottages overlooked the water, separated from the rest of Harkside village by about half a mile of open countryside.

  “What about doctors and dentists?” Annie asked. “That’s a bit trickier,” Harmond said. “There must have been a few over the years, but Lord knows what’s happened to them. Seeing as the village cleared out after the war, they’re probably all dead now. Remember, lass, I’m not that old. I were still a lad myself when the place emptied out. As far as I remember, there wasn’t any village bobby, either. Too small. Hobb’s End was part of the Harkside beat.”

  “How many schools were there?”

  Inspector Harmond scratched his head. “Just infants and junior, I think. Grammar school and secondary modern were here in Harkside.”

  “Any idea where the old records would be?”

  “Local education authority, most likely. Unless they were destroyed somehow. A lot of records got destroyed back then, after the war and all. Is there anything else?”

  Annie sipped some coffee and stood up. “Not right now, sir.”

  “You’ll keep me informed?”

  “I will.”

  “And Annie?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  Harmond scratched the side of his nose. “This DCI

  Banks. I’ve never met him myself, but I’ve heard a bit about him. What’s he like?”

  Annie paused at the door and frowned as she thought. “Do you know, sir,” she said finally, “I haven’t got a clue.”

  “Bit of an enigma, then, eh?”

  “Yes,” Annie said, “a bit of an enigma. I suppose you could say that.”

  “Better watch yourself, then, lass,” she heard him say as she turned to leave.

  Before I tell you what happened next, let me tell you a little about myself and my village. My name, as you already know, is Gwen Shackleton, which is short for Gwynneth, not for Gwendolyn. I know this sounds Welsh, but my family has lived in Hobb’s End, Yorkshire, for at least two generations. My father, God bless his soul, died of cancer three years before the war began, and by 1940 my mother was an invalid, suffering from rheumatoid arthritis. Sometimes she was able to help out in the shop, but not often, so the brunt of the work fell to me.

  Matthew helped me as much as he could, but university kept him busy most of the week and the Home Guard took up his weekends. He was twenty-one, but despite the call-up, the Ministry was encouraging him to finish the third year of his engineering degree at the University of Leeds. They believed, I suppose, that his training would come in useful in the forces.

  Our little shop was a newsagent’s-cum-general store about halfway along the High Street, near the butcher’s and the greengrocer’s, and we lived above it. We didn’t sell perishable goods, just things like newspapers, sweets, cigarettes, stationery, jam and other odds and ends, tea and tinned goods—depending, of course, on what was available at the time. I was especially proud of the little lending library I had built up. Because paper was getting scarce and books were in short supply, I rented them out for tuppence a week. I kept a good selection of World’s Classic editions: Anthony Trollope, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens in particular. I also stocked a number of the more sensational novels, Agatha Christie and the Mills and Boon romances, for those who liked such things—unfortunately, the majority of my customers!

  Though most of the able-bodied men in the village had joined up and put on one uniform or another, the place had never seemed busier. The old flax mill was operating at full strength again and most of the married women worked there. Before the war, it had practically come to a standstill, but now the military wanted flax to make webbing for parachute harnesses and other things where a tough fibre was needed, like gun tarpaulins and fire hoses.

  There was also a big RAF base about a mile or so away through Rowan Woods, and the High Street was often busy with Jeeps and lorries honking their horns and trying to pass one another in the narrow space. The airmen sometimes came to the village pubs—the Shoulder of Mutton just down the High Street, and the Duke of Wellington over the river—except when they went to Harkside, where there was much more to do. We didn’t even have one cinema in Hobb’s End, for example, but there were three in Harkside.

  These things aside, though, it remains difficult to say exactly how much the war affected us in Hobb’s End. I think that at first it impinged upon us very little. For those of us left behind, daily life went on much as normal. The first wave of evacuees came in September 1939, but when nothing happened for ages, they all started drifting home again, and we didn’t get any more until the bombing started the following August.

  Even with rationing, our diets didn’t change as much as those of the city folks, for we had always been used to eating plenty of vegetables, and in the country there were always eggs, butter and milk. Our neighbour, Mr Halliwell, the butcher, was probably the most popular man in town, and we were occasionally able to swap any tea and sugar we might put aside for an extra piece of mutton or pork.

  Apart from the feeling of waiting, the sense that normal life was suspended until all this was over, perhaps the hardest thing to get used to was the blackout. But even in that we were more fortunate than many, as Hobb’s End had no streetlights to begin with, and the countryside is dark enough at the best of times. Still, that pinprick of light on the distant hillside was often the only thing to guide you home. In the blackout, we had to tape up our windows to prevent damage from broken glass, and we also had to hang up the heavy blackout curtains. Every night, Mother used to send me outside to check that not a sliver of light showed, because our local ARP

  man was a real stickler. I remember the whole village laughing the day we heard Mrs Darnley got a visit from him for blacking out only the front of her house, but not the back windows. “Don’t be so daft,” she told him. “If the Germans come to bomb Hobb’s End, young lad, they’ll come from the east, won’t they, not by Grassington way. Stands to reason.”

  On moonlit nights, especially if there was a full moon, th
e effect could be spectacular: the hills were dusted with silver powder, the stars glittered like cut diamonds on black velvet, and the whole landscape looked like one of those black-and-white engravings or woodcuts you see in old books. But on cloudy or moonless nights, which seemed far more frequent, people bumped into trees and even cycled into the river with alarming regularity. You could use a torch if you wrapped the light with several layers of tissue paper, but batteries were scarce. All car and bicycle lights had to be hooded and masked with a variety of gadgets that let the light through only in muddied, useless slits. Needless to say, there were a lot of car accidents, too, until petrol became too scarce and nobody drove any more except on business.

  Several events made the war more personal for us, such as the Spinner’s Inn fire, or the Jowett boy getting killed at Dunkirk, but the day before Gloria Stringer arrived, something hit even closer to home: Matthew got his call-up papers. He was due to report for his medical in Leeds in two weeks.

  Jimmy Riddle had once accused Banks of skiving off to Leeds to go shagging his mistress and shopping at the Classical Record Shop. He had been wrong that time, but if he had seen Banks nipping out of the Merrion Centre late that afternoon, a new recording of Herbert Howells’s Hymnus Paradisi clutched in his sweaty palm, Riddle would have felt vindicated at least on one count. Not that Banks gave a toss. He didn’t even bother to look furtive as he walked out past Morrisons onto Woodhouse Lane.

  It was gone half past five. Shops were closing and office workers were heading home. Banks had driven to Leeds behind John Webb’s Range Rover and stayed with him until they got the skeleton set up and secured in Dr Williams’s lab, which turned out to be the first floor of a large redbrick house off the main campus. While the lab assistants worked at cleaning the bones, Banks had gone out for a quick sandwich at a café on Woodhouse Lane, making a slight detour to the Classical Record Shop. He had been gone for about an hour and a half.

  DS Cabbot was just parking her Astra when Banks arrived back at the lab. She didn’t spot him. He watched her get out and look up at the building, checking with the sheet of paper in her hand and frowning.

  He stepped up behind her. “It’s the right place.”

  She turned. “Ah, sir. I was expecting something a bit more . . . well . . . I don’t know really. But not like this.”

  “More labby?”

  She smiled. “Yes. I suppose so. Whatever that means.

  More hi-tech. This place looks like my old student digs.”

  Banks nodded towards the building. “The university bought up a lot of these old houses when the families and their servants couldn’t afford to live there any more. You’d be surprised how many odd and eccentric departments are hidden away in them. Let’s go inside.”

  Banks followed her up the steps. This evening she was wearing black tights and shoes, a mid-length black skirt and matching jacket over a white blouse. She was also carrying a black leather briefcase. Much more businesslike. Banks caught a brief whiff of jasmine as he walked behind her.

  Banks pressed the intercom and got them buzzed in. The lab was on the first floor, up one flight of creaky, uncarpeted stairs. Their footsteps echoed from the high ceiling.

  Dr Ioan Williams waited for them on the landing. He was a tall, rangy fellow with long, greasy blond hair. Wire-rimmed glasses magnified his grey eyes, and his Adam’s apple looked like a gobstopper stuck halfway down his throat. Much younger than Banks had expected, Dr Williams wasn’t wearing a white lab coat but was dressed casually in torn jeans and a black T-shirt advertising Guinness. His handshake was firm, and judging by the way he lingered over DS Cabbot, his mind was not one hundred per cent focused on science. Or maybe it was. Biology.

  “Come in,” he said, leading the way down the corridor and opening the lab door. “I’m afraid it isn’t much to write home about.” Despite his name, Williams had no trace of a Welsh accent. He sounded pure Home Counties to Banks, or Oxbridge. Posh, at any rate, as Banks’s mother would say.

  The lab consisted of two rooms knocked into one. Apart from the long table at the centre, where the skeleton lay, there was nothing much to distinguish it. Bookcases lined one wall, a long lab bench another. On it lay various measuring instruments and pieces of bone with tags on them like shop-window goods.

  Still, Banks thought, what more did Williams need? All he looked at was bones. No mess. No blood and guts to clean up, no need for dissecting knives, scalpels or brain knives. All he really needed were saws, chisels and a skull key. And, thank God, they didn’t have to worry about the smell, though the air was certainly redolent of loam and stagnant mud.

  There were a couple of posters on the walls, one of Pamela Anderson Lee in her “Baywatch” swimsuit and another of a human skeleton. Perhaps, Banks speculated, the juxtaposition meant something to Dr Williams. A reflection on mortality? Or maybe he just liked tits and bones.

  The bones on the table certainly looked different now that Williams’s assistants had been to work on them. Much of the crusting remained, especially in the hard-to-get-at crevices, but the skull, ribs and long bones were easier to examine. They were still far from the sparkling white of the typical laboratory skeleton, more of a dirty yellow-brown in colour, like a bad nicotine stain, but at least the whole resembled something more like a human being. There was even a little matted red hair on the back of the skull. Banks had come across this sort of thing before, so he knew it didn’t mean the victim had been a redhead; hair turns red when the original pigment fades, and even many of the “bog men,” Iron Age corpses preserved in peat bogs, had red hair.

  “There are a number of odds and ends my lads found while they were cleaning up,” Williams said. “They’re over there on the bench.”

  Banks looked at the collection of filthy objects. It was hard to make out what they were: pieces of corroded metal, perhaps? A ring? Shreds of old clothing?

  “Can you get them cleaned up and sent over to me?” he asked.

  “No problem. Now let’s get down to work.”

  Annie took out her notebook and crossed her legs. “First of all,” Williams began, “let me confirm, just for the record, that we are dealing with human remains, most likely Caucasian. I’ll check a few things under the microscope tomorrow, do some more work on the skull dimensions, for the sake of scientific accuracy, but you can take my word on it at the moment.”

  “What about DNA analysis?” Banks asked.

  Williams grunted. “People seem to think DNA analysis is some sort of miracle answer. It’s not. Right now, I can tell you a hell of a lot more about what you want to know than any DNA could. Believe me, I’ve had plenty of experience in this field. May I continue?”

  “Please do. But get a DNA analysis done, anyway. It might be useful for determining identity, or identifying any living descendants.”

  Williams nodded. “Very well.”

  “And what about radiocarbon dating?”

  “Really, Chief Inspector, shouldn’t you leave the science to the scientists? There’s too big a margin for error in radiocarbon dating. It’s mostly useful for archaeological finds, and I think you’ll find our friend here is a little more recent than that. Now, if there’s nothing else . . . ?” He turned back to the skeleton. “The height of the subject was easy enough to determine in this case by simple measurement once we got the bones arranged in their original positions. A metre and a half—well, between a hundred and fifty-four and a hundred and fifty-six centimetres.”

  “What’s that in feet and inches?” Banks asked.

  “Five foot two.” Dr Williams looked over and smiled at DS Cabbot. “But I can’t be sure about the eyes of blue.”

  Annie gave him a chilly smile. Banks noticed her roll her eyes and tug her skirt lower over her knees when Williams had turned away.

  “And,” Williams went on, “you are also dealing with the remains of a young woman.” He paused for dramatic effect.

  Annie shot him a quick glance, then looked down at her notebook a
gain.

  “Go on,” Banks said. “We’re listening.”

  “In general,” Williams explained, “a male skeleton is larger, the bone surfaces rougher, but the main differences are in the skull and the pelvic area. The male skull is thicker.”

  “Well, what do you know?” Annie muttered without looking up.

  Williams laughed. “Anyway, in this case, the pelvis is intact, and that’s the easiest way for the trained eye to tell.” Williams reached over and put his hand between the skeleton’s legs. “The female pelvis is wider and lower than the male’s, to facilitate child-bearing.” Banks watched as Williams ran his hand over the bone. “This pubic curve is definitely female, and here, the sciatic notch.” He touched it with his forefinger. “Also unmistakably female. Much wider than a male’s.” He hooked his finger in the sciatic notch, then looked at DS Cabbot again as he caressed the skeleton’s pelvic area. Annie kept her head down.

  Williams turned back to Banks. “The symphyseal area here, as you can see, is rectangular. In males it’s triangular. I could go on, but I think you get the point.”

  “Definitely female,” Banks said.

  “Yes. And there’s one more thing.” He picked up a small magnifying glass from the lab bench and handed it to Banks. “Look at this.” Williams pointed to where the two pelvic bones joined at the front of the body. Banks leaned over, holding the glass. On the bone surface he could just about make out a small groove, or pit, maybe about half an inch long.

  “That’s the dorsal margin of the pubis’s articular surface,” Williams said, “and what you’re looking at is a parturition scar. It’s caused by the stresses that attached ligaments put on the bone.”

  “So she’d given birth to at least one child?”

  Williams smiled. “Ah, you’re familiar with the technical terms?”

  “Some of them. Go on.”

  Annie raised her eyebrows at Banks, then got back to her notes before Williams could nail her with his leering gaze.

  “Well,” Williams went on, “there’s only a single pit on either side of the pubis, which would strongly suggest that she only gave birth once in her life. Usually, the more times a woman has given birth, the more apparent the parturition scars are.”