In a Dry Season

by Peter Robinson

  Frank spoke in Vivian’s ear. “Is that right, what he’s saying?”

  Banks couldn’t hear her, but he saw her mouth form the word, “Yes.”

  “Frank,” Banks pressed on, playing his advantage.

  “The gun. I know you don’t want to hurt anyone, but it’s dangerous. It’s easy to make a wrong move. Nobody’s been hurt yet. No harm’s been done.”

  Frank looked at the gun as if seeing it for the first time. Banks stepped onto the fairy bridge and moved forward slowly, holding his hand out. He knew there were probably two or three trained marksmen aiming in his direction, and the thought made his stomach churn. “Give the gun to me, Frank. It’s all over. Vivian didn’t kill your mother. She had nothing to do with it. She loved Gloria as a sister. It was Edgar Konig.”

  Frank let his gun hand drop and released his grip on Vivian Elmsley’s throat. She staggered aside and slipped down one of the muddy holes the SOCOS had dug in the Bridge Cottage floor. Annie ran to help her. Frank handed the gun to Banks. It weighed heavy in his hand. “What happened to him?” Frank asked. “This Konig. Did he ever get caught?”

  “I’ll tell you all about that later, Frank,” said Banks, taking Frank by the elbow. “Just for now, though, we’re all a bit tired and wet. Okay? I think we should leave here, go somewhere to dry off and get some clean clothes, don’t you?”

  Frank hung his head. Banks draped an arm across his shoulder. As he did so, he noticed something on the ground, partially covered by mud. He bent and picked it up. It was a photograph of a sixteen-year-old Gloria Shackleton, her beautiful, determined, defiant face staring out at the camera. It was damaged by the water, but still salvageable.

  Several police officers had already come dashing and sliding down the embankment. Two went to help Annie get Vivian out of the pit, and two of them grabbed Frank roughly and started handcuffing him.

  “There’s no need to be so rough with him,” said Banks. “Leave this to us, sir,” said one of the officers.

  Bank sighed and handed over the gun, then he held up the photograph of Gloria. “I’ll get this cleaned up for you, if you want, Frank,” he said.

  Frank nodded. “Please,” he said. “And don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right. It’s not the first time I’ve had the cuffs on.”

  Banks nodded. “I know.”

  They hustled Frank Stringer away, practically dragging him up the muddy slope, and Banks turned to see Annie and the other policemen helping Vivian Elmsley stumble over the fairy bridge.

  Vivian stopped in front of him, covered in mud, while the others went on ahead. “Thank you,” she said. “You saved my life.”

  “I lied for you,” said Banks. “I also sullied Gloria’s loyalty to Matthew.”

  She paled and whispered, “I know. I appreciate what you did. I’m sorry.”

  “There was a chance, you know. Maybe just a small chance, but a chance. If you’d come forward after you found Gloria dead, if you hadn’t destroyed all the evidence, if you’d gone to the police . . . ” Banks held his anger in check; this was neither the time nor the place for it. “Ah, to hell with it. Too late now.”

  Vivian bowed her head. “Believe me, I know what I’ve done.”

  Banks turned and slogged on alone through the mud. It was difficult, but he made it up the edge without falling down. At the top, he was aware of Annie standing beside him. Before he could say anything, Jimmy Riddle came running over and grabbed his arm. “I’m glad you’ve salvaged at least something out of this situation, Banks,” he hissed, “but you’re bloody incompetent. I don’t want incompetent officers under my command. I’ll be talking to you first thing Monday morning.” Then he turned to Annie. “As for you, DS Cabbot, you disobeyed a direct order. I don’t like insubordinate officers, either. I’ll be talking to you, too.”

  Banks shook his arm free, turned on his heel and walked back towards his car. All he wanted was a long hot bath, a large Laphroaig and a change of clothes.

  And Annie.

  She was already leaning against her car, arms folded. “Are you all right?” Banks asked.

  “I’m fine. Fine as anyone can be who’s spent the last half-hour standing in the rain wondering if someone was going to get her head blown off.”

  “Frank Stringer wasn’t going to hurt anyone.”

  “Easy for you to say. I respect what you did out there, by the way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You lied to protect Frank Stringer’s feelings. I told you, my mother died when I was six. I like to remember her as a beautiful, dazzling creature moving in a haze of light, the same way he remembers Gloria. And I wouldn’t want anyone to spoil that illusion for me, no matter what the truth.”

  “I lied to get us all out of there alive.”

  Annie smiled. “Whatever. It worked both ways.”

  “What next?” Annie stretched, arching her back and reaching her arms towards the sky. “Onwards to St Ives. After I’ve stopped home for some dry clothes. I was already on my way when I heard. I couldn’t just leave it.”

  “Of course not. Thanks for being there.”

  “You?”

  “Home, I suppose.” Banks remembered dinner with Jenny. Too late now, especially the state his clothes were in, but he could at least borrow a mobile from someone and phone her, apologize.

  Annie nodded. “Look, I’ll be gone for two weeks. Right now I’m still a bit mixed up about my feelings. Why don’t you phone me when I get back? Maybe we can have that talk?”

  “Okay.”

  She grinned at him crookedly. “If there weren’t so many policemen about I’d kiss you goodbye.”

  “Not a good idea.”

  “No. See you, then.”

  And with that she opened the car door and got in.

  Banks ignored his cutting-down programme and lit another cigarette, aware that his hands were shaking. Without looking back, Annie started her car. Banks watched the red tail-lights disappear down the muddy track.

  Epilogue

  After a long, rainy winter and overdue repairs by Yorkshire Water, Thornfield Reservoir filled up again and Hobb’s End once more disappeared. On 27 July of the year after the Gloria Shackleton murder had entered and left the public’s imagination, Vivian Elmsley lay on a king-size bed in her Florida hotel room, propped up with pillows, and watched the local news channel.

  Vivian was in the midst of a national book tour, seventeen cities, and while Gainesville wasn’t on the itinerary, she had enough clout with her publishers to make this brief diversion. She would have come anyway, tour or no tour. Yesterday she had been in Baltimore, Bethesda and Washington, DC; tomorrow she was going to Dallas, but tonight she was in Gainesville.

  For tonight was the night that Edgar Konig had his appointment with Old Sparky, and after everything she had been through, Vivian desperately needed some sense of an ending.

  It was a sultry, mosquito-ridden night, but that didn’t seem to deter the crowds that gathered outside the gates of Starke Prison, about twenty-five miles away. One or two were quietly carrying placards that asked for an end to capital punishment, but by far the majority were chanting, “Fry Konig! Fry Konig!” Bumper stickers echoed the same sentiments, and the crowd had created what the commentator called a “tailgate-party” atmosphere. It wasn’t big enough to attract any of the national networks—after all, executions in Florida were as common as muggings—but the Konig case had caught a lot of local interest.

  Frank Stringer would have come, too—and Vivian would have willingly paid his way—but he was in jail. English gun laws are far stricter than those in Florida. Besides, no matter how good his reasons for taking Vivian hostage at Thornfield Reservoir last September, he had committed a serious crime and occasioned a hugely expensive and highly publicized police operation. Vivian had visited him several times in jail and told him she would help him get back on his feet when he came out. It was the least she could do for Gloria’s memory.

  In his turn, Frank
had told her how his father’s sister Ivy and her husband, John, had taken good care of him during the war and how he had thought of them as his parents. When his real father came home on leave, they would spend time together. That was when they had made the first journey north, in 1943, and he had seen his mother.

  After the war, his father married and took him away from Ivy and John. Frank’s stepmother turned out to be a drunk and a shrew who had no time for her husband’s bastard son. Increasingly isolated and neglected, he got involved with crooks and gangs, and one thing led to another. The only constant was that he had always worshipped his true mother’s memory.

  Frank also told Vivian how the death of his father that spring and the re-emergence of Hobb’s End from Thornfield Reservoir had caused his obsession with the past to escalate. His father had been the first to recognize Gwen Shackleton as Vivian Elmsley on television, but Frank had confirmed it; he had memorized her eyes and her voice all those years ago, when he was eight, the same way he had also memorized his mother’s face.

  He couldn’t explain why he had taken the trouble to find out where Vivian lived and why he had followed her and approached her at the bookshop; it was just that she was the only one left, the only one who had known Gloria. He said that he meant no harm at first, that he might even have found the courage to approach her eventually.

  Then the skeleton was discovered, and he knew she must have lied all those years ago. He hated her after that; he telephoned to scare her, to make her suffer. He could have taken her anytime, but he enjoyed the anticipation. After all, once he had confronted her, it would be all over. So he followed her, watched her. When she got the taxi outside her hotel, he knew where she was going, and he felt it was fitting that things should end there, where they began.

  But tonight, Vivian was alone in Gainesville with her memories, the television, a bottle of gin, ice and tonic water. And an execution.

  They had already shown a fairly recent photograph of Edgar Konig. Vivian hadn’t been able to recognize the gangly, baby-faced young airman with the shy eyes and the blond brush-cut. His hair was gone, his cheeks had sagged and wrinkled, his brow creased, and his eyes were deep, dark pits in which slimy monsters squirmed.

  As she watched the coverage, Vivian imagined the officials carrying out the preliminary steps of state-sanctioned murder with swift and impersonal efficiency, much like dentists or doctors.

  First they would settle the patient in the heavy oak chair and buckle thick leather straps around his arms and legs. Then they would place the bit between his teeth and attach electrodes to his body as if they were carrying out an EKG.

  She wondered if the leather straps smelled, if they were sour with the sweat and fear of previous victims. How many hands and legs had they strapped down before? Or were they replaced after every execution? What about the chair itself? How many bladders and bowels had emptied there?

  Then they would clamp on the metal skull-cap. Vivian shook her head to clear the images. She felt dizzy, and she realized she was already a bit drunk. If anyone deserved this sort of end, she told herself, ambivalent as she was about the idea of capital punishment, it was probably Edgar Konig.

  Vivian had been shocked when Banks told her the day after Frank’s arrest that Gloria’s murderer was not dead, but on death row in a Florida prison.

  Did he think of Gloria now, Vivian wondered, now the end was so close? Did he spare a thought for a beautiful young woman all those years ago in a village that no longer existed, in a war long since won? And what about the others? How many had there been? Konig couldn’t remember, and even Banks hadn’t been able to give her a definite number. Did he think about them?

  If he was like most such killers she had read about in the course of her research, he probably felt nothing but self-pity and spent his last moments cursing the bad luck that resulted in his capture. What Banks had told her a few days after the scene at Hobb’s End did nothing to dispel that idea.

  Banks’s FBI contact had interviewed Edgar Konig last December and sent in a report, which Banks had shown to Vivian. In it, Konig said he was almost certain that the first one he did was in England during the war. He couldn’t remember her name or the circumstances, but he thought maybe she was a blonde. He did remember that he had been giving her stockings and gum and cigarettes and bourbon for more than a year, and when he came to collect, she didn’t show a scrap of gratitude. He’d been drinking. He remembered the way the pressure had been building and building in him all that time until he’d had too much that night and the dam finally burst. She wouldn’t have anything to do with him, a lowly PX grunt. Oh, no. She was fucking a pilot.

  As Vivian had read the report with trembling fingers, a familiar story emerged. Konig’s daddy had been a vicious alcoholic who regularly beat poor Edgar to within an inch of his life; his mother was a drunken whore who’d do it with anyone for a dime. It was always the drink, Konig complained. If it hadn’t been for the drink he would never have done any of them. But booze made something deep inside him just snap, and the next thing he knew, they were dead at his feet. Then he was angry at them for dying and he used the knife. When he didn’t get found out the first time, when he realized there wasn’t even going to be an investigation, he thought he must be leading a charmed life, then he had the bad luck to be caught on that highway in California.

  Always the drink.

  So went Edgar Konig’s story.

  The drink. Vivian looked at her glass, then with a shaking hand, she poured herself another tumbler of gin and grasped a fistful of ice cubes from the bucket on the bedside table, tossing them in the glass carelessly, so a little gin splashed on the table. An American habit she had picked up, that, ice in her drink.

  It was almost time.

  After years on death row and dozens of failed appeals, Edgar Konig, just turned seventy-six, was finally getting what he deserved. Vivian still felt a twinge of guilt when she realized that Banks was right, that she might have helped put an end to his killing all those years ago, after Gloria, the very first victim. She was partly responsible for Konig’s feeling that he led a charmed life of murder without consequence.

  She had tried to rationalize it to herself so many times since Banks told her what had happened and turned his back in scorn that evening when the storm broke at Hobb’s End. Even if she had reported what happened, she told herself, they would have still probably arrested Matthew. He wasn’t well enough to face that sort of treatment. Though Banks was a little easier on her when they spoke the next day, she could still feel his censure, and it stung.

  But what could she have told the police that would have pointed them specifically towards Edgar Konig? The whisky and Lucky Strikes on the kitchen counter? They were hardly evidence. Gloria could have got them anywhere, and they could have been lying there on the counter for a couple of days. She and Gloria had known plenty of American Air Force officers in the area, and she had no reason at the time to suspect any of them of murder. It was all very well for Banks to say in retrospect that she was responsible for all those deaths, that she could somehow have stopped all this had she acted differently, but it wasn’t fair. Twenty-twenty hindsight. And who wouldn’t, given the chance, go back and change something?

  Time.

  The first shock would boil his brain and turn all the nerve cells to jelly; the second or third shock would stop his heart. His body would jerk and arch against the straps; his muscles would contract sharply, and a few small bones would probably snap. Most likely the fingers, the fingers he had used to strangle Gloria.

  If he didn’t have a leather band strapped across his eyes, the heat would cause his eyeballs to explode. The death chamber would be filled with the smell of burning hair and flesh. Steam and smoke would puff out from under the hood. The hood itself might catch fire. When it was over, someone would have to turn on an air vent to get rid of the stench. Then a doctor would come, pronounce him dead, and the public would be informed.

  Besides, Vivian told
herself as she watched the people chanting outside the prison gates, others could have stopped him, too, if the system had worked properly. It wasn’t only her fault. She had acted only from the purest of motives: love of her brother.

  A cheer went up from the crowd outside the prison. News had come out. Edgar Konig was dead. It was all over.

  Why was it that Vivian felt no relief, felt nothing but the stirrings of a bad headache? She closed her eyes and pressed her fingers to the lids. All over. All over. She was so tired. Konig’s statement to the FBI had been bald and unembellished, but with her morbid imagination, Vivian was able to fill in the nuances and the emotions.

  She saw Gloria run into the kitchen as she became frightened by PX’s erratic behaviour—behaviour she had witnessed in embryo at the VE day party—saw her frantically pulling tins of tea and cocoa out of the kitchen cupboard, looking for the gun, shocked and scared to find that it wasn’t there. Did she realize in the last moments of her life that Gwen must have taken it?

  Next, Vivian saw PX grab Gloria, put his hands around her throat, felt the breath going out of her. Then she saw him pick up the kitchen knife from the counter, felt one sharp pain, then another, another, everything starting to slip away from her.

  Vivian put her hand to her throat.

  The gun.

  She was the one who had taken the gun, the one thing that might have saved Gloria’s life if she had got to it in time. And Brenda Hamilton’s life. And all the others.

  Then, for all those terrible years, she had cared for Matthew in his fallen state, believing he was a murderer. Poor, gentle Matthew, who wouldn’t harm a soul, who couldn’t even kill himself, no more than her husband Ronald could, despite the pain. Vivian had helped them both: Ronald with an extra dose of morphine, and Matthew, all those years ago . . .

  Before she started crying, she had a vivid memory of that afternoon in Leeds when she came back from the shops and saw Matthew sitting in the chair with the gun in his mouth, the gun she had taken from Gloria, kept and brought all the way from Hobb’s End. He was trying to find the courage, willing himself to pull the trigger.