Cold Is The Grave

5

The Charlie Courage murder occurred in early December, about a month after Banks had delivered Emily Riddle to her father’s house, a little battered and shop-soiled, but not too much the worse for wear. Judging by her silence on the train journey back to Yorkshire, he imagined she might lie low for a while before taking on the world again. In the meantime, Banks had been preoccupied with major changes at Eastvale Divisional Headquarters.

The county force had been reorganized from seven divisions into just three, and Eastvale was the new headquarters of the large Western Division, which took in just about the entire county west of the A1 to the Lancashire border, and from the Durham border in the north to the border with West Yorkshire in the south. There were vast areas of wilderness and moorland, including most of the Yorkshire Dales National Park, and the main occupations were the service industry, tourism, agriculture and a smattering of light industry. There were no major urban areas, but a number of big towns such as Harrogate, Ripon, Richmond, Skipton and Eastvale itself.

There was, of course, plenty of crime, and in keeping with its new status, the Eastvale station had been extended into the adjoining building, where Vic Manson’s fingerprints unit, scenes-of-crime, computers and photography departments had all set up shop. Renovations were still going on, and the place was filled with noise and dust.

While the section stations would continue to police their areas as before – indeed, they were to be given even more autonomy – Eastvale was now to be responsible for most of the criminal investigation within the new Western Division. Nobody was sure yet how many CID officers – or Crime Management Personnel, as some now liked to call them – they would end up with, or where they would all be put, but staffing increases had already begun.

One of the first moves that the Director of Human Resources, Millicent Cummings, had made was to transfer Detective Sergeant Annie Cabbot to the new team. Millie told Banks that she thought Annie had worked well with him on their previous case, no matter what Chief Constable Riddle thought of its messy outcome, and that as Annie was going for her inspector’s boards as soon as she could, the experience would be good for her.

Millie, of course, along with Riddle and everyone else, didn’t know about Banks’s affair with Annie, and Banks could hardly say anything now. This was a good opportunity for her to get back in the swing of things, and he certainly wasn’t going to stand in her way. Annie was a good detective, and if she could handle working with Banks, he could at least try to accommodate her.

The county also had a new Assistant Chief Constable (Crime) in the shape of Ron McLaughlin, known jokingly as “Red Ron” because he leaned more to the left than most senior policemen. ACC McLaughlin was known to be a hard but fair man, one who believed in using his officers’ abilities to the fullest, and he was also rumored to enjoy a wee dram of malt every now and then.

It was a misty, drizzling day – what the locals called “mizzling” – when Riddle got the chance to make good on his promise to Banks. Over the last year or so, all serious crimes in the division that couldn’t be handled by Detective Superintendent Gristhorpe, Detective Sergeant Hatchley and whichever DCs happened to be assigned to Eastvale Divisional Headquarters at the time, had been passed on to other divisions, or to the Regional Crime Squad, leaving Banks free to devote all his duty hours to paperwork and administration.

Since he had done Riddle the big favor of bringing Emily back home, since the big changes around the station, and since things had finally come to an end with Sandra, the thought of moving from his Gratly cottage and starting a new job with the NCS had begun to lose its appeal, and Banks had withdrawn his application. Eastvale was starting to seem like a good bet again, and it was where he wanted to be.

Despite the drizzle and the filthy gray sky, Banks felt in a buoyant, optimistic mood. He was reading a report on the sudden increase of car theft in rural areas, and in need of a break, he went to stand by the window to smoke a proscribed cigarette and look down on the market square in the late afternoon.

The renovators were mercifully silent, no doubt planning their next major assault, and Banks’s radio played quietly in the background: Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3. The Eastvale Christmas lights, turned on in the middle of November by some third-rate television personality Banks had never heard of, made a pretty sight outside his window, hanging across Market Street and over the square like a bright lattice of jewels. Soon they’d be putting up the huge Christmas tree by the market cross, and the church choir would be out singing carols at lunchtime and early evening, collecting for charity.

Brian thought he would be busy with the band over the holidays, but Tracy had phoned the previous day and promised to spend Christmas with her father before heading down to London to see her mother on Boxing Day. Banks had never been much of a fan of Christmas – far too many holiday seasons spent working and witnessing the gaudy excess of suicides and domestic murders that peaked around that time of year had taken care of that – but this called for celebration; this year he would make an effort, buy a small tree, presents, put up some decorations, cook Christmas dinner.

Last year had been a complete washout. He had turned down all offers of meals, drinks and parties from friends and colleagues and spent the entire holiday alone in the Eastvale semi he had once shared with Sandra, wallowing in his own misery and keeping up his maintenance buzz with liberal tots of whisky. Brian and Tracy had both phoned, of course, and he had managed to bluff his way past any worries they might have had about him, but there was no denying it had been a grim time. This year would be different. Delia Smith had a book about cooking for Christmas, he remembered; perhaps he would go to Waterstone’s and buy it before going home.

The telephone brought him back to his desk. “Banks here.”

“Chief Inspector Banks? My name’s Collaton, Detective Inspector Mike Collaton. I’m calling from Market Harborough, Leicestershire Constabulary. I just called your county headquarters and they put me on to you.”

“What can I do for you?”

“Earlier today a motorist stopped by the roadside near here and nipped down a lane into the woods for a piss. He found a body.”

“Go on,” said Banks, tapping his pen on the desk, still wondering what the connection was.

“It’s one of yours. Thought you might be interested.”

“One of my what?”

“Local villains. Bloke by the name of Charles Courage. Same as the brewery. Lived at number seventeen Cutpurse Lane, Eastvale.” He laughed. “Sounds like it could hardly be a more appropriate address, going by his record.”

Jesus Christ, Charlie Courage! Dutch, as his cronies jokingly called him on account of that was about the only courage he ever exhibited. Charlie Courage had been a thorn in the side of Eastvale Division for years. In truth, he was a petty villain, a minor player, but around Eastvale he was still a big fish in a small pond. Charlie Courage had done a little bit of everything – except anything that involved violence or sex – from handling stolen goods to sheep-stealing, when it was worth stealing them. You had to give Charlie his due; he was a character. Two or three years ago, he used to have a stall in Eastvale market, Banks remembered, right in front of the police station, where he blithely sold videos and CDs that in all likelihood had “fallen off the back of a lorry.” While questioning him about a local break-in once, Banks had even bought the Academy of Ancient Music’s CD of Mozart’s C Minor Mass for $3.99. A bargain at twice the price. He didn’t ask where it had come from. To his credit, Charlie had also acted as police informer on a number of occasions. Rumor had it that he had been going straight lately.

“You’ve heard of him?” DI Collaton went on.

“I’ve heard of him. What happened?”

“Shot. Looks like the weapon used was a shotgun. Made a real mess, anyway.”

“Any chance it was accidental, or self-inflicted?”

“Not unless he shot himself in the chest, then got up after he was dead and hid the weapon. We can’t find any sign of it.”

“Are you sure it’s Charlie? What on earth was he doing all the way down there? It’s not like Charlie to leave his parish.”

“I’m afraid we can’t shine any light on that just yet, either. But it’s definitely him. I got the ID from fingerprints. Seems he did two years once for something involving sheep. I’ve heard about you lot up there and your sheep. Some sort of unspeakable deed, was it?”

Banks laughed. “Stealing them, actually. They used to be worth a bit. You might remember. As for the other, I can’t say I’ve any idea what Charlie got up to in his spare time. Far as I know, he was single, so he could please himself. Anything more you can tell me?”

“Not much. I’ve checked around, and it seems he doesn’t have any living relatives.”

“Sounds like Charlie. I don’t think he ever did.”

“Anyway, I thought I’d ask you to have a look around his house, if you would, see if there’s anything there. Save my lads some legwork. We’re a bit short-staffed down here.”

“Aren’t we all? Sure. I’ll have a look. What about his car?”

“No sign of any car. Maybe you’d like to come down here tomorrow morning, see the scene, toss a few ideas around, that sort of thing? I’ve a feeling that if there are any answers to be found, they’re probably at your end. The postmortem’s tomorrow afternoon, by the way.”

“Okay,” said Banks. “In the meantime I’ll go have a quick poke around Charlie’s place right now and see about organizing a thorough search later. If he’s dead, I won’t have to worry about a warrant. I’ll drive down tomorrow morning.”

Banks took Collaton’s directions to the Fairfield Road police station in Market Harborough, then hung up and went into the main CID office. Since the reorganization began, they had been assigned three new DCs and were promised three more. DC Gavin Rickerd was a spotty, nondescript sort of lad given to anoraks and parkas. Banks couldn’t help feeling he must have been a train-spotter in a previous lifetime, if not in this one. Kevin Templeton was more flash, a bit of a jack-the-lad, but he got things done, and he was surprisingly good with people, especially kids.

The third addition was DC Winsome Jackman, who hailed from a village in the Cockpit Mountains, high above Montego Bay, Jamaica. Why she had wanted to leave there for the unpredictable summers and miserable winters of North Yorkshire was beyond Banks’s ken. At least superficially. When it came right down to it, though, he imagined that a village in the Jamaican mountains was probably no place for a bright and beautiful woman like Winsome to forge ahead in a career.

Why she hadn’t become a model instead of joining the police was also beyond Banks. She had the figure for it, and her face showed traces of her Maroon heritage in the high cheekbones and dark ebony coloring. She could certainly give Naomi Campbell a run for her money, and from what Banks had read about the supermodel in the papers, Winsome was a far nicer person. Some of the lads called her “Lose-Some” because of the time, back in uniform, when she had chased and caught a mugger in a shopping center, only to have him then slip out of her grasp and escape. She took it good-naturedly and gave as good as she got. You had to when you were the only black woman in the division.

As it turned out, everyone was out of the office except Kevin Templeton and Annie, who looked up from her computer monitor as Banks entered.

“Afternoon,” she said, flashing him a quick smile. Annie had a hell of a smile. Though not much more than a twitch of the right corner of her mouth, near the small mole, accompanied by a quick blaze of light from her almond eyes, it was dazzling. Banks felt his heart lurch just a little. God, he hoped this working together wasn’t going to be too difficult.

“See what you can dig up on a local villain called Charlie Courage,” he said. Then, more or less on impulse, he added, “Fancy a ride down to Market Harborough tomorrow?” He found himself holding his breath after the words were out, almost wishing he could take them back.

“Why not?” she said, after a short pause. “It’ll make a nice break.”

“Much on?”

“Nothing the lads can’t handle on their own.”

Kevin Templeton grunted from his corner.

“Okay. I’ll pick you up here around nine.”

Back in his office, Banks found himself hoping that things worked out with Annie on the job. He liked working with female detectives, and he still missed his old DC, Susan Gay, with all her uncertainties and sharp edges. When he had worked with Annie before, he had come to value her near-telepathic communication skills and the way she could mix logic and intuition in her unique style of thinking. He had also cherished her touch and her laughter, but that was another matter, one he couldn’t let himself dwell on anymore. Or could he?

He left the office in a good mood. For the moment, Riddle had proved true to his word, and Banks finally had a case he might be able to get his teeth into. It was DI Collaton’s call, of course, but Collaton had asked for help right off the bat, which led Banks to think that he probably didn’t want to spend too long away from hearth and home tracking the roots of the crime up in dreary Yorkshire, especially with Christmas being so close. Well, good for him, Banks thought. Cooperation between the forces and all that. His loss was Banks’s gain.

It was after five when Banks pulled up behind a blue Metro in front of Charlie Courage’s one-up-one-down. Cutpurse Lane was a cramped ragbag of terraced cottages behind the community center. Dating from the eighteenth century for the most part, the mean little hovels had privies out back and no front gardens. During the yuppie craze for “bijou” a few years ago, a number of young couples had bought cottages on Cutpurse Lane and installed bathrooms and dormer windows.

As far as Banks knew, Charlie Courage had lived there for years. Whatever Charlie had done with his ill-gotten gains, he certainly hadn’t invested them in improving his living conditions. It was a syndrome Banks had seen before in even more successful petty crooks than Charlie. He had even known one big-time criminal who must have brought in seven figures a year easily, yet still lived hardly a notch above squalor in the East End. He wondered what on earth they used the money they stole for, except in some cases to support mammoth drug habits. Did they give it to charity? Use it to buy their parents that dream house they had always yearned for? People had odd priorities. Charlie Courage, though, had not been a drug addict, was not known for his charity, and he didn’t have any living relatives. A mystery, then.

First, Banks knocked on the neighbor’s door, which was opened by a short, stocky man in a wrinkled faun V-necked pullover, who looked unnervingly like Hitler, even down to the little mustache and the mad gleam in his eyes. He stood in the doorway, the sound of the television coming from the room behind him.

Banks showed his identification. “Knightley,” the man said. “Kenneth Knightley. Please come in out of the rain.” Banks accepted his invitation. The drizzle was the kind that immediately seemed to get right through your raincoat and your skin, all the way to your bones.

Banks followed him into a small, neat living room with rose-patterned wallpaper and a couple of framed local landscapes hanging above the tile mantelpiece. Banks recognized Gratly Falls, just outside his own cottage, and a romantic watercolor of the ruins of Devraulx Abbey, up Lyndgarth way. A fire blazed in the hearth, making the room a bit too hot and stuffy for Banks’s liking. He could already smell the steam rising from his raincoat.

“It’s about your neighbor, Charles Courage,” he said. “When did you last see him?”

“I don’t have much to do with him,” said Knightley. “Except to say hello to, like. He always keeps to himself, and I’ve not been the most sociable of fellows since Edie died, if truth be told.” He smiled. “Edie didn’t like him, though. Thought he was a wrong ’un. Why? What’s happened?”

“I’m afraid Mr. Courage is dead. It looks as if he’s been murdered.”

Knightley paled. “Murdered. Where? I mean, not…”

“No. Not next door. Some distance away, actually. Down Leicester way.”

“Leicester? But he never went anywhere. One time I did talk to him, I remember him telling me you’d never catch him going to Torremolinos or Alicante for his holidays. Yorkshire was good enough for him. Charlie didn’t like foreign places or foreigners, and they began at Ripon as far as he was concerned.”

Banks smiled. “I’ve met a few people like that, myself. But one way or another, he did end up in Leicestershire. Dead.”

“That’s probably what killed him then. Finding himself in Leicestershire.” Knightley paused and ran his hand across his brow. “Sorry, I shouldn’t be so flippant. A man’s dead, after all. I don’t see how I can help you, though.”

“You said you saw him last a couple of days ago. Can you be more precise?”

“Let me think. It was early Sunday afternoon. It must have been then because I was just coming back from The Oak. I always go there on a Sunday lunchtime for a game of dominoes.”

“About what time would this be?”

“Just after two. I can’t be doing with all these new hours, all-day opening and whatnot. I stick to the old times.”

“How did he seem?”

“Same as usual: a bit shifty. Said hello and that was that.”

“Shifty?”

“He always looked shifty. As if he’d just that minute done something illegal and wasn’t quite sure he’d got away with it yet.”

“I know what you mean,” said Banks. Charlie Courage usually had just done something illegal. “So there was nothing odd or different about his behavior at all?”

“Nothing.”

“Was he alone?”

“Far as I could tell.”

“Coming or going?”

“Come again?”

“Was he just arriving home or leaving?”

“Oh, I see. He was going out.”

“Car?”

“Aye. He’s got a blue Metro. It’s usually… just a minute…” Knightley stood up and went to the curtain, which he pulled back a few inches. “Aye, there it is,” he said, pointing. “Parked right outside.” Banks saw the car in front of his and made a mental note to have it searched.

“Did you see or hear anyone with him in the house over the last few days?”

“No. I’m sorry I can’t be much help. Like I said, there was nothing unusual at all. He went off to work, then he came home. Quiet as a mouse.”

“Work? Charlie?”

“Oh, aye. Didn’t you know? He’d got a job as a night watchman at that new business park down Ripon Road. Daleview, I think it’s called.”

“I know the one.”

Business park. Another to add to Banks’s long list of oxymorons, along with military intelligence. That was an interesting piece of news, anyway: Charlie Courage with a job. A night watchman, no less. Banks wondered if his employers knew of his past. It was worth looking into.

“Is there anything else you can help me with, Mr. Knightley?”

“I don’t think there is. And it’s no use asking Mrs. Ford on the other side. She’s deaf as a post.”

“I don’t suppose you have a key to Mr. Courage’s house, do you?” he asked.

“Key? No. Like I said, we didn’t do much more than pass the time of day together out of politeness’s sake.”

Banks stood up. “I’m going to have to have a good look around the place. If there’s no key, I’ll have to break in somehow, so don’t be alarmed if you hear a few strange noises next door.”

Knightley nodded. “Right. Right, you are. Charlie Courage. Murdered. Bloody hell, who’d credit it?”

Banks walked around the back of the terrace block to see if he could find an easy way into Charlie’s place. A narrow cobbled alley ran past Charlie’s backyard. Each house had a high wall and a tall wooden gate. Some of the walls were topped with broken glass, and some of the gates swung loose on their hinges. Banks lifted the catch and pushed at Charlie’s gate. It had scratched and faded green paint and one of the rusty hinges had broken, making it grate against the flagstone path as he opened it. It wasn’t much of a backyard, and most of it was taken up by a murky puddle that immediately found its way through his shoes. First, out of habit, Banks tried the doorknob.

The door opened.

Perhaps Charlie hadn’t had time to lock up properly before being abducted, Banks thought, as he made his way inside the dark house. He found a light switch on the wall to his right and clicked it on. He was in the kitchen. Nothing much there except for a pile of dirty dishes waiting to be washed. They never would be now.

He walked through to the living room, which was tidy and showed no signs of a struggle. Noting the new-looking television and DVD setup, not what you could afford on a night watchman’s salary, Banks got some idea of what Charlie had done with his money. He went upstairs.

There were two small bedrooms, a bathroom with a stained tub and a tiny WC with a ten-year-old Playboy magazine on the floor and a copy of Harold Robbins’s The Carpetbaggers resting on the roll of toilet paper. One bedroom was empty except for a few cardboard boxes filled with magazines – mostly soft porn – and secondhand paperbacks, and the other, Charlie’s, revealed only an unmade bed and a few clothes.

Downstairs, in one of the sideboard drawers, Banks found the only items of interest: the title deed to the house, Charlie’s driving license, a checkbook, and a bankbook that indicated Charlie had made five cash deposits of £200 each over the past month, in addition to what seemed to be his regular paycheck. A thousand quid. Interesting, Banks thought. That would at least account for the new TV and DVD setup. What had the crooked little devil been up to? And had it got him killed?

Wednesday morning dawned every bit as dismal as Tuesday. It was still dark when Banks drove into Eastvale, sipping hot black coffee from a specially designed carrying mug on the way. The other CID officers were already in the office when he got there, and DS Hatchley, in particular, looked down-hearted that he had missed the opportunity of a day trip to Leicestershire. Or perhaps he was jealous that Banks had Annie’s company. He gave Banks the kind of bitter, defeated look that said rank pulled the birds every time, and what was a poor sergeant to do? If only he knew.

“You’ll be driving, I suppose?” Annie said when they got out back to the car park.

That was another thing Banks appreciated about Annie: she was a quick learner with a good memory. It was unusual for a DCI to drive his own car. Having a driver was one of the perks of his position, but Banks liked to drive, even in this weather. He liked to be in control. Every time he let someone else drive him, no matter how good they were, he felt restless and irritated by any minor mistakes they made, constantly wanting to get his own foot on the clutch or the brake. It seemed much simpler to do the driving himself, so that was what he did. Annie understood that and didn’t question his idiosyncrasy.

Banks slipped a tape of Mozart wind quintets in the Cavalier’s sound system as he turned out of the car park. “Mmm, that’s nice,” said Annie. “I like a bit of Mozart.” Then she settled back into the seat and lapsed into silence. It was another thing Banks liked about her, he remembered, the way she seemed so centered and self-contained, the way she could appear comfortable and relaxed in the most awkward positions, at ease with silence. It had also taken him a while to get used to her complete lack of deference to senior ranks, especially his, as well as to her rather free and easy style of dress, learned from growing up in an artists’ commune surrounded by bearded artistic types such as her painter father, Ray Cabbot. Today she was wearing red winkle-picker boots that came up just above her ankles, black jeans and a Fair Isle sweater under her loose suede jacket. Rather conservative for Annie.

“How are you liking it at Eastvale?” Banks asked as they joined the stream of traffic on the A1.

“Hard to say yet. I’ve hardly got my feet under the desk.”

“What about the traveling?”

“Takes me about three-quarters of an hour each way. That’s not bad.” She glanced sideways at him. “It’s about the same for you, as I remember.”

“True. Have you thought of selling the Harkside house?”

“I’ve thought of it, but I don’t think I will. Not just yet. Wait and see what happens.”

Banks remembered Annie’s tiny cramped cottage at the center of a labyrinth of narrow, winding streets in the village of Harkside. He remembered his first visit there, when she had asked him on impulse for dinner and cooked a vegetarian pasta dish as they drank wine and listened to Emmylou Harris, remembered standing in the backyard for an after-dinner smoke, putting his arm around her shoulders and feeling the thin bra strap. Despite all the warning signs… he also remembered kissing the little rose tattoo just above her breast, their bodies, sweaty and tired, the unfamiliar street sounds the following morning.

He negotiated his way from the A1 to the M1. Lorries churned up oily rain that coated his windscreen before the wipers could get through it; there were more long delays at roadwork signs where nobody was working; a maniac in a red BMW flashed his lights about a foot from Banks’s rear end and then, when Banks changed lanes to accommodate him, zoomed off at well over a ton.

“What did you find out about Charlie?” he asked Annie when he had got into the rhythm of motorway driving.

Annie’s eyes were closed. She didn’t open them. “Not much. Probably not more than you know already.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“He was born Charles Douglas Courage in February 1946-”

“You don’t have to go that far back.”

“I find it helps. It makes him one of the generation born immediately after the war, when the men came home randy and ready to get on with their lives. He’d have been ten in 1956, too young for Elvis, perhaps, but twenty in 1966, and probably just raring for all the sex, drugs and rock and roll you lot enjoyed in your youth. Maybe that was where he got his start in crime.”

Banks risked a glance away from the road at her. She still had her eyes closed, but there was a little smile on her face. “Charlie wasn’t into dealing drugs,” he said.

“Maybe it was the rock and roll, then. He was first arrested for distribution of stolen goods in August 1968 – to wit, long-playing records. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, to be exact, stolen directly from a factory just outside Manchester.”

“A music lover, our Charlie,” he said. “Carry on.”

“After that comes a string of minor offenses – shoplifting, theft of a car stereo – then, in 1988, he was arrested for theft of livestock. To be exact, seventeen sheep from a farm out Relton way. Did eighteen months.”

“Conclusion?”

“He’s a thief. He’ll steal anything, even if it walks on four legs.”

“And since then?”

“He appears to have gone straight. Helped Eastvale police out on a number of occasions, mostly minor stuff he found out about through his old contacts.”

“Got a list?”

“DC Templeton’s working on it.”

“Okay,” said Banks. “What next?”

“A number of odd jobs, most recently working as a night watchman at the Daleview Business Park. Been there since September.”

“Hmm. They must be a trusting lot at Daleview,” said Banks. “I think one of us might pay them a visit tomorrow. Anything else?”

“That’s about it. Single. Never married. Mother and father deceased. No brothers or sisters. Funny, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

Annie stirred in the car seat to face him. “A small-time villain like Charlie Courage getting murdered so far from home.”

“We don’t know where he was murdered yet.”

“An inspired guess. You don’t shoot someone in the chest with a shotgun and then drive him around bleeding in a car for three hours, do you?”

“Not without making a mess, you don’t. You know, it strikes me that Charlie might have been taken on the long ride.”

“The long ride?”

Banks glanced at her. She looked puzzled. “Never heard of the long ride?”

Annie shook her head. “Can’t say as I have.”

“Just a minute…” A slow-moving local delivery van in front of them was sending up so much spray that the windscreen wipers couldn’t keep up with it. Carefully, Banks changed lanes and overtook it. “The long ride,” he said, once he could see again. “Let’s say you’ve upset someone nasty – you’ve had your fingers in the till, or you’ve been telling tales out of school – and he’s decided he has to do away with you, right?”

“Okay.”

“He’s got a number of options, all with their own pros and cons, and this is one of them. What he does – or rather, what his hired hands do – is they pick you up and take you for a ride. A long ride. It’s got two main functions. The first is that it confuses the local police by taking the crime away from the patch that gave rise to it. Follow?”

“And the second? Let me guess.”

“Go on.”

“To scare the shit out of him.”

“Right. Let’s say you’re driven from Eastvale to Market Harborough. You know exactly what’s going to happen at the end of the journey. They make sure you have no doubt about that whatsoever, that there’s going to be no reprieve, no commuting of the death sentence, so you’ve got three hours or thereabouts to contemplate your life and its imminent and inevitable end. An end you can also expect to be painful and brutal.”

“Cruel bastards.”

“It’s a cruel world,” said Banks. “Anyway, from their perspective, it acts as a deterrent to other would-be thieves or snitches. And, remember, it’s not as if we’re dealing with lily-whites here. The victim is usually a small-time villain who’s done something to upset a more powerful villain.”

“Charlie Courage, small-time villain. Fits him to a tee.”

“Exactly.”

“Except that he was supposed to be going straight, and there aren’t any major crime bosses in Eastvale.”

“Maybe he wasn’t going as straight as we thought. Maybe he was just avoiding drawing our attention. And they don’t have to be that big. I’m not talking about the Mafia or the Triads here. There are plenty of minor villains who think life is pretty cheap. Maybe Charlie fell afoul of one of them. Think about it. Charlie worked as a night watchman. He put a thousand quid in the bank – above and beyond his wages – over the past month. What does that tell you, Annie?”

“That he was either selling information, blackmailing someone or he was being paid off to look the other way.”

“Right. And he must have been playing way out of his league. Maybe we’ll get a better idea when we talk to the manager up there tomorrow. Nearly there now.”

Banks negotiated his way around Leicester toward Market Harborough, about thirteen miles south. When they got to the High Street there, it was almost noon, and it took Banks another ten minutes to find the police station.

Before they got out of the car, Banks turned to Annie. “Are we going to be okay?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. This. Working together.”

She flashed him a smile. “Well, we seem to be doing all right so far, don’t we?” she said, and slipped out of the car.

DI Collaton turned out to be a big bear of a man with thinning gray hair, a red face and a slow, country manner. A year or so away from retirement, Banks guessed. No wonder he didn’t want to get involved in a murder inquiry. He looked at his watch and said, “Have you two eaten at all?”

They shook their heads.

He grabbed his raincoat from the stand in the corner of his office. “I know a place.”

They followed him to a small pub about two streets away. Judging by the smiles and hellos exchanged, Collaton was well-known there. He led them to a corner table, which gave a little privacy, then offered the first round of drinks. Annie asked for a tomato juice, though Banks knew she enjoyed beer. He ordered a pint of the local best bitter. A fire burned in the hearth and Christmas decorations festooned the walls and ceiling. Apart from the buzz of conversation around the bar, the place was quiet, which was the way Banks liked his pubs, and all too rare these days. As was Annie’s habit in pubs, she seemed to mold herself to the hard chair and stretch her legs out, crossing them at the ankles. DI Collaton raised his eyebrows at her red winkle-pickers, but said nothing.

After Banks had ordered game pie, on Collaton’s recommendation, and Annie, being a vegetarian, went for the Ploughman’s Lunch, he lit what he realized with some surprise was his first cigarette of the day.

“We don’t get a lot of murders down here,” said Collaton after his first sip.

That didn’t surprise Banks. From what he had seen, he supposed Market Harborough to be a bit smaller than Eastvale – maybe seventeen or eighteen thousand people – and Charlie Courage was Eastvale’s first murder victim of the entire year so far. In December, no less. “Any idea why they might have chosen your patch?” he asked.

Collaton shook his head. “Not really. It’s handy for the M1,” he said, “but a bit off the beaten track. If they were taking him somewhere, and he got troublesome…”

“Any witnesses?”

“Nobody saw or heard a thing. It’s out Husbands Bosworth way, toward the motorway, and at this time of year there’s nobody around. More in summer, tourist season, like.”

Banks nodded. Same as Eastvale. “Any physical evidence?”

“Tire tracks. That’s about all.”

“Anything interesting or unusual on his person?”

“Just the usual. Except his wallet was missing.”

“I doubt robbery was the motive,” Banks mused. “Maybe a London mugger might blow away someone with a shotgun, but not in some leafy Midlands lane.”

“My thoughts exactly,” said Collaton. “I thought maybe they’d taken it to help keep his identity unknown a bit longer. Maybe they didn’t know he’d got form and we’d find out that way.”

“Possibly.”

“Had he been up to anything lately?”

“We don’t know yet,” said Banks. “Rumor has it he’s been going straight. Had a job as a night watchman. We know he made five cash deposits of two hundred quid each over the past month, though, and I doubt that he came by the money honestly.”

Their food arrived. Collaton was right about the game pie. Annie nibbled at her cheese and pickled onion. Collaton kept looking at her out of the corner of his eye, when he thought no one noticed. At first Banks thought he was simply puzzled by her, as people often were, then he realized the dirty old bugger fancied her. And him old enough to be her father.

Suddenly, Banks felt himself struck almost as physically as by a blow by the memory of Emily Riddle in his hotel room. Not so much by her white and slender nakedness, the spider tattoo or the feel of her body pressing against his as by her torn dress, her fear, the little question mark of blood, and Barry Clough. Why on earth hadn’t he followed up on that? The next morning he had simply gone out to Oxford Street as soon as the shops opened and, not being skilled at shopping for women’s clothing, bought her a tracksuit because it seemed easiest. Though he had questioned her about the previous night, she had given away nothing, maintaining a surly silence all the way home. Did she even remember how she got to his hotel room and her awkward attempt at seducing him?

When he had driven her home from the station and left her with her parents, she had given him a look he found hard to interpret. Sad, yes, partly, and perhaps also a little let-down; defeated, a little hurt, but not completely without affection, a sort of complicit recognition that they had shared something together, been through an adventure. Banks had decided on the way that he had no reason to tell Riddle what happened down there. If Emily wanted to do so, that was fine, but his part of the bargain was over; she was Riddle’s problem now.

Still, it had gnawed at him over the past few weeks – Clough especially. Perhaps, if he had time over the next couple of days, he could make a few discreet inquiries of old friends on the Met, see if Clough had form, find out what his particular line of work was. Dirty Dick Burgess ought to know; he had been working with one of the top-level criminal intelligence departments for a while now. But Riddle had asked Banks to be discreet, and sometimes, when you set things in motion, you couldn’t always stop them as easily as you wanted to, and you didn’t know in which direction they would spin. That was Banks’s problem, as Riddle had told him more than once: he had never learned when to leave well enough alone.

“Sir?”

Banks snapped back from a long distance when he felt Annie’s elbow in his ribs. “Sorry. Miles away.”

“DI Collaton asked if we wanted to have a look at the scene after lunch.”

Banks looked at Collaton, who showed concern in his eyes, whether for Banks’s health or the lapse in attention wasn’t clear. “Yes,” he said, pushing his empty plate aside. “Yes, by all means let’s go have a look at poor old Charlie’s final resting place.”

After viewing the spot where Charlie Courage’s body had been discovered, just off a muddy track in some woods near Husbands Bosworth, they attended the postmortem in Market Harborough Hospital.

Courage’s body had already been photographed, finger-printed, weighed, measured and X-rayed the previous day. Now, the Home Office pathologist, Dr. Lindsey, and his assistants, worked methodically and patiently through a routine they must have carried out many times. Lindsey began with a close external examination, paying special attention to the gunshot pattern.

“Definitely a shotgun wound,” he said. “Twelve-bore, by the looks of it. Range about two or three yards.” He pointed out the central entrance opening over the heart and the numerous single small holes around it from the scattered shot. “Any closer and it would have been practically circular. Much farther away and the shot would have spread out more into smaller groups. There’s still some wadding embedded in the wounds, too. Look.” He held up a piece. “Depends whether they used a sawn-off, of course, as the shot patterns don’t hold as far. Even so, it was pretty close range. And judging by the angle of the main wounds, it looks as if either his killer was very tall or the victim was on his knees at the time.”

Banks guessed that if he was right in assuming Charlie had been taken for the long ride, then his killer would have used a sawn-off shotgun. The legal length for shotgun barrels was twenty-four inches, not including the stock, and no villain is going to walk or drive around with something that big.

“Then there’s this bruising,” Dr. Lindsey went on, pointing out the discoloration around Courage’s stomach and kidneys. “It looks as if he was beaten either with fists or some hard object before he was killed. Enough to make him piss blood for a week at least.”

“Perhaps somebody wanted him to tell them something?” Collaton said.

“From what I knew of Charlie, he’d give up his grandmother if you so much as waved your fist in his face. They might have wanted him to tell them something, but my bet is that he did, and then they carried on beating him up just for the fun of it.”

Next, Dr. Lindsey began his dissection with the Y-incision. He took blood samples, then removed and inspected the inner organs, working from the trachea, esophagus and what was left of the heart, down to the bladder and spleen.

As all this was going on, Banks kept a close eye on Annie. He didn’t know how good she was at postmortems on fairly fresh corpses, as the last one they had been to was of a skeleton disinterred after fifty years. Though she paled a little when Dr. Lindsey opened up the body cavity and swallowed rather loudly as he squished out the various organs as if he were shucking oysters, she stood her ground.

Until, that is, the power saw started ripping into the front quadrant of the skull. At that, Annie swayed, put her hand to her mouth and, making a gurgling sound, dashed out of the room. Dr. Lindsey rolled his eyes and Collaton glanced at Banks, who just shrugged.

Dr. Lindsey pulled out the brain, looked it over, tossed it from hand to hand as if it were a grapefruit, then put it aside for weighing and sectioning.

“Well,” he said, “until we get the tests back on the blood and tissue samples, we won’t know whether he was poisoned before he was shot. I doubt it, myself. Judging by the blood, I’d say the gunshot wound was the cause of death. It blew his heart open. And going by the lividity, I’d also say he was killed at the same spot he was found.”

“Did you determine time of death?” Banks asked, though he knew it was the question all pathologists hated the most.

Dr. Lindsey frowned and searched through a pile of notes on the lab bench. “I made some rough calculations at the scene. Only rough, of course. I’ve got them somewhere. Now, where… ah here it is. Rigor, temperature… allowing for the chilly weather and the rain… he was found on Tuesday, that’s yesterday, at about four P.M., and I surmised he’d been dead at least twenty-four hours, perhaps longer.”

Charlie had been seen by his neighbor on Sunday afternoon at around two o’clock, and if he had been killed sometime Monday afternoon, that left over twenty-four hours, the last twenty-four hours of his life, unaccounted for. When they got back to Eastvale, Banks would have to initiate some house-to-house inquiries in the neighborhood, find out if anyone had seen Charlie later than Sunday lunchtime, and if anyone had seen him with anyone. He hadn’t got to the lane near Husbands Bosworth in his own car, and he certainly hadn’t walked there. The fresh tire tracks that Collaton’s men had found most likely belonged to the car that had taken him there, as the lane was an out-of-the-way place. Depending on how good the impressions were, it might be possible to match them up with a particular car – if, of course, they found the car, and if the tires hadn’t been changed.

They had learned just about all they could from Dr. Lindsey for the moment, and Banks thanked him for his prompt postmortem and left with Collaton, looking out for Annie as he walked along the corridors.

They found her standing out in the misty, gray afternoon taking deep breaths. When she saw them, she looked away and ran her hand over her chestnut hair. “Christ, I’m sorry. I feel such an idiot.”

“It’s all right,” said Banks. “Don’t worry about it.”

“It’s not that I haven’t been to one before.” She pulled a face. “I was okay, honest I was, until… It was the smell, the saw burning the bone, and the noise it made. I couldn’t… I’m sorry. I feel like such a fool.”

It was the first time Banks had seen any real break in Annie’s on-the-job composure. “I told you,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. Are you up to going home?”

She nodded. He imagined it would be a quiet journey. Annie was clearly pissed off at herself for showing signs of weakness.

Banks looked at Collaton. The indulgent expression on his face indicated he would probably have forgiven Annie anything.

It was late when Banks finally got home, after calling in at the station to issue some actions for the following morning. The traffic on the M1 was murder, especially around Sheffield, and patches of dense fog on the A1 meant they had to move at a crawl, keeping in view the rear lights of the lorry in front of them. Banks was reminded of the time when he was lost in the fog, heading for a friend’s house, and had blindly followed the car in front right into a private drive. He had been damned embarrassed when the irate driver came to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing.

Annie recovered from her little spell of embarrassment a lot quicker than Banks expected. He had to remind himself that this wasn’t Susan Gay, and that Annie didn’t worry so much about appearing weak or incompetent; she simply got on with her work and her life.

The fog in the dale slowed him down most on the last leg of his journey. Wraiths of gray mist nuzzled up the daleside and swirled on the road before him. The road ran several feet up the hillside from the valley bottom, where the River Swain meandered through The Leas, and most of the fog had settled low. Banks knew the road well enough not to take too many foolish risks.

Back at the cottage, he found two messages waiting. The first was from Tracy, asking him for ideas about what she should buy her mother for Christmas. A wedding dress, perhaps? Banks thought. But he wouldn’t say that to Tracy.

The next caller didn’t identify herself, but he knew immediately who she was: “Hello, it’s me. Look, I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch… it was probably very rude of me… I mean, I never really thanked you and all, did I, you know, for what you did for me? I suppose I was pretty fucked up.” There, she broke off and Banks could hear her suck on a cigarette and blow out the smoke. He thought he could hear background noise, too. “Anyway, you must let me buy you lunch at least. Hey, look, I’ll be over in Eastvale tomorrow, so why don’t you meet me at the Black Bull on York Road over from Castle Hill, say about one o’clock? Is that all right?” There was a silence on the line, as if she were actually expecting an answer. Then she sighed. “Okay, then, hope to see you tomorrow. And I’m sorry. Really, I am. Ciao.”

Banks remembered the last time he had seen Emily at the door of the old mill house, in the pink tracksuit he had bought for her on Oxford Street, an outfit she obviously loathed, giving him that enigmatic look as he delivered her to her parents. He remembered Jimmy Riddle’s clipped thanks and Rosalind’s cool silence. It was all unspoken, but he had sensed Riddle’s awkward, hidden love for his daughter and Rosalind’s distance.

So Emily Riddle wanted to thank him. Should he go? Yes, he thought, reaching for the bottle of Laphroaig; hell, yes, he would go.