Dry Bones That Dream, page 2
‘Yes.’
‘Was there anything unusual about the taller man’s laugh?’
‘I . . . I don’t . . . I can’t remember.’ Alison wiped a tear from her eye with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. ‘It was just a laugh, that’s all.’
‘It’s all right. Don’t worry about it. Did they harm you in any way?’
Alison reddened and looked down into her half-empty mug. ‘The smaller one came over to me when I was tied up, and he put his hand on my breast. But the other one made him stop. It was the only time he said anything.’
‘How did he make him stop? What did he do?’
‘He just said not to, that it wasn’t part of the deal.’
‘Did he use those exact words, Alison? Did he say, “It’s not part of the deal”?’
‘Yes. I think so. I mean, I’m not completely sure, but it was something like that. The smaller man didn’t seem to like it, being told what to do by the other, but he left me alone after that.’
‘Did you see any kind of weapon?’ Banks asked.
‘Yes. The kind of gun that farmers have, with two barrels. A shotgun.’
‘Who had it?’
‘The smaller man, the one in charge.’
‘Did you hear a car at any time?’
‘No. Only when Mum and Dad came home. I mean, I heard cars go by on the road sometimes, you know, the one that goes through Relton and right over the moors into the next dale. But I didn’t hear anyone coming or going along our driveway.’
‘What happened when your parents came home?’
Alison paused and swirled the tea in the bottom of her mug as if she were trying to see into her future. ‘It must have been about half past eleven or later. The men waited behind the door and the tall one grabbed Mum while the other put his gun to Dad’s neck. I tried to scream and warn them, honest I did, but the rag in my mouth . . . I just couldn’t make a sound . . .’ She ran her sleeve across her eyes again and sniffled. Banks gestured to PC Weaver, who found a box of tissues on the window-sill and brought them over.
‘Thank you,’ Alison said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You don’t have to go on if you don’t want,’ Banks said. ‘It can wait till tomorrow.’
‘No. I’ve started. I want to. Besides, there’s not much more to tell. They tied Mum up the same as me and we sat there facing each other. Then they went outside with Dad. Then we heard the bang.’
‘How long between the time they went out and the shot?’
Alison shook her head dreamily. She held the mug up close to her throat. The sleeves of her sweatshirt had slipped down, and Banks could see the raw, red lines where the rope had cut into her flesh. ‘I don’t know. It seemed like a long time. But all I can remember is we just sat looking at each other, Mum and me, and we didn’t know what was happening. I remember a night-bird calling somewhere. Not a curlew. I don’t know what it was. And it seemed like forever, like time just stretched out and Mum and I got really scared now looking at one another not knowing what was going on. Then we heard the explosion and . . . and it was like it all snapped and I saw something die in Mum’s eyes, it was so, so . . .’ Alison dropped the mug, which clipped the corner of the table then fell and spilled without breaking on the floor. The sobs seemed to start deep inside her, then she began to shake and wail.
Banks went over and put his arms around her, and she clung on to him for dear life, sobbing against his chest.
THREE
‘It looks like his office,’ Banks said, when Gristhorpe turned on the light in the last upstairs room.
Two large desks formed an L-shape. On one of them stood a computer and a laser printer, and on a small table next to them stood a fax machine with a basket attached at the front for collecting the cut-off sheets. At the back of the computer desk, a hutch stood against the wall. The compartments were full of boxes of disks and software manuals, mostly for word processing, spreadsheets and accounting programmes, along with some for standard utilities.
The other desk stood in front of the window, which framed a view of the farmyard. Scene of Crime officers were still going about their business down there: taking samples of just about everything in sight, measuring distances, trying to get casts of footprints, sifting soil. In the barn, their bright arc lamps had replaced Darby’s roving light.
This was the desk where Rothwell dealt with handwritten correspondence and phone calls, Banks guessed. There was a blotter, which looked new – no handy wrong-way-around clues scrawled there – a jam jar full of pens and pencils, a blank scratch-pad, an electronic adding machine of the kind that produces a printed tape of its calculations and an appointment calendar open at the day of the murder, 12 May.
The only things written there were ‘Dr Hunter’ beside the 10:00 a.m. slot, ‘Make dinner reservation: Mario’s, 8:30 p.m.’ Below that, and written in capitals all across the afternoon, ‘FLOWERS?’ Banks had noticed a vase full of fresh flowers in the living room. An anniversary present? Sad when touching gestures like that outlive the giver. He thought of Sandra again, and suddenly he wanted very much to be near her, to bridge the distance that had grown between them, to hold her and feel her warmth. He shivered.
‘All right, Alan?’ Gristhorpe asked.
‘Fine. Someone just walked over my grave.’
‘Look at all this.’ Gristhorpe pointed to the two metal filing cabinets and the heavy-duty shelves that took up the room’s only long, unbroken wall. ‘Business records, by the looks of it. Someone’s going to have to sift through it.’ He looked towards the computer and grimaced. ‘We’d better get Phil to have a look at this lot tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t trust myself to turn the bloody thing on without blowing it up.’
Banks grinned. He was aware of Gristhorpe’s Luddite attitude towards computers. He quite liked them, himself. Of course, he had only the most rudimentary skills and never seemed to be able to do anything right, but Phil Richmond, ‘Phil the Hacker’ as he was known around the station, ought to be able to tell them a thing or two about Rothwell’s system.
Finding nothing else of immediate interest in the office, they walked out to the rear of the house, which faced north, and stood in the back garden, the hems of their trousers damp with dew. It was after five now, close to dawn. A pale sun was slowly rising in the east behind a veil of thin cloud that had appeared over the last couple of hours, mauve on the horizon, but giving the rest of the sky a light grey wash and the landscape the look of a water-colour. A few birds sang, and occasionally the sound of a farm vehicle starting up broke the silence. The air smelled moist and fresh.
It was certainly a garden they stood in, and not just a backyard. Someone – Rothwell? His wife? – had planted rows of vegetables – beans, cabbage, lettuce, all neatly marked – a small area of herbs and a strawberry patch. At the far end, beyond a dry-stone wall, the land fell away steeply to a beck that coursed down the daleside until it fed into the River Swain at Fortford.
The village of Fortford, about a mile down the hillside, was just waking up. Below the exposed foundations of the Roman fort on its knoll to the east, the cottages with their flagstone roofs huddled around the green and the square-towered church. Already, smoke drifted from some of the chimneys as farm labourers and shopkeepers prepared themselves for the coming day. Country folk were early risers.
The whitewashed front of the sixteenth-century Rose and Crown glowed pink in the early light. Even in there, someone would soon be in the kitchen, making bacon and eggs for the paying guests, especially for the ramblers, who liked to be off early. At the thought of food, his stomach rumbled. He knew Ian Falkland, the landlord of the Rose and Crown, and thought it might not be a bad idea to have a chat with him about Keith Rothwell. Though he was an expatriate Londoner, like Banks, Ian knew most of the local dalesfolk, and, given his line of work, he picked up a fair amount of gossip.
Finally, Banks turned to Gristhorpe and broke the silence. ‘They certainly seemed to know what was what, didn’t they?’ he said. ‘I don’t imagine it was a lucky guess that the girl was in the house alone.’
‘You’re thinking along the same lines as I am, aren’t you, Alan?’ said Gristhorpe. ‘An execution. A hit. Call it what you will.’
Banks nodded. ‘I can’t see any other lines to think along yet. Everything points to it. The way they came in and waited, the position of the body, the coolness, the professionalism of it all. Even the way one of them said touching the girl wasn’t part of the deal. It was all planned. Yes, I think it was an execution. It certainly wasn’t a robbery or a random killing. They hadn’t been through the house, as far as we could tell. Everything seems in order. And if it was a robbery, they’d no need to kill him, especially that way. The question is why? Why should anyone want to execute an accountant?’
‘Hmm,’ said Gristhorpe. ‘Unhappy client, maybe? Someone he turned in to the Inland Revenue?’ Nearby, a peewit sensed their closeness to its ground nest and started buzzing them, piping its high-pitched call. ‘One of the things we have to do is find out how honest an accountant our Mr Rothwell was,’ Gristhorpe went on. ‘But let’s not speculate too much yet, Alan. We don’t know if there’s anything missing, for a start. Rothwell might have had a million in gold bullion hidden away in his garage for all we know. But you’re right about the execution angle. And that means we could be dealing with something very big, big enough to contract a murder for.’
‘Sir?’
At that moment, one of the SOC officers came into the garden through the back door.
Gristhorpe turned. ‘Yes?’
‘We’ve found something, sir. In the garage. I think you’d both better come and have a look for yourselves.’
FOUR
They followed the officer back to the brightly lit garage. Rothwell’s body had, mercifully, been taken to the morgue, where Dr Glendenning, the Home Office pathologist, would get to work on it as soon as he could. Two men from the SOC team stood by the barn door. One was holding something with a pair of tweezers and the other was peering at it closely.
‘What is it?’ Banks asked.
‘It’s wadding, sir. From the shotgun,’ said the SOCO with the tweezers. ‘You see, sir, you can buy commercially made shotgun cartridges, but you can also reload the shells at home. Plenty of farmers and recreational shooters do it. Saves money.’
‘Is that what this bloke did?’ Banks asked.
‘Looks like it, sir.’
‘To save money? Typical Yorkshireman. Like a Scotsman stripped of his generosity.’
‘Cheeky southern bastard,’ said Gristhorpe, then turned to the SOCO. ‘Go on, lad.’
‘Well, sir, I don’t know how much you know about shotguns, but they take cartridges, not bullets.’
Banks knew that much, at least, and he suspected that Gristhorpe, from Dales farming stock, knew a heck of a lot more. But they usually found it best to let the SOCOs show off a bit.
‘We’re listening,’ said Gristhorpe.
Emboldened by that, the officer went on. ‘A shotgun shell’s made up of a primer, a charge of gunpowder and the pellets, or shot. There’s no slug and there’s no rifling in the barrel, so you can’t get any characteristic markings to trace back to the weapon. Except from the shell, of course, which bears the imprint of the firing and loading mechanisms. But we don’t have a shell. What we do have is this.’ He held up the wadding. ‘Commercial wadding is usually made of either paper or plastic, and you can sometimes trace the shell’s manufacturer through it. But this isn’t commercial.’
‘What exactly is it?’ asked Banks, reaching out.
The SOCO passed him the tweezers and said, ‘Don’t know for certain yet, but it looks like something from a colour magazine. And luckily, it’s not too badly burned inside, only charred around the edges. It’s tightly packed, but we’ll get it unfolded and straightened out when we get it to the lab, then maybe we’ll be able to tell you the name, date and page number.’
‘Then all we’ll have to do is check the list of subscribers,’ said Banks, ‘and it’ll lead us straight to our killer. Dream on.’
The SOCO laughed. ‘We’re not miracle workers, sir.’
‘Has anyone got a magnifying glass?’ Banks asked the assembly at large. ‘And I don’t want any bloody cracks about Sherlock Holmes.’
One of the SOCOs passed him a glass, the rectangular kind that came with the tiny-print, two-volume edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Banks held up the wadding and examined it through the glass.
What he saw was an irregularly shaped wad of crumpled paper, no more than about an inch across at its widest point. At first he couldn’t make out anything but the blackened edge of the wadded paper, but it certainly looked as if it were from some kind of magazine. He looked more closely, turning the wadding this way and that, holding it closer and farther, then finally the disembodied shapes coalesced into something recognizable. ‘Bloody hell,’ he muttered, letting his arm fall slowly to his side.
‘What is it, Alan?’ Gristhorpe asked.
Banks handed him the glass. ‘You’d better have a look for yourself,’ he said. ‘You won’t believe me.’
Banks stood back and watched Gristhorpe scrutinize the wadding, knowing that it would be only a matter of moments before he noticed, as Banks had done, part of a pink tongue licking a dribble of semen from the tip of an erect penis.
2
ONE
Traditional police wisdom has it that if a case doesn’t yield leads in the first twenty-four hours, then everyone is in for a long, tough haul. In practice, of course, the period doesn’t always turn out to be twenty-four hours; it can be twenty-three, nine, fourteen, or even forty-eight. That’s the problem: when do you scale down your efforts? The answer, Banks reminded himself as he dragged his weary bones into the ‘Boardroom’ of Eastvale Divisional Police Headquarters at ten o’clock that morning, is that you don’t.
The Suzy Lamplugh case was a good example. It started as a missing-persons report. One lunch-time, a young woman left the estate agent’s office in Fulham, where she worked, and disappeared. Only after over a year’s intensive detective work, which resulted in more than six hundred sworn statements, thousands of interviews, 26,000 index cards and nobody knew how many man-hours, was the investigation wound down. Suzy Lamplugh was never found, either alive or dead.
By the time Banks arrived at the station, Superintendent Gristhorpe had appointed Phil Richmond Office Manager and asked him to set up the Murder Room, where all information regarding the Keith Rothwell case would be carefully indexed, cross-referenced and filed. At first, Gristhorpe thought it should be established in Fortford or Relton, close to the scene, but later decided that they had better facilities at the Eastvale station. It was only about seven miles from Fortford, anyway.
Richmond was also the only one among them who had training in the use of the HOLMES computer system – acronym for the Home Office Major Enquiry System, with a superfluous ‘L’ for effect. HOLMES wasn’t without its problems, especially as not all the country’s police forces used the same computer languages. Still, if no developments occurred before long, Richmond’s skill might prove useful.
Gristhorpe had also given a brief press conference first thing in the morning. The sooner photographs of Keith Rothwell and descriptions of the killers, balaclavas and all, were sitting beside the public’s breakfast plates or flashing on their TV screens, the sooner information would start to come in. The news was too late for that morning’s papers, but it would make local radio and television, the Yorkshire Evening Post and tomorrow’s national dailies.
Of course, Gristhorpe had given hardly any details about the murder itself. At first, he had even resisted the idea of releasing Rothwell’s name. After all, there had been no formal identification, and they didn’t have his fingerprints on file for comparison. On the other hand, there was little doubt as to what had happened, and they were hardly going to drag Alison or her mother along to the mortuary to identify the remains.
Gristhorpe had also been in touch with the anti-terrorist squad at Scotland Yard. Yorkshire was far from a stranger to IRA action. People still remembered the M62 bomb in 1974, when a coach carrying British servicemen and their families was blown up, killing eleven and wounding fourteen. Many even claimed to have heard the explosion from as far away as Leeds and Bradford. More recently, two policemen had been shot by IRA members during a routine traffic check on the A1.
The anti-terrorist squad would be able to tell Gristhorpe whether Rothwell had any connections, however tenuous, that would make him a target. As an accountant, he could, for example, have been handling money for a terrorist group. In addition, forensic information and details of the modus operandi would be made known to the squad, who would see if the information matched anything on file.
While Gristhorpe handled the news media and Richmond set up the Murder Room, Banks and Susan Gay had conducted a breakfast-time house-to-house of Relton and Fortford – including a visit to the Rose and Crown and a generous breakfast from Ian Falkland – trying to find out a bit about Rothwell, and whether anyone had seen or heard anything unusual on the night of the murder.
Gristhorpe, Richmond and Susan Gay were already in the room when Banks arrived and poured himself a large black coffee. The conference room was nicknamed the ‘Boardroom’ because of its well-polished, heavy oval table and ten stiff-backed chairs, not to mention the coarse-textured burgundy wallpaper, which gave the room a constant aura of semi-darkness, and the large oil painting (in ornate gilt frame) of one of Eastvale’s most successful nineteenth-century wool merchants, looking decidedly sober and stiff in his tight-fitting suit and starched collar.
‘Right,’ said Gristhorpe, ‘time to get up to date. Alan?’
Banks slipped a few sheets of paper from his briefcase and rubbed his eyes. ‘Not much so far, I’m afraid. Rothwell was trained as an accountant. At least we’ve got that much confirmed. Some of the locals in Relton and Fortford knew him, but not well. Apparently, he was a quiet sort of bloke. Kept himself to himself.’
