“I’m not convinced,” Burgess said slowly, “but I’ll go along with it. And,” he added, poking his cigar in Banks’s direction, “on your head be it, mate. If he buggers off again, you’ll answer for it.”
“All right.”
“And we’ll keep him in another night, just so he gets the message. I’ll have another little chat with him, too.”
It was a compromise. Burgess was not the kind of man to give way completely to someone else’s idea. It was the best deal he would get, so Banks agreed.
Burgess smiled over at Glenys. Down at the far end of the bar, a glass broke.
“I’ll go get us a couple more, shall I?”
“Let me.” Banks stood up quickly. “It’s my round.” It wasn’t, but the last thing they needed was a lunchtime punch-up between the landlord of the Queen’s Arms and a detective superintendent from Scotland Yard.
“I’ll take Osmond again, too,” Burgess said, when Banks got back. “I don’t trust you when that bird of his is around. You go all gooey-eyed.”
Banks ignored him.
“Can I take DC Richmond with me?” Burgess asked.
“What’s wrong with Sergeant Hatchley?”
“He’s a lazy sod,” Burgess said. “How he ever made sergeant I don’t bloody know.
Every time he’s been with me he’s just sat there like a stuffed elephant.”
“He has his good points,” Banks said, surprised to find 208
himself defending Hatchley. He wondered if the sergeant really had been nurturing a dream of Burgess’s inviting him to join some elite Yard squad just because they both believed in the privatization of everything and in an England positively bristling with nuclear missiles. If he had, tough titty.
The difference between them, Banks thought, was that Hatchley just assumed attitudes or inherited them from his parents; he never thought them out.
Burgess, on the other hand, really believed that the police existed to hold back the red tide and keep immigrants in their place so that the government could get on with the job of putting the Great back in Britain. He also believed that people like Paul Boyd should be kept off the streets so that decent citizens could rest easy in their beds at night. It never occurred to him for a moment that he might not pass for decent himself.
Banks followed Burgess back to the station and went up to his office. He had a phone call to make.
209
I
South of Skipton, the landscape changes dramatically. The limestone dales give way to millstone grit country, rough moorland for the most part, bleaker and wilder than anything in Swainsdale. Even the dry-stone walls are made of the dark purplish gritstone. The landscape is like the people it breeds: stubborn, guarded, long of memory.
Banks drove through Keighley and Haworth into open country, with Haworth Moor on his right and Oxenhope Moor on his left. Even in the bright sun of that springlike day, the landscape looked sinister and brooding. Sandra hated it; it was too spooky and barren for her. But Banks found something magical about the area, with its legends of witches, mad Methodist preachers, and the tales the Bronte sisters had spun.
Banks slipped a cassette in the stereo and Robert Johnson sang “Hellhound on My Trail.” West Yorkshire was a long way from the Mississippi delta, but the dark, jagged edges of Johnson’s guitar seemed to limn the landscape, and his haunted, doom-laden lyrics captured its mood.
Dominated by mill-towns at the valley bottoms and weaving communities on the heights, the place is a product of the Industrial Revolution. Majestic old mills with their tall chimneys of dark, grainy millstone grit still remain. Many have now been scoured of two hundred years’ soot and set up as craft and antiques markets.
210
Hebden Bridge is a mill-town turned tourist trap, full of bookshops and antique shops. Not so long ago, it was a centre of trouser and corduroy manufacturing, but since the seventies, when the hippies from Leeds and Manchester invaded, it has been more of a place for arts festivals, poetry readings in pubs and other cultural activities.
Banks drove down the steep hill from the moors into the town itself. Rows of tall terraced houses run at angles diagonally along the hillside and overlook the mills at the valley bottom. They look like four-storey houses, but are actually rows of two-storey houses built one on top of the other. You enter the lower house from a street or ginnel at one level, and the upper from a higher one at the back. All of which made it very difficult for Banks to find Reginald Lee’s house.
Lee, Banks had discovered from his phone call to PC Brooks of the Hebden Bridge police, was a retired shop owner living in one of the town’s two-tiered buildings. Just over three years ago he had been involved in an accident on the town’s busy main street-a direct artery along the Calder valley from east to west-which had resulted in the death of Alison, Seth Cotton’s wife.
Banks had also discovered from the police that there had been nothing suspicious about her death, and that Mr Lee had not been at fault. But he wanted to know more about Seth Cotton’s background, and it seemed that the death of his wife was a good place to start. He was still convinced that the number written so boldly in the old notebook was PC Gill’s and not just part of a coincidentally similar calculation. Whether Seth himself had written it down was another matter.
Lee, a small man in a baggy, threadbare pullover, answered the door and frowned at Banks. He clearly didn’t get many visitors. His thinning grey hair was uncombed, sticking up on end in places as if he’d had an electric shock, and the room he finally showed Banks into was untidy but clean. It was also chilly.
Banks kept his jacket on.
