Cold Is The Grave

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.”