Cold Is The Grave

him show his mettle.”

While Rickerd demonstrated only minimal detective skills, he had an almost obsessive interest in details and the minutiae of organization: exactly what a good office manager needed, as it was his job to supervise the recording and tracking of all information retrieved both from a crime scene and during an investigation.

If truth be told, you needed more than a skill for organization, but Rickerd would do. Maybe he would find his true metier. Banks knew that having a train-spotter in the department would come in useful one day. Rickerd was just the kind to carry around that little book full of printed train numbers and draw a neat line with pen and ruler through each one he actually saw. He was too young for the steam trains, though. When Banks was a kid, there were still a few of them in service, many with exotic names like The Flying Scotsman, sleek, streamlined beauties. Many of Banks’s friends had been train-spotters, but standing on a windy station platform all day and noting down numbers to cross off later in a little book had never appealed to him. These days, with all the diesels looking like clones of one another, there didn’t seem to be much point in train-spotting anymore.

Banks called Rickerd over and explained what he wanted him to do. Rickerd went off looking pleased with himself to be given such responsibility. Then Banks lit a cigarette and leaned against a pillar. “I’d better go tell her parents,” he sighed.

“One of the uniforms can do that.” Annie put her hand on his arm in a curiously intimate gesture. “To be quite honest, Alan, you look all in. Maybe you should let me take you home.”

Wouldn’t that be nice? Banks thought. Home. Annie. Maybe even bed. The adagio from Concierto de Aranjuez drifting up from downstairs. The clock put back so that none of this had ever happened. “No,” he said. “I’ve got to tell them myself. I owe them that much.”

Annie frowned. “I don’t understand. What do you owe them?”

Banks smiled. “I’ll tell you all about it later.” Then he walked up the stairs to the deserted market square.

Banks felt sick and heavy with dread as he approached Riddle’s house close to one-thirty that morning. The Old Mill stood in almost complete darkness behind the privet hedge, but a glimmer of light showed through the curtains of one of the ground-floor rooms, and Banks wondered if it had been left on as a means of discouraging burglars. He knew it hadn’t when he saw the curtain twitch at the sound of his car on the gravel drive. He should have known Jimmy Riddle would be up working well after midnight. Hard work and long hours were what had got him where he was in the first place.

When he turned the engine off, he could hear the old millrace running down the garden. It reminded him of Gratly Falls outside his own modest cottage. He hardly had time to knock before a hall light came on and the door opened. Riddle stood there in an Oxford shirt and gray chinos; it was the first time Banks had seen him in casual dress.

“Banks? I thought that was your car. What on earth…?”

But his voice trailed off as recognition that something was seriously wrong crept into his features. Whether he’d been a good one or not, Riddle had been a copper for long enough to know that the call in the middle of the night was hardly a social one; he knew enough to read the expression on Banks’s face.

“Maybe we could sit down, have a drink,” Banks said, as Riddle stood aside to let him in.

“Tell me first,” said Riddle, leaning back on the door after he closed it.

Banks couldn’t look him in the eye. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. The honorific sounded odd even as he spoke the word; he had never called Riddle “sir” before, except in a sarcastic tone.

“It’s Emily, isn’t it?”

Banks nodded.

“My God.”

“Sir.” Banks took Riddle’s elbow and guided him into the living room. Riddle collapsed into an armchair and Banks found the cocktail cabinet. He poured them both a stiff whiskey; he was beyond worrying about drink driving at that point. Riddle held the glass but didn’t drink from it right away.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” he said.

“I’m afraid so.”

“What happened? How?”

“We’re not sure yet, sir.”

“Was there an accident? A car crash?”

“No. It was nothing like that.”

“Out with it, man. This is my daughter we’re talking about.”

“I know that, sir. That’s why I’m trying to tread softly.”

“Too late for that, Banks. What was it? Drugs?”

“Partly.”

“What do you mean, ‘partly’? Either it was or it wasn’t. Tell me what happened to her!”

Banks paused. It was a terrible thing to tell a dead girl’s father how painfully she had died, but he reminded himself that Riddle was also chief constable, a professional, and he would find out soon enough, anyway. Best he find out now. “We’re keeping this strictly confidential for the time being, but Dr. Burns thinks it might have been cocaine spiked with strychnine.”

Riddle jerked forward and spilled some whiskey on his trousers. He didn’t even bother to wipe it off. “Strychnine! My God, how…? I don’t understand.”

“She was taking cocaine at a nightclub in Eastvale,” Banks said. “The Bar None. You might have heard of it?”

Riddle shook his head.

“Anyway, if the doctor is right, somebody must have put strychnine in her cocaine.”

“Christ, Banks, do you realize what you’re saying?”

“I do, sir. I’m saying that, in all likelihood, your daughter was murdered.”

“Is this some sort of sick joke?”

“Believe me, I wish it were.”

Riddle ran his hand over his shiny bald skull, a gesture Banks had often thought ridiculous in the past; now it reeked of despair. He drank some of his whiskey before asking the hopeless question everyone asks in his situation: “You’re sure there’s no mistake?”

“No mistake, sir. I saw her myself. I know it’s no consolation, but it must have been very fast,” Banks lied. “She can’t have suffered very much.”

“Rubbish. I’m not an idiot, Banks. I’ve studied the textbook. I know what strychnine does. She’d have gone into convulsions, bent her spine. She’d have-”

“Don’t,” Banks said. “There’s no sense torturing yourself.”

“Who?” Riddle asked. “Who would want to do something like that to Emily?”

“Have you noticed anything strange while she’s been here?”

“No.”

“What about today, the last few days? Any changes in her behavior?”

“No. Look, you went to London, Banks. You found her. What about the people she was hanging around with down there? This Clough character. Do you think he could have had something to do with it?”

Banks paused. Barry Clough had been the first to come to his mind when Dr. Burns had told him about the poisoned cocaine. He also remembered how Emily had told him that Clough hated to lose his prize possessions. “That’s a distinct possibility,” he said.

Riddle plucked at the creases of his trousers, then he let out a long sigh. “You’ll do what you have to do, Banks. I know that. Wherever it leads you.”

“Yes, sir. Is there…?”

“What?”

“Anything you want to tell me?”

Riddle paused. He seemed to think hard for a few moments, then he shook his head. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you. It’s out of my hands now.” He knocked back the rest of the whiskey. “I’ll go to the mortuary and identify her.”

“It’ll wait till morning.”

Riddle got up and started pacing the room. “But I must do something. I can’t just… I