Cold Is The Grave

“But it wasn’t just the threat of revelations he made, remember. He also said he could take her back with him whenever he wanted. He knew I wouldn’t be able to bear the thought of her being with him. You should have told me, Banks. When you brought her back. You should have told us the sort of trouble she’d been getting herself into. You blame me for withholding evidence, but neither of you said a word about what Emily had been up to in London.”

Banks sighed. “What good would it have done?” Though maybe he should have, he thought miserably. He had believed that in keeping quiet he was saving the Riddles from unnecessary pain, and saving Emily perhaps from their disciplinarian backlash. But look what had happened. Emily was dead and Jimmy Riddle was in deep trouble himself. Trouble from which he might never fully recover. Banks remembered what Emily had told him about Riddle being a poor detective, always coming up with the wrong killer in the crime novels he read as an adolescent. He could believe it. “It’s no use blaming me,” he went on. “Believe me, there are times I wish I’d done things differently. But you. You’re a professional copper. You’re a bloody chief constable, for crying out loud. I can’t believe you’d be so stupid and stubborn and proud not to tell me that a man I’ve been seriously suspecting as your daughter’s killer actually approached you as a blackmail target only four days before she was murdered.”

Riddle’s expression hardened. “I told you. It was a private matter. It has nothing to do with Emily’s death. He had no motive for killing her. Don’t you think that if I really believed Clough had killed Emily I’d have throttled him with my bare hands by now? You might not understand this, Banks, but I loved my daughter.”

“Who can really know with someone like Clough?” Banks argued. “Perhaps from a business standpoint he would be better off with Emily alive, but he’s also a violent man, from what I’ve heard, and a possessive one. He doesn’t like people walking out on him. Maybe that’s why he killed her. Besides, I don’t believe she would have gone back to him that easily. She was frightened of him.”

“Well, that might be one good reason for going back to him, mightn’t it? Men like him might have a certain fascination for girls like… like Emily.”

“What do you mean?”

“Precocious, mischievous, rebellious. She’s always been like that. You know that she and I didn’t get on, no matter how much I cared about her. It always came out wrong. And Clough. He’s about my age, but he’s a criminal. Policeman – criminal. Don’t you see that she was doing this to hurt me?”

“If she’d wanted to hurt you, she’d have made sure you knew about it.”

Riddle just shook his head.

“Did Clough say anything about his business interests at this dinner?”

“No.”

“Did he mention PKF Computer Systems?”

“No.”

“Charlie Courage? Gregory Manners? Jamie Gilbert?”

“No. I’ve told you what he said. Don’t you think that if he’d told me anything incriminating I would have passed it along to you?”

“After what I’ve just heard, I don’t know about that.”

“There was nothing, Banks. Just his not-so-subtle blackmail hints.”

“But he was here, in the Eastvale area, when both Charlie Courage and your daughter were killed. Doesn’t that make you stop and think?”

“The first thing it makes me think is that he can’t have been responsible for the murders. He’s not so stupid as to be on the doorstep when they went down.”

“Stop defending him. For crying out loud, anyone would think you had…”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

Banks shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Whatever it is, please have the decency to wait until after the funeral, would you?”

Banks said he would, but his mind was elsewhere, with what he had left unsaid. He could think of only one good reason why Riddle would be so unprofessional as to conceal the details about his secret meeting with Clough: that he was at least considering capitulating to Clough’s request. Which brought Banks to consider an even greater problem. With Emily’s death, clearly a large part of Clough’s hold over Riddle had been extinguished. If Clough hadn’t killed her, then, who did want Emily Riddle dead, and why?

14

Alot of people, Banks mused, thought that the police attended the funerals of murder victims in the hope of finding the killer there. They didn’t. That only happened in books and on television. On the other hand, given that a victim’s close relatives were likely to be at the funeral, and given that by far the largest percentage of murders were committed by close family members, then the odds were pretty good that the murderer would be at the funeral.

Not this one, though. Barry Clough wasn’t there, for a start, and he was the closest they had to a suspect so far, even though Riddle was probably right about Emily being of far more value to him alive. Was Banks wearing blinkers when it came to Clough, or was he going off half-cocked, as Gristhorpe had warned him against doing? He didn’t think so. He knew it didn’t make sense for Clough to kill Emily just after he had used her to attempt to blackmail her father, but he was sure there must be something he was missing, some angle he hadn’t considered yet. The only thing he had thought of, but didn’t really believe in, was that Clough was some sort of psychopath and simply hadn’t been able to stop himself. If that had been the case, he would have made damn sure he was there to watch and participate in Emily’s murder.

Craig Newton and Ruth Walker had traveled up together; they stood looking puzzled and miserable in the rain as the vicar intoned the Twenty-third Psalm. Banks caught their eyes; Craig gave him a curt nod and Ruth gave him a dirty look.

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.” There was nothing green about the Dales pastures that morning – everything, from sky to houses to the unevenly shaped fields and drystone walls was a dull slate-gray or a mud-brown – nor was there anything still about the River Swain, which tumbled over a series of small waterfalls beside the graveyard and, along with the wind screaming through the gaps in the drystone wall like a Stockhausen composition, almost drowned out the vicar’s words. The wind also drove the rain hard across the churchyard, and the mourners seemed to draw as deeply into their heavy overcoats, gloves and hats as they could.

At least the vicar was using the old version, Banks noticed. “The Lord is my shepherd; therefore can I lack nothing” had about as much resonance as “as in a mirror, dimly,” he thought. Not that he went to church very often, but like many people, he remembered the powerful church language of his youth and anything less fell far short. He hadn’t known what half of it meant, either then or now, but it never seemed to matter; religion, he thought, was mostly a matter of mumbo-jumbo, anyway. Chants, mantras, whatever. Comforting mumbo-jumbo, in this case, though nobody was fooled. Rosalind Riddle dabbed at her eyes with a white hanky every now and then, Benjamin stood next to her, looking confused, and her husband looked as if he had been up all night grappling with his conscience.

When Riddle caught Banks’s eye briefly on the way out to the graveside, he looked away guiltily. And well he might, thought Banks, who still felt a residue of anger toward him for stalling the investigation. He had realized after his interview with Riddle the previous day, though, that he had also been guilty of hiding too many things; he hadn’t told Annie about the lunch with Emily at first, and he still hadn’t told her about the night in the hotel room. With any luck now, she wouldn’t find out about that. Of course, he could rationalize his own shortcomings a lot more easily than he could Riddle’s, but he could at least understand why Riddle might not like to admit to him that he had kept a dinner engagement with his daughter’s lover, a man who also happened to have a criminal reputation. Would Riddle have capitulated with whatever Clough wanted from him in order to protect himself and Emily? What kind of man was he when it came to the crunch? He would never have the chance to find out now. Virtue can’t prove itself until it’s tested.