Past Reason Hated

‘Could be. At least we know now he lied to us about being out. We’ll talk to him again later. What I want today is a fresh perspective on Caroline Hartley’s family background. We’ve already got Susan’s perceptions, now it’s time for yours and mine. The old man couldn’t have done it, so we’ll concentrate on the brother. It sounds like he had plenty of motive, and nobody keeps tabs on his movements. It wouldn’t have been hard for him to leave his father to sleep for a couple of hours and slip out. From what Susan said, the old man probably wouldn’t have noticed.’

‘What about transport?’

‘Bus. Or train. The services are frequent enough.’

They pulled up outside the huge, dark house.

‘Bloody hell, it does look spooky, doesn’t it?’ Richmond said. ‘He’s even got the curtains closed.’

They walked up the path through the overgrown garden and knocked at the door. Nobody answered. Banks hammered again, harder. A few seconds later, the door opened slowly and a thin, pale-faced teenager with spiky black hair squinted out at the sharp, cold day. Banks showed his card.

‘You can’t see Father today,’ Gary said. ‘He’s ill. The doctor was here.’

‘It’s you we want to talk to,’ Banks said. ‘If you don’t mind.’

Gary Hartley turned his back on them and walked down the hall. He hadn’t shut the door, so they exchanged puzzled glances and followed him, closing the door behind them. Not that it made much difference; the place was still freezing.

In the front room, Banks recognized the high ceiling, curlicued corners and old chandelier fixture that Susan had described. He could also see the evidence of what Gary Hartley had done to the place, its ruined grandeur: wainscotting pitted with dart holes, scratched with obscene graffiti.

Richmond looked stunned. He stood by the door with one hand in his overcoat pocket and the other touching the right side of his moustache, just staring around him. The room was dim, lit only by a standard lamp near the battered green-velvet sofa on which Gary Hartley lay smoking and studiously not looking at his visitors. A small colour television on a table in front of the curtained window was showing the news with the sound turned down. Empty lager cans and wine bottles stood along the front of the stone hearth like rows of soldiers. In places, the carpet had worn through so much that only the crossed threads remained to cover the bare floorboards. The room smelled of stale smoke, beer and unwashed socks.

It must have been beautiful once, Banks thought, but a beauty few could afford. Back in the last century, for every family enjoying the easy life in an elegant Yorkshire mansion like this, there were thousands paying for it, condemned to the misery of starving in cramped hovels packed close to the mills that accounted for their every waking hour.

Banks picked a scuffed, hard-backed chair to sit on and swept a pair of torn jeans to the floor. He managed to light a cigarette with his gloves on. ‘What did your father do for a living?’ he asked Gary.

‘He owned a printing business.’

‘So you’re not short of a bob or two?’

Gary laughed and waved his arm in an all-encompassing arc. ‘As you can see, the fortune dwindles, riches decay.’

Where did he get such language? Banks wondered. He had already taken in the remains of an old library in ceiling-high bookcases beside the empty fireplace: beautiful, tooled-leather bindings. Cervantes, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dickens. Now he saw a book lying open, face down, beside Gary’s sofa. The gold embossed letters on the spine told him it was Vanity Fair, something he had always meant to read himself. What looked like a red-wine stain in the shape of South America had ruined the cover. So Gary Hartley drank, smoked, watched television and read the classics. Not much else for him to do, was there? Was he knowledgeable about music, too? Banks saw no signs of a stereo. It was eerie talking to this teenager. He couldn’t have been more than a year or so older than Brian, but any other similarity between them ended with the spiky haircut.

‘Surely there must be some money left?’ Banks said.

‘Oh, yes. It’ll see him to his grave.’

‘And you?’

He looked surprised. ‘Me?’

‘Yes. When he’s gone. Will you have some money left to help you leave here, find a place of your own?’

Gary dropped his cigarette in a lager can. It sizzled. ‘Never thought about it,’ he said.

‘Is there a will?’

‘Not that he’s shown me.’

‘What’ll happen to the house?’

‘It was for Caroline.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Dad was going to leave it for Caroline.’

Banks leaned forward. ‘But she deserted him, she left you all. You’ve been taking care of him by yourself for all these years.’ At least that was what Susan Gay had told him.

‘So what?’ Gary got up with curiously jerky movements and took a fresh pack of cigarettes from the mantelpiece. ‘She was always his favourite, no matter what.’

‘What now?’

‘With her gone, I suppose I’ll get it.’ He looked around the cavernous room, as though the thought horrified him more than anything else, and flopped back down on the sofa.

‘Where were you on the evening of December twenty-second?’ Richmond asked. He had recovered enough to find himself a chair and take out his notebook.

Gary glanced over at him, a look of scorn on his face. ‘Just like telly, eh? The old alibi.’

‘Well?’

‘I was here. I’m always here. Or almost always. Sometimes I used to go to school so they didn’t get too ratty with me, but it was a waste of time. Since I left, I’ve got a better education reading those old books. I go to the shops sometimes, just for food and clothes. Then there’s haircuts and the bank. That’s about it. You’d be surprised how little you have to go out if you don’t want to. I can do the whole lot in one morning a week if I’m organized right Booze is the most important. Get that right and the rest just seems to fall into place.’

‘What about your friends?’ Banks asked. ‘Don’t you ever go out with them?’

‘Friends? Those wallies from school? They used to come over sometimes.’ He pointed to the wainscotting. ‘As you can see. But they thought I was mad. They just wanted to drink and do damage and when they got bored they didn’t come back. Nothing changes much here.’

‘December twenty-second?’ Richmond repeated.

‘I told you,’ Gary said, ‘I was here.’

‘Can you prove that?’

‘How? You mean witnesses?’

‘That would help.’

‘I probably emptied out the old man’s potty. Maybe even changed his sheets if he messed the bed. But he won’t remember. He doesn’t know one day from the next I might even have dropped in at the off-licence for a few cans of lager and some fags, but I can’t prove that either.

Every time Gary talked about his father his tone hardened to hatred. Banks could understand that. The kid must be torn in half by his conflicts between duty and desire, responsibility and the need for freedom. He had given in and accepted the yoke, and he must both hate himself for his weakness and his father for making such a demand in the first place. And Caroline, of course. How he must have hated Caroline, though he didn’t sound bitter when he spoke of her. Perhaps his hatred had been assuaged by her death and he had allowed himself to feel some simple pity.

‘Did you go to Eastvale that evening?’ Richmond went on. ‘Did you call on your sister and lose your temper with her?’

Gary coughed. ‘You really think I killed her, don’t you? That’s a laugh. If I was going to I’d have done it a few years ago, when I really found out what she’d lumbered me with, not now.’

Five or six years ago, Banks calculated, Gary would have been only twelve or thirteen, perhaps too young for a relatively normal child to commit sororicide – and surely he must have been living a more normal life back then. Also, as Banks had learned over the years, bitterness and resentment could take a long time to reach breaking point. People nursed grudges and deep-seated animosities for years sometimes before exploding into action. All they needed was the right trigger.

‘Did you ever visit Caroline in Eastvale?’ Banks asked.

‘No. I told you, I hardly go out. Certainly not that far.’

‘Have you ever met Veronica Shildon?’

‘That the lezzie she was shacking up with?’

‘Yes.’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘But Caroline visited you here?’

He paused. ‘Sometimes. When she’d come back from London.’

‘You told the detective constable who visited you a few days ago that you knew nothing of Caroline’s life in London. Is that true?’

‘Yes.’

‘So for over five years, when she was between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, you had no contact.’

‘Right. Six years, really.’

‘Did you know she had a baby?’

Gary sniffed. ‘I knew she was a slut, but I didn’t know she had a kid, no.’

‘She did. Do you know what happened to it? Who the father was?’

‘I told you, I didn’t even know she’d had one.’

He seemed confused by the issue. Banks decided to take his word for the moment.

‘Did she ever mention a woman called Ruth to you?’