The next few words were muffled.
‘All right, Mr Fellowes,’ Banks said. ‘Just stay where you are and we’ll be along as soon as possible.’
Gristhorpe had finished his call when Banks tapped on the door and entered his office. With its overflowing bookcases and dim lighting, it looked more like a study than part of a police station.
‘Ah, Alan,’ Gristhorpe said, rubbing his hands together. ‘They said they’ll deliver before the weekend, so we can make a start on the repairs on Sunday, if you’d care to come?’
Working on the drystone wall, which fenced in nothing and was going nowhere, had become something of a ritual for the superintendent and his chief inspector. Banks had come to look forward to those Sunday afternoons on the north daleside above Lyndgarth, where Gristhorpe lived alone in his farmhouse. Mostly they worked in silence, and the job created a bond between them, a bond that Banks, still an incomer to the Yorkshire Dales, valued greatly.
‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘Very much. Look, I’ve just had a rather garbled phone call from a chap by the name of Neil Fellowes. Says he’s found a body on the fell near Swainshead.’
Gristhorpe leaned back in his chair, linked his hands behind his head and frowned. ‘Any details?’
‘No. He’s still a bit shook up, by the sound of it. Shall I go?’
‘We’ll both go.’ Gristhorpe stood up decisively. ‘It’s not the first time a body has turned up in The Head.’
‘The Head?’
‘That’s what the locals call it, the whole area around Swainshead village. It’s the source of the River Swain, the head of the dale.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s about twenty-five miles, but I’m sure we’ll make it before closing time if I remember Freddie Metcalfe.’
Banks was puzzled. It was unusual for Gristhorpe to involve himself so much in an actual field investigation. As head of Eastvale CID, the superintendent could use his discretion as regards his role in a case. Theoretically, he could, if he wanted to, take part in searches and house-to-house enquiries, but of course he never did. In part, his job was administrative. He tended to delegate casework and monitor developments from his office. This was not due to laziness, Banks realized, but because his talent was for thinking and planning, not for action or interrogation. He trusted his subordinates and allowed them far greater leeway with their cases than many superintendents did. But this time he wanted to come along.
They made an incongruous couple as they walked to the car park at the back: the tall bulky Gristhorpe with his unruly thatch of grey hair, bristly moustache, pockmarked face and bushy eyebrows; and Banks, lean, slight, with angular features and short almost cropped black hair.
‘I can’t see why you keep on using your own car, Alan,’ Gristhorpe said as he eased into the passenger seat of the white Cortina and grappled with the seat belt. ‘You could save a lot of wear and tear if you took a department vehicle.’
‘Have they got radio-cassettes?’ Banks asked.
‘You know damn well they haven’t.’
‘Well, then.’
‘Well, what?’
‘I like to listen to music while I’m driving. You know I do. It helps me think.’
‘I suppose you’re going to inflict some on me, too?’
It had always surprised Banks that so well read and cultured a person as Gristhorpe had absolutely no ear for music at all. The superintendent was tone-deaf, and even the most ethereal Mozart aria was painful to his ears.
‘Not if you don’t want,’ Banks said, smiling to himself. He knew he wouldn’t be able to smoke on the way, either. Gristhorpe was a non-smoker of the most rabid kind — reformed after a twenty-year, twenty-a-day habit.
Banks pulled into the cobbled market square, turned left on to North Market Street, and headed for the main Swainsdale road, which ran by the river along the valley bottom.
Gristhorpe grunted and tapped the apparatus next to the dashboard. ‘At least you’ve had a police radio fitted.’
‘What was it you said before?’ Banks asked. ‘About this not being the first body in Swainshead.’
‘It was before your time.’
‘Most things were.’ Banks made the sharp westward turn, and soon they were out of the town, driving by the river meadows.
Gristhorpe opened his window and gulped in the fresh air. ‘A man had his skull fractured,’ he said. ‘It was murder, no doubt about that. And we never solved it.’
‘What happened?’
‘Some Boy Scouts found the body dumped in an old mineshaft on the fell side a couple of miles north of the village. The doctor said it had been there about a week.’
‘When?’
‘Just over five years ago.’
‘Was it a local?’
‘No. The victim was a private detective from London.’
‘A private investigator?’
‘That’s right. Name of Raymond Addison. A solo operator. One of the last of the breed, I should imagine.’
‘Did you find out what he was doing up here?’
‘No. We had his office searched, of course, but none of his files had any connection with Swainsdale. The Yard asked around among his friends and acquaintances — not that he had very many — but they turned up nothing. We thought he might have been on holiday, but why choose Yorkshire in February?’
‘How long had he been in the village?’
‘He’d arrived fairly late in the day and managed to get a room in a guest house run by a chap named Sam Greenock, who told us that Addison said nothing except for some remarks about the cold. He wrapped up well and went out for a walk after the evening meal, and that was the last anyone saw of him. We made enquiries, but nobody had seen or heard him. It was dark when he went out, of course, and even the old men who usually hang about chatting on the bridge come rain or shine had gone in by then.’
‘And as far as you could find out he had no connection with the area at all?’
‘None. And, believe me, we dug and dug. Either nobody knew or, more likely, someone wasn’t talking. He was an ex-serviceman, so we checked up on old army pals, that kind of thing. We ended up doing a house-to-house of the entire village. Nothing. It’s still unsolved.’
Banks slowed down as he drove through Helmthorpe, one of the dale’s largest villages. Beyond there, the landscape was unfamiliar to him. Though still broader than most of the dales, thanks to a glacier of particularly titanic proportions, the valley seemed to narrow slightly as they got closer to The Head, and the commons sloped more steeply up the fell sides. There were none of the long limestone scars that characterized the eastern part of Swainsdale, but the hills rose to high rounded summits of moorland.
‘And that’s not all,’ Gristhorpe added after a few moments of silence. ‘A week before Addison’s body was found — the day after he was killed, as far as the doctors could make out — a local woman disappeared. Name of Anne Ralston. Never been seen since.’
‘And you think there must have been a connection?’
‘Not necessarily. At the time she went, of course, the body hadn’t been discovered. The whole thing could have been a coincidence. And the doctor admitted he could have been wrong about the exact day of death, too. It’s hard to be accurate after a body’s been buried that long. But we’ve no idea what happened to her. And you’ve got to admit it’s damned odd to get a missing person and a murder in the same village within a week of each other. She could have been killed and buried, or maybe she simply ran off with a fellow somewhere. We’d hardly cause to block all the ports and airports. Besides, she could have been anywhere in the world by the time the body was found. At best we’d have liked her to answer a few questions, just to put our minds at rest. As it was, we did a bit more poking around the landscape but found no traces of another body.’