By the time he had finished his cigarette, the sun had gone down much lower and the sky had changed. The horizon was now grey and the mauve band much higher in the sky. The lake seemed scattered with pink, as if the colour had transformed itself into raindrops and shattered the ice-blue surface of the water. Carefully, Banks got to his feet on the angled rock and made his way back towards a streetcar stop.
Earlier that day, back in Swainsdale, Detective Constable Philip Richmond had sat on a knoll high on Adam’s Fell and unwrapped his cheese and pickle sandwiches. He flicked away the flies that gathered and poured some coffee from his flask. Up there, the air was pure and sharp; below, the sun glinted on the steel kegs in the back yard of the White Rose and flashed in the fountain playing in the Colliers’ huge garden behind the ugly Gothic mansion. The old men stood on the bridge, and the Greenocks’ front door was closed.
Sam had driven off on one of his regular jaunts to Leeds or Eastvale, and Katie had gone for a walk with Stephen Collier up Swainshead Fell. He thought he could see them across in the north-east, near a patch of grass that was greener than that around it, but it could have been someone else.
Sipping the bitter black coffee, Richmond had reminded himself that tomorrow was his last day in Swainshead. He was expected back at the station with a report on Sunday morning. Not that he hadn’t enjoyed himself — it had been very much like a week’s holiday — but he longed to get back to his Eastvale mates. Tomorrow the rugby team was playing Skipton, a game he would have to miss. There was always a good booze-up and sing-song after the match, and it would be a shame to miss that too. Jim Hatchley was usually there for the booze, of course. An honorary member they called him now he wasn’t fit enough to play any more. But even the sergeant’s presence didn’t spoil Richmond’s fun: a few jars, a good sing-song, then, with a bit of luck, a kiss and a cuddle with Doreen on the way home. He prided himself on being a man of simple tastes, yet he also liked to think that nothing else about him was simple.
Finishing his sandwich, he unwrapped a Kit-Kat and picked up The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the last of the four Philip K. Dick books he’d brought along. But he couldn’t concentrate. He began to wonder why nothing had happened during Banks’ absence. Was the killer certain that the chief inspector would find out nothing in Toronto? Or was there, perhaps, no connection at all between the Addison and Allen murders?
Certainly there had been a bit of a fuss or flap, as Freddie Metcalfe had said, earlier in the week. But it had soon died down and everyone carried on as normal. Was it a false sense of security? The lull before the storm. Perhaps they knew who Richmond was and were being especially careful? He certainly couldn’t keep an eye on all of them.
He stroked his moustache and turned back to his book. Not ours to reason why… But still, he thought, an arrest would have helped his career. A thrilling car chase, perhaps, or a cross-country marathon. He pictured himself bringing in the killer, arm twisted up his back, and throwing him in Eastvale nick under Banks’ approving smile. Then he laughed at himself, brushed a persistent wasp away and went back to Philip K. Dick.
That Saturday, the afternoon of his last day in Toronto, Banks went to his first baseball game. The retractable roof was open and a breeze from the lake relieved some of the humidity at the SkyDome, where the Toronto Blue Jays were playing the New York Yankees, but the temperature was still almost thirty degrees. In England, people would have been fainting from the heat.
Banks and Gregson sat in the stands, ate hot dogs and drank beer out of flimsy plastic cups.
‘Lucky to be drinking it at all,’ Gregson said when Banks complained. ‘It took a lot of doing, getting drinking allowed at ball games.’
A fat boy of about twelve sitting next to Banks stopped shovelling barbecue-flavoured potato crisps into his maw to stand up and hurl obscene death threats at the Yankees’ pitcher. His equally obese mother looked embarrassed but made no attempt to control him.
Banks wished his son, Brian, could be there. Unlike Banks, he had watched enough baseball on Channel 4 to be able to understand the game. When Banks first took his seat, the only baseball term he knew was home run, but by the end of the third innings, Gregson had explained all about RBIs, the tops and bottoms of the innings, designated hitters, knuckle balls, the bullpen, bunting, the balk rule, pinch hitters and at least three different kinds of pitches.
The game mounted to an exciting conclusion, and the boy next to him spilled his crisps all over the floor.
Finally, the home crowd went wild. Down five-four at the bottom of the ninth, with two out, the sixth Blue Jay up drove one home with all the bases loaded — a grand slam, Gregson called it. That made the score eight-five, and that was how the game ended.
They pushed their way out of the stadium, and Gregson negotiated the heavy traffic up Spadina to Bloor, where they stopped in at the Madison for a farewell drink.
‘Are you planning to do anything about the Culver woman?’ Gregson asked.
Banks sipped his pint of Conner bitter. They were out on the patio, and the late afternoon sun beat down on his shoulders.
‘No,’ he answered. ‘What did she do, after all?’
‘From the sound of it, she withheld evidence. She was a material witness. If she’d spoken up, this new homicide might never have happened.’
Banks shook his head. ‘She didn’t have much choice really. I know what you mean, but you’ve got to understand what things are like around Swainshead. It’s not like Toronto. She couldn’t tell what she knew. There was loyalty, yes, but there was also fear. The Colliers are a powerful family. If she’d stayed we might have got something out of her, but on the other hand something might have happened to her first.’
‘So she left under threat?’
‘That’s the way I’d put it, yes.’
‘And you think this Collier guy killed Allen because he knew too much?’
‘I think it was more to do with what Allen intended to do with his knowledge. I can’t prove it, but I think he was going to blackmail Stephen Collier. Julie Culver disagrees, but from what one of Allen’s boozing buddies told me, he had some plan to get back home to England. I think he asked Collier for the money to come home and live in Swainshead again, or maybe to fix him up with a job. Collier’s brother teaches at a small public school, and Allen was a teacher. Maybe he suggested that Stephen tell Nicholas to get him a job there. Instead, Stephen decided to get rid of Allen the same way he did with Addison.’
‘Shit,’ said Gregson. ‘I’d no idea Toronto was so bad that people would stoop to blackmail to get out of here.’
Banks laughed. ‘Maybe it’s just that Swainsdale is so beautiful people would do anything to get there. I don’t know. Allen was seriously disturbed, I think. A number of things took their toll on him: the divorce, the distance from home, the disappointment of not getting the kind of job that would really challenge his mind. Someone told me that he had gone beyond the parochial barriers of most English teachers, but he found himself in a system that placed no value on the exceptional, a system that almost imposed such barriers. The teaching he was doing was dreary, the students were ignorant and uninterested, and I think he tended to blame it on the local educational system. He thought things would be better in England. He probably remembered his own grammar school days when even poor kids got to learn Latin, and he thought things were still like that. Perhaps he didn’t even think he was doing anything really bad when he approached Collier. Or maybe he did. He had plenty of cause to resent him.’