But sleep didn’t come so easily for Katie that night. She thought about the body on the fell and pulled the sheets up tighter around her chin. Last time it had been awfuclass="underline" all those questions, all the trouble there’d been — especially when the police tried to connect the dead man with the missing girl, Anne Ralston. They’d acted as if Stephen or one of his friends might have killed both of them. And what had they found out? Nothing. Raymond Addison seemed to have come from nowhere.
Katie had hardly known Anne, for she and Sam hadn’t been in Swainshead long when all the trouble started five years ago. The only reason they had met her at all was because Sam wanted to seek out the ‘best people’ in the village. He latched on to the Colliers, and Anne Ralston had been going out with Stephen at the time.
She hadn’t been Katie’s type though, and they’d never have become good friends. Anne, she remembered, had seemed far too footloose and fancy-free for her taste. She had probably just run off with another man; it would have been typical of her to go off without a word and leave everyone to worry about her.
Katie turned on her side to reach for some Kleenex from the bedside table, dragging the sheets with her. Sam stirred and yanked back his half. Gently, she wiped herself. She hated that warm wetness between her legs. More and more every time she hated it, just as she had come to loathe her life with Sam in Swainshead.
And things had been getting worse lately. She had been under a black depression for a month or more. She knew it was a woman’s place to obey her husband, to stay with him for better, for worse, to submit to his demands in bed and slave for him all day in the house. But surely, she thought, life shouldn’t be so bleak. If there was any chance of escape from the drudgery that her life had become and from the beatings, would it really be such a sin to take it?
Things hadn’t always been so bad. When they had met, Katie had been working as a chambermaid at Queen’s Hotel in Leeds, and Sam, an apprentice electrician, had turned up one day to check the wiring. It had hardly been love at first sight; for Katie, love was what happened in the romantic paperbacks she read, the ones that made her blush and look over her shoulder in case her granny could see her reading them. But Sam had been presentable enough — a cocky young bantam with curly chestnut hair and a warm boyish smile. A real charmer.
He had asked her out for a drink three times, and three times she had said no. She had never set foot in a pub. Her granny had taught her that they were all dens of iniquity, and Katie herself held alcohol responsible for her father’s wickedness and for the misery of her mother’s life. Katie didn’t realize at the time that her refusal of a drink was taken as a rejection of Sam himself. If only he would ask her to go for a walk, she had thought, or perhaps to the Kardomah for a coffee and a bite to eat after work.
Finally, in exasperation, he had suggested a Saturday afternoon trip to Otley. Even though Katie was over eighteen, she still had a difficult time persuading her grandmother to let her go, especially as she was to ride pillion on Sam’s motorbike. But in the end the old woman had given in, muttering warnings about the Serpent in Eden and wolves in sheep’s clothing.
In Otley they had, inevitably, gone for a drink. Sam had practically dragged her into the Red Lion, where she had finally broken down and blurted out why she had refused to go for a drink before. He laughed and touched her shoulder gently. She drank bitter lemon and nothing terrible happened to either of them. After that she went to pubs with him more often, though she always refused alcohol and never felt entirely comfortable.
But now, she thought, turning over again, life had become unbearable. The early days, just after their marriage, had been full of hope after Katie had learned how to tolerate Sam’s sexual demands. They had lived with his parents in a little back-to-back in Armley and saved every penny they earned. Sam had a dream, a guest house in the Dales, and together they had brought it about. Those had been happy times, despite the hours of overtime, the cramped living quarters and the lack of privacy, for they had had something to aim towards. Now it was theirs, Katie hated it. Sam had changed; he had become snobbish, callous and cruel.
Like every other night for the past few months, she cried quietly to herself as she tried to shut out Sam’s snoring and listen to the breeze hiss through the willows by the nameless stream out at the back. She would wait and keep silent. If nothing happened, if nothing came of her only hope of escape, then one night she would sneak out of the house as quiet as a thief and never come back.
In room five, Neil Fellowes knelt by the side of the bed and said his prayers.
He had woken from his drunken stupor in time to be sick in the washbasin, and after that he had felt much better. So much so, in fact, that he had gone down and eaten the lamb chops with mint sauce that Mrs Greenock had cooked so well. Then he spent the rest of the evening in his room reading.
And now, as he tried to match the words to his thoughts and feelings, as he always did in prayer, he found he couldn’t. The picture of the body kept coming back, tearing aside the image of God that he had retained from childhood: an old man with a long white beard sitting on a cloud with a ledger on his lap. Suddenly, the smell was in his nostrils again; it was like trying to breathe at the bottom of a warm sewer. And he saw again the bloody maggot-infested pulp that had once been a face, the white shirt rippling with corruption, the whole thing rising and falling in an obscene parody of breathing.
He tried to force his mind back to the prayer but couldn’t. Hoping the Lord would understand and give him the comfort he needed, he gave up, put his glasses on the table and got into bed.
On the edge of sleep, he was able to reconstruct the sequence of events in his mind. At the time, he had been too distraught, too confused to notice anything. And very soon his head had been spinning with the drink. But he remembered bursting into the pub and asking for help. He remembered how Sam Greenock and the others at the table had calmed him down and suggested what he should do. But there was something else, something wrong. It was just a vague feeling. He couldn’t quite bring it to consciousness before sleep took him.
3
‘What is it?’ Banks asked, examining the faded slip of paper that Sergeant Hatchley had dropped on the desk in front of him.
‘Forensic said it’s some kind of receipt from a till,’ Hatchley explained. ‘You know, one of those bits of paper they give you when you buy something. People usually just drop them on the floor or shove them in their pockets and forget about them. They found it in his right trouser pocket. It’d been there long enough to go through the washer once or twice, but you know what bloody wizards they are in the lab.’
Banks knew. He had little faith in forensic work as a means of catching criminals, but the boffins knew their stuff when it came to identification and gathering evidence. Their lab was just outside Wetherby, and Gristhorpe must have put a ‘rush’ on this job to get the results back to Eastvale so quickly. The body had been discovered only the previous afternoon, and it was still soaking in a Lysol bath.
Banks looked closely again at the slip, then turned to its accompanying transcription. The original had been too faint to read, but forensic had treated it with chemicals and copied out the message exactly:
‘Wendy’s,’ Banks said. ‘That’s a burger chain. There’s a few branches in London. Look at those prices, though.’