Her face lit up. ‘No, it certainly doesn’t. The tourists rarely use the telephone, or if they do, they use it only once. Mostly they just take photographs of their husbands or wives pretending to use it. Is it a true mystery then? Has there been a murder? Oh, I do so wish Giles were here.’ She checked her watch. ‘Perhaps if you could just stay for another half hour or so? He’s usually not so long. More tea? I have fresh scones.’
The prospect of spending any longer in the cramped living room surrounded by twee knick-knacks and a garrulous old woman had about as much appeal as a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Winsome and Joanna were looking twitchy, too, Banks noticed. ‘Can you think of anyone?’ he asked. ‘You have the perfect view of the place. If the locals don’t use it, and the tourists don’t use it, then who does?’
‘Only the Gypsies, I suppose, if you care to count them.’
‘Gypsies?’
She waved her hand in the air. ‘Oh, you know. Gypsies, Travellers. Whatever they call themselves. They don’t stop anywhere long enough to have proper telephones installed, do they, and I don’t suppose they can afford mobiles, anyway. Not when they’re all on the dole.’
‘Who are these people?’
‘I’m afraid I have no idea. I’ve just seen them in the village occasionally, a man and a woman, separately. It may be terribly superficial of me to jump to conclusions, but there it is. Greasy hair, dirty clothes, unshaven face. And you should see the man.’
It took Banks a moment, but he glanced at Mrs Boscombe and saw the glimmer of a smile on her face. She’d cracked a joke, knew it, and was proud of it. He laughed, and the others laughed with him. ‘So did you see this Gypsy man or woman use the telephone recently?’ he asked.
‘Yes. A couple of times in the past week or two,’ Mrs Boscombe said.
‘But they weren’t together?’
‘No.’
Banks took out the photo of the girl with Bill Quinn. ‘Is she anything like the woman you mentioned?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘I didn’t get a good look at her, but I would say the one I saw was older, and she had a bit more flesh on her bones. No, it wasn’t her.’
‘OK,’ said Banks, feeling disappointed. If the photo had been taken a few years ago, the woman might have changed, he thought. ‘What about the man? What can you tell me about him?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know anything about him, or about any of them.’
‘Are there any others?’
‘I don’t know. I only saw the two of them use the phone, and it was always after dark. I could only see what I did because the box is well-lit, of course.’
‘Do you remember what days?’
‘Not really. I think the man was last here on Tuesday about nine, because I’d just finished watching Holby City, a little weakness of mine. The woman... it might have been Sunday. Or maybe Saturday. The weekend, I think, anyway.’
‘Can you describe him?’
‘I could only see him in the light from the telephone box. About your height, perhaps, wearing dirty jeans and a scruffy old donkey jacket, hair over his collar, hadn’t been washed in a while, beginnings of a beard and moustache.’
‘Fat or thin?’
‘Maybe just a little more filled out than you. Certainly not fat, not by any stretch of the imagination.’
‘The colour of his hair?’
‘Dark. Black or brown, it would be impossible to say exactly.’
‘Did he talk on the telephone for long?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t linger at the window to watch. All I know is by the time I’d finished what I was doing, he was gone again. Say maybe fifteen or twenty minutes.’
That didn’t quite match the four-minute call that Quinn had received from the box last Tuesday, so perhaps the man had made more than one call. The records from the phone box would tell them what other numbers had been called. If he had phoned Bill Quinn at about nine o’clock on Tuesday, that would have been during quiz night, so perhaps Quinn had missed quiz night because he had been expecting the call. It was a possibility, at any rate. ‘Is there anything else you can remember about this man?’ Banks asked. ‘How old would you say he was?’
‘I have no idea. Quite young. Mid-thirties, perhaps? The beard may have made him look older, of course.’
‘Would you recognise him again?’
‘I don’t know. I couldn’t really make out any clear features, if you know what I mean. I’m quite good at remembering faces, though, even if I’m not very good at describing them. I might remember him.’
‘Do you know where the camp is?’
‘There isn’t one, really. Not exactly a camp, as such.’
Banks’s shoulders slumped. ‘So you don’t know where he was living?’
‘I didn’t say that. I said there isn’t a Gypsy camp as such. Giles told me he heard it from a rambler that there’s someone living up at the old Garskill Farm. It’s about two miles away, on the moors. I can’t imagine what the poor fellow was doing walking up near there, even if he is a rambler, as it’s well off the beaten track and... well... it’s not the sort of place one wants to be alone.’
‘Why is that?’
‘One hears stories. Old stories. It’s a wild part of the moor. Most people give it a wide berth. There’s something eerie about the place.’
‘You mean it’s haunted?’
‘That’s what some folk believe.’
‘And you?’
‘I’ve no cause to go up there. It’s wild moorland. You’d risk getting lost — sometimes those fogs creep up all of a sudden, like, and you can’t see your hand in front of your face. And there are bogs, fens, mires, old lead mine workings, sinkholes. It’s not safe.’
‘Good enough reason not to go there, then,’ said Banks, smiling. ‘Even without the ghosts. What about kids? Is it somewhere the local kids might go to drink, take drugs or have sex?’
‘No. There aren’t really any local kids around here, and there are plenty of places nearer Lyndgarth or Helmthorpe for that sort of thing. Less remote, perhaps, but a lot more comfortable.’
‘So you think this man and the woman you saw might be squatting up at Garskill Farm?’
‘It’s the most likely place.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘Not much to tell, really. Someone must own it, but I can’t tell you who. It’s been abandoned as long as I can remember. Falling to rack and ruin. I’m not even certain it was ever a working farm. It’s my guess it belonged to whoever owned the lead mines, and when the industry died years back, well, they moved on.’
Why on earth, Banks wondered, would someone walk two miles each way twice, eight miles in all, to talk to Bill Quinn on a public telephone if it wasn’t important? Clearly whoever had done it didn’t have access either to a closer land line, or to a mobile, or he feared that someone might be listening in to his conversations. But why? And what, if anything, did he have to do with Bill Quinn’s murder?
They heard the sound of the gate opening and dogs barking. Mrs Boscombe got to her feet. ‘Ah, here’s Giles and the lads. He will be glad to see you. You can tell him about all about the murders you’ve solved. I’ll just put the kettle on again.’
There was no easy way up and over the dale to Garskill Farm, Giles Boscombe had explained, before they managed to cut short his analysis of what should be done about the presence of Gypsies and Travellers. Neither Banks’s Porsche nor Winsome’s Toyota would make it up the winding track, let alone over the top and across the moorland. There were probably other ways in — from the north, perhaps, or even the east or west — but they would most likely involve long detours and, no doubt, getting lost. Even if mobiles worked, satnavs weren’t always reliable in this desolate part of the world. People often mixed up the dales and the moors, but Brontë country was a few miles south-west of where they were, though the moorland landscape on the tops between the dales had many similarities with the moors the Brontës had walked.