Standing in the shadows, p.6
Standing in the Shadows, page 6
“If you can give me a five-year range, I’d be eternally grateful. Seven years is a pretty good start. At least we know what we’re dealing with, to some extent. That’s a fairly recent crime. Same if you can narrow the age of the victim to within five or ten years.”
“Well, I’ll do my best, Superintendent. As I say, there are many tests that can be done. Give me a few days?”
“As long as you need. And we’ll start working it from our end as of now. There’s one important thing you’ve given us already.”
“Oh? What’s that?” Dr Runcorn asked.
“If our victim here was killed between 2009 and 2016, there’s a very good chance his killer is still alive.”
“True enough,” said Dr Runcorn. “There are a few more things I need before I can get started: more information on soil composition, mineral and bacterial content, a more accurate idea of temperature variation, rainfall and so on.” He glanced at Grace. “If there’s a convenient time, I may visit the site with you?”
“Of course. Whenever you like. Just let me know. Or Superintendent Banks.”
“I’ll leave you two to make the arrangements,” said Banks. “How are things going at the dig, Grace?”
“Your team is still working on the rest of the field,” Grace said. “They finished with the ground-piercing radar early this morning and found nothing significant. When I left, they’d brought in the cadaver dogs, and some of your men and some of our volunteers were doing more digging in designated spots. But I honestly don’t think there are more bodies buried there.”
“Thanks for your help,” Banks said. Then to the doctors, “Keep at it. I’ll get back to the station and set a few actions in motion, starting with missing persons. If he’s local, someone might have missed him.” He glanced at his watch. “Drink, anyone? It’s a tradition to head to the Unicorn over the road after a post-mortem. And as it’s about lunchtime . . .”
“You never told me,” said Dr Galway with a smile.
“Well, you’re usually up to your elbows in blood.”
Dr Galway waved her arms in the air. “Not today,” she said. “Count me in.”
“Me, too,” said Grace.
“I’ll bow out, if I may,” said Dr Runcorn. “I’m anxious to get started.”
And so the three of them, Banks, Grace and Dr Galway, left the building.
29 November 1980
The first time Alice and I kissed, my legs actually turned weak at the knees and started shaking. I could hardly stand. I had been wanting her, dreaming of her, consumed by her for about two weeks, but had been too afraid to make a move, too afraid of rejection, I suppose, despite nights spent talking and listening to music together. Then one evening, in my room, she stood at the sink in the little kitchenette pouring water into the kettle, her hip at a sexy angle and the curve of her waist never more inviting, and I couldn’t help but walk up behind her and put my arms around her waist. I expected her to freeze, to give me some reason why this couldn’t happen, but she didn’t. She turned in my arms, and before we knew it, we were kissing and edging our way back towards the mattress on the floor that acted as my bed. The rest went by in a blur of ecstasy.
A week later, Alice moved into the Penthouse. She had been sharing a house with three other girls, and they weren’t getting along very well together, so she jumped at the chance to move into a one-bedroom flat and, or so I liked to think, be closer to me. I kept my own bedsit, but to all intents and purposes we were living together. We even spent the following summer, at the end of our first year, travelling around Europe on a rail pass—from Amsterdam to Zurich to Venice, Florence, Rome, the French Riviera, Barcelona, Cordova, Madrid and, finally, three wonderful days in Paris.
In the second year, perhaps I should have seen the signs, noticed the cracks appearing. After Margaret Thatcher came to power, in May towards the end of our first year, after the Winter of Discontent. Alice became more political, edged further to the left in that odd but predictable way the well-off often do. I was no fan of Thatcher’s, either, but I was more inclined to let politics be than Alice was.
I buried myself more in my literary studies. I wanted to be a writer, and I wrote mostly poetry back then. Alice wanted to change the world; I wanted to understand it and describe its intricacies and hidden corners. We started spending more time apart, me in my bedsit and her in her flat, at meetings or out distributing pamphlets in the city centre. I confess that there were one or two one-night stands followed by guilt-wracked days. Then things came to a head at the end of the second year, only about six months ago, when we had planned to head for Ireland, to a lovely cottage in Galway we had rented for the summer. When the time came, she said that she wasn’t coming with me, even though we would lose our deposit. It was over.
Our final argument lasted almost as long as the ecstatic talking on our first night. Alice said I just wasn’t engaged enough for her. That I had no real political passions or beliefs. That I was a bourgeois fantasist. A dreamer. An individualist. A romantic. I’d read all the requisite books—Fanon, Marx, The Female Eunuch, Simone de Beauvoir, Engels, Foucault, even the Marxist literary critics like Lukas—and I’d even watched Battle for Algiers with her, but it wasn’t enough, she said. I still preferred Sartre and Camus to Foucault and Fanon, and Li Po and Tu Fu to Mao’s Little Red Book. Sure, I believed in a fairer society, knew all the anti-capitalist arguments by heart, but I didn’t believe them, according to Alice. I was merely chanting by rote. Workers unite. Power to the people. All I really cared about were my precious reactionary Romantic poets—Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge. I even tried to convince her that young Wordsworth and Shelley were hardly reactionary, but it got me nowhere.
Perhaps she was right about me. All I knew was that I couldn’t come up with any decent counter-arguments to persuade her to stay, though in all fairness, I’d say she had already set out her stall, and any cogent argument I used to attempt to prove my leftie credentials would be dismissed as mere lip service. I did try to argue back, but she just dismissed me as a “phoney.” I accused her of appropriating the infantile insult from Catcher in the Rye, and she simply folded her arms, smiled down at me and said it was typical of me to say something like that. Point proven.
The problem was that I liked poetry and fiction too much. They were frivolous to her and would be no help in the coming revolutionary upheaval that would be necessary to change society for the better. I clung too much to the status quo. When it came right down to it, she said, I was a Conservative, perhaps the greatest insult of all.
And so the night from hell went on. In the end, when she stormed back up to the Penthouse, I can’t say I wasn’t relieved. I was exhausted by the struggle and had even started to wonder whether I wanted to hang on to this woman who had become, it seemed to me, a humourless robotic sloganeering firebrand.
Of course, it wasn’t until she was gone, truly gone, that I missed her. That was when I moped around the bedsit all day, ignoring my work, writing lousy love poems and doing badly in my exams, when I watched TV most evenings with Geoff or sat in Anton’s bedsit listening to weird free jazz and electronic music and smoking joints. I didn’t actually cry on Geoff’s shoulder, or Anton’s, or even in the presence of either, but I know I was very bad company indeed. All summer.
Instead of going with me to Galway, Alice went home to her parents in Lincolnshire for the summer. One immediate result of our break-up was that I lost a good deal of money I couldn’t afford on the summer cottage rental, so overseas travel was out of the question. Alice was wealthy enough not to worry about little things like paying her debts, and I was too angry and too ashamed to ask for her share, so I simply stayed put. I suppose I could have gone home. Maybe I should have. But my parents lived in Portsmouth, a long way, and there was nothing left for me down there. All my old school friends had left, as I had, and my parents were preoccupied with their own lives, friends and jobs. I just didn’t fit. My two married sisters also lived close to home and dumped their bratty kids on my parents as often as possible. Another reason to stay away.
When the new term began, my third and final year, Alice came back. I hadn’t seen her all summer, although her parents had kept up the rent on the Penthouse for her because she liked it so much, and suitable places were hard to come by (another foible of the well-off leftie). My heart leaped when I saw her for the first time. She’d had her beautiful blonde hair cut fairly short, in a sort of pixie style, but she looked just as wonderful as she always had to me. Maybe time had done its healing best? I couldn’t help but hope that the past was behind us. It was, but not in the way I hoped. Silly me.
Though she was polite about it, she made it quite clear from the start that I was the last person she wanted to pass the time of day with, and that she already had a new boyfriend, someone copacetic she had met at a political meeting towards the end of the previous academic year, someone who shared her views and her commitment to the cause. That got me thinking perhaps they had met and bonded before she split up with me, that her criticisms of me and her newfound political zealousness towards the end of the previous academic year were, in fact, his. It made sense. She had become far more hard-left since the end of our second year. I’d put it down to the fact that Margaret Thatcher was establishing herself as the Iron Lady, hammering the unions, but perhaps there were other reasons.
Whatever the truth of it was, the new boyfriend soon made his presence felt.
25 November 2019
Lunch at the Unicorn had been enjoyable, though the food was at best passable, and Banks’s chicken was dry, his chips cold. The landlord kept a good cellar, though, and the Black Sheep was in excellent condition. Conversation had quickly drifted away from freshly dug-up skeletons to Roman burial rituals, travel plans for the following year and England’s prospects in the summer’s Euros.
Late in the afternoon, the core team, such as it was, held their first meeting about the case in Banks’s spacious office, which they were using as a makeshift murder room until things escalated—if they did. Banks, DC Gerry Masterson and DS Winsome Jackman sat around the low glass table, notepads and pens scattered before them beside half-full coffee mugs. A whiteboard stood against the back wall with a few pictures of the scene and skeleton tacked to it, but little else. As the case progressed, the photos would be joined by names, details of the post-mortem, X-rays, dates and anything that seemed relevant. It was a visual refresher that anyone on the team could study at any time in the hope of some sort of epiphany.
“First off,” said Banks, “welcome back, Winsome. Everything OK?”
Winsome beamed. “Just fine, sir. Couldn’t be better.”
“And Terry? How’s he bearing up?”
“If you mean how does he feel about being a stay-at-home dad, he’s over the moon. Just as I am to be back at work. Not that I don’t love motherhood. I mean . . . I dote on little Joshua, but . . .”
Gerry patted Winsome’s shoulder. “It’s all right,” she said. “We know what you mean. And we’re happy to have you back, too, sarge.”
“Where’s Annie?” Winsome asked. “DI Cabbot . . . ?”
“Annie’s taking care of her father’s affairs,” Banks said. “He left a will, but the cottage is a bit of a rummage box, it seems. Mostly artworks. You know what Ray was like.”
“Poor Annie,” said Winsome. “No time to say goodbye.”
Annie’s relationship with her father Ray had ended on a sour note, Banks could have added, but didn’t. That was for Annie to explain, or not. But Banks knew that she felt guilty he had died while they were at loggerheads about his relationship with a beautiful younger woman, Zelda, who had disappeared, and whose loss, Annie was convinced, had precipitated her father’s heart attack.
Banks knew where Zelda was, but it was complicated. That was why he had evaded Burgess’s questions at dinner the previous evening. She was wanted for questioning by the police, and Banks had crossed the line, broken just about every rule in the book to help her. Why, he wasn’t sure. Perhaps he was a bit in love with her, but that wasn’t the reason. He wouldn’t have tried to sleep with his best friend’s partner anyway, even if he had been in with a chance. No, it went deeper and was, if possible, more complex than that. One day, perhaps, he would understand it. But for the present, things were as they were.
Banks had found Ray’s body at the top of the stairs, and the image still haunted him. It also turned out that Ray had bequeathed him a collection of almost 2,000 LPs—vinyl as they called them these days—along with a top-of-the-line Marantz turntable to link to his sound system. At home, he was engaged in rearranging his entertainment room to install racks along one wall to house the LPs, along with his own small collection, the precious few that had survived his various moves over the years. There were some duplicates, of course, but he would sort that out later. Nobody needed two copies of Trout Mask Replica or The Fugs’ Golden Filth. He was, however, grateful for Gong and the 13th Floor Elevators, missing from his collection for too long. To be fair to Ray, though, it wasn’t all sixties rock, psychedelia and prog; there were a few jazz LPs, from Bechet to Bird.
“Down to business, such as it is,” Banks said. He told Gerry and Winsome about the post-mortem and how they were still awaiting more accurate results.
“In the meantime, though,” Gerry said, “it sounds as if we’re after identifying a healthy white male between the ages of fifty and sixty, who was killed by two blows to the head sometime between 2009 and 2016. Possibly. Am I right?”
Banks scratched his head. “When you put it like that,” he said, “it does sound daunting. But that’s about all we’ve got so far. As I said, Dr Runcorn and Dr Galway may be able to narrow the numbers down after they’ve carried out their various tests, and if the team finds any other evidence at the scene, we might get a lead. The items found in the grave might help, too, but I wouldn’t get your hopes too high. We’ve got our work cut out for us.”
“You can say that again,” said Winsome. “Couldn’t you have found an easier case for me on my return? I may be rusty, you know, despite the quick refresher course.”
“I doubt that, Winsome,” said Banks. “As the case develops—if it does—we’ll naturally bring in more officers and civilian personnel as required. The first thing to do is to find out who he was.”
“How about a reconstruction?” Winsome asked. “From the skull?”
Banks shook his head. “Too expensive,” he said. “Not to mention it takes for ever and is often wildly inaccurate.”
“We don’t even know if he was local,” Gerry said.
“Agreed. But we do know that someone buried him locally, in a remote field—he certainly didn’t do that himself—and how far would you be willing to drive with a body in the boot of your car?”
“Not too far,” Winsome said. “Especially with cameras everywhere and the possibility of being stopped for the slightest traffic infringement.”
“Right,” said Banks. “So, local or not, I’d guess he wasn’t killed too far away from where he was buried.”
“There’s another thing, too,” said Gerry.
“Yes?”
“Given the time frame, there’s a good chance our killer is still alive.”
“Yes,” said Banks, “I thought of that, too. And it raises another problem. We need to keep this business as quiet as we can for the time being. If it gets out that we’ve found the body, the killer might go to ground, if he hasn’t already. It’s to our advantage that he doesn’t know his identity may become known to us before long.”
“You can depend on us,” said Winsome.
Banks smiled. “I bloody well hope so. I’m pretty sure I can count on Drs Galway and Runcorn, too, along with Grace Hutchinson. But I’m not too sure about all the others working on the dig. One of them may have already talked to the press. Already. People do.”
“So how do we proceed, guv?” Winsome asked.
“Softly, softly. And we try to keep it as quiet as we can. But there’s nothing we can do to make sure everyone keeps schtum, so we’d be better off expecting unwanted publicity at some point soon and thinking of ways we might turn it to our advantage. Maybe in terms of identifying the victim. Obviously, someone knows who he is.”
“I’ve got the details of the farm’s previous owner,” said Gerry, shuffling her papers. “His name is Harold Gillespie, and he lives in Lytham.”
“Hmm, posh,” said Banks. “Can you head over there tomorrow and have a chat with him?”
“Of course.” Gerry made a note.
“You’ve spoken with him already? This Gillespie?”
“Only briefly, to make sure he was the right one, and that he was likely to be in tomorrow. I mean, I assumed you’d want me to go and talk to him. I didn’t tell him . . . you know . . . about the skeleton. He sounded OK.”
“Still, he’ll know you’re coming. He’ll be prepared.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t think. Is he a suspect?”
“At this stage, just about everyone’s a suspect. But no, I very much doubt that he was stupid enough to bury someone he killed on his own land.”
“He might not have known what was going to happen,” Gerry said. “The compulsory purchase order, the dig.”
“True enough. He could hardly have known about that so far back. But when he did find out, he would have had time to move the body if he felt it necessary. Either way, I’d say it was maybe a bit too close to home to be worth the risk in the first place. No need to go at him hard, but use your subtle wiles, follow your instinct. You’ll know what to ask, where to push. Mostly, at this point, we’re interested in dates, anything that might help us pin down who we’re dealing with. So you don’t want to scare him off.”
