After a pub lunch in the Queen’s Arms and a chat with Hatchley and Richmond about the case, Banks was no further ahead. Back in his office, he sat down, sent for some coffee, and put his feet up on the desk to think things out. When PC Craig arrived with the coffee—looking very put out, no doubt because Susan Gay had coerced him into carrying it up—Banks lit a Silk Cut and went over what he’d got.
Richmond had discovered that Les Haines, Bernie Allen’s brother-in-law, had done a brief stretch in Armley Jail for receiving stolen goods (i.e. two boxes of Sony E-120 video cassette tapes). It was his second offence, hot on the heels of an assault charge against a man in the alley outside a Leeds bier-keller. But Haines had been at work on the day of Allen’s murder, so he would have had no opportunity to get to Swainshead and back, even if there had been some obscure family motive. Besides, as Banks well knew, just because a man has a record as a petty thief, it doesn’t make him a murderer. Esther had been home with the kids, as usual, and Banks could hardly visualize her trailing them up to the hanging valley and knocking off her brother.
Most interesting of all were the Colliers’ alibis, or lack of them. Nicholas never taught classes on Friday mornings, but he usually went in anyway and used the time for paperwork. On the Friday in question, however, the headmaster’s administrative assistant remembered seeing him arrive late—at around eleven o’clock. This was nothing unusual—it had happened often enough before—but it did leave him without a valid alibi.
Stephen Collier, it turned out, had no meetings scheduled for that day, again quite normal in itself, and nobody could remember whether he had been in or not. Work days, the world-weary secretary had explained to Sergeant Hatchley, are so much the same that most office workers have difficulty remembering one from another. Mr Collier was often off the premises anyway, and the people who actually ran the business never saw much of him.
PC Weaver from Helmthorpe, who had been questioning people in Swainshead that morning, reported that nobody remembered seeing Bernard Allen out there on the morning in question, let alone noticed anyone follow him.
At about two o’clock, Richmond popped his head around the door. He’d been using the computer to check with various business agencies and immigration offices, but so far he’d found no-one in Swainshead with Canadian connections. Except for Stephen Collier, who dealt with a Montreal-based food-products corporation.
“What’s a food product, do you think?” Banks asked Richmond.
“I wouldn’t know, sir. Something that’s not real food, I’d imagine.”
“And I thought he was trading Wensleydale cheese for maple syrup. That reminds me: what time is it in Toronto?”
Richmond looked at his watch. “It’ll be about nine in the morning.”
“I’d better phone the Mounties.”
“Er . . . they won’t be Mounties, sir. Not in Toronto.” Richmond stroked his moustache.
“Oh? What will they be?”
“The Toronto Metropolitan Police, sir. The RCMP’s federal. These days they mostly do undercover work and police the more remote areas.”
Banks grinned. “Well, you learn something new every day.”
When Richmond had left, he lit a cigarette and picked up the phone. There was a lot of messing about with the switchboard, but after a few minutes of clicks and whirrs, the phone started ringing at the other end. It wasn’t the harsh and insistent sound of an English telephone, though; the rings were longer, as were the pauses between them.
When someone finally answered, it took Banks a while to explain who he was and what he wanted. After a few more clicks, he finally got through to the right man.
“Chief Inspector Banks? Staff Sergeant Gregson here. And how’s the old country?”
“Fine,” said Banks, a little perplexed by the question.
“My father was a Brit,” Gregson went on. “Came from Derbyshire.” He pronounced the “e” as in “clergy,” and “shire” came out as “sheer.” “Do you know it?” he asked.
“Oh, yes. It’s just down the road.”
“Small country.”
“Right.”
Gregson cleared his throat and Banks could hear papers rustling three thousand miles away. “I can’t say we’ve got any good news for you,” the Canadian said. “We’ve had a look around Allen’s apartment, but we didn’t find anything unusual.”
“Was there an address book?”
“Address book . . . let me see . . .” More paper rustled. “No. No address book. No diary.”
“Damn. He must have taken them with him.”
“Makes sense, doesn’t it? If he was going on vacation he’d be sure to want to send pretty postcards to all his buddies back home.”
“What about his friends? Have you seen any of them?”
“We talked to his colleagues at work. There’s not many of them around. College finishes in early May, so teachers are pretty thin on the ground at this time of year. Nice work if you can get it, eh? Now they’re all off swimming in the lake and sunning themselves on the deck up at their fancy summer cottages in Muskoka.”
“Is that like a villa in Majorca?”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. What did they have to say?”
“Said he was a bit aloof, stand-offish. Course, a lot of Brits over here are like that. They think Canada’s still part of the Empire, so they come on like someone out of ‘The Jewel in the Crown.’ ”
“Did you find his ex-wife?”
“Yup. She’s been in Calgary for the past six months, so you can count her out.”
“Apparently, there was a lover,” Banks told him. “Someone at the college. That’s why they got divorced.”
“Have you got a name?”
“Sorry.”
Gregson sighed. “I’d like to help you, Chief Inspector, I really would,” he said. “But we can’t spare the men to go tracking down some guy who ran off with Allen’s wife. We just don’t have the manpower.”
“No, of course not.”
“Besides, people don’t usually steal a man’s wife and then kill him.”
“They might if he was causing them problems. But you’re right, it’s not likely. Did he have any girlfriends?”
“As I said, his colleagues thought he was a bit stuck-up. One of them even thought he was gay, but I wouldn’t pay much mind to that. Sometimes, with their accents and mannerisms and all, Brits do seem a bit that way to us North Americans.”
“Yes,” Banks said, gritting his teeth. “I think that just about covers it all. I can see now why they say you always get your man.” And he hung up. Nothing. Still nothing. He obviously couldn’t expect any help from across the Atlantic.
Still feeling a residue of irrational anger at Gregson’s sarcasm, he stalked over to the window and lit a cigarette. The drizzle had turned into steady rain now and the square below was bright with open umbrellas. As he gazed down on the scene, one woman caught his eye. She walked in a daze, as if she wasn’t sure where she was heading. She looked soaked to the skin, too; her hair was plastered to her head and the thin white blouse she wore was moulded to her form so that the outline of her brassiere stood out in clear relief. It took Banks a few moments to recognize Katie Greenock.
He grabbed his raincoat and made a move to go down and make sure she was all right, but when he looked out for her one last time, she was nowhere in sight. She had disappeared like a phantom. There was no sense in searching the town for her just because she was walking in the rain without an umbrella. Still, he was strangely disturbed by the vision. It worried him. For the rest of the wet afternoon he felt haunted by that slight and sensuous figure staring into an inner distance, walking in the rain.