The sun was a swollen red ball low on the western horizon. It oozed its eerie light over the South Yorkshire landscape, silhouetted motionless pit-wheels and made the slag-heaps glow. On the cassette, Nick Drake was singing the haunting “Northern Sky.”
Much of the way, the two had sat in silence, thinking things out and deciding what to do. Finally, Hatchley could stand it no longer: “How can we nail the bastard?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Banks answered. “We don’t have much of a case.”
Hatchley grunted. “We might if we hauled him in and you and me had a go at him.”
“He’s clever, Jim,” Banks said. The sergeant’s first name didn’t feel so strange to his lips after the first few times. “Look how he’s kept out of it so long. He’s not going to break down just because you and me play good cop-bad cop with him. That’ll be a sign of our weakness to him. He’ll know we need a confession to make anything stick, so it only strengthens his position. No, Nicholas Collier’s a cool one. And don’t forget, he’s got pull around Swainsdale. We’d no sooner get started than some fancy lawyer would waltz in and gum up the works.”
“What I’d give for a bloody good try, though!” Hatchley thumped the dashboard. “Sorry. No damage done. It just makes me angry, a stuck-up bastard like Nicholas Collier getting away with it. How many people has he killed?”
“Three, maybe four if we count Stephen. And he hasn’t got away with it yet. The trouble is, we don’t know if he killed anyone apart from the girl, Cheryl Duggan. We can’t even prove that he killed her. Just because Dr Barber told us he had a reputation for pestering the town’s working girls doesn’t make him guilty. It certainly doesn’t give us grounds for a conviction.”
“But it was Cheryl Duggan’s death that sent Addison up to Swainshead.”
“Yes. But even that’s circumstantial.”
“Who do you think killed Addison and Allen?”
“At a guess, I’d say Stephen. He’d do it to protect his little brother and his family’s reputation. But we don’t know, and we never will if Nicholas doesn’t talk. I’ll bet, for all his cleverness, Nicholas is weak. I doubt he has the stomach for cold-blooded murder. They might both have been at the scene—certainly neither had a good alibi—but I’d say Stephen did the killing.”
“What do you think happened with the Duggan girl?”
Banks shifted lanes to overtake a lorry. “I think he picked her up in a pub and took her down by the river. She was just a prostitute, a working-class kid, and he was from a prominent family, so what the hell did it matter to him what he did? I think he got over-excited, hurt her perhaps, and she started to protest, threatened to scream or tell the police. So he panicked and drowned her. Either that or he did it because he enjoyed it.”
The tape finished. Banks lit a cigarette and felt around in the dark for another cassette. Without looking at the title, he slipped in the first one he got hold of. It was the sixties anthology tape he’d taken to Toronto with him. Traffic came on singing “No Face, No Name and No Number.”
“I think Addison was a conscientious investigator,” Banks went on. “He more than earned his money, poor sod. He did all the legwork the police didn’t do and found a connection between Cheryl Duggan and Nicholas Collier. Maybe they’d been seen leaving a pub together, or perhaps her friends told him Collier had been with her before. Anyway, Addison prised the name out of someone, or bought the information, and instead of reporting in he set off for Swainshead. That was his first mistake.
“His second was to ask Sam Greenock about Nicholas Collier. Greenock was anxious to get in with the local gentry, and he was a bit suspicious of this stranger asking questions, so he stalled Addison and took the first opportunity to run over the bridge and tell Collier about it. There must have been real panic in the Collier house that evening. Remember, it was about fifteen months after the girl’s death, and the Colliers must’ve thought all was well. I don’t know the details. Maybe Sam arranged for Addison to go over to the house when the village was quiet, or maybe he even arranged for the Colliers to go up to Addison’s room and kill him there. I don’t know how it happened, but I think it was Stephen who struck the blow. That would explain the state he was in when he met Anne Ralston later that night.”
“What about Bernard Allen?” Hatchley asked.
“At first I thought he was just unlucky,” Banks said. “He told Katie Greenock that he knew Anne Ralston in Toronto. She told Sam, who did his usual town-crier routine. Not that it mattered this time, if Allen was intent on blackmail. Stephen Collier was an odd kind of bloke, from what I can make out—a real combination of opposites. When he’d killed Addison, he had to unburden himself to his girlfriend, but I’m sure he soon regretted it. He must have had a few sleepless nights after Anne first disappeared. Anyway, Bernard Allen knew that Stephen was involved in Addison’s murder and that it was something to do with an incident back in Oxford. He obviously assumed that if the police knew that they could put the whole thing together. Which we did, rather too late.”
“You said you thought Allen was unlucky at first,” Hatchley said. “What about now?”
“I think he was going to blackmail the Colliers. I’ve not had time to tell you much about Toronto, but I met a few people there who said that Bernard Allen really wanted to come home to Swainshead. His sister mentioned it, too, but the others all played it down. He’d even let on to Katie Greenock that he’d send for her when he got back to Canada. That was because she wanted to escape Swainsdale and he wanted to get into her pants.
“I wondered why I was getting so many conflicting pictures of Allen’s state of mind, so many contradictions. But that was his motive. He was blackmailing the Colliers to get himself home. A job at the school, money in the bank—I don’t know what he’d asked for, but I’m certain that was his reason. And it got him killed. I doubt that whoever said ‘you can’t go home again’ meant it as literally as that. Anyway, the Colliers decided they couldn’t live with the threat, so one or both of them waited for him in the hanging valley that morning. They knew he’d be there because he’d often talked about it and he was heading that way.”
“And what happened to Stephen? Why would Nicholas kill him, if he did?”
“Stephen was getting too jittery. Nicholas knew it was just a matter of time before his brother broke down completely, and he couldn’t allow him to remain alive when I got back from Toronto after talking to Anne Ralston. Stephen must have told his brother that he didn’t give anything away to Anne about the Oxford business, but that he’d made a serious mistake in hinting at his own involvement in Addison’s killing. Nicholas knew that what Anne had to tell me would give me enough grounds to bring Stephen in, and he couldn’t trust his brother to stand up under questioning. If we could discover the motive behind Addison’s murder, then we’d know everything. Nicholas couldn’t allow that.
“What he did was risky, but there was a lot at stake—not just the family name, now, but Nicholas’s own freedom, his home, his career. He had to kill his own brother to survive. And if he succeeded, it would look like the accidental death of a disturbed man or the suicide of a guilty one.”
It was dark when Banks negotiated the tricky connections onto the Al east of Leeds. Cream were singing “Strange Brew” on the tape and Hatchley had fallen silent.
Banks still didn’t understand it all. Stephen had killed to preserve what was important to him, but Nicholas Collier remained something of an enigma. In all likelihood, he had drowned Cheryl Duggan, but what bothered Banks was why. Had he done it from pleasure, accident or desperation? And was he also responsible for the bruising and marks of sexual abuse found on her body? Dr Barber had said that Nicholas had been in trouble once or twice over consorting with prostitutes and offering Oxford factory girls money for sex. Banks wondered why. Nicholas had all the advantages. Why hadn’t he hung around with his own set, girls of his own social class?
“Let’s call in at the station first,” Banks said. “Something might have turned up.” They were approaching the turn-off onto a minor road that would take them over the moors to Helmthorpe and the main valley road. “We can always drive to Swainshead later if there’s nothing new.” He looked at his watch. “It’s not late, only nineish.”
Hatchley nodded and Banks drove past the exit ramp and on to the Eastvale road.
The station was quiet. There had been no serious crimes while Banks and Hatchley had been gone. There was, however, a message from John Fletcher timed at five o’clock that evening asking them if they would call and see him as soon as possible. He said it was important—something to do with Stephen Collier’s death—and he would be at home all evening.
There was also a copy of Dr Glendenning’s preliminary post-mortem report on Stephen Collier. The doctor had found the equivalent of about five capsules of Nembutal in Collier’s system—not enough in itself to cause death, but potentially lethal when mixed with alcohol. And his alcohol level had been far higher than the amount five or six pints would account for. It looked as if Banks was right and Collier had been slipped vodka in the pub and more drinks back at the house.
“Should we go to see Fletcher tonight?” Banks asked Hatchley. “Or leave it until tomorrow?”
Under normal circumstances he would have expected Hatchley to take any opportunity to get off work for a pint or a session on the sofa with Carol Ellis, but this time the sergeant was angry.
“Let’s go,” he said. “Maybe Fletcher’s got the answer. I wouldn’t want to leave it till he went and got himself killed, too. And I wouldn’t mind paying a call on Nicholas bloody Collier either.”