Peter Robinson - Past Reason Hated

Richmond tapped the photograph. ‘Which makes it all the more odd she should have hung on to this. Thank you, Ms Shildon. I’d better be off now.’

‘Aren’t you going to finish your tea?’

‘Best not,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to get back to work or my boss’ll skin me alive. Thanks very much anyway. Richmond could sense her unease. She looked around the room before glancing at him again and nodding.

‘All right, if you must.’

‘Will you be all right?’ he asked. ‘You could always go back to Mrs Cooper’s, if you feel-’

‘I’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘I’m still in a bit of a daze. I can’t believe it’s really happened.’

‘Is there no one you can go to, until you’re feeling better?’

‘There’s my therapist. She says I can call her any time, day or night. I might do that. We’ll see. But do you know the oddest thing?’

Richmond shook his head.

She folded her arms and nodded towards the room in general. ‘I can take all this. The room where it happened. I didn’t think I’d be able to bear it after last night, but it doesn’t bother me in the slightest to be here. It just feels empty. Isn’t that strange? It’s the loneliness, Caroline’s absence, that hurts. I keep expecting her to walk in at any moment.’

Richmond, who could think of no reply, said goodbye and walked out into the snow. He still had about an hour before his lunchtime meeting with Banks in the Queen’s Arms. He could use that time to check on Charles Cooper’s movements the previous evening and perhaps see if he could find out anything about the mysterious Ruth.

The gearsscreeched as Susan Gay slowed to turn onto the Harrogate road. Luckily, the snow hadn’t been so heavy south of Eastvale. It lay piled up against the hedgerows, but the roads had been cleared and the temperature hadn’t dropped low enough to make the surface icy. She was out of the Dales now, in the gently rolling country south of Ripon. Nothing but the occasional stretch of stone wall, or a distant hamlet, showed through the thin white veil of snow.

She still felt angry at herself for being so damn jumpy Banks had only dropped by the community centre to break the news of Caroline Hartley’s death and to discover what time she had left the rehearsal the previous evening. But Susan hadn’t known anything about Caroline’s part in the play, so how could she help assuming that Banks was checking up on her? Anyway, she had kept quiet and matters had soon become clear to her.

When Banks had gone, she’d walked to Pristine Records in the shopping centre by the bus station. The girl with the white-face make-up and hair like pink champagne pointed out the small classical section and, when pushed, leafed idly through the stock cards. No, they hadn’t sold a copy of Lousy whatsit lately; they hadn’t even had a copy in. Ever. Using her own initiative, Susan also checked Boots and W. H. Smiths, both of which had small record departments, but she had no luck there either. The record was imported from Hungary, and whoever had bought it hadn’t done so in Eastvale.

Over lunch at the Queen’s Arms, information had been pooled and tasks assigned by Superintendent Gristhorpe. According to Banks, Caroline had left the Garden Café just after three o’clock, as usual, probably done a bit of shopping, then attended rehearsal at four. James Conran said they had finished at ten to six and everyone had left by five to. He himself had been the last to leave. He had gone out the back way, as usual, locked up and strolled over to the Crooked Billet on North York Road for a couple of drinks. In the caretaker’s absence, he and Marcia Cunningham were the only ones in the drama group to have keys to the centre, although an extra set had been lodged at the police station in case of emergencies. Members of the other societies housed in the centre also had keys, including Sandra Banks.

Presumably, Caroline had gone straight home, because a neighbour across the street told one of the constables that she had seen Miss Hartley enter the house. It had happened at the same time the neighbour had gone over to her window to close a chink in the curtains during the commercial break in Calendar, which would have been about six fifteen.

Richmond had not been able to find out much about Charles Cooper’s movements. The clerk who had been at the Barnard Castle shop on the evening in question had the day off today. He planned to visit Barnard Castle and ask around some more after he had talked to Veronica Shildon’s therapist and made a start on tracking down Ruth. Banks was off to visit Claude Ivers, Veronica’s estranged husband, and Susan herself had drawn the job of talking to Caroline’s family in Harrogate. In addition to keeping tabs on the break-in, she was still on the murder team. Thank God the Harrogate police had at least broken the news of Caroline’s death. That was one distasteful task she had been spared.

She drove up Ripon Road by the huge Victorian hotels – the Cairn, the Majestic, the St George – dark stone mansions set back behind vast walled lawns and croquet greens. As she kept an eye on the road, Susan found herself hoping that the Hartley case wouldn’t be solved by Christmas. That way she could legitimately beg off visiting her parents in Sheffield. Home visits were always tense. Susan found herself regaled with stories about her brother the stockbroker and her sister the lawyer. Of course, neither of them could ever make it home for Christmas; her brother lived in London and her sister in Vancouver But she had to hear all about them, nonetheless. And whatever Susan herself achieved was always belittled by her siblings’ success stories, pieced together from occasional letters and the odd newspaper clipping, and by her parents’ disapproval of the course she had chosen. She could make chief constable and they would still look down on her. With a bit of luck, Caroline Hartley’s murder would keep her busy well into the new year. Susan had a feeling they might be dealing with a nutter – the violence of the wounds and the music left playing seemed to point that way – and nutters, she remembered from her training, were always difficult to catch.

The town of Harrogate soon banished thoughts of psychopaths. All formal gardens and elegant Victorian buildings, it was a spa town, like Bath, a place people retired to or visited to attend business conventions. Ripon Road became Parliament as she drove past the Royal Baths and Betty’s Tea Room, then its name changed again to West Park. She turned left onto York Place, the road that ran by the Stray, a broad expanse of parkland in the town centre renowned for its vibrant flower displays in spring. Now it looked cool and serene under its layer of snow.

The Hartleys lived in a large house off Wetherby Road on the southern outskirts of the town. From the outside, it looked like something out of Edgar Allan Poe: the House of Usher, Susan thought, the way it appeared in that Roger Corman film that used to scare her when she was a little girl. The black stone was rough and pitted like coke, and the upper oriels seemed to stare out like bulging eyes. When Susan rang the doorbell she half expected an enormous manservant with a green complexion to answer and say ‘You rang?’ in a deep voice. But the boy who came to the door was far from enormous. He was in his late teens, judging by the pale, spotty face, the spiky hair and the look of dazed contempt for the world on his face, and he was as skinny as a rake.

‘What is it?’ he asked in an edgy, high-pitched voice. ‘We don’t want anything. There’s been a death in the family.’

‘I know,’ Susan said. ‘That’s why I’m here.’ She showed her card and he stepped back to let her in. She followed him down the gloomy hallway to a room that must once have been a study or library. The ceiling was high, with curlicues at the corners and an ornate fixture at the centre from which the chandelier had once hung. Dark wainscotting came waist high.