Peter Robinson: Not Safe After Dark

Singer paused and frowned at Banks. ‘Sorry. Well, as I was telling Detective Constable Gay here, it’s the least clear one so far. I was a hippie. At least, I think I was. I had long hair, wore a caftan, bell-bottom jeans. And I had this incredible sense of déjà vu when I was driving through Swainsdale yesterday afternoon.’

‘Where, exactly?’

‘It was just before Fortford. I was coming from Helmthorpe, where I’m staying. There’s a small hill by the river with a few trees on it, all bent by the wind. Maybe you know it?’

Banks nodded. He knew the place. The hill was, in fact, a drumlin, a kind of hump-backed mound of detritus left by the retreating ice age. Six trees grew on it, and they had all bent slightly to the south-east after years of strong north-westerly winds. The drumlin was about two miles west of Fortford.

‘Is that all?’ Banks asked.

‘All?’

‘Yes.’ Banks leaned forward and rested his elbows on the desk. ‘You know there are plenty of explanations for déjà vu, don’t you, Mr Singer? Perhaps you’ve seen a place very similar before and only remembered it when you passed the drumlin?’

Singer shook his head. ‘I understand your doubts,’ he said, ‘and I can’t offer concrete proof , but the feeling is unmistakable. I have been there before, in a previous life. I’m certain of it. And that’s not all. There’s the dream.’

‘Dream?’

‘Yes. I’ve had it several times. The same one. It’s raining, like today, and I’m passing through a landscape very similar to what I’ve seen in Swainsdale. I arrive at a very old stone house. There are people and their voices are raised, maybe in anger or laughter, I can’t tell. But I start to feel tense and claustrophobic. There’s a baby crying somewhere and it won’t stop. I climb up some creaky stairs. When I get to the top, I find a door and open it. Then I feel that panicky sensation of endlessly falling, and I usually wake up frightened.’

Banks thought for a moment. ‘That’s all very interesting,’ he said, ‘but have you considered that you might have come to the wrong place? We’re not usually in the business of interpreting dreams and visions.’

Singer stood his ground. ‘This is real,’ he said. ‘A crime has been committed. Against me.’ He poked himself in the chest with his thumb. ‘The crime of murder. The least you can do is do me the courtesy of checking your records.’ His odd blend of naivety and intensity charged the air.

Banks stared at him, then looked at Susan, whose face showed sceptical interest. Never having been one to shy away from what killed the cat, Banks let his curiosity get the better of him yet again. ‘All right,’ he said, standing up. ‘We’ll look into it. Where did you say you were staying?’

Banks turned right by the whitewashed sixteenth-century Rose and Crown in Fortford, and stopped just after he had crossed the small stone bridge over the River Swain.

The rain was still falling, obscuring the higher green dale sides and their latticework of drystone walls. Lyndgarth, a cluster of limestone cottages and a church huddled around a small village green, looked like an Impressionist painting. The rain-darkened ruins of Devraulx Abbey, just up the hill to his left, poked through the trees like a setting for Camelot .

Banks rolled his window down and listened to the rain slapping against leaves and dancing on the river’s surface. To the west he could see the drumlin that Jerry Singer had felt so strongly about.

Today it looked ghostly in the rain, and it was easy to imagine the place as some ancient barrow where the spirits of Bronze Age men lingered. But it wasn’t a barrow; it was a drumlin created by glacial deposits. And Jerry Singer hadn’t been a Bronze Age man in his previous lifetime; he had been a sixties hippie, or so he believed.

Leaving the window down, Banks drove through Lyndgarth and parked at the end of Gristhorpe’s rutted driveway, in front of the squat limestone farmhouse. Inside, he found Gristhorpe staring gloomily out of the back window at a pile of stones and a half-completed dry-stone wall. The superintendent, he knew, had taken a week’s holiday and hoped to work on the wall, which went nowhere and closed in nothing. But he hadn’t bargained for the summer rain, which had been falling nonstop for the past two days.

He poured Banks a cup of tea so strong you could stand a spoon up in it, offered some scones, and they sat in Gristhorpe’s study. A paperback copy of Trollope’s The Vicar of Bullhampton lay on a small table beside a worn and scuffed brown leather armchair.

‘Do you believe in reincarnation?’ Banks asked.

Gristhorpe considered the question a moment. ‘No. Why?’

Banks told him about Jerry Singer, then said, ‘I wanted your opinion. Besides, you were here then, weren’t you?’

Gristhorpe’s bushy eyebrows knit in a frown. ‘Nineteen sixty-six?’

‘Yes.’

‘I was here, but that’s over thirty years ago, Alan. My memory’s not what it used to be. Besides, what makes you think there’s anything in this other than some New Age fantasy?’

‘I don’t know that there is,’ Banks answered, at a loss how to explain his interest, even to the broad-minded Gristhorpe. Boredom, partly, and the oddness of Singer’s claim, the certainty the man seemed to feel about it. But how could he tell his superintendent that he had so little to do he was opening investigations into the supernatural? ‘There was a sort of innocence about him,’ he said. ‘And he seemed so sincere about it, so intense.’

‘ “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” W. B. Yeats,’ Gristhorpe replied.

‘Perhaps. Anyway, I’ve arranged to talk to Jenny Fuller about it later today.’ Jenny was a psychologist who had worked with the Eastvale police before.

‘Good idea,’ said Gristhorpe. ‘All right, then, just for argument’s sake, let’s examine his claim objectively. He’s convinced he was a hippie murdered in Swainsdale in summer, nineteen sixty-six, right?’

Banks nodded.

‘And he thinks this because he believes in reincarnation, he had a déjà vu and he’s had a recurring dream?’

‘True.’

‘Now,’ Gristhorpe went on, ‘leaving aside the question of whether you or I believe in reincarnation, or, indeed, whether there is such a thing – a philosophical speculation we could hardly settle over tea and scones, anyway – he doesn’t give us a hell of a lot to go on, does he?’

‘That’s the problem. I thought you might remember something.’

Gristhorpe sighed and shifted in his chair. The scuffed leather creaked. ‘In nineteen sixty-six, I was a thirty-year-old detective sergeant in a backwoods division. In fact, we were nothing but a subdivision then, and I was the senior detective. Most of the time I investigated burglaries, the occasional outbreak of sheep stealing, market-stall owners fencing stolen goods.’ He sipped some tea. ‘We had one or two murders – really interesting ones I’ll tell you about someday – but not a lot. What I’m saying, Alan, is that no matter how poor my memory is, I’d remember a murdered hippie.’

‘And nothing fits the bill?’

‘Nothing. I’m not saying we didn’t have a few hippies around, but none of them got murdered. I think your Mr Singer must be mistaken.’

Banks put his mug down on the table and stood up to leave. ‘Better get back to the crime statistics, then,’ he said.

Gristhorpe smiled. ‘So that’s why you’re so interested in this cock and bull story? Can’t say I blame you. Sorry I can’t help. Wait a minute, though,’ he added as they walked to the door. ‘There was old Bert Atherton’s lad. I suppose that was around the time you’re talking about, give or take a year or two.’