Peter Robinson - Not Safe After Dark

Banks leaned forward in his armchair. ‘You don’t sound so thrilled about it.’

‘Can’t say as I am. Oh, he’s a charmer all right is Geoff Salisbury. Bit too much of one for my liking.’

‘How did you meet him?’

‘He seems to have some sort of radar for all the old folks in trouble on the estate. He turns up everywhere at one time or another. Usually when you need help.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘More tea?’

‘Please.’ Banks held out his cup.

‘You know, you can smoke if you like.’ She smiled. ‘If I let you do it when you were fifteen, I can hardly stop you now you’re… what would it be?’

‘A lot older.’ Banks put his hand to his left temple. ‘Can’t you tell by the grey?’

Mrs Green laughed and touched her own head. ‘You call that grey?’ It was true, she had an entire head of fluffy grey hair.

‘Anyway,’ Banks said, remembering what Mr Green had died of, ‘thanks, but I’ve stopped.’

‘I won’t say that’s not good news. If only we’d all known all along what it was doing to us.’

‘You were saying? About Geoff Salisbury.’

‘I was, wasn’t I?’ She sat back in her chair, tea and saucer resting on her lap. ‘Oh, you know me. I tend to go off half-cocked on things.’

‘I’d still be interested to hear your thoughts,’ said Banks. ‘To be honest, I haven’t really taken to him myself, and he seems to be spending an awful lot of time around Mum and Dad.’

She waved a hand. ‘It’s nothing, really. He started coming around when Bill was sick. It was near the end and Bill was in a wheelchair, breathing from that horrible oxygen tank.’

‘What did he want?’

‘Want? Nothing. He never asked for a thing. Only to help. Give him his due, he’s a hard and willing worker, and he was certainly useful at the time. He fixed a few things around the house, ran errands.’

‘So what was the problem?’

‘You’ll think I was imagining things.’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘Well, it wasn’t any one thing, really. Just little things. The wrong change, or one of Bill’s tools would go missing. Nothing you could really put your finger on.’

Banks remembered the short change Geoff Salisbury had handed his mother yesterday evening. ‘Anything else?’

‘Ooh, just listen to us,’ said Mrs Green, refilling her teacup. ‘I’m being questioned by a policeman.’

Banks smiled. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it to seem like that. Comes with the territory, I suppose.’

She laughed. ‘It’s all right, Alan. I was only teasing. But it’s hard to talk about. It was only a feeling.’

‘What feeling?’

She clasped the collar of her frock. ‘That he was… hovering… like the Angel of Death or something. Listen to me now. What a fool I sound.’

‘You don’t think Geoff Salisbury had anything to do with your husband’s death, do you?’

‘Of course not. No, it’s nothing like that. It was a faulty valve, they said, on the oxygen tank.’ She gave a harsh laugh. ‘Someone told me if we’d been living in America I’d have got millions of dollars in compensation.’

‘That’s probably true.’

‘Yes, well, if we’d been living in America we probably wouldn’t have been able to afford the medical treatment in the first place, and Bill would have died a lot sooner.’

‘Also true,’ said Banks. ‘Can you explain a bit more clearly? About this feeling you had.’

‘I’m not sure. I felt as if he were, you know, waiting, waiting in the wings until Bill died.’

‘For what?’

‘I don’t know. So he could take over more, maybe, manipulate me more.’

Banks smiled at her. ‘He obviously didn’t know who he was dealing with.’

She didn’t smile back. ‘You’d be surprised how easy it is to take advantage when people are vulnerable.’ She looked at him. ‘Or maybe you wouldn’t. You probably see a lot of it in your job. Anyway, I felt as if he was hovering, waiting for Bill to die so that he could be more in control.’

‘But what could possibly have been in it for him?’

‘I don’t know. Like I said, I was probably imagining things anyway.’

‘I don’t suppose you won the lottery recently?’

‘Never bought a ticket.’

‘And you don’t have a million pounds hidden in the mattress or anything?’

She laughed. ‘Wish I had. No, there’s nothing, really. Bill’s insurance policy. Old-age pension. I’m not complaining, mind you. It’s enough to get by on.’

‘What happened?’

‘After Bill died, I gave Geoff Salisbury his marching orders. I was nice about it. I thanked him for his help, but said I was perfectly capable of managing by myself and I’d prefer it if he didn’t come around any more. It wasn’t that I couldn’t still have used the sort of help he had to offer, but I just didn’t feel comfortable having him around. Maybe I was being oversensitive as well as ungrateful.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Banks. ‘As I said, I haven’t taken to him myself and I’m not sure why.’

‘You’ll be feeling guilty because he’s looking after your parents while you’re not there to do it.’

‘Perhaps. Partly, yes. But there’s more. I don’t trust him. I don’t know what he’s up to, but I don’t trust him. Maybe it’s copper’s instinct.’

‘Well, I can tell you one thing for a start: you’ll get no thanks around these parts for going after Geoff Salisbury.’

‘Popular, is he?’

‘To hear some talk, you’d think the sun shone out of his… well, you know what.’

Banks smiled. ‘I think I can guess. How did he take your rejection?’

Mrs Green shrugged. ‘Well enough, I suppose. At least he didn’t bother me after that. Oh, I see him around now and then, and he always smiles and says hello as if nothing ever happened. It’s just that-’

‘What?’

‘Oh, probably me being silly again. But it feels just skin deep, as if underneath it all, if you were just to strip off the surface that, well, you’d find something else entirely under there. Something very nasty indeed.’

Banks decided to pay a quick visit to the city centre that afternoon. He needed to pick up a couple of things from the shops for tomorrow, such as a nice anniversary card and some candles. He asked his parents if they needed anything, but they said no (implying, Banks thought, that Geoff Salisbury was taking care of everything), so off he went. Rather than search the side streets for a vacant parking space, he parked in the short stay behind the town hall and walked through to Bridge Street.

Of course, the city centre had changed quite a lot since his schooldays. Most cities had changed a lot in the past thirty years, but Peterborough more so than many others. Gone were the small record shop in the back alley, where he used to buy a new single nearly every week and LPs whenever he could afford them – usually only Christmas and birthdays – and the musty used book shop, where he used to browse for hours among the dog-eared paperbacks, the one where the sour-faced woman behind the counter used to watch him like a hawk the entire time he was in there. The open-air market had closed; some of the pubs he used to drink in when he was sixteen and seventeen had disappeared and new ones had sprung up; an old cinema, after several years as a bingo hall, was now a nightclub; department stores had disappeared, moved or been given facelifts; Cathedral Square was now a pedestrian precinct.

Only yards from the Queensgate Centre stood the ancient cathedral itself. Throughout Banks’s childhood, the majestic structure had simply been there . It didn’t dominate the city the way York Minster did, and like most of the other local kids he had paid it scant attention unless school projects and organized visits demanded otherwise. After all, what kid was interested in a boring old cathedral where boring old farts had gone to pray and where even more boring ones were buried? But now he found himself admiring the west front, with its three soaring Gothic arches flanked by twin-pinnacled towers, the stone cream-coloured in the autumn sunshine.