Peter Robinson - Cold Is The Grave

“How are you liking it at Eastvale?” Banks asked as they joined the stream of traffic on the A1.

“Hard to say yet. I’ve hardly got my feet under the desk.”

“What about the traveling?”

“Takes me about three-quarters of an hour each way. That’s not bad.” She glanced sideways at him. “It’s about the same for you, as I remember.”

“True. Have you thought of selling the Harkside house?”

“I’ve thought of it, but I don’t think I will. Not just yet. Wait and see what happens.”

Banks remembered Annie’s tiny cramped cottage at the center of a labyrinth of narrow, winding streets in the village of Harkside. He remembered his first visit there, when she had asked him on impulse for dinner and cooked a vegetarian pasta dish as they drank wine and listened to Emmylou Harris, remembered standing in the backyard for an after-dinner smoke, putting his arm around her shoulders and feeling the thin bra strap. Despite all the warning signs… he also remembered kissing the little rose tattoo just above her breast, their bodies, sweaty and tired, the unfamiliar street sounds the following morning.

He negotiated his way from the A1 to the M1. Lorries churned up oily rain that coated his windscreen before the wipers could get through it; there were more long delays at roadwork signs where nobody was working; a maniac in a red BMW flashed his lights about a foot from Banks’s rear end and then, when Banks changed lanes to accommodate him, zoomed off at well over a ton.

“What did you find out about Charlie?” he asked Annie when he had got into the rhythm of motorway driving.

Annie’s eyes were closed. She didn’t open them. “Not much. Probably not more than you know already.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“He was born Charles Douglas Courage in February 1946-”

“You don’t have to go that far back.”

“I find it helps. It makes him one of the generation born immediately after the war, when the men came home randy and ready to get on with their lives. He’d have been ten in 1956, too young for Elvis, perhaps, but twenty in 1966, and probably just raring for all the sex, drugs and rock and roll you lot enjoyed in your youth. Maybe that was where he got his start in crime.”

Banks risked a glance away from the road at her. She still had her eyes closed, but there was a little smile on her face. “Charlie wasn’t into dealing drugs,” he said.

“Maybe it was the rock and roll, then. He was first arrested for distribution of stolen goods in August 1968 – to wit, long-playing records. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band , to be exact, stolen directly from a factory just outside Manchester.”

“A music lover, our Charlie,” he said. “Carry on.”

“After that comes a string of minor offenses – shoplifting, theft of a car stereo – then, in 1988, he was arrested for theft of livestock. To be exact, seventeen sheep from a farm out Relton way. Did eighteen months.”

“Conclusion?”

“He’s a thief. He’ll steal anything, even if it walks on four legs.”

“And since then?”

“He appears to have gone straight. Helped Eastvale police out on a number of occasions, mostly minor stuff he found out about through his old contacts.”

“Got a list?”

“DC Templeton’s working on it.”

“Okay,” said Banks. “What next?”

“A number of odd jobs, most recently working as a night watchman at the Daleview Business Park. Been there since September.”

“Hmm. They must be a trusting lot at Daleview,” said Banks. “I think one of us might pay them a visit tomorrow. Anything else?”

“That’s about it. Single. Never married. Mother and father deceased. No brothers or sisters. Funny, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

Annie stirred in the car seat to face him. “A small-time villain like Charlie Courage getting murdered so far from home.”

“We don’t know where he was murdered yet.”

“An inspired guess. You don’t shoot someone in the chest with a shotgun and then drive him around bleeding in a car for three hours, do you?”

“Not without making a mess, you don’t. You know, it strikes me that Charlie might have been taken on the long ride.”

“The long ride?”

Banks glanced at her. She looked puzzled. “Never heard of the long ride?”

Annie shook her head. “Can’t say as I have.”

“Just a minute…” A slow-moving local delivery van in front of them was sending up so much spray that the windscreen wipers couldn’t keep up with it. Carefully, Banks changed lanes and overtook it. “The long ride,” he said, once he could see again. “Let’s say you’ve upset someone nasty – you’ve had your fingers in the till, or you’ve been telling tales out of school – and he’s decided he has to do away with you, right?”

“Okay.”

“He’s got a number of options, all with their own pros and cons, and this is one of them. What he does – or rather, what his hired hands do – is they pick you up and take you for a ride. A long ride. It’s got two main functions. The first is that it confuses the local police by taking the crime away from the patch that gave rise to it. Follow?”

“And the second? Let me guess.”

“Go on.”

“To scare the shit out of him.”

“Right. Let’s say you’re driven from Eastvale to Market Harborough. You know exactly what’s going to happen at the end of the journey. They make sure you have no doubt about that whatsoever, that there’s going to be no reprieve, no commuting of the death sentence, so you’ve got three hours or thereabouts to contemplate your life and its imminent and inevitable end. An end you can also expect to be painful and brutal.”

“Cruel bastards.”

“It’s a cruel world,” said Banks. “Anyway, from their perspective, it acts as a deterrent to other would-be thieves or snitches. And, remember, it’s not as if we’re dealing with lily-whites here. The victim is usually a small-time villain who’s done something to upset a more powerful villain.”

“Charlie Courage, small-time villain. Fits him to a tee.”

“Exactly.”

“Except that he was supposed to be going straight, and there aren’t any major crime bosses in Eastvale.”

“Maybe he wasn’t going as straight as we thought. Maybe he was just avoiding drawing our attention. And they don’t have to be that big. I’m not talking about the Mafia or the Triads here. There are plenty of minor villains who think life is pretty cheap. Maybe Charlie fell afoul of one of them. Think about it. Charlie worked as a night watchman. He put a thousand quid in the bank – above and beyond his wages – over the past month. What does that tell you, Annie?”

“That he was either selling information, blackmailing someone or he was being paid off to look the other way.”

“Right. And he must have been playing way out of his league. Maybe we’ll get a better idea when we talk to the manager up there tomorrow. Nearly there now.”

Banks negotiated his way around Leicester toward Market Harborough, about thirteen miles south. When they got to the High Street there, it was almost noon, and it took Banks another ten minutes to find the police station.

Before they got out of the car, Banks turned to Annie. “Are we going to be okay?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. This. Working together.”

She flashed him a smile. “Well, we seem to be doing all right so far, don’t we?” she said, and slipped out of the car.

DI Collaton turned out to be a big bear of a man with thinning gray hair, a red face and a slow, country manner. A year or so away from retirement, Banks guessed. No wonder he didn’t want to get involved in a murder inquiry. He looked at his watch and said, “Have you two eaten at all?”