Peter Robinson - Cold Is The Grave

“You overestimate your importance to me,” said Banks, “and to be perfectly honest, the answer’s no, I’m not enjoying it. I haven’t enjoyed any of this. Not breaking the news to you about Emily’s death, not questioning you and your wife about her movements, and certainly not this. I’ve had the feeling that one or both of you has been lying or concealing things right from the start, and now I have some concrete evidence of it. I still wish I could simply wash my hands of the lot of you, but I can’t. I’ve got my job to do, and believe it or not, I feel that I owe your daughter something.”

“Why? What did she ever do for you?”

“Nothing. That’s not it at all.”

“What is, then?”

“You wouldn’t understand. Let’s just get back to that Sunday dinner at Scarlea, shall we? What did Clough want to talk to you about?”

“What do you think? He’d discovered that I’m chief constable and that I was contemplating entering into politics. The idea of having such an influential person in his pocket appealed to him.”

“What did he say?”

“He said that he knew Emily in London – as Louisa Gamine, of course – that they had lived together for two or three months and that he had compromising photographs and all sorts of interesting stories he could give to the newspapers about her, things that would spoil my chances of election, should I ever get that far, and things that would even call into doubt my fitness to stay on as chief constable, should I not. He made a few obscene comments about her, and he also indicated that he could probably persuade her to go back with him anytime he wanted. He seemed to believe that all he would have to do was whistle.”

“What did you say to him?”

“I told him to sod off. What do you think?”

“What did he say to that?”

“He said he could perfectly understand my reaction and that he’d give me a couple of weeks to think it over, then get in touch again.”

“Is that when you got up and walked away?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever hear anything else from him after that?”

“No. It’s only been a week and a half.”

“No threats or anything?”

“Nothing. And I don’t expect to.”

“Why not?”

“Well, he’s hardly going to draw attention to himself by making good on his blackmail threat to me now, is he? Not after the murder.”

“You don’t think the murder was a sort of warning for you, a signal?”

“Don’t be absurd. Things were in a delicate balance. Clough had everything to lose by harming Emily and everything to gain by keeping her alive. He’s not a stupid man, Banks. What do you imagine he’d guess my reaction to be if I thought for a moment that he’d murdered my daughter? It just doesn’t make sense.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that.” Banks really wanted a cigarette but he knew he couldn’t have one, not in Riddle’s house. “You must have known we’d find out sooner or later,” he said. “Why on earth didn’t you tell me?”

“It was a calculated risk. Why should I tell you? It was my personal business. My problem. It’s up to me to deal with it.”

“This wasn’t a personal problem. It stopped being that the minute someone murdered Emily, for Christ’s sake. Maybe Clough. You were withholding evidence.”

“What evidence?”

“That he was in the area around the time of her death, for a start. He could have easily given her the drugs.”

“I’ve tried not to interfere with the investigation in any way. I would like to have steered you away from Clough as a suspect, but I obviously couldn’t do that without raising suspicion.” Riddle leaned forward and rested his hands on his knees. “Think about it for a minute, Banks, before you go off half-cocked on this. What possible reason could Clough have for wanting to kill Emily when she represented his hold over me?”

“She didn’t need to be alive for him to make good on his threat.”

“But it wasn’t just the threat of revelations he made, remember. He also said he could take her back with him whenever he wanted. He knew I wouldn’t be able to bear the thought of her being with him. You should have told me, Banks. When you brought her back. You should have told us the sort of trouble she’d been getting herself into. You blame me for withholding evidence, but neither of you said a word about what Emily had been up to in London.”

Banks sighed. “What good would it have done?” Though maybe he should have, he thought miserably. He had believed that in keeping quiet he was saving the Riddles from unnecessary pain, and saving Emily perhaps from their disciplinarian backlash. But look what had happened. Emily was dead and Jimmy Riddle was in deep trouble himself. Trouble from which he might never fully recover. Banks remembered what Emily had told him about Riddle being a poor detective, always coming up with the wrong killer in the crime novels he read as an adolescent. He could believe it. “It’s no use blaming me,” he went on. “Believe me, there are times I wish I’d done things differently. But you. You’re a professional copper. You’re a bloody chief constable, for crying out loud. I can’t believe you’d be so stupid and stubborn and proud not to tell me that a man I’ve been seriously suspecting as your daughter’s killer actually approached you as a blackmail target only four days before she was murdered.”

Riddle’s expression hardened. “I told you. It was a private matter. It has nothing to do with Emily’s death. He had no motive for killing her. Don’t you think that if I really believed Clough had killed Emily I’d have throttled him with my bare hands by now? You might not understand this, Banks, but I loved my daughter.”

“Who can really know with someone like Clough?” Banks argued. “Perhaps from a business standpoint he would be better off with Emily alive, but he’s also a violent man, from what I’ve heard, and a possessive one. He doesn’t like people walking out on him. Maybe that’s why he killed her. Besides, I don’t believe she would have gone back to him that easily. She was frightened of him.”

“Well, that might be one good reason for going back to him, mightn’t it? Men like him might have a certain fascination for girls like… like Emily.”

“What do you mean?”

“Precocious, mischievous, rebellious. She’s always been like that. You know that she and I didn’t get on, no matter how much I cared about her. It always came out wrong. And Clough. He’s about my age, but he’s a criminal. Policeman – criminal. Don’t you see that she was doing this to hurt me?”

“If she’d wanted to hurt you, she’d have made sure you knew about it.”

Riddle just shook his head.

“Did Clough say anything about his business interests at this dinner?”

“No.”

“Did he mention PKF Computer Systems?”

“No.”

“Charlie Courage? Gregory Manners? Jamie Gilbert?”

“No. I’ve told you what he said. Don’t you think that if he’d told me anything incriminating I would have passed it along to you?”

“After what I’ve just heard, I don’t know about that.”

“There was nothing , Banks. Just his not-so-subtle blackmail hints.”

“But he was here, in the Eastvale area, when both Charlie Courage and your daughter were killed. Doesn’t that make you stop and think?”

“The first thing it makes me think is that he can’t have been responsible for the murders. He’s not so stupid as to be on the doorstep when they went down.”

“Stop defending him. For crying out loud, anyone would think you had…”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“What are you going to do about it?”