Peter Robinson - Cold Is The Grave

“Where was Ruth at this time?”

“They’d taken her to hospital. She jumped out of her bedroom window in the nick of time. Broke her ankle and dislocated her shoulder.”

“Nasty.”

“The ankle was the worst. Bad fracture, apparently. Took her weeks before she could walk again without crutches or a stick. Anyway, it wasn’t nearly as nasty as what happened to her mum and dad. She was the lucky one. There’d been a shower earlier in the evening, and the ground was soft, or she might have broken more bones.”

“How did her parents die?”

“Smoke inhalation. That’s what the postmortem showed. Never even had time to get out of bed. Ruth had inhaled some smoke, too, before she jumped, but not enough to do her much harm. A whiff of oxygen and she was right as rain.”

“Why did she have time to escape and her parents didn’t?”

Whitmore shrugged. “Younger, stronger, quicker reflexes. Also, her room was at the front, and the fire was worse further back. Her parents were probably dead when she jumped.”

“Can you tell me anything else?”

“That’s about it, really, love. Told you you’d probably had a wasted journey.”

“Well, you know what it’s like,” said Annie. “Was the house completely destroyed?”

“Pretty much. Inside, at any rate.”

“And now?”

“Oh, someone bought it and had it renovated. To look at it now you’d never know such tragedy happened there.”

Annie stood up. “Where is it from here, exactly?”

“Carry on along the main road, go left at the next lights and it’s the second street on the right.”

“Thanks very much.” Annie left Whitmore’s tiny office and walked back past the card players. This time one of them whistled at her. She smiled to herself. It felt quite nice, actually. Thirty-something and she still got whistled at. She’d have to tell Alan about that.

Alan . They had talked most of the night while the peat fire blazed in the hearth and soft jazz played in the background. He told her about Rosalind’s visit, about Emily and Ruth, about the guilt he felt on finding Riddle dead in his garage, and she told him about how Dalton’s appearance had knocked her out of kilter, brought back feelings she didn’t know she still harbored, and how she had confronted him on Sunday morning.

Had it been summer, they would have been up talking until dawn, but because it was December, the only light that shone through the windows at four o’clock in the morning came from a full moon as white as frost. Even then they continued to talk, and the way Annie remembered it she thought she had probably fallen asleep in mid-sentence.

It wasn’t until both had slept for about three hours that they made love – tentatively and tenderly – and in the morning they had to scrape the ice off their car windows and drive like hell to get to work on time.

Now, it seemed to Annie as if there were no more secrets, as if nothing stood between them. She still worried about their working together, especially now that she was stationed at Western Divisional HQ, too, and she could never quite get over her fear of commitment, of rejection. But Banks hadn’t asked her for commitment, and if anything, it was she who had rejected him last time, out of fear of his past impinging on her life.

All she really knew, she decided, was that whatever it was they had, she wanted it. It was time again to take her lesson from Eastern philosophy – go with the flow.

Annie smiled as she touched up her makeup, using the rear-view, then she headed off to see if she could discover anything from the Walkers’s neighbors.

The atmosphere that had hung over the death scene at Riddle’s garage the previous day seemed to have permeated the entire station, Banks thought as he looked out of his window at the market square. The place had all the atmosphere of a funeral parlor. While Riddle might not have been the most loved or admired chief constable they had ever had, he had been one of them, and he was dead. It was like losing a member of the family. A distant and austere uncle perhaps, but still a family member. Even Banks felt heavy-hearted as he sipped his bitter black coffee.

The dark mood reminded him of the days after Graham Marshall’s disappearance, when everyone in the school seemed to be going around walking on eggs, in a daze, and conversations all seemed to be carried out in whispers. Those days had given Banks his first real taste of guilt, a sense of being responsible for people that was one of the things that spurred him on now in his job. He knew deep down that he was no more responsible for Graham Marshall’s disappearance than he was for Phil Simpkins’s bleeding to death on the railings, or Jem’s overdose of heroin, but he seemed to attract the guilt, draw it to him and wrap it around himself like a comforting mantle.

When he thought of Annie, though, he felt his spirits rise. He knew not to expect too much – she had made that quite clear – but at least they had got beyond the rumors and fears they had been bogged down in the past week. Banks sensed the possibility of a new, deeper trust. It would have to develop naturally, though; there could be no pushing, not with someone as scared of intimacy as Annie was, or someone as recently battle-scarred as himself. Sandra’s asking for a divorce and telling him she wanted to marry Sean might have given him a sense of finality, of liberation, but the old wounds were still there. Which reminded him: he ought to respond to the second solicitor’s letter, or Sandra would think he had changed his mind.

Banks could see a knot of reporters outside the station. He looked at his watch: almost opening time. Pretty soon they’d all be ensconced in the Queen’s Arms padding out each other’s expense accounts. Riddle’s suicide was the kind of thing that got the London dailies this far up north. No official statements had been issued yet, and the Riddle house was still under secure guard. Of course, they could have a field day with this one: CHIEF CONSTABLE COMMITS SUICIDE WITH POLICE GUARD ONLY YARDS AWAY. They could spin that to read whatever way they wanted.

Rosalind was going down to stay with her parents in Barnstaple when she had made the funeral arrangements. Then, she had told Banks just before she left the previous evening, she would sell the house and decide what to do next. There was no hurry – she would be well provided for – but she would move as far away from Yorkshire as possible. Banks felt for her; he had absolutely no conception of how awful it must feel to lose a daughter and a spouse in the space of only a few days. He couldn’t even imagine how terrible it would be to lose Brian or Tracy.

Banks’s ancient heater hissed and sputtered as he sat down and thought over the previous evening’s conversation with Rosalind. One obvious point was that, by telling him what she had, she had inadvertently supplied him with a motive for getting rid of Emily. Or was it inadvertent? He had no doubt that Rosalind could be devious when she wanted to – after all, she was a lawyer – but he had no idea as to why she would want to incriminate herself that way. Put simply, though, if Rosalind wanted to keep Ruth’s existence from her husband, and if Emily was a loose cannon on the deck, then Rosalind had a motive for getting Emily out of the way.

And, by extension, she had an even better motive for wanting Ruth Walker out of the way permanently.

Since Riddle’s suicide, though, it was all academic. The money, the status, the celebrity, the possibility of political life – they had all vanished into thin air. Nothing remained for Rosalind except Benjamin and Ruth, and Banks doubted she would have anything more to do with Ruth after all that had happened. It was enough to prove the writer of Ecclesiastes right when he wrote that all is vanity.