Peter Robinson - Blood At The Root

“Yes.”

Banks nodded. Then he swung his arm back as far as it would go and hit Riddle hard, right in the mouth. Riddle staggered back against the flimsy desk and slid to the floor. Which was where he lay, shaking his head and wiping blood from his mouth with the back of his hand as Banks said, “And I’ve been looking forward to that, too, sir. Goodbye.” Then he left the station, his knuckles aching and bleeding.

The minute Susan heard raised voices arguing about Amsterdam, she tiptoed into the corridor like a sneaky school-girl to listen. Then she heard a loud crash and saw Banks stalk out of his office and out of the building through the fire exit, without even glancing in her direction.

The chief constable hadn’t left, though. Puzzled, Susan crossed the corridor and pushed Banks’s office door open. Then she just stood there. Chief Constable Riddle was getting up from the floor, brushing dust from his uniform and dabbing his mouth with a blood-soaked handkerchief.

He saw her standing in the doorway, pointed and said, “Get back to your office, DC Gay. Nothing happened, you saw nothing, do you understand?”

“Yes, sir… Er… what about DCI Banks…?”

“DCI Banks is under suspension.”

Susan’s jaw dropped.

“Back to your office,” Riddle said again. She noticed one of his front teeth was chipped. “And remember: If word of this gets out, I’ll know exactly where it came from, and your career won’t be worth two penn’orth of shit, sergeant’s exam or no sergeant’s exam.”

“Yes, sir.”

Back in her office, Susan leaned on her desk, took a deep breath and tried to collect the thoughts that were suddenly spinning in her mind, out of control. Had she really just seen Jimmy Riddle getting up off the floor in Banks’s office, wiping blood from his mouth? Yes, she had. Was that why Banks had got suspended?

But Riddle wanted her to keep it quiet, so there had to be another reason. He could have Banks kicked off the force for assaulting a senior officer, but it would have to be made public then.

She could understand Riddle’s desire for silence easily enough – he would look like a real wimp if he publicly accused one of his DCIs of assault. After all, as Susan well knew, the police force was still very much a man’s world, and physical prowess was important to men. Riddle would feel humiliated by what had just happened; it would be a blow to his macho ego. The last thing he’d want known was that Banks, four or five inches shorter than him and slighter in build, had knocked him down. If that got out, people all over the region would be sniggering at him behind his back even more than they did now.

So he must have suspended Banks for some other reason.

Amsterdam? Was that it?

And then she realized something. At first, it was just a vague sense of apprehension, then the tumblers fell into position, one inexorably after the other. Then came the final click, and the door opened.

Susan looked at her watch. Just after five.

First, she drove the short distance to Banks’s house. As she drove, she chewed on her lip wondering if she was doing the right thing. She wished Superintendent Gristhorpe were here to advise her, but he’d gone off to teach a two-week course at Bramshill that morning. She didn’t even know what she was going to say to Banks. After all, he was her senior officer. What could she, a mere DC, do to help?

But there were things she wanted to know. She had worked with Banks for several years now and had come to know his moods pretty well. She had seen him angry, sad, hurt and frustrated, but she had never seen him like this. Nor would she ever have thought him the kind of person to do something as stupid and impulsive as punching Jimmy Riddle.

Call it woman’s intuition, a term she had a lot more respect for than she would ever care to admit in front of a roomful of male colleagues, but she felt something was seriously wrong. And it wasn’t only to do with Riddle. All she could think of was that something had happened in Amsterdam. But what?

She walked up the front path to Banks’s semi. Standing on the doorstep, she took a deep breath, counted to three, and rang the bell.

Nothing happened.

She rang again.

Still nothing.

She waited a few minutes more, tried knocking and ringing the bell. Still nothing. Where the hell was he? Looking around, she couldn’t see his car.

She dashed down the path and jumped back in her Golf. She was starting to feel angry now, not a good emotional state for driving, but at least anger would sustain her all the way and help her do what she had to. She headed out of town through the darkening countryside at a dangerous speed, crossed over the A1 and headed southeast, then hurtled through the dark, through villages where families were just settling down to tea and an evening with the telly.

Soon she was on the outskirts of Northallerton, pulling up outside Gavin’s modest terrace house.

Gavin answered on the first ring and smiled when he saw Susan. “Come in,” he said, standing aside. “This is an unexpected pleasure.”

Susan walked into the hall and Gavin leaned forward to plant a kiss on her cheek. She jerked back and slapped him hard across the face. Gavin staggered back a step or two. “You bastard,” Susan said. “You bastard. How could you do it?”

Gavin looked surprised. He held his hand to the reddening weal on his cheek. “Do what? What the hell did you do that for?”

“You know why.”

“No, I don’t. Look, take your coat off and come through. Then you can tell me what you’re on about.”

Susan followed him into the living room but she didn’t take her coat off. “I won’t be stopping,” she said. “I’ll just say what I have to say and go.”

Gavin nodded. He leaned against the wall with his arms folded. He was wearing tartan slippers, Susan noticed, and looked ridiculous. Somehow, that helped.

“All right,” he said. “I’m listening. And it’d better be good after what you just did to me.”

“Oh, it’s good all right,” Susan said. “It took me a while. I don’t know. Maybe I’m thick, maybe I’m a fool, but I worked it out in the end.”

“Well, you are supposed to be a detective, after all. But look, I still don’t know what you’re talking about. Will you back up a little and explain?”

Susan shook her head. “You’re so damn smooth, aren’t you, Gavin? You used me. That’s what I mean.”

“How did I use you? I thought you enjoyed-”

“I’m not talking about sex. I’m talking about information. All the time we were going out together, all the things I told you in private, all the station gossip. You passed it all on to Jimmy Riddle, didn’t you? Even what I told you in bed on Saturday.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

But he looked away from her eyes, down at his slippers. Susan had seen that guilty gesture in enough criminals to know it meant Gavin was lying. “Yes, you bloody well do,” she went on. “How else could Riddle have known everything he did? I should have twigged much earlier, then maybe none of this would have happened.”

“What?”

“Riddle suspended Banks this afternoon. Don’t tell me you didn’t know.”

Gavin shrugged. “Oh, that. Well, it’s the chief constable’s pre-”

“Don’t give me that crap. You got me to talk about Banks in private. Shop talk. It was me who told you he liked to call at the Classical Record Shop whenever he had to go to Leeds. When Riddle mentioned that to me a few days ago, I didn’t even think at the time about where he might have got it from. It was me who told you about Pamela Jeffreys, too, the violist involved in that case a couple of years ago, the one he felt guilty about. And on Saturday night, in bed, I told you Banks was in Amsterdam. My fault for being such a fool. Blame it on the wine. But you… you… You’re beneath contempt.”