Peter Robinson - The Hanging Valley

Then, of course, she had to serve the meals and manage a smile for all the guests, whatever their comments about the quality of the food and no matter what their sweet little children saw fit to drop on the floor or throw at the walls. She was also often asked for advice about where to go for the day, but sometimes Sam would help with that part, breaking off from his usual morning monologue on current events with which he entertained the visitors daily whether they liked it or not.

Next, she had to clear the tables and wash the dishes. The machine Sam had finally bought her helped a lot. Indeed, it saved her so much time that she could hurry down to Thetford’s Grocery on the Helmthorpe Road and take her pick of the morning’s fresh produce. Sam used to do that before he had installed the machine, but now he had more time for the sundry business matters that always seemed to be pressing.

When Katie had planned the menu for the evening meal and bought all the ingredients, it was time to change the sheets and clean the rooms. It was hardly surprising then that by noon she was almost always tired. If she was lucky, she could sometimes find a little time for gardening around mid afternoon.

Putting off the moment when she would have to move on to the next room, Katie walked over to the window and rested her elbows on the sill. It was a fine day in a beautiful part of the world but to her the landscape felt like an enormous trap; the fells were boulders that shut her in, the stretches of moorland like deserts impossible to cross. A chance of freedom had offered itself recently, but there was nothing she could do about it yet. She could only wait patiently and see what developed.

She looked down on the grassy banks at each side of the fledgling River Swain, at the children sitting patiently with their home-made fishing nets, a visiting couple having a picnic, the old men gossiping as usual on the small stone bridge. She could see it all, but not feel the beauty of any of it.

And there, almost dead opposite, was the White Rose, founded in 1605, as its sign proudly proclaimed, where Sam would no doubt be hobnobbing with his upper-class chums. The fool, Katie thought. He thinks he’s well in, but they’ll never really accept him, ever after all these years and all he’s done for them. Their kind never does. She was sure they laughed at him behind his back. And had he noticed the way Nicholas Collier kept looking at her? Did Sam know about the times Nicholas had tried to touch her?

Katie shuddered at the thought. Outside, a sudden movement caught her eye and she saw the old men part like the Red Sea and stare open-mouthed as a slight figure hurried across the bridge.

It was that man who’d set off just a few hours ago, Katie realized, the mild-mannered clerk from Castleford or Featherstone or somewhere like that. Surely he’d said he was heading for the Pennine Way? And he was as white as the pub front. He turned left at the end of the bridge, hurried the last few yards and went running into the White Rose.

Katie felt her chest tighten. What was it that had brought him back in such a state? What was wrong? Surely nothing terrible had happened in Swainshead? Not again.

‘Well,’ Sam Greenock was saying about the racial mix in England, ‘they have their ways, I suppose, but—’

Then Neil Fellowes burst through the door and looked desperately around the pub for a familiar face.

Seeing Sam at his usual table with the Collier brothers and John Fletcher, Neil hurried over and pulled up a chair.

‘We must do something,’ he said, gasping for breath and pointing outside. ‘There’s a body up on the fell. Dead.’

‘Calm down, mate,’ Sam said. ‘Get your breath, then tell us what’s happened.’ He called over to the barman. ‘A brandy for Mr Fellowes, Freddie, if you please. A large one.’ Seeing Freddie hesitate, he added, ‘Don’t worry, you bloody old skinflint, I’ll pay. And get a move on.’

Conversation at the table stopped while Freddie Metcalfe carried the drink over. Neil gulped the brandy and it brought on a coughing fit.

‘At least that’s put a bit of colour back in your cheeks,’ Sam said, slapping Neil on the back.

‘It was terrible,’ Neil said, wiping off the brandy where it had dribbled down his chin. He wasn’t used to strong drink, but he did approve of it in emergencies such as this.

‘His face was all gone, all eaten away, and the whole thing was moving, like waves.’ He put his glass to his thin lips again and drained it. ‘We must do something. The police.’ He got up and strode over to Freddie Metcalfe. ‘Where’s the police station in Swainshead?’

Metcalfe scratched his shiny red scalp and answered slowly. ‘Let me see… There aren’t no bobbies in T’ Head itself. Nearest’s Helmthorpe, I reckon. Sergeant Mullins and young Weaver. That’s nigh on ten miles off.’

Neil bought himself another double brandy while Metcalfe screwed up his weather-beaten face and thought.

‘They’ll be no bloody use, Freddie,’ Sam called over. ‘Not for something like this. It’s CID business, this is.’

‘Aye,’ Metcalfe agreed, ‘I reckon tha’s right, Sam. In that case, young feller mi’ lad,’ he said to Neil, ‘it’ll be that chap in Eastvale tha’ll be after. T’ one who were out ’ere last time we ’ad a bit o’ bother. Gristhorpe, Chief Inspector Gristhorpe. Years back it was though. Probably dead now. Come on, lad, you can use this phone, seeing as it’s an emergency.’

‘Chief Inspector’ Gristhorpe, now Superintendent, was far from dead. When the call came through, he was on another line talking to Redshaw’s Quarries about a delivery for the drystone wall he was building. Despite all the care he had put into the endeavour, a section had collapsed during an April frost, and rebuilding seemed a suitable spring project.

The telephone call found its way instead to the office of Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, who sat browsing through the Guardian arts pages, counting his blessings that crime had been so slack in Eastvale recently. After all, he had been transferred from London almost two years ago for a bit of peace and quiet. He liked detective work and couldn’t imagine doing anything else, but the sheer pressure of the job — unpleasant, most of it — and the growing sense of confrontation between police and citizens in the capital had got him down. For his own and his family’s sake, he had made the move. Eastvale hadn’t been quite as peaceful as he’d expected, but at the moment all he had to deal with were a couple of minor break-ins and the aftermath of a tremendous punch-up in the Oak. It had started when five soldiers from Catterick camp had taunted a group of unemployed miners from Durham. Three people ended up in hospital with injuries ranging from bruised and swollen testicles to a bitten-off earlobe, and the others were cooling off in the cells waiting to appear before the magistrate.

‘Someone asking for the super, sir,’ said Sergeant Rowe, when Banks picked up the phone. ‘His line’s busy.’

‘It’s all right,’ Banks said. ‘I’ll take it.’

A breathless, slightly slurred voice came on the line. ‘Hello, is that Inspector Gristhorpe?’

Banks introduced himself and encouraged the caller, who gave his name as Neil Fellowes, to continue.

‘There’s a body,’ Fellowes said. ‘Up on the fells. I found it.’

‘Where are you now?’

‘A pub. The White Rose.’

‘Whereabouts?’

‘What? Oh, I see. In Swainshead.’

Banks wrote the details down on his scrap pad.

‘Are you sure it’s a human body?’ he asked. There had been mistakes made in the past, and the police had more than once been dragged out to examine piles of old sacks, dead sheep or rotten tree trunks.