Peter Robinson - A Dedicated Man

Barker gripped the dashboard. ‘So you’ve not brought me along for the pleasure of my company?’

‘Give me a break.’

‘Seriously, Chief Inspector, is she in danger?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what we’re going to find. Don’t worry, though, it won’t be long now,’ he said, and the tyres squealed as he turned sharp left. About a quarter of a mile along the bumpy minor road, Banks pulled into a driveway and Barker pointed and said, ‘That’s her car. That’s Penny’s car.’

A face peered through a chink in the curtains as they jumped out of the Cortina and hurried towards the door.

‘No time for pleasantries,’ Banks said after trying the handle to no avail. He stood back and gave a hard kick, which splintered the wood around the lock and sent the door flying open. With Barker close behind, he rushed into the living room and quickly took in the strange tableau.

There were three people. Michael Ramsden stood facing Banks, white-faced and slack-jawed. Penny lay inert on the couch. And a woman stood with her back to them all.

In a split second, it came to life. Barker gasped and ran over to Penny, and Ramsden started to shake.

‘My God,’ he groaned, ‘I knew this would happen. I knew it.’

‘Shut up!’ the woman said, and turned to face Banks.

She wore a clinging red dress that accentuated her curves; her hair was drawn back into a tight V on her forehead and carefully applied blusher highlighted the cheekbones of her heart-shaped face. But the most striking thing about her was her eyes. Before, Banks had only seen them watery and distorted through thick lenses, but now she was wearing contacts they were the chilly green of moss on stones, and the power that shone through them was hard and piercing. It was Emma Steadman, transformed almost beyond recognition.

Ramsden collapsed into an armchair, head in hands, whimpering, while Emma continued to glare at Banks.

‘You bastard,’ she said, and spat at him. ‘You ruined it all.’ Then she lapsed into a silence he never heard her break.

But Ramsden talked as willingly as a sinner in the confessional, and what he said over the first two hours following his arrest gave the police enough evidence to charge both of them. Banks was astonished at Ramsden’s compulsion to unburden himself, and realized only then what terrible pressure the man must have been under, what inner control he must have exerted.

As for Penny, she said she had been doing a great deal of thinking over the last few days. Steadman’s death, Banks’s questions and Sally’s disappearance had all forced her to look more deeply into a past she had ignored for so long, and especially into the events of a summer ten years ago.

At first she remembered nothing. She hadn’t lied; everything had seemed innocent to her. But then, she said, the more she found herself dwelling on the memory, the more little things seemed to take on greater significance than they had done at the time. Glances exchanged between Emma Steadman and Michael Ramsden – had they really happened or were they just her imagination? Ramsden’s insistent overtures, then his increasing lack of interest – again, had it really happened that way? Was there, perhaps, a simple explanation? All these things had inflamed her curiosity.

Finally, after the argument with Jack Barker, she knew it wouldn’t all just go away. She had to do something or her doubts about the past would poison any chance of a future. So she went to visit Ramsden to find out if there was any truth in her suspicions.

Yes, she knew what had happened to Sally Lumb and she also knew the police linked the girl’s death to Steadman’s, but she honestly didn’t believe she had anything to fear from Michael Ramsden. After all, they’d known each other off and on since childhood.

She questioned Ramsden and, finding his responses nervous and evasive, pushed even harder. They drank tea and ate biscuits, and Ramsden tried to convince her that there was nothing in her fears. Eventually she found difficulty focusing; the room darkened and she felt as if she were looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope. Then Penny fell asleep. When she awoke she was in Barker’s arms and it was all over.

Banks told her that Ramsden had sworn he wouldn’t have hurt her. True, he had drugged her with some prescription Nembutal and driven to the public telephone on the main road to send for Emma, but only because he was confused and didn’t know what to do. When Emma had insisted that they would have to kill Penny because she knew too much, Ramsden claimed that he had tried to stand up to her. She had called him weak and said she would do what was necessary if he wasn’t man enough. She said it would be easy to arrange an accident. According to Ramsden, they were still arguing when Banks and Barker arrived.

Penny listened to all this at about one o’clock in the morning over a pot of fresh coffee in Banks’s smoky office. All she could say when he had finished was, ‘I was right, wasn’t I? He wouldn’t have hurt me.’

Banks shook his head. ‘He would,’ he insisted, ‘if Emma Steadman told him to.’

It was a couple of days before all the loose ends were tied up. Hatchley made notes and wrote up the statements, complaining all the while about DC Richmond sunning himself in Surrey, and Gristhorpe went over the details. Emma Steadman said nothing; she didn’t even bother to deny Ramsden’s accusations. To Banks, she was a woman who had risked everything and lost. There was no room for regret or recrimination now it was all over.

Later in the week, Banks took Sandra over to Helmthorpe, where they heard Penny sing at a special memorial concert for Sally Lumb. Afterwards, as it was a warm night and the show ended early, they went with Penny and Jack Barker for a drink in the beer garden of the Dog and Gun. Crow Scar gathered the failing light and gleamed as the hills around it fell into shadow. It looked like a pale curtain hanging in the sky.

Sandra and the others pressed Banks for an explanation of the Steadman business, and though he felt very uncomfortable in the role they forced on him, he did feel he owed Barker and Penny something; nor had he had much time to talk to Sandra since the arrests, and she had helped him arrive at the correct pattern.

‘When did it start?’ Sandra asked first.

‘About ten years back,’ Banks told her. ‘That makes Penny here sixteen, Michael Ramsden eighteen, Steadman about thirty-three and his wife just twenty-eight. Harold Steadman had a promising career as a university lecturer. If he wasn’t exactly rich, he was certainly comfortably off, and he did have the inheritance to look forward to. Emma too, must have been quite pleased with life in those days, but I imagine she quickly got bored. She was beginning to fade into the background like so many faculty wives.

‘When I talked to Talbot and Darnley, two of Steadman’s colleagues at Leeds University, one of them remembered Emma as a “pretty young thing” at first, then she just seemed to disappear into the woodwork. I dare say she’d have liked to go abroad for her holidays more often, but no, Steadman had discovered Helmthorpe – Gratly rather – and that satisfied all his requirements for a busman’s holiday, so that was that. For Emma, life seemed to be passing by too quickly and too dully, and she felt too young to give it all up.

‘That summer was beautiful, just like this one.’ Banks paused to look around at the other drinkers with their jackets and cardigans hung on the backs of chairs. ‘How often can you do this in England?’ he asked, sipping chilled lager. ‘Especially in Yorkshire. Anyway, Penny and Michael were the pride of the village – two bright kids with their whole lives ahead of them. Michael was a lean serious romantic young fellow, and if he imagined he was losing Penny to an older wiser man, then he still had a steady diet of Keats and Shelley to keep him nicely melancholy. Penny here simply enjoyed Steadman’s company, as she’s told me often enough. They had a lot in common, and there were no amorous inclinations on either side. Or if there were, they were well repressed.’