Peter Robinson - A Dedicated Man

‘But how did he get back?’ Penny asked. ‘It’s an impossibly long walk, and the only bus to Eastvale goes early in the morning.’

‘Easy,’ Banks answered. ‘He wouldn’t have taken the bus anyway; too many people might have noticed him. Emma Steadman drove him back. She picked him up on the road at a prearranged time – a fairly isolated spot so there’d be no chance of their being seen. Then she dropped him off at the end of his lane and went shopping in York. We’ve checked on that now, and her neighbour remembers it because Emma brought back some material she’d asked for. There was nothing unusual in all that. Emma Steadman often spent afternoons shopping in York. After all, she was a lady of leisure. They just had to be careful not to be seen. And even if they had been, Ramsden looked enough like Steadman from a distance through a car window, so nobody would have thought twice about seeing them.’

‘What about that night?’ Penny asked. ‘After Harry had the row with my father?’

‘That’s another thing hindsight tells me I should have known,’ Banks answered. ‘There was only one place Steadman would have gone after the argument, and that’s exactly where he intended to go in the first place, to Ramsden’s. Remember he was a dedicated man, and you, Penny, were the only person he allowed to make emotional inroads into his valuable time. So he did exactly what he intended; he drove to York. And Ramsden killed him.

‘It was all planned in advance, perhaps even rehearsed. Ramsden already had plastic sheeting on the floor because he was painting his living room. He hit Steadman from behind with a hammer, wrapped his body in the sheet, bundled it in the boot of Steadman’s own car, drove it up near Crow Scar and buried it. He couldn’t bury him in the plastic because that might have given too much away, but he told us where he buried it and we’ve dug it up.’

Penny put her head in her hands and Barker put his arms around her.

‘I’m sorry, Penny,’ Banks said. ‘I know it sounds brutal, but it was.’

Penny nodded and took a sip of her drink, then reached for a cigarette. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s not your fault. I’m sorry to be such a crybaby. It’s just the shock. Please go on.’

‘It was well after midnight and the village was deserted. He put Steadman’s car back in the car park, cut through the graveyard and over the beck, then drove his own car home to York. All he had to worry about was getting stopped on the way, but the road he chose made that most unlikely. As I said, the whole thing was carefully planned to throw all suspicion away from Ramsden and Emma Steadman, who had the best motive. It even helped them that Steadman’s car was a beige Sierra. They’re quite common around here. I looked in the car park myself yesterday and saw three of them. And there are others that look much the same, especially in dim light – Allegros, for example. Of course there were minor risks, but there was a hell of a lot at stake. It was worth it.’

‘What about Sally then?’ Sandra asked. ‘How does she fit into it?’

‘She wasn’t part of the plan at all,’ Banks said. ‘She was just one of the innocent bystanders whose memory got jogged too much for her own good. Like Penny here.’

‘There but for the grace of God,’ Penny muttered.

‘Too true,’ Banks agreed. ‘Whatever you believe, Emma would have convinced Ramsden it was necessary to get rid of you. She’d probably have had to do it herself, but he wouldn’t have stopped her. He was too far gone.’

‘You said he seemed almost glad when you arrived,’ Penny said.

‘Yes, in a way. It was the end; he was free. I really think he was relieved. Anyway, according to Ramsden, Sally said she saw him and Emma together in Leeds. They were very careful; they’d never think of going out in York or Eastvale, but Leeds seemed safe enough. None of Steadman’s old colleagues would have recognized Emma, and she knew the kind of places they went to, the places to avoid. Sally was there with her boyfriend. I’ve talked to him again and he said they did go to Leeds once when he borrowed a friend’s car, and Sally pulled him out of a pub, Whitelock’s, pretty sharpish when she spotted someone she knew. But she didn’t realize who it was at the time. She was more concerned with Ramsden not seeing her than about who he was with. I suspect she and Kevin went to quite a few pubs. Sally certainly looked old enough to pass for eighteen, but she was under age, so she couldn’t afford to get caught.

‘Now, most people would have just thought that Michael Ramsden had got himself a good-looking girlfriend, and I’m sure that’s what Sally believed until events in Helmthorpe made her start re-examining little things like that. She was perceptive and imaginative. But it wasn’t until I’d managed to link Emma and Ramsden that I knew how Sally fitted in at all. One thing I noticed when I saw her was that she seemed very skilled with make-up for a girl of her age, and she was interested in acting, the theatre. She had seen Ramsden in Leeds with an attractive woman, forgotten about it, then seen the image again when her mind was on the Steadman business – maybe at the funeral, when she had plenty of time to examine what everyone was wearing and how they looked. I was there too, and I noticed how she seemed to be scrutinizing us all, though it didn’t mean anything to me at the time. However it happened, she remembered, and she became convinced it was Emma, carefully made up, she had seen with Ramsden. So Sally phoned her.

‘That was where she went wrong. Emma Steadman told Ramsden later that Sally had gone on about Wuthering Heights on the phone, and about how she thought Ramsden had killed Harold Steadman so he could marry Emma just to get his hands on the house and money. Sally was convinced that Ramsden would murder Emma too, after he had married her. She seemed to think the Ramsdens had gone down in the world and that Michael must resent Steadman tremendously for buying the house from his family and taking over. She suggested a secret meeting to discuss things and see if they could find a way to deal with the situation. She thought that, together, they could solve the case and make the police look silly. Emma was terrified of anything that could link her with Ramsden, so she killed the girl.’

‘Emma killed Sally Lumb?’ Penny repeated numbly.

‘Yes. Up by the packhorse bridge on Friday night. She hid the body under the bridge – the water was low then – and piled stones on it.’

‘But why on earth did Sally meet her like that?’ Barker asked. ‘She must have known it might be dangerous.’

‘Not at all. As far as Sally was concerned, she was simply warning Emma, saving her life. Besides, even if she did have second thoughts, ask Penny. She was about to do much the same thing, and she never seriously considered that Ramsden would harm her.’

‘But that was different,’ Penny argued. ‘I’d known Michael all my life. I knew he wouldn’t hurt me, even if what I thought was true.’

‘Somebody would have hurt you,’ Banks replied. ‘You wouldn’t find much comfort in being right about Ramsden while Emma was killing you. It wouldn’t matter then, would it?’

‘Only to the police, I suppose.’

‘You’re wrong about that,’ Banks said, leaning forward and looking straight into her eyes. ‘It matters to everyone except the corpse. Murder is the one crime that can’t be put right. It upsets the balance. The dead can’t be restored like stolen property; death doesn’t heal like physical or emotional scars left by assault or rape. It’s final. The end. Sally Lumb made a mistake and she died for it.’

‘She was reading the wrong book,’ Barker said. ‘And misreading it, at that. She should have been reading Madame Bovary. That’s about a woman who considers murdering her husband.’