Peter Robinson: A Dedicated Man

Banks hadn’t read Madame Bovary but made a mental note to do so as soon as possible. When the waiter reappeared, Banks and Penny were the only ones to order more drinks.

Banks lit another cigarette. ‘Ramsden got really scared after Emma killed Sally,’ he said. ‘But life went on and no thunderbolts from heaven struck him down. Then Penny started to figure things out. You know the rest.’

Penny shivered and draped her shawl over her shoulders.

‘Emma Steadman was far more powerful than any of us had imagined,’ Banks said. ‘She also had a solid alibi for her husband’s murder. There was no way she could have done that, and though I flirted with the idea that she might have paid someone, it didn’t seem likely. Sergeant Hatchley was right – she wouldn’t have known how to contact a hired killer. Besides, if she had, it would have meant someone else to fear, someone who knew about her and what she’d done. Ramsden was ideal; Emma could control him, and he stood to gain too. Sally knew that Mrs Steadman couldn’t have carried the body up Tavistock’s field – another reason not to fear her – but she didn’t know that Ramsden seemed to have a perfect alibi. I certainly didn’t tell her, and I don’t think anyone else did.

‘I was thinking about all the wrong combinations,’ he said to Penny. ‘You and Steadman, you and Ramsden, you and Barker here. For a while I even wondered whether Ramsden and Steadman were homosexually involved. Like everyone else, I was taken in by Emma Steadman’s outer drabness. I just couldn’t picture her as a woman of passion and power. I didn’t even try. But she had the most dangerous combination of all, a passionate and calculating nature.’

‘What did make you think of her?’ asked Barker. ‘I’d never have got it in a million years.’

‘That’s because you only write books,’ Banks joked, ‘while I do the real work.’

‘Touche. But really? I’m curious.’

‘Tell me, didn’t you ever notice anything odd about Emma Steadman?’

Barker thought for a while. ‘No,’ he answered. ‘I can’t say I did. I didn’t really see a lot of her. When I did I always felt a bit uneasy.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. There are some women just make you feel like that.’

‘You didn’t tell me that when I asked you about her.’

‘Never really thought of it till you mentioned it just now,’ Barker said. ‘Besides, what difference would it have made?’

‘None, I suppose,’ Banks admitted. ‘It’s just that I felt uneasy with her too. Claustrophobic even. It was a kind of gut reaction, and I ought to know better than that.’

‘But what did it mean?’ Barker asked.

‘This is all hindsight,’ Banks said, ‘so it did me no good until it was too late, but I think I was responding to her sexual power unconsciously and I was put off by her appearance. I couldn’t accept being attracted to her so I felt dislike, revulsion. It might sound silly, but I couldn’t see beneath the surface. Still, that was the last thing I realized. First of all there was something Darnley had said in Leeds that I couldn’t for the life of me remember. It was just the kind of casual, throwaway remark anyone might overlook.’

‘What was it?’ Penny asked.

‘He said that Emma had been a pretty little thing at first in Leeds. Of course, that meant nothing at the time. Then Sally disappeared. I thought she must be connected in some way to the Steadman business but I couldn’t figure out how. I knew about her theatrical interests, but there was no way of getting from that to seeing Michael Ramsden as Steadman’s killer. Besides, I was still too busy looking in every direction but the right one. I was blinded by Emma’s alibi, too.

‘Finally, Sandra said she’d seen Emma and noticed that she still looked pretty good. That was when the bits and pieces seemed to fit together: a pretty young thing, Sally’s skill at make-up – which is just altering appearances when you get right down to it – and Emma Steadman as the outline, still, of an attractive woman. And she did tell me she’d been involved in amateur dramatics. When I thought about what others had told me about Emma, I realized that nobody had ever mentioned her being attractive. Penny wouldn’t of course – like her husband, I don’t think you ever really noticed Emma – and Jack here hadn’t known her that far back. Ramsden never said that she was attractive either, and that, finally, seemed odd. Then I got to thinking about Ramsden alone with her at the house that summer, about how he suddenly seemed to drift away from Penny. I’d always seen him as a kind of pale loiterer, but it took me a long time to see Emma Steadman as a belle dame. My view of the past was wrong, just like Teddy Hackett said Steadman’s was, and everyone else seemed to look back on that summer through rose-tinted glasses. If truth be told, it was a period of desire, greed, deception, adultery – hardly an idyll at all. Even Sally got it wrong.

‘When I asked my questions, I never had Ramsden and Emma in mind, but it was easy enough to review what I’d learned in the light of a new perspective. Once I’d got that far, it seemed possible. Two people working together could have handled the Steadman killing, while both seeming to have solid alibis. Sally could have posed a threat to Emma if she had seen her transformed from the drab housewife into the sexy siren with Michael Ramsden. All I had to do then was go and push even harder. At least I knew I was going in the right direction. But events turned out differently.’

‘You were certainly fixed in your ideas about me and Harry,’ Penny said.

‘Yes,’ Banks agreed. ‘Maybe Ramsden and Emma was a combination I shouldn’t have overlooked. But it’s easy to say that now it’s over. Whenever I thought of that summer I knew there was something missing, so I assumed that people had been lying to me, hiding something. They hadn’t. As far as you knew, it had all happened the way you told me. Almost all, anyway.’

‘Don’t blame yourself,’ Sandra said to him, winking at Penny. ‘After all, you’re only a man.’

‘I’ll drink to that,’ Penny said, raising her glass and nudging Jack Barker.

While Banks joined in the toast and the chit-chat that followed, he thought deep guilty thoughts about Sally Lumb, who had seen beneath the surface only to find yet another romantic illusion. Above them, as all traces of the sun disappeared, Crow Scar began to gleam like bone in the light of the rising moon.