Peter Robinson: A Dedicated Man

At the western edge of the village, near the Bridge, was a coffee bar where Sally and her friends hung out. The coffee was weak, the Coke warm and the Greek owner surly, but the place boasted two video games, an up-to-date jukebox and an ancient pinball machine. Of course, Sally would rather have expertly applied a little make-up and passed for eighteen in one of the pubs – especially the Hare and Hounds on disco night – but in such a small community everyone seemed to know a little about everyone else’s business, and she was worried in case word got back to her father. She had been in pubs in Eastvale with Kevin, though even that was risky with the school so close by, and in Leeds and York, which were safer, and nobody had ever questioned her about her age.

The door rattled as she pushed it open and entered to the familiar bleeping of massacred aliens. Kathy Chalmers and Hazel Kirk were engrossed in the game, while Anne Downes looked on coolly. She was a bookish girl, plain and bespectacled, but she wanted to be liked; and if that meant hanging around with video-game players, then so be it. The others teased her a bit, but never maliciously, and she was blessed with a sharp, natural wit that helped her hold her own.

The other two were more like Sally, if not as pretty. They chewed gum, applied make-up (unlike Sally, they did this badly) and generally fussed about their hair and clothes. Kathy had even got away with a henna treatment. Her parents had been furious, but there was nothing much they could do after the fact. It was Hazel, the sultry, black-haired one, who spoke first.

‘Look who’s here,’ she announced. ‘And where have you been all weekend?’ The glint in her eye implied that she knew very well where Sally had been and who she had been with. Under normal circumstances Sally would have played along, hinting at pleasures she believed Hazel had only read about in books, but this time she ignored the innuendo and got herself a Coke from the unsmiling Greek. The espresso machine was hissing like an old steam engine and the aliens were still bleeping in their death throes. Sally leaned against the column opposite Anne and waited impatiently for a silence into which she could drop her news.

When the game was over, Kathy reached for another coin, a manoeuvre that necessitated arching her back and stretching out her long legs so that she could thrust her hand deep enough into the pocket of her skintight Calvin Kleins. As she did this, Sally noticed the Greek ogling from behind his coffee machine. Choosing her moment for best dramatic effect, she finally spoke: ‘Guess what. There’s been a murder. Here in the village. They dug up a body under Crow Scar. I’ve just come from there. I’ve seen it.’

Anne’s pale eyes widened behind her thick lenses. ‘A murder! Is that what those men are doing up there?’

‘They’re conducting a search of the scene,’ Sally announced, hoping she’d got the phrasing right. ‘The scene of the crime. And the forensic team was there too, taking blood samples and tissue. And the police photographer and the Home Office pathologist. All of them.’

Kathy slid back into her seat, forgetting the game. ‘A murder? In Helmthorpe?’ She gasped in disbelief. ‘Who was it?’

Here Sally had to admit lack of information, which she disguised neatly by assuming that Kathy meant ‘Who was the murderer?’ ‘They don’t know yet, you fool,’ she replied scornfully. ‘It’s only just happened.’ Then she hurried on, keen not to lose their attention to further fleets of aliens. ‘I saw the superintendent close up. Quite a dish, actually. Not at all what you’d expect. And I could see the body. Well, some of it. It was buried by the wall up in Tavistock’s field. Somebody had scraped away some of the loose soil and then covered it with stones. There was a hand and a leg sticking out.’

Hazel Kirk tossed back a glossy raven’s wing of hair. ‘Sally Lumb, you’re a liar,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t see that far. The police wouldn’t have let anyone get that close.’

‘I did,’ Sally countered. ‘I could even see the wet patches under the superintendent’s arms.’ She realized too late that this outburst clashed with her more romantic image of the ‘superintendent’ and rushed on, hoping nobody would notice. Only Anne wrinkled her nose. ‘And old man Tavistock was there. I think he discovered the body. And all the policemen from miles around. Geoff Weaver was there.’

‘That pink-faced pansy,’ Kathy cut in.

‘It wasn’t so pink today, I can tell you. I think he’d been sick.’

‘Well, wouldn’t you be if you’d just found a dead body?’ Anne asked, coming to the defence of young Weaver, on whom she had had a schoolgirl crush for nearly six months. ‘It was probably all decomposed and rotten.’

Sally ignored her. ‘And there was another inspector, or whatever they call them. He wasn’t in uniform anyway. Tall, strawy hair – a bit like your dad, Kathy.’

‘That’ll be Jim Hatchley,’ Anne said. ‘Actually, he’s only a sergeant. My father knows him. Remember when the social club was broken into last year? Well, they sent him from Eastvale. He even came to our house. My dad’s treasurer, you know. Hatchley’s a coarse pig. He’s even got hairs up his nose and in his ears. And I’ll bet that other chap was Chief Inspector Banks. He had his picture in the paper a while back. Don’t you ever read the papers?’

Anne’s stream of information and opinion silenced everyone for a moment. Then Sally, who read nothing but Vogue and Cosmopolitan, picked up the thread again. ‘They’re here now. In the village. They drove down before I came.’

‘I’m surprised they didn’t give you a lift,’ Hazel said, ‘seeing as how you’re on such good terms.’

‘Shut up, Hazel Kirk!’ Sally said indignantly. Hazel just smirked. ‘They’re here. They’ll be questioning everybody, you know. They’ll probably want to talk to all of us.’

‘Why should they want to do that?’ Kathy asked. ‘We don’t know anything about it.’

‘It’s just what they do, stupid,’ Sally retorted. ‘They do house-to-house searches and take statements from everyone. How do they know we don’t know anything till they ask us?’

Sally’s logic silenced Kathy and Hazel.

‘We don’t even know who the victim was yet,’ Anne chimed in. ‘Who do you think it was?’

‘I’ll bet it was that Johnnie Parrish,’ Kathy said. ‘He looks like a man with a past to me.’

‘Johnnie Parrish!’ Sally sneered. ‘Why, he’s about as interesting as a… a…’

‘A dose of clap?’ Anne suggested. They all laughed.

‘Even that would be more interesting than Johnnie Parrish. I’ll bet it was Major Cartwright. He’s such a miserable, bad-tempered old bugger there must be lots of people want to kill him.’

‘His daughter, for one,’ Hazel said, and giggled.

‘Why?’ Sally asked. She didn’t like to think she was excluded from what appeared to be common knowledge.

‘Well, you know,’ Kathy stalled. ‘You know what people say.’

‘About what?’

‘About Major Cartwright and his daughter. How he keeps such a tight rein on her since she came back to the village. Why she ran off in the first place. It’s unnatural. That’s what people say.’

‘Oh, is that all,’ Sally said, not quite sure she understood. ‘But she’s got her own place, that cottage by the church.’

‘Maybe it was Alf Pringle,’ Hazel suggested. ‘Now there’s a nasty piece of work. Be doing us all a favour if somebody did away with him.’

‘Wishful thinking.’ Kathy sighed. ‘Do you know, he chased me off his land the other day. I was only picking wild flowers for that school project. He had his shotgun with him, too.’