Peter Robinson: Careless Love

Annie and Gerry parked next to the patrol car in the tourist car park at Tetchley Moor and struggled against the wind as they made their way through the twisted heather and gorse roots towards the stunned group of ramblers. Had last week’s mist still been shrouding the moors, it would have been easy to mistake them for an ancient druids’ stone circle, Annie thought, but a sharp wind had finally arrived, especially on the heights, and it dispersed the low-lying cloud and drizzle that had been plaguing the Dales for weeks, replacing it with significantly lower temperatures. Now the sun shone bright and the sky was robin’s egg blue, with only the merest hint of white gossamer clouds twisting in spirals like DNA high above.

The wind moaned and whined and Annie’s winter coat flapped around her legs. Gerry’s long red hair whipped around her face, however much she tried the hold it back. When they got closer to the group, Annie recognised one or two of the faces from folk nights at the Dog and Gun she had attended with Banks.

Police Constable Ernie Garrett, who had been first officer on the scene, was standing guard over the gully, hands clasped over his groin like a footballer in the wall waiting for the free kick. Annie and Gerry approached, watched closely by the stationary walkers. One of the members held a handkerchief to her mouth, pale with shock.

When Annie leaned over the edge, she saw why. It looked as if the man had lost his way in the mist and fallen down the chasm, perhaps tripping over one of the heather or gorse roots that snaked all around the moors. He lay on his back, and his neck was twisted at an awkward angle. Annie guessed that the fall had probably broken it. There was also a fair amount of blood, which appeared to have come from where the back of the man’s head had hit a sharp stone. That he was dead was obvious enough, even to the layman. Small animals had clearly been nibbling at him, too, leaving marks on the exposed flesh of his face, ears and hands.

But there was another feature odd enough to snare Annie’s interest: the man was wearing an expensive slate grey suit, white shirt, striped tie and black brogues. Hardly the latest trend in walking gear, and certainly not the kind of clothing anyone in his right mind would have worn for a hike on Tetchley Moor at any time of the year.

But then, Annie thought, nobody in his right mind would have been walking in any sort of gear on Tetchley Moor over the past week or so.

Nobody, that is, except for the dead man in the grey suit.

Drinks in The Unicorn after a post-mortem was fast becoming a tradition. The pub was conveniently located opposite Eastvale General Infirmary, and it was usually quiet enough that he could hear himself think and have a private conversation.

Banks hadn’t seen any reason why he should inflict Adrienne’s post-mortem on Winsome, so he had texted her and asked her to walk down from the station to meet him afterwards. While he waited, he read again through the report the IT specialist had handed him after their brief chat that morning. They were still working on Adrienne’s laptop, and probably would be for some time, but they had been through the mobile without having recourse to go to her corpse for a fingerprint, and they were finished with it. He had her phone records before him.

The emails all seemed innocuous enough, mostly to or from family and friends, as far as Banks could gather. There was no evidence of cyber stalking, sexting, bullying or the myriad other offences social media had made it easier to commit. Adrienne also received a lot of automatic notifications of forthcoming classical concerts in the area along with regular newsletters from the Sage, Wigmore Hall and other music venues.

As far as apps were concerned, Adrienne had subscribed to the streaming and downloading services Idagio and Qobuz, and most of the downloaded music on her phone was classical. She had also bought an app for live screenings of the Berlin Philharmonic concerts which, Banks knew, cost around €150 a year. It was something Banks had thought about subscribing to himself, but felt that he wasn’t at home often enough to enjoy the luxury of the live broadcasts. Maybe he’d do it anyway. They all appeared in the archive eventually, and he could watch them at his leisure. The lure of seeing Patricia Kopatchinskaja dancing barefoot around Simon Rattle as she played the Ligeti violin concerto was almost too hard to resist.

Adrienne also had both Facebook and Twitter accounts, along with Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp, but there was nothing unusual about their content: a few photos of her and her college friends acting silly or formally dressed at a ball or wedding, wearing funny hats at a birthday party, holiday photos from a pal in Spain, along with Twitter feeds from her favourite classical musicians and scientific thinkers. There was certainly nothing risqué, no nude images, or even sexy poses. Nor did she have Tinder or any more sinister dating apps. It would all have to be sifted through in detail, of course, along with the contents of her laptop. There might be a clue to what happened to her among all the detritus of her private life. There usually was. There is no privacy for the dead.

The pub was almost empty, as usual. The landlord didn’t serve food, which discouraged the tourist trade, so the place survived on a clientele of serious drinkers and hospital shift workers, and sometimes the one was inseparable from the other. Truant pupils from Eastvale Comprehensive School down the road sneaked in now and then, and The Unicorn was well known as the pub where many an underage drinker had his or her first alcoholic drink.

The Unicorn certainly wasn’t the Queen’s Arms, being a rather shabby and rundown Victorian street corner pub, but at least it served a decent pint of Timothy Taylor’s, which was what Banks was drinking. As he sat in his corner and shivered, he also realised that another technique the landlord used to drive prospective customers away was keeping the heat turned low.

Winsome arrived and came over with her Britvic orange, keeping her fleece jacket on. She wasn’t drinking alcohol at all these days — not that she ever had drunk much — and Banks wondered whether that had any connection with her marrying Terry Gilchrist last March. If Winsome had an announcement to make, he was sure she would make it in her own time. Marriage seemed so far to have agreed with her. It had given her more confidence and encouraged her to speak her mind more freely. Before, she had often kept her own counsel, and Banks had had to coax ideas out of her, but now she tended to say what was on her mind. She had also lost much of her prudish aura and sometimes surprised him with a bawdy comment or even, God forbid, by swearing. Terry, the ex-soldier’s, influence, no doubt.

‘Anything on the mobile, guv?’ she asked as she sat down beside him at the corner table. It had been there so long it was still scarred with cigarette burns from the days when smoking was permitted in pubs.

‘Not as far as I can tell,’ said Banks. ‘Just the usual personal and college stuff. Nothing stands out. We’ll get the phone number from her call log and contacts checked.’

‘So what’s the doc’s verdict?’

‘That it seems very much as if Adrienne took enough sleeping pills to kill her.’ Banks remembered vividly the moment when Dr Glendenning had opened Adrienne Munro’s stomach. He took a gulp of beer to stem the rise of bile at the memory. The whole thing, her pale, beautiful, naked body on the stainless-steel slab, seemed a travesty of what her life should have been. On the one hand, she was nothing but an empty shell with no more personality or allure than a life-size doll, but on the other, she should have been pulsing with vitality and hopes and dreams and music. He thought of the beautiful melody of ‘Après un rêve’. ‘But, as it happens,’ he told Winsome, ‘she did a Jimi Hendrix before the sleeping pills could kill her, as Dr Burns suspected at the scene. Choked on her own vomit, too drugged to wake up. Jazz Singh is going to get to work on the toxicology.’