Past Reason Hated (7 page)

She still felt angry at herself for being so damn jumpy Banks had only dropped by the community centre to break the news of Caroline Hartley’s death and to discover what time she had left the rehearsal the previous evening. But Susan hadn’t known anything about Caroline’s part in the play, so how could she help assuming that Banks was checking up on her? Anyway, she had kept quiet and matters had soon become clear to her.

When Banks had gone, she’d walked to Pristine Records in the shopping centre by the bus station. The girl with the white-face make-up and hair like pink champagne pointed out the small classical section and, when pushed, leafed idly through the stock cards. No, they hadn’t sold a copy of
Lousy whatsit
lately; they hadn’t even had a copy in. Ever. Using her own initiative, Susan also checked Boots and W. H. Smiths, both of which had small record departments, but she had no luck there either. The record was imported from Hungary, and whoever had bought it hadn’t done so in Eastvale.

Over lunch at the Queen’s Arms, information had been pooled and tasks assigned by Superintendent Gristhorpe. According to Banks, Caroline had left the Garden Café just after three o’clock, as usual, probably done a bit of shopping, then attended rehearsal at four. James Conran said they had finished at ten to six and everyone had left by five to. He himself had been the last to leave. He had gone out the back way, as usual, locked up and strolled over to the Crooked Billet on North York Road for a couple of drinks. In the caretaker’s absence, he and Marcia Cunningham were the only ones in the drama group to have keys to the centre, although an extra set had been lodged at the police station in case of emergencies. Members of the other societies housed in the centre also had keys, including Sandra Banks.

Presumably, Caroline had gone straight home, because a neighbour across the street told one of the constables that she had seen Miss Hartley enter the house. It had happened at the same time the neighbour had gone over to her window to close a chink in the curtains during the commercial break in
Calendar,
which would have been about six fifteen.

Richmond had not been able to find out much about Charles Cooper’s movements. The clerk who had been at the Barnard Castle shop on the evening in question had the day off today. He planned to visit Barnard Castle and ask around some more after he had talked to Veronica Shildon’s therapist and made a start on tracking down Ruth. Banks was off to visit Claude Ivers, Veronica’s estranged husband, and Susan herself had drawn the job of talking to Caroline’s family in Harrogate. In addition to keeping tabs on the break-in, she was still on the murder team. Thank God the Harrogate police had at least broken the news of Caroline’s death. That was one distasteful task she had been spared.

She drove up Ripon Road by the huge Victorian hotels – the Cairn, the Majestic, the St George – dark stone mansions set back behind vast walled lawns and croquet greens. As she kept an eye on the road, Susan found herself hoping that the Hartley case wouldn’t be solved by Christmas. That way she could legitimately beg off visiting her parents in Sheffield. Home visits were always tense. Susan found herself regaled with stories about her brother the stockbroker and her sister the lawyer. Of course, neither of them could ever make it home for Christmas; her brother lived in London and her sister in Vancouver But she had to hear all about them, nonetheless. And whatever Susan herself achieved was always belittled by her siblings’ success stories, pieced together from occasional letters and the odd newspaper clipping, and by her parents’ disapproval of the course she had chosen. She could make chief constable and they would still look down on her. With a bit of luck, Caroline Hartley’s murder would keep her busy well into the new year. Susan had a feeling they might be dealing with a nutter – the violence of the wounds and the music left playing seemed to point that way – and nutters, she remembered from her training, were always difficult to catch.

The town of Harrogate soon banished thoughts of psychopaths. All formal gardens and elegant Victorian buildings, it was a spa town, like Bath, a place people retired to or visited to attend business conventions. Ripon Road became Parliament as she drove past the Royal Baths and Betty’s Tea Room, then its name changed again to West Park. She turned left onto York Place, the road that ran by the Stray, a broad expanse of parkland in the town centre renowned for its vibrant flower displays in spring. Now it looked cool and serene under its layer of snow.

The Hartleys lived in a large house off Wetherby Road on the southern outskirts of the town. From the outside, it looked like something out of Edgar Allan Poe: the House of Usher, Susan thought, the way it appeared in that Roger Corman film that used to scare her when she was a little girl. The black stone was rough and pitted like coke, and the upper oriels seemed to stare out like bulging eyes. When Susan rang the doorbell she half expected an enormous manservant with a green complexion to answer and say ‘You rang?’ in a deep voice. But the boy who came to the door was far from enormous. He was in his late teens, judging by the pale, spotty face, the spiky hair and the look of dazed contempt for the world on his face, and he was as skinny as a rake.

‘What is it?’ he asked in an edgy, high-pitched voice. ‘We don’t want anything. There’s been a death in the family.’

‘I know,’ Susan said. ‘That’s why I’m here.’ She showed her card and he stepped back to let her in. She followed him down the gloomy hallway to a room that must once have been a study or library. The ceiling was high, with curlicues at the corners and an ornate fixture at the centre from which the chandelier had once hung. Dark wainscotting came waist high.

But the room was a mess. Much of the fine oak panelling was scratched with graffiti and pitted where darts had been thrown at it. The huge windows, framed by heavy, moth-eaten drapes, were filmed with cobwebs and grime. Magazines and newspapers lay scattered all over the threadbare carpet. Beer cans and cigarette ends littered the hearth and the old stone fireplace, and the stuffing was coming out of the huge green velvet-upholstered settee. The room was an elegant Victorian sanctuary reduced to a teenager’s private wasteland.

The boy didn’t ask Susan to sit down, but she found a chair that looked in reasonable condition. Before she sat, she began to undo her coat, but as she did so she realized that it was freezing in the room, as it had been in the hall. There was no heat at all. The boy didn’t seem to notice or care, even though he was only wearing jeans and a torn t-shirt. He lit a cigarette and slumped on the settee. More stuffing oozed out, like foam from a madman’s mouth.

‘So?’ he said.

‘I’d like to see your father.’

The boy laughed harshly. ‘You must be the first person to say that in five years. People don’t usually
like
to see my father. He’s a very depressing man. He makes them think of death. The grim reaper.’

The boy’s thin face, only a shade less white than the snow outside, certainly made Susan think of death. He looked in urgent need of a blood transfusion. Could he really be Caroline Hartley’s brother? It was hard to see a resemblance between the boy and his sister. Caroline, when she was alive, must have been a beautiful woman. Even in death she had looked more alive than her brother.

‘Can I see him?’

‘Be my guest.’ The boy pointed towards the ceiling and flicked his ash towards the littered fireplace.

Susan walked up the broad staircase. It must have been wonderful once, with thick pile carpeting and guests in evening dress standing around sipping cocktails. But now it was just bare, creaky wood, scuffed and splintered in places, and the banister looked like someone had been cutting notches in it. There were pale squares on the walls showing where paintings had been removed.

Without a guide or directions, it took Susan three tries before she opened the right door. Her first try had led her into a bathroom, which seemed clean and modern enough; the second revealed the boy’s room, where the curtains were still closed and faint light outlined messy bedsheets and last week’s underwear on the floor; and the third took her into a warm, stuffy room that smelled of cough lozenges, camphor and commodes. A one-element electric fire radiated its heat close to the bed, and there, in a genuine four-poster with the curtains open, a shadow of a man lay propped up on pillows. The bags under his eyes were so dark they looked like bruises, his complexion was like old paper, and the hands that grasped the bedclothes around his chest were more like talons. His skin looked as if it would crack like parchment if you touched it. As she approached, his watery eyes darted towards her.

‘Who are you?’ His voice was no more than a frightened whisper.

Susan introduced herself and he seemed to relax. About Caroline?’ he said. A faraway look came into his ruined eyes, pale yokes floating in glutinous albumen.

‘Yes,’ Susan said. ‘Can you tell me anything about her?’

‘What do you want to know?’

Susan wasn’t sure. She had taken statements as a uniformed constable and studied interview techniques at police college, but it had never seemed as haphazard as this. Superintendent Gristhorpe hadn’t been much help either. ‘Find out what you can,’ he had told her. ‘Follow your nose.’ Clearly it was a matter of sink or swim in the CID. She took a deep breath and wished she hadn’t; the warmed-up smell of terminal illness was overpowering.

‘Anything that might help us find her killer,’ she said ‘Did Caroline visit you recently?’

‘Sometimes,’ he muttered.

‘Were you close?’

He shook his head slowly. ‘She ran away, you know.’

‘When did she run away?’

‘She was only a child and she ran away.’

Susan repeated her question and the old man stared at her. ‘Pardon? When did she go? When she was sixteen Only a child.’

‘Why?’

A look of great sadness came into his eyes. ‘I don’t know. Her mother died, you know. I tried the best I could, but she was so hard to manage.’

‘Where did she go?’

‘London.’

‘What did she do there?’

He shook his head. ‘Then she came back. That’s when she came to see me.’

‘And again since?’

‘Yes.’

‘How often?’

‘When she could. When she could get away.’

‘Did she ever tell you anything about her life down in London?’

‘I was so happy to see her again.’

‘Do you know where she lived, who her friends were?’

‘She wasn’t a bad girl, not really a
bad
girl.’

‘Did she write from London?’

The old man shook his head slowly on the pillow.

‘But you still loved her?’

‘Yes.’ He was crying now, and the tears embarrassed him. ‘I’m sorry . . . could you please . . .?’ He pointed to a box of tissues on the bedside table and Susan passed it to him.

‘She wasn’t
bad,
’ he repeated when he’d settled down again. ‘Restless, angry. But not bad. I always knew she’d come back. I never stopped loving her.’

‘But she never talked about her life, either in London or in Eastvale?’

‘No. Perhaps to Gary. . . . I’m tired. Not a
bad
girl,’ he repeated softly.

He seemed to be falling asleep. Susan had got nowhere and could think of no more questions to ask. Clearly, the old man had not jumped out of bed, hurried over to Eastvale and murdered his daughter. Maybe she would get more out of the son. At least he seemed angry and bitter enough to give something away if she pushed him hard enough. She said goodbye, though she doubted that the old man heard, and made her way back downstairs. The boy was still sprawled on the sofa, a can of lager open beside him on the floor. Despite the cold, she could still smell, underlying the smoke, a faint hint of decay, as if pieces of meat lay rotting under the floorboards.

‘When did you last see your sister?’ she asked.

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. A week, two weeks ago? She came when she felt like it. Time doesn’t have much meaning around this place.’

‘But she had visited you recently?’

Gary nodded.

‘What did she talk about?’

He lit a cigarette and spoke out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Nothing. Just the usual.’

‘What’s the usual?’

‘You know . . . job, house . . . relationships . . . The usual crap.’

‘What’s wrong with your father?’

‘Cancer. He’s had a couple of operations, chemotherapy, but . . . you know.’

‘How long has he been like this?’

‘Five years.’

‘And you look after him?’

The boy tensed forward and points of fire appeared in his pale cheeks. ‘Yes. Me. All the fucking time. It’s bring me this, Gary, bring me that. Go get my prescription, Gary. Gary, I need a bath. I even sit him on the fucking toilet. Yes, I take care of him.’

‘Does he never leave his room?’

He sighed and settled back on the sofa. ‘I told you, only to go to the bathroom. He can’t manage the stairs. Besides, he doesn’t want to. He’s given up.’

That explained the state of the place. Susan wondered if the father knew, suspected, or even cared that his son had taken over the huge cold house to live whatever life of his own he could scrounge from the responsibilities of the sickroom. She wanted to ask him how he put up with it, but she already knew the scornful answer she would get. ‘Who else is there to do it?’

Instead she asked, ‘How old were you when your sister ran away?’

He seemed surprised by the change in direction and had to think for a moment. ‘Eight. There’s eight years between us. She’d been a bitch for years, had Caroline. The atmosphere was always tense. People were always rowing or on the verge of rows. It was a relief when she went.’

‘Why?’

He turned away so she couldn’t see his eyes. ‘Why? I don’t know. She was just like that. Full of poison. Especially towards me. Right from the start she tormented me, when I was a baby. They found her trying to drown me in my bath once. Of course they said she didn’t realize what she was doing, but she did.’

‘Why should she want to kill you?’

He shrugged. ‘She hated me.’

‘Your father says he loved her.’