The Hanging Valley Read Free Page B

CID, the superintendent could use his discretion as regards his role in a case. Theoretically, he could, if he wanted to, take part in searches and house-to-house enquiries, but of course he never did. In part, his job was administrative. He tended to delegate casework and monitor developments from his office. This was not due to laziness, Banks realized, but because his talent was for thinking and planning, not for action or interrogation. He trusted his subordinates and allowed them far greater leeway with their cases than many superintendents did. But this time he wanted to come along.
    They made an incongruous couple as they walked to the car-park out back: the tall, bulky Gristhorpe with his unruly thatch of grey hair, bristly moustache, pock-marked face and bushy eyebrows; and Banks, lean, slight, with angular features and short, almost cropped, black hair.
    “I can’t see why you keep on using your own car, Alan,” Gristhorpe said as he eased into the passenger seat of the white Cortina and grappled with the safety belt. “You could save a lot of wear and tear if you took a department vehicle.”
    “Have they got tape-decks?” Banks asked.
    “Cassettes? You know damn well they haven’t.”
    “Well, then.”
    “Well, what?”
    “I like to listen to music while I’m driving. You know I do. It helps me think.”
    “I suppose you’re going to inflict some on me, too?”
    It had always surprised Banks that so well-read and cultured a person as Gristhorpe had absolutely no ear for music at all. The superintendent was tone deaf, and even the most ethereal Mozart aria was painful to his ears.
    “Not if you don’t want,” Banks said, smiling to himself. He knew he wouldn’t be able to smoke on the way, either. Gristhorpe was a non-smoker of the most rabid kind—reformed after a twenty-year, pack-a-day habit.
    Banks pulled into the cobbled market square, turned left onto North Market Street, and headed for the main Swainsdale road, which ran by the river along the valley bottom.
    Gristhorpe grunted and tapped the apparatus next to the dashboard. “At least you’ve had a police radio fitted.”
    “What was it you said before?” Banks asked. “About this not being the first body in Swainshead.”
    “It was before your time.”
    “Most things were.” Banks made the sharp westward turn, and soon they were out of the town, driving by the river meadows.
    Gristhorpe opened his window and gulped in the fresh air. “A man had his skull fractured,” he said. “It was murder, no doubt about that. And we never solved it.”
    “What happened?”
    “Some Boy Scouts found the body dumped in an old mine shaft on the fell-side a couple of miles north of the village. The doc said it had been there about a week.”
    “When?”
    “Just over five years ago.”
    “Was it a local?”
    “No. The victim was a private-enquiry agent from London.”
    “A private investigator?”
    “That’s right. Name of Raymond Addison. A solo operator. One of the last of the breed, I should imagine.”
    “Did you find out what he was doing up here?”
    “No. We had his office searched, of course, but none of his files had any connection with Swainsdale. The Yard asked around among his friends and acquaintances—not that he had very many—but they turned up nothing. We thought he might have been on holiday, but why choose Yorkshire in February?”
    “How long had he been in the village?”
    “He’d arrived fairly late in the day and managed to get a room in a guest house run by a chap named Sam Greenock, who told us that Addison said nothing except for some remarks about the cold. He wrapped up well and went out for a walk after the evening meal, and that was the last anyone saw of him. We made enquiries, but nobody had seen or heard him. It was dark when he went out, of course, and even the old men who usually hang about chatting on the bridge come rain or shine had gone in by then.”
    “And as far as you could find out he