Gallows View (33 page)

“Like to tell me about it, Mr Sharp?” he asked.

“What made you think of me?”

“Somebody else in your position.”

“What do you mean?”

Banks looked at Robin, then back at Sharp. “His mother came in and swore blind he was with her when he had already admitted to being the peeper. I just got to thinking about the lengths some people would go to to protect their families. After a while, it all seemed to fit. Your son insisted that he and Webster had nothing to do with Alice Matlock’s death and that was the only thing I believed from him. I’d already suspected that it was a different kind of crime. There was no senseless damage to Alice’s sentimental possessions as there had been in the other cases, and she was the first victim to die.

“The problem then was who on earth would want to kill a harmless old woman, and why? Robin’s mother gave me the answer. I remembered how protective you had been about Trevor, ready to perjure yourself and swear blind to false alibis. It didn’t take much stretching of the imagination to figure out that you might go a lot further to protect your illusion of him. The simple fact is, Mr Sharp, that your son’s a callous, vicious bastard, but to you he’s a bright lad with a promising future. Yo u would do anything to protect that future. Am I right?”

Sharp nodded.

“I don’t know all the details,” Banks went on, “but I think that Alice Matlock found out something about your son. Maybe she saw him leaving the scene of a break-in, saw him with some stolen goods or noticed him hiding his balaclava. She wasn’t a very sociable person, but everybody knew about the other women who’d been robbed. Am I still right?”

Sharp sighed and accepted a cigarette with a trembling hand. He seemed on the verge of a nervous collapse.

“Are you all right?” Banks asked.

“Yes, Inspector. It’s just the relief. You’ve no idea what a burden this has been for me. I don’t think I could have stood it much longer, pushing it to the back of my mind, pretending it never really happened. It was an accident, you know.”

“Do you mean you would have come forward eventually?”

“Possibly. I can’t say. I know how far I’d go to protect my son, but not how far I’d go to save myself.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Yes. Alice Matlock told me that she had heard Trevor bragging about the robberies with another boy one evening when she was walking home from a friend’s house. She came into my shop that Monday just before closing and told me about it. Said she was going to report him to the police the next day. She had no proof, no evidence, and at first it didn’t bother me much because I thought nobody would take any notice of an old woman. But then I got to worrying about what damage it might do, what questions we might have to answer.

“I couldn’t believe Trevor was guilty, even though I knew there was something wrong. Maybe I did know it, deep down. I can’t say. But I wanted to protect him. Is that so unusual in a father? I thought that whatever it was it was just a phase he would pass through. I didn’t want his life ruined because of a few foolish juvenile exploits.”

“If you’d come forward with your suspicions a long time ago,” Banks remarked, “you would have saved everybody, including your son, a lot of grief. Especially Thelma Pitt.”

Sharp shook his head. “I still can’t believe my Trevor did that.”

“Take my word for it, Mr Sharp, he did. That’s just the point.”

Sharp flicked the ash off his cigarette and looked at the floor.

“What happened?” Banks asked.

“I went to talk to her that night. Just talk to her. I knocked on the door and she answered it. I’m not really sure that she recognized me. She seemed to think I was someone else. I told her what a good future Trevor had and what a crime it would be to spoil it for him. I was desperate, Inspector. I even pleaded with her, but it was no good.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing that made much sense to me. She said there was no point coming back and pretending to be him. I wasn’t him. I was an evil imposter and she was going to the police. I couldn’t talk any sense into her and when she started going on about calling the police I lost my temper and reached for her.

“I didn’t intend to kill her, honestly. But she was so frail. I’ve got a terrible temper. Always have had. I couldn’t help myself. She fell
backwards. I tried to reach out, to stop her, but it all seemed to happen in slow motion, like one of them dreams when you can’t run fast enough. I heard the sound, her skull cracking on the edge of the table. And the blood on the flags . . . I . . .” Sharp put his head in his hands and sobbed.

“What happened next?” Banks asked, after giving him a couple of minutes to pull himself together.

“I messed the place up a bit, as if I’d been a burglar, and I took some things—some money, a set of silver cutlery. You’ll find it all buried on the edge of Gallows Field. I didn’t touch a penny of the money, honest I didn’t.”

“You didn’t think to call an ambulance?”

“I was scared. There would have been questions.”

“We didn’t find any fingerprints, Mr Sharp. Were you wearing gloves?”

“Yes.”

“That would explain the muffled knocking,” Hatchley interrupted, looking up from his note taking. “That Rigby woman said the knocking sounded muffled, distant, like it could have been a long way away.”

Banks nodded. “Why were you wearing gloves, Mr Sharp?”

“It was a cold night. I’ve got bad circulation.”

“But you didn’t have very far to go.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“And you didn’t take them off when you got inside.”

“I never thought. Things just started happening too fast. Don’t you believe me? Are you suggesting I intended to kill the woman?”

“That’s for the court to decide,” Banks said. “I’m just gathering the evidence. Did you see Mr Allott?”

“Yes, on my way in. He looked like he was running away from something himself. I didn’t think he got a really good look at me. Still, I was a bit worried for a few days, but then I realized that, whoever he was, he hadn’t come forward. Perhaps he hadn’t heard of the old woman’s death, or maybe he had his own secret to hide. I don’t know.”

“Did you have any idea why Alice Matlock didn’t seem to recognize you but let you in anyway?”

Graham shrugged. “I can’t say I gave it much thought. She was old. I suppose she did ramble a bit sometimes.”

“Close,” Banks said. “She probably couldn’t even remember what day she overheard Webster and your son. You see, the irony of it is, Mr Sharp, that by the morning she would most likely have forgotten all about the incident anyway. And you were quite right to think that nobody would believe a woman who was beginning to live more in the past than the present. You killed her for nothing.”

There wasn’t much left to do. Statements had to be written up and filed, charges laid, hearing dates fixed. But as far as Banks was concerned, the real job was finished. The rest was up to the courts and the twelve jurors “good and true.”

He believed that Sharp had killed Alice Matlock by accident, that he was basically a good man driven too far. But so many criminals were good men gone wrong. It sometimes seemed a pity, or at least an inconvenience, that society seemed to have discarded the concept of evil, something which, in Banks’s mind, would always separate Trevor Sharp from his father.

As he had no other pressing business, he decided to go home early and spend some time with Sandra. He would see Jenny again, too. No doubt Sandra would insist that she come over for dinner some evening. But not for a while. It was time to heal the wound and attempt to build more frail bridges between male and female; and the fewer confusing distractions, the easier that would be.

He would buy Sandra a small present, perhaps: that simple gold chain she had admired in H. Samuels’ window the last time they were in Leeds; or the new lightweight camera-bag at Erricks’ in Bradford. Or he could take her out for dinner and a show. Opera North were doing Gounod’s
Faust
next month. But no, Sandra didn’t like opera. Going to see a new film would be a better treat for her.

As he walked home in the steady drizzle, Banks began to feel some of the pleasurable release, the sense of lightness and freedom that was his usual reward at the end of a case.

Before leaving, he had slipped a cassette of highlights from
La Traviata
, usually reserved for the car, into his Walkman, and now he fumbled around in his pocket to switch it on. He walked down Market Street enjoying the cool needles of rain on his face and hummed along with the haunting prelude. Tourists heading for the car park, merchants closing up for the day, and disappointed shoppers rattling already-locked doors all seemed like actors in the opening scene of a grand opera. When the jaunty “Drinking Song” began, Banks started to sing along quietly, and his step lightened almost to a dance.