Blood At The Root

Peter Robinson

Blood At The Root

An Inspector Banks Mystery

For Sheila

ONE

I

The boy’s body sat propped against the graffiti-scarred wall in a gi

Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks stood in the rain and watched Peter Darby finish photographing the scene, bursts of electronic flash freezing the raindrops in mid-air as they fell. Banks was irritated. By rights, he shouldn’t be there. Not in the rain at half past one on a Saturday night.

As if he didn’t have enough problems already.

He had got the call the minute he walked in the door after an evening alone in Leeds at Opera North’s The Pearl Fishers. Alone because his wife, Sandra, had realized on Wednesday that the benefit gala she was supposed to host for the Eastvale community center clashed with their season tickets. They had argued – Sandra expecting Banks to forgo the opera in favor of her gala – so, stubbornly, Banks had gone alone. This sort of thing had been happening a lot lately – going their own ways – to such an extent that Banks could hardly remember the last time they had done anything together.

The limpid melody of the “Au fond du temple saint” duet still echoed around his mind as he watched Dr. Burns, the young police surgeon, start his in situ examination under the canvas tent the scene-of-crime officers had erected over the body.

Police Constable Ford had come across the scene at eleven forty-seven while walking his beat, community policing being a big thing in Eastvale these days. At first, he said, he thought the victim was just a drunk too legless to get all the way home after the pubs closed. After all, there was a broken beer bottle on the ground beside the lad, he seemed to be holding his stomach, and in the light of Ford’s torch, the dark blood could easily have passed for vomit.

Ford told Banks he didn’t know quite what it was that finally alerted him this was no drunk sleeping it off; perhaps it was the u

The gi

The gi

Banks watched Dr. Burns turn the victim on his side, ease down his trousers and take the rectal temperature. He had already had a glance at the body himself, and it looked as if someone had beaten or kicked the kid to death. The features were too severely damaged to reveal much except that he was a young white male. His wallet was missing, along with whatever keys and loose change he might have been carrying, and there was nothing else in his pockets to indicate who he was.

It had probably started as a pub fight, Banks guessed, or perhaps the victim had been flashing his money about. As he watched Dr. Burns examine the boy’s broken features, Banks imagined the scene as it might have happened. The kid scared, ru

Either way, he sees the gi

Well, maybe it had happened like that. Or they could have been already lying in wait for him, blocking the gi

Banks shrugged off the line of thought and got back to the business in hand. Dr. Burns was still kneeling, shining a penlight inside the boy’s mouth. It looked like a pound of raw minced meat to Banks. He turned away.

A pub fight, then? Though they didn’t usually end in death, fights were common enough on a Saturday night in Eastvale, especially when some of the lads came in from the outlying villages eager to demonstrate their physical superiority over the arrogant townies.

They would come early to watch Eastvale United or the rugby team in the afternoon, and by pub chucking-out time they were usually three sheets to the wind, jostling each other in the fish-and-chip-shop queues, slagging everyone in sight, just looking for trouble. It was a familiar pattern: “What are you looking at?” “Nothing.” “You calling me nothing!” Get out of that if you can.

By midnight, though, most of the boozers had usually gone home, unless they had moved on to one of Eastvale’s two nightclubs, where for a modest entrance fee you got membership, an inedible battered beefburger, a constant supply of ear-splitting music and, most important of all, the chance to swill back watery lager until three in the morning.

It wasn’t that Banks had no sympathy for the victim – after all, the boy was somebody’s son – but solving this case, he thought, would simply be a matter of canvassing the local pubs and finding out where me-laddo had been drinking, whom he’d been upsetting. A job for Detective Sergeant Hatchley, perhaps; certainly not one for a wet detective chief inspector with Bizet’s melodies still caressing his i

Dr. Burns finished his examination and walked over. Burns did on-scene examinations when the local Home Office pathologist, Dr. Glende