A Dedicated Man (31 page)

Finally, after the argument with Jack Barker, she knew it wouldn’t all just go away. She had to do something or her doubts about the past would poison any chance of a future. So she went
to visit Ramsden to find out if there was any truth in her suspicions.

Yes, she knew what had happened to Sally Lumb and she also knew the police linked the girl’s death to Steadman’s, but she honestly didn’t believe she had anything to fear from
Michael Ramsden. After all, they’d known each other off and on since childhood.

She questioned Ramsden and, finding his responses nervous and evasive, pushed even harder. They drank tea and ate biscuits, and Ramsden tried to convince her that there was nothing in her fears.
Eventually she found difficulty focusing; the room darkened and she felt as if she were looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope. Then Penny fell asleep. When she awoke she was in
Barker’s arms and it was all over.

Banks told her that Ramsden had sworn he wouldn’t have hurt her. True, he had drugged her with some prescription Nembutal and driven to the public telephone on the main road to send for
Emma, but only because he was confused and didn’t know what to do. When Emma had insisted that they would have to kill Penny because she knew too much, Ramsden claimed that he had tried to
stand up to her. She had called him weak and said she would do what was necessary if he wasn’t man enough. She said it would be easy to arrange an accident. According to Ramsden, they were
still arguing when Banks and Barker arrived.

Penny listened to all this at about one o’clock in the morning over a pot of fresh coffee in Banks’s smoky office. All she could say when he had finished was, ‘I was right,
wasn’t I? He wouldn’t have hurt me.’

Banks shook his head. ‘He would,’ he insisted, ‘if Emma Steadman told him to.’

It was a couple of days before all the loose ends were tied up. Hatchley made notes and wrote up the statements, complaining all the while about DC Richmond sunning himself in
Surrey, and Gristhorpe went over the details. Emma Steadman said nothing; she didn’t even bother to deny Ramsden’s accusations. To Banks, she was a woman who had risked everything and
lost. There was no room for regret or recrimination now it was all over.

Later in the week, Banks took Sandra over to Helmthorpe, where they heard Penny sing at a special memorial concert for Sally Lumb. Afterwards, as it was a warm night and the show ended early,
they went with Penny and Jack Barker for a drink in the beer garden of the Dog and Gun. Crow Scar gathered the failing light and gleamed as the hills around it fell into shadow. It looked like a
pale curtain hanging in the sky.

Sandra and the others pressed Banks for an explanation of the Steadman business, and though he felt very uncomfortable in the role they forced on him, he did feel he owed Barker and Penny
something; nor had he had much time to talk to Sandra since the arrests, and she had helped him arrive at the correct pattern.

‘When did it start?’ Sandra asked first.

‘About ten years back,’ Banks told her. ‘That makes Penny here sixteen, Michael Ramsden eighteen, Steadman about thirty-three and his wife just twenty-eight. Harold Steadman
had a promising career as a university lecturer. If he wasn’t exactly rich, he was certainly comfortably off, and he did have the inheritance to look forward to. Emma too, must have been
quite pleased with life in those days, but I imagine she quickly got bored. She was beginning to fade into the background like so many faculty wives.

‘When I talked to Talbot and Darnley, two of Steadman’s colleagues at Leeds University, one of them remembered Emma as a “pretty young thing” at first, then she just
seemed to disappear into the woodwork. I dare say she’d have liked to go abroad for her holidays more often, but no, Steadman had discovered Helmthorpe – Gratly rather – and that
satisfied all his requirements for a busman’s holiday, so that was that. For Emma, life seemed to be passing by too quickly and too dully, and she felt too young to give it all up.

‘That summer was beautiful, just like this one.’ Banks paused to look around at the other drinkers with their jackets and cardigans hung on the backs of chairs. ‘How often can
you do this in England?’ he asked, sipping chilled lager. ‘Especially in Yorkshire. Anyway, Penny and Michael were the pride of the village – two bright kids with their whole
lives ahead of them. Michael was a lean serious romantic young fellow, and if he imagined he was losing Penny to an older wiser man, then he still had a steady diet of Keats and Shelley to keep him
nicely melancholy. Penny here simply enjoyed Steadman’s company, as she’s told me often enough. They had a lot in common, and there were no amorous inclinations on either side. Or if
there were, they were well repressed.’

He glanced at Penny, who looked down into her beer.

‘So,’ Banks went on after a deep breath, ‘one sunny day Penny’s out with Steadman looking at the Roman excavations in Fortford say, and Michael’s languishing in the
garden reading “Ode to a Nightingale” or something. His parents are out shopping in Leeds or York and won’t be back till it’s time to prepare the evening meal. Emma Steadman
is moping around the place staying out of the sun, and probably feeling bored and neglected. I’m making this up, by the way. Ramsden didn’t give me a blow by blow account. Anyway, Emma
seduces young Michael. Not so difficult when you consider his age and his obsession with sex. Surely it’s every schoolboy’s fantasy – the experienced older woman. To Emma, he must
have seemed like a younger more vital version of her husband. Perhaps he wrote poetry for her. He was certainly gawky and shy, and she gave him his first sexual experience.

‘Most people probably thought of Emma Steadman as a married woman going quickly to seed, but Michael made her feel wanted, and then she began to see definite advantages in not being
thought particularly attractive. That way, nobody would think of her as the type to be having an affair.’

Banks stopped to drink some more lager, pleased to see that he hadn’t lost his audience. ‘The affair went on over the years,’ he continued. ‘There were gaps and breaks,
of course, but Ramsden told us they often got together in London when Emma went down for a weekend’s “shopping”, or when she went to “Norwich” to “visit her
family”. I don’t think her husband paid her a great deal of attention, he was far too busy poring over ruins.

‘Anyway, Emma developed a powerful hold over Michael. As his first lover, she had a natural advantage. She taught him all he knew. And he was still shy in company and found it hard to meet
girls his own age. But why bother? Emma was there and she gave him all he needed, far more than the inexperienced girls of his own age group could have given him. And, in turn, he made her feel
young, sexy and powerful. They fed off each other, I suppose.

‘Over the years, Emma developed two distinct personalities. Now I’m not suggesting for a moment that she’s mentally ill – there’s nothing at all clinically wrong
with her – all her actions were deliberate, willed, calculated. But she had one face for the world and another for Ramsden. If you think about it, it wasn’t that difficult for her to
change her appearance. She only had to do it to please Ramsden, and he was strongly under her influence anyway. Visiting him in London would have been no problem, of course. But even after she
moved to Gratly and he moved to York, it was simple enough. She could easily do herself up a bit in the car on the way to see him – a little make-up, a hairbrush. She could even change her
clothes after she arrived, if she wanted. With Harold gone, it was even easier. Her neighbour told me there’s a door from the kitchen right into the garage, and it’s a lonely road over
the moors to Ramsden’s place. But it wasn’t just looks, it was attitude, too. With Ramsden she felt her sexual power, something that was more or less turned off the rest of the
time.

‘As time went by, everything she expected to happen, happened. Steadman threw himself more and more into his work, and she found herself, except for Ramsden, increasingly isolated. Why did
she stay with her husband? I’m only guessing here, but I can think of two good reasons. First of all security, and secondly the promise of the inheritance, the possibility that things might
improve when they became rich. And what happens? The money comes through all right, but nothing changes. In fact, things get worse. And here I can sympathize with her, to some extent. She’s a
woman with dreams – travel, excitement, wealth, a social life – but all that happens is her husband buys the Ramsden house and she ends up even more bored and cut off while he spends
the money on historical research. A dedicated man. Even though I can’t condone what she did to him, I can understand why she was driven to it. Steadman wasn’t exactly sensitive to her
needs, emotional or material. He was selfish and mean. There they were, rich as bloody Croesus, and he spends his time drinking in the Bridge and his money on his work. I’m sure Emma Steadman
would have preferred the country club. In fact she was little more than a prisoner, and the only person her husband was really close to was Penny again.’

‘That’s not quite true,’ Penny said. ‘He was close to Michael. He liked him.’

‘Yes,’ Banks agreed. ‘But that was much more of a working relationship. Michael was of use to him. I think they were colleagues, or partners, rather than friends. Don’t
forget, Michael killed him.’

‘She made him.’

‘Yes, but he did it.’

A waiter came out and they ordered another round.

‘Go on,’ Penny urged him after the drinks arrived.

‘Michael Ramsden is ambitious but he’s weak. He’s not good with people. He shared Steadman’s interests, yes, but he wasn’t obsessed – a word that offended one
of Steadman’s colleagues, but apt, I think. Also, Ramsden resented Harold Steadman, and this really had nothing to do with you, Penny, even if he did feel jealous all those years ago. No, he
resented Steadman in the way many of us come to detest people we first set up as examples, models, call them what you will. He hated always playing second fiddle – the publisher, the
assistant – never the creative one, the leader, although he was busy working on a novel himself. Emma must have played on this, I think, dwelling on her husband’s bad points when she
was with Ramsden, playing on Michael’s growing resentment towards his mentor. Soon he began to recognize Steadman’s meanness and his lack of consideration for anybody with interests
other than his own. I think too that he was always, deep down, irritated at the way Harold could communicate so easily with Penny, how fond they were of one another. Anyway, this animosity grew and
grew over the years, fuelled by sexual desire for Emma, and finally there came a chance to get rich, to take it all.

‘Emma Steadman used Ramsden, manipulated him without a doubt. But that doesn’t absolve him from blame. Slowly, she introduced the idea of murder to him, helped him over his initial
resistance and nervousness. She did this partly by playing on his existing feelings about her husband, and partly through sex. Denial, satisfaction. More denial, greater satisfaction than
he’d ever had before. That’s what he told me, anyway. He’s not a fool; he knew what was happening and he went along with it. Together, they killed Harold Steadman.

‘Naturally, as Emma stood to inherit, she’d be the first suspect so she had to be sure of an airtight alibi, which she had. Also, Ramsden seemed to have neither motive nor
opportunity, no matter how I went at him, until the connection with Emma finally came into focus. There were also a number of other possibilities I had to pursue.’

Both Barker and Penny looked at him reprovingly as he said this.

‘Yes,’ he went on, acknowledging them. ‘You two. Hackett, for a while. Barnes. Even the major and Robert Kirk, fleetingly. Believe me, I blame myself for not arriving at the
answer before Sally Lumb had to die, too, but I couldn’t see the truth for the gossip, or the past for the present.’

‘Why did Sally have to die?’ Barker asked. ‘Surely she couldn’t have been a threat? What could she have known?’

‘Sally was older than her years in many ways,’ Banks replied. ‘She misread the situation. But I’ll get back to her a bit later. On the Saturday that Steadman was killed,
Ramsden drove close to Gratly. He parked his car in one of those derelict old barns on the minor road just east of the Steadman house, the one Emma always used to get to York. Remember, Ramsden had
been brought up in Gratly; he knew every twist and dip in the dale.’

‘But how did he get back?’ Penny asked. ‘It’s an impossibly long walk, and the only bus to Eastvale goes early in the morning.’

‘Easy,’ Banks answered. ‘He wouldn’t have taken the bus anyway; too many people might have noticed him. Emma Steadman drove him back. She picked him up on the road at a
prearranged time – a fairly isolated spot so there’d be no chance of their being seen. Then she dropped him off at the end of his lane and went shopping in York. We’ve checked on
that now, and her neighbour remembers it because Emma brought back some material she’d asked for. There was nothing unusual in all that. Emma Steadman often spent afternoons shopping in York.
After all, she was a lady of leisure. They just had to be careful not to be seen. And even if they had been, Ramsden looked enough like Steadman from a distance through a car window, so nobody
would have thought twice about seeing them.’

‘What about that night?’ Penny asked. ‘After Harry had the row with my father?’

‘That’s another thing hindsight tells me I should have known,’ Banks answered. ‘There was only one place Steadman would have gone after the argument, and that’s
exactly where he intended to go in the first place, to Ramsden’s. Remember he was a dedicated man, and you, Penny, were the only person he allowed to make emotional inroads into his valuable
time. So he did exactly what he intended; he drove to York. And Ramsden killed him.

‘It was all planned in advance, perhaps even rehearsed. Ramsden already had plastic sheeting on the floor because he was painting his living room. He hit Steadman from behind with a
hammer, wrapped his body in the sheet, bundled it in the boot of Steadman’s own car, drove it up near Crow Scar and buried it. He couldn’t bury him in the plastic because that might
have given too much away, but he told us where he buried it and we’ve dug it up.’