Summer Rain: An Inspector Banks Short Story

Contents

I

“
A
ND EXACTLY HOW
many times have you died, Mr. Singer?”

“Fourteen. That’s fourteen I’ve managed to uncover. They say that each human being has lived about twenty incarnations. But it’s the last one I’m telling you about. See, I died by violence. I was murdered.”

Detective Constable Susan Gay made a note on the yellow pad in front of her. When she looked down, she noticed that she had doodled an intricate pattern of curves and loops, a bit like Spaghetti Junction, during the few minutes she had been talking to Jerry Singer.

She tried to keep the skepticism out of her voice. “Ah-hah. And when was this, sir?”

“Nineteen sixty-six. July. That makes it exactly thirty-two years ago this week.”

“I see.”

Jerry Singer had given his age as thirty-one, which meant that he had been murdered a year before he was born.

“How do you know it was nineteen sixty-six?” Susan asked.

Singer leaned forward. He was a remarkably intense young man, Susan noticed, thin to the point of emaciation, with glittering green eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. He looked as if the lightest breeze would blow him away. His fine red hair had a gossamer quality that reminded Susan of spiders’ webs. He wore jeans, a red T-shirt, and a gray anorak, its shoulders darkened by the rain. Though he said he came from San Diego, California, Susan could detect no trace of suntan.

“It’s like this,” he began. “There’s no fixed period between incarnations, but my channeler told me—”

“Channeler?” Susan interrupted.

“She’s a kind of spokesperson for the spirit world.”

“A medium?”

“Not quite.” Singer managed a brief smile. “But close enough. More of a mediator, really.”

“Oh, I see,” said Susan, who didn’t. “Go on.”

“Well, she told me there would be a period of about a year between my previous incarnation and my present one.”

“How did she know?”

“She just
knows
. It varies from one soul to another. Some need a lot of time to digest what they’ve learned and make plans for the next incarnation. Some souls just can’t wait to return to another body.” He shrugged. “After some lifetimes, you might simply just get tired and need a long rest.”

After some mornings, too, Susan thought. “Okay,” she said, “let’s move on. Is this your first visit to Yorkshire?”

“It’s my first trip to England, period. I’ve just earned my degree in dentistry, and I thought I’d give myself a treat before I settled down to the daily grind.”

Susan winced. Was that a pun? Singer wasn’t smiling. A New Age dentist, now there was an interesting combination, she thought. Can I read your Tarot cards for you while I drill? Perhaps you might like to take a little astral journey to Neptune while I’m doing your root canal? She forced herself to concentrate on what Singer was saying.

“So, you see,” he went on, “as I’ve never been here before, it
must
be real, mustn’t it?”

Susan realized she had missed something. “What?”

“Well, it was all so familiar, the landscape, everything. And it’s not only the déjà vu I had. There was the dream, too. We haven’t even approached this in hypnotic regression yet, so—”

Susan held up her hand. “Hang on a minute. You’re losing me. What was so familiar?”

“Oh, I thought I’d made that clear.”

“Not to me.”

“The place. Where I was murdered. It was near here. In Swainsdale.”

II

B
ANKS WAS SITTI
NG
in his office with his feet on the desk and a buff folder open on his lap when Susan Gay popped her head around the door. The top button of his white shirt was undone and his tie hung askew.

That morning he was supposed to be working on the monthly crime figures, but instead, through the half-open window, he listened to the summer rain as it harmonized with Michael Nyman’s soundtrack from
The Piano
, playing quietly on his portable cassette. His eyes were closed and he was daydreaming of waves washing in and out on a beach of pure white sand. The ocean and sky were the brightest blue he could imagine, and tall palm trees dotted the landscape. The pastel village that straddled the steep hillside looked like a cubist collage.

“Sorry to bother you, sir,” Susan said, “but it looks like we’ve got a right one here.”

Banks opened his eyes and rubbed them. He felt as if he were coming back from a very long way. “It’s all right,” he said. “I was getting a bit bored with the crime statistics, anyway.” He tossed the folder onto his desk and linked his hands behind his head. “Well, what is it?”

Susan entered the office. “It’s sort of hard to explain, sir.”

“Try.”

Susan told him about Jerry Singer. As he listened, Banks’s blue eyes sparkled with amusement and interest. When Susan had finished, he thought for a moment, then sat up and turned off the music. “Why not?” he said. “It’s been a slow week. Let’s live dangerously. Bring him in.” He fastened his top button and straightened his tie.

A few moments later, Susan returned with Jerry Singer in tow. Singer looked nervously around the office and took the seat opposite Banks. The two exchanged introductions, then Banks leaned back and lit a cigarette. He loved the mingled smells of smoke and summer rain.

“Perhaps you’d better start at the beginning,” he said.

“Well,” said Singer, turning his nose up at the smoke, “I’ve been involved in regressing to past lives for a few years now, partly through hypnosis. It’s been a fascinating journey, and I’ve discovered a great deal about myself.” He sat forward and rested his hands on the desk. His fingers were short and tapered. “For example, I was a merchant’s wife in Venice in the fifteenth century. I had seven children and died giving birth to the eighth. I was only twenty-nine. In my next incarnation, I was an actor in a troupe of Elizabethan players, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. I remember playing Bardolph in
Henry V
in 1599. After that, I—”

“I get the picture,” said Banks. “I don’t mean to be rude, Mr. Singer, but maybe we can skip to the twentieth century?”

Singer paused and frowned at Banks. “Sorry. Well, as I was telling Detective Constable Gay here, it’s the least clear one so far. I was a hippie. At least, I think I was. I had long hair, wore a caftan, bell-bottom jeans. And I had this incredible sense of déjà vu when I was driving through Swainsdale yesterday afternoon.”

“Where, exactly?”

“It was just before Fortford. I was coming from Helmthorpe, where I’m staying. There’s a small hill by the river with a few trees on it, all bent by the wind. Maybe you know it?”

Banks nodded. He knew the place. The hill was, in fact, a drumlin, a kind of hump-backed mound of detritus left by the retreating ice age. Six trees grew on it, and they had all bent slightly to the southeast after years of strong northwesterly winds. The drumlin was about two miles west of Fortford.

“Is that all?” Banks asked.

“All?”

“Yes.” Banks leaned forward and rested his elbows on the desk. “You know there are plenty of explanations for déjà vu, don’t you, Mr. Singer? Perhaps you’ve seen a place very similar before and only remembered it when you passed the drumlin?”

Singer shook his head. “I understand your doubts,” he said, “and I can’t offer concrete proof, but the feeling is unmistakable. I have been there before, in a previous life. I’m certain of it. And that’s not all. There’s the dream.”

“Dream?”

“Yes. I’ve had it several times. The same one. It’s raining, like today, and I’m passing through a landscape very similar to what I’ve seen in Swainsdale. I arrive at a very old stone house. There are people and their voices are raised, maybe in anger or laughter, I can’t tell. But I start to feel tense and claustrophobic. There’s a baby crying somewhere and it won’t stop. I climb up some creaky stairs. When I get to the top, I find a door and open it. Then I feel that panicky sensation of endlessly falling, and I usually wake up frightened.”

Banks thought for a moment. “That’s all very interesting,” he said, “but have you considered that you might have come to the wrong place? We’re not usually in the business of interpreting dreams and visions.”

Singer stood his ground. “This is real,” he said. “A crime had been committed. Against me.” He poked himself in the chest with his thumb. “The crime of murder. The least you can do is do me the courtesy of checking your records.” His odd blend of naïvety and intensity charged the air.

Banks stared at him, then looked at Susan, whose face showed skeptical interest. Never having been one to shy away from what killed the cat, Banks let his curiosity get the better of him yet again. “All right,” he said, standing up. “We’ll look into it. Where did you say you were staying?”

III

B
ANKS TURNED RIGHT
by the whitewashed sixteenth-century Rose and Crown, in Fortford, and stopped just after he had crossed the small stone bridge over the River Swain.

The rain was still falling, obscuring the higher green dale sides and their latticework of drystone walls. Lyndgarth, a cluster of limestone cottages and a church huddled around a small village green, looked like an Impressionist painting. The rain-darkened ruins of Devraulx Abbey, just up the hill to his left, poked through the trees like a setting for
Camelot
.

Banks rolled down his window and listened to the rain slapping against leaves and dancing on the river’s surface. To the west, he could see the drumlin that Jerry Singer had felt so strongly about.

Today, it looked ghostly in the rain, and it was easy to imagine the place as some ancient barrow where the spirits of Bronze Age men lingered. But it wasn’t a barrow; it was a drumlin created by glacial deposits. And Jerry Singer hadn’t been a Bronze Age man in his previous lifetime; he had been a sixties hippie, or so he believed.

Leaving the window down, Banks drove through Lyndgarth and parked at the end of Gristhorpe’s rutted driveway, in front of the squat limestone farmhouse. Inside, he found Gristhorpe staring gloomily out of the back window at a pile of stones and a half-completed drystone wall. The superintendent, he knew, had taken a week’s holiday and hoped to work on the wall, which went nowhere and closed in nothing. But he hadn’t bargained for the summer rain, which had been falling nonstop for the past two days.

He poured Banks a cup of tea so strong you could stand a spoon up in it, offered some scones, and they sat in Gristhorpe’s study. A paperback copy of Trollope’s
The
Vicar of Bullhampton
lay on small table beside a worn and scuffed brown leather armchair.

“Do you believe in reincarnation?” Banks asked.

Gristhorpe considered the question a moment. “No. Why?”

Banks told him about Jerry Singer, then said, “I wanted your opinion. Besides, you were here then, weren’t you?”

Gristhorpe’s bushy eyebrows knit in a frown. “Nineteen sixty-six?”

“Yes.”

“I was here, but that’s over thirty years ago, Alan. My memory’s not what it used to be. Besides, what makes you think there’s anything in this other than some New Age fantasy?”

“I don’t know that there is,” Banks answered, at a loss how to explain his interest, even to the broad-minded Gristhorpe. Boredom, partly, and the oddness of Singer’s claim, the certainty the man seemed to feel about it. But how could he tell his superintendent that he had so little to do he was opening investigations into the supernatural? “There was a sort of innocence about him,” he said. “And he seemed so sincere about it, so intense.”

“ ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.’ W. B. Yeats,” Gristhorpe replied.

“Perhaps. Anyway, I’ve arranged to talk to Jenny Fuller about it later today.” Jenny was a psychologist who had worked with the Eastvale police before.

“Good idea,” said Gristhorpe. “All right, then, just for argument’s sake, let’s examine his claim objectively. He’s convinced he was a hippie murdered in Swainsdale in summer, nineteen sixty-six, right?”

Banks nodded.

“And he thinks this because he believes in reincarnation, he had a déjà vu, and he’s had a recurring dream?”

“True.”

“Now,” Gristhorpe went on, “leaving aside the question of whether you or I believe in reincarnation, or, indeed, whether there is such a thing—a philosophical speculation we could hardly settle over tea and scones, anyway—he doesn’t give us a hell of a lot to go on, does he?”

“That’s the problem. I thought you might remember something.”

Gristhorpe sighed and shifted in his chair. The scuffed leather creaked. “In nineteen sixty-six, I was a thirty-year-old detective sergeant in a backwoods division. In fact, we were nothing but a subdivision then, and I was the senior detective. Most of the time I investigated burglaries, the occasional outbreak of sheep stealing, market-stall owners fencing stolen goods.” He sipped some tea. “We had one or two murders—really interesting ones I’ll tell you about someday—but not a lot. What I’m saying, Alan, is that no matter how poor my memory is, I’d remember a murdered hippie.”

“And nothing fits the bill?”

“Nothing. I’m not saying we didn’t have a few hippies around, but none of them got murdered. I think your Mr. Singer must be mistaken.”

Banks put his mug down on the table and stood up to leave. “Better get back to the crime statistics, then,” he said.

Gristhorpe smiled. “So
that’s
why you’re so interested in this cock-and-bull story? Can’t say I blame you. Sorry I can’t help. Wait a minute, though,” he added as they walked to the door. “There was old Bert Atherton’s lad. I suppose that was around the time you’re talking about, give or take a year or two.”

Banks paused at the door. “Atherton?”

“Aye. Owns a farm between Lyndgarth and Helmthorpe. Or did. He’s dead now. I only mention it because Atherton’s son, Joseph, was something of a hippie.”

“What happened?”

“Fell down the stairs and broke his neck. Family never got over it. As I said, old man Atherton died a couple of years back, but his missis is still around.”

“You’d no reason to suspect anything?”

Gristhorpe shook his head. “None at all. The Athertons were a decent, hardworking family. Apparently the lad was visiting them on his way to Scotland to join some commune or other. He fell down the stairs. It’s a pretty isolated spot, and it was too late when the ambulance arrived, especially as they had to drive a mile down country lanes to the nearest telephone box. They were really devastated. He was their only child.”

“What made him fall?”

“He wasn’t pushed, if that’s what you’re thinking. There was no stair carpet and the steps were a bit slippery. According to his dad, Joseph was walking around without his slippers on and he slipped in his stocking feet.”

“And you’ve no reason to doubt him?”

“No. I did have one small suspicion at the time, though.”

“What?”

“According to the postmortem, Joseph Atherton was a heroin addict, though he didn’t have any traces of the drug in his system at the time of his death. I thought he might have been smoking marijuana or something up in his room. That might have made him a bit unsteady on his feet.”

“Did you search the place?”

Gristhorpe snorted. “Nay, Alan. There was no sense bringing more grief on his parents. What would we do if we found something, charge
them
with possession?”

“I see your point.” Banks opened the door and put up his collar against the rain. “I might dig up the file anyway,” he called, running over to the car. “Enjoy the rest of your week off.”

Gristhorpe’s curse was lost in the sound of the engine starting up and the finale of Mussorgsky’s “Great Gate of Kiev” on Classic FM blasting out from the radio, which Banks had forgotten to switch off.