Summer Rain: An Inspector Banks Short Story by Peter Robinson Page B

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