The Hanging Valley by Peter Robinson

also noticed an endearing awkwardness, a lack of self-consciousness about her movements that made her seem even more attractive. She stood before him drying her hands on her pinafore and blushed.
    “Sorry,” she said in a soft voice, “I was just doing some hand-washing. Please come in.”
    Though her accent was clearly Yorkshire, it didn’t sound like the Swainsdale variety. Banks couldn’t immediately place it.
    Her eyes were brown—the kind of brown one sees in sunlight filtered through a pint of bitter, thought Banks, amused at just how much of a Yorkshireman he must have become to yoke beer and beauty so audaciously. But her hair was blonde. She wore it tied up at the back of her neck, and it fell in stray wisps around her pale throat and ears. She wore no make-up, and her light complexion was completely smooth, her lips full and strawberry red without any lipstick. Between her lower lip and the curve of her chin was a deep indentation, giving her mouth a look somewhere between a pout and an incipient smile. She reminded him of someone, but he couldn’t think whom.
    Katie, as she introduced herself, led him into a hallway that smelled of lemon air-freshener and furniture polish, as clean and fresh as a good guest house should be. Neil Fellowes was waiting for him in room five, she said, and disappeared, head bowed, into the back of the house, where Banks guessed the Greenocks made their own living-quarters.
    He walked up the thick-pile burgundy carpet, found the room and knocked.
    Fellowes answered immediately, as if he had been holding the doorknob on the other side. He looked in much better shape than the previous day. His few remaining strands of colourless hair were combed sideways across his bald head, and thick-lensed wire-rimmed glasses perched on the bump near the bridge of his nose.
    “Come in, please er . . .”
    Banks introduced himself.
    “Yes, come in, Chief Inspector.”
    Fellowes was obviously a man who respected rank and title.
    Most people automatically called Banks “Inspector,” some preferred plain “Mister,” and others called him a lot worse.
    Banks glanced out of the window at the wide strips of grass on both sides of the Swain. Beyond the cottages and pub rose the overbearing bulk of a fell. It looked like a sleeping elephant, he thought, remembering a passage from Wainwright, the fell-walking expert. Or was it whale? “Nice view,” he said, sitting down in the wicker chair by the window.
    “Yes,” Fellowes agreed. “It doesn’t really matter which side of the house you stay in. Out back you can see Swainshead Fell, and over there it’s Adam’s Fell, of course.”
    “Adam’s Fell?”
    Fellowes adjusted his glasses and cleared his throat. “Yes. After Adam and Eve. The locals do have a sense of humour—of a sort.”
    “Do you visit the area often, Mr Fellowes?”
    “No, not at all. I just like to research the terrain, so to speak, before I embark. By the way, Chief Inspector, I do apologize sincerely about yesterday. Finding that . . . that corpse was a great shock, and I never take liquor as a rule—or tobacco, I might add. The brandy just seemed, well, appropriate at the time. I wouldn’t have thought of it myself, but Mr Greenock was kind enough . . .” He slowed and stopped like an old gramophone winding down.
    Banks, who had taken note of Fellowes’s declaration of abstemiousness and let go of the cigarette package he’d been toying with in his pocket, smiled and offered a cliché of consolation.Inwardly, he sighed. The world was becoming too full of non-smokers for his comfort, and he hadn’t yet succeeded in swelling their ranks. Perhaps it was time to switch brands again. He was getting tired of Silk Cut, anyway. He took out his notebook and went on.
    “What made you visit that spot in the first place?” he asked.
    “It just looked so inviting,” Fellowes answered. “So different.”
    “Had you ever been there before?”
    “No.”
    “Did you know of