Dust to Dust (Ackroyd and Thackeray Mysteries Book 15)
Patricia Hall
Patricia Hall (2011)
* * *
Patricia Hall has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patent Rights Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this book.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The Ackroyd and Thackeray Mysteries
Death by Election
Dying Fall
In the Bleak Midwinter (UK) The Dead of Winter (USA)
Perils of the Night
The Italian Girl
Dead on Arrival
Skeleton at the Feast
Deep Freeze
Death in Dark Waters
Dead Reckoning
False Witness
Death in a Far Country
By Death Divided
Devil’s Game
Dust to Dust
Other Novels
The Poison Pool
The Coldness of Killers
The Masks of Darkness
Dead Beat
Death Trap
DUST TO DUST
by
Patricia Hall
PROLOGUE
The two men were almost invisible in the deep shadow of a clump of trees at the westerly end of the narrow bridge. Below them and to one side, the motorway traffic howled past, infrequent at four in the morning and all the faster for that, the trails and patches of mist which drifted across the carriageways no deterrent. One of the men glanced at the luminous dial of his watch and murmured softly.
“About time?” His companion grunted and bent down to pick up something heavy from the muddy ground at his feet.
“Should be on their way,” he muttered, as his companion did the same.
Glancing around them for any sign of light or life at their level, and finding none, they both carried their heavy burdens to the edge of the bridge where it crossed the southbound carriageway. The lull in the traffic was a long one in that direction, although a few cars zipped beneath them heading north, rear lights quickly disappearing into air so dense as to be almost tangible as the fog thickened towards dawn. Both men balanced their loads carefully on top of the chest-high metal railing which was all that separated them from the road below. Then they waited, breathing heavily through the damp wool of their balaclavas.
“This it?” one asked as a cluster of cars emerged through the murk, followed by a single larger vehicle in the slow lane, its darkened windows giving little clue as to its size and shape until it was almost beneath them.
“Now!” the taller man instructed sharply, letting the first of the concrete blocks loose to drop with a crash into the path of the vehicle beneath, while his companion did the same a split second later, sending his missile straight through the windscreen of the minibus. The two men did not wait to see the effect of their assault as the vehicle braked, skidded and spun before hitting the solid concrete of the bridge support. As they ran they could hear the screeching and tearing of tyres and metal and the shattering of more glass in a final impact, and then a terrible silence.
The men melted back into the darkness and jogged silently across a muddy field before they arrived at their own vehicle where a hunched shape was visible in the driving seat. As they got into the back of the car they could hear the first shouts and screams from the motorway, its light barely visible now through the fog.
“Got everything?” the driver asked, revving the engine gently as he watched his companions stuff gloves and balaclavas carefully into a plastic bag.
“No-one’ll be moving yet,” one of the men in the back said. “Specially not in this. No-one will have seen a thing.”
“Good,” the driver said, letting the car into gear and turning north without switching on the headlights.
“Scabs,” came from the back, no heat in the word. “The whole bloody coalfield hates scabs, would see them dead if they could. There’ll be no shortage of suspects, that’s for sure.”
“Right,” the driver said as he flicked on the lights to carve a narrow tunnel of illumination along the lane. “Good night’s work then?”
“Might make a few of them think twice if we get a result,” one of the passengers said. “Bastards.”
CHAPTER ONE
Laura Ackroyd woke up late and lay quite still for a moment, luxuriating in the fact that she did not have to go to work. She was half way through six weeks sick leave and beginning to feel sufficiently recovered from a stab wound and the subsequent loss of blood to be beginning to enjoy a respite from the hectic office life she normally relished at the Bradfield Gazette. She stretched lazily, aware of the sound of children’s voices from the primary school at the end of the road. It must be playtime, she thought, smiling faintly at the thought that such daily events might soon become a much more significant in her life. She had never noticed the noise before, but then she was not often here at this time of the morning. The break from work, although the cause still haunted her dreams, was becoming a luxury.
She got out of bed and wandered into the kitchen to make herself a mug of coffee. A note leaning against the kettle reminded her that Michael Thackeray would be late home tonight as he had a meeting to attend at county police HQ. The solicitude made her smile. That was new, she thought, and none the worse for that. It was not that long since she had wakened in a hospital bed to find him at her side with a look of anxiety in his eyes that had filled her with guilt. She had taken a careless risk, imagining herself invincible, and nearly died for it, and he did not deserve that. Unlike Thackeray, she thought, she was not much given to guilt, and perhaps felt it all the more keenly when it did assail her.
She showered and dressed, and enjoyed a leisurely brunch, conscious of her unusually short curls only when she brushed them into a copper halo around her oval face and aware of the scar on her neck from the stab wound which had almost killed her only as she wrapped a scarf around it. The damage her attacker had inflicted in other ways would, she knew, take much longer to heal.
As she settled down with the morning paper, anticipating a quiet day, she was slightly irritated when the phone rang, but reconciled when she heard her grandmother’s voice, as strong as her body was becoming frail.
“How are you, pet?” Joyce Ackroyd demanded.
“I’m fine,” Laura said.
“Honestly?”
“Honestly.”
“So can you come up?” Joyce asked. “There’s someone here I want you to meet. It might make you a story for the Gazette when you get back to work. And at least it won’t put you in the way of a maniac, like the last time.”
“Michael will be pleased to hear that,” Laura said dryly. “I think I want my stories nice and gentle for a while myself.” She glanced at her watch. “Give me half an hour,” she said, surprised at how welcome the interruption to her quiet day felt.
Laura winced slightly as she pulled up outside her grandmother’s small bungalow on the Heights estate to the west of Bradfield, a Victorian manufacturing town with its mill chimneys long amputated, which nestled in the valley below. Her grandmother’s home had once been overshadowed by four brutalist tower blocks which Joyce herself had been instrumental in approving in her glory days on the town council in the 1960s. The blocks had decayed quickly, declining into disrepair, both physical and human, and had now been demolished, leaving the old people’s bungalows which flanked them more or less surrounded by a building site as the flats were replaced by housing on a more human scale. Laura sighed as she got out of the car and took in the dust and clatter Joyce now lived amongst. All efforts to persuade her to move had so far failed, but Lau
ra feared that as her arthritis worsened she would not be able to live on her own much longer. She dreaded the point when she or her father tried to insist on a move for Joyce. Insisting on anything for Joyce seemed barely feasible.
To Laura’s surprise, her grandmother’s door was opened, when she tapped on the glass, by a short, dark haired man of about her own age with anxious eyes and only a tentative smile.
“You must be Laura,” he said. “I’m Ian Baxter. It’s good of you to spare the time.”
Laura shook Ian Baxter’s hand, wondering what could possibly have brought him to Joyce Ackroyd’s home, and followed him back into the tiny living room where her grandmother was sitting in her favourite chair by the window from which she liked to watch the world go by.
“You still look pale, pet,” she said, offering her face for a kiss. “Perhaps we shouldn’t be bothering you.”
“Believe me, I’m bored to tears, nan,” Laura said, trying hard for enthusiasm, although she already felt slightly tired and was beginning to regret her decision to drive across the town on what might turn out to be a mere whim on Joyce’s part. “If you’ve got a good story for me I’m only too ready to listen.”
“I don’t know whether it’s a good story in your terms,” Baxter broke in. “I don’t know how you define that. And it all goes back a long, long way…You may not be interested.”
“Don’t be daft, lad,” Joyce said. “She’s a chip off the old block is Laura. You’ll see.”
“Not quite,” Laura said, more sharply than she intended. “I take my politics with a touch of scepticism.” Laura tried to soften her words with a smile, but her grandmother ignored her anyway, though Baxter looked slightly taken aback.
“I knew Ian when he were a lad,” Joyce said firmly. “You were only a little lass yourself when the miners’ strike was on in ‘84, but I must have told you how a lot of us women from Bradfield used to go down to Urmstone to help the wives there. It was our nearest pit, after all. We’d do collections in town – no trouble getting support round here, whatever That Woman said – buckets of cash we got. And support from all over. I think the men were a bit gob-smacked when women from Greenham Common turned up, hippies, lesbians, all sorts. They’d never seen owt like it.” Baxter laughed with her.
“It was quite a learning curve for us kids too,” he said. “I’d never met anyone black till that year. We were a bit isolated in Urmstone. Too isolated for our own good, maybe.”
“Anyway, the women’s groups, and other helpers, would buy food,” Joyce went on. “Whatever was needed to help keep the community together and feed the kids properly. And, to cut a long story short, I stayed with Ian’s family more than once and his mother became a good friend…”
“I was only fourteen,” Baxter said. “But I’ve never forgotten Joyce, with the flaming red hair. I see you’ve inherited that, Laura. A chip off the old block in that anyway. ” He glanced at Joyce with obvious affection. “I was quite surprised to find her hair was white now, though I suppose I should have expected it after all this time.”
“You were lucky to find me alive, lad,” Joyce snapped. “With all the provocation we’ve had since then, it’s enough to turn anyone white.” Laura smiled. Her grandmother had been a political warrior for too long to give it up even as old age advanced. Her once sharp tongue had lost only a little of its asperity.
“So tell me about this story,” Laura suggested as she took a seat opposite her grandmother and her visitor. She could see that she would have to listen, however unlikely it seemed that Ian Baxter would come up with anything worth writing about from such an unpromisingly historical start. Baxter hesitated, picking up on Laura’s limited patience.
“It’s a long one,” he said quietly. “But basically it’s about my brother, Billy. I don’t suppose you remember but Joyce knows all about it. There was a policeman killed in Urmstone during the strike, murdered. It was a horrible case and my brother was convicted for it…”
“It was obviously a miscarriage of justice,” Joyce said, eyes flashing. “It was all wrong. I knew Billy. He was a likely lad, but not a killer. But feelings were running high in the police force and Billy got life.”
“He’s still inside.” Baxter’s voice was bitter now. “He’s done much more than the twenty years the judge recommended, but the parole board’s turned him down three times. He’s had two appeals rejected so now we’re trying to persuade the Criminal Cases Review Commission to look at it.”
“We?” Laura asked.
“Billy had an amazing solicitor called Miriam Feldman, who came up from London to represent him,” Baxter said. “I had a real crush on her at the time of the trial. And when it all went pear shaped anyway, I decided I was going to be a lawyer and do my bit to get Billy out. I managed the first bit but sadly not the second.”
“And even that’s not as easy as it sounds when everyone expected you to go down the pit like your brother and your father and your grandfather before him,” Joyce said grimly.
“Joyce was fantastic when I told my parents I wanted to stay at school when most of my mates were leaving and going underground. Urmstone was supposed to be one of the pits with a long-term future, but that was one of the Coal Board’s lies. It had gone in three years flat,” Baxter said. “I ended up the lucky one, didn’t I? You got a grant for university then, so that was OK, and then Miriam Feldman helped find a scholarship to do my legal training. I work for the law centre she runs in East London now.”
“I reckon she felt guilty she hadn’t managed to get Billy off,” Joyce said. “There were so many holes in the prosecution case the judge should have thrown it out before a jury got anywhere near it.”
“There were scores being settled,” Baxter said, his eyes bleak. “There was no way the police were going to leave that case unsolved. Whatever it took to convict Billy was going to be done or said, however much the truth got twisted. I think a lot of them worked on the assumption that any conviction was better than none.”
“You’re saying he was set up?”
“He was set up,” Baxter said flatly. “His alibi was simply not believed.”
“Did you have to give evidence?” Laura asked. “At that age?”
“I did. I told them that the night of the killing Billy was so beaten up from the previous day at Orgreave, when he got half killed by a police horse, that he could barely walk. We shared a bedroom and I watched him struggle to get dressed. I actually begged him not to go out with the pickets that morning. But the judge took that as evidence that he bore a grudge, that if he’d come across a copper in the village on his own he’d have attacked him in revenge. The trial was a farce but we’ve never been able to prove it. The evidence was so conflicting that no jury in its right mind could have convicted him, but they did. People were on one side or the other back then, for the miners or for Thatcher. The country was split in two. I reckon we just got a lot of the wrong ones on the jury. They believed everything the police told them and nothing anyone else said at all.”
“Will you go down to Urmstone, Laura, and talk to the folk there,” Joyce asked. “I’d go myself but you know I can’t, or I wouldn’t ask. Talk to Ian’s family and see what you think.” Laura hesitated for a second and then saw the look in Ian Baxter’s eyes. She could see from the set of his jaw that he would not beg but the two pairs of eyes fixed on hers told her that she had little or no choice.
“I could come down with you this afternoon,” she said cautiously. “If you drive me down and bring me back. I’m not supposed to be doing anything too strenuous myself. I had a slight run in with a mad-man.” Joyce winced at the flippancy but relief flooded her eyes too.
“Done,” Baxter said. “I’ll make sure you don’t overdo it.”
“You’re a good girl,” Joyce said. “And they’re good people down there. You’ll see. It’s time it was all finished with after all these years, but the case of Billy Baxter’s still festering. It’s high time it was sorted out.”
The village of Urmstone lay to the south of Bradfield, an outpost on the edge of the Yorkshire coalfield, a closer neighbour to the textile towns of the Pennine valleys than to the rest of the mining communities clustered around Barnsley to the south. It lay at the foot of a sharp incline, surrounded by farmland, a series of red-brick terraced streets built at the turn of the nineteenth century when Urmstone Main colliery was sunk and families flocked from the surrounding countryside and much further afield to work in its depths. The idea that the seams beneath the green fields, which fed the miners and brought wealth to the landowners, might one day run out would never have crossed their minds.
“Where was the pit?” Laura asked, looking round her curiously as Ian Baxter drove slowly down the hill into the village. She had never visited Urmstone before. “Has it gone completely?”
Baxter pulled up close to a patch of worn grass in the centre of the village and waved a dismissive hand.
“That was the pit yard,” he said. “And they left us the winding wheel.” The huge wheel, which had plunged men hundreds of feet below the earth every day, was half buried in the black earth beside a brick representation of the winding house, evidently less a cherished memorial than a favourite target of spray-can anger amongst the local youth.
“And the spoil heaps? What happened to them?”
“Flattened,” Baxter said shortly. “And a good thing too. It wasn’t just at Aberfan that kids got killed by those filthy tips.” Laura glanced at him, taking in the pale face and tightened lips. There was a lot to learn here, and the trip down from Bradfield had only just scratched the surface. At first Baxter had driven in silence, as if unsure how far he could trust her, but once he began to talk there had been no stopping him, the old anger he recalled from the long months of the strike overlaid by something much more fresh and raw.
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