Dust to Dust

by Patricia Hall

  “I’ve made a new life for myself,” he had begun quietly. “It probably sounds cruel but it was the only way I could cope with what happened, Billy being convicted, and what it did to the rest of the family. My sister went away, just as I did. She’s in Canada now, married with a couple of children. She never comes back. My mother and father are still here, in the same house, living a sort of semi-life, with my father an invalid now. Do you know what the dust is?”

  “The disease miner’s got from working underground?” Laura ventured.

  “Right,” Baxter said. “You die in the end. He’s dying now, my mam tells me. I haven’t been up here for a year or so, but she begged me to come and see him before it’s too late. But that’s not the only reason I came.”

  Laura weathered the silence as Baxter negotiated the slip road from the M62 onto the M1.

  “And the other reason?” she prompted when they had filtered back into the traffic stream.

  “I’m married,” he said eventually. “We live in west London and I’ve a baby daughter, Daisy. Last week there was a massive knocking on the door before any of us were awake, even the baby. And when I went downstairs, there on the doorstep was a policeman, a detective sergeant called Jim Ferguson, from the Metropolitan Police, who claimed that the Yorkshire force were re-opening their investigations into Billy’s case. At first I was over the moon because I thought it meant that the campaign Miriam and I had launched was getting somewhere, but it wasn’t quite like that.”

  “Was he on his own?” Laura asked. “That’s unusual. They usually work in pairs.”

  “Well, he seemed genuine enough. He showed me his warrant card and certainly knew a man called Hartnett, DI Don Hartnett, who’d worked on the case back then. I didn’t remember Ferguson but I did remember a detective called Hartnett. They were all bullies, but Hartnett was one of the worst. Not a man you’d forget in a hurry. Anyway, Ferguson more or less pushed his way in and said he wanted to ask me some questions. Then the baby started crying so I had to go back upstairs and I took a few minutes to collect my thoughts while I got her up and took her to my wife so she could feed her, and of course it all seemed so long ago, and I’d none of the papers there, my boss, Miriam, had all those at the office, and I began to wonder why he’d come to see me at home rather than there. It didn’t seem quite right somehow.”

  “And it wasn’t? Right, I mean?”

  “When I went back downstairs, he was standing with his back to the fireplace, oozing aggression, but he seemed in no hurry to explain exactly what he wanted. He spooked me, to be honest. So I asked him why the case had been reopened, was there some new evidence that would help Billy prove his innocence, and that really set him off on one.

  “‘We know your brother wasn’t in this on his own,’” he said. ‘Some people might give up on a murder, but I don’t, especially not when it’s a friend of mine who’s been brutally killed like that. And your bloody brother still has the gall to claim he’s innocent after all this time. Well, we’ll see about that.’ He claimed that all the original statements were going to be looked at again, including mine. And he actually had it there with him, yellowing round the edges, but the real thing, no doubt about that. I told him I was only a boy back then – as I told you, I was only fourteen – but he ranted and raved and said we were all in it up to our necks, not just Billy, but me and my father and just about anyone else whose name he seemed to be able to dredge up. ‘You’re a lawyer now, Mr Baxter’”, he said, sneering, as if he couldn’t credit it. ‘You’re a lawyer, so you’ll know there’s all sorts of new techniques we can use on these old cases to get at the truth.’ I was frightened then, I won’t kid you, Laura. What Miriam had launched as a last ditch attempt to get Billy out of prison looked like blowing up in our faces, and not just ours, the whole of Urmstone’s. I couldn’t believe it.”

  “So what did you say?” Laura prompted.

  “Nothing,” Baxter said. “I reread my statement. I could actually remember a detective writing it out in black ink that had faded to brown over the years, remember it as if it was yesterday. And I told Ferguson there was absolutely nothing in it I wanted to change. He was obviously furious and I suddenly realised who he was. He’s a big flabby man now, with mean eyes, and I don’t think I really recognised him as an individual, but I know he was one of those tall, beer bellied young PCs from London who marched round the coal-field that year smashing heads and waving their over-time money in our fathers’ faces while our families were struggling to survive. He said he was a mate of the copper who died, and I believed him. They must have both been part

  of the invading army and even after all these years he still hated us all.”

  “Did he tell you what new techniques they were planning to use?” Laura asked

  “I just assumed it was DNA testing,” Baxter said. “But when I suggested DNA might be exactly what we needed to clear Billy’s name he just laughed. “‘We know he did it,’” he said. “‘What we want to know is who else was involved.’” And then he went, just as suddenly as he’d arrived, leaving me completely gob-smacked. Carrie never even saw him properly.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The two boys, bunking off school, had not found PC Andy Fielding’s body until long after daylight, although it was said later that he had died much earlier, alone, in the dark in the middle of the night, in agony. Ian Baxter was still convinced that he and his best mate Craig Atkinson had been the first to to see the body that day, although they had told no-one then and had never breathed a word since. At the time, the boys had been more exultant than horrified to stumble on one of the village’s hated tormentors lying in a ditch. The shock took a while to affect Craig, though Baxter could vividly remember the nausea which had brought him to his knees when he took in the full horror of what they had found.

  They had been full of the usual teenage resentment that morning as they had taken Ian’s younger sister Annie to the primary school, a chore they hated. The village had been quiet, a early autumn morning of mist and fitful sunshine flickering across the rolling green and gold countryside beyond the rows of identical red-brick houses clustered around the silent pit-head. The pickets, including both their older brothers and Ian’s father, were long gone to protest at distant pits where men were still working, leaving only a token presence in the village where the strike was rock solid. Other villages might send defiant scabs south, bussed surreptitiously behind darkened windows and wire grilles, their heads covered like criminals and more despised and hated than any convict. But Urmstone didn’t. It was a source of pride that there were no scabs there.

  And most of the women were already out of their homes too, raising money for the strikers, or occupied in the makeshift canteen where the men’s breakfast had been served before dawn and a meal would be ready for them when they got back – if they got back – from increasingly violent confrontations at far-flung pit gates. The two boys had dropped Annie off, as instructed, but that morning, instead of trudging on up the hill to the secondary school on the edge of the village, the two boys had exchanged complicit glances. As one, they pulled up the hoods of their anoraks, decked with coveted strike support badges, and veered off the road onto a muddy bridleway which led downhill, through the cluster of well-tended allotments which the village depended on these days for its fresh food, and then across fields, heading to the woods bordering a stream.

  “Come on,” Craig had urged his friend. “We don’t need to be in till dinner-time. We’ll go right down to t’woods.” He danced about in front of Ian, spinning around and bursting into the old children’s song, with an excitement that Ian did not understand. “If you go down in the woods today… Come on, last one to our place is a scab! If you go down in the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise.”

  Ian had hesitated only briefly, an English lesson he usually enjoyed – though he did not let on about that – offered offered only a fleeting temptation against the unseasonable warmth in the air and the sunshine lighting
up the tawny trees in the valley below. His only objection was the one which tormented all the children of Urmstone that year.

  “I’m bloody starving,” he objected half-heartedly.

  “I’ve got a fag, look,” Craig had said, waving a crumpled cigarette at his friend. “That’ll keep us going till dinner time. If you go down in the woods today you’re sure of a puff on a fag.” The old song had seemed childish, Craig’s behaviour manic, but the surprise had been real enough, and utterly shocking in the end.

  The path had been full of the scent of the open country, and a couple of rooks had been cawing raucously and circling something in the ditch against a dry stone wall. If it had not been for those birds, Ian had thought later, they might not even have noticed the huddled remains of the policeman almost concealed in the tall nettles and brambles which flourished in the soggy black earth. As it was, both boys had glanced that way, puzzled at first and then transfixed by what Ian still saw in all its muddy, bloody detail, as if the sight had been carved into his retina, when he woke in the early hours struggling breathlessly out of a dream.

  For some reason he had never heard explained, even at the trial, PC Andy Fielding had not

  been in full uniform when he met his death. He was wearing a sweatshirt and a light anorak over his uniform trousers and police boots: no helmet now, no visor, no shield or heavy equipment, no protection at all from whoever had smashed something heavy into the side of his head, leaving the hair matted with congealing blood, no protection from whoever had finished the job off with a heavy stake to the stomach which, it emerged later, had pinned his body to the ground.

  Impaled. It was a word Ian did not think he had ever heard before, but learned only too well over the next few weeks and months as it screamed from newspaper headlines and was spat in the face of the village by impassioned detectives trying to discover who had driven the stake home with such ferocity and left the dying man agonisingly alive.

  The boys had looked more closely and Ian had quickly turned away, sickened and shaking. But Craig had been bolder, or had a stronger stomach, and he had grabbed hold of the stake and had attempted to pull it out, as if that might bring the dead man back to life. Ian had knocked his hand away angrily.

  “He’s dead, you spanna. Leave him alone,” Ian had screamed, filled with unreasoning anger. And then, as one, they had run, and only when they had gained the shady safety of the woods on the other side of the stream did Craig fling himself to the ground with a half-sob, half-groan, with Ian dropping down beside him, retching and speechless.

  “He’s a pig,” Craig said at last, sucking his finger, scratched and bleeding, and wiping it on his shirt. “A copper, one of them bastards who’ve come up from London. I know he is.”

  “How do you know,” Ian had asked, not wanting to believe this new bombshell.

  “Didn’t you recognise him?” Craig asked. “I reckon he were t’one who were on t’tip that night wi’our Stevie, though wi’all that blood and stuff…” He hesitated. “Any road, there’s them boots. He’s got copper’s boots and kecks, uniform like. I tell you, he’s one o’t’pigs.”

  “But where’s the rest of his gear?” Ian objected, ever the logical one of the pair. “They don’t go round without their gear. They daresn’t.”

  “He’s one o’t’stupid ones then, isn’t he? They don’t go round on their tod, neither, but he must have. Any road, I’m glad he’s dead. I wish the rest o’them were an’all. He’s a pig. You’ll see.” Craig’s face had turned sullen and it had not taken long for him to be proved right, although no-one ever discovered why PC Andy Fielding had been alone on the outskirts of Urmstone, out of uniform, two hundred miles from his home in Croydon and a dozen from the disused army drill-hall in South Yorkshire where he had been billeted.

  The boys sat in silence in the woods for a while, trying to come to terms with what they had seen, before they summoned up the will to make their way further into the trees to what they called Their Place, a tumbledown shelter of stone and heavy baulks of timber where they occasionally made a camp fire, cooked canned beans and baked potatoes, and smoked illicit cigarettes. Neither boy suggested reporting what they had seen to the police. The idea of approaching the officers on duty in the village simply did not cross their mind. In a war, you did not communicate with the enemy and a war was what they believed they were in.

  Ian had flung himself down on the dusty floor and tried to erase the image of what he had seen from his mind but failed miserably. In the end he scrambled to his feet and made his way deeper into the undergrowth behind the shelter to where he and Craig had uncovered the entrance to an abandoned drift where local men must once have dug into the low rock overhang to burrow into a thin seam of coal, long before the deep shaft of Urmstone Main had been sunk. It was cool and dark in the entrance and the only sound was the chatter of the woodland birds. Craig had once scrabbled his way right inside the drift until he was convinced that it ended only yards from the entrance, blocked by the jumbled rocks of a roof fall, and offering little except the chance to prove once more that he was bolder than his friend.

  Craig joined him, waving his half-smoked cigarette to offer Ian a puff. But they could not settle. Craig’s hand trembled uncontrollably as he smoked and he eventually ground the stub into the dirt.

  “If we don’t go into school soon we’ll miss us dinner,” Ian had said eventually. He was already famished although it was only an hour or so since he had eaten breakfast: bread and jam and a cup of weak tea which his mother had left them before she left for the canteen. It had not been enough: it never was these days. He was used to it by now and pulled his belt tighter each day, knowing better not to ask at home for more.

  “All right, all right, let’s go back for us dinner,” Craig conceded. His mother still had a job and food was not so scarce in his house, a source of some resentment in the village when the other women watched Brenda Atkinson coming home from the supermarket with her shopping. “But we’ll go round by Royd Farm. We don’t want anyone to see us near him again. They might think we did it.” And Ian had nodded, suddenly aware that what they had seen was fraught with menace, not just for them but for the whole village. What they had seen was just the beginning of a nightmare.

  “Urmstone?” Michael Thackeray said, obviously astonished. “You went to Urmstone? Whatever for?” Laura was sitting on the sofa, allowing Michael Thackeray to make a fuss of her after they had eaten. She had to admit that she was tired after the drive to the mining village and back with Ian Baxter and had struggled to prepare a meal before Thackeray came home late. Her own return to work had suddenly seemed a long way away as she almost staggered around the kitchen, and she began to wonder if she would ever make it.

  “What on earth have you been doing? You look exhausted,” Thackeray had asked, his anxiety obvious, as he handed her a cup of coffee and sat down beside her.

  “I let Joyce drag me into one of her crusades,” she confessed quietly. “And now I wonder what I’ve let myself in for.” She told him how she had met Ian Baxter and allowed him to take her to see his parents in Urmstone, and was surprised at how angry Thackeray looked as she ploughed on.

  “Ian said that this was one of the places that had the heart dragged out of it back then,” Laura said. “They took a double blow, you know. They all fought for a whole year during the strike, and had to go back to work with nothing. But it was even worse than that. Urmstone was promised that its pit had a future even after the strike. They were given that little bit of hope. But then, after three years, they closed it anyway. Then there were lots of promises of new jobs and regeneration, but you only have to look at the place to see that nothing much happened. The kids are on the street corners, a lot of them on drugs, Ian says, and of course it’s getting worse again now with the cuts. There’s nothing for them there, or anywhere else for that matter. And the old men, like his father, are dead or dying or just defeated.”

  “It’s a lifetime ago, Laura,” Thackeray sai
d, surprising her with his lack of sympathy. “They should have come to terms with it by now.”

  “The Baxters have good reason not to have done that,” she said angrily.

  “Ah,” Thackeray said. “I thought they might have.” And he seemed content to listen to Laura’s tale of her visit to the family then, although his expression remained grim.

  Ian Baxter’s mother had opened the door to both of them, a small, exhausted-looking woman with deep circles under her eyes, who offered her cheek for a peck of a kiss from her son, a dry wordless greeting which seemed to reflect how Ian himself felt. But Madge Baxter’s eyes were bright and fixed on Laura, as she followed Ian inside, and Laura could not help noticing the Coal not Dole badge still worn prominently on her cardigan. Madge, it seemed, had not entirely given up yet, even after all these years, though maybe perilously close to it.

  “How’s dad,” Baxter had asked.

  “Not so good,” Madge Baxter had replied. She glanced at Laura. “He says he wants to see you, but the doctor says he not to tire himself trying to talk.”

  Ken Baxter’s bed had been brought downstairs and when Ian opened the living room door Laura had found herself face-to-face with a gray wraith of a man propped up on a mountain of pillows close to the window. In one hand he clutched the line which connected him to the oxygen cylinder which stood beside the bed. It was as if he believed that if he let that life-line go, his breath would finally seep away and Laura guessed that was not far from the truth.

  “This is Laura Ackroyd, from the Bradfield Gazette,” Ian Baxter explained to his father. “I told you about her. She’s auntie Joyce’s grand-daughter.” Ken managed a faint smile at that and held out his hand to Laura, who felt its thin fragility and did not dare to squeeze too hard.

  “He took his bloody time coming, our Ian,” Ken wheezed faintly. “Just got here in time for t’bloody funeral, I reckon.” Laura saw Ian wince at that and turn his head away.