Dust to Dust

by Patricia Hall

  “It’s been a long time,” Baxter said, offering his hand, which was briefly taken. He glanced at the half-empty glass in front of Randall whose father, he noticed, was drinking at the other side of the room with a couple of men his own age. “Can I get you another?”

  “Nay, I’m reet. I’ve got a fair drive home and there’s still a few coppers around who’d like nowt better than to pull me over just for the hell of it.” Randall gazed at Ian Baxter for a moment as if fascinated by the changes the years had wrought. “You don’t favour your Billy, do you?”

  “No, I was always the skinny one,” Baxter said.

  “Aye, well, we were all skinny then,” Randall said, patting his comfortable belly. “They made sure of that, didn’t they. D’you remember how some of the single lads used to come back with pockets full of potatoes they’d scavenged in t’fields after they’d been out picketing. They were that famished?”

  “I’ve never put any weight on,” Baxter said. “I’d have been useless if I’d gone down the pit like my dad wanted me to.”

  “It were better than where I ended up,” Randall said, and Laura saw the flash of bitterness in his face before he glanced away, his gnarled fingers, almost as black as a miner’s coming off shift, clutching his glass with a grip which looked as though it would crush it. “Your Billy must be desperate after all this time.”

  “You could say that,” Baxter agreed.

  “Aye, well, times change,” Randall said, taking a swig of his pint. “The pit had long gone by t’time I got out. I’ve a little business now, market gardening. A couple of kids, a wife who believes in me.”

  “All the things Billy’s not got and likely never will have, if we don’t do something for him,” Baxter said. “Which is why I’m making the effort to help his lawyer now, to get him parole at least.”

  “But I hear you’re a lawyer an’all. Done all right for yourself, I’m told. If I had any bloody faith in t’legal system I might be hiring you myself to look at my case. But I reckon it’s all a waste of time. It were fixed back then by those beggars and it’ll stay fixed.”

  “Has this man Ferguson from London been to see you as well?” Laura asked.

  “He’s interviewed t’bloody cows in t’fields and t’rats in t’bloody sewers from what I hear,” Randall said. “Anyone who might have been here that night his mate was killed. But especially me, I suppose, wi’my record. I remember Ferguson. He were one o’t’bastards who set me up. I remember him in court swearing to God that he’d found stuff in my car after the minibus got done. Stuff wi’dust on it from the blocks some stupid beggar threw over t’bridge onto t’motorway. I told them then and I’ll tell them to my dying day that it were nowt to do wi’me. It were planted. I were at home that night, getting a decent night’s sleep for once. But of course that meant I’d no-one to vouch for where I’d been that night, no rota to say who I was with. Not that an alibi did your Billy much good. They believed what they wanted to believe and made the bloody facts fit.”

  “You said at Billy’s trial you were with him that night,” Baxter said. “But Roy Atkinson said he took him in his car. That’s what did for him in the end. The jury didn’t believe either of you.”

  “They wouldn’t believe owt I said any road, by that time. They made a right song and dance about bringing me from Durham to give evidence. It were in all t’papers.” He gave Laura an unfriendly glance. “But I’ve wracked my brains any road. By t’time it came to trial it were all a bit vague and as you say, t’police were claiming the rosters weren’t complete. My dad says that’s nonsense. You can ask him yourself.” He glanced across to the bar, but his father and his friends had already gone without a word. Randall shrugged.

  “We hardly talk any more,” he said. “I still reckon he thinks I did t’motorway job and he’s never forgiven me.” He drained his glass and shook his head when Baxter offered him another.

  “Best not,” he said. “I must be getting back. Has Ferguson got you and Craig on his list of suspects then? Along with me and Roy Atkinson, and your dad and mine. The man’s bloody barmy. But you want to teck care, opening it all up again. No-one ever told them that we used to see the pair of you lads skulking about in t’dark, poking your noses in where they weren’t wanted. Your dad would have tanned your backside if he’d caught you.

  “We never knew anyone had seen us,” Baxter said quietly. “But now it seems half the village knew we were out. We swore blind that we’d been in bed asleep all that night. I was only out for ten minutes or so. I was sure my mother had seen me down by the welfare so I scuttled back to bed when the cars went off.

  “Mebbe she did see you,” Randall said. “She’d say nowt neither.”

  Laura noticed Baxter wince at that and guessed that the wall of silence which had existed during those weeks embarrassed him now.

  “And did your mate Craig go back to bed an’all?” Randall asked bluntly, breaking into Baxter’s discomfort.

  “As far as I know he did,” Baxter said. “I don’t think we ever talked about it later. When we heard about the murder we just knew we’d be asking for trouble if we said anything, so we said nothing.” He turned to Laura. “A Mafia village had nothing on Urmstone that year when it came to keeping its collective mouth shut, believe me,” he explained.

  “He’s right,” Randall agreed and then turned back to Baxter and put a hand on his arm in sympathy. “I reckon if you want to do your brother some good you could do worse than track Craig Atkinson down,” he said. “He were a big lad, were Craig. And even if he wasn’t involved he might have seen summat useful, if he stayed out after you went home. The trouble with everyone clamming up the way they did is that they might have hidden summat that could have helped Billy.” Baxter shrugged.

  “They came in here like an avenging army, the police,” he said to Laura.

  “That’s not surprising,” she said dryly. “They’re only human. One of their mates had been killed, in a particularly brutal way.” The two men looked at her with every sign of shock.

  “Come on, Ian,” Laura said, irritated now. “They weren’t going to tip-toe around that case, were they? Surely after all this time, you can see that? You’re supposed to be a lawyer. You know how these things are.” Baxter swallowed hard and, with a glance at Randall, nodded.

  “Of course, you’re right. It was a wicked, brutal thing someone did. No-one would admit it at the time, but that’s the truth of it. But my brother Billy didn’t do it. That’s the truth, too. And I’m sure we can prove it now, with DNA and all the new techniques on offer. They’re not just there to pin down guilty parties from years back. They can clear the innocent too.” Laura sighed. She felt tired at the end of a long morning and wanted to go home.

  “There’s one thing I remembered long after,” Col Randall said suddenly. “The man who were killed, Fielding. You know the police never said after he were killed why he were in the village at all that night, and not in uniform, neither. Well, with all the hassle of my own trial and the shock of being sent down, I didn’t recall till years after that I’d seen him in the village earlier on. I didn’t know he was a copper then, but when his picture were in t’papers again, when Billy first appealed, I saw it and I recognised him. He’d driven past me in a car as close as you are now, and glanced right at me, maybe months before he died. Then years after, my dad said he’d always thought the police were using officers in plain clothes to spy and to make trouble, to make the NUM look bad. You kept on hearing tales of violence stirred up by men no-one recognised, plain vans arriving with pickets no-one knew. I reckon Fielding were one of them.”

  “My father was always convinced that the police were getting information from someone in Urmstone,” Baxter said slowly. “He said it was downright uncanny how they had road blocks set up on the exact route people were taking to get to picket lines. And the motorway used to get mysteriously closed just where the pickets cars needed to turn off. Billy used to get furious when they had to walk miles over mu
ddy fields to get where they wanted to be.”

  “I reckon Fielding were a police spy, though God only knows who he was getting information from,” Randall said. “According to my dad, we knew and they knew we knew and we knew that they knew we knew what was going on. But nowt could ever be proved.” Laura glanced at Baxter with some sympathy.

  “It’s like fitting together a twenty-five year old jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing,” she said, not bothering to conceal her weariness. “I must go, but give me a call, Ian, if there’s anything else I can do. I’ve do have some time on my hands. And I’d like to go back to work with a good story to give my boss, if nothing else.”

  Michael Thackeray got home early that evening and found Laura asleep in bed. He stood for a long time in the doorway, gazing at her cropped hair on the pillow where once her luxuriant copper curls

  had lain, and his gut twisted as he recalled how close to death she had come just a month before. If he had believed in the God he had been brought up to believe in, he thought, he would be thanking more saints than he could recall the names of for her survival, and the survival of the baby he had only just learned she was carrying before they were both almost snatched from him. The possibility of losing them woke him in the small hours every night, shivering with fear. He sat on the bed beside her and put a gentle hand on her shoulder.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “Is there anything I can get you?” Laura opened her eyes, dazed with sleep, and then smiled the smile which turned Thackeray’s heart over still.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I was a bit tired when I got back. I didn’t intend to sleep for so long.”

  “I’m early,” he said, kissing her gently. “I thought we could go out. I want us to go to see my father to tell him about the baby. I don’t want to do it over the phone. And then we could maybe go for a meal at that new place in Eckersley. If you feel up to it?”

  “That would be good,” Laura said. “Of course I feel up to it. Give me half an hour to tidy myself up and get changed.” Her face clouded for a moment.

  “Do you think your father will be any more pleased to see me than the last time we met?” Joe Thackeray, devout Catholic, and ex-farmer, now retired in some frustration to a bungalow in Arnedale, had never approved of a relationship begun before Thackeray’s wife had died and still continuing without the benefit of even a civil marriage much less the religious one he doubtless craved and Thackeray himself would never give him.

  “We should tell him about the baby,” Thackeray said. “Before we tell anyone else. I owe him that at least. I don’t want him finding out through some grapevine or other I know nothing about. You know what the job is like. The news’ll reach Arnedale nick and then be all over the town.”

  “Of course, you’re right,” Laura agreed.

  “It’s remarkable how the arrival of grandchildren softens hearts and minds, though,” Thackeray said. “I guess he’ll dote on this one just as he did before.” Even now, years after the event, he found it hard to mention the name of his long dead son. Laura sighed, only too aware of how that tragedy had almost ended Thackeray’s career and threatened his sanity, and made the journey to their present happiness a desperate struggle at times for both of them.

  “You and I should visit Ian’s memorial if we’re going to Arnedale,” she said. “This will be his baby brother or sister. I know he can’t be replaced, Michael, but it is a new start for all of us. Hopefully for your father, too. Let’s do it and see if you can find some peace and put all that behind you at last. Please. It’s time.”

  “Have you been careering around Urmstone again,” Thackeray said, abruptly changing the subject. “Is that why you’re so tired?” Laura gave him a slightly shame-faced grin.

  “I wasn’t down there long,” she said. “Apart from anything else, it’s a deeply depressing place. They hardly seem to have recovered properly from the strike. And now times are getting hard again it’s difficult to see how they ever will. And Ian Baxter’s father is dying from the dust, with no compensation yet, after all these years. They’re haggling over his case for some reason. It’s truly awful.”

  “It was worse in ‘84, believe me,” Thackeray said grimly. “I was only there a week or so and I couldn’t get out fast enough. It was before the violence got really bad on the picket lines, and long before the murder of Andy Fielding, but the police were already regarded as being on the National Coal Board’s side. Maggie’s private army, they called us. I was spat at once, by one of the women. The only time that’s ever happened to me.”

  “They still seem to think that there were under-cover police down there stirring things up,” Laura said. “The dead copper seems to have been lurking about in plain clothes at odd times of the day and night and no-one has the faintest idea what he was doing. Did you ever hear anything about that?”

  “I’m sure the security services were up to their necks in it,” Thackeray said. “The government really regarded it as a sort of civil war, ‘the enemy within’ and all that, and we were the front line troops, whether we liked it or not. And there were plenty of coppers who did like it, especially in the Met. They loved every minute of it. But it was never really clear who was calling the shots. As a young copper I was well out of all the loops, but there was a lot of gossip. And there’s no doubt that the law was bent when it suited the powers that be, if not actually flouted. It was a nasty time, Laura, and I’m sure there are still huge unresolved resentments down there. That’s why I don’t want you involved. It could tip over into violence again, I’ve no doubt about that.”

  “Well, most of the miners’ leaders are pretty decrepit or dying, in Urmstone at least,” Laura said sharply. “But I did finally meet this man I told you about who’s claiming he’s still an officer from the Met, Jim Ferguson. He’s a really unpleasant bit of work, and seems quite determined to stir up the Baxter case again, even if he is on the other side of the fence now. He reckons there are still people around who got away with something when Billy Baxter was charged.” Thackeray’s face darkened.

  “He’s still there, is he? The local man’s been warned to keep a look out for him. But you know he may be right about the original case. The investigators were determined to get someone in the dock, and from what I heard the village was determined that they shouldn’t. It’s not a scenario which you’d guarantee to result in any sort of justice, is it?”

  “Which is just Ian Baxter’s point as well, isn’t it,” Laura said triumphantly.

  “Well, I wish him luck. It’s a terrible thing if his brother really has been locked up all these years as an innocent man. But you must promise me you won’t take any more risks. After last time… Ferguson is dangerous.”

  “I promise,” Laura said trying to disguise her own doubts. “I don’t think there’s any chance of getting hurt. Come on, let’s go and do our duty by your father. Then when I get back to work, I can let the world know about the baby. I’m sure Ted Grant will be glad to see the back of me on maternity leave for a bit when it arrives.”

  They drove up the valley of the River Maze to Arnedale in an uneasy silence apart from Billie Holiday on the stereo, always Thackeray’s blues singer of choice, and in spite of the fact that they were bearing what should have been welcome news, Laura felt that plaintive voice struck a chord deep within her as she was sure it did with Thackeray. Laura knew that his relationship with his father had fluctuated from edgy to icy ever since the younger man’s marriage had collapsed when he had found his wife comatose from an overdose and their baby drowned in the bath. Joe Thackeray was not the only one who had blamed a heavy drinking Michael Thackeray himself for the tragedy, and he was undoubtedly the last to forgive him, if he ever had. She doubted that even the good news they were bringing him would reconcile him to what had gone before.

  And when they arrived at the house, to be met by a much diminished old man with a dirty gray cardigan and an unwelcoming expression, she was not surprised. She had not seen him since he had been
prised out of the hill farm, where he could barely handle the physical hardship and punishing workload and where even a younger man would have found it hard to make a living, but she remembered him as still vigorous, despite his age, and with a determined gleam in his eyes. That had gone now, and when Thackeray told him that he and Laura would marry soon and that there was a child on the way, he barely seemed to register the news.

  “You’ll not be expecting me at a registry office,” was his only comment.

  “You’ll be welcome if you want to come,” Thackeray said.

  “The Church will marry you now Aileen’s gone,” Joe said. “I’ll talk to Father Rafferty.”

  “No,” Thackeray said flatly. “We’ll not go through a ceremony neither of us believes in, even for your sake.” Joe turned away and slumped into his chair by the gas fire and turned on the TV.

  “I’ll pray for your souls,” he said, dismissively. Outside the house, Laura put an arm through Thackeray’s.

  “Don’t blame yourself,” she said. “He’s an unforgiving man, who’s had a lot of tragedy in his life. His religion’s all he’s got left.” Thackeray put his arm round Laura.

  “And you’re the opposite, or you wouldn’t still be putting up with me,” he said. “Come on. Let’s go and try this new restaurant. I expect when there’s a baby around we won’t get the chance.”

  “But we’ll light a candle for Ian on the way,” Laura said. “I know that’s what you used to do. Father Rafferty told me once years ago. Even though it means nothing one way, it means something to us. You mustn’t wipe your son out of the picture. He’s always been part of you, and now he’s part of us.”

  “I love you, Laura,” Thackeray said.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Ian Baxter’s bed was narrow, the house chilly and there was none of the comforting warmth he was used to at home with Carrie, with Daisy sleeping in her cot just feet away. He had woken first at about two to find his feet frozen cold, the blankets on the floor and his mind still spinning with unanswered questions. Could Jim Ferguson really believe that his dying father had been involved in Andy Feilding’s murder? Was that why he had still been keeping what must have been a bone-chilling vigil outside the house at midnight when he had gone to bed? Or was he under surveillance himself, perhaps as a possible lead to his missing friend Craig? And how far would a maverick cop from London be able to persuade the local force that any of his theories about what they must consider a long closed case were serious.