Dust to Dust

by Patricia Hall

  He had drifted back into a fitful sleep until he woke again, his heart thumping with panic, as he found himself dissecting his conversation with Col Randall all over again, the letters DNA spinning like an illuminated Christmas tree in front of his eyes. He had no fear that the new science might reveal anything incriminating about his own actions the night Feilding died, or the next morning, when he and Craig had found the body, but if the police decided to launch another inquiry at Ferguson’s behest, Col Randall would inevitably be at the top of their list of suspects. A court had already concluded that he was a killer, in spite of his still vehement protestations of innocence, and his DNA might be the first they would seek out.

  And what about Craig? Baxter did not believe for a moment that his friend had killed Fielding. But again and again he wracked his brains to recall every detail of the morning the two of them had run through the muddy fields and stumbled across the remains of Andy Fielding in the ditch. Even allowing for the shock, which had convulsed him and left him retching, Ian knew that he had not touched the contorted corpse. But he was much less sure what Craig had done. He thought he recalled him grabbing the stake which had killed the man, just for a second or two, but perhaps that was enough to leave forensic clues which could now be traced? He did not know, any more than he knew whether Ferguson could really spark the sort of cold case review which would lead to anyone seeking new evidence officially. But he was sure that if Marian succeeded in getting a review in the hope of clearing Billy’s name, no-one in Urmstone would thank her, or him, if it implicated anyone else after all these years.

  By the time the gray light of dawn percolated the thin curtains of his parents’ spare room, he had concluded bleakly that perhaps it would be best to leave well alone, to fight for Billy’s parole simply because he had served the sentence the judge had recommended, leaving his guilt uncontested. But he was not sure how he could even begin to suggest this to his parents, whose eyes had shone briefly with renewed hope when he had explained Marian’s plans to them, or to Marian herself, who had slipped into fierce crusading mode now and was unlikely to want to back off for any reason at all. The only course he could think of to cut a way through this dilemma was to go and see Billy himself and ask him what he thought. As he sat shivering on the side of his bed, pulling his clothes on as quickly as he could, he wondered how quickly he could get a visiting order to see his brother in prison.

  He spent the morning with his father, who struggled again to recall what could have happened to the rosters which the police claimed were incomplete, but by eleven it was obvious that he was tiring, sucking more and more oxygen into his failing lungs, and glancing more and more anxiously at the clock. His mother had taken the opportunity of her son’s being in the house to go to Bradfield shopping, and Baxter could not understand what was worrying his father.

  “What is it, dad,” he asked eventually.

  “It’s Vic,” Ken gasped, trying to raise himself into a sitting position. “He usually comes up on a Saturday morning. Regular as clockwork, he is. Let’s our Madge out for a couple of hours.” The sick man collapsed against the pillows as Ian plumped them up for him. He was exhausted by the effort of speaking.

  “Maybe he thinks he’s not needed, as you’ve got family here,” his son said.

  “I like to see him,” Ken insisted faintly. “There’s not many of us left now. We like a chat about old times.”

  To keep his father happy, Baxter found Vic Randall’s number in the small notebook his mother kept by the telephone but there was no reply to his call. Vic’s devotion to Ken’s sickroom cast a new light on the old warhorse, Ian thought, remembering how intimidating, as a boy, he had found most of the dour, self-important lodge officials who came and went to visit his father.

  “Happen he’s in his garden,” Ken whispered. “He’s tecken to growing veg.” He managed a thin smile before sucking in his oxygen, and Ian realised that this new hobby must have been the subject of some mirth in the miners’ welfare bar as the aging class warrior turned his mind to potatoes instead of propaganda.

  “Do you want me to see if I can roust him out?” Baxter asked. “Maybe he thinks he shouldn’t intrude because I’m here but I’m sure he’ll come over if I ask him. Give me five minutes. Will you be all right?” Ken nodded.

  “Aye, he can tell you better than I can what’s going off in t’village these days. And his memory’s a sight better than mine an’all. You should have a chat wi’Vic if you want to help our Billy.”

  Baxter nodded bleakly, recalling his father’s admission that Billy’s claim to an alibi the night of the murder, along with the rest, might be no more than a figment of the older men’s determination to protect the younger miners. But for his father’s sake, he pulled on his jacket and stepped out of the front door, relieved to see no sign of ex-sergeant Ferguson this morning, just a couple of hooded youngsters sitting on the low wall opposite the house dragging deeply on cigarettes and casually giving him the finger as he passed.

  He took the narrow ginnel which cut through to Vic Randall’s street of houses, in identical red brick, and when he got no response to his knock on the front door he took the narrow side entrance to the back garden which, as his father had suggested, had already been dug over and raked to a fine tilth between the few remaining rows of winter leeks and cabbage. But of the gardener himself there was no sign. Almost ready to give up, Baxter tried the back door handle. When he had been a child in Urmstone, many people left their doors unlocked although he knew that was a level of neighbourly trust which had long gone as the community had been plunged into drug-fuelled crime and instability after the pit closed, so he was surprised when Vic’s kitchen door yielded to his pressure. Feeling a sense of guilt which he knew was not necessary, he put his head round the door and shouted Vic’s name. But the silence inside the house was impenetrable.

  Baxter stepped inside to be overtaken by a smell of burning and a waft of heat which, while not threatening, felt distinctly abnormal. Cautiously, he looked around the small kitchen and soon found the source: the electric oven was switched on and when he opened it gingerly a cloud of black smoke wafted out, through which he could just identify the charred remains of a fast-food container on a metal tray. It looked like Vic Randall’s supper rather than his breakfast and Ian felt the first stirrings of alarm.

  Slamming the oven door shut again and turning the power off, he opened the door into the hall, where his sense of foreboding turned instantly into shocked horror. Vic Randall was lying on the floor at the foot of the stairs with his head at an unnatural angle and Baxter had little doubt from the moment he saw him and drew a first sharp breath, that the old man was dead. The wave of nausea which swept over him reminded him of the other body he had stumbled upon all those years ago and for a moment he could do no more than steady himself against the wall until he regained control his stomach.

  Walking as if on shards of glass, he took the couple of steps across the narrow hall to kneel down beside the crumpled body. He had no need to feel for a pulse. The old man’s eyes were wide open and his face and hands were cold and faintly blue. Vic Randall was undoubtedly dead at the foot of his stairs, and had been for some time, and Baxter found himself facing two urgent questions: was his death natural, and how on earth could he break this appalling news to his father?

  He pulled out his mobile phone and called 999, but the signal was weak and in the end he opened the front door of the house to try again outside. But he realised at once that he did not need to bother. Since he had arrived and gone to the back of the house, a panda car had parked immediately opposite and a figure he recognised as the local policeman, Tom Becket, much expanded in girth and sporting a sergeant’s stripes, stood deep in conversation with a woman on the opposite side of the road. He glanced away without much enthusiasm when Ian ran towards him, but his face hardened when Baxter told him what he had found. He pulled out his own phone and called for assistance, and an ambulance.

  “Are you sure
he’s dead,” he asked, as he followed Baxter briskly into Randall’s house, moving surprisingly quickly for a heavy man who, Ian guessed, must be close to retirement by now, leaving the woman he had been talking to speechless in his wake. Baxter nodded and it took little more than seconds for the sergeant to assure himself that he was right.

  “Been dead a while, I reckon, poor old sod,” Becket said, casting his eyes around the ill-lit hall. “Must have fallen down t’stairs.” He got up from his knees and dusted his trousers carefully.

  “Looks like it,” Baxter said, still trying to get his head together. “Maybe he had a heart attack at the top. I’ve not touched anything, except him of course. But he was so cold that it was pretty obvious he was dead.” Stumbling on one dead body might be thought a misfortune, he thought grimly, but if the police knew that this was the second time it had happened they might really move him up their list of suspects to stand, after all these years, alongside his brother.

  “What’s burning,” Becket asked, sniffing suspiciously.

  “His dinner looks as if it’s been in the oven since last night,” Baxter said. “I came in through the back door into the kitchen. Whatever was in the oven’s burnt to a crisp.” Sergeant Becket looked at him speculatively.

  “What are you doing here any road?” he asked.

  “My father asked me to come round. Vic usually comes to see him on a Saturday morning, apparently. I couldn’t get any reply at the front so I came round the back to see is he was in the garden. The back door was unlocked so I put my head round and when I smelt the burning I guessed something was wrong. My dad’ll be absolutely devastated.”

  “Aye, he will that,” the sergeant said. “After all the years they worked together. I’d a lot of time for Vic, you know, in spite of everything that went on back then. He were a man who knew what he believed in and was prepared to fight for it. Lost his wife over it an’all. I met her once, long after, in Bradfield. She said she thought she’d married a man, not the bloody NUM. Very bitter, she were. There were a lot of marriages broke up back then. Kept the divorce courts busy a long while, that strike did.”

  “Tell me about it,” Baxter said, feeling helpless as he gazed at the crumpled body on the floor between them.

  “There’s no end to the destruction, even after all these years,” Becket said, with obvious anger which surprised Baxter. “I still dream about it. Especially the night your mate’s little brother died, buried in that muck. I nearly resigned from t’force after that, I were so shook up. My girl friend told me to get out but in the end I decided to stick with it, but she wouldn’t stick with me.”

  “It stays with you,” Baxter said quietly. “You don’t need to tell me, and I was only a lad.”

  “Aye, well, I’d best set wheels in motion. I’ll wait for t’ambulance outside.”

  “Can I get back to my father?” Baxter asked. “I’ve left him on his own.”

  “We’ll need a statement from you, but I know where to find you,” Becket said. “I still look after the village but I’m not based here any more. Local bobbies are long gone.”

  Ian Baxter left the house through the kitchen door, the same way he had come in, asking himself inconsequentially as he walked through the garden who would harvest Vic Randall’s leeks now and then wondering desperately how he could break the news of his old comrade’s death to his father. As he trudged back up the hill to his parents’ house, an ambulance careered past him, blue lights flashing. And to his surprise, his father took the news stoically enough.

  “When you’re down t’pit, you get used to it. There’s always a chance of an accident. But I did reckon Vic would be here long after I’ve gone. It’s a bugger, that.” But when his mother came home, laden with her shopping, she sat down abruptly at the kitchen table, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “They were t’pillars who kept the whole thing going in this village,” she said. “Without them there’d have been no strike. They’d all have slunk back to work that first summer when t’going got tough and t’kids got hungry. I don’t care of he was a communist. What’s that got to do wi’owt when your backs are against t’wall? We were all on t’same side and Vic knew how to organise things. It were Vic who found us places to go fund-raising and how to get food parcels, how to rally support. How would a woman like me have found herself on t’streets of Brussels talking to Belgian miners’ wives without the contacts Vic Randall had? We’d have worked with Old Nick himself against that woman.”

  “Or Ghadaffi, like they said?” Baxter said wryly. Madge ran a hand wearily across her face.

  “They’ll all be gone soon,” she said. “No-one will remember owt about ‘84. We’ll all be dead and buried.”

  Baxter sighed, feeling helpless, and knowing his mother was probably right. The people who wrote history books didn’t write the history of villages like Urmstone. The strike would be a footnote, the strikers dismissed as dinosaurs, the destruction of an industry and a way of life dismissed as an inevitable necessity, and the coal remain locked beyond reach forever. He suddenly felt very weary and wanted above anything to go home.

  Laura Ackroyd was surprised to get a phone call from Ian Baxter that Saturday lunchtime. Michael

  Thackeray had gone into police HQ to clear up some paperwork, and she had set about tidying their flat in an unaccustomed fit of domestic enthusiasm when her mobile rang. Baxter sounded tense even before he told her that he had found Vic Randall dead only an hour or so earlier.

  “Your father must have taken that hard,” she said. “What was it? A heart attack?”

  “It looked like it,” Baxter said. “They’ve taken the body away but the police still seem to be fiddling around inside the house. I don’t really know what’s going on.” He hesitated for a moment longer than Laura quite understood. “It was dreadful finding a body,” he went on eventually.

  “It must have been,” Laura said. “I suppose there’ll be a big funeral.

  “Certain to be,” Baxter said. “I’m planning to go home later this afternoon, but I’ll have to come back for that, for my father’s sake, at least. But I really rang to ask if you would come and visit Billy with me if I can get visiting orders. I’d really like you to meet him and see what you think. I don’t want you to imagine I’m leading you on a wild goose chase. Miriam and I really are right about Billy, you know. I know every family says the same thing when someone goes off the rails, but Billy couldn’t have killed that man. It wasn’t in him to do anything as brutal as that.”

  “People get carried away in violent times,” Laura said gently. “You said yourself it was like civil war. They’re the worst sort of wars.”

  “Not Billy, I promise you. Will you come with me?”

  “Well, I don’t see why not. If I’m going to write about the case it makes sense to talk to him. But you’d better not tell the prison I’m a journalist. They won’t like that. Just say I’m a family friend.”

  “Great,” Baxter said. “I’ll see what I can arrange for when I come back. Thanks, Laura.” He hesitated again and Laura could hear the sound of sirens in the background.

  “What’s all that?” she asked.

  “A couple of police cars have gone tearing down towards Vic’s house,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going on. I’m supposed to give a statement, so I suppose I’d better do that before I head home. As if this village hadn’t had enough to put up with without an incident like this. It’ll reopen all the old wounds for people here.”

  “They’re all getting old, set in their ways, like my grandmother,” Laura said quietly. “There’s not much we can do about that.”

  “But Billy’s not old,” Baxter said. “He’s worth fighting for. I’ll be in touch.” And he cut the call abruptly, leaving Laura wondering if this was a fight either of them could win. She increasingly doubted it.

  Sergeant Kevin Mower had already established an incident room in the police house which had once been Tom Becket’s home, now relegated to an office ma
nned by the sergeant for a few hours each week, with the upper floor let off as a flat. It still offered just about enough space for DCI Thackeray’s team to set up their base there and Mower was waiting for Thackeray slightly impatiently when he arrived half way through Saturday afternoon.

  “Ian Baxter’s waiting for you in what we’ve set up as an interview room, guv,” he said.

  “What have you told him?” Thackeray asked.

  “Nothing much,” Mower said. “He was expecting to have to give a statement about finding the body anyway. He wasn’t surprised. But he’s hoping to get home to London to see his wife later on, so he’s a tad impatient to get away. You know he’s a lawyer?”

  “Yes, I knew that,” Thackeray said, not wanting to expand on Laura’s contacts with Baxter at this stage. “He may know the law but that doesn’t mean he’s exempt from it. Have you had any luck tracking down Jim Ferguson? We’ll need to talk to him even more urgently now. I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing passing himself off as a policeman on my patch, but given this development I’ll want an explanation.”

  “When I picked up Baxter, he said he was surprised Ferguson wasn’t still mooching around outside the house,” Mower said. “He claims he’s been there more or less continuously since he got here himself. Followed him up from London, he reckons.”

  “Right. Have him picked up,” Thackeray said. “Put out a call. And I’ll see Baxter now.” Thackeray found Ian Baxter standing with his back to the interview room door gazing out of the window onto the green patch of grass where the pit yard had stood. He spun round as Thackeray came in with Sergeant Tom Becket, though whether from anxiety or impatience, or a bit of both, Thackeray could not tell. He introduced himself and Baxter nodded, sitting down quickly in the chair across the table from the one Thackeray took.