Death in a Far Country

by Patricia Hall

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Rosemary said, flinching slightly from the Sergeant’s vehemence.

  ‘Do you deal with many African clients?’

  ‘Some, from Somalia and Eritrea, asylum seekers who’ve been dumped – I mean moved – here from London,’ Rosemary said. ‘But this girl looks more like a West African. We don’t get so many West Africans.’

  ‘Sierra Leone, someone suggested.’

  ‘Maybe, or Nigeria. I’ll make sure we show the picture to all our black clients. Someone may know her.’

  ‘All your clients,’ Mower said again. ‘Including illegals we may not know about?’

  ‘Yes, all our clients,’ Rosemary agreed quickly. ‘But if they’re here illegally they don’t necessarily come near us. Or anyone else for that matter.’

  ‘You’ve got the phone number,’ Mower said. ‘Get in touch if you hear anything. Anything at all. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ the girl said, and watched, pale-faced, as Mower spun on his heel and left the shop before picking up the phone on the desk to make a call.

  The girl ate the loaf she had stolen ravenously. She had not eaten for two days and had drunk only the rainwater she had been able to scoop up from the puddles on the roof of the condemned block of flats where she had taken shelter. She had slept on the floor in one of the empty flats where she had found an abandoned mattress, but she preferred it up here on the roof, in spite of the biting wind. Most of the flats stank of urine or worse, and she knew that there were rats. She had heard them scuttling in the night, waking every half hour or so and listening until her ears rang for any sound that might tell her that her pursuers had tracked her down or that the rodents were close enough to threaten her. But there had been nothing but distant rustling, and as grey daylight woke her for the final time, she had crept down the filthy stairway and slipped outside briefly, long enough to find the single shop which served the estate, still shuttered and closed but with a couple of trays of that day’s bread delivery left outside the back entrance. She had grabbed a loaf and run back to the safety of the fenced off block, slipping through the gap she had found between the wooden boards and pushing open the heavy glass doors that no longer locked, picking her way up the littered and evil-smelling concrete stairs again to her eyrie to eat something at last.

  Pale sunlight began to warm her slightly as the morning wore on and, with food inside her, her mind began to distinguish between the reality of her position and the garbled images that had tormented her fitful sleep. Occasionally she crouched against the parapet and glanced down the dizzying side of the block to see what was happening below. Soon after daylight men had begun to arrive to continue work on the neighbouring block, which had been reduced to little more than a mound of rubble that was being gradually loaded onto huge trucks and taken away. She guessed that the block she was hiding in was due for the same fate. The flats below her had been trashed and vandalised, whether by their last residents or by others who had moved in later, she did not know. The entrances and ground floor windows had been ineffectually boarded up, the stairwells left open to rain and wildlife and whatever human flotsam chose to take refuge there, the lifts vandalised and the shafts gaping open. She did not think she was always alone in Priestley House but had so far avoided any contact with other people who were undoubtedly there as illicitly as she was herself.

  She gazed across the busy building site below to take in a view of the whole of the town whose name she did not even know and the blue-grey hills beyond. They were gentle hills here, she thought, not like the craggy mountainsides at home where the village she had left what seemed like a lifetime ago had crouched underneath the peaks as if trying to conceal itself, as more than once in its history it had needed to. Here she could see roads climbing up the hillsides, and cars, like ants, crawling up and over the rounded summits to whatever lay beyond.

  Closer at hand, there were busy urban streets with red buses and people moving about their business in ever-changing groups, cars swirling round circular intersections, an occasional small train trundling down rails that shone in the damp air and slid into what she recognised as a station even from this distance. There were the spires of churches and, to her surprise, the minarets of a couple of mosques, and an occasional tall chimney whose purpose she could only guess at. And then rows and rows of houses, snaking up the hills and down the valleys, until they gave way to the green fields and woods of open countryside. There was normality down there, she thought, hundreds, even thousands of people living safe lives without the fear that paralysed her and kept her chained to her cold and windy vantage point, choking with panic if she saw anyone approach the doors to the flats.

  When she had crept back to the canal-side path two nights earlier she had found no trace of her friend. At first she had hidden for more than an hour in some bushes in a tiny area of open land not far away, hardly daring to breathe in case their pursuers heard her. She had listened for footsteps, but heard nothing she could identify, no sounds of struggle, no car, no audible hint that the dark water had been disturbed, only her own heart thudding behind her ribs and her teeth chattering eventually as the cold air threatened to freeze her blood. Then, when she had summoned up the tattered remnants of her courage and crept back to where she had left her friend there was nothing at all, the black water was still and silent, the towpath deserted, the houseboats moored a little farther up the cut in total darkness. The only movement in the bleak silent landscape came from a few bright stars in the black sky, which were twinkling a million, million miles away as if to mock her bitter isolation.

  She did not know how long she had sat beside the water, crying silently, before faint streaks of grey in the sky to the east told her that she had to move before the town woke to a new dawn. She had pulled her thin cardigan around her then and slipped away, keeping to sidestreets and back alleys as she climbed the long hill to the west of the town where, in the faint light of dawn, she had seen the skeletal remains of the flats on The Heights, and realised that these abandoned relics might offer her temporary shelter at least. Finding a way through the fencing had not been hard. Others had been there before her. The doors of the one remaining block that looked relatively intact had been half open. The early morning light was sufficient to show her the way up the staircase to the top level, where she collapsed on the floor of what had evidently once been someone’s home, the plumbing ripped out now, the electricity wires dangling uselessly from the ceilings, the windows smashed and mouldering wallpaper hanging in strips like tattered bunting from the walls.

  And there she had stayed. She was no longer very sure how long she had been there, days and nights merging in the half light of the abandoned flat and the winter daylight when she emerged occasionally on the rooftop. The men below would move into this last block soon, she thought, as she watched them from above. Then she would have to decide where she could go next. Or not, she thought. Because of one thing she was quite sure. If her pursuers found her here, or if anyone else threatened her, she would not run any more. She could not. And there was another solution, obvious in its desperate simplicity. As she gazed down she could already see her own body, smashed and bloody, on the concrete far below.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Saturday dawned heavy and dismal, with the threat of rain carried over the hills by a biting wind, but nothing could dampen the excitement of the thousands of football fans who thronged the narrow streets around United’s stadium in Beck Lane, a narrow thoroughfare in the valley surrounded by retail outlets and motor showrooms and new housing, which had mushroomed where old stone textile warehouses had once stood. There was a heavy police presence on foot and on horseback, shepherding the gold and blue bedecked crowds towards the stadium as Laura Ackroyd approached the main entrance to the looming and slightly dilapidated stands where the local team had played for almost a century. She thought briefly of Thackeray, who had gone into CID headquarters that morning with an unconvincing explanation that the murder inquiry demanded his attention for
the whole weekend. Laura had not believed him and she wondered how long it was going to take him to confront the demons that were coming between them. And how long she could wait.

  She shook her head sharply at the memory, tossing her red hair back and letting the wind take it behind her in a cloud.

  ‘Hi, copperknob,’ a young man in a gold and blue flat cap yelled as he passed her in the jostling throng, and she felt unaccountably cheered up. When men stopped noticing her, she thought with a grin, was when she should start to worry. And she determined to enjoy the new experience of a big FA Cup match in Bradfield with more cheerful anticipation than she had felt all day.

  She had not felt threatened in the jostling, excited crowd, but she remembered that Tony Holloway – when he had recovered from his chagrin after learning of Laura’s coveted invitation to the directors’ box – had warned her to take care. There were enough wild local lads still around, he thought, to take the arrival of a major London club, especially one with its own reputation for supporter violence, as a challenge. In other words, he said, there could be trouble, more likely these days outside the ground than in, and it was clear to Laura, as she pushed her way to the main entrance, that he might well be right. Amongst the press of mainly men and boys garlanded in the club colours, there were a few pockets of cold-eyed young men who looked as if they might have more than raucous and foul-mouthed support for their team on their mind.

  Avoiding the queues for the turnstile entrances, she made her way to one side where glass doors gave access to the offices and other facilities of Bradfield United’s administration. Security guards looked at the invitation Jenna Heywood had sent to the office and one of them guided her inside the building to the boardroom, where another club official studied her credentials again before opening the imposing panelled doors for her and ushering her in.

  ‘Miss Heywood’s over there by t’window,’ the man said, gesturing vaguely across a throng of burly men in suits to the far side of the room, where picture windows gave onto the main stand and the so far empty green pitch beyond. Everyone was clutching a glass, and to judge by the heat and the noise, everyone had had their glass filled more than once already, although there was still more than an hour to go before kick-off. Laura dodged her way through the crush and joined the group around Jenna, who noticed her arrival with an unexpectedly warm smile.

  ‘Laura,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you could come.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,’ Laura said. ‘A chance of glory like this?’

  Jenna’s eyes lost their warmth for a second as she glanced out onto the pitch, which was being lashed by a sudden squall.

  ‘We hope so,’ she said quickly, glancing at a well-tanned, dark-haired man at her side wearing what Laura guessed was a casually elegant Armani suit and a slightly strained smile. ‘Right, Paolo?’ she said.

  ‘We can ’ope,’ he said, and Laura realised, even before Jenna introduced them, that this must be Paolo Minelli, the Italian coach who had been unexpectedly lured to the club by Jenna’s father. Minelli nodded in Laura’s direction and just for a second his expression switched from anxious to interested as the melancholy brown eyes in a crumpled face flickered over Laura’s trim figure. She had chosen her black trouser suit and emerald shirt carefully to set off her copper hair and was inevitably flattered by their effect.

  ‘And this is Angelica Stone, Paolo’s girlfriend,’ Jenna had continued smoothly. ‘And her brother Stephen, who runs the new nightclub in Northgate. I haven’t made it there yet, but I hear it’s very good.’ The Stones nodded briefly in Laura’s direction with little interest until Jenna added that Laura was features editor of the Gazette.

  ‘Are you here to write something?’ Angelica asked. She was thin enough to verge on the anorexic and wore a revealingly low-cut silk top that did not meet her designer jeans and exposed a tanned midriff and a pierced navel. Her expression, Laura realised, was somewhat less than friendly.

  ‘No, I’ve already written about Jenna taking over the club,’ she said. ‘If you saw the Gazette yesterday you might have read it. The sports editor will do the rest of the coverage. Football’s not something I know much about, to be honest. This is a new experience for me.’

  ‘Ah, you wrote that article, did you?’ Minelli asked, also looking at Laura with even greater interest and practised eyes that travelled again from her cloud of loosely swept back hair to her new high-heeled red boots in seconds. ‘I thought that was very good, very nice. Simpatico, si. So much writing about football is fantastic – is that the right word in English? I mean not true, made up?’

  ‘Sorry, I should have called to thank you for the article,’ Jenna said quickly. ‘It was quite a pleasure to read something that wasn’t having a go at me for being female, which is what’s happened on most of the sports pages. You wouldn’t think this was the twenty-first century, the way some of the tabloids go on. But that was a good piece. I liked it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Laura said.

  ‘Now, will you excuse me for a minute,’ Jenna went on quickly. ‘Paolo and I need a word before he goes downstairs to join the team. Perhaps Steve will get you a drink and introduce you to some more people. I won’t be long. You’re sitting next to me in the box when the time comes.’

  With that Jenna spun on her elegantly shod heel, followed by Paolo Minelli, who gave Laura a last appraising glance as he turned away, a glance, Laura realised, that was not lost on Angelica who watched her boyfriend depart with a face like thunder.

  ‘Vodka and tonic, please,’ Laura said in answer to Stephen Stone’s enquiry and he too moved away, leaving the two women to survey the now rain-lashed pitch outside, and the sight of the fans beginning to fill up the stands, in a prickly silence.

  ‘What do you do, Angelica?’ Laura asked, trying to break the ice.

  ‘Modelling, mainly,’ the other woman said, without enthusiasm.

  ‘What, here or in London?’ Laura asked, thinking that there could not be a great deal of modelling work on offer in Bradfield.

  ‘Oh, in London mainly,’ Angelica said airily. ‘Leeds, Manchester, you know. Around.’ She reached in her bag and took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one, without offering them in Laura’s direction. She drew the smoke into her lungs hungrily and Laura wondered if the addiction was how she maintained her stick-thin figure.

  ‘It must be an interesting life,’ she said, trying again to break the palpable tension between them. ‘What’s the ultimate in modelling? Doing the shows in Paris and New York?’

  ‘If you look like a twelve-year-old druggie,’ Angelica said with unexpected venom. ‘I know I’m not in that league and never will be.’ Before Laura could answer, she found herself uncomfortably close to Stephen, who had come up behind them and thrust a glass in her direction.

  ‘V and T,’ he said. The brother and sister duo were uncannily alike, Laura thought as she took a sip of her drink and found herself the focus of another sharp-eyed gaze, almost as chilly as Angelica’s. They were both tall and fair, although Angelica’s hair was highlighted with gold, and their high cheekbones hinted at an ancestry that was not totally rooted in Yorkshire. Angelica would photograph well with that bone structure, she thought.

  ‘Thanks,’ Laura said to Stephen. ‘So how’s the new club going? I heard about it when it opened, but I haven’t got there yet.’

  ‘I’ll put you on the guest list if there’s a gig you’d especially like to see,’ Stone said, but without much warmth.

  ‘Thanks,’ Laura said again.

  ‘Ackroyd,’ Stone said. ‘Weren’t you the reporter who was involved in some shooting a few months back? What was it? A siege of some sort and someone was killed. Did you get shot?’

  Laura swallowed another mouthful of her drink to cover the inevitable pang of distress that clenched her stomach before she could bring herself to answer.

  ‘No, I didn’t get shot. It was a man the police wanted to talk to who was killed and my boyfriend who was
hurt.’

  ‘Do reporters often get involved in that sort of thing?’ Stone asked.

  ‘Not if they have any sense,’ Laura said lightly, and felt relieved when Jenna Heywood rejoined them and the subject dropped.

  ‘Would you like some lunch?’ she asked Laura. ‘There’s a buffet through here.’ She waved to a door that was now crammed with burly men heading like hungry bears towards the aroma of food.

  ‘What does Paolo Minelli think of your chances this afternoon?’ Laura asked quietly as they moved in the same direction. Jenna laughed.

  ‘That’s the question you mustn’t ask,’ she said. ‘We’re going to win, of course. Aren’t we, Les?’ She directed her attention with practised ease to a florid, heavily built man in a tweed suit with what was left of his hair combed over his largely bald pate.

  ‘This is Les Hardcastle, my father’s best mate. Laura Ackroyd, from the Gazette.’ Hardcastle stopped dead, a plate piled high with food in his hand, and fixed his eyes on Laura’s.

  ‘Jack Ackroyd’s daughter?’ he asked without preamble.

  ‘That’s right,’ Laura said. ‘Did you know him?’

  ‘Aye, of course I did. I knew him when he were a director here,’ Hardcastle said. ‘It were a right shame he had to retire like that. We could do with him here now. He knew a thing or two, did your dad.’

  ‘Still does,’ Laura said with a grin. ‘But he’s enjoying his life in the sun. I’ll tell him I saw you next time I speak to him. He’ll be keen to know how this match goes.’

  ‘He will that,’ Hardcastle said. ‘Give him my best, will you, Laura, love. It’s nice to meet you. I remember him talking about you years ago when you were away at school. You were the apple of his eye.’

  Hardcastle disappeared as abruptly as he had appeared into the now enthusiastically chomping mêlée, everyone with piled plates and drinks balanced precariously in hand. For self-protection, Jenna and Laura retired to a corner by the window again, where they rested their plates on the windowsill and picked at refreshments lighter than most people’s, Laura thought, by several thousand calories.