Death in a Far Country

by Patricia Hall

  ‘That’s all. We’ve found her shoes but no handbag, though it seems inconceivable that a girl dressed like that for a night on the town wouldn’t have carried some sort of bag, however small. She’d need some money with her at the very least. To all intents and purposes she seems to have dropped into Bradfield from another planet.’

  ‘Aye, well, let’s not get too carried away,’ Longley said drily. ‘What about the forensics? Anything new there?’

  ‘Nothing more from Amos Atherton yet. They’re running various tests, including DNA. Somewhere, of course, there’s a man who fathered her baby, but he’ll remain as mysterious as the girl herself unless we get some positive ID.’

  ‘So it’s running into the sand?’

  ‘We’ve several lines of inquiry I still want to pursue. I’m not convinced that no one in the minority community knows her, African, Caribbean, whatever. But it’s not looking like an easy one to crack so far.’

  ‘I’ll have to leave it in your hands, Michael,’ Longley said wearily. ‘I’m tied up at County again today.’

  ‘How’s that going, sir?’ Thackeray asked cautiously. It had taken a DCI with a troubled career history and a superintendent with very definite ideas about how he liked his division run a long time to come to terms with each other, Thackeray thought, but he would be unhappy now to see Longley leave the service prematurely because of a case in which no one had covered themselves in glory.

  ‘How the hell should I know how it’s going?’ Longley said. ‘They give very little away. And I’ve no idea what the bloody spooks have been saying, or Val Ridley, for that matter, if she’s given evidence. I don’t even know that. She’s out of our control now she’s resigned, any road. She could be putting the knife right between my shoulder blades right now for all I know.’

  ‘You think they’ve seen her already?’

  ‘How the hell would I know,’ Longley snapped again. ‘They tell you bugger all. Just go through a long list of questions. Why did I do this, why did I do that, what were my priorities, what was the budget, what was the staffing…?’ He hesitated, his face flushed. ‘After this little lot, I’m not even sure I want to carry on any longer, Michael, and that’s the truth. I’ve had it up to here.’ He drew an angry finger across his throat where the flesh bulged over his uniform collar and grimaced. ‘Is it worth the aggro, I ask you?’

  ‘I’m a bit worried they’ll ask me about my trip to Ireland,’ Thackeray said quietly, suddenly back in a windswept Atlantic seaside resort in winter where he had faced a man as unapologetically ruthless as he had ever met before. He shivered slightly and forced his attention back to Longley’s totally unexpected response.

  ‘What trip to Ireland?’ Longley asked. ‘You were on holiday, weren’t you? Who knows where you went?’

  ‘You haven’t told them?’

  ‘I knew nothing about your holiday plans, Michael. Nothing at all.’

  ‘And the information I picked up there?’

  ‘Information received,’ Longley said. ‘Anonymous information received.’

  ‘Right,’ Thackeray said with a faint smile. ‘I’d better tell Laura that.’

  ‘You do that and you’ll be fine. There’s no reason why both of us should suffer for that bloody case. A lot of the blame for what went wrong rests somewhere else entirely and I’ll make bloody sure the inquiry knows that, don’t you worry. If you and your young woman are careful about what you tell the beggars, you’ll be fine.’ Longley glanced at his watch. ‘I’d best be off,’ he said. ‘I know they’re looking for a bloody scapegoat so I suppose I’d better give them one. If I end up on the golf course a few years before I expected I don’t suppose there’ll be many tears shed.’

  Thackeray watched Longley march down the corridor to the stairs at a brisk military pace before he made his own way back to the incident room next to the main CID office, his head whirling. He might not shed tears for Jack Longley, but he would certainly regret his going, he thought. His replacement as a boss could be much worse.

  The incident room was almost deserted as most of the detectives had set about fulfilling the tasks they had been allocated at the briefing earlier, but Sergeant Kevin Mower was still at his desk, his head close to his computer screen and a slight frown on his face. He glanced up as Thackeray approached and gave a wry grin.

  ‘I’ve got some info on “disappeared” asylum seekers from immigration but there’s no one I’ve found yet who fits our victim’s profile. If she’s as young as we think she is, she may have come here as part of a family group, of course.’

  ‘In which case why haven’t her family reported her missing?’

  ‘Because if they’re illegals they’ll be too frightened?’ Mower said, his tone matter-of-fact.

  ‘I suppose there’s a whole constituency out there living without any contact with the law, however much they need it,’ Thackeray said.

  ‘That’s about it, guv,’ Mower said. ‘You know that. There’s a whole underground economy based on something very close to slavery. The only time it surfaces is when something goes catastrophically wrong, like with the Chinese cockle-pickers who drowned in Morecambe Bay. So maybe that’s what we’re dealing with here. And we may never find out who the victim is because no one who knows her will come anywhere near us.’

  ‘We know someone knows her,’ Thackeray said. ‘Not least the girl Karen Wilson saw her with before she died. Has nothing turned up on the CCTV tapes from the town centre? There’s a good chance they’ll have picked up the two of them somewhere.’

  ‘Do you know how many hours’ worth of CCTV there is to look at for one evening, guv?’ Mower asked mildly. ‘We’ve got two people still ploughing through it.’

  ‘Good,’ Thackeray said. He glanced round the office but its only other occupants both had telephones glued to their ears. He dropped his voice all the same.

  ‘D’you know where Val Ridley is, Kevin?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve got her mobile number,’ Mower said with obvious reluctance. ‘Do you want to talk to her?’ Thackeray shook his head.

  ‘I just wondered if she’d been to County to talk to the inquiry yet. It wouldn’t do for me to contact her, but maybe you could find out?’ Mower nodded imperceptibly.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do, guv,’ he said. ‘Strictly off the record.’

  When Thackeray had gone back to his own office, Mower went downstairs and out of the building and stood on a windy corner of the town hall square watching the passers-by blindly for a moment before he pulled out his mobile. For a long time he thought he was going to be switched to voicemail for the fourth time, but eventually Val Ridley’s familiar voice responded, though the tone was not particularly friendly.

  ‘Why are you hassling me like this, Kevin?’ she asked. ‘I got your messages but what I do or don’t do is really nothing to do with you any more.’

  ‘Look, I know how angry you are about what happened, Val, but I just want you to think about who you’re going to damage in all this,’ Mower said.

  ‘I know exactly who you’re trying to protect, Kevin,’ Val said sharply. ‘But I’m not sure he deserves all this heart on the sleeve loyalty. And I’m bloody sure his girlfriend doesn’t.’

  ‘I think she was taken for a ride in a particularly nasty way,’ Mower said carefully. ‘Listen, Val, please. You have a point about the child. That was unforgivable. But the rest was more cock-up than conspiracy, believe me. I just want to be sure you don’t take the innocent down with the guilty on this crusade of yours, that’s all.’

  ‘Right,’ Val said, though Mower could detect no conviction in her voice.

  ‘Are you in Bradfield? Can we get together for a drink?’

  ‘No and no,’ Val said. ‘They don’t want to see me until next week, as it goes, so for the moment I’m staying well out of the way.’

  ‘Let me buy you a meal when you get back?’

  ‘Leave it, Kevin,’ Val said sharply. ‘This is something I have to work out for mysel
f.’

  ‘Fine,’ Mower said. ‘But remember what I’ve said, won’t you. Please?’ But she rang off without offering any reply to that and Mower stood for a moment, letting the wind swirl around him, before switching his own phone off and giving a shrug. He had tried, he thought, and he could not think of anything more he could do.

  Laura put her phone down and glanced at her watch. It was four-thirty and the newsroom was beginning to fall silent as reporters packed up after a day that had begun for most of them at eight. Her chances of finding what she was looking for were becoming slimmer, she thought. Academics, on the whole, did not seem to work late into the afternoon. She had spent the last half-hour calling around the language departments of all the local universities and colleges on the off-chance of discovering someone who could speak Albanian, so far without success. All this, she thought wryly, to avoid asking the one person who could probably supply the answer to her problem off the top of his head: the priest in Arnedale.

  But by now she was getting to the bottom of her list of possible language departments, and her prospects of success seemed to be dwindling. She had been kept on hold by the department at one of the Leeds universities for several minutes now and was on the point of hanging up when someone she had not heard before came on the line. The voice was male and gruff, with a local accent, but when he offered a name it was certainly not a native one.

  ‘You want someone who can speak Albanian?’ the stranger asked.

  ‘I do,’ Laura said, glancing around the now almost deserted office to make sure she was not being overheard. ‘I’ve met a young Albanian girl who speaks almost no English and I need someone to translate for her. Is that something you could do?’

  ‘My name is Ibramovic. I’m Bosnian myself, speak Serbo-Croat. But I did have a lot of contact with the Albanian speakers in Kosovo years ago before I came over here, before all the trouble, when Yugoslavia was still Yugoslavia. I’m a bit rusty, but I could probably help. What’s it all about?’

  ‘Well, that’s what I’m trying to find out,’ Laura said evasively. ‘She has problems but she speaks so little English we can’t really work out what they are. Could I bring her over to see you, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ the voice said. ‘When exactly?’

  ‘I’ve got a day off tomorrow,’ Laura said. ‘Could you fit us in tomorrow morning some time?’ There was a rustle of papers at the other end of the phone.

  ‘About eleven? Do you know your way?’ Ibramovic asked. The appointment made, Laura cleared her desk and was pulling on her jacket when her phone rang again.

  ‘Laura? It’s Jenna, Jenna Heywood. I hoped I’d catch you. I wondered if you fancied a drink after work?’

  Laura hesitated, surprised by the invitation.

  ‘I was going to see my grandmother before I went home…’

  ‘I won’t keep you long,’ Jenna said, and Laura thought she heard a slight break in her usually confident voice. ‘I’m at my new flat, right in town. If you just popped in on your way I’d be really grateful for your advice.’

  ‘I’ll be there in ten minutes,’ Laura said, taking down the address of an apartment in one of the newly converted warehouses close to the canal. This, she thought, was too good an opportunity to miss, although she knew how furious another interview with Jenna would make Tony Holloway. Ten minutes later she had parked her car outside The Woolcomber building, the name and the towering stone walls by now the only reminder of its industrial past, and took the lift from the marble foyer to the top floor where Jenna was waiting for her at the door of one of the two penthouse apartments.

  ‘This is very nice,’ Laura said as she glanced around the stylish open-plan living room with its tall windows giving a vast view across the town, where lights were just beginning to flicker into life like scattered jewels, and a glimpse beyond of the dark, looming Pennine hills silhouetted against a stormy western sky.

  ‘I’m only renting it,’ Jenna said. ‘I couldn’t stand living with my mother again after all this time. But I’m not sure about putting down roots here again just yet.’

  ‘You’re very cautious,’ Laura said.

  ‘I had…have a life in London,’ Jenna said. ‘I’m not convinced yet I’ve got one here.’ She half-turned towards the well-stocked drinks cabinet as if to hide her expression. ‘What will you have?’ she asked.

  ‘A vodka and tonic, please,’ Laura said. ‘Light on the vodka, I’m driving.’

  Drinks in hand, Jenna waved Laura into a seat close to the window, and sat herself in silence for a moment sipping her own drink and gazing out at the quickly falling dusk outside.

  ‘I’m not at all certain I should be talking to you,’ she said eventually. ‘But to be perfectly honest I don’t know anyone else up here I could talk to. Can I trust you to keep what I say strictly off the record? For the moment, anyway? I promise that when there’s something to print you’ll be the first to know.’

  ‘That sounds reasonable,’ Laura said. ‘Though it won’t please Tony Holloway.’

  ‘I don’t trust Tony Holloway,’ Jenna said with some asperity. ‘I think he’s in the pocket of the old guard at United.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ Laura said. ‘He’s been reporting on United for so long he lives and breathes the club just as much as the directors do. It’s something that happens to sports reporters, isn’t it? They lose their critical faculties where the local team’s concerned.’

  ‘Yes, well, when the local team’s split into two factions, then that makes it impossible for them to do their job. Judging by how little you know about football, you’re not in a position to take sides.’

  ‘Thanks for that vote of confidence,’ Laura said with a grin. ‘I thought I’d done a reasonable job at concealing my ignorance.’

  ‘Hardly,’ Jenna said, without rancour. ‘Anyway, that’s all by the way. It’s not what’s going on on the pitch that’s bothering me. It’s what’s happening behind the scenes. I was quite prepared for a fight when I came up here to take my dad’s place, but not for this sort of nastiness.’ She reached into her designer handbag and took out a sheet of paper, which she passed to Laura.

  ‘Everyone gets furious letters from the fans in the so-called beautiful game,’ Jenna said. ‘It seems to generate more emotion than I could ever have imagined. But this is something else.’

  Laura unfolded the single sheet of lined paper to discover a couple of sentences composed from words carefully cut from newsprint, very likely, she thought, as she took in the typefaces, cut from the Gazette itself. The message was short and succinct.

  ‘STOP, bitch. Leave UNITED. We do not want YOU. Go BACK TO London. If YOU don’t you will BE Sorry. We are not JOKING.’

  ‘Surely this is just some overwrought fan taking it out on you because you’re a woman, isn’t it?’ Laura said.

  ‘I’d like to think so,’ Jenna said quietly. ‘But there’s more.’ She walked across to the kitchen and opened the fridge from which she took a small plastic box. She opened the lid and then the brown paper packet, encased in an extra layer of cling-film, which lay inside. ‘It’s not pleasant,’ she said, opening the parcel very carefully to reveal what Laura identified by smell alone as a small but pungent turd. Jenna shrugged and wrapped her exhibit up again quickly and closed the box tightly. ‘It arrived in the post yesterday,’ she said. ‘Someone must really hate me. But whoever it is sent it here. They knew I’d just moved.’ She pulled a disgusted face and replaced the packet in her fridge.

  ‘I’m keeping it as evidence, in case it’s needed,’ she said, and Laura marvelled at her composure.

  ‘You should go to the police,’ she said.

  ‘Not yet,’ Jenna came back quickly. ‘That’s why I wanted to talk to you. You know this town. You said you knew Les Hardcastle personally. I just wanted to pick your brains, just to find out who or what I’m up against before I make a move myself. I’ve been in some tough business battles myself over the years, but not
hing like this, never with anyone who would get into these sorts of dirty tricks. It’s unbelievable.’

  ‘It’s harassment. It’s illegal,’ Laura said.

  ‘I won’t be bullied,’ Jenna said. ‘What they’re forgetting is that I’m my father’s daughter, in that respect at least. The more they push, the more I’ll resist.’

  ‘What makes you think Les Hardcastle is behind it?’

  ‘Les is the one who’s putting up most opposition to my plan to build a new stadium out of town.’

  ‘Can he stop you if you’re the majority shareholder?’

  ‘Unfortunately he can,’ Jenna said. ‘My lawyers tell me there’s a covenant on that site and that it can only be sold for redevelopment with the approval of a two-thirds majority of the shareholders. I haven’t got that majority.’

  ‘Can you get it?’ Laura asked, thinking of her father’s holding, which he seemed willing enough to sell if the price was right.

  ‘From what I’ve been able to discover Les has more than a third of the shares sewn up between himself and his mates.’

  ‘So it’s a stalemate? You can’t move without help, but nor can he.’

  ‘Which may be why someone is making a pretty strenuous effort to persuade me to give up on United and pack my bags completely. They must reckon if I can’t make a difference here I’ll sell my shares and let the old guard get on with whatever they want to get on with. Which as far as I can see is to get the club closed down so they can sell the assets and run.’

  ‘And that would explain the rumours about a transfer for Okigbo? The last thing they want is a star player who might bring the crowds back and turn the club back into a going concern?’

  ‘I’ve heard the rumours and they’re nonsense. I told Tony Holloway that, but I haven’t seen anything in the Gazette yet. The last thing I want to do when we’re in the middle of a Cup run is sell OK Okigbo. Though I must say, Minelli is as ambivalent about it as usual. I don’t understand that man.’

  ‘How did OK get here in the first place,’ Laura asked. ‘He seems an unlikely recruit for a team like Bradfield United.’