By Death Divided

by Patricia Hall

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sergeant Kevin Mower walked the short distance from police HQ to Bradfield Infirmary and presented himself at the ward where the night’s apparent mugging victim had been found a bed. The doctor treating her had reported that she was now fit enough to be questioned, but showed few signs of being able to explain who she was or how she came to be lying on a patch of waste ground, battered and bruised about the face and at serious risk of hypothermia.

  She was, Mower thought as the nurse showed him to her bed, a good-looking elderly woman, in her seventies, he guessed, with almost white hair and intelligent blue eyes. But the gash on her cheek, which had been stitched, had caused the left side of her face to swell and discolour, and her hands, which clutched at the sheets nervously, were also bruised, although her nails were clean and carefully trimmed, not the hands of anyone who might have collapsed after an evening’s binge drinking. He introduced himself and was sure that he saw a flash of consternation in her eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry about your accident,’ he said. ‘Mrs…’ The woman licked her lips and then set them in a straight line.

  ‘I think I must have had a dizzy spell,’ she said, her voice husky but perfectly clear, her accent only faintly local. ‘The doctor tells me there’s nothing serious to worry about. I don’t think you need to waste your time with me, Sergeant. It’s very kind of you, but there’s no need.’

  ‘The doctors were concerned about you,’ Mower said. ‘You seemed not to know your name, and they suspected a crime might have been committed. They were quite right to call us. Have you forgotten your name?’

  The woman hesitated for a moment and then shook her head slightly, wincing with the pain.

  ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘I was just a bit confused when I woke up here.’

  ‘So you are?’ Mower prompted firmly enough for her to be clear he was not going to be fobbed off.

  ‘My name is Holden, Vanessa Holden.’ And she gave him an address in Southfield.

  ‘Do you have a husband we can contact, Mrs Holden?’

  ‘No, no, I’ve been a widow for years,’ she said and hesitated, as if she had been about to say more and had changed her mind. Mower wondered for a moment if she had a boyfriend she was reluctant to admit to, but dismissed the idea with the arrogant contempt of youth.

  ‘No one else we should contact for you? Other family…’

  ‘No thank you,’ Vanessa Holden said with finality.

  ‘So can you remember what happened last night? We’ve had a series of muggings of elderly people in your area, that’s why CID is so interested. If you can remember anything, give us a description of an assailant, that would be very, very helpful.’ Mower knew that someone of her class and generation would generally help the police willingly enough if they could, but Vanessa Holden shook her head again.

  ‘I can’t remember what happened,’ she said firmly. ‘The doctor says it might come back to me but it certainly hasn’t done yet, so perhaps it never will.’ Mower wondered whether he was imagining the note of certainty in her voice again, as if a decision not to recall anything about her injury and what led to it had already been taken and she was merely confirming it now.

  ‘Do you live alone, Mrs Holden?’ he asked, and again heard that slightly odd hesitation, and a flickering of her eyes, which told Mower without doubt this time she was lying.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But I’ll get someone – a friend with a car – to come round later and take me back. I don’t walk very fast now, you know. Arthritis. The doctor says I can go after lunch. I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Well, I’m pleased to hear that,’ Mower said. ‘But if you do recall any more about what happened, I’d be grateful if you’d call me.’ He handed her a card. ‘It’s often difficult to get a clear description of these young muggers. I’m sure yours would be more accurate than most.’ But he could see he had lost her. She glanced away towards one of the nurses as if for help and Mower guessed that she had no interest in muggers because there probably had not been one. If someone really had assaulted Vanessa Holden she probably knew, but did not intend to tell him, who it was.

  On his way out he met a white-coated young woman doctor he vaguely recognised and asked exactly when Mrs Holden would be discharged.

  ‘There’s no reason to keep her,’ she said. ‘And, as always, we need the bed.’

  ‘Is there any indication what caused that gash on her face?’

  ‘Not really. It could have happened if she felt faint and fell, although it’s quite deep and there wasn’t any sign of mud or gravel in it, apparently, which is a bit odd if she fell out of doors. But it’s really not serious. We only kept her in overnight because of the risk of concussion. We’ve told her to see her own GP about any dizzy spells she might be having, if that’s what it really was.’

  ‘You sound doubtful,’ Mower pressed.

  ‘Well, I was a bit surprised she had forgotten so completely after such a relatively minor injury. But at her age, you never know.’

  As Mower came out of the hospital entrance he pulled out his mobile and thumbed in a text to Jess. The swift and explicit answer made him grin exultantly as he strolled across the town hall square in the watery sunshine that had followed the previous night’s heavy rain. Promises, promises, he thought happily, as he put Vanessa Holden’s problems onto the mental back burner. He would get no information from that source, for whatever reason, he thought: there was no assailant, no witnesses and no real evidence of a crime having been committed, and CID really had more important things to think about.

  DC Mohammed Sharif drove back from Milford to Bradfield that evening feeling extremely uneasy. He had driven the seven miles to the smaller town after work and found his way to the address which Jamilla had given him for her sister Faria. It proved to be in a narrow street of stone terraced houses not far from the town centre, each one set back behind a wall and a tiny patch of garden, some well-tended, but most, like that at number 41, cluttered with wheelie-bins and assorted rubbish that had missed its target. In the fading light there were few people around, and few lights on in this or any other house. He knocked a couple of times, without really expecting an answer. And when he peered though the downstairs window, where the curtains were only half drawn, he could see very little of the gloomy interior at all.

  There was absolutely nothing that his detective’s nose could pin down as suspicious but still something about the evidently empty house disturbed him, and when a male voice spoke immediately behind him he gave a start that to an observer must have looked uncannily like guilt.

  ‘Ah said, what d’you think you’re up to?’ The voice was broad Yorkshire and the tone distinctly unfriendly but when Sharif turned he found himself looking down at an elderly man in a flat cap and threadbare sweater, who had apparently stepped out of the house next door and was speaking to him from his own gate, leaning his full weight on it to keep it firmly shut.

  Sharif smiled faintly and, he hoped, reassuringly. The man was small and wiry, coming barely up to the tall Asian’s shoulder, but he radiated determination like a small bantam cock, alert for any intruder on his territory.

  ‘I’m looking for my cousin who lives here,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not a burglar.’ He hesitated to admit to being a policeman but guessed that, if it came to the crunch, it might take his warrant card to remove the suspicion from this next-door neighbour’s sharp eyes.

  ‘Oh aye? And what’s your cousin’s name then?’

  ‘Faria,’ Sharif told him. ‘She’s the wife of Imran Aziz. Have I got the right house?’

  Sharif watched a range of emotions flicker across the old man’s weatherbeaten, deeply wrinkled face as he looked him up and down before he nodded slightly, his expression marginally more friendly.

  ‘I don’t know her name, that one,’ he said. ‘I hardly ever see her. She sometimes hangs t’washing out in t’back yard but that’s about it. But he’s Imran, I do know that. I took some package for him one ti
me, months back, summat from Pakistan. There were nobody in that day either so the van left it wi’me.’

  ‘They moved here about two years ago, after they got married,’ Sharif said.

  ‘Aye, that’d be right. He’s quite a bit older than she is, real May and September job, that.’

  ‘Quite a bit older,’ Sharif agreed non-commitally, although he knew that he was not the only one in the family to wonder at the twenty-year age gap between bride and groom, something he had almost had his head bitten off for when he raised the issue with his uncle on the plane to Lahore for the wedding. ‘I don’t suppose you know where they are? If they’re away, anything like that? I really need to speak to my cousin and there’s been no answer to the phone for a few days.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know owt about their comings and goings,’ Faria’s neighbour said dismissively. ‘We keep ourselves to ourselves.’ I bet you do, Sharif thought, guessing why without any difficulty at all. This was not a predominantly Asian area, like Aysgarth Lane in Bradfield, and he knew that an Asian family buying into a white street would not be greeted enthusiastically by many of the local families. Local lore had it that brown faces reduced property values and that often became a self-fulfilling prophesy as the whites began to move out in a torment of anxiety and prejudice. He turned away from the front doorstep with a sigh.

  ‘Course, they might have gone away after being harassed like that,’ the neighbour conceded reluctantly.

  ‘Harassed?’ Sharif said.

  ‘Brick through t’window a week or so back.’

  ‘BNP thugs, you mean?’ Sharif snapped. ‘Did they report it?’

  ‘Not BNP. No way. A couple of your kind – long white shirts and beards, like summat from bloody Afghanistan on t’telly.’

  ‘Muslims?’

  ‘Aye, Muslims.’

  Sharif shook his head angrily, not sure what this bit of information might imply.

  ‘I’ll have to come back another time then,’ he said. He hesitated for a second and then pulled his wallet out of his inside pocket.

  ‘I’ll just leave Faria a note, I think,’ he said. ‘Ask her to call her mother.’ He was conscious of the old man’s bright bird-like eyes watching him suspiciously as he scribbled something on a page from his diary. ‘Maybe their phone’s out of order,’ he said inconsequentially, knowing that was untrue, but he wanted to give this curious observer as little to gossip about as he could. He slipped the page through the letter box and closed the dilapidated gate carefully behind him.

  ‘Thanks for your help,’ he said as the old man turned on his heel and closed his own front door with a sharp bang that said more than words could about his resentments, and Sharif wondered, for the hundredth time, whether the two communities that lived so uneasily side by side in these small Yorkshire towns, could ever learn to coexist without friction. It was without surprise that he noticed a tattered British National Party election sticker in the window of number 43. It was in sad and neglected streets like these, he thought, that the racists gained ground, not in the vibrant multi-cultural enclaves of the big cities where a rainbow nation seemed to thrive. And the difference, in the end, came down to money, or the lack of it. Faria and Imran had little enough, he thought, but judging by the state of the street, their white neighbours had even less, and probably much less chance of escaping their poverty. An Asian like him, westernised, confident and turning up in smart clothes and an almost new car, would only feed the old boy’s sense of injustice.

  He had turned back towards Bradfield, driving unusually slowly to give himself time to think. There was no evidence that he could see that anything was wrong at the house in Milford, no reason to send in the uniforms to break down the door. But even so there was this knot of fear in his stomach. On the way into the centre of Bradfield, where he coexisted happily enough with white neighbours in his flat in a warehouse building, he turned again into the warren of streets around Aysgarth Lane where Punjabi immigrants had created over forty years as near a replica to a village society as the old men had been able to impose on the unyielding grid of Yorkshire millworkers’ houses.

  He pulled up close to the mosque, an imposing structure that had been paid for by the long and painstaking accumulation of cash from pockets that could ill afford it. But he was not here to pray. He rarely observed the strictures of his religion these days and his father had despaired of turning him back into Islamic paths, failing to understand how thoroughly the young men who had recently become strict observers of their faith alarmed him. Instead, he turned to one of the identical stone houses in the shadow of the minaret and knocked again on a solid frontdoor. This time his knock was answered promptly by a stocky middle-aged man in a white shalwar kameez and skull cap, his grey-flecked beard reaching comfortably to his chest.

  ‘Mohammed,’ he said with a welcoming smile. ‘We don’t often see you here – or at prayers. Come in.’

  Ignoring the implied criticism, which was only to be expected from the Bradfield mosque’s imam, Sharif followed Achmed Siddique into the dark living room of the small terraced house, where he had to move piles of books and papers from chairs before both men could find anywhere to sit. When the ritual pleasantries had been completed, Siddique looked inquiringly at the detective.

  ‘So, is this an official visit or are you looking for a little spiritual guidance at last?’

  ‘I’ll skip the guidance, but I’m not here on official business,’ Sharif said carefully. ‘It’s a family thing.’

  ‘Good,’ Siddique said. ‘There’s enough of the official business going on already. Most of it unannounced. I suppose we have to expect it in the circumstances but it gets a little wearisome being regarded as an emissary of that lunatic in the mountains at every prayer meeting when what I am preaching is the precise opposite of his ravings.’ He glanced away as if to hide the anger in his eyes.

  ‘It’s that bad?’ Sharif asked sympathetically.

  ‘We’re all being blamed for what those misguided young men did,’ Siddique said. ‘I had thought things were getting better but now people spit at us in the street and abuse the women. It is a bad time, Mohammed. Maybe you’re insulated from it, but here in Aysgarth Lane, it’s a very bad time.’

  ‘I know,’ Sharif said, knowing that far from being insulated he was in the front line, part of a police service horrified and disgusted by the effects of terrorism, which reached them on the grapevine in detail far more graphic than ever reached the public. He was lucky that his nickname had not been transformed into Osama by now, he thought bitterly. Maybe in his colleagues’ private conversations it already had.

  ‘So what is your family problem?’ Siddique asked quietly. ‘Are you thinking of marriage at last? To someone your parents have difficulty accepting?’

  Sharif laughed.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Although I’m sure the time will come. No, what I wanted to ask was whether you have any contact with the imam in Milford. My cousin Faria – you remember – married Imran Aziz and went to live there. For some reason she has lost touch with her parents and I’ve not been able to contact her for a while, either. It’s been a couple of months since anyone has spoken to her and everyone is very worried. I remember when I went to the wedding I was told that Imran was a religious man, very traditional, and I wanted to find out if he was still observant and whether the imam there had contact with either of them.’

  ‘They have a new young man at the mosque there,’ Siddique said slowly, looking unhappy. ‘I’ve only met him once and I was surprised at how poor his English was. His name is Abdel Abdullah. They recruited him in Pakistan and he preaches only in Urdu.’

  ‘Special branch will be taking an interest, then,’ Sharif said.

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Do you think he’s a serious menace?’

  Siddique looked even more unhappy at that, but he shook his head slowly.

  ‘You know it doesn’t work like that. After everything that’s happened, the most dangerous pe
ople are working very quietly, in the youth clubs, the gyms, the bookshops, or simply in their own houses. They don’t raise their heads over the parapet if they can help it. The mosques don’t know who they are, if they ever did. I don’t think there is anyone dangerous in Bradfield, but I can’t really know for sure. Some of the young men shout a lot but I think that’s all they do. But there’s no doubt the anger grows all the time, even amongst the most peaceable people, and with some justification. Not just Palestine, but then Iraq and Lebanon on top of that. Your security friends will have a better idea than I do what’s going on but there’s no doubt that times are getting more difficult. As for Milford,’ he shrugged. ‘I think my new brother is just not very experienced, that is all. He should learn the ways of the mosques here soon, God willing. Tone down his passion against sin, adultery, homosexuality, all that. This is not a fanatical country.’

  ‘Could you ask him if he knows Aziz?’

  ‘I could,’ Siddique said. ‘If Aziz is as devout as you say, I’m sure he will know the name. I’ll see what I can find out, Mohammed, but I can’t make any promises. But there’s probably some innocent explanation. Perhaps your cousin has been ill.’

  ‘According to her sisters, she may be expecting a baby. But that’s no reason not to contact her parents. Quite the reverse.’

  Siddique nodded. ‘Perhaps her husband is of such a traditional mind that he dislikes her travelling alone.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Sharif said, his expression hardening. ‘I always thought that she had been persuaded into this marriage. Forced, maybe, though I hate to say that about my uncle and aunt. It seems unlike them.’

  ‘Ah,’ Siddique said. ‘That would be…’ He hesitated, choosing his words carefully. ‘That would be unfortunate. Change takes a long time.’

  ‘Too long,’ Sharif said, not hiding his own anger. ‘We bring much of the dislike and suspicion on our own heads by clinging to old customs that are not required by the Koran.’