By Death Divided

by Patricia Hall

  ‘So you’re quite sure you want to make a complaint of assault against your husband, Mrs Holden?’ Janet asked. And when Julie nodded, she persisted.

  ‘You know the implications of that? It could lead to a prosecution and you would be expected to give evidence against your husband. You would have to describe in detail what injuries you sustained and how they were inflicted. We might also need to talk to your daughter, and other witnesses, in seeking corroboration of what you are saying. You would be cross-examined on it, not necessarily believed. It’s not a pleasant business, Mrs Holden, and I want to be sure that you know exactly what it entails before I take your statement.’

  ‘I want to go ahead,’ Julie said, her voice no more than a whisper. ‘I have to go ahead. He’s taken my daughter and I’m afraid for her safety.’

  Laura listened impassively as Julie went through the same details that she had recounted to her the first time they had talked at the women’s refuge. Julie was willing now, impelled by her fear for Anna, to go into more graphic detail: a catalogue of intimidation and physical violence dating back many months before she had finally cracked and decided to leave.

  ‘Have you had medical treatment for any of your injuries?’ Janet asked eventually, but Julie shook her head.

  ‘I didn’t dare go to the doctor.’

  ‘So is there anyone who can provide evidence of what you went through? A friend you confided in, perhaps. Someone who has seen your injuries soon after they were inflicted?’

  ‘I tried to keep my bruises covered when I went out,’ Julie whispered, and Laura wondered angrily how anyone could be so ashamed of being a victim that she had refused to seek help for so long.

  ‘You told Vicky,’ she said gently. ‘That’s Vicky Mendelson,’ she added for Janet Richardson’s benefit.

  ‘Yes, I told her some of it,’ Julie admitted. ‘Bruce had trodden on my hand during one of our rows. It was bruised. I thought maybe he’d broken it but it seemed to settle down…Anyway, Vicky noticed it when we were chatting outside the school one day and I was feeling so distraught that I told her some of it. Not everything.’

  ‘So we could talk to Vicky Mendelson,’ Janet said, making a note.

  ‘I suppose,’ Julie said.

  ‘Vicky is David Mendelson’s wife, the CPS lawyer,’ Laura offered. Then a thought struck her.

  ‘I wonder…’ She hesitated, but Janet Richardson was not going to leave it at that.

  ‘You wonder?’

  ‘Well, there was an intruder at Vicky’s house the other night. They called the police. It just struck me it could have been Bruce looking for Julie and Anna. He might have thought they were staying there. But I expect CID have thought of that.’

  ‘I expect they have,’ Janet said. ‘But I’ll pass it on, just in case. It might be useful if we’re looking for a reason to bring Bruce in.’

  She glanced back at Julie who seemed astonished by the implications of what she had set in train.

  ‘You’ll arrest Bruce? Then that would mean I could take charge of Anna again?’

  ‘It could do, but I need to talk to some people first. Do you have any family in Bradfield? Anyone else who might have guessed what was going on even if you didn’t tell them?’

  ‘Not my own family,’ Julie said. ‘They’re all in Blackpool. There’s my mother-in-law but I’m never sure whose side she’s on. Bruce is an only child.’

  ‘D’you think she suspects what’s been going on?’ Janet persisted.

  ‘She adores Anna. It’s possible Anna’s let something slip…I never told her anything myself, not about the violence anyway.’

  ‘And she hasn’t mentioned it to you?’

  Julie shook her head.

  ‘Never,’ she said.

  ‘She does know,’ Laura broke in. ‘She’s known for some time. I interviewed her for the article I’m writing on domestic violence and she said that she knew Bruce was being violent at home. And then when he moved in with her, he behaved the same way there. But like everyone else, she seemed to want to protect him…’ She broke off, guessing that this was not helping Julie, who was looking distraught.

  ‘But now you don’t want to protect him any more, Mrs Holden. Right?’ Janet said.

  Julie nodded faintly.

  ‘So I’d like you to make a formal statement detailing your complaint against your husband. Then I’ll initiate some inquiries and hopefully, if I can get some corroboration from your friend Vicky, and your mother-in-law, and we’ll have something to tackle him with by the end of the day. Is that OK with you?’

  ‘Can Julie get Anna back immediately, then?’ Laura asked.

  ‘I’ll let you know when I intend to go and visit him and if I invite him down to the station for questioning,’ Janet said. ‘At that stage I need to be sure Anna is in safe hands, and where could be safer than with her mother?’ She gave Julie a warm smile.

  ‘Come on, cheer up,’ she said. ‘If you’re tough enough, and I’m sure you are, we can deal with men like this. You just have to be strong.’

  ‘Fine,’ Julie said, but as they left the police station after she had signed her statement, Laura still wondered if she would turn out to be strong enough to carry this through to the witness box.

  Thackeray was late home that evening and when he finally came in, to find Laura sitting in front of the television news with a vodka and tonic in her hand, he hesitated at first to tell her the news that he knew she would not welcome.

  ‘Good day?’ he asked as he hung up his rain-soaked mac.

  ‘So-so,’ Laura said, zapping the TV news off and ready to fill him in on the latest details of Julie Holden’s problems. But noticing his sombre expression, she hesitated.

  ‘Can I get you a drink? You look as if you’ve had a bad day.’ He shook his head, and to her surprise pre-empted the very subject that was at the forefront of her mind.

  ‘I hear you came in with Mrs Holden,’ he said. ‘Janet Richardson filled me in.’

  ‘She finally agreed to make a complaint,’ Laura said enthusiastically. ‘Have they tackled her husband yet?’

  ‘Well, they would have done if they’d been able to find him,’ Thackeray said. ‘Janet had it all set up. But when she finally went up there to ask him to come to the station for questioning she found he’d gone. The house was empty and the garage door wide open. A neighbour said she’d seen him drive off with the child at about five and they hadn’t been back since to her knowledge. I’m very afraid the bird’s flown.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Laura said. ‘I knew it wasn’t a good idea to go up there. I should have stopped her but she was so insistent.’

  ‘Not the best idea in the circumstances,’ Thackeray said dryly. ‘If you want someone arrested, don’t forewarn them you’re coming if you can help it. I’d have told you that if you’d bothered to ask.’

  ‘She wouldn’t be persuaded,’ Laura said. ‘She needed to know where Anna was, that she was safe, that she hadn’t been abducted by a stranger. You know. She was desperate.’

  ‘I know,’ Thackeray said. ‘But it was still the wrong thing to do. He must have guessed she’d go to the police, or a solicitor, take some action against him. She had no choice. It could take months to track him down now. Tracing violent husbands is not exactly a high priority these days.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it is,’ Laura said sadly. ‘Does Julie know what’s happened?’

  ‘Janet’s kept her informed,’ Thackeray said. ‘Apparently she’s seeing a solicitor tomorrow morning. She’s staying with Vicky and David tonight.’

  Laura reached up to where Thackeray was standing and pulled his head down to kiss his cheek.

  ‘Thanks for taking an interest,’ she said. ‘I know I shouldn’t get so involved in these things but it’s hard not to when you hear the unexpurgated version of what goes on. The man’s a brute.’

  ‘I did ask Mower to have another word with the older Mrs Holden, you know, after you spoke to her. But she’s still insisting
she doesn’t remember what happened, whatever she’s saying to you and her daughter. There’s not much we can do. Janet’s going to have a chat with her to see if she can persuade her to tell us what really happened. She may be more willing to talk to us now she knows that he’s run off with Anna. Apparently she adores her granddaughter and won’t want to lose contact with her any more than Julie does. She may also have some idea where Bruce might hole up with the child.’

  ‘Ha! I said to Ted Grant that I’d deal with battered grannies too,’ Laura said. ‘He was a bit worried that battered wives were too right-on for his delicate sensibilities. I didn’t realise we might find all this going on across the generations in one family.’

  ‘Be careful, Laura. If you publish too many details of Julie’s case you might prejudice a prosecution.’

  Laura pulled a face at him.

  ‘I’ll tread on tippy-toes,’ she said. ‘We can always use assumed names if there’s really a possibility of him being charged. But there’s fat chance of that if you can’t find him, isn’t there? How are you going to get Anna back without publicity? Pictures in the Gazette, on TV, all the rest of it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Thackeray said sombrely. ‘I wouldn’t bank on Julie getting Anna back at all.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Amos Atherton, in greens and plastic apron, gazed at the distended mass of flesh, barely identifiable as the remains of a human being, that lay on his stainless steel table and shrugged faintly towards the unfamiliar police presence there to attend the post-mortem.

  ‘It’s been in the water some time,’ he said. ‘It’s female. And that’s about all you can tell at first glance.’ The detective inspector from the east of the county who had been detailed to follow the body to Bradfield’s pathology department was looking pale and Atherton doubted that his stomach would be strong enough to cope with the unpleasant task ahead.

  ‘If you’re going to throw up on me, perhaps you’d better watch from outside,’ he said. ‘It stinks now and is only going to get worse when I open her up.’

  The hapless officer swallowed hard and retreated to a vantage point closer to the door.

  ‘Chances are you’ll get nothing out of this,’ Atherton said grumpily. ‘If she’s drowned, I’ll not be able to tell you whether it was an accident or suicide or murder. Where did you say she was found?’

  ‘Ingleby, a village on the Maze down Selby way. The body was trapped under a bridge by a lot of debris after the floods. It could have gone in anywhere and been carried down the river while it was in spate. Could have ended up in the sea, for that matter, if it had drifted a few miles further and gone into the Ouse.’

  ‘The obvious injuries are no more than you’d expect from the battering she must have taken in a flooded river – scratches, abrasions, cuts and so on,’ Atherton said. ‘Her clothes are in shreds, as you can see. But onward and inward as they say. Let’s have a closer look.’ And he began to dictate his description of the external state of the corpse. When he eventually picked up his scalpel to cut into the distended flesh and release the bloating gases, the DI hovering on the far side of the room turned even paler, muttered his excuses with his hand over his mouth, and rapidly left.

  ‘Where do they get them from these days?’ Atherton abstractedly asked his technician as he peered into the liquefying cavity he had created. The younger man grinned.

  ‘Not everyone shares our tastes,’ he said. ‘Your mate DCI Thackeray always looks pretty sick when he has to be here.’

  ‘Aye, he’s a delicate flower underneath that iron mask of his,’ Atherton said, with a grin. ‘I wonder if they’re going to tell him about this lass.’

  ‘Why should they?’ the technician asked, taking the mass of almost unidentifiable flesh that Atherton handed him in gloved hands and weighing it carefully, before slicing a specimen and placing it is a bag for analysis. ‘I thought this was an East Yorkshire job.’

  ‘Well, she’s obviously Asian, isn’t she?’ Atherton asked, running a gentle finger across the long dark hair that still surrounded the unrecognisable features of the girl on the table. ‘And she was in the Maze. She might well be one of ours.’

  It was an idea that lodged in his mind as he completed his examination of the corpse a couple of hours later and, even as he oversaw the replacement of the now plastic-wrapped organs, minus the samples for analysis, inside the decaying body, and began to think longingly of lunch. The thought eventually propelled him towards the phone in his office and a call to police HQ.

  ‘Fancy a quick bite, Michael?’ he asked DCI Thackeray when he eventually got through. ‘Got something here that may be of interest, strictly off the record, mind.’ Thackeray, bogged down in crime management statistics, agreed readily enough and the two men met an hour or so later in the bar of the Clarendon hotel, where the widely spaced tables ensured a level of privacy they would not get in a pub. When they had ordered drinks and sandwiches, Atherton leant back in his leather armchair and let out a sigh of contentment.

  ‘Glad to get out this morning,’ he said. ‘Folk reckon we don’t feel anything because we only deal with bodies. No empathy, all that bollocks. But it’s not true, any more than it is with you lot. You build a shell. Have to. Enjoy the humour of it all when you can. Then try to forget it.’

  Thackeray nodded, knowing that everyone had their own ways of dealing with the stresses of the job and that his own had been less than successful more than once during a career that had seen him progress much less far up the ladder than had once been predicted. He and Atherton were not friends in any real sense of the word. They seldom met outside the confines of Atherton’s department in the bowels of the infirmary. But the pathologist was one of the few people Thackeray had already known when he had arrived in Bradfield as DCI and one to whom he was indissolubly linked by his own inglorious history. He would always be grateful to the man who had conducted the post-mortem on his baby son and who, when faced with a young copper distraught and at his lowest ebb, had offered consolation rather than the condemnation with which Thackeray had been assailed from all other directions. Gratitude had turned to trust as the two men renewed their acquaintance when Thackeray eventually came to work in Bradfield, just across the town hall square from the infirmary and Atherton’s gloomy caverns in the basement. If Atherton uncharacteristically invited him out to lunch he knew there would be good reason.

  ‘So what’s rattled your cage then?’ he asked as the roast beef sandwiches arrived and Atherton helped himself hungrily, before ordering another half pint of bitter for himself and an orange juice for Thackeray.

  ‘A messy job I had this morning,’ Atherton said through a mouthful of food. ‘Woman found in the River Maze close to where it joins the Ouse. Only got asked to do it because of staff shortage down there, apparently. Not on your patch, I know, and I dare say East Yorkshire will think on to tell you eventually, but I reckoned you might like to know straight away.’

  Thackeray nodded non-committally, knowing immediately what Atherton was implying.

  ‘You mean she may have gone in much higher up the river?’

  ‘She’d been in the water some time, that was obvious from the state of her. She was found wedged in amongst debris under a bridge down there, invisible till the water level dropped, and then a dog spotted her. She’s not identifiable, I can tell you that for nothing. I’ve sent off a DNA sample, of course. I just thought you might like to check your missing persons. If you’ve seen the state of the river recently you’ll know what I’m on about. I reckon she could have gone in anywhere from Arnedale down. It was still in spate the other day when I went over the bridge in Milford. We’re lucky she didn’t end up in the sea after all that rain and the flooding.’

  ‘You say she’s not identifiable,’ Thackeray said, aware how quickly immersion in water could destroy the human body. ‘But what about clothing? Nothing significant there? A watch? Jewellery? Teeth?’

  ‘Clothing’s largely gone. What’s left is in shreds.
You could look for dental records if you need to. Most of the teeth are still in the jaw. But the reason I thought you should know is that I think she’s Asian. What the water hasn’t got to is the hair, long and thick and very dark.’

  Thackeray nodded slowly, his stomach clenching for a moment as he took in the implications of what Atherton was telling him for DC Mohammed Sharif. He knew with grim certainly and not a little foreboding that he needed this body identified as soon as humanly possible.

  ‘Can you prioritise the DNA?’ he asked.

  ‘You’ve got someone missing?’ Atherton asked.

  ‘Maybe,’ Thackeray said. ‘Any indication that it was other than a drowning?’

  ‘Nothing I could see. No convenient bullet in the inner recesses, skull and skeleton intact. No sign of a knife wound, although quite honestly that would be difficult to rule out, the state she was in. I can’t give you my report directly, but I’m sure you can get hold of it through official channels. I’ll be working on it this afternoon.’

  ‘We do have a young Asian woman gone missing over the last few weeks,’ Thackeray said. ‘It could be her. I’m grateful for the warning, Amos. I’ll get my colleagues down there to cut me in on your report as soon as it’s available. They’re supposed to circulate these things but in my experience it’s a slow process. There’s no chance of a visual identification then?’

  ‘I wouldn’t ask my worst enemy to look at her,’ Atherton said, finishing his beer greedily. ‘There’s no face left to speak of. Turned the young DI who came over to the PM quite green, she did.’

  ‘It’ll be DNA then,’ Thackeray said. ‘That shouldn’t be a problem. Let’s hope it rules our missing person out. She’s a relative of a bright young DC on my team and I’d hate to have to break it to him that she’s dead.’

  ‘At least that’s one shitty job I don’t have to share,’ Atherton said as he lumbered to his feet. ‘There’s no bad news to break to my clients, is there? Thank God.’