By Death Divided

by Patricia Hall

  ‘They should have a record of him. Apparently he was sectioned after some violent incident with the police over there. That’s twice he’s been let off when perhaps he should have been charged.’

  ‘They didn’t mention it. Anyway, we’ve circulated the registration number of his four-by-four. Someone somewhere will pick him up in the car in the end.’

  ‘Good, let’s hope so,’ Thackeray said. ‘If he’s threatening the child we need to get hold of him quickly. We’ve already got every reason to arrest him. We should have done it by now.’

  ‘Did you get anything out of Doug McKinnon on the Aziz case?’ Mower asked.

  ‘Not a lot. They’ve done a quick trawl through Aziz’s phone records but not come up with anything suspicious so far. His computer will take much longer. They’ve not found any mobiles in the house but there is a charger so at least one of them had a handset, but of course they might have been carrying it when they left. No sign of bills from a mobile company apparently, but they could be using pay-as-you-go. You can ask Faria’s sisters if she used a mobile. They’ll certainly know.’

  ‘A lot of Asian girls have mobiles their parents don’t know about. Perhaps it goes for wives too. So do we publish Aziz’s picture?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Thackeray said, not bothering to hide his frustration. ‘McKinnon says it will compromise his investigation.’

  ‘If Aziz has contacts he shouldn’t have, they’ll know all about his disappearance by now,’ Mower said. ‘They’ll probably have organised it. What do our own terrorism people at county say?’

  ‘Not on their radar,’ Thackeray said.

  ‘But that means nothing?’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ Thackeray agreed gloomily. ‘The ones not on the radar are the ones we need to worry about.’

  ‘And what about the assault on Omar? Any progress?’

  ‘Nothing so far, guv. He’s still very confused and says he didn’t see anyone. We’re looking for witnesses but nothing’s turned up so far.’

  ‘Right. Don’t let it slip. I want those bastards caught.’

  Mohammed Sharif was let out of hospital that afternoon, his ribs strapped, his head and hand bandaged and a large bottle of pain-killers in his pocket. He was no longer regarded as in danger and his bed was needed. He took a taxi back to his flat and, exhausted by the effort of getting home, he lay down on his bed with the blinds down, half sleeping, half waking, as the winter evening closed in, and he eventually found himself in the near-dark wincing with pain as the effect of the painkillers wore off. Groaning, he slid off the bed and gingerly made his way to his tiny kitchen, where he swallowed another handful of pills with a glass of water and then lowered himself gingerly into an armchair in the living room and looked for messages on his mobile. There were none. No one – family, friends or colleagues – had tried to contact him since the assault. Not even Louise, who was unlikely to know about the assault, had so much as sent him a text.

  It was as if he had dropped out of existence, he thought, and not for the first time he wondered whether the path he had chosen, semi-estranged from his own community and not really accepted by the rest, was sustainable. People talked about integration but there were times when it felt more like exile to him. And now he seemed to have angered Muslims who were prepared to use violence against him, and he did not know who they were or why they had attacked him so ferociously – whether it was his police work or his girlfriend they had taken exception to – and he wondered whether he could bring himself to report what he suspected.

  He called Louise to explain what had happened to him, but only got her voicemail and then remembered that she would still be at work, rehearsing the school play. His depression deepened as he tried to persuade his mind to clear the miasma that infected it after twenty four hours of pain and drugs, but failed, and the next thing he knew he was awake again but in darkness, the blinds he did not recall pulling down keeping out the orange glow of the street lights outside, and not even an electronic standby light providing any orientation in a space that suddenly seemed completely alien. With a groan he hauled himself to his feet and stumbled to the light switch by the door and found himself almost blinded by the glare. But as the lights came on and his brain kicked back into gear, in spite of the jabbing pain in his side and his thumping head, he suddenly knew what he had to do.

  He moved slowly to his computer on the other side of the room and logged on to a travel site he had used before. Thackeray’s ban on his involvement in the investigation into his cousin’s death was even less likely to be lifted now he was injured, he thought. But there was one other course open to him. Given a little time for his ribs and other injuries to mend, he would go to Pakistan and see what he could uncover about his cousin’s marriage and her husband’s previous life in Lahore. In fact the more he thought about it, the more he felt convinced that the answer to her death lay there. With a faint feeling of excitement mitigating his gloom, he booked a seat on a flight to Lahore in two days’ time.

  Bruce Holden took the back roads across the Pennine hills, reasoning that a muddy four-by-four would be less noticeable there and would avoid the cameras that increasingly infested the motorways. He felt calm now, the rage that had infused his last conversation with Julie dissipated into a manic clarity as he formulated a plan. He had bundled up the few possessions the two of them had taken with them to Blackpool and roused his daughter at three that morning, bundling her in a blanket and strapping her into the front seat. She had barely protested and had fallen asleep again before he had reached the outskirts of the town. He had headed north then, weaving through the old mill towns, almost deserted at that time in the morning, and reaching the bare summit of the hills above Colne before the eastern sky showed the faintest streak of dawn.

  By five-thirty he had pulled up in a narrow gap between other parked cars outside his mother’s house and, leaving Anna still asleep in the front seat, let himself in with the key she had given him when he had stayed there. He took the stairs two at a time and opened his mother’s bedroom door. She was asleep, the duvet pulled tightly up to her ears but she woke at once, plainly terrified, when he shook her shoulder roughly.

  ‘Get some clothes on,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a little job for you.’ He glanced at the bedside table for a second before unplugging the phone and carrying it with him out of the room.

  ‘Be quick,’ he said over his shoulder. Downstairs he moved fast, checking all the doors and windows to make sure they were locked and pocketing the keys before wrenching the main telephone connection out of the wall. In the kitchen he unlocked a door at the back of the room and switched on the light beyond to illuminate a steep flight of stone steps. Like many older houses in Bradfield, this one had a small cellar, built to accommodate a narrow space for regular deliveries of coal through a hatch from above to feed the open fires that used to be the only means of heating, and beyond the coal-hole, another larger room with a stone sink and copper for the household’s washing in the days before electric machines took over.

  His mother had bought the house after the death of an elderly woman and although she had spent some of her savings on modernising the rest of the property he knew she had done nothing at all to the cellar, beyond boarding up the area window to deter intruders and rodents. Gingerly, he made his way down the steps to find the space much as he had expected, reasonably dry but cold, dusty and lit only by a single low watt bulb dangling from the ceiling. It would do the job he wanted it to do, he thought with satisfaction. It would keep prying eyes and ears away from Anna until he had finished the task he had decided, in the dark hours of the previous night, that he had to complete before he and his daughter would be safe.

  He hurried upstairs again and began carrying down cushions from the sofa in the front room, and then as much of the food in the kitchen as he thought they would need, and a couple of bottles of water. On his last trip he met his mother, fully dressed but looking gray and dazed, inching her way down the stairs.

&nbs
p; ‘I want you to look after Anna for me,’ he said, brusquely. ‘Just for a little while. I’ve got things to attend to and then I’m going to take her right away from here…’ Vanessa made as if to object but Holden’s face suffused with colour and she seemed to think better of it, flinching away from his outstretched hand as he offered to help her down the last few steps.

  ‘Where is she?’ Vanessa asked faintly.

  ‘In the car. I’ll get her in a minute. She fell asleep. You come with me and I’ll bring her in.’

  He hustled Vanessa into the kitchen and to the top of the cellar steps and at that point she realised what he intended.

  ‘Not down there,’ she said in horror.

  ‘Not for long,’ Holden said. ‘I don’t want you ringing Julie. I need some peace to finish things off here. You and Anna will be safe enough down there, no problem.’

  Ignoring her protests he hustled her down the stairs into the cellar and pushed her down roughly onto the cushions he had arranged in one corner of the small stone-floored room, knowing that she would find it very hard to get to her feet again. He glanced around and waved towards a cardboad box.

  ‘There’s food and drink here. You won’t starve. What about a bucket for you-know-what? I’ll get you a bucket, just in case it takes longer than I think.’

  He bustled back up the stairs, located a bucket and placed it in the small coal cellar.

  ‘Not quite all mod cons but I’m sure you’ll manage. I won’t keep you long, I promise.’

  Within minutes he had carried his sleepy daughter, fully dressed and wrapped in a blanket, into the makeshift prison he had constructed and put her on the cushioned floor beside her grandmother.

  ‘Daddy,’ the child wailed, looking around her in astonishment. ‘Where am I?’

  ‘I want you to stay here for a bit and look after your nanna, sweetheart,’ Holden said brusquely. ‘And Nanna will look after you. I won’t be long, I promise. I’ll come and get you very soon and then we’ll go away together, somewhere warm and sunny, maybe. Not bloody miserable and cold and wet like Blackpool. We’ll be fine, I promise.’

  And without looking back at woman or child, he strode back up the cellar steps and they heard the door being closed and locked behind him. Anna gazed at her grandmother in horror and saw silent tears streaming down her wrinkled face.

  ‘Don’t cry, Nanna, please,’ she said taking her hand. ‘Please don’t cry. He’ll be back soon. He always does what he says.’

  But it was that certainty which filled Venessa Holden with terror as she wondered exactly what business her son intended to complete before he came back to release them. But that was speculation she did not dare share with the child at her side. She sniffed back her tears and put her arm round Anna.

  ‘We’ll have to think of some games to play until your daddy comes back,’ she said. ‘I’m sure he won’t be long.’ She glanced at her watch and shivered slightly. It was half past five.

  After carefully locking up his mother’s house, Holden eased his car out of its parking slot and drove a hundred yards to the end of the street and turned into a narrow alleyway that led to a row of lock-up garages, where his mother kept her little used car. He reversed her Nissan carefully out of the garage and put his own four-by-four in, dropping down the door as quietly as he could. He did not think he had been seen. The houses all around were still in darkness. Driving the Nissan circumspectly so as to attract no unwelcome attention, he made his way to his own road and went slowly past his own house, pausing to take in the absence of a vehicle on the drive and the fact that the curtains were not drawn on the window of the main bedroom. He parked a couple of streets away and walked back slowly. In the distance he could see a milk float proceeding at a leisurely pace from house to house but otherwise there was no sign yet that anyone was awake as the faint grey light of morning stole over the rooftops. Glancing around cautiously for one last time he let himself in through his own front door and very quietly began a systematic search of the house.

  He sniffed at a bottle of fresh milk in the fridge and smiled faintly, guessing that someone had been there recently but he was not really surprised when he gently opened the bedroom door to find the bed neatly made, and no one there. He pulled back the cover and picked up the pillow on what had been Julie’s usual side, and sniffed it. She had been here, and not long ago, he was sure, and therefore might well come back. He went back downstairs and into the kitchen, taking the largest of the cooks’ knives from the knife block and then moving into the living room and settling himself into the armchair half hidden behind the door. He could wait, he thought. He could wait for the pleasure of giving her what she deserved. He felt exhilarated by the idea and considered putting some music on the stereo, but then told himself firmly that he could not risk disturbing the neighbours. His silence would have its reward, he promised himself, when Julie walked through the front door.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Mohammed Sharif flung himself onto the small, hard bed in the bed and breakfast establishment he had deliberately chosen to be as anonymous a base as possible in the city of Lahore, still jet-lagged by the time difference, enervated by the heat, and aching all over after he had crushed his battered body into an airline seat for so many weary hours. It was mind-blowingly hot and stuffy in the tiny room, with a faint smell that he hesitated to identify, but he had decided to keep well away from the glitzy air-conditioned tourist and business hotels, which were still busy in spite of the country’s slightly ambivalent relationship with its friends and neighbours internationally. He could stand the heat, he hoped, for the few days he intended to stay, and although there was little chance of his being recognised in the teeming capital of the Pakistani Punjab, he did not want to take the slightest chance. What he was doing, he knew, would infuriate family members even more in Pakistan than at home in Bradfield, and would not enchant his colleagues and superiors in CID, and he did not want to take the slightest risk of anyone reporting back to anyone at all.

  He did not really know the city at all. He had flown into Allama Iqbal airport often enough on family visits, most recently to Faria and Imran’s wedding, but his father’s custom was to hire a people-carrier at the airport and drive the family immediately out of Lahore, with the children craning through the window to glimpse as many of its famous parks and monuments, and a good proportion of its six million inhabitants, as they could before they headed across the agricultural plains to the family village about one hundred miles away. This time Sharif had taken a taxi straight to the centre and, encumbered only with an overnight bag, asked to be dropped close to the old walled city, where he found himself almost overwhelmed by streets clogged with a maelstrom of cars and vans and technicolour quingqi, motorised rickshaws, which swirled in what looked like an intricate and noisy dance of death, and by the sheer number of people milling in the narrow streets. Although he felt hungry, he resisted the enticing smells and noisy blandishments from the roadside food stalls selling every variety of snack and which he knew that his unaccustomed western digestion might reject violently. His grandfather’s village still seemed an oasis of timeless tradition to young people born and brought up in England. This was a metropolis uneasily, it seemed to him, poised between the old and the new: beautiful, glamorous even, but at the same time so seethingly crowded and, in parts, impoverished, as to seem faintly threatening.

  He lay on his bed naked, still feeling sticky after what passed for a shower in the communal bathroom – a one-handed contortion because of the need to keep his strapped ribs and bandaged hand reasonably dry, and considered his next move. Two days ago he had driven up to his parents’ house after checking that his father would be out and cross-questioned his mother, so gently he hoped that she had not realised quite what was happening. He had felt guilty as he took advantage of her grief over Faria’s death to persuade her to get out her precious photograph album and show him pictures of his cousin’s wedding to Imran Aziz, pictures in which he himself appeared on the
back row, in traditional dress, looking slightly uncomfortable and half hidden by the bride and groom.

  ‘Did you go to Imran’s first wedding?’ he had asked, hoping that the question sounded like an idle one, but his mother was only too pleased to discuss weddings, anybody’s wedding, with her so far unmarried son, no doubt hoping that it would enthuse him in that direction. As he had hoped his mother flicked back through the pages of her album, full of uncles and aunts and cousins and second and third cousins, until she came to a single fading snapshot of another village wedding.

  ‘Only your father went,’ she said. ‘There he is, look.’ But Sharif was looking much harder at the bride, her headscarf thrown back after the ceremonies, and at the same time trying to conceal his surprise. She was not a young woman, nor a particularly beautiful one, and he wondered callously why Imran, who at that time was reputed to be doing well in business in Lahore, should have consented to marry such an unprepossessing bride.

  ‘What was her name?’ he asked his mother as casually as he could manage, but she only frowned as she tried to recall. She flicked through her photographs again. ‘I remember your father saying that Imran could not attract a young bride because he was too old. He had left it too long. And at that stage of course Faria was too young…’ Her eyes filled with tears and she dabbed them with the end of her scarf. ‘They couldn’t insist on that arrangement then. It is such a pity that it happened later.’ She dabbed her eyes.

  ‘Can you really not recall her name?’ Sharif persisted, knowing that going to Pakistan to trace a nameless bride would be worse than useless, but very reluctant to try to extract the information from Faria’s own parents. His mother shrugged and detached the fading wedding photograph from the album and looked at the back of it.