Dead Reckoning

by Patricia Hall

  “That’s …” Laura began but Grant’s rising colour and bulging blue eyes stopped her completing her objection, which she knew was a waste of breath in any case. If Grant could not already see how fragile the peace was becoming in Bradfield she guessed that she lacked the powers to persuade him. His belief that the word of a woman was worth only a fraction of that of a man was almost Muslim in its intensity.

  Back at her desk she gazed at her reflection for a long time before switching on her computer and reading through the features for the next day’s paper. But before she felt calm enough to begin editing the fashion contributor’s stilted prose, she pulled a carefully folded letter out of her handbag and scanned the contents again. Then she made a phone call.

  “Kelly?” she said when she was connected. “I’ve been thinking about what we discussed last week. And yes, I’d like to stand in for you while you’re away if your bosses are happy with that arrangement. Listen. What do you think of this for a theme?” She glanced around the newsroom as she put the receiver down, to make sure that she had not been overheard, and then gave her reflection its first smile of the day. Just possibly, she thought, she had found the escape tunnel from Ted Grant’s Colditz that she had been seeking for so long.

  Chapter Two

  The message to call Amos Atherton, the pathologist, was on Michael Thackeray’s desk when he arrived in the office after a canteen lunch.

  “There’s something not right about this lad they found up on Broadley Moor this morning,” Atherton said bluntly when he took Thackeray’s call. “My fault. It looked like an obvious accident to me but now I’ve got him stripped down I’m not so sure. I think the body’s been moved around. D’you want to come down?”

  Thackeray had little choice but to agree, in spite of his distaste for the cold intimacies of the post-mortem examination process, and within ten minutes he and sergeant Kevin Mower had walked the short distance from police headquarters to Bradfield Infirmary, where the pathology department was housed in the cavernous tiled basement of the Victorian hospital. In the fiercely lit morgue, Atherton and his assistant had stripped the clothes from the remains of the still unidentified jogger and were listing the head and neck injuries which had evidently killed him, and the bruises and abrasions on other parts of his body. To Thackeray’s unskilled eye there seemed to be little on the slab which was not consistent with the theory so far accepted by the medics and the police who had attended the scene, that the jogger had slipped and crashed over the edge of the crag, falling some hundred feet to smash head-first onto the rocks below. Even in the bright mortuary lights, the man’s own mother would have difficulty recognising what was left of his face.

  Atherton ended his recitation into his tape-recorder and switched the machine off.

  “It did strike me as a bit odd that rigor was so far advanced when I examined him,” he said. “It was damn cold up there, well below freezing, which usually slows the stiffening down. Of course he could have been there all night but the farmer was adamant he wasn’t there when he went to look at his animals at dusk, so the consensus seemed to be he’d been on an early morning run and lost his footing on the frosty surface.”

  “And now?” Thackeray prompted.

  “You can be wrong about rigor, but not about hyperstasis. Look at him. He’s like a bloody ghost.”

  The figure lying on its back on the slab was certainly pale but the police officers had not immediately grasped the significance of that.

  “After death the blood pools in the lowest part of the body,” Atherton explained with some impatience. “You should know that by now.”

  “And of course he was found face down,” Mower said quickly. “Sorry guv, maybe I never mentioned that. The farmer had turned him over, actually, but he said he was definitely face down when he found him.”

  “It’d have helped if you’d shared that bit of information with me while we were up there,” Atherton said sharply. “Any road, face down, the blood should have run to the chest and stomach. Instead of which it’s very obviously run to the back, the buttocks and the back of the thighs and calves. Look.” Atherton rolled the body, like a board with rigor mortis, to one side slightly to reveal the purplish underside. “He lay on his back for some time after death to arrive in that condition,” he said. “You may have an accident here, but I wouldn’t bank on it. I suspect he was dead when he went over the crag. And if he’d landed on his back instead of his front whoever chucked him over might have got away with it. If the hyperstasis had been in the right place I’d not have been any more suspicious now than you lot were when you found him. Now …?”

  He shrugged his broad shoulders and patted his green plastic apron over his belly.

  “Now I think we’d better do a serious job on this young man, don’t you? I take it you lads’ll be stopping?”

  Back in his office after two hours spent watching Atherton’s detailed dissection of the body on his slab Thackeray wondered how many murders were written off as accidents - as this one had so nearly been. Kevin Mower, who had followed him into the room, tried to conceal the anxiety twisting his stomach in a way which took him back to places he did not wish to revisit.

  “Sorry, guv,” he said. “We nearly missed that one. It wasn’ t really Amos’s fault. I’d already talked to the farmer and sent him back down. It was bloody dangerous up there.”

  “He should have checked whether the body had been moved,” Thackeray said, without much sympathy for the heavyweight pathologist.

  “Yeah, well, he was working crouched on a ledge on a bloody mini-precipice covered in ice. I had to hold him steady once or twice or he’d have slipped to the bottom himself. Let’s face it: he’s not built for that sort of work. He must have reckoned it would be better to get the body out and into the morgue sharpish rather than hang around there. No one suspected foul play. I’ve had the site taped off but I didn’t think it was worth leaving anyone up there.”

  “Right,” Thackeray said. “You’re both lucky that bit of ground is off-limits to the public so it shouldn’t have been touched since he was found.”

  “Except for the odd lost sheep,” Mower muttered, with a sideways smile at the inimitable details of country life.

  “The farmer will have safely corralled them by now,” Thackeray said, with the certainty of one who had grown up on a farm. “It’s illegal for them to be loose on the moors in restricted areas. And that goes for us too, but there’ll have to be a way found round that so we can treat the area as a crime scene. Call the Ministry of Agriculture or whatever they call themselves now. Tell them we need to do a fingertip search of an area of Broadley Moor and the Crag and get whatever permission that takes. Disinfectant up to our eyebrows, I shouldn’ t wonder. And then get an incident room set up. First priority is to find out who he is, next how he got there. If he was dead before he went over the top, as Amos suggests, it sounds as if it would take a vehicle and at least two men to get him to where he was found.”

  “If the killer had known about hyperstasis he might have got away with it,” Mower said.

  “Maybe,” Thackeray conceded. “Although Amos would probably have found the suspicious head wound anyway once he’d started looking closely at the skull. The cuts and bruises from the fall were obviously not enough to disguise the clean blow on the back of the head which probably killed him. Let’s hope there’s some forensic evidence as well when the lab results come back. And one thing we can be sure of. Nothing’s going to get past Amos now. He’s made a mistake and his pride’s on the line. Did I hear an apology, by the way?”

  “I wouldn’t go quite as far as that, guv,” Mower said with a grin. “But I reckon he’ll be good for a drink at the end of the day.” Thackeray’s instant glower reminded him that he had not yet completely convinced his boss that the odd pint might not lead to far too many more, but the DCI made no comment. He glanced instead at the papers on his desk.

  “Anyway, let’s find out who our battered jogger is, shall we? Get y
our idle local bobby off his backside and get some house to house inquiries launched in Broadley. At least the victim’s white enough for race not to be an issue on this one.”

  “White, fair-haired, probably blue-eyed, though I wouldn’t swear to it — apart from that his mum’d have trouble recognising him. It’ll be a distinguishing marks job,” Mower said. “Appendix scars and birthmarks in unusual places.”

  “It’s possible, I suppose, that someone deliberately tried to make sure he was unrecognisable, but Amos seems to think most of the facial injuries came from the fall. Anyway, you may be surprised what a clever undertaker can do to his face when Amos has finished,” Thackeray said. “But we’ll not get any sort of picture for a while, that’s true. So sift through the missing persons reports and see who fits what we do know about him. He’s not your average missing teenager, is he? Or one of the great unwashed. Someone’ll be going frantic for him somewhere, I’d guess. Wife, girlfriend, mother.”

  “Do you want to talk to the troops?”

  “Two o’clock,” Thackeray said. “In the meantime set up the search of the crime scene while there’s still time for the forensic troops to do something useful in daylight. I’ll fill Jack Longley in, and sort out what we’re going to tell the Press.”

  But when Mower had closed the office door behind him, Thackeray felt disinclined to move upstairs to see his boss. He supposed there were detectives who felt the thrill of the hunt when a new murder inquiry started. He was not one of them. As the years went by the burden of anger and sorrow at each violent death he encountered seemed to make his limbs heavier and his mind slower as he contemplated the details of the inquiry ahead. The victims were seldom only the body or bodies on Amos Atherton’s slab. The innocent were always hurt and often tainted by the remorseless nature of a murder investigation. The adrenaline, he knew from experience, would kick in eventually as evidence began to accumulate but on this chilly grey morning, with his own life on the brink of changes which he knew he should have concluded long ago, he felt nothing but a weary pity for the man whose violation he had so recently witnessed in the mortuary and for all those whose lives would be devastated by his death, even, he thought wryly, for the murderer himself. “You’re going soft,” he told himself as he picked up the phone. “Or maybe that’s your trouble. You always have been when it comes to the crunch. Laura would be proud of you.”

  Laura Ackroyd had been at her own desk early that morning in spite of her encounter with the town’s racist youth, and by dint of taking a sandwich lunch in front of her computer screen she felt able to slide out of the busy newsroom by four. Much of the day’s news agenda had been taken up with rumours and counter-rumours that one of Bradfield’s three remaining textile mills, Earnshaws, which had been weaving high quality worsted cloth for the tailoring trade for more than a hundred years, was to close. Time was when the wool correspondent of the Bradfield Gazette had been a power in the town, dividing his time between the gothic Exchange, now converted into a shopping precinct, and the bar of the Clarendon Hotel, where the mill owners traditionally took a three course lunch, smoked several cigars and routinely cut local politicians off at the knees if their policies did not suit. Those days were long gone and, on the day the once staple industry looked like taking its terminal plunge into oblivion, Ted Grant was hard pressed to find a single reporter who could even distinguish between combing, spinning and weaving let alone a top from a noil. But Ted did not expect female members of his staff to bother their pretty little heads about the local economy or industrial relations — which looked like becoming imminently stormy — and on this occasion Laura was keen to keep her head down. Fifteen minutes after leaving the office she was sitting with two young Asian women in dilapidated armchairs in a women’s centre just off Aysgarth Lane.

  “What I’d like to do in these radio interviews is give ordinary members of the Asian community space to tell people what it’s like at the moment with the tension so high,” Laura said. “I was horrified by what I saw this morning in town. This was an elderly woman being abused and no one took a blind bit of notice.”

  “Have you talked to councillor Khalid?” asked Amina Khan, a tall woman in dark shalwar kameez and severe white hijab covering every inch of her hair. But Laura shook her head quickly.

  “I don’t want to talk to the community leaders and politicians for this,” she said. “They get plenty of opportunity to have their say. I want to talk to people, especially women, about their own experience day to day, going shopping, taking children to school, going to the hospital like the women who were being abused this morning in the town centre. It’s not the politics that I want to talk about but the reality on the street.”

  Amina looked dubious and shook her head but her companion, Farida Achmed, fashionable in a black trouser suit, boots and a long silky scarf thrown back from her dark hair in defiance of tradition, nodded.

  “The councillors are not always the best judges of that,” she said. “I work in the town hall in the housing department and I must say that no one has bothered me in the street or anywhere else for that matter. Maybe it’s because I look as though I can stand up for myself. But the problems are getting worse. The men are starting to talk about taking women everywhere, which knocks us back a whole generation. And there are a lot of young men who are eager to meet violence with violence. You say you don’t want to get involved in the politics but to some extent this is all about politics. It’s about whether immigrant communities can live here without being harassed when things get nasty in the old country.”

  “It’s not new,” Laura said. “The Irish used to become very unpopular every time there was an outrage in Belfast or London.”

  “But there weren’t many young Irishmen prepared to stand up publicly for the terrorists, were there?” Farida came back quickly. “We have these young idiots making martyrs out of murderers, growing their beards, ranting from the mosque. None of the rest of us believe that blowing people up solves anything but we get tarred with that brush. That’s why your passers-by wouldn’t help the old lady. They blame us all for New York, the Taliban, terrorism in Pakistan, and all the rest of it.”

  “Most of them hate us anyway,” Amina said quietly. “They don’t want us here. Never did. It’s just that much worse now.”

  “Well, they’ll have to put up with us,” Farida said. “I was born here. I went to school and college here. I don’t belong anywhere else.”

  “There’s a lot of people who’d dispute that,” Amina said, her face closed and cold. “You try to dress and behave like an English girl but they laugh at you behind your back. You’re still a Paki and always will be.”

  In spite of her traditional dress it was clear that Amina was the more forceful of the two young women and Farida glanced away, evidently unwilling to argue with her any further in front of Laura.

  “Will you come on the programme and talk about some of these issues?” she asked Amina specifically. “Especially about how they affect women.”

  But Amina looked cautious.

  “I’ll talk to my father about it,” she said at last.

  “You’re a grown woman. You should make your own decisions,” Farida said sharply, her dark eyes bright. “I’ll do it. No one ever bothers to ask the women what they think. I’d love to be on your radio show.”

  “Give me your mobile numbers and I’ll get back to you,” Laura said and, to her surprise, both Amina and Farida wrote them down for her.

  She walked back across the brightly lit town centre to the Gazette to pick up her car more aware than usual that the late shoppers did not include many Asian women and that the groups of men in traditional dress who chatted in the town hall square stared with more than usual suspicion at passersby from other ethnic groups. As she walked past the straggling bus queues, especially those for the services which made their way up Aysgarth Lane, the Asian community’s bustling, shabby heart, before heading to outlying suburbs, she thought she detected an electric tension in
the air. She had occasionally wondered if it were true that animals could sense the approach of an earthquake or a volcanic eruption and was more inclined to believe it tonight. It felt as if the centre of Bradfield, enclosed between its seven encircling hills, was about to explode.

  Laura drove home in a thoughtful mood and to her surprise she saw that the ground-floor lights of the large Victorian house of which she owned one floor were on, a sign that, unusually, Michael Thackeray had arrived home before her. Dropping her coat in the hall of the flat and her shopping in the kitchen, she opened the door of the living room and found him watching the local television news. She stood for a moment with one hand on his shoulder as the presenter described the morning’s discovery of an unidentified body over shots of an unseasonable Broadley Moor, with the gorse in its brilliant summer glory.

  “Stock pictures,” she said, with professional certainty. “There’s cars in the car-park too, look. We had the same problem. I heard one of our photographers complaining he wasn’t allowed anywhere near the site because of the foot-and-mouth restrictions. It looks as though the telly cameras couldn’t get any closer. Have you no idea who he is yet?”

  “No one’s come forward to claim him,” Thackeray said, taking Laura’s hand in his and pulling her onto the sofa beside him.

  “Was it an accident?” Laura asked. Thackeray shrugged, not wanting to spend time discussing death tonight.

  “Probably not,” he said. “Did you have a good day?”

  “In parts,” Laura said, willing enough to distract him. So often the nature of his work hovered like a dark cloud between them.

  “Only in parts,” Thackeray said wryly. “You talked to this Kelly Sullivan at the radio station?”