Dead Reckoning

by Patricia Hall

“I’m sure Simon can be persuaded to go along with our plans, or at the very least sell us his shares so that we can outvote your grandfather,” Frank said, though without total conviction. “Even now he doesn’t want to be involved directly in the company any more he’ll not want to see it wrecked. He’ll lose as heavily as the rest of us if we go belly up.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him,” Matthew mumbled, “Though last time I saw him he seemed to be worried about money, and that was a bloody first for him.” His words were beginning to slur now. His mother looked at him anxiously.

  “You’ll stay for a meal?” she asked.

  “I suppose so,” Matthew said ungraciously. He lived another ten miles out of industrial Yorkshire in the rolling Dales, where he and his now divorced wife had bought and renovated an old stone farmhouse. Since Lizzie’s precipitate and acrimonious departure he had lived there alone.

  “I’ll tell Juanita,” Christine said, leaving the room to discuss the meal with the housekeeper.

  When she had gone, Frank Earnshaw looked angrily at his older son.

  “Where the hell is he?” he asked. “Did he say he was going away when you spoke to him on Sunday?”

  “Nope,” Matthew said, his eyes heavy with sleep now. “I told you, he’s being very mysterious about some woman he’s taken up with. Perhaps he’s with her. He doesn’t confide. You know that.”

  With good reason, Frank Earnshaw thought. Not only had Simon given up his management role at the mill to go back to university to study for a postgraduate degree in environmental science, but he had made it very clear on more than one occasion that one of the reasons for his change of direction was the increasing impossibility of working with his older, more volatile and increasingly drunken brother.

  “I wouldn’t put it past your grandfather to try to collar him to put his side of the argument before we talk to him,” Frank said, but his son’s eyes were shut now and before long he was snoring softly in the comfortable sofa across which he could now sprawl, mouth open and a thin trickle of saliva running from one corner and down his chin.

  It was more than two hours later, after an uncomfortable meal at which both parents had attempted unsuccessfully to limit the amount of wine Matthew consumed, that Frank Earnshaw was surprised to pick up the phone and hear a female voice asking for his younger son.

  “Simon doesn’t live here,” Frank said, a shade more sharply than he intended. “I’ve not seen him for weeks.”

  “He was supposed to call me yesterday,” the woman said. “I’ve been trying to get him ever since.”

  “Who is this?” Frank said. “Do I know you.”

  “No. It doesn’t matter. I’ll keep trying his mobile.”

  “Who was that?” Matthew asked.

  “Some woman trying to find Simon,” Frank said. “The girlfriend, d’you think?”

  Matthew took the portable receiver out of his hand and quickly punched in 1471 but he soon switched off again with a shrug.

  “Number withheld,” he said. “Where the hell is Simon?” he asked no one in particular. “It’s bloody typical of him to go missing just when he’s actually needed for once.”

  “Missing?” his mother said sharply. “Do you really think he’s missing? Could he have had an accident, do you think?” She hesitated. “He gave me a key to his flat, in case of emergencies …”

  Frank Earnshaw stood up as if he had made a decision to take charge of the situation.

  “In that case, I think I’ll go down to his flat and have a look round,” he said. “I reckon this might be an emergency You’d better come with me, Matthew. I’ll drive. You’re in no fit state.”

  Within the hour the two men were standing in the small flat Simon Earnshaw now called home. It was the bottom half of a Victorian terrace house, close to the university where he was now studying.

  “How can he go back to living like this?” Matthew said disgustedly, drawing a toe across the worn carpet which looked none too clean. “A bloody student hovel all over again.”

  “You both made your own decisions,” Frank said mildly, privately thinking that Simon’s choices, disappointing as he had found them at first, were in many ways preferable to the fast-lane lifestyle Matthew attempted to sustain. “If he wants to live on his savings, that’s his business. He earned his money while he was at the mill. I’ve no complaints.”

  “What you mean is, I don’t,” Matthew muttered angrily. “Earn it, I mean.”

  “You can work that one out for yourself, Matthew,” his father said. He crossed the room to where an answerphone was winking. There were three messages, all from the same young woman he had spoken to earlier in the evening, each sounding more anxious than the one before. She had not identified herself, but the soft and intimate “It’s me” told Simon Earnshaw’s father and brother clearly enough that this was someone special in his life.

  “There’s something not right,” Frank Earnshaw said, as he switched off the woman’s voice, which by that morning had been pleading for Simon to get in touch. “I’m going to call the police.”

  Laura Ackroyd picked at a couple of lettuce leaves and watched Michael Thackeray tuck with gusto into the steak and chips she had just cooked him. It was the sort of food she suspected he still preferred in spite of her long-standing efforts to tempt him with all sorts of dishes from the Mediterranean, India and points south, east and west. After sandwiches and scones with her father, she was not hungry and had made herself a salad which the good Yorkshireman across the table from her would have dismissed as rabbit food if she had offered him the same.

  “So what’s he up to then, your dad?” Thackeray asked through a mouthful of chips and brown sauce.

  “Some money-making scheme,” Laura said, not wanting to break Jack’s confidence and mention Earnshaws. “He kept various interests here when he went abroad. I’m not sure how he fixes it with the Inland Revenue, but I know every time I go and visit he’s poring over his investment portfolio.”

  “He can only spend a limited amount of time in the UK if he wants to avoid tax,” Thackeray said.

  “Oh, knowing my father, I’m sure he wants to do that,” Laura said wryly. “He’s one of those Tories always ready to moan about the quality of public services but never prepared to pay his whack to fund them. He drives Joyce crazy”

  “You must drive him crazy too,” Thackeray said mildly. “I’ve never known such an ill-matched family in some ways, but you’re all Ackroyds to the tips of your fingers — pig-headed through three generations. Do you think if we …”

  Laura’s heart lurched uncomfortably.

  “If we what?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Thackeray said quickly. He finished his steak thoughtfully and pushed the plate away with a satisfied grunt.

  “That was good,” he said.

  “How did I get involved with a man who doesn’t know his mozzarella from his focaccia?” Laura asked. “Do you want anything else? Apple pie and custard or jam rolypoly?” For a second Thackeray’s eyes lit up until he realised she was teasing.

  “You know that wouldn’t do my waistline any good,” he admitted reluctantly. “Your trouble is, you spent too long down in the effete south.”

  “Ha, you’ve obviously never experienced boarding school food or you wouldn’t say that,” she said. “Funnily enough, it was my father who got me interested in good food. He tried to seduce me away from Joyce’s puritan habits by taking me to good restaurants when I was home for the holidays. And I have to confess, I loved it. Will you come to dinner with him tomorrow? I can guarantee the food’ll be good, and if it’s the Clarendon, pretty traditional too.”

  “If I can get away in time,” Thackeray said. “I like your father. Which reminds me, I must go and see mine.” He was suddenly sombre.

  “Ah,” Laura said softly. “About the divorce? Will he be very opposed, after all this time?”

  “Resigned, I think,” Thackeray said. “He’s not a fool. He knows what’s going on. But I owe h
im an explanation, not just a wedding invitation. Not that he’ll come, of course. He’s about as dyed in the wool as you can get without actually being the Pope.”

  “Michael, you mustn’t tear yourself apart over this,” she said. “We can go on as we are …”

  “No,” he said. “That’s not an option is it? I see you with Vicky and David’s children and I know very well what you want. You’re going to get fed up with the way we are. And I couldn’t bear to lose you.”

  “Maybe I can’t have children, after … you know …”

  “We won’t know till we try, will we,” he said, as lightly as he could, although he felt breathless with panic at the thought. “Come here,” he said, and took her in his arms and kissed her so fiercely that she had to pull away, laughing, for breath.

  “Shall we leave the washing up?” she asked, pulling him back towards her and feeling his hardness against her thigh and opening her mouth for his next kiss. But before they could reach the bedroom, locked in a close embrace, his phone rang loudly and long enough to split them reluctantly apart.

  “Damm” Laura said as she watched Thackeray flick on the mobile and listen impassively to the voice at the other end.

  “I’ll be right there,” he said at length and she flung herself onto the sofa, feeling defeated.

  “It looks as if we may have identified our jogger,” he said, pushing her hair away from her brow and kissing her on the cheek. “I’m sorry, Laura. Really sorry. You know what it’s like.”

  She shrugged, trying to conceal her disappointment.

  “I’ll see you later then,” she said. “I’ll keep the bed warm.” But she knew that he would come back exhausted and fall instantly into a deep sleep in her arms as he had done so many nights before.

  Thackeray sat across an interview room table from Frank and Matthew Earnshaw as Sergeant Mower eased his way through the door with two brimming polystyrene cups of grey-looking coffee in his hands. He placed them in front of the visitors and sat down beside Thackeray. Everyone in the room looked pale and haggard in the harsh lighting but Frank Earnshaw in particular seemed to be finding it difficult both to sit still for long and to frame his words carefully enough for coherence.

  “Sergeant Mower tells me that you didn’t know that a body had been found on Broadley Moor,” Thackeray said at length.

  “We don’t see the local rag,” the younger Earnshaw said dismissively.

  “The village has been full of police …” Mower objected mildly.

  “We’d not noticed,” the older Earnshaw added. “We’re a bit preoccupied at the minute. We’ve other problems to worry about. You’ll have heard about the financial difficulties we’ve run into. Simon’s whereabouts were the last thing on my mind this week, till he failed to turn up to meet his brother this evening.”

  “So when did you last see Simon?” Thackeray asked.

  “We’ve not seen him since Christmas, but I spoke to him on the phone on Sunday to arrange a meeting at the Clarendon today. There was some business stuff we needed to discuss,” Matthew said. The crisis appeared to have sobered him up.

  “Simon is a major shareholder in the company,” his father added dully.

  “But he doesn’t work for you?” Thackeray asked.

  “No, he used to, but not now. He did a management degree and I put him in charge of marketing and administration when he finished. He was very good. But then a year or so ago he had some sort of conversion to green politics and decided to go back to university to do a postgraduate degree. He said he wanted nothing to do with the company any more. Or the family, it seems. He’s kept himself very much to himself since.”

  “He kept his bloody shares, though,” Matthew said. “He wasn’t so converted he didn’t know which side his bread was buttered.”

  “So you wouldn’t have expected to see him regularly?”

  “We speak to him on the phone if we need to. His mother meets him in town for lunch now and again, though she doesn’t think I know that,” Frank Earnshaw said, his bitterness overcoming the anxiety in his faded blues eyes.

  “He knew how important it was to talk about the problems at the mill,” Matthew said. “We told him it was urgent and he didn’t object, just said he wasn’t keen to come up to the mill or out to Broadley. He suggested the Clarendon. I think he thought it was some sort of joke. It’s not the sort of place he goes these days.”

  “So you wouldn’t normally expect him to be jogging on Broadley Moor?” Thackeray said. “Too close to home, maybe?”

  “I wouldn’t expect him to be jogging anywhere,” Matthew said sourly. “He’s not the type. Unless that’s another sort of conversion he’s gone through that we don’t know about.”

  “Do you happen to have a photograph of Simon with you?” Thackeray asked. “We could possibly eliminate this body quite quickly without any more distress …”

  “I brought this one from his flat,” Frank Earnshaw said. “I thought if we reported him missing you’d want one.”

  He reached into an inside pocket and pulled out a snapshot of a young man standing outside a substantial Victorian house beside Frank himself and a woman Thackeray guessed must be his wife.

  “It was taken about three years ago, but he’s not changed much. Hair’s a bit longer, maybe.”

  Thackeray looked at the photograph carefully but his hopes of finding some distinguishing characteristic, such as dark hair or unusual stature, which could make it impossible that the body in the Infirmary freezer could be Simon Earnshaw, faded almost at once. Simon was about the right height, and as fair-haired as the unknown victim, and allowing for three years, of around the same build. He sighed and handed the photograph back to Frank Earnshaw.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s impossible to rule him out. I think you’d better have a look at the man who was found the other morning.”

  As the quartet walked the short distance across the city centre to the Infirmary and down into the basement where it had been arranged that a technician would retrieve the remains of the unknown jogger, Thackeray explained as gently as he could the nature of the injuries that had been inflicted on the corpse and the efforts which had already been made to repair the damage in the hope that by the following morning a suitably cosmetic photograph could be issued to the media. But as it turned out the undertaker’s efforts were enough.

  Frank Earnshaw and his son stood pale-faced and rigid beside the gurney as the technician pulled back the sheet covering the corpse but their reaction was instant. The older man choked slightly and then nodded, jaw clenched, while Mower moved quickly to provide a steadying arm to his son, Matthew, who was visibly swaying.

  “You’re sure that is your other son, Simon Earnshaw?” Thackeray asked, his own face rigid with tension.

  “It’s Simon,” Earnshaw said, his voice hoarse. “How the hell did he come to fall down the Crag?”

  “He didn’t fall, Mr. Earnshaw,” Thackeray said. “We have good reason to believe he was murdered.”

  “Oh my God,” Earnshaw said, while his other son slumped against Mower, who grabbed him in a bear hug, before he vomited all over the floor and the sergeant’s shoes.

  Chapter Five

  Sergeant Mower seized his companion’s arm fiercely as he came out of the main entrance to Bradfield Infirmary and pushed him to a stop against the wall at the bottom of the broad stone steps, holding his elbow across the younger man’s chest.

  “Don’t ever, ever, let your personal feelings go like that again,” he said. “It’s not helpful, it’s not professional, it’s not even safe. You were winding that girl’s father up, you idiot. Trying to get him to commit himself to something he can’t possibly judge at this stage. As if they haven’t got enough to cope with.”

  DC Mohammed Sharif, commonly known in CID as Omar, a name he accepted so amiably that Mower suspected that the joke was his own idea, pushed the sergeant’s arm away irritably.

  “You can’t treat that sort of shit as if the girl
’s grazed her knee,” he said angrily. “She’ll possibly lose the sight of that eye. Someone’s got to deal with these fucking racists. She’s going to be scarred for life, she’ll never marry …”

  “And how do you know that it’s not the work of a gang of Asians pissed off because she’s got a white boyfriend?” Mower snapped.

  “What?” Sharif said, his angry eyes suddenly uncertain. “Is that what they’re saying? Is that what she said?”

  “She didn’t get a look at whoever threw the stuff,” Mower said, more quietly, aware that they were attracting curious glances from passers-by making their way in and out of the busy hospital. “You’re assuming it was a racist attack. You’re pushing her father into claiming it was a racist attack. And you may well be right and of course we have to take that possibility on board. That’s the way it works. But we don’t know for certain. Not yet. So calm down and let’s try to behave like bloody detectives instead of emotional schoolboys, shall we? That’s what they pay us for.”

  Sharif pulled himself away from Mower’s restraining arm and walked ahead of the sergeant, back towards police headquarters. Mower caught up with him quickly.

  “When I talked to her father initially he was evasive, evidently not sure of what was going on with the girl,” Mower said in a fierce whisper, one cautious eye on a couple of Asian youths leaning against a wall. “I want you to talk to him and the mother, calmly and rationally. I’ll come with you but my Punjabi’s not up to it if she doesn’t speak much English. You know the rules: this is a racist incident if they say it’s a racist incident, but so far I’m not getting that message clearly enough. The girl can’t be sure. I’ll talk to the guv’nor when we get back because in the present state of tension we don’t want to go winding anyone up if we don’t have to. We need to be sure. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sarge,” Sharif said, his plump boyish face still betraying signs of sulkiness as they made their way up to the CID office and Mower went to report to DCI Thackeray on what he had learned so far about an attack with corrosive liquid on a fourteen-year-old girl, which had shaken even an old hand like Mower who reckoned he had seen everything that human beings could inflict on one another.