Dead Reckoning

by Patricia Hall

  “Seems an odd place to be doing environmental stuff,” Mower remarked as they made their way into one of the university’s more dilapidated blocks, which were generally the most recently constructed.

  “Once the bottom fell out of the old industries they had to diversify, just like everyone else,” Thackeray said. “I knew a lad at school who came here to study textile engineering when it was the best place in the country for that sort of thing. And if you think about it, this part of the world needs an environmental leg-up more than most. Maybe that’s what Earnshaw reckoned.”

  Mower punched the lift button for the fourth floor where Simon Earnshaw’s tutor was waiting for them.

  “So why was he apparently heading for Provence?” he asked, as the lift struggled upwards.

  “Maybe Dr. Stephen McKenna can tell us,” Thackeray said as the doors creaked reluctantly open and they found themselves face-to-face with a stocky man with a neat red beard and mournful brown eyes. He held out a hand, first to Thackeray and then Mower, and his grip was firm and dry.

  “Gentlemen,” he said. “Tell me what I can do to help. Anything. I just can’t believe that Simon is dead.”

  When they had squeezed themselves into his tiny office, which involved much shuffling of chairs and piles of books and files, McKenna inserted himself behind his cluttered desk and repeated his offer.

  “What can I say,” he said. “Simon was a good friend as well as a post-graduate student. I’m simply devastated.”

  “How much longer did he have to go to gain his master’s?” Thackeray asked.

  “Not long. He’s — he had, I mean — completed the examined part of the course and was half way through his project and dissertation. It was going well, I thought. Some more research to do here and there, and some tidying up of the arguments, but he was well on his way. He just needed to settle down and write for another few weeks, a month maybe …He was looking at problems of urban regeneration, obviously close to his heart and just the sort of study this area needs. Such a bloody waste,” McKenna concluded sombrely.

  “So you would be the Steve his family had heard him talk about, the Steve he was working with?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose so,” McKenna said. “As I say, I regarded him as a friend as much as a student.”

  “He was actually studying local problems?” Mower broke in. “Relevant to the redevelopment of the family mill, for instance?”

  “Well, as part of a theoretical study, of course, but yes, there are plenty of examples of successful and unsuccessful regeneration projects in this part of Yorkshire as you probably know. Look at the redevelopment of Leeds. And Salts Mill and the Hockney gallery and the success they’ve made of that. Once or twice he said he wished his father would consider something similar for the family mill — you know about Earnshaws, of course?” When the two police officers nodded, McKenna rushed on, as if he feared the emotion which would overwhelm him if he dared to pause.

  “Of course, he played no part in the running of the business any more. I got the impression that he and his father had fallen out over ecological issues. I don’t think the family had any time for his change of direction.”

  “How seriously had they quarrelled?” Thackeray asked.

  McKenna hesitated.

  “I regarded Simon as a friend, as I say, but he never confided much about his family. He simply said he had got out when it seemed to him that the company was heading in the wrong direction, that it was missing opportunities, I think was the way he put it. I got the feeling that he had cut himself off from all that when he came back here to study.”

  “But the mill’s problems might have appeared in his dissertation? They were relevant?”

  “Well, I got the impression that he thought so. He seemed to be keeping in touch with what was going on there, though not through his family I suspect. More likely through the trade union.”

  “The people who are threatening to strike?” Thackeray asked.

  “Well, I guess so. He never said, but I think he was far more sympathetic to the workers at the mill than he was to the management,” McKenna said. “I’m not trying to make him out to be some sort of revolutionary, Chief Inspector. Don’t get me wrong. But he was deeply concerned about how a place like Bradfield can survive in the twenty-first century, and he seemed quite convinced, as I am, that it won’t be through hanging on to industries which are essentially moribund.”

  “Did he say what he wanted to do when he finished his dissertation?” Thackeray asked.

  “Not really,” McKenna said. “I think he wanted to travel. He once said that he regretted not taking time off the first time he graduated. He missed his‘gap year’ he said, because his father wanted him to go straight into the business. But, no, he never mentioned anything specific.”

  “Would it surprise you that he seemed to be planning to buy a house in France?”

  “In France? Yes, that would surprise me. I got the feeling he wanted to go further afield than that.”

  “And did he tell you he was planning to get married?”

  “Ah,” McKenna said, making a steeple of his fingers in front of his face. “That might explain the house in France.”

  Thackeray waited while McKenna evidently had an internal argument with himself.

  “We’re dealing with a murder, sir,” he prompted at last, battening down his impatience with difficulty.

  “I know. I’m sorry,” McKenna said. “Of course, I must tell you everything I know but as you’ll realise when I tell you, there are other people involved here — and possibly at risk.”

  “At risk?” Thackeray said and Mower glanced sharply at the academic, wondering what was coming next.

  “I said Simon was a friend,” McKenna said. “And in a sense he was, but when I think about it I realise what a shallow sort of friendship it really was. We were intensely interested in our subject, both of us were, and we followed up our tutorials very often in the pub, long evenings talking, but talking professionally, you understand. In some ways Simon was an intensely private person. He talked very little about his family, and not at all about his love life, if he had one. And I think he had. I heard from other sources that he had acquired a girlfriend this year, this academic year I mean, and that she was a student here and …and this is where it gets difficult …that she was Asian — Pakistani, I assumed.”

  “You don’t know who she was?” Thackeray asked sharply.

  “I think Simon took care that no one knew that.”

  “So she was someone whose family might not have welcomed the relationship?”

  “That’s what I assumed,” McKenna said. “I never asked. Perhaps I should have done. Perhaps if I had, Simon would still be alive.”

  Chapter Seven

  Laura fastened Naomi’s nappy and slipped chubby legs, pink from her bath, into pyjama bottoms before picking the child up and burying herself in the sweet smell of her.

  “Let’s go and find your mummy now, sweetheart,” she said and carried the little girl carefully downstairs to the kitchen where Vicky Mendelson, Laura’s closest friend since they had been students together at Bradfield University, was tending a large and aromatic pot over the stove. Vicky’s enthusiastic adoption of an earth mother role had initially startled Laura and now occasionally caused her to wonder what she was missing.

  “There, I told you I could bath a baby if pushed,” she said triumphantly, putting Naomi down on the floor where she tottered delightedly towards her mother. “It’s not some arcane skill you need a degree in, is it.”

  “Well done,” Vicky said noncommitally. She wiped a smear of bubble bath foam from the shoulder of Laura’s deep fuschia shirt before picking Naomi up and putting her in her high chair. “You’re all dressed up too. I just wonder how long you can go on borrowing my kids when you so obviously want your own.”

  “Ouch,” Laura said. “Is it so obvious?”

  “Of course it is, you idiot.”

  “Well, a wedding looks as
if it may be on the cards this year,” she said. “As for the rest, we’ll have to wait and see.”

  Vicky parked her wooden spoon carefully and gave Laura a hug.

  “That’s great news,” she said. “We did introduce you so I feel some responsibility when he makes you miserable. I like Michael, though he’s obviously not the easiest man in the world.”

  “You could say that,” Laura said with a wry grin. She glanced at her watch slightly anxiously. “Will David be long? I’m supposed to be fetching Joyce from the Heights and then having dinner with my father at the Clarendon. He’s on a flying visit — for some mysterious purposes of his own, of course, not simply to see me.”

  “He’s here, I think,” Vicky said. “I just heard the car.” And even as she spoke the front door opened and David Mendelson, preceded by two excited sons, came down the hall and into the kitchen. David kissed his wife, his baby daughter and then Laura while Daniel and Nathan milled about both telling anyone who would listen what they had done at their after-school computer club.

  “Whoa, whoa,” David said at last, pushing the boys towards the table which was set for their tea. “Laura, you said on the mobile you wanted to talk to me. Shall we have a drink in the other room and leave this gang to eat?”

  Laura shot an apologetic glance at Vicky, contentedly surrounded by the family she envied, and followed David into the calm of the sitting room where he poured her a vodka and tonic without being asked, and a Scotch for himself.

  “Problems?” he asked. David too was an old student friend and now used his legal training as a member of the Crown Prosecution Service where his work had often brought him into contact with Michael Thackeray. The two men had formed a firm friendship, something both David and Laura knew was an unusual event in Thackeray’s life, and it was round the dinner table in the next room that Laura had first set instantly interested eyes on her lover.

  “Just an informal query really,” Laura said. “I’ve been covering this attack today on the young Asian girls, and it’s only a day or so since I witnessed a really nasty bit of harassment in the street — two Asian woman minding their own business and a gang of lads making their lives a misery. I want to write a piece about it all tomorrow and I wondered whether the CPS had any policy on prosecuting these racists. They seem to be getting away with it to me.”

  “You’ve talked to Michael about this, presumably?” David said cautiously.

  “He just says that the minor stuff is left to the uniformed police. It’s not CID’s concern unless a serious crime’s been committed — like the acid attack, presumably. Or unless there’s some concerted campaign going on. And I’m beginning to wonder about that.”

  “Yes, that attack on the young girl was pretty horrific,” David said. “It’s not just the Asian community that’s being threatened either. My father tells me that there’s been an outbreak of swastika graffiti around the synagogue. Of course, they tend to keep quiet about it, though I’m really not sure they should.” As a not-very-observant Jew married to a gentile, David was not a very frequent visitor to Bradfield’s small synagogue.

  “So there’s a nasty racist group taking on anyone and everyone they don’t like?”

  “I think so, yes. But as far as prosecutions are concerned, we rely on the police to bring us the suspects. You know that. And so far they’ve not come up with anyone much, as far as I know.”

  “You can’t make it any sort of priority?”

  “That would be down to the Chief Constable. Or some sort of national initiative. We can only take action on what the police bring us,” David said.

  “Do you get the impression that the police aren’t very interested? The top brass I mean, at county?” Laura asked carefully.

  “I don’t think it’s a priority,” David said. “But for Christ’s sake don’t quote me on that. My boss would go bananas.” He hesitated for a moment then seemed to come to a decision.

  “I shouldn’t really be telling you this, so you’d better protect your sources or I’ll be out of a job.”

  Laura sat very still, her face serious.

  “You know me well enough,” she said. David nodded.

  “Last year we initiated a police investigation into a man called Ricky Pickles. CID were pretty sure that he was behind a pretty obnoxious letter campaign to ethnic community leaders, including the Jewish community, which is how I came to hear of it.”

  “Michael was involved in this?” Laura asked.

  “No, it was organised from county HQ. But he probably knew it was going on. Anyway, a lot of evidence was accumulated about Pickles and his friends. They were running some sort of far right splinter group and we were pretty sure they were behind the threatening letters. But in the end the whole thing collapsed. You know we have to reckon that there’s a fifty per cent chance of a prosecution succeeding and in this case it was decided there wasn’t enough evidence for that. So it’s not as if the authorities haven’t been trying. But it’s hard to pin down, this sort of crime. Conspiracy always is.”

  “Pickles,” Laura said. “Where does this splinter group hang out then?”

  “Laura, you mustn’t go anywhere near these people. They say they’re only involved in legitimate political activity but I think they’re very dangerous,” David said, his face instantly anxious. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it …”

  “They’ll wreck this town if they get away with chucking acid at schoolchildren,” Laura said, her expression closed and angry.

  “You’ve no evidence that they were involved,” David protested.

  “No, it just gives me an idea where to direct my questions, that’s all,” Laura said. “Tomorrow I’ll go right to the top and ask the Chief Constable what the hell he’s going to do about acid attacks on little girls on the way to school. And whether or not Pickles and his friends are still being investigated.”

  “He won’t like that,” David said.

  “I don’t suppose he will. But it’s a fair question. And I’ll talk to the police locally about what they’re doing to protect vulnerable groups, including people who go to the synagogue.” She drained her glass quickly as David smiled faintly in a way which, she thought, could just have been encouraging. “I must go or else Joyce will be rampaging around the Heights looking for me and Dad will be knocking back far too many G and Ts in the Clarendon bar. Say my farewells to your gang for me, will you?”

  David saw his guest out of the house and into her Golf which was parked under the trees in the leafy street outside. He watched the car thoughtfully until the lights disappeared down a bend on the hill in the direction of the town centre. A beam of light directed at the murky underworld of extremist groups might be just what Bradfield needed, he thought. On the other hand, it might provide the spark for the explosion that a lot of people dreaded but half expected.

  Sergeant Kevin Mower was definitely a believer in shining the brightest possible searchlights into murky corners of society. He had grown up on a south London high-rise estate where he had lived and gone to school with children from a rainbow of different nationalities and ethnic identities. When his mother had regularly retreated into a surreal world of her own, some stability had been brought to his chaotic life by a motherly Indian neighbour. He had never known his father who, his mother had told him when she mentioned him at all, had been Greek or possibly Turkish Cypriot. He had loved and lusted after and invariably lost women of every shade of skin-colour and when — very rarely — he considered the prospect of having children of his own he fully expected that they would be a shade or two darker than he was. He was not by nature a crusader, he had simply accepted from an early age what his experience had taught him: that human beings come in a variety of shades and with a variety of traditions as well as personalities and had lived his life without letting that bother him in any way. Now he found himself, somewhat to his consternation, in a small town where two different cultures appeared to live parallel lives without many people remarking that this was in any wa
y peculiar let alone undesirable. And he found himself disoriented by it.

  DC Mohammed Sharif, who called himself Omar, was different, Mower thought, as he trawled with the junior officer through computer details on local extremists, and he did not just mean because his skin was several shades darker than Mower’s own. Omar thought that a slight difference in skin colour was not just important but crucial in all sorts of ways. Omar was not in any sense colourblind. He was acutely colour sensitive, and religion and ethnicity sensitive too. He was too intelligent not to realise that the police force was bound not, discriminate in any way, but he did discriminate personally if not officially, minutely and, he no doubt hoped, invisibly. But it was not invisible to Mower. He knew from experience that Omar did not like people of African descent and that he distrusted Hindus and Sikhs on the rare occasions that he came across them in Bradfield. He knew that Omar did not like women in positions of any authority and was not even quite comfortable with women officers of equal rank. And he knew that Omar was pretty happy with some of what Mower regarded as the local Muslim community’s more deeply sexist traditions. All this Mower knew by instinct as much as observation because Omar was very careful to hide his prejudices and beliefs and it took antennae as sensitive as Mower’s to probe beneath the young Muslim officer’s smoothly cheerful and apparently modern exterior.