“You know I am careful,” Laura said. “But I have to do my job. We can’t ignore the Muslim community in the Gazette just because there’s a few fundamentalist idiots around. Anyway, I want to talk about these issues in the radio interviews. It’s worse if it’s all covered up, isn’t it?”
“The whole town is like a pent-up volcano,” Thackeray said. “It means policing’s like walking on egg-shells. We really need to catch the yobs who attacked the Malik girl, but so far we haven’t a clue where to look. And you never heard me say that, Ms. Ackroyd.” Thackeray concluded by pulling Laura closer. “Come on,” he said softly in her ear. “I’ve got to work this weekend and we’ve better things to do than try to sort out Bradfield’s race relations at this time of night. Much better.”
Chapter Eight
George Earnshaw himself opened the door to his visitors from police headquarters that Saturday morning himself. He was a tall man, but painfully stooped, and his clothes — baggy twill slacks and a blue-grey tweed sports jacket of antique cut - hung off a frame so gaunt that he could have been a starving refugee from some cataclysmic war. The old man stood for a moment with the door held half open as if sizing DCI Thackeray and Sergeant Mower up carefully with sharp, pale eyes before allowing them over his threshold. It was a smaller house than Thackeray had expected, a modern ‘executive’ style dwelling down a narrow lane which had once led only to a couple of farms on the edge of Broadley Moor, but which was now lined on each side by an anonymous development of marginally individual detached houses faced with an approximation of Yorkshire stone.
“You’d best come in, Mr. Thackeray,” Earnshaw said. “Although I’m not at all sure I can tell you anything useful. I haven’t seen my grandson Simon for a long while. As I’m sure you’ve discovered by now, there was a family falling out and Simon went his own way.”
He showed them into a sitting room with French windows leading onto a well-stocked but tiny garden. It was comfortably, though not luxuriously, furnished every flat surface cluttered with books and pictures, photographs and nicknacks, in no apparent order. The atmosphere was warm and stuffy and Earnshaw waved them into armchairs next to a flickering gas ‘coal fire’. Mower chose instead to take a chair further away next to the window and Earnshaw raised an eyebrow at this show of independence before lowering himself carefully into what was obviously his own favourite well-cushioned chair close to the source of heat. He was deathly pale and his limbs trembled slightly as he moved around to find the most comfortable position.
“It’s good of you to see us, Mr. Earnshaw,” Thackeray said, waving away the offer of a drink. Earnshaw poured himself a large whiskey from a decanter strategically placed at his elbow, stretching long legs awkwardly from his low chair. “Do you live here alone?”
“My wife died some years back,” Earnshaw said dismissively. “I’ve a woman who comes in to tidy up for me.” It was as if his deceased wife had served no more useful purpose than the cleaning woman, Thackeray thought.
“I decided then that Frank should have the family home and I’d move to somewhere smaller. The grandsons were still teenagers then and needed the space. These places had just been built and seemed big enough for what I needed.” The old man gazed for a moment at the flickering blue and yellow flames in the fireplace. “You can never tell how things will turn out, can you?” he murmured. “I had hoped that eventually Simon would marry and take on that house in turn from his father …and eventually run the mill.” Earnshaw’s voice drifted away.
“But Simon went his own way?” Thackeray prompted. “Were you disappointed about that?”
“Oh, yes, I was disappointed,” Simon’s grandfather said, his voice bitter and Thackeray gathered that disappointment was probably an inadequate word to describe Earnshaw’s feelings. “Matthew never had the same staying power. Full of big schemes but never able to see them through. Failed his degree, you know. Frittered his time away at college, I dare say. He wasn’t what Earnshaws Mill needed and he fell apart when his wife left him and I can’t say I was surprised.”
“When did you last see Simon, Mr. Earnshaw?” Thackeray asked carefully, conscious of Jack Longley’s insistence that he conduct the interview with the old man in person. Even approaching his eighties, Longley had said, no doubt repeating the assistant chief constable’s injunctions, the elder Earnshaw was a name to be conjured with in Bradfield and the time a sensitive one with the mill apparently in serious trouble.
“I was trying to think before you came,” Earnshaw said, glancing at a side table where a series of photographs of two fair-haired young men were displayed. “It’s not since he packed the job in and signed on for this daft course at the university. How long’s that? Two years or so? You lose track of time at my age.”
“His tutor told us that he would be finishing his course this summer,” Thackeray said.
“Yes, well, we had a right old set-to when he came to tell me what he was planning,” Earnshaw said. “I’ll not pretend I was best pleased because I wasn’t. I could see that without Simon young Matthew would run out of control and the business would suffer.” The old man’s creased face closed and his eyes were cold. “I told Simon to bugger off, if you want the truth,” he said.
“And you’ve not seen him since?”
“No.” Earnshaw spoke flatly, his face like stone. “He’s not been round and I’ve not invited him.”
“Or heard from him — by phone, letter, anything?”
“No, not a word.”
“Not even a birthday card? From your favourite grandson?” Mower put in from the far side of the room where he was conscientiously taking notes.
Earnshaw flashed him a furious look.
“He did once send me a card,” he said. “I sent it back. He never bothered me again.”
“So you wouldn’t know anything about his private life, a girlfriend for instance? We think he may have been planning to marry.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Earnshaw said, with a finality which indicated that he would not care either. Thackeray sighed as another avenue of inquiry seemed to close.
“But as I understand it Simon maintained his shareholding in the firm?” he eventually suggested carefully. “Surely you, or your son, would need to consult Simon in present circumstances.”
“I leave the day-to-day running of the business to my son Frank now,” Earnshaw said sharply. “He consults me when he chooses to. Nothing more.”
“But Matthew was planning to meet Simon apparently to discuss business on the day he died, or just after …”
“I have no idea what they arranged. No one told me about it. There was no reason why they should. Simon hasn’t been to company meetings since he gave up his working directorship. The rest of us have taken the decisions. There’s no reason why anything should change now. Frank has everything in hand.”
“I thought …” Thackeray began, but injudiciously as it turned out.
“There’s no reason for anything to change now,” Earnshaw said again with a passion bordering on venom. “Simon let us all down and I’ve not regarded him as my grandson since he gave up his job. I had high hopes of that young man, but he flung it all back in our faces. As far as I’m concerned, he’s already been dead for years.”
“Whew,” Mower said as the two police-officers settled themselves back in the car for the ten mile drive back into town. “What did you make of that, guv?”
“He’s a man who can hate,” Thackeray said. “I’d like to have been a fly on the wall when he broke with Simon. But unless he’s a lot stronger than he looks I can’t see any way he could have dumped his grandson over a cliff, even if he had some motive we don’t know about. He looks seriously unwell to me.”
“Odd man,” Mower said. “It looks as though he’s got mementos of his entire life stuffed into that house. Did you see the photograph of him in RAF uniform? Must have been during the war, I suppose, a man that age.”
“Or national service,” Thackeray said absently.
>
“He had some Indian bits and pieces too.” Mower had reasons of his own for noticing Indian arts and crafts and Thackeray merely nodded.
“What I’d like to know,” he said slowly. “What I’d really like to know is how well the two brothers got on after Simon dropped out. You’d imagine Matthew would be quite pleased to be left as the heir apparent in spite of his evident handicaps as a businessman, but when I talked to him and his parents he seemed to resent the fact that Simon had left the firm. I think we need to do a bit more sniffing around the family, just in case. You know the statistics. Ninety per cent of murder victims are bumped off by their own nearest and dearest.”
“Money, jealousy or revenge?” Mower asked. “Or any combination of the above?”
“What’s the alternative?” Thackeray asked, as Mower negotiated the steep hill down from the centre of Broadley village to the valley below. “Random violence over a clapped out old Volvo? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Random violence seldom does,” Mower said.
That lunchtime Laura grabbed a salad and a yoghurt in the town centre and walked slowly up the hill towards the university. A dozen years had altered the institution she had known well: the students were more diverse, the buildings shabbier and the sense of overcrowding more oppressive as she pushed her way through the bustling students’ union to the women’s office at the back of the building. She was expected. She was planning a Saturday afternoon shopping trip but agreed to spare an hour on a trip up the hill in response to a call on her mobile the previous afternoon from a young women who said she was the sister of Farida Achmed.
“Farida?” Laura had said stupidly, her meeting at the women’s centre to talk about street harassment slipping her mind for a moment in the busy newsroom. “Oh, yes, Farida. Of course …”
“I’m her sister, Fatima,” the voice said. “She gave me your number. I’m a student at the university. Farida said you were nice and wanted to write about the problems of Asian girls, and I couldn’t think who else to call. Can we meet? I’ve got something you might be interested in. I need to tell someone …” She had broken off, her voice full of anxiety and Laura had not had the heart to turn her down. She had arranged to meet her the next day.
The girl was waiting for her, slumped in a chair in the women’s room, her white scarf draped around her shoulders above jeans and a loose yellow shirt.
“Thank you for coming,” she said.
“So what can I do for you?” Laura asked, settling herself down next to the girl and accepting a cup of weak coffee from a machine in the corner of the room.
“I’m sorry,” Farida said. “I know you must be very busy. It may be nothing, but one of my friends on the pharmacy course, someone I’ve known since school, hasn’t come back this term and no one seems to have seen her for nearly a week. I’m worried about her. I can’t get any reply from her mobile phone.”
“Have you asked her family where she is?” Laura said, thinking that this was probably a wasted journey.
“Of course I have. She moved to Eckersley with her family and I went out there to call on her, to see if she was ill or something. But her brother came to the door and more or less told me to go away and mind my own business. Saira would be back soon, he said.”
“In other words she wasn’t at home? Is that how you took it?”
“I can’t see why he wouldn’t let me see her if she was there,” Fatima said, looking miserable. “We’ve been friends for so long.”
“What do you think has happened? What are you afraid of?” Laura asked.
“What we’re all afraid of,” Fatima said. “That she’s been sent back to Pakistan to be married off to someone she hasn’t met.”
Laura swallowed her mouthful of coffee too quickly and nearly choked.
“Sorry,” she said. “Are we talking about forced marriage here?”
“Not necessarily forced,” Fatima said. “Saira said there’s been talk at home about her marrying a cousin who lives near Lahore. She’s never met him of course, and apparently he speaks no English, but they wanted her to go out and meet him. She was saying she must finish her course and get her degree before she even thinks about marriage. And she’s afraid that even if she didn’t like this cousin there’d be a lot of pressure on her to say yes so that he could come to this country. I told you, it’s what we’re all scared of, especially if we get to university and have that freedom and the chance of a profession. We want to live our own lives just like everyone else in this country.”
“But your parents still want to arrange your marriages?”
“Arrange, force? What’s the difference. In the end we get very little choice, especially if we agree to go back to Pakistan for the arranging to be done there,” Fatima said, her eyes filling with tears, and Laura guessed that she might be under similar pressure to Saira herself.
“Have the tutors here noticed Saira’s absence?” Laura asked.
“I don’t know. Term’s only just started. The classes are very big. They may not notice until she fails to hand some work in.”
“I think you’d better talk to the university people and get them to make some inquiries,” Laura said. “She may simply be ill or away from home for some very innocent reason.”
“So why isn’t she answering her mobile?”
“Perhaps it’s been stolen, or she’s lost it. It happens.”
“It’s only a pay as you talk one,” Fatima said. “We buy those so we don’t get bills going home.” She grinned slightly shamefacedly at this admission of deceit.
“Did Saira have a boyfriend?” Laura asked. Fatima looked down for a moment at her hands and shrugged. When she looked up again Laura saw the fear in her eyes.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I think she’d have told me if she had. She comes from an educated family. Her sister is a teacher and her brother is a lawyer …”
“Not Sayeed Khan?” Laura said. “I met him the other day at the home of that young girl who was attacked in Aysgarth Lane.”
“Yes, that would be Sayeed. He does a lot of work around there. But that’s the point. This is a family which wants their daughters to get a good education. They were really pleased when Saira came to university, she said. You’d think they could cope with these things, but you never know. The mosque is very powerful. And there are risks …”
“What sort of risks?” Laura asked sharply.
“Girls who step out of line are hunted down,” Fatima whispered. “It’s all about family honour, izzat.”
“So you think not a boyfriend?”
“She might not have told even me if there was,” Fatima said. “It can be dangerous.”
Laura sighed, seeing no way to resolve the girl’s fears.
“If you like I could ask her family where she is, but there’s no guarantee they’d tell me. Unless you have a really strong reason for thinking she may be in some sort of danger, it’s up to her family to report her missing to the police if she really is missing.”
“Would you do that?” Fatima asked, her eyes full of tears. She wrote down the address of the Khan family in Eckersley and passed the sheet of paper to Laura. “Her sister, Amina, works at the Muslim school in Aysgarth. I don’t know her myself.”
“Amina Khan?” Laura said, glancing at the paper Fatima had given her. “Yes, of course, I met her when I met your sister. We were talking about harassment — and that was before this girl got acid thrown at her in the street. I’m doing some radio programmes soon and want to talk about some of these issues. Perhaps you’d like to come on and talk about arranged marriages?”
Fatima shook her head vigorously.
“Oh, no, you’ve no idea how angry that would make the community. They don’t want to talk about anything like that in public.”
“Which leaves you caught between the two cultures.”
“Oh, yes,” Fatima said bitterly. “Trapped. But no one, and I mean no one, is allowed to talk about that. And if you, as a white person
, tried, they’d just accuse you of being racist and not understanding Muslim culture.”
“I’d take a chance if young women like you want the issue discussed,” Laura said angrily. “We wouldn’t need to use your real name.”
“It’s too risky. You don’t have to live with our fathers and the men at the mosque,” Fatima said flatly.
As Sergeant Mower drove him up the hill towards Earnshaws mill, Michael Thackeray was thinking how much he hated cases where someone in the hierarchy above him seemed to expect him to tiptoe around on egg-shells. He could see no reason for treating Simon Earnshaw’s family with any more or less deference than was due to the family of any murder victim. A certain respect for the bereaved was fine. But in the light of the fact that most murder victims were killed by their own relatives, anything more than that verged, in his view, on neglect of duty. And if Frank Earnshaw was over reticent about his business affairs and Simon’s involvement in them, then he would not scruple to try to find out what he wanted to know by other means.
Which was why he had decided to take time out of the office and accompany Mower on his proposed visit to the shop-front office of the mill-workers union, which stood less than a hundred yards from the monumental entrance to the mill yard itself. Mower pulled up to the kerb, and eyed the crowd of mainly Asian workers who, although it was Saturday, were gathered on the pavement outside the office.
“I reckon the Earnshaws have got serious bother here,” he said, with a grin. “Trubble at’mill and all that. I thought we’d moved on a bit from all that.”
“Maybe not,” Thackeray said. “Though it could be all froth and no substance.”
“The Gazette says they want to cut wages. I can’t see that going down a treat.”
“Closing the mill won’t go down a treat either,” Thackeray said. “Unemployment round here’s bad enough already, particularly amongst the Asians.”
They got out of the car and pushed their way to the office door through a murmur of suspicion if not outright hostility which made the hair on the back of Thackeray’s neck bristle. The mood of the men milling about on the pavement was volatile and he was sure that it would only take a single spark for the tension to flare into violence.
Dead Reckoning Page 10
