“Come on, Omar,” he said. “What do you really think about all this? Are we looking for another body?”
The younger man shrugged.
“It’s possible, sarge,” he said. “Don’t imagine I don’t think that, and wouldn’t work as hard as anyone to find out who did it.”
“I wasn’t suggesting that you wouldn’t,” Mower said. “But watch yourself. If we get into investigating the dark side of Muslim traditions, runaway girls and family honour and all that stuff, you’ll have a crucial part to play, and they’ll be watching you from on high, believe me.”
“You mean they don’t trust me because I’m a Paki?” Sharif asked, letting his anger gleam for a moment in his eyes.
“I mean you’ll have to prove you can be trusted,” Mower said. “D’you think the family will be trying to hunt her down, however much they deny it?”
“Quite possibly,” Sharif said uneasily.
“Can we find out who does the hunting? We need to know. Will people know at the mosque, the community centre? Or do you know yourself?”
“No I don’t,” Sharif said, struggling not very successfully to hide his discomfort.
“So you’ll make inquiries, then?”
Sharif shrugged.
“If that’s what you want, sarge,” he said. Mower glanced at him curiously, taking in the angry eyes and frozen expression on his colleague’s face.
“Surely you’re not into all this tradition yourself, are you? Are you going to let your parents choose your wife for you, for God’s sake?”
“Maybe,” Sharif said. “And if I do it’ll be no one’s business at work, will it? What gives you, or anyone else, the right to criticise?”
Mower sighed.
“You’re going to make life difficult for yourself,” he said. “That’s all I’m saying. You know what the job’s like. They play all the right tunes on equality but there’s plenty still resent it and they can make your life a misery if they think you’re stepping out of line. Believe me. I know. See what you can find out about what the Khan family is up to, right?”
“Right,” Sharif said.
Chapter Twelve
Earnshaws mill had stood four-square on the hill above Aysgarth Lane for more than a century, a great looming stone battleship of a building, its towering chimney dominating the hills of Victorian terraced cottages for miles around. But where once the structure had shaken daily with the deafening clatter of a thousand looms, large sections of the fourstorey building were now closed off, some of them structurally unsafe, and the huge cobbled yard, where as little as twenty years earlier the bulging hessian bales of British and Australian wool had been stacked several stories high waiting to be winched to the upper floors, was now often deserted. Thackeray drove in past a couple of desultory security guards and parked next to the handful of staff cars which used the yard as a car-park. He glanced up curiously at the decaying, blank-windowed relic of the industrial age. It was, he thought, quite ostentatiously ornate, a florid symbol of a confidence long dissipated and a wealth now only a fading memory in these steep Yorkshire valleys. He did not see how Earnshaws could survive. The world was moving on at a frantic and accelerating pace, leaving it high and dry.
But that was not a thought which he wished to share with Frank Earnshaw, into whose wood-panelled office he was ushered by a secretary five minutes later. The room shuddered slightly to the rhythm of the few machines which were still active in the cavernous depths of the mill. Thackeray had come to see the mill’s managing director alone and in person in deference to his superiors’ sensitivities. He did not at this stage want to interview Earnshaw again in any formal way, but he thought there were some aspects of the case that the dead man’s father might illuminate for him one-to-one, without the presence of officers taking notes or taperecorders inhibiting every word they exchanged.
“Have you got any news, Mr. Thackeray?” Earnshaw asked, his face more grey and lined than the last time Thackeray had seen him. “My wife’s finding this very hard.” And you too, Thackeray thought, his sympathy automatically with any bereaved father. He knew every bitter step of that road only too well.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But not news in the sense you mean it. We’re no further forward in the main part of our investigation. If you asked me who the prime suspect is I’d have to tell you that I’ve no idea yet.”
Earnshaw nodded, and gazed out of the office’s tall window over the roofs of the little houses which snaked down the hill below the mill towards the town centre. They had been built for Earnshaws workers and still housed most of them, although a whole history of failing industry and lost Empire had intervened.
“I wanted to talk to you a bit less formally than last time about your family as a whole, about how they got on.” Earnshaw looked wary but nodded.
“For instance, you’ve just the two sons — were they friends?” Thackeray asked.
Earnshaw turned his now bleak gaze onto the policeman and shrugged.
“More Cain and Abel than David and Jonathan? Is that what you’re thinking, Chief Inspector? Well, in one sense I suppose you’re right. They weren’t great friends, no. They never were, really, not even when they were little lads. They were always very different and Matt was always jealous of Simon. I think he thought that I approved of Simon more than I approved of him, and he was right of course. Matt’s been nowt but trouble in many ways, at school, at college. The drink started early on, his marriage never looked as if it would work — and it didn’t. When Simon left the company I was deeply disappointed. My father was appalled. I don’t think he’s seen Simon since, cut him out of his life completely … I’d always regarded Simon as my successor as well …”
“So Simon was the blue-eyed boy?”
“Aye, I suppose you could say that. Not only mine, his grandfather’s too. My father wanted to fire Matt more than once. I have to confess that I couldn’t ever bring myself to that point but he was — is — a disappointment.”
“Your father is still actively involved in running the company then?” Thackeray asked.
“Not active in the day-to-day running, no,” Earnshaw said. “He’s not fit enough for that now. But he’s still a director and he makes his views known.” Earnshaw shrugged ruefully and Thackeray, thinking of the tall gaunt old man in his cluttered, empty house, guessed that George made his views known pretty forcefully on occasion.
“It’s a difficult time right now, as you probably know. We need to make changes here but it’s proving very hard to get the directors to agree. You could say my father heads the status quo party. He believes that trade will pick up and Earnshaws will be restored to its former glory. He’s living in cloud cuckoo land, to be honest. The textile industry in this country is as good as dead. There are only two options for this place. We go bust and someone else acquires the site dirt cheap and redevelops, or we try to diversify and regenerate ourselves, which means bringing in some extra capital. In the meantime we’re making economies and trying to hang on. That’s what all the trouble with the union is about.”
“And that’s the line you’re pursuing personally? Hanging on until you can negotiate a rescue package?” Thackeray asked carefully, not wanting to let Earnshaw know of his contact with Jack Ackroyd and his apparent interest in the future of the mill.
“Right, but it’s complicated,” Earnshaw said. “The way the company is structured, deliberately structured by my father, I may say, three out of four of the family directors have to agree to any major strategy. With my father and I at loggerheads the two boys’ shareholdings are crucial. I think I’ve persuaded Matt that my proposals make sense, although he tells me that his grandfather’s been trying to persuade him different. But that still leaves Simon’s shares. That’s what Matt wanted to discuss the night we realised Simon was missing, when he didn’t turn up at the Clarendon. I’d already talked to Simon by phone and I really thought I’d got him on side but last week he seemed to be backing off again, making difficulties �
�� His priority seemed to be getting some community benefit out of any changes which were made — which wasn’t impossible. There’s all sorts of ways you can develop a property like this.”
“But if you can’t get an agreement …?
“We carry on as we are, and eventually we go bust — sooner rather than later, I’d say,” Earnshaw said harshly. “My father can’t see that but it’s inevitable.”
“Do you know who’ll inherit Simon’s shares?”
“I don’t even know if he’s made a will,” Frank Earnshaw said. “If he hasn’t I suppose they come back to the family. I’m not sure what the legal position would be.”
“That’s something we’ll have to investigate. You do understand that,” Thackeray said.
“Good God, man, d’you think one of us killed Simon for his shares? The idea’s bizarre.” Earnshaw looked genuinely shocked.
“I don’t think anything at this stage, Mr. Earnshaw,” Thackeray said. “But you have to appreciate that in a murder investigation nothing’s sacred, nothing’s off-limits. It’s not a pleasant process for the victim’s family, even if they’re as innocent as the driven snow.”
“Not innocent till proved guilty then? More possibly guilty till proved innocent?”
“That’s about it,” Thackeray admitted.
“Did you track down Simon’s alleged girlfriend?” Earnshaw asked.
“We think we may have identified her although we haven’t actually found her yet,” Thackeray said. “But we’ve some more inquiries to make before we can be sure.” Thackeray did not want to broach the subject of Saira Khan with Simon Earnshaw’s family until he had a clearer idea of whether she had been spirited out of Bradfield by her own family, in spite of their denials, or indeed whether she was dead or alive.
“It does seem possible that she may be of Asian origin,” he conceded, not averse to watching Earnshaw’s reaction to that piece of information.
“Asian?” Earnshaw said, visibly surprised. “We had no idea.”
“Would it have caused you and your family a problem, if you’d known? Was that why Simon didn’t tell you about her?”
“Not me, or Simon’s mother,” Earnshaw said, quickly enough to be convincing. “If she was fond of Simon I’d like to meet her. But my father wouldn’t have been too happy about it. I think it’d be fair to say he’s had more difficulty than most in coming to terms with immigration to Bradfield. He wouldn’ t employ Asian workers when they first began to come over. Brute economics forced his hand in the end, but he didn’ t like it. He spent some time in India just after the war when he was in the RAF. Came back after independence. He never talked about it at all but I think he saw things there that shocked him. It was pretty bloody business, wasn’t it, the partition of India? Whatever happened out there, when Pakistanis turned up here in the 1960s it seemed to upset him more than most.”
“You’re sure your father hasn’t seen Simon recently? Had a row with him, perhaps?”
“Obviously I can’t be absolutely sure, but I don’t think he’s seen him for a long while,” Earnshaw said. “But if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, Chief Inspector, you must realise that he’s an unlikely murder suspect even if he is a bit of a racist. You may not know that my father has prostate cancer. It’s a slow disease but it’s killing him. His doctors don’t reckon he has much more than six months to live. Unfortunately, to put it brutally, we can’t wait for him to go before we tackle the problems of the mill. We’ve got to move faster than that.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Thackeray said. “But I may need to talk to him again.”
“I’m sure there’s nothing I can do to stop you,” Earnshaw said, his face suddenly drawn with weariness.
Amina Khan, in a long grey coat and hijab, caused a slight rustle of interest amongst the mainly young, white and welldressed clientele as she came into the café bar to meet Laura Ackroyd that lunchtime. It was not an environment much frequented by evidently devout Muslim women on their own and the fact that she was momentarily the focus of attention might have explained the look of anxiety with which she scanned the tables in search of Laura.
“What can I get you?” Laura asked when Amina eventually eased her way between the crowded tables and sat down. “Coffee?” Amina nodded and Laura realised just how strained she looked beneath the severe head-covering.
“Is there still no news of your sister?” Laura asked when she had dealt with the waitress. Amina’s eyes filled with tears which she dashed away impatiently.
“I do know she’s actually missing,” Laura went on. “I know, even though your brother tried to deny it when I went to see him. Did he tell you that?”
Amina shook her head.
“I didn’t know you’d seen Sayeed,” she said. “My father and my brother are saying very little, although I can see they’re worried.” She doesn’t know yet what the police suspect, Laura thought, and wondered as she stirred her own latte whether she should tell her.
“So how can I help?” Laura asked eventually, deciding for the moment to keep her counsel about what she had learned from Michael Thackeray.
“I know where she is now and it’s not good news,” Amina said. “I had a letter. It was sent to the school, no doubt so that my father wouldn’t see it.”
“So she’s alive?” Laura said quietly, filled with relief at that.
“When she wrote it, at least,” Amina said. “But she’s run away with a man.”
“Ah,” Laura said cautiously. “So why are you telling me all this now?”
“Because you’ve discovered she’s missing, and now I want you to forget all that. I don’t want anyone else to know about what’s happened, especially my father and brother. I want you to stop asking questions about my sister.”
“Don’t you think your father will try to find her?”
“They’ll be furious, and they may try. Though I don’t think it will be that easy. The letter was posted in Paris. She seems to have gone abroad.”
“Can I see it?” Laura asked, wondering where this conversation would leave her in relation to the police inquiry. Amina took a tightly folded envelope from the small black bag she had placed on the table in front of her and passed it to Laura who glanced at the handwritten address and French stamp before unfolding the letter and beginning to read.
My dearest sister,
By the time you read this I’ll have gone away. Already I feel like something out of one of those classic novels that we used to read at school. I know you’ll think I’ve dishonoured our family and you’ll never want to see me again, like poor Kitty in “Pride and Prejudice”. Do you remember? I know you’ll think I am weak and treacherous which is why I want you to have this letter to remember me by, so that you’ll know that I did try to live by the rules you believe in and that I’ve been taught too. But in the end it didn’t make sense for me and I’ve made my own decisions. I hope one day you and the rest of the family will be able to forgive me.
You see, I’ve met someone I love very much. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t marry and that’s what we intend to do. You’ve been so busy with your work, which I admire, that I don’t think you’ve noticed how much Father has been pressuring me to go home with him when I graduate and marry our cousin Ahmed. But even before I met the man I love I’d decided I didn’t want that. It’s difficult enough to live in two cultures without constantly being pulled back into the old one by traditions that my English friends regard as unacceptable. I know you’ll think I’m very wrong but I want an English marriage between equals. I’ve thought and thought about this, and can’t accept anything else. I don’t believe any more that this is immoral. don’t believe I’ve been immodest in getting to know my lover, although I know you’ll think that. I do admire your decision to live a more traditional life, but I can’t do that.
I won’t tell you where I am going, and I won’t contact you. I know Papa and Sayeed will want to seek me out and punish me and I hope we’ll be f
ar enough away to prevent that.
Don’t think too badly of me, my dearest sister. I wish we could have stayed close together for the rest of our lives as we always imagined we would when we were little girls.
Your loving sister,
Saira
“I suppose you sympathise,” Amina said angrily when she saw that Laura had finished reading and was staring into her coffee cup.
“I sympathise with you both,” Laura said. “I think trying to live in one culture while surrounded by a quite different one must be incredibly hard.”
“Not if you live according to our faith,” Amina said. “But I didn’t come here to talk about that. I just wanted to ask you to forget that we ever talked about Saira. I’ve talked to her friends at college and we all agree that it’s best if our parents, the mosque, the rest of them, don’t know anything about all this. It’s safer that way. Let them go and never be found. That’s all.”
“There’s just one problem with that,” Laura said. “You obviously don’t know, but I’m afraid the police are looking for Saira too. I’m surprised they haven’t been to see you by now.”
“But why?” Amina protested. “Did you tell them about her? How can they be looking for her when no one has reported her missing? What have you done?”
Laura took hold of the agitated young woman’s hand.
“It wasn’t me,” she said. “And it’s worse than you think. Far worse. The police have discovered that Saira’s boyfriend was Simon Earnshaw, the student who was found dead in Broadley a few days ago. They want to talk to Saira and I don’t think they’re going to take no for an answer.”
“He’s dead?” Amina said, almost to herself, but the horror stark in her face. “What will she do now? Whatever will she do now?”
“If she’s any sense she’ll come back to Bradfield and talk to the police,” Laura said.
“You don’t understand,” Amina said. “You don’t understand anything. You liberals think you do, but you don’t.”
Dead Reckoning Page 15
