Dead Reckoning

by Patricia Hall

  “Good,” Sharif said. He and Mower followed Thackeray in.

  “Right,” the DCI said. “We can’t go on like this. Let’s look at progress to see if we can help calm things down a bit in Aysgarth Lane. Kevin, any developments with the Malik girl?”

  “Not a lot, guv,” Mower said. “House-to-house inquiries have turned up one witness prepared to say she saw the boys running away and she’s sure they weren’t Asian, which isn’t much of a surprise. She says their hoods had slipped back a bit as they ran past her, but apart from revealing a bit of white skin she couldn’t see their faces properly even then. But she’s given us some details of clothes, height, that sort of thing.”

  “There’s a lot of white youths hang around the BPP offices,” Sharif said. “I think they’ve had some sort of recruiting drive amongst unemployed teenagers up on the Heights. I’d put money on the attackers coming from there.”

  “I’ll see what the word is on the street up there,” Mower said. “We may pick up a whisper from informants in the Grenadier.”

  “And Mohammed Iqbal? What’s the latest from the Infirmary?”

  “Still critical, guv,” Mower said. “Still unconscious. I’ve got lads checking motorbikes registered in Bradfield and the surrounding area to see if that throws up anyone of interest. What information we’ve been able to glean — which isn’t a lot with all the mayhem that’s been going on up there — says that they were heavy bikes, dark coloured, probably black, with riders in full leathers. One lad who saw them on Aysgarth Lane says that one was a Kawasaki and one a Harley, and there can’t be many of those about. So if they’re local we may be able to pin them down.”

  “Someone at Ricky Pickles’ place rides a big bike,” Sharif said. “I’ve seen it parked at the back of the offices.”

  Thackeray’s eyes brightened at that.

  “That might just justify us paying him a visit and asking him who it belongs to and where the owner was when Iqbal was attacked,” he said. “But if I know Pickles himself, he’ll have a cast iron alibi in a tea-shop in Harrogate with his great-auntie at the relevant time. He’s not a man to take risks when someone else can take them for him. You’ve not seen anyone riding the bike then?”

  “No,” Sharif admitted. “I can’t be there all the time. But the bike’s definitely been there once or twice when I’ve been there myself. I’ll make sure I get the registration number next time I’m up there.”

  “Maybe we should step up the surveillance on Pickles, guv?” Mower suggested but Thackeray shook his head.

  “I can’t justify the overtime,” he said. “Wait and see what the bike checks turn up, if anything. Now, next — and biggest - problem. Where are we with the Simon Earnshaw murder? I saw his father this morning and he’s not a happy man. He and the grandfather were there and they claim they know nothing about Simon’s relationship with Saira Khan. Kevin, I want you to catch up with Mrs Earnshaw and Matthew, and ask them the same question — urgently before the family’s had time to close ranks. Did they know about Saira Khan? I think both of them may have been in closer contact with Simon than Frank and George imagine. I also want to find out whether Simon Earnshaw left a will and if so what’s in it.”

  “Nothing like that turned up when we searched the flat,” Mower said.

  “There must be a family solicitor,” Thackeray said. “Track him down and ask him. And his bank. People sometimes store important documents with their banks.”

  “Right, guv,” Mower said.

  “Now, Omar, have you unearthed anything about Saira we need to know.”

  Sharif hesitated for no more than a second although both his colleagues noticed the pause.

  “According to one of my mates who’s close to the mosque, Sayeed Khan was worried about his sister,” he said. “Before she disappeared, I mean.”

  “Was he now? And do you think that worry might be about a white boyfriend?”

  “Could have been. Or perhaps not as serious as a boyfriend — just getting too friendly with someone at uni. Something like that.”

  “And how did your friend know that?” Thackeray pressed.

  “He knew Sayeed had been talking to the imam,” Sharif said, with obvious reluctance.

  “About what?”

  “About talking to Saira and persuading her it wasn’t a good idea,” Sharif said.

  “So we need another chat with Sayeed Khan,” Thackeray said, glancing at Mower again. He turned back to Sharif.

  “Do you think there’s any possibility that the Khan family have sent anyone looking for Saira? Could she be in danger from her own family?”

  Sharif shook his head uncomfortably.

  “I’ve not heard anything like that,” he said. “The Khans are highly respected in the community but regarded as fairly liberal. Everyone seems surprised she’s gone missing.”

  “Could you find out who might be looking for her, if anyone was?” Mower asked. Sharif shrugged.

  “Not one name?” Mower persisted.

  “I know what you’re suggesting, and I don’t know the answer, any more than you do. And after what happened last night it’s getting harder and harder to ask anyone up Aysgarth anything at all if you’re a copper, even if your skin is the right colour.”

  “Right, well, we’ll have to ask Sayeed Khan himself to tell us a bit more about what he thought his sister was up to. You can go with Kevin to check that out later,” Thackeray said.

  “And Ricky Pickles?” Sharif said, his face tense.

  “Leave Pickles for the moment until we’ve talked to him again,” Thackeray said, dismissing Sharif with a nod. When the young DC had left, Thackeray glanced at Mower.

  “Do you believe him?” he said. “About people who might hunt Saira down for the Khans, I mean?”

  “Not really,” Mower said. “I think that information is something the Asian community doesn’t want to talk about to us or anyone else. And in this case the community includes Omar. When things have calmed down a bit I’ll go up to the mosque myself and see what I can dig up.”

  “I think that would be a good idea,” Thackeray said.

  Michael Thackeray finished work late that evening and stepped from police HQ into a drizzle which drifted down from the hills to the west and brushed chilly wet fingers against eyes and ears and down the back of his neck as he hurried across the car-park. He had already told Laura that he would be even later home than usual that evening, although he had not volunteered a reason. He did not really want to admit to himself that he was at last about to make a visit which he had been putting off for weeks, ever since he had finally decided to go ahead with a divorce.

  He drove slowly out of town, up the steep road towards Lancashire, a quiet route ever since the opening of the motorway to Manchester, and then turned down a country lane which was as familiar to him as the lane to his parents’ farm had once been. But this was a road which promised no happy memories of a solitary but contented boyhood spent running wild over the moorland he still loved. The lane to Long Moor was shadowed not just by overhanging trees and the drifting rain but by a pervading sense of guilt, which he had begun to hope had left him as he inched towards an acceptance that Laura’s presence in his life might become permanent. But he could not break free of years of depression here it seemed, as he took the bends marginally too fast and had to brake hard to avoid an on-coming van whose headlights dazzled him through the wet windscreen. Heart thumping, he slowed down, content to put off the object of his journey for as long as possible the nearer he got to it.

  Long Moor Hospital was ablaze with lights as he pulled up in the visitors’ car-park. It was several months since he had been to see his wife and although he knew that the passage of time meant little to someone who seldom seemed to even recognise him when he did visit, that did not lessen his own sense of obligation to the wreck of the woman he had once loved. Sins of omission, he thought grimly as he made his way to the ward where Aileen had been confined for more than twelve years. Well, there
had been plenty of those over the years, as well as the sins of commission which had wrecked his marriage in the first place and destroyed his son as well as his wife. The priests knew how to achieve what they set out to achieve, he thought bitterly. Once in their web there was no escape, even after all this time. The mind might make a break for it, a lunge for freedom, but the threads were still ravelled around the heart, the memory, and the dreams that came in the darkest watches of the night. They might translate it into English, damp down the fires of hell, create cuddly confessors to replace the oppressive martinets of so many Catholic childhoods, but the ingrained guilt survived. It would go with him to his grave.

  “Mr. Thackeray, nice to see you,” said the middle-aged woman seated at the nurses’ station at the entrance to the ward who buzzed open the locked door for him. “You’re late tonight. I think your wife may already be asleep.”

  “How is she?” Thackeray asked, his voice curt with suppressed tension. The nurse gazed up at him with mild, sympathetic eyes.

  “There’s never much change, is there, dear?” she said. “But I know that the doctor’s a bit concerned about her physical health. Did he not contact you?”

  Thackeray shook his head dully.

  “Well, you know you really need to talk to him, but I know he’s been worried about her heart.”

  “Her heart?”

  “Well, it’s not surprising really is it? All these years of hospital food and no exercise. She’s put on a lot of weight. Even when she’s at her best it’s very hard to persuade her to leave her room …”

  “And she’s not often at her best?”

  The nurse looked at Thackeray with an expression which made him cringe inside.

  “It never gets any easier, does it, dear?” she said, getting to her feet. “Let’s see if she’s awake, shall we?”

  Aileen was not awake, but Thackeray sank into the chair beside her bed anyway, gazing at the bloated figure under the duvet with a mixture of shame and despair. He thought, as he always thought, that not even a vicious pagan deity could have been as cruel as the allegedly kindly One who had allowed Aileen to survive the onslaught of pills she had inflicted on herself, leaving her with her physical self intact but her mind almost totally destroyed. She ate, she drank, she expelled waste products, she even, occasionally, smiled, but the eyes were blank, the will gone, and the only emotion left what appeared to be panic, as she curled in the corner of her bed against the wall, her eyes wide and terrified, and an occasional blind outburst of what looked like rage which threatened the safety of anyone within range of whirling arms and feet and scratching hands. However many times the doctors told him that these wild emotions were not real, that she could not in fact suffer as she appeared to suffer, he did not believe them. He had occasionally sat beside her when she had been subdued with sedatives and wished he had the moral courage to take a pillow and place it over the puffy remnants of a once-beautiful face, a face he had to his bitter shame more than once bloodied and bruised himself.

  He had never told Laura any of this. She had been with him to see Aileen once, and found her mercifully, and as most usual, asleep. This evening, too, his wife lay unmoving, impassive, her eyes closed and her breathing regular, as if it would never cease. And yet he knew that one day it would, sooner perhaps rather than later if the doctors’ fears for her heart were correct, and he wished for that day with every fibre of his being. Tonight would not be soon enough. It was time, for both of them, that this nightmare was finally over and Aileen laid to rest with her baby son.

  Driving back out of the hospital gates half an hour later Thackeray hesitated, looking too long in both directions for traffic he knew was not there.

  “God help me,” he said, feeling another craving which he had not experienced recently sidle like a crab into his brain. Instead of turning back towards Bradfield, at this distance a mere orange glow in the dark night sky, he swung north and by creeping his way almost instinctively along a series of narrow unlit lanes he found himself within half an hour in Arnedale, where groups of youths and half-clothed girls patrolled the wide main street, staggering their way from pub to pub. He pulled up outside an off-licence which, with old-fashioned rectitude, wrapped his purchase in brown paper. He slung the bottle onto the passenger seat and set off again, this time taking the main road out of the small town and heading west again and then, on a narrow climbing lane, north into the high hills. At the end of the moorland road, which petered out into an unmetalled track beyond the village of High Clough, he pulled the car into a narrow opening blocked by a five-barred gate. He did not bother to pull any further into the farmyard, leaving the car with its boot protruding into the lane, confident that no traffic would be inconvenienced at this time of night.

  This was terrain he knew instinctively. The surface of the farmyard underfoot, pitch-black beneath the overhanging hill, felt more overgrown than he remembered but that was only to be expected. And when he reached the back door — the front only ever being used for weddings and funerals — it was as firm against his thrust as he had expected it to be. His father was a careful man and would not have left the house unsecured even though its only likely future, if he could be persuaded to put it on the market, would be to be gutted to make someone a chilly holiday home. Thackeray applied his shoulder to the door and thought after several assaults that it would defeat him. But eventually there was a sharp crack as the wood around the lock splintered, and after one more shove it swung open in front of him.

  He tried the light switch but was not surprised when it failed to produce any effect. He pulled his cigarette lighter out of his pocket and the flickering flame briefly revealed a heart-stopping travesty of the family kitchen. Joe had evidently taken anything of use when he finally closed up the house, and what remained was grimed with several years of dust and bird-droppings. In one corner a crumpled heap of feathers indicated where an owl had starved to death. In another a mound of half demolished newspapers, shredded almost to powder, had made a family of rodents a fine nest.

  There used to be candles, Thackeray thought, and to his surprise there were still candles tucked away in a drawer of the huge fitted dresser which dominated one side of the kitchen. Leaving one flickering on the windowsill he carried a second and walked slowly from room to room, tormented by visions of the past so real that he thought he could reach and touch his mother in the wheelchair in which she had spent the last years of her life, so conscious of the presence of one of the many dogs who had served his father that he could almost hear the animal panting behind him, and above all aware of his father’s eyes, watching, judging, grieving, condemning in every room, on every stair, in every corner of the house.

  Frantic, he flung himself into the one intact chair in what had been the parlour, unwrapped his bottle of whisky and cried out in pain. But instead of opening the bottle he eventually placed it on the floor in front of him and stared at it intently. When he had first begun to recover from his drinking, he had had a mentor whom he could call on at any time when the temptation to open a bottle or order a drink in a bar became too great. He had long ago passed beyond that stage, gained enough control to survive, ceased to need a liquid crutch to lean on. Or so he thought. But tonight he longed for the comfortable voice of his friend Geoff, long departed now for a new life in Australia and never replaced, to tell him just how unwise it would be to unscrew that bottle top.

  He wanted Laura, too, here, in this bleak and dingy room, with a naked physical desire which hurt. But the very thought of Laura tormented him in other ways. He had desired Aileen too, and they had enjoyed a passionate physical relationship before they began to tear each other apart. Could he, he wondered now, his eyes fixed unblinkingly on the seductive gold of the spirit, have the one without the other? Or would he ultimately and inevitably destroy Laura too?

  Holy Mary, Mother of God. The old familiar words sprang into his mind unbidden, along with an image of his mother as he had last seen her, barely conscious but with her ro
sary twined around her fingers in the huge white bed in his parents’ room upstairs. But as tears began to run down his cheeks he knew that neither Mother nor Holy Mother would help him. This was a battle he had to win or lose alone. Convulsively he picked up his bottle and hurled it across the room, where it smashed into fragments and the spirit ran in glittering rivers through the dust and filled the air with sharp vapours as he cursed and swore against the unfairness of life. And when his mind finally ran out of obscenities he buried his face in his hands and took a deep breath as he faced the inevitable, knowing that he had to carry on without any guarantees that he could succeed.

  “I love you Laura,” he told the dark shadows which surrounded him. “But I don’t know if I can do marriage and children again.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was a moot point whether Laura Ackroyd or Vicky Mendelson looked most distraught the next morning when Vicky opened the front door in a dressing gown and with a red-faced baby daughter in her arms.

  “Your night looks as if it was as bad as mine,” Laura said as she kissed Naomi’s hot damp hair and brushed her lips against her mother’s cheek.

  “At least Naomi can’t help having a cold,” Vicky muttered as she led Laura into the kitchen where the wreckage of a family breakfast lay scattered across the table. “Can you hold her while I make coffee?” she asked, thrusting the grizzling child onto Laura’s lap. “This is the down-side of family life. She kept us all awake most of the night. Thank God David had time to take the boys to school.” Naomi for her part took one look at Laura and began to howl in full-throated protest.

  “She sounds the way I feel,” Laura said, putting the child onto her shoulder and trying to soothe her. She wondered just when the paracetamol she’d taken for her dull headache would kick in.

  “Have you made contact with that bastard Michael yet?” Vicky asked. Laura had rung her at seven that morning, just as an extremely unwelcome alarm turned on the bedside radio. She had been close to tears as she explained that Michael Thackeray had failed to return home that night.