Dead Reckoning

by Patricia Hall

  “So where exactly were you with the four Earnshaw directors when Simon died?” Mower pressed.

  Jack took a moment before replying, turning to Victor Mendelson as if for reassurance but Mendelson merely nodded him on.

  “Well, George was against a sale from the off — nowt surprising there. He’s stuck in the 1930s is old George, so apart from a formal letter, which he never replied to, we wasted no time on him. Frank was keen on our ideas from the start and as I say Matthew seemed keen an’all, and began to press for a quick decision. Simon was the one who made difficulties all along, firstly because he wanted us to make guarantees about the use of the site that my backers weren’t too keen on - community use, the bloody environment, as if the environment up Aysgarth Lane has got anything worth preserving in it. All a load of cobblers but we humoured him, of course. Kept him sweet. And then, the last time I spoke to him he tried to push the price up, which shook me, to be honest, because of all three of them he was the one I thought was least anxious about the price.”

  “Did you meet him face-to-face?”

  “No, I spoke to him on t’phone when I arrived in England, that’s all, and I called Frank when I realised things were going pear-shaped. Frank said he’d get Matthew to talk to Simon and get him back on board but of course as it turned out, that never happened, did it? He were dead before owt was settled. Pity that.”

  “Mr. Frank Earnshaw doesn’t seem at all sure whether or not Simon had made a will,” Mower said thoughtfully. “Do you know what happens if he hasn’t?”

  Ackroyd glanced at his solicitor again and in the end it was Victor Mendelson who replied.

  “Normally I would regard this information as confidential but Mr. Frank Earnshaw has asked me to be as helpful to the police inquiry as possible,” he said. “If there’s no will there’s a clause in a family trust to ensure that the shares are divided equally between the surviving shareholders. So Frank, Matthew and old Mr. Earnshaw will each inherit a third of the holding.”

  “And Frank and Matthew can force the sale through?” Mower asked, his eyes suddenly sharper than before.

  “Indeed,” Mendelson said.

  “Can I ask you, Mr. Mendelson, then, whether this was a piece of information which could have reached Mr. Ackroyd and his colleagues …”

  “Absolutely not,” Mendelson said sharply. “I wasn’t aware of the arrangement myself until yesterday when Frank Earnshaw told me. I’m not professionally involved with the company, or with any of the Earnshaws individually, but it so happened that Frank Earnshaw rang me, as I think he has rung a number of solicitors, to ask whether we were holding a will on behalf of Mr. Simon Earnshaw. We were not. And nor, as I understand it, have the family discovered anyone who is.”

  “I knew nowt about it,” Jack Ackroyd said angrily. “If that’s the way you’re thinking, sergeant, you’re on a hiding to nothing. This was a reputable business deal we were negotiating. If it fell through it fell through, no skin off my nose or my colleagues’, for that matter. There’s plenty more redevelopment opportunities on the cards. No one’s dependent on Earnshaws mill falling into their hands, least of all me. If anyone’s desperate enough to commit murder in this business you can draw your own conclusions about who it might be. But it’s certainly no one on my side of the deal. You can be bloody certain of that.”

  Mower was very tempted to believe him, although he knew that DCI Thackeray would make no allowances for sentiment when considering Jack Ackroyd’s statement. The reverse, in fact. Mower hoped for Thackeray’s sake, and Laura Ackroyd’s, that Jack was as squeaky clean as he professed to be.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Mohammed Iqbal was pronounced brain-dead at 5.42 that evening. The news was relayed to DCI Thackeray by the young uniformed constable who had been watching over the union man’s fight for life alongside the attentive medics and distraught members of his family. Even before the life-sustaining tubes had been removed from his body, and the dead man had been wheeled to the mortuary in the basement of the Infirmary, news of his death was racing out around the town, raising emotions of very different kinds as it electrified almost everyone who had had contact with the determined young official.

  At police HQ Thackeray and Longley, summoned by an urgent phone call from his early evening golf practice session, listened grim-faced as Chief Inspector Brian Butler outlined how he had deployed his uniformed forces around Aysgarth Lane in the hope of preventing any violent reaction to news of Iqbal’s death.

  “I’ve got more officers off sick after last night’s bit of mayhem on the Heights,” Butler complained. “At the moment all we’ve got is a crowd around the mosque, calm enough so far but you can’t rely on that for long.”

  “You know we want words with the lad from Wuthering you’ve charged with GBH, don’t you?” Thackeray said. “DC Sharif reckons that he could be one of the ones we want for the attack on Iqbal. What’s his name?”

  “Craig Porter. We could oppose bail,” Butler offered. “Should be able to swing that in the circumstances. Their worships aren’t going to want anyone with a history of violence let out into this atmosphere.”

  “That would be handy, now we’re talking murder,” Thackeray said.

  “Coming up with summat useful, young Mohammed, is he?” Longley asked.

  “Maybe,” Thackeray said. “He’s certainly trying hard.”

  “Aye, well, we’re all going to have to try hard,” Longley said. “The Asian community leaders are going to be clamouring for a result on this one and I’ve already had the ACC on the blower asking how this will affect the Earnshaw case. What am I supposed to tell him, for Christ’s sake, Michael?”

  “I’m interviewing Matthew Earnshaw formally tomorrow,” Thackeray said quietly. “I think at last I’ve pinned down a motive for Simon Earnshaw’s death, and I reckon, looking through his brother’s first statement, that he had the opportunity as well. My rough scenario is that he did meet Simon, either the evening he says he was supposed to, or perhaps earlier, had a row over the redevelopment, which it turns out Simon was holding up, and killed him. With Simon dead, he and his father can go ahead with the scheme regardless of old George’s wishes. I’ll ask Matthew’s permission to look at his mobile phone records tomorrow and if he refuses I’ll be asking you for permission to check them out anyway. Simon’s own mobile still hasn’t turned up. It wasn’t at his flat or on the body. I reckon he left it in his car, or someone left it there for him, so we’re still relying on the car turning up somewhere. We need to know who he was talking to before he died. The phone at the flat’s been no help. There’s a pay-as-you-talk mobile coming up regularly so I guess that’s Saira Khan’s, but apart from that nothing. No calls from the rest of the family at all.”

  “The car’s probably at the bottom of Gawstone reservoir,” Longley said gloomily. “Or any one of a dozen others. It’s not hard to lose a car up the Dales if you really want to.”

  “So why not dump the body in the reservoir as well?” Thackeray said. “It makes no sense. The only reason I can think of is that whoever killed him wanted it known that he was definitely dead, not just missing, and that would fit with it being a family member.”

  “Whoever dumped the body must have been convinced the death would be taken for an accident,” Butler offered.

  “And it very nearly was,” Thackeray said. “He died of head injuries and head injuries consistent entirely with a fall from the crag are what we found. We’re just lucky the old boy who found him admitted moving the body and Amos Atherton picked up on the implications — eventually.”

  “Not like Amos to make a mistake,” Longley said. “Mind, he must be coming up to retirement, must Amos. He’s a sight longer in the tooth than I am. I’ll tell Peter Ellison that there’s some progress being made, then, shall I? Though he’ll be appalled if that’s the direction you’re heading in. It’s not the sort of progress Frank Earnshaw’s going to like much, is it, if you’ve got a Cain and Abel situation here?”<
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  “I’d tell the ACC nothing,” Thackeray objected. “I don’t want any of this filtering back to Frank Earnshaw, or any other members of the family, for that matter.”

  Longley looked at him thoughtfully for a moment and then nodded.

  “Happen you’re right,” he said. “I think I’ll get back out onto the golf course for the weekend and inadvertently switch my mobile off. You two can send someone to find me if you really need me, but otherwise I’m incommunicado.”

  “Right,” Thackeray said. Incommunicado was the way he had hoped to spend his own weekend, but there seemed little chance of that now. Agonising over his future with Laura would have to wait — and he was not at all sure that she was prepared to wait much longer.

  Laura herself heard the news of Mohammed Iqbal’s deathfrom her grandmother who had called her as she was eating a microwaved Thai meal in front of the television that evening and feeling distinctly sorry for herself.

  “Are you sure?” she asked her grandmother somewhat tetchily. “It wasn’t on the local TV news.”

  “I don’t suppose it’s got out to the media yet, love,” Joyce said with a touch of satisfaction in her voice. “I still have some contacts, you know. He died at tea-time, apparently.”

  “They may be keeping it under wraps,” Laura said. “There’ll be trouble again up Aysgarth Lane when people find out.”

  “What sort of country are we living in?” Joyce asked. “It’s getting like some banana republic, union officials being attacked and murdered, folk rioting every night. I hope your Michael is going to get the thumbscrews out for Frank Earnshaw over this. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he didn’t set it up. Old George was always anti-union. They had to fight him every inch of the way to get decent pay and conditions when he was running that mill. I can remember standing on more than one picket line up there.”

  “I think this has more to do with racism than the Earnshaws’ plans for the mill,” Laura said, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice. As conspiracy theories went, she thought, this was one of Joyce’s wilder examples. Industrialists might still have bloody talons, but on the whole they concealed them pretty effectively these days in the velvet gloves of legal sanctions and redundancy packages generous enough to persuade most sacked workers bought off with a few thousand pounds that they were being well treated. Street violence, she guessed, was unlikely to be part of the Earnshaws’ armoury, however keen they were to cut costs or close the mill.

  After doing her best to reassure Joyce, who sounded almost as deeply depressed as she felt herself, Laura reluctantly called her father at the Clarendon Hotel. He had not heard the news and after Laura told him what had happened he lapsed into a long silence.

  “Dad?” Laura said anxiously at last. “Are you still there?”

  “Aye, I’m here,” Jack Ackroyd said. “But I’m increasingly thinking I ought not to be. What sort of a redevelopment are we going to end up with if this carries on? No beggar’s going to want to live anywhere near Aysgarth Lane, are they, let alone the young yuppies we had in mind. There’ll soon be no one left in Bradfield wi’tuppence to rub together. They’ll all have buggered off to Harrogate.”

  “I think maybe you got a bit carried away on this one, Dad,” Laura said, trying hard not to add ‘I told you so’.

  “I should know better than to get involved with old acquaintances like Frank Earnshaw,” Jack said. “I reckon we’ve been taken for a right ride here.”

  “Could well be,” Laura said, unsympathetically.

  “I really thought we had this one wrapped up, until bloody Simon Earnshaw started upping the ante. I don’t know what got into him at the end. Any road, at least that meant that nothing was signed and sealed before these murders, so mebbe we’ll slide out of it yet. I’ll get onto my partners right away, love. I’ll let you know if I’m checking out, though God alone knows when I’ll be able to get a flight home. Can you tell your feller what’s going off? He seems to be taking an altogether unnecessary interest in my affairs.”

  “Then you’d better tell him yourself,” Laura said sharply, not wanting to go down that avenue. She hung up without waiting for a response and flung herself back onto the sofa, gazing unseeing at the latest make-over programme in which a young couple appeared to be staring in blank disbelief at their new bedroom apparently modelled on an illustration out of the Arabian Nights.

  “Bloody fools,” Laura muttered to herself, an all-embracing comment which encompassed her father and his colleagues, the credulous couple on TV, and herself and Thackeray, thoughts of whom still boiled at the back of her mind like a tropical storm about to break. She zapped fruitlessly between programmes, trying to find something which would take her mind off the decision she knew Thackeray would make over the weekend, wondering for the thousandth time whether he would in the end find it impossible to make the commitment he had promised. In that event, she thought, she would hand in her resignation to the Gazette on Monday and leave Bradfield for good as soon as she could. Her beloved Joyce could come with her, she thought, if she was still reluctant to take up Jack’s offer of a home in the sun. What she could not face was a situation where she risked meeting Michael Thackeray again and again, as inevitably she would in a small town, after their affair was over. Her body still craved for him however sternly she told it not to, and she knew that meeting him casually with composure would be more than she could bear.

  The curry was cold by now and she pushed it aside irntably. She still did not know whether Michael Thackeray would be coming home that night and as she sat watching television, trying to distract herself from the leaden lump of anxiety which threatened to overwhelm her, her mobile rang. She put the TV on mute.

  “Michael,” she said, as levelly as she could.

  “I’m sorry,” Thackeray said. “You can curse and swear if you like. I know you must want to.”

  “We have to talk,” Laura said, although very tempted by his invitation.

  “I know, but first I need some time to think.”

  “So you’re still not coming home?”

  “Not tonight. I’ll go back to my place when I’ve finished here. But I’ll be up to my eyes for hours yet. We banned the BPP march this morning, so there’s a high risk there’ll be trouble on the Heights tonight. Enough of them live up there to cause some serious aggro. And Mohammed Iqbal has died so I now have to launch another murder investigation.”

  Laura was tempted to cut the connection but after a long silence she succeeded in controlling her voice enough to speak again.

  “We can’t go on like this, Michael,” she said.

  “I know.”

  The silence lengthened again. It was Thackeray who broke it this time.

  “There was another reason for calling,” he said. “After what you told Kevin, we interviewed your father this afternoon. With his solicitor. He’s been holding out on us, Laura. There are things he knows about the Earnshaws and their finances that I needed to know days ago. Not to put to fine a point on it, I’m not very happy with Jack.”

  “Amaze me,” Laura said unsympathetically. “My grandmother’s been unhappy with Jack for the last forty years or so, and I’m not too sure my mother’s always over the moon with him. I’ve no doubt you found him as charming as a talkshow host and as slippery as an eel. I hope you didn’t hesitate to give him a hard time on my account.”

  “You know I wouldn’t do that,” Thackeray said drily.

  “Will I see you tomorrow then?” Laura asked.

  “I’m going to be working all weekend,” Thackeray said. “Give me till Monday? Please, Laura?”

  “If I must,” she said, breaking the connection with a sigh. She gazed at the silently performing newsreader who had appeared on the TV screen through a blur of tears. If this were really the end of the affair, people would imagine she had been outraged by Thackeray’s interrogation of her father, she thought wryly, when in fact she was sure that anything the police dished out to Jack Ackroyd and h
is city cronies would be no more than they deserved. But no one, except perhaps Vicky, would come close to guessing that the cracks in the relationship had been widened by the still-powerful ghosts of children long dead. She had seldom thought about her own hasty termination when she was a student, a source of relief not guilt at the time, until Thackeray had revived the memory with his fierce opposition to such operations. But she recalled it sometimes now, with a faint but real regret for what might have been. I have a man I love to distraction, Laura thought miserably, and I want to give us both back the children we lost, but especially him, because his child was real, a warm presence in his life and he deserves that again. If only he would dare. By Monday, she thought, she would know the answer.

  By ten Laura was dozing, still on the sofa, still with the TV flickering quietly in the corner of the room, with the lump of unresolved foreboding slowing her thoughts and reducing her body to inertia. The shrill of the phone startled her and set her heart thumping in hope that it was Thackeray again. Instead she heard a voice she only half recognised.

  “Amina,” she said stupidly. “What can I do for you? Have they found your sister?”

  “I need you to help me,” Amina Khan said, her voice husky and so low that Laura could hardly hear what she was saying.

  “If I can,” Laura prevaricated.

  “Saira rang me. I persuaded her to meet me in Paris. But I want someone to come with me. She’s not going to believe me if I tell her Simon Earnshaw is dead. She’ll think it’s a trick of my father’s to get her back home. There are seats on the early flight to Paris in the morning from Manchester. We could be there by eleven, meet her, and be home the same day. Will you come with me? Please?”

  Laura was fully awake now, heart beating fast, knowing she was being presented with a story to die for.

  “I’d want to write about this, when the time’s right,” she said, hesitantly. She heard Amina draw a deep breath.