“Did you call him at his flat or on his mobile?”
“On the mobile as far as I can remember. I don’t call him at the flat much. He’s not often there.”
“So you made the date on Sunday, and Simon’s body was found on Wednesday morning, but according to the pathologist Simon probably died on the Tuesday evening. Did you know your brother went jogging, Mr. Earnshaw?”
“No, I didn’t. What are you suggesting now? That I pushed Simon over that bloody cliff? You must be crazy.”
“I’m not suggesting anything, Mr. Earnshaw, yet,” Thackeray said. “But I’d like you to go over your movements on that Tuesday for me, if you would.”
Earnshaw looked mutinous, but eventually pulled out a diary from his jacket pocket and flicked through it until arriving at the right date.
“I was at work that day at the mill until about three in the afternoon,” he said. “I had a meeting with my father and the maintenance engineers at two, I remember now. Then I left early and drove over to Leeds, had a few drinks and then went to a casino.”
“Can you be a bit more specific, please? Where did you have your drinks? Which casino?”
Earnshaw reeled off the names of a couple of pubs and a casino and Sergeant Mower ostentatiously wrote them down.
“Did you see anyone in Leeds who would know you? Did you go there to meet friends?” Thackeray asked.
Earnshaw shrugged.
“Nope, I was on my own, at a loose end, you might say. I go to the casino quite often, though,” he said. “They’d recognise me there.”
“And what time did you get home?” Thackeray asked.
“I really don’t remember,” Earnshaw said. “It was late and I wasn’t keeping an eye on the time. No reason why I have to now Lizzie’s gone. Back to an empty house, more often than not.”
“And of course you’d been drinking,” Thackeray said drily.
“Too late to effing breathalyse me now,” Earnshaw said.
“We’ll need to check these details,” Thackeray said.
“Check away,” Earnshaw snapped back. “I’d nothing to do with Simon’s death, I can assure you of that.
“But you have to admit that selling the mill will be easier for you and your father now he’s gone and you look like inheriting his shares.”
“In the end, maybe,” Earnshaw said. “But if that’s the tree you’re sniffing round you’ve got it wrong. I was the one who wanted a quick sale, remember. That’s exactly what I’m not going to get now. Persuading Simon to cooperate was certainly in my interests, but everything could be buggered up now he’s dead. We may not be able to do anything until probate’s settled.”
“But you and your father can take the decisions? Your grandfather’s objections don’t hold water any longer.”
“That’s true,” Earnshaw said.
After a few more routine questions, and gaining permission to look at his mobile phone records, they let Earnshaw go. Back in his office Thackeray looked at Mower with a hint of doubt in his eyes.
“What do you reckon?” he asked. “I don’t like that young man but is he a killer?”
“He could be,” Mower said. “It all depends on the timings, and if and when we can get confirmation he was in Leeds. As alibis go it’s all pretty vague. And we’ve only his word for it that they set up the meeting for Wednesday at the Clarendon. It could just as easily have been fixed for the day before and Wednesday’s little performance all be a charade. That might explain why he got pissed out of his head. He knew damn well Simon wasn’t going to turn up, and why.”
“And if they met and had a blazing row anything could have happened,”
Thackeray said. “He seems to be permanently drunk, that young man, and you can do things when you’re drunk that you’d never dream of doing when you’re sober.” He spoke, Mower knew, with the voice of bitter experience.
“Check his movements for the Tuesday,” Thackeray said. “That list he’s given us is like a sieve. People may well remember seeing him in Leeds but you can bet their recall of the time and even the day will be vague. We’ve got no weapon and no forensic evidence to speak of on the killer. A sharp blow to the back of the head too clean, Amos thinks, to have been caused by the fall — plus other bumps and contusions — and a few unidentified fibres clinging to his clothing, probably from an old blanket, according to the lab. We may be lucky with those in the end but I don’t think we’ve got a strong enough case to search Earnshaw’s car or house just yet. But I still think he had the motive and the opportunity. We’ll have to pin him down more precisely to find the gaps when he could have met Simon the day before he claims he planned to. Given that Simon was dressed for jogging I’d guess early evening on the Tuesday, before he drove to Leeds. That would fit Amos’s time of death. Get the team onto it and ask Leeds for some help with the pubs and the casino.”
When Mower had gone to pass on these new tasks to the overburdened murder detectives, Thackeray leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette and allowed himself the luxury of a moment’s thought. Laura edged her way into his mind every time he relaxed and he knew that he was doing neither his job nor his lover justice. Endless stress, endless overtime wrecked marriages. They had helped wreck his own. It was certainly arguable that Laura would be better off without him. But without her, he would be adrift again on an endless sea of despair. He did not think he was strong enough to let her go.
DC Omar Sharif was feeling more overburdened than most as he ploughed through statement after statement on his computer screen, hoping to pick up the slightest missed clue from those who had been close enough to see anything of the assault on Mohammed Iqbal. It was still early on Saturday morning and he was waiting his chance to claim the attention of Sergeant Kevin Mower to fill him in on what he had discovered from his freelance activities of the previous day. But so far Mower had been fully occupied with the DCI and an interview with Matthew Earnshaw, and Sharif began to wonder whether the murder of a wealthy young white man might not be taking too great a priority over the killing of an Asian union leader from Aysgarth Lane.
“Sarge,” Sharif got in at last as Mower passed his desk with a sheaf of papers in his hand.
“Omar?” Mower said. “Found something?”
“Not in this lot,” Sharif said. “But I put out my own feelers in the community when I went up there yesterday. I’m sure someone up there knows something about those bikes but no one’s got back to me yet.” He felt this sounded inadequate and sensed that Mower’s attention was already wandering.
“And then there’s Ricky Pickles’ garage,” he said.
“What garage?” Mower said sharply. “You mean South Bradfield Autos, his alibi for the attack on Iqbal? That’s been checked out and it stands up. He took his Escort in to have a new exhaust fitted and was there for at least an hour while it was done. We’ve seen the invoice, looked at the car; it’s all above board.”
“I went up there last night to have a sniff around, just as they were closing and there was no one around,” Sharif said. Mower’s attention was suddenly fixed on the young DC and he dropped into a chair at the next desk.
“You what?” he said.
“You know as well as I do that Pickles is almost certainly mixed up with this lot, however many alibis he’s got. If he didn’t do it, he planned it.”
“Wishful thinking, Omar?” Mower suggested quietly, but the young DC shook his head fiercely.
“I told you yesterday, according to someone I spoke to up Aysgarth, Craig Porter, the scumbag we’ve got banged up for GBH after the trouble outside the Grenadier on Thursday night, is involved in this too. Apparently Porter’s got a powerful Kawasaki that he’s complaining went missing after he was arrested. I checked his registration number and found the bike at SB Autos, right at the back, tucked away out of sight. And so’s another bike that I’ve seen parked at the British Patriotic Party’s HQ. I’d already checked with vehicle registration and that one belongs to Pickles himself. Coincidence?
I don’t think so.”
“Pickles claims …” Mower began.
“So what? You may have seen the invoice for the work on his car, but there’s nothing to say he didn’t take off on the bike while the work was being done. Him, Porter and the rest. Why else would two bikes belonging to two racist thugs be together? It’s not as if SB is a bike specialist. They’re not.”
“So you reckon someone picked up Porter’s bike after he was arrested and took it up to SB Autos for safe-keeping?”
“Must have done. Porter apparently doesn’t know what’s happened to it.”
“It could have been nicked,” Mower said.
“In which case we’ve got a reason to give SB Autos a going-over.”
Mower hesitated.
“You have to admit it’s odd, sarge,” Sharif insisted.
“Porter was remanded yesterday and I’ve told Armley goal that we need to talk to him about another matter. I’ll give them a call and find out when we can go over there — today if possible. I take it you’d like to come? You don’t have a weekend break in Ibiza planned?”
“Chance would be a fine thing,” Sharif said, his dark eyes inscrutable, and Mower wondered, not for the first time, just how far Sharif conformed to his community’s expectations in matters of sex and marriage.
But in the end, when Mower and Sharif faced Craig Porter in a bleak interview room at Armley Gaol, it was a forensic report which had arrived at police HQ just before they left which made the difference to the case and brought a faint smile of satisfaction to Sharif’s face as they inched their way through the football traffic back to Bradfield.
“Take it slowly,” Mower had said quietly as they were escorted through the locked doors and corridors of the gaol. “Don’t let him wind you up. Don’t rush.”
Porter’s initial reaction was stormy. He was a heavily built young man in his middle twenties, pasty-skinned and with a shaven skull and an array of nationalistic tattoos on show beneath his black T-shirt. The pale blue eyes which had flickered over Sharif as he came into the room had been filled with dislike.
“How the hell did you know about my bike?” he asked, addressing himself exclusively to Mower, and as Mower did not know the answer to that question and Sharif was not telling, he had to be content with vague suggestions of ‘information received’. Eventually he admitted that one of his ‘mates’ might have delivered his bike to SB Autos for safe-keeping, although he had no suggestions as to who that might be or how they might have found an ignition key to fit.
“That would be one of your mates from the British Patriotic Party, would it?” Mower asked.
“Who said anything about them?” Porter countered quickly.
“You had a membership card in your pocket,” Mower said. “It’s still there, with the other bits and pieces they took from you when you were arrested. A fake, then, is it?”
“Someone’s got to stand up for the English,” Porter muttered. “He’s a good lad is Ricky Pickles. Knows what’s what. Any road, it’s not a crime to belong to a political party, is it?”
“Certainly not, so long as the party sticks to politics and doesn’t take its battles onto the streets,” Mower said.
“It isn’t us that takes the battles onto t’bloody streets, is it?”
“You were found in possession of an iron bar when you were arrested,” Mower said almost casually. “Carry that often, do you, just in case?”
“You need protection from them bastards,” Porter said. “They attacked us, remember? They came up to the Grenadier looking for aggro, didn’t they? Self defence is what I’ll be pleading, don’t you worry.”
“They?” Mower said.
“Bloody Pakis,” Porter spat, with another scowl in Sharif direction.
“The man you hit has a fractured skull,” Sharif came back angrily, only subsiding in response to a sharp glance from Mower, who had known this interview would be edgy and hoped that it would not disintegrate.
“So you’re not claiming the iron bar was not yours?” Mower said, knowing that it would be difficult for Porter to make that argument as he had been disarmed by two burly officers from the riot squad and the injured man’s blood and Porter’s fingerprints had been found all over the weapon.
Porter shrugged and lit another cigarette.
“Used it before, have you?” Mower pressed.
“What do you mean?” Porter asked, with just a flicker of anxiety in his eyes.
“I mean we’re very interested in people with a history of violence and access to a powerful motorbike, people like you in fact, in connection with the murder of Mohammed Iqbal.”
“Snuffed it, has he?” Porter asked, making no pretence of not knowing who they were talking about. “Bloody troublemaker from what I heard. Nowt to do wi’me, though. One down …” He glanced at Sharif and sneered, not needing to complete the sentence.
“Perhaps you can tell us where you were, then, last Wednesday between five-thirty and six-thirty in the evening,” Mower said quickly.
“In t’Grenadier,” Porter said quickly. “I’m always in t’Grenadier at that time of day having a game of pool. Anyone’ll tell you that.”
“And no doubt any number of people can vouch for you?” Mower said. “And you won’t be the least bit worried about the fact that our forensic labs have found traces of someone else’s blood on that iron bar you were using on Thursday night, will you?
“What do you mean, someone else’s?” Porter said. “What are you trying to fit me up with now?”
“You and the four others who rode up to Aysgarth Lane to beat up Mohammed Iqbal,” Mower said.
“Bollocks,” Porter said. “Ask anyone in t’Grenadier.”
“Oh, we’ll be doing that, Craig, don’t you worry Our labs will also be doing a DNA analysis of the traces they’ve found on your vicious little club. And if it matches Iqbal’s we’ll be back. It may take a little while but it’s nice to know that you’ll be here waiting for us when we come looking.”
Early the following morning, armed with a search warrant, the police required Ricky Pickles to open the heavily barred doors of the BPP offices and proceeded to remove every computer and paper file inside.
“This is a legitimate political party. I’ll have you for this,” Pickles vowed as he watched box after box of the party’s information being loaded into police vans. “I’ll have you for violating my human rights.”
“You’ll find out what it feels like, then,” Omar Sharif responded cheerfully, catching Pickles’ remark as he passed him carrying a computer. For a moment the two men’s eyes locked in mutual contempt.
“Leave it, Omar,” Mower said, catching the moment. “Let him crawl back under his stone, where he belongs.”
Chapter Nineteen
Laura Ackroyd woke late that Sunday morning, with a thumping headache and the sudden desolation of finding herself alone again. Michael, where are you when I need you? she thought. The plane back from Paris the previous night had been delayed and she had finally got home at two, listened to her messages, hoping against hope for some word from Thackeray, but had to be content with her father announcing that he was on his way home. Too disappointed by Thackeray’s continuing silence to even try to follow up that bit of news, she had drunk two large vodka and tonics and eventually thrown herself into bed in a state of deep depression. The clouds had not lifted when she finally woke at about eleven although even through the curtains she could see that in the world outside the sun was unexpectedly shining and she could hear a full-throated blackbird singing outside the window.
She got out of bed, picked up the Sunday papers and glanced without much interest at the headlines before dumping them on the sofa. She poured herself a large glass of orange juice in the kitchen and went back to bed again, propping herself up on the pillows as she gloomily reviewed the previous day’s nerve-wrenching trip to Paris. She and Amina Khan had made their way back to Charles de Gaulle airport in a silence only broken by the most cursory exchan
ges about Metro tickets and routes. On the plane, Amina appeared to fall asleep although Laura suspected that this was merely a ploy to avoid any further discussion of her sister’s plight. She refused the food and drink on offer and slept again in the car as Laura drove her back across the pitch black moors from Manchester to Bradfield.
Laura was almost as deeply upset by their trip as Amina appeared to be. She knew that they had to report what they knew to the police, but when they sat in the car outside the Khan’s family home in Eckersley, Amina refused point blank to contemplate calling DCI Thackeray herself.
“You can tell them whatever you like,” she said. “And then I suppose they’ll come looking for me too. But I can’t call them, I really can’t. It will cause too much trouble in the family. Tell them to come to talk to me at school on Monday if they must.”
“They’ll keep what you say confidential if they can,” Laura had said, without much conviction. Amina looked at her from beneath her nun-like hijab and smiled as if from a great distance.
“Wishful thinking,” she said. “I don’t think any of this is going to remain confidential for very long. My father and brother will be furious, my mother will be heart-broken and the community will be scandalised. If the police bring Saira back to Bradfield she won’t be safe. She’ll have to stay in hiding. Even if my family wish her no harm, someone will take it upon himself to uphold the old ways. You probably know as well as anyone that we’re not all medieval fanatics, but there are some, and they’re dangerous and unpredictable.” She had opened the car door then.
“Thank you for coming with me,” she said. “I am grateful, but there’s nothing either of us can do for Saira now. It’s all over. She will have to make her own way in the world.” She closed the door quietly but, Laura thought, with a finality which was chilling.
Which left Laura to face the next day with a thick head and an unwelcome task to perform. She desperately wanted to speak to Michael Thackeray but about matters very far removed from the problems of Saira Khan. Like a child reluctant to get ready for school, she showered and dressed slowly, before making a large pot of strong coffee to help her consider her options. But before she could even begin to sort out her thoughts, the phone rang and she found herself assailed by Jack Ackroyd in full flood.
Dead Reckoning Page 23
