Dead on Arrival

by Patricia Hall

  He had come into the office early determined to shake off the deep depression which had dogged him since Laura had gone away. The previous evening he had left police headquarters early and driven up the hill out of the oppressive heat of the town centre in its enfolding valley to the leafy avenue where Laura lived on the top floor of a tall Victorian villa. He still had his keys. His one slender hope that their relationship might be mended rested on the fact that she had not asked him to return them.

  He had let himself into the flat, paced unhappily around the unusually tidy living room in a state of distraction, and then flung himself onto the double bed where he had for months now felt something tantalisingly close to content in Laura’s arms. He breathed deeply of her scent in the pillows. For a while he had slept, a restless, uneasy sleep broken by dreams in which the faces of Laura and his wife dissolved and redefined themselves above a body which filled him with aching desire.

  He had wakened to a moment of panic, imagining himself in a narrower bed in a narrower room where the windows of toughened glass had distorted the outside world into a blur and the institutional walls had regularly cracked open to reveal Heironymous Bosch visions of hell as he had sweated out his demons years ago.

  The only thing which had kept him going then had been the knowledge that if he lost his job as well as everything else he had lost, then life would be insupportable. He had to work to live and gradually, as the shivering which seemed to shake him to the roots of his being had subsided, his will had revived and he had clambered out of the pit, one day at a time, clinging on to his resolve at times by his finger-nails. Until Laura gave him fresh hope. And now what, he wondered, now she had gone?

  Unrefreshed and with his longings unresolved, he had eventually rolled off the bed and sat on the edge with his head in his hands, his broad rugby-player’s shoulders hunched. Outside the window the long summer dusk still bathed the town in a faint purple light through which church steeples and an occasional surviving mill chimney reached grey fingers to the hazy sky. He knew he should not have come. He had no right to violate Laura’s privacy in this way and, worse, the closeness he felt for her here, a closeness which was entirely missing in his own bleak flat, only made the pain of her absence more acute.

  She had gone suddenly and typically in a whirlwind of excitement at the invitation of the London editor for whom she occasionally wrote. But they both knew that the trip was both welcome and convenient as a way out of the impasse in which they found themselves through no fault, as he told himself bitterly and repeatedly, but his own. It would give her time to think, she had said. About what, he had wanted to shout in a mixture of rage and despair. But he had not dared, because he knew the answer and did not want to hear it put into words.

  She would think, he knew, about whether she could forgive the deception which had lain at the very heart of their relationship since the beginning. And if she decided she could not, then she might also think about leaving her frustrating job on the local Gazette and making the permanent move to London she had always hankered after and which would remove her physically as well as emotionally from his life. And that, with a self-knowledge honed by years of rigid self-control, he did not think he could survive.

  Loss, he thought, never left you, and he had suffered more than his share of it. For a short time he had hoped that Laura might fill the void at the centre of his life but that hope was guttering now like a candle in a high wind.

  He got to his feet with a groan, straightened out the bedclothes where he had lain, and picked up his coat from the chair where he had dropped it several hours earlier. For a moment his eyes rested on the bottle of vodka which Laura had left carelessly on the side table by the television. One could do no harm, he said to himself persuasively. But he knew it could and years of iron-willed determination conquered even this moment’s temptation. One day at a time, he muttered to himself with a wry smile. And tomorrow, he thought, I must get a grip on the job, or there’ll soon be no job to get a grip on. And that really would be the end of it all.

  He had not missed sergeant Kevin Mower’s moment of chagrin when he walked into the CID room and informed him that he would be accompanying Rita Desai to the school to interview Safi Haque’s teachers. Nor did he think that it was Mower’s devotion to duty alone which caused the disappointment which flashed momentarily across his dark, good looking features. Mower was practised enough at keeping his feelings to himself, Thackeray thought. Almost as practised as he was himself. But where an attractive young woman was concerned, those appreciatively appraising eyes always gave him away, however fleetingly.

  “You think it’s serious then, guv?” Mower had asked.

  “If she hasn’t turned up by this evening we’ll start a search,” Thackeray said, and with that the sergeant had to be satisfied as he watched Rita follow the DCI out of the room with a faintly mutinous expression in his eyes.

  “Do you know the way?” Thackeray asked Rita Desai as she swung the unmarked police car off Aysgarth Lane and up a bleak hill of council houses towards the school.

  “I was brought up in Bradfield, sir,” she said evenly. “Moved to Leeds when I was sixteen.” She swung the car through heavy iron gates and parked it in front of the school building, a tall Victorian structure built into the side of one of Bradfield’s many steep inclines. There were grilles on the ground floor windows and a handful of teenagers in navy school uniform still drifting into the building although it was already well after nine o’clock.

  “Did you go to school here?” Thackeray asked, knowing that a high proportion of the town’s Asian children did, but the DC shook her head.

  “St. Marks,” she said. “And then a sixth form in Leeds.” Her tone was non-commital, polite, but Thackeray got the feeling that she resented this interrogation from a senior officer.

  “You know there was a murder here a couple of years ago? An Asian lad?”

  “I remember reading about it,” she said. “Something to do with drugs, wasn’t it?”

  “It was before I came to Bradfield,” Thackeray said. “DCI Huddleston was still in charge, his last great case, apparently. But Kevin Mower was on the team, I think. You should ask him about it.”

  Rita Desai flashed him a glance which mixed surprise and amusement and Thackeray realised that he had hit a spot he had not been aiming for, consciously at least.

  “I’d like you to do the talking,” he said, as they got out of the car. “I’ll just listen, unless anything particularly strikes me.”

  “Sir,” she said. He wondered whether he was just placating her but he realised when they were shown into a small room with a table and a couple of chairs and a low bed evidently maintained for medical emergencies that his decision had been an appropriate one. They were met by a tall, slim, attractive woman in her late thirties, Thackeray guessed, who eyed them both with some suspicion, but cast a marginally more amenable eye on Rita Desai than himself. She introduced herself as Joanna Robertson, deputy head of the school, a teacher of English and Safi Haque’s sixth form tutor.

  “I have half an hour before I have to take a class,” Joanna Robertson said brusquely. “If there’s anything else I can help you with, of course I’m pleased to be of assistance. But I have already talked to sergeant Mower….”

  “We’ll try not to keep you long,” Rita Desai said. “But you told the sergeant that you would make inquiries about Safi’s movements in school the day she disappeared.”

  Joanna Robertson picked up a piece of paper from the table in front of her. She gave an impression of quiet efficiency and Thackeray wondered whether her evident discomfort with the police had anything to do with his blustering predecessor as DCI, Harry Huddleston, or with the egregious Mower, who would hardly have been oblivious to her understated good looks. Had Kevin overstepped the mark here, Thackeray wondered.

  “She was in school most of the day,” the deputy head said. “I’ve spoken to everyone who taught her and she was in class as she should have been al
l day, behaving quite normally. She handed in an essay to her history teacher. An excellent piece of work, he said. The only time we can’t account for is the final period of the afternoon which was free for private study. No-one seems to have seen her after her last lesson which ended at three. She wasn’t seen in the sixth form common room or the library. No-one saw her leave, but it is possible that she went home early, without waiting for the official end of the afternoon.”

  Joanna Robertson ended more hesitantly than she had begun, and looked slightly embarrassed.

  “She didn’t go home,” Rita Desai objected. “Or, put it another way: she never arrived.”

  “No, of course not,” Joanna Robertson said quickly.

  “Are they allowed to go early in those circumstances?” Rita asked.

  “Not officially,” Joanna Robertson said. “But we wouldn’t make a great fuss if a sixth former went home to work instead of staying in school.”

  “So you can’t be sure she was here until four?”

  “No, I think she probably wasn’t,” the deputy head admitted, shaking her head angrily, as if blaming herself for what had happened.

  “And you’re sure none of her friends saw her go..?”

  “We asked in the sixth form assembly for anyone who had been with her on Monday to come forward. Lots of them had seen her earlier in the day, but no-one recalls seeing her after three.”

  Rita Desai hesitated for a moment, staring at her notebook.

  “Did you say Monday?” she asked at length.

  “Monday was the last day she was in school,” Joanna Robertson said and then hesitated, evidently surprised. “Wasn’t it?” she asked. “Her history teacher said that when she was away for a second day on Wednesday he asked her brother if she was ill….”

  Rita glanced at DCI Thackeray, who had remained standing by the door watching the proceedings silently, his expression as impassive as ever.

  “I think it would be a good idea if we could talk to her history teacher, and possibly to some of her friends,” she said.

  “You can talk to them if you wish, but I don’t think it will do any good….” Joanna Robertson paused and glanced directly at Thackeray.

  “You know we had dreadful things happening here a year or two ago, chief inspector? Some of these kids remember all that. They’re getting very twitchy again. It’s not good for them.”

  “I’m sorry,” Thackeray said quietly. “That case was before my time. But you must realise we’re becoming concerned for Safi’s safety. We wouldn’t be here otherwise. There now seems to be a problem pinning down just when she disappeared. It’s two days - or so we were told - since she left home to come to school, a day and a half since she was last seen.

  “Two days? But we haven’t seen her in school for four…,” Joanna Robertson said.

  “So perhaps she was ill - at first,” Thackeray said smoothly. “We’ll need to check that out with her parents. Don’t you worry about that. What we’d like to discover from you and your colleagues is everything you know about Safi. She doesn’t seem to be the sort of girl who would cause her parents all this difficulty voluntarily…”

  “She’s not,” Joanna Robertson said. “Don’t get me wrong, chief inspector. I’m desperately worried about Safi too. Of course you’re welcome to talk to people here.”

  She stopped and it was as if a shadow had passed momentarily across her face leaving a haggard mask in its place.

  “I’m glad it’s not Mr. Huddleston handling this case, at least,” she said wearily. “I think that’s more than any of us could stand.”

  Back at police headquarters, Thackeray forced himself to concentrate on the disappearance of Safi Haque. He had read all the preliminary reports which Desai and Mower had collated and the sense of foreboding which had seized him as they had left Sutton Park School had only deepened. He had left Rita Desai at the school to talk to staff and Safi’s friends but even without any confirmation yet that the girl had disappeared a whole two days earlier than her parents were suggesting, his fears for her safety were growing. Could they have lied, he wondered. And if so, why? They would have to be interviewed again - and urgently.

  He knew as well as any policeman that the majority of disappearances were entirely voluntary and already he could justifiably be accused by his superiors of wasting time on this case. Almost every day men, women and teenagers chose to leave home, for good reasons or bad, oblivious of the panic and hurt they often left behind them. Only in the case of young children did the police instigate a full scale search as soon as the alarm was raised, and even then more often than not accident or misadventure accounted for the disappearance rather than crime, and the majority of children came safely home again.

  There were a dozen reasons why Safi Haque might have decided to disappear. Abduction or murder were at the very tail end of the list of probablities. Even so Thackeray was not convinced it was simply his own desperation clouding his judgement as his worry for Safi grew. The decision to shift the case up several gears from missing person to something more serious was his and it was time, he decided abruptly, to take it. He opened his office door to summon Kevin Mower, who arrived in shirt sleeves, his tie loose and an unusually distracted look in his eyes.

  “Guv?” he said warily, as if stepping too close to the mouth of a volcano for comfort.

  Thackeray smiled grimly, knowing Mower’s reaction was no more than he deserved.

  “You think Safi Haque’s disappearance is serious, I take it?” he asked. Mower hesitated for a moment before replying and then shifted the responsibility for answering with some agility.

  “Rita Desai certainly thinks so, guv,” he said. “She’s not come up with anything definite, any more than the uniformed boys have, but she says the whole Pakistani community seems tense. She’s chatted up a lot of the women, not just Safi’s mother. Something’s going on that no-one’s talking about.”

  “That’s very vague,” Thackeray said impatiently. “I need more than that to convince Jack Longley that we should put resources into a full-scale search.” Mower shrugged his elegant shoulders.

  “What about the school? Rita’s not back yet, but d’you want me to go back to the family?” he asked. Thackeray came to his decision quickly.

  “Not yet,” he said. “Though we need to ask them again just when the girl disappeared. From what her teachers say it could have been Monday, not Wednesday. I’ll tell the super that’s why we’re taking it seriously. And I’ll have a word with uniformed. Let them know we’ll need some bodies. You get in touch with the crime reporter on the Gazette. Let them have a photograph and some background for use tomorrow. Tell them we are becoming seriously concerned for the girl’s safety. Tomorrow we’ll start a proper investigation. And let’s hope we’re over-reacting, shall we, for her sake, though it won’t do my credibility much good if she turns up in London shacked up with a boy-friend.”

  It was that thought which concerned him more than anything when he went upstairs to report to Superintendent Longley what he had decided to do about Safi Haque. Longley waved him into a chair and took his time responding, shocked at how tense and unwell Thackeray looked.

  “Tread carefully,” he said mildly. “We don’t want any more explosions in Little Asia.” It was not long since Bradfield’s Asian community had been made restless by some vociferous campaigning against prostitution on the streets. Thackeray nodded his assent to that.

  “The lass from Leeds. What’s her name? Rita? Helpful, is she?” Longley asked.

  “She’s very bright,” Thackeray said. “She’ll be useful if we do find a body. But I still think this may be a family thing. It looks as though they may not have told us the full truth about when she went missing.”

  “Aye, well, let’s hope you’re wrong on this one, Michael, shall we,” Longley said. “I’ll talk to Imran Hussain about it and see what he thinks. I’m having dinner with him and his brother tonight to discuss this appeal for the cultural centre he’s launching.
He wants me to join the committee.” He looked at Thackeray consideringly.

  “You ought to get more involved in the local community, Michael. It’d give you summat to think about.”

  Thackeray looked at the superintendent with something as close to hatred as Longley ever wanted to see in his eyes.

  “Just at the moment,” he said icily, “I’d like to get as far from this bloody local community as it’s humanly possible to get. Antarctica would do nicely.”

  “Aren’t you due some leave?” Longley said, with clumsy literalism.

  “Maybe,” Thackeray muttered, gathering up his file on Safi Haque. “It’ll be time to think about that when we’ve found this girl, won’t it? Sir?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Osman Barre’s mother lived on the top floor of a decaying block of 1930s flats overlooking the railway viaduct along which Laura had recently travelled to Canary Wharf. She and Sally climbed up three flights of stinking concrete stairs to the top landing where a row of doors led off a puddled walkway. Laura felt out of place in her heels and new suit, an outfit which had drawn derisory comments as they had walked across the car-park past a group of teenaged boys idly kicking a ball about.

  What Sally believed was the Barre’s front door was reinforced with an iron grille, like several others in the block, and the windows onto the landing were boarded up, although whether the intention was to keep occupants or just the property safe was not at all clear.

  “Surely this one’s empty,” Laura said uncertainly, although the number roughly painted on the rotting bricks beside the door was the one they had been given. Sally knocked hard on the door and after a long pause it was inched open gingerly, held ajar by two stout chains on the inside. They could see little more than a pair of dark inquiring eyes peering at them well below the level of their own.