Dead on Arrival

by Patricia Hall

  They had eaten at a Chinese restaurant in Stepney before Tom left them and drove off to set up his sound system at the club. It was then that Sally revealed the cause of her earlier anger.

  “I didn’t want to go into it all while Ben was around,” she said, after they had finished their drinks and followed Tom out onto the rain-steaked pavement outside. “But there’s been some sort of a riot involving the kids from school.”

  “They certainly weren’t very happy when I left them this morning,” Laura said.

  “Jan and some of the others are having a drink down at the Ship and Compass,” Sally said. “Do you mind calling in there before we go to the club?”

  Laura shrugged. So long as she was with other people this evening she did not really mind where she went. She had spent long enough alone that afternoon wrestling with the temptation to pack her bag, jump in a taxi to Kings Cross and onto a train to the North. Only the knowledge that she still had not untied the knot of sick anger which Michael Thackeray had provoked deterred her.

  But she was unprepared for the fury which greeted them when they joined half a dozen teachers from Ben Jonson School huddled over pint glasses in an overcrowded pub just off Stepney Green.

  “The pigs arrested Molly and three of the kids and kept them in a cell for an hour, till the crowd outside got so big that they thought better of it apparently,” Jan Dennison said. Her indignation threatened to overwhelm her as she explained what had happened when some of the staff and students had gone down to Deadman’s Quay police station to complain about their treatment at the school.

  “Deadman’s Quay doesn’t seem to be the most community-friendly police-station in London,” Laura said mildly, to cries of derision over the pint glasses.

  “It’s notorious,” Sally said. “Don’t you remember the case last year where a young black boy died in custody and they couldn’t find a single copper to charge? That was Deadman’s Quay.”

  “So did they charge anyone today?” Laura asked.

  “A couple of kids with obstruction. And another couple got bashed over the head with batons when the police moved in mob-handed to clear the crowd,” an indignant Asian teacher offered. “Jan got hold of Dave Swinburn at the immigration advice centre and he got them a solicitor and they’ve been bailed now. The whole thing’s outrageous. The demonstration was completely peaceful until the police waded in.”

  “I thought the Met was getting its act together on race,” Laura suggested, to hoots of laughter from Jan and the rest.

  “Not so’s you’d notice in this neck of the woods,” Sally said.

  “The whole exercise this morning seems to have been directed at finding out who Osman was with that night instead of trying to identify the bastards who killed him,” Jan said.

  “That’s exactly the impression I got from DI Wesley,” Laura had said thoughtfully.

  “They must have guessed by now it was his brother,” Liz said sombrely.

  “His brother?” Laura said, her brain suddenly whirring into gear and coming up with an answer which made perfect sense. The boys she had followed from the train were not only speaking the same language but had looked uncannily alike. And she did not think she was suffering from the notorious inability of a white person to distinguish one black face from another.

  “Forget I said that,” Liz said hastily. “We’re not supposed to know, but Osman has a brother who’s eighteen or nineteen. I know for a fact he was expecting him to come over to join them soon - though I doubt very much that he was using legitimate channels to get in. He’s probably too old to be classed as a dependent of his mother’s, so he’ll have to make his own asylum claim and that might be tricky.”

  “There are dozens of Somali boys in the area,” Sally said doubtfully. “But most of them will quite likely be too scared to come forward and talk to the police. It could be any of them.”

  “The boy Osman was with was smaller than he was,” Laura said, forcing her mind back to the attack at the station. “He looked younger.”

  “It could be the brother, though,” Sally said. “Age and height are all over the place with teenaged boys.”

  “If he was here illegally it would explain why he ran,” Laura said almost to herself, a vivid picture of the brightly lit station forecourt suddenly swimming into focus, a clinical setting for an act of primaeval brutality. She could understand only too well the fear which might have made the second boy run.

  “Forget I mentioned the brother,” Liz said, gripping Laura’s arm fiercely. “Please. I shouldn’t have said a word. It was just something Osman said to me one day after class. He seemed very excited and I asked him why. But as soon as he’d mentioned him, he panicked and asked me to keep it a secret until he’d arrived. He didn’t seem to know when that would be, which made me think straight away that he was coming in illegally somehow. There are routes, you know. Places in Turkey and the European ports where they virtually queue up to get a place on a plane or a boat.”

  “I don’t know why they bother,” Sally said fiercely. “Between the police and the other thugs on the streets, it makes you think they’d be better off staying where they came from.”

  “Not the Barres,” Liz said. “Osman told me once what had happened to his father. The people who took him away dumped the body back on the doorstep when they’d finished with him.”

  “Most of them have very good reason to come,” the young Asian teacher said. “In spite of what the Globe would like you to believe.” He gave Laura an unfriendly look and as she wondered, not for the first time, whether it was worth continuing the struggle to be an honest reporter when the tar from that brush tainted everything she touched.

  The group fell silent, embarrassed by the reminder that Laura was not just there as a friend. Sally put an arm round Laura’s shoulders and gave her one of her bear-like hugs.

  “Come on,” she said. “I promised you a fun night out. Let’s go, shall we.” But the fun did not really materialise. After an hour in the club Laura found herself leaning with her head against a wall in a back room, chilling out with a bottle of fizzy water, her silk top sticking to her skin, her headache redoubled by the incessant beat, surrounded by sweaty dancers in a similar state. She closed her eyes wearily, wondering if she could summon up the energy to go back onto the dance floor to find Sally and perhaps persuade her to go home.

  There had been a time not so very long ago when she would have been in the middle of that human maelstrom with the best of them and enjoying every minute. Age, she thought wryly, was catching up on her though by her reckoning it was a bit soon. But other people’s children increasingly tugged at her heart, and she wished passionately that she could see a clear future for herself on the other side of the emotional turmoil that Michael Thackeray had plunged her into.

  A sudden pain in her side startled her and she opened her eyes to find herself pinned against the wall by two men leaning uncomfortably close, one on each side. She tried to turn to look at her assailants but one of them put a hand on the side of her head, pressing her cheek hard against the rough plaster. They were so close it was impossible to move her arms, and she realised that the one on the left appeared, incongruously in the heat, to be wearing a loose jacket that allowed him to disguise the fact that he was pushing something very sharp against her ribs.

  “We was sent to tell you to go home, darling,” one said, shouting into her ear secure in the knowledge that no-one even a foot away would be able to hear what he said against the decibels from the other room. She wriggled slightly to escape the pain and the man on the other side put a restraining arm across her back.

  “D’you hear us,” he said into the other ear, leaning heavily against her and grinding her face against the wall. Laura nodded dumbly.

  “Go home, darling,” his companion said again. “Forget you ever come near Docklands.”

  The pain in her side suddenly redoubled and she cried out, desperately aware she was wasting her breath. But as suddenly as they had
grabbed her the men released their grip, her knees gave way beneath her and she slid to the floor. By the time she had turned and propped herself up with her back against the wall, they had butted their way through the crowd and out of the room, allowing her only the briefest glimpse of two bullet-like, close-shaven heads above leather jackets. She sat there still clutching her bottle in her hand aware that the wetness she could feel at the side of her black top was caused by something worse than sweat. She had no idea how much time passed before Sally appeared, looming above her, her hair hanging in damp strings down to her shoulders, her round face full of concern.

  “Are you OK? Did you take something?” she mouthed against the noise. Laura could do little more than shake her head before Sally had hauled her to her feet and bundled her towards the entrance where slightly cooler air filtered through the main doorway.

  “I think I need to go home,” Laura said.

  “I think you do,” Sally agreed, helping her out into the rain puddled street and hailing a taxi which was cruising past. She glanced at her hand, puzzled.

  “Christ, this is blood,” she said. “What the hell happened? We’d better get you to hospital.”

  Laura pulled a handful of paper tissues out of her bag, and pushed them under her shirt to staunch the flow.

  “It’s nothing serious,” she said. “Just get me back to the flat. I’ll be fine with a bit of Elastoplast.”

  All brisk competence, Sally helped Laura home and onto her bed, paid off the babysitter and came back into the room with a bowl of warm water and disinfectant and a large wad of cotton wool.

  “Get that blasted top off,” she said impatiently, but her hands were gentle as she helped Laura pull it over her head, dragging her hair out of its clips and so that it tumbled down onto her shoulders. She drew a sharp breath when she saw the cut in Laura’s side, just below the ribs.

  “They could have killed you,” she said grimly, dabbing at the wound with hot cotton wool which made Laura gasp with pain.

  “They didn’t want to kill me,” Laura said through gritted teeth. “They just wanted to terrify me.”

  “Well, they bloody well succeeded as far as I’m concerned. We’ll get this strapped up and then I’m going to ring the police.”

  “There’s no point,” Laura said wearily. “Inspector Wesley told me this morning he couldn’t protect me.”

  “That was a threatening phone call, this is a stabbing,” Sally said, as she continued to wash away the blood and examine the wound more closely. “Thankfully it’s not gone very deep. I don’t think you need stitches. Did you get a good look at these bastards?”

  “I didn’t get a look at them at all. They came up behind me and pushed me against the wall. They knew exactly what they were doing.” She felt the right side of her face gingerly and knew that by morning it would be black and blue. No more lunches at the Riverside in this condition, she thought ruefully.

  “I thought your boyfriend was a copper,” Sally said. “I’d have thought he’d have taught you more sense than to get into these situations.”

  Laura settled herself more comfortably against the pillows as Sally covered the cut with a dressing and strapped it on with tape.

  “What do men teach you except not to get involved with them? Why don’t you and Tom live together? What’s that all about?” Laura tried to divert the conversation away from areas even more painful than the wound in her side.

  “It’s a long story,” Sally said. “When Ben arrived he wanted me to stay home to look after him. I wasn’t prepared to do that.”

  “You didn’t trust him to stick around?”

  “I’m not sure I’d ever trust any man to stick around. Would you?”

  “Michael’s been sticking around too long - with a wife he didn’t bother to tell me about,” Laura said.

  “Ah,” Sally said. And she listened quietly while Laura told her about the day Michael Thackeray had taken her to Long Moor Hospital to see Aileen, whose suicide attempt years before had left her brain damaged and unrecognisable as the woman she had once been.

  “If he’d told me at the beginning, told me the whole story instead of just bits of it, then maybe I could have lived with it and we could have built something out of it. But to hide it all that time, all that pain, all that guilt, not to trust me, not to share it…”

  As she burst into tears, Sally took her into her arms and rocked with her, stroking her tumbled red hair, until eventually her sobs subsided.

  “Oh, Sally, what can I do?” Laura asked. “I can’t decide what to do and I can’t go back home until I do.”

  Sally looked away, her rounded face hardening imperceptibly.

  “What you can’t do is stay here much longer,” she said, staring hard at the foot of the bed, avoiding Laura’s eyes. “I’ll ask Tom to stay for a couple of nights, just for security. But then you’ll have to find somewhere else to stay. I can’t take any risks with Ben.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The beat constable would not usually have bothered about the badly parked silver BMW if it had not been Sunday morning. Old and wise in the ways of the job, with an eye on retirement rather than glory, on any other day he would have left it to a traffic warden to attach a ticket to the windscreen and eventually have it towed away. But on his leisurely early Sunday perambulation down the suburban end of Aysgarth Lane, where solid stone semi-detached houses faced the road behind battlements of terracing and dusty summer flowers, he thought that on the wardens’ day of rest he had better take note of the obstruction’s existence before the build up of mid-morning traffic on its way to out-of-town supermarket, garden centre and golf course.

  He crossed the road incuriously to take a closer look at the car, which was halfway across the grass verge with its bonnet overhanging a slight dip beneath a rustic garden wall. Nice motor, he thought enviously as he walked round it to make a note of the number and incidently admire the leather upholstery, a classy stereo and an array of instruments fit for an aircraft.

  Odd, he thought, to park a car like that so carelessly. Odder still, he thought, when he noticed that the car was not simply badly parked but was also severely damaged on the side which had not been visible at first. One wing was scraped and dented, a front tyre was flat, the bumper hung on crazily by a single screw, and the windscreen had crazed from a point just in front of the steering wheel.

  Much more cautious now, the officer tried the driver’s door and was surprised when it not only opened but failed to set off any cacophanous alarm system. At first he could see nothing amiss. Then he noticed a smear of something brown on the driver’s seat and beneath that on the floor a reddish pool which was still viscous enough to catch the light.

  Fully alert at last, he used his radio to call in the car’s number and report what appeared to be a road traffic accident with a missing victim. But even before the computer had come up with the name of the owner of the BMW, he became aware of someone shouting at him from a house a few yards further down the road. A woman in a pink dressing gown was waving frantically from her garden gate.

  “Can I help, madam,” he asked as he tried to take in the message from control against the woman’s disjointed appeals for help. Instead of replying, she grabbed his arm and half urged and half dragged him up her steep front steps, round the side of her house and into the back garden where a small white terrier was barking hysterically at the shrubbery, tail wagging like a small hairy metronome.

  “I let him out and he went crazy,” the woman said indistinctly. “There’s someone in there. And I think he’s dead.”

  Gently parting the leaves of a viburnum to see what they concealed, the constable had no doubt that the woman in the dressing gown was not mistaken. He had seen enough bodies in his long career to know that the staring brown eyes which met his from beneath a bloodied forehead would see nothing in this world again.

  “I’m afraid you’re right, madam,” he said to the woman who had picked up the frantic dog and was cradling it in
her arms, her face pinched and white with shock. “I should wait indoors, if I were you, while I fetch folk to clear up the mess.”

  Michael Thackeray left Bradfield soon after dawn on a humid summer Sunday morning and drove fast along the main road up the valley of the Maze to Arnedale. He had slept badly, pulled on jeans and a sports shirt and left the house without bothering to shave or eat breakfast. His pressing objective was to put as much distance as possible between himself and his stuffy flat in as short a time as possible. The place had become a prison and ecape an imperative. Half dazed with tiredness, he did not notice the speed camera which flashed behind him as he skirted the town where he had spent some of the unhappiest years of his life as a detective sergeant.

  Once round Arnedale he slowed slightly as he joined the winding main road to Lancashire, and then, after half an hour’s steady driving, took a sharp right into the hills to the north where the bulk of Ingleborough could just be glimpsed above the morning mist. He parked the car at the highest point of the village of High Clough, where the road petered out into an unpaved track across unfenced moorland. A low stone farmhouse stood in the lee of the open fells, its windows boarded up, its barn door gaping open and the small enclosed fields which had once sheltered over-wintering sheep deserted and abandoned to thistles and the first burgeoning fronds of encroaching bracken.

  He gave West Rigg farmstead, which had once been his home, a quick sideways glance, as though he half expected one of his father’s black and white sheep-dogs to come bounding out to check on an intruder. But he knew the dogs were dead and shaking his head briefly he set off on foot at a brisk pace, following the dried up ruts of the track up the steep hill behind the farm and then taking another barely visible pathway which led even higher into the steep fells far beyond all human habitation. There was a faint wind at this height even on a still summer day which threatened only heat and humidity on the valleys, but by the time he breasted the first rise he was sweating under his cotton sports shirt. But still he pressed on, taking deep breaths of the clean, peaty air into lungs intoxicated after months of urban grime. He had to force his unaccustomed legs up the steepest parts of the path, over loose stones which skittered down behind him and runnels where in winter water would cascade down from the highest moors to plunge into the brook which ran through High Clough before tumbling down again into the river Maze.