Dead on Arrival

by Patricia Hall

  “And Safi Haque, sir? Mr. Thackeray wanted a major search launched today…”

  “Aye, well, that’ll just have to wait a bit,” Longley said. “Priorities, lad, that’s what this job’s all about these days. If it really is Imran Hussain and there’s summat not quite right you’ll be working all the hours God sends without worrying about some lass who’s probably off somewhere with her boyfriend.”

  “But, sir…,” Mower protested injudiciously.

  “Forget it, lad,” Longley snapped. “We’ve got a body and if it’s who we think it is we’ve got a major problem on our hands while we work out how he came to be lying dead in Mrs. Aylott’s garden. You bend your mind to where Mr. Thackeray might be, Kevin, before I get really stroppy, will you?”

  But even when the superintendent had mopped his brow and departed for the infirmary Mower sat in Thackeray’s office gazing out of the window at the square where huddles of Muslim men in white gossipped peacefully in the shade of the municipal cherry trees, evidently unaware of the fate which had befallen on of the most prominent members of their community.

  The niggle of anxiety at the back of his mind had not been quelled by Longley’s preremptory instructions. Ever since they had spoken to Tracy Sullivan the previous day Mower had been convinced that Safi Haque’s disappearance would not turn out to be a willing one. The knowledge that she might be alive, in danger and that the police were going to do nothing more about it filled him with foreboding. As did the fear that Michael Thackeray might have also have been mugged - by a bottle of Scotch.

  Thackeray realised that his appearance did not inspire confidence as he took in Mower’s startled look when he walked into the CID room at lunch-time. He had driven straight back to police headquarters on leaving Arnedale without going home to change or shave and his wind blown hair and crumpled shirt and the dark circles under his eyes gave him a disturbingly disreputable look.

  Mower glanced round the now almost empty office.

  “The boss wants to see you, guv,” he said.

  “Is he in?” Thackeray asked, surprised.

  “Got in about ten,” Mower said. “We’ve got a body…”

  “The girl? Safi?” Thackeray broke in angrily, fear clutching at his stomach. “Where..?”

  “No, not her,” Mower said doing his best to edge Thackeray towards his own office. “Some Asian bloke the super knows. Imran Hussain, brother of Councillor Hussain.” The shock in Thackeray’s eyes was palpable and he allowed Mower to guide him out of the main office and into his own. He sat down at the desk as if his legs would no longer support him and Mower began to fear that the chief inspector was about to disintegrate in front of his eyes.

  “Rough night, guv?” he asked quietly. “Can I get you some coffee?”

  “In a minute,” Thackeray said, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes for a moment as Longley had done an hour before. “And some sandwiches. I can’t remember when I last had anything to eat. But first, fill me in?” For the second time that morning Mower described the finding of the body in the garden close to the damaged BMW but he wondered whether his almost comatose boss was even listening.

  “Mr. Longley’s identified the body for the moment, until we can trace someone from the family.”

  “Christ, what a mess,” Thackeray said at last, and Mower was relieved to see some colour returning to his face and a spark of life in his eyes when he opened them again.

  “You say Jack Longley’s looking for me?”

  “He was not too happy I couldn’t contact you earlier by phone….” Mower said hesitantly. Thackeray took his mobile out of his pocket and shrugged.

  “Blasted thing’s switched off. Sorry,” he said. “There was something I had to do this morning and I got delayed.” Mower did not think that explanation was going to satisfy the superintendent.

  “I’ll get you something from the canteen,” he said. “And I’ve got an electric razor in my desk if you’d like it?”

  Thackeray ran his hands through his ruffled hair, rubbed a fist against his unshaven chin and gave Mower the faintest of smiles.

  “You’re nannying me, sergeant,” he said but it was more appreciation than complaint. But he did not find superintendent Longley in a nannying mood when he answered his summons fifteen minutes later, clean-shaven and fed but still looking deathly tired.

  “You were out of touch, Michael,” Longley said angrily. “Where the hell were you? I needed you here. This one’s going to be the mother of all investigations to handle.”

  “I had some family business to attend to,” Thackeray said, waiting in vain for an invitation to sit down. Longley looked at him, scepticism oozing from every pore as he examined the stains on the chief inspector’s shirt, his scuffed shoes and unkempt hair.

  “Oh aye?” he said. “And a hangover to go with it, by the look of you.”

  “No, sir,” Thackeray said evenly. “I can remember the exact day I last had a hangover. It wasn’t one you could forget and it was more than ten years ago.”

  “I hope you’re telling me the truth, Michael, by God I do,” Longley said. “Because if your personal problems get in the way of this investigation, I’ll not rest till you’re out of this division. And after what happened in Arnedale them ten years ago, that’ll mean out of the force. Do you understand?”

  “Sir,” Thackeray assented grimly. He knew that in the situation he had allowed himself to slip into since Laura left, Longley’s was not an idle threat. It was a promise.

  “Right. For God’s sake sit down. You’re standing there like a spare prick at a wedding. I want this handled with some bloody sensitivity,” Longley said, without conscious irony. “First off I want young Mower on his way to London. Jackson’s discovered that Mrs. Hussain and the kids are down there at her sister’s. They’re at private schools, of course, the boys, and they started their holidays last week. I want him to go down and break the news to them. I don’t want it done by phone and I certainly don’t want it done by some smart-arsed beggar from the Met. who reckons anyone with a sun-tan is an illegal immigrant. I’ll take care of Councillor Sayed Hussain myself, dammit. He’s going to be beside himself, I should think. This could really muck up his political career.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “It’s for you.” Sally Neill had answered the door-phone with a desultory Sunday evening lassitude. Tom was sprawled across the sofa watching athletics on television, a clutter of take-away cartons on the table in front of him, a spliff in one hand and the other arm around his sleeping son. Laura flung aside the newspaper she had been pretending to read, swallowing down the momentary panic brought on by the intrusion of an unexpected visitor into the warm languorous cocoon which Sally’s flat had presented all day. She had intended to use the day to think out her position carefully, but a combination of shock and fatigue had intervened and she had stayed in bed late and lazed most of the afternoon away.

  “Did they say who?” she asked warily. Sally gave her friend an anxious look.

  “Someone calling himself Kevin?” she said.

  Laura ran a hand through her mane of dishevelled hair behind which she had been hiding her bruised face and padded on bare feet to the door.

  “Who is that?” she asked cautiously and was astonished when the crackling voice at the other end said Kevin Mower.

  “How on earth did you get here?” she asked.

  “It’s a long story,” Mower said. “Can I come up?” Laura glanced around the untidy living-room, littered with newspapers and half eaten food, and heavy with the scent of cannabis and smiled grimly.

  “I’ll come down,” she said. “Give me a couple of minutes.” She did not doubt that the street-wise Mower had shared a joint in his time but she did not want to embarrass her friends by inviting a policeman in. She went back to the spare bedroom and slipped on a pair of shoes and a clean shirt, wincing as she pulled inadvertently at Sally’s first aid strapping below her ribs. She ran a brush through her hair and, studying her
self carefully in the mirror, decided there was little more she could do to disguise the bruises which ran from her temple to her jaw on the right side of her face except coax the copper curls forward into a curtain around her eyes. She had perhaps ninety seconds to think up a convincing excuse for her injuries which would not throw Mower into a panic over her safety. Sally glanced at her quizzically as she opened the front door of the flat.

  “Friend or foe?” she asked.

  “Friend, but a policeman,” Laura said, and smiled as Tom sat up, suddenly tense, his dark eyes unfriendly.

  “Your policeman?” Sally persisted.

  “Not exactly,” Laura said. “Don’t worry. I won’t invite him in.”

  Inevitably the bruises were the first thing Mower noticed as she emerged from the heavy entrance doors to the flats, looking slim and girlish in jeans and loose green shirt.

  “Christ, what happened?” he said anxiously, taking her arm and brushing the concealing hair away to get a closer look.

  “I got mugged,” Laura lied with a shrug and a slightly shame-faced smile as she pulled away. “A couple of kids tried to grab my bag. I hung on, they shoved me against a wall, but someone came round the corner just at the right moment and they ran.”

  “You’re not safe out on your own,” Mower said. “The boss’ll go spare. Did you report it?”

  “No, and don’t tell Michael,” Laura said distantly. “He’s not my keeper. Nor, may I say, are you. How the hell did you find me and what are you doing in London anyway? He didn’t send you, did he?”

  “Official business,” Mower said. “Honestly,” he added when he noticed the sceptical look in Laura’s green eyes. “But when I knew I was coming I called Vicky Mendelson to see if she knew where you were staying.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “Call it devotion to duty,” Mower said flippantly. “I was worried about you. Both of you, as it happens. Come on, Laura, lighten up. I’ve got the evening to spare, I’ve got my car. I’ll take you to the Lighterman for a drink, if you like. It was a haunt of mine once upon a time and it’ll be quiet on a Sunday evening. Not too many City yuppies about. You look as though you need reviving.”

  “Some confidante Vicky turns out to be,” Laura said with a edge of anger in her voice. If Mower had found it so easy to trace her she did not think Thackeray would find it any harder and she was quite serious in her determination not to see him until she was good and ready.

  “Huh,” she said. “You can tell Vic, and anyone else who wants to know, that I’m moving on tomorrow.”

  “And not coming back?” Mower said, surprised at how fiercely anxiety gripped his stomach.

  “Not yet,” Laura said grimly. “I’m working on a story. I took two weeks holiday from the Gazette so I don’t have to rush back. I’m planning to hire a car in the morning and find somewhere else to stay. I can’t impose on Sally any longer.”

  Mower looked at her sharply but said no more and she let herself be guided into his car and driven half a mile down towards the river where the historic Lighterman clung to the bank of the Thames, dwarfed but not outclassed by the towering modern developments which surrounded it. On a wooden terrace overhanging the swirling brown water Laura perched her drink on the ship’s rail which was all that separated her from the river and stared into its uncommunicative depths. The sun was beginning to hang low in the sky in the west and the current swirled red, as if suffused with blood where the light caught it.

  “How’s Michael?” she asked quietly at last.

  “Not good.”

  “You’re sure he didn’t send you?”

  Mower took a deep gulp from his bottle of Oranjeboom and shuddered as the ice cold lager ran like fire down his throat.

  “He’d kill me if he knew,” he said. “Jack Longley sent me down to see a woman whose husband’s been found dead. I’ll have to be back in the office in the morning but I’d a couple of hours to spare this evening…”

  He took another swig from his bottle and watched a barge ploughing its way up-river against the tide, touched by a nostalgia for the city which he thought had faded but which now filled him with a fierce desire for the jostling crowds and garish lights of the West End. You could lose yourself there, he thought, and escape the threatening tentacles of emotion which increasingly seemed to threaten his self-sufficiency in Bradfield.

  “You know I know what all this is about?” he asked. “Between you and Michael, I mean?”

  “He never bloody told me about his wife,” Laura said bitterly, swilling back her vodka and tonic and crashing the glass down against the rail with barely suppressed fury. “How could he do that? And why didn’t you tell me, if you knew?”

  “I only found out by accident when they found that body on the railway line at Long Moor Hospital,” Mower said.

  “So why didn’t you tell me?” she cried, drawing startled glances from neighbouring drinkers. “You bloody men, you stick together like leeches, don’t you.”

  “I couldn’t,” Mower said helplessly.

  She faced him, her eyes full of unshed tears and he fought down a desire to put his arm round her.

  “Oh, you bastards,” she said softly. “You’re all as bad as each other.”

  “He’s going to kill himself without you, one way or another,” Mower said flatly. “That’s what I came to tell you.” Laura turned away, her shoulders slumped as she leaned out over the water, letting her hair fall forward to hide her face. Mower moved away, half sitting against the rail and gazing up at the drunken old building, its walls leaning at crazy angles beneath their patchy stucco, like a tatty old bag lady surrounded by tall catwalk models dressed in glittering glass and steel.

  “I shouldn’t interfere,” he muttered. Laura spun round, swinging her hair back in a fiery explosion and exposing her bruises to the sun’s searching light. Mower winced and he knew that if he was upset by the state Laura was in, Thackeray would be beside himself.

  “No you bloody shouldn’t,” she said. “I need time to think. And I really am working on a story.” She told him the bare bones of what she knew about Osman Barre’s murder, without touching on the threats she had received, which she knew would have Mower and Thackeray, should he find out, agonising over her safety. The scalding sense of impotence she felt at her inability to prevent the fatal attack was painful to see and Mower knew that nothing he could say would persuade her to leave London while that guilt went unexpiated. “There was nothing you could have done,” he said. “Not against a gang of thugs like that.”

  “That’s what the police said when they eventually turned up,” she said.

  “There were times when I was in London that I felt like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke,” Mower said. “The tide was coming in fast and there was no way we were going to stop it. I thought it was better now but maybe down here - when you’ve got the glitz and the desperation side by side like this - it’s just as bad as it ever was. You mustn’t let it get to you, that’s all.”

  Laura gave Mower one of her dazzling smiles.

  “Thanks, Kevin,” she said. “I’m glad you found me.”

  “Who’s the investigating officer at Deadman’s Quay?” he asked.

  “Steve Wesley,” Laura said quickly, her pent up anger returning. “He really doesn’t seem to be very interested…”

  “That figures,” Mower said quietly.

  “You know him?”

  “Oh, yes, I remember Wesley. He was at Paddington Green when I was,” Mower said. “He was a racist bastard then and I don’t suppose he’s changed much. But he was subtle about it, cautious enough to blow with the anti-racist wind when the brass were around, careful never to let his prejudices show enough to get in the way of his promotion. Which is no doubt why he’s a DI now, sod him.”

  “And you’re still a sergeant?”

  “Ah, well, my problem wasn’t disliking blacks and women, it was liking a few of them too much,” Mower said with a grin which lit up
his thin face and dark eyes and reminded Laura how much she had missed him as well as Thackeray.

  “Some things never change,” Laura said.

  “Well, there’s this DC just come over from Leeds. She is, as you say ‘oop north’, a real bobby-dazzler.”

  “You’re incorrigible,” Laura said, amused in spite of herself. “What’s this one called.”

  “Rita, the dusky beauty,” Mower said thoughtfully. “And you can bet your life Steve Wesley wouldn’t approve.”

  Mower slid his car to a halt outside Deadman’s Quay police station and sat for a moment drumming his fingers nervously on the steering wheel. He had dropped an evidently weary Laura back at Sally Neill’s flat ten minutes previously and driven thoughtfully the half mile down river to where the tall old brick nick shared its view of the waterway with warehouses now converted into luxury apartments.

  It was ten o’clock on a windless, clear summer night and the glow of the city against the still lavender sky gave an unreal luminescence to the slowly moving Thames. As he watched, a brightly lit pleasure boat chugged past, heading for Greenwich and moving swiftly with the tide, the insistent beat of disco music and shrieks of laughter echoing plangently across the water.

  It could almost convince you all was right with the world, he thought, if it hadn’t been just a mile from here as a twenty-one year old probationer in uniform that he had seen his first body hauled out of that black water one equally pleasant evening. The bloated sight had him retching helplessly over the side of the wharf to the unsympathetic laughter of his older colleagues. He had never exposed himself like that again.

  But now here he was not far from the place where he had suffered that youthful humiliation and about to take a chance for reasons which he could not have explained coherently if he had been asked. He got out of the car with a sigh, locked the doors and ran up the steps into the police station and identified himself with his warrant card to the desk sergeant.