Dead on Arrival

by Patricia Hall

  He did not hold out high hopes. Aysgarth Lane was a busy thoroughfare by day but much quieter in the late evening when Bradfield’s commuters had long gone home to their suburban villas and the dormitory villages in the Dales where they put on green wellies and played at country life.

  The houses at that end of the main road were set back and above the carriageway with steep drives and stone steps to garages and front doors. Beyond the last of them, the road followed a sharp curve in the river and crossed the sort of semi-urban landscape of allotments and scrubby fields which had house builders salivating over plans for more acres of detached executive residences. If the crime had been committed there, where the car had been found, double glazing and thick curtains, not to mention late-night television, would have insulated the residents from pretty well anything short of a small war outside.

  Mower glanced round the office, unable to resist giving Rita Sayed half a smile before he noticed Val Ridley put her phone down and glance in his direction.

  “Anything?” he asked. She shook her short blonde hair dismissively and he felt the usual glint of disapproval in her eyes.

  “Mrs. Hussain’s not back yet. There are relatives at the house and they say they left London at about nine. She should be back by one.”

  “I’ll tell the DCI,” Mower said, seizing the opportunity to disturb Thackeray, who had shut his office door fairly decisively half an hour earlier. “He’ll want to see Mrs. Hussain himself, I should think.”

  When he put his head round the door he found Thackeray’s office as thick with cigarette smoke as it had been the previous day and the man himself looking no less grim.

  “Can I have a word, guv?” Mower asked tentatively and closed the door behind him when Thackeray waved him in. Mower was not often lost for words but when he had reported on progress, such as it was, he found himself standing in front of the DCI’s desk feeling like a schoolboy unable to come up with a convincing excuse for failing to deliver his homework.

  Thackeray looked at him impatiently.

  “Was there something else?” he asked.

  “Can we have a quiet chat, guv? Off the record? At lunch-time perhaps?”

  “What makes you think there’s going to be a lunch-time?” Thackeray said. “I want you to come with me to see Mrs. Hussain as soon as she gets back…”

  “Right,” Mower said.

  “So what is it?” Thackeray snapped. “Stop being so bloody mysterious, Kevin. If you’ve got something to say, say it.”

  “I bumped into Laura in London,” Mower said quietly, but he waited in vain for the explosion he was expecting. Thackeray merely sat back sharply in his chair, as if he had come face-to-face with an invisible wall. He abruptly lit another cigarette from the butt of the previous one.

  “I guess you’re being pretty economical with the truth there,” he said at length, his face closed and his eyes blank as he watched the smoke curl up into the haze which hung below the office ceiling. “But how was she, anyway?”

  “Not good,” Mower said and gave Thackeray an edited version of Laura’s latest crusade. Thackeray listened in silence though his expression darkened perceptibly when he heard that Laura claimed to have been mugged.

  “Do you have her friend’s number?” he asked. “She doesn’t always remember to keep her mobile switched on.” She’s not the only one, Mower thought, remembering the difficulty he had experienced trying to contact Thackeray the previous day. He wrote down Sally Neill’s address and telephone number in the wild hope that Thackeray could find the time to go to London before Laura got any more deeply involved. But Thackeray merely put the slip of paper inside his diary and tucked both away in his inside jacket pocket without comment.

  “Let’s see if we can make some progress on the case of Imran Hussain, shall we, before the politicians begin to tie the town in knots?” he said, and Mower retreated, dismissed.

  Rita Desai was both angry and frustrated. She had been sent to Bradfield from Leeds to help in the search for a missing Asian school-girl. She was as convinced as she had been ever since Tracy Sullivan told the police she had seen Safi Haque in a car that the girl had been abducted and was probably dead. But for twenty-four hours she had been unable to convince her superiors that the new inquiry which was cranking into top gear around her should not be allowed to impede the search for Safi.

  Her frustration was partly her own fault, she admitted to herself. After Kevin Mower had gone off to London the previous afternoon she had found herself drafted into routine inquiries for the rest of the day. Without Mower’s support, she had not found the courage, in a strange office in a strange division where her welcome had been circumspect rather than warm, to stick her neck out and raise her worries with the DCI.

  If she was honest, she was faintly alarmed by Michael Thackeray. She was used to unapproachable superiors and to colleagues who still found it hard to treat a woman, and an Asian woman at that, unequivocally as an equal. But she had seldom been as un-nerved as she found herself with the dour and unsmiling Thackeray. Nor, to her surprise, did she find much support from Val Ridley, the only other woman in CID. When Val was not ignoring her completely, her attitude seemed at best frosty and at worst hostile. When Rita’s tentative smile in the women’s washroom had been met with a monosyllablic response, she decided that she would wait until Mower returned to raise her fears for Safi Haque.

  But Mower had not proved as helpful as she anticipated on Monday morning. He too seemed tired and preoccupied when he came into the office and unwilling to question superintendent Longley’s priorities or raise the issue of Safi Haque with Michael Thackeray.

  “This is a murder case, Rita,” he had said impatiently. “With the other there’s no sign of a body. We just don’t know what we’re dealing with.”

  “We’ll never find out if we don’t pursue our inquiries,” Rita came back angrily. Mower shrugged helplessly.

  “There’s nothing I can do about it,” he said.

  She had been sent out to help, with ill-grace and no useful result, in the house-to-house inquiries in Aysgarth Lane for most of the afternoon. No-one, it appeared, had seen or heard anything untoward the previous evening, and one or two residents made it clear that they did not particularly relish being disturbed about something which did not concern them by a young female police-officer several shades darker than they thought she should have been.

  As the traffic heading out of town thinned out at the end of the evening rush hour the uniformed sergeant in charge decided to call it a day and Rita found herself in her own car with an hour’s drive home to Leeds ahead of her and an empty evening stretching beyond that. She would, she thought, take the time and trouble to do what she had wanted to do since the previous day, which was talk to Safi Haque’s mother again. One more interview, she thought, could not hurt.

  She drove slowly down Aysgarth Lane towards the town centre, leaving suburbia behind as the road steepened and narrowed and the pavements became more crowded with mainly Asian shoppers patronising the late-opening stores. She turned off the main road, hoping that Mohammed Haque would still be at work in his shop and Mrs. Haque alone at home.

  She parked in the narrow side-street outside the terraced stone house which was separated from the pavement by a low stone wall and a narrow strip of unkempt garden. Pulling her headscarf out of her bag and slinging it around her shoulders, she locked the car and rang the door-bell.

  It was the son, Majeed, who answered. He evidently recognised her from her previous visit and he looked at her with pure panic in his dark eyes.

  “Have you found her?” he asked in English. Rita shook her head quickly.

  “No, there’s no news, Majeed,” she said. “I just wondered if I could speak to you and your mother again.” The boy looked over his shoulder anxiously.

  “My father’s not home yet,” he said.

  “But you’re here,” Rita said, pressing in on the boy so that he backed into the narrow hallway and she was able to
follow. “It’s important for Safi,” she said. Reluctantly Majeed led the way into the kitchen at the back of the house where Mrs. Haque was busy at the stove with several aromatically steaming saucepans. She glanced round in surprise and pulled her scarf over her head, as if expecting Rita to be followed by a male colleague.

  “I’m by myself,” Rita said, in Punjabi this time, in an effort to persuade the woman and the boy to relax. “There were just a few more things I wanted to ask you.”

  With great reluctance Mrs. Haque turned down the gas beneath the evening meal and led Rita into the sitting room where they had spoken on her last visit. She sat down heavily, and Majeed stood awkwardly beside her, with a hand on her shoulder.

  “Mrs. Haque, if Safi has got herself involved with a white boy and the family is trying to break up the relationship by sending her away, you really must tell me. If you’re wasting police time by reporting her missing to mislead her boyfriend, or something like that, it’s a serious matter. It could bring trouble to you all.”

  Mrs. Haque clasped her hands tightly in her lap and shook her head.

  “We are not wasting police time,” she said. “Safi has disappeared. We do not know where she is.”

  “Then is there any other reason you know of why she might have been taken away by people in your own community?”

  Mrs. Haque shook her head but it was obvious that Majeed was not happy with this answer.

  “Mother, why don’t you tell her? If you don’t tell her we may not ever see either of them again.”

  “Either of them?” Rita said sharply. “Mrs. Haque? Is there someone else who is missing?”

  “Not missing!” Mrs. Haque said, her voice rising sharply. “My other son, Ali, is on his way here from Pakistan and has been delayed that is all. He is not missing. That is Majeed exaggerating. It is a long way to come. He is just delayed.”

  Rita Desai looked puzzled.

  “Is he flying in? What’s the problem?” Mrs. Haque shook her head.

  “Something about the tickets,” she said vaguely. “He will be arriving soon.”

  “Why do you think Safi’s disappearance is connected to your brother’s late arrival?” Rita asked the boy directly but his mother siezed his arm in an iron grip and he shook his head helplessly and shrugged.

  “It was just an idea,” he mumbled. “I suppose it’s stupid.” Then he said in English, avoiding his mother’s eyes. “But Ali is not the only one who is delayed.”

  In the empty CID office an hour later Kevin Mower listened as Rita Desai described how she had taken it upon herself to chat to some of the Asian shoppers on Aysgarth Lane to try and confirm what Majeed had said. But she had met only blank stares and shaken heads for her pains. If Majeed was right, it was not information that anyone wanted to share with the police.

  “There’s no reason why he should make it up,” she said. “I knew last week that there were a lot of worried people down there. I thought it was just because of Safi but now I think there’s something more.”

  “If the other son is coming in illegally no-one is going to tell us anything,” Mower said. “Nor is any other family, for that matter. It’s odd. I was talking to a DI I used to work with in London on Sunday and he was hunting illegals with an enthusiasm beyond the call of duty. He reckoned it was a growing problem there, so maybe it is here too.”

  Mower had been sitting in the office in semi-darkness when Rita Desai came back, anxious to put her thoughts on paper before she finally went home. She had not been expecting to find anyone still on duty at the end of a long day. He gave her no more than a half smile but a sudden spark in his dark eyes betrayed him and she guessed he had been waiting for her.

  “Do you think I’m going over the top, sarge?” she asked. “Reading too much in to it?”

  “Probably not,” Mower said. “But if no-one will report anyone else missing, there’s damn all we can do about it. I’ll have a word with the DCI in the morning for you. And pass on the word to immigration.”

  “Thanks,” Rita said, the anxiety which had shadowed her face lifting slightly as she stood hesitantly beside Mower’s desk. Mower slipped into his jacket and stood up.

  “And now after all that unpaid over-time, I’m taking you out for that meal I promised you the other night when the super interrupted us. OK?”

  Rita knew that the promise was a figment of Mower’s imagination, but none the worse for that. She smiled, a smile which lit up her thin, oval face and dark eyes and had a strange effect on the rhythm of Mower’s heart.

  “I have to get back home to Leeds,” she objected, but only tentatively. Mower briefly considered contradicting her and then slapped the idea down. This was something which should not be rushed, he thought happily.

  “I’ll make sure you get your beauty sleep,” he said with only the faintest hint of mockery in his eyes. “If you’re sure that’s what you really want.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Laura was awake early that Monday morning only to find that Sally Neill’s household was ahead of her. She found Ben already dressed, sitting at the kitchen table dipping bread into the soft yolk of an egg while Sally brewed coffee and filled a cup for Laura.

  “What time do you have to leave?” she asked. Sally glanced at her watch.

  “About five minutes ago,” she said cheerfully. “I drop Ben off at his nursery on the way to school. I like to get in soon after eight. There’s always a few of my kids mooching about in the playground early and I’d rather have them in the classroom getting on with something useful than outside getting into mischief.”

  “I’ll get out of your hair today, I promise,” Laura said. Sally glanced at her son with troubled eyes.

  “If it weren’t for him…” she said.

  “I know,” Laura said. “I’d feel the same.”

  They said no more as Tom Massey came into the kitchen behind Laura and helped himself to a mug of coffee. He merely nodded in her direction and sat down by his son, helping him mop up the last of the egg with his bread.

  Sally shrugged across the two dark heads.

  “You’re staying in London, then?” she asked.

  “Till I’ve finished the research for the assignment,” Laura said. “I’ll go home to write it up. One thing you could help me with is an address for the immigrant advice centre. I want to talk to that young man we met at the Barre’s flat. What was his name?”

  “Dave Swinburn. The office is up towards Stepney. I’ll find the phone number for you,” Sally said.

  “You want to be very careful, asking questions,” Tom said suddenly. “You know it’s not healthy.”

  Laura shrugged, conscious suddenly of a sharp twinge from the cut in her side. She was not sure whether Sally had told Tom everything which had happened at the club. He had not mentioned the attack directly but had seemed preoccupied and tense the whole of the previous day.

  “You sound like my boy-friend,” she said more lightly than she felt.

  “Sound man,” Tom said.

  Sally thrust a piece of paper into Laura’s hand.

  “Dave’s number,” she said. “And the school number, in case you need it. It can be hard to get hold of us if we’re teaching. But you can leave messages at the office.” She put her arms round Laura and gave her a hug.

  “We must go or we’ll be late,” she said. “Do take care. Slam the front door hard when you leave.”

  Tom picked up his son but he hesitated before following Sally out of the flat.

  “I mean it,” he said, his dark eyes cold. “It’s not just Sally and this one I have to look out for.” He glanced at his son, who had a hand entangled in his hair and an arm round his neck. “We’ve got dozens of shell-shocked kids down there at Ben Jonson. We’ve got enough on our plate without you parachuting in stirring up trouble. You with me?”

  Laura nodded.

  “I’m out of here,” she said. “I promise.”

  “Good,” Tom said and suddenly the three of them were gone an
d Laura was alone in the light and airy flat and the enormity of what she was planning to do hit her. She stood for a moment at the tall window which gave onto the dock where the boats bobbed gently on dark shadowed water and felt the silence pressing down on her. Not for the first time since the night of the Somali boy’s murder she felt seriously alone and seriously afraid.

  Laura decided that action was the best defence against panic and called Nick Bentall to make sure he would fund her expenses. He raised no objections to her plans so she hired a car which the firm brought round to the front door of the flats. She drove the shiny red Peugeot north and booked into a small bed-and-breakfast hotel in Stoke Newington, which seemed far enough away from Docklands to be safe but not so far that she could not drive back easily to continue her inquiries. She checked in, dumped her bags on the narrow-looking double bed, and went straight out again, heading south, back towards the Thames through the grinding traffic of East London.

  After losing herself several times in one-way systems and on broad new roads which seemed to by-pass her destination and take sudden leaps down tunnels and onto overpasses, she eventually parked on a yellow line in a Stepney side-street outside a row of dilapidated shop fronts, one of which advertised legal and immigration advice. In spite of the large white wedding-cake of an eighteenth century church which stood on a corner, still evidently in use, the population in this part of East London appeared to be largely Asian. The streets were lined with small businesses. Travel agents were plastered with bright advertisements for cheap flights to Bangladesh and Turkey while take-aways filled the air with the aroma of Balti and Tandoori specialities. Rows of rag-trade wholesalers and small factories had doors open wide onto the street to reveal ranks of dark women in traditional dress racing away on sewing machines as if their lives depended on it, as perhaps they did.