Dead on Arrival

by Patricia Hall

  “Why’s that,” Thackeray asked.

  “Think about it,” Roberts said impatiently. “If we find these bodies we won’t know who the hell they are.” Thackeray grimaced slightly.

  “No, I don’t mean that,” Roberts said, his sharp eyes picking up Thackeray’s distaste. “Sure, they won’t be very pretty when we dig them up, but that’s not the problem. If they were British we’d probably be able to identify them anyway. But dental and medical records are not too reliable in the villages of Pakistan and Turkey. And if they’re carrying passports they’ll be forged. These are not people who are going to be reported missing, unless and until we can persuade someone at this end to do it.”

  “Of course,” Thackeray said suddenly. “You must talk to the young Asian DC whose been telling me for days that there was something wrong in the Asian community we couldn’t get a grip on.”

  “Here legally, is he?” Roberts said, and Thackeray could not be sure how far he was joking. Roberts was not evidently a man to whom humour came easily.

  “She,” he said shortly. “And she was born here. You know we’ve had a murder? A prominent Asian businessman. The whole Asian community’s in uproar about that. But Rita Desai thinks there’s something else going on.”

  “Aye, well, she may be right,” Roberts said. “We’ve been picking up rumours in Leicester and London too. I think there may well be a consignment gone astray. Of course, it saves the taxpayer a bob or two in the long run, I suppose.”

  “How’s that?” Thackeray asked.

  “No need to return to sender, is there?” Roberts said, and this time he did allow himself a thin smile.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “It’s nothing personal, Michael,” superintendent Jack Longley said as Thackeray walked beside him across the town centre to the Victorian town hall on the other side of the square. Thackeray glanced away, trying to keep his temper under control. Longley panted slightly as he struggled to keep up with the chief inspector’s long angry stride.

  “It’s for your own good, lad,” Longley said. “We don’t want any bother with Hussain. If I pull rank it’ll make the whole thing smoother.”

  Thackeray pushed open the heavy mahogony swing doors but thought better of letting them swing back in Longley’s face. Instead he held the door open for him, and fell into step behind him as they made their way up the broad marble staircase, past the decorative pool where a couple of dolphins spouted water over a desultory school of goldfish and down the long polished corridor to Councillor Sayed Hussain’s office.

  The introduction made, Hussain sat at his desk opposite the two police officers, his hands tented in front of his face. He was a tall rangy man, dressed in a dark high necked traditional jacket, clean-shaven with his iron grey hair cropped short and his eyes darkly hooded under heavy brows.

  “This is a terrible thing which has happened to my brother,” he said. “If there is any way in which I can help you find the killer, you have only to ask.” Longley nodded.

  “There are some questions my colleague would like to ask you, sir,” he said heavily. “We know this must be a difficult time for you, but we must build up a picture of Imran’s last few days in the hope of finding a motive for this dreadful business.” Hussain shrugged slightly.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “When was the last time you saw your brother?” Thackeray asked brusquely.

  “He came to my house for a meal the night before he was killed,” Hussain said. “As you know, his wife had gone to visit her brother in London. Imran was alone.”

  “Did he seem his usual self that night?”

  “Not entirely,” Hussain said. “He was in quite good spirits. We talked briefly about the cultural centre he is helping to set up, and then about the cricket. It is always an interesting summer when the Pakistan tourists are here.”

  “They’re looking very good this year,” Longley broke in. “That young lad, what’s his name? Very promising.” Hussain and Thackeray ignored the interruption.

  “You didn’t discuss the business?” Thackeray pressed on. “Your brother had no worries there?”

  “I am a partner in the business but I leave the day to day running of it entirely to Imran. I think maybe there was something bothering him. But he didn’t raise it and I didn’t ask. This is all the business I want to cope with.” He waved an expansive hand around his office and the town hall beyond. “If he had any serious worries he would, of course, have shared them with me. But he said nothing that evening.”

  “Did he talk to you at all about the young Asian girl who has disappeared, Safi Haque?” Thackeray asked. Hussain glanced at Longley for a second before replying but again he shrugged.

  “We have discussed it, but it didn’t come up that night. Imran’s view was that the girl had run away and that the family did not want to lose face by admitting it. It must be difficult for you , dealing with some of these traditional families, chief inspector. But that is a possiblity, is it not?”

  “It’s possible,” Thackeray conceded ungraciously. “But there are other possibilities. It’s possible she has come to some serious harm. It’s also possible that she’s been put on a plane to Pakistan for some reason, and a smokescreen thrown up around that. I’ll be asking my officers to look at travel agency records of flight bookings. You still have an interest, I think, in Hussain Travel.”

  “We do. It was one of the first businesses Imran started when he came to this country. Immigrants always like to feel that there is a way back, you know, if we need one, if things don’t work out. The agency flourished, and still does, as far as I can recall last year’s accounts. The community is very loyal. I’ll ask the manager there to give you any help you need. It would make the whole community feel better if the girl could be found. One murder is enough, I think. Two would be very bad for…” He hesitated as he chose his words carefully. “For stability, I suppose. For community morale. You know how fragile that can be.”

  “Can you think of anyone at all who might have a motive for killing your brother?” Longley asked, looking flustered. Sayed Hussain shook his dark head slowly.

  “No-one,” he said. “No-one at all. But am I to gather from that question that you think the attack was not a random one? That my brother was targeted and deliberately killed?”

  “We have more than one lead we are working on,” Thackeray said flatly. “But that is a possibility, yes. Street robbers in Bradfield don’t normally ambush cars or carry hand-guns.”

  Laura Ackroyd drove circumspectly up to the Heights in her aging Beetle. She parked at the back of the tower blocks named after Yorkshire authors and inevitably and irreverently dubbed Wuthering by a town unimpressed by 1960s municipal architecture, and made her way round the estate to where a row of tiny bungalows cowered in the shadow of their bulky neighbours. She glanced behind her before opening her grandmother’s garden gate, but the street and the expanse of browning grass beneath the flats seemed deserted in the afternoon heat. Quickly she made her way to the back yard and tapped gently on the door. Ahmed Barre opened the door a fraction and peered out with dark anxious eyes before flinging it back and welcoming Laura with a relieved smile and bright eyes.

  “Come in, come in,” he said expansively. “I’m glad to see you. Have you decided to marry me after all?”

  “I’ve brought you some more food,” Laura said, pleased to see the boy more cheerful. She handed him a bag of groceries she had been carrying. “Have you been very careful about not being seen.”

  “Yes, yes,” Ahmed said airily. “Very careful. I didn’t go out last night until after dark.”

  “Out!” Laura said, horrified. “I told you to stay here. Where did you go? Did anyone see you?”

  “I can’t stay in all the time,” Ahmed said. “I can’t be shut up, locked in….” The brightness drained out of his face and Laura felt stricken when she remembered what he had been through.

  “I told the police that I didn’t know where you were,
but I’m not sure that they believed me,” Laura said, recalling Thackeray’s deeply sceptical blue eyes. “They could be looking for you here.”

  “I was quite safe,” Ahmed said. “I went to a place where everyone was from Pakistan. Not so far away. No-one would notice me there. I ate some curry and then came back again in the dark. No-one saw me, Laura. Don’t worry. You don’t need to worry.”

  “You have money?”

  “My uncle gave me plenty of money to travel to Canada. I’m not a drain on your precious welfare state.”

  “But just because you’ve come away from London doesn’t mean you’re safe,” Laura said, trying to impress the boy with the seriousness of his situation. She recalled how his mood had lightened on the long drive north and suspected that he did not realise that in England the writ of the police and the immigration service ran nationwide. “I’ve been thinking about your situation and I’m sure the best thing to do is to get some legal help and then volunteer to talk to the police.” Ahmed looked mutinous, as he always did when she suggested that he should voluntarily make contact with officialdom.

  “I won’t be locked up,” he said and there was real fear in his eyes. Laura sighed.

  “I’ve told the police about the land-fill site and they’re going to look for the bodies,” she said. “I just hope I’ve been able to give them precise enough instructions. But if they find them they’re going to be even more keen to talk to you. You’re the only survivor, Ahmed, the only witness. They’ll need your help to find the truck, your evidence if they trace it.”

  “Let them find it first,” Ahmed said. “Here.” He crossed Joyce Ackroyd’s tiny living room and picked up his jacket off a chair and felt in the pockets. He handed Laura the crumpled scrap of paper on which he had scribbled his painstaking navigation on his journey from the Channel to Kent.

  “I’m sure we can find you a lawyer in Bradfield to represent you,” Laura said. “Someone sympathetic.”

  “Not yet,” Ahmed said flatly. “No lawyers, no police. Here, take this as well to show your policemen,” he said. He gave her the plaited gold ring which he had retrieved from the body they had seen at the tip. “Maybe they will find out who this belonged to,” he said wistfully. “There was another thing. If they can find the truck, up where there was the crack in the metal I wrote my name. No-one will see it unless they are looking for it, it’s so high up, near the roof. But it’s evidence, isn’t it? Evidence that I am telling you the truth?”

  “How did they know where I was?” Laura asked Thackeray bitterly, as she stood by her living room window looking down at the great swags of red and pink and cream roses, their petals already falling to make a Persian carpet of the grass in the untidy garden at the rear of the house. Her eyes blurred with tears. Michael Thackeray looked up from his examination of the wreck of her home and shrugged dispiritedly.

  “You can’t be certain it has anything to do with your magazine story,” he said, although he did not really believe what he was saying. “People get burgled every day. You know they do.”

  “I haven’t been burgled,” Laura snapped. “Not as far as I can see. I’ve just been vandalised. There’s nothing missing.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Someone wants to find Ahmed Barre very badly,” she said, not turning round. “They’ve followed me here. They must have done. That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  Laura had known as soon as she got back home that something was wrong. The front door to the tall Victorian house was ajar and as she ran up the stairs she could tell from the way the light fell onto the top landing that her own front door was open too.

  Cautiously she had pushed the door wide and come face to face with the scene of desolation which by this time she half expected. Her visitors had trashed the flat very thoroughly, leaving not a drawer or a cupboard un-emptied nor a piece of furniture undamaged, not a book or CD which had not been flung onto the floor and apparently trampled on.

  “Oh, bloody, bloody hell,” she had whispered as she peered cautiously into every room, touching her jumbled possessions with her foot as if to prod them into telling her their story. But the vandals had departed, leaving chaos in their wake. Thackeray had come as quickly, as she knew he would when she called, and had surveyed the dereliction in his turn with a distress as deep as Laura’s and the added sharpness of his conviction that she was in real danger.

  “I’ll get the fingerprint people to go over the place, but I don’t expect they’ll find anything. Whoever did this was probably too careful for that.”

  “What were they looking for, if not Ahmed?” she asked helplessly. “What didn’t they find?”

  “Notes for your story, perhaps?” Thackeray suggested.

  “It’s all on tape and my tape-recorder’s in my bag. I didn’t leave anything here. In any case, you have a copy. Destroying mine wouldn’t do anyone any good.”

  “They don’t know that,” Thackeray said. “And if they didn’t find what they were looking for they may be back. You can’t stay here. I’ll get my new DC to come over to stay with you until the forensic people have finished, and then I think you should move out.”

  “Where to?” she said, her mind dulled with shock. Thackeray’s immediate thought was of his own bleak flat but he dismissed the idea as quickly as he knew Laura would. This was not the time, he thought, to even begin to resolve their differences.

  “David and Vicky would give you a bed, I’m sure,” he said.

  “I hate being driven out of my own home.”

  “These people are either very vicious and, if they really are are looking for you or the Somali boy, very determined. If they think that you know where he is they won’t give up, will they?” He looked at her for a moment until she glanced away.

  “You do know where he is, don’t you?” But she would not answer the question directly.

  “He gave me something for you,” she said, reaching into her bag. “This is the ring he took off the body at the dump. And this is the paper he used to work out where the lorry was going. And…” She rooted in her bag again. “I almost forgot. He says there were no markings on the container truck, but some letters and numbers. Here. I wrote them down.” She pulled the sheet from her notebook and handed them to Thackeray who looked exasperated.

  “Laura…,” he began, but she stopped him again.

  “One more thing he told me,” she said firmly. “Where he was trapped in the truck, he wrote his name on the side, where there was a crack which let air in. No-one’s likely to notice it, he says…”

  “He’s in Bradfield, isn’t he?” Thackeray said sharply. “You’ve brought him here and that’s what this is all about.” He waved at the clutter of damaged furnishings which littered the floor.

  “You know you’re putting me in an impossible position? If I turn up with all this evidence, Ray Roberts will want to know where the hell I got it from. I can’t cover up for you, Laura. You know that.”

  “When they’ve found the bodies I’ll talk to immigration,” she said, and he recognised the implacable look in her eyes. Thackeray glanced again at the gold ring, twisting it between his fingers. He remembered a day when he had slipped a gold ring onto a woman’s finger and he wondered about his chances of ever doing the same again. Coping with Laura while the gulf between they lay unbridged was almost more than he could bear.

  “Did he notice who this belonged to, before….?”

  “A Pakistani boy, he said,” Laura said.

  “It’s quite small.”

  “The boy was quite young.” Thackeray shook his head in frustration.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said, and he sounded as uncertain as she had ever heard him sound and she knew she was stretching what little trust they had left to breaking point.

  “Look at my beautiful poppies,” she said, suddenly wretched again as she crossed the room to the small fire place where a terracotta jug lay in shards and a cluster of silk flowers had been wrenched
apart and flung across the hearth rug like gouts of blood. She sank to her knees and gathered up the crumpled petals, sinking her face into them, hiding the fading bruises on her face and her tears.

  Thackeray watched her for a moment, still desperate for answers to his questions but wrenched apart by her grief. Quietly he came up behind her and ran his hands across her tangled hair and took her lightly by the shoulders.

  “Laura,” he said, as he felt her stiffen against his touch. “Please,” he said, not quite knowing what he was asking for. She did not shrug him off, as he expected her to, and gradually he felt her relax until eventually she stood up and let the flowers fall in a scarlet drift around her feet as she turned towards him and let him take her in his arms. He kissed her forehead tentatively, unsure of her reaction, and then her cheek, still purple and blue, until his lips met hers and he found them as hungry for him as he was for her.

  “You can’t imagine how I’ve missed you,” he said.

  “I can,” she said.

  Later, as she lay in an uneasy sleep beside him surrounded by the wreckage of her home, he watching the smoke of his cigarette drift to the ceiling. They had made love more in desperation than tenderness and he felt shamed by that. He glanced at her naked body, sprawled half under the sheet beside him and noticed for the first time the small cut on her side under her ribs. He touched it gently with a finger and knew that it represented something else that she had not been able to tell him. He pulled her towards him again as her eyes flickered and she drifted back to consciousness, her head on his chest.