By Death Divided (18 page)

Laura flushed faintly and turned away. She understood the justice of Thackeray’s reaction but she was still concerned for Julie’s safety.

‘You haven’t talked to Julie and her mother-in-law,’ she muttered. ‘They’re both terrified of this man. He’s a monster. And there’s a child involved.’

Thackeray gazed at her for a moment without speaking.

‘You get in too deep,’ he said at last. ‘All the time, you get in too deep. You should learn to insulate yourself from it, if you’re going to insist on writing about these emotional cases. It’s the only way to survive. Believe me, I know.’

Laura looked at him sceptically.

‘But you don’t, do you? You don’t insulate yourself. You can’t, any more than I can. Is that what this is all about? There’s a child involved again so you’re trying not to think about it? I watched you when those children were killed in Staveley last year. You hated every minute of that case. It nearly tore you apart. You’re just as emotional as I am. You just hide it better.’

Thackeray said nothing as she flounced across the room and poured herself a large vodka and tonic.

‘Do you want anything?’ she asked, grudgingly and when he shook his head she sat down in the armchair opposite him and sipped her drink, trying to look unconcerned although her heart was thudding uncomfortably. She knew that she was trespassing flat-footed into areas that she had never felt were hers to approach, but with a flash of understanding she knew she was right to venture there at last. She had been happy with Thackeray for months now, as their relationship seemed to have reached a level of contentment they had never previously
known. But if it was to go further, she thought, she needed some answers to questions she had quietly buried for years. And perhaps the disintegration of Julie Holden’s marriage and what she believed was the threat to her daughter was the catalyst they needed to clear the air. She took a larger gulp of her drink and decided to live dangerously.

‘You don’t deny it, then,’ she said quietly, more a statement of the obvious than a question. ‘You hang on in there with the job, on the edge every time a child goes missing or a body is found, but can you hang on in with me when you know how much I want a child? Can you give me that, Michael? Or am I wasting my time with you? I really, really need to know the answer. I have a right to ask. I’ve waited long enough.’

Thackeray flinched at the directness of the question and for a moment she thought he was going to fling himself out of the flat with all the risk that entailed of his trying to drown his past in a bottle of whiskey. But after closing his eyes for a moment he seemed to come to a decision.

‘You have a right to ask,’ he said, his voice thick with emotion. ‘And you have a right to an answer.’

The silence between them lengthened until, her voice hesitant, Laura spoke again.

‘And what is the answer, Michael?’

He crossed the room to her and sat beside her, taking her hands in his, and she could see the pain in his eyes but for once did not regret putting it there. They needed to have this out once and for all.

‘You have no idea how the guilt corrodes you inside,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s enough to lose a child and see so many lives wrecked, Aileen’s destroyed so slowly over so many years, my parents distraught, her parents distraught, but to know
that it was all down to the way you behaved, the crimes you committed…I wonder if your man Holden is going through all that now, you know? Is he thrashing about the way I did? The way I still do sometimes?’

‘He’s sick, Michael, that’s obvious,’ Laura said, veering away from their own problems as if the heat was too intense. ‘And thankfully someone’s decided to stop him abusing women before he goes too far. If you can just find Anna and get her out of his clutches…’

But Thackeray had lost interest in Julie Holden and her problems.

‘No one even noticed what I was doing,’ Thackeray said. ‘There was no one to stop me before I drove Aileen over the brink and she did what she did. I’ve forgiven her long ago but I don’t think I can ever forgive myself. I live with the fact that I effectively murdered my son every day of my life.’

Laura knew better than to argue with his bleak assessment of his own part in Ian’s death. It was too close to the truth to be debatable now.

‘No absolution, then?’ she said softly. ‘I thought you were brought up with that.’

‘I was brought up with a lot of things, but they died too and were buried with Ian. And now with Aileen.’

‘You’re too hard on yourself,’ Laura whispered, although she knew she was wasting her breath.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ Thackeray said. ‘And you want to know why I persist with this job, for all the stress and pain it can cause? Because every time someone’s killed, and especially if it’s a child, I want to pin the blame where it belongs, however hard it is to do. I want everything out in the open and justice served as it never really was in Ian’s case. It wasn’t Aileen
who should have stood in the dock, it was me. But neither of us ever did, Aileen because she was never fit to plead and me because the blame was indirect and could never be proved. So I plough on, dispensing some sort of justice, knowing all the time that it’s a case of the guilty pursuing the guilty, that I’m as culpable as the Bruce Holdens of this world.’

‘No, that’s not true, Michael. You’re too hard on yourself,’ Laura said, taking his hand.

‘You don’t know. You can’t know. You weren’t there. But maybe it makes me a better copper. Who knows?’

‘No, I don’t believe that,’ Laura said. She kissed his cheek, fighting back the tears, knowing that she had her answer. ‘You can’t do it again, can you? You can’t bear another child.’

He pulled Laura close and clung to her for a long time.

‘I love you, Laura,’ he said. ‘I always will. But no, I don’t think I can do that again. I’m too afraid to make myself that vulnerable again. I’m sorry.’

‘I’m sorry too,’ Laura said. ‘You can’t imagine how sorry that makes me.’

Anna Holden sat on the floor in her grandmother’s cellar trying not to cry. Her nanna was lying asleep on the bed of cushions her father had left for them and Anna had spent the last half hour creeping around the small square room and the coal cellar next to it trying to find some way out of their prison. But the cellar window had been securely boarded up from the outside, and the small metal grill at the top of the coal chute was too small and too firmly wedged in place by years of accumulated dirt and dust for her to move it even when she scrambled up the chute and tried to put her full weight on it from beneath. Hot and dirty, she had sunk to the floor, trying not to cry in case she woke Nanna.

She could see that outside it was daylight again now. Small lozenges of light dimly illuminated the coal cellar through the patterned grating, but in the main room almost no light at all penetrated past the boards attached to the window frame outside. When Bruce had first locked them in her grandmother had tried banging on the window and even shouting to attract attention from the street outside, but after a while both of
them had grown hoarse and they had evidently not been heard through the glass and thick boarding. Anna had seen her nanna glancing anxiously at the single light bulb that Bruce had left on and she knew that occasionally bulbs failed. If that happened, she thought, she would be really frightened, especially of the spiders, whose webs festooned the ceiling in great dusty swathes. Anna hated spiders. But there was no way to turn the bulb on or off. The switch, Nanna said, was on the kitchen wall beyond the locked cellar door. They should just be thankful he had decided to leave it on when he left them, she said, trying to reassure Anna, who was not at all reassured but said nothing.

Anna was beginning to panic as the second day of their imprisonment wore on. At first she had believed her father’s promises that he would not keep them there long. It had seemed like something of an adventure: she had helped her grandmother, who found it hard to get up from the cushions on the floor, to make picnic meals from the supplies her dad had dumped in a cardboard box. But although he had put in cans of baked beans and ham he had neglected to include a can-opener, so that even Anna began to wonder how long their supplies of bread and cheese would last. She noticed that her grandmother ate and drank very little, and while at first she had tried to fulfil her promise of playing games to keep themselves occupied, she soon seemed to run out of energy and as night fell outside she lapsed into a heavy sleep while Anna, cuddling up to her for warmth under the single duvet and blanket, found it hard to close her eyes, anxiously watching for signs of life amongst the cobwebs.

They were both awake by six, while it was still dark outside, and Anna rummaged in the box for a picnic breakfast,
noticing anxiously that they had already eaten more than half of the bread and cheese and that their two bottles of water were going down fast.

‘Daddy will be coming back soon,’ she said, trying to keep her own spirits up as much as Vanessa’s after her grandmother had struggled into the coal cellar to use the bucket he had left there. ‘He can’t be much longer.’

Vanessa had nodded vaguely as she lowered herself back into a sitting position with a groan.

‘Shall we play I-spy again?’ Anna asked, but Vanessa had lain back on the cushions, clutching her arms around herself and beginning to shiver.

‘It’s so cold,’ she whispered.

‘I’m not cold, Nanna,’ Anna said cheerfully.

‘You jump up and down a bit,’ Vanessa said. ‘That’ll keep you warm’

‘P’raps you should do that too.’ But Vanessa just sighed and closed her eyes again and Anna realised, as she had not quite done before, that although Vanessa was supposed to be looking after her, in these circumstances their roles had insidiously reversed themselves. She picked up the blanket from the floor and laid it over her grandmother gently and watched as the old woman fell back to sleep, her bruised and stitched face relaxing as she did.

‘Poor Nanna,’ Anna whispered. ‘It’ll be all right. He’ll be back soon. He loves us, you know.’ But somewhere at the back of her mind she was beginning to doubt all the protestations of undying love her father had made to her over the last few days when they had been alone together. His parallel insistence of how much he hated her mother for what she had done to him suddenly took on new significance, and
as she sat watching her grandmother’s shallow breathing tears rolled down her dirty cheeks. What, she wondered, was her father doing now? And would he ever come back to release them? Suddenly frightened she shook her grandmother’s arm, but there was no response. Very quietly, Anna began to sob.

Half a world away, Mohammed Sharif was riding beside his cousin in an official car, heading towards the far suburbs of Lahore where, Hussain had assured him, they would be able to speak to Imran Aziz’s ex-wife, who was, to Sharif’s horror, incarcerated in a women’s prison on the outskirts of the city.

Sharif had spent the previous day anxiously filling in time while waiting for Hussain to call him on his mobile. He had pushed and pummeled his way through the crowds of the Inner City near his hotel, admiring its small shrines and palaces, walked through the Elephant Gate into the Lahore Fort and persuaded a friendly caretaker to take him to the underground summer rooms where the Sikh rulers of the Punjab had sheltered from the blazing heat, and ended the day watching Sufi dancers at the shrine of Shah Jamal, sitting in the separate seating area for women and foreigners. But his mind was not on sight-seeing. He felt hot and jet-lagged and anxious, even as he tried to relax watching the kite flyers in the Lawrence Gardens just off the magnificent Mall. Eventually he gave up, risked buying a frugal, piping hot meal at one of the many small food stalls close to his hotel and went to bed early, hoping that by morning Hussain’s researches would have born fruit.

His phone shrilled soon after breakfast and Hussain announced that he had tracked down Mariam Gul and that she was in fact in gaol, serving a six month sentence.

‘For what?’ Sharif had asked, horrified.

‘Theft and immorality,’

‘She’s a prostitute?’

‘She’s a prostitute,’ Hussain confirmed. ‘With divorced women it sometimes happens. If their families don’t want to take them back, all sorts of bad things can happen. It is hard for a single woman on her own to make a living.’

‘Maybe we can help her,’ Sharif breathed, without much confidence but he did not think that Hussain heard him. Or if he did, he chose to ignore him, instead making arrangements to pick him up and take him to see Mariam.

The prison consisted of low white buildings surrounding a central courtyard where, once through security, Sharif was surprised to find the prisoners free to wander and chat in animated groups. The two men were taken to a
small-white
walled room furnished with a bare table and chairs and eventually a puzzled looking Mariam Gul, in faded blue
shalwar kameez
and a white headscarf, was brought to them. She was a small woman and much older that Sharif had expected, her face creased and her eyes tired. For a moment she looked at the two men without speaking, and then sat meekly on one of the chairs with her hands in her lap, evidently waiting for them to speak. Hussain introduced them both and as Mariam took in Sharif’s relationship to her former husband a flicker of understanding crossed her face but she said nothing.

‘Are you the former wife of Imran Aziz?’ Hussain asked, not unkindly. And this time, for a second, a flash of anger showed in her eyes. But she quickly looked down as if to veil it, and when she met their eyes again she looked bland as she nodded silently.

‘He divorced me three years ago,’ she said. ‘As you must know.’ She directed her last remark to Sharif, who nodded.

‘And what happened after that? Did your family not take you back into their home?’

Mariam shook her head.

‘I have unmarried sisters. There was no place for me there. And my father regarded my divorce as a disgrace.’

‘Why? Were you unfaithful?’ Hussain asked, without much sympathy.

‘No, I was not,’ she said quietly.

‘But the marriage was unhappy and they blamed you? Because there were no children?’

‘The blame should not have been on my side as there was no marriage in any real sense, anyway,’ she said. ‘There could be no children because the marriage was never complete. Imran Aziz did not want me except to disguise his own lifestyle, to escape from his parents’ pressure to marry.’

The two men stared at her for a long moment in silence and Sharif could feel his stomach tighten.

But now she had started Mariam seemed to decide to tell them everything.

‘Imran’s father had pressed him to marry and now they seemed to be pressing him to have a family. But I am getting old. The chance of children has passed me by now. I think Imran would have been happy to continue as we were but his father wanted grandsons, it was obvious, and grandsons meant a younger wife. And then Imran’s business ran into some difficulties so I think he too began to feel a new start was necessary, in England, if possible. And there may have been other reasons for him to want to leave the country. I don’t know.’

‘What other reasons?’

‘You really don’t know, do you?’ Mariam asked. ‘About his tastes?’

Sharif’s’ mouth was dry and he struggled with the question.

‘What tastes?’

‘He prefers boys to women,’ Mariam said quietly. ‘That is what I was supposed to conceal from his family. And his new wife in England, too, no doubt. Here in the city it was easy enough for him to follow his inclinations. And maybe even easier in England. I don’t know. But I think maybe the family of one of his boys had discovered a liaison and threatened him so he decided he must leave. He divorced me and married your cousin within a month, had left the country within two.’

‘Leaving you with nothing?’ Sharif asked.

‘Oh, I got by,’ Mariam said with a shrug. ‘I got a job in a factory for a while, but there were always men willing to offer more money for a night than I could earn in a week there.’

Sharif stood up and pressed his head against the barred window from which he could see the women in the courtyard outside, drifting from group to group, chatting as if it was some village market place.

‘How long are you in here?’ he asked, his voice thick with anger.

‘Another month,’ Mariam said.

‘And then?’

‘Back to work,’ she said, as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

‘Will you let my cousin here know when you are released?’ Sharif said. Mariam shrugged and looked at him wide-eyed.

‘If you wish,’ she said.

‘Come on,’ Sharif said to Hussain. ‘Let’s go.’

In the corridor outside Hussain looked at his companion curiously.

‘There’s nothing you can do for her, you know. Officially, these women don’t exist. To their families they no longer exist. The chances are she’s already HIV positive and she’ll be dead within a couple of years.’

‘And homosexuals don’t exist either?’ Sharif asked furiously. ‘The family here must have done all this to to cover up Imran’s unacceptable sexuality, the divorce and remarriage, everything. We knew nothing about it in England but they must have known what they were doing here. They owe that woman something.’

‘You may be right,’ Hussain said. ‘But I’d be very surprised if they repaid the debt.’

‘We’ll see about that,’ Sharif said.

‘Do you want to talk to Imran’s business partner?’ Hussain asked. ‘We have records of him and Aziz. They ran an import/export business together for ten years, mainly textiles to Europe, but it collapsed just before Imran divorced his wife. It was apparently fairly openly known in his circle that Imran was a homosexual but Lahore is quite liberal in that respect if you are discreet. No one seems to have taken much notice anyway. The wife spent a lot of her time in the village with his parents. But when that relationship broke up the business seems to have collapsed as well. I can give you his partner’s address if you like.’

Sharif pulled a face, knowing that he was revealing his own prejudice, deeply ingrained since childhood when he had first asked his father what ‘gay’ meant and seen his face suffuse with rage.

‘I’ll give him a miss,’ he said, ‘so long as you’re sure there’s
no political dimension to all this. That’s what they’re worried about at home.’

‘No,’ Hussain said. ‘There’s nothing like that, unless there are security files I can’t get access to. But I’ve no doubt your people will have made inquiries about that already.’

‘Will you keep me in touch if anything else crops up?’ Sharif asked.

‘Of course,’ his cousin said.

‘I’ll see if I can persuade the family to help Mariam.’

‘I wish you luck,’ Hussain said. ‘I doubt very much that anyone will want to know.’

As Sharif sat on the plane the next day heading back to Manchester and gazing down at a cloud-shrouded Europe below, his mind was still whirling with fears that he had not even broached with his cousin. If Imran had followed the same pattern with Faria as he had with his first wife, he thought, pursuing a sexless marriage of convenience, then it seemed extremely unlikely that he was the father of the baby she was carrying when she died. And if he was not the father, then DCI Thackeray would undoubtedly wish to find out who was, with all the implications that line of inquiry implied for Sharif himself and his entire family in Bradfield. The trip to Pakistan had seemed like a good idea at the time, Sharif thought as he tried to accommodate his still-painful ribs to the narrow airline seat without much success. But the closer he got to England the more he became convinced that it might have been a terrible mistake, a mistake Faria’s father and his own would never forgive him for as it inevitably exposed their family secrets to the public gaze.

‘Guv?’ Sergeant Kevin Mower put his head round his boss’s
door the next morning and found Thackeray with his chair turned round towards the window, apparently oblivious to the interruption as he gazed out at the wind-torn trees tossing in a wintry and almost deserted town hall square, a cigarette clutched unlit in one hand.