Dead Reckoning (6 page)

Read Dead Reckoning Online

Authors: Patricia Hall

BOOK: Dead Reckoning
9.93Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“We've had the Press and TV onto us already, bloody vultures,” Earnshaw complained.
“We need their help to trace witnesses, find Simon's car, all of that,” Thackeray said quietly. “These first hours of an inquiry are vital.”
“Aye, I suppose so,” Earnshaw conceded. “So what do you want to know, Chief Inspector? I thought we dealt with a lot of this last night.”
“Only in outline, Mr.. Earnshaw,” Thackeray said. “You and your son were too shocked last night for a lengthy interview.” He glanced at Matthew Earnshaw who had also been far too drunk to be coherent when he had recovered from his
brief collapse at the mortuary but who did not appear to be in much better condition this morning. He wondered whether he had slept at all or whether he had kept on drinking all night. It was impossible to tell. It was odd, he thought, how deep his revulsion was these days for the weakness which had once threatened to destroy his own life. There's no one so fierce as a convert, he thought.
“Let's start with your son Simon's recent activities, shall we?” Thackeray said. “And then work as far back as seems sensible. You said he was studying for a post-graduate degree. Do you know the names of any of his friends at the university? Or enemies, for that matter? We will need to talk to as many people he was in contact with as possible.”
“He kept his new life very separate,” the dead man's father said. “He's brought nobody here from the university on the odd occasions he's come up to Broadley since. Never talked about it much, to me, anyway. Knew I didn't approve, I suppose. Thought it was all a bloody waste of time. What about you, Christine? I know you have sneaky lunches with Simon when you think I won't notice. Was he any more forthcoming with you?”
Christine Earnshaw turned her gaze very slowly from the elaborate flower arrangement in the stone fireplace and looked at her husband and then at Thackeray with heavy, dazed blue eyes, puffy with crying.
“He talked about his new life to me,” she said, so quietly that Val Ridley, on the other side of the room, had to strain to catch what she was saying. “He loved his course. It was what he had decided to do, decided for himself I mean, not something Frank pushed him into.” She flashed another glance at her husband and Thackeray was surprised at the venom in it. There was some history there, he thought, and it might be necessary to tease it out.
“Did he mention friends and fellow students at the university, Mrs. Earnshaw?” he asked quietly. “A lot of them are still on vacation and we need to trace them as quickly as we can.”
“He talked a lot about someone called Steve. He was working on some project with Steve, something about regeneration? Would that be right? I never totally understood what his course was all about. It seemed to cover so much.”
A snort of derision from the other end of the sofa distracted them briefly, in time to notice Matthew Earnshaw refilling his glass from a bottle which he had evidently tucked out of sight into the cushions of the sofa behind him.
“No other name? Just Steve?” Thackeray persisted.
“Just Steve,” Simon's mother said. “I'm not sure whether he was another student or a teacher.”
“I'm sure we'll be able to trace him,” Thackeray said reassuringly. “Any other names?” But Christine Earnshaw shook her head.
“Now the other point Matthew raised last night was Simon's girlfriend. Did you know anything about her?”
“He had a lovely girlfriend called Julie before he gave up work at the mill,” Mrs. Earnshaw said. “They'd been going out for years but he broke up with her. I don't think she understood what he was doing going back to college.”
“Did any of us?” Matthew Earnshaw asked the room at large.
“But a current girlfriend? You said last night, Mr. Earnshaw, that there were messages on the answerphone. Do any of you know who those could be from?”
“She rang here an'all,” Frank Earnshaw said. “Said she was supposed to be meeting him. But she didn't say who she was. It wasn't Julie. I'd have recognised her voice.”
“Do you know, sir?” Thackeray asked, turning to the
semi-recumbent figure at the other end of the sofa. The younger man looked at him with something close to contempt in his eyes.
“I know nothing about Simon's hippy friends,” he said. “I never met any and he certainly never told me about any of them. As far as I can see they want us all back in the bloody stone age, growing veg on the back lawn and walking everywhere. It's all bollocks, as far as I'm concerned.”
“He did have a new girlfriend,” his mother said suddenly. “I could tell someone was making him happy. But he never told me her name. And I never asked. This falling out with his father and his grandfather has made us all suspicious. I hated it, every minute of it.” And Christine Earnshaw began to cry quietly.
The husband and son exchanged glances, half embarrassed and half guilty.
“It must be the girl who called here,” Frank Earnshaw said. “But she wouldn't leave her name, or a message. It was the same one on the answerphone at the flat. The voices were the same.”
“There was a woman he was involved with,” his son added sulkily. “Something serious was going on. Last time I spoke to him on the phone he said something about not asking me to be his best man. I never thought any more about it. It was just a crack about my divorce I thought. Him being as snotty as he always is …was …these days. Oh, hell, I don't know who killed him. If I had any idea I'd tell you. We fell out lately but he was my brother, for God's sake. I still cared about him in spite of the bloody hippies he was hanging out with at the uni.”
“Let's move on, then, from friends to enemies,” Thackeray said carefully. “Do any of you know anyone who disliked Simon, hated him, even — enough to want him dead?”
But the three members of the family looked horrified at the idea and shook their heads.
“Simon was a popular lad,” his father said eventually. “Always had lots of friends at school and at college the first time he went. I've never heard anyone say a harsh word about Simon. Of course I was disappointed when he decided to leave the business and we had rows about that, but in the end we accepted it. If anyone bore a grudge it was him. He stayed away from us, not the other way round.”
“What about the difficulties your business is having, Mr. Earnshaw,” Thackeray persisted. “Could that have impinged on Simon in any way, even though he'd stopped working for the company?”
“It's two years, nearly, since Simon walked out, resigned, whatever you want to call it,” Earnshaw said, angry now. “He's not been involved since. I don't think he's been near the place even. What's going off there now is nothing to do with him.”
“He has no financial interest? I thought from what Mr. Matthew Earnshaw here said that's what he was meeting him to discuss?”
Earnshaw hesitated.
“He has a shareholding,” he said reluctantly. “We did talk to him about the future of the company. We needed to make sure he knew what was going on and agreed with it, that's all, with redundancies and strike threats and everything else that's blowing up. And that's why Matthew was expecting to see him on Wednesday evening. Simon's not given up his shares, or sold them, I'd know if he had, so he's still involved in that sense but I don't see what that's got to do with someone mugging him.”
“It's not an obvious motive,” Thackeray said mildly. “Was
Simon's shareholding a large one? Could it interfere with any plans you might have to sell out.”
“What plans to sell out? We don't intend to sell out,” Earnshaw said angrily. “We're talking a rescue plan here.”
“But the shares will come back to you now?”
“As far as I know, yes. Unless Simon's left them elsewhere. But I don't see where this line of questioning is taking us, Inspector. I really don't.”
“Was Mr. George Earnshaw in touch with your son, do you know?” Thackeray changed tack suddenly.
“Grandad loved both the boys,” Christine Earnshaw broke in. “He was heartbroken when Simon left the mill, absolutely heartbroken. I don't think he's seen him since.”
“We have an address in Farmoor Lane for Mr. George Earnshaw. Is that right?”
“Do you really need to question him?” Frank Earnshaw asked, his face flushed. “He's an old man, and seriously ill. He doesn't need to be bothered with all this.”
“I'll have to be the judge of that,” Thackeray said. “But I'll bear what you say in mind. Now, just one last thing. According to the DVLC in Swansea, Simon Earnshaw was the owner of a 1992 Volvo estate, colour red. Is that right?”
“Clapped-out old heap of junk,” Matthew Earnshaw muttered into his full-again glass. “Bought it when he went hippy on us. Used to drive quite a decent Beamer before that.”
“So the Volvo is definitely the car we're looking for?”
“He must have used it to get up to Broadley. There's no bus service to speak of except at peak times,” Frank Earnshaw said.
“That's assuming he drove himself up here,” Thackeray said quietly and the dead man's family stared at him speechlessly for a moment as the implications of that remark sank in. “But if he did, where's the car now?”
“Nicked,” Matthew Earnshaw said flatly. “You can't leave anything unattended for ten seconds these days.”
“Maybe,” Thackeray said although he knew very well that the dead man did not have his car keys with him when he was found. But that was not a fact he wanted known at this stage, even by Simon Eamshaw's family.
“We'll put out a call for the car,” he said. “It'll turn up, I'm sure. The trouble was until we identified the body we didn't know what we should be looking for.”
“It's not worth anything, that car,” Frank Earnshaw said. “If someone stole it they'll probably have dumped it by now.”
“Torched it, more like,” Matthew Earnshaw said, refilling his glass yet again.
“Yes, well, we'll keep you in touch with developments. We're planning to tell the media who the victim is this afternoon, and seek help from the public to put us in touch with his friends and find the car. If you need any help, or think of anything else that may help our inquiries, DC Ridley here is the person to contact. She's your liaison officer.” Val Ridley smiled faintly in the direction of the Earnshaw family who were not, in her judgement, the sort of people who would seek out her, or anyone else's, shoulder to cry on.
“I'll leave you the numbers you need,” she said as, following Thackeray's lead, she got up to go.
Back outside in the car she glanced at Thackeray, who sat for a moment in silence before switching on the engine.
“I wonder why the son who was evidently well-trained and effective left the business while the one who's obviously drinking himself to an early grave stayed on,” Thackeray said at last.
“Perhaps because his brother was so useless,” Val suggested. “They're certainly an odd lot. There doesn't seem to be
much love lost, does there? Why the hell does the mother have to meet Simon in secret. It's not as if changing your career is such a big deal. It happens all the time and most families live with it.”
“I don't think she's telling us everything she knows. And I will go and see the old man, whatever they say,” Thackeray said. “He might be more forthcoming about what makes that lot tick. But not yet. First I think we need to know more about Simon's current relationships. And find his car. It's not impossible that some yob hit him over the head for his car keys and then dumped the body. Let's not invent a complicated explanation when a very simple one might do.”
Soraya Malik lived with her family in one of the narrow terraced streets in the shadows cast by Earnshaws mill on the hill half a mile or so from the bustling thoroughfare of Aysgarth Lane with its curry houses, Asian grocers and a mosque converted from a Wesleyan chapel. The Maliks were a devout family, and had decided to send their daughters to the small Muslim school for girls being run a few streets away rather than to the local comprehensive. The women and girls wore hijab, the austere head-covering of the strict Muslim, rather than the more revealing, and in Bradfield far more common, loose Pakistani headscarf. Even so, the girls' father had felt it safe enough for his daughters to walk the half mile or so to school on their own and for several years Soraya and her sisters had walked there through the almost traffic-free streets of this poor, mainly Asian neighbourhood and arrived home again safely. But not that morning.
Laura Ackroyd stood for a moment outside number 17 Blenheim Street and gazed up at the towering smokestack of the mill which dwarfed the rows of houses beneath and wondered at a family history which had moved in a downward spiral from the building of this commercial monument to the younger Earnshaw's murder, the sensational story of which had been working its way onto the
Gazette'
s front page when she had left the office. Like Titus Salt at Saltaire, the original George Earnshaw had recognised the need to house his labourers close to their workplace, though not nearly as generously. These had been small, cramped and strictly utilitarian dwellings when they were new: more than a hundred years later roofs sagged, window frames rotted
and families of Victorian proportions packed themselves into the single living room and kitchen with at most three small bedrooms above and a bathroom tacked on in the back yard, just as their predecessors had done in the nineteenth century. Only the colour of their skin was different.
It was a townscape Laura felt she was barely familiar with. Earnshaws mill loomed over this side of the town just as the blank slabs of the Heights dominated the hill to the west, and both were neighbourhoods where Bradfield's more affluent citizens seldom ventured. Laura watched an elderly man in khaki shalwar kameez under a thick black overcoat walking slowly down the deserted street, his white lace cap offering little protection from the chilly drizzle. He glanced at her car and then at her, his eyes full of suspicion. White faces were probably rare in Blenheim Street, and white people arriving in cars even more unusual. More often than not, she thought, such an incursion meant trouble. After the last bout of violence on the streets of Bradfield the powers-that-be who inquired into such things had concluded that the town's various communities were leading parallel lives and Laura, whose profession brought her into contact with politically and socially active Asians in all walks of life, had thought that an exaggeration. Here she was not so sure.
Soraya must have walked the length of the street, Laura thought, before turning into the narrow alleyway which linked Blenheim with the parallel Alma Street. It was there that a former Labour club housed the Muslim school. Somewhere down that alley the girls had met a group of boys running in the opposite direction and, after they had passed, Soraya had fallen to the ground screaming in agony and trying to rub the liquid one of the boys had hurled at her from her face and eyes.
Laura felt slightly sick when she contemplated what had
happened, and she had to steel herself to knock at the Malik family's front door to seek the interview with the family Ted Grant had sent her to find, though years of experience had taught her that surprisingly often the victims of tragedy were comforted rather than repelled by the chance to talk about what had happened, even to a stranger. After a long silence the door was opened by a short, stocky Asian man in traditional Pakistani dress. His eyes were not friendly and Laura hurried to explain who she was and what she wanted. Eventually he turned back into the house and shouted something in Punjabi to those inside. He was quickly joined by a taller, younger man, dark and bearded but in a smart western suit and tie and with an equally unfriendly expression.
“I am Sayeed Khan,” the newcomer said. “I'm a lawyer and I'm advising the Maliks. I'm not sure that giving interviews to the Press is what they need to be doing just now.”
“If you want to catch the thugs did this terrible thing you need publicity,” Laura said bluntly. “There may be people who saw them running away and who don't realise what happened. If Soraya's parents will talk to me, I can give a better picture of the girl and her sisters, and perhaps give the readers some information that someone may need to persuade them to help.”
“I doubt many of your readers will be much interested in helping,” Khan said curtly. “We're getting racist abuse and attacks almost every day of the week and the
Gazette'
s not shown a scrap of interest up to now.”
Laura nodded, knowing how much truth there was in that allegation and cursing Ted Grant under her breath for his casual prejudice.
“Of course we'll publish what the police tell us about the attack,” she said. “But an interview with Soraya's family, perhaps pictures of her sisters, would put a human face on it,
get more space in the paper even. I'm also going to be doing some interviews on Radio Bradfield soon and I wanted to talk about race problems in those. But of course it's up to Mr. Malik …”
She glanced at the older man who had been listening to her exchange with Khan intently. He in turn glanced at Khan. It was clear that it was the lawyer who would be making the decision for the family. He seemed to consider for a moment and then nodded.
“You may be right,” he said. “But I'll stay while you talk to them, and if Soraya's mother is distressed, then you must leave. Her English is not good, but I, or one of the girls, will translate.”
Laura followed the two men into the cramped living room where a woman and two young girls of ten or eleven were sitting together on a shabby sofa, their eyes red with crying. Khan explained in Punjabi who Laura was and then waved her into a chair. She took out her tape-recorder cautiously, watching Mrs. Malik carefully. Sometimes the technology frightened reluctant interviewees and a notebook and pen were less threatening.
“Is this OK?” she asked, and reassured by the nods from the woman and girls, she switched on.
She asked Soraya's sisters first to tell her exactly what had happened that morning, a story which became even more upsetting, Laura thought, as the two girls, their eyes bright and troubled under the severe hijab, explained how they too had been pushed to the ground in the narrow alleyway by three or four boys or young men running at full pelt towards them with their hoods pulled tights around their faces so that only their eyes were visible.
“And you really couldn't see if they were Asian or white?” Laura asked.
“Asian boys wouldn't do that to girls,” the older of Soraya's two young sisters said firmly in her broad local accent, and Laura was inclined to agree with her. Asian young men were not necessarily angels and many were increasingly involved in crime, but attacking young female children, and these were children, seemed an unlikely transgression for that culture.
“How old is Soraya?” Laura asked her mother, but in fact it was her father who answered.
“She is fourteen,” he said.
“And before you ask the insulting question I can see on your lips,” Sayeed Khan broke in angrily. “I can tell you this is a very devout Muslim family and that Soraya has had nothing to do with boys. If that suggestion appears in your newspaper, that this is some sort of attack launched from within the community, the family will regard it as deeply insulting.”
He spoke quickly, and Laura guessed deliberately so, so that the girls' mother would not be able to follow what he was saying, but his tone annoyed her.
“It is not so outrageous a question with a girl of her age,” she said. “You know the cases which spring to mind.” The previous year two young Muslim girls had fled Bradfield in fear of their lives after being discovered with boys their families disapproved of. “Izzat”, or dishonour, was still a very real concept for many of the families who had come to Bradfield from the rural heart of the Punjab only a generation or so ago, and some fathers and sons still policed their daughters and sisters fiercely. Rumour had it that there were young men in the community who would hunt down and even kill a young woman who defied tradition too blatantly. Laura knew it had happened elsewhere and she knew that Sayeed Khan knew it too.
“Could you really not see whether these boys were Asian or white?” she asked the girls again. “It could be very important to help the police catch them if they knew the answer to that.” But the two girls shook their heads.
“It was so quick,” the older girl said. “They came round the corner, and we were all pushed and then they were gone. We thought they had stabbed Soraya but it was her face …” The girl turned to her mother and began to sob quietly.
“I'm sorry,” Laura said. “You've been very patient. I think you've told me enough now to give people an idea of how dreadful this is for you.” She switched off her tape recorder. She could, she thought, concoct enough paragraphs from this brief encounter to satisfy Ted Grant's passion for personal detail without being too intrusive, although in his book there was no such thing as intrusive when someone was catapulted into the public eye, for whatever reason. She glanced at Sayeed Khan and smiled her thanks but he did not respond. As she closed the front door behind her she heard him begin to speak angrily in Punjabi again and wished that she could understand the language. She hoped that her visit had not caused the family too much distress, but she was sure it had not brought much comfort either.
As she turned back to her car, her stomach lurched as someone grabbed her arm from behind. She spun round and found herself face to face with two Asian boys of fourteen or fifteen. They made no further attempt to molest her but their eyes were unfriendly.
“Round here women cover up their hair,” one of them said.
“If you want to visit round here, you cover up,” the other added.
Half a dozen objections to these instructions sprang to Laura's lips but she bit them back. Discretion might be safer,
she thought as she unlocked the car with careful deliberation and slipped into the driver's seat. Only as she started the engine did she lower the window.
“You'll do no one any good if you try to set up a no-go area,” she said then.
“Just an Islamic area,” the older of the two boys said. “You don't have to come back if you don't like it.”
 
“They've taken the place apart, guv,” Sergeant Kevin Mower said, dropping a thick file onto Michael Thackeray's desk later that afternoon. “You say his father says he was paying his way from his savings. Well, according to his bank statements that's exactly what he was doing. No problem there. He's got almost a hundred thousand in a deposit account and he's been taking a monthly amount out and obviously using it to live on. Nothing odd going into and out of his current account: rent, utility bills, smallish amounts of cash, that sort of thing. But then there's this.” He opened the file and pulled out a travel agents' folder and opened it wide.
“Two air tickets from Heathrow to Marseilles in France for a date in April.”
“In whose names?” Thackeray asked.
“Mr. S and Mrs. S Earnshaw.”
Thackeray took hold of the tickets and flicked through them.
“No return date,” he said. “Open tickets.”
“Yep,” Mower agreed. “And who the hell is Mrs. Earnshaw?”
“Whoever she is, no one in his family seems to know that he was married,” Thackeray said. “They're aware of a girlfriend, but no more than that.”
“Perhaps he wasn't married,” Mower said. “Perhaps he was just planning to be and these are the tickets for his
honeymoon. But that's not the only French connection. Look, I found these.” He pulled a couple of brochures from the file, closely typed and with photographs of several red pantiled cottages amongst the text.
“My French is even worse than my Punjabi but if these aren't estate agents' details I'll eat the
chapeau de ma tante.
”
Thackeray flicked through the brochures quickly.
“No sign that he's actually purchased a property in southern France?”
“No. Maybe he was just going to look.”
“Well, find someone who does speak reasonable French and get them to call these people and see if Earnshaw made any arrangements with them, will you? They're all close to Marseilles, in Provence anyway, so it seems a reasonable bet that the flights were linked with this. Perhaps he wanted to buy a holiday home. It's not unusual these days. And check with the Registrar's office and see if he is married — or about to be. They may have booked the tickets to follow the wedding. Are his phone bills here?”
“Only up to December last year,” Mower said.
“Get a more recent one from his phone company. We need to know who he's been calling regularly and who's been calling him. We should be able to trace the girlfriend, wife, whatever she is, that way.”

Other books

Surrender by Amanda Quick
Scandalous Intentions by Amanda Mariel
Funhouse by Michael Bray
The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst
Stone in a Landslide by Maria Barbal
Naughty Rendezvous by Lexie Davis
The Fran Lebowitz Reader by Fran Lebowitz