Read The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori Online
Authors: Robert Barnard
The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori
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Chapter 1: The Body of an Unknown Man
Chapter 2: The Road to Ashworth
Chapter 5: In the Bosom of his Family
Chapter 10: The Artist and his Womenfolk
Chapter 11: One of the Acolytes
Chapter 15: Cracks in the Surface
The Haworth Tandoori exists, and in the position I have placed it, close to the station in the town of Haworth in the north of England. It serves excellent Indian tandoori food, but I have given it a fictitious proprietor and waiters, and to my knowledge a corpse has never been found in its car park. All other characters, with the exception of the two ladies in the parsonage shop, are fictitious, as is the community of Ashworth, which I have placed on a green-field site in the dip between Stanbury and Oakworth. Since this book was written a kitchen shop, called Tabby's Kitchen, has opened on Haworth Main Street.
PART I
The Corpse1
THE BODY OF AN UNKNOWN MAN
The last diners pushed away their plates of lamb biryani or chicken tikka masala, downed the last of their Tiger beers or their fruit juices, and began scrabbling in purses and feeling in back pockets as they made their way to the till. It had been a table for four, and they had arrived only shortly before ten o'clock. They had been talking incessantly, and had been quite unconscious that they had been watched for the past twenty minutes, that all the other tables were cleared and all the washing up had been done. The Haworth Tandoori was ready, indeed anxious, to turn
off its lights and bolt its doors, but the late diners were quite unaware of the fact.
It was half past eleven at night.
“You two can go,” said Mr. Masud to his two waiters as he shut the door on the customers. The young men had been constantly on the go from six until business had slackened off to those last four diners about half past ten. “See you tomorrow. I'll shut up.”
Taz and Bash nodded gratefully and slipped out through the back door and up to the car park behind the restaurant. Mr. Masud went to bolt the front door and the side door, switching off all the lights in the dining area before going back to the kitchen. He was just about to bend down and switch on the dishwasher for its last load of the evening when he was frightened out of his witsâHaworth on weekends was a rough, unpredictable placeâby banging and shouting at the back door. A second later he was relieved to recognize Taz's voice.
“Mo! Mo! Open the door!”
When he pulled back the bolts and opened it, he was confronted by a frightened face.
“There's a body in my car!”
“What? What do you mean, a body?” demanded Mr. Masud. “Some drunk got into it by mistake?”
“I mean a body! A dead body! In the boot!”
Mr. Masud swallowed and went out into the dim area of the car park. With reluctance in his steps he went over to Taz's ancient Fiesta and cast his eye down to the open boot: he saw first a hand, then the back of a head, then in the depths of the boot a scrap of white clothing that could have been underpants. Seconds later he was back in the
kitchen and, seizing the receiver from his phone there, he pressed nine three times.
“Police. Keighley Police. . . . This is the Haworth Tandooriâyou know it? Near the station. We've discovered a body. In the boot of a car. Yes, in the boot, left there. I think a man has been murdered.”
 â¢Â â¢Â â¢Â
By the time Detective Constable Peace had arrived at the little car park behind the Tandoori, the SOCO people were already beginning to assemble to collect the scene-of-the-crime evidence: there was, after all, little question of a dead man stuffed into the boot of a car having died from natural causes.
Lights were beginning to go up around the car. Not welcoming, warming lights, but a piercing, pitiless illumination of the scene. With less reluctance than when he had started in the force, but with a slight sense of shame underlying his curiosity, Charlie Peace went over to look at the body. It was a white man, young-looking; it was male, but the face was indistinct, tucked into the mass of limbs and trunk, so it would not be clearly seen until it could be removed from the boot. Charlie caught the same glimpse that Mr. Masud had seen and looked closer: yes, the body was naked except for a pair of white underpants. He stood back to look at the car: a very old, B-reg Ford Fiestaâone of only two cars in the car park. The other was an almost equally old Mini. From the little he had been told he suspected they both belonged to the waiters at the Tandoori. He conjectured that the proprietor must live close enough to walk to and from work.
Charlie walked away from the car and looked around him. The road he had driven down was the road to the station, which lay on the other side of the buildings he was looking at. The road then lay flat for a hundred yards to his left, though he couldn't see it, then began the steep climb up to what had once been the village properâshops, church, parsonage on the edge of the sweep of moorlands, going southward to Hebden Bridge, westward to Burnley. Now the top of Haworth was taken up with cafés, shops selling tourist souvenirs, herbalists, and peddlers of the occult. Any real shops that sold things that people needed were at the bottom, around the station, and for anything except basics the people of Haworth had to hike up the hill to Crossroads or take the bus to Keighley. They had paid a heavy price for all the generations of their ancestors who had peddled tall stories about Branwell Bronte at the drop of a sixpenny piece.
Everywhere in Haworth, Charlie reflected, involved a stiff hike. He had a car, of course, but he wouldn't mind betting that this case would involve making door-to-door inquiries of shopkeepers and café proprietors up and down Main Street. He remembered a previous case at Micklewike, on the other side of the moors. That had involved fearsome climbs as well. One of the (few) good things that Charlie could think of to say about his native Brixton was that it was flat.
Two cars arrived, driving in from the road and parking behind the Tandoori. More SOCO people in one of them, his boss Mike Oddie in the other. Charlie recognized the car in the dim light, and walked over to it. Oddie put his window down and raised a hand in salute.
“What have we got?” he asked.
“I haven't got much more than I was told when I was called out,” admitted Charlie. “Body stuffed in the boot of a carâbut I expect you know that. Body in question is young, male, nearly naked. Caucasian, but I think the car belongs to one of the waiters here.”
“Any connection?”
“I shouldn't think so. From what I heard when I was called out he found the body in the boot when he was going home, and went screaming to the proprietor of the place.”
“Why his car, then?”
Charlie shrugged.
“It's an old bomb. The lock on the boot looked dodgy. Whoever dumped it may have thought it was abandoned.”
“Well, let's get talking to him,” said Oddie, climbing out of his car. “If you're right and the body was just dumped on him, we can let him go for the moment.”
Taz had been waiting, with Bash his fellow waiter and his boss, in the kitchens of the Tandoori, compulsively drinking Cokes. His English was good, and his apprehension, which sometimes made him babble, seemed to spring mainly from his experience of finding the body and his reluctance to involve himself with the police rather than any irregularities in his status: he had been born in Bradford twenty-four years ago, he told Oddie, and he was a British citizen.
“So just go through what happened tonight,” Oddie said.
“We finish 'ereâ There's a party of four chatterin' away an' not carin' they're the last ones 'ere and everyone's waitin' to get 'ome. Anyway, they goâ Arpast eleven it was. We'd cleared away, and Mr. Masud says we can go, Bash and me, and so we go out to Bash's car.”
“Why Bash's car?”
“Mine's been out of order five or six days now.”