Death in a Far Country

by Patricia Hall

  Anyway, it would be interesting, she thought, to tease out Jenna Heywood’s reactions to exchanging her high-powered job in the south for such an unorthodox job close to her roots in Yorkshire. Laura could remember Sam Heywood in his early days, one of her own father’s business cronies who occasionally came to the house for drinks and long discussions in Jack Ackroyd’s smoke-filled study. He had taken over Bradfield United during one of its periodic financial crises and allegedly pumped millions of his own money into supporting the club, which yo-yoed alarmingly from one year to the next between the lower divisions of the Football League, permanently hovering on the brink of some disaster or other.

  ‘Our Sam’, as he was affectionately and sometimes contemptuously known to the fans, had ricocheted from hero to villain and back again in the pages of the Gazette more or less in line with the club’s fortunes, until his sudden death a couple of months ago while on holiday in the West Indies. And then suddenly Jenna Heywood had materialised, a young woman few people in Bradfield seemed ever to have heard of, but now the sole inheritor of her father’s majority stake in the club. And as if her arrival in Bradfield had not created enough of a shock, her announcement that she intended to take her father’s place as club chairman created a local earthquake.

  Interviewing Jenna just as United, defying the odds and their own indifferent record, faced one of the best teams in the country in the FA Cup would be an interesting assignment, Laura thought, and that was something she desperately needed. And if it also helped her clarify her own mind about whether to stay in Bradfield or whether, at last, to go, that might be for the best. She did not think that continuing her life on its present track was tenable much longer, although how she was going to tell Michael Thackeray that she simply did not know.

  The canal in Bradfield’s narrow town centre had never led anywhere. Built in the nineteenth century as a spur to the busy Leeds to Liverpool waterway, it had always come to an abrupt halt at the back of the textile mills and warehouses that had transformed the village of Bradfield at breakneck speed into a smoky but booming manufacturing town. A couple of wharves had made space for barges filled with coal or bales of raw wool to unload, and a broad basin allowed them to turn and make the return journey through a lock and down the narrow valley to rejoin the main artery.

  There had been talk over the best part of two centuries about filling the canal in when its usefulness was overtaken by the railways as a means of transporting heavy goods, but in spite of complaints about noxious dumping, stagnant water and threats to health, nothing had ever been done to close it down. Eventually the new interest in leisure pursuits on the waterways had seen the basin dredged, the cut cleared of shopping trolleys and other rubbish and its leaks sealed, the wharves restored and the towpath resurfaced to allow pleasure boats access to the town and a few houseboats to moor just a stone’s throw from the shopping centre. In Bradfield’s latest stuttering regeneration, some of the mills and warehouses nearby were being converted into studios and flats, and the first signs of a modest waterside night life were springing up around the basin itself.

  DCI Thackeray stood for a moment close to the last stone hump-backed bridge before the narrow waterway opened out into its new incarnation. This was a quiet, isolated spot, where the towpath was overshadowed by a still disused and derelict textile warehouse and sight-lines from the more open water beyond were effectively blocked by the bridge over the cut and the towpath. Behind him was a high stone wall, breached only by a narrow alleyway giving access from a quiet street of offices and commercial premises behind. At night, he thought, out of reach of streetlighting and probably out of earshot of the small community of houseboat owners, it would be cut-off and secluded, the perfect place for an assignation or a murder – or both.

  Behind him he was aware of the bustle of the crime team clustered around the body, which had now been lifted from the dark water of the cut. But he knew that at night this place would be totally empty, in spite of being only a couple of hundred yards from well-lit shopping streets and passing traffic. Even now, on a wintry day of pale sunshine, beyond the police tape that had closed off the towpath in both directions, the unusual activity appeared to have attracted no curious sightseers at all.

  Reluctantly he turned back towards the well-organised team behind him. Kevin Mower looked up as Thackeray approached, turning away from the overweight figure of the pathologist, Amos Atherton, who was crouched in a protective suit close to the sodden form of a young woman.

  ‘Seriously hurt, possibly dead, before she went into the water,’ Mower said, his face grim. ‘Heavy bruising, and what looks like a stab wound just below the ribs.’

  Thackeray focused reluctantly on the limp form that had been dragged from the dark, still water and made his own mental evaluation of the victim: a tall, thin black girl, dressed in the skimpy skirt and cut-off top of the typical youngster on a night out, and without any sort of coat or sweater although the year had so far held out no hint of spring warmth. Her feet and legs were bare and although someone had pulled her mini-skirt down to afford some sort of decency to the body, she looked as sexually vulnerable in death as she had probably been in life.

  ‘Any ID?’ he asked.

  Mower shook his head. ‘No pockets in that gear,’ he said. ‘And no sign of a bag. We’ll have to get the divers down to have a look for anything else, including a weapon.’

  ‘Shoes,’ Thackeray said. ‘She must have been wearing shoes.’

  Atherton struggled to his feet, indicating to the waiting assistants standing by with a stretcher and body bag that he had finished his initial examination, and pushed through the crowd to Thackeray.

  ‘I can’t tell yet whether she was dead when she went into the water,’ he said. ‘But the stab wound to the upper abdomen is deep. She must have bled a lot.’

  Thackeray glanced at the compacted gravel of the pathway in irritation.

  ‘There’s been rain,’ he said. ‘But I’ll get the SOCOs to see if they can find traces of blood.’

  ‘They’ll have their work cut out with the body, an’ all,’ Atherton said. ‘The water will have washed her clean. We’ll have to see what the post-mortem gives us.’

  ‘Has she been in there long?’ Thackeray asked, glancing again at the iridescent black water for inspiration and finding none.

  ‘Doubt it,’ Atherton said, beginning to peel off his plastic suit. ‘No sign of decomposition that I can see. At a guess, she went in last night.’

  ‘She was spotted about eight o’clock this morning by a bloke from one of the houseboats walking his dog,’ Mower broke in. ‘It was barely light, he said. And he’d had the dog out here last night too, about nine o’clock. He’s not sure he could have seen her in the dark, but he didn’t notice anything unusual. And the dog behaved quite normally. For what that’s worth.’

  Thackeray smiled faintly. ‘You know we should always take dogs that don’t bark seriously,’ he said. ‘We’d better talk to everyone in the houseboats. They’re the only likely witnesses around, I should think. No one else is likely to be on the towpath in the dark.’

  ‘Except the victim and the killer,’ Mower said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Laura Ackroyd turned over in bed in the dark, focused with some difficulty on the radio-alarm on the bedside table, and groaned. It was six a.m., and she was aware of Michael Thackeray lying on his back beside her, rigid and obviously awake. She turned back towards him and slipped an arm round his chest.

  ‘Can’t you sleep?’ she whispered. Thackeray half-turned towards her and put a hand on her arm, although Laura could not be sure whether it was intended to encourage her embrace or fend her off.

  ‘Just a bit of pain,’ he said. ‘Go back to sleep. I’ll get up in a bit and take a painkiller. It won’t hurt if I get in early this morning. I’ve got a post-mortem to go to at eight-thirty.’

  Laura ran a finger across his back gently and located the surprisingly small scar left by the ricocheting bullet
from a rifle that had come close to killing him, lodging so close to his heart that it presented the surgeons with an operation of nightmare delicacy to remove it. The pain was proving surprisingly intractable, she thought, but probably not as intractable as the sense of failure he obviously still felt at having failed to protect so many innocent victims of the psychopath and his hangers-on who had come so close to killing him too.

  ‘Another murder?’ she said and listened soberly, wide awake now, to the bare details he offered about the body of the black girl found submerged in the canal the previous day.

  ‘Don’t you know who she is?’

  ‘There’s no ID,’ Thackeray said. ‘She was wearing surprisingly little for a cold winter’s day. Looked as though she’d been clubbing or to a party.’

  ‘A lover’s quarrel, maybe,’ she said softly.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Thackeray said. ‘She wasn’t just beaten up. She was stabbed.’

  ‘Ah,’ Laura said. The Bradfield canal was not an area of the town she was at all familiar with. She was aware that it was the latest part of the town to be redeveloped and was no doubt changing fast, but as a teenager spending her boarding school holidays in one of the town’s more leafy suburbs, she knew it only as a place that most parents routinely warned their children against: a noisome dumping ground for rubbish, both animate and inanimate; a haunt of prostitutes and drug-addicts who valued its seclusion so close to the town centre. Laura realised that this was not a path she, or probably Thackeray, should travel down at this hour. He would have enough of it when he got to work.

  ‘Would you like me to make you breakfast?’ she asked. He kissed her gently on the cheek, a peck that was more brotherly than loverly, and rolled himself off the edge of the bed with a grimace of pain.

  ‘Go back to sleep,’ he said. But when he had moved slowly to the bathroom and she heard the shower switch on, she found his suggestion impossible to follow. Her mind was racing now, as she guessed his had been, but almost certainly not in the same direction. Sleep looked like a remote possibility as she watched the digits of the clock creep towards six-thirty and agonised over whether the passion that had brought the two of them together had disappeared for good.

  Eventually she got up, pulled on her dressing gown against the chilly air, and went into the kitchen to brew a large pot of coffee. By the time Thackeray emerged, dressed for the day, she was sitting at the table with her hands round a steaming mug, gazing out of the window at the first streaks of grey in the morning sky.

  ‘Can I get you something to eat?’ she asked.

  ‘Not before a post-mortem,’ he said. Laura looked at him closely as he poured himself coffee, absorbing just how much older he seemed to have become in the three short months since the shooting. But maybe, she thought, he had been changing even then. The process had started when Aileen finally died and brought back all the memories that he had been so intent on burying for more than ten years. It seemed an impossible irony, she thought, but she was beginning to feel that they had been better off before Aileen’s death, before the shadow she had always cast over their relationship had been so suddenly removed. With Aileen gone, they were free to look at each other in the clear light of day and, as far as Laura could tell, the light left her somehow wanting in Thackeray’s eyes, diminished in some way from what she thought she had been before. She sighed.

  ‘I thought maybe we could go out for a meal tonight,’ she said. ‘We haven’t done that for a long time.’

  ‘I’ll give you a call later,’ he said. ‘You know what it’s like at the start of a murder investigation. I may be late finishing.’

  She nodded as he pulled on his coat without meeting her eyes.

  ‘Take care,’ she said, her voice dull as he moved towards the door, but he did not respond as he pulled it shut behind him.

  Of course it was partly her own fault, she thought, as she stood under the shower herself a few minutes later, hoping the hot water would galvanise her from her depression. She had told Thackeray, on one of the long evenings when she had sat at his hospital bedside as he slowly recovered from his own trauma, how her former boyfriend had helped himself to information she had been entrusted to pass on to Thackeray himself. She had been a fool to get drunk in Vince Newsom’s company, she had admitted, and he had taken advantage of her, as she should have known he would. What she had never passed on was Vince’s suggestion that he had not only put her to bed that night, but had joined her there. It was a claim that Laura had never accepted, and which she found more unbelievable as time went by. Unbelievable and unbearable, and never, she had decided, to be revealed.

  Thackeray drove straight to the infirmary without calling in at his office. He made first for the hospital cafeteria, where he gulped another scalding hot cup of coffee before making his way down to the basement to be met by a bleary-eyed Amos Atherton, still in his outdoor clothes.

  ‘You’re bloody early,’ Atherton said, without enthusiasm. ‘Couldn’t you sleep?’

  ‘I don’t like taking too many painkillers,’ Thackeray said brusquely. ‘I need to keep a clear head.’

  ‘Aye, we all need to do that,’ Atherton agreed, as he hung up his coat in the small cloakroom alongside the mortuary and pulled clean scrubs from the cupboard where they were kept. ‘You can go in if you like,’ he said, as he pulled a green smock over his head. ‘The Technician’s already in there prepping up.’

  ‘I’ll wait,’ Thackeray said. ‘I’ll just have a cigarette before we start.’ Atherton raised an eyebrow at that but said nothing as Thackeray pulled a packet from his pocket and opened a side door, which led outside into a narrow courtyard where it was permitted to smoke. The infirmary was a place he hated more than any other, never able to banish the memory of the day he had paced these aseptic corridors while Atherton had performed the autopsy on his own son. He should not have been there then, although no one in the department, most of whom already knew him as a copper although it was long before he had come to Bradfield to work as DCI, had found the courage to turn him away. So what, he wondered, bitterly, had driven him here, of all places, too early for the routine duty he disliked so much to have even got close to starting. He ground out his half-smoked cigarette under his heel after a few minutes and went back inside, to find Atherton fully dressed in scrubs and apron and ready to start his own routine under the glaring lights of the morgue. He put on a gown himself and joined him.

  The dead girl lay naked and statuesque on the stainless steel table, long-legged, broad-hipped, firm-breasted and strangely beautiful in death. There was no massive disfigurement. The bruises she had suffered showed up less against her smooth dark skin than they would have done on a fairer victim, and the stab wound on the left side of her body revealed itself only as a small pink nick washed clean by the water of the canal. Atherton spoke quietly and monotonously into his tape recorder as he made his external examination, only raising his voice and glancing at Thackeray to emphasise some point that he regarded as significant. Taking swabs from her mouth and other orifices with a surprisingly gentle touch he glanced at the stony-faced policeman.

  ‘Sexually experienced,’ he said, closing the girl’s legs again. ‘But we’ll be lucky to find any traces of recent activity after she’s been in the water.’

  ‘Any sign of rape?’ Thackeray asked, dry-mouthed.

  Atherton shrugged. ‘She’s extensively bruised, so I couldn’t exclude it. I’ll look for internal evidence.’

  As usual in this situation, Thackeray tried to turn his mind away from what was happening on the table as Atherton reached for his scalpel and proceeded to conduct his internal examination of the body. But these days he found that his escape mechanisms did not work as effectively as they used to. As he got older, the tragedies he had to deal with as part of his daily routine seemed to become harder rather than easier to bear. He had never joined in the culture of black humour with which many police officers and medics tried to shield themselves from the worst of the horrors
they witnessed, preferring to withdraw into himself behind what he had thought was an impregnable armour of dispassion. But the last case he had handled, which had nearly cost him his life, had only shown him how fragile that armour had become. The death of children had eaten away at his defences, reduced them to no more than egg-shell after all these years, he realised now, as he stood so close to yet another death of such youth and beauty that it screamed out for retribution. The last case had left him feeling terrifyingly vulnerable.

  A faint exclamation from Atherton claimed his attention and he focused again on the now mutilated cadaver from which the pathologist was carefully extracting internal organs.

  ‘She was pregnant,’ Atherton said. ‘Only just. Six, eight weeks maybe. She might not even have known.’

  Thackeray nodded, not trusting himself to speak. Two deaths, not one, he thought.

  ‘And there’s vaginal bruising and scars. Was she a prostitute?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Thackeray said. ‘She was carrying no ID and we’ve not found a handbag. We’re going to search the canal today in case there’s something down in the mud. Can you give any estimate of how old she was?’

  Atherton stepped back from the table and studied the body as his technician began to tidy it up before the major incision was closed up again.

  ‘I’d say about eighteen,’ he said. ‘But I could be out by two years either way. She’s obviously of African or Caribbean origin. If I had to guess I’d say West African. And the knife wound didn’t kill her. It came close to the heart, with an upward trajectory, but hadn’t touched it. Her lungs are full of canal water. She undoubtedly drowned.’