Death in a Far Country

by Patricia Hall

  ‘So she either fell or was pushed into the canal after she was attacked?’

  ‘Looks like it,’ Atherton said, his face as impassive as Thackeray’s as he began to stitch his subject together again as delicately as if she had been alive. ‘I’ll let you have the toxicology and other test results as soon as I have them. But at least you’ve got a definite cause of death. I’ll let you have it in writing by the end of the day.’

  ‘I’d like an artist’s drawing of her,’ Thackeray said. ‘If we don’t find any more information on who she is, and no one’s reported her missing, we’ll need it for the Press.’

  ‘Tell your artist to get in touch. We’ll arrange for access.’

  Thackeray nodded and turned away, only to find Atherton close behind him as the doors swung shut.

  ‘Michael,’ Atherton said, his voice unusually uncertain. Thackeray faced his old colleague for a moment without speaking. Atherton swallowed and seemed to make up his mind.

  ‘Are you sure you should be back at work?’ he asked. ‘You look terrible.’

  Thackeray smiled thinly. ‘Thanks for that,’ he said. ‘I seem to be getting votes of no-confidence from every direction just now. Just for the record, my doctor says I’m fine.’

  ‘Physically, maybe,’ Atherton said, his face flushed. ‘But that’s not everything, is it? I’m only talking as a friend…’

  ‘I’m OK,’ Thackeray said angrily. ‘Sitting on my backside brooding isn’t going to do me or anyone else any good. I need to work.’ He stopped abruptly, knowing he had said much more than he intended. He held out his hand to Atherton, who shook it briefly.

  ‘I’m sorry, Amos, but I’m fine.’ The pathologist nodded and turned on his heel to go back to his mortuary, but Thackeray knew he was no more convinced than anyone else that he could cope. That was something he was going to have to prove the hard way.

  Laura Ackroyd drove through the gates of the West Royd Golf and Country Club with a faint sense of disbelief. It was an area on the edge of Bradfield that she recalled as one of scruffy allotments and small-holdings against a backdrop of hill farms, which grazed their sheep on the lower reaches of the fells to the west of the town. She had not been up here, she thought, for several years and the transformation had been startling. She recalled the outcry when the allotments and some of the farms had been bought up by a developer, but the transformation was more complete than she had ever imagined. The flat area where local gardeners had once grown their runner beans and rhubarb now housed an extensive clubhouse, and beyond that the farmland had been transformed into a pristine golf course where she could see several groups of bright-shirted players making their way across the rolling, well-manicured terrain.

  She parked her modest Golf alongside ranks of Beamers and an occasional Jag, and wondered, as she made her way up the shallow stone steps to the main entrance, whether her working outfit of dark trouser suit, cream shirt and low heels was classy enough for this assignment. Inside, a low key but elegant lounge, almost deserted, stretched out in all directions and she hesitated for a moment to take stock. It was, she thought, more like the entrance to a five-star hotel than a sports club, the directions to the gym, the squash courts, the pool and the changing rooms so discreet as to be almost invisible. But she was not alone for more than a couple of seconds before a young man in an understated uniform of light trousers and blue club blazer approached with a welcoming smile.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m meeting Jenna Heywood,’ Laura said.

  ‘Ah, yes, Ms Heywood said she was expecting a guest for lunch. She’s in the bar already, I think. Would you like to come through?’

  Laura followed her guide through a door to one side of the lounge into an extensive bar with picture windows overlooking the rolling golf course on one side and offering a view of an indoor swimming pool on the other, where a number of young men were powering through the water with splashy aggression. Jenna Heywood apparently spotted her guest before she spotted her, and Laura became aware of a tall woman of about her own age breaking away from a convivial group at the bar and approaching across the thick pile carpet in a black skirt not much longer than a mini teamed with breathtaking heels and a plunging neckline in embroidered scarlet silk.

  ‘Laura?’ she said enthusiastically. ‘I’m so glad you could make it. I thought it would be good to have a quiet chat up here before I take you to United. This is so much more comfortable. It’s a real asset to the old town, don’t you think?’

  Reluctant to admit she had never been to the club before, Laura just nodded and allowed herself to be steered towards a table by the window with two comfortable armchairs arranged to face the windows and the view of the golf course. A waiter was hovering almost immediately.

  ‘Just a tonic with ice and lemon,’ Laura said. ‘I’m driving.’

  Jenna looked disappointed. ‘You’ll have a glass of wine with lunch?’

  ‘Yes, that would be fine,’ Laura said, and sank back into her chair while Jenna dealt with the waiter, thankful for a moment to observe this phenomenon who appeared to have shaken Bradfield’s sporting community to its foundations simply by being young, elegant and female, an effect that Laura had hoped, maybe naïvely, had passed into history.

  Jenna was tall and fashionably slim, her blonde hair worn loose, long legs crossed to display her Jimmy Choos, and her clothes evidently straight from the sort of designer shops that Laura could only gaze at in a state of financial shock when she occasionally passed them by. But when Jenna turned back to her guest Laura could see that she was not some ditzy clothes-horse. There was humour in the perfectly made-up face and a sharp intelligence in the blue eyes. Jenna Heywood was no fool, Laura thought, any more than her father had been, and she guessed that the middle-aged and complacent directors at Bradfield United, who seemed intent on derailing her plans, might find that they had bitten off more than they could chew.

  ‘So,’ Jenna said consideringly. ‘You’re the features editor for the Gazette? You don’t do sport then?’

  Laura shook her head.

  ‘That’s Tony Holloway’s baby,’ she said. ‘I expect you’ve met him.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jenna said noncommitally, with a faint smile. ‘My father had a run-in or two with Tony, I think, as the team lurched from the bad to the appalling over the years.’

  ‘I think Tony’s mother put him in United colours from the moment he was born,’ Laura said with a grin. ‘I’m not sure why sports reporters think they’re exempt from trying to be objective, but a lot of them do.’

  ‘Well, maybe it’s no bad thing on a local paper,’ Jenna said easily. ‘The public expect their paper to be partisan for the local team. But you? If you don’t do sport, what’s all this about? Why have I attracted your particular attention? I like to know where I stand.’

  Jenna’s stock-in-trade was attention, Laura thought wryly, and how it could be manipulated to the best advantage, and she knew that she was playing in the big league here.

  ‘I’m intrigued by a woman taking over a football club,’ Laura said. ‘Or rather, taking over this particular football club. I know it’s not unheard of these days, but United is such a basket case. Why bother?’ She knew she was being provocative, but was interested to see how Jenna would react to such a frontal assault. But Jenna Heywood just threw back her head and laughed.

  ‘A bloody good question,’ she said. ‘It’s one I ask myself in the small watches of the night when I wake up from a nightmare about the balance sheets I’ve seen. I reckon my father was barmy to keep pumping money into the club, and I must be even more barmy to follow suit.’

  ‘But like Tony, you’re a fan?’

  ‘Oh, I was always that,’ Jenna admitted. ‘If your sports editor wore blue and gold Babygros in his pram, I think I got the bug even earlier. My mother always said she went into labour in the directors’ box at one particularly fraught game when United scored a winning goal in the ninety-first minute. She leapt out of he
r seat to cheer and the next thing she knew they were sending for the ambulance. There’s no logic in my trying to rescue United, any more than there was for my poor old dad. It’s an emotional thing. We’ll have to see how it goes. Just at the moment, with the Cup run, things are looking up. But I expect Chelsea will thrash them eight-nil on Saturday and it’ll be back to our normal gloom and doom on Monday – and that’s not for quoting by the way. We don’t want the players suspecting me of lack of confidence before a game like that.’

  She glanced over her shoulder. ‘There are a couple of them in here, as it goes, certain to be taking a close interest in what I’m up to.’ She gestured at a group of young men in the latest smart-casual gear by the bar, accompanied by a couple of young women in short skirts and abbreviated tops, and strappy sandals with heels so high they looked in imminent danger of toppling off them.

  ‘The black lad is our star, “OK” Okigbo. I hope he’s not spending too much time in here with the big game coming up. I’m surprised the coach hasn’t got them out training today. I’ll have to have a word with him about that.’

  ‘You’re going to be a hands on boss, then?’ Laura asked.

  Jenna grinned. ‘I’ve been running my own business for ten years,’ she said. ‘I’m not likely to take a back seat in this one. They haven’t seen anything yet.’

  ‘But some of the directors don’t like it?’

  ‘There’s still a lot of men who don’t like working for a woman,’ Jenna said. ‘I don’t know what it’s like in newspapers.’

  Laura smiled faintly at the idea of Ted Grant knuckling under to a female boss.

  ‘Some editors don’t even like women on their staff let alone giving the orders.’

  ‘Yes, well, I’ve come across plenty like that, not so much in my own profession, but amongst the clients. Companies that hire a PR firm and are then taken aback when a woman turns up with a critical report on how they do things. I don’t imagine Bradfield United will be any different.’

  ‘Not different, but quite possibly worse,’ Laura said, with a smile. ‘Your unreconstructed Yorkshireman can be an intransigent fellow. They don’t take happily to change, especially in their hallowed sanctums like football and cricket clubs. I think you may be in for an interesting time.’

  ‘I control the club,’ Jenna said, her mood darkening slightly. ‘She who pays the piper, and all that. There are two things United needs – good results and a new stadium. And both depend on hard cash, firstly for better players, and OK is a start. And then to build a bigger venue so we can increase our revenue. It’s the same with all these small clubs. They can’t survive by standing still.’

  ‘Can you get the finance?’ Laura asked. ‘Won’t being a woman make even that harder? And with some of the directors against you?’

  ‘I have contacts,’ Jenna said. ‘I think it can be done.’

  ‘You didn’t stay in Bradfield though. Why was that, if you’re so wedded to the team?’

  ‘Are you born and bred in Bradfield?’ Jenna came back quickly.

  ‘I am, as it happens, though I was sent away to boarding school.’

  ‘Ackroyd? Are you Jack Ackroyd’s daughter?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Laura said. ‘Did you know him?’

  ‘Not really,’ Jenna said. ‘But he and my father were close financially at one time, weren’t they? They had some sort of business deals going?’

  ‘They could well have,’ Laura said. ‘I’ll ask my dad next time I talk to him. He and my mother live in Portugal now. He retired out there when his heart started playing up some years ago.’

  ‘He was lucky, then,’ Jenna said soberly. ‘My father’s heart only played up the once and that was it.’ She drained her glass. ‘Shall we eat?’

  Jenna led the way, nodding slightly to the group at the bar who returned her attention, Laura thought, with slightly uncertain smiles, and took their place at a table for two, again in a prime position by the window. Jenna flicked a menu in Laura’s direction.

  ‘It’s not three star Michelin,’ she said. ‘But it could be worse. I usually have the smoked salmon and then a steak. Difficult to spoil.’

  Laura nodded and agreed to have the same and then pulled her tape recorder out of her bag.

  ‘You don’t mind?’ she said, and Jenna smiled.

  ‘Harder for you to distort what I say,’ she said. ‘Record away.’

  ‘So tell me how you got from youthful supporter to owner, by way of a career in London. From what I read in the business cuttings about your company, you need to come back to Bradfield about as much as you need to go to Baghdad. What’s it all about?’

  Jenna nibbled at her smoked salmon and shrugged.

  ‘Maybe I need a new challenge,’ she said. ‘I haven’t lived up here since I was at school, and I’m not really intending to live here now. I’ll come up as often as I need to during the season but my apartment in London is still going to be home. All my friends are down there, and the business, of course, although that runs itself to a large extent these days. The sign of a good boss, in my book, is the ability to appoint good people and then delegate. I can do that.’

  From most people the statement would have sounded like overconfidence, Laura thought, but this was a woman who did not over-estimate her capabilities, she just understood them.

  ‘PR?’ she said. ‘A dirty word to us reporters. If you want the truth about a story you don’t go to PR looking for it. You call it spin, we call it lies.’

  ‘That’s out of date,’ Jenna said, without apparently taking offence. ‘Companies that know what they’re doing are willing to pay a lot of money to present their best face to the public. But if there are problems they know it makes no sense to lie. You always get found out in the end. PR should be part of corporate strategy, not crisis management. That’s what we do for a number of blue chip companies. And we do it very well.’

  ‘And make a lot of money out of it?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Jenna said. ‘I never apologise for that. My dad only sat up and took notice of what I was doing when he saw a healthy profit on the balance sheets.’ They paused for a moment as the waiter brought their steaks, rare and medium, exactly as ordered, and fussed with the bottle of Burgundy Jenna had ordered to go with them.

  ‘You’ll have that glass of wine?’ she asked after she had tasted the vintage and nodded her acceptance of it.

  ‘Thank you,’ Laura said. She could easily get used to lunching here every day, she thought.

  ‘So did you meet prejudice setting up your company in London?’ Laura asked.

  ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘But it’s a different planet down there. Or at least it was ten, fifteen years ago. The north’s beginning to catch up now, I think. Harvey Nicks in Leeds can’t be bad.’

  ‘There’s a lot of money sloshing around up here now,’ Laura said. ‘But still a lot of problems, too. Leeds is Leeds but Bradfield’s something else. You should have a look at Aysgarth Lane. It’s still a bit third-world around there. There’s some real poverty. And on some of the estates.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve noticed. The place needs a good kick up the backside in some respects,’ Jenna said. ‘Not least at United.’

  ‘So you could say you’re on something like a crusade?’ Laura said.

  ‘I suppose you could. And I hope the Gazette’s going to be right behind it, as well.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Michael Thackeray’s face tightened as he read Amos Atherton’s preliminary report on the body of the young woman who had been found in the canal. Somehow seeing facts like these in black and white always seemed worse to him than hearing the pathologist’s conclusions tossed over his shoulder almost casually from the operating table while he watched. The spare, scientific prose reduced the victim to a specimen in a way that did not quite happen when the body was actually present in the all-too oppressive flesh. Even the bare list of injuries sickened him. There were twenty-five separate fresh bruises and contusions on the girl’s face
and body; three broken ribs; one smashed finger; one stab wound, three inches deep and a quarter of an inch wide caused by a pointed blade with no serrations; there was internal bruising and scarring; her lungs were filled with water and she was carrying a foetus of approximately six weeks gestation. And there was evidence that she had suffered similar brutality over a period of time. Before she died, she had been beaten, stabbed, quite possibly raped and finally drowned, as she had fallen or been pushed into the canal in no fit state to even attempt to save herself. He hoped that by then she had been unconscious.

  He called Superintendent Longley on the internal phone.

  ‘It’s definitely murder,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Was she on the game?’

  ‘Possibly,’ Thackeray said, wondering why he hoped quite so fervently that she was not. There were some police officers who might take prostitution as a signal not to put too much effort or resources into a murder investigation, regarding violence as a professional hazard for ‘working girls’, something they ‘asked for’, and which occasionally went too far and killed them. He did not count himself amongst them.

  ‘On drugs?’ Longley asked.

  ‘No external signs of that,’ Thackeray said. ‘But we won’t get toxicology results for a few days.’

  ‘Best keep speculation about her lifestyle under wraps for a while till we see if anyone claims her,’ Longley said. ‘A “respectable family” won’t be too thrilled if we cast aspersions.’

  ‘There’s been no missing person report that fits,’ Thackeray said. ‘But at that age, she could be a student. No one may notice that she’s not around until she fails to turn up for something important.’

  ‘Or a refugee,’ Longley said. ‘Legal, illegal, she may be difficult to pin down.’

  ‘I’m setting inquiries in motion,’ Thackeray said.

  ‘Talking about inquiries,’ Longley said. ‘I’ve just heard that they’ve appointed an assistant chief constable from West Midlands to look into our recent problems. No one I’ve ever heard of. Man called Brian Richards, started off with the Met, made commander and moved up there about six years ago. I’ve got feelers out to find out a bit more.’