By Death Divided

by Patricia Hall

  His image of Vicky Mendelson, traumatised in her own home the previous night, was still vivid. He had promised David some help and even if he could not be seen to be leaning too heavily on his uniformed colleagues, he was determined to provide it.

  ‘And see if someone has time to check on other attempted break-ins in Southfield. There might be a pattern there we’ve not noticed.’

  ‘Guv,’ Mower said cheerfully. With a following wind, he thought, he just might be able to catch Jess for a drink at lunchtime, a luxury in CID, and the thought filled him with a sudden pang of desire.

  Laura Ackroyd rang the bell at the women’s refuge, a five minutes’ walk from the Gazette office, talked her way through that obstacle and then through the solid front door which was reinforced with plates of heavy metal. She grimaced slightly as the door swung open. She had thought that only drug dealers up on the Heights, the town’s most dilapidated estate, now in the throes of demolition, went in for this level of fortification, in their case against raids by the police.

  ‘It’s like Fort Knox in here,’ she said lightly to the woman in jeans and sweatshirt who opened the door for her, but there was no answering spark of amusement in her eyes.

  ‘You have no idea what we put up with,’ she said, pushing untidy hair away from her unmade-up face. ‘I’m Carrie Whittaker, by the way. I work here.’

  The house was early Victorian, a mill-owner’s stately pile, no doubt, in those days of frantic industrial expansion when towns like Bradfield metamorphosed from weaving villages to booming mill towns in less than fifty years. The house would have been handily placed for the master’s access to the burgeoning warehouses and factories on the seven hills rising above the Beck, its heyday as a family home long before the town’s more affluent residents took flight to less sooty residences in Ilkley and Harrogate. Many of the solid stone mansions had been converted into flats or offices, others demolished in the Sixties and Seventies to make way for new development. But this one had evidently stood still, gently decaying, until the women’s refuge had taken it over and packed in as many women and children as the space would allow, and then some.

  Laura followed her guide up the broad staircase to the first floor, where at least the windows were free of wire mesh, and faint sunlight filtered across the broad landing.

  ‘If you write anything about this place, please don’t mention anyone by name,’ the woman said. ‘What Julie says is up to her, but no one else’s confidentiality must be breached. You do understand that, don’t you? It can be dangerous. Most of their partners don’t know where they are.’

  ‘Of course,’ Laura said. ‘I’ll be careful.’

  It had taken her a good portion of that morning’s editorial conference to persuade her editor, Ted Grant, to allow her to embark on a feature, or maybe a series, on domestic violence at all, and she knew that unless she could come up with some pretty sensational case histories her investigations might get no further than the now merely proverbial spike, where unused articles used to be physically impaled. These days a click of a computer key could consign reams of unwanted material to the bin in a second.

  ‘See if you can find a battered husband, too,’ Ted had growled before reluctantly approving the project. ‘It’s not all one way, you know.’

  ‘I’ll look for a battered granny if you like,’ Laura had come back, with an unwary flash of anger. ‘They say that’s getting more common, too.’ But it was Julie Holden’s desperate eyes, and the way the child, Anna, had clung to her mother as they scuttled into this building, that had haunted her.

  Julie answered the door of her room quickly, and offered Laura a wan smile.

  ‘Come in,’ she said. ‘I don’t know whether I should be doing this, but come in anyway.’

  It was a small room, sub-divided from a larger one, and was over-filled by two single beds and a bleak minimum of other furniture. Julie waved Laura into the single wooden chair and sat on one of the beds beside Anna, who barely glanced up from her book as Laura arrived.

  ‘Should she not be at school?’ Laura asked.

  ‘I can’t take her back to Southfield Primary. Bruce would ambush us up there too easily. And I’ve not got her in anywhere else yet.’ The child glanced at her mother with eyes full of tears, but she said nothing, turning back to Harry Potter in silence. Laura took her tape-recorder out of her bag.

  ‘Do you mind?’ she asked. ‘I want to get it right.’

  ‘Fine,’ Julie muttered, her voice low. ‘Though I hardly know where to begin.’

  ‘At the beginning,’ Laura said gently. Somewhere in the building a baby began to cry. ‘When did you get married?’

  ‘Anna, why don’t you go downstairs and see if you can help get lunch ready,’ Julie said suddenly. The girl looked at her mother mutinously for a moment before putting her book face down on the rumpled bed and rolling herself to the floor.

  ‘Don’t be long,’ the child said. ‘You know, I really, really hate it here. I really, really want to go home now.’

  Anna closed the door with a bang that reverberated around the high ceilings of the hallway outside and sparked renewed howling from the baby close by. Julie sighed but said nothing, clearly close to tears herself.

  ‘Are you up to this?’ Laura asked, suddenly feeling guilty at intruding on this private tragedy. ‘I can come back another time if you like.’

  ‘It’s not going to get any better, is it? Let’s do it,’ Julie insisted and Laura, not for the first time, nor inevitably the last, felt surprised at how readily people under stress proved willing to discuss their most intimate problems with complete strangers. Reporter as therapist, she thought wryly, and knew that few of her friends would take that concept seriously.

  Julie began slowly, almost hesitantly, as Laura switched on her tape recorder. She had met Bruce, she said, in Blackpool, where she had been brought up and was working as a teacher. He was an IT troubleshooter for a local company. He had been good-looking and charming and, she admitted, swept her off her feet soon after she had broken up with a previous partner. They had married within six months of meeting and without Julie even having met Bruce’s parents. And soon after that, she was pregnant and they settled in Lytham close to her family home, coming back to Bradfield, which was Bruce’s home town, years later when and where he had found a better job. With his father dead and his mother alone, she had not argued against the move, knowing that she could probably find part-time teaching work there as easily as in Blackpool.

  But almost as soon as Anna had arrived, eight years ago, things had already begun to change, she said.

  ‘I know a lot of dads get jealous of the baby, because they’re not the centre of attention any more. But she was a quiet baby, not much trouble, and I knew enough to try to include Bruce in everything we did, to make a real family. But every now and then he would get really angry, explode almost, with rage. Not often, but often enough to make me quite careful of how I behaved, and wonder how far I could trust him with Anna. I thought it would pass. I loved him very much, and I really thought it would pass as she got older and more independent. But I didn’t suggest having another child. I could see that one was as much as he could cope with. Probably ever.’

  ‘But it didn’t pass,’ Laura prompted, uncomfortably aware of how personally interested she was in this woman’s experience.

  ‘No,’ Julie said softly. ‘It didn’t pass. And since we came to Bradfield his rages have been getting more frequent and more violent. And it’s been getting harder and harder to cover up. I was terrified he would begin hitting Anna as well as me.’

  ‘Has he?’ Laura asked.

  ‘No, I’ve always managed to protect her. Quite often she’s been in bed asleep when things have got bad. I tried to leave him once before but he begged and begged me to go back. He seems quite normal, you see, most of the time. Loving and so ashamed of what he’s done. And I let myself be persuaded. In fact, I generally end up comforting him. Stupid I know, but I did love him onc
e. But recently, since we came to Bradfield really, he’s been flaring up more often and I’ve got completely frantic with the worry. Even in between the rages he’s been moody and distant, not his normal self. I thought this time if I didn’t get out I’d be the one to crack up completely, so a few days ago I packed up and went out as if I was taking Anna to school as normal. But we came here and I’ve not been back.’

  ‘He’s no idea where you are?’

  ‘Not at the moment but I don’t think it will take him long to find this place. We’ll have to move on. The husbands and partners do turn up here, that’s why there’s all the security. To keep fathers out.’ Suddenly Julie was in tears and Laura switched her taperecorder off.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she sobbed. ‘I just never thought I would be in this situation. It all started so well. We were so in love. We had good jobs. We weren’t short of money. Anna was a very much wanted baby. Where did it all go so wrong?’

  ‘Who have you talked to about it, apart from Vicky?’

  ‘No one really. I went to the doctor and said I was stressed and he gave me some tranquillisers.’

  Laura looked at her aghast for a second.

  ‘I would have thought it was your husband who needed pills, not you,’ she said.

  ‘He won’t go near the doctor,’ Julie said. ‘He’s got quite a phobia about the medical profession. I think he had some sort of bad experience before I met him. He never talks about it. And he won’t go near marriage counsellors. I’ve suggested it but he says he doesn’t want anyone interfering in his private life, asking questions, demanding explanations. He seems quite frightened of that.’

  ‘I think you ought to see your doctor again and be honest with him this time. I don’t know much about mental illness but it sounds as if your husband could be suffering from some form of it. And talk to the police. If you don’t do something pretty dramatic, you or Anna could get seriously hurt.’ Or worse, she thought, and she knew that Julie could recognise the unspoken thought only too clearly.

  ‘That’s what Vicky said,’ Julie said dully. ‘But I don’t want him locked up. That would destroy him. I just want it to stop.’

  Mohammed Sharif, known at work happily enough as Omar, but not here, felt the familiar sounds and smells of Aysgarth Lane enfold him, the Punjabi chatter, the spicy aromas, the car horns of impatient young drivers and every now and again the beat of a Bangla rhythm. It felt like home and for a fleeting moment he regretted having cut himself off so completely from it. He had parked in one of the narrow streets of terraced houses nearby and joined the early evening crowds making their way from one Asian emporium to another. He inched through the door of the Punjab Bazaar, a gloomy cluttered store where women in brightly coloured shalwar kameez, headscarfs worn loosely around their hair or shoulders, gossiped amongst the crammed shelves. He had promised Louise, who did not realise how unusual it was for an Asian man to be seen in a kitchen, that he would cook her a curry that night, and he spent some time selecting large plastic packets of coriander, cumin and red pepper for his store cupboard on the other side of town, where such things only appeared on the supermarket shelves in minute and highly priced jars. He slipped easily back into Punjabi at the checkout, where he was greeted by name. This was a tight-knit community, which did not lose track of its sons if it could help it.

  He dropped his shopping into the boot of his car and then made his way up the hill, not this time to his parents’ home but to the house of his aunt and uncle, Faria’s parents, and knocked lightly on the front door, which opened directly onto the street. It was opened by his cousin Jamilla, a few years younger than Faria. She was a young woman now, he noticed with approval, elegant in her traditional dress but with her headscarf only loosely furled around her shoulders revealing glossy black hair cut short in a fashion which he did not think her parents would totally approve of. She looked instantly pleased to see him, but he could see an anxiety in her eyes that worried him.

  ‘Are your parents at home?’ he asked. She shook her head and ushered him in. The proprieties were not offended by the visit of a cousin, even an unmarried one. She led him into the living room, where they found her sister curled on the sofa. The younger girl, Saira, turned the television off with a guilty look.

  ‘It’s all right, it’s only Mohammed,’ Jamilla said. ‘We were watching a Bollywood video. My father doesn’t like it. He says it’s far too modern.’ She laughed. ‘If he only knew what went on out of sight these days. There’s no way we’re going to marry backwoodsmen from some dusty village.’

  ‘Good for you,’ Sharif said, aware that perhaps they regarded him and his less than traditional choices as some sort of role model, and knowing that it would be much harder for these young women to break free than it had been for him as a male in a strictly paternalist community. ‘Are you staying on at school, Jamilla?’

  ‘I’m doing A levels. I’m going to university, whatever they say,’ she said.

  ‘Me too,’ Saira said. ‘I want to study law. Perhaps I’ll join the police like you.’

  ‘Perhaps you will,’ Sharif said. ‘Your parents should be pleased. But watch your film if you like. I enjoy the music and dancing, though I can’t say the plots appeal much. I really came to see your father.’

  Jamilla looked at her cousin for a moment thoughtfully.

  ‘Did you want to ask him about Faria?’ she said quietly at last. ‘He won’t talk about her, you know, even though she hasn’t been to see us for ages.’

  ‘My parents told me that,’ Sharif said, wondering how much these two smart young women had kept in touch with their older sister. ‘Have you spoken to her at all?’ He knew a lot of the girls had mobile phones their parents did not necessarily know about.

  ‘Not for weeks,’ Jamilla said. ‘When I call, Imran Aziz answers so I hang up. The last time I spoke to Faria she seemed fine.’ She glanced at her sister for a second and the younger girl nodded imperceptibly, as if giving her permission to go on.

  ‘You mustn’t tell anyone, Mohammed,’ Jamilla said. ‘But the last time we spoke she seemed really excited because she said she was pregnant, but it was very early and I wasn’t to tell anyone except Saira because she wasn’t sure yet. She sounded really happy about it. But since then I haven’t managed to get through to her.’

  ‘If she was really pregnant surely she would have let your parents know?’ Sharif said.

  ‘I know, I know, so maybe it was a false alarm. She doesn’t seem to have told my mother yet. False alarms happen, you know,’ she said seriously as if Sharif might be unaware of such female mysteries.

  ‘I know,’ he said gravely, suppressing a smile.

  ‘And we think it’s happened before,’ Saira said.

  ‘You mean the false alarm?’ Sharif said. ‘She’s lost babies?’

  Saira nodded, her face serious.

  ‘I’m only guessing,’ she said. ‘But she always sounds very sad about not having children yet.’

  ‘So how long ago did you speak to her?’

  ‘Jamilla glanced at her sister again as if for confirmation.’ ‘About two months ago maybe. My mother’s very upset because she doesn’t come to see her any more.’

  ‘And you haven’t been over to Milford to see her? It’s not very far.’

  ‘We thought when school finishes we might go on the bus to visit her, didn’t we, Saira?’

  ‘We don’t like Imran Aziz much,’ Saira said. ‘But Faria is working all day in some travel agent’s, so we could only really see her in the evening when he would be there too.’ Sharif guessed that the girls’ new-found determination not to marry anyone from a Pakistani village had been reinforced by the arrival of Imran Aziz in their lives, the proverbial cousin from the old country, though not in this case, he believed, a country bumpkin.

  ‘Perhaps I’ll go over and see her myself,’ Sharif said. ‘Do you have her address? Or do you know where she works, perhaps? It might be easier to catch up with her there.’

  ‘Oh,
would you?’ Jamilla said fervently, and Sharif realised just how seriously anxious she was about her sister. She went over to a small bureau on the other side of the room and rummaged through a drawer. She came back with a small notebook of addresses and phone numbers from which Sharif copied Faria’s details into his own notebook.

  ‘I’m not sure where she works, but it’s some sort of travel agency. Surely you could find it, Mohammad. You’re a detective.’

  ‘I’m sure I can,’ Sharif said. ‘No problem.’

  ‘I know my parents are worried about her,’ Jamilla said quietly. ‘They won’t admit it but I think they are afraid that she has run away from Imran Aziz. But she wouldn’t do that if there’s a baby coming, would she? I really wanted to tell my mother, but she made us swear not to.’ Saira gave her sister an anxious look and Sharif knew the scandal a runaway wife would cause in the family and the wider community and hoped for Faria’s sake her parents’ fears were not true.

  ‘Did she agree to this marriage?’ he asked. ‘I was never sure.’

  ‘Nor was I,’ Jamilla said quietly. ‘My father wanted it, I know that. But Faria would never talk about it. Like you, I was never sure.’ Her dark eyes filled with tears.

  ‘I’ll see what I can find out,’ he said, his stomach tight with foreboding. And when he left and glanced down the narrow, almost deserted street, few cars here, where many of the men were out of work, he wondered if he risked precipitating a family crisis by pursuing his cousin. But as he hurried back to his own car, close to the still bustling thoroughfare of Aysgarth Lane, he concluded he would have to risk it. The three sisters had always been close and if Jamilla and Saira were so worried about Faria then the least he could do was try to set their minds at rest. He would take a chance and track her down in Milford. It was, he thought, the least he could do. In the meantime he would cook for Louise, a simple thing that would shock his father and uncle to their core, but which in the new life he had created for himself seemed quite normal. He was, he thought, further adrift from his roots that anyone in his family could imagine.