By Death Divided

by Patricia Hall

  ‘Do you think he’ll listen?’ Laura asked sceptically.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Vanessa said, and with that Laura had to be content. But by the time she got home half an hour later she found that she was seething with suppressed anger herself, and when Thackeray finally arrived home she poured out everything she had uncovered about Julie Holden’s situation. Thackeray listened tolerantly enough but when she had finished he shook his head in exasperation.

  ‘I know it’s infuriating,’ he said. ‘But unless these women make a complaint it’s almost impossible for us to do anything. We were aware of Vanessa Holden’s alleged accident. The hospital alerted us. But according to Kevin Mower she couldn’t – or wouldn’t – remember what happened, so we didn’t even know if a crime had been committed. She could simply have had a fall. It’s not unusual at her age.’

  ‘So that’s it, is it?’ Laura said. ‘She’s sitting in her own home, terrified of her own son, and no one can do anything to protect her?’

  ‘She tells you that now, but it’s not what she said yesterday and it may not be what she’ll say tomorrow. She has to make a complaint. Of course, if you can persuade her to do that, we’ll take it seriously.’

  Thackeray put an arm round her and pushed her unruly hair away from her face as if about to try to kiss her, but she pushed him away, her face flushed.

  ‘Don’t you dare say “I love you when you’re angry”,’ she said. He smiled faintly and pulled away.

  ‘I wasn’t exactly going to say that. But I do think that you’re in a better position to do something about all this than the police are. Just for once, and don’t ever quote me on that. Write your story, why don’t you? Do your campaigning. It can’t do any harm and it might actually do some good, if not for the Holden family then for some other battered woman who reads it and makes the decision to take a bully to court.’

  ‘Hah,’ Laura came back, not mollified, but slightly encouraged to find that for once Thackeray allowed that her work might be useful. ‘I’ll talk to Ted again in the morning,’ she said. ‘I’ll see if I can widen my brief to include battered mothers.’

  ‘And talk to your Asian contacts as well,’ Thackeray said thoughtfully. ‘There are more ways than one in which wives can be bullied. I suspect some young women are still being bullied into marriage, one way or another. And I’m not sure how that works out in the long run.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Laura asked quietly.

  ‘I can’t tell you anything specific,’ Thackeray said. ‘Not without breaking a confidence. Let’s just say that young women are still going back to the subcontinent to marry and I reckon that some of them don’t go very willingly. How are they treated when they find the marriage is not going well? What do they do? Where do they turn for help?’

  ‘That sounds like a hornets’ nest,’ Laura said. ‘And one Ted Grant may not be very keen to poke a stick at.’

  ‘And when did that ever stop you?’ Thackeray asked. And Laura grinned wickedly before she kissed him.

  For the second time that week Mohammed Sharif drove slowly towards the network of terraced streets off Aysgarth Lane on his way home from work. If he had been reluctant to knock on his uncle’s door the last time, he was ten times more reluctant now. He knew that his news would not be welcome and his inevitable questions resented bitterly where they touched on family honour. Even if he had attended the mosque five times a day for prayers, for as long as he had lived, he would not be greeted with any warmth now, and as someone who had obviously abandoned most of the traditions his uncle and his father held dear, he would be doubly resented.

  His tentative knock on the street door was opened quickly by his uncle himself, who greeted him with obvious coolness. He led him, unsmiling, into the cramped living room, where his wife and his two younger daughters were sitting, almost as if they had expected him.

  ‘Jamilla has told me that she spoke of Faria,’ Faisel Sharif said curtly, obviously angry that Mohammed had visited his young cousins when he had not been there himself.

  ‘My parents told me that you were worried because she hadn’t been in touch,’ Sharif said. ‘There’s nothing the police can do unless someone reports her missing – you or her husband preferably, so this is not official yet. It can’t be. But obviously I’m anxious too. I’ve tried to contact her but apart from a brief phone call to her husband, who just said she was out, I’ve not been able to speak properly to either of them. It does seem very odd. I wondered if you’d heard from her yet? Have you spoken to Imran Aziz?’

  The question hung in the air as his uncle lapsed into a brooding silence before glancing at his two younger daughters and then waving an angry hand towards the door.

  ‘Go upstairs while I talk to your cousin,’ he said. Jamilla looked for a moment as if she might protest but then thought better of it and the two girls left, closing the door behind them. Sharif’s aunt said nothing, her hands twisting her long scarf compulsively between her fingers, her dark eyes opaque. Sharif waited. Whatever his uncle wished to tell him, he could see that it was causing him great distress and there would be no hurrying him. Eventually he glanced at his wife, whose eyes filled with tears, and they both sighed.

  ‘It is a long story and God willing it will have a happy outcome,’ Faisel said at last.

  Sharif waited again, his stomach churning, but well aware that the older man would not be pushed and that his wife would not pre-empt anything he wanted to say. But the longer he waited the more he was certain that he would not like what he was about to be told.

  ‘It goes back more than twenty years, to the year Faria was born,’ Faisel Sharif said at last. ‘The family was already well settled in England. I came alone originally, to join your father, and we had good work at Earnshaw’s mill. My wife came later, and soon after that our first child arrived.’

  ‘I remember all that,’ Sharif, who had been about ten at the time, said quietly. ‘I remember when Faria was born.’

  Faisel nodded impatiently, clearly not wanting to be interrupted.

  ‘But I began to get letters from my father about a dispute in the village between him and his cousin, Imran’s father. There was trouble over some land that no one disputed belonged to the family but which my uncle wanted to sell and my father did not. My father prevailed but there was bad blood remaining with this cousin, a lot of bitterness, and he suggested that we promise my daughter to his cousin’s young son Imran in marriage, if he had not already married by the time she was old enough. There was such a gap in their ages that I thought it would never happen. God willing, it was just a sop to a disgruntled old man.’

  ‘So you agreed?’ Sharif said quietly, trying to hide his shock.

  ‘I was far away. It seemed like a gesture, a way to ease the relationship that had been soured.’

  ‘But the debt was called in?’

  ‘Imran wanted to come to England and had not been able to get a visa. The marriage offered a way. He already had a wife but he divorced her. There were no children.’

  ‘And Faria agreed to this…?’ Sharif hesitated, trying to conceal the anger which threatened to overwhelm him as he thought of the pressure which must have been brought to bear on his beautiful, intelligent young cousin. ‘She agreed to this arrangement?’ he asked at last, keeping his voice level.

  ‘In the end,’ his uncle said. ‘She could see that this was a debt of honour that her grandfather could not deny.’

  ‘Do her sisters know?’ Sharif asked, thinking of the two younger girls with their ambitious plans for the future and a more liberated lifestyle and wondering how bitterly they might be disappointed.

  ‘No, Faria simply told them that she accepted my choice of husband for her in the traditional way.’

  ‘I don’t think they believed her,’ Sharif said flatly.

  ‘That is not important,’ Faisel Sharif said, although his nephew thought he could hear a lack of conviction in his voice. The younger girls would not be so pliant, he thought, and gues
sed that Faisel knew that already. He was sure that there would be storms in this family for years to come.

  ‘So do you know where Faria is now?’ He knew now why his uncle had remained silent about Faria’s unexplained absence but he wanted to hear him spell out his fears himself. ‘Has she gone to Pakistan for some reason? Just what is going on?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Faisel said. ‘Neither of them has said anything to me. Everything seemed normal, although there were not children yet, which grieved us. And then Faria lost contact. She used to telephone her mother every week or so.’ Faisel glanced at his wife, who nodded in confirmation. ‘And she came to see us regularly. But for two months now – nothing.’

  ‘And Imran Aziz has offered no explanation?’

  ‘Imran Aziz answers the telephone and says Faria is not there at that moment and he will ask her to telephone. But she does not telephone. This has happened three or four times now.’

  ‘You haven’t been to Milford to look for her?’

  Faisel shook his head and Sharif suddenly realised the extent of the older man’s impotence in the face of this disaster. Having acceded to his own father’s demand that the long-ago arranged marriage should be implemented, in spite of being aware that it was no more than a convenient way around the immigration rules, he felt unable to confront Imran Aziz, no doubt afraid that whatever he did would re-ignite a quarrel half a world away between two old men over a patch of dusty earth.

  Controlling his anger carefully, Sharif took a deep breath and broached the question he knew was tormenting his aunt and uncle.

  ‘So you’re afraid she has run away from this marriage?’

  His uncle shrugged helplessly.

  ‘It is a possibility,’ he conceded. And obviously one which Faisel could not bear to contemplate, Sharif thought. With two more daughters coming up to marriageable age, the scandal would reverberate around his family and the community, in Bradfield and Pakistan, damaging their prospects of a good match and no doubt encouraging Imran Aziz and his dishonoured family into taking whatever steps they could to find the runaway wife and deal with her. He shuddered.

  ‘I realise she may have run away of her own free will,’ he said carefully. ‘And that is bad enough. But there are other possibilities.’

  Faisel nodded and his nephew almost had the feeling that he might prefer any other possibility – even Faria’s death – to the dishonour of her deserting her husband.

  ‘There are a lot of questions you should be asking, and I should be asking not just as her cousin but as a policeman. We need to know she is safe. Just because she is married doesn’t break all Faria’s ties with our family. I want to see her, or at least speak to her on the telephone. I’d also like to know a bit more about why Imran Aziz was so desperate to get to England that he would divorce one wife and take another. And I may not be the only one asking that question. Did it never cross your mind that there might be something odd about that? That he might have an ulterior motive in coming here?’ Sharif refrained from spelling out his worst fear of what that ulterior motive might be, but he knew his uncle understood him very well when he saw the flash of alarm in his eyes. The older man licked his lips while his aunt stared at him as if mesmerised by a snake.

  ‘He is from a very respectable family,’ Faisel said.

  ‘So is bin Laden,’ Sharif snapped. The two men stared at each other, both outraged, until the younger Sharif gave a shrug.

  ‘I’ll make more inquiries in Milford,’ he said. ‘Do you know where Faria was working? I’ve not had time to track down her employers yet. She may have talked to someone at work about going away.’

  His uncle shook his head.

  ‘A travel agent’s. That’s all I know.’

  ‘And will you contact Imran’s father back home? We’ll all look foolish if Faria is safe and sound there on a visit to her mother-in-law.’ But he knew that was a forlorn hope. There was no reason why Imran Aziz should not have told either him or Faisel if Faria had gone to Pakistan. The situation was a whole lot more threatening than that.

  ‘I will speak to my father,’ Faisel said, and his nephew knew how much that concession cost him. ‘God willing, she is there.’

  ‘God willing,’ Sharif said grudgingly.

  He turned his attention to his silent aunt.

  ‘Did Faria ever give you a hint that the marriage was an unhappy one for her?’ he asked more gently. ‘Could she have run away from Imran, do you think?’ But when his aunt shook her head he did not think she was simply lying to avoid the shame that would bring on the family, although he doubted very much that she would tell him all she knew.

  ‘She said nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing like that at all.’

  Sharif turned back to his uncle.

  ‘I will have to talk to my boss about this,’ he said

  ‘Why?’ his uncle came back angrily. ‘This is a family matter.’

  ‘It may be. But Imran is behaving very strangely. Perhaps he just doesn’t want to admit that his wife has deserted him. Or perhaps there’s more to it than that. I got the impression that there were some wild young men at the mosque in Milford. I have to report things like that. I have no choice.’

  ‘You were a fool to join the police,’ his uncle said bitterly. ‘It will pull you in two eventually.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Mohammed Sharif said. ‘And perhaps you have pulled Faria in two yourself by insisting on this marriage. You chose to come here and produce British children. You can’t expect them to live by the rules of some backward village in Pakistan. It’s not reasonable and it’s bringing us nothing but trouble.’

  Sharif had never spelt out his feelings so clearly to his uncle and he could see how unwelcome the message was. But his own anger made him bold.

  ‘I will speak to your father,’ Faisel Sharif said through clenched teeth.

  ‘My father is not responsible for me any longer,’ Sharif said, realising how absurd this conversation would sound to his white friends and colleagues. ‘I live in another world,’ he muttered. ‘I have to.’ And with that he left, closing his uncle’s front door carefully behind him. He doubted that he would ever be invited to cross the threshold again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Julie Holden flung open the office door at the women’s refuge, startling the two women inside.

  ‘Have you seen Anna?’ she blurted, oblivious to the frosty looks that greeted her. Carrie Whittaker, whose interview with one of the refuge’s clients had been interrupted, shook her head irritably.

  ‘Isn’t she with Polly in the kitchen? She enjoys helping her.’

  Julie turned on her heel, unzipping her jacket as she hurried down the corridor to the kitchen where an evening meal was being prepared, only to find it deserted, a few pans simmering steamily on the stove. Still clutching a chemist’s bag in one hand she rushed back up the stairs calling for her daughter. Anna had promised to stay in her room finishing her Harry Potter book while her mother went out for half an hour or so to do some shopping, but when Julie had returned she had found the room empty and now, as she stood between the two narrow beds, her heart thumping, she realised that Anna’s coat, which had been hanging on a hook on the door, was missing. When she looked round more carefully, she could see that Anna had taken her book and that some of her other most precious possessions – her teddy bear, her school pencil case and a battered old briefcase of her father’s, which she loved and had carefully arranged around her bed – had also disappeared.

  Julie’s heart felt as if it had frozen and she began to shake. She sat down heavily on her bed and tried to swallow down the panic that threatened to engulf her. But even before she had managed to collect her whirling thoughts, Carrie put her head round the door.

  ‘Did you find her?’ she asked. Julie felt the tears coming.

  ‘She’s gone,’ she said. ‘She’s taken some of her things…her precious Harry Potter book, her pyjamas, her teddy bear…She must have slipped out while I was out shopping. I was o
nly gone twenty minutes.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Carrie said, putting a hand on Julie’s shoulder. ‘Have you been round to ask everyone? She might be with some of the other children.’

  Julie shook her head vehemently, knowing that Anna was uncomfortable with some of the younger children, some still in nappies, who seemed to spend most of their time grizzling and squabbling in the communal rooms downstairs, but she followed Carrie on a tour of the building which, as she expected, failed to find anyone who had seen Anna recently.

  ‘Surely the doors were locked?’ Julie protested as the two women stood in the hall facing each other impotently.

  ‘Anna would probably be able to reach the lock,’ Carrie said. ‘They’re fitted too high for small children but not for a child of her age. We’re not in the business of locking people in, after all, only keeping unwanted visitors out.’

  ‘I must ring the police,’ Julie said urgently. ‘They must start a search.’

  ‘Are you sure you need the police?’ Carrie said quietly. ‘Isn’t it quite likely that she’s headed off to see someone? I know she’s not been very happy here, has she? You’d only to look at her to see how fed up she was. These things take it out of kids, you know that. Could she have gone to see her father?’

  ‘No,’ Julie almost screamed. ‘After the way he’s treated me? She couldn’t have gone to see her father. Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘Look,’ Carrie said quietly. ‘We’re not going to get anywhere like this. Just sit and think calmly and rationally for a moment. You say she’s taken some of her stuff so she must be heading somewhere she thinks she can stay. Has she got any money?’

  Julie swallowed hard and tried to concentrate.

  ‘Not very much. A couple of quid maybe, saved from her pocket money.’

  ‘So enough to take a bus but not enough to get out of town. She hasn’t taken any more out of your bag?’