By Death Divided

by Patricia Hall

  ‘You’re jumping to conclusions, but I had thought of looking at the Asian angle anyway,’ Laura said soberly. ‘But you know how difficult it is to get a grip on. No one in the Asian community will talk about it openly, except a few women’s groups.’

  ‘Talk to them then,’ Grant snapped. ‘If they’re not all raving lezzers.’

  Laura smiled grimly.

  ‘If they were, they really would stir the community leaders up. More than they do already. If there’s one sin worse than adultery for Muslims, its homosexuality. I’ll talk to some of the women I know, see what they’ve heard. But I do think you’re jumping to conclusions. The poor woman may have fallen in the river by accident, for all we know.’

  ‘And she might have jumped. But she might have been pushed,’ Grant said. ‘As far as I know, no one’s reported her missing. We’d have heard. Use your nose, girl. That’s what I pay you for. See what you can find out.’ He tapped his own nose meaningfully.

  ‘This one smells,’ Grant said, in the tone his staff knew brooked no contradiction. ‘From the sound of it, quite bloody literally.’

  By the end of the afternoon Laura found herself being admitted to a terraced house on the very edge of Milford, ten miles or so outside Bradfield, and some distance from any of the mainly Asian areas of the two towns. The door was opened on a chain by a tall Asian woman in jeans and a loose sweatshirt, her hair long and loose, who glanced up and down the almost deserted street of identical houses before admitting Laura and closing and locking the door behind her. She ushered her into a cluttered office made gloomy by drawn blinds at the window in the main downstairs room of the house and again closed the door behind them.

  ‘Thanks for making time, Ayesha,’ Laura said. ‘I know you’re busy.’

  Ayesha Farouk, organiser of Asian Women’s Aid, a charity much condemned by some of the men of her own faith and others, but which struggled on regardless from one crisis to another, smiled faintly.

  ‘You’d think with a long settled community like ours there’d be some change in traditional attitudes,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen? Instead of which it’s actually getting worse now. All these angry young men who’ve suddenly rediscovered religion are making life more difficult for women. They’re like the Taliban. They’ll be wanting us in burkas next.’

  She sank onto a sagging sofa and Laura took the seat beside her, accepting a cup of thick black coffee from a pot which had been stewing on a corner shelf.

  ‘Did you know a young Asian woman’s been found dead in the River Maze?’ Laura asked. ‘Faria Aziz, lived here in Milford, apparently, married but with no children. I just wondered if she was anyone you knew.’

  ‘Faria’s dead?’ Ayesha asked, her eyes quickly filling with tears.

  ‘You knew her?’ Laura asked, surprised that she had struck gold so quickly.

  ‘Yes, I knew her,’ Ayesha said. ‘I knew she was very unhappy, but I never thought she was so desperate that she would kill herself.’

  Laura explained about the article she was writing and Ayesha looked at her uncertainly.

  ‘I’m not sure I can break her confidence even now,’ she said. ‘She came here looking for help.’

  ‘If you knew her at all, you’ll have to talk to the police,’ Laura said. ‘I’m not sure that they’ve ruled out murder.’

  Ayesha gasped slightly. ‘Murder?’ she whispered. ‘God willing, not that.’

  She sat for a moment in silence, gazing at the floor while Laura waited patiently until she seemed to come to a conclusion that gave her no pleasure.

  ‘OK, it’s not much,’ Ayesha said. ‘But I’ll tell you, anyway. She only came here once, about six months ago, but it was obvious she was deeply unhappy in her marriage. She said her husband was much older than she was and though she never spelt it out I got the impression she had been persuaded into the marriage against her better judgment.’

  ‘A forced marriage?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Certainly arranged. She said she barely knew her husband when it happened. These things are not always easy to define. The men know how to bring pressure to bear in the name of family honour. You have no idea.’

  ‘I’m beginning to learn,’ Laura said grimly.

  ‘Anyway, she came to ask advice about getting a divorce. I gave her the name of a sympathetic solicitor, but I’ve no idea whether or not she went to see him. You can be sure it would have been unpopular with her husband and the rest of the family. I never heard from her again.’

  ‘Was she being abused?’ Laura asked.

  ‘She didn’t say so,’ Ayesha said. ‘But it’s not impossible. Her husband may have been worried about his immigration status if she divorced him. She is – was – British, of course. But that would certainly not give him a motive to get rid of her. Quite the reverse, in fact. He’d want her alive and married to him if he wanted to be sure of staying here.’

  ‘You’ll have to tell the police all this,’ Laura said. ‘What I can actually include in my article will depend very much on how their inquiry goes. Do you know where she lived or worked? I could maybe find out a bit more about her circumstances that way.’

  ‘I’m heartbroken,’ Ayesha said. ‘I wish now I’d been able to do more for her.’

  ‘I don’t think you should blame yourself,’ Laura said as Ayesha went to her desk and began to flick through her records, making brief notes that she gave to Laura.

  ‘I suppose confidentiality doesn’t really apply now she’s dead,’ she said. ‘You might be able to do us some good by letting a little light into the murky areas my community doesn’t want to talk about, particularly as they affect women. Let’s hope so anyway.’

  ‘And you’ll talk to the police?’

  ‘Of course,’ Ayesha said. ‘Someone’s to blame for this and I want them punished.’

  Laura drove thoughtfully back into the centre of Milford and eventually pulled up outside the address Ayesha had given her for Faria Aziz, but when she knocked on the door there was no answer. She looked up and down the street of terraced houses but apart from a couple of women deep in conversation at the very far end of the row of houses, it appeared deserted. It was probably not a good idea to approach Faria’s husband, anyway, at the moment, she thought, even if she could track him down, as she turned the car round and drove back into the centre of the town. There, she quickly found the travel agent’s office where Ayesha thought Faria had worked. She found a parking space and walked back to the shop and tentatively opened the door. Two assistants, one male and one female, looked up from their computers and offered her encouraging smiles as she approached the counter. Deliberately, Laura chose to take a seat opposite the plump young woman with dark hair, on the reasonable grounds that if Faria had confided in anyone here it would be a female rather than a male colleague. According to the neat notice at her work station, her name was Sandra Wright.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Laura said with her most conciliatory smile. ‘I’m not looking for a holiday booking, I’m afraid. I’m making inquiries about Faria Aziz. Someone told me she worked here.’

  ‘Well, she does,’ the woman said. ‘But she’s off sick at the moment. Her husband says she’s got some virus. She hasn’t been in for…’ She glanced at her colleague. ‘How long is it, Damien? A week or more?’

  The young man at the other end of the counter gave the two women a harassed glance as his phone rang.

  ‘Yeah, a week at least,’ he said as he picked up the receiver and instantly retreated into a complicated conversation about tickets to Bahrain.

  ‘Which means we’re understaffed,’ the young woman said. ‘I hope to goodness she’s back soon because I’ve got holiday booked for next week. And you are…?’

  Laura froze, realising that Faria’s colleagues had not yet been told what had happened to her and then berating herself silently for not foreseeing that this might be the case. Obviously the police had not yet traced where Faria worked. For once she was a jump ahead a
nd very aware that this was not a comfortable place to be. She took a deep breath and introduced herself.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry, Sandra,’ she said. ‘Obviously you haven’t heard, and this is going to be a shock. But Faria has been found dead in the River Maze.’ The woman looked at Laura, clearly stunned, her face turning a muddy shade of grey and her eyes staring.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she whispered. ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘It will be in the Gazette tomorrow, possibly on the local radio news tonight. It’s not actually a secret.’

  The woman had begun to cry quietly now, scrambling in her handbag for tissues, which she pressed to her eyes.

  ‘Is there anywhere we can talk more privately?’ Laura asked, glancing at Damien, who seemed to have taken in her message in spite of his telephone conversation, and was staring at her goggle-eyed. ‘I didn’t mean to shock you. I thought the police would have let you know by now.’ She shrugged her shoulders helplessly.

  ‘Come in the back,’ Sandra said, wiping her eyes and getting to her feet. ‘The manager’s out this afternoon so we can use his office.’

  ‘Were you good friends?’ Laura asked when the woman had slumped into a chair in the cramped office behind the shop and she had handed her a plastic cup of water from the water-cooler in the corridor outside the door.

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose so,’ Sandra said. ‘Office friends, you know? Nothing more than that. None of us were. I suppose I was sorry for her really. She never said a lot about her own home life but I could see she wasn’t very happy. She was born here, you know, went to school here, in Bradfield, I think, though she wore traditional dress, you know? Trousers and the long loose tunic thing, and a scarf, though she didn’t often have it over her head, just round her shoulders, in the office anyway. She once said her husband preferred it, the traditional dress, I mean, when I was chattering on about buying a new dress for a wedding and she looked a bit… well…jealous, I suppose. I can’t believe this, you know.’

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ Laura said. ‘I really thought you would have been told.’

  ‘What happened? Did she kill herself? I never thought she was that unhappy. In fact…’

  Sandra hesitated, and Laura wondered what was coming next.

  ‘She told me in confidence,’ Sandra said, echoing Ayesha’s hesitation and then coming to the same conclusion, that it was too late now to be scrupulous in guarding Faria Aziz’s secrets. ‘Though I don’t suppose that matters now. She told me a few weeks ago she was pregnant.’

  ‘She must have been very happy about that,’ Laura said automatically, knowing how happy she would be, and then realising that maybe Faria had not been happy at all if she had wanted a divorce from her husband.

  ‘Well, I think so,’ Sandra said. ‘She seemed a bit nervous about it, actually. But maybe that’s natural with a first baby. I’ve not been there myself…Can’t afford it. My fiancé and me, we can hardly pay the mortgage some months…’

  ‘So she was more scared than excited?’

  ‘Yes, sort of. She never spoke much about her husband or family, you know? Not like me. I chatter on about my fiancé all the time. But she was more private. Maybe it was the different, what do you call it? Culture? A different culture. She was very nice, very good-tempered, not like me, I fly off all over the place when I’m stressed out. And she was good at the job. She dealt with all the Pak…Asians…who came in. Talked to them in their own languages sometimes. I can’t believe she’s dead.’

  And Sandra burst into tears again, unrestrainedly this time, until her colleague put his head round the door wonderingly.

  ‘There’s a policeman outside wants to see the manager,’ he said. ‘I told him he’s out. What on earth’s going on?’

  An hour later Laura found herself facing Michael Thackeray across his desk and was less than surprised to find him unhappy.

  ‘I’m sorry, Michael,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t trying to put myself a jump ahead. I just never thought there would be any mystery about where she worked. You know what I’m investigating. This looked like a perfect way into the domestic problems of Asian women.’

  ‘And how did you discover so easily where she worked? We only managed to find out by contacting every travel agent in Milford.’

  Laura could not resist a faint smile.

  ‘I was lucky,’ she said. ‘I went to talk to the Asian women’s advice centre in Milford and Faria had been there looking for help with a divorce. I asked Ayesha Farouk, who works there, to contact you. I hope she’s done that.’

  ‘I’ll check,’ Thackeray said. ‘If not we’ll chase her up.’ He made a note on a pad on his desk and then leant back in his chair and sighed.

  ‘It would have helped if you’d contacted me first,’ he said, wondering how many more times their professional interests might clash before his bosses, if not hers, objected.

  ‘Ted wouldn’t like to think I was asking your permission to talk to people,’ Laura said.

  ‘No, I don’t suppose he would. Anyway, you’d better give us a statement and tell Ted what’s happened afterwards, as you’ve managed to get ahead of us on this one.’

  ‘Fine,’ Laura said. ‘But tell me one thing. Where’s Faria’s husband?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Thackeray said.

  ‘Ah,’ Laura breathed with sudden understanding. ‘A very suspicious death then?’

  Thackeray managed a smile then.

  ‘You might think that, Ms Ackroyd. I couldn’t possibly comment.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  By the middle of the next morning DC Mohammed Sharif was aware of just how isolated he had become. He had spent the previous evening with his family, most of whom had crowded into his uncle’s house a couple of streets down from his own parents’ home. The atmosphere was hysterical with grief and Sharif found himself comforting his young cousins, Jamilla and Saira, who had taken refuge in their bedroom upstairs to escape from the crush of adults bewailing Faria’s fate in Punjabi below.

  ‘She should never have married that man,’ Jamilla had said in English in a fierce whisper when Sharif came in and closed the door carefully behind him. It was a sentiment Sharif shared but which he knew could not be spoken downstairs, where the rest of the family were giving vent to their grief and horror but without apparently ever touching on the subject of Imran Aziz and his unexplained absence from the home he had shared with Faria.

  ‘I’m sure your father blames himself for insisting on it,’ Sharif said. ‘He regrets giving in to your grandfather.’

  ‘Are they looking for Imran?’ Jamilla asked. She seemed to be the calmest member of the family in the house although Sharif could see the pain in her eyes and knew that her self-control must be fragile.

  ‘I think so,’ Sharif had said, the policeman in him making him very cautious.

  ‘Can you catch him?’ Saira said. ‘He must have driven her to this. She would never never have killed herself if she hadn’t been driven to it. She used to be so happy here with us.’ The younger girl collapsed on her bed in tears and her sister sat beside her, stroking her hair gently.

  ‘Or did he kill her?’ Jamilla asked, her own face beginning to crumple. ‘Was she murdered?’

  But Sharif could only shrug.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘No one does. When you last spoke to her, did she give you the feeling that she was depressed?’

  ‘That she might kill herself, you mean? No, no, of course not. I told you. She said she might be pregnant and seemed – well, excited, I suppose. She would never kill herself. Not Faria. It must be Imran to blame. You’ll catch him and find out, won’t you? You won’t let him get away with this?’

  ‘They will find him,’ Sharif said. ‘Not me personally. They won’t allow me to be involved, but my boss will catch him. Believe me. We’ll find out what happened. Did you tell your father about what she told you about a baby?’

  ‘No, not yet,’ Jamilla said. ‘Do you think I should? It will only make him even more upset
now, won’t it?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Sharif said. ‘I suppose there’s no point. We don’t even know if it’s true.’ He lied without a qualm, very aware that DS Mower had not mentioned this crucial piece of information to Faria’s father when he had broken the news of her identification to him, and guessed that the DCI wanted to raise the issue with Faisel Sharif during the interviews that would inevitably follow. Perhaps Thackeray was right, he admitted to himself wearily. This was not a case he could be involved in.

  Sharif had gone home to his own flat late, leaving a huddle of family members still distraught in his uncle’s small living room, and found he could sleep only fitfully for the rest of the night. Rising early, and ignoring Thackeray’s instruction to take some time off, he arrived in the CID office before eight-thirty and found it almost deserted. He tried to settle at his desk, dealing with some of the files he had abandoned in despair the previous day, but he could not concentrate and when some of his colleagues began to drift into the room, one or two giving him curious glances, he realised that there had been some sort of meeting from which he had been excluded. Getting to his feet he found himself face to face with DS Kevin Mower.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked thickly.

  ‘An early start,’ Mower said. ‘They’ve launched a major inquiry into your cousin’s death, on the assumption it’s probably murder. We’ve just had the first briefing. The DCI heard you were in and wants to see you straight away. He’ll explain what’s going on.’

  Sharif found his fists clenched into balls at his side and he made a conscious effort to breathe normally and relax.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Thanks Sarge.’ He did not hurry to the DCI’s office, guessing he would get short shrift for disobeying an order to stay away, not relishing the dressing down that would provoke, and even more afraid of what Thackeray might tell him about his cousin’s death. Something must have caused this morning’s upgrade of the inquiry, and he knew that the grounds for it could only be bad news for him and his family.