By Death Divided

by Patricia Hall

  They were both awake by six, while it was still dark outside, and Anna rummaged in the box for a picnic breakfast, noticing anxiously that they had already eaten more than half of the bread and cheese and that their two bottles of water were going down fast.

  ‘Daddy will be coming back soon,’ she said, trying to keep her own spirits up as much as Vanessa’s after her grandmother had struggled into the coal cellar to use the bucket he had left there. ‘He can’t be much longer.’

  Vanessa had nodded vaguely as she lowered herself back into a sitting position with a groan.

  ‘Shall we play I-spy again?’ Anna asked, but Vanessa had lain back on the cushions, clutching her arms around herself and beginning to shiver.

  ‘It’s so cold,’ she whispered.

  ‘I’m not cold, Nanna,’ Anna said cheerfully.

  ‘You jump up and down a bit,’ Vanessa said. ‘That’ll keep you warm’

  ‘P’raps you should do that too.’ But Vanessa just sighed and closed her eyes again and Anna realised, as she had not quite done before, that although Vanessa was supposed to be looking after her, in these circumstances their roles had insidiously reversed themselves. She picked up the blanket from the floor and laid it over her grandmother gently and watched as the old woman fell back to sleep, her bruised and stitched face relaxing as she did.

  ‘Poor Nanna,’ Anna whispered. ‘It’ll be all right. He’ll be back soon. He loves us, you know.’ But somewhere at the back of her mind she was beginning to doubt all the protestations of undying love her father had made to her over the last few days when they had been alone together. His parallel insistence of how much he hated her mother for what she had done to him suddenly took on new significance, and as she sat watching her grandmother’s shallow breathing tears rolled down her dirty cheeks. What, she wondered, was her father doing now? And would he ever come back to release them? Suddenly frightened she shook her grandmother’s arm, but there was no response. Very quietly, Anna began to sob.

  Half a world away, Mohammed Sharif was riding beside his cousin in an official car, heading towards the far suburbs of Lahore where, Hussain had assured him, they would be able to speak to Imran Aziz’s ex-wife, who was, to Sharif’s horror, incarcerated in a women’s prison on the outskirts of the city.

  Sharif had spent the previous day anxiously filling in time while waiting for Hussain to call him on his mobile. He had pushed and pummeled his way through the crowds of the Inner City near his hotel, admiring its small shrines and palaces, walked through the Elephant Gate into the Lahore Fort and persuaded a friendly caretaker to take him to the underground summer rooms where the Sikh rulers of the Punjab had sheltered from the blazing heat, and ended the day watching Sufi dancers at the shrine of Shah Jamal, sitting in the separate seating area for women and foreigners. But his mind was not on sight-seeing. He felt hot and jet-lagged and anxious, even as he tried to relax watching the kite flyers in the Lawrence Gardens just off the magnificent Mall. Eventually he gave up, risked buying a frugal, piping hot meal at one of the many small food stalls close to his hotel and went to bed early, hoping that by morning Hussain’s researches would have born fruit.

  His phone shrilled soon after breakfast and Hussain announced that he had tracked down Mariam Gul and that she was in fact in gaol, serving a six month sentence.

  ‘For what?’ Sharif had asked, horrified.

  ‘Theft and immorality,’

  ‘She’s a prostitute?’

  ‘She’s a prostitute,’ Hussain confirmed. ‘With divorced women it sometimes happens. If their families don’t want to take them back, all sorts of bad things can happen. It is hard for a single woman on her own to make a living.’

  ‘Maybe we can help her,’ Sharif breathed, without much confidence but he did not think that Hussain heard him. Or if he did, he chose to ignore him, instead making arrangements to pick him up and take him to see Mariam.

  The prison consisted of low white buildings surrounding a central courtyard where, once through security, Sharif was surprised to find the prisoners free to wander and chat in animated groups. The two men were taken to a small-white walled room furnished with a bare table and chairs and eventually a puzzled looking Mariam Gul, in faded blue shalwar kameez and a white headscarf, was brought to them. She was a small woman and much older that Sharif had expected, her face creased and her eyes tired. For a moment she looked at the two men without speaking, and then sat meekly on one of the chairs with her hands in her lap, evidently waiting for them to speak. Hussain introduced them both and as Mariam took in Sharif’s relationship to her former husband a flicker of understanding crossed her face but she said nothing.

  ‘Are you the former wife of Imran Aziz?’ Hussain asked, not unkindly. And this time, for a second, a flash of anger showed in her eyes. But she quickly looked down as if to veil it, and when she met their eyes again she looked bland as she nodded silently.

  ‘He divorced me three years ago,’ she said. ‘As you must know.’ She directed her last remark to Sharif, who nodded.

  ‘And what happened after that? Did your family not take you back into their home?’

  Mariam shook her head.

  ‘I have unmarried sisters. There was no place for me there. And my father regarded my divorce as a disgrace.’

  ‘Why? Were you unfaithful?’ Hussain asked, without much sympathy.

  ‘No, I was not,’ she said quietly.

  ‘But the marriage was unhappy and they blamed you? Because there were no children?’

  ‘The blame should not have been on my side as there was no marriage in any real sense, anyway,’ she said. ‘There could be no children because the marriage was never complete. Imran Aziz did not want me except to disguise his own lifestyle, to escape from his parents’ pressure to marry.’

  The two men stared at her for a long moment in silence and Sharif could feel his stomach tighten.

  But now she had started Mariam seemed to decide to tell them everything.

  ‘Imran’s father had pressed him to marry and now they seemed to be pressing him to have a family. But I am getting old. The chance of children has passed me by now. I think Imran would have been happy to continue as we were but his father wanted grandsons, it was obvious, and grandsons meant a younger wife. And then Imran’s business ran into some difficulties so I think he too began to feel a new start was necessary, in England, if possible. And there may have been other reasons for him to want to leave the country. I don’t know.’

  ‘What other reasons?’

  ‘You really don’t know, do you?’ Mariam asked. ‘About his tastes?’

  Sharif’s’ mouth was dry and he struggled with the question.

  ‘What tastes?’

  ‘He prefers boys to women,’ Mariam said quietly. ‘That is what I was supposed to conceal from his family. And his new wife in England, too, no doubt. Here in the city it was easy enough for him to follow his inclinations. And maybe even easier in England. I don’t know. But I think maybe the family of one of his boys had discovered a liaison and threatened him so he decided he must leave. He divorced me and married your cousin within a month, had left the country within two.’

  ‘Leaving you with nothing?’ Sharif asked.

  ‘Oh, I got by,’ Mariam said with a shrug. ‘I got a job in a factory for a while, but there were always men willing to offer more money for a night than I could earn in a week there.’

  Sharif stood up and pressed his head against the barred window from which he could see the women in the courtyard outside, drifting from group to group, chatting as if it was some village market place.

  ‘How long are you in here?’ he asked, his voice thick with anger.

  ‘Another month,’ Mariam said.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Back to work,’ she said, as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

  ‘Will you let my cousin here know when you are released?’ Sharif said. Mariam shrugged and looked at him wide-eyed.

 
‘If you wish,’ she said.

  ‘Come on,’ Sharif said to Hussain. ‘Let’s go.’

  In the corridor outside Hussain looked at his companion curiously.

  ‘There’s nothing you can do for her, you know. Officially, these women don’t exist. To their families they no longer exist. The chances are she’s already HIV positive and she’ll be dead within a couple of years.’

  ‘And homosexuals don’t exist either?’ Sharif asked furiously. ‘The family here must have done all this to to cover up Imran’s unacceptable sexuality, the divorce and remarriage, everything. We knew nothing about it in England but they must have known what they were doing here. They owe that woman something.’

  ‘You may be right,’ Hussain said. ‘But I’d be very surprised if they repaid the debt.’

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ Sharif said.

  ‘Do you want to talk to Imran’s business partner?’ Hussain asked. ‘We have records of him and Aziz. They ran an import/export business together for ten years, mainly textiles to Europe, but it collapsed just before Imran divorced his wife. It was apparently fairly openly known in his circle that Imran was a homosexual but Lahore is quite liberal in that respect if you are discreet. No one seems to have taken much notice anyway. The wife spent a lot of her time in the village with his parents. But when that relationship broke up the business seems to have collapsed as well. I can give you his partner’s address if you like.’

  Sharif pulled a face, knowing that he was revealing his own prejudice, deeply ingrained since childhood when he had first asked his father what ‘gay’ meant and seen his face suffuse with rage.

  ‘I’ll give him a miss,’ he said, ‘so long as you’re sure there’s no political dimension to all this. That’s what they’re worried about at home.’

  ‘No,’ Hussain said. ‘There’s nothing like that, unless there are security files I can’t get access to. But I’ve no doubt your people will have made inquiries about that already.’

  ‘Will you keep me in touch if anything else crops up?’ Sharif asked.

  ‘Of course,’ his cousin said.

  ‘I’ll see if I can persuade the family to help Mariam.’

  ‘I wish you luck,’ Hussain said. ‘I doubt very much that anyone will want to know.’

  As Sharif sat on the plane the next day heading back to Manchester and gazing down at a cloud-shrouded Europe below, his mind was still whirling with fears that he had not even broached with his cousin. If Imran had followed the same pattern with Faria as he had with his first wife, he thought, pursuing a sexless marriage of convenience, then it seemed extremely unlikely that he was the father of the baby she was carrying when she died. And if he was not the father, then DCI Thackeray would undoubtedly wish to find out who was, with all the implications that line of inquiry implied for Sharif himself and his entire family in Bradfield. The trip to Pakistan had seemed like a good idea at the time, Sharif thought as he tried to accommodate his still-painful ribs to the narrow airline seat without much success. But the closer he got to England the more he became convinced that it might have been a terrible mistake, a mistake Faria’s father and his own would never forgive him for as it inevitably exposed their family secrets to the public gaze.

  ‘Guv?’ Sergeant Kevin Mower put his head round his boss’s door the next morning and found Thackeray with his chair turned round towards the window, apparently oblivious to the interruption as he gazed out at the wind-torn trees tossing in a wintry and almost deserted town hall square, a cigarette clutched unlit in one hand.

  ‘Morning, guv,’ Mower said more loudly, closing the office door behind him. ‘A few developments overnight for a change.’ Thackeray swivelled his chair round towards the sergeant, who tried not to allow his concern to show as he realised how ill the DCI looked. His face was ashen and he had dark circles under his eyes, and as he lit his cigarette, Mower could see that his hands were shaking.

  ‘Health and safety haven’t got you yet,’ he said as lightly as he could, nodding at the smoke that wreathed around the office as Thackeray exhaled deeply. Thackeray merely shook his head irritably.

  ‘What are these developments then?’ he asked. ‘Have we traced Imran Aziz?’

  ‘No, not that,’ Mower admitted. ‘But we are getting a clearer picture of what had been going on in that house. Slower than we might like because the spooks took so much stuff away, but they’re feeding the information back to us now. In fact, I get the distinct impression that they’ve lost interest in Imran Aziz as a potential terrorist. There’s no evidence of that, apparently.’

  ‘I’ll check personally with Doug McKinnon later,’ Thackeray snapped. ‘If he’s not a terrorist they’re just getting in the way of our investigation of his wife’s murder.’

  ‘That’s what I thought, guv,’ Mower said. ‘Anyway, what they have found are traces of Class A drugs.’

  ‘Drugs?’ Thackeray could not hide his excitement.

  ‘Heroin, to be precise,’ Mower said. ‘Just a single wrap hidden in some of Aziz’s paperwork, which suggests a user rather than a dealer. But interesting, even so.’

  ‘Especially in the light of what forensics say about Faria having narcotics in her bloodstream. Talk to the drug squad, Kevin, and see if they have any knowledge of his involvement and of his most likely source. Did anyone find a syringe or any other paraphernalia?’

  ‘No, not yet, but I’ll ask for everything to be checked again. It might be worth asking Amos Atherton if he’s found anything further as well. He did say he would have a another look, didn’t he?’

  ‘I’ll chase him,’ Thackeray said. ‘We could ask the police in Pakistan if there’s any record of Aziz’s involvement in narcotics, though I don’t understand how he would get a visa to come here if anything like that was on record, even if he had married a British woman.’

  ‘Well, perhaps he picked up the habit after he arrived,’ Mower said. ‘It’s pretty obvious he wasn’t making the success of his life here that he’d hoped. He’d not got a business off the ground, his wife was working, possibly needing to work to keep them going, which doesn’t go down too well in that community, and he’d only had factory jobs himself. Perhaps he was more desperate than anyone’s letting on.’

  ‘I think there’s a lot going on in that family that no one is telling us,’ Thackeray said. ‘Do we have a photograph?’

  ‘A couple,’ Mower said.

  ‘Right, let’s get them on TV and into the press. I want Imran Aziz found. Have you spoken to DC Sharif since he got out of hospital?’

  Mower looked at his boss warily for a moment.

  ‘I thought you didn’t want any contact,’ he said.

  ‘Come on, Kevin. I know you’ll talk to him if you think he has anything to offer. Have you done that?’

  But Mower shook his head.

  ‘I did give him a bell to see how he was but I got no reply. His mobile was switched off. I might try to contact his girlfriend…’

  ‘He’s got a girlfriend, has he?’ Thackeray asked. ‘One his parents would approve of?’

  ‘Almost certainly not,’ Mower said, with a tight smile. ‘She’s called Louise.’

  ‘Check he’s OK. That’s legitimate enough,’ Thackeray said. ‘That was a nasty beating he took. Any witnesses turned up?’ Mower shook his head.

  ‘Well, if Omar offers you any further thoughts about Aziz, let me know.’

  ‘Right, guv,’ Mower said.

  ‘Is there any further news on Bruce Holden? Any sightings?’

  ‘Nothing’s come in overnight,’ Mower said. ‘He seems to have vanished off the face of the earth.’

  ‘I had David Mendelson bending my ear first thing this morning,’ Thackeray said. ‘The wife is staying with them for the time being, though I told him I didn’t think that was a very good idea. Can you tell uniform she’s there and ask them to keep a close eye? We know he’s made one attempt to break in and he might try again. I’d rather his wife got right out of the area, r
eally, but David says she won’t move until she finds out where the daughter is. She’s in a bad way, apparently.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Mower said. ‘I’ll pass it on.’

  When Mower had gone, Thackeray ground out his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray that, according to the rules, had no place in his office any longer, and sighed heavily. He glanced at the phone, wondering whether he dare call Laura, who had left the flat early that morning with barely a word, and then decided against it. She would, he thought, either come to terms with what he had said the previous night or she would not, in which case he knew their relationship would probably be over. But he felt that there was little he could say to convince her that she should give up the prospect of being a mother for his sake. To ask her to do that, he thought, would be grossly unfair. It was a decision only she could make, and he feared the worst.

  Angrily, he picked up the phone and punched in Amos Atherton’s number, but the pathologist was not available, intent, no doubt, on his delicate dissection of some new and fascinating cadaver. But he did succeed, at the second attempt, in making contact with Doug McKinnon, who admitted, cautiously, that his investigators had found nothing at all to link Imran Aziz with fundamentalism or violence of any kind.

  ‘He seems to be clean, from our point of view,’ McKinnon said. ‘As far as any of the bastards are clean. He’s all yours. It looks like a simple domestic to me.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Thackeray said coldly and made to hang up just as McKinnon spoke again.

  ‘There was one thing I bet you don’t know, though.’ The man sounded faintly triumphant, Thackeray thought, and his heart sank. ‘Your DC Sharif. What do you call him? Omar? Spent the weekend in Lahore, didn’t he? You might want to ask him what he thought he was up to out there, mightn’t you? Blood being thicker than water with that lot, after all. I’ll let you know if anything else crops up.’

  ‘Do that,’ Thackeray said, hanging up angrily. He punched in Mower’s internal number.

  ‘Find Sharif and get him in here now,’ he said. ‘And don’t take no for an answer.’