By Death Divided

by Patricia Hall

  ‘Good idea,’ Thackeray said. ‘I hope to God we’re not looking for another body. We’ll be pilloried again for not taking domestic violence seriously enough, even if Julie Holden does get away with pleading provocation. Laura’s already threatening to crucify us in the Gazette, as it is. She says she’s sure Holden would have killed Julie if she hadn’t grabbed a knife herself.’ The memory of Laura’s anger when he had seen her briefly at the Holdens’ house still felt raw.

  ‘She’ll say that in court, will she? You two must have some interesting exchanges of view around the fireside,’ Mower said lightly, and was shaken by how quickly Thackeray’s expression changed to a mask of fury, quickly suppressed.

  ‘Thank you, Sergeant,’ he snapped, and Mower turned and left without a word. There was something very wrong there, he thought, as he went back to his desk to pick up his coat. And it did not seem to be getting any better.

  Sergeant Mower parked outside Vanessa Holden’s neat Victorian house and glanced up at the façade. It was a dark afternoon, drizzling with rain, but there was no sign of any lights inside, and when he unlatched the gate he noticed that there was still a bottle of milk on the doorstep and a morning paper, soggily wet, protruding from the letterbox. Feeling anxious now, he knocked on the door, but no one responded. Glancing around, he noticed the curtains at the baywindow of the next door house twitching slightly. Nosy neighbours, the policeman’s best friend, he thought with a faint smile, and sure enough, as soon as he opened the next door gate, the front door was flung open and an elderly woman, warmly clad but wearing her slippers, squinted out at him.

  ‘I’m looking for Mrs Holden,’ he said conversationally. ‘Is she away, do you know? Her milk’s still on the step.’

  ‘I’ve not seen her for a day or two,’ the neighbour said. ‘He were here the other day, though. The son, Bruce. I thought he’d left after what he did to her before, but he were back with the little lass for a while. I’d not have let him in the door if he were my son.’

  ‘When did he leave?’ Mower asked. ‘Did you see him go?’

  ‘No,’ the neighbour said. ‘I didn’t notice him leave. D’you think there’s summat up? D’you think we should call the police?’

  ‘I am the police,’ Mower said grimly, flashing his warrant card. ‘You don’t happen to have a spare key to Mrs Holden’s house, do you?’

  ‘I do,’ the neighbour said, more cheerful now. ‘I have hers, and she has mine. At our age you never know, do you? Summat can go wrong.’

  ‘Would you open the door for me?’ Mower asked. The woman agreed and bustled off, coming back with her shoes on, and a thick coat round her shoulders, to lead an increasingly impatient Mower back to her neighbour’s front door. She picked up the milk.

  ‘I’ll put it in her fridge,’ she said, as she inserted the key into the lock.

  The narrow hallway smelt slightly musty and all the internal doors were closed, but there was nothing to spark a panic in Mower’s suspicious mind. One by one, he opened the doors, and inspected a neat and tidy front room, a kitchen where a modest amount of washing-up lay drying on the draining board, before going upstairs and repeating the process to discover two empty bedrooms and a bathroom where the bath and basin looked dry and unused.

  ‘She’s not here,’ he said unnecessarily to Vanessa Holden’s neighbour, who was waiting for him in the hall. He felt massively relieved not to discover Vanessa’s body, or worse, that of her granddaughter, decomposing in the house. ‘Did she not mention that she might be going away?’

  ‘She didn’t,’ her neighbour said, with faint disapproval in her voice. ‘She usually lets me know. Asks me to keep an eye out, you know. There’s so many little yobs about these days.’

  Mower went back into the kitchen and tried the back door. It was locked on the inside.

  ‘Where does that door lead?’ he asked, seeing a further door at the side of the kitchen for the first time.

  ‘Down to the cellar. All these houses have an old wash-cellar down below, and a coal-hole. The young couples are opening them up and modernising them for extra space, but I’ve never bothered and I don’t think Vanessa has either.’

  Mower tried the door handle only to find again that the door was locked, but this time there was no key in the lock.

  ‘She’ll not be there in a locked cellar, will she?’ the neighbour asked. ‘Stands to reason.’

  ‘Sssh,’ Mower said urgently. ‘I thought I heard something.’ He banged on the door and shouted against the wood panel.

  ‘Hello. Is there anyone there?’

  This time a voice responded, young and faint, and Mower, with a huge sense of relief, knew that the DCI’s worst nightmare had not come to pass this time.

  ‘Is that you, Anna?’ he shouted. ‘Do you have a key?’

  ‘No, no. Let us out please. Please, please let us out.’

  Mower glanced round the kitchen angrily, looking for something with which to force the lock, and when nothing obvious presented itself, he took several paces back from the door and charged it with his shoulder. After a couple of attempts the elderly door gave way and he almost toppled down the stone steps into the smelly, gloomy depths below. Grabbing the door frame just in time, he steadied himself and tried the light switch, without effect, before going down circumspectly in the dim light. At the foot of the steps he found the girl he recognised as Anna Holden waiting for him, clutching a blanket around herself and shivering uncontrollably.

  ‘I thought no one would ever come,’ she said, grabbing his hand in her small, icy one. ‘Daddy said he would come back but he didn’t. And my Nanna’s asleep now and she won’t wake up. She got very cold.’

  Mower put his arm round the child and guided her up the steps quickly to where the neighbour was waiting.

  ‘Make her a hot drink,’ he said curtly. ‘She’s half frozen.’

  Then he went quickly back down to the room where he had half-glimpsed in the faint light which filtered down the steps what looked like a bundle of rubbish in one corner. There, curled up on a bed of cushions and covered by a blanket, he found Vanessa Holden, icy cold and stiff and undoubtedly dead.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ he muttered, pulling out his mobile phone to call for reinforcements. This was a case, he thought, that had gone more than pear-shaped. It was rapidly turning into a catastrophe.

  Mohammed Sharif was pacing up and down the living room of his small flat waiting for Louise to finish work. He had exhausted his stock of DVDs, read a morning paper from cover to cover, and gone shopping, and it was still only lunchtime, and he could find neither the enthusiasm nor the appetite to eat. What he really wanted to do was talk to as many members of his family as he could, to try to tease out who knew what about Faria’s death. He was, he believed, in a far better position to do that than any of his colleagues were, but he knew that not only would that compromise his position with Thackeray, but would aggravate the abyss that had already opened up between him and his uncle. He was condemned, he thought, to this agonising inaction, which meant waiting in silence for an axe to fall.

  But just when he began to think he might catch Louise on her mobile as the school day ended, there was a buzz on the intercom, and he was surprised to see his cousins Jamilla and Saira downstairs outside the main doors to the block. He buzzed them in and waited anxiously, certain that they could be bringing nothing but bad news.

  The girls scuttled in when he opened the door to them and flung off their top coats, sitting themselves side by side onto the sofa, almost like twins in their dark blue school shalwar kameez and white headscarves. He could see the nervous tension in their expressions and the reluctance, even though they had made the effort to come to see him, of either of them to break the silence.

  ‘We need to talk to you,’ Jamilla said eventually.

  ‘Well, here I am,’ Sharif said, with a feeling of foreboding wrenching at his guts. Both the girls looked more worried than he had ever seen them before.

  ‘We think we sh
ould have told someone before,’ Jamilla said. ‘But we weren’t sure what it meant. Or who to tell.’

  A single tear ran down Saira’s cheek, and she wiped her eyes with the corner of her headscarf.

  ‘We thought you would know what to do,’ she whispered.

  ‘It’s about Imran Aziz,’ Jamilla said. ‘He came to our house.’

  ‘When?’ Sharif asked. ‘I thought you said that you hadn’t seen him or Faria for months.

  ‘We didn’t actually see him,’ Saira said. ‘I heard him, one night, talking to my father. A couple of weeks ago. I went downstairs for a glass of water and overheard them talking.’

  Sharif’s mouth was dry as he looked at the two girls, trying to keep his expression calm.

  ‘What were they talking about?’ he asked.

  ‘My father was very angry. He was telling Imran that he should know what he had to do. He should know, and he should do it.’

  ‘Did he say what he should do?’

  Saira shook her head.

  ‘No, but then Imran said he didn’t have the money for a plane ticket, and my father said he would see to that, so I thought maybe Imran and Faria were going to Pakistan. That’s what it sounded like.’

  ‘But this was when? How long ago?’ Sharif asked. ‘Was it before Faria disappeared?’

  ‘Just after she told us on the phone she might be having a baby,’ Saira said.

  ‘But she wasn’t sure about it then? Did she say she had told Imran?’

  ‘She said she hadn’t told anyone else. It was too early,’ Jamilla said firmly.

  ‘And you didn’t tell your parents?’

  Saira glanced at her sister for a second before she spoke again.

  ‘I told my mother,’ she whispered. Mohammed Sharif suddenly felt very cold, knowing with absolute certainty that anything Saira told her mother would reach her father’s ears too.

  ‘You were right to come and tell me,’ he said, keeping his voice calm. ‘But I don’t think any of this is very important. I’ll pass it on if I think it’s useful.’

  The girls looked relieved and Jamilla struggled back into her coat and handed her sister hers.

  ‘We’d better get home. We’ll be late and our parents will think we’ve been chattering to boys.’

  ‘And that would never do,’ Sharif said, his expression desolate. ‘Will you tell your father I may be round to see him a bit later on? There’s something I need to talk to him about.’

  ‘You won’t tell him that we told you?’ Saira asked anxiously.

  ‘No, I won’t tell your father,’ Sharif said. But the knowledge that he had to tell someone hung like a lead weight around his neck. He sat for a long time, contemplating his own future and that of his shattered family, before he pulled out his mobile and speed dialled Sergeant Kevin Mower’s number.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ he said.

  The early winter dusk was falling when a countryman out walking his lurchers failed to bring them under control as they ran off and started eagerly exploring amongst the rubble and tumbled rock at the foot of a small quarry on the scrubby moorland above Milford.

  ‘Come here, you silly beggars,’ he commanded. Annoyed that two normally well-trained dogs were taking absolutely no notice of him, he strode over to the pile of rubble they were scattering in all directions with manic zeal, only to stop dead a foot or so from where they were digging, swearing virulently to himself.

  ‘Come here, you beggars,’ he said, pulling the dogs’ leads out of a deep pocket in his camouflage jacket and clipping them to their collars. He pulled them away roughly and wound the leads around an old fence post, where they stood straining and whining in high excitement. Gingerly, he approached the rocks again and kicked away a few more to make sure that what he thought he could see in the fading light was actually what he suspected it was. But there was no doubt, and he swore again as he uncovered a human hand, filthy with mud and blood, and the side of a human head, the dark hair matted and the skull distorted like no human head he had ever seen before.

  He thought himself a hard man but this sight turned his stomach and he turned away quickly. He untied the dogs’ leads and dragged them away, back down the track towards the lights of the nearest houses in the valley below. Let the police deal with it, he thought. That’s what they were paid for. And he made his phone call without leaving his name.

  Michael Thackeray sat in his car outside the flat he had shared with Laura, gazing up at the darkened windows, and wondering if it was still in any sense his home. He should have been feeling elated at the conclusion of a difficult murder case, but when he had watched Faisel Sharif being taken from the interview room to be charged with the murder of his daughter Faria, he had felt only a deep discontent, and he had not joined the rest of the CID team, who were celebrating in the pub at this moment. He and Mohammed Sharif, who had been waiting in the CID office for the conclusion of the interview with his uncle, had left police HQ quietly side by side.

  ‘There was nothing you could have done,’ Thackeray had said to the younger man as their paths diverged. ‘You mustn’t blame yourself.’

  ‘I had no idea he could ever, ever contemplate something like that. He was not a fanatic…He seemed like a good man.’

  ‘If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that you simply can’t tell. Take some time off, Mohammed. Help the rest of your family to come to terms with what’s happened. Come back to work when you feel ready.’

  ‘You want me back?’ Sharif muttered.

  ‘Of course I do,’ Thackeray said.

  He had gone to his car, feeling limp and exhausted, and then driven, in defiance of common sense he knew, towards Southfield and Laura’s place, not his own, only to discover that she was not there. Rather than call her, he had slumped back into the driving seat, eyes closed, reliving and trying to make sense of the rollercoaster of an evening that had left him with almost as big a problem as he had managed to resolve.

  They had picked Faisel Sharif up from his home soon after Mohammed had poured out his horrified suspicions to Sergeant Mower. The older Sharif had not seemed unduly surprised to find a posse of policemen on his doorstep, and while Thackeray and Mower had waited for his legal representative to arrive before they began their interrogation, they found that they already had sufficient evidence, accumulated that day, to tear holes in Sharif’s almost half-hearted protestations of innocence.

  Imran Aziz’s telephone records showed that he had been in touch with his father-in-law’s house several times during the period when Sharif claimed he and Faria had lost contact, including the day on which Saira had overheard the two men together. Sharif did not deny that he had been furiously angry, nor that the cause of that anger was the confirmation Imran brought that Faria was pregnant with another man’s child.

  ‘So when you told Imran to do what he knew he had to do, you expected him to kill her?’ Thackeray had asked at last. Sharif gazed at him with sorrowful eyes and then nodded slightly, in spite of his solicitor’s warning hand on his arm.

  ‘I did not want that shame brought on my family,’ he said. ‘Here, or back in Pakistan, it was too much to bear, for me, for my father, for everyone. She had become a whore.’ He stared angrily at Thackeray, as if daring him to contradict his indictment of his daughter.

  ‘So Imran killed her? With your encouragement?’ Thackeray pressed him.

  ‘He called me one night a few days later. He said he had given her an injection and that he needed help to move her. We took her to the river in his car and threw her in. She did not know what was happening to her.’

  ‘And where is Imran now? Did you give him a plane ticket to go back to Pakistan?’

  ‘No,’ Faisel said. ‘I don’t know where he is now. He never came back to me for the price of a ticket.’

  But no sooner had Faisel Sharif signed his confession, than that final question was answered when news of the discovery of a body in a quarry to the north of Milford filtered back to
CID in Bradfield. Identification was easy, it turned out. Imran Aziz still carried his driving license and his wallet in his bloodstained jacket. Faisel Sharif, now in a cell, took the news of his death quietly, almost indifferently.

  ‘You found him?’ he said, resignedly.

  ‘We found him,’ Thackeray had snapped. ‘So now we know why he never came back for the plane ticket. And now, perhaps, you can tell us how he died.’ Sharif shrugged, looking old and tired and gray.

  ‘There were people at his own mosque anxious enough to kill him. He caused outrage there.’

  ‘He seems to have been beaten to death. He was found on the moors beneath a pile of stones. Are you saying you think the young militants at the mosque did that because he was gay?’

  Faisel hesitated, and then he shrugged.

  ‘The traditional way can be by stoning,’ Sharif said, evidently unmoved by Thackeray’s horrified expression at the equilibrium with which he seemed to accept what amounted to an execution.

  ‘You encouraged this?’ he asked. Sharif nodded imperceptibly.

  ‘I did it,’ he said very quietly. ‘If I had let him live it would have made a mockery of Faria’s death and brought endless shame to my family. Imran had to die too. It was inevitable.’

  ‘No,’ Thackeray had said, containing his own anger. ‘In this country it is not inevitable. It is a murder like any other, and we will always track down those who did it. There are no excuses for murder.’

  The two men’s eyes locked in mutual incomprehension.

  ‘You did this alone? No one helped you?’ Thackeray asked at length.

  ‘I did it alone,’ Sharif said, though Thackeray did not believe him. But if he had help from the angry young men at the mosque in Milford, he knew he might never prove it, and by the end of another hour Sharif had signed a new confession, taking full responsibility for the death of his son-in-law.

  For a few minutes Thackeray slept in the car, exhausted by everything that had happened, until he wakened again with a start that sent a stab of pain across his back. He took a moment to work out where he was, and then pulled out his mobile and called Laura. The phone rang for so long that he almost despaired of reaching her, expecting to be switched to voicemail, when at last the familiar voice answered, noncommittally, but a sound so welcome that he could hardly speak.