Dead Reckoning

by Patricia Hall

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Also by Patricia Hall

  Copyright Page

  Prologue

  He twined his fingers in her long dark hair which she had loosened from its normal severity. But when he pulled her closer and tried to kiss her she pulled away and shuddered slightly.

  “What if they find me?” she whispered.

  “They won’t find you,” he said, with as much reassurance as he could muster.

  “They will be so angry. My brothers …”

  “Your brothers won’t find you. Take the train. You’ll be quite safe. And then as soon as I can get away I’ll join you. We’ll be together in another country. A new life. Away from all the nonsense that’s going on here. You’ll be fine, I promise.”

  “You can’t come now?” Her voice trembled with an anxiety she tried hard to conceal.

  “You know I can’t,” he said holding her close again. “I have to finish things here. I can’t just walk out. In any case, it will be less obvious to your family if we leave separately. Much safer for you. I’ll only be a few weeks behind you. Everything’s finalised, official. You’ll be fine.”

  “Your family will hate me,” she said.

  “My mother will love you because I do,” he said.

  “It wouldn’t work like that with my family,” she said, and he could feel her trembling again through the soft silk of her dress. “They try so hard to be modern and sophisticated and European but deep down nothing changes. They’ll try to find me.”

  “And they won’t succeed. You’ll be safe, I promise. And we’ll be happy.” And this time she let him kiss her, and all the anxieties about what they had planned so carefully seemed to melt away as passion took over.

  The next day she took the train south.

  Chapter One

  In normal circumstances the body would have been found quite quickly. Broadley Crag was a local beauty spot, a ragged cliff of millstone grit which dropped from the duncoloured winter expanse of Broadley Moor to a finger of sheltered green fields where the local farmers over-wintered their sheep and a few hardy ponies were left out to graze until snow or frost made it impossible. Normally, even in the most bitter weather, when sharp winds blasted unimpeded over the hundred miles of hill and heather that lay directly between this part of Yorkshire and Scotland, the rutted car-park, set well back from the edge of the crag, would have been busy most afternoons in anything less than a blizzard. But this winter a pocket of foot-and-mouth disease some five miles away had seen the car-park blocked off with a few well-placed boulders and stark red notices which had deterred most of the hikers, runners, model aeroplane enthusiasts and bird-watchers who normally frequented this wild green lung only ten miles from the industrial centre of Bradfield and Milford.

  Which was why farmer Fred Stanley’s first reaction was one of fury when he noticed a patch of something red lodged half inside a natural cave beneath one of the huge black boulders which littered the shallower part of the crag above his farm.

  “Little bastards,” he muttered. “Can’t they bloody well be told?”

  The cave, with its soft and usually dry sandy floor was a favourite hiding place for sheep seeking shelter from the wind and rain and for young boys playing along the crag’s hidden paths and tumbling screes. It was one of the first places he had looked when he discovered tell-tale scraps of wool where, overnight, one of his dry-stone walls around the sheep pastures had given up its hundred year struggle against gravity and the elements. He did not blame the sheep. The disease restrictions meant that they had remained in a pasture long after they had nibbled every scrap of goodness from the grass, and some of them found the hay he was providing a poor substitute. He did not know how long sheep could remember anything. They were stupid animals. But he guessed it was not impossible that some of the ewes could recall better commons up on the open moorland above the little valley, moorland where they normally roamed for most of the year, and that they had decided to take a look when the chance offered. After all, foot-and-mouth restrictions on grazing meant nothing to them, he thought. But kids? Kids from round Broadley especially? They should know better. Surely no one could have missed the rancorous debate about the disease, its origins, its wild-fire progress across the country and the best methods of dealing with it, which had raged across the newspapers and television screens all the previous year. He had been as bitterly disappointed as everyone else when another case had been confirmed so close to Broadley.

  “Hey oop,” he yelled towards the hiding place forty feet above him. “Get out of theer, you little beggar. Clear off!” But when there was no response from the intruder he began to clamber carefully up between the heather and bilberry tussocks which had almost overgrown the sheep-paths during the emergency. It was not until he had reached the boulders, which at some point, long before his or even his father’s time, had tumbled from the top of the crag more than a hundred feet above the farm, that he could see that whoever was lying there was unnaturally still.

  “Bloody hell,” he muttered when he had scrambled closer, crouching over what was undoubtedly an adult, dressed in black sweat-pants and the red shirt which had first caught his attention from the farm track below. Tentatively he rolled the body towards him so that he could see the face and realised as soon as he saw the mess of blood and bone that he hardly needed to touch the ice cold skin to confirm that the man was dead.

  All thought of his lost sheep disappeared as he turned away, unexpectedly queasy so close to a human death in a way he would not have been had the victim been an animal. Awkwardly he lumbered back down the slope, made slippery by a hard overnight frost, and ran back to the warmth of the farm kitchen where his wife was cooking breakfast. His hands were shaking as he dialled 999 for the police.

  “Accident, was it?” DCI Michael Thackeray looked up from his paperwork as Sergeant Kevin Mower put his head round the door of his office later that morning. Mower had been the senior detective on duty when the body had been found at Broadley Crag and had followed the uniformed officers out to the scene.

  “I reckon so, guv,” he said. “Amos came out to have a look and will do a PM later, but there were no obvious signs of foul play. He was dressed for a run so it looks as if he slipped on the icy vegetation and went over the edge. Head-first by the look of it. Made a mess of his face.”

  “Do we know who he is?” Thackeray asked.

  “He had no ID on him. He was in sports gear. But the local uniforms are looking for a car. He won’t have got up there any other way unless he’s very local but the car-park close to the crag is closed off because of foot-and-mouth so he’ll have left it somewhere else. He shouldn’t have been on that land, by rights. The farmer who found him is doing his nut. More seriously, it could have been months before the body was found except for the fact that he was wearing a bright sweatshirt and it stood out like a red rag to a farmer looking for a lost sheep, would you believe?”

  It was not clear whether Mower, a sharp-suited, sharp-witted and crop-haired urban man to his fingertips, had been more surprised to rediscover the existence of sheep or by the fact that even in the twenty-first centur
y the Biblical creatures occasionally went astray. He looked more than slightly aggrieved at his unexpected early morning encounter with icy rocks that had threatened his stability, rough terrain that had scuffed his loafers, gorse bushes which had plucked viciously at his trousers and the monosyllabic outrage of a taciturn countryman whose pastoral calm had been invaded so brutally.

  “Perhaps he didn’t know about the foot-and-mouth restrictions,” Thackeray said.

  “You’d have to be blind not to see the notices up there, guv,” Mower said. “And a recluse not to have heard that the disease is back. The local bobby had us all trailing through disinfectant before he’d let us set foot off the main road. Bloody marvellous.” He glanced down at his shoes with some anxiety. “Anyway, he reckons it couldn’t be someone local. He must have come from further afield to be so pig ignorant, he reckons. But they’ll ask around Broadley village if a car doesn’t turn up soonish, just in case. Though he’s not one of your locals who admits he could be wrong, isn’t PC Moody. Typical bloody Yorkshireman.”

  “So everything’s under control then?” Thackeray asked with only the faintest smile in acknowledgement of the criticism of his native heath from the Londoner. And Mower knew that it was not just the sudden death that he was referring to.

  “Yes, guv,” he said quietly. He knew that the DCI would not press the issue, but was aware of being on an unofficial and unspoken probation that he suspected might prove permanent. Well, he thought, if the trust Thackeray had placed in him had been shattered beyond repair he would have to manage without it. It would not be the first time in his career that senior officers had regarded him with suspicion. And if the worst came to the worst, his decision to come back to the job after three months’ sick leave was not irrevocable and the prospect of moving on not unattractive. There must, he thought, be easier ways to earn a living than gazing into the remnants of a man’s smashed and bloodied face before breakfast, as he had done that morning.

  “Keep me up to speed, Kevin,” Thackeray said.

  “Guv,” the sergeant muttered as he closed the office door behind him. Thackeray sighed. He had stuck his neck out for Mower when his superintendent, Jack Longley, would have sacked him, but with Mower apparently securely back in harness he knew he would get no thanks for his stand, either from above or below, if the sergeant’s new-found stability proved to be an illusion. There were times, he thought, when the tightrope he negotiated at work and at home felt dangerously frayed. He glanced at the clock, closed the file in front of him and flung it into his out tray. His next appointment was with his solicitor.

  Across town in the newsroom of the Bradfield Gazette, Thackeray’s girlfriend Laura Ackroyd scowled at her own reflection in her blank computer screen and tried to control the fury which had overtaken her more than an hour ago as she had walked through the town centre on her way in to the office.

  She had come hurriedly out of a coffee shop clutching a polystyrene take-away, anxious to get to work before her irascible boss began hurling himself round the office like a rogue torpedo seeking a target, when she found herself surrounded by a group of young men who were milling about on the pavement laughing and shouting apparently amongst themselves. But when Laura had dodged to the other side of the group she realised that the object of their jeers was two Asian women in traditional dress who were hurrying along the pavement on the other side of the street. Before she could react, the youths had dodged through the traffic and surrounded their prey, while other shoppers edged away, doing nothing to deter them. The women, probably a mother and daughter, Laura thought, glanced around wildly for help and the younger of the two, a protective arm around her companion, caught Laura’s eye with a desperate appeal as the boldest of the youths tweaked her headscarf off her sleek black hair and said something which made both women flinch.

  Without thinking, Laura dodged the traffic herself and pushed her way through the laughing youths and grabbed the arm of the one who had been most prominent in the assault.

  “What’s your problem?” she yelled, to the evident amazement of both attackers and attacked. “Can’t you think of anything better to do with your time than harass women?”

  One or two of the youths backed away slightly at this unexpected attack but the ring-leader stood his ground, his grin of disbelief turning quickly to an angry snarl.

  “Who’ve we got here then?” he asked his mates. “A bloody Paki-lover? Don’t you read your papers, love? Don’t you know they’re all fucking terrorists and should be shipped back where they came from?” And with deliberate intent he turned back towards the gang’s two victims and spat in the older woman’s face.

  “You pig,” Laura said, her colour rising as she searched desperately for at least one friendly face amongst the scatter of onlookers who had stopped on the fringes of the group since she had intervened. “You disgusting racist pig. Can anyone see a policeman?”

  “There’s never one there when you need one is there?” her antagonist mocked amongst more raucous laughter from his mates, while behind her she could hear one of the women sobbing.

  “It doesn’t bloody matter,” Laura said. “I’ll take them to the police myself.”

  This threat did not seem to alarm the youths much but as the crowd of onlookers grew larger and one or two murmurs of disapproval seemed to reach them, they began to retreat.

  “You want to watch it with that ginger hair, love,” the ringleader flung over his shoulder as he moved off. “You’ll catch fire and burn thi’sen if you’re not careful. And you won’t find a bloody Paki rushing to put t’fire out neither.”

  As the adrenaline drained away, Laura found herself shaking, and when she turned to the two women behind her, she met dark frightened eyes and near inarticulate thanks. But when she tried to persuade them to come with her to police headquarters they both shook their heads.

  “No police,” the younger woman said. “They won’t do owt. Ever since New York this has been happening all t’time. T’police don’t want to know.”

  “Of course they want to know. I’ll make bloody sure they want to know,” Laura had said recklessly. “There are witnesses. We can find those yobs again.” But the women merely looked more frightened than ever and began to edge away along the pavement, watched impassively by the remaining onlookers who were quickly losing interest.

  “No police,” the younger woman said again. “You are very kind, but we’re all reet now.” While her daughter spoke in the unmistakable accent of what was almost certainly her birthplace, the older woman nodded and said something voluble in what Laura guessed was Punjabi, the most common of the Asian languages used in Bradfield. She had wrapped her long lace-fringed head-scarf tightly around her head and face so that little was visible except her dark frightened eyes, still full of tears.

  “I’m so sorry,” Laura said, overwhelmed by a feeling of shame that an elderly woman should be so humiliated.

  “We must go. Me mam’s got an appointment at the Infirmary,” the second woman said.

  Laura watched them hurry to the traffic lights at the end of the street and then trudge up the hill towards Bradfield’s main hospital.

  “You want to watch yourself. Lads like that’ll have a knife out before you know it.” Laura turned to identify this unexpected voice and found a heavily built man with a florid complexion watching her from a shop doorway.

  “Did you see what happened?” she asked quickly.

  “Aye, well, I might have, and then again I might not,” the man said. “I’m just sayin’, that’s all. You’re taking a chance facing beggars like that down. And for Pakis, an’all.”

  “Well someone’s got to,” Laura said, turning on her heel and marching so angrily to the office that by the time she got there she found that most of her skinny latte had been shaken out of the loose top of her cup and splashed down her almost new black coat before she reached her desk. She drank the dregs, flung the cup into her waste bin with a thud, tried to scrub herself dry with a tissue and fa
stened back the strands of unruly red hair which had escaped from their anchors as she had hurried to the office. But the fury that had erupted in the street did not dissipate, it merely died into a glowing ember of anger that she knew she had to do something about.

  As soon as Ted Grant, the Gazette’s editor, had settled himself into his glass-walled enclosure at one end of the newsroom — and before he had time to begin his morning prowl amongst the reporters’ desks — Laura had tapped on his halfopen door and dropped into the single hard chair which Grant reserved for visitors when it was not piled high with back-copies or the heaps of material which passed for in and out trays in his scheme of work. He glanced up from his close reading of the morning’s Globe, on which he had once served what he claimed had been a triumphant stint before returning to his home town, and took in Laura’s flushed face and still-dishevelled hair.

  “What’s rattled your cage so early?” he asked.

  She told him what she had witnessed outside the coffee shop.

  “We need to do something about this sort of thing,” she said. “It’s getting out of hand, getting the town a bad name, and anyway some of the Asians are our readers.”

  “Those that bother to learn English,” Grant objected.

  “This was in broad daylight in a main shopping street,” Laura said. “Two women on the way to the Infirmary, for God’s sake. Even if it won’t stand up as a news story it’s a good peg for a feature on race relations. There’s going to be real trouble if someone doesn’t stop these yobs.”

  “They’re their own worst enemy some of the Asians. Young men threatening this and threatening that. They sound like terrorists even if it is all bravado.”

  “They’ll fight back if this sort of harassment gets any worse,” Laura said. “We’ll have a war on our hands.”

  “Aye, well, that’s your boyfriend’s problem, not mine,” Grant said, his eyes flicking back to the Globe’s page three. “We’re reporters not bloody race relations experts. Why don’t you do summat for your women’s page about forced marriages, if you want an Asian subject? Find out how many girls they’re shipping back to Paki-land every year to pick up a husband.”