Dead Reckoning

by Patricia Hall

  “I did, we had a chat this morning and discussed the technicalities and some ideas I’ve got for interviews. And I had a quick drink with her just now on the way home and that’s the good part. Her boss, the station manager, is happy for me to do her segment of the early evening show for the three weeks she’s away. I can choose the people I interview and it’ll be recorded in advance so it’s not as nerve-wracking as live radio. It sounds great.”

  “And the bad part?”

  Laura shuddered and told him about seeing the Asian woman harassed on her way in to work.

  “It was horrible, Michael. I thought you had people trying to stamp on that sort of thing. Those lads were just brazen about it, and no one did anything to help.”

  “Except you, I suppose,” Thackeray said. “Rushing in where angels fear to tread again? I wish you’d be careful, Laura. Gangs of lads can be dangerous. You know that.”

  “There were masses of people about …”

  “And not one of them would help you? Perhaps that’s a topic you should explore on your radio show?”

  “That is a good idea, chief inspector,” Laura said, taking what might had an offhand remark more seriously than Thackeray expected. “But one I’ve already had, as it happens. Kelly thinks it’s a good idea too.”

  “What’s Ted Grant going to make of this new career move?”

  “I’m looking forward to seeing his face when I tell him,” Laura said delightedly. “He can’t stop me. I’ve done it before. There’s nothing in my contract says I can’t do freelance work so he’ll have to lump it. Kelly says we can do the recordings to suit me so it won’t interfere with what I do at the Gazette. Anyway, apart from picking up dead joggers on Broadley Moor, what have the forces of law and order been doing today?”

  Thackeray hesitated for a moment before he spoke, choosing his quiet words with care.

  “I went to see Victor Mendelson this afternoon and signed the divorce papers.”

  Laura turned to Thackeray in surprise, her heart thudding and her green eyes bright with expectation. This was a subject which had been flung back and forth between the two of them for so long that she had almost despaired of Thackeray’s ever making the vital first move towards the marriage they had discussed so often and so inconclusively that it seemed unlikely ever to become a reality.

  “You really did it?”

  He nodded, although she could see from his eyes that even this first step had hurt him in some way which she could only dimly understand.

  “What can I say?” she said softly. “Thank you, I suppose. I know it’s hard for you.”

  “It feels like …” Thackeray shrugged wearily. “Abandoning the two of them again, I suppose. It was never their fault. This just compounds it.”

  “You can’t hurt them any more. It was all over long ago.”

  “I don’t think it will ever be over,” he said, and she turned away, her eyes clouding again, knowing that might be only too true.

  She left him watching television and went into the bedroom to tidy up. She had been more deeply moved than she had allowed Thackeray to realise by his decision to process his divorce at last. The marriage had effectively ended more than twelve years before when Aileen had been brain-damaged by an overdose but she knew that Thackeray’s sense of responsibility for the shell of a woman who had lived on in an institution ever since was profound. He blamed himself for her condition and for the death of their baby son which had preceded and provoked her suicide attempt. She knew that breaking the agonising link between them would be as hard now as it had ever been. As she brushed her deep copper curls and tied them back with a deep green ribbon which matched the silk of her shirt, she wondered whether this was something he could do without tearing himself apart all over again. He had promised to marry her, but maybe she was wrong to force the issue. And even if she eventually got him to the registry office, she wondered if he could ever satisfy what she felt as an increasingly urgent yearning to have children. Might that, even now, be a step too far?

  Life was never simple, she thought with a sigh, and hers seemed to become even more complicated as she got older. She turned out the light in the bedroom, went into the kitchen, put on a butcher’s apron and began to slice onions for their evening meal, though not all the tears which sprang to her eyes were caused by the fumes. Half an hour later, with a slow-cooking casserole in the oven filling the flat with its aroma, and a Billie Holiday CD on the player, and her head on Thackeray’s shoulder, she was irritated when her phone rang and surprised when she recognised her father’s voice at the other end.

  “Dad? Is Mum all right?” she asked sharply. Her parents had retired to a villa on the Portuguese coast near Lisbon when her father had sold out his business for more millions than he was ever prepared to admit, and relations between father and daughter had passed from chilly to almost frozen over the years.

  “I’m at Heathrow, love,” Jack Ackroyd said. “I’m stopping at the Dorchester tonight but I’ll be up in Bradfield lunchtime tomorrow. Couldn’t get a flight any sooner. Booked up, they were. Things looking up in Bradfield at last, are they?”

  “You must be joking. Leeds maybe, but not here. Do you want to stay with us?” Laura said, feeling stupid as her brain refused to assimilate this unexpected information. “Is Mum with you?”

  “Don’t be daft,” her father said. “You know how she hates flying. No this is just a business trip. I’ve a project locally that I want to check out myself, that’s all.” Laura knew that her father still had business connections in Yorkshire although he played his cards so close to his chest that she had no idea what they were.

  “I’ve booked into the Clarendon,” Ackroyd said. “Come and have tea with me tomorrow about four. I should have finished my first round of meetings by then. And get your gran down, an’all. She’s still in that poky little place up on the Heights, is she? She’ll never learn.”

  “I’ll have to go and fetch her. Her hip’s not getting any better,” Laura said. “Better make it five o’clock, not four.”

  “Aye, right you are,” Jack Ackroyd said. “I’ve offered to pay for a new hip if the bloody NHS can’t do anything for her but you know what she’s like. You’d think I’d suggested robbing a bloody starving child the way she carried on. So I’ll see you both tomorrow then. I’ll not be stopping long if I can avoid it.”

  “Right,” Laura said, slightly bemused, as the line went dead.

  “A visitor?” Thackeray asked wryly as she hung up.

  “Not here, thank God,” Laura said. “Just my father making one of his flying visits. He’ll stay at the Clarendon.”

  “Good,” Thackeray said, pulling her back onto the sofa. “I’m not in the mood to share you.”

  Chapter Three

  To her surprise, Laura found herself summoned, along with all the rest of the more senior journalists on the Gazette, into the dusty, seldom-used “conference room” by a flustered looking Ted Grant almost as soon as she arrived at the office next morning.

  “The chief executive has arranged for us to have a briefing from Frank Earnshaw himself about the troubles at t’mill,” he said, with enough self-awareness to appreciate at least some of the ironies of such a meeting with a grim smile.

  “You don’t need me then, do you?” Laura asked, irritated both by the compromising situation the offer put the Gazette in and the unlikelihood of her being asked to write anything about what looked like becoming a major confrontation as the mill’s unions worked themselves up for a strike ballot. However hard the workers fought, she thought, they were unlikely to save this struggling remnant of a once great industry.

  “We might need a backup feature,” Ted said grudgingly. “You’d best hang on.” Laura shrugged and doodled idly on the pad of paper in front of her. She let her mind wander back to the previous evening when she had found herself facing a Thackeray distracted by thoughts of work and his divorce and at his most morose. She had eventually persuaded him early to bed where they h
ad made love with a passion which seemed unaffected by their anxieties. Her mouth still felt bruised and the echo of her response lingered and she hoped none of her colleagues could guess what she was looking so pleased about. Like the cat who got the cream, she thought, and struggled to suppress a broad grin. But she straightened her face quickly as the conference room door opened to admit Richard Babbage, the expensively suited and optionally bald local executive and representative of the media company which owned the Gazette and scores of newspapers like it around the country. He was followed by an older man, smartly dressed but with a face creased by anxiety beneath the thinning grey hair.

  “G’morning guys,” Babbage said briskly. “You’re lucky this morning to get a word with Frank Earnshaw, chairman of a company which I’m sure you all know. He’s anxious to have the opportunity to tell you a little about what’s going on with Earnshaws, which has been a world textile leader for a hundred years or more, and is hoping to continue — in some form at least — for another century to come.”

  He chivvied Earnshaw into the waiting seat next to Ted Grant and then bustled back to the door.

  “Sorry I can’t stop myself, people. I’ve a meeting in five minutes — but Frank, do drop by when you’ve finished here. I’ve a nice malt in the drinks cupboard you might appreciate.” And with that he was gone leaving an unusually awkward Grant to introduce his “top staff” around the table and then give his guest the floor.

  “We don’t go in for posh public relations advisers at Eamshaws,” Frank Earnshaw began with an unexpected glare at the assembled journalists. “As you probably know, we’re a private company with most of the shares still in family hands and the quality of what we produce has always been able to speak for itself — till now, apparently.” Earnshaw shuffled the papers he had placed on the table in front of him. “Well,” he resumed, with slightly less bravado. “Now we’ve run into a few little difficulties, but I’d rather deal with the media myself than hand the firm over to some flash company from Leeds who wouldn’t know a wool mill from a bloody call centre.”

  Laura smiled faintly. The old rivalry between big brash commercial Leeds and small, inward-looking manufacturing Bradfield had been multiplied many times in the nineties as the textile industry’s sickness became near terminal and the larger city flourished on a boom in financial services. The southerners’ old jibe that travelling to Yorkshire meant venturing to the Third World could now be heard amongst travellers making the twenty minute trip on the train from Leeds to Bradfield. The words knives and twisting sprang to mind, Laura thought, and Earnshaw was obviously not a man who liked to be on the losing side in any competition. A bit like my father, she thought, reminded of her teatime engagement at the Clarendon. But one of her colleagues had asked the mill boss to outline his company’s problems and in spite of her initial lack of interest she found her attention seized.

  “We’re not bust,” Earnshaw was saying combatively. “But as you know the economic climate’s tight for manufacturing and we need to put together a refinancing package to keep going until sales look up again. That’s all in hand, with meetings set up this week and next with people who are considering our position. In the meantime we’ve had to go to our workforce and ask for some sacrifices from them. We need to cut costs and there’s not much chance of that on the raw materials side so it has to be the workforce. I don’t like it, I won’t pretend I do, but we need to cut wages, cut overtime, retrench now in the hope of bouncing back in a year-or-so’s time when the climate improves.”

  “D’you really think it will improve?” put in Bill Wrigley, who wrote most of the industrial and transport stories for the Gazette. “I mean, the market may not bounce back this time, not for high quality stuff like you produce.”

  Earnshaw looked at him for a long time before he replied.

  “To be honest, there’s no telling,” he said. “All I can say is that I’m determined to keep this business going if I can and I know that in the present circumstances, if the workers vote for a strike, that will upset the customers we do still have. I’m trying to persuade them that what they’re planning is suicide for them as well as the company. And that’s the point I want you to get across in your coverage of the dispute. The union’ll tell you different of course. But it could be the end of us if they strike.”

  “You say it’s a family company still. Exactly how does that work now, Mr. Earnshaw?” Wrigley pressed.

  “The mill was built in 1872 by my great-grandfather,” Earnshaw said. “It was a model of its kind at the time. It’s always been a family firm and that’s the way I want it to stay. At present the shareholding is divided between my father George, myself and my two sons, Matthew and Simon. A four way split.”

  “Wouldn’t floating the company help you at this juncture?” Wrigley asked. “If you need extra capital to streamline your operation …”

  “Not if it meant we lost control,” Earnshaw said flatly. “You’d not find outside finance that gave a monkey’s for Bradfield worsted cloth.”

  “And your father’s still fit, is he?” Wrigley asked. “He must be knocking on a bit.”

  “He’s fighting fit,” Earnshaw said. “Still a working director at 78, and shows no signs of tiring.”

  “But …” Wrigley began again but Ted Grant intervened.

  “I don’t think that’s really relevant to our coverage of the labour dispute, is it Mr. Earnshaw, if you’re not thinking of selling out. So give us a run-down on what happens next?”

  Laura let her mind wander again as Earnshaw went into details of how he planned to reduce the pay of the mill’s 600 workers and how long a strike ballot would take if the union pushed the dispute that far. Personally she doubted that it would ever come to that. She suspected that enough pressure would be brought to bear to persuade the workers to vote for their own pay cuts in the perhaps vain hope that better times would return to the massive mill which dominated the southernmost of Bradfield’s seven hills. Nothing in the recent history of the textile industry persuaded her that such sacrifices saved mills in the long run. She had no doubt that Earnshaws mill would join the long roll of derelict Victorian structures which had gradually been demolished or occasionally refurbished into something entirely different as the long decline of the English textile industry came to its dispiriting close.

  When the Gazette’s first edition came out later that day Laura was not surprised to find a picture of Earnshaws massive neoclassical building on the front page with a sympathetic interview with Frank Earnshaw beside it. It was not until she turned to the continuation of Wrigley’s story on an inside page that she found anything to surprise her slightly. There a picture of a union meeting outside the mill’s massive iron gates revealed that most of the workers were Asian, something which had not been alluded to even in passing at that morning’s meeting. There might, she thought, be good reasons for hoping that a strike ballot at Earnshaws failed in the current climate. A bruising dispute there involving the descendants of the Pakistani immigrants who had first been encouraged to come to Bradfield in the 1960s and 70s to work in the town’s then flourishing mills would do little for race relations in an area which was stubbornly failing to flourish in the bright new millennium.

  DCI Michael Thackeray leaned back in his chair, ran his hands through his unruly dark hair and sighed. They said that if a murder inquiry did not make significant progress in the first twenty-four hours then the police were in for a hard slog. This one had not even succeeded in identifying the victim in the first twenty-four hours. Progress had been limited to a fingertip search of Broadley Moor, which had turned up little of significance, in spite of the fact that it had been out of bounds to the public for so long, and to an appeal in the previous afternoon’s Gazette for help from the public in identifying the unknown man who still lay in the mortuary, now in the care of an undertaker’s technician who had been contracted to rebuild his shattered face in the hope of obtaining a reasonable likeness for publication. But that could t
ake some time.

  Thackeray glanced at Kevin Mower, who had just delivered the latest sheaf of negative reports to his office: no identification in the jogger’s clothing, no signs of a struggle or identifiable footprints at the top of the crag where the early mornings’ hard frost had now melted twice and refrozen again since the man’s likely time of death, no unidentified cars left in Broadley village, and no obvious candidates on the missing person’s register.

  “So what have we got, Kevin? Anything at all that’s useful?” Thackeray asked.

  “Male, white, around twenty-five to thirty, fit and healthy and keen to stay that way, not poor — his hair was well cut, nails trimmed, no nicotine stains, jogging gear was common enough designer kit — not cheap, pretty untraceable though — underwear from M & S. Probably lives alone …”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because if he didn’t someone would have been on to us by now to report him missing,” Mower said. “Wife, mother, girlfriend, boyfriend, whoever. We’ve had no new missing person reports in the last thirty-six hours so we can only assume that no one realises he’s missing. We’ve got another paragraph in the Gazette tonight saying he’s still not been identified, but yesterday’s story only brought in half a dozen calls and five of those were from the usual nutters. The other was from a woman whose son went missing six years ago and hasn’t been seen since.”

  “And?”

  “Right age group, but he was black. Poor cow.”

  “Tonight’s Gazette’ll be dropping through letter-boxes by now, commuters will be buying it. No calls so far?”

  “Not yet, guv, no,” Mower said. “We’ve got two people manning the phones all evening but I wouldn’t hold your breath.”

  “An employer might take a few days to register that someone was missing, I suppose,” Thackeray said but Mower just smiled grimly.

  “These days they want a sick note if you spend too long on the bog,” he said. “Mind, if he didn’t work in Bradfield an employer might not have seen our appeal. I didn’t see the story in any of the national rags. Perhaps we should ask the papers in Leeds and Sheffield to do something. It’s possible he’s some way from home.”