Dead Reckoning

by Patricia Hall

  “Was Mr. George Earnshaw in touch with your son, do you know?” Thackeray changed tack suddenly.

  “Grandad loved both the boys,” Christine Earnshaw broke in. “He was heartbroken when Simon left the mill, absolutely heartbroken. I don’t think he’s seen him since.”

  “We have an address in Farmoor Lane for Mr. George Earnshaw. Is that right?”

  “Do you really need to question him?” Frank Earnshaw asked, his face flushed. “He’s an old man, and seriously ill. He doesn’t need to be bothered with all this.”

  “I’ll have to be the judge of that,” Thackeray said. “But I’ll bear what you say in mind. Now, just one last thing. According to the DVLC in Swansea, Simon Earnshaw was the owner of a 1992 Volvo estate, colour red. Is that right?”

  “Clapped-out old heap of junk,” Matthew Earnshaw muttered into his full-again glass. “Bought it when he went hippy on us. Used to drive quite a decent Beamer before that.”

  “So the Volvo is definitely the car we’re looking for?”

  “He must have used it to get up to Broadley. There’s no bus service to speak of except at peak times,” Frank Earnshaw said.

  “That’s assuming he drove himself up here,” Thackeray said quietly and the dead man’s family stared at him speechlessly for a moment as the implications of that remark sank in. “But if he did, where’s the car now?”

  “Nicked,” Matthew Earnshaw said flatly. “You can’t leave anything unattended for ten seconds these days.”

  “Maybe,” Thackeray said although he knew very well that the dead man did not have his car keys with him when he was found. But that was not a fact he wanted known at this stage, even by Simon Eamshaw’s family.

  “We’ll put out a call for the car,” he said. “It’ll turn up, I’m sure. The trouble was until we identified the body we didn’t know what we should be looking for.”

  “It’s not worth anything, that car,” Frank Earnshaw said. “If someone stole it they’ll probably have dumped it by now.”

  “Torched it, more like,” Matthew Earnshaw said, refilling his glass yet again.

  “Yes, well, we’ll keep you in touch with developments. We’re planning to tell the media who the victim is this afternoon, and seek help from the public to put us in touch with his friends and find the car. If you need any help, or think of anything else that may help our inquiries, DC Ridley here is the person to contact. She’s your liaison officer.” Val Ridley smiled faintly in the direction of the Earnshaw family who were not, in her judgement, the sort of people who would seek out her, or anyone else’s, shoulder to cry on.

  “I’ll leave you the numbers you need,” she said as, following Thackeray’s lead, she got up to go.

  Back outside in the car she glanced at Thackeray, who sat for a moment in silence before switching on the engine.

  “I wonder why the son who was evidently well-trained and effective left the business while the one who’s obviously drinking himself to an early grave stayed on,” Thackeray said at last.

  “Perhaps because his brother was so useless,” Val suggested. “They’re certainly an odd lot. There doesn’t seem to be much love lost, does there? Why the hell does the mother have to meet Simon in secret. It’s not as if changing your career is such a big deal. It happens all the time and most families live with it.”

  “I don’t think she’s telling us everything she knows. And I will go and see the old man, whatever they say,” Thackeray said. “He might be more forthcoming about what makes that lot tick. But not yet. First I think we need to know more about Simon’s current relationships. And find his car. It’s not impossible that some yob hit him over the head for his car keys and then dumped the body. Let’s not invent a complicated explanation when a very simple one might do.”

  Chapter Six

  Soraya Malik lived with her family in one of the narrow terraced streets in the shadows cast by Earnshaws mill on the hill half a mile or so from the bustling thoroughfare of Aysgarth Lane with its curry houses, Asian grocers and a mosque converted from a Wesleyan chapel. The Maliks were a devout family, and had decided to send their daughters to the small Muslim school for girls being run a few streets away rather than to the local comprehensive. The women and girls wore hijab, the austere head-covering of the strict Muslim, rather than the more revealing, and in Bradfield far more common, loose Pakistani headscarf. Even so, the girls’ father had felt it safe enough for his daughters to walk the half mile or so to school on their own and for several years Soraya and her sisters had walked there through the almost traffic-free streets of this poor, mainly Asian neighbourhood and arrived home again safely. But not that morning.

  Laura Ackroyd stood for a moment outside number 17 Blenheim Street and gazed up at the towering smokestack of the mill which dwarfed the rows of houses beneath and wondered at a family history which had moved in a downward spiral from the building of this commercial monument to the younger Earnshaw’s murder, the sensational story of which had been working its way onto the Gazette’s front page when she had left the office. Like Titus Salt at Saltaire, the original George Earnshaw had recognised the need to house his labourers close to their workplace, though not nearly as generously. These had been small, cramped and strictly utilitarian dwellings when they were new: more than a hundred years later roofs sagged, window frames rotted and families of Victorian proportions packed themselves into the single living room and kitchen with at most three small bedrooms above and a bathroom tacked on in the back yard, just as their predecessors had done in the nineteenth century. Only the colour of their skin was different.

  It was a townscape Laura felt she was barely familiar with. Earnshaws mill loomed over this side of the town just as the blank slabs of the Heights dominated the hill to the west, and both were neighbourhoods where Bradfield’s more affluent citizens seldom ventured. Laura watched an elderly man in khaki shalwar kameez under a thick black overcoat walking slowly down the deserted street, his white lace cap offering little protection from the chilly drizzle. He glanced at her car and then at her, his eyes full of suspicion. White faces were probably rare in Blenheim Street, and white people arriving in cars even more unusual. More often than not, she thought, such an incursion meant trouble. After the last bout of violence on the streets of Bradfield the powers-that-be who inquired into such things had concluded that the town’s various communities were leading parallel lives and Laura, whose profession brought her into contact with politically and socially active Asians in all walks of life, had thought that an exaggeration. Here she was not so sure.

  Soraya must have walked the length of the street, Laura thought, before turning into the narrow alleyway which linked Blenheim with the parallel Alma Street. It was there that a former Labour club housed the Muslim school. Somewhere down that alley the girls had met a group of boys running in the opposite direction and, after they had passed, Soraya had fallen to the ground screaming in agony and trying to rub the liquid one of the boys had hurled at her from her face and eyes.

  Laura felt slightly sick when she contemplated what had happened, and she had to steel herself to knock at the Malik family’s front door to seek the interview with the family Ted Grant had sent her to find, though years of experience had taught her that surprisingly often the victims of tragedy were comforted rather than repelled by the chance to talk about what had happened, even to a stranger. After a long silence the door was opened by a short, stocky Asian man in traditional Pakistani dress. His eyes were not friendly and Laura hurried to explain who she was and what she wanted. Eventually he turned back into the house and shouted something in Punjabi to those inside. He was quickly joined by a taller, younger man, dark and bearded but in a smart western suit and tie and with an equally unfriendly expression.

  “I am Sayeed Khan,” the newcomer said. “I’m a lawyer and I’m advising the Maliks. I’m not sure that giving interviews to the Press is what they need to be doing just now.”

  “If you want to catch the thugs did th
is terrible thing you need publicity,” Laura said bluntly. “There may be people who saw them running away and who don’t realise what happened. If Soraya’s parents will talk to me, I can give a better picture of the girl and her sisters, and perhaps give the readers some information that someone may need to persuade them to help.”

  “I doubt many of your readers will be much interested in helping,” Khan said curtly. “We’re getting racist abuse and attacks almost every day of the week and the Gazette’s not shown a scrap of interest up to now.”

  Laura nodded, knowing how much truth there was in that allegation and cursing Ted Grant under her breath for his casual prejudice.

  “Of course we’ll publish what the police tell us about the attack,” she said. “But an interview with Soraya’s family, perhaps pictures of her sisters, would put a human face on it, get more space in the paper even. I’m also going to be doing some interviews on Radio Bradfield soon and I wanted to talk about race problems in those. But of course it’s up to Mr. Malik …”

  She glanced at the older man who had been listening to her exchange with Khan intently. He in turn glanced at Khan. It was clear that it was the lawyer who would be making the decision for the family. He seemed to consider for a moment and then nodded.

  “You may be right,” he said. “But I’ll stay while you talk to them, and if Soraya’s mother is distressed, then you must leave. Her English is not good, but I, or one of the girls, will translate.”

  Laura followed the two men into the cramped living room where a woman and two young girls of ten or eleven were sitting together on a shabby sofa, their eyes red with crying. Khan explained in Punjabi who Laura was and then waved her into a chair. She took out her tape-recorder cautiously, watching Mrs. Malik carefully. Sometimes the technology frightened reluctant interviewees and a notebook and pen were less threatening.

  “Is this OK?” she asked, and reassured by the nods from the woman and girls, she switched on.

  She asked Soraya’s sisters first to tell her exactly what had happened that morning, a story which became even more upsetting, Laura thought, as the two girls, their eyes bright and troubled under the severe hijab, explained how they too had been pushed to the ground in the narrow alleyway by three or four boys or young men running at full pelt towards them with their hoods pulled tights around their faces so that only their eyes were visible.

  “And you really couldn’t see if they were Asian or white?” Laura asked.

  “Asian boys wouldn’t do that to girls,” the older of Soraya’s two young sisters said firmly in her broad local accent, and Laura was inclined to agree with her. Asian young men were not necessarily angels and many were increasingly involved in crime, but attacking young female children, and these were children, seemed an unlikely transgression for that culture.

  “How old is Soraya?” Laura asked her mother, but in fact it was her father who answered.

  “She is fourteen,” he said.

  “And before you ask the insulting question I can see on your lips,” Sayeed Khan broke in angrily. “I can tell you this is a very devout Muslim family and that Soraya has had nothing to do with boys. If that suggestion appears in your newspaper, that this is some sort of attack launched from within the community, the family will regard it as deeply insulting.”

  He spoke quickly, and Laura guessed deliberately so, so that the girls’ mother would not be able to follow what he was saying, but his tone annoyed her.

  “It is not so outrageous a question with a girl of her age,” she said. “You know the cases which spring to mind.” The previous year two young Muslim girls had fled Bradfield in fear of their lives after being discovered with boys their families disapproved of. “Izzat”, or dishonour, was still a very real concept for many of the families who had come to Bradfield from the rural heart of the Punjab only a generation or so ago, and some fathers and sons still policed their daughters and sisters fiercely. Rumour had it that there were young men in the community who would hunt down and even kill a young woman who defied tradition too blatantly. Laura knew it had happened elsewhere and she knew that Sayeed Khan knew it too.

  “Could you really not see whether these boys were Asian or white?” she asked the girls again. “It could be very important to help the police catch them if they knew the answer to that.” But the two girls shook their heads.

  “It was so quick,” the older girl said. “They came round the corner, and we were all pushed and then they were gone. We thought they had stabbed Soraya but it was her face …” The girl turned to her mother and began to sob quietly.

  “I’m sorry,” Laura said. “You’ve been very patient. I think you’ve told me enough now to give people an idea of how dreadful this is for you.” She switched off her tape recorder. She could, she thought, concoct enough paragraphs from this brief encounter to satisfy Ted Grant’s passion for personal detail without being too intrusive, although in his book there was no such thing as intrusive when someone was catapulted into the public eye, for whatever reason. She glanced at Sayeed Khan and smiled her thanks but he did not respond. As she closed the front door behind her she heard him begin to speak angrily in Punjabi again and wished that she could understand the language. She hoped that her visit had not caused the family too much distress, but she was sure it had not brought much comfort either.

  As she turned back to her car, her stomach lurched as someone grabbed her arm from behind. She spun round and found herself face to face with two Asian boys of fourteen or fifteen. They made no further attempt to molest her but their eyes were unfriendly.

  “Round here women cover up their hair,” one of them said.

  “If you want to visit round here, you cover up,” the other added.

  Half a dozen objections to these instructions sprang to Laura’s lips but she bit them back. Discretion might be safer, she thought as she unlocked the car with careful deliberation and slipped into the driver’s seat. Only as she started the engine did she lower the window.

  “You’ll do no one any good if you try to set up a no-go area,” she said then.

  “Just an Islamic area,” the older of the two boys said. “You don’t have to come back if you don’t like it.”

  “They’ve taken the place apart, guv,” Sergeant Kevin Mower said, dropping a thick file onto Michael Thackeray’s desk later that afternoon. “You say his father says he was paying his way from his savings. Well, according to his bank statements that’s exactly what he was doing. No problem there. He’s got almost a hundred thousand in a deposit account and he’s been taking a monthly amount out and obviously using it to live on. Nothing odd going into and out of his current account: rent, utility bills, smallish amounts of cash, that sort of thing. But then there’s this.” He opened the file and pulled out a travel agents’ folder and opened it wide.

  “Two air tickets from Heathrow to Marseilles in France for a date in April.”

  “In whose names?” Thackeray asked.

  “Mr. S and Mrs. S Earnshaw.”

  Thackeray took hold of the tickets and flicked through them.

  “No return date,” he said. “Open tickets.”

  “Yep,” Mower agreed. “And who the hell is Mrs. Earnshaw?”

  “Whoever she is, no one in his family seems to know that he was married,” Thackeray said. “They’re aware of a girlfriend, but no more than that.”

  “Perhaps he wasn’t married,” Mower said. “Perhaps he was just planning to be and these are the tickets for his honeymoon. But that’s not the only French connection. Look, I found these.” He pulled a couple of brochures from the file, closely typed and with photographs of several red pantiled cottages amongst the text.

  “My French is even worse than my Punjabi but if these aren’t estate agents’ details I’ll eat the chapeau de ma tante.”

  Thackeray flicked through the brochures quickly.

  “No sign that he’s actually purchased a property in southern France?”

  “No. Maybe he was
just going to look.”

  “Well, find someone who does speak reasonable French and get them to call these people and see if Earnshaw made any arrangements with them, will you? They’re all close to Marseilles, in Provence anyway, so it seems a reasonable bet that the flights were linked with this. Perhaps he wanted to buy a holiday home. It’s not unusual these days. And check with the Registrar’s office and see if he is married — or about to be. They may have booked the tickets to follow the wedding. Are his phone bills here?”

  “Only up to December last year,” Mower said.

  “Get a more recent one from his phone company. We need to know who he’s been calling regularly and who’s been calling him. We should be able to trace the girlfriend, wife, whatever she is, that way.”

  “There is one mobile number which keeps cropping up but it’s a bloody pay-as-you-go so no joy there. Could be anyone but I’d guess that’s the girlfriend’s. And there are bills for a mobile as well as his land-line,” Mower said. “Though there’s no mobile around, and he didn’t have one on him when he was found, which is odd. You’d think if he was going running he’d have it in his pocket.”

  “Maybe it’s in the missing car,” Thackeray said. “No joy on that, I suppose.”

  “Not yet,” Mower said. “Maybe Matthew Earnshaw’s right and it’s a burnt-out wreck somewhere.”

  “I don’t think this is a mugging gone wrong,” Thackeray said sombrely. “There’s too many anomalies around this young man. Has anyone been to the university yet to talk to his tutor?”

  “I was going up there next, guv.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Thackeray said. “This isn’t an eighteen-year-old we’re talking about here. He’s a mature student, a post-graduate with plenty of cash and one apparently successful career behind him. I reckon his tutor will be more of a friend than a teacher. He may well have a lot of the answers we’re looking for.”

  Bradfield University had grown from its original technical college roots in a sprawl of Victorian college buildings and modern slab-like blocks on the lower slopes of the town’s most westerly hill. It reminded Mower of the polytechnic in south London where he had taken his degree when he and his teachers had finally discovered that his wits could carve him a way out of his teenaged semi-delinquency. It could not have been more unlike the Oxford college of St. Frideswide where Thackeray had found to his deep disillusionment that a sharp mind was not a sufficient passport to acceptance amongst mores that were almost as foreign to him as they would have been to a Pakistani, and about as unacceptable. Both men had found a sort of ethical haven in the police force, where even if the ground occasionally shifted beneath their feet, they could rely most of the time on a system which distinguished firmly enough between right and wrong to keep them upright.