Dead Reckoning

by Patricia Hall

  “Laura? I’m at Heathrow, on my way home. Where the hell were you yesterday? I must have tried your flat a dozen times. And I got nowt out of your mobile. Didn’t you get any of my messages? I wanted to tell you I was packing up. I told your grandmother. Whole trip’s been a bloody waste of time, it turns out. Backers have turned tail and fled after all this trouble around Aysgarth. Can’t say I blame them, really. I think we were flogging a dead horse: luxury apartments in the centre of Bradfield! Best bet is to turn Earnshaws mill into a gaol, if you ask me. Lock all these rioting beggars up, black, white and everything in between. They’re wrecking Bradfield between them. Who’s going to invest with all that going on in the streets?”

  “Dad,” Laura said, trying to absorb all this sound and fury through her dulled perceptions. “I’m sorry it’s all fallen through, though I always thought you were being a tad optimistic …”

  “Now you tell me,” her father said.

  “You didn’t exactly ask my opinion,” Laura snapped back.

  “Aye, well, I think I’m well out of it,” Jack conceded.

  “Does anyone know about all this?” Laura asked, her reporter’s instincts snapping belatedly into gear. “Has it been announced officially?”

  “Firoz Kamal’s issuing some sort of statement tomorrow, I think,” Ackroyd said. “It’s nowt to do with me now. I’m finished with it. Any road, I’ve got to go. They’re calling my flight. Why don’t you get your grandmother out to Portugal for some sunshine? And you too, if you like. Always glad to see you.” And with that he hung up.

  “And goodbye to you too,” Laura muttered, staring at the gently purring phone in exasperation, thinking that winter sunshine was very appealing. At least the conversation had penetrated her depression. If she was the only journalist aware of this unexpected reverse for the Earnshaws she could earn a few Brownie points on a quiet Sunday by following it up ready for the next day’s paper. For the moment, she thought, she would put the problems of the Khan family on one side and do her job by trying to get comments from the Earnshaw family about the mill’s now very uncertain future.

  She started with George Earnshaw, partly because she thought his reaction would be the most uninhibited as he saw his son’s plans confounded, and partly because she had been intrigued by Saira Khan’s revelation that the old man had been willing to help finance his grandson’s liaison with the Muslim girl and his move to France. An hour after speaking to her father, Laura, muffled up in a skiing jacket and scarf, was standing on the doorstep of Earnshaw’s modest Broadley home, where the pale sunshine glittered on frostspangled banks of winter heather and the first virginal snowdrops nestled in a rockery of dark millstone grit like a glimpse of dawn at midnight.

  The old man was slow to open the door and Laura was shocked to see his hollow cheeks and sunken eyes above a gaunt frame still dressed in grubby-looking pyjamas and dressing gown at midday. This was a man whose son had described him as fighting fit and still working as a director of Earnshaws only a week ago. Frank’s efforts to keep his business afloat, she suspected, were as over-optimistic as his view of his father’s health.

  George Earnshaw was still waiting and as he did not seem to recognise her from her last abortive visit she explained quickly who she was and why she had come, and saw a flicker of satisfaction light up his face. He waved her into the house and through to a cluttered sitting room.

  “Fallen through then, has it?” Earnshaw said. “I can’t say I’m surprised. Bloody stupid scheme that was. I told them. Stupid and unnecessary. If we make the savings we planned there’ll be no need to sell the mill. Trade’ll pick up. It always does.”

  “Can I quote you on that?” Laura asked, pulling her tape recorder from her bag. The room was warm and stuffy and she took off her coat and dropped it onto a chair. She took a seat as far from the gas fire as seemed decent.

  “Of course you can quote me, my dear,” Earnshaw said. He was clearly delighted with the news she had brought.

  “But you’re still facing the same problem with the union, aren’t you?” Laura asked. “The workers aren’t going to be happy to see their pay cut however necessary that is to save the mill.”

  Earnshaw’s face darkened.

  “Pity we ever let the blasted union back on the premises,” he said. “But they’ll come round. They’ll see which side their bread’s buttered. They always do.” Laura nodded and did not argue although she expected to find Frank Eamshaw and his remaining son rather less sanguine about their chance of keeping the mill going. She glanced round the room curiously for a moment, Earnshaw’s collection of Indian brasses and bronzes reminding her of the second reason for her visit.

  “You seem to have been the only person in the family who knew about Simon and Saira Khan,” she said. “I saw her yesterday and she told me you’d agreed to help Simon financially with his move to France.”

  For a moment she thought that George Earnshaw was having some sort of seizure. His face went into spasm and he clutched the arms of his chair with a white-knuckled grip, gasping for breath.

  “Are you all right, Mr. Earnshaw?” she said anxiously. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m sure Simon’s death is still very distressing for you.” But the look Earnshaw flashed as he regained his composure was not one of grief but of hatred.

  “Help him?” he said, though gritted teeth. “Help him? Are you mad, girl?”

  “I’m sorry?” Laura said. “Saira said …”

  “Saira? Is that what she’s called. As if it wasn’t bad enough for Simon and the rest of them to go along with some Muslim chancer’s scheme to take over the mill. Then he tells me he wants to marry one of them. I was appalled, do you hear, appalled …”

  “But I thought,” Laura hesitated, glancing round the room again. “Saira said … You obviously spent some time in India …”

  “Do you know what happened in India after the war, girl?” Earnshaw said, almost spitting the words in her face. “I was in the RAF, 31 squadron, ended up airlifting British families out of Kashmir when the balloon went up. Fifteen at a time in Dakotas with no oxygen and fuel turning up in cans if you were lucky. Chaos. Bloody murderous chaos. They were smuggling their Hindu servants out to get them away from the Muslims, while down on the ground village after village was burning and whole trainloads of people were being massacred as they tried to get to the right side of the new borders.”

  “I knew there was a lot of bloodshed,” Laura said. “On both sides, though, wasn’t it?”

  The old man did not answer. He got to his feet with difficulty and rummaged in a carved wooden box on a side-table which seemed to be full of photographs, most of them old. He handed Laura a tattered and faded black and white snapshot of a young woman in a sari.

  “That was the Hindu girl I planned to marry,” he said, his face contorted with bitterness. “She was going to Bombay to take a boat to England. I put her on a train which never arrived. Not a single person survived. And then Simon comes to tell me that he’ll back me in the dispute with his father if I’ll make it worth his while. And what does he want the money for? To set himself up with a bloody Pakistani girl, a Muslim … He couldn’t wait for the sale.”

  “So you turned him down?” Laura said quietly. “You wouldn’t help him.”

  “Of course I wouldn’t help him.”

  “But he wouldn’t have known about your experiences in India, would he?” She touched the worn photograph lightly with her finger. “It’s so long ago …”

  “I never told anyone,” Earnshaw said. “That sort of relationship wouldn’t have been welcomed by my family in those days. She was killed. Quite possibly burned alive. What good would telling anyone have done?”

  More good, perhaps, than burying his bitterness for fifty years had done him, Laura thought, looking at the creased features etched, she now realised, as much by disappointment and despair as by his illness. Evidently his love had faded like the photograph of his lover, but the hatred her death had sparked had
survived more than a generation to blight his grandson’s life.

  “So you turned Simon away when he came to see you?”

  “I told him I wouldn’t help him,” Earnshaw whispered.

  “And what was his response to that?” she asked, guessing that Earnshaw could not have been happy with his grandson’s reaction.

  “He said he’d go along with his father’s scheme,” the old man said. “He’d help them close Earnshaws down. He was furious with me but I wouldn’t listen …” He closed his eyes for a moment and Laura thought he had exhausted himself and had fallen asleep. But then he roused himself again and his eyes blazed and Laura guessed he had been reliving the final row with Simon.

  “I killed him,” he said unexpectedly and very quietly, leaning back in his chair with an almost peaceful expression on his face. “I hit him, I hit with all the strength I had, and he lost his balance and fell, and I couldn’t rouse him. He’d caught his head on that table there.” He waved vaguely at the heavy glass-topped coffee table. Laura felt a chill grip her stomach and she swallowed hard.

  “It was an accident then?” she whispered.

  “Oh, no,” George Earnshaw said. “I wanted him dead. He was going to become one of them, give me great-grandchildren with murderers’ blood in their veins. At that moment I wanted him dead. My own grandson — can you believe that?”

  Laura hesitated. Earnshaw was an old man and evidently frail and she did not feel physically threatened but she was still unsure how to handle such a dramatic confession. She glanced at her tape-recorder, still running on the table.

  “Are you sure you want to tell me about this?” she said, her mouth dry.

  “It makes no odds to me now,” Earnshaw said. “I’ll not live to stand trial.” The admission made, Earnshaw seemed to have shrivelled in his chair until he resembled little more than skin and bone, the only life in him visible in his blue eyes still blazing from deep dark sockets in his grey and haggard face.

  “I should call the police,” Laura said. The old man shrugged.

  “Do as you like,” he said listlessly.

  But before Laura could pull out her mobile the door-bell rang and she helped the old man up to answer it. She went to the door with him to find a burly figure she recognised and a white Escort parked behind her car on the drive, blocking it in.

  “Ricky,” Earnshaw said hoarsely. “You’d better come in, lad. I think I may have caused you a bit of a problem here.”

  In a sudden flash of understanding, Laura knew that the old man could not have disposed of Simon Earnshaw’s body alone and that Pickles must have helped him — and she realised then the danger she was in.

  At police headquarters a part of the murder team eager to earn overtime on a Sunday had been tasked to go through the documents which had been removed from the British Patriotic Party offices earlier that morning. It was tedious work and it was not until almost midday that Sergeant Kevin Mower looked up and caught DCI Thackeray’s eye as he made one of his increasingly impatient visits to the incident room.

  “This is interesting, guv,” he said, wondering why his boss looked as if he had not slept for a week. Laura must be giving him a hard time, he thought, with a flicker of jealousy. His own recent liaisons had ended in tragedy and he had felt no urge to to take amorous risks for months.

  “What’s that?” Thackeray asked, making his way through the desks to Mower’s side where he looked over the sergeant’s shoulder at the accounts he was studying.

  “Donations,” Mower said. “A surprising number, given the party’s reputation for violence. A lot of money given anonymously but some people don’t seem to mind their names being recorded, including, it appears, one George Earnshaw of Broadley, young Simon’s grandfather I guess, unless there are two George Earnshaws in Broadley.”

  “He has the reputation of being a racist old bastard,” Thackeray said non-commitally. “Though it’s not illegal for people to make donations to political parties, however obnoxious their aims. How much did he give?”

  “Twenty grand,” Mower said.

  “Not insignificant then,” Thackeray conceded.

  “Not given that BPP members are now prime suspects for the murder of a union activist who was getting in Earnshaw’s way.”

  “We’d best have another word with Mr. Earnshaw senior,” Thackeray said. “But it can wait until tomorrow. Let’s get the paperwork cleared today and then we’ll see where we stand.”

  “Right, guv,” Mower agreed, turning back to his pages of figures.

  “Where’s Sharif this morning?” Thackeray asked, glancing round the room again with tired eyes. He had slept very little the previous night.

  “I told him to keep a discreet eye on Pickles,” Mower said. “He’s been snooping around off his own bat. I thought it was time to make it official.”

  “Is he the best person to do it?” Thackeray asked.

  “Let’s just say he’s the best motivated,” Mower said. “He won’t do anything stupid, guv.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Thackeray said gloomily and turned away to make his way back to his own office where he flung himself into his chair with something approaching a groan, lit a cigarette and drew on it deeply. His sleepless night had brought him no closer to a resolution of his indecision over his future with Laura and had fuddled his brain so that he no longer saw clearly enough where the murder investigations might lead him. At least it was Sunday, thankfully, a day when some inquiries would stall as mobile phone officials and forensic scientists pursued the sort of normal lives denied to police officers. Increasingly, the resolution of murder cases depended on science, the tiny droplet of blood or other fluids, the hair or the speck of fibre, which placed a suspect somewhere he had vehemently denied being. In his heart, he still had Matthew Earnshaw down for his brother’s murder and he hoped against hope that Ricky Pickles might be implicated in the death of Mohammed Iqbal. But he knew these were irrational responses, unscientific and of no value, and in the case of Matthew Earnshaw a visceral reaction to a young man in whom he saw too many of his own failings at the same sort of age. Prejudice, he thought, came in many forms, and when it came down to it he was no more immune than Pickles himself. He needed Laura, he thought, to keep him sane but when impulsively he tried her mobile number he only got her voicemail.

  “I love you,” he said softly after the tone. But did he, he still wondered, love her enough.

  He was interrupted by a uniformed constable who put his head round the door waving a slip of paper.

  “They thought you ought to see this, sir,” he said. The message had come from the French police to inform West Yorkshire that the body of a young Asian woman, carrying a passport in the name of Saira Khan, had been recovered from the Seine that morning.

  “Hell and damnation,” Thackeray said.

  Omar Sharif had parked his unmarked car a discreet distance down the road from George Earnshaw’s house and watched as Ricky Pickles swung his Escort behind a VW Golf on the drive and went inside. Thoughtfully he called police headquarters and asked the control room to check the ownership of the Golf. The name they came up with meant nothing to him but he asked to be put through to Sergeant Kevin Mower anyway

  “He’s driven out to some village in the country,” Sharif said. “Broadley” And he relayed the address.

  “That’s old Earnshaw’s house,” Mower said. “We’ve just discovered that the old bastard’s a major backer of Pickles’s political ambitions.”

  “They must be having a campaign meeting then,” Sharif said. “There’s another car there, a Golf belonging to a woman called Ackroyd, Miss Laura Ackroyd. Is anything known about her?”

  “Say that again,” Mower said, his mouth suddenly dry. It was ten miles to Broadley and there was no permanent police presence in the village. Sharif was effectively on his own. When Sharif had repeated what he had seen Mower knew both their jobs were on the line, not to mention Laura’s safety.

  “Take this very slow
ly, Omar,” he said. “Very slowly and carefully. Laura Ackroyd is the DCI’s girlfriend, and Pickles is at best a violent bastard and at worst a murderer. We need Laura out of there without a hair of her head disturbed. Have you got that?”

  “Loud and clear, sarge,” Sharif said, his heart suddenly thumping uncomfortably.

  “I’m going to transfer this call to the DCI’s office. Stay on the line, Omar.”

  But by the time Mower had barged unceremoniously into Thackeray’s office and indicated that he should pick up his phone, Sharif was already talking again, an edge of panic in his voice.

  “They’re moving,” he said. “Pickles has been fiddling about in the Golf — I can’t make out from here what he’s been doing but now he’s shifted his car off the drive, and moved the Golf onto the road as well to make space for some old boy - Earnshaw presumably — who’s getting a red car out of the garage, some sort of old estate.”

  “A dark red Volvo, an old model?” Mower snapped.

  “Could be,” Sharif said. “Difficult to tell from here. The red car’s driving off now and Pickles is following in the Ford. They’ve left the Golf behind. Should I follow or try to find Miss Ackroyd in the house.”

  Mower glanced at Thackeray who was listening in on his extension ashen-faced and shaken, his knuckles white.

  “What do you think, guv?” he asked desperately, knowing that whichever decision they made might be the wrong one for Laura. “She could be in the Volvo.”

  “Follow them, Omar,” Thackeray said harshly. “We can’t afford to lose them. We’ll get help to you as quickly as we can. Keep us in touch with where you are.”

  For a second the two men’s eyes locked in mutual fear.