Dusty Death

by J M Gregson

  ‘Yes. Otherwise I shouldn’t be here but at work.’

  They were off on the wrong foot already then. ‘It’s really rather important, sir, or you wouldn’t have been troubled.’

  He nodded, looking them up and down as if he might divine their purpose by a close examination. He did not disguise his distaste for the young woman in uniform who stood slightly behind Pickering. Nor did he trouble to disguise his reluctance as he said, ‘I suppose you had better come inside.’

  The sitting room into which he led them was very British in its furnishings, with a heavy three-piece lounge suite dominating it. Only a heavily patterned carpet and an abundance of ornaments suggested a different taste. An olive-skinned woman in a headscarf acknowledged their introduction but did not speak; she assessed her visitors for a few seconds, then cast her eyes back to the carpet.

  Gordon Pickering hadn’t been looking forward to this meeting to start with, and the fifty-minute drive from Brunton had only added to his tension. He wished the man would sit down, but sensed that it wouldn’t be well received if he asked him to do so in his own home.

  Pickering said nervously, ‘I understand you have a daughter?’

  He had addressed his question automatically to both of them, but it was the man who responded. His face set like stone as he said, ‘We had a daughter once. We no longer have a daughter.’

  For a moment, Pickering thought they knew already what he had come to tell them. But then Akhtar went on, ‘She chose to disobey her parents. She chose to reject us and the way we live. So we no longer have a daughter.’

  It was his wife, sitting in an armchair so huge that it made her look slight and vulnerable, who said, ‘Sunita left home in 1990. We have not heard of her since. Do you have news of her?’

  ‘We think we might have news, Mrs Akhtar. Not good news, I’m afraid.’

  Akhtar glanced at his wife as if she should never have spoken. ‘She rejected our guidance. She chose to disobey the wishes of her parents.’

  His wife shot a look of smouldering resentment at his rigid back, but he was totally unconscious of her disgust. She said, ‘Our daughter rejected our choice of a marriage partner. It is traditional, in our culture, for the parents to choose the partner. But Sunita had lived all her life here, had all her schooling here. She was never going to find it easy to accept our choice of partner.’

  Akhtar said without looking round at her, articulating each syllable like a man only just in control of himself, ‘She should not have had this difficulty. She knew from birth what our system was. But she said she had the right to make her own choice. She defied us. From that moment, she was no longer our daughter.’ He seemed to grow taller with the force of his iron conviction on the last sentence.

  The young female uniformed constable had the sense to realize that it would not be taken kindly if she tried to take the initiative here. She sat down at the end of the settee nearest to Mrs Akhtar, reached out a hand and put it gently on top of the older woman’s hand, which lay on the broad arm of her chair. The Asian woman looked at her first with surprise and then with gratitude, and left her hand where it lay.

  DC Pickering said rather desperately. ‘As I said, I’m afraid we do not bring good news. Three days ago, when a site was being cleared of old buildings in preparation for redevelopment, a body was found. It was the body of a young woman of about twenty, of Asian extraction.’

  Pat Rogers felt the thin hand under hers tighten with tension. Then Mrs Akhtar said in a voice hollow with grief, ‘This girl was murdered, wasn’t she? I heard that on the radio this morning.’

  ‘I’m afraid she was, yes.’

  Akhtar’s face might have been carved from marble. He said in an even tone, ‘This was not my daughter. She ceased to be that as soon as she defied us and walked out of this house.’

  ‘Defied you.’ The words came so quietly that it took them a moment to realize that they had come from the very still woman in the armchair. ‘You drove Sunita from this house. And now she is dead. Murdered. Murdered!’ Her voice rose towards a scream on the repetition of the word.

  ‘It was her own choice.’

  The rift was deepening between them, whilst they spoke absurdly into space, refusing to look into each other’s faces. Pickering sensed that he was in the presence of something he had never witnessed before. Deaths usually brought parents closer to each other, but this was a rift which would never be bridged in whatever lives this pair had left. He said desperately, ‘We’re not even absolutely sure yet that this is your daughter.’

  ‘Do you need an identification?’ Mrs Akhtar was as still and composed as her husband, as if she wished to show that she could control her different emotions as well as he.

  ‘That isn’t possible, I’m afraid. The body had been buried for a long time, you see. It is – well, damaged.’

  ‘Rotting. Decomposed. Unrecognizable.’ Mrs Akhtar uttered each word as if she was driving a dagger into herself. ‘Our daughter. Sunita!’ The scream lurking at the back of her throat almost escaped on the name.

  Pat Rogers fastened her young hand more strongly on the older one underneath it, feeling the bones beneath the skin, as Gordon Pickering said, ‘But I have to tell you that the body discovered on Monday was almost certainly that of your daughter Sunita. A Bolton dentist, Mr Ensten, has come up with a match for the dental chart our forensic laboratory took from the remains unearthed by the site equipment. I’m very sorry.’

  Akhtar said like one speaking in a trance, ‘There can be no doubt that this is Sunita?’ It was the first time he had used his daughter’s name. He pronounced the syllables as if they had grown difficult for him with disuse.

  Pickering wanted to offer some consoling words, but he sensed that they would not be welcome. ‘I’m afraid there can now be no reasonable doubt that this is Sunita. We’d like you to give us a DNA sample, for comparison with samples taken from the body, but I’m afraid that I can’t offer you any realistic hope that this will not be your daughter.’

  The two police officers left as quickly as they could, letting themselves out of the silent house. The bereaved parents had still not looked at each other. They stared unseeingly across the comfortable lounge, contemplating this awful thing which would lie between them for the rest of their lives.

  Nine

  The village of Waddington is one of the prettiest in the Ribble Valley. And the modest stone cottage in which Matthew Hayward lived was one of the most attractive residences in this pleasant setting. The stream which ran through the centre of the village passed in front of the cottage, several feet below its garden. On the morning of Friday, the twenty-fifth of February, the fells rose steeply behind it towards a blue sky and the invisible Trough of Bowland beyond them. The air was crisp and clear, the sky a brilliant blue, there was warmth in the sun, and it seemed that spring could surely not be far away.

  It could hardly have been a bigger contrast with the squalid, sparsely furnished squat from thirteen years earlier which was now the focus of a murder inquiry.

  The cottage was at the top of the village. Matthew Hayward was standing in its low doorway as Lucy Blake drove the police Mondeo over the little bridge which spanned the stream. He had been looking anxiously out of the window for the last twenty minutes. ‘Thank you for coming out here to see me.’

  ‘No problem, sir. You’re merely helping the police with their enquiries, as yet.’ Peach threw the final phrase in beneath a breezy smile. He had a nose like a sniffer dog’s for nervousness, and he smelt it here. His research showed that this man was thirty-three: only five years younger than Percy was himself. But he looked callow by comparison.

  Hayward took them into a long, low-ceilinged sitting room, which was dominated by a single piece of furniture, the magnificent rosewood grand piano at the far end, beside the long, low window which looked up the hillside. ‘I’ve been thinking back to those days when we lived in the house in Brunton, as you asked me to on Wednesday night.’

  �
�The squat in Sebastopol Terrace. That’s good,’ nodded Peach. No harm in reminding the man that he’d been breaking the law at that time.

  ‘We were a collection of misfits really. All down on our luck in various ways.’ Matthew laughed nervously, looking instinctively towards Lucy Blake, where he sensed he might get a more sympathetic hearing.

  ‘Most squats are occupied by people like that. And worse,’ said Peach ominously.

  ‘Yes, I suppose they are. Well, people came and went. That’s also typical of squats, I believe.’

  ‘But this one was rather more stable than most.’ Peach spoke with authority, and Matthew divined with an unwelcome shock that he was not the only source of information about that derelict house.

  ‘Yes, I think it was. I was there for quite a few months myself. And there were several of us who—’

  ‘Six, our information says. Correct?’

  This wasn’t going the way Matthew had expected at all. He had thought they would be grateful for whatever information he chose to give them, that he would be able to reminisce and present the picture of himself and others that he had chosen to reveal. Now it seemed that they already knew things, that whatever he said would be set against some other account. Perhaps they had more than one witness already; perhaps what he had to say would be weighed and found wanting, if he chose to be selective in his recall. He said uncertainly, ‘Six is the figure I had in mind, yes.’

  ‘Including the girl who was killed. The girl who is now officially a murder victim.’

  ‘Yes. Have you found someone else as well as me who was there at that time? I’d like to—’

  ‘We never reveal our sources of information, sir. Not until they become official witnesses in a court case. We won’t tell other people about what you have to tell us today. Not initially.’

  Matthew wondered why he felt that he was being warned rather than thanked for his co-operation. He said defensively, ‘We didn’t get to know a lot about each other, you know. When you’re living like that, most people have things to hide. They don’t welcome questions. You learned to respect their privacy.’

  ‘And to preserve your own skin by doing so, no doubt. Some dangerous people live in squats.’

  ‘Not in that one, I’m sure.’

  ‘Oh yes there were, Mr Hayward. Very dangerous, in one case at least. One of you was a murderer.’ They weren’t actually sure of that yet, but Percy wasn’t going to weaken his position with this nervous man by making that qualification to his statement.

  Matthew licked his lips. ‘I think the victim was the girl called Sunita.’

  ‘Correct.’

  His replies were being checked off against a list, when he had expected them to be welcome information. He had better be very careful; this bouncy, broad-shouldered man had in effect just told him that he was a murder suspect. Matthew wished he was not sitting so close to that shining bald head, with its fringe of jet-black hair and matching moustache, to the very white teeth and very dark eyes, which seemed about to pierce his very skin.

  He swallowed and said, ‘You’ll want me to tell you all I can about Sunita. I don’t know exactly where she came from; probably she never told us. She’d fallen out with her family and she didn’t want them to find her. That wasn’t unusual: most of us had had blazing rows, or worse, with one or other of our parents. But Sunita was almost paranoid about it. She wouldn’t register for social security, because she was so afraid they’d find where she was.’

  ‘How long was she there?’

  ‘She was there when I got there.’

  ‘Which was when?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to pin it down exactly. I think it was about November, 1990. You might as well know why.’ He had nerved himself to this, feeling sure they would ask about it, and it came out in a rush, like water bursting past an obstruction. ‘My father died when I was eleven. My mother had a succession of boyfriends after that. Some of them weren’t too bad, but the one who eventually moved in was the worst of all. He knocked me about a lot, even when I was in the sixth form at school. He was big and strong and delighted in showing me that I wasn’t, especially when my mother wasn’t around. Eventually, after I’d played the piano at a school concert and got a bit of publicity, he tried to hit the back of my left hand with a coal hammer. Fortunately, it was only a glancing blow, but I realized that he would cripple me if I stayed around, so I got out.’ He turned his hand over and looked at the back of it now, as if even after all these years he could scarcely believe that it was intact.

  Peach watched Lucy Blake making swift notes with the small gold ball pen she always carried. ‘And you say Sunita Akhtar was there when you arrived?’

  They knew her full name. Knew more than he had realized. ‘Yes, but she’d only just arrived. Not more than a day before me, I think. They’re suspicious of you, the people already in a squat, when you move in. I remember that both of us felt we were being watched, for a few days.’

  ‘Drew you together, that, I expect.’

  He knew far too much, this man. ‘Yes. We got on together, Sunita and I. We’d arrived together, and we were both fugitives from home.’

  ‘Lovers, were you?’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  You did. No one else. But thank you for the information! Peach gave him a wide, appreciative beam. ‘Couldn’t tell you who it was, even if I wanted to, Mr Hayward. Fall out with each other, eventually, did you?’

  ‘No!’ Matthew was aware that he was losing it, that his denial was too emphatic. ‘It’s too simplistic to say that we were lovers. We were thrown together by circumstances, as I’ve said, and eventually we slept together. But we never became an item.’

  ‘And did you regret that?’

  ‘No. We weren’t in a position to form lasting sexual relationships, either of us.’ He wondered how convincing his denial sounded.

  ‘Put it about a bit, did she, this Sunita?’

  Matthew almost shouted at him again. Instead, he controlled himself and said with venom, ‘The poor girl’s dead. Do you have to be so offensive?’

  ‘Probably do, yes, Mr Hayward. Just trying to get the fullest possible picture of what went on at twenty-six Sebastopol Terrace all those years ago, you see. So I’m asking you again, were you the only person who enjoyed the girl’s sexual favours?’

  ‘No. I don’t think I was. Sunita went off the rails a bit, I think. She’d had a very strict upbringing, and it seemed to be a kind of rebellion against that.’

  This wasn’t what a CID team wanted to hear. Sex meant passion, and passion meant possible violence. If the girl had offered sex around, it increased the possible number of suspects. ‘You think she slept with other people in the squat?’

  The slim shoulders shrugged hopelessly. ‘I think she might have done. I think she probably did. I’m not certain of it.’

  ‘And others as well?’

  ‘I – I think she might have. It’s a long time ago and I can’t be certain.’

  ‘She didn’t have a job?’

  ‘No. She did bits of work where she could pick them up. I remember she stacked supermarket shelves for a while, but it didn’t last. She didn’t like working with Asians, because she was worried it might get back to her parents and they’d come after her. I told you, she was almost paranoid about that.’

  ‘So she needed money, didn’t she? If she was refusing to take Unemployment Benefit.’

  ‘Yes. She was a proud girl, Sunita. We didn’t need much, in the squat, but she didn’t want anyone to think she was sponging off them.’

  ‘So she might have sold sexual favours to raise money.’

  ‘I suppose she might. I don’t have any knowledge that she did.’

  ‘When did you leave that squat, Mr Hayward?’

  ‘April, 1991.’

  And why did you go?’

  ‘No one really wants to live in a squat for ever, do they? By definition, it’s an insecure and impermanent existence. I’d got myself together again. Befo
re things blew up at home, I’d already secured a scholarship and a place at the Northern College of Music, in Manchester, to begin in September. I’d thought that was all off when I left home, but I realized that it could be my salvation. I got a job for the summer playing the piano in a pub in Blackpool. Even got the odd booking in theatre orchestras for the summer shows, when the regular players were ill; I can play the violin well enough to get by. I had cheap digs and I got myself back on my feet.’

  It had come out in a rush again, like a prepared statement. But there was nothing wrong with that: they had asked him to spend twenty-four hours thinking back to that vanished time in his life, hadn’t they?

  ‘And Sunita was still there when you left?’

  Matthew wondered if he could get away with saying she was. It would be a large step to putting him in the clear for her killing. But they had another source of information: he couldn’t be certain how much they already knew about this. ‘No. She’d disappeared a little while before I went. About two weeks earlier, I’d say. I can’t be precise, at this distance from it.’

  ‘You must have been curious to know what had happened to her.’

  ‘No. Well, not very curious, anyway. We weren’t very close to each other by that time. And people come and go in squats. Sometimes they tell you what’s happening, what’s turned up for them, sometimes they don’t. You’re never very curious when someone leaves.’

  ‘No, I realize that. But you used the word “disappeared”, for Sunita. Wouldn’t it have been more natural to say she left, as you did?’

  How sharp he was, this man! And he was right; Matthew had implied there was a mystery, that he was worried about her going, when he had not meant to. He said carefully, ‘It’s just a question of semantics. I suppose it seemed to me like a disappearance, because it was so abrupt. She hadn’t said anything about going, as I said.’