Dead on Arrival

by Patricia Hall

  “This wasn’t just a drunken scuffle,” she said. She spoke jerkily, trying to keep her temper under control. “Those two boys weren’t drunk. I was on the train with them. They were behaving perfectly normally. There was no provocation. There wasn’t time for any. The gang set on them as soon as they saw them. It was almost like an ambush.”

  “You wouldn’t have been able to hear what was said, though, would you? With the train pulling out? Too much racket?” Wesley spoke lazily, almost as if he had already worked out his own scenario for what had happened at Princess Wharf station and that what Laura offered by way of evidence was irrelevant.

  “I don’t think anything was said,” Laura said firmly. “The station was empty, echoing. They don’t seem to have staff on stations any more.”

  “But the train was pulling out? That would be noisy?” Wesley persisted with his interrogation doggedly, his mouth twisted in what looked like permanent disbelief.

  “They’re very quiet, those Docklands trains,” Laura insisted. “More of a hiss than a clatter. What is this? You sound as though you’re trying to find reasons to blame the victim instead of the killers.”

  “Not at all, Miss Ackroyd,” Wesley said blandly. “I’m just trying to get the picture clear in my own mind, that’s all.”

  “They had weapons, inspector,” Laura said flatly. “What more evidence of premeditation do you want? It was an ambush, a racist ambush. They were waiting for those boys.”

  “Well, you know what they say. It’s a racist attack if someone says it’s a racist attack. Sounds to me like a gang of thugs looking for anyone who annoyed them. Thuggery pure and simple. It could have been someone who didn’t support West Ham.”

  “I don’t think so,” Laura said flatly.

  “You heard racist abuse, then, did you?”

  “No,” Laura admitted. “I told you. It was quick, and silent and deadly.”

  “And the knife?” Wesley came back quickly. “Did you see exactly who had the knife?”

  Laura looked at him for a long moment.

  “I never saw a knife,” she said.

  “Ah well, it just goes to show how even the most observant witnesses can miss things, doesn’t it?” Wesley said with a note of satisfaction in his voice. “As for reporters….I suppose with Canary Wharf and Wapping stuffed full of them, we’ll get used to reporters round here.” He shrugged and smiled and Laura bit back an angry retort. There was no sense, she thought, in antagonising the man when any chance of catching the murderers clearly depended upon him.

  “Was the victim stabbed?” she asked quietly.

  “We don’t have the post-mortem report yet, but it looks like it,” Wesley said. “Which makes me wonder if it was his knife. Or his run-away friend’s. It took us until this morning to identify him and find his mother. He was carrying no ID. I thought he must be an illegal, but it seems not.”

  “Illegal?” Laura asked.

  “Illegal immigrant,” Wesley said. “But he turned out to be kosher, at least until the mother’s asylum claim is dealt with. Osman Barre. A Somali, apparently.” The contempt was guarded but Laura did not think she was imagining it.

  “Do you get a lot of illegal immigrants round here?” Laura asked, determined to keep her temper under control.

  Wesley laughed, although there was not much amusement in his eyes.

  “The place is awash with them,” he said. “Which is why I’m very interested in the other lad, the one who ran away. You said they were speaking a foreign language?”

  Laura nodded bleakly. She had wondered all night what had driven the slightly smaller youth to run so fast and abandon his friend and realised now that it might not have been simply the fear of being hurt. She turned back to the book of photographs in front of her with a helpless shrug. She felt adrift in this environment where murder seemed to be regarded as a minor incident and black youths fair game.

  But the next page of the book of photographs caused her to take a sharp breath. Wesley leaned close to her again, although Laura did not think he had any difficulty in seeing the picture she was looking at.

  “That’s him,” she said.

  “You’re sure?” Wesley said. The portrait looking up at them was not a fearsome one. The face was youthful and rounded, the pale eyes well spaced and the full lips smiling slightly, but the fair hair was closely cropped and there was a white streak down one cheek from temple almost to the line of the jaw.

  “You didn’t say he had a scar,” Wesley said, his voice suddenly harsh with suspicion.

  “He was half turned away from me,” Laura said. “I couldn’t see that side of his face. But it’s definitely him.”

  “Right then, we’ll see what he has to say for himself,” Wesley said, without much enthusiasm.

  “I’ll do an identity parade, anything you want,” Laura said eagerly, realising almost as soon as she spoke that enthusiasm was a mistake in this place where her words fell into the warm soupy air and fluttered helplessly like a dying bird before hitting the grubby floor.

  “It may not be as simple as that, Miss Ackroyd,” Wesley said. “How many did you say there were of them - five, six? If they all swear this lad was two miles away in the Black Dog,which is where a lot of the skinheads hang out, it will be your word against half a dozen others and it’ll not do us a scrap of good.”

  “But I was there,” Laura said hotly. “I saw him.”

  “I’m sure you did, but a defence lawyer would have you laughed out of court - half-way up an escalator, trying to make a phone call, seven or eight lads milling about below you? It wouldn’t get to court. The Crown Prosecution Service wouldn’t wear it. We need much more than that, I’m afraid. In fact what I really need is the other witness, the lad who ran away.”

  An hour later Laura was pushing her way through the heavy glass and steel doors of Canary Wharf tower and into another world. Security was smooth in the atrium which soared up five floors and the express lift soon hurled her up another twenty five to her appointment with the editor of the Sunday Extra, leaving her stomach temporarily far below.

  Nick Bentall, an impeccably groomed but boyish figure in a black Ralph Lauren Polo shirt and dark jeans, got up from his desk to greet Laura as she was shown in. Behind him floor to ceiling windows gave onto a panorama of London’s great river basin where the white Millenium Dome hung from its spiky yellow gantreys on one hand and the shining Thames curved away to the ridges of the Woolwich flood barrier on the other and forests of cranes swung and swayed over a patchwork of new building sites.

  “Hi,” Bentall said, with an easy smile. “I’m really glad to meet you. I just loved that piece you did for us on the abused women. Just fantastic.” He held out a hand, pulled her towards him and kissed her fleetingly on both cheeks.

  “Thank you,” Laura said, taken slightly aback by this Metropolitan greeting. Embraces in Yorkshire were altogether more significant and physical affairs. She took the low chair Bentall waved her into and arranged her long black stockinged legs decorously beneath her short black skirt. She was very aware, because she had carefully checked in Sally’s full-length mirror before setting out, that she looked her best in her black suit over an aubergine silk shirt, her red hair swept away from her face into a foaming mass of curls which fell down her back. She was equally aware that Steve Bentall was impressed.

  “So what next?” he said, settling down in a twin chair across the coffee table where a cafetiere and cups were waiting. He busied himself pouring and fussing over sugar and cream. “You suggested something about children in care - what is it they call them now, the politically correct? ‘Looked after’ children? Bizarre in the circumstances, when you think what’s been going on in most of those homes.”

  Laura sipped her coffee for a moment thoughtfully, knowing she had an even better story for Steve but unsure how too broach it. In the end she decided on a full frontal approach.

  “I witnessed a murder last night,” she said quietly. “Only a mile or s
o from here. In another world.”

  Bentall shook his head in disbelief, the blue eyes sharply alert now as he scented an angle.

  “Tell me,” he said, so she did. He listened intently and said nothing for a moment when she had finished, sitting with one hand behind his head and a thoughtful expression on his face.

  “It’s true,” he said at length. “People like me waltz into this part of London on that overhead railway, we shop here in our posh shops, eat in our exclusive restaurants, even entertain prime ministers and foreign heads of state up here in the tower. Then we swan off again in the evening with our carrier bags from the Tesco deli without giving a second thought to the poor beggars who live here all the time. We must seem like some sort of space-ship full of aliens that’s landed on a bend in the river to some of the people out there.”

  “This place even looks like an ugly great rocket,” Laura said, smiling and glancing out at the vista beyond Greenwich. “But you can forgive architects a lot for a view like that.”

  “There’s a brilliant feature in your murder, isn’t there?” Bentall said thoughtfully. “A tale of two cities?”

  “Do you think so? I’d have to stay down here for a while to do it. And we might get caught out if they charge someone with the murder. Though I did pick up a certain lack of enthusiasm for the case when I went to the police station. I’d be a witness and you’d not be able to use anything until after the trial was over.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” the editor said. “It’ll still be worth using even if we have to wait. The fact you were actually there would make it for us. And I’ll cover your expenses - within reason. I tell you what, think about it over the weekend, and have lunch with me on Monday and we’ll finalise a brief then. Have you been to the Waterside?”

  Laura shook her head, recognising the name of the restaurant from the glossy magazine stories in which it and its temperamental chef regularly featured.

  “It’s the hot place at the moment, tables at a premium, but I think I can swing it. Give me a call Monday morning to confirm? OK?” Bentall said.

  “OK,” Laura said, swept along by his enthusiasm. “I’ll do you a detailed plan - for both ideas.”

  “You should think about moving down here permanently, Laura,” Bentall said as he showed her to the door with a hand on her arm. “You’re wasted up there in the wilds of Yorkshire.”

  “Maybe,” Laura said noncommittally. But as she swallowed hard in the lift to clear her ears as it plummetted twenty five floors to ground level again, she knew that Bentall’s motives were by no means purely professional and that his boyish charm left her not only unmoved but desperate to be back in those Northern wilds where she had left part of herself in a sort of limbo, and the whole of her life unresolved. Never mind, she said to herself as she began window-shopping her way slowly back to the station, I’ll not say no to a meal at the Riverside. Then we’ll see.

  She got back to Sally’s flat soon after five burdened with a couple of glossy carrier bags, evidence of a shopping spree in the galleries at the Wharf. Compensation, she had thought wryly as she tried on a lime green linen suit with a designer label she knew she could not afford but had bought anyway. And she had added a couple of shirts for good measure. Carrying her black jacket over her arm in the late afternoon heat, she walked into the lofty living area to find Sally slumped in a chair surrounded by several other people, all of them seized by an apparently deep depression.

  “You’re back,” Sally said without enthusiasm, and Laura wondered whether her friend had been crying. “This is Tom Massey, Ben’s father.” She waved in the direction of a tall, lean, black man with dread-locks and deeply opaque dark eyes, and a sleeping Ben, dressed only in boxer shorts, sprawling across his lap.

  “So you’re the very lucky reporter who fell over a murder?” Tom asked. The question was not intended to be a friendly one and Laura merely nodded in response, not wanting to cross swords with Sally’s boy-friend at first meeting.

  “And this is Liz and Jan,” Sally said quickly. Liz and Jan, both pale and blonde and dishevelled, nodded blankly in the newcomer’s direction and said nothing, like a mute Greek chorus on a tragic stage.

  Laura stood for a moment feeling like an alien in this company as all her elation about her own day drained away. She waited for an explanation which no-one seemed inclined to offer, shrugged and went into the spare bedroom where she dropped her bags and her jacket on the futon and sat down with the door open, thinking perhaps that she had intruded on a private meeting of some kind.

  After a moment, Sally came into the room and closed the door behind her and leaned against it heavily. In the bright light from the window reflecting off the water outside, Laura was sure that she had indeed been crying and that she might be about to do so again.

  “What’s happened?” she asked.

  “It’s the boy who was killed last night,” Sally said. “It turned out he was one of ours.”

  “Yours? You mean at school?”

  “Right,” Sally said, a single tear running down her pale, plump cheek. “A Somali boy, in Year 10. Liz was his form tutor. Jan taught him English. We’ve had a dreadful day.”

  “I can imagine,” Laura said. This was not the best moment, she thought, to tell her friend that the Sunday Extra wanted her to write about the boy’s death. That would have to wait.

  “I asked them round just to unwind a bit. I’m the only one who lives so close. I bought this place when I inherited a bit of money from my grandfather. I thought it was a good idea to live in the same community as the kids. But now I’m not so sure. Maybe you can get too close.”

  She moved to the window and stood looking down at the wharf, her shoulders hunched in misery. Laura moved to join her and touched her shoulder tentatively.

  “I’m so sorry,” Laura said.

  “Look at that.” Sally said. Below them the dark dappled waters of the old dock sparkled in the sunlight. On the quay, BMWs and Range Rovers were parked neatly in their allotted secure parking places. Rows of pleasure boats, yachts and cruisers of all shapes and sizes, their white paintwork and brass accoutrements gleaming, bobbed gently up and down. A tall bronzed young man in shorts and a teeshirt, busy edging a rowing boat alongside what Laura guessed was a sea-going yacht, was the only person in sight.

  “Beautiful,” Laura said tentatively. “It’s amazing what they’ve done with this area.”

  “Parts of it, only parts of it, Laura,” Sally said vehemently. “This is another world. I think it’d be fairer to the kids if I buggered off to Islington or Beckenham every evening to live my nice middle-class life out of sight.”

  This was a side of Sally Laura had never seen before. As a student Sally had seemed a-political. She had only two enthusiasms, as she had squeezed herself into bustles and bodices and clown’s gear and struggled to wipe traces of greasepaint off her essays. The first was to turn her student passion for the stage into a career and the second to turn her infatuation for one of her drama lecturers into a relationship.

  Neither ambition, it seemed, had turned out well. But that made it no less unexpected to find Sally expressing the sort of generalised dissatisfaction with the state of the world which Laura indulged in herself on occasion. But her own outbursts, more often than not, were simply homage to her grandmother’s fervent commitment to a socialist future whereas Sally seemed still to believe in what seemed to Laura like a fast-fading dream.

  “The kids are lucky to have you,” Laura said. “Don’t torment yourself. You can’t set the world to rights single handed.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” Sally said bitterly. “We’ve a school full of damaged kids there, most of them are black, lots of them are refugees of one sort or another. This sort of thing terrifies them: endless questions, men in uniform marching about. You’ve no idea. We had kids hiding under the dinner tables one day when the police helicopter went over the playground. The last helicopter some of them had seen had machine gunned t
hem…. And all we get from the powers that be is whinging about how much better we should be doing and how we’re no worse off than dozens of other schools down here…”

  The words which seemed to have tumbled out almost in spite of herself suddenly dried up and Sally rubbed her eyes on the sleeve of her shirt, leaving a smear of mascara on the blue cotton. Laura held out her hand and took Sally’s.

  “When I went to the police station I identified one of the boys who was involved in the attack. They should be able to get the gang who did it,” Laura said with far more confidence in detective inspector Wesley’s commitment and capability than she actually felt.

  Sally looked at her for a moment and then flung her arms round Laura in a bear-like embrace, her eyes shining.

  “That’s marvellous,” she said. “Come and tell the others. They’ll be so pleased. You have no idea what a relief it is to find someone who’s prepared to stand up to these thugs.”

  “What do you mean?” Laura asked quietly.

  Sally hesitated for a moment. Then she shrugged.

  “You know what it’s like in areas like this,” she said. “Most witnesses won’t talk to the police let alone give evidence in court.”

  Laura nodded. A vivid recollection of baseball bats rising and smashing down onto unprotected flesh flashed before her eyes and made her shudder.

  “I’ll need to mind my back, then?” she asked, far more lightly than she felt.

  “You’ll be safe enough in Bradfield,” Sally said. “They won’t get to you there.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  DCI Michael Thackeray could feel Rita Desai’s unease as an almost physical chill as she drove him through the crowded streets of Bradfield’s Asian quarter to Sutton Park School. His decision to come with her had been taken almost impulsively, spurred by the photograph of the missing school-girl which had lain on his desk in a jumble of discarded paperwork since the previous day.