By Death Divided (15 page)

‘This isn’t getting any better, is it?’ she said. ‘We’re still in the same dead end we were in when we came back from Blackpool.’

‘I’ve been thinking about this, Julie,’ Laura said when she had got herself a glass of wine and ordered some sandwiches for the two of them. ‘I think the best thing to do is to fill the police in on what we’ve discovered. They said they’d let the Lancashire police know Bruce might have gone over there, but now we’re sure he’s in Blackpool we should let them know that too. It would be cheaper to let the police track him down than to do it through a detective agency. You have to give them a chance.’

‘I suppose so,’ Julie said dully.

‘Did your mother-in-law make a complaint?’

‘Yes, I think the woman we went to see came out to interview her.’

‘Janet Richardson? Right, well let’s see if we can go and have a chat with her as well.’ Laura pulled out her mobile and evidently got a positive response.

‘Come on,’ she said cheerfully as a waitress brought their sandwiches. ‘You don’t look as if you’ve eaten anything for a month. Eat up, and then we can go to see Janet straight away. She’s in her office and is expecting us.’

The detective sergeant, when she came to meet her two visitors in a bland interview room at police headquarters,
looked tired as well and Laura began to wonder how many people were being slowly ground down by the cycle of violence that seemed to afflict so many families. There were dark circles under the sergeant’s eyes, and Laura got the feeling she was only half listening as Julie explained how her husband had deceived her about his previous history and had begun to behave more and more erratically as time had gone by.

‘We know he’s gone back to Blackpool,’ she said. ‘Or that area, anyway. There’s lots of accommodation there in the winter, when there are no visitors. It’s an ideal place for him to hide. Can you get the police over there to find him? Please?’

‘I’ll pass on the details,’ Janet said. ‘A man with a small girl in tow should be more noticeable that a man on his own. But I can’t guarantee they’ll give it a high priority. It’ll be a bit like looking for the proverbial needle.’

‘He’s not safe to be in charge of Anna,’ Julie said, her voice shrill, but Janet shrugged.

‘You may think that but he’s her father and you say he’s never harmed her. You’ll have to settle the custody dispute in court if you can’t come to an agreement yourselves. But so far all the violence has been aimed at you, not Anna. We can’t treat it as an abduction and we have no evidence Anna’s in danger. All we can do is look for him in connection with your complaint of assault. Not taking your medication if you’re sick isn’t a crime, you know.’

Laura had not intervened in the conversation until then but she suddenly felt angry herself at the DS’s attitude.

‘Two complaints of assault,’ she said. ‘You’re forgetting his mother. Surely that’s enough for you to regard him as dangerously violent and arrest him. Or is that just ‘domestic’
too and not worth the effort? I thought the police were treating this sort of thing more seriously now. I thought that was your job.’

Janet flushed slightly.

‘It is and we do,’ she said quietly. ‘We treat it very seriously. But that doesn’t mean there are enough resources to make our efforts effective if we can’t easily get our hands on a perpetrator. I’ll talk to my opposite number in Blackpool and see what I can do, I promise. But I’m trying to be realistic here. I don’t want to raise your hopes when it seems such a long shot that we’ll track him down.’

And with that they had to be satisfied. But when Thackeray came home that evening Laura did not hesitate to express her own frustration with Julie’s situation.

‘Janet Richardson really didn’t seem to be taking it very seriously at all,’ she complained after they had eaten.

‘Janet Richardson handles dozens of these cases every week,’ Thackeray said sharply. ‘It’s her job and she’s very good at it. Her top priority is always to prevent more violence, by arresting people if necessary. But in this case, with Holden well away from his wife and his mother, there doesn’t seem much risk of that, and I’m sure that’s what the Blackpool police will say. He’ll come well down the list. Nothing in what you’ve told me says he’s going to hurt his daughter.’

‘He’s mentally ill,’ Laura said.

‘Well, he may be, though we’ve no real evidence for that. He was mentally ill years ago. That’s not evidence he is now. And being mentally ill isn’t a crime, either. If we catch up with him he’ll probably just claim he took the child away for a few days to the seaside without asking her mother first.’

‘I hope she doesn’t get hurt,’ Laura said. ‘I hope no one gets
hurt.’

Thackeray looked at Laura across the table and sighed.

‘You’re letting your heart rule your head again,’ he said.

‘Maybe,’ Laura said wearily. ‘But has it crossed your mind that Bruce Holden might have been Vicky’s mysterious intruder? I did mention it to Janet. He might have been skulking around up there looking for his wife. So just what would have happened if he’d found her? And to Vicky, too?’

‘I think Janet’s passed that thought on to the lads who are investigating that incident. But I’ll check tomorrow.’

‘Julie says he’s like an unexploded bomb,’ Laura said quietly. ‘And the slightest thing might set him off again.’ She realised now, if she had not before, that no one was going to take Julie’s fears seriously. If Julie wanted Bruce found she would have to find him herself, and if no one else would help her, Laura would have to join in the hunt. She got up from the table and kissed Thackeray lightly on the cheek.

‘I’ll clear away now and then I think I’ll have an early night. I’ve got a busy day tomorrow.’

Mohammed Sharif felt in need of some rest and recreation that evening. He had called Louise Bentley earlier and they met in a smart bar in the centre of Leeds, a safe ten miles from Bradfield and the censorious eyes that Sharif knew would follow his every move if anyone he knew, and perhaps some he didn’t know, spotted him with a woman who was obviously not a Muslim. He bought the first drinks, still not entirely comfortable with Louise’s insistence on paying her own way. In the cosmopolitan crowd of young people who surrounded them they were in no way unusual. Life here, he thought as he glanced around, had thankfully moved on from the clannish insularity of so many on both sides of the racial divide in Bradfield. Here, he thought, they could breathe easily.

But although he had gone home to shower and change he still had not been able to lift the anxiety that had enveloped him ever since he had learnt of Faria’s death, insistent fingers of suspicion pointing first this way and then that, and Louise was soon demanding an explanation. When he had finished
telling her all that had happened, she put a hand on his.

‘I’m sorry about your cousin,’ she said. ‘Were you very close?’

‘I’m much older than she was,’ he said. ‘But yes, I thought of her as another sister pretty much. We lived a few streets away. She and her younger sisters were part of my family too. I used to help them with their homework.’ He stopped suddenly, half choked with emotion, and took a deep breath to fight back the tears that threatened to overwhelm him for the first time. ‘I feel as if I should have been able to protect her,’ he said. ‘She had no brothers of her own.’

‘Do you really think her husband has killed her?’ Louise asked.

‘It’s beginning to look that way,’ he said. ‘At first I hoped it was an accident. Then I hoped it was suicide. Now it looks as if she was deliberately killed. It couldn’t be any worse.’

‘But you said she was pregnant. Would her husband really kill her when they were expecting a baby?’

Sharif hesitated. He knew that there were circumstances in which a Muslim husband might conceivably kill his wife
because
she was expecting a baby, if he suspected it was not his child. But he did not want to elaborate. He avoided the subject of religion with Louise, beyond saying that he no longer attended the mosque, and he was even more reluctant to discuss some of the traditions that lingered on in the community, particularly in relation to marriage, which he knew he would find difficult to justify and she would find difficult to understand. His ambition, as far as Louise was concerned, just as it was at work, was to be regarded as a thoroughly modern man. So he merely shrugged in response to her question.

‘It’s difficult to know what goes on in a marriage, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I don’t know my cousin’s husband very well. It’s all a complete mystery to me.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Louise said. ‘And it must be even worse if they’re not letting you help with the investigation. That must be very hard.’

‘My DCI is right,’ Sharif said. ‘Though I wish he weren’t. I’m too involved to go anywhere near it.’

He sipped his lager thoughtfully. Alcohol was one of the prohibitions of his religion he chose to ignore although he was an abstemious drinker, a late starter who found no pleasure in excess and with a tendency in a crowd to stick to the orange juice his colleagues half expected. There was no way he had ever felt able to compete in the alcoholic league most of them, men and women alike, played in.

‘Do you feel like going away this weekend?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Maybe we could go down to London and stop over Saturday night? I really feel like getting away for a bit.’

‘That would be good,’ Louise said.

‘Let’s go back to mine and see what we can find on the internet,’ he said. ‘It’s the best place for last minute hotels.’ Louise smiled encouragingly.

‘I’ll pick up a few things from my place,’ she suggested. ‘I don’t have any marking to do, for once, so we can make a weekend of it. You look as if you need a break.’ She smiled again and Sharif saw the promise there. He linked his fingers into hers across the table.

‘I think you’re good for me,’ he said quietly. She was not the first white girl he had taken out but she was the first whom he felt was not just leading him on out of curiosity, looking for a taste of the exotic to discuss with friends on the next
girls’ night out. Louise was different, not easy in any sense, making him wait before agreeing to share his bed and in one sense making him uneasy. If, as he thought she might, she had marriage in mind, there would be a mountain to climb with his family, and in present circumstances it was a mountain he could only shove away to a distant horizon. Faria’s death had thrown everything into grief and confusion and he and Louise would have to live for the moment. Nothing else was remotely possible.

Sharif woke on Monday morning and lay in bed for a moment feeling relaxed and happy for the first time in days. It had been a good weekend, a companionable trip south by train, a comfortable enough tourist hotel near Kings Cross and some gentle sightseeing from Tate Modern (her choice) to Westminster (his). They had made love that night and lain in bed late on Sunday morning before meandering back to the station and taking the train back to Leeds, from where they made their separate ways home. They had not discussed the future, Sharif because it was simply too difficult to think about and Louise, he suspected, because she too could see the obstacles they would have to overcome if they were to stay together, but they had been very happy for a brief time and both seemed able to accept that this was enough for now.

As he lay there in the warm afterglow of the weekend, Sharif tried to thrust away unwelcome thoughts of what was happening in the rest of his life, but in the end he tossed the duvet off irritably and got out of bed as the harsh reality of Faria’s death and his own equivocal situation returned to overwhelm him again. He dressed and shaved, but found he could only pick at toast and coffee, before giving in to the urge
to phone police HQ and ask for Kevin Mower.

The sergeant answered his call with obvious caution.

‘Have there been any developments?’ Sharif asked, his voice tight with tension. ‘I’ve been away for a couple of days…’

‘Omar, you know you’re supposed to be keeping out of this,’ Mower said. ‘But no, there’s nothing new. No sightings of Imran Aziz, nothing yet from pathology. Maybe there’s nothing more for forensics to find. But seriously – don’t call me again, mate. I really can’t help you on this. You know how it is.’

Sharif hung up with a feeling of despair. There was nothing to keep him in the empty flat and he grabbed his coat and went downstairs quickly and out of the front door, heading round the back of the building to where his car was parked. He could do worse, he thought, than talk to his father and try to tease out any slight thread of information that might indicate why his cousin had been killed. He was bound to have more success at that than his colleagues, who knew little and sympathised less with a family like his. The morning was dark and gloomy, with rain in the air, and as Sharif reached for the car door he half-turned, hearing a slight sound behind him, and then a shout of pure hate. But that was all he heard before a blow to the head poleaxed him to the concrete floor, and he felt more blows rain down on his head and body, before darkness took him and he lay abandoned and senseless in a widening pool of blood.

DCI Michael Thackeray and DS Kevin Mower gazed through the glass panel at the bed in A and E where Mohammed Sharif lay hooked up to a plethora of monitoring devices, profoundly unconscious. Both officers looked grim but
Thackeray was finding it difficult to control the anger that had overtaken him ever since the first reports had come in of his DC’s condition, after he had been found close to his home, appearing to the ambulance crew who attended to him to be more dead than alive. The two officers had hurried to the infirmary across the town hall square and had arrived even before the medics had come to any conclusion about the extent of Sharif’s injuries. Their wait had been silent and anxious. Mower hardly daring to look at the DCI, whose jaw seemed to have set like stone as soon as the initial message had been received. For fifteen minutes or more Thackeray had paced up and down outside the room where Sharif was being treated until at last a young doctor came out of the room and turned to Thackeray with a slight shrug.

‘There’s no skull fracture, which is something to be thankful for,’ he said. ‘But he has four cracked ribs, a smashed hand, which looks as though it has been stamped on, and he’s lost a hell of a lot of blood. He’s not regained consciousness yet, so we’re taking him up to intensive care.’

‘Is it life-threatening?’ Thackeray asked, his mouth dry.

‘It shouldn’t be at his age. He’s young and fit. But he’s taken a hell of a beating, boots
and
fists, I’d say, and the blow to the head looks as if it was from something like a baseball bat or a pickaxe handle. Somebody really, really didn’t like him. If he’d been brought in at chucking out time on a Friday night I wouldn’t have been surprised, but at this time of the morning… Very odd.’

‘Has his family been informed?’ Thackeray asked Mower, and the sergeant nodded.

‘They’re on their way,’ he said. ‘I called them myself.’

‘Right, we’ll get back and see if we can find any witnesses
to this.’

‘Uniform are already up there, going door-to-door,’ Mower said.

‘I want CID up there too,’ Thackeray almost snarled. ‘If this is a racist attack I want someone hung out to dry.’

‘There’s no evidence of any motive yet,’ Mower said. ‘He had his wallet on him and it wasn’t touched. Nor his car keys and phone. He was found right beside his car, as if he was going somewhere. He’d only just called me and I think he was at home then. He must have gone straight out to the car. But it obviously wasn’t a robbery, unless they were disturbed before they could grab his stuff.’

‘That level of violence isn’t a mugging,’ Thackeray said flatly. ‘There’s no need for it. This was targeted, either because he’s Asian or because he’s a copper.’

‘Or for some reason we don’t even know about,’ Mower said. ‘He walks a thin line, does Omar. Maybe he overstepped it.’

As they left the main hospital entrance Thackeray recognised the Asian man and woman approaching from the street and moved over quickly to greet them, holding out his hand, which Sharif’s father took without enthusiasm.

‘Mr Sharif, I’m incredibly sorry about this. Especially at a time when you’ve just lost your niece. We’ll find out who’s done this, I promise you. It will be a priority for all of us.’

Sharif nodded dully, and his wife gazed at the ground, not meeting the eyes of Thackeray or Mower.

‘Mohammed is an excellent young officer,’ Thackeray said. ‘Believe me, this won’t go unpunished.’

Sharif pushed past the DCI without a word and his wife followed close behind, her eyes full of tears. Mower glanced
warily at his boss and away again. He had felt the full force of his superior’s anger once or twice during his own somewhat chequered career and did not envy Sharif’s assailants if they ever came face to face with it themselves.

‘I’ll roust out the usual suspects,’ he said. ‘The raving right. They’ve been pretty quiet recently, but this has to be racist. What else could it be?’

‘Something to do with his cousin’s death, maybe,’ Thackeray suggested quietly. ‘Something we don’t know about, maybe, and may never know about? I thought I’d done the best thing taking him off the case, away from it all, but maybe he’s the man I should have been talking to. He’s our best link to that community and I’ve let him go. And now where are we? One member of the family dead, and another half-dead, and no lead in sight.’

It was on the tip of Mower’s tongue to advise Thackeray not to blame himself but he checked himself in time. He knew he would be wasting his breath.

Mohammed Sharif regained consciousness that afternoon, struggling up through swirls of mist into a world of confusion and pain that made him crave the oblivion that had cradled him safely in its arms for most of the day. He opened his eyes tentatively, knowing instantly that he was in hospital and guessing that he was lucky to be alive. There was no one close to his bed but further down the small ward he could see nurses clustered around another bed where someone else was hooked up to the same monitoring devices that he became aware surrounded him too. He groaned slightly as he tried to move and a pain stabbed viciously through his chest. His head throbbed unbearably beneath what seemed to be a
helmet of dressings and he could feel an oxygen feed strapped to his nose. He took a deep breath and felt slightly more alert as the life-giving gas did its job. But he closed his eyes again.

He was slightly surprised that there was no uniformed figure at his bedside, keeping watch and waiting to question him about what had happened. For a moment he felt an urge to weep, and fought hard to contain the tears that welled up behind his eyelids. Perhaps his worst nightmares were true, he thought, and he, the outsider, was expendable, his fate of no concern to his colleagues or superiors, prey to any mad racist who took a dislike to the colour of his skin. Where were his brother officers when he needed them? Or even a sister, one of the women he had made a special effort to accept as his equal, or even sometimes his superior, after a lifetime of tacitly denying that possibility. Had they made a similar effort to accept him? he wondered bitterly.

He shook his head slightly, a mistake as it intensified the throbbing, but the action at least forced him to open his eyes again and banish the incipient paranoia that threatened to overwhelm him, and suddenly he was no longer alone as a nurse and DS Kevin Mower approached his bed, both of them smiling some sort of a welcome as he struggled to offer a grimace of recognition in return.

‘You’re awake then,’ Mower said cheerfully. ‘Thank God for that.’

The nurse began to check the monitors that surrounded Sharif’s bed and then nodded.

‘You seem to be fine,’ she said. ‘I’ll get the doctor to come and check you out but I should think we’ll be able to move you down to a normal ward later on. They’ll want to keep you in overnight, maybe longer.’