By Death Divided (21 page)

Thackeray got to his feet again and faced his slightly startled-looking team.

‘The rest of this is getting even more difficult,’ the DCI said. ‘You all know, because its been drummed into you at every training course on race and community relations you’ve ever been on…’ There was a faint groan from the back of the room, which Thackeray quelled with an angry glance. ‘You all know very well,’ he repeated coldly, ‘that honour is of great importance to Muslim families, especially the honour of their women folk. Whether or not Faria’s situation provides us with the motive for her murder, and it’s looking increasingly likely, it will undoubtedly cause her family great distress.’

‘You’re not going all politically correct on us, are you boss?’ another voice asked from the back of the room.

‘Soft-pedal, should we?’ a different voice asked.

Thackeray scowled.

‘This is a murder case,’ he snapped. ‘We put every ounce of energy into finding out who killed this young woman, just as we would in any other case. That’s been true from the beginning and is even more true now it has become even more complicated. But I do expect you to treat everyone we interview with respect, particularly Faria’s close family. I don’t want the water muddied with accusations of racism or cultural insensitivity. It isn’t helpful, in fact, it’s a serious distraction, even if in the end we have to arrest one, or more, of them. That’s all.’

There was a moment of silence while the assembled team absorbed this warning.

‘You think they won’t cry racism anyway?’ a young detective at the front of the room asked.

‘Of course they will,’ Thackeray said. ‘Their lawyers will jump on us if they think we’ve put a foot wrong and even if we haven’t. But when, rather than if, they do, I need to know that there’s absolutely no justification for the complaint. If there’s no justification, I can deal with it. So play it by the book. Understood?’

There was a murmur of assent from the meeting.

‘Right. Now we’ll deal with new and crucial information that has come back to us about the family from Pakistan. Kevin.’

But as Mower stood up again, to pass on essentially what Mohammed Sharif had discovered in Lahore, a uniformed constable came into the room and handed the DCI a note, which he read quickly, his face becoming a shade paler and even grimmer as he nodded for Mower to continue and walked out of the room. He made his way quickly down the stairs to the control room, where he took hold of the duty sergeant’s arm fiercely.

‘This incident in Southfield? Was anyone else hurt?’ he asked.

‘One fatality, according to the paramedics. Male. Two women at the scene. No one else hurt. Is CID on its way, sir?’

‘I’ll fix it,’ Thackeray said.

Mower drove Thackeray to Southfield faster than the law allowed and pulled up outside the Holdens’ modest house, which was already hemmed in by an ambulance, two squad
cars and a group of concerned neighbours. Thackeray shouldered his way past the uniformed constable on the door to be met by a sergeant, barring the way inside to unauthorised visitors.

‘The body’s in here, sir,’ he said, standing aside, and Thackeray glanced cursorily into the kitchen, where the body of Bruce Holden lay where he had fallen, surrounded by blood, which was liberally spattered and smeared on the floor and walls around him.

‘Weapon?’ he asked.

‘Two knives, one heavily bloodstained, on the floor,’ the sergeant said, waving towards them.

‘Secure the scene for the SOCOs,’ Thackeray said. ‘And the women who were here?’

‘In the front room, sir. They’re both in shock. The paramedics have had a look at them. We’re not sure whether they should go to hospital…’

‘I’ll talk to them now. Then decide,’ Thackeray said, turning, with Mower on his heels. Opening the door to the living room, he found Laura on the settee supporting an almost comatose and shivering Julie Holden whose hands and clothes were stained with blood. Laura looked up at Thackeray, her eyes full of tears.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I’m not hurt or anything,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll be fine. He took us by surprise…’

‘Wait,’ Thackeray said sharply to Laura. ‘Mrs Holden. I’m DCI Thackeray. Can you hear me?’

Julie Holden turned dull eyes towards the two police officers.

‘Where’s my daughter?’ she asked. ‘Where’s Anna? What
have you let him do to her?’

‘Mrs Holden, I want you to go to hospital now for a
check-up
,’ Thackeray said, knowing that the two women had to be separated before they could discuss what had happened, and reckoning this was the least contentious way to do it. ‘The ambulance will take you. And we will talk later about what has happened when you’re feeling better. Do you understand?’ Julie nodded and Mower slipped out of the room to summon the paramedics, who helped Julie into a wheelchair and took her out.

‘Go with her, Kevin,’ Thackeray said. ‘We’ll want her clothes. And if they don’t want to keep her in, I want her at HQ straight away.’

‘Guv,’ Mower said, turning on his heel but not without flashing Laura an encouraging smile.

When they had gone, Thackeray closed the living room door firmly on the increasingly congested crime scene outside, and flung himself down beside Laura, putting his arm round her shoulders, where she collapsed in tears.

‘This isn’t the sort of support witnesses are supposed to get,’ he murmured, kissing her wet cheeks. ‘I thought you’d put yourself at risk again… Are you sure you’re all right?’

‘I’m fine, just a bit shaken,’ Laura said. ‘I don’t think I was at risk. That was a purely domestic battle. He wasn’t really interested in me.’ She dried her eyes.

‘Sorry,’ she said, sniffing. ‘It’s the shock.’

‘Do you need to see a doctor?’

‘No, I’ll be fine. This is a story I can’t wait to write, and I guess you’re not going to like it very much. I think the police let Julie down very badly. This should never have happened.’

‘Hang on, Laura,’ Thackeray said. ‘We haven’t even
established what did happen yet. And you’re going to be our main witness. Ted Grant will have to take his turn on this one.’

‘Oh, phooey,’ Laura said, her eyes sharp again. ‘That bastard tried to kill her. He would have done if she hadn’t grabbed a knife herself…’

‘Save it for your statement,’ Thackeray said. ‘We’ll need a blow-by-blow account but we’ll do it at the station, not here. What possessed the two of you to come up here to meet Holden anyway? You must have known it was a terrible risk.’

‘I didn’t know he was here. She told me she just wanted to come and collect some of her stuff. But he called her, apparently, and told her she could see Anna…’ Laura stopped, realising the implications of what she had just said.

‘She lied to you?’ Thackeray said quietly. Laura nodded.

‘You’ll charge her, won’t you?’

‘Inevitably, I should think,’ Thackeray said. ‘Though what with remains to be seen. But what about the child? Was she here?’

‘No.’

‘Did he say where she is?’

‘No.’ Laura stared at Thackeray, her eyes wide with shock again. ‘You don’t think he’s killed her, do you?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know what to think,’ Thackeray said. ‘But we need to find her.’

‘This shouldn’t have happened, should it?’ Laura asked, angry again now. ‘It really shouldn’t have happened. If you’d given Julie and Anna more protection, if you’d arrested Holden when he was making all those threats, if the police in Blackpool had bothered to find them when they were holed up there…You all had so many opportunities and they were
all wasted. It’s low priority stuff, still, isn’t it? Domestic violence? Low level, low priority, even though it’s well known that men who bash up their wives are likely to hurt their children as well. Kill them even…’ Laura stopped suddenly and Thackeray froze.

‘Is that what you’re afraid of?’ she whispered.

Thackeray stood up abruptly, policeman, not lover, suddenly.

‘I want you to go down to HQ and make a full statement about everything that’s happened this morning. Someone will be waiting to look after you. I’ll tell them you’re coming. I have a search for a missing child to supervise.’

Laura stood up too, and straightened her clothes, glancing in distaste at the faint spray of blood on her shirt sleeve.

‘I’ll go home and change first,’ she said, her voice
matter-of
-fact. ‘Will I see you later?’

Thackeray shrugged, and Laura turned away without another word and left the house, where the SOCOs were now busy in the blood-splattered kitchen.

Sandra Wright wriggled in embarrassment as she faced Sergeant Kevin Mower across her desk at the travel agency where Faria Aziz had worked.

‘A boyfriend?’ she said. ‘She never said anything about a boyfriend. I didn’t think that was allowed for Muslims. They’re a bit strict, aren’t they, about that sort of thing? Playing away?’

‘It wouldn’t be something she would want widely known,’ Mower said dryly. ‘But we have some evidence for it. She gave you no hint?’

‘No way,’ Sandra said. ‘I’m amazed actually.’

Mower sighed. His ears were still ringing from a
tongue-lashing
Thackeray had doled out earlier when he realised that the statements which had been taken from Faria’s colleagues did not include one from her boss, Mark Harman, the manager of the agency. Mower had been dispatched to Milford to fill in the gap, only to find that once again he was not at his desk.

‘Did Mr Harman say when he would be back?’ he asked Sandra. ‘I really need to see him.’

Sandra flashed a glance at her colleague Damien at the other end of the counter.

‘He’s been out a lot lately. You don’t think he…’

‘I don’t think anything,’ Mower said sharply. ‘It’s just that he was out the last time we came and I need to catch up with him in case he can add anything to what we know about Faria.’

‘Here he is now,’ Damien said as the door opened and a tall young man in his thirties, with an anxious-looking, pale face but fashionably cropped fair hair and a sharp suit, came in.

‘Can I help?’ he asked, pleasantly enough, though when Mower introduced himself his face fell and Mower thought he saw a flicker of fear in his eyes.

‘You’d better come into my office,’ he said, leading the way into a small room at the back of the premises, and closing the door firmly behind him on his staff. ‘I suppose you’re here about Faria. I was devastated, you know? Absolutely devastated.’ He took off his coat and sat down behind his desk, but did not seem to know what to do with his hands as he waited for Mower to continue. In the end he settled for pushing his chair back and hiding his hands in his pockets.

‘Was she a good employee, Mr Harman? Reliable, all that?’ Mower asked, sure that he had hit gold here.

‘Absolutely,’ Harman said enthusiastically, as if let off a particularly unpleasant hook. ‘She was an excellent employee, very useful in an area like this because she spoke Asian languages, you know? Very good for some of our clients…They fly back to…wherever they came from a lot, for holidays and weddings and all that.’ But Mower was impatient to get to the nub of the matter.

‘Did she discuss her private life with you at all?’ he asked
sharply. ‘Her family life? Did she tell you, for instance, that she was pregnant and presumably might be leaving her job, at least for a time?’

Harman hesitated for a moment and Mower watched impassively as a red flush spread from his neck to suffuse his face. This was not a man who would ever be able to hide his feelings easily, the sergeant thought happily, and Harman seemed to realise just how clearly he had given himself away.

‘Sandra’s been chattering, has she? I did wonder if she guessed. Some women seem to have a sixth sense for these sorts of things, don’t they? I knew I should come to see you but…’ He shrugged. ‘My family wouldn’t have liked it if they’d known. They’re not BNP or anything, but they wouldn’t have liked it. And…’

‘And?’ Mower prompted.

‘I was scared, if you must know. I was scared of her family finding out. Right from the beginning, but even more when she disappeared. I expected her husband or her father to come storming through that door. You hear things about them, don’t you? Muslims, I mean, especially where woman are concerned. She was a married woman, though she said she wanted a divorce. The marriage was no good…’ He trailed off miserably.

‘You were having an affair with Faria Aziz?’ Mower said flatly, and the other man nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘For the last six months or so. I was crazy about her. We loved each other. I’m not ashamed of that.’

‘There’s no reason why you should be, Mr Harman, but I’m not sure my boss will be very pleased to hear you’ve been concealing vital information in a murder inquiry.’

‘It was all concealed,’ Harman came back angrily. ‘She was
terrified of it coming out because of what her family’s reaction would be. Then, when she got pregnant, she said she would get a divorce. Definitely.’

‘You assumed the baby was yours?’

‘Oh, yes. She said she wasn’t sleeping with her husband. She said her husband had never wanted to sleep with her, though I took that with a pinch of salt. I thought she was trying to please me, you know? Though when I think back…’ He hesitated. ‘I think she maybe was a virgin. It could have been her first time when we first slept together. I wasn’t sure. She was very…modest in what she did. I liked that. It made a change from the little slags you meet on a Friday night. But if that’s really true, her husband must have known the baby wasn’t his.’

‘A DNA test will establish the paternity of the baby,’ Mower said. ‘We would have tracked you down in the end that way.’

‘I’m sure you would. I don’t mind. I loved her very much and I want you to find out who killed her. I’ll help you any way I can.’

‘Do you know if she told her husband she was pregnant?’

‘I don’t think so. The only people she confided in were her sisters. I never met them but I know they were very close to Faria. It was the men in her family she was afraid of. They still seemed to think they were living in some medieval village in Pakistan, rather than Yorkshire in the twenty first century. The men in her family, the men at the mosque. It’s bizarre the way they carry on.’

‘Did you know her husband was gay?’ Mower asked.

‘Gay?’ Harman sounded genuinely surprised. ‘Faria never told me that. She just thought…well, I don’t know what she
thought. She said the marriage had been arranged for family reasons and I think she just thought he didn’t fancy her. He was much older than she was. At first, when she started telling me things when we were on our own here in the office, I just felt sorry for her. But things developed from there.’

‘She must have been afraid of being seen with you,’ Mower said.

‘We spent most of our time at my place. I’ve got a cottage out at Broadley. We went there mostly. Or if we wanted to do anything else, we went to Leeds. We took great care not to be seen in Milford or Bradfield. Neither of us wanted that.’

‘I’ll have to ask you to come to police headquarters to make a full statement about all this, and answer more questions,’ Mower said. ‘You’ve seriously hindered our inquiry by not coming forward before and you need to understand that we’ll be checking out everything you tell us.’

Harman flushed again.

‘You can’t imagine that I could have harmed her,’ he said, his voice shrill. ‘You can’t imagine that.’

‘I don’t imagine anything, Mr Harman, but I assure you we’ll want to be certain that you’re telling us the truth now we’ve found you. We won’t be taking anything on trust.’

‘Do you believe him?’ Thackeray asked Mower when he reported back on Mark Harman’s statement, which he had completed after a couple of gruelling hours in an interview room.

‘I think so,’ Mower said. ‘He’s given us a DNA sample voluntarily to check the paternity of the baby. He seems genuinely shocked and upset by what’s happened and there doesn’t seem to be any reason why he should have killed her.’

‘But no shortage of motive now for either the husband or the father to have taken exception to what Faria had been up to. That’s clear enough. It all comes down to who knew she was pregnant and exactly when they found out.’

‘And who knew Aziz was unlikely to have been the father,’ Mower added.

‘Well, the fact that he was gay seems to have become fairly common knowledge at the mosque in Milford, and it was not very popular with some of the worshippers there, so it’s not impossible the news got back to Bradfield on the grapevine some time ago. Have we traced the previous imam in Milford?’

‘He’s in Pakistan,’ Mower said. ‘Visiting his family. He’s an old man, so that’s not an unlikely story.’

‘Right. I’ll talk to the super about liaising with the police in Pakistan. We need to check out what Sharif uncovered there, and ask them if they can trace our imam from Milford and see exactly what he knew about Aziz, who he told, and what, if anything, the young militants at the mosque might have thought to do about it, if anything. Meanwhile, keep up the hunt for Aziz – dead or alive.’

‘Guv,’ Mower said.

‘Any news on the Holden child?’

‘Not yet,’ Mower said. ‘We’ve not traced the father’s
four-by
-four, which is odd. He must have got to the house somehow. Mrs Holden’s still at the infirmary under observation. Not fit to be questioned, they say. I thought I would go up to her mother-in-law’s place to see if she’s had any contact with Holden since he left Blackpool. It’s a bit unlikely after what he did to her before he buggered off, but she might have some ideas that would help.’

‘Good idea,’ Thackeray said. ‘I hope to God we’re not looking for another body. We’ll be pilloried again for not taking domestic violence seriously enough, even if Julie Holden does get away with pleading provocation. Laura’s already threatening to crucify us in the
Gazette
, as it is. She says she’s sure Holden would have killed Julie if she hadn’t grabbed a knife herself.’ The memory of Laura’s anger when he had seen her briefly at the Holdens’ house still felt raw.

‘She’ll say that in court, will she? You two must have some interesting exchanges of view around the fireside,’ Mower said lightly, and was shaken by how quickly Thackeray’s expression changed to a mask of fury, quickly suppressed.

‘Thank you, Sergeant,’ he snapped, and Mower turned and left without a word. There was something very wrong there, he thought, as he went back to his desk to pick up his coat. And it did not seem to be getting any better.

Sergeant Mower parked outside Vanessa Holden’s neat Victorian house and glanced up at the façade. It was a dark afternoon, drizzling with rain, but there was no sign of any lights inside, and when he unlatched the gate he noticed that there was still a bottle of milk on the doorstep and a morning paper, soggily wet, protruding from the letterbox. Feeling anxious now, he knocked on the door, but no one responded. Glancing around, he noticed the curtains at the baywindow of the next door house twitching slightly. Nosy neighbours, the policeman’s best friend, he thought with a faint smile, and sure enough, as soon as he opened the next door gate, the front door was flung open and an elderly woman, warmly clad but wearing her slippers, squinted out at him.

‘I’m looking for Mrs Holden,’ he said conversationally. ‘Is
she away, do you know? Her milk’s still on the step.’

‘I’ve not seen her for a day or two,’ the neighbour said. ‘
He
were here the other day, though. The son, Bruce. I thought he’d left after what he did to her before, but he were back with the little lass for a while. I’d not have let him in the door if he were my son.’

‘When did he leave?’ Mower asked. ‘Did you see him go?’

‘No,’ the neighbour said. ‘I didn’t notice him leave. D’you think there’s summat up? D’you think we should call the police?’

‘I am the police,’ Mower said grimly, flashing his warrant card. ‘You don’t happen to have a spare key to Mrs Holden’s house, do you?’

‘I do,’ the neighbour said, more cheerful now. ‘I have hers, and she has mine. At our age you never know, do you? Summat can go wrong.’

‘Would you open the door for me?’ Mower asked. The woman agreed and bustled off, coming back with her shoes on, and a thick coat round her shoulders, to lead an increasingly impatient Mower back to her neighbour’s front door. She picked up the milk.

‘I’ll put it in her fridge,’ she said, as she inserted the key into the lock.

The narrow hallway smelt slightly musty and all the internal doors were closed, but there was nothing to spark a panic in Mower’s suspicious mind. One by one, he opened the doors, and inspected a neat and tidy front room, a kitchen where a modest amount of washing-up lay drying on the draining board, before going upstairs and repeating the process to discover two empty bedrooms and a bathroom where the bath and basin looked dry and unused.

‘She’s not here,’ he said unnecessarily to Vanessa Holden’s neighbour, who was waiting for him in the hall. He felt massively relieved not to discover Vanessa’s body, or worse, that of her granddaughter, decomposing in the house. ‘Did she not mention that she might be going away?’

‘She didn’t,’ her neighbour said, with faint disapproval in her voice. ‘She usually lets me know. Asks me to keep an eye out, you know. There’s so many little yobs about these days.’

Mower went back into the kitchen and tried the back door. It was locked on the inside.

‘Where does that door lead?’ he asked, seeing a further door at the side of the kitchen for the first time.

‘Down to the cellar. All these houses have an old
wash-cellar
down below, and a coal-hole. The young couples are opening them up and modernising them for extra space, but I’ve never bothered and I don’t think Vanessa has either.’

Mower tried the door handle only to find again that the door was locked, but this time there was no key in the lock.

‘She’ll not be there in a locked cellar, will she?’ the neighbour asked. ‘Stands to reason.’

‘Sssh,’ Mower said urgently. ‘I thought I heard something.’ He banged on the door and shouted against the wood panel.

‘Hello. Is there anyone there?’

This time a voice responded, young and faint, and Mower, with a huge sense of relief, knew that the DCI’s worst nightmare had not come to pass this time.

‘Is that you, Anna?’ he shouted. ‘Do you have a key?’

‘No, no. Let us out please. Please, please let us out.’

Mower glanced round the kitchen angrily, looking for something with which to force the lock, and when nothing obvious presented itself, he took several paces back from
the door and charged it with his shoulder. After a couple of attempts the elderly door gave way and he almost toppled down the stone steps into the smelly, gloomy depths below. Grabbing the door frame just in time, he steadied himself and tried the light switch, without effect, before going down circumspectly in the dim light. At the foot of the steps he found the girl he recognised as Anna Holden waiting for him, clutching a blanket around herself and shivering uncontrollably.