Death in a Far Country (4 page)

‘It’s not just me. The fans are grumbling too,’ Holloway said defensively. ‘They don’t like it. They’ve not got much time for political correctness on the terraces. They liked old Sam Heywood. He was one of them, in spite of his brass. But a public relations woman from London? Who’s not been to a match in years? They just think she’s having a laugh.’

‘Well, I daresay the Chelsea game will fill me in,’ Laura said. ‘Jenna’s invited me into the directors’ box to see the game. I’ve never been to a football match before. It’ll be a new experience.’

Holloway looked at her for a moment in apparent disbelief, his lips a perfect O of surprise in his rounded face.

‘She’s invited you to the Chelsea game? A lot of people would sell their grandmothers for a ticket for Saturday.’

Laura smiled sweetly.

‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘I don’t think I’m taking any fan’s ticket as a guest of Jenna’s. And who else would I support?’ She was surprised to recognise just how much she and Jenna Heywood had in common in their unfashionable tendency to stick to Bradfield in spite of the temptations to play on a bigger stage.

‘If these clubs are going to survive at all, she reckons that you need to attract women and families to become fans. And some of the ethnic minorities. You can’t rely on elderly white men
in cloth caps any more. There aren’t enough of them left, are there?’ Laura knew that such sentiments were often regarded as sacrilegious in the context of United, although she was equally sure that Tony Holloway, who was not stupid, recognised the truth of them. If something dramatic was not done at the club, it would continue its long slow decline into oblivion, in spite of the current season’s unexpected Cup success. And that, too, would in all likelihood dribble away into the sand this coming Saturday afternoon when the poor bloody infantry of Bradfield faced the stratospherically expensive guided missiles from Stamford Bridge. As Jenna had admitted – not for quoting, of course – it would probably be a massacre.

‘What’s all this about some millionaire property developer being interested in buying the club, anyway? You haven’t written about that, have you?’ Laura asked.

Holloway shrugged and looked uncomfortable.

‘She knows about that, does she?’

‘No, I don’t think she’s heard more than the odd rumour,’ Laura said. ‘She was asking me about it, thinking that I would know. What’s it about, another Russian billionaire like the one who bought Chelsea or what?’

‘We should be so lucky. But it is just a rumour,’ Holloway said. ‘I’ve not been able to make it stand up as a story, though stranger things have happened. Football clubs are getting a bit like trophy wives – something every self-respecting millionaire wants to spend his money on. Worse things could happen to United.’

‘Just as long as it’s the football club he’s interested in and not just the property for redevelopment. That’s what Jenna says she’s afraid of.’

‘You’re not putting anything about that in your piece, are you? Ted Grant’ll think I’m falling down on my job if you do.’

‘No, I wasn’t planning to. I was concentrating on the personal in this piece. I’ll leave the financial skulduggery to you.’

‘You obviously got on well with our Jenna, then?’

‘Yes, I did actually,’ Laura said with a smile. ‘I liked her. She seems to know what she wants and she’s not going to be put off by unreconstructed Yorkshiremen who still think women should only speak when they’re spoken to. I don’t know much about football but I do recognise a breath of fresh air when it hits me. I think you’re going to be in for an interesting few months on the sports pages, Tony. I really do.’

When she had finally finished her feature and received Ted Grant’s grudging grunt of approval, Laura took a detour to see her grandmother on her way home. Joyce Ackroyd still lived in one of the old people’s bungalows on the edge of The Heights, always known locally as Wuthering, one of Bradfield’s most notorious estates where the tower blocks were at last in the process of redevelopment. Apparently unfazed by the noise and dust as she watched the blocks of flats she had helped to plan as a young town councillor come down, Joyce Ackroyd was proving very reluctant to move away to any quieter corner of the town that Laura suggested.

She came to the door slowly, reliant on a walking frame now for her arthritic hips and knees, but delighted as always to see the granddaughter who had inherited her once red hair and more than a little of her fiery temperament.

‘You look tired, love,’ Joyce said sharply when Laura had made them both tea and settled in her tiny living room.
‘How’s that man of yours? Is he better now?’

‘More or less,’ Laura said cautiously. She knew Joyce had always harboured reservations about her relationship with what she called ‘her policeman’. ‘He’s back at work, though I’m not sure he should be.’

‘You both work too hard,’ Joyce said. ‘How are you ever going to…’ Joyce hesitated, with unusual tact though Laura knew well enough how she had intended to end the sentence.

‘Don’t go there, Nan,’ Laura said. ‘It’s all a bit fragile. Anyway, I didn’t come up to talk about my love life, such as it is. I came to ask you about Dad.’

‘Ha,’ Joyce said. She had recently returned from a holiday with her only son, Laura’s father, and had been succinct in her criticisms of an ex-pat lifestyle in Portugal, which she regarded as self-indulgent and futile. ‘Next thing you know he’ll be back in England,’ she said. ‘He’s in a panic over this drought and the forest fires they’ve been having in Portugal, reckons the place won’t be worth living in if he can’t fill his swimming pool and play on a nicely watered golf course.’

‘I wouldn’t bank on it being any better here in a few years’ time, the way things are going,’ Laura said. ‘Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to ask you. What I’m interested in is Dad and Sam Heywood. Weren’t they big mates at one time? I seem to remember meeting Sam at home once or twice, a long time ago, when he first took over United and they did quite well for a bit. I don’t remember Dad having any interest in football, but Sam was one of the local wheelers and dealers and Dad never let one of them pass him by.’

‘I think he had some shares in the club at one time,’ Joyce said slowly. ‘I’ve no idea if he still has. He wouldn’t tell me
owt like that. But if he thought he could make a bob or two he’d be in there like a flash. And that time United got into the second division and won that Cup – what was it? The Milk Cup? I think that’s when he was making up to Sam Heywood, jumping on his bandwagon, was even a director of the club for a while. As he would be if it looked like yielding a profit.’ Joyce’s incomprehension of her successful businessman son’s money-making activities masked one of the major disappointments of her life. She had put her only son, whom she had brought up as a widow, down to become the socialist prime minister she would have liked to have been herself but, as sons do, Jack had gone his own way and made a fortune in business and broken his mother’s heart. Joyce looked forlorn for a second.

‘I don’t remember all the details, love,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to ask him yourself.’

‘I might do that,’ Laura said. ‘As I hear it, there’s a few predators circling United, aiming to buy Jenna Heywood out.’

‘Oh, well, your dad’ll be interested in that,’ Joyce said. ‘If he’s still got any shares and there’s money to be made out of them, he’ll be in there like Jack Flash.’

Michael Thackeray parked his car outside the Victorian stone house where he shared the ground-floor flat with Laura Ackroyd and sat for a moment after he had switched off the engine, going over an exhausting and unsatisfactory day in his mind. As he had supervised that afternoon’s briefing of his detectives he had felt somehow detached, as the well-oiled wheels of a murder investigation had rolled into motion once more. Evidence, such as it was, had been reviewed, lines of inquiry delineated and tasks allocated, but while the rest of the team had seemed well-focused, he had found his mind only half on the matter in hand, and it was only partly because the supposedly healed wound close to his spine had begun to throb with an intensity he was becoming all too familiar with.

The months he had been off work had distanced him from the day-to-day routine of CID and he was not finding it nearly as easy as he had expected to take up where he had left off. He was desperately tired tonight, as he often was these days, but he knew that the malaise which afflicted him was not simply, or even mainly, physical. The surgeons at the infirmary, he thought, had saved his life three months ago, for which he could only be grateful. But they had left him facing this intermittent fierce pain, a confusion of emotions that he
had hardly begun to come to terms with and, worst of all perhaps, a sense of futility rooted in the knowledge that so often his best efforts could not stave off disaster of the most brutal kind.

It had not been the first time Laura had put herself in danger, but it was the first time he had felt impelled to throw away years of professional training and his own natural caution to put himself so comprehensively in the way of harm on her behalf. He knew that the formal inquiry into the mayhem that day would probe that impulsive moment remorselessly and, when it came to it, he would be very reluctant indeed to admit that he had done the wrong thing, that he had taken an unacceptable risk, that he should have left Laura as a helpless hostage until back-up arrived. Would the outcome have been any different if he had acted in some other way, he had asked himself relentlessly ever since that night. He would probably have escaped injury himself, but the rest of the night’s events would probably still have played out with the terrifying logic of a Greek tragedy. He did not think that any life that was lost could, with any certainty, have been saved if he had taken another track. He just hoped he could convince the inquiry of that. And that eventually he could convince himself.

But what filled him with anxiety even more than his own situation was the knowledge that Laura would be interrogated too. Information which should not have reached the newspapers had leaked out from the police inquiry, with tragic consequences, and she had played a part in that disaster. Thackeray believed her role had been innocent, but he was not so sure his senior colleagues would come to that conclusion. He did not think that Laura really understood
how culpable she might seem to the members of the inquiry, nor how unpleasant their conclusions might be for her.

Thackeray shook himself irritably and slammed the car door behind him with some force before making his way to the flat. He found Laura in the kitchen stirring something in a large pan. He took off his coat and came up behind her quietly, put his arms round her waist and kissed her on the neck.

‘That smells good,’ he said.

‘A bit exotic, maybe?’ Laura said. ‘Risotto? Can you bear that?’ Thackeray’s stolid preference for traditional British food had become a joke between them.

‘Foreign muck again? What’s wrong with meat and two veg?’ he mocked her gently.

‘Boring, is what’s wrong with that,’ Laura said firmly. ‘This is mainly for you, as it goes. I’m not very hungry. I had a very nice lunch at that country club up at West Royd with the new football impresario, Jenna Heywood. She’s invited me to go and see the big match on Saturday afternoon. You don’t mind, do you?’

‘I dare say I’ll be busy. I have this unidentified black girl lying in the morgue.’

‘Ah, yes,’ Laura said quietly. ‘I’d forgotten about her.’ She turned to Thackeray, putting down her wooden spoon and looking into his blue eyes. They had discussed this moment interminably while Thackeray had been off work, but never reached any conclusion. He had been determined to get back to work as quickly as he could, and nothing she had said about less stressful alternatives had moved him in any way.

‘Another murder,’ she said. ‘This is the crunch, isn’t it? Can
you cope with another murder?’

Thackeray did not answer immediately. He turned back into the living room and slumped into an armchair, his expression unreadable. Laura followed him and sat on the arm of his chair, one hand touching his shoulder gently.

‘Well?’ she said. ‘Can you? Are you sure?’

‘They say you should get back on a horse immediately after you’ve fallen off,’ Thackeray said slowly. ‘I didn’t have the chance to do that, did I? Perhaps I won’t be able to manage it now. We’ll have to wait and see.’ He could barely admit to himself, and certainly never to Laura, how close he sometimes felt these days to disintegration. The pain in his back jabbed viciously and he turned his face away so that she could not see him wince.

‘Who is she, this girl?’ Laura asked.

‘We still don’t know. She was very young. She was pregnant. And she was black. That’s it, so far. There’ll be a picture for the
Gazette
tomorrow morning, an artist’s impression, so we’re hoping someone will identify her from that.’

‘Nobody’s reported her missing?’

‘Nobody.’

Laura shivered.

‘How awful,’ she said. ‘Where’s the boyfriend? The baby must have a father somewhere.’

‘She may not have known herself that she was pregnant, Amos Atherton says. So the boyfriend, husband, whoever, certainly may not have been aware.’ He shook his head irritably. ‘Come on, Laura. Let’s leave all that and taste this Italian concoction you’ve cooked up. I’m sure it’ll be delicious. And you can tell me all about your football woman. How’s
she going to survive among all those testosterone-fuelled blokes? It’ll be even harder than in the police force, won’t it? All those highly paid lads in love with themselves. Will she love it, or will they gobble her up and spit out the pips?’

Laura laughed, although she could see from the strain around Thackeray’s eyes that this attempt at cheerful normality was forced. ‘I don’t think anyone’s going to gobble Jenna Heywood up. She’s as tough as her father, I reckon, and that’s as tough as old boots – and a damn sight more attractive. Which reminds me. I saw Joyce on the way home and she thinks my father still has an interest in United. I’ll call him later and find out what he thinks. He’s far enough away not to be involved in any in-fighting that’s going on at Beck Lane.’

‘I wouldn’t bank on that,’ Thackeray said. ‘If I know Jack he’ll be in there scrapping with the best of them, particularly if there’s a hint of a profit involved.’

‘Jenna Heywood reckons that the only way to make a profit out of United would be to close the club down and sell off the land for redevelopment. She’s desperately trying to avoid that, and I’m not sure that even my dad would go along with such a drastic solution. I think he’s still got a bit of affection for poor old Bradfield United.’

Thackeray raised an eyebrow at that but said no more. A fiercely competitive rugby player as a boy and young man, he knew little of soccer and cared less, but was quite sure that if there were vultures gathering around the club, Jack Ackroyd could well be one of them. He had liked Jack on the couple of occasions he had met him briefly on his rare visits to the UK, but he did not underestimate his businessman’s edge, still keen
even after all these years in the sun. He did not think Jack had mellowed, and if he still had any financial stake in the club he would want it maximised.

‘I’ll call him after the match tomorrow, and tell him the result,’ Laura said. ‘He’ll be interested in that at least. Now let’s eat, shall we?’ She looked at Thackeray, slumped in his chair, and her heart tightened.

‘You look tired out,’ she said.

But he just shrugged as he got up to join her at the table. ‘I’m fine,’ he said. But they both knew that was a lie and when they went to bed later, Laura could see just how exhausted he was as his eyes closed almost as soon as his head hit the pillow. She put an arm round him, curling her body round his and aching for something more than the companionable hug he offered in return before he fell asleep, and she wondered where the downward slide that their relationship seemed to have entered would end.

Sergeant Kevin Mower walked up the hill to Bradfield University the next morning in a sour mood. He had the typical Londoner’s aversion to ever walking more than an urban block if he could avoid it, but the parking problems around the town’s academic quarter meant that even he had to accept that taking his car the half mile from police HQ to the university made no sense. He glanced up at the utilitarian modern blocks that towered over the Victorian technical college, from which the university had directly descended and grunted in recognition. It reminded him of the former polytechnic he had attended himself, and he knew it attracted the same degree of contempt from those who had attended
more prestigious institutions. But he knew the strength of these places, willing to offer those, like himself, from troubled or poverty-stricken backgrounds, the chance to succeed at something for the first time and, as he pushed his way through a polyglot and multiracial crowd of students milling about the entrances, he smiled faintly. He felt at home here.

But his inquiries were frustrating. Without a name to attach to the artist’s impression of the dead girl, the registry officials could do no more than promise to circulate copies of the picture to all their departments, which kept photographs of their own students. They would let him know, they promised, if any members of staff recognised the girl as one of theirs. And the students’ union was little more help. The young black woman in charge of the union office readily agreed to put copies of the sketch on the noticeboards and ask people to get in touch with the police if they thought they knew her. But she gazed at the picture for a long moment, her expression troubled.

‘If she was a student here, I’d probably know her,’ she said. ‘There are not so many black students here. More Asians, obviously, in this part of the world.’

‘Do you reckon she’s African or Caribbean?’ Mower asked. ‘Can you tell?’

‘I’d say African, though I wouldn’t be sure. She looks very like a friend of mine from Sierra Leone. But younger. In fact, she looks too young to be here at all, really. Most overseas students are a bit older, you know? Especially the Africans. They take extra time to learn English or retake their A Levels. Quite often they have children of their own. This looks more like a schoolgirl, don’t you think? She can’t be more than
seventeen. Are you sure she’s a student?’

‘We’re not sure of anything,’ Mower said. ‘Her picture will be in the evening paper this afternoon but we know students don’t often see that, so we need a more direct approach here.’

‘You could try the further education college. Some overseas students take English exams there before they apply to university.’

‘We’re circulating the drawing there too,’ Mower said shortly.

‘How was she killed?’ the girl asked.

‘She was attacked and pushed, or maybe fell, into the canal,’ Mower said.

‘Because she was black?’ the girl asked.

Mower hesitated for a moment before replying as the girl twisted her hands into a knot, the knuckles showing white.

‘We don’t know,’ he said at last. ‘We’ve no reason to think that, but we simply don’t know at this stage. Until we know who she is…’ He shrugged. ‘Is there much racism on the campus?’ he asked.

‘Since the London bombings we have all felt at risk if we’re not white,’ the girl said flatly. ‘We advise students – Asian and black students as well, some people don’t seem to make any distinction – not to go around the town on their own. We’ve got a leaflet we give them when they arrive. You should know what it’s like. We’re all under siege if our skin’s the wrong colour.’

‘I can imagine,’ Mower said. ‘The registry didn’t tell me any of this, though.’

‘They wouldn’t, would they? Their priority is protecting their precious image. This place relies heavily on overseas
students. If they stop coming, it might have to close down.’

‘You’ll put as many copies of the picture and the police phone number up as you can, then?’

‘Of course,’ the girl said. ‘I hope you catch the bastards that did it.’

‘We will,’ Mower said. ‘Believe me, we will.’

The young woman hesitated for a moment as Mower turned away.

‘You could try the churches and mosques,’ she said. ‘Most Africans are more religious than the white population. So are West Indians, come to that. But remember, if she comes from West Africa she could be a Christian or a Muslim.’

‘Good idea,’ Mower said. ‘Thanks for that.’

The Sergeant made his way back onto the street feeling more depressed than when he had come in and with none of the confidence with which he had tried to reassure the young woman he had just left. The hilly street outside was buzzing with young people of all races, chattering excitedly in the pale sunshine, but he knew that this was not typical of Bradfield as a whole. Londoners might talk complacently about their harmonious multiracial society but in some of these northern towns different groups kept themselves more clannishly to themselves, and since the bloody arrival of Al Qaeda-inspired terrorism in Britain, suspicion had burgeoned and racist incidents had spiralled almost out of control. There were hundreds of thousands of second- and third-generation immigrants in this part of the world, he thought, and it took only a handful of fanatics from Leeds to jeopardise years of patient work towards racial harmony. He hoped that the girl whose picture he was distributing did not turn out to be the
victim of a racially motivated crime, but he knew it couldn’t be ruled out, and the thought made him angry. He was dark-complexioned enough himself, the son of a Cypriot father he had never known, to have felt the lash of racist abuse more than once in his career. It was not pleasant, and as far as he could see it was as far from being rooted out as ever.