Sins of the Fathers

Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
About the Author
By Patricia Hall
Copyright

The boy could not understand why it had all turned out so badly. But he was old and wise enough to have known immediately that the appearance of a gun on a morning’s outing over the moors was a threat, not a joke, although his father still seemed to be smiling, a fierce, rigid sort of smile that was in no way reassuring. That sort of gun anyway was never a joke, never just a bit of fun, as his dad might say when things got a bit out of hand; that sort of gun was not for shooting rabbits. No way. And that was not the first thing which had gone wrong and filled him with dread since he had been picked up as he had dawdled down the road to school, more than usually reluctant to go because his sister had been allowed to stay at home with what she claimed was a bad cold, more likely a test today, really, he’d thought.

The snow had come on suddenly soon after they had set off, rattling icy flurries against the windows at first, rolling and bouncing across the road in front of them even as the sky turned from grey to almost black. Within ten minutes it was nearly impossible to see out of the windows, the wipers struggling to keep even a narrow triangle of the screen clear. They slowed down as the demarcation between the edge of the road and the edge of the moor became blurred and then disappeared completely. He had
pressed his face against the cold glass, misting it up with his breath and then wiping the mist off with a red woollen glove, and he had realised that there were striped poles at intervals along the edge of the road, marking out the way, but they were swinging wildly by then as the tyres struggled to keep their grip.

The boy’s panic grew as eventually they slid to a halt, wheels whining, nose down close to one of the poles where the front had found an ice filled ditch rather than solid ground and, for a moment, he thought they would tip right over and he clung to the seat in front, trying not to scream. Outside he could see nothing but the whirling white flakes, a dancing blanket which seemed to suffocate the vehicle, allowing little light into the interior. Inside he felt sick and his breath seemed to come in small pants as he concentrated on the outside world, trying not to look over the seats into the front of the car where he knew there was nothing but danger and some sort of madness. He could feel it like a vice around his chest.

Cautiously, making no sound, he took hold of the door handle and pulled. There was a shout from behind him and then the stunning reverberation of a shot in a confined space but he had already fallen headfirst into the soft wet snow as soon as the door swung open and he felt nothing as he staggered to his feet, his boots scrabbling and sliding for a purchase in the ditch and up the other side. He heard more shots behind him but nothing hit him and he realised that he must have become almost invisible as soon as he moved a couple of feet into the whirling storm. He glanced down at his anorak and saw that he was already white from head to foot, like a snowman, he thought, momentarily delighted at the thought, before the terror overtook him again.

Behind him he could still hear a voice shouting. Terrified, he ignored it, plodding on through the deepening snow and still visible tussocks of grass until finally he could hear nothing at all except the wind which was already whipping up small drifts. I’m like one of those explorers in the arctic, he thought, but not optimistically. The snow had already worked its way into his wellington boots and his feet were beginning to feel very cold. His anorak hood was little protection from the gusty squalls and his ears tingled at first, and then began to stab him intensely. He knew that he needed somewhere to shelter, and he knew that shelter would be difficult to find up here, and he began to cry.

He never knew how long he struggled across the moor, shivering and sobbing, his tears turning to ice which clung to his cheeks. He had no watch, and after what seemed like hours he stumbled and came to rest in the lee of a
half-demolished
drystone wall where the snow provided a soft enough resting place for him to begin to relax as numbness succeeded the fierce pain in his feet and hands and ears. He no longer had the strength to get back to his feet. Someone would find him there, he thought. Someone would come.

Half asleep, curled up with his arms round his knees in search of warmth he couldn’t find, his mind wandered. Funny to be lying here in so much snow, he thought. It was almost like the sand at Guincho, deep and soft and slippery, but cold and wet while the sand had been too hot to walk across to the sea. His father had been good then, enjoying the sunshine and taking him into the waves and jumping him over them in strong arms, the spray catching him harmlessly and making him scream in a frenzied mixture of fear and delight. Dad had been different then. Dad had been fun. None of this would have happened then.

He closed his eyes and felt the snowflakes settle on the lids, but he could no longer find the energy to brush them off. He could not find the energy for anything any more. In spite of everything, he hoped his dad would come and fetch him soon. Perhaps then everything would be all right and they could go back to the hot sun and the thundering, shimmering sea and the burning sand. That’s what he would like to happen, he thought, as he drifted into sleep beneath the deepening blanket of snow. He would like to see the sun, and the foaming waves and the golden sand again…

DCI Michael Thackeray pulled on the regulation plastic overalls he was required to wear before venturing into a crime scene with an expression of distaste. He knew he should not admit it, even to himself, but he found himself increasingly reluctant to become a voyeur of death. You didn’t become more inured to it. In fact, he had found the reverse to be true, although he had undoubtedly become more expert at hiding his feelings when he faced the constant reminders of mortality, often bloody and frequently stomach-churning, which his career provided. Flurries of snow whipped around his legs and shoulders, sliding off the white plastic but clinging to dark hair and eyebrows and beginning to settle quickly on the frozen ground. Behind them the hills had disappeared beneath heavy clouds, rolling in fast from the north. It would not be long, he thought, before they were enveloped in the blizzard which seemed already to be raging across most of the Pennine hills.

Thackeray glanced at Sergeant Kevin Mower, who was tying plastic overshoes over his smart city loafers. From what they had been told before they had driven from police
headquarters to this cottage at the very farthest edge of Bradfield, he knew that this particular catastrophe would test his stomach and his ability to disguise his feelings to the limit. Even as he pulled up his hood, two anxious looking paramedics appeared from round the side of the cottage carrying a stretcher and the inert form which lay on it, already attached to a drip, was painfully small. Children had been hurt here, or worse, and he found that the hardest thing of all to bear.

‘Right?’ he asked Mower brusquely, and together they moved through the cluster of parked police cars, past the ambulance and into the narrow doorway of the cottage to be met by the grim-looking scene-of-crime officer.

‘How many?’ Thackeray asked, his mouth dry.

‘Three,’ the SOCO said. ‘Woman and a child dead, another child as near as dammit. All shot.’

Kevin Mower whistled faintly between his teeth.

‘Weapon?’ Thackeray asked, but the SOCO shook his head, his eyes shadowed and unreadable beneath the plastic hood. Everyone, Thackeray thought, was put through the wringer by this sort of case, and he knew his own vulnerability only too well.

‘No sign,’ the SOCO said. ‘But it’s a pistol job, not a shotgun as you might have expected out here. An automatic – we’ve found cartridge cases. It’s slightly less messy than a shotgun, but not much.’ He smiled mirthlessly.

‘No sign of the perpetrator, then? Not hanging up in the garage, by any chance?’ Mower asked, his voice deceptively casual though his eyes were as bleak as Thackeray’s. ‘That’s the usual scenario.’

‘Uniform have done a thorough search of the property,’ the SOCO said, not smiling. ‘It looks as if the bloke
worked here as a mechanic of some sort. There are workshops at the back, but no one there, no car, no gun, certainly no suicide. Zilch. Whoever’s responsible for this has scarpered, and probably a while ago. The pathologist hasn’t arrived yet but the bodies are pretty cool already.’

‘Not surprised, in this bloody weather,’ Mower said, glancing at the leaden sky outside the front door with a city man’s deep mistrust.

‘They’ve been forecasting heavy snow for days,’ the SOCO said.

‘We’ll take a look now,’ Thackeray said, knowing his voice was unusually strained and conscious of Mower’s eyes quickly flicking in his direction. ‘Let’s get it over with.’

They followed the SOCO into the main hallway, past the open door of what was obviously the living room, scantily furnished and scattered with toys, and into a kitchen which appeared to be an extension at the rear of the original stone structure of the cottage. But what had been a comfortable family room, the table still covered by a buttercup yellow cloth and a clutter of used dishes, had been turned into a charnel house. A woman who might once have been pretty lay sprawled on her back on the tiled floor, with a gaping wound where her left eye should have been and a pool of blood around her head and clotted in her untidy blonde hair. Closer to the door was the sight Thackeray had been dreading and which caused Mower too to take a sharp breath. A small child of perhaps three or four lay face down near the open door, as if she had been running not towards her mother, whose protection had probably already been beyond reach by then, but in a desperate attempt to escape the other way on still babyishly chubby legs from the fate threatening her from
behind. One small hand reached beyond the threshold, its fingers splayed on the doorstep, the other still clutched a small brown teddy bear drenched in blood. She had been shot more than once the observers guessed, her back reduced to a mass of bloodily clotted fabric, her blood spattered over the tiles and onto the kitchen cupboards closest to her remains.

‘Jesus wept,’ Mower muttered under his breath while Thackeray simply stood transfixed, his face ashen and his breath shallow as he swallowed down the nausea which threatened to overwhelm him and tried to banish the image of his own son, still as clear as the day when he had found him dead, back into the dark recesses of his mind.

‘What’s the betting it was her own fucking father,’ the SOCO said, his voice far too loud in the crowded space.

‘Where was the other child found?’ Thackeray asked sharply. ‘The one who survived?’

‘Outside,’ the scene of crime officer said. ‘She was hit in the back too, and another shot creased her head, from what I could see, but she seems to have dragged herself into one of the barns out there. The bastard seems to have gone completely berserk with the gun. I’ve counted six or seven bullets without even trying. Shall I show you?’

Thackeray nodded and the three men stepped over the small child’s body, all of them taking deep breaths of the bitterly cold air as if their lives depended on it as soon as they stepped outside. In one corner of the yard there was more blood in a viscous, half-frozen pool from which a smeared trail led into what was little more than a shed
half-filled
with workbenches and tools. The swirling snow was already beginning to soften the outlines of the yard, covering frozen mud and, quite possibly, vital evidence.

‘She was lucky to be found in time.’ The SOCO’s voice
was dispassionate. ‘Apparently she was semi-conscious when she was discovered by this bloke who came round looking for the father, Gordon Christie he’s called – the father that is. All this is from the first uniform on the scene. Christie had been doing some work on this bloke’s lawnmower and he turned up to fetch it about eleven this morning. Says he found the front door open and he went inside, poor sod. Found the kitchen the way you just saw it and staggered out here to be sick. Heard some moaning and found the surviving kid just over here. Had enough sense to dial 999 on his mobile. Lucky to get a connection, apparently.’ The SOCO glanced down at another rusty stain where blood had soaked into the dusty wooden floor of the shed.

‘Will she survive?’ Thackeray asked. ‘What did the ambulance crew say?’ He hoped neither of his colleagues would guess from the question just how fiercely he wanted the answer to be optimistic.

‘She was lucky not to have bled to death, they said. They weren’t holding their breath they’d even get her to hospital alive.’

Thackeray wearily ran a hand through his unruly dark hair. He felt cold and suddenly immensely tired as if the sheer weight of this outrage against an innocent family was crushing him from above. He closed his eyes briefly as he tried to steady his heart rate and re-order his disjointed thoughts.

‘So we’ve got a double murder, an attempted murder and a hundred to one a man who’s blown his own brains out somewhere not far away. Wonderful,’ he said. He turned away from the two younger men and walked slowly around the yard with his hood pushed back and the snow clinging to his dark hair, glancing into the various sheds
and outbuildings where Gordon Christie evidently pursued his trade. Then he made his way to the side gate and the narrow lane beyond where his car was parked close against the hedge. Mower followed quickly, catching up with his boss where he was leaning against the door of the car, apparently oblivious to the bitter cold and the thickening snowfall. Mower said nothing but his eyes were full of anxiety. He had lost a lover, and survived, just, but was still able to admit that to lose a child must be the worst death of all. And to lose a child and blame yourself for the death, as he knew Thackeray did, must be a hell he could barely imagine.

‘Set it all up, Kevin, will you?’ Thackeray asked, his voice weary and his expression unreadable. ‘You know what needs to be done – a statement from the man who found the bodies, a trawl of the neighbours to find out what you can about the family – and get a search under way. He won’t have gone far. They never do. But if we don’t find him before this weather closes right in it might be weeks before he turns up. Get the chopper out if you need to. You could lose an army of gunmen up here in a blizzard.’