Sins of the Fathers (3 page)

Thackeray looked at Mower for a moment.

‘What’s she suggesting? Lottery winners hiding from their family or what?’

‘She just seemed puzzled, that’s all. She didn’t seem to think that Gordon Christie could be earning enough from his business to keep five of them in the style they seemed to be living in. Good quality clothes for the kids, a long holiday in Spain last summer…people notice these things, don’t they?’

‘And this is quite a substantial house, as it goes,’ Thackeray said thoughtfully. ‘A bit run down but what –
four bedrooms? A big yard and garden behind. The way house prices are going it must have cost a bit.’

‘Dawn said it was on the market for £250,000.’

‘Right,’ Thackeray said. ‘You stay up here, Kevin, and go through the place for anything that fills in the gaps. I’ve got Val Ridley at the infirmary with the surviving child in case she regains consciousness.’

‘And the chances of that are…?’

‘Remote, apparently,’ Thackeray said, his face perfectly impassive. ‘In the meantime we’ve got the chopper quartering the moors again in case the Land Rover’s up there somewhere in the snow. What I need as top priority is the registration number of that vehicle. The DVLA can’t trace anything in Christie’s name, or Linda Christie’s, which is very odd. See if you can find the registration document and let me know. I’ll send Sharif up to help you as soon as he gets back from court.’

‘Right, guv,’ Mower said. ‘And you’ll be…?’

‘I’ll go to the post-mortem, for my sins, and then I’ve got a meeting with the super, who’s planning a Press conference this afternoon when he wants to expand on the fact that the son’s missing as well. That should get us some coverage in the national papers and TV. If Gordon Christie’s responsible for this mess I’ll not be too bothered if we find him dead in a ditch. It’s the boy I’m concerned about.’

There’s a surprise, Mower thought. Thackeray might think he was concealing his emotional involvement in this case, but to anyone who knew him as well as the sergeant did, Thackeray’s painful accommodation to the case was a clear as day.

Mower glanced around the room.

‘No photographs,’ he said. ‘Hang on a minute. I think
there’s something in the other room.’ But he returned holding only a single cardboard frame.

‘Just this. A school photo of the two older kids,’ he said. Thackeray took it off him and gazed at the two children, both blonde and blue eyed, the girl, shyly smiling at the camera, who was now lying fighting for her life in the infirmary and the boy, a couple of years younger and with a mischievous glint in his eyes, the son who had vanished with his father. He felt suddenly suffocated.

‘Let me know if you find any others. I’ll keep this for the Press conference,’ he muttered, striding quickly to the front door and brushing past the uniformed constable who was stamping his feet to keep them warm.

Mower watched him go. He had no children himself but he knew only too well what strong emotions they aroused in others. He hoped for Thackeray’s sake that this case would be resolved quickly before it shattered the iron resolve with which he normally led his life. But the cracks, he thought, were already beginning to show.

By lunch time Sergeant Mower and Detective Constable Mohammed Sharif – generally, and apparently happily, known as Omar – were sitting in the sitting room at Moor Edge surrounded by the meagre results of the morning’s close search of the Christie family’s lives. And nothing, they had concluded gloomily, gave them much inkling why Gordon Christie might have turned a powerful handgun on three members of his family and subsequently vanished with his son.

Mower shrugged and glanced down a checklist he had made in his notebook. Amongst the documents on the floor in neat piles was a log book for a Land Rover, which had apparently been registered in 1989, but of which the DVLA in Swansea could find no trace – not for Christie or any previous owner. As far as officialdom was concerned the Land Rover with the registration number on the document simply did not exist. There was also a series of unexceptionable bank statements dating back just under three years which revealed a steady but modest income stream, presumably from Christie’s repair business, but also with occasional and totally unexplained injections of large sums of cash.

‘Whoever he was, he was up to something dodgy,’ Mower said. ‘I thought the banks were supposed to be
watching out for unexplained cash payments but no one seems to have noticed this.’

‘I think it’s only sums over £10,000, sarge,’ Sharif said.

‘So maybe that’s why he’s been paid £9,000 a time, for whatever it is he was paid so generously for,’ Mower said.

‘Or maybe he’s only put that much into the bank at any one time,’ Sharif suggested. ‘After all, there is the money we found in the wardrobe.’ He glanced at a blue leather sportsbag stuffed with notes which they had found hidden behind Christie’s meagre selection of neatly stored clothes upstairs. The whole house, Mower had thought as they worked their way around it, had been preternaturally tidy, with a place for everything and everything in its place, even in the children’s bedrooms, where the toys and books and even the teddy bears were neatly marshalled into their allotted places. Someone, he concluded, had had this home in an iron grip.

‘You’d better count that lot before we go any further,’ Mower said, glancing at the bag. ‘We don’t want any allegations that a few hundred went walkabout.’ Sharif glanced at Mower with dark, unreadable eyes, as if unsure whether or not to be insulted by this remark, but he pulled a bundle of notes out of the bag anyway, and began to count.

‘I’ll call the boss and give him this registration number,’ Mower said, without much enthusiasm. ‘Though if the plates are false, Christie may have changed them for another set by now. If you can lay hands on one false set you can no doubt lay hands on another if you need them. And I’ll bring the DCI up to date on the rest of what we’ve found before we tackle the garage and the workshop. There’s no papers at all here for his business so I guess they must be out there somewhere. He’s obviously a meticulous
bastard, so he’ll have them filed away safely for sure.’

‘The other odd thing is that there’s no passports for any of them,’ Sharif said. ‘I thought you said they’d lived abroad.’

‘So the neighbour said,’ Mower said. ‘Damnation, we should have looked for a passport sooner. If he’s taken it with him we need to alert the ports. I’ll pass that on, too.’

Sharif glanced around the sitting room where they had displayed some meticulousness themselves in working through every drawer and cupboard but had left the place very obviously less tidy than it had been before they began, and he wondered, like most of his colleagues, at the mental explosion which must have led to the carnage of the previous day. He came from a community where fathers were known occasionally to turn their wrath on their children, on their daughters in particular, and he understood, though he did not condone, the motives for that. But this father’s terrible rage, this madness turned against small children, he did not understand at all. He hoped Gordon Christie was dead while hoping equally fervently that his son was out there somewhere and still alive. While Mower continued his phone discussion with headquarters he pulled the sportsbag towards him again and tipped the bundles of notes onto the floor and began to count again. They were used and dirty and he felt defiled.

Half an hour later they had moved out of the house and into Christie’s workshop at the back of the house, where the pool of blood in which his older daughter Emma had been found had been sprinkled with sand and the door closed. But when Mower opened it, he did not find what he expected. The previous day, when precedence had of necessity been given to the forensic examiners, he had
glanced briefly through the door and immediately taken on board the carefully ordered layout of the skilled craftsman: tools in racks, nuts and bolts and screws in their individual small cabinets, the workbenches tidy, the floor swept clear of debris, the rubbish binned and the small desk and filing cabinet in one corner clear of any sort of junk.

Mower took a deep breath as he surveyed what was inside and held an arm across the doorway to prevent Sharif from following him inside.

‘Go and get that woodentop off the front door,’ he said angrily. ‘Someone’s been in here before us.’ The workshop was no longer tidy. Paperwork was strewn on the floor around the desk, the drawers had been pulled out and turned upside down and several of the cupboards along the back wall also appeared to have been ransacked. What, if anything, had been taken would be almost impossible to know, Mower thought, and he knew that his fury at the carelessness which had allowed this to happen overnight would be nothing to Michael Thackeray’s.

Behind him he heard Sharif return and spun round to face the uniformed constable who followed him.

‘Were you on duty here overnight?’ he asked, his voice harsh. But the constable, his face boyish under the helmet, shook his head dumbly, his eyes anxious.

‘I came on at eight,’ he said. ‘I don’t think anyone was up here overnight, sarge. There was no one here when I was dropped off. The place was locked up, they told me. They just gave me the keys to the house.’ He dug into his trouser pocket and pulled out the bunch of keys which he had used earlier to open the front door for them.

‘Is there one for this door?’ Mower asked, gesturing at the workshop, but when they examined the keys carefully it was evident that there was not.

‘So this place was probably left unlocked all night?’ Mower curbed his anger, knowing it should be directed elsewhere. ‘Bloody marvellous. Why didn’t they put up a sign inviting the local burglars in? Did you check round here at all?’

The constable nodded.

‘I had a walk right round when I arrived,’ he said. ‘It all looked in order to me.’

‘You didn’t think to try the doors?’

The constable shook his head uncomfortably.

‘I didn’t think of that, sarge,’ he mumbled.

Mower glanced around the still snowy yard which was just beginning to thaw, the tracks left by the previous day’s invasion beginning to darken and fill with water.

‘If they’ve left any signs out here they’ll be gone in half an hour,’ he said bitterly. ‘The same with car tracks in the lane. How did you say you got up here?’ He turned again to the uncomfortable constable who was stamping his feet to keep out the insidious cold.

‘The panda car dropped me off,’ he said.

‘Are you the community bobby for the village?’ Mower asked.

‘No, that’s Gav Hewitt. He brought me up, but he’s on the front desk at the nick this morning. It’s a bit of a laugh, this community stuff, when we’re so short staffed, to be honest. I don’t reckon they get round their patch more than once a week.’

‘How far away’s the nick,’ Mower asked, still caught out occasionally by Bradfield’s complicated and hilly geography. ‘Thornton Lane, is it?’

‘Aye, that’s right, three miles or so. Technically we’re still in Bradfield here, but in fact we’re out in the sticks. You can see that.’ He gestured with ill-concealed contempt
at the open moorland which loomed darkly above them beyond the end of the track which led to the cottage. ‘Nowt out there but sheep and the odd tumbledown barn. Not for miles. They reckon you can walk to Scotland without getting to another bloody village from here if you just keep going north. Nowt but heather and sheep and grouse and the odd road to cross. So Gav Hewitt says.’ The constable was obviously not impressed by this piece of local folklore.

‘I’ll have a chat with your PC Hewitt later. For now we’d better see if our nocturnal visitor has left anything we might be interested in. Come on Omar, let’s see if we can find anything useful. Hopefully the intruders were more interested in the odd Black and Decker than the paperwork. Let’s see shall we?’

At police headquarters DCI Thackeray was standing in the main control room listening to the conversation between the police helicopter pilot and his controller, his face taut with suppressed anger. It was clear that the pilot and his observer were drawing a complete blank as they worked their way at low level in increasingly wide circles over the open countryside around Staveley. Many of the remote moorland roads were still impassable to vehicles and so far they had found no sign of the missing Land Rover holed up anywhere within a ten mile radius of the Christie’s cottage. This was the second sweep they had made above the barren hilltops and moors and Thackeray knew that the enterprise was beginning to look like a waste of time and resources.

He knew the sort of countryside they were searching: the miles of unfenced moor and bog on the high fells, with small fields squeezed into the valleys divided by
tumbledown stone walls and dotted with often derelict barns; the boggy surface frozen at this time of year but still terrain where even the most robust four wheel drive would have difficulty manoeuvring, and certainly not without leaving a clear track through the snow. Thackeray was increasingly convinced that if there was no sign of Christie and his son trapped up there in the freezing wilderness then he had probably made his escape much further afield, and he worried, in the light of what Mower had told him about the absence of passports in the house, that he might not only still be alive and but be attempting to flee abroad with his son.

‘Tell them they might as well pack it in,’ he said gloomily to the control room manager. ‘They’re wasting their time up there. I think he’s long gone. Have you put out the registration number to the ports and airports?’

‘We put out a general call last night for the two of them,’ the manager said. ‘We’ve added more details this morning.’

‘But no response?’

‘No sightings at all so far, sir.’

Thackeray spun on his heel and pounded up the stairs to his own office, thankful to be moving vigorously, if only briefly. What had seemed like an open and shut domestic tragedy was showing disturbing signs of turning into something more complex and it was time, he thought, to do something about that possibility. When he opened his office door he was only mildly surprised to find Superintendent Jack Longley standing by his window, evidently waiting for him to arrive.

‘Sir?’ he asked.

‘Have you found him?’ Longley asked, and his usually cheerful countenance darkened when Thackeray shook his head.

‘It doesn’t look as simple as we thought,’ Thackeray said. ‘I’m organising a full house-to-house around the village this afternoon to see if we can pick up anything else about the family that might help. And I want every copper in the country looking for that Land Rover. I think if he’d shot himself – and probably the boy as well – we’d have found them by now in spite of the weather. He wouldn’t go far to blow his brains out. Why should he? If the tragedy happened after the lad had set off to school that would explain why he took the vehicle and maybe picked him up before he got there. Or maybe the boy ran, and he chased after him in the Land Rover…’ He swallowed hard to control the turbulent feeling in his stomach which had dogged him ever since he had stepped into the murdered family’s kitchen the previous day.

‘The girl who survived, Emma, seems to have run out of the house and it looked as if even the little girl tried to as well, but couldn’t quite make it. That would make sense if he shot his wife first.’

He stopped talking, knowing that if he pictured the probable shooting scenario too clearly in his mind’s eye he would not be able to go on. Longley looked at him sharply, and the question in his eyes was obvious.

‘It’s all right,’ Thackeray said quietly. ‘I can cope. It’s a lot to ask of the whole team, especially those who went to the house. These things always are always difficult to handle if children are involved. You never really get inured to it. But we’ll deal with it, one way or another.’

‘Sure?’ Longley asked.

‘Sure,’ Thackeray said firmly.

‘You’ll be at the Press conference at two?’ Longley asked.

Thackeray nodded. ‘I want to concentrate on the Land
Rover,’ he said. ‘Mower’s come up with some odd things about Christie’s lifestyle, and the vehicle itself looks dodgy, but the urgent task is to find Christie and the boy – dead or alive. I can’t see why he should decide to drive miles to finish the thing off in the way we expected, quite honestly. So if he’s not been discovered in the immediate vicinity by now it’s possible he’s run with the boy for reasons of his own. And Kevin can’t find any passports in the house, either, even though they’re supposed to have lived abroad, so maybe he’s got a long trip in mind, perhaps back to wherever they came from. And just maybe we’re looking for someone else with a gun. Perhaps it’s not a domestic at all.’

‘You haven’t found the weapon, I take it, so we’re assuming he’s taken it with him?’

‘Whoever used it has taken it,’ Thackeray said. ‘The house and workshops have been searched and the area round the house seems to be clear, though the snow’s not making it easy. But what’s not helping is that Christie’s workshop was ransacked last night and there are some lockers that are empty. Kevin says there’s oil and grease around, but that could just be from tools rather than firearms. I’ve told Thornton Lane nick that I’m less than happy with the level of security they provided overnight, and sent forensics up there again to look at the workshop for prints and anything else they can find, but there’s no way of knowing what’s missing. Mower’s brought all Christie’s paperwork back here and he’s going through it now. It was scattered around his workshop, so even that’s not simple.’