Sins of the Fathers (5 page)

‘Right, well we’ll have two double malts to warm us up a bit,’ the newcomer said. He glanced at Laura with an interrogative smile. ‘Can I fill yours up, love?’ he asked. The face was broad and looked recently shaved and there was a whiff of expensive aftershave about the man which surprised Laura slightly, but the eyes beneath the
close-cropped
hair were pale and chilly in spite of the generosity of his offer.

Laura shook her head. She did not feel encouraged to continue her inquiries with this pair.

‘Thanks but I’m just off,’ she said. But she was not to be allowed to withdraw so easily.

‘This lady’s a reporter asking about Gordon Christie,’ the landlord said over his shoulder as he held the glasses under the optic behind him. ‘From the
Gazette
.’ The two newcomers looked Laura up and down for a second before the man who was obviously the senior partner of the duo smiled again, though without warmth, and offered his hand.

‘Bruce Weldon,’ he said. ‘I’ve just had a policeman knocking on the door because I made the mistake of employing Gordon now and again.’

‘Half the village employed him, Mr Weldon,’ the landlord said. ‘He was a miserable beggar but he was damn good at what he did and he didn’t charge over the odds. He serviced my lawn mower last year. How was anyone to know it’d end up like this?’

‘No, well, that’s what I told the copper who came calling this morning. They’d found my name amongst his records, believe it or not. I don’t think I’ve spoken to the man for six months, but he did some work on my cars for me last summer. I thought I’d paid him in cash, no questions asked about VAT and all that rubbish, but he must have made a note. Daft, that. Asking for trouble if the VAT officers come calling.’

The two men took their drinks and turned away from the bar to take one of the tables close to the empty fireplace and Laura guessed, looking at their broad dismissive shoulders, that she would get no further with them. It was as if they and the landlord had staged that little conversation to pre-empt any further questions she might feel like asking. She shivered and fastened her coat more firmly and pulled her scarf around her neck. She felt
oppressed by Staveley and the village life which had obviously had no inkling of the impending tragedy in its midst. The hurly-burly of the
Gazette
newsroom suddenly seemed much more inviting than it usually did.

‘An armed man, a boy and a Land Rover can’t just disappear off the face of the earth,’ DCI Michael Thackeray said angrily as he and his team reviewed the progress – or lack of it – of the Staveley murder investigation at the end of a long and frustrating day. ‘The top priority in this investigation now is to find an
eight-year
-old boy who, as far as we can tell, is in the company of an armed man who has already killed twice. As I told the Press conference earlier, finding Scott Christie alive is what this is about. What’s the latest on the search, Omar?’

DC Mohammed Sharif glanced down at his notes.

‘All the roads over Staveley moor are open now, sir, and the snow’s melting fast,’ he said. ‘But the chopper’s still not sighted anything significant. Mobile units are up there now scouring the ground at least until it gets dark. If they’ve gone any further, we’ve had the registration number out there for the best part of the day and there’s not been a single sighting so far. Nothing from CCTV anywhere has been reported. Nothing from motorway or street cameras. A blank, in fact.’

‘Start working on garages. If they’ve gone far they must have stopped for petrol,’ Thackeray said.

‘I reckon the vehicle must be under cover somewhere,’ Sergeant Kevin Mower offered. ‘Either that or at the bottom of one of the reservoirs up there in the hills. You could sink a tank in one of those lakes and no one would be any the wiser till the next drought brought the water level down.’

‘We’ll have a long wait for that after this winter,’ a voice from the back of the room muttered.

‘I’ve asked for the search teams to keep looking until they can’t see a hand in front of their faces,’ Thackeray said, trying to fight off the immense weariness which kept threatening to overwhelm him. He was aware of Kevin Mower’s sharp eyes watching him, for signs of weakness no doubt, and was determined to give neither him nor anyone else cause to question his ability to handle this case. His own doubts, he reckoned, were his own affair.

‘There are barns up there that don’t see anyone for months on end at this time of the year,’ he went on, confident that if nothing else he knew the terrain around Staveley. ‘But if he doesn’t turn up locally soon I think we have to rethink the suicide theory and assume he’s made a run for it, taking the boy with him, for whatever reason. And with a powerful handgun involved that’s a serious problem. We need to alert serious crimes, other forces, whoever.’

‘And in that case the absence of passports in the house has to be significant,’ Mower added. ‘He’s probably taken them with him.’

‘The picture of the boy on TV tonight may help,’ Thackeray said, trying to inject some optimism into the proceedings to boost the team’s obviously flagging morale. ‘There’s no doubt people take more notice of a case if children are involved.’ He ignored the tightening of his own stomach as he contemplated the recurring image of Gordon Christie’s dead wife and daughter and the likelihood that his son had already met a similar fate.

‘Val,’ he said. ‘Anything on next-of-kin?’

‘Nothing, guv,’ DC Val Ridley said. ‘Kevin found nothing to indicate any relations at the house – no address
book, no mobile phone, though that’s not necessarily significant because reception in Staveley’s notoriously poor. We’ve turned nothing up on any of the computer bases we’ve got access too. No one questioned in the village has recalled any mention of grandparents or aunts and uncles. They really do seem to have been a completely isolated family and the father seems to have done everything he could to keep them that way. And he’s been self-employed, running his own business, so there’s no old employment records. Apart from odd references to living abroad, possibly in Spain, they might have dropped into Staveley from another planet for all we’ve been able to find out about them. I’m waiting for the itemised bills for the fixed phone as we speak. That may give us some clues.’

‘No one can be that invisible,’ Thackeray said.

‘Unless…’ Kevin Mower paused, as if reluctant to finish the sentence. Thackeray looked at him, waiting.

‘Unless he’s hiding from someone or something. Or being hidden. It might be worth checking with our own people. He could be on a witness protection scheme of some sort.’

‘With a wife and three children?’ Thackeray’s tone was sceptical, verging on the dismissive. ‘That’s not normal procedure. It’s too dangerous for the family. You can’t keep kids locked up in safe houses.’

‘So maybe he was trying to protect his wife and three children on his own account,’ Mower suggested. ‘We’ve never strayed far from the assumption that Christie himself was the gunman up till now. But what if he wasn’t? What if he was the target?’

The meeting fell silent as they took this idea on board.

‘What have we got from forensics on the bullets?’ Thackeray asked eventually.

‘Nothing yet, except the calibre,’ Mower said.

‘Well, give them a kick up the backside and say we need to know everything there is to know about that gun,’ Thackeray said. ‘If it’s on record anywhere I want to know about it first thing in the morning. I never like the assumption that any crime is “just a domestic”. A domestic victim is just as dead as any other and just as deserving of justice if we can provide it. And this domestic is beginning to look distinctly odd in any case. I don’t like the smell of it one little bit. I think it’s time to redouble our efforts, don’t you?’

DC Val Ridley took a detour into the intensive care ward at Bradfield Infirmary on her way into work the next morning, as she had ever since Emma Christie had been brought in two days earlier. One of the nurses on duty at the desk smiled at her vaguely as she came in.

‘Any change?’ Val asked. The nurse shrugged, glancing at the small form in a large bed, wires and tubes attached to more machinery than any lay person could comprehend.

‘She was a bit restless in the night,’ the nurse said. ‘I was just writing up her notes for the day shift. It could be a good sign, or it could be nothing.’ Val nodded her thanks and approached the bed. As far as she could see the pale face on a delicate stalk of a neck, eyes closed, chest barely moving with each assisted breath, looked no different from the way it had looked the day before. What hair was left after the doctors had cut it away was limp and lifeless, so blonde it was almost colourless, the rest of her head heavily bandaged. An inch to the left and the bullet which had creased her skull would probably have killed her, the nurse had told her the day before. Emma had been lucky, but perhaps not lucky enough. The bullet wound in her back had required major surgery and her life still hung on a thread. Val guessed that the gunman supposed her dead when he left her bleeding on the floor. Judging by the way he had pumped her sister’s
body full of bullets, there seemed little doubt as to his intention to kill the whole family. Emma’s survival was some sort of miracle, although Val doubted that she would see it that way if she ever regained consciousness.

She took the chair by the bed and gazed sightlessly at the floor. The child hovering between life and death had only deepened the pall which the original shooting had caused throughout CID and although she had perfected a stoic face for the rest of the world, she was not immune. The usual motives for murder – lust, greed, revenge, sudden anger – she could at least comprehend. Parents who turned their rage on their children she could not. Emma’s mother and father should be sitting here, holding her hand and willing her to live, she thought angrily, not a police officer she would not recognise if she ever did open her eyes again. It was the ultimate betrayal.

She glanced at her watch. She was late for the start of her shift at police HQ but she was reluctant to move on. The silent, immobile child in the hospital bed pulled her back to the ward at every opportunity and she knew that her anxieties were not only for Emma herself. If the child recovered she guessed that the physical damage would eventually heal and be forgotten. What brought the tears pricking at her eyes was the utter isolation of this survivor and the knowledge that the damage that inflicted would last forever. She shook her head irritably and squared her shoulders to try to settle her emotions, when she became aware of another presence by the bedside. She jerked herself back to reality to find a tall, elegant Asian woman in a black trouser suit and a silky scarf around her shoulders looking at her speculatively. She put down her briefcase on the floor and pulled up a chair from the next bed and sat down next to Val.

‘Are you a member of Emma’s family?’ the woman asked with a smile which faded as Val Ridley explained who she was and how CID could find no trace of family for Emma.

‘I’m from social services,’ the woman said. ‘Razia Qureshi. I was going to call the police later this morning to check out Emma’s exact situation. If there are no relatives on hand we’ll have to make an emergency care order and take over parental responsibility for her. The hospital will need consent for further treatment of a child. Strictly speaking they shouldn’t have operated on her at all without consent, but no one bothers too much when it’s a life or death situation. The doctors do what they have to do.’

Razia Qureshi nodded slightly to herself, as if confirming her own judgement, and ran a hand across her immaculate dark hair.

‘I feel very bad about this,’ she confided, her face sombre now. ‘We should have seen it coming.’

‘What do you mean?’ Val asked, astonished.

‘I didn’t hear about the shooting until last evening, when my boss rang me at home. I’d been away for a few days. He wanted me to talk to the police straight away but I thought I would come and see Emma first.’ She spoke with very little accent but what there was betrayed her Yorkshire birth.

‘You knew about the family?’ Val asked, her voice hardening. ‘Social services knew about them?’

‘I knew about them, personally,’ Razia said, glancing down at the floor, uncomfortable with the admission. ‘It was about six months ago and we had an anonymous complaint from someone in Staveley, some neighbour, she said, worried about the little boy. She thought the father was hitting him.’

‘And was he?’ Val asked sharply.

‘I don’t know,’ Razia said. ‘I went up there and saw all the children and the mother, who denied that there was anything wrong. In fact the children seemed well cared for, no signs of ill-treatment, happy, I thought. You have to understand that I have more than forty families on my casebook and with most of them there’s no contest; they have serious problems, the kids are at risk, they’re neglected or they’re playing up, or there are all the signs of abuse of one sort or another. But I couldn’t pick up any signs with the Christies except that the father was volatile, irascible – he came back in the Land Rover as I was leaving, demanded to know who I was and threatened me with violence if I ever came back. I can hear him now. “I’ll effing kill you, you interfering cow,” he said. “Paki cow,” actually, though that’s not the worst thing I’ve ever been called. We get a lot of abuse.’ She smiled faintly. ‘Not all of it racist.’

‘I’m sure,’ Val said, as Razia twisted her hands in her lap. ‘But you never went back?’

‘I told them I would be back, as a deterrent in case there was anything in it. I didn’t like the father, obviously. But I never did go back. I put it on the back-burner, something to keep an eye on perhaps if I ever got the time. But I never found the time. There never is enough time in this job. And now…’ She looked at Emma Christie, whose shallow breathing never faltered beneath the white bedding. Val swallowed down her initial anger.

‘You couldn’t have predicted this,’ she said briskly. ‘I don’t see how anyone could.’

Razia shrugged. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘If the newspapers get hold of it they’ll pillory us, as usual.’

PC Gavin Hewitt shuffled uncomfortably in his canteen chair and gazed down at his industrial strength cup of tea.

‘It’s not always so easy to get out there as often as I should,’ he mumbled at DS Kevin Mower. ‘Omar’ Sharif was on the opposite side of the table, listening to the conversation with a sceptical look in his dark intelligent eyes.

‘But if there were problems with Christie’s shotgun, surely that would be a high priority?’ Mower insisted, holding the young uniformed constable in an icy glare. ‘That’s not kids in the bus shelter stuff, is it? That’s serious?’

‘Yeah, well, I did talk to him about it when the woman from social services complained, but he said she just panicked. He’d come in from doing a bit of rabbiting, the gun wasn’t even loaded, he said. He reckoned she’d never seen a shotgun before and thought he was going to blow her head off with a high powered rifle.’

‘That’s what he said?’ Mower asked, even more sharply. ‘That’s an odd way to put it, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose it is,’ Hewitt admitted grudgingly. ‘He obviously didn’t like her snooping round, but I just thought it was the way he thought. Nothing significant.’ He glanced at Sharif. ‘I don’t think he liked her being a Paki, either. He was obviously a bit of a racist. You know how it is? I reckon he could have deliberately tried to put the wind up her by waving the gun about, as a joke, like.’

‘Not much of a joke,’ Sharif said sharply. Hewitt looked at him without enthusiasm.

‘Just what I thought at the time,’ he said. ‘No offence.’

‘And you didn’t think it was serious enough to take any further action on his shotgun certificate?’

‘He was bloody meticulous about that gun,’ Hewitt
said, annoyed now. ‘I inspected his gun cupboard, and it was all in order. If I was looking for people being sloppy with shotguns up there, it wouldn’t be Gordon Christie I’d be looking at. He never said, but I reckon he’d been in the army. He knew about guns and took good care of them.’

‘And if the gun used in the shooting – an automatic pistol, by all accounts – if that was his, you’d no idea he had it.’

‘Of course not,’ Hewitt said angrily. ‘You know as well as I do it’s illegal to have a handgun. I’d have been down on him like a ton of bricks and so would my super. What do you think this is out here, the wild West?’

‘Just checking,’ Mower said, and there was no apology in his tone. ‘What made you think Christie had been in the army anyway?’

‘Just a feeling,’ Hewitt said. ‘He wasn’t local, though I think his wife was. He had a Scottish accent, I think, though he never said where he came from. It was the short hair cut, the way he walked maybe – a bit military, know what I mean? But he was very cagey, never gave owt away. Answered your questions – yes, no, maybe – polite but nothing more. No words wasted, any road. Quiet, amenable enough, but I wouldn’t have liked to get on the wrong side of him.’

‘And now we know he had a violent temper, so violent he probably hit his son – if the complaint to social services is to be believed – and seems to have ended up taking out his whole family with a handgun which suddenly appeared out of nowhere. So just what was that all about?’

‘You never know, do you?’ Hewitt said. ‘Some people just snap for no obvious reason at all.’

‘People may snap but they don’t usually have a powerful weapon to wreak this sort of carnage when they do.’

‘Right,’ Hewitt said unhappily. ‘I told you. I’d no idea about the pistol. No idea at all.’

‘And when they snap, there’s usually a trigger,’ Mower said, almost as if thinking aloud. ‘They may be stressed out but something makes them snap. In Christie’s case it doesn’t seem to have been money. There was plenty of cash going through his bank account, cash in the house, some of it unexplained. The house is well furnished, the kids seemed well looked after, apart from this incident with Scott. People commented on it. But what we don’t know is where he was getting those large sums of cash from. Did you get any clues about that? Did he have some sort of illegal scam going we ought to have known about? It can’t just be avoiding VAT and income tax. This is big money we’re talking about, for a self-employed odd job man. Who was paying him, and for what?’

Hewitt shook his head. ‘As far as I knew he worked as a mechanic. She didn’t work at all. The kids looked okay to me. I didn’t have many problems up at Staveley. An occasional burglary and the teenagers mucking about in the bus shelter, that was about it. The Christies gave me no cause for concern. Apart from the visit by the social worker, egged on by some nosy neighbour, and to be honest I’d have been pretty upset if that had happened to me and my family.’

‘Well, it looks as though the nosy neighbour may have been on to something,’ Mower snapped. ‘But that wasn’t the trigger, was it? It happened a while back?’

‘A good few months ago,’ Hewitt said, returning to defensive mode. ‘I can check the date if you like. I did pass it on, you know. It wasn’t my decision to take no further action.’

But more senior officers would have relied on Hewitt to
assess the seriousness of Christie’s behaviour, Mower thought to himself, and Hewitt obviously hadn’t thought it was serious at all. He sighed.

‘Do you want me to check the date?’ PC Hewitt persisted.

‘Not now, later,’ Mower said irritably. ‘So, not shortage of money. What about sex? Tell me about Mrs Christie. Was she on the razzle? Was there any sign the marriage was in trouble?’

‘How the hell would I know that?’ Hewitt protested.

‘Gossip,’ Mower said surprisingly mildly. ‘Chatter in the pub, in the post office. Intelligence gathering, Gavin. Isn’t that what community policing is supposed to be about? Keeping an eye on things so we’re not taken by surprise, so we pick up the bad apples before they get out of hand. Did you know Mrs Christie? Did you ever talk to her? Or did you ever hear anyone talking about her?’

Hewitt furrowed his brow in thought. ‘I saw her when we had the complaint from the social worker, but I don’t think she said a word. He made all the running on that one. And I think I saw her fetching her kid from playgroup a couple of times. I used to stop for a chat with the mothers at the gate now and again, listen to the gossip, know what I mean? Linda is…was, I mean, quite a good-looking blonde, so you’d notice her in a crowd. She was quite a bit younger than Christie, I reckon. I suppose you could call that intelligence gathering.’

‘Fancied her, did you?’ Mower asked cynically and the younger man flushed slightly.

‘I didn’t mean that,’ he said.

‘No, but did you mean she was fanciable?’ Mower pressed, in spite of the discomfort the question obviously caused Sharif ’s Muslim sensibilities. It was time the lad
toughened up, he thought, as he waited for Hewitt to reply.

‘Well, yeah, she could have been,’ Hewitt conceded. He thought again. ‘I did see her once talking to Gerry Foster… He’s got a bit of a rep for playing away, come to think of it.’

‘And who’s Gerry Foster?’

‘The landlord at the Fox and Hounds. Big bloke with dark hair, a beard. If you want someone who keeps his finger on the pulse up here, Gerry Foster’s your man. He hears it all, I reckon. Much more than I do, as it goes.’

‘Well, I might just have a chat with Mr Foster next time I’m up here,’ Mower said. ‘In the meantime keep thinking in case there’s anything else you’ve missed on your intelligence missions. So far it looks as if you’ve been wandering round Staveley with your eyes tight shut for all the intelligence you’ve gathered.’

‘Yes, sarge,’ Hewitt mumbled, swallowing his fury. But if Hewitt thought murdered children deserved anything less than his full attention then he was making a huge mistake, Mower thought, and he knew DCI Thackeray would back him up every inch of the way on that.