Sins of the Fathers (6 page)

Late that evening, Michael Thackeray himself was standing by the tall window in the sitting room of the flat he shared with Laura Ackroyd, gazing at the moonlit garden outside. He felt rather than heard Laura come up behind him before she put an arm through his.

‘You can’t blame yourself for everything that goes wrong,’ she said quietly.

‘Not everything,’ he said. ‘But some things I’m responsible for. There’s no getting away from that.’

‘It’s the little boy, isn’t it?’

‘The longer he’s missing, the less chance of finding him alive,’ Thackeray said, the fear which haunted him clenching his stomach like a vice.

‘Why would the father take him away in the car if he wanted to kill him?’ Laura asked. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

‘He seems to have gone off to school; his sisters hadn’t, for some reason. His school-bag’s not in the house, theirs were still hanging on the kitchen door. Men who kill their families generally don’t like to leave anyone out,’ Thackeray said. ‘It seems to be almost a point of honour – if they go, everyone has to go.’ He shuddered before turning to Laura and kissing her on the cheek, holding her very close for a moment.

‘It’s late. Come and eat,’ she said and he followed her into the kitchen where a small table was set for two. But as he turned his attention to the curry she had kept hot in the oven, she could see that he was still preoccupied with work. She watched him pick at his food for a moment before she gave in and turned the conversation reluctantly back in the direction of his thoughts.

‘Why haven’t you issued a photograph of Christie?’ she asked. ‘Ted Grant was going bananas for one this morning.’

‘We can’t find one,’ Thackeray said. ‘There were a few pictures of the children in the house, including the school picture of Emma and Scott we issued to the Press yesterday. But we can’t find one of the parents.’

‘No family albums? I thought everyone kept family albums,’ Laura said, knowing she had strayed onto treacherous ground. She had never seen a photograph of Thackeray’s wife and son from the time before his marriage disintegrated in tragedy. She guessed he had either destroyed them or hidden them away long ago.

‘Not this family.’

‘I did an interview with a psychologist today,’ she said. ‘I wanted to talk to him about what drives people to do these things.’

‘Did you ask him if he knows how to prevent them doing them,’ Thackeray said. ‘That’d be a lot more useful.’

‘You still think the father did it?’

‘What else can we think?’ Thackeray said wearily. ‘If he didn’t do it, where the hell is he? And where’s the boy? There are so many holes in this whole scenario that I don’t know what to think, to be honest. It’d be a whole lot clearer if we found the boy – one way or the other.’

Alive or dead, Laura thought, and she knew that it was becoming increasingly unlikely that the fugitive pair would be found alive.

‘How’s the child in hospital?’ she asked. ‘Is there any change there?’

‘The doctors seemed a little bit more hopeful before I came away this evening,’ Thackeray said. ‘But she’s still not conscious. And even when she is, the chances are she won’t remember much about what happened.’

‘This psychologist at the university, he wasn’t very optimistic about anything really,’ Laura said. ‘He said Christie sounds like the classic family killer – intense, controlling, wanting everything to be perfect, and then losing it completely when something runs out of his control. And the other cases I’ve looked at in the cuttings are all the same. Father is a perfectionist and can’t bear anything to threaten his perfect family, so he kills himself and takes the family with him. Quite often the trigger is the threat of the marriage breaking down.’

She knew that she was not telling Thackeray anything that he did not know already and that he was only half listening to her. But she felt an intense need to keep on
talking. Anything to distract Thackeray from the thoughts which threatened to torment him all night.

‘He said if the killer runs off with a child, or children sometimes, he tends to go back to somewhere the family’s been happy together; the seaside, quite often, or a beauty spot. It’s as if he wants to kill himself somewhere he has good memories…’

‘This is Dr Prothero, at the university, is it?’ Thackeray asked. ‘I’ve talked to him before.’

‘So you know it all? Sorry,’ Laura said.

Thackeray shrugged.

‘Usually when you search a house when something like this has happened you build up a picture of what the family was like,’ he said. ‘But in this case Kevin Mower said he wasn’t able to get hold of anything personal in that place. It was as if Christie had somehow wiped the slate clean at some point, and then kept everything strictly impersonal. There was nothing there to give a handle onto either of the parents at all. No letters, no address books, no records of the children being born or growing up, nothing at all more than three years old. It’s as if they parachuted into Staveley from outer space. And then – carnage.’ His voice trailed away.

‘Michael,’ she said. ‘You can’t let this case damage you as well.’

‘No,’ he said, his eyes bleak. ‘There’s been enough of that, hasn’t there?’

‘I didn’t mean that,’ she said.

He got up from the table and stood behind her chair with his arms round her shoulders for a moment.

‘Don’t ever leave me, Laura,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t survive without you.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘Truly, I do know that.’

Ted Grant’s bulging blue eyes told Laura Ackroyd that he was not likely to be deterred by her objections to his latest brainwave. He brandished the outline of her feature on family murders which she had printed out for him, and scowled.

‘Human interest,’ he said. ‘That’s what it needs. All this psycho-babble about fathers is all very well but our readers won’t wade through that unless there’s summat personal to hold their attention. This little girl in hospital’s the perfect peg. All alone there, hanging between life and death because her father couldn’t hack it. Get yourself over to the infirmary and see what details you can dig up about her condition. Is she going to make it or what? Where’s her granny and her aunties and uncles? See if there’s any chance of getting a picture. We can make a big appeal of it if she doesn’t snuff it too soon. Where’s the rest of little Emma’s family when she needs them?’

Laura opened her mouth, took a deep breath and eventually replied in the only terms that she thought Grant would understand.

‘The police won’t want us making the assumption that Gordon Christie was the gunman,’ she said carefully. ‘It’s legally very dodgy to go there.’

‘Well, don’t say he was,’ Grant snapped. ‘Leave it open.
She’s still a victim with no family to support her. That’s all you need. You can get round the legal issues with a few allegedlys and apparentlys, the odd well placed question mark, for God’s sake. Is this the latest victim of a spate of family massacres? How much carnage lies in wait behind surburban front doors? That sort of thing. You’re not working for the bloody police force, you know, even if you do choose to live with it.’

‘Right,’ Laura said, her cheeks flaming. She took hold of the article which Grant thrust in her direction and went back to her desk, careful not to slam the editor’s door too hard behind her. Reluctantly she stowed her tape recorder in her bag, put on her coat and walked the short distance from the
Gazette
’s office to the Infirmary. She made her way through the long corridors to the intensive care ward on the top floor. When she looked through the glass in the heavy swing doors she recognised DC Val Ridley sitting beside a high bed where a small figure lay hooked up to the machinery which Laura assumed was keeping her alive. She slipped into the ward and past the empty nurses’ station. Most of the staff were clustered around a bed at the other end of the ward where some major life and death procedure seemed to be taking place.

‘Hi,’ she said quietly to Val, who jumped, as if her mind had been a long way away, but her startled expression was soon replaced by a faint look of embarrassment and she glanced round at the nurses, who had still failed to notice Laura’s arrival.

‘How is she?’ Laura asked, her eyes fixed now on the child’s pale face with a mask over her mouth. Emma’s eyes were closed and it was difficult to tell whether or not she was alive, although the monitors bleeped rhythmically above the bed.

‘There’s no change,’ Val said quietly, following Laura’s eyes. ‘She’s been slightly less deeply unconscious since yesterday, apparently, but she’s not opened her eyes. It’s still touch and go.’

‘Are you on duty here until she wakes up?’ Laura asked, slightly surprised that the police could spare an officer for what looked like a fairly fruitless vigil.

Val, usually so pale and composed, flushed slightly, ‘Not officially, I just pop in when I’ve got the time,’ she said. ‘Stupid to let it get to me, I know, but I do so want her to survive…’

‘It’s a terrible thing,’ Laura said quietly. ‘But what’s she going to wake up to?’

‘Tell me about it. It haunts me,’ Val said, and Laura realised from her stricken expression just how deeply affected she evidently was by Emma Christie’s plight. Thackeray was obviously not the only officer to be taking a hammering from this case, she thought.

‘Can’t the
Gazette
make some sort of appeal for relatives?’ Val suggested. ‘There must be someone somewhere…’

‘You’d think so,’ Laura said. ‘As it happens my editor wants me to write something about Emma for tomorrow, so maybe that’ll help.’ She wondered if her own reservations about what she had been ordered to do were oversensitive. Perhaps Emma needed publicity. But her doubts returned with full force as she saw a nurse bearing down on her from the other end of the ward with a fiercely disapproving expression on her face.

‘Are you a relative?’ she asked.

‘I’m from the
Bradfield Gazette.
I just wanted to know how…’

‘Out!’ the nurse snapped, without waiting for more.
‘You’ve no right to be in here. It’s Press intrusion. Gross intrusion. If you’re not out of that door in ten seconds I’ll send for security and have you thrown out.’

Laura shrugged and turned to go. Val Ridley stood up and followed her to the door.

‘You were lucky to get as far as you did,’ she said mildly as they made their way back out of the hospital side by side. ‘But I’ll let you know if there’s any change in her condition. We need to find some relatives, we really do, and something in the paper might help with that. The poor kid will end up in care if no one comes forward soon and I couldn’t bear that.’

Laura looked at Val Ridley for a moment and wondered what had made the normally cool and detached detective so emotionally concerned about the injured girl’s future. But she knew better than to ask directly.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said. ‘And thanks.’

Half an hour later Laura was sitting in Dawn Brough’s neat sitting room holding a cup of tea and looking out of the picture window at the family’s bleak winter garden where a few daffodils where just beginning to force their way through the half-frozen soil. She had driven up to Staveley for the second time that week, determined this time to find out more about the family whose life in the village had been so brutally curtailed. After parking briefly outside the Christie’s cottage, which was still wreathed in police tape, she had turned the car and driven slowly back down the waterlogged lane where she had spotted Dawn closing the garden gate of the first small detached house in the new development between the village proper and Moor Edge. She had stopped and wound down her window.

‘Have you got yourself lost?’ Dawn had asked.

‘Not really,’ Laura said and introduced herself. For a
second the other women’s blue eyes clouded and she pushed untidy blonde hair away from her broad, open face.

‘The
Gazette
?’ she said uncertainly.

‘I’m writing about Emma Christie,’ Laura said. ‘The police are trying to find the rest of her family but they’re not having much success. There must be some relatives somewhere…’

‘Poor kiddie,’ Dawn said. ‘It’s wicked, what happened, isn’t it? I feel terrible about it, actually. I’m lying awake at night wondering if there was something I could have done to prevent it.’

She must have realised from Laura’s astonished expression that she had said more than she could leave at that.

‘You’d better come in,’ she said. ‘I was just making a cup of tea.’

Having settled her visitor in her comfortable sitting room and plied her with tea and biscuits, a professional hazard, Laura thought wryly as she turned down the unwanted calories, Dawn sat down herself and sighed heavily.

‘Linda didn’t have many friends in the village,’ she said. ‘It was just an accident that we got to know each other outside the school gate. You know? As you do?’

Laura smiled encouragingly, knowing nothing from experience about what went on outside school gates.

‘Anyway, it turned out we lived close, and our Stephen was in the same class as Scott, and we used to arrange for the two little ones to play together sometimes. I’m furious with myself now. I should have seen this coming.’

‘You mean you knew her husband was violent?’ Laura asked, surprised.

‘Not as violent as he turned out to be, obviously,’ Dawn said quickly. ‘But I knew he hit her. She tried to keep the
bruises covered up but I saw her shoulder once, when she was wearing a short-sleeved shirt. It was black and blue. She started crying then, and said she’d had a fall but I knew it wasn’t true and eventually she admitted he hit her. She said it didn’t happen often, but I think she was lying. He was such a big man, really tall and broad with it, and she was so tiny really, in comparison. I think he bullied all of them. I’m sure he hit Scott as well, if not the girls.’

‘He sounds a nasty bit of work,’ Laura said. ‘Did you tell anyone about what was going on?’

Dawn shook her head, looking miserable.

‘Linda swore me to secrecy when we talked about it. She swore she could handle it. She said Gordon was under a lot of pressure, he’d had a bad time in the past, something about a previous job, and he’d get over it in time. She made out he was quite ill, not sleeping, having nightmares, all sorts, and it wasn’t really his fault, but he didn’t seem to be seeing a doctor or anything. I didn’t really believe a lot of what she said, but what could I do? Anyway, she seemed much happier over the last few months, so I thought things must be getting better.’

‘Why d’you think that was?’ Laura asked, but Dawn just shrugged and looked uncomfortable.

‘I couldn’t say really,’ she said. But Laura could tell from the faint flush which rose from her neck and her refusal to meet her eye that neat, conventional Dawn was lying.

‘Do you think her husband was behaving better – or was there something else?’ she persisted. Dawn twisted her hands in her lap for a second and then shrugged.

‘It’s not going to hurt Linda now, is it?’ she said very quietly. ‘I did think she might be playing away.’

‘You mean she had a boyfriend? That seems a risky thing to do if her husband was so violent.’

‘Maybe she saw it as a way out,’ Dawn said. ‘Why not? Why should she stay with a man like Gordon if she’d found someone better?’

‘Have you any idea who it was?’ Laura asked.

‘Not really,’ Dawn said. ‘Though I wondered about Gerry Foster at the pub. I saw them talking at the Christmas do at the school. Gordon wasn’t there that day and Linda looked quite relaxed and pretty… She was pretty, you know, but so stressed out most of the time you hardly noticed…but honestly, I don’t actually know anything for sure. It’s only me picking up hints, you know? Nothing definite.’

‘Have you told the police all this?’ Laura asked.

‘No, I haven’t. I spoke to them when it happened but the sergeant I spoke to rushed off when he discovered Scott was missing, and they’ve not been back.’

‘I think you should tell them now,’ Laura said. ‘It could be important. If there was a boyfriend that could have been what triggered this whole catastrophe.’

‘I suppose so,’ Dawn said without enthusiasm.

‘The other thing I wanted to ask you was whether Linda ever talked about her own family?’ Laura said. ‘There’s Emma lying in hospital and no one seems to have shown any interest in her at all, no granny, no aunts or uncles. No one’s been to visit or even contacted the hospital to see how she is. Surely one of the Christies had relations who would want to see Emma, even if they couldn’t look after her. If she recovers it looks as though she’ll be taken into care because there’s no one else around. That’s awful.’

‘Linda did talk about having a sister once or twice, but she never said where she lived. I got the impression that they’d lived abroad for quite some time and lost touch with folk here.’

‘You don’t have any pictures of the family, do you? It would be good to have a photograph to go with the piece I’m writing about Emma.’

‘I may have some snaps of the children taken when they were playing with mine last summer. I can’t remember if Linda’s in any of them but I’m pretty sure Gordon isn’t. He never came round here and usually he was out when I went up to Moor Edge. I think that was deliberate. I don’t think he liked Linda mixing with anyone, really. She had to keep her friends to herself. Hang on a minute, and I’ll look in my photo album, see what’s there.’

Laura waited patiently while Dawn rummaged in a cupboard in the hall and came back with a leather bound album which she riffled through quickly.

‘There we are,’ she said at last, handing Laura the book. ‘I thought I remembered taking a few snaps one hot day last summer, in the school holidays. They were all round here for tea that day.’ She leaned over Laura’s shoulder.

‘That’s my two, and that’s Scott. And there’s the two girls with their mum. There’s another one of Linda but it didn’t come out very well. My husband says I’m hopeless with a camera. He takes all the snaps when we’re on holiday. We haven’t got a digital yet.’

Laura looked at the smiling faces frozen in time, two of them now gone for ever and the other two lives evidently hanging by a thread, and felt an overwhelming sadness.

‘Can I borrow these two?’ she asked. ‘It may just jog someone’s memory even if the school photos we’ve already printed haven’t. There must be someone out there for Emma, surely.’ And she realised that she too had been hooked irretrievably by this tragedy.

The police patrol car cruised slowly up the twisting hill behind Staveley village, the two uniformed officers inside chatting companionably as they drove. To their left the land fell away and the stone roofs of old Staveley, interspersed with the occasional red tiles of new houses, were visible beneath the craggy hill which protected it from the prevailing westerly winds. To the right the land rose steeply, with brown clumps of dead bracken and thickets of spiny gorse clinging to the thin soil between outcrops of dark millstone grit. The driver slowed slightly where the road widened at a muddy entranceway partly obscured by bushes and a few straggly trees, which apparently led into the side of the hill.

‘It’s an old quarry, disused now,’ the officer in the passenger seat said in response to his partner’s interrogative glance.

‘Has anyone looked down there?’ the driver asked. The passenger shrugged.

‘Doesn’t look as if anyone’s been down there. There’s no recent wheel tracks.’

‘Best check, if I can get in without getting stuck in t’mire,’ the driver said, swinging into the narrow entrance and beginning to bump his way along a rutted and extremely muddy surface.