Sins of the Fathers (8 page)

‘I didn’t think he was such a mad beggar as he turned out to be, no,’ Foster said. ‘No one could have known that.’

‘And you didn’t think that this was something you should have told us when the worst happened up at Moor
Edge cottage? Two dead, two missing and another life hanging in the balance and you said nothing when the village was full of police asking questions. Did you really not think it was relevant to Linda’s murder?’

‘It wouldn’t have helped you find Gordon, would it?’ Foster flashed back. ‘He was an evil-tempered bastard. Summat like this could have happened any road, whatever I did. Whatever Linda did, for that matter. I told her to leave him. I told her to take the kids and get out. But she wouldn’t listen. The man was paranoid. He was running from something, though she never let on what – if she even knew. He’d sit in here of an evening wi’ his back to t’wall, twitching every time the door opened. Strangers came in and he’d be off, not even finishing his pint half the time. He was a nutter, was Gordon Christie but nothing I said could persuade her to get out while she could.’

Foster shrugged, his face putty coloured and drawn beneath the beard.

‘I tried to persuade her, believe me, I did,’ he said, so quietly that the two police officers could barely hear him. ‘But she wouldn’t budge.’

‘Do you think he could have found out about your relationship with Linda?’ Mower asked. ‘If you were so careful? Do you think she told him?’

Foster drew a sharp breath.

‘That’s not very likely, is it?’ he said, his voice hoarse. ‘That’s the last thing she’d do. Apart from owt else, he’d have been as likely to come after me as her, and there was no sign of that, thank God. I’ve told you. The man’s violent. The man’s crazy. Anything could have set him off. He was like a volcano waiting to blow. But he didn’t seem to be coming in my direction.’

‘Well, I can tell you for a fact that someone did guess, so
maybe Christie worked it out as well,’ Thackeray said. ‘Did you know he had a handgun?’

‘No, of course not,’ Foster said. ‘I knew he had a shotgun. Linda mentioned him going after rabbits once. Lots of folk round here do that. But I knew nowt about any other guns.’ He hesitated for a second. ‘Not that he might not have known about them,’ he said.

‘What makes you say that?’ Thackeray asked sharply.

‘Well, she talked about them living in Portugal before they came here. The little lass, Louise, was born out there. But Linda hadn’t liked the climate there, or the people, something made her unhappy, any road, and I think she persuaded him to come back to this country. She never talked about anything before Portugal. Except once, when she said something about the lad missing his father when he’d been in Ireland. Then she stopped dead, and wouldn’t say owt else when I asked her what he’d been doing in Ireland. It was like a shutter coming down. She looked scared witless and she went off home that night without letting me take her up to the moor for our usual little rendezvous.’

‘Was Gordon Irish?’ Thackeray asked sharply. ‘Did he have an accent?’

‘He did, a slight accent, but I’d have said it was more Scottish than Irish. Linda never said where she came from but she sounded like born-and-bred Yorkshire to me. Not broad, like round here, but not your southerner, rhyming grass wi’ arse. Know what I mean?’

Mower smiled faintly, possessing a few of the despised vowels himself, but Thackeray was still fixed on the landlord’s story.

‘She never said anything else about his background?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ Foster said. ‘But she did make me think I was right about something else. I always suspected he was
ex-army
, though he never said. I was in the Green Jackets myself for eight years, and there was something about him that made me think he’d been there, done that, know what I mean? If he was, it could be that’s what did his head in. It happens, especially in Ireland. They’re supposed to sort you out before they let you out again, but it doesn’t always work. I’ve seen it before with mates of mine. What do they call it? Post-traumatic stress, is it?’

‘Being paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you,’ Thackeray said. ‘Do you think someone was out to get Gordon Christie?’

‘I haven’t a clue,’ Foster said. ‘But he looked as if he thought they were. What I do know is that Gordon was out to get Linda one way or another. And it looks as if he succeeded, doesn’t it? I only wish to God we’d had this conversation a week ago and maybe she’d still be alive.’

Later that afternoon the phone on Thackeray’s desk rang and snapped his mind back to reality. He had been sitting in his office ever since he had come back from a canteen lunch he had done no more than pick at, brooding over what the sudden reappearance of Vince Newsom in Bradfield might mean. His own contact with him several years earlier, when he had first met Laura Ackroyd, had been brief. Newsom had already left the
Bradfield Gazette,
and moved out of Laura’s flat, by the time Thackeray had reluctantly recognised the attraction between himself and the red-headed reporter with the mischievous smile. But with his wife confined to a long-stay hospital and the events which had taken her there painfully carved into his psyche with an acid which only seemed to grow more
painfully corrosive with time, he had not been looking for a relationship.

It was surprising, he thought wryly, how insidiously Laura’s looks, her persistence and her personality had worn down his defences, and it would be even more surprising if Vince Newsom, who had also adored her in his way, would not still be bowled over when he saw her again. If he had not done so already. Surely, Thackeray thought, the first thing Newsom would do in Bradfield would be to renew that old acquaintance, for professional if not personal reasons. They were both journalists, after all. And at a time when he and Laura were living together at arm’s length rather than in each others arms, Newsom might seem as attractive as he had once done. He shook his head angrily. Laura would not make that mistake twice, he told himself. Would she?

He picked up the phone, which had continued to shrill impatiently.

‘Thackeray,’ he said.

‘Atherton,’ a voice snapped back. ‘You took your time. You asked me to call you if I found anything interesting when I got the little lad’s body back here.’

‘And?’ Thackeray asked.

‘And – he was shot at,’ Atherton said. ‘Not shot, just shot at. There’s a bullet hole in the left sleeve of his jacket which I didn’t see when we were up there. Goes right through, but it’s left a slight mark on his left arm. Someone shot at him and just missed, I’d say. He may not even have known he’d been touched. But I thought you’d want to know that.’

‘Anything else?’

‘I’ve not begun the post-mortem yet. D’you want to come down? It could be attempted murder.’

‘I’ll give that a miss,’ Thackeray said wearily. He found all post-mortems hard to stomach, but the dissection of a small boy was an event he felt more than justified in sparing himself. ‘I’ll get Kevin Mower to join you,’ he said, and hung up.

Vince Newsom marched into the newsroom at the
Bradfield Gazette
the next morning as if he owned the place, which was exactly the way he had acted when he had worked there himself. Laura Ackroyd suddenly became conscious of his presence behind her chair, and spun round to find herself the recipient of an enthusiastic kiss on her cheek.

‘There you are, babe,’ Vince said cheerfully. ‘Same old desk, same old stories? Tell me about it. I told you years ago you should come to London and look at you, still here.’

‘And same old Vince,’ she said sharply, taking in the fair hair falling across his forehead, the faintly tanned skin, the slightly jutting jaw and the unbelievably blue eyes which were as self-satisfied as they had ever been. ‘It’s obvious London suits you, anyway.’

‘Couldn’t be better,’ Vince said. He glanced round the newsroom, where most of the reporters’ eyes were fixed on him, mostly in horrified fascination, and pulled a bulging wallet out of his inside pocket.

‘I’m taking the plunge at last,’ he said to Laura more quietly. ‘Got engaged to this amazing babe last month. Bought her a bloody great diamond, the lot.’ He flicked a photograph of a young woman in her direction, a bland
face with a token smile and long blonde hair, rake thin, professionally coiffed and made up and wearing an off-
the-shoulder
evening gown that Laura guessed would have cost more than her monthly pay cheque.

‘Very nice,’ she conceded, relieved to find that there might be a good reason for Vince not to make too much of a nuisance of himself while he was in Bradfield. ‘Who is she?’

‘Caroline Stewart Venables. Met her on a story I was doing in the Isle of Wight over Cowes week. Her father made a mint in property and has built himself a mansion down there. Swimming pool, gym on site, enough en suites for a footie team. Very
nouveau
, very nice.’

‘You won’t have any trouble getting on the property ladder then,’ Laura said.

A look of satisfaction, quickly subdued, flashed across Vince Newsom’s good-looking features.

‘Daddy’s buying us a house in St John’s Wood,’ he said. ‘Period property, excellent location.’ He glanced round the newsroom complacently. ‘Never mind, hey?’ he said.

‘We’ll be seeing you in
Hello
magazine, then?’ Laura offered. ‘Mind the curse doesn’t get you. A spread in
Hello
followed by a quick divorce, you know how it goes?’

‘Do I sense the presence of the little green monster?’

‘I think on the whole I prefer what I’ve got,’ Laura said, suddenly sickened by the exchange, although she was conscious even as she spoke that what she had got was by no means as certain as she had hoped it would be so long after she had thrown Vince Newsom and all his worldly goods out of her flat.

‘Why don’t you go and see Ted?’ she suggested. ‘I’m sure he’ll be suitably impressed.’

‘I will, I will,’ Vince said. ‘I just wanted to ask you if
there’s been any developments with this kid in hospital. Has she come round? Any relatives turned up?’

‘Oh, dramatic developments,’ Laura said
contemptuously
. ‘They found her little brother yesterday afternoon, as dead as the rest of them. They only need her father now to make the complete set.’ Vince shrugged and turned away and Laura watched him make his way through the crowded desks to Ted Grant’s glass cubicle at the other end of the office where he was greeted with a shout of rude good humour that could be heard across the whole editorial floor. She smiled wryly to herself. Vince had always fulfilled the editor’s criteria for a good reporter – brash, unscrupulous, and not too concerned with the actual facts of a story if they got in the way of a good headline. He was, in other words, just what she knew she could never be. She was as likely to survive in the cutthroat world of the tabloid Press as a butterfly in a tornado.

But at least Vince’s arrival had one good side. Much as his presence would irritate Michael Thackeray professionally, the news of his impending nuptials might calm any anxiety he might feel about Newsom’s more personal ambitions in Bradfield. Although she was not as certain about that as she hoped Michael would be. She had good reason to know that fidelity did not come high on Vince’s list of desirable attributes, if it appeared there at all. And she had to admit that his presence revived memories of the exuberantly good times which had lit up their relationship at the start as well as the sour taste it had left at the end. She sighed and turned back to her computer screen, knowing that, one way or another, Vince Newsom’s nuisance value could be high.

Superintendent Jack Longley looked up impatiently when his DCI came into his office in response to his summons.

‘You took your time,’ he said, taking in the tension in the younger officer’s body language as he loomed towards him, shoulders hunched.

‘Sit down, sit down,’ he said. ‘I think we may have cracked this Christie business.’

Thackeray took the offered chair and looked at Longley in surprise.

‘You’re joking?’ he said, swallowing down an intense surge of relief which he knew he could not explain in purely professional terms.

‘Well, it’s no thanks to our colleagues in Manchester, I have to say. And I tore them off a strip for some sloppy routines over there. But here’s the report, just faxed through. The good news is that they spotted Christie’s Land Rover two days ago, burnt out in Moss Side, where apparently, wrecked and burnt out vehicles pop up overnight like rose bay willowherb on every vacant bit of land. The fire brigade apparently knew nowt about it. The locals are so used to this sort of thing that they don’t bother to report it half the time. Normally it’s kids, nicking cars and setting light to them for the hell of it. So it was a good two days before the local bobby took a close look, took the trouble to check the reg – which was a tad discoloured by that time – and discovered we were interested in it. Even worse, it wasn’t until they sent someone to remove it that anyone realised that there was a body inside. Burnt to a cinder. They got around to letting me know this morning.’

‘Christie?’ Thackeray asked quietly, making an effort to control his breathing. He should not be gratified by any death, least of all that of a man he needed to speak to, for
reasons which went well beyond police procedure. But he could not suppress a feeling that some sort of justice might have been done in Moss Side. But Longley had not finished, and sounded less than certain in his response.

‘Well, it’s likely to be Christie,’ he said. ‘But our contact in Manchester says there’s not a lot left of whoever it is, certainly nothing to give a positive ID at this stage. The remains are in the morgue and will be looked at in detail today.’

‘DNA?’

‘Tricky, he thought.’

Thackeray pondered this for a moment.

‘It’s a horrific way to commit suicide,’ he said, doubtfully. ‘And difficult too. It’s not that easy to set a car ablaze, especially if you’re inside it. I suppose it could be murder, which would leave us with a very nasty problem.’

‘We’ll cross that bridge if we have to,’ Longley said equably. ‘Manchester’s making inquiries around where the vehicle was found but it’s not an area where witnesses beat a path to the door, apparently. Sounds a bit like the Heights, to me. You know the scene well enough. But I thought you’d want to get over there, see what the hell’s going on, talk to the pathologist, if you can. Hopefully this will wrap the whole thing up. In one way these domestic cases are simple enough to crack, but they’re unpleasant. Let’s hope the whole family’s accounted for now, Christie shot them and then killed himself, and that’ll be an end to it.’

‘The pub landlord in Staveley suggested that Christie was ex-army. Reckoned he knew the type. But we’ve checked with the MoD and they’ve no record of him. What’s more relevant, I reckon, is that the same landlord admits he was having it away with Christie’s wife. He was
a morose beggar at the best of times, apparently, so it could well be that which pushed him over the edge.’

‘Well, maybe the coroner will want to know about all that, but it’ll be of no interest to us any more if this really is Christie they’ve found, and it’s a suicide’, Longley said.

The superintendent handed Thackeray the file on his desk.

‘It’s all in there,’ he said. ‘Give me a bell when you’ve made your own assessment at the scene. We’ll need to keep the Press informed. There’ll still be a lot of interest in the little girl in the infirmary, even if this closes the case.’

‘And the
Globe’s
sniffing around looking for some sort of tear-jerker,’ Thackeray said. He forebore to tell Longley just who was in town from the
Globe
. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll keep you up to date. This is one case I’d like to see resolved more than most.’

Longley nodded. He had seldom seen Michael Thackeray so stressed, but he knew that he would get nothing out of him about his own feelings. This was the most private of men and he suspected that the job was becoming more difficult for him as time went by, rather than less. And there was absolutely nothing he could think of doing about that except hope he made it through to retirement.

Thackeray and Sergeant Mower drove to Manchester in what could hardly be called a companionable silence. Mower knew his boss well enough to recognise when he wanted to be left to his own apparently gloomy thoughts, which he reckoned was increasingly often. For his part, Thackeray chain-smoked and stared out of the window at the continuous stream of lorries they overtook on the trans-Pennine motorway, lorries which threw up so much spray that it was almost impossible to make out the details
of the rolling hills and moors the road swept across on its way from one conurbation to another. Once past the high reservoirs, almost invisible through the swirling rain and mist, and over the watershed, it was downhill into the overcast murk of Greater Manchester, where the glittering regeneration of the city centre spread little cheer in the small outlying towns of Victorian terraces, abandoned mills and edgy race relations which they passed through on the way.

They were met in reception at police headquarters by a crop-haired, chilly eyed young man who introduced himself as DI Mark Hesketh.

‘Glad you came, sir,’ he said to Thackeray without any sign of warmth when the introductions were made and he led them upstairs to the CID offices. ‘We’ve made a bit more progress since I spoke to your super this morning. But if it’s ID you’re after, it’s not going to be easy according to our forensics people. There’s not much of this guy left. They’re still working on the body and on what’s left of the vehicle.’

‘It must have been a fierce fire,’ Thackeray said.

‘Right,’ Hesketh said, with slightly more enthusiasm. ‘And the reason’s not difficult to find. The petrol can was in the main body of the car with him. He must have doused himself with it and struck a match, as far as we can work out. The tank didn’t go up until later, and that finished off the job pretty comprehensively, as it goes. Must have taken some bottle, that.’

‘Unless someone else struck the match,’ Thackeray said coldly. ‘I assume you’ve considered that possibility?’

‘You’re thinking murder, not suicide?’ Hesketh’s surprise registered as little more than a raised eyebrow.

‘I’m not thinking anything,’ Thackeray said. ‘You’ve
found a Land Rover we’ve been seeking for the last four days, and a body which may or may not be the owner of the car, who may have killed himself in a particularly agonising way – or not, as the case may be. I don’t know who he is or how he died, and nor, I suspect, do you. Did anyone see the blaze?’

Hesketh shrugged, obviously irritated by Thackeray’s implied criticism.

‘It’s not an area where people volunteer much to the police,’ he said. ‘It’s bandit country down there. We’re still knocking on doors, without much result so far. Chances are the vehicle was torched in the early hours, three, possibly four days ago.’

‘Was there a weapon of any sort found inside the Land Rover?’ Thackeray asked, bringing Hesketh up short again.

‘Should there have been?’ he asked.

‘If the victim was Gordon Christie we think he was in possession of an automatic pistol. If he’d wanted to kill himself, a bullet would be the most obvious way to do it. We’ve good reason to believe that he shot his wife and children before he disappeared.’

‘Ah,’ Hesketh said. ‘One of those. We weren’t aware of that, I don’t think.’

‘You should have been. We warned that the driver of the vehicle might be armed and that he might have a child with him, when we put out the call for it,’ Thackeray said sharply.

‘Right,’ Hesketh said. ‘A child? There’s no sign…’

‘We’ve located the child,’ Thackeray snapped. ‘He’s dead, too. I think maybe we ought to start at the beginning again. Let me fill you in on Gordon Christie and then we’ll look at your reports, and maybe what remains of the Land Rover.’

‘Sir,’ Hesketh said with ill-grace, unresponsive to the flash of sympathy in Kevin Mower’s eyes as the visitors pulled chairs up, sat down around Hesketh’s desk and began to go through the file that the Yorkshire detectives had brought with them. But before Thackeray had finished his succinct exposition of the tragedy at Moor Edge cottage, Hesketh’s phone rang and he grabbed the receiver like some sort of lifeline. He listened in silence for some time.

‘Right,’ he said, at length. ‘I’ve got the officers from Bradfield here with me now. We’ll come over.’

‘Something significant?’ Thackeray asked.

‘It was the pathologist,’ Hesketh said. ‘He’s found a bullet-hole in the fire victim’s skull. No sign of the bullet though. Something else to look for in the wreckage and at the site – though if it went through one of the windows we’ll be lucky to locate it on the waste ground up there.’

‘I’d keep trying, if I were you,’ Thackeray said curtly, getting to his feet. ‘So let’s go and see your pathologist, shall we? And then see what’s left of the Land Rover. If this is Christie and he shot himself, the gun should be in the wreckage and we’re just left with the mystery of how the car went up in flames. If it’s not, then we could be looking at another murder investigation.’