Authors: Patricia Hall
‘Ah,’ Laura had said, understanding his lack of interest in Holden. ‘That could be very nasty.’
‘You have no idea just how difficult it could be,’ Thackeray had said, his face bleak.
At that moment Julie flung herself back into the passenger seat of Laura’s Golf, her waterproof jacket dripping copiously over the passenger compartment as she flung back the hood
and tried to dry her face with a wad of paper tissues.
‘God,’ she said. ‘I’d quite forgotten how grim winter can be on this coast. My home was in Lytham St Anne’s, which is on the estuary and a bit more protected. That’s one place we can be sure Bruce won’t have gone. He wouldn’t want to bump into my mother in the shopping precinct. Anyway, I’ve got the route to Richard’s place. Stupid of me not to bring a map. He’s not in the phone book, though, as far as I can see, so he may not even be there. I may have brought you on a complete wild goose chase.’
‘Let’s go,’ Laura said, switching the wipers on to full speed to clear the streaming rain and sea spray that was obscuring her vision. ‘Which way?’
‘Straight on towards Cleveleys for a bit, and then I’ll tell you where to turn.’
To Laura’s surprise, Richard Churchward was at home when they knocked on the door of his semi-detached house in Bispham, a 1930s suburb halfway between Blackpool proper and the less frenetic family resort of Cleveleys. He looked only slightly surprised when he recognised Julie, and Laura guessed that he had been half expecting her.
‘That didn’t take you long,’ he said mildly after introductions had been made on the doorstep.
‘Is he here?’ Julie almost screamed, pushing sodden hair away from her face, and trying to peer around Churchward’s paunchy figure into the hall behind him.
‘No, no, of course not. He’s not here,’ Churchward exclaimed. ‘You’d better come in.’
He let the two women dry off slightly in the kitchen and then directed them to the comfortable front room and brought them steaming mugs of coffee.
‘I’ve had flu,’ he said, by way of explanation for the clutter on the sofa and the mute TV showing twenty-four hour news in the corner. ‘The wife’s at work and the kids are at school. It was sheer chance that Bruce found me in. And you, too. I’d not have taken a call at work from either of you and they wouldn’t have given out my mobile number. I really don’t want to be involved in this.’
‘You don’t have a fixed phone?’ Laura asked, surprised.
‘I’m out and about for work so much that we decided to rely on the mobiles.’
‘So where’s Bruce? You’ve obviously seen him,’ Julie demanded, ignoring the coffee that Churchward had put on the low table in front of her. He shrugged.
‘I don’t know where he is now,’ he said. ‘Honestly, I don’t. He turned up here yesterday with the little girl. Lovely kid by the way. I was feeling even worse then than I do now and I told him flat: we haven’t got the space here to put him up, even if I’d wanted to. But he seemed to be completely manic. High as a kite. I certainly didn’t want him around my kids. Anyway, I gave him the local paper and my mobile and let him get on with it. There’s plenty of vacancies at this time of the year, bed sits, self-catering places, so long as you can pay a deposit up front, which he said he could. By teatime, when I woke up after having a bit of a rest upstairs, they’d gone.’
‘No address?’ Laura asked.
‘I didn’t want to know, to be honest. I knew someone would come looking. We used to be good mates in the old days, before you were married, but it was never quite the same after he had that spell in hospital. I thought he was over all that, but maybe that was only true while he kept taking the medication. Is all this because he’s stopped taking the pills?’
‘What pills?’ Julie said faintly. Churchward really did look surprised this time, his heavy face sagging in disbelief.
‘You didn’t know? He didn’t tell you? I mean, this happened before you got married. He was in hospital for about six months after a fight in a bar. I was there. He completely lost it. He was lucky not to end up in jail rather than the loony bin. But after that he really did seem to get better, much calmer, more even tempered. I don’t think I ever saw him fly off the handle again while we lived together in that flat down Garstang Road. By the time he met you, the whole thing seemed like a bad episode that he’d got over, thankfully, but I must say I was always a bit edgy about him after that. But he seemed to be taking his medication regularly, so in the end I stopped worrying. I just assumed he would have told you all about it.’
‘No,’ Julie said dully. ‘He never told me he’d been in a psychiatric hospital. He told me nothing about it at all.’
‘But he’s having bad episodes again? Flying into rages?’ Churchward asked, his face full of anxiety.
‘He’s been beating me up,’ Julie said. ‘And beating up his mother.’
‘He could have killed someone in that bar-room brawl if I hadn’t pulled him away. I was stronger than him, and got him out of the door in time. But it was a close run thing. He’d got a cut eye himself and I took him to A and E. He threw another wobbly there, attacked a nurse and after a lot of toing and froing with the police they put him on a section and kept him in the psychiatric ward. He was away six months, but his employers were very good, put him on sick leave so there was money to pay the rent. Eventually he came back to the flat and went back to work and seemed to be much better. All this was
a year or so before he met you, I think. He’d moved out into that bed-sit in Squire’s Gate by then and I wasn’t seeing nearly so much of him. I just assumed…’
‘Yes,’ Julie said. ‘Well, he didn’t ever tell me anything about all this. Not a word.’
‘Do you know what the diagnosis was?’ Laura asked quietly. But Churchward shook his head.
‘I’ve no idea. All I know is that the pills seemed to do the trick.’
‘Well, judging by the way he’s been behaving he didn’t bother to get hold of any more of them after we moved to Bradfield. That’s certainly when the trouble began,’ Julie said. ‘And now he’s on the loose somewhere with our daughter. That sounds to me like very bad news.’
DCI Michael Thackeray sat facing Superintendent Jack Longley in a silence so profound that he began to suspect that the senior officer had no answers to the dilemma that faced them. The file Thackeray had brought still lay still open on the super’s desk but he stared into space over Thackeray’s head, his normally alert expression dulled by a frown across the broad brow and a suspicion of perspiration on his bald, domed head. Eventually he seemed to shake himself back into the land of the living and met Thackeray’s bleak expression with one just as grim.
‘Nasty,’ Longley said. ‘Whichever way you look at it.’
Thackeray nodded. ‘Especially for Sharif.’
‘Keep him well away from this one,’ Longley said. ‘Send him on compassionate leave if you have to. Although that might give him too much time to poke his nose in where it’s not wanted.’
‘He got hold of her clothing from the family for the DNA match,’ Thackeray said. ‘He’s as keen as anyone to get to the bottom of it.’
‘He may not be when the reality of it hits him,’ Longley said. ‘Anyway, he can’t be on the team. Not under any circumstances. He’s too close to it, too emotionally involved. Send him up to see me if you have any problems getting that message across.’
‘It could still be an accident, or suicide,’ Thackeray said. ‘There’s no forensic evidence to indicate murder.’
‘There’s enough circumstantial evidence to launch a major inquiry,’ Longley said flatly. ‘You know that. A young married woman, pregnant, found dead in a river, and her husband missing from home. You know the usual formula we use when it’s suicide: ‘no suspicious circumstances’? There’s enough suspicious circumstances here for you to arrest the husband the moment you set hands on him. And if it throws a spotlight on the marriage practices of the Muslim community, that’s just too bad. They’ll have to live with it. I’ll not have young women disposed of on my patch in the name of family honour or a husband’s right to abuse his wife or anything else. And I’ll not have community sensitivities interfering with a possible murder inquiry, and the community relations people will just have to live with that.’
‘It’s the spooks I’m more bothered about. They seem much more interested in why Imran Aziz was so desperate to get into Britain in the first place,’ Thackeray said. ‘They seem to think there’s something going on in Milford that they should know about. Sharif himself came back from there a bit edgy about the new imam, and had the sense to fill me in.’
‘I’ll talk to those beggars,’ Longley said. ‘I don’t want to get at cross-purposes with them if this turns out to be a murder investigation. I want Aziz found and questioned. And the rest of the family tackled about the marriage and the relationship
between Aziz and – what’s her name? – Faria? Did Amos find nothing to indicate foul play?’
‘He didn’t even spot that she was pregnant from the physical remains. It was the blood tests that showed it up. The family didn’t seem to know she was expecting. Or at least they didn’t mention it to us. I’ll ask Amos to check his results again if you like. Even have another look at the body. She’ll still be in the ice-box waiting for the identification. Now we’ve got it, the family will want her body back as soon as possible. You know how quickly Muslims require a burial.’
‘That’s up to the coroner where she was found, of course,’ Longley said. ‘If there are suspicions of foul play it won’t be quick. They’ll have to accept that. And I’ll have to talk about liaison, but I think you can regard this as our case now we’ve got a name. Chances are she went into the river close to home. Where she finished up is neither here nor there.’
‘I’ll set the wheels in motion,’ Thackeray said, with a sigh. ‘First off, I’ll have to talk to Mohammed Sharif.’ Longley nodded gloomily, running a hand over his head as if to cement in place the few remaining hairs that straggled there.
‘One way or another, I’ve got a feeling this is going to be a very messy one,’ he said.
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Thackeray said.
‘Keep me posted, Michael.’
‘Of course, sir.’
DC ‘Omar’ Sharif took the news as badly as Thackeray expected he would when he summoned him to his office later that morning. He sat down abruptly as if his knees could no longer support him when the DCI told him that the body was undoubtedly his cousin Faria’s, and gazed blindly out of
the window behind Thackeray’s desk as if an answer to the tragedy that had overwhelmed him was to be found in the grey clouds scudding ominously across the town centre from the looming grey Pennine hills beyond.
‘There’s no indication of how she died?’
‘None so far,’ Thackeray said quietly. ‘It could have been an accident…’
‘Or suicide, or even murder,’ Sharif said angrily. ‘You don’t have to protect me, you know, sir.’
‘Did you know she was expecting a baby? You didn’t mention it.’
Sharif glanced away, his face darkening.
‘Her sister said she might be, but it wasn’t definite. Her parents didn’t seem to know. She hadn’t told them. So it was true then?’
‘According to Amos Atherton.’ Thackeray hesitated for a moment.
‘You can’t be involved in this case, Mohammed,’ he said at last. ‘You’re too close to it.’
Sharif gripped the arms of his chair until his knuckles stood out white against his brown skin.
‘You need me,’ he said. ‘You need someone close to the community if you’re ever to get to the bottom of this. She was my cousin. Almost as close as a sister. We grew up together, a couple of streets apart. I felt like the older brother she never had. Who could be better motivated to find out what happened to her?’
‘No way,’ Thackeray said. ‘The closer you were to her the more you rule yourself off the team. We’ll need a statement from you, for a start.’
‘You mean I may be a suspect?’ Sharif said, outraged.
Thackeray shook his head.
‘You know I can’t answer that in any sensible way,’ he said. ‘I don’t even know if I’m looking for suspects yet. The first thing I need to do is build up a picture of what was going on in Faria’s life before she died, and crucial to that is to find her husband. There’s still no sign of him at the house. If we don’t trace him today I’ll get a warrant to break into the house. What I suggest for you is that you take some leave, be with your family at what’s going to be an appalling time for them. Believe me, if Faria was murdered, I’ll find out who did it. I promise you that.’
Sharif gazed out of the window again where the first splashes of icy rain were spattering against the glass, and Thackeray guessed he was far beyond the cloud-shrouded hills.
‘Can I tell my uncle?’ he asked at length.
‘I’m sending Kevin Mower,’ Thackeray said. ‘You can go with him if you wish. Then take the rest of the week off, and we’ll talk again after that.’ And as Sharif opened his mouth to protest he said quietly: ‘That’s an order, Mohammed.’
Sharif struggled to his feet with some difficulty and left the DCI’s office without another word. His head was swimming and he leant for a moment against the wall of the corridor before staggering to the men’s room and leaning over a basin until the urge to vomit receded. Then he splashed his face with cold water and glanced at himself in the mirror as he dried himself on a paper towel. He met his own eyes just as the tears came and he retreated into a cubicle to bury his face in his hands for a long time. He had not seen his cousin’s body but he had gathered from the grapevine that the unknown female pulled out of the river had been decomposed almost beyond
recognition, and he knew that he would not see the beautiful young woman Faria had been ever again, even in death. Somehow that added an extra layer of horror to the turmoil of emotions he was experiencing and he knew his aunt and uncle and his younger cousins would feel the same. Their lovely, loving Faria had been reduced to a decaying chunk of meat and that was an outrage beyond bearing.
It was a long time before he could begin to compose himself and even then he replied only faintly to a voice he recognised calling his name apparently from outside. He smoothed his hair and wiped his face before unlocking the cubicle door and responding to DS Kevin Mower.
‘God, you look rough,’ Mower said, leaning against the door to the corridor to prevent anyone else interrupting them. ‘The boss has just told me what’s happened. Do you really want to come with me to break the news?’
‘I must,’ Sharif said. ‘It’s the best I can do. At least I can stay with them, make myself useful, do something for the family. The bastards here aren’t going to let me anywhere near the inquiry.’
‘No, I don’t suppose they are, mate,’ Mower said, putting a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. ‘I don’t suppose they are.’
Later that day, long after the final issues of the
Bradfield Gazette
had been bundled up into the company’s yellow and blue vans and distributed around the town, the editor, Ted Grant, summoned Laura Ackroyd into his glass-walled office at the far end of the newsroom.
‘What do you make of that?’ he asked without preamble, handing her a brief print-out headed by the police logo. She read it quickly and shrugged.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked. ‘They’re not ruling out suspicious circumstances, are they, which they usually do if they’re sure it’s suicide.’ She glanced again at the brief details of the identification of a body that had been found in the River Maze some twenty miles downstream from Milford, where the dead woman had lived.
‘Might be worth a look for this piece you’re doing on wife battering,’ Ted grunted. ‘Have a word with your contacts, why don’t you? See if they really think it’s murder. See if you can get on the inside track. It’ll be a news story if it is murder, of course, but it gives you a good peg to hang a discussion of this whole honour malarky with the Muslims.’
‘You’re jumping to conclusions, but I had thought of looking at the Asian angle anyway,’ Laura said soberly. ‘But you know how difficult it is to get a grip on. No one in the Asian community will talk about it openly, except a few women’s groups.’
‘Talk to them then,’ Grant snapped. ‘If they’re not all raving lezzers.’
Laura smiled grimly.
‘If they were, they really would stir the community leaders up. More than they do already. If there’s one sin worse than adultery for Muslims, its homosexuality. I’ll talk to some of the women I know, see what they’ve heard. But I do think you’re jumping to conclusions. The poor woman may have fallen in the river by accident, for all we know.’
‘And she might have jumped. But she might have been pushed,’ Grant said. ‘As far as I know, no one’s reported her missing. We’d have heard. Use your nose, girl. That’s what I pay you for. See what you can find out.’ He tapped his own nose meaningfully.
‘This one smells,’ Grant said, in the tone his staff knew brooked no contradiction. ‘From the sound of it, quite bloody literally.’
By the end of the afternoon Laura found herself being admitted to a terraced house on the very edge of Milford, ten miles or so outside Bradfield, and some distance from any of the mainly Asian areas of the two towns. The door was opened on a chain by a tall Asian woman in jeans and a loose sweatshirt, her hair long and loose, who glanced up and down the almost deserted street of identical houses before admitting Laura and closing and locking the door behind her. She ushered her into a cluttered office made gloomy by drawn blinds at the window in the main downstairs room of the house and again closed the door behind them.
‘Thanks for making time, Ayesha,’ Laura said. ‘I know you’re busy.’
Ayesha Farouk, organiser of Asian Women’s Aid, a charity much condemned by some of the men of her own faith and others, but which struggled on regardless from one crisis to another, smiled faintly.
‘You’d think with a long settled community like ours there’d be some change in traditional attitudes,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen? Instead of which it’s actually getting worse now. All these angry young men who’ve suddenly rediscovered religion are making life more difficult for women. They’re like the Taliban. They’ll be wanting us in burkas next.’
She sank onto a sagging sofa and Laura took the seat beside her, accepting a cup of thick black coffee from a pot which had been stewing on a corner shelf.
‘Did you know a young Asian woman’s been found dead
in the River Maze?’ Laura asked. ‘Faria Aziz, lived here in Milford, apparently, married but with no children. I just wondered if she was anyone you knew.’
‘Faria’s dead?’ Ayesha asked, her eyes quickly filling with tears.
‘You knew her?’ Laura asked, surprised that she had struck gold so quickly.
‘Yes, I knew her,’ Ayesha said. ‘I knew she was very unhappy, but I never thought she was so desperate that she would kill herself.’
Laura explained about the article she was writing and Ayesha looked at her uncertainly.
‘I’m not sure I can break her confidence even now,’ she said. ‘She came here looking for help.’
‘If you knew her at all, you’ll have to talk to the police,’ Laura said. ‘I’m not sure that they’ve ruled out murder.’
Ayesha gasped slightly. ‘Murder?’ she whispered. ‘God willing, not that.’
She sat for a moment in silence, gazing at the floor while Laura waited patiently until she seemed to come to a conclusion that gave her no pleasure.
‘OK, it’s not much,’ Ayesha said. ‘But I’ll tell you, anyway. She only came here once, about six months ago, but it was obvious she was deeply unhappy in her marriage. She said her husband was much older than she was and though she never spelt it out I got the impression she had been persuaded into the marriage against her better judgment.’
‘A forced marriage?’
‘I’m not sure. Certainly arranged. She said she barely knew her husband when it happened. These things are not always easy to define. The men know how to bring pressure to bear
in the name of family honour. You have no idea.’
‘I’m beginning to learn,’ Laura said grimly.
‘Anyway, she came to ask advice about getting a divorce. I gave her the name of a sympathetic solicitor, but I’ve no idea whether or not she went to see him. You can be sure it would have been unpopular with her husband and the rest of the family. I never heard from her again.’