Authors: Patricia Hall
‘Get some clothes on,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a little job for you.’ He glanced at the bedside table for a second before unplugging the phone and carrying it with him out of the room.
‘Be quick,’ he said over his shoulder. Downstairs he moved fast, checking all the doors and windows to make sure they were locked and pocketing the keys before wrenching the main telephone connection out of the wall. In the kitchen he unlocked a door at the back of the room and switched on the light beyond to illuminate a steep flight of stone steps. Like many older houses in Bradfield, this one had a small cellar, built to accommodate a narrow space for regular deliveries of coal through a hatch from above to feed the open fires that used to be the only means of heating, and beyond the
coal-hole
, another larger room with a stone sink and copper for the household’s washing in the days before electric machines took over.
His mother had bought the house after the death of an elderly woman and although she had spent some of her savings on modernising the rest of the property he knew she had done nothing at all to the cellar, beyond boarding up the area window to deter intruders and rodents. Gingerly, he made his way down the steps to find the space much as he had expected, reasonably dry but cold, dusty and lit only by a single low watt bulb dangling from the ceiling. It would do the job he wanted it to do, he thought with satisfaction. It would keep prying eyes and ears away from Anna until he
had finished the task he had decided, in the dark hours of the previous night, that he had to complete before he and his daughter would be safe.
He hurried upstairs again and began carrying down cushions from the sofa in the front room, and then as much of the food in the kitchen as he thought they would need, and a couple of bottles of water. On his last trip he met his mother, fully dressed but looking gray and dazed, inching her way down the stairs.
‘I want you to look after Anna for me,’ he said, brusquely. ‘Just for a little while. I’ve got things to attend to and then I’m going to take her right away from here…’ Vanessa made as if to object but Holden’s face suffused with colour and she seemed to think better of it, flinching away from his outstretched hand as he offered to help her down the last few steps.
‘Where is she?’ Vanessa asked faintly.
‘In the car. I’ll get her in a minute. She fell asleep. You come with me and I’ll bring her in.’
He hustled Vanessa into the kitchen and to the top of the cellar steps and at that point she realised what he intended.
‘Not down there,’ she said in horror.
‘Not for long,’ Holden said. ‘I don’t want you ringing Julie. I need some peace to finish things off here. You and Anna will be safe enough down there, no problem.’
Ignoring her protests he hustled her down the stairs into the cellar and pushed her down roughly onto the cushions he had arranged in one corner of the small stone-floored room, knowing that she would find it very hard to get to her feet again. He glanced around and waved towards a cardboad box.
‘There’s food and drink here. You won’t starve. What about a bucket for you-know-what? I’ll get you a bucket, just in case it takes longer than I think.’
He bustled back up the stairs, located a bucket and placed it in the small coal cellar.
‘Not quite all mod cons but I’m sure you’ll manage. I won’t keep you long, I promise.’
Within minutes he had carried his sleepy daughter, fully dressed and wrapped in a blanket, into the makeshift prison he had constructed and put her on the cushioned floor beside her grandmother.
‘Daddy,’ the child wailed, looking around her in astonishment. ‘Where am I?’
‘I want you to stay here for a bit and look after your nanna, sweetheart,’ Holden said brusquely. ‘And Nanna will look after you. I won’t be long, I promise. I’ll come and get you very soon and then we’ll go away together, somewhere warm and sunny, maybe. Not bloody miserable and cold and wet like Blackpool. We’ll be fine, I promise.’
And without looking back at woman or child, he strode back up the cellar steps and they heard the door being closed and locked behind him. Anna gazed at her grandmother in horror and saw silent tears streaming down her wrinkled face.
‘Don’t cry, Nanna, please,’ she said taking her hand. ‘Please don’t cry. He’ll be back soon. He always does what he says.’
But it was that certainty which filled Venessa Holden with terror as she wondered exactly what business her son intended to complete before he came back to release them. But that was speculation she did not dare share with the child at her side. She sniffed back her tears and put her arm round Anna.
‘We’ll have to think of some games to play until your daddy
comes back,’ she said. ‘I’m sure he won’t be long.’ She glanced at her watch and shivered slightly. It was half past five.
After carefully locking up his mother’s house, Holden eased his car out of its parking slot and drove a hundred yards to the end of the street and turned into a narrow alleyway that led to a row of lock-up garages, where his mother kept her little used car. He reversed her Nissan carefully out of the garage and put his own four-by-four in, dropping down the door as quietly as he could. He did not think he had been seen. The houses all around were still in darkness. Driving the Nissan circumspectly so as to attract no unwelcome attention, he made his way to his own road and went slowly past his own house, pausing to take in the absence of a vehicle on the drive and the fact that the curtains were not drawn on the window of the main bedroom. He parked a couple of streets away and walked back slowly. In the distance he could see a milk float proceeding at a leisurely pace from house to house but otherwise there was no sign yet that anyone was awake as the faint grey light of morning stole over the rooftops. Glancing around cautiously for one last time he let himself in through his own front door and very quietly began a systematic search of the house.
He sniffed at a bottle of fresh milk in the fridge and smiled faintly, guessing that someone had been there recently but he was not really surprised when he gently opened the bedroom door to find the bed neatly made, and no one there. He pulled back the cover and picked up the pillow on what had been Julie’s usual side, and sniffed it. She had been here, and not long ago, he was sure, and therefore might well come back. He went back downstairs and into the kitchen, taking the largest of the cooks’ knives from the knife block and then moving
into the living room and settling himself into the armchair half hidden behind the door. He could wait, he thought. He could wait for the pleasure of giving her what she deserved. He felt exhilarated by the idea and considered putting some music on the stereo, but then told himself firmly that he could not risk disturbing the neighbours. His silence would have its reward, he promised himself, when Julie walked through the front door.
Mohammed Sharif flung himself onto the small, hard bed in the bed and breakfast establishment he had deliberately chosen to be as anonymous a base as possible in the city of Lahore, still
jet-lagged
by the time difference, enervated by the heat, and aching all over after he had crushed his battered body into an airline seat for so many weary hours. It was mind-blowingly hot and stuffy in the tiny room, with a faint smell that he hesitated to identify, but he had decided to keep well away from the glitzy air-conditioned tourist and business hotels, which were still busy in spite of the country’s slightly ambivalent relationship with its friends and neighbours internationally. He could stand the heat, he hoped, for the few days he intended to stay, and although there was little chance of his being recognised in the teeming capital of the Pakistani Punjab, he did not want to take the slightest chance. What he was doing, he knew, would infuriate family members even more in Pakistan than at home in Bradfield, and would not enchant his colleagues and superiors in CID, and he did not want to take the slightest risk of anyone reporting back to anyone at all.
He did not really know the city at all. He had flown into Allama Iqbal airport often enough on family visits, most recently to Faria and Imran’s wedding, but his father’s custom was to hire a people-carrier at the airport and drive the family immediately out of Lahore, with the children craning through the window to glimpse as many of its famous parks and monuments, and a good proportion of its six million inhabitants, as they could before they headed across the agricultural plains to the family village about one hundred miles away. This time Sharif had taken a taxi straight to the centre and, encumbered only with an overnight bag, asked to be dropped close to the old walled city, where he found himself almost overwhelmed by streets clogged with a maelstrom of cars and vans and technicolour
quingqi
, motorised rickshaws, which swirled in what looked like an intricate and noisy dance of death, and by the sheer number of people milling in the narrow streets. Although he felt hungry, he resisted the enticing smells and noisy blandishments from the roadside food stalls selling every variety of snack and which he knew that his unaccustomed western digestion might reject violently. His grandfather’s village still seemed an oasis of timeless tradition to young people born and brought up in England. This was a metropolis uneasily, it seemed to him, poised between the old and the new: beautiful, glamorous even, but at the same time so seethingly crowded and, in parts, impoverished, as to seem faintly threatening.
He lay on his bed naked, still feeling sticky after what passed for a shower in the communal bathroom – a
one-handed
contortion because of the need to keep his strapped ribs and bandaged hand reasonably dry, and considered his next move. Two days ago he had driven up to his parents’
house after checking that his father would be out and
cross-questioned
his mother, so gently he hoped that she had not realised quite what was happening. He had felt guilty as he took advantage of her grief over Faria’s death to persuade her to get out her precious photograph album and show him pictures of his cousin’s wedding to Imran Aziz, pictures in which he himself appeared on the back row, in traditional dress, looking slightly uncomfortable and half hidden by the bride and groom.
‘Did you go to Imran’s first wedding?’ he had asked, hoping that the question sounded like an idle one, but his mother was only too pleased to discuss weddings, anybody’s wedding, with her so far unmarried son, no doubt hoping that it would enthuse him in that direction. As he had hoped his mother flicked back through the pages of her album, full of uncles and aunts and cousins and second and third cousins, until she came to a single fading snapshot of another village wedding.
‘Only your father went,’ she said. ‘There he is, look.’ But Sharif was looking much harder at the bride, her headscarf thrown back after the ceremonies, and at the same time trying to conceal his surprise. She was not a young woman, nor a particularly beautiful one, and he wondered callously why Imran, who at that time was reputed to be doing well in business in Lahore, should have consented to marry such an unprepossessing bride.
‘What was her name?’ he asked his mother as casually as he could manage, but she only frowned as she tried to recall. She flicked through her photographs again. ‘I remember your father saying that Imran could not attract a young bride because he was too old. He had left it too long. And at that stage of course Faria was too young…’ Her eyes filled with
tears and she dabbed them with the end of her scarf. ‘They couldn’t insist on that arrangement then. It is such a pity that it happened later.’ She dabbed her eyes.
‘Can you really not recall her name?’ Sharif persisted, knowing that going to Pakistan to trace a nameless bride would be worse than useless, but very reluctant to try to extract the information from Faria’s own parents. His mother shrugged and detached the fading wedding photograph from the album and looked at the back of it.
‘There,’ she said. ‘Imran Aziz and Mariam Gul. That was her name. She seemed a good woman, but not perhaps what Imran’s father had really wanted. But Imran was beginning to be the subject of gossip at his age and not married… I don’t think Mariam came from a very good family. Perhaps Imran chose her himself, being away from home in Lahore anything is possible…’ She glanced at her son slyly. ‘Away from home is away from good advice,’ she said. ‘You should remember that.’
And with that Mohammed Sharif had had to be satisfied, and he flew from Manchester to Lahore two days later without much confidence that he would be able to track down Mariam Gul or her family with the minimal information at his disposal, but determined to try.
The next morning, after a fitful night’s sleep in a room where the heat built up to a point where he felt as if he was drowning in the damp air, and still half bemused after the long flight and the painkillers he was still taking, Sharif spent half an hour using the mobile phone he had rented at the airport. His aim was to track down a distant cousin of his mother’s who had outraged his father, much as Mohammed had infuriated his, by joining the Pakistan security services
after taking a degree in law. Sharif only knew of his existence, not being nearly as well versed in family relationships as his parents’ generation, because his name was occasionally invoked by his mother’s father and his own as an example of another young man in the family who had unaccountably and outrageously ignored his elders’ advice and chosen his own career and, Sharif suspected, his own lifestyle.
In his apparently hopeless quest to find a divorced woman of uncertain age amongst the millions of inhabitants of the Punjab, Ali Hussain, if he could locate him, might be at least a source of advice if not practical assistance, and Sharif was prepared to use the remote family connection on this occasion to the hilt. Official channels, he knew, would be slow and devious and might bring him unwanted attention both in Lahore and back home if anyone felt moved to report back to West Yorkshire about a holidaying British detective playing sleuth in a foreign country. That he could well do without.
Somewhat to his surprise, he eventually tracked Hussain down to central police headquarters, where he had apparently reached the rank of captain in some branch of the service that Sharif had never heard of. After the family politeness of exploring the tortuous connections of blood and marriage that linked the two men, Hussain had suggested that they meet that lunchtime at a branch of McDonald’s close to a sparkling new shopping centre and not far from the colonial mansions and administrative buildings of the British Raj on the Mall.
‘I didn’t know the Big Mac had arrived here,’ Sharif said.
‘
Halal
, of course,’ his cousin said. ‘But is there anywhere they haven’t arrived? It has the advantage of being quick. I
have a busy afternoon booked.’
‘Of course,’ Sharif said. ‘It’s good of you to take the time.’
‘I heard something about Faria from my uncle. Family news spreads fast here – though not always accurately. The speculation can get red hot. Time for us policemen to keep our heads down below the parapet.’
‘I’m sure,’ Sharif said dryly. ‘I’ll see you in an hour then.’
After dressing painfully in khakis and a long-sleeved sports shirt to hide his bruises, although there was nothing he could do to disguise the plaster that still covered the deep cut on his head, and the strapping on his left hand, he ventured out into the crowded street and hired a
quingqi
, plastered with brightly coloured pin-ups and scenes from Bollywood and Lollywood – the fiercely competitive Mumbai and Lahore film industries – and asked to be taken to the McDonald’s he had been instructed to find. The driver veered and swerved through the traffic, while chattering on his mobile phone, but with thankfully unerring accuracy, although more than once Sharif closed his eyes as a truck or bus seemed to be heading straight at them at breakneck speed. The
quingqi
finally deposited Sharif, safe but shaking slightly, outside the familiar golden arches. As he paid the driver, he noticed a tall man of about his own age in a smart uniform heading towards the doors and he guessed this must be Hussain.
The two men waited in line for food and then settled at a table close to the door and exchanged the obligatory family pleasantries, news and information that spanned three continents and three generations from the ancestral village to branches of the family in Bradfield, London and Toronto.
‘And you?’ Hussain asked, finishing his cola and wiping his mouth, his eyes appraising his cousin. ‘You look as if
you have been in the wars. What happened?’ Sharif told him about the assault he had suffered, but did not go into details. His belief that he had been attacked by members of his own community might spark a political debate, which he did not want.
‘You make enemies in this job,’ he said. ‘I expect you find the same.’
‘Oh yes,’ Hussain said. ‘Here you must watch yourself all the time. But you said your interest was this sad family matter? How can I help with that?’ He listened quietly while Sharif told him in detail about Faria’s death and the disappearance of Imran Aziz.
‘You think he killed her?’ he asked when Sharif had finished. ‘You think it’s a question of honour? She was unfaithful?’
‘We know nothing about the marriage or what went on between them,’ Sharif said. ‘She visited her parents very seldom and not at all for a few months. And I have been taken off the case because I’m too close to it. And now I’m on sick leave, anyway. That’s why I came. I thought that here I might find out a bit more about Imran Aziz from his former wife – if I can find her.’
Hussain looked at him consideringly for a moment as if wondering how far he would go even for a kinsman from a faraway country.
‘It is possible we could trace her,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘You know that here divorced women are not always welcomed back by their families? Some of them find themselves alone and in difficulties and it’s not unknown for them to become known to the police.’
‘They lived in Lahore while they were married,’ Sharif said. ‘My mother says she was not a woman from a village family.
She thinks Imran may have met her in Lahore. She may still be here.’
‘She may,’ Hussain agreed. ‘Give me a day and I’ll see what I can discover in our files. Since 9/11 they have become – what shall I say? – a bit more extensive, and a bit more accurate. I’ll check her out and give you a call. I’ve got your mobile number. I’ll check out Imran Aziz for you, too. If he was in business here there will be be traces of him to be found in the records, more easily than for his wife actually.’
‘I’d be grateful,’ Sharif said. ‘Faria was like a sister to me. Her death, her murder, must be solved. Her killer has to be found.’
‘Of course,’ Hussain said. ‘Of course he must.’
Laura sat hunched in her chair on the other side of the fireplace from Michael Thackeray, grimly aware that what had been planned as a rare evening together was turning into a battlefield. She should not have answered her mobile, she thought, when it had rung soon after they had finished a companionable meal together. Just for once she should have let it ring. She, after all, was not the senior police officer on more or less permanent call. She could have let it ride, but her insatiable curiosity always made it very hard to ignore a ringing phone.
So she had answered it and listened to a hysterical Julie Holden on the other end of the line, demanding to know what her bloody boyfriend had done today to trace her daughter. Laura had tried to calm the distraught mother down, but she was conscious of Thackeray half listening to the conversation and that he very quickly adopted a stony expression, which presaged nothing but trouble to come as he worked out what
was going on.
‘Would you like to talk to her,’ she had mouthed at Thackeray eventually, but he had shaken his head vehemently, and left her to persuade Julie to calm down as best she could by suggesting she talk to Sergeant Janet Richardson the next morning. When she finally hung up Thackeray had buried his head in that evening’s
Gazette
and continued to read it in silence until Laura could bear it no longer.
‘She says nobody’s been in touch with her,’ she said. ‘Surely someone’s liaising with her. She’s beside herself with worry.’
‘She’s no right to try to get to me when I’m not on duty,’ Thackeray said, his voice like ice. ‘She’s no right to try to get at me through you.’
‘Of course not,’ Laura said. ‘But you can understand how desperate she is, and I have been following her story. She’s a perfect right to call me if she wants to.’
Thackeray flung the newspaper to one side with a heavy sigh but Laura ploughed on regardless, ignoring the warning signs.
‘Isn’t Sergeant Richardson supposed to keep her in touch with developments?’ she asked. ‘She could be at risk if Holden comes back to Bradfield. She needs to know…’
‘As far as I know there are no developments. No one’s seen Holden and the child since they left their rented place in Blackpool. He could be out of the country by now. As far as I know Janet Richardson is doing the job she’s paid for, which involves dozens of cases like this. Neither she nor CID can devote themselves to Julie Holden full time when there’s no obvious risk to her safety or the child’s. Get real, Laura. And for God’s sake don’t give your mobile number to every lame dog in your contacts book. We’ll never get any peace. We get
little enough time together as it is.’