Radio Bradfield's lawyer flinched visibly at that list of questions and made to object but Steve Denham raised a hand impatiently.
“I'm sure Laura is experienced enough to know the risks of defamation,” he said.
“All to be discussed in general terms,” Laura said innocently. “Obviously we can't comment on a police investigation.” Me less than most, she thought to herself wryly.
“But most urgent of all perhaps, as a topic,” she went on, “is the fact that there are young Muslim men who will try to hunt down girls and young women who step out of line. That's illegal, and if no one talks about it they'll continue to get away with it.”
“The same young men who'll be ready with their petrol
bombs if tension rises any higher,” the lawyer, Colin Makin, got in quickly this time with a sour look in Laura's direction. “I wouldn't recommend that sort of debate at any time, but especially not now.”
“I thought this was a news station,” Laura said sweetly.
“Laura,” Kelly Sullivan broke in. “I think all Steve is suggesting is that we postpone this particular set of interviews for now. I'd certainly like to follow the idea up myself, when things are a bit calmer.” She flashed a glance at her boss. “But perhaps you could come up with something a bit less, well, difficult this time?”
Less difficult and more boring, Laura thought but this time she kept her temper in check.
“Don't you think that half the problems in this town could be resolved if we didn't keep on dodging the difficult questions?” she asked, far more calmly than she felt. “You know what they say? The communities are living parallel lives? But on the fringes there are people who want to get closer together, young women in particular, who want to integrate, become more Westernised if you like, leave behind some Muslim traditions which they find oppressive, and isn't that their right if they've been born and brought up here? In a free country it's their choice. And in a free country their voices should be heard. What you're saying is that we close off a debate about that so we can all have a quiet life and don't get accused of racism by the men at the mosque.”
“This is all a bit heavy for me at this time in the morning,” Steve Denham said, with an attempt at lightness. “Let's call this a postponement of the issue, shall we? I wouldn't want the research you've already done to go to waste, Laura, so you and Kelly can certainly come back to it in calmer times. But for now I want you to come up with something less inflammatory. OK?”
“OK,” Kelly said, glancing at Laura, who sighed and nodded ungraciously. She knew she could not defy the station manager and as an outside contributor she was in an uniquely weak position. If she wanted to maintain any sort of toehold at the station, which she did, she would have to acquiesce, however unwillingly.
“Thanks for coming in, Laura,” Denham said. “I was sure we could work something out. Talk to Kelly about a different topic and I'll look forward to your interviews. You've got a good voice for radio. You never know. There might be a good career move in this direction some day.”
Laura did not believe him for a moment. Her chances here were almost certainly blown.
Â
Sergeant Kevin Mower sat in the same cramped space he had occupied last time he had visited Dr. Stephen McKenna and the scientist gazed back at him across the equally cluttered desk with the same mournful expression.
“So how come you're now sure Simon Earnshaw was having a relationship with Saira Khan when the last time we spoke you were adamant you didn't know who the girl was?” Mower asked. DC “Omar” Sharif perched against the cluttered windowsill watching the proceedings with dark, unreadable eyes.
“I told you I thought the girl was Asian. Simon was being so cagey that it had to be something like that. Obviously she wouldn't want her family to know.” McKenna glanced at Sharif, who scowled at him. “I'm not being racist,” McKenna said fiercely. “You must know how it is. We have lots of Asian women students here. The families are thankfully becoming really ambitious for their children now. But some of the young women are brought here every day by minibus and picked up again in the evening. The traditions about
what women can do run very deep, as you must know very well.”
“So?” Mower pressed. “How did Saira's name crop up. Was she one who came in the minibus, or what?”
“No, I don't think so. You need to talk to her tutor as well to find out more. That's Olive Makepiece in the pharmacy department. She was the one who told me one of her Asian students had not come back this term and she was wondering if she'd gone off to Pakistan or something.” Another glance at Sharif. “It happens sometimes. Anyway, I began to wonder, put two and two together and maybe make five or six, but I thought I'd check it out. Simon was a good man, a good friend, and I want his killer found, and it seemed to me not impossible that his love life had something to do with what happened. I couldn't think of any other reason why he should be killed.”
Stephen McKenna shuffled the papers in front of him on his desk for a moment, evidently needing time before he felt able to continue.
“Anyway, I waylaid some of the students coming out of their pharmacy lectures yesterday,” he said. “Eventually I pinned down a girl called Fatima Achmed who everyone said was Saira Khan's best friend and it all came out. She was frightened to death for Saira. She hasn't seen her for more than a week, her family has told her to mind her own business and she suspects â well, I think she knows really, but she says she only suspects â that Saira was in a relationship with an older student that she didn't dare tell her family about. It has to be Simon, doesn't it?”
McKenna hesitated again for a moment and Mower waited patiently. It was obvious that there was more to come.
“What puzzled me is why he never told me about Saira,” he said slowly. “He knew very well I wouldn't mind who his
girlfriend was. But he said something odd once. We were talking about the city, and regeneration and all that, and he said the problem with Bradfield and the immigrant community was that neither side wanted to know the other, both communities wanted to keep themselves to themselves. I got the feeling he was talking personally somehow, that he wouldn't have wanted his own family to know he was going out with an Asian girl any more than she would want it known by her parents. It was just an impression, you understand, but it might be relevant.”
By the end of the afternoon Mower and Sharif had questioned Saira Khan's tutor and more than a dozen of her friends and acquaintances on her course, but without being offered anything more than vague speculation about her private life and her likely whereabouts since she had last been seen by Fatima Achmed on a cinema trip just before the start of the university term. As the two officers joined the stream of young people flooding out of the university buildings at the end of the day and made their way the short distance down the hill to the town centre and the main police station, Mower glanced at his companion, who had said little all afternoon.
“Come on, Omar,” he said. “What do you really think about all this? Are we looking for another body?”
The younger man shrugged.
“It's possible, sarge,” he said. “Don't imagine I don't think that, and wouldn't work as hard as anyone to find out who did it.”
“I wasn't suggesting that you wouldn't,” Mower said. “But watch yourself. If we get into investigating the dark side of Muslim traditions, runaway girls and family honour and all that stuff, you'll have a crucial part to play, and they'll be watching you from on high, believe me.”
“You mean they don't trust me because I'm a Paki?” Sharif asked, letting his anger gleam for a moment in his eyes.
“I mean you'll have to prove you can be trusted,” Mower said. “D'you think the family will be trying to hunt her down, however much they deny it?”
“Quite possibly,” Sharif said uneasily.
“Can we find out who does the hunting? We need to know. Will people know at the mosque, the community centre? Or do you know yourself?”
“No I don't,” Sharif said, struggling not very successfully to hide his discomfort.
“So you'll make inquiries, then?”
Sharif shrugged.
“If that's what you want, sarge,” he said. Mower glanced at him curiously, taking in the angry eyes and frozen expression on his colleague's face.
“Surely you're not into all this tradition yourself, are you? Are you going to let your parents choose your wife for you, for God's sake?”
“Maybe,” Sharif said. “And if I do it'll be no one's business at work, will it? What gives you, or anyone else, the right to criticise?”
Mower sighed.
“You're going to make life difficult for yourself,” he said. “That's all I'm saying. You know what the job's like. They play all the right tunes on equality but there's plenty still resent it and they can make your life a misery if they think you're stepping out of line. Believe me. I know. See what you can find out about what the Khan family is up to, right?”
“Right,” Sharif said.
Earnshaws mill had stood four-square on the hill above Aysgarth Lane for more than a century, a great looming stone battleship of a building, its towering chimney dominating the hills of Victorian terraced cottages for miles around. But where once the structure had shaken daily with the deafening clatter of a thousand looms, large sections of the fourstorey building were now closed off, some of them structurally unsafe, and the huge cobbled yard, where as little as twenty years earlier the bulging hessian bales of British and Australian wool had been stacked several stories high waiting to be winched to the upper floors, was now often deserted. Thackeray drove in past a couple of desultory security guards and parked next to the handful of staff cars which used the yard as a car-park. He glanced up curiously at the decaying, blank-windowed relic of the industrial age. It was, he thought, quite ostentatiously ornate, a florid symbol of a confidence long dissipated and a wealth now only a fading memory in these steep Yorkshire valleys. He did not see how Earnshaws could survive. The world was moving on at a frantic and accelerating pace, leaving it high and dry.
But that was not a thought which he wished to share with Frank Earnshaw, into whose wood-panelled office he was ushered by a secretary five minutes later. The room shuddered slightly to the rhythm of the few machines which were still active in the cavernous depths of the mill. Thackeray had come to see the mill's managing director alone and in person in deference to his superiors' sensitivities. He did not at this stage want to interview Earnshaw again in any formal way, but he thought there were some aspects of the case that the
dead man's father might illuminate for him one-to-one, without the presence of officers taking notes or taperecorders inhibiting every word they exchanged.
“Have you got any news, Mr. Thackeray?” Earnshaw asked, his face more grey and lined than the last time Thackeray had seen him. “My wife's finding this very hard.” And you too, Thackeray thought, his sympathy automatically with any bereaved father. He knew every bitter step of that road only too well.
“I'm sorry,” he said. “But not news in the sense you mean it. We're no further forward in the main part of our investigation. If you asked me who the prime suspect is I'd have to tell you that I've no idea yet.”
Earnshaw nodded, and gazed out of the office's tall window over the roofs of the little houses which snaked down the hill below the mill towards the town centre. They had been built for Earnshaws workers and still housed most of them, although a whole history of failing industry and lost Empire had intervened.
“I wanted to talk to you a bit less formally than last time about your family as a whole, about how they got on.” Earnshaw looked wary but nodded.
“For instance, you've just the two sons â were they friends?” Thackeray asked.
Earnshaw turned his now bleak gaze onto the policeman and shrugged.
“More Cain and Abel than David and Jonathan? Is that what you're thinking, Chief Inspector? Well, in one sense I suppose you're right. They weren't great friends, no. They never were, really, not even when they were little lads. They were always very different and Matt was always jealous of Simon. I think he thought that I approved of Simon more than I approved of him, and he was right of course. Matt's
been nowt but trouble in many ways, at school, at college. The drink started early on, his marriage never looked as if it would work â and it didn't. When Simon left the company I was deeply disappointed. My father was appalled. I don't think he's seen Simon since, cut him out of his life completely ⦠I'd always regarded Simon as my successor as well ⦔
“So Simon was the blue-eyed boy?”
“Aye, I suppose you could say that. Not only mine, his grandfather's too. My father wanted to fire Matt more than once. I have to confess that I couldn't ever bring myself to that point but he was â is â a disappointment.”
“Your father is still actively involved in running the company then?” Thackeray asked.
“Not active in the day-to-day running, no,” Earnshaw said. “He's not fit enough for that now. But he's still a director and he makes his views known.” Earnshaw shrugged ruefully and Thackeray, thinking of the tall gaunt old man in his cluttered, empty house, guessed that George made his views known pretty forcefully on occasion.
“It's a difficult time right now, as you probably know. We need to make changes here but it's proving very hard to get the directors to agree. You could say my father heads the status quo party. He believes that trade will pick up and Earnshaws will be restored to its former glory. He's living in cloud cuckoo land, to be honest. The textile industry in this country is as good as dead. There are only two options for this place. We go bust and someone else acquires the site dirt cheap and redevelops, or we try to diversify and regenerate ourselves, which means bringing in some extra capital. In the meantime we're making economies and trying to hang on. That's what all the trouble with the union is about.”
“And that's the line you're pursuing personally? Hanging on until you can negotiate a rescue package?” Thackeray
asked carefully, not wanting to let Earnshaw know of his contact with Jack Ackroyd and his apparent interest in the future of the mill.
“Right, but it's complicated,” Earnshaw said. “The way the company is structured, deliberately structured by my father, I may say, three out of four of the family directors have to agree to any major strategy. With my father and I at loggerheads the two boys' shareholdings are crucial. I think I've persuaded Matt that my proposals make sense, although he tells me that his grandfather's been trying to persuade him different. But that still leaves Simon's shares. That's what Matt wanted to discuss the night we realised Simon was missing, when he didn't turn up at the Clarendon. I'd already talked to Simon by phone and I really thought I'd got him on side but last week he seemed to be backing off again, making difficulties ⦠His priority seemed to be getting some community benefit out of any changes which were made â which wasn't impossible. There's all sorts of ways you can develop a property like this.”
“But if you can't get an agreement â¦?
“We carry on as we are, and eventually we go bust â sooner rather than later, I'd say,” Earnshaw said harshly. “My father can't see that but it's inevitable.”
“Do you know who'll inherit Simon's shares?”
“I don't even know if he's made a will,” Frank Earnshaw said. “If he hasn't I suppose they come back to the family. I'm not sure what the legal position would be.”
“That's something we'll have to investigate. You do understand that,” Thackeray said.
“Good God, man, d'you think one of us killed Simon for his shares? The idea's bizarre.” Earnshaw looked genuinely shocked.
“I don't think anything at this stage, Mr. Earnshaw,”
Thackeray said. “But you have to appreciate that in a murder investigation nothing's sacred, nothing's off-limits. It's not a pleasant process for the victim's family, even if they're as innocent as the driven snow.”
“Not innocent till proved guilty then? More possibly guilty till proved innocent?”
“That's about it,” Thackeray admitted.
“Did you track down Simon's alleged girlfriend?” Earnshaw asked.
“We think we may have identified her although we haven't actually found her yet,” Thackeray said. “But we've some more inquiries to make before we can be sure.” Thackeray did not want to broach the subject of Saira Khan with Simon Earnshaw's family until he had a clearer idea of whether she had been spirited out of Bradfield by her own family, in spite of their denials, or indeed whether she was dead or alive.
“It does seem possible that she may be of Asian origin,” he conceded, not averse to watching Earnshaw's reaction to that piece of information.
“Asian?” Earnshaw said, visibly surprised. “We had no idea.”
“Would it have caused you and your family a problem, if you'd known? Was that why Simon didn't tell you about her?”
“Not me, or Simon's mother,” Earnshaw said, quickly enough to be convincing. “If she was fond of Simon I'd like to meet her. But my father wouldn't have been too happy about it. I think it'd be fair to say he's had more difficulty than most in coming to terms with immigration to Bradfield. He wouldn' t employ Asian workers when they first began to come over. Brute economics forced his hand in the end, but he didn' t like it. He spent some time in India just after the war when
he was in the RAF. Came back after independence. He never talked about it at all but I think he saw things there that shocked him. It was pretty bloody business, wasn't it, the partition of India? Whatever happened out there, when Pakistanis turned up here in the 1960s it seemed to upset him more than most.”
“You're sure your father hasn't seen Simon recently? Had a row with him, perhaps?”
“Obviously I can't be absolutely sure, but I don't think he's seen him for a long while,” Earnshaw said. “But if you're thinking what I think you're thinking, Chief Inspector, you must realise that he's an unlikely murder suspect even if he is a bit of a racist. You may not know that my father has prostate cancer. It's a slow disease but it's killing him. His doctors don't reckon he has much more than six months to live. Unfortunately, to put it brutally, we can't wait for him to go before we tackle the problems of the mill. We've got to move faster than that.”
“I'm sorry to hear that,” Thackeray said. “But I may need to talk to him again.”
“I'm sure there's nothing I can do to stop you,” Earnshaw said, his face suddenly drawn with weariness.
Â
Amina Khan, in a long grey coat and hijab, caused a slight rustle of interest amongst the mainly young, white and welldressed clientele as she came into the café bar to meet Laura Ackroyd that lunchtime. It was not an environment much frequented by evidently devout Muslim women on their own and the fact that she was momentarily the focus of attention might have explained the look of anxiety with which she scanned the tables in search of Laura.
“What can I get you?” Laura asked when Amina eventually eased her way between the crowded tables and sat down.
“Coffee?” Amina nodded and Laura realised just how strained she looked beneath the severe head-covering.
“Is there still no news of your sister?” Laura asked when she had dealt with the waitress. Amina's eyes filled with tears which she dashed away impatiently.
“I do know she's actually missing,” Laura went on. “I know, even though your brother tried to deny it when I went to see him. Did he tell you that?”
Amina shook her head.
“I didn't know you'd seen Sayeed,” she said. “My father and my brother are saying very little, although I can see they're worried.” She doesn't know yet what the police suspect, Laura thought, and wondered as she stirred her own latte whether she should tell her.
“So how can I help?” Laura asked eventually, deciding for the moment to keep her counsel about what she had learned from Michael Thackeray.
“I know where she is now and it's not good news,” Amina said. “I had a letter. It was sent to the school, no doubt so that my father wouldn't see it.”
“So she's alive?” Laura said quietly, filled with relief at that.
“When she wrote it, at least,” Amina said. “But she's run away with a man.”
“Ah,” Laura said cautiously. “So why are you telling me all this now?”
“Because you've discovered she's missing, and now I want you to forget all that. I don't want anyone else to know about what's happened, especially my father and brother. I want you to stop asking questions about my sister.”
“Don't you think your father will try to find her?”
“They'll be furious, and they may try. Though I don't think it will be that easy. The letter was posted in Paris. She seems to have gone abroad.”
“Can I see it?” Laura asked, wondering where this conversation would leave her in relation to the police inquiry. Amina took a tightly folded envelope from the small black bag she had placed on the table in front of her and passed it to Laura who glanced at the handwritten address and French stamp before unfolding the letter and beginning to read.
My dearest sister,
By the time you read this I'll have gone away. Already I feel like something out of one of those classic novels that we used to read at school. I know you'll think I've dishonoured our family and you'll never want to see me again, like poor Kitty in “Pride and Prejudice”. Do you remember? I know you'll think I am weak and treacherous which is why I want you to have this letter to remember me by, so that you'll know that I did try to live by the rules you believe in and that I've been taught too. But in the end it didn't make sense for me and I've made my own decisions. I hope one day you and the rest of the family will be able to forgive me.