“Resigned, I think,” Thackeray said. “He's not a fool. He knows what's going on. But I owe him an explanation, not just a wedding invitation. Not that he'll come, of course. He's about as dyed in the wool as you can get without actually being the Pope.”
“Michael, you mustn't tear yourself apart over this,” she said. “We can go on as we are ⦔
“No,” he said. “That's not an option is it? I see you with Vicky and David's children and I know very well what you want. You're going to get fed up with the way we are. And I couldn't bear to lose you.”
“Maybe I can't have children, after ⦠you know ⦔
“We won't know till we try, will we,” he said, as lightly as
he could, although he felt breathless with panic at the thought. “Come here,” he said, and took her in his arms and kissed her so fiercely that she had to pull away, laughing, for breath.
“Shall we leave the washing up?” she asked, pulling him back towards her and feeling his hardness against her thigh and opening her mouth for his next kiss. But before they could reach the bedroom, locked in a close embrace, his phone rang loudly and long enough to split them reluctantly apart.
“Damm” Laura said as she watched Thackeray flick on the mobile and listen impassively to the voice at the other end.
“I'll be right there,” he said at length and she flung herself onto the sofa, feeling defeated.
“It looks as if we may have identified our jogger,” he said, pushing her hair away from her brow and kissing her on the cheek. “I'm sorry, Laura. Really sorry. You know what it's like.”
She shrugged, trying to conceal her disappointment.
“I'll see you later then,” she said. “I'll keep the bed warm.” But she knew that he would come back exhausted and fall instantly into a deep sleep in her arms as he had done so many nights before.
Â
Thackeray sat across an interview room table from Frank and Matthew Earnshaw as Sergeant Mower eased his way through the door with two brimming polystyrene cups of grey-looking coffee in his hands. He placed them in front of the visitors and sat down beside Thackeray. Everyone in the room looked pale and haggard in the harsh lighting but Frank Earnshaw in particular seemed to be finding it difficult both to sit still for long and to frame his words carefully enough for coherence.
“Sergeant Mower tells me that you didn't know that a body had been found on Broadley Moor,” Thackeray said at length.
“We don't see the local rag,” the younger Earnshaw said dismissively.
“The village has been full of police ⦔ Mower objected mildly.
“We'd not noticed,” the older Earnshaw added. “We're a bit preoccupied at the minute. We've other problems to worry about. You'll have heard about the financial difficulties we've run into. Simon's whereabouts were the last thing on my mind this week, till he failed to turn up to meet his brother this evening.”
“So when did you last see Simon?” Thackeray asked.
“We've not seen him since Christmas, but I spoke to him on the phone on Sunday to arrange a meeting at the Clarendon today. There was some business stuff we needed to discuss,” Matthew said. The crisis appeared to have sobered him up.
“Simon is a major shareholder in the company,” his father added dully.
“But he doesn't work for you?” Thackeray asked.
“No, he used to, but not now. He did a management degree and I put him in charge of marketing and administration when he finished. He was very good. But then a year or so ago he had some sort of conversion to green politics and decided to go back to university to do a postgraduate degree. He said he wanted nothing to do with the company any more. Or the family, it seems. He's kept himself very much to himself since.”
“He kept his bloody shares, though,” Matthew said. “He wasn't so converted he didn't know which side his bread was buttered.”
“So you wouldn't have expected to see him regularly?”
“We speak to him on the phone if we need to. His mother meets him in town for lunch now and again, though she doesn't think I know that,” Frank Earnshaw said, his bitterness overcoming the anxiety in his faded blues eyes.
“He knew how important it was to talk about the problems at the mill,” Matthew said. “We told him it was urgent and he didn't object, just said he wasn't keen to come up to the mill or out to Broadley. He suggested the Clarendon. I think he thought it was some sort of joke. It's not the sort of place he goes these days.”
“So you wouldn't normally expect him to be jogging on Broadley Moor?” Thackeray said. “Too close to home, maybe?”
“I wouldn't expect him to be jogging anywhere,” Matthew said sourly. “He's not the type. Unless that's another sort of conversion he's gone through that we don't know about.”
“Do you happen to have a photograph of Simon with you?” Thackeray asked. “We could possibly eliminate this body quite quickly without any more distress ⦔
“I brought this one from his flat,” Frank Earnshaw said. “I thought if we reported him missing you'd want one.”
He reached into an inside pocket and pulled out a snapshot of a young man standing outside a substantial Victorian house beside Frank himself and a woman Thackeray guessed must be his wife.
“It was taken about three years ago, but he's not changed much. Hair's a bit longer, maybe.”
Thackeray looked at the photograph carefully but his hopes of finding some distinguishing characteristic, such as dark hair or unusual stature, which could make it impossible that the body in the Infirmary freezer could be Simon Earnshaw, faded almost at once. Simon was about the right height, and as fair-haired as the unknown victim, and allowing
for three years, of around the same build. He sighed and handed the photograph back to Frank Earnshaw.
“I'm sorry,” he said. “It's impossible to rule him out. I think you'd better have a look at the man who was found the other morning.”
As the quartet walked the short distance across the city centre to the Infirmary and down into the basement where it had been arranged that a technician would retrieve the remains of the unknown jogger, Thackeray explained as gently as he could the nature of the injuries that had been inflicted on the corpse and the efforts which had already been made to repair the damage in the hope that by the following morning a suitably cosmetic photograph could be issued to the media. But as it turned out the undertaker's efforts were enough.
Frank Earnshaw and his son stood pale-faced and rigid beside the gurney as the technician pulled back the sheet covering the corpse but their reaction was instant. The older man choked slightly and then nodded, jaw clenched, while Mower moved quickly to provide a steadying arm to his son, Matthew, who was visibly swaying.
“You're sure that is your other son, Simon Earnshaw?” Thackeray asked, his own face rigid with tension.
“It's Simon,” Earnshaw said, his voice hoarse. “How the hell did he come to fall down the Crag?”
“He didn't fall, Mr. Earnshaw,” Thackeray said. “We have good reason to believe he was murdered.”
“Oh my God,” Earnshaw said, while his other son slumped against Mower, who grabbed him in a bear hug, before he vomited all over the floor and the sergeant's shoes.
Sergeant Mower seized his companion's arm fiercely as he came out of the main entrance to Bradfield Infirmary and pushed him to a stop against the wall at the bottom of the broad stone steps, holding his elbow across the younger man's chest.
“Don't ever, ever, let your personal feelings go like that again,” he said. “It's not helpful, it's not professional, it's not even safe. You were winding that girl's father up, you idiot. Trying to get him to commit himself to something he can't possibly judge at this stage. As if they haven't got enough to cope with.”
DC Mohammed Sharif, commonly known in CID as Omar, a name he accepted so amiably that Mower suspected that the joke was his own idea, pushed the sergeant's arm away irritably.
“You can't treat that sort of shit as if the girl's grazed her knee,” he said angrily. “She'll possibly lose the sight of that eye. Someone's got to deal with these fucking racists. She's going to be scarred for life, she'll never marry ⦔
“And how do you know that it's not the work of a gang of Asians pissed off because she's got a white boyfriend?” Mower snapped.
“What?” Sharif said, his angry eyes suddenly uncertain. “Is that what they're saying? Is that what she said?”
“She didn't get a look at whoever threw the stuff,” Mower said, more quietly, aware that they were attracting curious glances from passers-by making their way in and out of the busy hospital. “You're assuming it was a racist attack. You're pushing her father into claiming it was a racist attack. And
you may well be right and of course we have to take that possibility on board. That's the way it works. But we don't know for certain. Not yet. So calm down and let's try to behave like bloody detectives instead of emotional schoolboys, shall we? That's what they pay us for.”
Sharif pulled himself away from Mower's restraining arm and walked ahead of the sergeant, back towards police headquarters. Mower caught up with him quickly.
“When I talked to her father initially he was evasive, evidently not sure of what was going on with the girl,” Mower said in a fierce whisper, one cautious eye on a couple of Asian youths leaning against a wall. “I want you to talk to him and the mother, calmly and rationally. I'll come with you but my Punjabi's not up to it if she doesn't speak much English. You know the rules: this is a racist incident if they say it's a racist incident, but so far I'm not getting that message clearly enough. The girl can't be sure. I'll talk to the guv'nor when we get back because in the present state of tension we don't want to go winding anyone up if we don't have to. We need to be sure. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sarge,” Sharif said, his plump boyish face still betraying signs of sulkiness as they made their way up to the CID office and Mower went to report to DCI Thackeray on what he had learned so far about an attack with corrosive liquid on a fourteen-year-old girl, which had shaken even an old hand like Mower who reckoned he had seen everything that human beings could inflict on one another.
Thackeray listened to Mower's report with a deepening anger of his own.
“This one will make it into the
Gazette,”
he said. “Laura was complaining that Ted Grant seems to be ignoring the attacks and harassment that have been going on, but he won't be able to ignore this. So we need our facts straight. I'll
talk to the Super and he'll want to brief the Press Office, so can you get the family's complaint clear by lunchtime. Where was she going, this kid?”
“To school,” Mower said. “She's at that Muslim girls' school near Aysgarth Lane.”
“On her own, was she?”
“With her two younger sisters. It's not far from where she lives, but she says that there was no one around in that little alleyway that goes up between the Lane and Alma Street at the back of Earnshaws mill. They take that route every day, apparently. Then these lads appeared, hoods up, running, and as they went past she felt this liquid hit her. It was acid of some sort, the hospital's analysing it. Burnt her scalp and cheek badly and splashed into one eye.”
“What do the doctors say?”
“Bloody equivocal, as usual, but the burns will probably leave scars and the eye damage could go either way. Too soon to tell.”
“Is the girl sure her attackers were white?”
Mower shrugged.
“She says she didn't get a good look. It's a bit of a bastard this one.”
“And one we need to sort out sharpish,” Thackeray said. “It's not what we needed with the Broadley murder investigation set to go now we've got an identification, but of the two it could be the more tricky to handle. So watch it.”
“I'm taking Omar with me to see the family,” Mower said.
“Makes sense,” Thackeray said. “Make sure he doesn't get too emotionally involved.”
“I'll watch him, guv,” Mower said, his smile grim. “Like his guardian angel.”
Thackeray got to his feet slowly and made his way upstairs to Superintendent Longley's office. His boss was leaning
back in his swivel chair, his fingers tented in front of him and his usually jovial features sombre.
“This is a beggar we could have done without, Michael,” he said, without preamble. “Who've you put in charge?”
“Mower,” Thackeray said. “With Sharif in tow. They'll not put size ten boots where they shouldn't, with the family at least.”
“We're sure it's racist, are we?”
“No, not yet,” Thackeray said. “But I'd put money on it. And Mower knows the local Nazis as well as anyone. He knows which stones to turn over and which slimy bastards' tails to salt.”
“Are they getting any reinforcements from outside, d'you reckon?” Longley asked. Thackeray shrugged.
“We'll check that out when Mower's made sure that there aren't any other reasons why this girl might have been attacked ⦔
“Family reasons, you mean?”
“Exactly. We'll check that out first â carefully â and then consult Special Branch about extremist movements. We've not had serious attacks on women before but this may not be the first. There's been a lot of low-level harassment going on in the streets for a while, and a few gangs of lads facing off. But it's not as if people always rush to report things to us. I'd like to think they did but ⦔ He shrugged. They both knew that some of the Asian community were as suspicious of the police force as they were of the extreme right wing youths who stoked up violence on the streets from day to day.
“Right, keep me up to speed on this one. It could turn nasty. And what about the Earnshaw murder? As if one politically sensitive case isn't enough we get landed with two. I take it you've told the Press who the victim is?”
“The Press Office have issued a statement,” Thackeray said.
“I used to play golf with Frank Eamshaw until he transferred his affections to that new country club out at Arnedale. Along with the bloody Assistant Chief Constable, no less. We could do without that beggar Ellison watching our every move in a murder investigation. How the hell did this lad come to get pushed off a cliff?”
“Amos Atherton says that's not the way it happened,” Thackeray said mildly. He was determined not to let the Earnshaw family's local status cloud his judgement now or later. “We were supposed to think he slipped over the crag, but Amos says he was already dead when he fell or, more accurately, his body was dropped over the edge. He died somewhere else. God knows where. Given the time scale it could be anywhere in the county, or even further away. He'd been dead at least twelve hours by the time he was found and the cold is making an accurate timing difficult.”
“Leads?” Longley asked.
“Not yet, it's early days. I've got a team searching his flat. There's supposed to be a girlfriend, but apart from messages on the answerphone there's no sign of her yet. The victim's car is missing, so we've got a call out for that. His university colleagues aren't due back in Bradfield until tomorrow but we've located his tutor and will interview him later today and then chase up his mates. And I'm going to talk to the family myself this afternoon, parents and brother â and there's a grandfather still around too.”
“Old George Earnshaw, aye, I remember him,” Longley said. “I didn't know he was still alive. A big noise, he was, in the wool trade, when there was a wool trade. Still, give him his due, he kept that mill alive when most of them were going spectacularly bust. This could be something as simple as a robbery that went wrong, presumably? Someone
mugged him and chucked his body somewhere they hoped it wouldn't be found for a while?”
“He was dressed in jogging gear. It's unlikely he'd be carrying anything of value, except perhaps a Walkman or a mobile phone,” Thackeray said.
“Or his car keys,” Longley said. “Perhaps he was mugged for his car keys, he was hit too hard, his body dumped and chummie escaped in the car? A car-jacking? Feasible?”
“Certainly feasible,” Thackeray said evenly, refusing to allow himself to be irritated by Longley's persistence which he knew only too well arose from the fact that the superintendent already felt assistant chief constable Peter Ellison's hot breath down his neck. “I've got the lads looking for tyre tracks right across the top of the crag. It's been out of bounds for months so if there's anything fresh up there they'll certainly find it. I'm ruling nothing in and nothing out at this stage.”
“Of course not,” Longley said quickly. “There's the trouble at the mill to bear in mind, too. I suppose it's feasible someone there's got it in for the family. Worth a look, maybe?”
“As I understand it Simon Earnshaw has nothing to do with the business any more. He bailed out some time ago.”
“Could be a way of getting at his father,” Longley suggested.
“I gather industrial relations are pretty ropey there but surely not bad enough to provoke murder,” Thackeray said, trying to keep the incredulity out of his voice. Longley, he thought, was letting his anxieties get to him. “I'll bear it in mind as another lead anyway.”
“Aye, do that,” Longley said heavily. “It looks like we're in for a messy few weeks one way and another. Keep me up to date, Michael. I don't want to be caught on the wrong foot and end up in the sticky stuff with either of these cases.”
“Sir,” Thackeray said.
Â
Â
It was mid-morning before DCI Thackeray and DC Val Ridley parked on the gravel drive outside the Earnshaw family's substantial house on the outskirts of Broadley.
“Not short of a bob or two, then, boss,” Val said, pulling a wry face as she glanced at a gleaming Jag and a muddy Range Rover parked outside and gazed up at the dark stone façade and tall windows each side of the heavy front door. As they stared, a thick curtain at one of the downstairs bays swayed slightly as if someone had been pulling it aside to look out and had then let it fall again.
“One of the great wool families, when that meant anything,” Thackeray said. “But from what I hear that mill is a white elephant now. One of the things I want to get out of this is some idea of just how much financial trouble the Earnshaws are in. But I guess they won't be keen to tell us.”
The front door was opened almost as soon as Thackeray touched the bell and the small plump housekeeper showed them into the main sitting room at the front of the house: a large, opulently furnished, immaculately tidy room where the only items that appeared out of place were the three people who inhabited it. Matthew Earnshaw, dressed in navy tracksuit bottoms and a green polo shirt, was sprawled on a pale cream sofa with a glass of what looked like whisky in his hand. He looked pale and drawn. His father and mother were sitting in armchairs, one on each side of the fireplace like a pair of porcelain ornaments, both dressed in black, both pale-faced and red-eyed, both apparently uninterested in the visitors who hovered for a moment awkwardly by the double doors from the hall.
“I'm sorry to intrude,” Thackeray said. “But you do understand that we need to talk to you about Simon's death?”
This elicited a flicker of reaction from Frank Earnshaw who turned his head slowly in Thackeray's direction. Matthew Earnshaw ignored them, taking another gulp of his drink and turning his head away while his mother did not stir at all.
“Mr. Earnshaw?” Thackeray persisted. “This is DC Val Ridley. Today we merely need to establish some of the basic facts about Simon so that we can start the investigation into his death as quickly as possible. The first twenty-four hours of an inquiry is reckoned to be vital and a lot of time has already been wasted in this case because we didn't know who our victim was.”
With what appeared to be an enormous effort Frank Earnshaw forced himself to sit up and take notice and waved the two officers to sit down, Thackeray taking the end of the sofa on which the surviving Earnshaw son was slumped and Val Ridley selecting a seat close to the door from which she could observe everyone else in the room. As she pulled out her notebook she felt she could almost touch the brittle tension which surrounded the bereaved family. Any of them might shatter, she thought, at the slightest touch.