Authors: Patricia Hall
‘She’s gay, as you call it these days,’ Joyce said flatly. ‘She
lives with a woman friend out in the country somewhere. She’s very discreet but obviously someone’s found out and is spreading the word. And you know what these born-again Christians feel about that. And the Muslims, come to that. She has a lot of Muslim parents at the school. They’ll kick up as well, if they find out.’
‘Ah,’ Laura said quietly. ‘And there was I thinking all this bigoted nonsense was over and done with, in this country at least. Does Steve think David Murgatroyd has found out about this?’
‘No, no, the pressure seems to be coming from some of the governors and possibly from the council. You know how keen they are to get their hands on the cash to rebuild. They don’t want anything standing in the way of that, never mind who gets trampled underfoot. The threat seems to be that they’ll tell Murgatroyd about her sexuality if she doesn’t keep quiet about her opposition to the scheme. And to think this is supported by the party I worked for for all those years. You can understand the Tories going for it, but the Labour councillors? Huh?’ Joyce broke off with an angry grunt and Laura could imagine the pain of her disillusion and her bitter frustration at no longer wielding any influence at the town hall. Joyce Ackroyd was not growing old contentedly. Far from it.
‘I’ll make some inquiries,’ Laura said. ‘I think there’s a lot of lobbying going on, but that sounds several steps too far. Let me see what I can find out.’
‘You sound a bit down yourself, pet,’ Joyce came back. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ Laura lied. ‘How are you? How’s the hip? Was it all right on the plane?’
‘Oh, you know. It comes and goes,’ Joyce said. ‘It’s not going to get any better, is it, at my age?’
‘And mum and dad? I’ll call you all at the weekend for a proper chat, but I must get back to work now.’
‘You work too hard, pet,’ Joyce said quietly, before saying goodbye.
Laura sat for a moment trying to absorb the information her grandmother had passed on. She doubted that Peter Maxwell, the councillor in charge of schools policy, would ever admit to exerting that sort of pressure on Debbie Stapleton. Nor would Debbie herself be very likely to want to admit to being the victim of a particularly nasty form of blackmail if she had succeeded in keeping her sexuality under wraps for the whole of the time she had been at Sutton Park. If she felt she needed to be discreet in normal circumstances, she certainly would not want that sort of publicity in the middle of a furious battle for her school and her own professional future. The inescapable fact was that exposing this particular attempt at blackmail would also expose the victim and, given that Murgatroyd and his supporters almost certainly did not want Debbie Stapleton to retain her headship, covering the story at all would simply ease their way to getting rid of her.
Laura left her desk and went outside into the car park, where she called Sutton Park on her mobile, and to her surprise was put through to the head teacher almost straight away.
‘This is a private call,’ Laura said when Debbie Stapleton came on the line. ‘Can you talk?’ When the head teacher had assented, she went on, weighing her words carefully.
‘I thought you ought to know that there are rumours circulating about your private life. I’m not interested in
writing anything about it, but someone might be. It’s not something I can control. And it sounds like something David Murgatroyd, with his views, would be very interested to hear about.’
Debbie Stapleton laughed, a curiously mirthless sound.
‘Oh yes, don’t worry, I know exactly what’s going on. It’s like something out of the 1950s. We thought these battles were over and done with and then these fundamentalists come along, Christians, Muslims, you name it, and suddenly we’re back in the Dark Ages. Don’t you worry. I’ve had it spelt out to me just how unsuitable being gay might make me as a candidate for my own job if Murgatroyd found out. And how easily he might find out if I go on being stroppy about the takeover of the school.’
‘I wish I could expose these bastards,’ Laura said.
‘Yes, well, give me a bit of time to think,’ Debbie said. ‘I’m not sure that I might not just come clean and expose them myself. I don’t really think I’ll get the job anyway. Murgatroyd will be looking for some born-again clone to run his academy and I certainly don’t fit that profile either. I’m not having children taught religious myths as if they’re scientific fact in biology lessons. They can discuss Adam and Eve in religious studies as much as they like, but not in science. Maybe I’m a fool to even consider applying for the job.’
‘Don’t give up,’ Laura said. ‘The kids need teachers like you. Keep me in touch with what you’re planning.’
‘I will. And thanks for your concern,’ Debbie said, and hung up.
Laura went back to the newsroom with a thoughtful expression and logged on to the Internet to check the list of academies that David Murgatroyd had already set up, against
the local newspaper archives in the towns concerned. It was no surprise to discover, from their coverage at the time each of them had been set up, that there had been similar debates to the one now raging in Bradfield, and that the controversy did not always die down once the new school had opened. In one area parents complained bitterly within months that the school was weeding out the most difficult children by excluding them on what seemed like very flimsy grounds. In another, a religious studies teacher had resigned in a fury, complaining to the local paper that she had been asked to teach about the Bible as if every word of it were literally true. And in a third, the existing head of the previous school who had, unusually, been appointed to run the new academy, had taken the new governors, all appointed by Murgatroyd, to an industrial tribunal claiming he had been forced out soon after it opened because he refused to toe one of Murgatroyd’s many hard lines.
There was more than enough evidence to suggest that, just as she had discovered in Leeds, Murgatroyd’s academies were not proving universally popular and were not necessarily helping the difficult and deprived children they were supposed to benefit. In fact, Laura began to wonder if David Murgatroyd’s agenda was even remotely in touch with that of the Government, which was supporting him to the tune of millions of pounds. She had enough ammunition, she thought, to tackle Peter Maxwell at the local council, to ask him just how and why he thought this particular wealthy philanthropist would benefit the struggling children of Bradfield’s poorest areas. And incidentally, she might tease out whether or not he saw a future for Debbie Stapleton in Bradfield, or whether she was already down simply as collateral damage.
It had taken three officers and a set of handcuffs to bring Terry Bastable to police headquarters this time, and even after the trip into the centre of town in the back of a police van, he was still slumped in a chair, with his hands secured behind his back, breathing heavily and cursing the two officers who were struggling to hold him down when DCI Michael Thackeray and DS Kevin Mower came into the room.
‘Calm down, Mr Bastable,’ Thackeray said, his voice cracking across the small room like a whip. ‘You’ll do yourself no good behaving like that. I’ll wait all day and all night to talk to you if I have to.’ Bastable looked at him with naked hatred in his eyes but eventually the stream of obscenities dried up and he sat panting like a dog, his shaved head glistening with sweat, until the uniformed officers cautiously let go of his shoulders and allowed him to sit more comfortably in his chair.
‘You understand why you’ve been brought here?’ Thackeray asked. ‘You’ve been arrested on suspicion of the murder of your wife, Karen.’
‘Who says she’s been murdered?’ Bastable spat back. ‘You’ve not shown me a body. I’ve not identified her. What the hell’s going on?’
‘If you keep calm, I’ll tell you exactly what’s happened,’ Thackeray said, glancing at one of the uniformed constables who was standing poised to grab the angry man again, with what might seem unwarranted forbearance, given the black eye he had evidently incurred during the arrest. ‘You can take the cuffs off now,’ Thackeray said to the uniformed officers when Bastable appeared to have accepted the situation he found himself in. ‘We’ll be fine. Get that eye seen to, Jim.’ He turned back to Terry Bastable.
‘I understand you’ve been cautioned. Do you want a solicitor present?’ Thackeray asked.
Bastable shook his head and suddenly slumped awkwardly forward across the table, his shoulders shaking and his head in his hands. Thackeray took one of the chairs facing Bastable and Mower sat next to him.
‘Then we’ll tape-record this interview,’ Thackeray said, nodding at the sergeant who set up the equipment and identified the three people left in the stuffy, claustrophobic room.
‘Is she dead, then?’ Bastable mumbled. ‘Have you found her dead? Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you let me see her?’
‘Right, Mr Bastable. Let’s start at the beginning, which we could have done some time ago if you hadn’t decided to assault my officers when they asked you to come to the station. We have found a body. Unfortunately, it’s been so severely treated that it would have been impossible to identify the person for certain, visually.’ Thackeray watched Bastable closely as he spoke but could see nothing but bemused horror
in his eyes. ‘We will have to identify Karen by comparing her DNA, taken from your house – you remember, we took some clothes and her hairbrush? – with DNA taken from the body. But we are satisfied the dead woman is almost certainly your wife. The hair is identical. We had that confirmed about an hour ago and I immediately sent officers to bring you here for questioning.’
Bastable groaned theatrically.
‘What happened to her?’ he asked. His eyes were red now but he smeared the tears away angrily and Thackeray could not tell how much of his reaction was play-acting and how much was genuine.
‘We’re hoping that you will be able to help us find that out,’ he said. ‘You’re under arrest, so we will be taking your fingerprints and a DNA sample, and it will be quite clear whether you had any contact with Karen at the time of her death or immediately afterwards when the body was disposed of. What I advise you to do now is tell us everything that happened on the night you say she went missing. You should be aware that now we know she’s dead, and how she died, I already have forensic officers going over your house to see whether or not there is any evidence at all that the murder took place there. The car you borrowed from your friend is also being examined, as you know. If Karen, or Karen’s body, was in that car there will inevitably be traces left behind. If, as you claimed earlier, the children were in it to go to the supermarket, they will have left traces too. We will find out where that car went that night, and who was in it.’
‘You’re setting me up for this, aren’t you?’ Bastable said, suddenly furious again, eyes popping. ‘You’re bloody well setting me up. I knew as soon as I set eyes on that little Paki
bint you’d have it in for me. It’s persecution, that’s what it is.’
‘My interest is in finding out the truth about Karen’s death,’ Thackeray said, ignoring this tirade. ‘And so far you’ve been telling me a pack of lies. First you were at home all evening. Then you admit you borrowed a car to go to the supermarket. Then you admit you followed Karen and saw what she was up to but she didn’t see you. Where’s it going to end, Mr Bastable? Just where does the truth lie?’
Bastable shrugged and did not respond.
‘What you need to understand, Terry,’ Mower broke in, ‘is that all of this can be checked scientifically and if your wife was in that car that night, dead or alive, we’ll find out. So you might as well tell us the truth now, and make it the whole truth while you’re about it.’
‘She weren’t in the car,’ Bastable said. ‘I swear to God, she weren’t. I never even spoke to her. I saw what she was up to and then I came back home and got stinking drunk and went to sleep, and it weren’t till next morning that I realised she hadn’t come back at all.’
‘Didn’t it strike you that if she had seen Les Duckworth’s car up there she would have realised the game was up and she might be better off staying away? She’d stay out of the way of your fists if she had any sense.’ Thackeray said. ‘Why bother reporting her missing? The only reason I can think of is that you wanted to establish yourself as the anxious husband because you knew very well she was dead, because you’d killed her yourself and dumped the body.’
‘No,’ Bastable said. ‘That’s not how it was. I waited for her to come home, right? OK, I was going to have it out with her, but she never came, and I fell asleep, didn’t I? Woke up in t’morning early on t’sofa, still in my clothes, and realised
summat bad must have happened. I didn’t know if she’d seen me and run off or if she’d come to some harm wi’that gang of sex maniacs up there. Of course I reported her missing. Wouldn’t you?’
‘But you didn’t tell us where she’d gone, or what you knew she’d been doing. Why not? If you genuinely feared for her safety, you would have told us the whole truth from the start.’
‘Because I bloody knew that this is what would happen,’ Bastable spat out. ‘I bloody knew you’d think I’d harmed her, and I knew I bloody hadn’t. I just wanted her found. There, does that satisfy you?’
‘Not really,’ Mower said. ‘It sounds like a load of rubbish to me.’
‘Did you see who she was with in the forest?’ Thackeray asked, suddenly changing tack. ‘Would you recognise her partner if you saw him again?’
Bastable shook his head like a tormented bull at the corrida.
‘It were difficult to see right to t’centre of the ring,’ he said. ‘And most of the men had their faces covered. Some had them silly masks on – Tony Blair and them politicians. You know?’ Thackeray nodded as Bastable confirmed what he already knew about the meetings at Bently Forest.
‘Did it turn you on, Terry?’ Mower asked suddenly. ‘Watching all that stuff? We know you had a lot of porn at home. Did you get worked up watching all that?’
The question seemed to touch a raw nerve as Bastable flushed.
‘Bitch,’ he said explosively. ‘She’s not slept wi’me for months and now I know why. She were getting more than enough, weren’t she?’
‘So what did you do? You must have been very angry. Did
you wait for Karen to drive out of that forest track and drag her into your mate’s car?’ Thackeray pressed on while Bastable’s eyes roamed around the small room as if seeking the smallest crack in the tiles to hide himself in.
‘No, I didn’t,’ Bastable said. ‘I didn’t. I didn’t. I don’t say I weren’t fucking furious, but I went straight home.’
Thackeray shook his head implacably.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I think that’s exactly what happened. You lay in wait for her and stopped her car somehow. You had a furious row and ended up killing her. You’ve already told me you wanted to give her a good thrashing. Then you drove her car back into the woods to hide it for as long as possible to make it look as if she’d driven off in it herself, and then you put her body in Les Duckworth’s car and dumped her somewhere else entirely so it looked like a random attack by a stranger when she was eventually found. Isn’t that what happened, Mr Bastable? Isn’t that what the scientific evidence will tell us when we get it? You killed her, dumped her body and only then went home to drink yourself to sleep.’
Bastable shook his head from side to side and groaned.
‘No,’ he said again.
‘Did you rape her as well, Terry?’ Mower asked. ‘That’s something else we’ll be checking with your DNA sample. You can’t escape the science these days, Terry. You should know that.’
‘I didn’t touch her. I told you. I haven’t slept with her for months.’
‘So you say,’ Mower said. ‘Anyway, we’ll soon know, one way or the other, so you’re wasting your time lying.’
‘You were unlucky that the car and the body were found so quickly, weren’t you, Terry?’ Thackeray resumed. ‘You must
have hoped for more time. Maybe hoped the body would never be found, dumping it in a remote spot like that. Had you been up there before?’
‘I don’t know where she was found, do I? You haven’t told me. So you’re not going to catch me that way. I didn’t bloody do it,’ Bastable said, half rising from his seat and then slumping back again as Mower, too, got to his feet and leant over the table threateningly.
‘You might not have intended to kill her,’ Mower conceded. ‘Maybe it was just a thrashing you intended. But you’re a big man, Terry, and we’ve seen today how easily you lose control. Is that what happened? Did you lose it? Someone certainly did and you’re the obvious suspect.’
‘No,’ Bastable said. ‘No, no, no. I’m not answering any more of your questions, you bastards. I want a solicitor before I say another word.’
‘Right,’ Thackeray said. ‘You can wait in a cell while we contact the duty solicitor for you.’
When Bastable had been taken away, and the recorder switched off, Thackeray ran a hand wearily through his hair.
‘What do you think?’ he asked Mower but the sergeant shrugged.
‘He’s not going to crack without more for us to go on,’ he said. ‘It’s all down to the forensics on the cars, isn’t it? It’s ten miles or more from Bently Forest, where she was last seen, to the moor where she was found. She must have made that journey by car, alive or dead. And if she was dead, there has to be blood, probably a lot of blood. There was no blood in her own car so if Bastable’s our man, he must have used the one he borrowed. I’ll get on to the lab and see if they can give us any preliminary findings at all.’
‘Do that,’ Thackeray said. ‘Otherwise we’re going to run out of time with him. I’m still not totally convinced that he’s our man, and I’d like it settled before we start putting a huge effort into looking for some other psychopath, with all that entails.’
Halfway through the morning Laura Ackroyd’s phone rang and she recognised the voice of Winston Sanderson, Sir David Murgatroyd’s personal assistant.
‘Has he agreed to an interview at last?’ she said, still smarting from the pressure Ted Grant had put on her at that morning’s editorial meeting to get hold of Murgatroyd or give up the chase. The implication was that failure would be down to her incompetence rather than Murgatroyd’s recalcitrance and she left the meeting with cheeks aflame with anger at Grant’s routine unfairness.
‘Meet me for lunch,’ Sanderson said. ‘I can tell you more then.’
Laura hesitated, curbing irritated thoughts of monkeys and organ-grinders.
‘Can you really help me with this profile?’ she asked, her voice sharp with anxiety. Suddenly a life with which she had felt almost content seemed to be disintegrating around her.
‘Of course I can,’ Sanderson said. ‘Be my guest. One o’clock in the Clarendon lounge. That suit you?’
A couple of hours later Laura walked into the Clarendon Hotel bar, deep-carpeted and as quiet as she always imagined a London club might be. The Clarendon was the haunt of Bradfield’s ageing and most affluent burghers, including Laura’s own father in his days as a local entrepreneur, before he retired to play golf in Portugal, and the grey men enjoying
their lunchtime tipple were clearly more than a little disconcerted by the appearance of a young and elegantly suited black man relaxing in their inner sanctum. Sanderson got to his feet with almost exaggerated politeness as Laura approached, every inch of her progress followed by calculating blue eyes, as she took the armchair on the other side of his table.
‘What can I get you?’ he asked and raised a hand to the expectant waiter on the other side of the room when she asked for a vodka and tonic.
‘So, am I going to get my interview?’ Laura asked after taking a sip of her drink. She glanced around and raised a hand at one of the rotund men whom she recalled was an old friend of her father’s, who glanced away, embarrassed to be caught watching her so closely. Sanderson followed her eyes and raised an eyebrow.
‘I gathered you were a native of these parts,’ he said.
‘Born and bred, just like Sir David,’ Laura said. ‘I used to come here with my father, although my parents have retired to live in the sun now.’
‘Which I suppose explains why you take such an interest in this wretched failing school at Sutton Park.’
‘According to the inspectors, it’s no longer a failing school,’ Laura said. ‘Which is why so many of the governors and parents seem to resent what they see as a takeover by an outsider, and an outsider with views which don’t necessarily fit with their own. But this is a conversation I need to have with Sir David. With all due respect, you’re not the prime mover in all this. He is. And I have to say that the opponents of this scheme are getting pretty fed up that Sir David is not willing to talk to them privately or give any public interviews
to the press or TV. Why so secretive, Mr Sanderson? Has he got something to hide?’