Devil's Game

  Devil’s Game

  PATRICIA HALL

  Contents

  Title Page

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  About the Author

  By Patricia Hall

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  She drove into the forest with her heart thudding as usual and smiled to herself. It was always like this, the raised heartbeat, the clammy hands on the wheel, the slight breathlessness as she tried to hold the small car steady on the uneven track through the close-packed ranks of trees. It was a moonless night and not even a star could be glimpsed overhead between the swaying branches, but she kept her headlights dipped. They all knew better than to attract attention to themselves, at least until they were well away from the main road – although here, high in a plantation on the slopes of a Pennine hill long after dark, they were unlikely, she thought, to be noticed. Little moved up here at night, not even the scattered sheep on the open moors above them.

  She could just see the rear lights of a car ahead of her making for the usual meeting place, and in her mirror she caught a glimpse of someone else following behind, the lights dipping up and down in tune with the rutted track. She hoped there would be a good turnout tonight. It was the variety of these encounters which excited her, the not knowing who would be there, whose hands would touch her, the knowledge that she would not know tonight, or ever, who she had been with. She smiled at the thought of the pleasures to come.

  They were beginning to obsess her, these nights when her husband thought she was safely at work on the late shift, to the point where she wished they would come round more often. She was beginning to anticipate for days in advance the long drive, not usually alone but tonight there had been no choice, the bumpy track through the woods which in itself aroused her, and then the climax in the circle of headlights, the thrashing bodies, the shouts and cheers of the onlookers. The fact that Terry, and the rest of her family, her workmates and friends and neighbours, would be appalled at what she had fallen into almost by accident, only made the excitement greater. They would never know, she thought, and anyway, what the hell did it matter to them? Why should she live out her life with no thrills, no excitement, stuck in the chronic boredom of a dead-end job, a couple of kids, and a husband whose idea of a great night out was the quiz at the local pub?

  It was a workmate who had introduced her to these meetings, at the end of a fag break in the yard which had ended up with a ritual moan about the lack of excitement in their lives, and especially in bed, since the kids had been born.

  ‘D’you want summat a bit different?’ Charlene had asked, leaning forward confidentially. ‘A bit out o’t’ordinary?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she’d asked.

  ‘A bit o’dogging?’

  ‘Dogging?’ Karen had no idea what Charlene was talking about.

  ‘You must ha’ read about it.’

  ‘You mean doing it in public, like? Wi’people watching? I don’t think Terry’d go for that.’

  ‘You go on your own, silly. That’s t’whole point. It’s quite safe. There’s lots of people there. You can go wi’any bloke you fancy but you’re not on your own. Far from it. It’s safety in numbers, like. You can’t get hurt or owt like that. You can come wi’me, if you want. It’s a right turn-on, if that’s what you’re looking for.’

  ‘What’ll I tell Terry?’

  ‘Tell him you’re on a girls’ night out. Wi’me. There’s nowt wrong wi’that. You will be, won’t you? But it’ll be a bit more bloody exciting than most girls’ nights out, I can tell you.’

  So she had gone with Charlene that first time, on her girls’ night out, in Charlene’s car, driving out of Bradfield and up into the high hills, and down this same long winding track through the conifers, to this same clearing she was just pulling into, but on her own this time, taking her place in the circle of cars and feeling nothing but exhilaration at the prospect ahead. Perhaps the bloke who had turned her on until she screamed last time would be there again tonight, she thought. But it didn’t really matter. So far, it had worked for her every time. She had not been disappointed. The pool of light created by the encircling headlights had lived up to expectations and she only wished that the meets, every couple of weeks, could happen more often. She pulled on the handbrake and switched her headlights to full, illuminating the centre of the circle like a stage. This, she thought, as she slipped out of her coat and got out of the car in hot pants and a top which barely covered her nipples, was what life should be like.

  * * *

  The newsroom at the Bradfield Gazette was abnormally hectic that morning, as reporters struggled with garbled first reports of a major pile-up on the motorway during the rush hour in which there had been fatalities and serious injuries. Insulated slightly from the hubbub by her concentration on the deadline for the feature she was writing on a local school which was being considered as a prospective academy, Laura Ackroyd bashed her computer keyboard urgently, blotting out the distractions around her. By ten o’clock she had finished and pressed the key that sent her work to the sub-editors who would fit it into the feature pages, and to the editor, Ted Grant, who looked very unlikely to take much notice of her efforts. He was almost galloping around the room, reading over one reporter’s shoulder after another as they put together the details of the motorway smash for the front page. His comments and advice were never less than trenchant and this morning, with a very tight deadline, they bordered on the manic.

  She leant back in her swivel chair with a sigh, letting the tension drain out of her shoulders as she surveyed the controlled chaos of the newsroom, something she loved and resented in almost equal measure. How much longer would she be here, she wondered, driven out not by her own ambition as she had once expected, nor even by Ted Grant’s relentless aggression, which she had occasionally feared, but by a wholly new obsession which was beginning to dominate her every waking hour. Soon, she thought, for the hundredth time, she must resolve this. She could not go on much longer as she was.

  Her brief respite was suddenly interrupted by the unexpected sound of her name hurled across the newsroom in the editor’s usual stentorian tones. He had retreated to his glass-walled office now, she noticed, and was beckoning her urgently in his direction from the doorway.

  ‘Who is this beggar, Sir David Murgatroyd?’ he asked without preamble as she came into the cluttered space from which he directed his reign of terror over his staff. Laura could see that he had the feature she had just completed on his computer screen in front of him.

  ‘He’s some sort of venture capitalist,’ Laura said cautiously. ‘I thought you might have known him. He claims to have come from these parts originally.’

  ‘Never heard of the beggar,’ Grant said. ‘Why’s he getting involved in one of our schools then? Everyone I talk to reckons Sutton Park should be closed down, and good riddance to it.’

  Everyone you talk to in the Clarendon bar, Laura thought cynically, where she knew from past experience that the assembled wisdom of Bradfield’s ageing and wealthy conservatives, with and without a capital C, was distilled into a particularly potent racist and sexist bile.

  ‘The inspectors say the school has improved out of all recognition over th
e last few years,’ she said mildly. ‘A new head, better discipline, exam results going up. As I say in my piece, the teachers and parents are not best pleased at the idea of handing the place over to some peripatetic millionaire. The scheme would throw loads of money at the place, which can’t be bad, but control would go to this man Murgatroyd. And he’s a fundamentalist Christian by all accounts, so I don’t know where that leaves all the Muslim kids who go to Sutton Park now.’

  ‘Aye, well, you’ve said all that here,’ Grant said dismissively. ‘I reckon what this piece needs, before we use it, is a profile of this Murgatroyd bloke. Let’s find out who he is and what his motives are, shall we? We’ll hold it for the minute. How can I write a leader one way or t’other unless I know what sort of alternative he thinks he’s offering? And you might ask him what he thinks he’s going to get out of it, an’all. It seems a funny sort of thing to do with your money, however much of it you’ve got, propping up a run-down comprehensive.’

  ‘I’ll do some digging around then, shall I? See if I can get an interview with him?’ Laura asked, not displeased with the idea. ‘If you like, we could do a full page about it next week if I have any luck. I’ve got something Jane did on the plans for the Mela which could just as well go in today.’

  ‘Aye, do that. People keep telling me I need to keep the flaming ethnic minorities happy. We’ll use this school stuff later when we’ve got summat a bit more meaty to go on. You should have thought of that yourself. I don’t know why I’m having to teach you to suck eggs after all this time.’

  Unmoved by Grant’s parting jibe, which she knew was at least partly justified, Laura went back to her desk and began an intensive trawl of the Internet for details of Sir David Murgatroyd’s career. He was right: she should have done this before, she thought wryly. She must focus better, at least while she was within range of Ted Grant’s unforgiving surveillance, and not let her own private obsessions interfere with the job. If she was going to leave the Gazette, she wanted to leave under her own steam and at a time of her own choosing, not booted out ignominiously for making mistakes that only a cub reporter could be forgiven. She owed herself more for the years she had spent here, locked into her home town by quite other considerations than the nature of the job.

  * * *

  DCI Michael Thackeray glanced up slightly wearily as DS Kevin Mower entered his office. The bullet wound in his back, which had nearly taken his life the previous year, had been playing up in the night and he had slept only fitfully, lying rigid at the side of the bed hoping that he would not wake Laura.

  ‘Quiet night?’ he asked hopefully, taking in the sheaf of papers Mower carried.

  ‘Traffic’s up the wall, guv,’ Mower said. ‘A lorry careered into a queue of cars at the M62 junction and there’s complete mayhem out there. As far as CID’s concerned it was quiet enough. A burglary in Southfield, place ransacked when the owners came home from the opera in Leeds. Forensics are out there now so we may get something from them. But the lads are getting wise to DNA. The canny ones are wearing coveralls, and gloves and masks, would you believe? There was one toerag nicked red-handed in Harrogate by an off-duty DI who said it could have been one of our own forensics team on a murder inquiry the way he was all dressed up for the job.’

  ‘It’s lucky they’re not all quite as bright as that,’ Thackeray said. ‘We might have to shut up shop.’

  ‘And a good job most killings are spur of the moment. The last thing on your average murderer’s mind is whether he’s leaving DNA behind.’ Thackeray nodded, his own mind obviously not really on what the sergeant was saying.

  ‘So, no other overnight excitement then?’ he asked eventually.

  ‘Uniform are talking to some bloke whose wife didn’t come home after work last night, but it sounds like another domestic. She’s got bored with the husband and kids and has done a runner, I expect. They’ll keep me informed if it looks like anything more dodgy.’

  ‘A day to catch up on the paperwork, then,’ Thackeray said, glancing at the pile of files in his in tray without enthusiasm. More likely, he thought, another day with time to wrestle with the problem Laura Ackroyd had set him and which he knew would have to be resolved soon if their relationship was to have any future. Her desire to have a family was growing, that was all too obvious, while his own reservations only deepened. And he did not know how to tell her that.

  ‘Thanks, Kevin,’ he said. Mower glanced at him warily. He knew better than to probe too deeply into Thackeray’s private life but he had known his boss and Laura long enough to recognise the signs that things were not going well. It really was time those two sorted their future out, he thought unsympathetically as he closed the door carefully behind him. They’d had time enough.

  On the other side of town, on the edge of the new housing complex that was still being built to replace the dilapidated blocks of flats on the Heights, known not just to its inhabitants but to the whole town as Wuthering, young police constable Nasreem Mirza was sitting uncomfortably on the edge of Terry Bastable’s sofa. She was by now well aware that whatever it was that worried Mr Bastable, whose broad face looked pale and drawn, he really did not want to fill her in on the details. And she knew exactly why she was unwelcome, even though Mr Bastable had called the police himself and she had been dispatched to see him within half an hour. She had spotted the small, fading red, white and blue BNP poster in the front window, no doubt left over from the last council election campaign, and drawn her own conclusions even before the man had opened the front door and she had seen his face harden into hostility rather than welcome or relief. He was a muscular figure, in a tight T-shirt, revealing several indecipherable tattoos and with a close-shaven head which in itself exuded aggression.

  ‘Are you the best they could send?’ he muttered as he led her into the house, his expression surly. Nasreem knew better than to respond and settled herself in an armchair without being asked.

  ‘So tell me what’s happened, Mr Bastable,’ Nasreem said, her Yorkshire accent as broad as Terry’s own. ‘We can’t do owt about it unless you tell me the facts.’ She got out her notebook and pencil and busied herself trying to impart a sense of calm efficiency, in spite of the fluttering anxiety in her stomach. Whatever he thought about the colour of her skin, he had no choice but to deal with her, but she knew that this antagonism, which she met every day from some local people, only added an edge to the need for her to do a good job. If anyone was going to mess up her career by making a complaint, she thought, it would inevitably be one of these racist bastards.

  ‘She told me she were on t’late shift,’ Terry mumbled. ‘I look after t’kids when she’s working late. She takes the car and is usually back about midnight. I had a few bevvies and fell asleep on t’sofa. I didn’t wake up till gone seven this morning, and didn’t realise she’d not come back till I went upstairs with a cup of tea for her about half past. She weren’t in bed and the car’s not outside.’

  ‘No messages?’ Nasreem asked. ‘Phone, text…?’

  ‘Nowt,’ Terry Bastable said. ‘And when I rang Shirley’s, which is where she works, they said she weren’t on t’rota for last night any road. She weren’t supposed to be at work at all till tomorrow.’

  Nasreem sighed. Anyone asking the questions she knew she had to ask would be unwelcome, she thought, but her interrogation would be more unwelcome than most to this man who sat bolt upright on the sofa, rigid with a fury which she guessed was pretty equally aimed at his errant wife and her own unwelcome presence in his house.

  ‘Has she ever done anything like this before?’ she ventured.

  Bastable shook his head irritably.

  ‘’Course not,’ he said. ‘She’s steady, is Karen. Not like some.’

  ‘And have you been getting on well together? No domestic problems which might lead her to go off on her own for a bit?’

  ‘We’re happily married, aren’t we?’ Bastable said. ‘As far as I know, we are, any road. No, no domestic problems,
none at all.’

  ‘No hint that she had begun to see anyone else?’

  Bastable glowered at Nasreem, his face beginning to look flushed, and shook his head vehemently.

  ‘Nowt like that,’ he snapped.

  ‘But she said she was on the late shift, when she wasn’t…’

  ‘Summat must have happened to her. Summat bad,’ Bastable said, and Nasreem could see the fear in his eyes. ‘She went off in t’car. I always make her go by car because she comes back late. Maybe she thought she was on shift… Made a mistake like, with the rota, and summat happened on the way there or on the way back. You hear of women getting abducted, don’t you? Women disappear. It’s not just kiddies who get taken.’

  ‘It’s unusual, Mr Bastable,’ Nasreem said gently. ‘Most adults who disappear go of their own free will, you know. Generally we wait for a few days, just post them as missing, and they turn up again. In this case we can also look for the car, if you give me the details. It would also help if you could tell me what she was wearing when she left the house.’

  Bastable looked at her blankly.

  ‘I didn’t notice,’ he muttered. ‘Her coat, I suppose. It were chilly last night, weren’t it? Her coat’s dark…blue. No, green. That’s right, green wool, but dark, almost black. Fits a bit tight, like. I don’t know what she had on under it.’

  ‘Have you looked to see if she’s taken a suitcase or holdall? Whether all her clothes are still here?’ He shook his head dumbly.

  ‘Could you check that for me, d’you think?’ Nasreem asked. Rigid with suppressed emotion, Bastable got to his feet and went thundering upstairs, where Nasreem could hear him opening cupboards and drawers and slamming them shut again. She glanced round the living room of the small house with its large flat-screen TV and PlayStation in one corner, computer games strewn where the children must have left them before they went to school, and she wondered if they had any idea where their mother might have gone. Judging by the school photographs of a blond boy and a red-headed girl on the mantelpiece over the gas fire, they must be ten or eleven, probably still at primary school. Wherever Karen Bastable was, they would no doubt be devastated if she never came back. She sighed and waited until Terry Bastable came back into the room and slammed the door behind him.