By Death Divided Read online

  ‘You need a solicitor who specialises in family law,’ Vicky said. ‘I’m sure David could recommend someone.’

  ‘Oh, they have all those sorts of details at the place where I’ve arranged to stay,’ Julie said.

  ‘Julie’s got a place for herself and Anna at the refuge in town…’ Vicky began to explain, only to be interrupted.

  ‘But I can’t stay there long,’ Julie said, her voice strained. ‘It’s too close to home. He’ll find me. I can’t let him find me. I don’t know what he’ll do.’ Laura could see that the woman was terrified and on the edge of panic.

  ‘Surely you can get an injunction to keep him away,’ she said tentatively, dredging her mind for anything she had ever written in the Gazette about domestic violence.

  ‘I don’t even know where he is,’ Julie said. ‘I’ve been ringing him at home since we left this morning but he’s not answering the phone. I don’t even know if he’s still there, but I daren’t go round in case he is.’

  ‘Doesn’t he have a mobile?’ Laura asked.

  ‘No, no, he hates mobile phones. He thinks people can spy on him if he carries a mobile.’

  ‘Sounds a bit paranoid,’ Laura said.

  ‘He is,’ Julie snapped. ‘He is. I really think he’s going mad.’

  Laura had driven Julie Holden and her daughter back to the refuge in the centre of Bradfield and watched them scuttle into the dilapidated old house with the unexpected signs of twenty-first century security precautions only too clearly visible: the wire mesh over the downstairs windows, the CCTV cameras observing the scruffy garden from every angle and the answer phone system not just on the front door but also on the high iron gate. It looked more like the entrance to a prison than a refuge, she thought, and she wondered what effect it had on the no doubt numerous children who were forced into its confines by dangers in their own homes she could not even begin to imagine. She sighed. She knew, from what little Michael Thackeray had told her about his own marriage, which had ended in tragedy, how overwhelming passion could transmute into a species of war. And she had learnt, since she had known him, how difficult he found it to deal with these issues at work, as he frequently had to. And yet her imagination still could not stretch to any scenario where such anger could affect her own life.

  Tiredly, she pulled away from the kerb and made her way through the rush hour traffic in the direction of home, relieved to escape the atmosphere of fear and tension her two passengers had carried with them like an echo from a dark place. For all the ups and downs in her relationship with Michael Thackeray, who carried a weight of guilt she could only dimly begin to comprehend, she had never felt physically threatened by his periodic descents into depression and the ever-present threat of a drink-fuelled binge. For a man so burdened he was remarkably gentle, and for that she was thankful and had begun to hope that the long shadow of his troubled marriage was lifting at last.

  When she had eased her way out of the traffic and into the leafy avenue where the two of them shared a flat in a tall Victorian house, she was surprised to see his car already parked outside. They both started work early but she was generally home first, not subject to the vagaries, in terms of time or emotion, that the daily battle against crime implied. She found Thackeray watching the television news.

  ‘Good day?’ she asked, as she took off her coat and leant over the back of the sofa to kiss him. He laughed.

  ‘I spent the afternoon at County listening to the latest on the amalgamation of the Yorkshire forces. People already complain that we’re not close enough to the ground so I don’t really understand how these new massive organisations are going to help. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it all ran into the ground eventually.’

  ‘It’s all about serious crime and terrorism, isn’t it?’ Laura asked. ‘Isn’t this new FBI-style organisation supposed to do all that nationally anyway?’

  ‘I thought that was the general idea,’ Thackeray said.

  ‘I’d have thought for the rest of it, it would be better to be close to the ground. It’ll be like trying to run the Bradfield Gazette from Leeds or Manchester.’

  ‘Supposedly there are things small forces can’t do, but as we’re a big force we’ll have to go through the pain for no particular gain, as far as I can see. I expect it’s all about saving money in the long run. Fewer chief constables can’t be bad, can it?’

  ‘It’s fewer editors I could do with,’ Laura said with a grin. ‘But I can’t see any chance of that. Will it affect CID?’

  ‘Probably not,’ Thackeray said, turning the television off. ‘We’ve already got as many specialist units for serious crime as anyone could possibly need. So let’s not worry about it. How was your day?’

  Laura’s face clouded as she told him about visiting Vicky and meeting Julie Holden and her pale-faced, anxious daughter.

  ‘She should first of all report it to us,’ Thackeray said. ‘And then get an injunction to stop him coming anywhere near her and the child. There’s nothing we can do unless she takes the first steps and make a complaint.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Laura said. ‘How can a man…’ She started the sentence and then bit her tongue, though Thackeray was looking at her calmly enough.

  ‘Count yourself lucky you can’t comprehend what anger can do,’ he said quietly. ‘You don’t want to go there.’

  ‘No,’ Laura said. ‘And you’re not going there, either. Ever again.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  Detective Constable Mohammed Sharif stared out of the CID office window, lost in thought as he gazed across the windswept square flanked on one side by police HQ and on the other by the Italianate Bradfield town hall which looked even more out of time and place than usual on this grey and gusty winter morning. Born and bred not a mile away amongst the close-knit stone terraces off Aysgarth Lane, he should be used to this climate, he thought. For him there were no childhood memories of blue skies and dusty villages to idealise of an evening, as his father and uncles often did. On family visits to Pakistan, he had concluded that it was hot, dirty and anarchic, and he had always been pleased when the plane bumped its way down through the cloud cover into Manchester airport. But he still hated the British winter and longed for a sight of the sun.

  Sharply intelligent, Sharif had clawed his way from an impoverished home life after the textile mills had closed, plunging Bradfield’s immigrant population into long-lasting unemployment, and made it through indifferent schooling and the local university, and then into the police force. His choice of career had not pleased his parents. They would have preferred the law or a business career for their first-born, who had achieved the almost impossible in their eyes by going to university at all, but Sharif, when he had eventually made CID, had been content. It was what he wanted and he had withstood the sullen racism he had met every day on the streets and even within the police force itself, to follow his dream, self-confident enough in the end, with his sergeant, Kevin Mower’s backing, to give evidence at a tribunal that put an end to the careers of two officers who had indulged in particularly blatant acts of prejudice a year or so earlier. That had not endeared him to many of his colleagues. That was the downside. The upside turned out to be a new respect from most of his colleagues, and even a wary acknowledgement by a hostile minority that he should not be messed with.

  But now he faced a dilemma, a conflict of loyalties that had been creeping up on him for weeks and which he knew he had to resolve soon. It was a problem which brought his membership of his own community and his obligations to the job into a stark and very personal confrontation. He glanced across the office and caught Kevin Mower’s eye. If any of his colleagues could understand his problem, it had to be Mower, who was still felt to be something of an outsider here himself: a Londoner of less than pure anglo-saxon parentage, who was still regarded with a certain amount of suspicion by his clannish Yorkshire colleagues. But Sharif had not felt able to confide his worries even to him.

  ‘OK?’ Mower asked
across the room.

  Sharif glanced at his computer screen, where he was supposed to be searching the records of known offenders whose modus operandi might link them to a spate of street robberies carried out in broad daylight in the bright new shopping centre on the edge of the town.

  ‘A couple of possibles, Sarge, going on the victims’ descriptions,’ Sharif said. ‘Give me ten minutes.’

  ‘Fine,’ Mower said and returned to his own screen.

  But Sharif could not concentrate on the task in hand. Unlike most young unmarried Asian men, he had not been content to stay in the family home. As soon as his income allowed, he had chosen a small self-contained flat several miles from the Aysgarth area, a flat where he could indulge his passion for rock music and entertaining friends, even, occasionally, women friends, away from the censorious eyes of his own community. As a non-observant Muslim he felt no shame in what he was doing, but for his parents’ sake he kept quiet about his lifestyle when he visited them, and he tended to frequent clubs and cinemas when he was with white friends, and especially young women, sufficiently far away from Aysgarth Lane to protect his family from any hint of scandal. Recently, since he had acquired a more serious girlfriend, Louise, a local girl who had come back from college to teach in one of the town’s secondary schools, he generally went out in Leeds to avoid adverse comment on their relationship from either side of the racial divide. The disadvantage was that he was increasingly less well informed about what was going on in the heartland of the Punjabi diaspora around the Lane, and, he feared, less useful in the job as a consequence.

  The previous evening he had visited his parents on the way home from work and had found them both slightly abstracted. They had been that way the last time he had seen them a week or so previously and he had not had the curiosity then to wonder why. His mother had plied him with huge portions of traditional food, never convinced that he could possibly be having enough to eat when out of her care, and filled him in on the charms of various eligible young women she had just happened to come across in the community, and his father had discoursed vaguely about politics in Pakistan and, much more interesting to Sharif, the activities of various solemn-faced and bearded young men at the mosque.

  ‘They’re not dangerous,’ his father had opined, his own face serious. ‘We do not have crazy men here.’ But, conscious of recent events, Sharif wondered how his father could possibly know and tried to prise a few names out of him.

  His mother had changed the subject quickly to her usual run-down on the activities of his younger brothers and sisters, all married and living locally, and then began to run through the litany of his aunts and uncles – getting older and more difficult – and his cousins, their behaviour apparently more modern and scandalous by the day. He had no doubt that his own idiosyncrasies, not least his determined refusal to take a wife yet, would be recounted endlessly amongst the rest of the family in exactly the same way. He never left home for his own place without silently congratulating himself on his decision to move out and escape the clammy clutches of the clan.

  But there had been one jarring element in this rare family visit. When he had inquired, without great enthusiasm, about his young cousin Faria, who had been married off, he suspected reluctantly, to a distant cousin in Pakistan, his mother’s comments turned unusually angry.

  ‘She never visits her mother,’ Ayesha Sharif said, lips pursed in her plump face. ‘Not for months has she visited home. I don’t understand that in a daughter.’

  ‘They moved away from Bradfield, didn’t they?’ Sharif had said mildly. ‘Does she drive a car?’

  ‘No, she doesn’t drive, but Imran Aziz could bring her to Bradfield. It’s not very far. Milford is not very far. And there are no children coming, as far as I know.’

  Sharif opened his mouth to speak and then instantly thought better of it. The idea that a young bride in her late teens might not yet want children would not only not cross his mother’s mind but would deeply offend her ideas of what was right and what was wrong. He smiled faintly but even so he determined to call his young cousin, in whom he had always taken an older brother’s interest, as she had no brothers of her own.

  ‘Married two years now and no children,’ his mother went on, irritating Sharif with the censoriousness of her tone, and as soon as he decently could he made his escape.

  But when he called the Milford number which he had for Faria on his way home he got only Imran Aziz, who told him that Faria was not at home. Imran hung up quickly and did not elaborate on where a young Muslim wife might be without her husband at ten o’clock at night, a fact that Sharif found faintly disturbing. He had tried the number again the next morning before setting off for work, reluctantly leaving Louise still getting dressed in his bathroom, and this time he got no reply. Should he worry? he wondered, recalling the lively eyed girl and her two sisters who had been regular visitors to his home when he was a boy. He had lost touch as they had all grown up and he had gone his separate way, but Faria had been his favourite and he determined to make a visit to Milford as soon as he had the time. He had no intention of allowing his parents to arrange a marriage for him, and Faria had been very young when hers was set in train. Perhaps it was not working out well, he thought, and resolved to find out.

  ‘Just about to print out the details, Sarge,’ he said guiltily in response to Mower’s increasingly impatient query. ‘Give me ten seconds.’

  Feeling slight anxiety that he had dismissed Laura’s concerns about her brush with a battered wife the previous evening too easily, not least because he had been determined to make the most of a rare long evening with her, DCI Michael Thackeray took the trouble to wander casually into the domestic violence unit at police HQ that morning. Most of the desks were empty, but he found the head of the unit, DS Janet Richardson, in her tiny glassed-off office, surrounded by heaps of files. She glanced up at him anxiously with tired eyes.

  ‘Morning,’ she said. ‘We don’t often see you down here. We don’t have a body for you – not yet. Though I know a few men doing their best to oblige.’

  Thackeray nodded, accepting the justice of her implied criticism. Crime prevention was meant to be a priority but as money was poured into higher and higher-tech policing, intelligence gathering, surveillance, rapid response units, armed response units and efforts to combat the threats of terrorism and organised crime, he knew Janet felt increasingly under-resourced and neglected in the wider scheme of things. Yet the most usual murder was the result of a common or garden domestic dispute.

  ‘My girlfriend… partner, I mean, came home last night very upset about some woman she’d met at the refuge in town who’s being harassed by her husband. I wondered if she’d made a complaint.’ Thackeray’s faint grasp of the politically correct still left Laura amused at times.

  ‘What’s her name?’ Janet asked, turning to her computer screen. But when Thackeray told her, she scrolled through her data and then shook her head.

  ‘No record,’ she said. ‘Has she been seriously hurt? We can prosecute off our own bat now, you know, but it’s difficult if they won’t give evidence.’ She pushed a sheaf of photographs across her desk towards him. ‘Look at those,’ she said. He glanced at pictures of a woman whose face and upper body were shown in colour, covered with a lurid mass of cuts and bruises, and drew a sharp breath.

  ‘Not only will she not go to court but she’s bloody well gone back to the bastard,’ Janet said wearily. She pushed the photographs back into a folder and put it in a wire tray.

  ‘Case closed,’ she said. ‘CPS won’t look at it without her.’

  ‘Will you let me know if Mrs Holden comes in?’ Thackeray said. ‘Laura and her friend Vicky Mendelson are very worried about her. And there’s a child involved. A little girl.’

  ‘I’ll have a word with social services,’ Janet said. ‘They may have had some involvement. Is Vicky David Mendelson’s wife?’

  ‘Yes. The CPS lawyer.’ It had been at David and Vicky’s house,
soon after arriving in Bradfield, that he had met a red-headed young woman who had occupied his thoughts and emotions, not always comfortably, ever since. But Thackeray kept his private life determinedly private, still scarred by the pain of having his disintegrating marriage the focus of vicious canteen gossip years before.

  ‘Right,’ Janet said. ‘David’s been very helpful on some of these cases. Unlike some lawyers and coppers I’ve come across. There are still some male dinosaurs around who won’t take it seriously, over here and at the CPS.’

  ‘You can count on me, Janet, if you need back-up. You know that,’ Thackeray said mildly.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘My major worry at the moment is that I don’t think we’re getting anywhere near knowing what’s going on under the surface with the Muslim community.’

  ‘Ah,’ Thackeray said. ‘You’ll be treading on eggshells there, then?’

  ‘You have to believe it. Some of the brides who are still coming from the sub-continent speak no English at all when they arrive. They’re incredibly isolated.’

  ‘But there are fewer of them now, surely?’

  ‘Yes, it is changing, but very slowly. There are still imams who insist the Koran allows men to beat their wives. It’s bloody medieval, like those veils a few of them wear over their faces, the niqab. They give me the creeps. But don’t let the community relations people hear me saying that. Anyway, I’m sure if there is domestic violence in Muslim families, we’ll never hear about it. It’s not part of the women’s culture to complain.’

  ‘It doesn’t look as if it’s part of our culture either, from what you say,’ Thackeray said, a hint of anger in his voice too. ‘This Julie Holden. She’s an educated woman, for God’s sake. Why on earth isn’t she in here raising hell if he’s knocking her about? She’s letting him get away with it, covering up for him, effectively.’

  ‘Relationships are not rational,’ Janet said, seeming slightly surprised at his vehemence before she turned back to her files. Her expression jolted Thackeray back to more than one relationship of his own that had been very far from rational. Painfully he pushed the monsters back into the dark pit from which they thankfully crept out less often since the death of his wife, knowing that in Janet Richardson’s world he could not count himself amongst the innocent, and sighed.