Dust to Dust Read online

  “It’s difficult with the baby,” he said. But his father seemed to have exhausted himself with the jibe and lay back on the pillows with his eyes shut. Madge took both their arms and led them into the kitchen at the back of the house where she put the kettle on and spooned tea into a pot while Ian and Laura sat down at the table. When she had poured the tea, she lit a cigarette and drew deeply with nicotine stained fingers as she scanned Laura’s face, looking, she thought, for signs of hope.

  “Do you think you can do owt for our Billy’s case?” she asked at length. “Ken might die happy if we could get the lad out of prison before he goes.”

  “I don’t know, Mrs Baxter,” Laura said. “But it sounds like something worth investigating, from what Ian’s told me. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Aye, well, you’ll not be the only one asking questions,” Madge said, glancing at her son. “The police seem just as keen on dragging everything up again, to judge by the one who came round here this afternoon, demanding to talk to Ken. I told him he knew nowt new and couldn’t talk to them any road, he were too poorly, but he took no notice. More or less pushed his way in, he did. Man called Ferguson. Said he’d come all the way up from London.”

  “I’ve met him already,” Ian said angrily. “He came to see me at crack of dawn the other day. He’s not kidding when he says they’re looking for something new, is he? I get the feeling we may have done the wrong thing in asking for the case to be reconsidered. It seems to have stirred up a hornet’s nest in the Metropolitan Police. And the change of government won’t help. We’ll get no sympathy there.”

  Laura glanced at Thackeray when she had finished explaining how the family was trying to get Billy Baxter’s case reviewed, and sipped of her coffee, but his face gave little away.

  “It was awful, Michael,” she said. “I can’t see much chance of getting Billy Baxter out of jail, certainly not quickly, but I couldn’t really bring myself to tell them that, any more than Ian could. Madge and Ken just want a little bit of hope. He can’t last much longer but Ian and his mother obviously think that some new development might keep him alive. What could I do but promise to help?”

  “I remember Urmstone,” Thackeray said quietly, not answering her directly. “ I was there in ‘84 and saw exactly what was going on.”

  “You were there?” Laura could not hide her astonishment. This was an area into which they had never had any reason to venture.

  “I was only a probationer but I still got posted down there for a couple of weeks, late in the summer when they were short of people to keep the situation under control. I don’t think I ever met the lad who was killed. He was from the Met and they kept themselves pretty much to themselves, they were billetted somewhere down near Wakefield, but I certainly remember the investigation. Did this man Baxter tell you what his brother did to him?”

  “He insists his brother didn’t do anything to him,” Laura said, taken aback by Thackeray’s vehemence. “He claims he’s innocent, and he finally wants him cleared while his father’s still alive. I told you, I met the parents. They’ve been destroyed by what happened.”

  “Well, I guess Andrew Fielding’s parents were destroyed by it, too,” Thackeray said. “Urmstone had more than its share of hotheads. There was another local man jailed, as I recall. He was lucky not to get a life sentence as well. He chucked a couple of concrete blocks off a motorway bridge to try to stop a busload of miners going to work in one of the Nottingham pits which was still open. Luckily no-one was killed in the crash, but there were serious injuries.”

  “I’d no idea you’d been in the coalfield during the strike,” Laura said. “You’d not be quite the blue-eyed boy Joyce thinks you are if she knew about that.” The idea of Thackeray taking part in some of the more controversial experiments in policing that went on at that time disturbed her more than she would admit.

  “Your grandmother still sees the world in black and white,” he said. But he could see the anxiety in Laura’s eyes and did not want to upset her.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I’d a fair amount of sympathy with the miners, as it goes, but less and less with their tactics, as time went on. And my involvement was minimal, anyway. I did a couple of weeks down there keeping a weather eye on the pit in Urmstone. I’d only been in the job a year. There was never any trouble while I was there. It was all going on around the pits where there was heavy picketing further south. Urmstone was quite peaceful, the strike was solid there and no-one was trying to cross picket lines. The murder was later, and I heard that the boys from the Met went there in force later on, as well. I’m not sure which came first, but by the end of the year there were a lot of very angry people on both sides, by all accounts. The London coppers were out of order a lot of the time, and certainly when they went storming into people’s homes. But I didn’t see any of that. I got sent back to Arnedale and watched the rest of it on the telly like most people did.”

  “Even I saw the pitched battles on TV,” Laura said. “They let us watch the news at school.”

  “Well. I didn’t like what I saw any more than you and Joyce probably did,” Thackeray reassured her. “But I bet your father was cheering Maggie Thatcher on.”

  “Oh yes,” Laura said with a faint smile. “He was certainly doing that. And now here we are wondering where our energy is going to come from now we’ve closed all those mines and the oil’s running out. Ian’s father, says they can’t be reopened because most of them are flooded out. The coal’s locked up for ever now, dead and buried, like he will be soon.”

  “You’re not going to try to follow this up, are you?” Thackeray said, picking up the sympathy in Laura’s voice. “You’re not fit enough to go careering about trying to reopen long dead cases. You’ve not just got yourself to think about now. And you’re on a hiding to nothing with Billy Baxter. As I recall it, the jury only took a couple of hours to convict him. And it was an appalling crime. The poor beggar was impaled and left to die in agony. I’m quite sure there are still people in the Met and up here lobbying for Baxter to be kept inside for the rest of his life every time he applies for release. His family’s on a hiding to nothing, believe me. You shouldn’t get involved. It’s a waste of time.”

  “I promised Joyce that I’d see what I can do,” Laura said, with an obstinate look in her eyes that made Thackeray’s heart sink. “And Ian Baxter obviously needs some help.”

  “You need to rest,” Thackeray said.

  “Nonsense. I’m bored to tears,” Laura said. “I need something to do. It won’t be very strenuous, I promise. Ian can do the leg work and I’ll dig around in the paperwork, see what we can come up with. One thing you might know is where a copper called Don Hartnett is now. Is he someone you’ve ever heard of? Was he in the Yorkshire force or the Met? And what about this London copper who says the case is being reopened anyway? What’s that all about?” Thackeray sighed.

  “I know absolutely nothing about the case being looked at again. It’s not crossed my radar.”

  “But Ian Baxter says Ferguson has come up from London to Yorkshire to talk to people.”

  “It could be some cold case investigation the county’s launched and not bothered to tell Bradfield about. I’ll make some inquiries.” Thackeray looked at Laura and she dropped her gaze, knowing what he was going to say.

  “I don’t want you to do this, Laura.” She took his hand and stroked it gently.

  “I know you don’t. But I can’t see the harm. It’s an entirely legitimate enterprise to try to get the case looked at again. Ian’s involved personally but he’s working with his brother’s lawyer. It’s all above board. You know some pretty nasty things went on back then – on both sides – and I’ve got the time and the energy now to do a bit of digging.”

  “You’re not going to be deterred, are you?”

  “No,” Laura said. “I’m not. I won’t involve you, I promise. I’ll make sure to keep a low profile, so you’re not embarrassed in any way. Ian and the L
ondon lawyer can take all the flak.”

  “That would be a first,” Thackeray said grimly, thinking of the many times their professional interests had clashed in the past.

  “I’ll try,” Laura said. “Really I will. It’s not as if its on your patch. Or only on the very edge. I’ll keep out of your hair, I swear.” Thackeray sighed again.

  “Well, promise me one thing: that first of all you talk to Don Hartnett. He was from West Yorkshire, as it goes. I think he was based in Wakefield back then, and he ended up a DI in Bradfield, though he’d retired by the time I got here. I expect I can find out where he is now, and I’m sure he’ll give you a different perspective on the whole rotten case. I think the Baxters are living in cloud cuckoo land if they think they can get the conviction overturned after all this time and with a bit of luck Don Hartnett will be able to tell you everything you need to know about why that is.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Ian Baxter had ceased to sleep easily in his bed and it had little to do with the fact that his young daughter Daisy was still prone to waking in the small hours. He had come back from work the day that DS Ferguson had wakened him early by hammering on the front door, to find his wife Carrie standing at the bay window with Daisy in her arms watching the stream of commuters making their way from the tube station through the maze of Victorian streets. She had spun away from the window as Ian came through the front door and met him in the narrow hall where Daisy’s buggy took up most of the space, kissing him quickly on his chilly lips while he pulled Daisy’s shawl away from a cheek warm with sleep and kissed her. Ian could see that Carrie was uneasy as he followed her into the kitchen.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “I thought I saw that policeman again,” she said. “The one who came this morning.”

  “Did he come back here?” Ian had asked angrily. “He’d been to see Miriam at work last night. Has he been bothering you, too? I’ll make a formal complaint if this doesn’t stop. It’s not on.”

  “No, no, it was just now. I was watching for you from the front room. I thought it was him just behind you, following, but maybe not. Perhaps I was imagining it. I only saw him on his way out this morning.”

  But now, knowing that Ferguson was in Urmstone and had been pursuing his father, Baxter no longer thought Carrie had been imagining it. And as he lay in the narrow spare bed in what had once been the room he had shared with his brother, he knew that his search for sleep would only get more frantic now he had come back to what had once been home. He glanced at his watch. It was four am, the time of night, he knew, when difficulties grew into monsters, and anxiety turned to panic. He thumped at his pillows and turned resolutely on his side, seeking oblivion again. And in the end it came, but not peacefully.

  For years Ian Baxter had stayed away from Urmstone and his family, alienated from the tightly-knit community which he felt he had effectively abandoned when he left to go to university. He had studied in the teeth of his father’s hostility to his ambitions and resentment of his inability to contribute in more than a token way to the family finances as he stayed doggedly at school when all his friends had left and most had followed their fathers down the pit. He had felt mean and his father had told him more than once that he was selfish, especially after Billy had been convicted, although his mother seemed to take some pride in what he was attempting. But the real crisis had not come until the pit closed and his father had been thrown out of work. By then Ian had moved away and it had been too late to draw back, even if he had wanted to.

  And he had to admit that he had never wanted to. The conviction that he must get on and get out had been strengthened by those dark days of hunger and cold and violence during the strike. But his urge to escape had not really been born then. It had crystalised a year or so earlier, deep underground, in circumstances which still came back to haunt him in his dreams, and which he knew would come again tonight as he drifted into uneasy sleep. It was as if the black water he had seen trickling down the surface of the rock on his one and only descent into the pit had begun to eat away at his foundations as insidiously as it had now washed away those solid-seeming tunnels and galleries as soon as the pumps had been turned off for the last time.

  He had hurtled down into the bowels of the earth just the once, on a school visit arranged to encourage boys to opt for apparently secure jobs underground, but Ian had known as soon as the cage began to fall at what seemed to him a terrifying speed down the shaft that this was something he could never do again. Fear had choked him almost as quickly as the cage had descended while his friend Craig had radiated excitement beside him.

  “Fast, innit?” Craig had said, with every appearance of enjoying the sensation. Ian had not replied, feeling sick and breathless long before they jerked to a halt. They had been guided in their borrowed helmets by sweaty miners in full work gear, along broad well-lit galleries, but all Ian had been able to think about as he trailed behind his chattering schoolmates had been the crushing weight of the rock above them, and the sound of the trickling water which he knew, as all miners’ children knew, could engulf these tunnels within hours if something went wrong.

  Ian had travelled back to the surface, pale and silent, surrounded by classmates exhilarated by their first experience of what they believed to be their future. No-one had noticed his reaction and he had said nothing. In Urmstone, the jobs were there, deep underground, and no-one looked any further. In a world where other industries not far away were dead or dying, the miners had seemed to be the lucky ones, their futures guaranteed.

  Jerked awake again by that long-ago blind panic, Ian lay rigid thinking how Craig had positively yearned to go down the pit, longing to leave school and follow both their fathers and older brothers into the depths of Urmstone Main, while Ian nursed to himself the knowledge that nothing on earth would persuade him down there again. But the life Craig had chosen so eagerly had very soon turned sour and he had never discovered whether his friend had found a better future in the end. That cheerful, headstrong enthusiasm which had led the two of them into schoolboy mischief had drained away even before the strike was over and by the time Craig left school they had grown apart, until he felt that he no longer really knew his friend at all.

  Gradually drifting back to the edge of sleep, Ian found himself back in his childhood Urmstone again, not down the pit this time but high above it, beside Craig and as happy as they had ever been that dreadful year. It had been a steep climb to the top of the tip where the two boys had flung themselves down, breathless and laughing, when they reached the summit.

  “You could roll right down theer into t’Smith’s back yard,” Craig had said, pointing to the last row of brick houses which backed onto the colliery yard as his fair hair blew wildly in the wind.

  “T’dog really would have you then,” Ian objected, always the more sober, the less spontaneous of the two, but even more so now that Craig was inhabiting the body of a man while Ian remained boyishly small, his voice unbroken. It was the first time the two of them had ventured to the top of the tip although, as the strike had run on into the summer holidays, and Urmstone families realised they were in for the long haul when the union and the government had dug in, some of the men had begun to work seriously on the sides of the man-made mountains, grubbing for usable nuggets of coal to sell or to hoard for the winter.

  Ian’s brother Billy had come back with a couple of bags the previous week, dug and sieved from the largely useless spoil one afternoon after he had returned from picketing the working mines further south. Ian had watched in alarm as his usually cheerful brother had become more and more angry and morose as the strike dragged on. Like most of the men, he harboured a bitter sense of injustice because he “was deemed” by the authorities to be getting strike pay from the union, when no strike pay was ever paid. The men got by on the £1 a day the union handed out for picketing expenses, and the charity of their families, which struggled to get by on the benefits the women got for the children. By August, Billy
was getting skinny and his temper was uncertain. He watched his mother angrily as she opened the red printed bills which still came through the letter box most days and which the whole family knew she could not pay.

  By the middle of their long summer holiday from school Ian and Craig were bored. The highlight of their day was the meal they were given at the miners’ welfare hall. The canteen had originally been set up by the women to feed the returned pickets, running on cash brought in from around the country from supporters of the striking miners. But the service was extended to whole families while school meals were not available, and kept those running it, including Ian’s mother, busy most of the day. Even Craig, whose mother Brenda never came near the hall, was fed willingly enough although people knew he would eat better than most when his mother came home from her job in Bradfield. After that, the long summer evenings stretched ahead for the boys, with no pocket money for sweets or treats of any kind, and no possibility of finding the bus fare to leave the village. They soon began to make their own plans.

  The first time they had climbed the tip, clutching a couple of sacks and a small trowel and fork they had filched from Craig’s father’s garden shed, they got distracted. They had struggled with the steep climb to the top on unstable shale, where a couple of steps up generally resulted in a small slide down again. They had chosen the back of the tip for their expedition, furthest away from the pit yard and less favoured by the men who could be seen digging and sieving furiously, shirts off, on the other, sunnier side. By the time they had got to the top they had almost forgotten their plan to take a couple of bags of usable coal back home, and simply sat on the summit enjoying the hot sunshine and occasionally lobbing a stone towards Mrs Smith’s Alsatian who could be seen patrolling her back garden with the relentless pace of a caged tiger.