By Death Divided E-Book

Patricia Hall

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: Thackeray & Ackroyd
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 400

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Laura Ackroyd, the journalist girlfriend of DCI Michael Thackerary, becomes drawn into the plight of Jenny Holden and her daughter Anna when she writes an article about domestic abuse. Suffering violence at the hands of her husband, Jenny takes flight to a women's refuge. But her dreams of a safety are shattered when young Anna goes missing. Meanwhile, Mohammed Sharif, known as 'Omah' to his colleagues, is finding it increasing difficult to keep his balance on the tightrope he walks between his family's traditional Muslim beliefs and his job as a policeman. When his young, newly married cousin Faria Aziz disappears, Mohammed tries to trace her to ease the worry of his family. But his unofficial inquiry soon becomes a police matter when a bloated and badly lacerated corpse is pulled from the river. If it is that of Faria, Thackerary and his team must tread a careful path to discover whether she died by accident, suicide or murder. A tense, gripping and emotional mystery, By Death Divided delves into the murky and complex dynamics of two very different families, each of which suffer in the cause of pride, passion and family honour.

Leseprobe

By Death Divided

PATRICIA HALL

Contents

Title PagePREFACECHAPTER ONECHAPTER TWOCHAPTER THREECHAPTER FOURCHAPTER FIVECHAPTER SIXCHAPTER SEVENCHAPTER EIGHTCHAPTER NINECHAPTER TENCHAPTER ELEVENCHAPTER TWELVECHAPTER THIRTEENCHAPTER FOURTEENCHAPTER FIFTEENCHAPTER SIXTEENCHAPTER SEVENTEENCHAPTER EIGHTEENAbout the AuthorBy Patricia HallCopyright

PREFACE

The splash when her body touched the water would have disturbed no one. The place had been carefully chosen, a stretch of the river that ran deep between embankments in the old industrial heartland of Milford, where the mills had long ago closed down and only a small beginning had been made on replacing them with anything new. All was in darkness at that time of the night.

The woman slipped easily into the deep fast-running water. Heavy rain for days the previous week on the high hills to the west had left the river in spate. If God had chosen destruction for her, this was the perfect place. The water was dark and peaty and carried the accumulated debris of its tumbling course down from the moors, fragments of grasses and brittle bracken and heather, the occasional tree branch tufted with hanks of greasy wool left by the hefted sheep still late grazing on the unfenced land between Yorkshire and Lancashire.

The woman slipped beneath the surface of the rushing water, invisible and anonymous as the river took her past the confluence of the Maze and the Bradfield Beck, and thechannel widened out slightly but barely slackened, its flood waters breaching the banks here and there and spreading into the scrubby fields and woodland along the river’s edge beyond the town, creating a morass only the most fool-hardy walker would venture into for days. The banks of the Maze would be no place for dogs or children or small boats for a while. She would be carried a long way, far from home, by this implacable accomplice to whatever had happened that night.

And so it proved. For days she slipped down the river unnoticed, half submerged in the deepest water furthest from the bank, through the ever-widening valley, past villages, under bridges, unseen by the few intrepid walkers who ventured near in the still pelting rain, ignored by the most venturesome animals who tried to drink in the shallows, floating alone, her trailing garments taken for a dislodged tangle of weed if they were spotted at all, Ophelia with nothing at all for remembrance.

But eventually she came to rest as her clothes became entangled with a branch torn from a tree, which itself had lodged firmly under the arch of an old stone bridge spanning the river in the village of Ingleby, an ancient hamlet in the flat, open farmland where the river began its long slow meander across the plain towards the Ouse and, eventually, the sea. It did not take long for her remains and the branch, inextricably meshed, to collect more debris, pushing the flow of the river into unexpected eddies, sending ripples and even small waves lapping across the riverside path. And there she lay for days, no more than a single part of the natural wreckage from the week’s storms, wreckage that lashed and lacerated her remains. Only her long scarf was visible on the surface as the tumbling water tried to wrench it from her body like a dirtywhite streamer and sent it downstream beyond the shadow of the bridge, a silent, tugging, tattered signal of distress. The fish found her body first, and then a dog, which stood, ears pricked and tail stiff, barking excitedly until at last someone came to investigate.

CHAPTER ONE

Rage overtook him like a foul fog, filling his mouth with bile and squeezing his chest like a vice, forcing breath from his lungs with a harsh rattle. There was never any warning. One moment he was calm and in control, and the next filled with this murderous madness, which he only half-remembered after it had abated. But more and more when he returned to his normal self he was aware of the havoc it – or was it he? – had created. Today it was the traffic. Just the common or garden everyday traffic. He had left his trip late and on the way back had hit the gridlock of parked cars outside the schools, and had only been able to inch his way along the normally quiet suburban roads of Southfield towards his home. Inevitably, his fury centred on the small blue car in front of him, inching through the stream with the heads of two children just visible through the rear window.

Close to the shops, breathing heavily and grinding his teeth, he saw his chance to overtake. Foot down, barely seeing where he was going, he swung out, crashed his foot hard on the accelerator and felt the satisfying surge of power through his spine as he began to pass the small blue car. Only then did he see another vehicle pulling out of a side-road into his path. He pulled the wheel viciously to the left and cut in on the blue car with a howl of rage. He was not conscious of the impact, not conscious of anything except the fact that he had swerved in time to avoid the vehicle coming towards him and that the road ahead of him was miraculously clear. He put his foot to the floor and accelerated away and the surge of speed began to soothe the flames of his anger. By the time he arrived home his heart rate had returned to normal and, on auto-pilot now, he put the four-by-four in the garage and dropped down the door, unaware of the smear of blue paint on the bull-bar, or even what it signified. His voice, when he opened the front door and sang out ‘I’m ho-o-o-me,’ was completely normal, cheerful even. He had already blotted out that brief visit to his other dimension. But his voice faltered as no reply came to his greeting, and after a brief and increasingly angry look round, he realised the house was still empty. They had not come back.

Back in Southfield, a crowd had already gathered around the small car slewed across the pavement in front of the shopping parade when the Panda car pulled up at the kerb. PC Ali Mirza, who had only been a couple of streets away when he was told to attend the incident, could see a woman in jeans and a fleece leaning against the front door of the blue Nissan, which, if it had skidded any further, would have crashed through the plate-glass window of the hairdresser’s, A Fine Cut, where customers and staff in pink overalls were staring through the window in some agitation. The woman was shouting and gesticulating angrily, and Mirza made his way cautiously through the bystanders to confront her. Only just out of his probation, he felt less than confident amongst the wealthy white residents of Bradfield’s most exclusive suburb.

‘Is this your car, madam?’ he asked, in a voice husky with nervousness. He could see two children still strapped into their seats in the back of the blue Nissan and the woman followed his gaze. School run, second family car, he told himself, hardly unusual up here, and undoubtedly a woman who would be confident of her rights.

‘My God, they could have been killed,’ she half-screamed, and promptly burst into tears.

‘Is anyone hurt?’ Mirza addressed his question then to the small crowd that was watching him, faces impassive, but got only negative shakes of the head in return.

‘So can anyone tell me what happened?’ He glanced at the driver who had by now pulled open the back door and was undoing the seatbelts of a boy of about eight and one slightly younger, both in the uniform of the primary school half a mile away. He walked to the front of the car and pulled out his notebook to jot down the registration number. The front offside wing of the car was badly scraped and dented and the lights had smashed. There had obviously been some sort of a collision but there was no sign of any other vehicle that might have been involved. He turned back to the woman, who was now half into the back of the car, comforting the two children. Careful, he told himself, she must be in shock.

‘I can tell you what happened, Officer,’ a tall elderly man in a military-looking overcoat offered. ‘It was an atrocious piece of bad driving. If I’d been a bit quicker I would have taken the number of the other vehicle, but he was away so fast I didn’t manage it.’

The driver of the car, tear-stained but calmer now, let go of her children and turned back towards Mirza, pushing her tangled hair out of her eyes.

‘The bastard ran me off the road,’ she said. ‘He could have killed us all, people on the pavement, anything could have happened…’ She waved her hand around at the small crowd of shoppers and at the prosperous-looking hairdresser’s salon and the baker’s and the delicatessen behind them, and then leant back against the side of the car again, shivering.

Mirza stood with pen poised over his notebook.

‘Perhaps if you give me your details, madam, then you can tell me exactly what happened. Do you have your driving license with you?’

The woman shook her head vaguely, but managed to offer her name and address.

‘I picked up the boys from school,’ she said. ‘There was a lot of traffic coming back up the hill.’ She waved back down towards the main road, which led into Bradfield town centre. ‘Then I was aware of this four-by-four very close on my tail. Too close, obviously wanting to get past. But he couldn’t. There was too much traffic coming the other way.’

‘It was a man driving?’ Mirza asked.

‘Yes, I think so, I could see him in my mirror. And then when I turned off to come up here, past the shops, he turned as well and then pulled out very fast, but he didn’t notice another car coming into the main road from the turning over there…’ She waved vaguely again to a junction on the opposite side of the road. ‘So before I knew what was happening he’d cut in in front of me and clipped my wing and just pushed me over, onto the pavement. There was nothing I could do.’ She searched Ali Mirza’s face desperately for understanding.

‘Did he stop at all?’ the constable asked.

‘Of course he didn’t,’ she said, angry suddenly. ‘He shot off like a maniac.’

‘Could you describe the car? Colour? Make? Anything at all?’

‘Big, dark, blue or black, I suppose, four-by-four, with a spare tyre on the back. Like bloody tanks, aren’t they, those things? I don’t know why they need to be driving them in town at all. They’re a menace.’ She shuddered suddenly and glanced at her small blue Nissan. ‘My husband will go crazy,’ she said. ‘I’ve only been out ten minutes and this happens.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I must get back,’ she said. ‘I’ve left my daughter with a friend…’

Mirza closed his notebook.

‘I suggest you drive home with the children now, Mrs Mendelson, and I’ll arrange for someone to contact you later to take a proper statement from you. Luckily no one’s been hurt, so no serious harm has been done.’

‘You’ll try and find that lunatic, though?’

‘I’ll put in a report, but without a registration number he may not be easy to trace.’

‘He could kill someone next time.’

‘Yes,’ Mirza said. ‘I’m sure he could.’ And after taking the names and addresses from half a dozen of the witnesses, he got into the Panda car with a feeling of satisfaction that he had handled that well enough.

Laura Ackroyd glanced at her watch, logged off her computer and ran her hands through her unruly cloud of copper hair. It had been a good day for once, with her boss, Ted Grant, thankfully out of the office at a conference of the local newspaper groups’ editors. Slightly ominous, that, had been the consensus round the water cooler that morning. They all knew that the position of many local newspapers was potentially dire as crucial advertising slipped away to new media, and circulations dipped because the younger generation seemed not to have inherited their parents’ interest in parochial news. Stories of belt-tightening and redundancies were the stock-in-trade of the media columns these days and the staff of the Bradfield Gazette knew that they would not be immune to the chilly winds blowing through the company. But even so, Laura refused to feel too despondent. For the first time in many months she felt that life was good and could get better.

She spent five minutes in the cloakroom repairing her make-up, giving her reflection a quick smile in the mirror, and then left the office and drove up the long hill out of the town centre, through the thickening early evening traffic, and parked outside a substantial house in a leafy avenue in Southfield. This was the time she enjoyed visiting her friend Vicky Mendelson best, the hour or two after her two older boys had arrived home from primary school and the youngest child, Naomi Laura, named after her mother’s best friend, was having her tea and being prepared for bed. She had known Vicky and her husband David since they had all been students together at Bradfield University and, lacking children of her own, although she still nurtured hopes that might be put right, she relished the chance to take even a small share in Vicky’s slightly chaotic teatime rituals. But when Vicky opened the door this particular evening she did so with an anxious air, and gave Laura a hug that lacked its usual enthusiasm.

‘What’s the problem?’ Laura asked, sensing trouble. ‘You look shattered.’

‘It’s been an awful day,’ Vicky said, obviously close to tears. ‘Some lunatic bashed my car when I went to pick up the boys from school. And then drove off without a bloody word. I’ve had the police taking details, everything.’

‘My God, were you hurt?’

‘Fortunately no one was hurt and the boys took it in their stride, as kids do. But I feel a bit shaken up. And I’ve also got an unexpected visitor. Sorry,’ she whispered as she led Laura down the hall to the kitchen, where she saw a pale, thin woman in jeans and a loose, long-sleeved shirt, sitting at the table with her hands clutched around a mug of coffee, as if for warmth. The stranger looked up as Laura came into the room and gave a tentative smile.

‘This is Julie Holden,’ Vicky said.

‘Hi, Julie,’ Laura said cheerfully before she crossed the room to give Naomi, who was sitting in her high chair, a kiss. ‘Where are the boys?’ she asked.

‘They’re watching TV with Julie’s little girl, Anna,’ Vicky said.

Laura put her head round the sitting room door and saw two dark heads and one blonde one on the sofa in front of CBBC.

‘Hi gang,’ she said but got only the briefest murmur in exchange from Vicky’s two sons, who were immersed in their programme. Back in the kitchen she accepted a cup of coffee gratefully and took a seat next to Julie Holden.

‘Is Anna at school with the boys?’ she asked. But to her horror Julie shook her head violently and her eyes filled with tears. It was obvious that Laura had touched a sensitive nerve with what she had thought was an innocuous question.

‘She used to be, but she’s not going to school at the moment,’ Julie said. ‘We’ve got a bit of a family problem.’

Laura glanced at Vicky, who was busy wiping her daughter’s sticky hands and face.

‘Julie’s just left her husband. I’ve been telling her to do it for ages, and now she has,’ Vicky said.

‘I’m sorry,’ Laura said, her tone cautious. If she had interrupted an informal marriage guidance session she was not so happy about her unannounced intrusion. She, of all people, was the last person to offer advice on relationships. And at a point when she was beginning to think that maybe she could look forward to a family of her own, she was not keen to immerse herself in other people’s disasters.

‘Vicky makes it sound easy, but it’s not,’ Julie said, her voice thick with emotion.

‘It is when he’s been treating you like he’s been treating you,’ Vicky said angrily. ‘It’s a no-brainer. You can’t possibly stay with him.’ Laura looked from one woman to the other, Julie clutching her mug, pale and scared-looking but now with two vivid red blotches of colour in her cheeks, and Vicky, standing above her, flushed with indignation, but plump and beautiful and, the accident notwithstanding, a golden picture of contentment, and she wondered at the contrast. She felt her usual prickle of jealousy and tamped it down firmly. There was no need for jealousy now, she thought, with the future looking good.

‘I’m sorry, perhaps you don’t want me here just now,’ Laura said, finishing her coffee quickly and glancing from one woman to the other.

‘No, no,’ Julie said quickly. ‘You might be able to help. Vicky says your partner is a policeman. I think I might need some advice.’

Laura hesitated. Michael Thackeray, she knew, would not welcome being dragged into a stranger’s domestic affairs, even at second hand. But catching the desperation in Julie’s eyes, she knew that she could not refuse at least to listen.

‘Tell me about it,’ she conceded, hoping her reluctance did not appear too obvious. By way of reply, Julie rolled up the sleeve of her shirt to reveal a series of blue and purple bruises the length of her arm.

‘This time he threw me across the room,’ she said quietly. ‘If I stay with him I think he’ll kill me in the end. It’s been going on for months. I’ve lost track of how long.’

Laura drew a sharp breath.

‘Have you been to the police?’ she asked. ‘They have special departments these days to deal with this sort of thing.’

Julie shook her head.

‘Then you must do that,’ Laura said. ‘You can’t let him get away with behaviour like this. It’ll only get worse.’

‘I’ve already told her that,’ Vicky chipped in. ‘She can’t let this go on. Anna’s at risk as well.’

‘No, no, he’d never hurt Anna,’ Julie said sharply. ‘He wouldn’t lay a finger on her. He adores her.’

‘You can’t be sure of that if he’s so violent,’ Laura said. ‘What does David say about it?’ she asked, turning to Vicky, whose husband was a Crown Prosecution Service lawyer and, she thought, far better qualified than she was to give advice to a battered wife.

‘I don’t want to bother him,’ Julie said, her voice dull.

‘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.

‘Let me know,’ he said as he turned away, but she did not even bother to reply.

Vanessa Holden unlocked the bathroom door very gently, aware that on the last fraction of its turn it tended to click. She hoped he was asleep, or if not, was too far away to hear her moving. Once it was open she kept her hand on the lock for a long minute, listening hard, but she could hear nothing.

Before she switched the light off and inched the door wide open, she glanced one last time in the mirror and flinched. For all her efforts with foundation and face-powder she had not succeeded in hiding the darkening bruise down her left cheek where he had hit her. Nor had she completely disguised the purple circles beneath her eyes, the result of several nights now spent barely asleep, wondering whether he would come back and terrified of what would happen to them both, whether he did or whether he didn’t.

She had taken her outdoor coat and her handbag into the bathroom with her and intended to creep down the stairs now and out of the front door before he realised she had moved from her bedroom, where she had locked the door in his face after he had attacked her, hours ago now. But she had no real idea where she would go if she got out of the house, her house, that he had invaded like some unpredictable incubus days ago when Julie had first left him.

He had come home tonight in a towering rage again and then slumped in front of the television, with the sound turned so high it made her dizzy, while she put together an evening meal with shaking hands. It had not been to his liking. Her food never was. Even as a little boy he had been a picky eater and as a teenager he had almost given up eating at home, preferring the bright lights and noise of fast-food restaurants and pubs. Once, when she asked him whether the food was better than her own offerings he said, bizarrely, she thought, that the food wasn’t what he went for. He liked McDonald’s, he said, because no one could hear him thinking.

If she was honest with herself, she had been relieved when he went away to university and even more relieved that he successfully completed his course, got a job as a manager in a high-tech company in Lancashire, and announced, soon afterwards, that he was to marry a young woman called Julie whom Vanessa had barely met, but who seemed pleasant enough when she did. Gradually, her memories of the erratic teenager she had lived with faded as her time and attention were taken up with her husband, who developed cancer in his sixties and died before his seventieth birthday. After gruelling years, Vanessa tentatively hoped for some calm and even happiness. She found herself pleased when her son and his family eventually moved back to Bradfield and she invested in a smaller house, one of a Victorian terrace, deliberately chosen to be close to her son and his growing daughter, Anna, whom she idolised.

But she soon learnt only too bitterly that her respite had been brief and her modest ambitions hopelessly optimistic. The marriage, she soon discovered, was on the rocks, and although Julie said little and Anna, increasingly pale and silent, even less, she guessed that it had become violent. To her horror, a couple of days earlier, he had arrived on her doorstep with a large suitcase. Julie had left him, he said, and taken the child with her. He could not stay in the family house on his own, he said, it was too quiet, and had decided to come ‘home’ for a bit. Only when Vanessa began to protest mildly and try to persuade him to go back to his own place did she realise exactly why Julie had given up on the marriage in despair.

Bruce, it appeared, had not only lost his wife and daughter but also his job, although the firm had allowed him to keep his four-by-four, which he had been using to visit the sites they had been working at all over the north of England. He could barely afford the petrol for it now, Vanessa realised, and he spent most of his time in the house, either with the television turned up to full volume, or pacing restlessly around, talking to himself. When she suggested that he should see a doctor he screamed and swore at her. And any innocent query about his welfare, like tonight when she asked him if he wanted anything to follow his main meal, could be met with a sudden eruption of violence. She fingered the gash on her cheek, where the blood was slowly congealing, as she inched down the stairs, her arthritic knees making progress slow. He had thrown his empty plate at her, spinning it like a frisby, before hurling his chair back and careering drunkenly out of the room and into the kitchen, where she heard him throwing crockery about in a frenzy. As she closed the front door behind her she felt tears cutting channels through her newly applied make-up as despair overwhelmed her. With her coat collar turned up she hurried away from the house, feeling the sharp wind on her wet face. She had absolutely no idea where to go.

Vicky Mendelson turned the DVD player off and stretched lazily. David was out at a lawyers’ dinner with his father, the children were all sound asleep upstairs and the only decision she had to make now was whether or not to wait up for her husband and hear the latest legal gossip over cocoa tonight, or go to bed and follow up in the morning over breakfast. She was sleepy, but guessed that conversation tomorrow would be as difficult as two small boys getting ready for school and a hungry toddler to feed and David himself in a distracted state after a late night could make it, so she determined to wait up and wandered into the kitchen to get herself another glass of the wine she had opened to dissipate the solitariness of her own supper. Wives were not expected at her father-in-law Victor’s little get-togethers, and knowing her mother-in-law’s lack of interest in the law she was not surprised. Anyway, she had chosen to be a full-time mother, at least until all the children went to school, but she still envied her friend Laura Ackroyd’s independence almost as much as she guessed Laura envied her her family life. The grass on the other side, she thought wryly as she went back into the sitting room and glanced at the TV schedules. But then she froze as she heard an unexpected noise outside the house, not at the front door where David could well have been arriving, but at the back of the house from which french windows led into the garden where flower beds and a worn lawn struggled for survival amongst the children’s play equipment.

Her heart thumped as she listened intently. The curtains were tightly drawn so she could not see out and she knew that it would be pitch black out there with all the lights at the back of the house switched off. She glanced round anxiously, realising that her mobile phone was upstairs in her handbag and the only other phone downstairs was in the study, where, if she switched the light on, she would be instantly seen by anyone in the back garden. Her ears straining against the silence, she could hear nothing.

‘I must be imagining it,’ she told herself firmly, but she knew she wasn’t, and was acutely conscious of the three children sleeping upstairs. Then it came again, a slightly different sound this time, which she knew was someone trying the handle of the back door. Swallowing down panic, she ran out of the room, flicking light switches as she went, and stumbled up the stairs to fumble frantically for her phone. Whoever was outside would know they had disturbed someone now and, as she called David’s mobile, she peered out of the uncurtained bedroom window into the shadowy half-lit darkness of the garden. There was someone there, she decided with absolute certainty, although she could not make out exactly where amongst the shadows of the trees and bushes moving and rustling in a stiff breeze.

To her immense relief David answered quickly.

‘Call the police, now!’ he said when she had explained what was happening. ‘I’ll be there in fifteen minutes, max. Dial 999 now, Vicky. Don’t take any chances. I love you.’ Her hands trembling on the keys, she did as she was told.

The call came just as Laura, already in silky pyjamas and with her hair in a loose copper cloud around her shoulders, was thinking about enticing Thackeray to bed and wondering, when she got him there, whether she dare broach her near obsessive wish to come off the pill.