Death in a Far Country E-Book

Patricia Hall

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

Seitenzahl: 411

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The dark of the night. Two girls are running for their lives. Terrified, one falls, and unable to get up, she forces her friend to go on without her, to save herself. For her there is no escape as their attackers close in. The following morning the body of a young girl is found in the canal. DCI Thackeray, recently returned to the force after a bungled kidnapping operation left him near death, is put on the case. But with the entire town's attention focused on the football team's upcoming match against Chelsea, no one seems to be able to tell the police anything about how the girl died, let alone identify her. Thackeray's girlfriend, reporter Laura Ackroyd, also has much to investigate. The appointment of a female chairman at the football club has annoyed many people, in particular the men who dominate the share holders and who will apparently stoop to any depth to force her out. Thackeray and Ackroyd soon discover that their two stories are linked, and the common denominators are the shady dealings of the club's directors and the unsavoury goings on at the infamous post game parties. But as Laura becomes more and more involved in the case does she risk putting Thackeray's job and her life in danger?

Leseprobe

Death in a Far Country

PATRICIA HALL

Contents

Title Page

PREFACE

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

About the Author

By Patricia Hall

Copyright

PREFACE

She lay for a long time with her arms wrapped around her knees, to try to ease the pain, her teeth clamped tightly over her lips to prevent the slightest groan escaping. The darkness was not quite absolute. There was no moon but she could faintly see reflections shimmering on water and occasionally the sky lightened as a vehicle’s headlights flickered for a moment some distance away and then vanished. She knew she needed help, but did not dare call out for it in case her attackers were still looking for her. They had not been far behind when the two of them had stumbled onto this dark pathway and she had slumped to her knees, feeling the skin tear on the sharp gritty surface, unable to run any further. She had urged her friend to make her own escape. For a long time she had refused and they had huddled together against the cold, arms around each other, but at last she had persuaded her to go, to save herself, her friend’s voice strangled by sobs as she promised to return with help. But she knew she would not come back. She would not dare, in case they were waiting for her. She knew she was utterly alone.

She clutched herself more tightly, the pain in her chest more intense, impossible to assuage, and she gazed into the chilly darkness in despair. At home, she thought, the night was warm and soft, a relief after the searing heat of the day, and full of the smell of cooking and the noise of cicadas and dogs, the rhythm of music and occasional shouts of anger and laughter as people relaxed on their verandahs and children played in the dust. At home, she had liked the night. Here it seemed always hostile, cold and angry and full of the threatening shadows of the men who had made her life hell.

She let out her breath in a faint hiss of agony as the pain ratcheted up one more intolerable notch and convulsed her body. She was not sure what they had done to her in the mêlée of fists and boots when they had caught up with the two of them, but she knew it was serious, and that she was sodden with blood. Her friend, she thought, had got off more lightly, slipping out of their grasp somehow at the height of the attack and then coming back and pulling her upright and dragging her away when the men were frightened off by the lights of passing cars, leaving the two of them briefly alone in the gutter, just long enough for them to run. But she had not been able to keep it up. She had soon stumbled and fallen to her knees, trying to stifle her groans, and her friend had been unable to pull her to her feet again.

‘Go quickly. Run,’ she had said. ‘Save yourself.’

And then she was finally alone, facing the icy darkness and the surging waves of pain, knowing they would find her, and when they did, that would be the end.

She never knew how long she lay there. Once or twice she tried to drag her protesting body into a patch of deeper shadows, but the agony of movement was too great. For what seemed like hours, she drifted between the reality of pain and bleak darkness and the soothing half-conscious dreams of another life where there had been safety and warmth and hope and the promise of happiness. Then, increasingly, the present nightmare became jumbled in her mind with previous nightmares, seemingly endless brutalities that she could never have even imagined in her earlier life, and as her strength ebbed away she began to sob, the hot tears coursing through the caked layers of dirt and blood she could feel on her face. And she knew they would find her soon.

They came quietly in the end, a single pencil beam of torch light focusing on her face, dazzling her. There was no strength left in her, and she did no more than moan as they picked her up roughly, carried her a little way and then let her slip into the icy waters of the canal, where the water closed over her unresisting body with scarcely a ripple.

CHAPTER ONE

Detective Chief Inspector Michael Thackeray sat uncomfortably across a desk from Superintendent Jack Longley, drumming his fingers on the polished surface in frustration. If Longley himself felt any tension, he was concealing it well, his rubicund face bland and his balding head gleaming slightly in the artificial light. But he was watching the younger man intently for all that, as if someone had deposited an unattended package in his office that had to be checked out for explosive possibilities.

‘I’m not saying that’s what I expect, Michael,’ he said. ‘I’m just saying it’s something maybe you should consider. You may feel OK but I’m buggered if you look it. You were on the critical list for a week, for God’s sake. Maybe it’s time to think about a quieter life.’ The senior officer’s eyes ran quickly over his junior’s untidy hair and a dark suit that looked in need of pressing, before fixing on the blue eyes which seemed weary even at the beginning of a working day. Thackeray glanced away before squaring his broad rugby-player’s shoulders and meeting Longley’s sharp eyes again.

‘And do what?’ he asked. ‘Run some crummy security firm? Go fishing? Take up golf?’ Thackeray was offering deliberate provocation to the golf-addicted superintendent but he refused to rise directly, though sufficiently provoked to step onto forbidden territory himself.

‘You could marry that long-suffering lass of yours, for a start,’ he said. ‘That might make you feel better.’ Thackeray, thinner faced than he had been, the creases around mouth and eyes deeper and his unruly dark hair a touch greyer at the temples, froze for a moment and then shook his head angrily.

‘You really think she’d be willing to have me when I’m on the way to the knacker’s yard?’

‘That’s a “no” to early retirement then, is it?’

Thackeray looked at his boss consideringly for a moment.

‘Are they pushing for me to go, the brass?’ he asked quietly. Longley shrugged and suddenly looked almost as tired as Thackeray himself, as if deflated by the thought of the official hierarchy looming threateningly above them both, looking for scapegoats for their own incompetence.

‘I don’t think they’d shed many tears if either of us went,’ he said. ‘Don’t kid yourself. We didn’t cover ourselves with glory in Staveley, did we? Two dead who needn’t have been? And you as good as. A right cock-up, as I’m sure this inquiry they’ve launched will conclude. And whatever connivance they got at the top, we were the ones in charge of the case. I took over as senior investigating officer while you were away, remember.’

‘I took a risk I shouldn’t have taken by not waiting for backup in a hostage situation,’ Thackeray conceded cautiously. ‘I felt I had no choice – in the circumstances.’

‘And damn near got yourself killed. They don’t like that, the brass. It looks bad when the Home Office inspectors come sniffing around.’

‘We’d have done better if we’d had proper cooperation from our so-called friends in London,’ Thackeray said, anger in his voice now. ‘I complained at the time and I’ll tell them again when they ask me for my opinion, don’t worry.’

‘Aye, well, we’ll both put the best case we can,’ Longley said. ‘But I blame myself for the little girl. We should have looked after her better. They can’t lay that at your door, any road. You weren’t even here.’

Thackeray nodded, his eyes sombre. The case that now seemed to threaten Bradfield CID with unforeseeable retribution had been a harrowing one, and Longley was not the only one to blame himself for an unsatisfactory and blood-soaked outcome. But Longley suddenly squared his shoulders.

‘Right then, let’s not fret about what we can’t alter,’ he said. ‘I’d rather you stayed than went, Michael, you should know that. So fill me in on where you are now you’re back. Are you up to speed?’

‘Just about,’ Thackeray said cautiously, though feeling relieved at that unexpected vote of confidence. He was aware that for a long time Longley had regarded him with extreme caution, knowing of his near terminal career difficulties elsewhere, but he had thought he had earned his trust. ‘I’m ploughing through the reports. The crime figures look reasonably encouraging. Maybe I should take a couple of months off more often. They seem to have been doing pretty well without me.’

‘I kept a close eye,’ Longley said.

‘I was sorry Val Ridley fell by the wayside,’ Thackeray said, thinking of the cool, blonde young woman detective who had resigned in the aftermath of the series of murders that had left him in intensive care himself.

‘Kevin Mower was bending my ear, trying to get her to change her mind,’ Longley said. ‘I had a chat with her, but she was adamant she wanted to go. Planning to train as a social worker, she said.’

‘So Kevin told me. She got too involved with the child who died. She got burnt out, as you do if you lose your objectivity. It’s a great pity. She was a good officer.’

Longley looked at the DCI, knowing how bitterly difficult he had found the same case, and wondered, not for the first time, at Thackeray’s dogged capacity for survival.

‘You coped,’ he said.

Thackeray smiled grimly, thinking that it was a very good thing that Longley did not know how close he had come to giving up himself as he had lain in his hospital bed going over the mistakes that had put him there. Only his growing sense that he could not leave a job half done had persuaded him to come back.

‘Only just,’ he admitted. ‘It gets no easier.’

They were interrupted by Sergeant Kevin Mower himself, who tapped on the door and put his head round when Longley called for him to enter. Mower nodded briefly at the Superintendent, his face grim, but addressed himself to the DCI.

‘Uniform have found a body in the canal, guv,’ he said quietly. ‘Suspicious death – looks like murder.’

Thackeray pulled his heavy six-foot frame out of his chair and sighed, feeling the cogs of the police machine slipping relentlessly into place again and threatening, as never before, to grind him to a pulp.

‘We’d best have a look,’ he said.

‘Keep me in touch, Michael,’ Longley said as the two detectives departed, shoulder to shoulder. And, as the door closed behind them, he muttered to himself: ‘Please God, we don’t bugger this one up.’

Laura Ackroyd was sitting in the morning editorial meeting at the Bradfield Gazette feeling more than usually bored. She twisted a long strand of her copper hair around her fingers as she listened to the sports editor, Tony Holloway, a small chubby man in his early thirties, already balding, who had an inexplicably fathomless enthusiasm for the local football team. Bradfield United’s normally dire performance, in Laura’s view, earned nothing like the uncritical loyalty it got on the back pages of the local newspaper. But just for once, she had to admit, Tony had something to crow about and it was obvious that the paper’s editor, Ted Grant, who was sitting inscrutably at the end of the table like a basking bullfrog, was ready to allow him full rein.

‘So how much cash will they make out of playing Chelsea, then?’ Ted asked. ‘Thousands? Tens of thousands?’

‘Well, the stadium’ll be full on Saturday for the match, not much doubt about that. Tickets are like gold dust, so certainly tens of thousands,’ Tony said. ‘But you get into the big money when you get a share of the take at a big stadium like Chelsea’s. If they could only draw next week and go back to Stamford Bridge for the replay, they’d be quids in. They’ve already done pretty well out of this Cup run, because they’ve played away from home so often. A share of the take on a crowd of thirty thousand is a damn sight better than a share on the ten thousand United can cram in at Beck Lane when they’re on this sort of roll and fill all the seats.’

‘And can they draw against Chelsea?’ Ted asked, doubt written all over his heavy features. A deep and abiding scepticism was his stock-in-trade, hallmark, he believed, of a serious player who had done his stint on a London tabloid.

‘Stranger things have happened,’ Tony said cheerfully. ‘No one gave them a chance in either of the last two games, so you never know. The Nigerian lad Okigbo is a real star. The two goals against Sunderland were gems by any standard. Chelsea’ll come looking to buy him if we’re not careful.’

‘And what about this lass they’ve got running the club now?’ Grant asked. ‘Is she going to make a go of it?’

Laura’s interest in the discussion flared momentarily at that. Even she, with her minimal interest in football, had been intrigued to see a woman apparently jump at the chance of taking over the chairmanship of the struggling local club when her father, Sam Heywood, the major shareholder, had unexpectedly died. But her interest had turned to dismay as she realised that Jenna Heywood’s succession had aroused real hostility in and around the club, a hostility that Tony Holloway seemed only too happy to encourage in his weekly column of United news and gossip.

‘Why shouldn’t she make a go of it?’ Laura asked, mildly. ‘She’s an experienced businesswoman, from what I’ve heard. Chances are she’ll do a much better job than her father.’

Tony flushed slightly at the unexpected interruption from the only woman amongst the senior staff at the table and glanced at Ted for support.

‘From what I’ve heard, she knows absolutely zilch about football,’ he said. ‘The way things are these days for these small clubs you need a tough chairman if you’re going to survive. Someone with a bit of financial nous and the guts to stand up to the players’ agents and the rest of the sharks out there.’

‘And running your own PR firm in London doesn’t need all that?’ Laura asked with her sweetest smile. ‘I reckon there’s as many sharks down there as there are in the Football League. What you football nuts really don’t like is the fact that she’s a woman.’

‘Some of the old guard directors, maybe,’ Tony admitted, looking flustered at this unprecedented attack from the least likely direction. ‘There’s no doubt they’re upset. And as I hear it, she’s not exactly built up a rapport with the coach, Minelli. And he’s easy enough to get on with, for God’s sake. A really good bloke – for an Italian.’

‘With the accent on the bloke?’ Laura came back sharply. ‘And the regulation Italian as well? How trendy is that?’

‘Give us a break, Miz Ackroyd,’ Ted Grant broke into the spat heavily. ‘I tell you what, though. With the town buzzing like it is over the Chelsea match, we could do worse than run a profile of the lovely Jenna Heywood. How about that?’

Tony Holloway looked doubtful but obviously hesitated to contradict the notoriously irascible editor of the Gazette directly.

‘I’ve a hell of a lot to go on my pages,’ he prevaricated. ‘Interviews with both managers, a profile of Okigbo…’

‘I’ll do it,’ Laura broke in quickly. ‘You don’t even have to give up an inch of your precious sports space if you don’t want to. It can go on my features page on Friday before the match. You’ve made it pretty clear you don’t think it’s a suitable job for a woman, and you obviously all expect her to make a hash of it. Let’s see what she’s got to say for herself. What do you think, Ted? Good idea?’

‘Not bad,’ Ted conceded. ‘Not bad at all. Fix it up, then, Laura. I’m told quite a few women watch football these days so let’s give them summat to think about, shall we? A bloody good idea, as it goes.’

And as the meeting broke up, Laura met Tony Holloway’s accusing eyes across the table and smiled sweetly.

‘OK, Tony?’ she asked. ‘Perhaps you can give me a few cuttings as background?’

‘Fine,’ Holloway came back, but the expression on his face told her it was not so fine at all, and she spun on her heel to hide her satisfied grin.

It was years now since Laura had begun to feel that the Gazette had taught her all it could about journalism. Colleagues who had joined the paper at the same time as she had, straight out of the local university, had long ago moved onwards and upwards to jobs elsewhere, and she herself still harboured the embers of a once fierce ambition to work in London. In fact she had tried more than once to break into a wider professional world, but again and again she had been dragged back to her home town by the only force in her life that had outweighed her ambition and would, perhaps, she thought sadly, end up stifling it completely.

She had hoped to have married Michael Thackeray by now, but she was beginning to wonder if she ever would. She still found it hard to escape the memory of the moment she had thought he was dead. In fact, his heart had stopped, she had been told later, and only the attentions of a particularly determined paramedic had got it beating again in the ambulance. But since she had sat by his bedside watching him struggle back to a semblance of normality after being shot, she had felt nothing but coolness on his side, as if his brush with death had taken something away from his capacity to feel as well as some of the physical vigour he had always put into life. But he seemed to have pulled himself out of his initial apathy and in the end he had insisted on going back to work as soon as he could persuade his doctor to sanction it but long before Laura thought he was fully mended. He had dismissed her objections impatiently.

‘I need to work,’ he had said. ‘Just like you do. You once told me the job is what I am, and you were right.’

But Laura still doubted that the fevered intensity with which Thackeray seemed to have launched himself back into running Bradfield CID was what he or the job really needed. Thackeray seemed to be treading a thin line between commitment and hysteria, and nothing she said seemed to convince him that there was any danger in that. In fact, she thought, nothing she said these days seemed to reach him at all. And if that was where they were, perhaps it was only prudent to give some tentative thought to her own ambitions in case she had to face the future without him.

Anyway, it would be interesting, she thought, to tease out Jenna Heywood’s reactions to exchanging her high-powered job in the south for such an unorthodox job close to her roots in Yorkshire. Laura could remember Sam Heywood in his early days, one of her own father’s business cronies who occasionally came to the house for drinks and long discussions in Jack Ackroyd’s smoke-filled study. He had taken over Bradfield United during one of its periodic financial crises and allegedly pumped millions of his own money into supporting the club, which yo-yoed alarmingly from one year to the next between the lower divisions of the Football League, permanently hovering on the brink of some disaster or other.

‘Our Sam’, as he was affectionately and sometimes contemptuously known to the fans, had ricocheted from hero to villain and back again in the pages of the Gazette more or less in line with the club’s fortunes, until his sudden death a couple of months ago while on holiday in the West Indies. And then suddenly Jenna Heywood had materialised, a young woman few people in Bradfield seemed ever to have heard of, but now the sole inheritor of her father’s majority stake in the club. And as if her arrival in Bradfield had not created enough of a shock, her announcement that she intended to take her father’s place as club chairman created a local earthquake.

Interviewing Jenna just as United, defying the odds and their own indifferent record, faced one of the best teams in the country in the FA Cup would be an interesting assignment, Laura thought, and that was something she desperately needed. And if it also helped her clarify her own mind about whether to stay in Bradfield or whether, at last, to go, that might be for the best. She did not think that continuing her life on its present track was tenable much longer, although how she was going to tell Michael Thackeray that she simply did not know.

The canal in Bradfield’s narrow town centre had never led anywhere. Built in the nineteenth century as a spur to the busy Leeds to Liverpool waterway, it had always come to an abrupt halt at the back of the textile mills and warehouses that had transformed the village of Bradfield at breakneck speed into a smoky but booming manufacturing town. A couple of wharves had made space for barges filled with coal or bales of raw wool to unload, and a broad basin allowed them to turn and make the return journey through a lock and down the narrow valley to rejoin the main artery.

There had been talk over the best part of two centuries about filling the canal in when its usefulness was overtaken by the railways as a means of transporting heavy goods, but in spite of complaints about noxious dumping, stagnant water and threats to health, nothing had ever been done to close it down. Eventually the new interest in leisure pursuits on the waterways had seen the basin dredged, the cut cleared of shopping trolleys and other rubbish and its leaks sealed, the wharves restored and the towpath resurfaced to allow pleasure boats access to the town and a few houseboats to moor just a stone’s throw from the shopping centre. In Bradfield’s latest stuttering regeneration, some of the mills and warehouses nearby were being converted into studios and flats, and the first signs of a modest waterside night life were springing up around the basin itself.

DCI Thackeray stood for a moment close to the last stone hump-backed bridge before the narrow waterway opened out into its new incarnation. This was a quiet, isolated spot, where the towpath was overshadowed by a still disused and derelict textile warehouse and sight-lines from the more open water beyond were effectively blocked by the bridge over the cut and the towpath. Behind him was a high stone wall, breached only by a narrow alleyway giving access from a quiet street of offices and commercial premises behind. At night, he thought, out of reach of streetlighting and probably out of earshot of the small community of houseboat owners, it would be cut-off and secluded, the perfect place for an assignation or a murder – or both.

Behind him he was aware of the bustle of the crime team clustered around the body, which had now been lifted from the dark water of the cut. But he knew that at night this place would be totally empty, in spite of being only a couple of hundred yards from well-lit shopping streets and passing traffic. Even now, on a wintry day of pale sunshine, beyond the police tape that had closed off the towpath in both directions, the unusual activity appeared to have attracted no curious sightseers at all.

Reluctantly he turned back towards the well-organised team behind him. Kevin Mower looked up as Thackeray approached, turning away from the overweight figure of the pathologist, Amos Atherton, who was crouched in a protective suit close to the sodden form of a young woman.

‘Seriously hurt, possibly dead, before she went into the water,’ Mower said, his face grim. ‘Heavy bruising, and what looks like a stab wound just below the ribs.’

Thackeray focused reluctantly on the limp form that had been dragged from the dark, still water and made his own mental evaluation of the victim: a tall, thin black girl, dressed in the skimpy skirt and cut-off top of the typical youngster on a night out, and without any sort of coat or sweater although the year had so far held out no hint of spring warmth. Her feet and legs were bare and although someone had pulled her mini-skirt down to afford some sort of decency to the body, she looked as sexually vulnerable in death as she had probably been in life.

‘Any ID?’ he asked.

Mower shook his head. ‘No pockets in that gear,’ he said. ‘And no sign of a bag. We’ll have to get the divers down to have a look for anything else, including a weapon.’

‘Shoes,’ Thackeray said. ‘She must have been wearing shoes.’

Atherton struggled to his feet, indicating to the waiting assistants standing by with a stretcher and body bag that he had finished his initial examination, and pushed through the crowd to Thackeray.

‘I can’t tell yet whether she was dead when she went into the water,’ he said. ‘But the stab wound to the upper abdomen is deep. She must have bled a lot.’

Thackeray glanced at the compacted gravel of the pathway in irritation.

‘There’s been rain,’ he said. ‘But I’ll get the SOCOs to see if they can find traces of blood.’

‘They’ll have their work cut out with the body, an’ all,’ Atherton said. ‘The water will have washed her clean. We’ll have to see what the post-mortem gives us.’

‘Has she been in there long?’ Thackeray asked, glancing again at the iridescent black water for inspiration and finding none.

‘Doubt it,’ Atherton said, beginning to peel off his plastic suit. ‘No sign of decomposition that I can see. At a guess, she went in last night.’

‘She was spotted about eight o’clock this morning by a bloke from one of the houseboats walking his dog,’ Mower broke in. ‘It was barely light, he said. And he’d had the dog out here last night too, about nine o’clock. He’s not sure he could have seen her in the dark, but he didn’t notice anything unusual. And the dog behaved quite normally. For what that’s worth.’

Thackeray smiled faintly. ‘You know we should always take dogs that don’t bark seriously,’ he said. ‘We’d better talk to everyone in the houseboats. They’re the only likely witnesses around, I should think. No one else is likely to be on the towpath in the dark.’

‘Except the victim and the killer,’ Mower said.

CHAPTER TWO

Laura Ackroyd turned over in bed in the dark, focused with some difficulty on the radio-alarm on the bedside table, and groaned. It was six a.m., and she was aware of Michael Thackeray lying on his back beside her, rigid and obviously awake. She turned back towards him and slipped an arm round his chest.

‘Can’t you sleep?’ she whispered. Thackeray half-turned towards her and put a hand on her arm, although Laura could not be sure whether it was intended to encourage her embrace or fend her off.

‘Just a bit of pain,’ he said. ‘Go back to sleep. I’ll get up in a bit and take a painkiller. It won’t hurt if I get in early this morning. I’ve got a post-mortem to go to at eight-thirty.’

Laura ran a finger across his back gently and located the surprisingly small scar left by the ricocheting bullet from a rifle that had come close to killing him, lodging so close to his heart that it presented the surgeons with an operation of nightmare delicacy to remove it. The pain was proving surprisingly intractable, she thought, but probably not as intractable as the sense of failure he obviously still felt at having failed to protect so many innocent victims of the psychopath and his hangers-on who had come so close to killing him too.

‘Another murder?’ she said and listened soberly, wide awake now, to the bare details he offered about the body of the black girl found submerged in the canal the previous day.

‘Don’t you know who she is?’

‘There’s no ID,’ Thackeray said. ‘She was wearing surprisingly little for a cold winter’s day. Looked as though she’d been clubbing or to a party.’

‘A lover’s quarrel, maybe,’ she said softly.

‘I don’t think so,’ Thackeray said. ‘She wasn’t just beaten up. She was stabbed.’

‘Ah,’ Laura said. The Bradfield canal was not an area of the town she was at all familiar with. She was aware that it was the latest part of the town to be redeveloped and was no doubt changing fast, but as a teenager spending her boarding school holidays in one of the town’s more leafy suburbs, she knew it only as a place that most parents routinely warned their children against: a noisome dumping ground for rubbish, both animate and inanimate; a haunt of prostitutes and drug-addicts who valued its seclusion so close to the town centre. Laura realised that this was not a path she, or probably Thackeray, should travel down at this hour. He would have enough of it when he got to work.

‘Would you like me to make you breakfast?’ she asked. He kissed her gently on the cheek, a peck that was more brotherly than loverly, and rolled himself off the edge of the bed with a grimace of pain.

‘Go back to sleep,’ he said. But when he had moved slowly to the bathroom and she heard the shower switch on, she found his suggestion impossible to follow. Her mind was racing now, as she guessed his had been, but almost certainly not in the same direction. Sleep looked like a remote possibility as she watched the digits of the clock creep towards six-thirty and agonised over whether the passion that had brought the two of them together had disappeared for good.

Eventually she got up, pulled on her dressing gown against the chilly air, and went into the kitchen to brew a large pot of coffee. By the time Thackeray emerged, dressed for the day, she was sitting at the table with her hands round a steaming mug, gazing out of the window at the first streaks of grey in the morning sky.

‘Can I get you something to eat?’ she asked.

‘Not before a post-mortem,’ he said. Laura looked at him closely as he poured himself coffee, absorbing just how much older he seemed to have become in the three short months since the shooting. But maybe, she thought, he had been changing even then. The process had started when Aileen finally died and brought back all the memories that he had been so intent on burying for more than ten years. It seemed an impossible irony, she thought, but she was beginning to feel that they had been better off before Aileen’s death, before the shadow she had always cast over their relationship had been so suddenly removed. With Aileen gone, they were free to look at each other in the clear light of day and, as far as Laura could tell, the light left her somehow wanting in Thackeray’s eyes, diminished in some way from what she thought she had been before. She sighed.

‘I thought maybe we could go out for a meal tonight,’ she said. ‘We haven’t done that for a long time.’

‘I’ll give you a call later,’ he said. ‘You know what it’s like at the start of a murder investigation. I may be late finishing.’

She nodded as he pulled on his coat without meeting her eyes.

‘Take care,’ she said, her voice dull as he moved towards the door, but he did not respond as he pulled it shut behind him.

Of course it was partly her own fault, she thought, as she stood under the shower herself a few minutes later, hoping the hot water would galvanise her from her depression. She had told Thackeray, on one of the long evenings when she had sat at his hospital bedside as he slowly recovered from his own trauma, how her former boyfriend had helped himself to information she had been entrusted to pass on to Thackeray himself. She had been a fool to get drunk in Vince Newsom’s company, she had admitted, and he had taken advantage of her, as she should have known he would. What she had never passed on was Vince’s suggestion that he had not only put her to bed that night, but had joined her there. It was a claim that Laura had never accepted, and which she found more unbelievable as time went by. Unbelievable and unbearable, and never, she had decided, to be revealed.

Thackeray drove straight to the infirmary without calling in at his office. He made first for the hospital cafeteria, where he gulped another scalding hot cup of coffee before making his way down to the basement to be met by a bleary-eyed Amos Atherton, still in his outdoor clothes.

‘You’re bloody early,’ Atherton said, without enthusiasm. ‘Couldn’t you sleep?’

‘I don’t like taking too many painkillers,’ Thackeray said brusquely. ‘I need to keep a clear head.’

‘Aye, we all need to do that,’ Atherton agreed, as he hung up his coat in the small cloakroom alongside the mortuary and pulled clean scrubs from the cupboard where they were kept. ‘You can go in if you like,’ he said, as he pulled a green smock over his head. ‘The Technician’s already in there prepping up.’

‘I’ll wait,’ Thackeray said. ‘I’ll just have a cigarette before we start.’ Atherton raised an eyebrow at that but said nothing as Thackeray pulled a packet from his pocket and opened a side door, which led outside into a narrow courtyard where it was permitted to smoke. The infirmary was a place he hated more than any other, never able to banish the memory of the day he had paced these aseptic corridors while Atherton had performed the autopsy on his own son. He should not have been there then, although no one in the department, most of whom already knew him as a copper although it was long before he had come to Bradfield to work as DCI, had found the courage to turn him away. So what, he wondered, bitterly, had driven him here, of all places, too early for the routine duty he disliked so much to have even got close to starting. He ground out his half-smoked cigarette under his heel after a few minutes and went back inside, to find Atherton fully dressed in scrubs and apron and ready to start his own routine under the glaring lights of the morgue. He put on a gown himself and joined him.

The dead girl lay naked and statuesque on the stainless steel table, long-legged, broad-hipped, firm-breasted and strangely beautiful in death. There was no massive disfigurement. The bruises she had suffered showed up less against her smooth dark skin than they would have done on a fairer victim, and the stab wound on the left side of her body revealed itself only as a small pink nick washed clean by the water of the canal. Atherton spoke quietly and monotonously into his tape recorder as he made his external examination, only raising his voice and glancing at Thackeray to emphasise some point that he regarded as significant. Taking swabs from her mouth and other orifices with a surprisingly gentle touch he glanced at the stony-faced policeman.

‘Sexually experienced,’ he said, closing the girl’s legs again. ‘But we’ll be lucky to find any traces of recent activity after she’s been in the water.’

‘Any sign of rape?’ Thackeray asked, dry-mouthed.

Atherton shrugged. ‘She’s extensively bruised, so I couldn’t exclude it. I’ll look for internal evidence.’

As usual in this situation, Thackeray tried to turn his mind away from what was happening on the table as Atherton reached for his scalpel and proceeded to conduct his internal examination of the body. But these days he found that his escape mechanisms did not work as effectively as they used to. As he got older, the tragedies he had to deal with as part of his daily routine seemed to become harder rather than easier to bear. He had never joined in the culture of black humour with which many police officers and medics tried to shield themselves from the worst of the horrors they witnessed, preferring to withdraw into himself behind what he had thought was an impregnable armour of dispassion. But the last case he had handled, which had nearly cost him his life, had only shown him how fragile that armour had become. The death of children had eaten away at his defences, reduced them to no more than egg-shell after all these years, he realised now, as he stood so close to yet another death of such youth and beauty that it screamed out for retribution. The last case had left him feeling terrifyingly vulnerable.

A faint exclamation from Atherton claimed his attention and he focused again on the now mutilated cadaver from which the pathologist was carefully extracting internal organs.

‘She was pregnant,’ Atherton said. ‘Only just. Six, eight weeks maybe. She might not even have known.’

Thackeray nodded, not trusting himself to speak. Two deaths, not one, he thought.

‘And there’s vaginal bruising and scars. Was she a prostitute?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ Thackeray said. ‘She was carrying no ID and we’ve not found a handbag. We’re going to search the canal today in case there’s something down in the mud. Can you give any estimate of how old she was?’

Atherton stepped back from the table and studied the body as his technician began to tidy it up before the major incision was closed up again.

‘I’d say about eighteen,’ he said. ‘But I could be out by two years either way. She’s obviously of African or Caribbean origin. If I had to guess I’d say West African. And the knife wound didn’t kill her. It came close to the heart, with an upward trajectory, but hadn’t touched it. Her lungs are full of canal water. She undoubtedly drowned.’

‘So she either fell or was pushed into the canal after she was attacked?’

‘Looks like it,’ Atherton said, his face as impassive as Thackeray’s as he began to stitch his subject together again as delicately as if she had been alive. ‘I’ll let you have the toxicology and other test results as soon as I have them. But at least you’ve got a definite cause of death. I’ll let you have it in writing by the end of the day.’

‘I’d like an artist’s drawing of her,’ Thackeray said. ‘If we don’t find any more information on who she is, and no one’s reported her missing, we’ll need it for the Press.’

‘Tell your artist to get in touch. We’ll arrange for access.’

Thackeray nodded and turned away, only to find Atherton close behind him as the doors swung shut.

‘Michael,’ Atherton said, his voice unusually uncertain. Thackeray faced his old colleague for a moment without speaking. Atherton swallowed and seemed to make up his mind.

‘Are you sure you should be back at work?’ he asked. ‘You look terrible.’

Thackeray smiled thinly. ‘Thanks for that,’ he said. ‘I seem to be getting votes of no-confidence from every direction just now. Just for the record, my doctor says I’m fine.’

‘Physically, maybe,’ Atherton said, his face flushed. ‘But that’s not everything, is it? I’m only talking as a friend…’

‘I’m OK,’ Thackeray said angrily. ‘Sitting on my backside brooding isn’t going to do me or anyone else any good. I need to work.’ He stopped abruptly, knowing he had said much more than he intended. He held out his hand to Atherton, who shook it briefly.

‘I’m sorry, Amos, but I’m fine.’ The pathologist nodded and turned on his heel to go back to his mortuary, but Thackeray knew he was no more convinced than anyone else that he could cope. That was something he was going to have to prove the hard way.

Laura Ackroyd drove through the gates of the West Royd Golf and Country Club with a faint sense of disbelief. It was an area on the edge of Bradfield that she recalled as one of scruffy allotments and small-holdings against a backdrop of hill farms, which grazed their sheep on the lower reaches of the fells to the west of the town. She had not been up here, she thought, for several years and the transformation had been startling. She recalled the outcry when the allotments and some of the farms had been bought up by a developer, but the transformation was more complete than she had ever imagined. The flat area where local gardeners had once grown their runner beans and rhubarb now housed an extensive clubhouse, and beyond that the farmland had been transformed into a pristine golf course where she could see several groups of bright-shirted players making their way across the rolling, well-manicured terrain.

She parked her modest Golf alongside ranks of Beamers and an occasional Jag, and wondered, as she made her way up the shallow stone steps to the main entrance, whether her working outfit of dark trouser suit, cream shirt and low heels was classy enough for this assignment. Inside, a low key but elegant lounge, almost deserted, stretched out in all directions and she hesitated for a moment to take stock. It was, she thought, more like the entrance to a five-star hotel than a sports club, the directions to the gym, the squash courts, the pool and the changing rooms so discreet as to be almost invisible. But she was not alone for more than a couple of seconds before a young man in an understated uniform of light trousers and blue club blazer approached with a welcoming smile.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked.

‘I’m meeting Jenna Heywood,’ Laura said.

‘Ah, yes, Ms Heywood said she was expecting a guest for lunch. She’s in the bar already, I think. Would you like to come through?’

Laura followed her guide through a door to one side of the lounge into an extensive bar with picture windows overlooking the rolling golf course on one side and offering a view of an indoor swimming pool on the other, where a number of young men were powering through the water with splashy aggression. Jenna Heywood apparently spotted her guest before she spotted her, and Laura became aware of a tall woman of about her own age breaking away from a convivial group at the bar and approaching across the thick pile carpet in a black skirt not much longer than a mini teamed with breathtaking heels and a plunging neckline in embroidered scarlet silk.

‘Laura?’ she said enthusiastically. ‘I’m so glad you could make it. I thought it would be good to have a quiet chat up here before I take you to United. This is so much more comfortable. It’s a real asset to the old town, don’t you think?’

Reluctant to admit she had never been to the club before, Laura just nodded and allowed herself to be steered towards a table by the window with two comfortable armchairs arranged to face the windows and the view of the golf course. A waiter was hovering almost immediately.

‘Just a tonic with ice and lemon,’ Laura said. ‘I’m driving.’

Jenna looked disappointed. ‘You’ll have a glass of wine with lunch?’

‘Yes, that would be fine,’ Laura said, and sank back into her chair while Jenna dealt with the waiter, thankful for a moment to observe this phenomenon who appeared to have shaken Bradfield’s sporting community to its foundations simply by being young, elegant and female, an effect that Laura had hoped, maybe naïvely, had passed into history.

Jenna was tall and fashionably slim, her blonde hair worn loose, long legs crossed to display her Jimmy Choos, and her clothes evidently straight from the sort of designer shops that Laura could only gaze at in a state of financial shock when she occasionally passed them by. But when Jenna turned back to her guest Laura could see that she was not some ditzy clothes-horse. There was humour in the perfectly made-up face and a sharp intelligence in the blue eyes. Jenna Heywood was no fool, Laura thought, any more than her father had been, and she guessed that the middle-aged and complacent directors at Bradfield United, who seemed intent on derailing her plans, might find that they had bitten off more than they could chew.

‘So,’ Jenna said consideringly. ‘You’re the features editor for the Gazette? You don’t do sport then?’

Laura shook her head.

‘That’s Tony Holloway’s baby,’ she said. ‘I expect you’ve met him.’

‘Yes,’ Jenna said noncommitally, with a faint smile. ‘My father had a run-in or two with Tony, I think, as the team lurched from the bad to the appalling over the years.’

‘I think Tony’s mother put him in United colours from the moment he was born,’ Laura said with a grin. ‘I’m not sure why sports reporters think they’re exempt from trying to be objective, but a lot of them do.’

‘Well, maybe it’s no bad thing on a local paper,’ Jenna said easily. ‘The public expect their paper to be partisan for the local team. But you? If you don’t do sport, what’s all this about? Why have I attracted your particular attention? I like to know where I stand.’

Jenna’s stock-in-trade was attention, Laura thought wryly, and how it could be manipulated to the best advantage, and she knew that she was playing in the big league here.

‘I’m intrigued by a woman taking over a football club,’ Laura said. ‘Or rather, taking over this particular football club. I know it’s not unheard of these days, but United is such a basket case. Why bother?’ She knew she was being provocative, but was interested to see how Jenna would react to such a frontal assault. But Jenna Heywood just threw back her head and laughed.

‘A bloody good question,’ she said. ‘It’s one I ask myself in the small watches of the night when I wake up from a nightmare about the balance sheets I’ve seen. I reckon my father was barmy to keep pumping money into the club, and I must be even more barmy to follow suit.’

‘But like Tony, you’re a fan?’

‘Oh, I was always that,’ Jenna admitted. ‘If your sports editor wore blue and gold Babygros in his pram, I think I got the bug even earlier. My mother always said she went into labour in the directors’ box at one particularly fraught game when United scored a winning goal in the ninety-first minute. She leapt out of her seat to cheer and the next thing she knew they were sending for the ambulance. There’s no logic in my trying to rescue United, any more than there was for my poor old dad. It’s an emotional thing. We’ll have to see how it goes. Just at the moment, with the Cup run, things are looking up. But I expect Chelsea will thrash them eight-nil on Saturday and it’ll be back to our normal gloom and doom on Monday – and that’s not for quoting by the way. We don’t want the players suspecting me of lack of confidence before a game like that.’

She glanced over her shoulder. ‘There are a couple of them in here, as it goes, certain to be taking a close interest in what I’m up to.’ She gestured at a group of young men in the latest smart-casual gear by the bar, accompanied by a couple of young women in short skirts and abbreviated tops, and strappy sandals with heels so high they looked in imminent danger of toppling off them.

‘The black lad is our star, “OK” Okigbo. I hope he’s not spending too much time in here with the big game coming up. I’m surprised the coach hasn’t got them out training today. I’ll have to have a word with him about that.’

‘You’re going to be a hands on boss, then?’ Laura asked.

Jenna grinned. ‘I’ve been running my own business for ten years,’ she said. ‘I’m not likely to take a back seat in this one. They haven’t seen anything yet.’

‘But some of the directors don’t like it?’

‘There’s still a lot of men who don’t like working for a woman,’ Jenna said. ‘I don’t know what it’s like in newspapers.’

Laura smiled faintly at the idea of Ted Grant knuckling under to a female boss.

‘Some editors don’t even like women on their staff let alone giving the orders.’

‘Yes, well, I’ve come across plenty like that, not so much in my own profession, but amongst the clients. Companies that hire a PR firm and are then taken aback when a woman turns up with a critical report on how they do things. I don’t imagine Bradfield United will be any different.’