Sins of the Fathers E-Book

Patricia Hall

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

Seitenzahl: 427

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Stepping over the threshold of a once-happy family home turned charnel house, DCI Michael Thackeray knows he'll be faced with a grim sight. After all his years in the force, he's come to realise that you can never truly become inured to the sight of death. Especially when there are children involved. On entering the kitchen he is faced with the unthinkable: the bloodstained bodies of a mother and her young child. Outside the horror continues; a trail of crimson in the white snow leads them to another victim. With the father, Gordon Christie, and his son missing, the police come to the inevitable conclusion that this cruel tragedy is the result of a domestic row turned violent. But are things really that simple? Laura Ackroyd, Thackeray's journalist lover, thinks not, and she soon begins to wonder just who the absent Gordon Christie really is. As things fall apart, Laura and Thackeray become tangled in carefully constructed layers of mystery, and their lives hang in the balance as the full tragedy of the elusive Gordon Christie is eventually uncovered...

Leseprobe

Sins of the Fathers

PATRICIA HALL

Contents

Title PageChapter OneChapter TwoChapter ThreeChapter FourChapter FiveChapter SixChapter SevenChapter EightChapter NineChapter TenChapter ElevenChapter TwelveChapter ThirteenChapter FourteenChapter FifteenChapter SixteenChapter SeventeenChapter EighteenChapter NineteenChapter TwentyChapter Twenty-OneChapter Twenty-TwoAbout the AuthorBy Patricia HallCopyright

Chapter One

The boy could not understand why it had all turned out so badly. But he was old and wise enough to have known immediately that the appearance of a gun on a morning’s outing over the moors was a threat, not a joke, although his father still seemed to be smiling, a fierce, rigid sort of smile that was in no way reassuring. That sort of gun anyway was never a joke, never just a bit of fun, as his dad might say when things got a bit out of hand; that sort of gun was not for shooting rabbits. No way. And that was not the first thing which had gone wrong and filled him with dread since he had been picked up as he had dawdled down the road to school, more than usually reluctant to go because his sister had been allowed to stay at home with what she claimed was a bad cold, more likely a test today, really, he’d thought.

The snow had come on suddenly soon after they had set off, rattling icy flurries against the windows at first, rolling and bouncing across the road in front of them even as the sky turned from grey to almost black. Within ten minutes it was nearly impossible to see out of the windows, the wipers struggling to keep even a narrow triangle of the screen clear. They slowed down as the demarcation between the edge of the road and the edge of the moor became blurred and then disappeared completely. He had pressed his face against the cold glass, misting it up with his breath and then wiping the mist off with a red woollen glove, and he had realised that there were striped poles at intervals along the edge of the road, marking out the way, but they were swinging wildly by then as the tyres struggled to keep their grip.

The boy’s panic grew as eventually they slid to a halt, wheels whining, nose down close to one of the poles where the front had found an ice filled ditch rather than solid ground and, for a moment, he thought they would tip right over and he clung to the seat in front, trying not to scream. Outside he could see nothing but the whirling white flakes, a dancing blanket which seemed to suffocate the vehicle, allowing little light into the interior. Inside he felt sick and his breath seemed to come in small pants as he concentrated on the outside world, trying not to look over the seats into the front of the car where he knew there was nothing but danger and some sort of madness. He could feel it like a vice around his chest.

Cautiously, making no sound, he took hold of the door handle and pulled. There was a shout from behind him and then the stunning reverberation of a shot in a confined space but he had already fallen headfirst into the soft wet snow as soon as the door swung open and he felt nothing as he staggered to his feet, his boots scrabbling and sliding for a purchase in the ditch and up the other side. He heard more shots behind him but nothing hit him and he realised that he must have become almost invisible as soon as he moved a couple of feet into the whirling storm. He glanced down at his anorak and saw that he was already white from head to foot, like a snowman, he thought, momentarily delighted at the thought, before the terror overtook him again.

Behind him he could still hear a voice shouting. Terrified, he ignored it, plodding on through the deepening snow and still visible tussocks of grass until finally he could hear nothing at all except the wind which was already whipping up small drifts. I’m like one of those explorers in the arctic, he thought, but not optimistically. The snow had already worked its way into his wellington boots and his feet were beginning to feel very cold. His anorak hood was little protection from the gusty squalls and his ears tingled at first, and then began to stab him intensely. He knew that he needed somewhere to shelter, and he knew that shelter would be difficult to find up here, and he began to cry.

He never knew how long he struggled across the moor, shivering and sobbing, his tears turning to ice which clung to his cheeks. He had no watch, and after what seemed like hours he stumbled and came to rest in the lee of a half-demolished drystone wall where the snow provided a soft enough resting place for him to begin to relax as numbness succeeded the fierce pain in his feet and hands and ears. He no longer had the strength to get back to his feet. Someone would find him there, he thought. Someone would come.

Half asleep, curled up with his arms round his knees in search of warmth he couldn’t find, his mind wandered. Funny to be lying here in so much snow, he thought. It was almost like the sand at Guincho, deep and soft and slippery, but cold and wet while the sand had been too hot to walk across to the sea. His father had been good then, enjoying the sunshine and taking him into the waves and jumping him over them in strong arms, the spray catching him harmlessly and making him scream in a frenzied mixture of fear and delight. Dad had been different then. Dad had been fun. None of this would have happened then.

He closed his eyes and felt the snowflakes settle on the lids, but he could no longer find the energy to brush them off. He could not find the energy for anything any more. In spite of everything, he hoped his dad would come and fetch him soon. Perhaps then everything would be all right and they could go back to the hot sun and the thundering, shimmering sea and the burning sand. That’s what he would like to happen, he thought, as he drifted into sleep beneath the deepening blanket of snow. He would like to see the sun, and the foaming waves and the golden sand again…

DCI Michael Thackeray pulled on the regulation plastic overalls he was required to wear before venturing into a crime scene with an expression of distaste. He knew he should not admit it, even to himself, but he found himself increasingly reluctant to become a voyeur of death. You didn’t become more inured to it. In fact, he had found the reverse to be true, although he had undoubtedly become more expert at hiding his feelings when he faced the constant reminders of mortality, often bloody and frequently stomach-churning, which his career provided. Flurries of snow whipped around his legs and shoulders, sliding off the white plastic but clinging to dark hair and eyebrows and beginning to settle quickly on the frozen ground. Behind them the hills had disappeared beneath heavy clouds, rolling in fast from the north. It would not be long, he thought, before they were enveloped in the blizzard which seemed already to be raging across most of the Pennine hills.

Thackeray glanced at Sergeant Kevin Mower, who was tying plastic overshoes over his smart city loafers. From what they had been told before they had driven from police headquarters to this cottage at the very farthest edge of Bradfield, he knew that this particular catastrophe would test his stomach and his ability to disguise his feelings to the limit. Even as he pulled up his hood, two anxious looking paramedics appeared from round the side of the cottage carrying a stretcher and the inert form which lay on it, already attached to a drip, was painfully small. Children had been hurt here, or worse, and he found that the hardest thing of all to bear.

‘Right?’ he asked Mower brusquely, and together they moved through the cluster of parked police cars, past the ambulance and into the narrow doorway of the cottage to be met by the grim-looking scene-of-crime officer.

‘How many?’ Thackeray asked, his mouth dry.

‘Three,’ the SOCO said. ‘Woman and a child dead, another child as near as dammit. All shot.’

Kevin Mower whistled faintly between his teeth.

‘Weapon?’ Thackeray asked, but the SOCO shook his head, his eyes shadowed and unreadable beneath the plastic hood. Everyone, Thackeray thought, was put through the wringer by this sort of case, and he knew his own vulnerability only too well.

‘No sign,’ the SOCO said. ‘But it’s a pistol job, not a shotgun as you might have expected out here. An automatic – we’ve found cartridge cases. It’s slightly less messy than a shotgun, but not much.’ He smiled mirthlessly.

‘No sign of the perpetrator, then? Not hanging up in the garage, by any chance?’ Mower asked, his voice deceptively casual though his eyes were as bleak as Thackeray’s. ‘That’s the usual scenario.’

‘Uniform have done a thorough search of the property,’ the SOCO said, not smiling. ‘It looks as if the bloke worked here as a mechanic of some sort. There are workshops at the back, but no one there, no car, no gun, certainly no suicide. Zilch. Whoever’s responsible for this has scarpered, and probably a while ago. The pathologist hasn’t arrived yet but the bodies are pretty cool already.’

‘Not surprised, in this bloody weather,’ Mower said, glancing at the leaden sky outside the front door with a city man’s deep mistrust.

‘They’ve been forecasting heavy snow for days,’ the SOCO said.

‘We’ll take a look now,’ Thackeray said, knowing his voice was unusually strained and conscious of Mower’s eyes quickly flicking in his direction. ‘Let’s get it over with.’

They followed the SOCO into the main hallway, past the open door of what was obviously the living room, scantily furnished and scattered with toys, and into a kitchen which appeared to be an extension at the rear of the original stone structure of the cottage. But what had been a comfortable family room, the table still covered by a buttercup yellow cloth and a clutter of used dishes, had been turned into a charnel house. A woman who might once have been pretty lay sprawled on her back on the tiled floor, with a gaping wound where her left eye should have been and a pool of blood around her head and clotted in her untidy blonde hair. Closer to the door was the sight Thackeray had been dreading and which caused Mower too to take a sharp breath. A small child of perhaps three or four lay face down near the open door, as if she had been running not towards her mother, whose protection had probably already been beyond reach by then, but in a desperate attempt to escape the other way on still babyishly chubby legs from the fate threatening her from behind. One small hand reached beyond the threshold, its fingers splayed on the doorstep, the other still clutched a small brown teddy bear drenched in blood. She had been shot more than once the observers guessed, her back reduced to a mass of bloodily clotted fabric, her blood spattered over the tiles and onto the kitchen cupboards closest to her remains.

‘Jesus wept,’ Mower muttered under his breath while Thackeray simply stood transfixed, his face ashen and his breath shallow as he swallowed down the nausea which threatened to overwhelm him and tried to banish the image of his own son, still as clear as the day when he had found him dead, back into the dark recesses of his mind.

‘What’s the betting it was her own fucking father,’ the SOCO said, his voice far too loud in the crowded space.

‘Where was the other child found?’ Thackeray asked sharply. ‘The one who survived?’

‘Outside,’ the scene of crime officer said. ‘She was hit in the back too, and another shot creased her head, from what I could see, but she seems to have dragged herself into one of the barns out there. The bastard seems to have gone completely berserk with the gun. I’ve counted six or seven bullets without even trying. Shall I show you?’

Thackeray nodded and the three men stepped over the small child’s body, all of them taking deep breaths of the bitterly cold air as if their lives depended on it as soon as they stepped outside. In one corner of the yard there was more blood in a viscous, half-frozen pool from which a smeared trail led into what was little more than a shed half-filled with workbenches and tools. The swirling snow was already beginning to soften the outlines of the yard, covering frozen mud and, quite possibly, vital evidence.

‘She was lucky to be found in time.’ The SOCO’s voice was dispassionate. ‘Apparently she was semi-conscious when she was discovered by this bloke who came round looking for the father, Gordon Christie he’s called – the father that is. All this is from the first uniform on the scene. Christie had been doing some work on this bloke’s lawnmower and he turned up to fetch it about eleven this morning. Says he found the front door open and he went inside, poor sod. Found the kitchen the way you just saw it and staggered out here to be sick. Heard some moaning and found the surviving kid just over here. Had enough sense to dial 999 on his mobile. Lucky to get a connection, apparently.’ The SOCO glanced down at another rusty stain where blood had soaked into the dusty wooden floor of the shed.

‘Will she survive?’ Thackeray asked. ‘What did the ambulance crew say?’ He hoped neither of his colleagues would guess from the question just how fiercely he wanted the answer to be optimistic.

‘She was lucky not to have bled to death, they said. They weren’t holding their breath they’d even get her to hospital alive.’

Thackeray wearily ran a hand through his unruly dark hair. He felt cold and suddenly immensely tired as if the sheer weight of this outrage against an innocent family was crushing him from above. He closed his eyes briefly as he tried to steady his heart rate and re-order his disjointed thoughts.

‘So we’ve got a double murder, an attempted murder and a hundred to one a man who’s blown his own brains out somewhere not far away. Wonderful,’ he said. He turned away from the two younger men and walked slowly around the yard with his hood pushed back and the snow clinging to his dark hair, glancing into the various sheds and outbuildings where Gordon Christie evidently pursued his trade. Then he made his way to the side gate and the narrow lane beyond where his car was parked close against the hedge. Mower followed quickly, catching up with his boss where he was leaning against the door of the car, apparently oblivious to the bitter cold and the thickening snowfall. Mower said nothing but his eyes were full of anxiety. He had lost a lover, and survived, just, but was still able to admit that to lose a child must be the worst death of all. And to lose a child and blame yourself for the death, as he knew Thackeray did, must be a hell he could barely imagine.

‘Set it all up, Kevin, will you?’ Thackeray asked, his voice weary and his expression unreadable. ‘You know what needs to be done – a statement from the man who found the bodies, a trawl of the neighbours to find out what you can about the family – and get a search under way. He won’t have gone far. They never do. But if we don’t find him before this weather closes right in it might be weeks before he turns up. Get the chopper out if you need to. You could lose an army of gunmen up here in a blizzard.’

‘Right, guv,’ Mower said. He glanced around at the square stone cottage behind them, sheltered from the prevailing wind by a spur of dark millstone grit topped by heather and rough grass, and at the rutted lane and scrubby fields and patches of faded grassland between the Christie home and the rest of the village of Staveley. He shrugged. ‘Not many neighbours up here.’

‘Chat up the village. I was brought up in a place like this, remember? They’ll know everything there is to know about the Christies, and then some. The suburbs are creeping out here but they haven’t quite taken over yet. There’ll still be plenty of folk who’ve spent their whole lives in a village like this and whose eyes are sharper than they ought to be. You’ll see. The wife must have done her shopping somewhere, the kids must have gone to school, he’s obviously got customers he’s been doing work for. They may have some idea where he could have gone. And when the scene of crime people have finished and you can get in there again, give me a call. I’m going back to HQ for now. I’ll report to the super and organise an incident room. This looks like one of those where we don’t need to work on the who, we just need to know the why for the coroner.’

‘Right, guv,’ Mower said again, wondering if it was ever possible to pin down anything as rational as a motive for such an unfathomable outburst of rage as this must have been.

‘What I’ve never understood in these cases is the arrogance of the fathers,’ Thackeray said slowly. ‘I can understand a man rowing with his wife, perhaps using violence, even killing her, but the kids as well? Why the hell does he need to kill the kids?’

It was a cry of pain and he turned away abruptly and got into the car, where Mower watched him briefly rest his head on the steering wheel, his shoulders hunched, before he started the engine. He let the wipers clear the snow off the screen, then eased the car forward and down the lane.

‘Jesus wept,’ Mower said to himself again, guessing how much of that story might have been Thackeray’s own, though never to the extent of violence turned against a child. He needs this case like he needs a hole in the head, he thought, and his sense of deep foreboding only grew as he turned back towards the cottage and steeled himself to face the slaughter inside again.

* * *

The snowfall accelerated its whirling descent almost as soon as Thackeray had driven away, and Mower realised that the forensics team would have difficulty amassing any evidence from the murder scene that was not under cover in the cottage or its outbuildings. He gingerly picked his way back towards the front door, astonished at how quickly the soft heavy flakes had begun to settle on the narrow paved pathway and the lawn in front of the house, but before he could go back inside he became aware of a flurry of activity behind him. He turned and found himself face to face with a small red-cheeked woman, her face barely visible beneath an enveloping hooded duffel coat and scarf, with snow clinging to her head and shoulders.

‘Whatever’s happened?’ she asked, breathlessly. ‘I knew there was summat wrong when I saw the ambulance come back down the lane with its lights flashing. Is someone hurt? Has there been an accident? Are Linda and the children all right?’

‘And you are?’ Mower asked.

‘Dawn Brough,’ the woman said, her agitation barely under control. ‘Linda’s a friend of mine. The kids are all at school together.’ She glanced at the cluster of police vehicles behind them. ‘Are you with the police? What on earth’s been going on?’

‘DS Kevin Mower, Bradfield CID,’ Mower said briefly. He brushed the snow off his hair irritably. ‘You’d better come and sit in one of the cars out of this stuff. We can’t go inside just now.’

The woman followed him obediently, her face pale and set, as if she had already guessed the truth, although Mower knew that what he had to tell her would far exceed her worst imaginings. As they huddled on the front seats of one of the patrol cars she listened to what Mower had to say with her eyes full of tears, which eventually brimmed over and poured down her weather reddened cheeks.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’ve got a hankie.’ Mower reached awkwardly into one of his pockets and pulled out a packet of paper tissues which she used to dab her eyes dry.

‘It’s all right, Dawn,’ Mower said. ‘It must be a shock. Have you known the family long?’

‘Well, not the family, not really. It was just Linda and the kids. Gordon was an odd man, not friendly at all, you never got much more than a good morning or a good afternoon out of him if he was around. But I met Linda at the school gate, as you do, you know?’

That was a parental pleasure Mower was in no hurry to explore. If he had ever had any ambitions in that direction they had been brutally snuffed out some years before by a single bullet. But he contained his irritation and let the woman talk at her own pace, allowing her to come at least partly to terms with the unthinkable.

‘We both had one in a buggie at the time, when the Christies first arrived. My Jenny’s at school now. And little Louise is due to start next term.’ She hesitated, realising what she had said and the tears began to flow again. ‘Was due to start. Oh God, I can’t believe this…’

‘Let’s take this another way, Dawn,’ Mower said. ‘It’ll be easier for you. Tell me where you live, and when you first got to know the Christies. How about that? Have they lived up here long?’

‘No, not long. A couple of years, that’s all, two and a half, maybe a bit longer. My house is the first of the new ones at the end of the lane. We’re their closest neighbours, really, though it’s not that close, must be half a mile. I always thought this cottage was a bit isolated but Linda never complained. It was on the market for ages before the Christies bought it. But when Linda and I discovered we both lived at this end of the village she started to bring Louise down for the afternoon sometimes, to let her and Jenny play together.’

‘And did you bring Jenny up here?’

‘Not really. Not nearly so much anyway. As I say, Gordon was a strange man. Unfriendly really, and he worked up here a lot, in his workshop at the back. I don’t think he liked visitors. I came up once or twice but I think she only invited me when she knew he’d be out. I never saw him much at all.’

‘You say they’d been here a couple of years. Do you know where they came from before they moved here?’

‘They lived abroad, I think. Spain, Portugal, somewhere hot. I don’t think Linda ever said where exactly, but she talked about how nice it was to live in a hot climate. Especially in the winter. I think this place got her down a bit. She didn’t seem like a country woman, to me, and as I say this cottage is a bit isolated, a bit remote.’ She glanced out of the window where the snow was now coming down hard and covering the windscreen. ‘Give this weather another couple of hours and you won’t be able to get up the lane without a four wheel drive. You can get really snowed in up here.’

Wonderful, Mower thought. Finding Gordon Christie looked like becoming more difficult by the minute. He started the engine and put the fan on hard.

‘What did Gordon drive then?’ he asked.

‘Oh, an old Land Rover thing. Not one of these smart new all-singing, all-dancing tanks with central heating. More the sort of muddy old thing the farmers use up on the moors. I don’t know how good it would be in the snow. It looks clapped out, my husband always says.’

‘I don’t suppose you know the registration number, do you?’

‘No.’ Dawn Brough looked ready to cry again as she worked out the implication of the question. ‘He’s disappeared, hasn’t he? He’s not here?’

Mower shook his head briefly.

‘Did you have any idea he had a gun?’ he asked.

‘A gun? You mean a shotgun? A lot of the lads around here have shotguns. Shooting rabbits is a local sport. And lamping foxes at night.’

‘Not a shotgun. More likely a handgun, a pistol of some sort. Did Linda ever mention that he was interested in guns?’

Dawn shook head and swallowed hard before she answered.

‘I know he used to hit her,’ she said, her voice choked with emotion. ‘Linda never said owt. They don’t, do they, battered wives? But I saw the bruises. She couldn’t always hide them. I think he was a violent man and he beat her up. But what really upset me was that I once saw Scott with a bruise down the side of his face. He said he fell in the yard but I didn’t believe him and I didn’t know what to do about it…’

‘Scott? Who’s Scott?’ Mower interrupted her sharply.

‘Scott’s the son. There’s three children: Louise, Emma and Scott. He’s eight, I think, maybe nine now. Adored his dad, though I could never understand why.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Scott and Emma should be at school now, but they come home for lunch…’ She looked at Mower with wide horrified eyes.

‘Emma’s not at school, she’s in hospital,’ Mower said, all the sympathy gone from his tone now as he was seized with a terrible sense of urgency. He revved the engine hard. ‘Show me where the school is,’ he said, letting in the clutch gently and skidding slightly across the fresh snow as he set off down the rutted lane. ‘We need to find Scott.’ But less than ten minutes later he found himself standing in frustration in the porch of the village school calling Michael Thackeray on his mobile and getting a less than perfect signal.

‘Guv,’ he said urgently. ‘Can you hear me? There’s a Christie son, called Scott, eight years old. He should be at school but the headmaster says he’s not. And he’s not one of the victims. Not that we’ve found so far, anyway. I think the father must have taken him with him. He drives an old Land Rover, apparently, so we need that chopper right now. The boy might just possibly still be alive.’

Chapter Two

Laura Ackroyd sat with her legs tucked underneath her toying with a vodka and tonic and waiting for Michael Thackeray to come home. She had left the curtains open at the high sitting room window and could see the snow weighing down the trees in the garden outside. The fall had lasted the best part of the day but now the clouds had cleared, a crescent moon and Venus hung in the navy blue sky like jewels, apparently almost close enough to reach out and touch, and the world outside the warm flat was silvered and shimmering in the frost. But the wintry scene did not fill her with the exhilaration it might have done. She had spent a tense afternoon in the newsroom of the Bradfield Gazette trying to concentrate on her own work while nervously aware of the horrific story that was unfolding on the crime reporter’s computer screen nearby, knowing that the murders at Moor Edge cottage in Staveley would be the last thing Michael Thackeray needed after the traumatic death of his wife, Aileen, a couple of months earlier.

She had heard nothing from him all day and assumed that he still intended to come home for the meal she had prepared, which was now filling the flat with a savoury aroma that told her that it was ready. But she did not feel like banking on his arriving in time to eat it. She had almost ceased banking on anything with Michael these days. Since she had sat beside him through Aileen’s requiem mass at her parents’ church in Northumberland, he had not, as far as she knew, had another drink. But his hand had clutched hers so fiercely throughout the service that she had lost all feeling in it by the time the coffin was carried out and they fell into line behind Aileen’s parents to move on to the burial at a bleak and windy hillside cemetery on the edge of the town. Back home, the iron control with which he usually conducted his life appeared to have returned, to the extent that she barely knew what he was feeling or thinking from one day to the next. They were speaking little and communicating anything of significance even less. The loss of Aileen, which should have been a relief after all the years she had spent in hospital, instead seemed to have cast a pall over their relationship which Laura had so far found no means of lifting.

She sighed and gazed at the bubbles in her glass, alert for the sound of a car on the road outside. But the surface had already been covered with compacted snow when she had parked her own Golf outside, and it would now be turning, she guessed, to ice. The blanket of snow muffled the normal sounds of the town going about its business and the silence seemed heavy and oppressive. She wondered if the police could still be searching for the murdered family’s father in the dark. She could not imagine that the fugitive was still alive. She was as convinced, as she guessed Thackeray would be, that cases like this did not usually have any sort of happy ending and she knew how that would crush him, though if past experience were anything to go by he would not tell her so. He would, as usual, say nothing at all.

‘Damn and blast,’ she said explosively as she got up to turn the oven down in the kitchen and refill her glass. ‘How can men turn on their own children like that? It’s monstrous.’

On any other night she would have called her friend Vicky Mendelson to help unburden herself, but she knew that Vicky was away visiting her sick mother and there would be no opportunity to share confidences there. Even Vicky’s mobile phone was unreliable in the pocket of the Cumbrian valley where her mother’s cottage was. And as she sat on alone, sipping her third V and T and watching the moon slip slowly across the sky, her anger grew so that when she heard Thackeray’s key in the lock and he came into the room looking grey with fatigue, all she could think of to say was ‘Have you got him yet?’

Thackeray shrugged himself out of his coat and scarf.

‘No,’ he said. ‘You can’t put men on foot out there in conditions like this. The drifts on the moors are four foot deep. We’ve got the chopper up, looking for unusual signs of movement now the snow’s eased off. But I think he’s long gone. Judging by the state of the cottage the family were shot around breakfast time and not found until almost midday. He could have been out of the country by then.’

‘Or long dead,’ Laura said, vodka on an empty stomach making her bolder than she would normally have been in stepping into Thackeray’s domain.

‘And buried under the snow. It could be a week before we find them up there,’ he said.

‘Them?’ Laura said.

‘He seems to have taken his eight-year-old son with him,’ Thackeray said grimly. ‘I don’t really expect to find either of them alive, to be honest.’

‘I didn’t know about the son,’ Laura said, appalled.

‘We didn’t realise he was missing straight away,’ Thackeray said.

‘How can they do that?’ she asked. ‘Why do they imagine that if they die everyone else has to die with them? Arrogant bastards.’ Laura could not contain her anger, although she knew it would do neither of them any good.

‘Oh yes, they’re all of that,’ Thackeray said, turning away from Laura so that she could not see his face.

‘Can we eat?’ he asked, obviously as unwilling as she had expected to discuss his own reaction to the case.

Laura got to her feet somewhat unsteadily and crossed the room to put her arms round Thackeray’s neck.

‘We can eat,’ she said. ‘Or we can just go straight to bed. If you’re interested in that, at all?’

Thackeray disentangled himself from her embrace and flung himself down in a chair, not answering directly.

‘Sometimes I wonder if I can go on with this job any more,’ he said, and the words jolted Laura back into some sort of sobriety.

‘You don’t mean that,’ she said quietly. ‘The job’s part of you. You’re good at it. You know you can make a difference.’

‘How can I make a difference to a four-year-old child with not one but four bullet wounds in her back? What can I actually do about that, whether her killer is still alive or already dead? What bloody difference can I possibly make?’

‘Oh, Michael,’ Laura said, with tears in her eyes. ‘I’m sorry.’

Laura sat in the Gazette’s editorial conference the next morning doodling idly on her notepad as the chief reporter ran through the agenda of that afternoon’s council meeting with mind-bending slowness. There must be, she thought, some connection between a reporter’s character and the specialism they chose to follow. She could easily imagine the paper’s crime reporter, Bob Baker, commonly to be seen, even in the office, in designer shades and a sharp suit, hustling for Mr Big in some sleazy scam, while sweet-faced Jane Archer, who liked nothing better than to write a feature about nursery schools or the downside of testing young children to destruction, looked as though she could run a Montessori establishment with her own eyes tight shut.

It was just the same with Steve Edwards, who was now boring the meeting rigid with an agenda even more tedious than the one which would occupy the town council’s cabinet for most of the day. She could remember a time when Steve had displayed some sparkle, even inviting her out once to a club in Leeds where an ecstasy-fuelled throng had danced until well after dawn. But the town hall job seemed to have sucked him in and spat him out altogether smaller and greyer and with all the life choked out of him. She must, she concluded, get herself out of the Gazette before some similar fate overtook her.

She was startled out of her daydream by the editor, Ted Grant, bellowing her name from the far end of the table.

‘Are you with us, then, Miz Ackroyd?’ Ted wanted to know, with a dangerous glint in his blue eyes, obviously having failed to gain any response to earlier inquiries. ‘Do we get owt on our feature pages today, or do I hand’em to sport for an extended inquest on United’s slim chance of escaping relegation to the Vauxhall bloody Conference?’

Laura grinned, and pushed a stray strand of copper hair out of her eyes, although she knew no charm offensive on her part would mollify Ted. The dislike, personal and professional, was too long entrenched now for either to budge an inch and there had been more times than Laura could count when she had concluded that she had better jump ship before she was pushed. But this morning, at least she thought she had something which might mollify her boss.

‘For today we’ve got the stuff Jane did about the new technology academy they’re opening officially tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Loads of loot and a mission statement direct from God, apparently. But I thought for later in the week we ought to do a spin-off from these murders out at Staveley. It looks like another case where a father’s gone ape and wiped out his entire family. We’ve had a couple of these cases in the last twelve months. I looked up the cuttings. I thought some sort of background piece on the stresses that drive men to those lengths, why they get so desperate they want to take the kids with them, all that stuff, might make a good page. Obviously we can’t talk about this case in particular until they find the bloke and his son, but…’

‘Did you say his son?’ Grant asked suspiciously. ‘Do I know about a son?’ He hauled his substantial bulk upright and went to the door of his office. ‘Bob!’ he shouted across the busy newsroom. ‘Get in here, now.’

Bob Baker, looking flustered for once, did as he was told and stood awkwardly in the doorway under the concentrated gaze of the paper’s senior staff.

‘These murders out at Staveley. Laura here says there’s a kid missing as well as the father. Why don’t we know owt about that?’

Baker flashed Laura a look of unadulterated dislike.

‘My contacts are bloody good,’ he said. ‘But they’ll never be as close as hers, will they? Stands to reason, I can’t compete with pillow talk. Officially no one’s said anything about a kid being missing, as far as I know.’

‘The eight-year-old son,’ Laura said, knowing that she had no choice although she realised with a sinking feeling in her stomach that she seemed to be breaking a confidence which she had not imagined existed. ‘So I’m told, off the record, of course.’

‘You’d better check it out,’ Grant said to Baker. ‘If they’re hunting for a kid on the moors in this weather that’s the front page lead, and it’s bloody late to be standing it up. Let’s get on with it, shall we? Chop chop! Soon as you like!’

The meeting broke up in disarray and Laura assumed she had gained permission by default to pursue some research into violent families. As she settled back into her desk she caught Bob Baker’s eye across the room.

‘Bitch,’ he mouthed at her, and she stuck out her tongue in response. She could not imagine why the police had failed to reveal to the Gazette that they were looking for Gordon Christie’s son as well as the man himself, but she had no sympathy to spare for Bob Baker. She knew he had made himself so unpopular at police headquarters that the Press office could conceivably have left him out of the loop deliberately. Baker had picked up his phone and now seemed to be shouting unintelligibly into it. Laura smiled to herself. Embarrassing Bob Baker was the least of her worries. In fact it constituted one of life’s little pleasures.

DCI Thackeray had arrived at the Christies’ isolated cottage by eight that morning, parking his car in the icy ruts that had been left by the dozen or more vehicles which had been up the snowy lane the day before. Not even a lowly panda car remained now, and the cottage faced the world with blank, dark windows in the early morning light. With Kevin Mower on his heels, Thackeray had been waved through the front door by the uniformed constable stationed morosely in the porch. He was in a more steely frame of mind than he had achieved the previous day, determined not to let his own demons cloud his objectivity. The forensic examiners had completed their meticulous work by now, packed up their samples of blood and hair and fibre; fingerprints and footprints and traces and smears of unidentifiable materials had been found and collated; the pathetic bodies of the two victims discovered in the kitchen had been removed to the mortuary. The house had been left overnight, empty and forlorn, the detritus of everyday life all that remained of the family of five who had lived there until yesterday, the dirty breakfast dishes on the table the starkest indication of how normal service had been so catastrophically interrupted.

Thackeray came to a halt in the still blood-stained kitchen and took stock, aware that Mower was watching him while seeming not to. The place smelt of death and he swallowed hard to control his revulsion.

‘So let’s think what can this place tell us?’ he said, with unusual uncertainty. ‘Let’s assume, for now, it’s Christie we’re looking for, shall we?’

‘No one’s come up with any evidence that there was anyone else here, guv,’ Mower said mildly. ‘Forensics may say different, of course. But there’s no sign of a break-in.’

‘Right, so if it’s Christie we want, he evidently had a gun. Where did he keep it? He had a pretty ancient Land Rover. Where are the documents? He had a business. Was it in trouble? Did he have other financial worries? Did he have a dodgy past which caught up with him? Was he being treated by a doctor for anything, mental problems maybe? In other words, what the hell motivated this massacre?’

‘There’s not always an obvious reason,’ Mower said. ‘These things sometimes come right out of the blue.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ Thackeray said. ‘There has to be some underlying cause, and it’s usually pretty obvious: marital trouble, financial trouble, depression. See if you can find his doctor. There can’t be more than one practice out this way.’

Mower nodded. ‘And his bank manager, his customers, and whatever family he has left,’ the sergeant enumerated. ‘So far everyone we’ve talked to in the village says they appeared here a couple of years ago, she was pleasant enough, he was the strong silent type, the kids were well behaved and well-turned out, and they never talked about where they came from.’

‘No visitors?’ Thackeray asked.

‘Not that anyone could recall, guv. Only customers. He was a good mechanic, by all accounts, and didn’t overcharge, so people were soon bringing him odd jobs. But Mrs Christie’s friend Dawn did say one thing which seemed a bit odd when I eventually got back to her. She said they didn’t seem short of money.’

Thackeray looked at Mower for a moment.

‘What’s she suggesting? Lottery winners hiding from their family or what?’

‘She just seemed puzzled, that’s all. She didn’t seem to think that Gordon Christie could be earning enough from his business to keep five of them in the style they seemed to be living in. Good quality clothes for the kids, a long holiday in Spain last summer…people notice these things, don’t they?’

‘And this is quite a substantial house, as it goes,’ Thackeray said thoughtfully. ‘A bit run down but what – four bedrooms? A big yard and garden behind. The way house prices are going it must have cost a bit.’

‘Dawn said it was on the market for £250,000.’

‘Right,’ Thackeray said. ‘You stay up here, Kevin, and go through the place for anything that fills in the gaps. I’ve got Val Ridley at the infirmary with the surviving child in case she regains consciousness.’

‘And the chances of that are…?’

‘Remote, apparently,’ Thackeray said, his face perfectly impassive. ‘In the meantime we’ve got the chopper quartering the moors again in case the Land Rover’s up there somewhere in the snow. What I need as top priority is the registration number of that vehicle. The DVLA can’t trace anything in Christie’s name, or Linda Christie’s, which is very odd. See if you can find the registration document and let me know. I’ll send Sharif up to help you as soon as he gets back from court.’

‘Right, guv,’ Mower said. ‘And you’ll be…?’

‘I’ll go to the post-mortem, for my sins, and then I’ve got a meeting with the super, who’s planning a Press conference this afternoon when he wants to expand on the fact that the son’s missing as well. That should get us some coverage in the national papers and TV. If Gordon Christie’s responsible for this mess I’ll not be too bothered if we find him dead in a ditch. It’s the boy I’m concerned about.’

There’s a surprise, Mower thought. Thackeray might think he was concealing his emotional involvement in this case, but to anyone who knew him as well as the sergeant did, Thackeray’s painful accommodation to the case was a clear as day.

Mower glanced around the room.

‘No photographs,’ he said. ‘Hang on a minute. I think there’s something in the other room.’ But he returned holding only a single cardboard frame.

‘Just this. A school photo of the two older kids,’ he said. Thackeray took it off him and gazed at the two children, both blonde and blue eyed, the girl, shyly smiling at the camera, who was now lying fighting for her life in the infirmary and the boy, a couple of years younger and with a mischievous glint in his eyes, the son who had vanished with his father. He felt suddenly suffocated.

‘Let me know if you find any others. I’ll keep this for the Press conference,’ he muttered, striding quickly to the front door and brushing past the uniformed constable who was stamping his feet to keep them warm.

Mower watched him go. He had no children himself but he knew only too well what strong emotions they aroused in others. He hoped for Thackeray’s sake that this case would be resolved quickly before it shattered the iron resolve with which he normally led his life. But the cracks, he thought, were already beginning to show.

Chapter Three

By lunch time Sergeant Mower and Detective Constable Mohammed Sharif – generally, and apparently happily, known as Omar – were sitting in the sitting room at Moor Edge surrounded by the meagre results of the morning’s close search of the Christie family’s lives. And nothing, they had concluded gloomily, gave them much inkling why Gordon Christie might have turned a powerful handgun on three members of his family and subsequently vanished with his son.

Mower shrugged and glanced down a checklist he had made in his notebook. Amongst the documents on the floor in neat piles was a log book for a Land Rover, which had apparently been registered in 1989, but of which the DVLA in Swansea could find no trace – not for Christie or any previous owner. As far as officialdom was concerned the Land Rover with the registration number on the document simply did not exist. There was also a series of unexceptionable bank statements dating back just under three years which revealed a steady but modest income stream, presumably from Christie’s repair business, but also with occasional and totally unexplained injections of large sums of cash.

‘Whoever he was, he was up to something dodgy,’ Mower said. ‘I thought the banks were supposed to be watching out for unexplained cash payments but no one seems to have noticed this.’

‘I think it’s only sums over £10,000, sarge,’ Sharif said.

‘So maybe that’s why he’s been paid £9,000 a time, for whatever it is he was paid so generously for,’ Mower said.

‘Or maybe he’s only put that much into the bank at any one time,’ Sharif suggested. ‘After all, there is the money we found in the wardrobe.’ He glanced at a blue leather sportsbag stuffed with notes which they had found hidden behind Christie’s meagre selection of neatly stored clothes upstairs. The whole house, Mower had thought as they worked their way around it, had been preternaturally tidy, with a place for everything and everything in its place, even in the children’s bedrooms, where the toys and books and even the teddy bears were neatly marshalled into their allotted places. Someone, he concluded, had had this home in an iron grip.

‘You’d better count that lot before we go any further,’ Mower said, glancing at the bag. ‘We don’t want any allegations that a few hundred went walkabout.’ Sharif glanced at Mower with dark, unreadable eyes, as if unsure whether or not to be insulted by this remark, but he pulled a bundle of notes out of the bag anyway, and began to count.

‘I’ll call the boss and give him this registration number,’ Mower said, without much enthusiasm. ‘Though if the plates are false, Christie may have changed them for another set by now. If you can lay hands on one false set you can no doubt lay hands on another if you need them. And I’ll bring the DCI up to date on the rest of what we’ve found before we tackle the garage and the workshop. There’s no papers at all here for his business so I guess they must be out there somewhere. He’s obviously a meticulous bastard, so he’ll have them filed away safely for sure.’

‘The other odd thing is that there’s no passports for any of them,’ Sharif said. ‘I thought you said they’d lived abroad.’

‘So the neighbour said,’ Mower said. ‘Damnation, we should have looked for a passport sooner. If he’s taken it with him we need to alert the ports. I’ll pass that on, too.’

Sharif glanced around the sitting room where they had displayed some meticulousness themselves in working through every drawer and cupboard but had left the place very obviously less tidy than it had been before they began, and he wondered, like most of his colleagues, at the mental explosion which must have led to the carnage of the previous day. He came from a community where fathers were known occasionally to turn their wrath on their children, on their daughters in particular, and he understood, though he did not condone, the motives for that. But this father’s terrible rage, this madness turned against small children, he did not understand at all. He hoped Gordon Christie was dead while hoping equally fervently that his son was out there somewhere and still alive. While Mower continued his phone discussion with headquarters he pulled the sportsbag towards him again and tipped the bundles of notes onto the floor and began to count again. They were used and dirty and he felt defiled.