By Death Divided (3 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To her immense relief David answered quickly.

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

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

‘Damn and blast,’ she muttered, struggling up from the sofa
where she had been leaning amorously against her lover to pick up the receiver on the other side of the room.

‘Hi,’ David Mendelson said, and she caught the tension in his voice immediately. ‘Is Michael there?’

She handed the receiver to Thackeray and watched anxiously, seeing his face tighten as he listened for a couple of minutes without saying anything.

‘Are uniform with you now?’ he asked at length, and Laura’s heart lurched as she heard David respond.

‘Do you want me to come over?’ Thackeray asked, and when he obviously got an affirmative answer, he cut the connection and turned back to Laura.

‘It’s nothing too serious,’ he said, seeing her panic-stricken face. The Mendelsons were Laura’s closest friends in Bradfield, and David had also been the first friend Thackeray had made himself when he arrived in the town as the new DCI, a friend who had gradually encouraged him back from the frozen emotional state he had arrived in into a semblance of a normal life. He had also, most memorably, and as a deliberate ploy in his campaign to restore Thackeray to normality, introduced him to Laura.

‘What’s happened?’ Laura asked.

‘Vicky was there on her own with the children and heard someone snooping around in the back garden. The local car got there pretty fast but as far as David knows they haven’t picked anyone up yet. I think if I make an appearance it might just stiffen their resolve a bit, take it a bit more seriously than they might otherwise.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Laura said flatly, hurrying into the bedroom to pull on jeans and a sweatshirt over her pyjamas.

Thackeray knew better than to argue and they drove
the mile or so to the Mendelsons’ home in Southfield in an anxious silence. They found the house lit up, the patrol car still parked outside, and Vicky and David in the sitting room with the two boys, who had been wakened by the excitement. Laura flung her arms round Vicky.

‘You must have been terrified,’ she said.

‘A bit,’ Vicky admitted, her eyes full of tears.

‘It’s good of you to come. The officers are out at the back,’ David said, taking Thackeray’s arm and leading him out of ear-shot of the two confused and sleepy children. ‘An attempt’s definitely been made to force the back door.’

‘Even though the house was obviously occupied?’ Thackeray said. ‘That’s not your everyday opportunistic burglar. They want to avoid people as much as possible. Let’s have a look, shall we?’

He led the way into the back garden, where two uniformed officers were shining their flash-lights into the bushes and around the back of the garage. They looked startled to see Thackeray.

‘Sir?’ the older man said.

‘Mr Mendelson is a good friend,’ Thackeray said. ‘I’m not here officially. Just as a friend of the family. Wilson, isn’t it?’

‘Sir,’ the officer said in acknowledgement. He did not look particularly happy at this unexpected interruption of a routine chore by a senior officer.

‘Two of you?’

‘That’s Ali. Ali Mirza. Just finishing his probation and doing a bit of overtime.’ Wilson’s face, in the dim light from the kitchen door, was impassive, but Thackeray could feel the undercurrent of resentment. Why, he wondered angrily, why
the hell, after all this time, couldn’t they just accept people? But the middle-aged copper, his girth stretching his uniform to its limit, was still talking.

‘Someone’s had a go at the kitchen door,’ he said. ‘But he’s done more damage to the woodwork than the actual lock. Look’s like an amateur job to me. Could be kids. It’s easy enough to shin over the back gate, even though it’s locked.’

‘Let’s make sure we have a good look round in daylight, shall we?’ Thackeray suggested. ‘There may be some prints on the door, or the gate, if you think that’s the way he got in. He, they, whoever.’

‘Yes, sir,’ the constable said without enthusiasm, and Thackeray knew he had pushed his influence as far as it would go. This was not CID business, much more likely to be a case of anti-social behaviour by local teenagers high on drink or drugs, and he and PC Wilson both knew that. He ushered David back into the house and left the two officers to their desultory search. He knew that they would find nothing in the dark and they wouldn’t be looking very hard for fingerprints or DNA in the morning.

‘I don’t think it’s anything to worry about, David,’ he said. ‘They’re very unlikely to be back.’

‘I’ll look at the security at the back of the house,’ David said. ‘I hate having to turn the place into a fortress but maybe security lights out there, or an alarm on the back gate? Vicky was terrified.’

‘I’m sure,’ Thackeray said. ‘I suppose there’s just a chance it could be someone with some personal grudge, someone you helped put away. I’ll make sure the forensic people do a thorough check for prints tomorrow, just in case it’s anyone
we know.’

‘I’m grateful, Michael,’ Mendelson said. ‘If anything happened to the children…’ He stopped suddenly, realising he was treading on delicate territory. ‘You know?’ he said lamely.

‘I know,’ Thackeray said, and turned away.

‘Morning, guv,’ Sergeant Kevin Mower said cheerfully as he stuck his head round the DCI’s door. His love life had recently taken a distinct turn for the better and the swarthy Londoner, still not entirely at home amongst the dour Yorkshire coppers he worked with, had even been heard whistling around the CID office recently. Seeing his boss also sitting at his desk in a more relaxed frame of mind than had been apparent for months, he smiled even more broadly. Michael Thackeray, he reckoned, was getting it a bit more regularly too, although he knew better than to ever comment on the DCI’s personal life. He had fancied Laura Ackroyd himself when he first met her and still reckoned she had made the infinitely more demanding choice. But he wished them well, especially now that he had found a dishy and sexually athletic partner he could envisage spending some serious time with. He straightened his
multi-coloured
silk tie, which set off a sharper suit than most detectives could muster for Sunday best, and tried to temper the smile that kept breaking through as he contemplated the previous night’s adventures with his foxy lady.

‘Anything I should know about?’ Thackeray asked, not wondering too hard what had made the sergeant so cheerful. It did not take a very skilled detective to work it out. Mower enjoyed a sudden vivid mental image of Jess slowly lowering her generous breasts towards his face. But he suffocated the thought as soon as it had been born.

‘Odd case up at Southfield overnight, guv,’ was all he said. Thackeray looked slightly surprised.

‘You mean the Mendelson intruder?’

Mower looked blank.

‘No,’ he said. ‘The woman a patrol car found up by Forster Park. Looked as if she’d been mugged, but she doesn’t seem to be saying anything yet. She’s in the infirmary. Mild hypothermia, they say, elderly and very confused. But someone had hit her quite hard. Her cheekbone is broken.’

‘Nasty,’ Thackeray said. ‘Best have a word yourself when the doctors say she’s fit enough. A description would be good. The number of street robberies is creeping up again after all the hard work we did last year to get it down. Doesn’t make the crime figures look good. I’ll raise it when I see the super to review the state of play.’

‘And what’s this about a Mendelson intruder? This is David Mendelson, I take it?’ Mower asked.

Thackeray described the events of the previous night and the sergeant’s face darkened.

‘Nasty,’ he echoed Thackeray. ‘Do you want me to chase up uniform? Make sure they’ve actually sent someone up to look for prints?’

‘You could do. It would be better coming from you than me. I got the distinct impression that Derek Wilson, who took the shout, resented my involvement.’

‘He would. He’s as unreconstructed as they come, is Derek,’ Mower said. ‘I’ve come across him before, blundering about on Aysgarth Lane with all the sensitivity of a rhinoceros. I wouldn’t be surprised if he voted for the blasted BNP.’

‘I wonder who teamed him up with the new Asian probationer last night, then,’ Thackeray said. ‘He hardly sounds like the best mentor we could come up with.’

‘Ali Mirza? He’ll be fine. He’s a bright lad and knows where he’s going. Actually, it’s our Sharif I’m worried about at the moment. He seems seriously distracted and I don’t know why. He’s lost his focus, somehow. He’s not married, so it can’t be that sort of trouble.’

‘Maybe it’s the fact he’s not married,’ Thackeray said. ‘Maybe his family’s putting him under pressure.’

‘Maybe,’ Mower said. ‘I’ve got the feeling recently that there’s someone serious in his life, but whether she’s white or Asian I’ve no idea. But he’s got real potential, has Omar. I’d like to see him succeed, go for sergeant in a while, maybe, and not just to prove what idiots bigots like Derek Wilson are. I’ll see what I can suss out over a pint of orange juice with him. Unless you want to volunteer for that honour?’ The oblique reference was as close as he dared get to the fact that Thackeray did not drink – ever.

‘I’ll pass,’ Thackeray said dryly, glancing at the heap of files on his desk. ‘Now, as it looks like there’s a lull in serious crime, I’ll get on with the crime figures, with my crime manager’s hat on. Though that may be tempting fate. But I wasted a whole day yesterday at county with the super, listening to how wonderful our new enlarged force is going to be. The only thing they didn’t tell us was how much money they’re going to waste on yet another reorganisation. But have
a word with uniform about the Mendelson inquiry, and with your mugging victim, when she’s fit. While we’ve got the time, we might clear up a few minor issues, which are actually the ones that scare people half to death.’

His image of Vicky Mendelson, traumatised in her own home the previous night, was still vivid. He had promised David some help and even if he could not be seen to be leaning too heavily on his uniformed colleagues, he was determined to provide it.

‘And see if someone has time to check on other attempted break-ins in Southfield. There might be a pattern there we’ve not noticed.’

‘Guv,’ Mower said cheerfully. With a following wind, he thought, he just might be able to catch Jess for a drink at lunchtime, a luxury in CID, and the thought filled him with a sudden pang of desire.

Laura Ackroyd rang the bell at the women’s refuge, a five minutes’ walk from the
Gazette
office, talked her way through that obstacle and then through the solid front door which was reinforced with plates of heavy metal. She grimaced slightly as the door swung open. She had thought that only drug dealers up on the Heights, the town’s most dilapidated estate, now in the throes of demolition, went in for this level of fortification, in their case against raids by the police.

‘It’s like Fort Knox in here,’ she said lightly to the woman in jeans and sweatshirt who opened the door for her, but there was no answering spark of amusement in her eyes.

‘You have no idea what we put up with,’ she said, pushing untidy hair away from her unmade-up face. ‘I’m Carrie Whittaker, by the way. I work here.’

The house was early Victorian, a mill-owner’s stately pile, no doubt, in those days of frantic industrial expansion when towns like Bradfield metamorphosed from weaving villages to booming mill towns in less than fifty years. The house would have been handily placed for the master’s access to the burgeoning warehouses and factories on the seven hills rising above the Beck, its heyday as a family home long before the town’s more affluent residents took flight to less sooty residences in Ilkley and Harrogate. Many of the solid stone mansions had been converted into flats or offices, others demolished in the Sixties and Seventies to make way for new development. But this one had evidently stood still, gently decaying, until the women’s refuge had taken it over and packed in as many women and children as the space would allow, and then some.

Laura followed her guide up the broad staircase to the first floor, where at least the windows were free of wire mesh, and faint sunlight filtered across the broad landing.

‘If you write anything about this place, please don’t mention anyone by name,’ the woman said. ‘What Julie says is up to her, but no one else’s confidentiality must be breached. You do understand that, don’t you? It can be dangerous. Most of their partners don’t know where they are.’

‘Of course,’ Laura said. ‘I’ll be careful.’

It had taken her a good portion of that morning’s editorial conference to persuade her editor, Ted Grant, to allow her to embark on a feature, or maybe a series, on domestic violence at all, and she knew that unless she could come up with some pretty sensational case histories her investigations might get no further than the now merely proverbial spike, where unused articles used to be physically impaled. These days a
click of a computer key could consign reams of unwanted material to the bin in a second.

‘See if you can find a battered husband, too,’ Ted had growled before reluctantly approving the project. ‘It’s not all one way, you know.’

‘I’ll look for a battered granny if you like,’ Laura had come back, with an unwary flash of anger. ‘They say that’s getting more common, too.’ But it was Julie Holden’s desperate eyes, and the way the child, Anna, had clung to her mother as they scuttled into this building, that had haunted her.

Julie answered the door of her room quickly, and offered Laura a wan smile.

‘Come in,’ she said. ‘I don’t know whether I should be doing this, but come in anyway.’

It was a small room, sub-divided from a larger one, and was over-filled by two single beds and a bleak minimum of other furniture. Julie waved Laura into the single wooden chair and sat on one of the beds beside Anna, who barely glanced up from her book as Laura arrived.

‘Should she not be at school?’ Laura asked.

‘I can’t take her back to Southfield Primary. Bruce would ambush us up there too easily. And I’ve not got her in anywhere else yet.’ The child glanced at her mother with eyes full of tears, but she said nothing, turning back to Harry Potter in silence. Laura took her tape-recorder out of her bag.

‘Do you mind?’ she asked. ‘I want to get it right.’

‘Fine,’ Julie muttered, her voice low. ‘Though I hardly know where to begin.’

‘At the beginning,’ Laura said gently. Somewhere in the building a baby began to cry. ‘When did you get married?’

‘Anna, why don’t you go downstairs and see if you can help
get lunch ready,’ Julie said suddenly. The girl looked at her mother mutinously for a moment before putting her book face down on the rumpled bed and rolling herself to the floor.

‘Don’t be long,’ the child said. ‘You know, I really, really hate it here. I really, really want to go home now.’

Anna closed the door with a bang that reverberated around the high ceilings of the hallway outside and sparked renewed howling from the baby close by. Julie sighed but said nothing, clearly close to tears herself.

‘Are you up to this?’ Laura asked, suddenly feeling guilty at intruding on this private tragedy. ‘I can come back another time if you like.’

‘It’s not going to get any better, is it? Let’s do it,’ Julie insisted and Laura, not for the first time, nor inevitably the last, felt surprised at how readily people under stress proved willing to discuss their most intimate problems with complete strangers. Reporter as therapist, she thought wryly, and knew that few of her friends would take that concept seriously.

Julie began slowly, almost hesitantly, as Laura switched on her tape recorder. She had met Bruce, she said, in Blackpool, where she had been brought up and was working as a teacher. He was an IT troubleshooter for a local company. He had been good-looking and charming and, she admitted, swept her off her feet soon after she had broken up with a previous partner. They had married within six months of meeting and without Julie even having met Bruce’s parents. And soon after that, she was pregnant and they settled in Lytham close to her family home, coming back to Bradfield, which was Bruce’s home town, years later when and where he had found a better job. With his father dead and his mother alone, she had not argued against the move, knowing that she could
probably find part-time teaching work there as easily as in Blackpool.

But almost as soon as Anna had arrived, eight years ago, things had already begun to change, she said.

‘I know a lot of dads get jealous of the baby, because they’re not the centre of attention any more. But she was a quiet baby, not much trouble, and I knew enough to try to include Bruce in everything we did, to make a real family. But every now and then he would get really angry, explode almost, with rage. Not often, but often enough to make me quite careful of how I behaved, and wonder how far I could trust him with Anna. I thought it would pass. I loved him very much, and I really thought it would pass as she got older and more independent. But I didn’t suggest having another child. I could see that one was as much as he could cope with. Probably ever.’

‘But it didn’t pass,’ Laura prompted, uncomfortably aware of how personally interested she was in this woman’s experience.

‘No,’ Julie said softly. ‘It didn’t pass. And since we came to Bradfield his rages have been getting more frequent and more violent. And it’s been getting harder and harder to cover up. I was terrified he would begin hitting Anna as well as me.’

‘Has he?’ Laura asked.

‘No, I’ve always managed to protect her. Quite often she’s been in bed asleep when things have got bad. I tried to leave him once before but he begged and begged me to go back. He seems quite normal, you see, most of the time. Loving and so ashamed of what he’s done. And I let myself be persuaded. In fact, I generally end up comforting him. Stupid I know, but I did love him once. But recently, since we came to Bradfield
really, he’s been flaring up more often and I’ve got completely frantic with the worry. Even in between the rages he’s been moody and distant, not his normal self. I thought this time if I didn’t get out I’d be the one to crack up completely, so a few days ago I packed up and went out as if I was taking Anna to school as normal. But we came here and I’ve not been back.’

‘He’s no idea where you are?’

‘Not at the moment but I don’t think it will take him long to find this place. We’ll have to move on. The husbands and partners do turn up here, that’s why there’s all the security. To keep fathers out.’ Suddenly Julie was in tears and Laura switched her taperecorder off.

‘I’m sorry,’ she sobbed. ‘I just never thought I would be in this situation. It all started so well. We were so in love. We had good jobs. We weren’t short of money. Anna was a very much wanted baby. Where did it all go so wrong?’

‘Who have you talked to about it, apart from Vicky?’

‘No one really. I went to the doctor and said I was stressed and he gave me some tranquillisers.’

Laura looked at her aghast for a second.

‘I would have thought it was your husband who needed pills, not you,’ she said.

‘He won’t go near the doctor,’ Julie said. ‘He’s got quite a phobia about the medical profession. I think he had some sort of bad experience before I met him. He never talks about it. And he won’t go near marriage counsellors. I’ve suggested it but he says he doesn’t want anyone interfering in his private life, asking questions, demanding explanations. He seems quite frightened of that.’