By Death Divided (9 page)

‘I know,’ Thackeray said. ‘But it was still the wrong thing to do. He must have guessed she’d go to the police, or a solicitor, take some action against him. She had no choice. It could take months to track him down now. Tracing violent husbands is not exactly a high priority these days.’

‘I don’t suppose it is,’ Laura said sadly. ‘Does Julie know what’s happened?’

‘Janet’s kept her informed,’ Thackeray said. ‘Apparently she’s seeing a solicitor tomorrow morning. She’s staying with Vicky and David tonight.’

Laura reached up to where Thackeray was standing and pulled his head down to kiss his cheek.

‘Thanks for taking an interest,’ she said. ‘I know I shouldn’t get so involved in these things but it’s hard not to when you hear the unexpurgated version of what goes on. The man’s a brute.’

‘I did ask Mower to have another word with the older Mrs Holden, you know, after you spoke to her. But she’s still insisting she doesn’t remember what happened, whatever she’s saying to you and her daughter. There’s not much we can do. Janet’s going to have a chat with her to see if she can persuade her to tell us what really happened. She may be more willing to talk to us now she knows that he’s run off with Anna. Apparently she adores her granddaughter and won’t want to lose contact with her any more than Julie does. She may also have some idea where Bruce might hole up with the child.’

‘Ha! I said to Ted Grant that I’d deal with battered grannies too,’ Laura said. ‘He was a bit worried that battered wives were too right-on for his delicate sensibilities. I didn’t realise we might find all this going on across the generations in one
family.’

‘Be careful, Laura. If you publish too many details of Julie’s case you might prejudice a prosecution.’

Laura pulled a face at him.

‘I’ll tread on tippy-toes,’ she said. ‘We can always use assumed names if there’s really a possibility of him being charged. But there’s fat chance of that if you can’t find him, isn’t there? How are you going to get Anna back without publicity? Pictures in the
Gazette
, on TV, all the rest of it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Thackeray said sombrely. ‘I wouldn’t bank on Julie getting Anna back at all.’

Amos Atherton, in greens and plastic apron, gazed at the distended mass of flesh, barely identifiable as the remains of a human being, that lay on his stainless steel table and shrugged faintly towards the unfamiliar police presence there to attend the post-mortem.

‘It’s been in the water some time,’ he said. ‘It’s female. And that’s about all you can tell at first glance.’ The detective inspector from the east of the county who had been detailed to follow the body to Bradfield’s pathology department was looking pale and Atherton doubted that his stomach would be strong enough to cope with the unpleasant task ahead.

‘If you’re going to throw up on me, perhaps you’d better watch from outside,’ he said. ‘It stinks now and is only going to get worse when I open her up.’

The hapless officer swallowed hard and retreated to a vantage point closer to the door.

‘Chances are you’ll get nothing out of this,’ Atherton said grumpily. ‘If she’s drowned, I’ll not be able to tell you whether it was an accident or suicide or murder. Where did you say she
was found?’

‘Ingleby, a village on the Maze down Selby way. The body was trapped under a bridge by a lot of debris after the floods. It could have gone in anywhere and been carried down the river while it was in spate. Could have ended up in the sea, for that matter, if it had drifted a few miles further and gone into the Ouse.’

‘The obvious injuries are no more than you’d expect from the battering she must have taken in a flooded river – scratches, abrasions, cuts and so on,’ Atherton said. ‘Her clothes are in shreds, as you can see. But onward and inward as they say. Let’s have a closer look.’ And he began to dictate his description of the external state of the corpse. When he eventually picked up his scalpel to cut into the distended flesh and release the bloating gases, the DI hovering on the far side of the room turned even paler, muttered his excuses with his hand over his mouth, and rapidly left.

‘Where do they get them from these days?’ Atherton abstractedly asked his technician as he peered into the liquefying cavity he had created. The younger man grinned.

‘Not everyone shares our tastes,’ he said. ‘Your mate DCI Thackeray always looks pretty sick when he has to be here.’

‘Aye, he’s a delicate flower underneath that iron mask of his,’ Atherton said, with a grin. ‘I wonder if they’re going to tell him about this lass.’

‘Why should they?’ the technician asked, taking the mass of almost unidentifiable flesh that Atherton handed him in gloved hands and weighing it carefully, before slicing a specimen and placing it is a bag for analysis. ‘I thought this was an East Yorkshire job.’

‘Well, she’s obviously Asian, isn’t she?’ Atherton asked,
running a gentle finger across the long dark hair that still surrounded the unrecognisable features of the girl on the table. ‘And she was in the Maze. She might well be one of ours.’

It was an idea that lodged in his mind as he completed his examination of the corpse a couple of hours later and, even as he oversaw the replacement of the now plastic-wrapped organs, minus the samples for analysis, inside the decaying body, and began to think longingly of lunch. The thought eventually propelled him towards the phone in his office and a call to police HQ.

‘Fancy a quick bite, Michael?’ he asked DCI Thackeray when he eventually got through. ‘Got something here that may be of interest, strictly off the record, mind.’ Thackeray, bogged down in crime management statistics, agreed readily enough and the two men met an hour or so later in the bar of the Clarendon hotel, where the widely spaced tables ensured a level of privacy they would not get in a pub. When they had ordered drinks and sandwiches, Atherton leant back in his leather armchair and let out a sigh of contentment.

‘Glad to get out this morning,’ he said. ‘Folk reckon we don’t feel anything because we only deal with bodies. No empathy, all that bollocks. But it’s not true, any more than it is with you lot. You build a shell. Have to. Enjoy the humour of it all when you can. Then try to forget it.’

Thackeray nodded, knowing that everyone had their own ways of dealing with the stresses of the job and that his own had been less than successful more than once during a career that had seen him progress much less far up the ladder than had once been predicted. He and Atherton were not friends in any real sense of the word. They seldom met outside the confines
of Atherton’s department in the bowels of the infirmary. But the pathologist was one of the few people Thackeray had already known when he had arrived in Bradfield as DCI and one to whom he was indissolubly linked by his own inglorious history. He would always be grateful to the man who had conducted the post-mortem on his baby son and who, when faced with a young copper distraught and at his lowest ebb, had offered consolation rather than the condemnation with which Thackeray had been assailed from all other directions. Gratitude had turned to trust as the two men renewed their acquaintance when Thackeray eventually came to work in Bradfield, just across the town hall square from the infirmary and Atherton’s gloomy caverns in the basement. If Atherton uncharacteristically invited him out to lunch he knew there would be good reason.

‘So what’s rattled your cage then?’ he asked as the roast beef sandwiches arrived and Atherton helped himself hungrily, before ordering another half pint of bitter for himself and an orange juice for Thackeray.

‘A messy job I had this morning,’ Atherton said through a mouthful of food. ‘Woman found in the River Maze close to where it joins the Ouse. Only got asked to do it because of staff shortage down there, apparently. Not on your patch, I know, and I dare say East Yorkshire will think on to tell you eventually, but I reckoned you might like to know straight away.’

Thackeray nodded non-committally, knowing immediately what Atherton was implying.

‘You mean she may have gone in much higher up the river?’

‘She’d been in the water some time, that was obvious from the state of her. She was found wedged in amongst
debris under a bridge down there, invisible till the water level dropped, and then a dog spotted her. She’s not identifiable, I can tell you that for nothing. I’ve sent off a DNA sample, of course. I just thought you might like to check your missing persons. If you’ve seen the state of the river recently you’ll know what I’m on about. I reckon she could have gone in anywhere from Arnedale down. It was still in spate the other day when I went over the bridge in Milford. We’re lucky she didn’t end up in the sea after all that rain and the flooding.’

‘You say she’s not identifiable,’ Thackeray said, aware how quickly immersion in water could destroy the human body. ‘But what about clothing? Nothing significant there? A watch? Jewellery? Teeth?’

‘Clothing’s largely gone. What’s left is in shreds. You could look for dental records if you need to. Most of the teeth are still in the jaw. But the reason I thought you should know is that I think she’s Asian. What the water hasn’t got to is the hair, long and thick and very dark.’

Thackeray nodded slowly, his stomach clenching for a moment as he took in the implications of what Atherton was telling him for DC Mohammed Sharif. He knew with grim certainly and not a little foreboding that he needed this body identified as soon as humanly possible.

‘Can you prioritise the DNA?’ he asked.

‘You’ve got someone missing?’ Atherton asked.

‘Maybe,’ Thackeray said. ‘Any indication that it was other than a drowning?’

‘Nothing I could see. No convenient bullet in the inner recesses, skull and skeleton intact. No sign of a knife wound, although quite honestly that would be difficult to rule out, the state she was in. I can’t give you my report directly, but I’m
sure you can get hold of it through official channels. I’ll be working on it this afternoon.’

‘We do have a young Asian woman gone missing over the last few weeks,’ Thackeray said. ‘It could be her. I’m grateful for the warning, Amos. I’ll get my colleagues down there to cut me in on your report as soon as it’s available. They’re supposed to circulate these things but in my experience it’s a slow process. There’s no chance of a visual identification then?’

‘I wouldn’t ask my worst enemy to look at her,’ Atherton said, finishing his beer greedily. ‘There’s no face left to speak of. Turned the young DI who came over to the PM quite green, she did.’

‘It’ll be DNA then,’ Thackeray said. ‘That shouldn’t be a problem. Let’s hope it rules our missing person out. She’s a relative of a bright young DC on my team and I’d hate to have to break it to him that she’s dead.’

‘At least that’s one shitty job I don’t have to share,’ Atherton said as he lumbered to his feet. ‘There’s no bad news to break to my clients, is there? Thank God.’

DC Mohammed Sharif faced his uncle, his jaw clenched. He felt deeply sorry for him but Faisel Sharif was not a man to show his emotions or make any attempt to ease the younger man’s own deep discomfort. He gazed at his nephew, mouth a thin line of distaste above the greying beard, his eyes opaque, as if he was being asked to compromise his deepest beliefs.

‘It may not be Faria, God willing,’ Sharif said. ‘But unless they are able to do a DNA comparison we’ll never know. Imran Aziz is still not at his house, so I can’t ask him. There has to be something here of Faria’s, or something of my aunt’s
or the other girls’ which she’s handled recently. That would be enough for a match. Believe me, it’s much better to cooperate. They will get a sample one way or another if they think there’s foul play involved, which we hope there wasn’t. But we all need to know, one way or another.’

‘This DNA is on her clothes?’ Faisel asked sceptically.

‘It’s on everything you touch,’ Sharif said flatly. ‘It’s becoming so sophisticated that you only have to breathe in a room or glance against someone for the forensic people to know you were there. But we’re not trying to find suspects. We’re trying to identify this poor woman who’s not going to be identified any other way. It is possible to make an identification from a family member’s DNA if it’s necessary. Mine, for instance. But they’ll want to try for hers first. And if it is Faria, we need to know, Uncle. This is my cousin, your daughter we’re talking about. God willing, the body isn’t hers, but we need to know.’

‘You told your officers all about our family problems, then?’ Faisel Sharif’s face was closed tight, his eyes angry.

‘I told you I had to tell them about Imran Aziz’s strange behaviour. I had no choice,’ Sharif said quietly. ‘Inevitably, I had to mention Faria’s absence as well. Now we have an unidentifiable body pulled from the river that runs no more than half a mile from her house.’

Mohammed Sharif stared at his uncle, baffled and angry at his attitude.

‘There is no hiding this,’ he said at length when his uncle did not reply. ‘However painful it is for the family, there will be an investigation and you will have to answer questions. The best course is to help identify the body as quickly as possible. It may not even be Faria. God willing, it’s not. But if
you hinder the inquiry now it will only cast suspicion on the family if it turns out that it is. You have to assist the police with their inquiries. You know that.’

‘It cannot be Faria,’ Faisel said. ‘She must be in Pakistan. Let me speak to your grandfather and discover the facts of the matter. I’ll do that, I promise you.’

‘It’s too late for that now,’ his nephew shot back. ‘They want a DNA sample. If necessary they will break down Imran’s door to get one, whether he’s there or not. This could be a case of murder.’

He knew he had to be brutal as his mind shot back to the traumatic interview he had just had with a grim-faced Michael Thackeray when the DCI had broken the news that the unidentified, and almost unidentifiable, body of a possibly Asian woman had been found. He hoped that his boss had not noticed the uncontrollable shaking of the knees that he had tried to conceal by sinking uninvited into a chair in Thackeray’s office and burying his face briefly in his hands.

‘My family will want to know quickly whether or not it is Faria,’ he had said, raising his head only when he thought he could control his voice adequately, and knowing that what he said was not necessarily true. The breath of scandal, especially if it impinged on the honour of a woman, was not something his family would welcome in any guise. But equally he knew that in this other world in which he worked, delay was not a possibility, and could only fuel the worst sort of suspicion.

‘Let me try to locate something of Faria’s from her parents’ home if her husband is still away,’ he offered Thackeray. ‘If not, you can use my DNA. Would that be a close enough match?’

‘A first cousin?’ Thackeray had said. ‘I’m not sure. But I
can’t wait long. The full PM report will be here tomorrow morning, the samples have already gone to the lab. There’s no one on the official missing persons’ register who immediately fits what limited description we have of this woman. We need to rule your cousin in or out quickly, Mohammed. I’m sorry. You can have until tomorrow morning to come up with something. Otherwise we’ll have to make it more official.’

Sharif had driven round to his uncle’s house immediately he finished his shift and to his relief found him at home alone. His wife and daughters, he said, were visiting friends. Now Sharif watched his uncle pace up and down the cramped living room before finally turning through the door and up the stairs, where he could hear him moving around in one of the bedrooms. Eventually, he returned holding a multi-coloured bundle of clothing in one hand with an expression of distaste on his face.

‘These are hers,’ he said. ‘She left them for her sisters when she got married but I don’t think Jamilla or Saira have ever worn them. They are still in a cupboard Faria used to use.’

Sharif took the clothes and shook out a couple of
shalwar kameez
in the bright colours he knew Faria liked to wear and shuddered slightly.

‘Do you have a bag I could put them in?’ he asked, and his uncle disappeared again and came back with a plastic supermarket carrier bag which he handed to his nephew without a word.