Dusty Death (10 page)

‘No. Nothing I can remember.' He waved his hands vaguely in the air, indicating voluptuous curves, then clapped them hard upon his beer mug, as if they might betray him if he allowed them free rein. ‘She was about the same age as the blonde bint, I think. I couldn't say which of them was older.'

Peach drank his beer and gave his man a grim smile. ‘You must have been in your grubby little element, Billy Bedford. Your own little harem to spy on. What do you remember about the men?'

Predictably, it was much less. They were all young, all under thirty, but Bedford couldn't say what age within that band. He thought they were all fairly tall, but every policeman knows that people of diminutive stature tend to think that everyone is tall. Billy couldn't even recall what colour of hair they had, though he thought two of them had worn it long. That wouldn't mean much, fifteen years later.

Peach pressed him as hard as he could for any detail he might recall, and Bedford said suddenly, ‘One of them had a beard. And'e were a big bugger. And'e had a tooth missing.'

Peach knew suddenly why he was getting this unexpected series of personal details. ‘He came out and caught you, didn't he, Billy? Came out and caught the dirty little sod who was spying on the women!'

Bedford's voice rose into its familiar, apprehensive whine. ‘They'd no curtains, had they? It wasn't my fault, Mr Peach! And I told him, I'ad to walk Spot, didn't I?'

‘Local bloke, was he?'

‘Don't know, Mr Peach. He had me by the throat. Threatened to tear my'ead off,'e did. He had fierce eyes, nearly black I think, like yours. And a beard, like I said.'

They finished their beers, whilst Peach probed earnestly but unsuccessfully for any more detail about these men, who were so much less vividly imprinted on Bedford's memory than the women. The barman banged the double doors of the pub noisily shut behind them as they left.

Percy Peach walked the short distance back to the Brunton police station ruminatively. It was still possible, of course, that someone had dumped this body in the empty house, that they might have to look for an outsider. But it seemed likely that the Asian girl Bedford had seen there was their victim.

And it was possible, even probable, that one of the other five who had occupied the squat with her had been her killer.

It was a detached nineteen-thirties house, one of a row of almost identical properties in a quiet suburban road.

Expectations are conditioned by experience. DC Gordon Pickering met hundreds of Asians in the course of his work, but it was still a surprise to him to find them living in a house like this in a prosperous suburb of Bolton. The man who stood on the doorstep above him was dark-skinned and austere. Pickering said quickly, ‘Mr Akhtar? I'm Detective Constable Pickering and this is Police Constable Pat Rogers. I think someone rang you about this visit.'

‘Yes. Otherwise I shouldn't be here but at work.'

They were off on the wrong foot already then. ‘It's really rather important, sir, or you wouldn't have been troubled.'

He nodded, looking them up and down as if he might divine their purpose by a close examination. He did not disguise his distaste for the young woman in uniform who stood slightly behind Pickering. Nor did he trouble to disguise his reluctance as he said, ‘I suppose you had better come inside.'

The sitting room into which he led them was very British in its furnishings, with a heavy three-piece lounge suite dominating it. Only a heavily patterned carpet and an abundance of ornaments suggested a different taste. An olive-skinned woman in a headscarf acknowledged their introduction but did not speak; she assessed her visitors for a few seconds, then cast her eyes back to the carpet.

Gordon Pickering hadn't been looking forward to this meeting to start with, and the fifty-minute drive from Brunton had only added to his tension. He wished the man would sit down, but sensed that it wouldn't be well received if he asked him to do so in his own home.

Pickering said nervously, ‘I understand you have a daughter?'

He had addressed his question automatically to both of them, but it was the man who responded. His face set like stone as he said, ‘We had a daughter once. We no longer have a daughter.'

For a moment, Pickering thought they knew already what he had come to tell them. But then Akhtar went on, ‘She chose to disobey her parents. She chose to reject us and the way we live. So we no longer have a daughter.'

It was his wife, sitting in an armchair so huge that it made her look slight and vulnerable, who said, ‘Sunita left home in 1990. We have not heard of her since. Do you have news of her?'

‘We think we might have news, Mrs Akhtar. Not good news, I'm afraid.'

Akhtar glanced at his wife as if she should never have spoken. ‘She rejected our guidance. She chose to disobey the wishes of her parents.'

His wife shot a look of smouldering resentment at his rigid back, but he was totally unconscious of her disgust. She said, ‘Our daughter rejected our choice of a marriage partner. It is traditional, in our culture, for the parents to choose the partner. But Sunita had lived all her life here, had all her schooling here. She was never going to find it easy to accept our choice of partner.'

Akhtar said without looking round at her, articulating each syllable like a man only just in control of himself, ‘She should not have had this difficulty. She knew from birth what our system was. But she said she had the right to make her own choice. She defied us. From that moment, she was no longer our daughter.' He seemed to grow taller with the force of his iron conviction on the last sentence.

The young female uniformed constable had the sense to realize that it would not be taken kindly if she tried to take the initiative here. She sat down at the end of the settee nearest to Mrs Akhtar, reached out a hand and put it gently on top of the older woman's hand, which lay on the broad arm of her chair. The Asian woman looked at her first with surprise and then with gratitude, and left her hand where it lay.

DC Pickering said rather desperately. ‘As I said, I'm afraid we do not bring good news. Three days ago, when a site was being cleared of old buildings in preparation for redevelopment, a body was found. It was the body of a young woman of about twenty, of Asian extraction.'

Pat Rogers felt the thin hand under hers tighten with tension. Then Mrs Akhtar said in a voice hollow with grief, ‘This girl was murdered, wasn't she? I heard that on the radio this morning.'

‘I'm afraid she was, yes.'

Akhtar's face might have been carved from marble. He said in an even tone, ‘This was not my daughter. She ceased to be that as soon as she defied us and walked out of this house.'

‘Defied
you
.' The words came so quietly that it took them a moment to realize that they had come from the very still woman in the armchair. ‘
You
drove Sunita from this house. And now she is dead. Murdered. Murdered!' Her voice rose towards a scream on the repetition of the word.

‘It was her own choice.'

The rift was deepening between them, whilst they spoke absurdly into space, refusing to look into each other's faces. Pickering sensed that he was in the presence of something he had never witnessed before. Deaths usually brought parents closer to each other, but this was a rift which would never be bridged in whatever lives this pair had left. He said desperately, ‘We're not even absolutely sure yet that this is your daughter.'

‘Do you need an identification?' Mrs Akhtar was as still and composed as her husband, as if she wished to show that she could control her different emotions as well as he.

‘That isn't possible, I'm afraid. The body had been buried for a long time, you see. It is – well, damaged.'

‘Rotting. Decomposed. Unrecognizable.' Mrs Akhtar uttered each word as if she was driving a dagger into herself. ‘Our daughter. Sunita!' The scream lurking at the back of her throat almost escaped on the name.

Pat Rogers fastened her young hand more strongly on the older one underneath it, feeling the bones beneath the skin, as Gordon Pickering said, ‘But I have to tell you that the body discovered on Monday was almost certainly that of your daughter Sunita. A Bolton dentist, Mr Ensten, has come up with a match for the dental chart our forensic laboratory took from the remains unearthed by the site equipment. I'm very sorry.'

Akhtar said like one speaking in a trance, ‘There can be no doubt that this is Sunita?' It was the first time he had used his daughter's name. He pronounced the syllables as if they had grown difficult for him with disuse.

Pickering wanted to offer some consoling words, but he sensed that they would not be welcome. ‘I'm afraid there can now be no reasonable doubt that this is Sunita. We'd like you to give us a DNA sample, for comparison with samples taken from the body, but I'm afraid that I can't offer you any realistic hope that this will not be your daughter.'

The two police officers left as quickly as they could, letting themselves out of the silent house. The bereaved parents had still not looked at each other. They stared unseeingly across the comfortable lounge, contemplating this awful thing which would lie between them for the rest of their lives.

The village of Waddington is one of the prettiest in the Ribble Valley. And the modest stone cottage in which Matthew Hayward lived was one of the most attractive residences in this pleasant setting. The stream which ran through the centre of the village passed in front of the cottage, several feet below its garden. On the morning of Friday, the twenty-fifth of February, the fells rose steeply behind it towards a blue sky and the invisible Trough of Bowland beyond them. The air was crisp and clear, the sky a brilliant blue, there was warmth in the sun, and it seemed that spring could surely not be far away.

It could hardly have been a bigger contrast with the squalid, sparsely furnished squat from thirteen years earlier which was now the focus of a murder inquiry.

The cottage was at the top of the village. Matthew Hayward was standing in its low doorway as Lucy Blake drove the police Mondeo over the little bridge which spanned the stream. He had been looking anxiously out of the window for the last twenty minutes. ‘Thank you for coming out here to see me.'

‘No problem, sir. You're merely helping the police with their enquiries, as yet.' Peach threw the final phrase in beneath a breezy smile. He had a nose like a sniffer dog's for nervousness, and he smelt it here. His research showed that this man was thirty-three: only five years younger than Percy was himself. But he looked callow by comparison.

Hayward took them into a long, low-ceilinged sitting room, which was dominated by a single piece of furniture, the magnificent rosewood grand piano at the far end, beside the long, low window which looked up the hillside. ‘I've been thinking back to those days when we lived in the house in Brunton, as you asked me to on Wednesday night.'

‘The squat in Sebastopol Terrace. That's good,' nodded Peach. No harm in reminding the man that he'd been breaking the law at that time.

‘We were a collection of misfits really. All down on our luck in various ways.' Matthew laughed nervously, looking instinctively towards Lucy Blake, where he sensed he might get a more sympathetic hearing.

‘Most squats are occupied by people like that. And worse,' said Peach ominously.

‘Yes, I suppose they are. Well, people came and went. That's also typical of squats, I believe.'

‘But this one was rather more stable than most.' Peach spoke with authority, and Matthew divined with an unwelcome shock that he was not the only source of information about that derelict house.

‘Yes, I think it was. I was there for quite a few months myself. And there were several of us who—'

‘Six, our information says. Correct?'

This wasn't going the way Matthew had expected at all. He had thought they would be grateful for whatever information he chose to give them, that he would be able to reminisce and present the picture of himself and others that he had chosen to reveal. Now it seemed that they already knew things, that whatever he said would be set against some other account. Perhaps they had more than one witness already; perhaps what he had to say would be weighed and found wanting, if he chose to be selective in his recall. He said uncertainly, ‘Six is the figure I had in mind, yes.'

‘Including the girl who was killed. The girl who is now officially a murder victim.'

‘Yes. Have you found someone else as well as me who was there at that time? I'd like to—'

‘We never reveal our sources of information, sir. Not until they become official witnesses in a court case. We won't tell other people about what you have to tell us today. Not initially.'

Matthew wondered why he felt that he was being warned rather than thanked for his co-operation. He said defensively, ‘We didn't get to know a lot about each other, you know. When you're living like that, most people have things to hide. They don't welcome questions. You learned to respect their privacy.'

‘And to preserve your own skin by doing so, no doubt. Some dangerous people live in squats.'

‘Not in that one, I'm sure.'

‘Oh yes there were, Mr Hayward. Very dangerous, in one case at least. One of you was a murderer.' They weren't actually sure of that yet, but Percy wasn't going to weaken his position with this nervous man by making that qualification to his statement.

Matthew licked his lips. ‘I think the victim was the girl called Sunita.'

‘Correct.'

His replies were being checked off against a list, when he had expected them to be welcome information. He had better be very careful; this bouncy, broad-shouldered man had in effect just told him that he was a murder suspect. Matthew wished he was not sitting so close to that shining bald head, with its fringe of jet-black hair and matching moustache, to the very white teeth and very dark eyes, which seemed about to pierce his very skin.