Sins of the Fathers (16 page)

Kevin Mower negotiated the slightly bewildering dual carriageways which led around the centre of Leeds and found a parking space at the back of the Civic Hall. It was there that the two universities and the infirmary kept a sedate distance between their ancient pursuits and the trendy business developments around the shopping centre and the river which had catapulted the old Yorkshire manufacturing city into an icon of twenty-first century glitz. He glanced at his street map and followed the instructions he had been given to a red brick street corner pub which did not seem to have been touched by anything much in the way of development since the 1970s.

There were no smart loft apartments in this quarter, he noticed, just terraced houses, many of which appeared to have been converted into student homes, no doubt with young people crammed into every available nook and cranny. Term, he could see, was in full swing, and he passed groups of youngsters evidently making their way home, clutching bags of books and carriers of shopping. What was left of the local population seemed to be a mixture of white and Asian, none of them showing much sign that they were sharing in the booming prosperity for which the city had become well-known.

He pushed open the door of what announced itself in
lettering engraved into the opaque glass of the windows to be the lounge bar and peered inside, where a sparse early evening cluster of men were hunched over their pints with the rapt attention of serious drinkers and did not so much as glance up as he entered. He could feel the
multi-coloured
carpet stick under his feet and the tang of liquor was overlaid by that of stale cigarette smoke and the greasy taint of ancient chips.

The person he was seeking was sitting in a corner close to the bar. Mower held out a hand, which was only taken reluctantly by the burly, grey-faced man in jeans and a dark anorak.

‘Good to see you again, Harry,’ Mower said. ‘It’s been a long time.’ Harry Maitland wiped the froth off his upper lip and grunted by way of a greeting in return. Mower glanced at his drink, which was only half finished.

‘I’ll get you another,’ he said. ‘What is it? Tetleys?’ He got another grunt in response which he took for assent. Fresh glasses on the table, Mower pulled up a stool opposite Maitland and took a draught of his own lager.

‘How’s it going in the security business?’ Mower asked. ‘You must be in demand with things the way they are. The IRA never came close to this lot, did they? And they were bad enough.’

The man looked at Mower with chilly slate-coloured eyes, around which the whites were too redly veined to look healthy. They had never been close when they had served together in the Metropolitan Police and this unexpectedly renewed acquaintance, renewed at Mower’s request, reminded the sergeant just how much he had always distrusted the former soldier who had been his colleague at Paddington Green for a brief and not very productive period of his career.

‘Business?’ Maitland said. ‘Swings and roundabouts, innit?’ The voice still betraying his South London origins and the deeply ingrained cynicism Mower remembered. In spite of the dim light at the back of the lounge bar, Mower could see just how unhealthy the man looked, and that his dark blue anorak was stained at the front and frayed slightly at the cuffs. The security business Maitland had gone into after he left the Met under a cloud was clearly not going anything like well enough for a man who, he recalled, had disliked hard work but been fond of his Scotch and his girls. Pints of Tetleys did not seem his style.

‘The IRA was a doddle compared to this lot,’ Maitland said with an approximation of confidence in his voice. ‘The financial geezers down the road are wetting themselves.’ But somehow Mower did not think that the financial geezers were turning to Maitland’s security and investigation company for help against Al Qa’ida. A bit of surveillance on behalf of jealous spouses and business partners would be more likely the bread-and-butter of his world, and not much of that either, by the look of it.

‘So what can I do for you,’ Maitland asked, without enthusiasm. ‘At the usual rates, of course.’

Mower smiled faintly at that.

‘Just an ID problem,’ he said. ‘I thought you or some of your mates might come up with a solution. I think there’s an army connection.’

‘The British army’s a bloody big institution,’ Maitland said.

‘Yes, but not the bit you were in,’ Mower countered. ‘And that’s the bit I’m interested in. Irish connections. Possibly undercover. You know the sort of thing.’

‘Could bring me a lot of grief, that,’ Maitland objected, but he did not reject the photograph which Mower pulled
out of his inside pocket and handed to him.

‘The bloke in the green shirt there,’ Mower said, ‘does he look familiar, at all?’ Maitland peered at the picture in the dim light for a moment but shook his head.

‘Never seen him before in my life,’ he said. ‘It’s fifteen years since I came out. It’s too long ago. You can see he’s a good bit younger.’

‘D’you know anyone else who might give me a name?’ Mower persisted. ‘Anyone else you could show it to? You must still have some contacts.’

Maitland grunted and started on his second pint.

‘Not if they’re still in the service,’ he said shortly. ‘More than their pension’s worth to chatter.’

‘Someone who came out more recently then?’

‘They keep at you even then,’ Maitland said. ‘They could make life very uncomfortable if they thought you’d been blabbing.’

‘People do, though, don’t they?’ Mower countered. ‘Write books, even.’

‘Line their pockets,’ Maitland said. ‘But ID-ing someone? That’s dodgy. Very dodgy.’

‘We can’t trace this bloke back more than three years when he turned up in Yorkshire with a wife and three kids and absolutely nothing in the records to pin him down. Before that it’s a blank. A very carefully contrived blank, as far as I can see.’

‘If the powers that be fixed him up with a new ID, it’ll stay that way,’ Maitland said.

‘We want the bastard for multiple murder,’ Mower said angrily. ‘We’re getting precisely nowhere with the powers that be. He shot his wife and kids.’

Maitland stared at the smeared table top in front of him for a moment or two and then shrugged.

‘He’d not be the first to flip,’ he said. ‘There’s supposed to be resettlement, counselling, all that stuff, but if it happens at all I don’t reckon it does some of those lads much good. There’s a lot of stuff buried in their heads, especially if they were in Ireland for any length of time. What do they call it these days? Post- traumatic stress? There’s a lot of it about. An epidemic, if you really want to know.’

‘Right,’ Mower said.

Maitland picked up the photograph and put it in his inside pocket.

‘I know someone who might just know, though God knows if he’ll be prepared to help,’ he said. ‘Leave it with me. I’ll have a word. Get back to you if I get anything. But don’t hold your breath.’

‘I won’t,’ Mower said, thinking that he had flogged some dead horses in his time but few more lifeless than Harry Maitland. He wondered whether his flagging career was the result of his evidently massive apathy or whether the apathy sprang from his sagging fortunes at work. Either way he reckoned that the photograph of Gordon Christie, apparently relaxing at the Staveley school fête, would get no further than Maitland’s inside pocket. His trip to Leeds and the cost of a couple of pints of Tetleys ale, he concluded as he got up to go, had been pretty much a waste of time.

Michael Thackeray heard Laura’s key in the lock as he was packing a couple of polo shirts into an overnight case. For a moment he stood by the bed, rooted to the spot, shirts in hand, and his heart thumping uncomfortably as he waited for her to dump her bags and come into the room behind him. He did not turn round, even though he heard her
sharp intake of breath as she realised what he was doing.

‘Where are you going, Michael?’ she asked. He dropped the handful of clothes into the bag and turned slowly towards her, seeing the raw anxiety in her face.

‘I’ve been told to take a holiday,’ he said, his voice unnaturally low. ‘I had this major row with Jack Longley and he told me to get away for a couple of weeks…’

‘He’s suspended you?’ Laura asked.

‘No, not exactly. Just a holiday, but without the option.’

‘And you’re going to accept that? In the middle of a murder inquiry?’

Thackeray sat down on the edge of the bed as if his legs would no longer support him. His face was very pale and he avoided Laura’s eyes.

‘I don’t have any choice, Laura,’ he said. ‘He didn’t give me any choice. And in any case the murder inquiry’s running into the sand. Manchester’s in charge of the body in the Land Rover, the search for Christie can quite easily continue whether I’m here or not. In fact, the chances of finding him at all, never mind alive, are getting more remote by the day. We had a report that someone had been seen at the cottage yesterday but we didn’t find anything significant. It was probably just some ghoul peering in the windows to look at the blood on the floor.’

Laura shivered slightly, knowing that there had been more than one person who could be classified as a ghoul at Moor Edge the previous day.

‘But there are so many unanswered questions around Christie,’ she said.

Thackeray shrugged. ‘Maybe. But as I’m effectively blocked from digging around in his past, I might as well not be here. I’ll be better off out of it.’

Laura had never seen Thackeray look so defeated.

‘I’ll come with you,’ she said, taking his hand. ‘I’ll call Ted first thing in the morning and tell him I need a week off. We could go to Portugal to see my parents. Joyce is still out there but they’ve got plenty of space. It would do us both good to get away for a bit.’

But Thackeray shook his head.

‘Somewhere else then? Somewhere we can be alone…?’

‘I’ve booked a flight,’ he said. ‘I need to be on my own for a while. This business with Longley has made me ask myself a lot of questions about the future. I need to think about where I’m going, if I’m going anywhere at all in the police force any more.’

Laura thought of the resignation letter Thackeray had written and put in his pocket and guessed that he might be planning to put it in the post on the way to the airport.

‘You can’t let these bastards defeat you,’ she said.

‘That’s not what Jack Longley says. He says I’m wasting my time even thinking about defying the spooks, and I’d just better get over it if I want my career to go on much longer. He was pretty clear about that.’

‘Don’t do anything stupid, like resigning,’ she said. ‘That would be a total waste. They need people like you.’

‘Not if we get in the way, apparently,’ Thackeray said.

‘I don’t believe this,’ Laura said, feeling almost as defeated as Thackeray looked but determined to keep on fighting with all the means in her power. ‘I’ll get your
so-called
holiday on the front page tomorrow, if you like, ask what the hell’s going on with this case, a mother and two children dead, no sign of the father, and now the senior investigating officer effectively off the case. It’s unforgivable, Michael. You must see that. I can easily stir Ted Grant up on this, get him into crusading mode, get him to make an issue of it.’

‘Don’t do that, Laura. Please,’ Thackeray said. ‘There’s no way that would help me. It would wind up the brass at county and turn them against me like nothing else could. You’d kill my career, such as it is, stone dead.’

‘If they haven’t killed it stone dead already,’ Laura said. ‘Those bastards.’

Thackeray turned away and zipped up his bag, glancing at his watch.

‘Leave it, Laura,’ he said. ‘I must go if I’m going to catch my flight. Give me some time and space, a week at most, and I promise I’ll sort my head out, I’ll be in touch.’

‘And you don’t need me for any of that?’ she asked, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice now. ‘I’m superfluous to requirements in a crisis, am I?’

‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Please don’t.’ He tried to take her in his arms but she slid out of his grasp and turned away angrily, her face flushed, copper hair flying.

‘Are you going to tell me where you’re going?’ she asked as he moved out of the bedroom with his bag. ‘Am I not allowed to know that, even?’

‘I’m not sure yet,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’

‘You’ve got a flight booked but you’re not sure where it’s going?’ she flashed. ‘You’re kidding me.’

But he did not reply. He shrugged tiredly, picked up his coat in the hall and closed the front door quietly behind him, leaving Laura to fling herself into a chair and gaze at the silk flowers in the Victorian fireplace with her eyes full of tears. She was as sure as she had ever been sure of anything during the years of their stormy relationship that it was not just his future career Michael Thackeray was planning to reconsider on his enforced holiday; it was also his future with her. She wondered, in fact, if he would ever come back.

DS Kevin Mower and DC Val Ridley walked down the stairs from Superintendent Jack Longley’s office in silence. The interview they had just had with him, in his
self-appointed
new capacity as senior investigating officer for the Christie family murders, had left them seriously dissatisfied. Neither of them had yet even begun to come to terms with the fact that DCI Thackeray had suddenly left police headquarters without any explanation apart from a two line note on the CID noticeboard that morning to say that he had gone on holiday. And their unease had only been compounded when Val’s conviction that she had achieved a breakthrough in the investigation had been dismissed by Longley with little sign of interest.

‘I’ll get them to look at the forensics again,’ he had conceded. ‘There may be evidence of someone else being in the house but it will be difficult to pin it to that morning even if there is. But I wouldn’t get too excited about what the child says, any road. A ten-year-old with a severe head injury’s never going to make a credible witness, is she? Look into it, by all means, but don’t waste any time over it. What I want is Christie found. It’s a hundred to one that this case begins and ends with Gordon Christie. There’s been enough time and resources wasted on chasing up other so-called leads.’

Back in the main CID office Val flung herself into a chair and ran her hands through her short fair hair in something close to fury. She looked at Mower, who had perched himself on a neighbouring desk and was watching her with a sardonic look in his eyes.

‘I’ve waited with that kid for a week for this, sarge,’ Val said in a furious whisper. ‘And look where it gets me. The DCI’s buggered off and the super’s not even remotely interested in what she’s saying. What the hell’s going on?’

Mower did not answer directly.

‘How reliable is what she’s saying, do you reckon?’ he asked instead.

Val pulled out her notebook and flicked over a few pages before she replied.

‘She began to talk coherently yesterday,’ she said. ‘Only a few words at first, asking for her mother, asking where she was, asking what happened. The doctors advised not telling her anything yet. It would be too much of a shock on top of her physical problems, so I just answered vaguely. I promise you I didn’t put any ideas into her head. I was very, very careful not to, sarge. Believe me.’

‘I believe you,’ Mower said. ‘And then?’

‘Then, when I went in this morning, she really seemed properly awake for the first time. And she seemed to recognise me. She knew she’d seen me before, at least. Even managed a faint smile.’ Val worked hard to keep her voice neutral. There was no way she could let anyone in CID know just how close she felt to the pale,
semi-conscious
child she had been watching over with a devotion far beyond the call of duty for more than a week now, or how desperately she wanted her to recover.

‘And she could remember the day of the shooting? It’s
unusual for traumatic memories to return like that. It very often gets blotted out.’

‘She asked for her mummy again. And then she asked if her mummy got hurt, and I didn’t know what to answer, so I just said mummy and daddy would be in to see her soon. But that seemed to really upset her. She looked straight at me and began to cry. She said she didn’t want her daddy to come. Or the other man. So I asked her who the other man was. And she said the man who banged on the door and had a fight with her daddy.’

‘Did she know who he was?’

‘No,’ Val said. ‘He seems to have been a stranger, at least to her. Which doesn’t mean her father didn’t know him, of course. But it rules out Gerry Foster from the pub, at any rate. The Christie children knew him.’

‘And you think this was the morning of the murders?’ Mower asked. ‘Can you be sure?’

‘Not a hundred per cent. As I told the super. But the thing she seemed most frightened about was a gun. I asked her who had a gun and she said the man who came to the door.’

‘Does she remember the shootings? Does she remember who shot her?’

Val shook her head. ‘She seems to have blanked that out. When I pressed her just a little she got distressed so I didn’t push it. She just said she tried to run away and everything went black, which of course it would have done when she was shot. And we have no idea if she was injured first, in which case she wouldn’t have seen the others killed.’

‘You can’t blame the super for thinking it’s a bit vague, Val,’ Mower said.

‘That’s why I want to keep going with her,’ Val said
fiercely. ‘The doctor says that if she’s remembering something it may indicate that she’ll gradually remember more. I want to stay with her, Kevin. I’m sure Emma’s got the key to all this locked away in her head.’

Mower shrugged. ‘Well, you heard what the super said. Maybe the forensics will come up with something. But there’s nothing to stop you visiting Emma in your own time. You seem to have done that already often enough. See if you can get any sort of description of this visitor. She may never be a very reliable witness but if we can match up what she says with some forensic evidence we may have something serious to go on.’

‘The DCI wouldn’t be so dismissive,’ Val muttered angrily. ‘Where the hell’s he gone anyway, in the middle of a murder case?’

‘I don’t know,’ Mower said. ‘But he looked as though he needed a holiday, that’s for sure.’

‘Something odd’s going on with this case,’ Val said.

‘Maybe,’ Mower said, cautiously. But he knew she was right, and half an hour later, when he was sure no one was taking any interest in his movements, he left the main CID office and went into Michael Thackeray’s room, closing and locking the door behind him. He stood for a moment looking round at the desk – relatively tidy; the filing cabinets – tightly closed and, when he tried them, tightly locked; and the computer – switched off and unplugged. Wherever Thackeray had gone, he thought, he had tidied up before he went, almost as if he expected to be away a long time, if not for good. Anxiety growing in the pit of his stomach, he crossed the room and pulled out the desk drawers methodically, one after the other. But, to his relief, he did not find the bottle he feared might be there.

He sat down suddenly at the desk, letting out the breath
he realised he had been holding for too long in a low sigh. Mower was not a man who offered respect easily, but he had watched Thackeray fight his demons as he handled a case that came far to close to his own experience, and had been impressed. Why should he have bottled out now, he wondered. It did not make sense. Stressed out he might have been, but that came with the job. Emotionally involved in the deaths of two children he had undoubtedly been, but he had concealed it well. Only those who knew him as well as Mower thought he did could have guessed at the turmoil those small bodies had caused Thackeray. So if he had not cracked and asked for time away there had to be another reason, and it had to come from above. Val Ridley was right. There was something odd going on with this case and no one at police HQ was going to tell him what it was. He would, Mower concluded, getting to his feet and letting himself out of the DCI’s abandoned office, have to find out for himself.

Laura Ackroyd had rolled out of bed long before first light that morning. She had slept only fitfully, her mouth was dry and her eyes felt swollen in their sockets. She did not dare look at herself in the mirror. As she padded across the chilly kitchen floor to override the central heating timer and put the kettle on, she wondered bleakly if this was the first day of the rest of her life. As she sipped her coffee, strong and black, she went over the previous evening’s events in her mind for about the hundredth time since Thackeray had walked away, and wondered yet again if she could have said anything that would have changed his plans.

With only half her mind on what she was doing, Laura eventually found herself in the office, working like an
automaton on some routine changes to the feature pages which formed a major part of the next day’s Saturday edition. When the phone on her desk rang towards lunchtime she grabbed it with a dry mouth and thumping heart, in the certain conviction that it must be Thackeray, only to be flung into despair again by a voice that she only half recognised.

‘Who?’ she asked, more sharply than she intended and was conscious of the crime reporter, Bob Baker, watching her curiously from a couple of desks along. Val Ridley identified herself again and a glimmer of an interested response swam to the front of Laura’s consciousness as the detective suggested a quick drink.

‘Fine,’ Laura said, intrigued at last, in spite of a thumping headache and an increasingly sick stomach. ‘I’ll see you there.’ She finished off her editing chores with more urgency than she had managed to summon up in the last three hours and put on her coat, and wrapped a scarf up to her eyes. If she could have covered herself entirely like a strict Muslim she would have felt more comfortable. Fortunately, it was only a short walk to the bar Val had suggested and she could easily fit her trip into her lunch hour.

Val was already sitting at a table with a fruit cocktail in front of her when Laura arrived, unwrapped herself carefully, and ordered a vodka and tonic from the attentive waitress. Her fragility, she thought, might best be cured by a kick in the teeth than by pussyfooting around with soft drinks. Laura took a sip of her drink and looked at the pale, self-contained police officer, in her black trouser suit and white shirt, with a curiosity she had never really felt before. She hardly knew Val Ridley, she thought, and wondered again at her apparent devotion to the sick child in the
infirmary. Val fiddled with her own glass for a moment, as if working up the courage to tell Laura what she had implied she wanted to tell her.

‘I really need to speak to the DCI,’ she said at last. Laura glanced away for a moment.

‘So do I,’ she said wryly at length, hoping that Val would not read desperation into her tone. ‘But he said he needed some time and space on his own. I don’t even know where he is.’

‘I tried his mobile. He’s not answering.’

‘No, I don’t suppose he is,’ Laura said. Val made a figure of eight pattern on the table top with her glass, obviously considering her next move.

‘If I tell you what I want to tell Mr Thackeray, will you promise not to use it in the
Gazette
until I think it’s the only option?’ she asked eventually. ‘It’s what you’d call a “good story”, but I want to get some official movement on it if I possibly can. I need the DCI’s advice, I really do. And his clout with the superintendent. He’s bound to contact you before anyone else and you can pass the message on.’

Laura thought that she would not bank on that, with Thackeray in his present mood, but she did not want Val Ridley to know anything about the desperate state of their relationship, so she nodded as positively as she could manage.

‘If you give me a message in confidence for Michael, of course I’ll pass it on, if I can,’ Laura said. ‘And I don’t usually offer private communications to my boss, whatever Superintendent Longley may imagine. We do try to keep our professional lives separate.’ Laura knew that Val Ridley probably didn’t believe her but she reckoned it was up to her to decide how far she could trust a journalist. And that
maybe depended on how urgent her message was.

In the end Val nodded and reached into her bag and handed Laura a single sheet of photocopied typescript.

‘Emma Christie’s coming round and beginning to remember the morning of the shooting,’ Val said in a low voice. ‘It’s all a bit garbled, doesn’t make a lot of sense, but if it’s anything close to the truth it throws the whole case open again. The DCI will see the implications. I really need to talk to him about it because the superintendent is effectively closing the case down, concentrating on the hunt for Gordon Christie and not much else. He doesn’t even seem very bothered about keeping an eye on Emma and listening to what she says.’

Laura thought of Michael Thackeray’s complaints along similar lines and wondered just how big and smelly the can of worms was that someone was working so hard to keep the lid on.

She took the sheet of paper slightly gingerly and glanced at it.

‘There was someone else there,’ she said wonderingly.

‘She seems to think so, though how reliable anything she says is, I don’t know. The doctors are very vague.’

‘Right,’ Laura said. ‘And if we can’t get hold of Michael…?’

‘I don’t know,’ Val said. ‘Maybe if the
Gazette
got involved… But you’d have to keep my name out of it. There’s been information leaking out of the hospital anyway so it wouldn’t be that odd if something else got out. Most of the nurses seemed to be desperate for Emma to wake up. We’re all desperate, really. And if it wasn’t her father with the gun, she deserves to know that, doesn’t she? And for the truth to be known. It will be bad enough for her to have lost the rest of her family without believing
that it was her own father who killed them if it wasn’t.’

Laura could see how desperate Val was herself, and shivered slightly. She doubted very much whether anything she could do would help Val Ridley or Emma Christie. She could not even see any way of helping herself.

‘I’ll tell Michael when he contacts me,’ she said. ‘But I’ve no idea when that will be. Don’t bank on me, please. I really don’t think you should do that.’

Laura went back to the office reluctantly, with Val Ridley’s piece of paper feeling like an unexploded bomb in her bag. By the end of the afternoon she had tidied her desk, deleted the clutter on her computer, spent half an hour in the loo trying to repair the ravages of the previous night with make-up, and was left at five thirty wondering how she could fill the rest of the evening on her own. She rang her friend Vicky’s home number several times but got no reply, and she did not seem to be picking up her mobile. Vicky must still be away with her mother, she thought desolately, and there was no one else she felt even remotely able to unburden herself to.

Eventually, as she sat staring at her blank computer screen trying to summon up the resolve to go home to the empty flat, she felt a hand on her shoulder.