Death in a Far Country

She lay for a long time with her arms wrapped around her knees, to try to ease the pain, her teeth clamped tightly over her lips to prevent the slightest groan escaping. The darkness was not quite absolute. There was no moon but she could faintly see reflections shimmering on water and occasionally the sky lightened as a vehicle’s headlights flickered for a moment some distance away and then vanished. She knew she needed help, but did not dare call out for it in case her attackers were still looking for her. They had not been far behind when the two of them had stumbled onto this dark pathway and she had slumped to her knees, feeling the skin tear on the sharp gritty surface, unable to run any further. She had urged her friend to make her own escape. For a long time she had refused and they had huddled together against the cold, arms around each other, but at last she had persuaded her to go, to save herself, her friend’s voice strangled by sobs as she promised to return with help. But she knew she would not come back. She would not dare, in case they were waiting for her. She knew she was utterly alone.

She clutched herself more tightly, the pain in her chest more intense, impossible to assuage, and she gazed into the chilly darkness in despair. At home, she thought, the night
was warm and soft, a relief after the searing heat of the day, and full of the smell of cooking and the noise of cicadas and dogs, the rhythm of music and occasional shouts of anger and laughter as people relaxed on their verandahs and children played in the dust. At home, she had liked the night. Here it seemed always hostile, cold and angry and full of the threatening shadows of the men who had made her life hell.

She let out her breath in a faint hiss of agony as the pain ratcheted up one more intolerable notch and convulsed her body. She was not sure what they had done to her in the mêlée of fists and boots when they had caught up with the two of them, but she knew it was serious, and that she was sodden with blood. Her friend, she thought, had got off more lightly, slipping out of their grasp somehow at the height of the attack and then coming back and pulling her upright and dragging her away when the men were frightened off by the lights of passing cars, leaving the two of them briefly alone in the gutter, just long enough for them to run. But she had not been able to keep it up. She had soon stumbled and fallen to her knees, trying to stifle her groans, and her friend had been unable to pull her to her feet again.

‘Go quickly. Run,’ she had said. ‘Save yourself.’

And then she was finally alone, facing the icy darkness and the surging waves of pain, knowing they would find her, and when they did, that would be the end.

She never knew how long she lay there. Once or twice she tried to drag her protesting body into a patch of deeper shadows, but the agony of movement was too great. For what seemed like hours, she drifted between the reality of pain and bleak darkness and the soothing half-conscious dreams
of another life where there had been safety and warmth and hope and the promise of happiness. Then, increasingly, the present nightmare became jumbled in her mind with previous nightmares, seemingly endless brutalities that she could never have even imagined in her earlier life, and as her strength ebbed away she began to sob, the hot tears coursing through the caked layers of dirt and blood she could feel on her face. And she knew they would find her soon.

They came quietly in the end, a single pencil beam of torch light focusing on her face, dazzling her. There was no strength left in her, and she did no more than moan as they picked her up roughly, carried her a little way and then let her slip into the icy waters of the canal, where the water closed over her unresisting body with scarcely a ripple.

Detective Chief Inspector Michael Thackeray sat uncomfortably across a desk from Superintendent Jack Longley, drumming his fingers on the polished surface in frustration. If Longley himself felt any tension, he was concealing it well, his rubicund face bland and his balding head gleaming slightly in the artificial light. But he was watching the younger man intently for all that, as if someone had deposited an unattended package in his office that had to be checked out for explosive possibilities.

‘I’m not saying that’s what I expect, Michael,’ he said. ‘I’m just saying it’s something maybe you should consider. You may feel OK but I’m buggered if you look it. You were on the critical list for a week, for God’s sake. Maybe it’s time to think about a quieter life.’ The senior officer’s eyes ran quickly over his junior’s untidy hair and a dark suit that looked in need of pressing, before fixing on the blue eyes which seemed weary even at the beginning of a working day. Thackeray glanced away before squaring his broad rugby-player’s shoulders and meeting Longley’s sharp eyes again.

‘And do what?’ he asked. ‘Run some crummy security firm? Go fishing? Take up golf?’ Thackeray was offering deliberate provocation to the golf-addicted superintendent but he
refused to rise directly, though sufficiently provoked to step onto forbidden territory himself.

‘You could marry that long-suffering lass of yours, for a start,’ he said. ‘That might make you feel better.’ Thackeray, thinner faced than he had been, the creases around mouth and eyes deeper and his unruly dark hair a touch greyer at the temples, froze for a moment and then shook his head angrily.

‘You really think she’d be willing to have me when I’m on the way to the knacker’s yard?’

‘That’s a “no” to early retirement then, is it?’

Thackeray looked at his boss consideringly for a moment.

‘Are they pushing for me to go, the brass?’ he asked quietly. Longley shrugged and suddenly looked almost as tired as Thackeray himself, as if deflated by the thought of the official hierarchy looming threateningly above them both, looking for scapegoats for their own incompetence.

‘I don’t think they’d shed many tears if either of us went,’ he said. ‘Don’t kid yourself. We didn’t cover ourselves with glory in Staveley, did we? Two dead who needn’t have been? And you as good as. A right cock-up, as I’m sure this inquiry they’ve launched will conclude. And whatever connivance they got at the top, we were the ones in charge of the case. I took over as senior investigating officer while you were away, remember.’

‘I took a risk I shouldn’t have taken by not waiting for
backup
in a hostage situation,’ Thackeray conceded cautiously. ‘I felt I had no choice – in the circumstances.’

‘And damn near got yourself killed. They don’t like that, the brass. It looks bad when the Home Office inspectors come sniffing around.’

‘We’d have done better if we’d had proper cooperation
from our so-called friends in London,’ Thackeray said, anger in his voice now. ‘I complained at the time and I’ll tell them again when they ask me for my opinion, don’t worry.’

‘Aye, well, we’ll both put the best case we can,’ Longley said. ‘But I blame myself for the little girl. We should have looked after her better. They can’t lay that at your door, any road. You weren’t even here.’

Thackeray nodded, his eyes sombre. The case that now seemed to threaten Bradfield CID with unforeseeable retribution had been a harrowing one, and Longley was not the only one to blame himself for an unsatisfactory and
blood-soaked
outcome. But Longley suddenly squared his shoulders.

‘Right then, let’s not fret about what we can’t alter,’ he said. ‘I’d rather you stayed than went, Michael, you should know that. So fill me in on where you are now you’re back. Are you up to speed?’

‘Just about,’ Thackeray said cautiously, though feeling relieved at that unexpected vote of confidence. He was aware that for a long time Longley had regarded him with extreme caution, knowing of his near terminal career difficulties elsewhere, but he had thought he had earned his trust. ‘I’m ploughing through the reports. The crime figures look reasonably encouraging. Maybe I should take a couple of months off more often. They seem to have been doing pretty well without me.’

‘I kept a close eye,’ Longley said.

‘I was sorry Val Ridley fell by the wayside,’ Thackeray said, thinking of the cool, blonde young woman detective who had resigned in the aftermath of the series of murders that had left him in intensive care himself.

‘Kevin Mower was bending my ear, trying to get her to change her mind,’ Longley said. ‘I had a chat with her, but she was adamant she wanted to go. Planning to train as a social worker, she said.’

‘So Kevin told me. She got too involved with the child who died. She got burnt out, as you do if you lose your objectivity. It’s a great pity. She was a good officer.’

Longley looked at the DCI, knowing how bitterly difficult he had found the same case, and wondered, not for the first time, at Thackeray’s dogged capacity for survival.

‘You coped,’ he said.

Thackeray smiled grimly, thinking that it was a very good thing that Longley did not know how close he had come to giving up himself as he had lain in his hospital bed going over the mistakes that had put him there. Only his growing sense that he could not leave a job half done had persuaded him to come back.

‘Only just,’ he admitted. ‘It gets no easier.’

They were interrupted by Sergeant Kevin Mower himself, who tapped on the door and put his head round when Longley called for him to enter. Mower nodded briefly at the Superintendent, his face grim, but addressed himself to the DCI.

‘Uniform have found a body in the canal, guv,’ he said quietly. ‘Suspicious death – looks like murder.’

Thackeray pulled his heavy six-foot frame out of his chair and sighed, feeling the cogs of the police machine slipping relentlessly into place again and threatening, as never before, to grind him to a pulp.

‘We’d best have a look,’ he said.

‘Keep me in touch, Michael,’ Longley said as the two detectives departed, shoulder to shoulder. And, as the door closed behind them, he muttered to himself: ‘Please God, we don’t bugger this one up.’

Laura Ackroyd was sitting in the morning editorial meeting at the
Bradfield Gazette
feeling more than usually bored. She twisted a long strand of her copper hair around her fingers as she listened to the sports editor, Tony Holloway, a small chubby man in his early thirties, already balding, who had an inexplicably fathomless enthusiasm for the local football team. Bradfield United’s normally dire performance, in Laura’s view, earned nothing like the uncritical loyalty it got on the back pages of the local newspaper. But just for once, she had to admit, Tony had something to crow about and it was obvious that the paper’s editor, Ted Grant, who was sitting inscrutably at the end of the table like a basking bullfrog, was ready to allow him full rein.

‘So how much cash will they make out of playing Chelsea, then?’ Ted asked. ‘Thousands? Tens of thousands?’

‘Well, the stadium’ll be full on Saturday for the match, not much doubt about that. Tickets are like gold dust, so certainly tens of thousands,’ Tony said. ‘But you get into the big money when you get a share of the take at a big stadium like Chelsea’s. If they could only draw next week and go back to Stamford Bridge for the replay, they’d be quids in. They’ve already done pretty well out of this Cup run, because they’ve played away from home so often. A share of the take on a crowd of thirty thousand is a damn sight better than a share on the ten thousand United can cram in at Beck Lane when
they’re on this sort of roll and fill all the seats.’

‘And can they draw against Chelsea?’ Ted asked, doubt written all over his heavy features. A deep and abiding scepticism was his stock-in-trade, hallmark, he believed, of a serious player who had done his stint on a London tabloid.

‘Stranger things have happened,’ Tony said cheerfully. ‘No one gave them a chance in either of the last two games, so you never know. The Nigerian lad Okigbo is a real star. The two goals against Sunderland were gems by any standard. Chelsea’ll come looking to buy him if we’re not careful.’

‘And what about this lass they’ve got running the club now?’ Grant asked. ‘Is she going to make a go of it?’

Laura’s interest in the discussion flared momentarily at that. Even she, with her minimal interest in football, had been intrigued to see a woman apparently jump at the chance of taking over the chairmanship of the struggling local club when her father, Sam Heywood, the major shareholder, had unexpectedly died. But her interest had turned to dismay as she realised that Jenna Heywood’s succession had aroused real hostility in and around the club, a hostility that Tony Holloway seemed only too happy to encourage in his weekly column of United news and gossip.

‘Why shouldn’t she make a go of it?’ Laura asked, mildly. ‘She’s an experienced businesswoman, from what I’ve heard. Chances are she’ll do a much better job than her father.’

Tony flushed slightly at the unexpected interruption from the only woman amongst the senior staff at the table and glanced at Ted for support.

‘From what I’ve heard, she knows absolutely zilch about football,’ he said. ‘The way things are these days for these
small clubs you need a tough chairman if you’re going to survive. Someone with a bit of financial nous and the guts to stand up to the players’ agents and the rest of the sharks out there.’

‘And running your own PR firm in London doesn’t need all that?’ Laura asked with her sweetest smile. ‘I reckon there’s as many sharks down there as there are in the Football League. What you football nuts really don’t like is the fact that she’s a woman.’

‘Some of the old guard directors, maybe,’ Tony admitted, looking flustered at this unprecedented attack from the least likely direction. ‘There’s no doubt they’re upset. And as I hear it, she’s not exactly built up a rapport with the coach, Minelli. And he’s easy enough to get on with, for God’s sake. A really good bloke – for an Italian.’

‘With the accent on the bloke?’ Laura came back sharply. ‘And the regulation Italian as well? How trendy is that?’

‘Give us a break, Miz Ackroyd,’ Ted Grant broke into the spat heavily. ‘I tell you what, though. With the town buzzing like it is over the Chelsea match, we could do worse than run a profile of the lovely Jenna Heywood. How about that?’

Tony Holloway looked doubtful but obviously hesitated to contradict the notoriously irascible editor of the
Gazette
directly.

‘I’ve a hell of a lot to go on my pages,’ he prevaricated. ‘Interviews with both managers, a profile of Okigbo…’

‘I’ll do it,’ Laura broke in quickly. ‘You don’t even have to give up an inch of your precious sports space if you don’t want to. It can go on my features page on Friday before the match. You’ve made it pretty clear you don’t think it’s a
suitable job for a woman, and you obviously all expect her to make a hash of it. Let’s see what she’s got to say for herself. What do you think, Ted? Good idea?’

‘Not bad,’ Ted conceded. ‘Not bad at all. Fix it up, then, Laura. I’m told quite a few women watch football these days so let’s give them summat to think about, shall we? A bloody good idea, as it goes.’

And as the meeting broke up, Laura met Tony Holloway’s accusing eyes across the table and smiled sweetly.

‘OK, Tony?’ she asked. ‘Perhaps you can give me a few cuttings as background?’

‘Fine,’ Holloway came back, but the expression on his face told her it was not so fine at all, and she spun on her heel to hide her satisfied grin.

It was years now since Laura had begun to feel that the
Gazette
had taught her all it could about journalism. Colleagues who had joined the paper at the same time as she had, straight out of the local university, had long ago moved onwards and upwards to jobs elsewhere, and she herself still harboured the embers of a once fierce ambition to work in London. In fact she had tried more than once to break into a wider professional world, but again and again she had been dragged back to her home town by the only force in her life that had outweighed her ambition and would, perhaps, she thought sadly, end up stifling it completely.

She had hoped to have married Michael Thackeray by now, but she was beginning to wonder if she ever would. She still found it hard to escape the memory of the moment she had thought he was dead. In fact, his heart had stopped, she had been told later, and only the attentions of a particularly
determined paramedic had got it beating again in the ambulance. But since she had sat by his bedside watching him struggle back to a semblance of normality after being shot, she had felt nothing but coolness on his side, as if his brush with death had taken something away from his capacity to feel as well as some of the physical vigour he had always put into life. But he seemed to have pulled himself out of his initial apathy and in the end he had insisted on going back to work as soon as he could persuade his doctor to sanction it but long before Laura thought he was fully mended. He had dismissed her objections impatiently.

‘I need to work,’ he had said. ‘Just like you do. You once told me the job is what I am, and you were right.’

But Laura still doubted that the fevered intensity with which Thackeray seemed to have launched himself back into running Bradfield CID was what he or the job really needed. Thackeray seemed to be treading a thin line between commitment and hysteria, and nothing she said seemed to convince him that there was any danger in that. In fact, she thought, nothing she said these days seemed to reach him at all. And if that was where they were, perhaps it was only prudent to give some tentative thought to her own ambitions in case she had to face the future without him.

Anyway, it would be interesting, she thought, to tease out Jenna Heywood’s reactions to exchanging her high-powered job in the south for such an unorthodox job close to her roots in Yorkshire. Laura could remember Sam Heywood in his early days, one of her own father’s business cronies who occasionally came to the house for drinks and long discussions in Jack Ackroyd’s smoke-filled study. He had taken over
Bradfield United during one of its periodic financial crises and allegedly pumped millions of his own money into supporting the club, which yo-yoed alarmingly from one year to the next between the lower divisions of the Football League, permanently hovering on the brink of some disaster or other.