Sins of the Fathers (12 page)

‘What happened to our exclusive picture of Gordon Christie?’ she asked before the editor had chance to inquire why she was there.

‘Ah,’ Ted said. ‘That’s a long story.’

‘I thought it was the whole point of the story,’ Laura snapped back. ‘Seeing that Vince Newsom beat us into the ground yesterday with his snatched picture of Emma Christie. Not that I think much of snatching pictures of
unconscious children, but ours was legitimate enough. It was taken in good faith. Here I am spelling out the impact of the apparently happy dad who goes berserk with a gun, the shock it’s caused to a whole community, and we have an exclusive – and legitimate – picture of the same happy dad with his kids last summer. What went wrong?’ The words tumbled out and her cheeks became even more flushed before she had finished this breathless tirade.

Laura had never seen Ted look abashed. It was not an emotion she thought he ever experienced, and certainly never expressed. But for the couple of seconds it took for the expression to flicker across his face, this was the only word she could find to describe her boss’s feelings.

‘The police don’t want his picture published just at the moment,’ Grant said, his embarrassment abating as quickly as it had appeared. ‘Superintendent Longley was bending my ear soon after eight o’clock this morning, before the first edition went to press. I don’t know how he knew we had pictures of Christie…’

He left the sentence hanging and Laura suddenly felt very cold. Had she mentioned the pictures to Thackeray? She could not remember. She pushed the thought out of her mind though she knew that it would not go away.

‘Why on earth doesn’t he want the picture published? It might help find the wretched man.’

‘Apparently they might have already found him, dead. They’re waiting for forensic evidence to prove it one way or the other.’

‘So? He might reasonably ask us not to use the pic as a sort of wanted poster, but that’s not what I was doing. My piece was quite different. And the picture of Christie and the children made perfect sense in that context.’

Ted Grant flushed and hauled himself out of his chair.

‘It was a good feature, Laura,’ he said as if the words were being squeezed out of him like toothpaste from an almost empty tube. ‘Don’t fret about the picture. We’ll use it later when we know for sure what’s happened to Christie.’

And with that she had to be content as she followed Grant out of his office and watched him begin one of his threatening perambulations around the newsroom, breathing down necks and grunting approval or disapproval as he read what was being written on the various screens. He could have done his reading by calling up reporters’ files from the comfort of his own desk computer, but that, she knew, would not have had the same demoralising effect he enjoyed so much.

Somewhat wearily, she got on with the rest of her day, but she never succeeded in shaking off that chilly worry in the pit of her stomach and as soon as Thackeray came home that night, looking grey and tired, she could no longer contain the question which had been niggling her all day.

‘Did you tell Jack Longley that we had a picture of Gordon Christie?’ she demanded, almost before he had taken his coat off.

He looked at her blankly for a moment and then shrugged.

‘I might have done,’ he said. ‘It didn’t matter, did it? Wasn’t it today it was going in the paper?’

‘Only it didn’t,’ Laura said, her anger bubbling over. ‘Jack Longley pressured Ted Grant into holding it out. It ruined my story.’

‘I’d no idea he was planning anything like that. And I must say, I’m surprised Ted Grant agreed,’ Thackeray said. ‘But Jack’s under a lot of pressure on this case. We all are.’

‘Well, I’m sorry about that,’ Laura said. ‘But I don’t see why you have to indulge in stupid censorship like that. What on earth’s the point? There’ll probably be other pictures kicking about and they’ll end up on the front page of the
Globe
, no doubt, when Vince Newsom gets his sticky fingers on them.’

‘That’s what all this is about, is it?’ Thackeray asked, turning away. ‘You and Vince Newsom?’

‘No, of course it isn’t,’ Laura said. ‘But I think you could treat anything I tell you off the record as carefully as I do when you let things slip.’

‘I try not to do that,’ Thackeray said quietly. ‘It’s much more embarrassing for me when our professional lives get entangled than it is for you.’ He spoke with a cold objectivity which chilled Laura’s blood, almost as if she herself were a nuisance he could do without.

‘You should be at a few of my editorial conferences if you think that,’ Laura said bitterly, smarting still from some of Bob Baker’s jibes. ‘I suppose that’s why you didn’t tell me that you’d already found Gordon Christie’s body,’ she added bitterly.

‘I didn’t tell you that because I don’t know yet whether or not it’s true,’ Thackeray said. ‘A body’s been found in his burnt out vehicle. They’re trying to identify it from DNA but it’s not easy. It may be him. We really don’t know. Maybe Jack decided to fill Ted Grant in on where the investigation has got to. I simply don’t know that either.’

Laura looked at him, her eyes full of scepticism.

‘It’s not a good enough reason to pull the picture,’ she said. ‘Why would we? It was harmless enough. It was a fantastic illustration for my piece. Why shouldn’t we run it?’

‘I don’t know what Jack Longley said to your boss,
Laura,’ Thackeray said, his own anger boiling over. ‘You’ll have to believe me. I thought you understood how much I hate this case. I don’t want anything which will make it more awful than it already is. I want it over and done with. And I really don’t care how many pictures of Gordon Christie you publish in the
Gazette
so long as the man’s safely dead.’

Laura pulled up short at that, recognising the pain behind Thackeray’s anger, and knowing it was a pain that she could never fully share and had so far failed to assuage in any significant way. She swallowed down her own irritation.

‘It’s horrible, I know,’ she said reaching out a tentative hand to touch his arm. ‘I’ve seen something of it, too, you know. But you mustn’t let it get to you.’

‘Easy to say,’ Thackeray said, ignoring her outstretched hand as he turned away. And with a sudden stab of fear Laura wondered if, after all they had been through together, this would be the case that destroyed them.

DC Val Ridley knocked on the DCI’s office door soon after nine the next morning and found, as she expected, Michael Thackeray and Kevin Mower reading the
Globe
’s latest front page with muted fury. Thackeray looked up as Val came in.

‘Any idea where he got this from?’ he asked. ‘She’s not just asking for mummy now but her sister as well. Allegedly.’

Val took a deep breath, almost overcome by the anger that had hit her as well as soon as she had read the headline in the paper someone had thrust in front of her in the main CID office: Vince Newsom’s new instalment of the Emma Christie story.

‘The bastard’s inventing it, with a bit of help from one of the nurses,’ she said.

‘Are you sure?’ Thackeray snapped.

‘No, I’m not sure, sir, not one hundred per cent sure. But I took a camera off her yesterday after the picture first appeared and I read her the riot act. That’s the same picture. No one’s managed to get a new one, at least. There’s been someone at Emma’s bedside ever since yesterday’s story appeared. I organised it as soon as I realised she was coming round. I saw Emma yesterday evening myself and it’s true, she is coming out of the coma,
but she’s not coherent. She’s mumbling a lot, but I can’t make out what she’s trying to say and the ward sister says nobody can.’

‘So this is all a fantasy?’ Kevin Mower asked. ‘That’s a bit much, even for the
Globe
, surely?’

‘I’ve just come back from the hospital. Nothing’s changed overnight. The nurse I took the camera off isn’t on duty this morning, which is why I thought I’d better see you. I wanted permission to chase her up, look at her mobile phone records maybe. It’s quite possible she’s ignored me completely and is still feeding Newsom this garbage. She certainly seemed to think she’s found a useful source of extra income and I’m pretty sure he couldn’t have got to Emma himself. I talked to uniform about setting up a rota to keep an eye on her up as soon as I realised what was happening yesterday with her trying to get another photograph, and I also put the fear of God into hospital security. Uniform aren’t too happy about a 24 hour watch.’

Thackeray sat back in his chair and sighed.

‘I’ll talk to uniform,’ he said. ‘But I doubt if the nurse has committed anything you could call a crime, though she may well be in trouble with the hospital authorities. It’s invasion of privacy, though, a particularly nasty instance of it, and embarrassing for us. If we’re doing nothing else right in this case we should at least be able to keep Emma Christie safe. It’s not impossible that if the killer is still alive he might want to finish what he started, I suppose. As Vince Newsom so helpfully suggests in his story. Whoever the killer is, he may think Emma will remember something about what happened once she’s fully conscious.’ He thumped a fist onto the offending newspaper with a force that surprised the two younger officers. It was rare to see
Thackeray express overt emotion, although Mower knew better than most the turmoil he concealed beneath his controlled public face.

‘You’re assuming the killer isn’t lying in a morgue in Manchester, then?’ Mower said. Thackeray looked at him bleakly for a moment without answering.

‘We can’t assume that,’ he said. He turned back to Val Ridley. ‘Talk to your nurse again, and close that loophole. Tell her you’re investigating breaches of hospital security which might put the child in danger. And if you let drop that her phone calls can very easily be traced it may bring her to her senses.’

‘Shall I tell hospital security about the camera incident?’ Val asked. ‘It could lose her her job.’

Thackeray hesitated for a second, staring down at the
Globe
’s front page again.

‘Tell her that if Vince Newsom prints any more information that he’s obviously gained from an inside source, we’ll have to make a full report to the hospital. So far this is harmless stuff as far as we’re concerned: true or not, it doesn’t really impinge on the investigation. But if Emma really does wake up and remembers anything important about the shootings then it will need to be kept confidential, and her security will be absolutely vital. We may have to move her somewhere else. You can tell the hospital that.’

‘Right, sir,’ Val said.

After she had gone, Thackeray looked at Mower with obvious anxiety.

‘Like everything else in this case, it all hangs on the forensics from Manchester,’ he said. ‘If Christie’s dead I don’t think we need to worry about Emma. If not…’ He shrugged.

‘We can’t just move her out of intensive care,’ Mower said.

‘Not without very good reason,’ Thackeray agreed. ‘And probably only to another hospital which might be just as leaky. Talk to uniform for me and make sure they know that her security is not just a babysitting issue. It’s a whole lot more important than that.’

DCI Thackeray allowed himself to be driven up the steep hill from Bradfield to Staveley with far more ambivalence than he would have admitted to DS Kevin Mower, who was at the wheel. It was true that he had felt an urgent need to get out of his office after a steamy hour fending off Superintendent Longley and the Press office, all incandescent at the morning’s
Globe
frontpage. Vince Newsom’s latest effort had provoked a spate of excited calls from other London papers which probably had reporters tailgating each other up the fast lane of the M1 in the direction of Bradfield by now. But halfway through the morning, CID had received a report from PC Hewitt in Staveley which had brought Thackeray some relief from the pressure of outside interest in the case. It had been Mower who had spoken directly to the breathless constable, sceptically at first but then with increasing interest as the main point of what he had to say had emerged from the avalanche of words.

‘So why didn’t we pick this up in the house-to-house inquiries?’ Mower had asked sharply when Hewitt had finished.

‘The old boy’s been on holiday, hasn’t he?’ Hewitt said. ‘But I spotted him this morning when I went up on my regular patrol, and I suddenly remembered we hadn’t interviewed him.’

‘Good man,’ Mower was forced to concede. ‘I’ll be up to see him myself later.’ And when he had passed the information on to DCI Thackeray he was not entirely surprised when his boss had decided to come to the village with him to interview Donald Wright of Lane End, Staveley, just back from a few days’ break in Torquay.

Wright was at home when they knocked on the door of a substantial stone house behind the church, and he answered the door so promptly that he might have been waiting behind it.

‘Mr Wright?’ Thackeray asked, offering his warrant card. ‘DCI Thackeray and Sergeant Mower, Bradfield CID.’

‘Major Wright,’ the short, dapper man with silver-grey hair, a small moustache and a military-looking blazer responded. ‘Royal Engineers, retired.’ Thackeray wondered just how long he had been retired. It was almost impossible to judge Wright’s age, but he guessed that it was many years since the man studying their ID with elaborate care had donned a uniform. He was obviously fit and trim and his face was tanned, the blue eyes still sharp, but as he showed them into his neat and tidy sitting room he moved slowly and the hands that picked up a decanter of whiskey and waved it in their direction shook slightly. When Thackeray and Mower refused the offer, Wright poured a generous measure for himself and was sipping contentedly even before he sat down.

‘You don’t mind if I do?’ he asked. ‘There’s not too many pleasures left at my age, you know. My wife died last year and I find the time hangs heavily.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Thackeray said. ‘It must be some time since you left the army?’

‘I did longer than many,’ Wright said. ‘Saw a lot of good men sacked, you know? War service didn’t save them. I was at D-Day myself – just got my commission in time. Then in Germany.’ He fell silent for a moment, apparently staring intently at something they could not see, and then, after another sip of his whiskey, straightened up in his chair. Thackeray waited patiently, wondering what memories haunted the old man and letting him take his time to return to the present.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to listen to an old buffer like me maundering on. I thought I’d told your constable all you needed to know. Sent for the top brass, has he? A bad business, this shooting. Had Christie hung on to a pistol from his time in the service, do you know? Too many of them get away with that, in my opinion. Always did. There’s a few World War Two pistols still rusting at the back of drawers, you know?’

‘Did Christie tell you he’d been in the army?’ Thackeray asked. ‘We weren’t sure about that.’

‘I don’t think he ever told me,’ Wright said. ‘I just assumed he had. Behaved as though he had. Walked like a soldier, and a good one, I’d guess. Said something about Belfast once, I think, but he didn’t give much away. Taciturn, I suppose you’d call him. Maybe not allowed to talk openly about what he did. Crossed my mind. But I thought it was strange that two ex-soldiers had ended up in Staveley quite recently.’

‘Two?’

‘Gerry Foster at the pub was in the Royal Green Jackets as a young man. Came out seven or eight years ago, he told me. Served in Northern Ireland, too, of course.’ Wright’s eyes clouded again for a moment. ‘Nasty business, that. Never went there myself. Desk jockey by that time. But I
was in Aden briefly. Don’t suppose you remember that. Trouble in Arabia’s nothing new. It’s been going on for years.’

Kevin Mower, less tolerant of an old man’s tendency to live more in the past than the present, broke in impatiently.

‘So what about Christie? Hewitt tells us that you saw him just before you went off for your holiday. Is that right?’

‘I’ve not lost my marbles yet, Sergeant,’ Wright said sharply, somewhat to Mower’s surprise. He was not used to being put in his place quite so abruptly and Thackeray smiled faintly at his discomfiture. ‘I think I only spoke to Christie a couple of times while he lived here. Knew his wife by sight, of course. Saw her with the children. I like to get out and about every day for a brisk walk. Keeps the ticker in good shape.’

‘Where did you see Christie last?’ Thackeray asked quietly, becoming impatient with Wright’s meandering thought processes himself. ‘In the village, was it?’

‘I was up on the footpath that takes you onto the Pennine Way eventually. It passes the back of Christie’s cottage, but a hundred or so feet above it I suppose. Rough terrain. Christie’s Land Rover had stopped just before the end of the lane and he was leaning out of the window talking to Bruce Weldon and his son, what’s he called – Stuart?’

‘You’re sure about that?’ Thackeray asked.

‘There’s nothing wrong with my eyes, thank God,’ Foster said sharply. ‘Hearing’s a bit dodgy. Have to turn the television up, you know? But the vision’s A1. Anyway, I know Stuart. I’ve bumped into him once or twice at the diabetic clinic I go to. Doesn’t say much.’

‘And when was this exactly? Can you remember the day
you saw him with Christie?’ Mower asked, impatient again.

‘I went away on the 14th, so it must have been the 13th,’ Wright said, without hesitation. ‘The previous day was Monday and I don’t walk as far on Mondays because I go down into Bradfield to a lunch club for ex-officers I belong to. Get the 0900 bus, do any business I need to do in town, back on the 15.15. Doesn’t leave much time for a long walk, especially at this time of the year. So I’d say the 13th. At around fifteen hundred hours. I have my lunch while I listen to the one o’clock news, finish the chores and then normally go out about fourteen hundred. I’d been right up to the top of Pollock Hill that day and was on my way home when I saw them, at least an hour’s walk, so about fifteen hundred hours would be right.’

‘And was it a long conversation they were having? Did you notice that?’ Thackeray asked, taking the major’s accuracy as read, and thinking what a reliable witness he would make if these facts ever needed to be spelled out in court.

‘The Weldons were on foot, standing close to the driver’s window. I couldn’t see their car so maybe they’d walked up from the house and met Christie coming down the lane. But that’s speculation. I’d no idea what they were saying, of course. I was far too far away to hear them. But it looked like a pretty animated exchange, if you like. A bit of arm-waving going on. And I recall Bruce Weldon thumping the bonnet of the Land Rover quite sharply. And Christie drove off very fast, considering the other two were standing quite close to the Land Rover. Bit close to the toes, I thought.’

‘So it looked as though they’d been having a row? An argument of some sort?’ Thackeray asked.

‘Certainly could have been. What do they call it? Body
language? It was the body language. It didn’t look friendly. If they’d been a group of Arabs I’d been watching in Aden I would have put their conversation down as argumentative, even though I couldn’t hear it.’

‘Had you ever seen Christie with the Weldons before?’ Thackeray asked.

Major Wright thought for a moment.

‘I’m not a great pub man, myself. My wife and I preferred a less smoky atmosphere for one thing. But I pop into the Fox for a tot now and again. I’m not a beer man. Christie was usually in there in the evenings, as I understand it, but he wasn’t a man given to casual conversation. Always sitting in the same corner, back to the wall. But I did see him exchange words with Bruce Weldon once when I was in for a snifter after a meeting of the parish council. Weldon took him outside for a chat. I thought nothing of it. Why should I? Christie’s done odd jobs for most of the village over the last couple of years. He’s a good workman, knows his trade. Fixed my old mower for me when it packed up on me. Cornered the market in repairs since he’s been here. I just assumed Weldon wanted to talk to him about a job.’

‘Did you ever get any indication, from anyone, that Christie might be violent?’ Thackeray asked.

Wright shook his head. ‘I can’t honestly say that I was privy to much village gossip,’ he said. ‘Nor my wife. We don’t have close friends in Staveley. We moved here when I retired because of the access to the hills, which we both liked. Our friends are scattered – York, Richmond, on the south coast…a lot of people in the services don’t put down roots, you know. I got the impression that Christie was a bit like that. But it was only an impression. He looked like the sort of man who would pack his kit and be off
somewhere new at a moment’s notice. A lot of soldiers have to be like that when they’re in the service, and I suppose it’s a hard habit to shake off. Total mobility, we used to call it. I don’t think it’s much good for the soul, or for family life. I rather doubt it.’