Sins of the Fathers (13 page)

‘Well,’ Thackeray said, when they had finally taken their leave of the major. ‘There’s a few things Mr Bruce Weldon seems to have forgotten to tell us. Well worth a word, I think.’

‘See if we can catch him now, shall we?’ Mower asked.

‘Oh, I think so,’ Thackeray said, thinking of his office waiting for him at HQ, almost like a prison cell, and glancing up at the sky, which was an unseasonable blue with only a few clouds being whipped in from the west on an almost spring-like breeze. He took a deep breath. Bradfield was out of sight from Staveley, which nestled in a hollow sheltered from the east by a rocky spur of heather-covered hillside, and Thackeray was suddenly filled with an overwhelming desire to escape from the steep, cramped streets and the clatter of construction in the little town in the valley where the new century was catching up rapidly on the remnants of the nineteenth almost as though the twentieth had never been. Thackeray suddenly felt old and tired, and he was aware of the unspoken questions in Mower’s dark eyes as he waited for him to implement his decision.

‘Leave the car here,’ Thackeray said. ‘I feel like a walk. We’ll have a bite to eat at the pub afterwards.’ Mower concealed his surprise and glanced down at his Italian loafers. Walking for him was an unfortunate necessity, certainly not undertaken for pleasure. He glanced at the car and shrugged before setting off in step with Thackeray down the steep hill towards the Old Hall.

Bruce Weldon was at home and they were shown into his sitting room by the housekeeper and greeted politely enough though without enthusiasm. The two dogs with him looked up at their master inquiringly and sank down again when he glanced in their direction. While Mower was openly admiring the man’s Armani suit and tie, impeccably covering a slim-hipped broad-shouldered figure in a way that only serious money can buy, Thackeray was more conscious of the hint of strain on the tanned face and around eyes which did not echo the smile with which Weldon waved them into comfortable armchairs.

‘Is this about the Gordon Christie business again?’ Weldon asked with only the smallest hint of impatience. ‘I thought I’d told Gavin Hewitt everything I knew about the man.’

‘We thought you had done that,’ Thackeray said. ‘In fact, you could say we hoped and expected you had. But it now seems there’s a little more that you could have told us.’ Even the faint hint of a smile left Weldon’s face at that and the two officers were left in little doubt that this was a man who did not like to be crossed.

‘I don’t think so, Chief Inspector,’ he said brusquely. ‘I had very little contact with Christie.’

‘But you had some contact, not long before the killings, on the 13th in fact, according to a new witness we’ve been talking to.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Weldon said. ‘What day of the week would that have been?’ He pulled an electronic organiser from an inside pocket and thumbed a few buttons before shaking his head. ‘Tuesday the 13th? I was in Leeds all morning in meetings. As I recall I came home about 1.30, got changed and just got over to Broadley in time for a ride before dark.’

‘So you weren’t talking to Christie in the lane leading to his cottage that afternoon?’

‘Certainly not,’ Weldon said. ‘As I just said, I was only here for half an hour, at most. I distinctly remember the hurry I was in to get Broadley by 2.30.’

‘And your son, Stuart? Was he at home that day?’ Thackeray persisted.

Weldon shrugged an elegant shoulder.

‘I don’t recall seeing him when I came in,’ he said.

‘But that would have been before he went away on his current trip?’

Weldon glanced at his organiser again before he nodded.

‘Yes, Stuart didn’t go away until later that week, Wednesday or Thursday, I think. As I told PC Hewitt, we lead separate lives. I don’t always know where he is or what he’s doing. That’s the way he likes it.’

‘But he could have gone away on the same day that Gordon Christie apparently went berserk with a pistol?’

‘That was the Wednesday, wasn’t it? Yes, he could have done. That day or the next.’

‘And have you heard from him?’ Mower asked. ‘Do you know when he’s coming back?’

‘I haven’t, no,’ Weldon said, and Thackeray wondered if he was imagining the faintest flicker of anxiety on Weldon’s impassive features.

‘But you spoke to him about his car,’ Mower broke in. ‘You told PC Hewitt you had mentioned it to him…?’

Weldon hesitated for a fraction of a second. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I told Hewitt I
would
speak to him about it. When he gets in touch. He’s never been good at keeping in touch. His mother used to complain about it when he was away at school.’

‘And his mother is…?’

‘Divorced ten years ago,’ Weldon said, curt now. ‘She lives in Spain.’

‘Right,’ Thackeray said. ‘Would you let me know when your son turns up, please, Mr Weldon? I’ll need a word with him, too.’

‘Fine,’ Weldon said. ‘Though I can’t imagine why. I’d have thought your top priority would be to find Christie, if he’s still alive. Or are you assuming he’s lying dead somewhere on the moors? It could take months to find a body up there, I suppose.’

‘We’re making no assumptions, Mr Weldon,’ Thackeray said, recognising he was wasting his time and getting to his feet. ‘I won’t disturb you any longer, but I would like to speak to your son, when that’s convenient. Please?’

‘I’ll tell him when I see him,’ Weldon said without enthusiasm. The dogs wagged their tails tentatively as the visitors went to the door but Weldon quelled them with no more than a glance. Everything in this man’s life, Thackeray thought, was controlled with the likely exception of his son, and he wondered why Stuart was the exception.

Walking back up the village street to the Fox and Hounds after the electronic gates had closed soundlessly on Weldon’s immaculate gravelled entrance, Mower grunted in frustration.

‘What did you think?’ Thackeray asked.

‘Lying through his teeth,’ Mower said. ‘But clever with it. He’s admitted he was in the village at about the right time that day but with enough people to confirm that he was elsewhere most of the day. You can bet no one will be prepared to swear exactly what time he arrived in Broadley.’

‘What I find really odd is the absence of the son,’
Thackeray said. ‘Where the hell has he gone, and why? It might have nothing at all to do with Christie, but the timing says different. I think we need to talk to Stuart Weldon quite urgently, don’t you?’

DC Val Ridley sat by Emma Christie’s bed and watched the child intently. She had been moved downstairs to a side room off the main children’s ward that morning, and was now sleeping peacefully without the aid of all the technical paraphernalia which had kept her alive for almost a week. The knot of anxiety which had clenched Val’s stomach for all that time was gradually beginning to unravel and she was beginning to wonder where all her carefully nurtured detachment had gone. She had learned early in her career that whatever emotion she felt was safest concealed from thicker skinned colleagues who regarded any show of feeling as a sign of weakness. But somehow Emma Christie, this slight, ashen-faced figure with her head still swathed in bandages, had crept beneath her defences and left her vulnerable to the curious looks of Kevin Mower and even the DCI as she had found herself spending far more time at the child’s bedside than duty demanded.

Part of her self-defence had always been to keep memories of her own childhood safely locked away, but Emma’s uncertain future had inevitably reminded her of the time she had spent in a children’s home when her parents’ marriage had split up, and of the merciless bullying she had suffered from the other children there. She had wondered wildly, waking once or twice in the
middle of the night in something approaching panic, whether she could adopt Emma if no relatives came forward to take care of her, only to dismiss the idea as foolish and impracticable in the icy light of dawn. She was single, she worked long hours and, if she was honest, she had to admit she did not really know either her own capacity to be a mother or anything about Emma herself, she told herself irritably as she watched the white coverlet that covered the child almost imperceptibly rise and fall in time to her shallow breathing. Emma awake and smiling and playing happily in the sunshine was just a figment of her own imagination, Val thought dispiritedly. It was a seriously unlikely prospect when the news was eventually broken to her about the fate of the rest of her family. She had even wondered, in the dark hours before daylight filtered through the curtains, whether wanting Emma to recover was not a cruelty too far. She might have been better off if the bullet that had grazed her brain had penetrated more deeply and killed her.

Val reached out gently and touched Emma’s limp hand, imagining for a moment that she felt a response, before withdrawing as if she had been stung when the door opened behind her. One of the nurses she recognised from the intensive care ward put her head round the door looking worried.

‘Oh, she’s got you with her, has she?’ the woman said.

‘Someone’s going to be here with her all the time now in case she starts to talk. Is there a problem?’ Val asked, suddenly filled with suffocating anxiety again.

‘There was, possibly,’ the nurse said. ‘Or maybe we’re getting paranoid. An Asian woman came up to the ward upstairs without any obvious reason for being there, and shot off again when I asked her who she was looking for. I
lost track of her by the lifts so I think she must have come down to this level.’

‘Have you told security?’ Val asked quickly.

‘Yes, I have and they say they haven’t seen her leave the building. They’re looking at the CCTV tapes now. She’s pretty conspicuous: she was dressed in the whole long black number, with her face covered. You could only see her eyes.’

‘No guarantee she was even female, then,’ Val said, almost to herself, beginning to be seriously worried now. ‘Don’t worry about Emma. I’m staying here until I’m relieved at four. But I’ll pass it on to my people, just in case.’

When the nurse had left she went out into the corridor and called Kevin Mower on her mobile.

‘You could hide a sub-machine gun under those long black robes,’ he said sharply.

‘More likely a couple of cameras,’ Val said. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time a journalist has dressed up as a Muslim woman. Didn’t that BBC man do it in Afghanistan?’

‘Is it Vince Newsom of the blasted
Globe
again, d’you think?’ Mower snapped.

‘I don’t really know what to think,’ Val said. ‘It could be some perfectly innocent visitor who got lost. This place is pretty confusing if you don’t know your way around it. The CCTV should show us whether she’s left the building or not.’

‘If not, ask security to search the place until they find her,’ Mower said. ‘The brass will go potty if there’s many more stories in the
Globe
like this morning’s.’

But when Val got through to hospital security she found that they had anticipated police concerns and confirmed the justice of them. There had been no sign of a fully veiled
Asian woman leaving the building, but in a cubicle in the women’s lavatories near the main entrance they had found a black enveloping
jilbab
, discarded and bundled up in one of the rubbish bins.

‘So someone dressed entirely differently could have left the building?’ Val said angrily. ‘When I’m relieved here I’ll come down and look at your tapes and see if there’s anyone I recognise.’

‘Or maybe they’ve not left the building,’ the security officer at the other end of the phone said with a hint of satisfaction, as if anticipating some sort of police failure on his patch. ‘No way of knowing, love, is there, if you can’t tell us who we’re looking for? Not our fault.’

When Val hung up, she returned to Emma’s bedside to find the girl looking at her with intensely blue eyes sunk into their dark sockets.

‘Hi,’ Val said. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Where’s my mummy?’ Emma whispered, and closed her eyes again.

Michael Thackeray drove home that evening with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. He had left his office an hour before after a fraught meeting with Superintendent Jack Longley and had then taken a detour via one of the new town centre bars before picking up his car from the police car park. He knew the man he was meeting by sight, but little more. His opinion of him, which was very far from friendly, had been honed by the very public display of his work over the last couple of days and by a sharp memory of what Laura Ackroyd had told him about her stormy relationship with her former live-in lover. His worst expectations were more than met by the sight of Vince Newsom in the flesh, as he swept into the bar a
quarter of an hour after the time they had agreed to meet. The DCI had tracked him down earlier at the end of his mobile and insisted on talking to him face to face. The mobile was still attached to Newsom’s ear as he glanced round the bar and was only snapped shut when the reporter apparently recognised Thackeray.

Newsom had draped his camel overcoat over the back of a chair and sat down opposite the DCI, flicking his hair out of his eyes and grabbing the cocktail list from the centre of the table. The bar had been Newsom’s choice of rendezvous and Thackeray felt out of place in his slightly crumpled dark suit amongst the sharply dressed young couples enjoying after-work drinks at what he regarded as vastly inflated prices. Newsom glanced at Thackeray’s glass, half full of gold liquid, with a look of near contemptuous inquiry.

‘Another?’ he asked. Thackeray had shaken his head. The sweet fruit cocktail had already furred his teeth and settled like lead in his stomach. Vince Newsom shrugged and ordered a
Margarita
and, while he waited for it to arrive, he leaned back in his seat and eyed the policeman with frank curiosity.

‘Well,’ he said at length. ‘How’s Laura? Still as spikey as ever from what I’ve seen of her.’

‘I didn’t come here to talk about Laura,’ Thackeray said, knowing he risked sounding pompous.

‘So why did you come here?’ Newsom retorted as the waitress put his salt-rimmed glass in front of him. ‘A bit of a briefing on this Christie case sounds good to me. Why haven’t you found your man yet? Dead or alive?’

‘You’ll have to put questions like that to the Press office,’ Thackeray said. ‘What I wanted to talk to you about, off the record for the moment, although we can do
this down at the nick if you prefer, is where you’re getting your information from.’

‘Oh, come on, Chief Inspector,’ Newsom scoffed. ‘You know as well as I do if you’re still shacked up with Laura that we’re never going to tell you that. It’s for me to know and you to find out – if you can.’

‘If your source is one of my officers you can be sure that I will find out, and they’ll be out of the force before their feet can touch the ground,’ Thackeray said.

‘My lips are sealed, chief inspector,’ Newsom said with a smirk.

‘The other thing I want to know – and this is even more serious – is whether you tried to gain access to Emma Christie again today.’

‘Again? Who said I’d ever gained access to her?’ Newsom countered, his face darkening. ‘Although if she’s awake now, I assume she can have visitors? D’you think grapes or jelly babies would be best?’ His flippant tone infuriated Thackeray but he choked back his anger.

‘Until we find whoever shot her I’m responsible for the safety of that child,’ he said. ‘This isn’t a game. Her life could still be in danger. I’ll ask you again: did you try to see her today?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ Newsom said and, although he did not want to, Thackeray believed him. ‘But surely you’re joking, aren’t you? You think her father would come back and finish the job off?’ Newsom’s tone was incredulous now. ‘In which case you must think Christie’s alive? And armed? Well, that’s tomorrow’s story, no problem. “Emma Under Threat From Mad Dad”. How’d that suit you as a headline?’

‘I didn’t say that,’ Thackeray countered angrily, realising he had said too much. ‘And if you allege I did, I’ll deny it.’

‘Oh, I don’t need to quote you, Michael,’ Newsom said easily. ‘You know that. We wouldn’t want you booted out of the force before your feet touch the ground, would we? What would sweet Laura do then, poor thing?’

Thackeray had got to his feet then, steadying himself for a second on the table before straightening up. His stomach churned and he had to make a distinct effort not to use the fist bunched at his side to wipe the smirk off Newsom’s face.

‘Talk to the Press office,’ he said at last, through gritted teeth.

‘Oh, sure,’ Newsom scoffed. ‘Are you going so soon?’

Thackeray had walked away stiffly, his face a rigid mask of fury, with Newsom’s final jibe ringing in his ears. ‘Give my love to Laura. Tell her I miss her.’

What Thackeray could not know was that when he had gone the reporter had picked up his glass and sniffed the mixture suspiciously before tasting it. He savoured the fruit cocktail with distaste, which was quickly followed by a faint smile of triumph.

‘Alkie,’ he said under his breath. ‘I thought so. Oh, Mr Thackeray, you just made a big mistake. And I’ll have you for it.’

Laura had given up trying to tempt Thackeray’s palate onto the wider shores of culinary adventure. Years of traditional Yorkshire cookery – heavy on meat and potatoes and light on herbs and spices – and snatched snacks on long, erratic shifts had left him deeply suspicious of the unfamiliar and the exotic. She had tried to educate his taste buds out of their rut and steer them in a more southerly or easterly direction but had reluctantly had to accept that the road to this particular man’s heart involved
traditional fare, however unhealthy: steak, sausages, battered fish and mountains of chips and mashed potatoes.

This evening she had picked up a steak at the supermarket on the way home, peeled potatoes and prepared mushrooms for what she knew was his favourite meal, but realised with foreboding as soon as he walked through the door and flung his coat down on the sofa that even this might fail to lighten his mood.

‘A bad day?’ she asked, as he came into the kitchen behind her and kissed the back of her neck.

‘Not good,’ he said.

She turned the heat down under the pans and turned towards him, taking in the deep lines that were developing around his mouth and the dark circles under his eyes. He was having far too many bad days, she thought, but knew that until he had resolved the mystery surrounding the shootings at Staveley he would be haunted by what he had seen at the cottage that day and would never discuss with her or anyone else. But as she ran a hand down his cheek she realised that tonight there was something else.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked, steering him into the living room and pouring two drinks, one tonic with vodka and one without. She handed him a glass.

‘I just had a drink with that bastard Vince Newsom,’ he said. The unexpectedness of that piece of information threw Laura for a moment and she looked at Thackeray in astonishment.

‘Whatever for?’ she asked.

‘Someone tried to get in to see Emma Christie this afternoon. I thought it might be him.’

‘And was it?’

Thackeray shrugged. ‘He says not,’ he said. ‘But I wouldn’t put it past him, would you? You know what the
Globe
’s like. You know what he’s like. You, better than most. In some ways I’d rather it was him. Someone else might be worse.’

‘You mean she might be in danger?’ Laura asked, shocked.

‘I don’t know anything about this case any more,’ Thackeray said. ‘I don’t know who shot them, I don’t know where Gordon Christie is, I don’t know whether he’s dead or alive, I don’t really know who he is and what he was doing in Staveley, and all I get from upstairs is obstruction.’

‘What do you mean, obstruction?’ Laura said. ‘Where’s the obstruction coming from?’

‘I don’t even know that. And I certainly shouldn’t be telling you all this. It seems pretty obvious to me that Christie and his family were hiding from something or someone. But whether they were hiding from the authorities or being hidden by them is totally obscure. And no one, it seems, wants to tell me one way or another. I had a session with Jack Longley this afternoon and he more or less told me to leave Christie’s background alone. It wasn’t relevant, he said, though I know he was just repeating what he’d been told to say.’

‘That’s outrageous,’ Laura said quietly. ‘Where’s upstairs, in this case. If not Jack Longley, who? The Chief Constable, or somewhere else?’

‘Oh, somewhere else, undoubtedly,’ Thackeray said. ‘If county had him on some sort of local witness protection scheme there’d be no problem in telling me now, even if I’d been out of the loop earlier, for security reasons. This is coming from elsewhere. County’s being leaned on and it’s making the whole inquiry twice as difficult as it need be. There are still leads to follow but no encouragement to
follow them.’ Thackeray thought back to his latest fractious meeting with Longley when he had outlined the suspicions that Bruce Weldon and his absent son had aroused, suspicions that Longley had dismissed with little interest. ‘Wait for the forensics,’ he had said yet again. ‘Don’t waste time or resources until we know whether he’s dead.’