Sins of the Fathers (2 page)

‘Right, guv,’ Mower said. He glanced around at the square stone cottage behind them, sheltered from the prevailing wind by a spur of dark millstone grit topped by heather and rough grass, and at the rutted lane and scrubby fields and patches of faded grassland between the Christie home and the rest of the village of Staveley. He shrugged. ‘Not many neighbours up here.’

‘Chat up the village. I was brought up in a place like this, remember? They’ll know everything there is to know about the Christies, and then some. The suburbs are creeping out here but they haven’t quite taken over yet.
There’ll still be plenty of folk who’ve spent their whole lives in a village like this and whose eyes are sharper than they ought to be. You’ll see. The wife must have done her shopping somewhere, the kids must have gone to school, he’s obviously got customers he’s been doing work for. They may have some idea where he could have gone. And when the scene of crime people have finished and you can get in there again, give me a call. I’m going back to HQ for now. I’ll report to the super and organise an incident room. This looks like one of those where we don’t need to work on the who, we just need to know the why for the coroner.’

‘Right, guv,’ Mower said again, wondering if it was ever possible to pin down anything as rational as a motive for such an unfathomable outburst of rage as this must have been.

‘What I’ve never understood in these cases is the arrogance of the fathers,’ Thackeray said slowly. ‘I can understand a man rowing with his wife, perhaps using violence, even killing her, but the kids as well? Why the hell does he need to kill the kids?’

It was a cry of pain and he turned away abruptly and got into the car, where Mower watched him briefly rest his head on the steering wheel, his shoulders hunched, before he started the engine. He let the wipers clear the snow off the screen, then eased the car forward and down the lane.

‘Jesus wept,’ Mower said to himself again, guessing how much of that story might have been Thackeray’s own, though never to the extent of violence turned against a child. He needs this case like he needs a hole in the head, he thought, and his sense of deep foreboding only grew as he turned back towards the cottage and steeled himself to face the slaughter inside again.

The snowfall accelerated its whirling descent almost as soon as Thackeray had driven away, and Mower realised that the forensics team would have difficulty amassing any evidence from the murder scene that was not under cover in the cottage or its outbuildings. He gingerly picked his way back towards the front door, astonished at how quickly the soft heavy flakes had begun to settle on the narrow paved pathway and the lawn in front of the house, but before he could go back inside he became aware of a flurry of activity behind him. He turned and found himself face to face with a small red-cheeked woman, her face barely visible beneath an enveloping hooded duffel coat and scarf, with snow clinging to her head and shoulders.

‘Whatever’s happened?’ she asked, breathlessly. ‘I knew there was summat wrong when I saw the ambulance come back down the lane with its lights flashing. Is someone hurt? Has there been an accident? Are Linda and the children all right?’

‘And you are?’ Mower asked.

‘Dawn Brough,’ the woman said, her agitation barely under control. ‘Linda’s a friend of mine. The kids are all at school together.’ She glanced at the cluster of police vehicles behind them. ‘Are you with the police? What on earth’s been going on?’

‘DS Kevin Mower, Bradfield CID,’ Mower said briefly. He brushed the snow off his hair irritably. ‘You’d better come and sit in one of the cars out of this stuff. We can’t go inside just now.’

The woman followed him obediently, her face pale and set, as if she had already guessed the truth, although Mower knew that what he had to tell her would far exceed her worst imaginings. As they huddled on the front seats of one of the patrol cars she listened to what Mower had to
say with her eyes full of tears, which eventually brimmed over and poured down her weather reddened cheeks.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’ve got a hankie.’ Mower reached awkwardly into one of his pockets and pulled out a packet of paper tissues which she used to dab her eyes dry.

‘It’s all right, Dawn,’ Mower said. ‘It must be a shock. Have you known the family long?’

‘Well, not the family, not really. It was just Linda and the kids. Gordon was an odd man, not friendly at all, you never got much more than a good morning or a good afternoon out of him if he was around. But I met Linda at the school gate, as you do, you know?’

That was a parental pleasure Mower was in no hurry to explore. If he had ever had any ambitions in that direction they had been brutally snuffed out some years before by a single bullet. But he contained his irritation and let the woman talk at her own pace, allowing her to come at least partly to terms with the unthinkable.

‘We both had one in a buggie at the time, when the Christies first arrived. My Jenny’s at school now. And little Louise is due to start next term.’ She hesitated, realising what she had said and the tears began to flow again. ‘Was due to start. Oh God, I can’t believe this…’

‘Let’s take this another way, Dawn,’ Mower said. ‘It’ll be easier for you. Tell me where you live, and when you first got to know the Christies. How about that? Have they lived up here long?’

‘No, not long. A couple of years, that’s all, two and a half, maybe a bit longer. My house is the first of the new ones at the end of the lane. We’re their closest neighbours, really, though it’s not that close, must be half a mile. I always thought this cottage was a bit isolated but Linda
never complained. It was on the market for ages before the Christies bought it. But when Linda and I discovered we both lived at this end of the village she started to bring Louise down for the afternoon sometimes, to let her and Jenny play together.’

‘And did you bring Jenny up here?’

‘Not really. Not nearly so much anyway. As I say, Gordon was a strange man. Unfriendly really, and he worked up here a lot, in his workshop at the back. I don’t think he liked visitors. I came up once or twice but I think she only invited me when she knew he’d be out. I never saw him much at all.’

‘You say they’d been here a couple of years. Do you know where they came from before they moved here?’

‘They lived abroad, I think. Spain, Portugal, somewhere hot. I don’t think Linda ever said where exactly, but she talked about how nice it was to live in a hot climate. Especially in the winter. I think this place got her down a bit. She didn’t seem like a country woman, to me, and as I say this cottage is a bit isolated, a bit remote.’ She glanced out of the window where the snow was now coming down hard and covering the windscreen. ‘Give this weather another couple of hours and you won’t be able to get up the lane without a four wheel drive. You can get really snowed in up here.’

Wonderful, Mower thought. Finding Gordon Christie looked like becoming more difficult by the minute. He started the engine and put the fan on hard.

‘What did Gordon drive then?’ he asked.

‘Oh, an old Land Rover thing. Not one of these smart new all-singing, all-dancing tanks with central heating. More the sort of muddy old thing the farmers use up on the moors. I don’t know how good it would be in the snow.
It looks clapped out, my husband always says.’

‘I don’t suppose you know the registration number, do you?’

‘No.’ Dawn Brough looked ready to cry again as she worked out the implication of the question. ‘He’s disappeared, hasn’t he? He’s not here?’

Mower shook his head briefly.

‘Did you have any idea he had a gun?’ he asked.

‘A gun? You mean a shotgun? A lot of the lads around here have shotguns. Shooting rabbits is a local sport. And lamping foxes at night.’

‘Not a shotgun. More likely a handgun, a pistol of some sort. Did Linda ever mention that he was interested in guns?’

Dawn shook head and swallowed hard before she answered.

‘I know he used to hit her,’ she said, her voice choked with emotion. ‘Linda never said owt. They don’t, do they, battered wives? But I saw the bruises. She couldn’t always hide them. I think he was a violent man and he beat her up. But what really upset me was that I once saw Scott with a bruise down the side of his face. He said he fell in the yard but I didn’t believe him and I didn’t know what to do about it…’

‘Scott? Who’s Scott?’ Mower interrupted her sharply.

‘Scott’s the son. There’s three children: Louise, Emma and Scott. He’s eight, I think, maybe nine now. Adored his dad, though I could never understand why.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Scott and Emma should be at school now, but they come home for lunch…’ She looked at Mower with wide horrified eyes.

‘Emma’s not at school, she’s in hospital,’ Mower said, all the sympathy gone from his tone now as he was seized
with a terrible sense of urgency. He revved the engine hard. ‘Show me where the school is,’ he said, letting in the clutch gently and skidding slightly across the fresh snow as he set off down the rutted lane. ‘We need to find Scott.’ But less than ten minutes later he found himself standing in frustration in the porch of the village school calling Michael Thackeray on his mobile and getting a less than perfect signal.

‘Guv,’ he said urgently. ‘Can you hear me? There’s a Christie son, called Scott, eight years old. He should be at school but the headmaster says he’s not. And he’s not one of the victims. Not that we’ve found so far, anyway. I think the father must have taken him with him. He drives an old Land Rover, apparently, so we need that chopper right now. The boy might just possibly still be alive.’

Laura Ackroyd sat with her legs tucked underneath her toying with a vodka and tonic and waiting for Michael Thackeray to come home. She had left the curtains open at the high sitting room window and could see the snow weighing down the trees in the garden outside. The fall had lasted the best part of the day but now the clouds had cleared, a crescent moon and Venus hung in the navy blue sky like jewels, apparently almost close enough to reach out and touch, and the world outside the warm flat was silvered and shimmering in the frost. But the wintry scene did not fill her with the exhilaration it might have done. She had spent a tense afternoon in the newsroom of the
Bradfield Gazette
trying to concentrate on her own work while nervously aware of the horrific story that was unfolding on the crime reporter’s computer screen nearby, knowing that the murders at Moor Edge cottage in Staveley would be the last thing Michael Thackeray needed after the traumatic death of his wife, Aileen, a couple of months earlier.

She had heard nothing from him all day and assumed that he still intended to come home for the meal she had prepared, which was now filling the flat with a savoury aroma that told her that it was ready. But she did not feel like banking on his arriving in time to eat it. She had almost
ceased banking on anything with Michael these days. Since she had sat beside him through Aileen’s requiem mass at her parents’ church in Northumberland, he had not, as far as she knew, had another drink. But his hand had clutched hers so fiercely throughout the service that she had lost all feeling in it by the time the coffin was carried out and they fell into line behind Aileen’s parents to move on to the burial at a bleak and windy hillside cemetery on the edge of the town. Back home, the iron control with which he usually conducted his life appeared to have returned, to the extent that she barely knew what he was feeling or thinking from one day to the next. They were speaking little and communicating anything of significance even less. The loss of Aileen, which should have been a relief after all the years she had spent in hospital, instead seemed to have cast a pall over their relationship which Laura had so far found no means of lifting.

She sighed and gazed at the bubbles in her glass, alert for the sound of a car on the road outside. But the surface had already been covered with compacted snow when she had parked her own Golf outside, and it would now be turning, she guessed, to ice. The blanket of snow muffled the normal sounds of the town going about its business and the silence seemed heavy and oppressive. She wondered if the police could still be searching for the murdered family’s father in the dark. She could not imagine that the fugitive was still alive. She was as convinced, as she guessed Thackeray would be, that cases like this did not usually have any sort of happy ending and she knew how that would crush him, though if past experience were anything to go by he would not tell her so. He would, as usual, say nothing at all.

‘Damn and blast,’ she said explosively as she got up to
turn the oven down in the kitchen and refill her glass. ‘How can men turn on their own children like that? It’s monstrous.’

On any other night she would have called her friend Vicky Mendelson to help unburden herself, but she knew that Vicky was away visiting her sick mother and there would be no opportunity to share confidences there. Even Vicky’s mobile phone was unreliable in the pocket of the Cumbrian valley where her mother’s cottage was. And as she sat on alone, sipping her third V and T and watching the moon slip slowly across the sky, her anger grew so that when she heard Thackeray’s key in the lock and he came into the room looking grey with fatigue, all she could think of to say was ‘Have you got him yet?’

Thackeray shrugged himself out of his coat and scarf.

‘No,’ he said. ‘You can’t put men on foot out there in conditions like this. The drifts on the moors are four foot deep. We’ve got the chopper up, looking for unusual signs of movement now the snow’s eased off. But I think he’s long gone. Judging by the state of the cottage the family were shot around breakfast time and not found until almost midday. He could have been out of the country by then.’

‘Or long dead,’ Laura said, vodka on an empty stomach making her bolder than she would normally have been in stepping into Thackeray’s domain.

‘And buried under the snow. It could be a week before we find them up there,’ he said.

‘Them?’ Laura said.

‘He seems to have taken his eight-year-old son with him,’ Thackeray said grimly. ‘I don’t really expect to find either of them alive, to be honest.’

‘I didn’t know about the son,’ Laura said, appalled.

‘We didn’t realise he was missing straight away,’ Thackeray said.

‘How can they do that?’ she asked. ‘Why do they imagine that if they die everyone else has to die with them? Arrogant bastards.’ Laura could not contain her anger, although she knew it would do neither of them any good.

‘Oh yes, they’re all of that,’ Thackeray said, turning away from Laura so that she could not see his face.

‘Can we eat?’ he asked, obviously as unwilling as she had expected to discuss his own reaction to the case.

Laura got to her feet somewhat unsteadily and crossed the room to put her arms round Thackeray’s neck.

‘We can eat,’ she said. ‘Or we can just go straight to bed. If you’re interested in that, at all?’

Thackeray disentangled himself from her embrace and flung himself down in a chair, not answering directly.

‘Sometimes I wonder if I can go on with this job any more,’ he said, and the words jolted Laura back into some sort of sobriety.

‘You don’t mean that,’ she said quietly. ‘The job’s part of you. You’re good at it. You know you can make a difference.’

‘How can I make a difference to a four-year-old child with not one but four bullet wounds in her back? What can I actually do about that, whether her killer is still alive or already dead? What bloody difference can I possibly make?’

‘Oh, Michael,’ Laura said, with tears in her eyes. ‘I’m sorry.’

Laura sat in the
Gazette
’s editorial conference the next morning doodling idly on her notepad as the chief reporter ran through the agenda of that afternoon’s council meeting
with mind-bending slowness. There must be, she thought, some connection between a reporter’s character and the specialism they chose to follow. She could easily imagine the paper’s crime reporter, Bob Baker, commonly to be seen, even in the office, in designer shades and a sharp suit, hustling for Mr Big in some sleazy scam, while sweet-faced Jane Archer, who liked nothing better than to write a feature about nursery schools or the downside of testing young children to destruction, looked as though she could run a Montessori establishment with her own eyes tight shut.

It was just the same with Steve Edwards, who was now boring the meeting rigid with an agenda even more tedious than the one which would occupy the town council’s cabinet for most of the day. She could remember a time when Steve had displayed some sparkle, even inviting her out once to a club in Leeds where an ecstasy-fuelled throng had danced until well after dawn. But the town hall job seemed to have sucked him in and spat him out altogether smaller and greyer and with all the life choked out of him. She must, she concluded, get herself out of the
Gazette
before some similar fate overtook her.

She was startled out of her daydream by the editor, Ted Grant, bellowing her name from the far end of the table.

‘Are you with us, then, Miz Ackroyd?’ Ted wanted to know, with a dangerous glint in his blue eyes, obviously having failed to gain any response to earlier inquiries. ‘Do we get owt on our feature pages today, or do I hand’em to sport for an extended inquest on United’s slim chance of escaping relegation to the Vauxhall bloody Conference?’

Laura grinned, and pushed a stray strand of copper hair out of her eyes, although she knew no charm offensive on her part would mollify Ted. The dislike, personal and
professional, was too long entrenched now for either to budge an inch and there had been more times than Laura could count when she had concluded that she had better jump ship before she was pushed. But this morning, at least she thought she had something which might mollify her boss.

‘For today we’ve got the stuff Jane did about the new technology academy they’re opening officially tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Loads of loot and a mission statement direct from God, apparently. But I thought for later in the week we ought to do a spin-off from these murders out at Staveley. It looks like another case where a father’s gone ape and wiped out his entire family. We’ve had a couple of these cases in the last twelve months. I looked up the cuttings. I thought some sort of background piece on the stresses that drive men to those lengths, why they get so desperate they want to take the kids with them, all that stuff, might make a good page. Obviously we can’t talk about this case in particular until they find the bloke and his son, but…’

‘Did you say his son?’ Grant asked suspiciously. ‘Do I know about a son?’ He hauled his substantial bulk upright and went to the door of his office. ‘Bob!’ he shouted across the busy newsroom. ‘Get in here, now.’

Bob Baker, looking flustered for once, did as he was told and stood awkwardly in the doorway under the concentrated gaze of the paper’s senior staff.

‘These murders out at Staveley. Laura here says there’s a kid missing as well as the father. Why don’t we know owt about that?’

Baker flashed Laura a look of unadulterated dislike.

‘My contacts are bloody good,’ he said. ‘But they’ll never be as close as hers, will they? Stands to reason, I can’t
compete with pillow talk. Officially no one’s said anything about a kid being missing, as far as I know.’

‘The eight-year-old son,’ Laura said, knowing that she had no choice although she realised with a sinking feeling in her stomach that she seemed to be breaking a confidence which she had not imagined existed. ‘So I’m told, off the record, of course.’

‘You’d better check it out,’ Grant said to Baker. ‘If they’re hunting for a kid on the moors in this weather that’s the front page lead, and it’s bloody late to be standing it up. Let’s get on with it, shall we? Chop chop! Soon as you like!’

The meeting broke up in disarray and Laura assumed she had gained permission by default to pursue some research into violent families. As she settled back into her desk she caught Bob Baker’s eye across the room.

‘Bitch,’ he mouthed at her, and she stuck out her tongue in response. She could not imagine why the police had failed to reveal to the
Gazette
that they were looking for Gordon Christie’s son as well as the man himself, but she had no sympathy to spare for Bob Baker. She knew he had made himself so unpopular at police headquarters that the Press office could conceivably have left him out of the loop deliberately. Baker had picked up his phone and now seemed to be shouting unintelligibly into it. Laura smiled to herself. Embarrassing Bob Baker was the least of her worries. In fact it constituted one of life’s little pleasures.

DCI Thackeray had arrived at the Christies’ isolated cottage by eight that morning, parking his car in the icy ruts that had been left by the dozen or more vehicles which had been up the snowy lane the day before. Not even a lowly panda car remained now, and the cottage faced the
world with blank, dark windows in the early morning light. With Kevin Mower on his heels, Thackeray had been waved through the front door by the uniformed constable stationed morosely in the porch. He was in a more steely frame of mind than he had achieved the previous day, determined not to let his own demons cloud his objectivity. The forensic examiners had completed their meticulous work by now, packed up their samples of blood and hair and fibre; fingerprints and footprints and traces and smears of unidentifiable materials had been found and collated; the pathetic bodies of the two victims discovered in the kitchen had been removed to the mortuary. The house had been left overnight, empty and forlorn, the detritus of everyday life all that remained of the family of five who had lived there until yesterday, the dirty breakfast dishes on the table the starkest indication of how normal service had been so catastrophically interrupted.

Thackeray came to a halt in the still blood-stained kitchen and took stock, aware that Mower was watching him while seeming not to. The place smelt of death and he swallowed hard to control his revulsion.

‘So let’s think what can this place tell us?’ he said, with unusual uncertainty. ‘Let’s assume, for now, it’s Christie we’re looking for, shall we?’

‘No one’s come up with any evidence that there was anyone else here, guv,’ Mower said mildly. ‘Forensics may say different, of course. But there’s no sign of a break-in.’

‘Right, so if it’s Christie we want, he evidently had a gun. Where did he keep it? He had a pretty ancient Land Rover. Where are the documents? He had a business. Was it in trouble? Did he have other financial worries? Did he have a dodgy past which caught up with him? Was he being treated by a doctor for anything, mental problems maybe?
In other words, what the hell motivated this massacre?’

‘There’s not always an obvious reason,’ Mower said. ‘These things sometimes come right out of the blue.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ Thackeray said. ‘There has to be some underlying cause, and it’s usually pretty obvious: marital trouble, financial trouble, depression. See if you can find his doctor. There can’t be more than one practice out this way.’

Mower nodded. ‘And his bank manager, his customers, and whatever family he has left,’ the sergeant enumerated. ‘So far everyone we’ve talked to in the village says they appeared here a couple of years ago, she was pleasant enough, he was the strong silent type, the kids were well behaved and well-turned out, and they never talked about where they came from.’

‘No visitors?’ Thackeray asked.

‘Not that anyone could recall, guv. Only customers. He was a good mechanic, by all accounts, and didn’t overcharge, so people were soon bringing him odd jobs. But Mrs Christie’s friend Dawn did say one thing which seemed a bit odd when I eventually got back to her. She said they didn’t seem short of money.’