Sins of the Fathers (7 page)

‘You can clean t’mud off when we get back to base,’ his partner said irritably.

‘Happen,’ the driver said. ‘But what’s that then if no one’s been down here?’

He pointed at a car parked at the back of the hollow rocky bowl left by years of quarrying. ‘Someone didn’t want that seen, did they?’

‘The chopper should have picked it up. They’ve been over often enough in the last few days.’

‘Well, they didn’t, did they?’ the driver said
triumphantly
, stopping the car and unbuckling his seat belt. ‘Let’s have a look, shall we? If it does nowt else, it’ll get Sergeant Elsey off our backs. Though it’s not the Land Rover we’re supposed to be looking for.’

When they reached the car, a sporty looking Honda, they realised that the overhanging cliff of rock above them, plus a heavy covering of snow which still lingered on the shaded side of the quarry might well have made the car invisible from above. The driver cleared the remaining wet snow from the number plate, radioed headquarters for a check on the vehicle’s ownership and peered through the car windows curiously. The vehicle was locked and the tax disc on the windscreen was up to date.

‘Belongs to someone in t’village,’ he said when the answer came back. ‘A Stuart Weldon, of the Old Hall, Staveley. Happen we’d best go and ask Mr Weldon if he knew his car’s been hidden up here. Seems a bit of an extreme way to avoid getting clamped, doesn’t it? Most likely it’s been nicked and dumped, and someone’s planning to come back for it later when the heat’s off.’

Laura Ackroyd put the phone down and ran a hand through her red curls in exasperation as she considered the unexpected intrusion. She had got home early with the intention of calling Michael Thackeray in private, away from the hubbub and intrusive curiosity of the newsroom. She wanted to know whether or not Dawn Brough had been as good as her word and contacted the police to pass on the revelations she had shared with Laura that afternoon. The last thing Laura wanted was to lay herself open to the accusation that she had gained relevant knowledge of the Christie case and not passed it on.
Keeping her own career and Thackeray’s judiciously separate was like walking a tightrope, she thought, and one of these days one of them would fall off. She just hoped the drop was not too damaging.

As she had opened the door of the flat at five thirty, the telephone was already ringing and she snatched it up slightly breathlessly, flinging her coat and bag onto the settee as she did so. The voice which greeted her, distorted by a mobile connection which came and went erratically, but still only too instantly recognisable, was one from the past she had absolutely no wish to hear again.

‘Hey, babe,’ carolled Vince Newsom, the former boyfriend whom Laura had ejected from her flat and, she hoped, her life, several years before. ‘I’m on my way up the motorway to your neck of the woods, sweetie, to follow up this story of the poor little abandoned kid you wrote about yesterday. Nice one, that. Any chance of meeting up for a quickie this evening?’

Laura swallowed hard.

‘No chance, Vince,’ she said, with as much ice in her tone as she could inject.

‘Oh, come on, darling,’ Vince persisted. ‘I could make it worth your while – one way or another.’

‘Get lost,’ Laura said.

‘Oh dear,’ Vince said, the connection sharpening so there was no doubt of the contempt behind the banter. ‘Settled down, have we? You’re not still with that gloomy copper you fancied, are you?’

‘That’s none of your business,’ Laura said.

‘I only meant I may need a bit of local input on this story,’ Vince said, angry now. ‘The
Globe
’s not ungenerous on that sort of help, and I don’t expect the
Gazette
has upped its miserable rates of pay since I left, has it? I’m
staying at the Clarendon, if you want to get hold of me.’

‘I don’t want to know, Vince,’ Laura said. ‘You’ll have to do your own legwork on this one. And don’t bother to call again.’ She broke the connection angrily, knowing that she was unlikely to avoid bumping into Vince if he spent any time in Bradfield building up Emma Christie’s plight into a full-blown London tabloid tear-jerker. And where the
Globe
led, the other papers would probably not be far behind. She smiled grimly. Emma’s nurses hadn’t seen anything in the way of Press intrusion yet, she thought. If Emma did wake up, she might need a 24-hour guard to keep the
paparazzi
at bay.

Angrily, she threw herself into a little energetic housework, and after a frenzy of polishing and Hoovering, she began to prepare an evening meal for herself and, she hoped, Thackeray. Left to herself, she knew that she might rely on ready-meals and the microwave oven, but Thackeray was a traditionalist about food and although his timekeeping was highly unreliable, she did her best to satisfy his appetite for home-cooking. Tonight, as she had the time, she put a lamb casserole in the oven and peeled potatoes before she tried to contact him by phone again. But when she called CID she was put onto Sergeant Kevin Mower.

‘He’s in with the super,’ Mower said. ‘Can I give him a message?’

‘One reason I was calling was to ask if Dawn Brough, Linda Christie’s friend, had been in touch. I talked to her this morning and advised her to tell you lot what she told me about the family. Has she been in contact?’

‘Not that I know of,’ Mower said. ‘Was there anything particularly significant?’

Laura hesitated for a second. She did not make a habit
of passing on information to the police that she had picked up in an interview, but Dawn Brough’s unexpected suggestion that Mrs Christie might have been having an affair struck her as too serious to ignore. She told Mower what Dawn had said.

‘It may be nothing,’ she said. ‘She may have got it completely wrong. But I thought you’d want to check it out. It could be the reason for what happened, couldn’t it? And the reason you’ve not found Gordon Christie and the boy? Perhaps he attacked his wife, and the girls got in the way, so he took the boy and ran.’

‘Whoa,’ Mower said, laughing. ‘You’re running away with yourself. But I’ll pass it on and I’m sure we’ll check it out. There’s still no sign of Christie or the boy, so it’s quite possible they’re still alive somewhere. Let’s hope so.’

But when Michael Thackeray finally came home a couple of hours later, he appeared even more pessimistic than usual and was dismissive of Laura’s revelations.

‘There’s a pattern in these cases,’ he said. ‘And a hundred places up in the hills where Christie’s body could be. And the boy’s as well. They may not turn up till the spring when the sheep farmers let the flocks up onto the tops again and take a look at some of the more isolated barns. We’ve had forty men up there again all day today and all they’ve come up with is one apparently stolen car belonging to someone in Staveley who’s away on holiday, according to his father. We can’t spare that sort of manpower for much longer if that’s all they’re going to come up with. We’re going to have to scale the search down.’

‘You don’t think they’re alive, do you?’

‘Not really,’ Thackeray said, his eyes bleak. ‘There’s not been a single sighting of Christie or the Land Rover since
he disappeared. I thought at first he must have made a run for it with the boy, but now I’m not so sure. I’m more inclined to think he’s driven the vehicle into one of the reservoirs, or into a bog. But you can’t search the whole of the Pennines indefinitely. We all know there are bodies on those moors that haven’t been found for fifty years or more, even though we know roughly where they’re buried.’

Thackeray’s expression was resigned and Laura longed to take him in her arms, but was even more afraid of the sort of rebuff which had been becoming more frequent recently. This case was getting to him in ways which she could only begin to guess at, and she could find no way to comfort him, or even persuade him to admit that anything was wrong.

‘The nationals are beginning to take an interest in Emma Christie,’ she said. ‘I heard the
Globe
is sending someone up.’

‘That’s no bad thing,’ Thackeray said unexpectedly. ‘Someone may recognise her or her brother and come forward with some information. The
Gazette
and the local radio stations haven’t been very effective so far. I’m beginning to think the family must have come from some other part of the country originally. No one in Yorkshire’s taking a blind bit of notice.’

‘Right,’ Laura said cautiously. She knew that Thackeray would be less than pleased to discover that the
Globe
’s knight in shining armour would turn out to be Vince Newsom, but she didn’t intend to tell him that tonight. His mood was dark enough already. Hopefully Vince would discover that an unconscious child gave him as little purchase on a dramatic story as it had given her, and that his stay in Bradfield would be both frustrating and brief. Laura sighed.

‘What are you thinking?’ she asked softly. ‘Not about this awful case, but about us? I never know these days.’ But Thackeray did not answer, his expression hardening and his eyes distant, and eventually Laura stood up and went to bed alone.

Jason Fearnley, cocooned like an Arctic explorer in his padded jacket and with a thick brown muffler covering his nose and mouth against the fierce north wind, wrestled his quad bike over the rough unfenced terrain beyond his small hill holding. He had lost three ewes, pregnant but no less silly for that, who had somehow scrambled clear of their walled field close to the farmhouse and wandered out of sight on the open moor, where in the summer they were let loose to graze.

‘Damnation,’ Jason said as the bike skidded almost out of control on the greasy surface, sodden with melted snow. The perilous economics of hill farming meant that the loss of any ewe and the lamb she was carrying was a serious anxiety. The loss of three would be a heavy blow. He brought the bike to a precarious halt on the edge of an outcrop of rock and scanned the moors which spread out in all directions, a patchwork of dark rock, last season’s battered swathes of burnt umber bracken and pale, desiccated, moorland grasses. Hefted sheep would not wander beyond their normal grazing land, but that allowed these three several square miles of familiar space in which to lose themselves; square miles that still harboured deep snow drifts and sodden bog at this time of the year.

Below him he could see the dilapidated drystone walls
that hemmed in his small enclosed fields and the farmhouse where he had left his wife cooking breakfast. His stomach told him that it was past time to be back in the warmth of the house tucking in to a loaded plate and a mammoth mug of sweet tea, but there was little chance of that just yet.

‘I should have fettled that wall before I brought them in,’ he muttered angrily to himself, knowing that his present predicament was due as much to his own carelessness as to the sheep’s inherent urge to wander. Suddenly something unusual caught his eye. Where the snow had drifted three or four feet deep against the remains of a wall that struck out across the moor, he could just discern an indeterminate bundle lying in the melting snow, a bundle which could possibly be a dead ewe, possibly a sack of fly-tipped rubbish, or just possibly something worse. He turned the bike and stormed and bounced down the slope, cursing himself under his breath for his lax husbandry. But as he got closer he realised it was not a sheep that lay huddled there, and he knew, with an uncomfortable lurch in his stomach, that what he had found was human and probably as dead as he feared his ewes might be.

An hour later DCI Michael Thackeray and Sergeant Kevin Mower leaned against the same drystone wall, watching the pathologist Amos Atherton crouching awkwardly above the huddled body of a young boy who, they all assumed, must be Scott Christie. Thackeray drew deeply on a cigarette, as if his life depended on it, while Mower seemed more interested in the damage being inflicted by mud and snowy slush on his shoes. He remembered being told to keep a pair of wellingtons in his car boot when he first came to Bradfield and realised yet
again what a mistake it had been not to listen to that sage Yorkshire advice.

Atherton glanced in the officers’ direction, puffing slightly as he eased his heavy frame into a more comfortable position.

‘There’s no sign of trauma,’ he said.

‘He wasn’t shot?’ Thackeray asked.

‘No blood, no wounds.’ Atherton’s tone was irritable, as if he had expected to have made himself clear enough already. ‘If he was out here for any length of time in the snow, the likely cause will be hypothermia. The way he’s curled up tells you he was probably trying to keep warm, poor little sod.’

‘And he wasn’t carried here and dumped?’

Atherton scrambled to his feet and stepped back from the body, his breath coming in steamy gusts.

‘I couldn’t swear to it, but the way he’s lying says he was alive when he lay down there. His hood was pulled up, his arms round his knees, classic foetal position you’d adopt if you were still conscious but bloody cold. Of course, if he was carried out here and dumped you’ll not find any trace of it now, with the snow almost gone and all this mud churned up. Get your forensic teams up here if you like, but I reckon they’ll be wasting their time. They’ll not find owt.’

‘He’s less than half a mile from the farmhouse,’ Mower objected. ‘Surely if he was on his feet he’d have made it down there.’

‘You ever been out in a blizzard up here, lad?’ Atherton asked with some asperity. ‘He’d not see a hand in front of his face for a start, let alone a house as far away as that. And a child as small as him would soon find it difficult to walk at all in deep, drifting snow. Once he was off the road in
that weather he didn’t stand much of a chance unless someone actually fell over him.’

‘He’d just go to sleep, presumably?’ Thackeray asked, hoping against hope that the falling asleep had been gentle.

Atherton shrugged.

‘That’s what they say,’ he said. ‘But they don’t often wake up to tell you about it, do they?’

‘But what the hell was he doing wandering around up here on his own? Was he really running from his own father?’ Thackeray asked and Mower recognised the pain behind the question.

‘He must have been running from whoever shot the rest of the family,’ Mower said quietly. ‘Whether it was the father or not.’

‘So maybe Christie is up here somewhere,’ Thackeray said. ‘Maybe he lost track of the boy in the blizzard, and gave up and finished himself off. Or just lay down to die himself. We’ll have to keep the search going now. The super won’t be too enchanted with that. It’s costing a fortune in overtime already.’

‘If he’s up here, where’s the Land Rover?’ Mower objected. ‘A body’s hard to find but a bloody Land Rover shouldn’t be.’

Thackeray sighed, trying to fight off the black depression which had threatened to overwhelm him as he tramped across the soggy moor to Scott Christie’s last resting place.

‘Come on,’ he said, suddenly pulling himself back into some semblance of normality. ‘There’s nothing more we can do up here.’ He turned to Atherton who was packing his bag already.

‘Let me know if anything unexpected turns up at the post-mortem,’ he said. He was thankful that this was one
dissection he did not have to attend as it appeared to be an accidental death.

As they turned away, Jason Fearnley, who had been perched some distance away on his unwieldy bike watching the proceedings, wrapped himself up again in his muffler and tucked it into the collar of his jacket.

‘Is that it then?’ he asked. ‘You don’t need me any more?’

‘We’ll need a statement later,’ Mower said. ‘I’ll get a uniformed officer to come and see you this afternoon, okay? It looks as if he simply got lost and died of cold.’

‘If I’ve found my bloody ewes, I’ll be at home,’ Fearnley said sourly. ‘At this rate, all I’m going to find is three more bloody dead bodies.’ There was a glimmer of sympathy in Thackeray’s eyes as he nodded his farewell to the farmer. It was a hard life on these hills, as he knew only too well from watching his own father’s ultimately vain struggle to keep a small sheep farm going. Fearnley’s permanent battle to wrest a living up here in all weathers could have been his own if his life had taken a different turn and an ambitious teacher at his school in Arnedale had not encouraged him – an unexpectedly bright country boy – not to any old university, but to Oxford and towards, he had obviously hoped, life’s glittering prizes. And much good that had done him in the long run, he thought bitterly, as he turned away and strode in sturdy boots down the hill towards the road and the parked police vehicles, leaving Mower slipping and sliding on Italian leather in his wake.

As they approached the road again they noticed a car they did not recognise parked on the muddy verge behind the police and emergency vehicles, and as they got closer two men got out, one carrying the paraphernalia of a photographer.

‘Morning, Mr Thackeray,’ the other said cheerily. ‘Have you found anything significant up there?’ Thackeray looked at the tall man in padded jacket and wellingtons and, although he looked familiar, he did not immediately put a name to the good-looking, tanned face beneath the floppy fair hair.

‘Vince Newsom, the
Globe
,’ the not-quite-stranger said, holding out a hand which Thackeray ignored. ‘You remember me? I’m up here to do something on this Christie family murder.’ He glanced up the hillside down which Thackeray and Mower had just slid and up which a couple of ambulancemen in bright green waterproofs were beginning to climb.

‘Have you found Christie then?’ Vince persisted. Thackeray turned away, his expression frozen, and left it to Mower to deal with Newsom.

‘If you get in touch with the Press office at county HQ, there’ll be a statement later,’ the sergeant said briefly. The photographer had by now attached his telephoto lens and was snapping the huddle of police officers who remained partly hidden by the drystone wall half a mile up on the side of the hill.

‘There’s nothing for you here,’ Mower said angrily, and turned to the car, while Newsom and the photographer shrugged and began climbing up the steep slope themselves.

‘Bloody ghouls,’ Mower said as he struggled into the driving seat and eased the zip on his padded jacket a fraction before trying to wipe some of the mud off his loafers with a paper tissue. He glanced at his boss and wondered why he was gazing out of the car window so fixedly.

‘I don’t envy the farmer working up there in this
weather, either,’ he said. ‘Bloody nightmare.’

‘It’s a dying way of life,’ Thackeray said,
noncommittally
.

‘So what now, guv?’ Mower asked as he started the engine and swung the car onto the narrow road, which wound a tortuous course from Staveley to the villages on the west-facing, Lancashire slopes of the Pennines.

‘It looks as if we’re back where we started,’ Thackeray said. ‘Just one body worse off. A family dead, a father missing.’ He lapsed into silence as the scene at the Christie’s house leapt in all its bloody detail into his mind’s eye again, as it had been doing ever since he had first walked blindly away from it on the first day of this case. Mower took one glance at the frozen expression in Thackeray’s eyes and said no more, concentrating on negotiating the sharp bends as the road dropped precipitately from the high moors back into Staveley village. As they slowed at the first of the stone cottages, Thackeray put a hand on Mower’s arm.

‘Stop at the pub,’ he said.

‘Any special reason?’ Mower asked, with a crooked smile. Thackeray’s reasons for stopping at a pub did not include the normal everyday need Mower still felt, and cautiously indulged, for a pint or two of ale.

‘I want to talk to the landlord. Something Laura picked up when she was doing interviews in the village yesterday.’ Mower raised a laconic eyebrow at that. It was not often Thackeray acknowledged any exchange of information between himself and his girlfriend, in either direction.

‘The possible boyfriend?’ Mower said as he parked the car in the empty car park at the side of the Fox and Hounds. ‘She did pass that on earlier. Maybe I forgot to tell you.’

It was eleven o’clock and the pub did not look as if it had opened its doors yet. But when the two men tried the main entrance they found it unlocked and inside Gerry Foster, the landlord, was busy behind his bar stacking bottled lagers on his chilled shelves. He looked up at his visitors without enthusiasm or any sign of recognition.

‘Mr Foster?’ Thackeray asked, pulling his warrant card from his inside pocket and offering it across the bar. ‘DCI Thackeray. I wonder if we could have a talk about Linda Christie.’

Foster was as tall and as broad as Thackeray himself but his expression was difficult to read behind the dark beard, which hid his mouth and gave him a slightly piratical air of menace. His eyes remained deeply unfriendly as he surveyed his visitors.

‘Oh, aye?’ he said. ‘And what about Linda Christie?’

‘Are you married, Mr Foster?’ Thackeray asked.

‘I am,’ the landlord said. ‘You can’t run a place like this on your own. My wife takes care of the catering. We’re not one of these poncey gastro-pubs, but we do sandwiches and snacks. You have to these days. Folk want to eat while they drink in case you lot catch’em over the limit on the way home.’

‘Is your wife in?’ Thackeray asked. The question was straightforward but Mower knew from the tension that it generated that it carried a heavy weight. There was a battle of wills going on between the other two men which he did not quite understand yet.

‘She’s gone to the cash and carry,’ Foster said. ‘Won’t be back for an hour.’

‘You’re in luck, then,’ Thackeray said.

Foster said nothing but Thackeray merely waited as the silence between them grew electric. In the end, the
landlord shrugged in surrender and ran a hand across his mouth and beard.

‘Some beggars been gossiping, have they? We thought we’d been pretty careful.’

‘You were having an affair with Linda Christie?’ Thackeray asked, though it was more of a statement than a question.

‘If you could call it that,’ Foster said bitterly. ‘It was hardly
Footballers’ Wives.
It was pathetic really, looking back. We got to know each other a bit last summer when we were both involved at the school. For me, it was more like running a branch of the Samaritans than owt else, as it goes. She was desperate for someone to talk to about Gordon and at first that’s all we did. She’d come in here for a lemonade or summat after the meetings, something he wouldn’t pick up on her breath, and I’d walk her back up the lane to see she got home safely.’

‘But it went further than that?’ Thackeray persisted.

‘In the end, yes. We went up on the moors in the car, like a couple of teenagers. I knew it was stupid, I knew Gordon Christie was a stroppy bastard and he’d go ape if he found out. And my missus wouldn’t have been best pleased, neither. But you know how it is. Two unhappy marriages and the chance offers? You take it, don’t you?’

‘Did you not think that you were putting Mrs Christie at risk?’ Thackeray found it hard to keep the contempt he felt for Foster out of his voice. He bunched his fists inside the pockets of his coat until the nails dug into the palms.