Sins of the Fathers (9 page)

‘There’s another possibility if you know our scallies,’ Hesketh said sourly. ‘Someone found the body, nicked the gun as a useful accessory and then torched the Land Rover for a laugh. Not just one crime but several, and more to come if the automatic’s on the streets of Moss Side now. All round, it’s a pity you didn’t keep your Mr Christie on your side of the Pennines, Mr Thackeray. With respect, of course.’

Dawn Brough sat in silence by Emma Christie’s bedside, twisting a paper tissue in her hands until it disintegrated into damp shreds between her fingers. She knew she was doing neither Emma or herself any good by maintaining this intermittent vigil she had taken upon herself, but she had found herself drawn into town again that morning after she had dropped her own children off at school. She did not understand why she felt so driven to make the journey to the infirmary, except by owning to some sort of overwhelming mothering instinct that she could not explain to herself let alone her husband, who told her irritably that she was wasting her time and should concentrate on her own kids.

This morning she thought that Emma’s breathing sounded more regular – normal even – than on her previous visits, and the screens and dials which flickered above the bed did not appear to her to be doing such a frantic dance today. But she did not know whether this meant anything and the nurses were too busy to be approachable and merely seemed relieved that the unconscious child had a visitor ready to sit beside the unwrinkled white covers of the bed and occasionally make contact with Emma’s limp hand.

The one person Dawn had spoken to on her last visit had been DC Val Ridley, who had stood up when she arrived, as if ready to leave. She had looked at her interrogatively and Dawn had felt obliged to explain awkwardly who she was.

‘She doesn’t seem to have any family left,’ she had whispered in embarrassment, but the police officer had smiled warmly at her.

‘We’ve not been able to find anyone at all yet,’ she said. ‘I’m sure there must be someone, but maybe abroad or
something. It’s really good of you to take the trouble. I feel awful about her lying here all alone, too. She’s bound to want her mother when she does wake up.’

Dawn had nodded, on the edge of tears, and had been thankful when Val had rushed off, promising to come back when she could.

‘We need to talk to her, you see,’ Val had said, as if in self-justification as she went, and Dawn guessed that there was more to it than that. Sitting by the bed again today, at one end of the busy ward, she occasionally glanced towards the door, half hoping that Val would appear again. But no one came or went except a couple of anxious-looking relatives who hurried down to the far end of the ward, where a huddle of medical staff were gathered around the bed of a young man swathed in bandages and high-tech equipment.

Dawn shuddered. She hated this place and wished more than anything that she did not feel this overwhelming need to be here. She glanced at her watch again. Soon she would have to leave to be in time to collect her own children from school. That was the only thing that seemed even more important at the moment than seeing Emma. At least, she thought, her younger child, Jenny, had not shown any apparent curiosity about the sudden disappearance of her friend Louise, but Stephen had taken the loss of Scott Christie hard, asking about him constantly over the days when his whereabouts had been uncertain, and storming about the house like an angry whirlwind the previous evening when Dawn had gently explained to him that his friend would not be coming back. How could anyone do that? Dawn asked herself for the hundredth time, and for the hundredth time could find no answer.

She glanced back to the small figure in the bed beside her and drew a sharp breath in surprise as she realised that Emma’s eyes were open and staring at her, though barely focused.

‘Emma?’ Dawn said quietly, taking the child’s hand again. Emma did not seem to hear her. Dawn glanced up and down the ward, feeling herself trembling slightly, and eventually caught the eye of a harrassed looking nurse.

‘She’s awake,’ Dawn said, her breath coming quickly.

The nurse looked at Emma dispassionately for a moment, but the child’s gaze never flickered as the adults bent over the bed.

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘I’ll get the doctor to come over and have a look at her when he’s free.’

‘Will she remember what happened?’ Dawn asked, but the nurse just shrugged.

‘They seldom do,’ she said. ‘And with the head wound it’s even less likely. There may be brain damage…’

‘It might be better not to remember,’ Dawn whispered but found she was talking to herself as the nurse hurried away. She took Emma’s hand and squeezed it gently, but there was no reaction and after a couple of minutes she closed her eyes again with a faint sigh, as if the effort of raising the lids, even for a few moments, had exhausted her.

‘Come on, sweetheart,’ Dawn said urgently. ‘Come on, keep trying.’ Dawn jumped as she felt a hand on her shoulder and turned round to face Val Ridley again.

‘I thought you’d be going soon,’ Val said. ‘I can stay for a while now.’

‘I must go,’ Dawn said. ‘But she opened her eyes a minute ago. The doctor’s coming to look at her. I really think she may be coming out of it at last.’

‘I hope so,’ Val said. ‘She’s our only witness to what happened in that house.’

‘She may not remember,’ Dawn said.

‘No, she may not, and in some ways I hope she doesn’t. If it was her father with the gun it’s more than she needs to know, isn’t it? Better forgotten, though it’ll make our job harder.’

She hesitated for a moment, her eyes fixed on the unconscious child again.

‘What really bugs me is that if no one from the family turns up she’ll end up in care. I’d hate that. It happened to me when I was ten.’

Dawn looked at her, suddenly understanding why this quiet pale police officer spent so much time at Emma’s bedside.

‘It must be dreadful,’ she said. ‘But surely she can’t be completely on her own. Is there no sign of her father yet? He might have some answers.’

Val hesitated for a split second and then shook her head.

‘Nothing definite,’ she said. ‘One of the problems is we’ve no photographs of the wretched man. There was nothing in the house.’

‘I found one,’ Dawn said unexpectedly. ‘I was hunting through for that reporter from the
Gazette
, Laura something? I gave her some pictures of the children taken in our garden, but after she’d gone I remembered my husband had taken some snaps at the school fête last summer and I thought Gordon was there that day. And there he was, just in the one snap, but definitely him, in the background but quite a clear likeness…’

‘Where’s this photograph now?’ Val interrupted, suddenly galvanised. ‘You haven’t given it to the
Gazette
, have you?’

‘No, not yet, it’s still at home,’ Dawn said, startled. ‘You can come and get it, if it’s so important. I’ve got to get back now to collect the kids from school.’

‘Right,’ Val said. ‘I think I’d better do that, don’t you?’

Sergeant Kevin Mower closed the file of reports from the Manchester police which he had been reading in Michael Thackeray’s office and sighed.

‘It makes no sense, guv,’ he said.

‘Not a lot,’ Thackeray agreed. ‘I thought we’d been lucky that they found both the bullet and the pistol in the wreckage yesterday. The bullet’s badly damaged but a match with the gun in the Land Rover, but the gun in the Land Rover isn’t the one used in Staveley. What the hell does that mean?’

‘You think it was murder, not suicide? And whoever shot him left the gun to make it look like suicide?’

‘As DI Hesketh said, it’s certainly a possibility. But either way, we don’t know who the victim was, so it’s difficult to know where to go next.’

‘What are the chances of getting usable DNA?’ Mower asked. ‘I thought with these new techniques they’d got, miracles were just about possible.’

‘At a price,’ Thackeray said gloomily. ‘I couldn’t get any promises out of the forensics lab. They’d do their best and it would take some time, was all they’d say. They can work from a single cell, apparently, but it’s a time-consuming business. But as I said to the super, we do need to know if the body’s Christie’s, whatever it takes to find out. In the
meantime they’re looking at matches for the bullet and the gun on the files. If it’s been used before, that may offer us a few leads. There’s little enough else to go on.’

‘You’d have put money on it being Christie,’ Mower said.

‘You’d have put money on Christie having driven up onto the hills and shot himself soon after the deaths at the house that morning,’ Thackeray said. ‘With the same gun. But he didn’t. The whole thing’s beginning to look a lot more complicated than we thought at first. While we’re waiting for something definite from the labs, we’ll do a complete review of all the evidence we’ve got so far in case there’s anything we’ve missed. If we don’t do it ourselves we’ll have county breathing down our necks wanting the thing either cracked or closed. We all thought we were dealing with a particularly nasty domestic but if that body isn’t Gordon Christie’s we could have a major murder investigation on our hands and very little of the basic work done.’

Before Mower could respond there was a tap on the door and Val Ridley put her head round.

‘Something important, Val?’ Thackeray asked.

‘Two things, sir,’ she said, passing Thackeray a buff envelope. ‘Dawn Brough, the Christies’ neighbour, found this for us.’ Thackeray took the photograph out of the envelope and studied the picture of a group of adults and children smiling with more or less enthusiasm at the camera against a background of balloons and candyfloss.

‘That’s Gordon, behind Linda and Scott,’ Val said, pointing to a partially obscured figure at the back of the picture, caught full-face but looking away from the camera and probably unaware of being photographed.

‘We’ll get it blown up,’ Thackeray said sharply. ‘At this
moment we don’t even know whether Christie is alive or dead, but if we discover he’s alive that will be very helpful. Well done, Val. And the second thing?’

‘I’ve just come from the infirmary,’ she said. ‘Emma Christie looks like she’s regaining consciousness. She actually opened her eyes yesterday and spoke a few words this morning, the doctor said. He also said that she probably won’t remember what happened that morning but it’s just possible she will. She could be the witness we need.’

‘We’d better have someone at the bedside soon, then,’ Thackeray said. ‘Someone’s going to have to tell her about the rest of her family, but only when the medics think it’s wise.’

‘I’d like to be there, sir,’ Val said. ‘If you can spare me?’

Thackeray looked at the pale, blonde young woman, an efficient officer who generally kept her private life and her emotions well concealed, and wondered what caused the barely disguised pleading in her eyes. What was Emma to her? he wondered.

‘You can’t be there twenty-four seven,’ he said quietly. ‘Organise a rota with uniform to start as soon as the doctors think it’s sensible. As soon as she’s able to talk we need to know what she’s got to say.’

‘Sir,’ Val said and went out looking even less cheerful than when she had arrived.

‘She’s taking this case badly,’ Mower said. Thackeray nodded but made no comment. Val Ridley was not the only one taking this case badly, he thought. He glanced down at the photograph of Christie and his wife and son with cheerfully smiling friends and shuddered slightly. The man was tall and dark-haired, as they had been told, and he wondered if he was only imagining a threatened look in his
eyes, something of the desperation of a trapped animal, as Christie stood there hemmed in by lightly clad summer revellers who seemed to be in a different dimension to the one he inhabited. He passed the picture to Mower impatiently.

‘Get it enhanced and copies made. If that body’s not Christie’s, we’ll need it. We’ll have even more urgent reasons to find him.’

Dawn Brough felt slightly guilty about the red-headed reporter who had chatted to her over tea at her house. She had promised her a photograph of Gordon Christie if she could find one, but now the police had taken possession of the only snap she had discovered. She picked up the phone and rather tentatively called the
Gazette
and eventually found herself put through to Laura Ackroyd.

‘I expect the police will issue it to the Press eventually,’ Laura said, annoyed that she had been pre-empted by Val Ridley. ‘When was the school fête exactly? Perhaps one of our photographers was there.’

‘Oh, yes, there was someone,’ Dawn said. ‘But I don’t expect they caught Gordon. He was really – what do you call it? – camera shy?’

‘What was he wearing that day?’ Laura asked. ‘Can you remember?’

Dawn thought that over for a moment.

‘It was a hot day,’ she said hesitantly. ‘We were lucky for once. Usually it rains. He had a green shirt, a polo shirt with a collar, short sleeves, that’s in my picture, and dark jeans, I think. And he had Scott in tow most of the time. The little lad had a green T-shirt as well, paler green. Scott was quite fair, but Gordon was dark. Dark hair, no beard or anything, and tall. Don’t get him mixed up with Gerry
Foster from the pub if you’re looking at pictures. He’s dark too, but he has a beard.’

‘Yes, I’ve met him,’ Laura said. ‘Okay, I’ll have a look through our own pictures here and see if I can find him. You never know, we might get an exclusive out of it in spite of the police.’

‘What exclusive’s that then, doll?’ a voice she didn’t want to hear came from behind her as she hung up. She turned round irritably.

‘Are you looking for a job here or something?’ she asked. ‘Doesn’t the
Globe
want you any more?’

‘What do you think?’ Vince said, his eyes roaming across the newsroom restlessly. ‘I just came in to see Bob Baker, but he doesn’t seem to be around.’

‘He’s on a day off, I think,’ Laura said, unable to keep a note of satisfaction at the crime reporter’s absence out of her voice. Anything which interfered with Vince’s plans was good news in her book.

‘I’ll treat Ted to a lunchtime pint, then,’ Vince said easily. ‘Care to join us, honey, or are you too deep in your little exclusive?’

‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ Laura said, thinking that there were no two people she would less like a drink with today, or any day, but Vince merely grinned at her over his shoulder as he drifted away. He still treats the place as if he belongs here, Laura thought angrily. She guessed she was not the only one who resented the assumption that the
Bradfield Gazette
was a branch office for the
Globe
. Only Ted and perhaps Bob Baker would find that flattering.

She sighed, glanced out of the office window, and turned back to her computer screen without enthusiasm. It was a dark, damp day with more than a hint of rain in the air and it matched her mood. Watching Thackeray get
dressed that morning, insisting that he had to make an early start as he brought her a cup of tea in bed with a smile that was no more than perfunctory, she had wondered for the hundredth time why the loss of his wife, which should, she had hoped, have liberated him from his past at last, had instead thrown him into a mood of icy non-
communication
which was gradually tearing her apart.

‘Do you feel like going out for a meal tonight?’ she had asked. ‘There’s that new Italian place?’

‘I’m not sure what time I’ll get away. Don’t worry about me, I’ll get something on the way home if I’m late.’

‘I do worry about you, Michael,’ she had said quietly. ‘All the time, as it goes.’ But he had merely looked at her, his blue eyes unfathomable, before turning on his heel and closing the bedroom door behind him. And when she had heard the front door of the flat close behind him she had buried her head in the pillows again and wept.

Once the lunchtime drinkers had left the office she walked over to the far corner of the newsroom where Phil Halliday, the picture editor, sat hunched over his computer juggling images of Bradfield United’s latest disastrous midweek performance around the screen. He barely glanced up as Laura approached and, when he did, his expression was mournful.

‘Looks like they’re for the drop again,’ he muttered as he zoomed in on a shot of United’s goalkeeper sprawling in the mud as a scoring ball sailed into the net for the fourth time during the previous evening’s match. ‘Pillock,’ Phil said as he stabbed at his keyboard viciously and blanked the screen. ‘Not a win in seventeen games. So what can I do for you, love?’ he asked.

‘How long do you file stuff in that system of yours?’ Laura asked.

‘How long do you want me to have filed something?’

‘One of our photographers went to a school fête out at Staveley last summer, June or July probably. Would you still have all the shots he took?’

‘You don’t know which photographer, I suppose?’ he asked, and shook his head when Laura said she didn’t.

‘Well, you might be lucky. I’m not as religious as I should be at culling stuff. The memory’s so good I tend to leave things on I probably shouldn’t. The truth is I still hanker for the old picture library where we stored stuff for years. It was surprising how often it turned up trumps when someone or something resurfaced years later.’

‘Staveley primary school?’ Laura said.

‘Summat to do with the family who was shot?’ Phil asked.

‘We may have the father in a picture,’ Laura said. ‘The police are very slow at issuing a photograph of him.’

‘Right,’ the picture editor said, evidently galvanised at that. She stood behind him while he searched his indexes and files for what seemed like forever before stabbing at the keyboard in triumph.

‘Bingo,’ he said as a couple of dozen tiny images appeared on the screen. ‘There’s another set as well, by the look of it. Do you want to have a look at them while I go and get a sandwich. Click on each image to enlarge it and then on Next. Okay?’

Laura slid into Phil’s vacated chair with a feeling of excitement and began to flick through the photographer’s record of a sunny afternoon last summer. But she worked quickly, focusing only on green shirts, and eventually she knew that in that sea of happy faces she had tracked down Gordon Christie in not one photograph, but two. In the first, he too was smiling as he glanced down at the fair-haired
little boy whom Laura recognised as his son, Scott. In the second, he had been caught by the camera full-face and was looking much less happy in a crowd of people that included his wife and all his children and, ironically, the burly bearded figure of Gerry Foster, the bad-tempered landlord from the Fox and Hounds. It looked, Laura thought, as if he had realised he was being photographed that time and did not like it much.

She made a note of the reference numbers of the two photographs and saved the file again, deciding not to print anything out until Vince Newsom was safely out of range. Finding the pictures was a modest triumph, and as it was now too late to get them into the paper today she decided to keep the knowledge to herself for the moment and reveal it at the next day’s editorial conference, to which Vince would certainly not be invited. She didn’t win many brownie points with Ted Grant but this, she thought, might earn her one or two.

PC Gavin Hewitt pulled up outside Staveley Old Hall and looked at the high electronically controlled gates with disfavour. Any idea of pulling up in the cobbled yard with a screech of brakes, in the old
Starsky and Hutch
style he secretly favoured, had to be shelved as he climbed out of the panda car and pressed the bell on the stone gatepost. When he had explained his business to a disembodied voice in the house, the wrought iron gates swung slowly back and he drove in.

Hewitt was old enough to remember when the old hall had been just that, a dilapidated stone manor house, its roof sagging under the weight of its ancient tiles, its woodwork beginning to rot after centuries of withstanding the Pennine gales, one or two of its mullioned windows
torn out and replaced with PVC, and what was left of the house surrounded by a cluster of outbuildings left to fall into ruin when most of its farmland had been sold off to other landowners, leaving the house without much purpose in the rural landscape. In the early Nineties, when Hewitt had been a teenager in Staveley, the house had been bought by a young couple whom the locals dismissed contemptuously as hippies, and who had made a half-hearted attempt at modernisation, which seemed to require an effort out of all proportion to the results visible to the sceptical villagers. Three children and many botched attempts at small-scale farming later, the couple had sold off the chickens and goats and pigs, split up and acrimoniously moved on, and the house had stood empty for a few more years until the tentacles of the property boom reached even these outlying areas of unfashionable Bradfield and attracted renewed interest in the hall’s ancient stone walls and picturesque situation on the
lower-lying
edge of the village, with nothing but miles of wild open moors beyond its walls.

Hewitt had moved on himself when he joined the police force, his family had scattered and he had had little reason to revisit Staveley until he was appointed its community police officer in the early years of the next century. Staveley had seemed to him familiar enough when he came back, apart from the cluster of new-build properties on the village edge. But the Old Hall, he had thought, was something else. It had moved into a new dimension:
re-roofed
, re-windowed, re-pointed, tastefully extended here and there, its boundary walls made more than proof against intruders, the gardens made over, gravelled and decked and water-featured out of all recognition, and one of the barns reclaimed to house an indoor pool and conservatory
terrace, which would not have looked out of place in Hollywood.