Devil's Game (2 page)

‘No messages?’ Nasreem asked. ‘Phone, text…?’

‘Nowt,’ Terry Bastable said. ‘And when I rang Shirley’s, which is where she works, they said she weren’t on t’rota for last night any road. She weren’t supposed to be at work at all till tomorrow.’

Nasreem sighed. Anyone asking the questions she knew she had to ask would be unwelcome, she thought, but her interrogation would be more unwelcome than most to this man who sat bolt upright on the sofa, rigid with a fury which she guessed was pretty equally aimed at his errant wife and her own unwelcome presence in his house.

‘Has she ever done anything like this before?’ she ventured.

Bastable shook his head irritably.

‘’Course not,’ he said. ‘She’s steady, is Karen. Not like some.’

‘And have you been getting on well together? No domestic problems which might lead her to go off on her own for a bit?’

‘We’re happily married, aren’t we?’ Bastable said. ‘As far as I know, we are, any road. No, no domestic problems, none at all.’

‘No hint that she had begun to see anyone else?’

Bastable glowered at Nasreem, his face beginning to look flushed, and shook his head vehemently.

‘Nowt like that,’ he snapped.

‘But she said she was on the late shift, when she wasn’t…’

‘Summat must have happened to her. Summat bad,’ Bastable said, and Nasreem could see the fear in his eyes. ‘She went off in t’car. I always make her go by car because she comes back late. Maybe she thought she was on shift… Made a mistake like, with the rota, and summat happened on the way there or on the way back. You hear of women getting abducted, don’t you? Women disappear. It’s not just kiddies who get taken.’

‘It’s unusual, Mr Bastable,’ Nasreem said gently. ‘Most adults who disappear go of their own free will, you know. Generally we wait for a few days, just post them as missing, and they turn up again. In this case we can also look for the car, if you give me the details. It would also help if you could tell me what she was wearing when she left the house.’

Bastable looked at her blankly.

‘I didn’t notice,’ he muttered. ‘Her coat, I suppose. It were chilly last night, weren’t it? Her coat’s dark…blue. No, green. That’s right, green wool, but dark, almost black. Fits a bit tight, like. I don’t know what she had on under it.’

‘Have you looked to see if she’s taken a suitcase or holdall? Whether all her clothes are still here?’ He shook his head dumbly.

‘Could you check that for me, d’you think?’ Nasreem asked. Rigid with suppressed emotion, Bastable got to his feet and went thundering upstairs, where Nasreem could hear him opening cupboards and drawers and slamming them shut again. She glanced round the living room of the small house with its large flat-screen TV and PlayStation in one corner, computer games strewn where the children must have left them before they went to school, and she wondered if they had any idea where their mother might have gone. Judging by the school photographs of a blond boy and a red-headed girl on the mantelpiece over the gas fire, they must be ten or eleven, probably still at primary school. Wherever Karen Bastable was, they would no doubt be devastated if she never came back. She sighed and waited until Terry Bastable came back into the room and slammed the door behind him.

‘I can’t see owt missing,’ he said. ‘She’s got a lot of stuff up there, stuff I’ve never even seen before, bit saucy, some of it.
But if she’d gone off by her own choice she’d have taken some of her new stuff. Stands to reason. She’d been out shopping just last weekend for holiday gear because we’re going to Majorca as soon as t’kids finish school for Easter. Some of the stuff’s still in t’Primark bags, not even taken out yet. And all the suitcases are still in t’cupboard on the landing. I don’t believe she’s run off. It’s not what Karen would do. She loves the kids even if…’ He didn’t finish the sentence although his sudden doubt about his missing wife’s commitment to him was written in his face.

‘Even if you have your problems?’

‘We don’t have problems,’ Bastable said loudly. ‘What would you know about it with your arranged marriages and all that bollocks, any road? My marriage is grand.’

But Nasreem did not believe him. She changed tack suddenly.

‘Do you have a bank account? Can she draw money out that you can check on?’

‘There’s never owt in our account to draw,’ Bastable said bitterly. ‘We’ve paid for us holiday, so there’s even less than nowt.’

‘But you’ll check?’

‘Aye, I’ll check, but it’s wasting time, isn’t it? I need to know where she is, what’s happened to her, the kids need to know. I need you lot to start bloody looking. She’d never go off like this without a word.’

‘But it does look as if she might have had plans last night which she didn’t want to tell you about, if she said she was going to work and didn’t,’ Nasreem said. Bastable scowled and clenched his fists, a baffled bull, but said nothing.

‘I’ll complete a missing person report for her,’ Nasreem
went on quickly. ‘And I’ll log in the details of the car. That’s really all we can do for now.’

‘Well, it’s not enough, is it?’ Bastable said angrily. ‘You’re not taking it bloody seriously.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Bastable,’ Nasreem said. ‘If you’re unhappy about the procedure you can always come down to the station and talk to my sergeant. But you’ll get the same answer, I’m afraid.’

‘You’ve not got enough time for folk like us now, all the hours you’re putting in tracking effing terrorists and illegals and God knows who in this country,’ Bastable shouted, jumping to his feet so suddenly that Nasreem flinched. She stood up herself and deliberately turned her back on the angry man although her heart was thudding as she walked to the door. She turned briefly, her hand on the handle.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Bastable. I’ll do what I can. Let me know if she comes home, will you? That’s the most likely outcome, you know. Honestly it is.’

‘Paki cow,’ Bastable spat as she closed the front door behind her.

Karen tried to move but she had been secured too tightly for that. She was still wearing the thin clothing she had stripped down to in the forest clearing as she moved back to her car as the meet in the forest began to disperse. She was surprised when a man she had not noticed before, with a scarf pulled up over the lower half of his face, approached her just as she was reaching for her coat.

‘Do you feel like another quick turn?’ he had asked, his voice muffled by the scarf, and when she had hesitated, he had suddenly seized her from behind pushing her head down, and
before she could scream or attract anyone’s attention, he had pulled a heavy bag over her head. She had seen pictures of hooded prisoners on television and had never imagined just how suffocatingly disorienting the procedure could be. She had struggled for breath and drawn in only dust and fibres and found herself choking helplessly within seconds. Even as she tried to fight him off, she felt her arms being strapped to her side, and soon knew that she was being bundled into the boot of a car. She tried to scream, but the thick material around her face muffled her cries and she was dimly aware the noise of departing vehicles was fading away. There was nobody left to hear her.

She had no idea how long the journey had lasted but eventually the car stopped and there was complete silence. How long she lay there she had no way of telling. She thought she fell asleep at one point, but could not be sure. She groaned occasionally as her limbs cramped, and she felt freezing cold. And then at last she glimpsed a dim light even through the thick fabric across her face and realised that the boot was being opened and she could see it was already daylight. She had been in the boot all night, she thought, trying to get a good look at the man who was gazing down at her, but he tugged her blindfold down lower so that she could only glimpse him from the waist down.

‘You bastard,’ she stuttered, through the thick fabric. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ But he did not respond and she was shivering so convulsively now in the sharp morning air that however much she wriggled and tried to struggle she could not resist the strong arms which took hold of her and dragged her out of the boot and along the ground so violently that she cried out in pain. Eventually she managed to lash out with her
feet and catch her attacker so sharply that he too cried out.

‘Bitch,’ he said, flinging her to the ground in frustration. ‘Bloody whore.’ She tried shouting and screaming again but the sound seemed to get lost without even penetrating the suffocating mask, and eventually she simply accepted that there was no one to hear her anyway, just as no one had heard her in the forest. She could hear her attacker breathing heavily now, as if in the grip of some overpowering emotion. And she simply began to moan, a high, keening sound, equally muffled, but she was by then beyond rational thought, the hard ground beneath her cold and wet, with sharp stones which tore at her half-naked body.

‘Please, please, let me go,’ she said, sobbing in despair. ‘Please, please don’t hurt me.’

But as if he needed to hear her beg, her pleas seemed to act as some sort of trigger and her attacker pulled off the suffocating hood and stood over her, his face still barely visible behind his scarf and a hat pulled low over his eyes.

‘Now, you little cow,’ he said. ‘You still seem to be gagging for some more fun and games. And I can’t bloody wait.’

It was then that the pain began, and there was nothing left for Karen to hear except her own gasping, panicking breath and then her desperate screams as the uncaring sun rose faintly and looked down from a pale, misty sky and she begged him in the end to kill her quickly.

Laura Ackroyd picked at a piece of toast at the breakfast table and watched Michael Thackeray pour himself coffee. He looked tired, she thought, and she knew that he was still occasionally sleeping badly, the residual pain of his gunshot wound keeping him awake. But she was sure that there was more to it than that. What she wanted to discuss – and perhaps soon must – would not help at this time of day, she decided, spooning marmalade onto her plate. Given his present mood, she would leave it until later.

‘You’re not in a hurry this morning?’ he asked, sipping hot coffee and pulling on his jacket.

‘I’m going straight up to the Heights to talk to Joyce,’ Laura said. ‘Part work, part social.’

Laura’s grandmother Joyce Ackroyd still lived resolutely on her own on the housing estate she had helped to create in her political heyday in the Sixties and Seventies, unwilling to accept her increasing physical frailty and showing no sign of diminishing mental energy as she pursued one cause or another close to her very old socialist heart.

‘What’s she up to now?’ Thackeray asked with a smile. He approved of Joyce in spite of Laura’s anxieties about her obstinately independent lifestyle, in the teeth of encroaching arthritis and the reduction of her neighbourhood to a building site.

‘I want to know what she knows about David Murgatroyd, or Sir David, apparently. He was knighted in the last honours list for services to education. He’s the one who wants to turn Sutton Park into an academy, but he’s an elusive fellow. I know he was born in Yorkshire and has one of his homes here. That’s on top of others in London and Monaco and the Caribbean, no less. But when you try to track him down or find out how he made his millions, or maybe billions for all I know, it’s like hitting a brick wall. I know Joyce has got herself involved with the Sutton Park governors who don’t want to be taken over, so I thought she might have gleaned a bit more info than I’ve been able to so far. Ted is very keen on a profile but I could write it on the back of a postage stamp so far.’

‘I thought you could find out anything about anyone on the Internet these days,’ Thackeray said.

‘Not this lad,’ Laura said. ‘Date of birth, the names of his companies – all private equity jobs so almost no details – and a few cuttings on the six academies he’s sponsored so far. That explains the recent knighthood, of course. That’s about as much as I gleaned yesterday. Another couple of academies and he’ll get a peerage, no doubt.’

‘Such cynicism in one so young,’ Thackeray mocked, pulling on his coat and kissing the top of Laura’s copper curls by way of farewell.

‘Michael, will you be home reasonably early tonight?’ she asked quietly. ‘We need to talk.’

He looked at her for a moment, the light draining from his eyes.

‘I’ll try,’ he said, but as he closed the door behind him she wondered if he really meant it.

Later that morning, in her grandmother’s tiny living room, nursing a cup of instant coffee as she flicked through the pile of paperwork Joyce had presented her with, Laura marvelled at how efficiently she managed to keep in touch with the various protest movements and campaigns she thought worthy of her political experience and commitment. And surprisingly, Laura thought, in spite of the advance of the smart new politicians of all persuasions who now seemed to dominate the town, there were still people who seemed to value Joyce’s old-fashioned wisdom, though her knees would no longer let her wave a banner at their protest marches as she once had.

‘The person you want to talk to is Steve O’Mara,’ Joyce said. ‘I’ll give you his phone number. He’s one of the parent governors and he’s really angry about the whole affair. I think he was on the panel when the new head was appointed and he reckons she’s doing a brilliant job. He’s afraid that the new regime will simply ignore the local kids who go to Sutton Park now, and go all out to recruit middle-class youngsters from further away to make the place look good. That’s what’s happened in other places by all accounts. And the parents will lose what little say they have now in how the place is run. This beggar Murgatroyd will control the governors, the school rules, appointments, the lot. Where’s the accountability in that? And from what we’ve been able to find out from the other schools he’s taken over, he’s one of these born-again Christians.’

‘I know, I know,’ Laura said. ‘I’ve heard most of this already. What I want now is to get hold of Murgatroyd and put some of these objections to him. But he’s an elusive man, is Sir David. He claims to have local connections but I’ve not tracked down anyone who knows him, or even remembers him from way back. Have you heard of him?’

‘There used to be a David Murgatroyd out Eckersley way years ago. Too long ago to be this one, but maybe a relation. All I can recall is that he was a county councillor for a while, Tory of course, and was one of those who tried to stop the West Riding going for comprehensive schools in the Sixties because it meant closing Eckersley Grammar. Made no difference, of course. There were only a handful of Tories on t’county council back then when Harold Wilson got in. Not like the other ridings where they still ruled the roost, of course: all those landowners and farmers. Mind you, they all went comprehensive in the end, when they realised how much money they were wasting on all those small grammar schools and bog-standard secondary moderns. Maggie Thatcher closed more grammar schools than anyone else, you know.’ Joyce chuckled in satisfaction.

‘But Murgatroyd…’ Laura edged her grandmother back to the matter in hand. Her knowledge of the politics of her beloved county was encyclopaedic but inclined these days to be rambling.

‘Aye, David Murgatroyd,’ Joyce acquiesced amiably enough. ‘I don’t reckon he was involved in politics for very long. As I recall he resigned quite quickly. I think there was some family tragedy, but I really can’t remember what it was. You might find something in the archives at the
Gazette
, I should think. Bradfield Council and the county never had a
right lot to do with each other. We were textiles, they were mining and the rural bits in between. We didn’t have a right lot in common, even in the Labour Party. We weren’t in the pockets of the miners’ union, like some.’ Laura could see the pain of old battles lost in her grandmother’s eyes, but she had more urgent things on her mind and she pressed on.

‘So if that David Murgatroyd is my man Murgatroyd’s father, he could well have been born in the county. According to
Who’s Who,
which has a very brief entry, he was born in 1960, so he would have been a small child when his father was involved in politics.’

‘Look in your own archives,’ Joyce said. ‘It’s sure to be there. Eckersley wasn’t part of Bradfield in them days but it was close enough for the
Gazette
to keep an eye on.’

‘I’ll do that,’ Laura said. ‘And I’ll catch up with Steve O’Mara. What about the new head at Sutton Park? Is she really doing a good job?’

‘Debbie Stapleton? Yes, I reckon she is. Steve’s no fool and he rates her very highly. And the exam results are getting better, for what that’s worth. You should talk to her, too. Steve said she’s absolutely gutted with what’s happening. Feels she’s been sold down the river by the council, which seems to have fallen for this scheme hook, line and sinker.’

‘I bet she does,’ Laura said, finishing her coffee. ‘Right, I’d better get into the office or Ted Grant will think I’ve jumped ship.’

Joyce glanced at her granddaughter, with her red hair and green eyes, a combination of colouring and character which reminded her so sharply of her own impulsive youth that it brought tears to her eyes, and eventually asked her the question that kept her awake at night.

‘And are you? Thinking of jumping ship?’ Laura shook her head sharply.

‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘What gives you that impression?’

‘Oh, I know you, miss,’ Joyce said enigmatically. ‘Do you think I can’t tell when you’re unhappy?’

‘I’m fine,’ Laura said firmly.

‘And that man of yours? What’s he doing? Is he going to make an honest woman of you?’

Laura laughed at the question although she knew that she wanted it answered a hundred times more urgently than Joyce did.

‘We’re fine,’ she prevaricated. ‘Always busy, but fine.’ Joyce did not believe her.

Back at the office, Laura took Joyce Ackroyd’s advice and delved back into the paper’s own dusty archives and soon found some of what she was looking for. David Murgatroyd had indeed been a county councillor in the mid-Sixties and had resigned before his four-year term of office was up. But it was the reason for that resignation which intrigued Laura. Murgatroyd, who had died suddenly in 1974, had been a wealthy textile manufacturer who, like many before him, had abandoned the smoky environment of Bradfield, where he had amassed his millions, and bought a country pile, Sibden House, just outside the small market town of Eckersley, ten miles or so up the valley of the Maze and well out of sight of the belching mill chimneys of the industrial belt. Once there, he had apparently established himself as lord of the manor and local politician. But as Laura flicked through the cuttings, it soon became apparent that his comfortable lifestyle was built on sand.

His wife, younger than he was, had given him two children
in his middle age: a son, and a daughter six years later. Exactly what happened was not fully spelt out in the archive. Local papers had none of the intrusive carelessness with people’s private lives that the tabloids had begun to wallow in after the birth of Murdoch’s
Sun
years later, and the details of the family tragedy in the
Gazette
were minimal and muted. But it was clear from the inquest report that Murgatroyd’s wife had suffered some sort of breakdown – post-natal depression Laura guessed – and had drowned herself and the baby in a reservoir not far from their home. The jury had returned a kindly open verdict. Mrs Murgatroyd had left no note.

Laura felt suddenly cold. The stark details recorded by the coroner were close enough to Michael Thackeray’s bitter experience to make her shudder. This was one investigation she would not be sharing with him in much detail, she thought. But she was intrigued to uncover whether the younger David Murgatroyd, whose life story she was investigating and who seemed still to have a house in the county, was in fact the son of the late county councillor and had been left motherless at seven and an orphan in his teens. It was quite possible, she thought, that he still owned his father’s house and the simplest way to find out might be to go up to Eckersley and ask.

Ten miles above Bradfield, where the fells rose sharply towards the lowering, windswept watershed which separated the steep industrial valleys of West Yorkshire from the more rolling plains of industrial Lancashire, two men bounced on a tractor along the rutted track through a conifer plantation. They were pulling a long, low trailer, which swung wildly if
the driver accelerated too fast, as he often seemed tempted to do. The two men wore earmuffs, which insulated them not just from the roar of the heavy diesel engine but also from the natural rustle and sough of the forest floor, littered deep with pine needles; not much of a habitat for birds but home to a few small creatures who scuttled beneath the trees, and to an occasional deer which had strayed to this upland retreat from its more fruitful pastures lower down the valley.

The tractor eventually reached its destination, a clearing where the sun could just penetrate and some thin green vegetation survived, and where stacked piles of felled logs were waiting to be loaded onto the trailer and taken to the sawmill. The driver killed the engine, took off his ear protection and hard hat and glanced at his companion.

‘Who the hell is that?’ he asked, waving at a compact blue car parked almost out of sight beneath the trees and partially obscured by bushes. His companion shrugged and jumped down from the cab and sauntered over to the car, which turned out to be an elderly Astra. He was followed by the driver, who was lighting up a cigarette and sucking in the smoke gratefully.

‘No one here,’ his mate said, peering through the misted windscreen. ‘Someone left their coat.’ A dark-coloured item lay crumpled on the front passenger seat as if it had been discarded in a hurry. He tried the passenger door and looked surprised when it swung open.

‘Careless beggar,’ he said, peering into the interior. ‘Gone for a walk, d’you reckon?’

‘Bloody funny place to come rambling,’ the driver said, glancing round the clearing and the almost impenetrable ranks of trees which enclosed it. ‘Any road, it’s nowt to do
wi’us. If they’ve not come back when we finish up this afternoon we’ll report it in.’ He paused for a moment and looked at the ground more closely. ‘There’ve been a few cars up here since last week,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Look at them tyre tracks. Summat funny’s been going off.’

‘Darren said he thought cars were coming up here at night,’ his partner said. ‘Noticed it a few times, he said. I’ve not seen owt missen, but then rain washes out tracks pretty fast.’

‘You’d not think they’d come all this way for a bit of nooky. Even in my day we made do with the edge of Broadley Moor and most of t’kids seem to be happy with a bloody car park these days. They don’t care who sees them at it.’

‘At it like bloody rabbits, teenagers today,’ said his companion, a small grey-haired man, with a sour look. ‘We’d best get a shift on. We’ll be up here all day, else. And there’s no overtime to be had, you can bet on that, no bloody fear.’

The two men returned to the trailer and set about their day’s work, casting only an occasional glance at the apparently abandoned blue car. Only when they left the clearing with their last trailer load of logs did they mention it again.

‘I’ll drop you off, and tell Gordon about it when I get back to t’yard,’ the driver said. ‘It’s a bit odd, that.’ But when he had unloaded and completed his paperwork, Gordon has already gone home, and he promised himself he would report it the following morning. If he remembered.

Laura was glad to be out of the office. She had made another call to the only number she had for David Murgatroyd’s business enterprises and had met a brick wall for the fourth time. Mr Murgatroyd did not give interviews, she was told by
a press officer. Mr Murgatroyd’s interests were private. There were no public companies and so no public information. There would be no change in that position however many times she approached them.