Death in a Far Country (3 page)

‘I’m meeting Jenna Heywood,’ Laura said.

‘Ah, yes, Ms Heywood said she was expecting a guest for lunch. She’s in the bar already, I think. Would you like to come through?’

Laura followed her guide through a door to one side of the lounge into an extensive bar with picture windows overlooking the rolling golf course on one side and offering a view of an indoor swimming pool on the other, where a number of young men were powering through the water with splashy aggression. Jenna Heywood apparently spotted her guest before she spotted her, and Laura became aware of a tall woman of about her own age breaking away from a convivial group at the bar and approaching across the thick pile carpet in a black skirt not much longer than a mini teamed with breathtaking heels and a plunging neckline in embroidered scarlet silk.

‘Laura?’ she said enthusiastically. ‘I’m so glad you could make it. I thought it would be good to have a quiet chat up here before I take you to United. This is so much more comfortable. It’s a real asset to the old town, don’t you think?’

Reluctant to admit she had never been to the club before, Laura just nodded and allowed herself to be steered towards a table by the window with two comfortable armchairs arranged to face the windows and the view of the golf course. A waiter was hovering almost immediately.

‘Just a tonic with ice and lemon,’ Laura said. ‘I’m driving.’

Jenna looked disappointed. ‘You’ll have a glass of wine with lunch?’

‘Yes, that would be fine,’ Laura said, and sank back into her chair while Jenna dealt with the waiter, thankful for a moment to observe this phenomenon who appeared to have shaken Bradfield’s sporting community to its foundations simply by being young, elegant and female, an effect that Laura had hoped, maybe naïvely, had passed into history.

Jenna was tall and fashionably slim, her blonde hair worn loose, long legs crossed to display her Jimmy Choos, and her clothes evidently straight from the sort of designer shops that Laura could only gaze at in a state of financial shock when she occasionally passed them by. But when Jenna turned back to her guest Laura could see that she was not some ditzy
clothes-horse
. There was humour in the perfectly made-up face and a sharp intelligence in the blue eyes. Jenna Heywood was no fool, Laura thought, any more than her father had been, and she guessed that the middle-aged and complacent directors at Bradfield United, who seemed intent on derailing her plans, might find that they had bitten off more than they could chew.

‘So,’ Jenna said consideringly. ‘You’re the features editor for the
Gazette
? You don’t do sport then?’

Laura shook her head.

‘That’s Tony Holloway’s baby,’ she said. ‘I expect you’ve met him.’

‘Yes,’ Jenna said noncommitally, with a faint smile. ‘My father had a run-in or two with Tony, I think, as the team lurched from the bad to the appalling over the years.’

‘I think Tony’s mother put him in United colours from the moment he was born,’ Laura said with a grin. ‘I’m not sure
why sports reporters think they’re exempt from trying to be objective, but a lot of them do.’

‘Well, maybe it’s no bad thing on a local paper,’ Jenna said easily. ‘The public expect their paper to be partisan for the local team. But you? If you don’t do sport, what’s all this about? Why have I attracted your particular attention? I like to know where I stand.’

Jenna’s stock-in-trade was attention, Laura thought wryly, and how it could be manipulated to the best advantage, and she knew that she was playing in the big league here.

‘I’m intrigued by a woman taking over a football club,’ Laura said. ‘Or rather, taking over this particular football club. I know it’s not unheard of these days, but United is such a basket case. Why bother?’ She knew she was being provocative, but was interested to see how Jenna would react to such a frontal assault. But Jenna Heywood just threw back her head and laughed.

‘A bloody good question,’ she said. ‘It’s one I ask myself in the small watches of the night when I wake up from a nightmare about the balance sheets I’ve seen. I reckon my father was barmy to keep pumping money into the club, and I must be even more barmy to follow suit.’

‘But like Tony, you’re a fan?’

‘Oh, I was always that,’ Jenna admitted. ‘If your sports editor wore blue and gold Babygros in his pram, I think I got the bug even earlier. My mother always said she went into labour in the directors’ box at one particularly fraught game when United scored a winning goal in the ninety-first minute. She leapt out of her seat to cheer and the next thing she knew they were sending for the ambulance. There’s no logic in my
trying to rescue United, any more than there was for my poor old dad. It’s an emotional thing. We’ll have to see how it goes. Just at the moment, with the Cup run, things are looking up. But I expect Chelsea will thrash them eight-nil on Saturday and it’ll be back to our normal gloom and doom on Monday – and that’s not for quoting by the way. We don’t want the players suspecting me of lack of confidence before a game like that.’

She glanced over her shoulder. ‘There are a couple of them in here, as it goes, certain to be taking a close interest in what I’m up to.’ She gestured at a group of young men in the latest smart-casual gear by the bar, accompanied by a couple of young women in short skirts and abbreviated tops, and strappy sandals with heels so high they looked in imminent danger of toppling off them.

‘The black lad is our star, “OK” Okigbo. I hope he’s not spending too much time in here with the big game coming up. I’m surprised the coach hasn’t got them out training today. I’ll have to have a word with him about that.’

‘You’re going to be a hands on boss, then?’ Laura asked.

Jenna grinned. ‘I’ve been running my own business for ten years,’ she said. ‘I’m not likely to take a back seat in this one. They haven’t seen anything yet.’

‘But some of the directors don’t like it?’

‘There’s still a lot of men who don’t like working for a woman,’ Jenna said. ‘I don’t know what it’s like in newspapers.’

Laura smiled faintly at the idea of Ted Grant knuckling under to a female boss.

‘Some editors don’t even like women on their staff let alone giving the orders.’

‘Yes, well, I’ve come across plenty like that, not so much
in my own profession, but amongst the clients. Companies that hire a PR firm and are then taken aback when a woman turns up with a critical report on how they do things. I don’t imagine Bradfield United will be any different.’

‘Not different, but quite possibly worse,’ Laura said, with a smile. ‘Your unreconstructed Yorkshireman can be an intransigent fellow. They don’t take happily to change, especially in their hallowed sanctums like football and cricket clubs. I think you may be in for an interesting time.’

‘I control the club,’ Jenna said, her mood darkening slightly. ‘She who pays the piper, and all that. There are two things United needs – good results and a new stadium. And both depend on hard cash, firstly for better players, and OK is a start. And then to build a bigger venue so we can increase our revenue. It’s the same with all these small clubs. They can’t survive by standing still.’

‘Can you get the finance?’ Laura asked. ‘Won’t being a woman make even that harder? And with some of the directors against you?’

‘I have contacts,’ Jenna said. ‘I think it can be done.’

‘You didn’t stay in Bradfield though. Why was that, if you’re so wedded to the team?’

‘Are you born and bred in Bradfield?’ Jenna came back quickly.

‘I am, as it happens, though I was sent away to boarding school.’

‘Ackroyd? Are you Jack Ackroyd’s daughter?’

‘That’s right,’ Laura said. ‘Did you know him?’

‘Not really,’ Jenna said. ‘But he and my father were close financially at one time, weren’t they? They had some sort of
business deals going?’

‘They could well have,’ Laura said. ‘I’ll ask my dad next time I talk to him. He and my mother live in Portugal now. He retired out there when his heart started playing up some years ago.’

‘He was lucky, then,’ Jenna said soberly. ‘My father’s heart only played up the once and that was it.’ She drained her glass. ‘Shall we eat?’

Jenna led the way, nodding slightly to the group at the bar who returned her attention, Laura thought, with slightly uncertain smiles, and took their place at a table for two, again in a prime position by the window. Jenna flicked a menu in Laura’s direction.

‘It’s not three star Michelin,’ she said. ‘But it could be worse. I usually have the smoked salmon and then a steak. Difficult to spoil.’

Laura nodded and agreed to have the same and then pulled her tape recorder out of her bag.

‘You don’t mind?’ she said, and Jenna smiled.

‘Harder for you to distort what I say,’ she said. ‘Record away.’

‘So tell me how you got from youthful supporter to owner, by way of a career in London. From what I read in the business cuttings about your company, you need to come back to Bradfield about as much as you need to go to Baghdad. What’s it all about?’

Jenna nibbled at her smoked salmon and shrugged.

‘Maybe I need a new challenge,’ she said. ‘I haven’t lived up here since I was at school, and I’m not really intending to live here now. I’ll come up as often as I need to during the season
but my apartment in London is still going to be home. All my friends are down there, and the business, of course, although that runs itself to a large extent these days. The sign of a good boss, in my book, is the ability to appoint good people and then delegate. I can do that.’

From most people the statement would have sounded like overconfidence, Laura thought, but this was a woman who did not over-estimate her capabilities, she just understood them.

‘PR?’ she said. ‘A dirty word to us reporters. If you want the truth about a story you don’t go to PR looking for it. You call it spin, we call it lies.’

‘That’s out of date,’ Jenna said, without apparently taking offence. ‘Companies that know what they’re doing are willing to pay a lot of money to present their best face to the public. But if there are problems they know it makes no sense to lie. You always get found out in the end. PR should be part of corporate strategy, not crisis management. That’s what we do for a number of blue chip companies. And we do it very well.’

‘And make a lot of money out of it?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Jenna said. ‘I never apologise for that. My dad only sat up and took notice of what I was doing when he saw a healthy profit on the balance sheets.’ They paused for a moment as the waiter brought their steaks, rare and medium, exactly as ordered, and fussed with the bottle of Burgundy Jenna had ordered to go with them.

‘You’ll have that glass of wine?’ she asked after she had tasted the vintage and nodded her acceptance of it.

‘Thank you,’ Laura said. She could easily get used to lunching here every day, she thought.

‘So did you meet prejudice setting up your company in London?’ Laura asked.

‘Not really,’ she said. ‘But it’s a different planet down there. Or at least it was ten, fifteen years ago. The north’s beginning to catch up now, I think. Harvey Nicks in Leeds can’t be bad.’

‘There’s a lot of money sloshing around up here now,’ Laura said. ‘But still a lot of problems, too. Leeds is Leeds but Bradfield’s something else. You should have a look at Aysgarth Lane. It’s still a bit third-world around there. There’s some real poverty. And on some of the estates.’

‘Yes, I’ve noticed. The place needs a good kick up the backside in some respects,’ Jenna said. ‘Not least at United.’

‘So you could say you’re on something like a crusade?’ Laura said.

‘I suppose you could. And I hope the
Gazette
’s going to be right behind it, as well.’

Michael Thackeray’s face tightened as he read Amos Atherton’s preliminary report on the body of the young woman who had been found in the canal. Somehow seeing facts like these in black and white always seemed worse to him than hearing the pathologist’s conclusions tossed over his shoulder almost casually from the operating table while he watched. The spare, scientific prose reduced the victim to a specimen in a way that did not quite happen when the body was actually present in the all-too oppressive flesh. Even the bare list of injuries sickened him. There were twenty-five separate fresh bruises and contusions on the girl’s face and body; three broken ribs; one smashed finger; one stab wound, three inches deep and a quarter of an inch wide caused by a pointed blade with no serrations; there was internal bruising and scarring; her lungs were filled with water and she was carrying a foetus of approximately six weeks gestation. And there was evidence that she had suffered similar brutality over a period of time. Before she died, she had been beaten, stabbed, quite possibly raped and finally drowned, as she had fallen or been pushed into the canal in no fit state to even attempt to save herself. He hoped that by then she had been unconscious.

He called Superintendent Longley on the internal phone.

‘It’s definitely murder,’ he said quietly.

‘Was she on the game?’

‘Possibly,’ Thackeray said, wondering why he hoped quite so fervently that she was not. There were some police officers who might take prostitution as a signal not to put too much effort or resources into a murder investigation, regarding violence as a professional hazard for ‘working girls’, something they ‘asked for’, and which occasionally went too far and killed them. He did not count himself amongst them.

‘On drugs?’ Longley asked.

‘No external signs of that,’ Thackeray said. ‘But we won’t get toxicology results for a few days.’

‘Best keep speculation about her lifestyle under wraps for a while till we see if anyone claims her,’ Longley said. ‘A “respectable family” won’t be too thrilled if we cast aspersions.’

‘There’s been no missing person report that fits,’ Thackeray said. ‘But at that age, she could be a student. No one may notice that she’s not around until she fails to turn up for something important.’

‘Or a refugee,’ Longley said. ‘Legal, illegal, she may be difficult to pin down.’

‘I’m setting inquiries in motion,’ Thackeray said.

‘Talking about inquiries,’ Longley said. ‘I’ve just heard that they’ve appointed an assistant chief constable from West Midlands to look into our recent problems. No one I’ve ever heard of. Man called Brian Richards, started off with the Met, made commander and moved up there about six years ago. I’ve got feelers out to find out a bit more.’

‘Right,’ Thackeray said. ‘When’s he coming up to Yorkshire?’

‘They’re sending him all the reports and he anticipates starting preliminary interviews next week. Obviously they want to get on with it now you’re fit and back on duty.’

Thackeray took a deep breath. Fit, he thought, was a relative concept. ‘Right,’ he said again as Longley hung up without further comment.

They would waste no time now, and he wondered whether he or Longley would still have careers by the summer. There was no doubt in his own mind that if the Chief Constable and the senior officers at County Headquarters wanted either of them out of the force they would be able to justify it to this outside investigator: Longley seemed to have inexplicably left a vulnerable child unprotected; he himself had thrown away a life-time’s training in an attempt to protect Laura. He had never regretted that decision, made in the heart-stopping heat of the moment, but he knew that if he had gone by the book the resulting shoot-out might have been avoided and the life of a man might have been saved. He shifted uneasily in his chair, jarred by the now familiar stab of pain from the wound in his back. He and Laura could also very easily have died that day, he thought, and maybe ACC Richards from Birmingham would find that a mitigating factor. Or maybe not.

He got up with Amos Athertons’s report in his hand and walked slowly through to the main CID room, feeling old. Most of the desks were empty, the detectives already deployed on inquiries around the canal area, but Sergeant Kevin Mower glanced up from his computer screen, with questions in his eyes.

‘You need to read this,’ Thackeray said, dropping the report onto Mower’s desk. ‘She was beaten, stabbed and then
drowned. I’m organising a briefing for two o’clock. We need to get a murder inquiry on the road, even if we don’t know who she is.’

‘There’ve been no missing person reports that fit in the whole of the county. I just checked again, guv,’ Mower said.

‘Identification is the first priority,’ Thackeray said. ‘But we mustn’t let potential witnesses by the canal off the hook. We need to check if anyone saw or heard anything that night. Door-to-door, though that’s a relative concept down there. Most of those buildings are empty, and those that aren’t are offices closed at night. But there’s the houseboats.’

‘Uniform are on to all that,’ Mower said.

‘What about the underwater search?’

‘Zilch,’ Mower said. ‘Used condoms and needles, which is more or less what you’d expect round there. It’s a quiet spot. But no sign of a handbag or a weapon.’

‘According to Amos we’re looking for a knife with a three-or four-inch blade, less than half an inch across, pointed, smooth edged. If they’ve had no joy in the water you’d better intensify the search along the bank. And I can’t believe a girl wouldn’t be carrying some sort of bag or purse. You may not carry ID as a matter of course, but everyone needs money.’

‘Maybe the motive was simply robbery,’ Mower said.

Thackeray shook his head slowly. ‘She’d been hit and kicked in a sustained attack,’ he said. ‘Read the report on her injuries. You don’t do that just in the course of snatching a purse.’

‘Race then?’ Mower said, his face darkening. ‘There’s enough nutters out there these days who don’t like anyone a shade darker than they are.’

‘There are, but do they hang around a lonely towpath on the off-chance someone they don’t like will turn up? But you’re right, that’s another line of inquiry. We’ll have to see what we can pick up amongst the right-wing racist groups. But ID is the first priority. Until we know who she is we can’t even begin to work out what she was doing down there in the first place. It’s not somewhere you’d choose for a stroll on a dark winter night with no coat on. Remind the search teams that she was distinctly under-dressed for the conditions, will you? As under-dressed as that, she must have been noticeable. Or there may be a coat or jacket somewhere. If she was down there for sex, paid for or not, she may have taken a coat off in the heat of the moment.’

‘Odd things people do,’ Mower said. He glanced away, as if thinking of something else. Thackeray hesitated for a second himself, before ploughing on.

‘The other thing you need to know is that the inquiry team looking into the Christie deaths is expected up here next week for preliminary interviews. I expect they’ll want to talk to you.’

‘I’m sure they will,’ Mower said. He leant back in his chair and took in Thackeray’s sunken cheeks and pale complexion.

‘I saw Val Ridley the other night,’ he said quietly, making sure none of their colleagues could hear what they were saying. ‘She’s all geared up to give evidence and I don’t think the Super’s going to like what she has to say. She’s still furious that someone got to the little girl.’

Thackeray nodded. Val Ridley had resigned while he had been fighting for his life in hospital after a child she had become attached to had been killed. It was not something she
would either forget or forgive, and he was not sure how far and wide she would apportion blame when she was asked. The very fact that she had resigned probably meant that she wanted to escape the pressure she would be under to close ranks in the face of an inquiry. The canteen culture of officers covering each other’s backs still ran deep and although he did not condone it, he understood it. Val was a wild card, he thought, who certainly threatened the Superintendent, and possibly himself as well.

‘They won’t confine themselves to serving officers,’ he said. ‘I fully expect they’ll want to talk to Laura. And then there’ll be the inquests. A lot of things will be said there that we could do without. I guess the Chief Constable wants this inquiry finished before the trial and then the Coroner opening full hearings. That way he’ll reckon he can put the best gloss possible on what happened – and maybe say he’s sacked the people responsible for any mistakes as well. I wouldn’t be surprised.’

‘It’s a bloody shame we lost Val,’ Mower said explosively. ‘I did try to get her to change her mind while you were in hospital, you know.’

‘I know,’ Thackeray said. ‘But it’s water under the bridge now. Is she still planning to be a social worker?’

‘So she says.’

‘She’ll be good at it,’ Thackeray said.

‘She was a good copper.’ Mower was not bothering to hide his anger.

‘Yes,’ Thackeray agreed. ‘But in the end she couldn’t hack it. She got too involved. And I’m sure that when she’s asked she won’t hesitate to tell the inquiry who she thinks is to
blame.’

‘It could be a year or more before the case comes to trial,’ Mower said. ‘This thing will run and run.’

‘And mud sticks,’ Thackeray said, tiredly. ‘Anyway, put all that on the back burner for now. We’ve more urgent things to think about, like a dead pregnant girl. I’ll see everyone at two, and we’ll see where we’re at. Two lives were lost in the canal, the girl and her baby, and they both deserve our attention. Don’t let’s get distracted.’

Across town at the
Gazette
, Laura Ackroyd stared contemplatively at her computer screen as she tried to compose a final paragraph for her profile of Jenna Heywood for the next day’s paper. She could see an anxious-looking Tony Holloway watching her from the other side of the newsroom, where his and the other sports reporters’ desks were clustered together in a defensive hollow square. Ever since she had returned to the office from her long lunch with Jenna, Tony had been eagerly offering snippets of information and advice and, in return, she knew that he was hoping for first view of what she had written. First view, she thought, and quite probably a pre-emptive input to her article if it in any way impinged on his entrenched opinions about United, its new chairman and members of the old guard to whom he felt that he owed favours.

She had enjoyed her lunch with Jenna, and had begun to think that she understood why she had taken up part-time residence with her mother in Broadley while they both took time to come to terms with the loss of Sam and Jenna took stock of her newly inherited position as chief shareholder
of the club. The latter was not a job any of her co-directors hoped she would keep for long, Jenna had admitted with a faintly satisfied smile. She reckoned she knew of at least two groups – one of existing directors and one of people with no apparent connection to Bradfield at all – who seemed determined to buy her out if they possibly could. But if Laura was reading Jenna Heywood correctly, she guessed that sort of challenge would only make her the more determined to do her own thing, as soon as she had taken time to reflect on exactly what that might be.

‘What my dad was really worried about was that some outsider would buy the club and then just asset strip it,’ Jenna had said quietly, after a few glasses of wine had evidently made her more forthcoming than she had been at first. ‘The stadium site, so close to the town centre, is worth a fortune, and if you didn’t want to build a replacement you could just flog it off for redevelopment and pocket the profit. I really don’t want the bastards to do that. United was part of my life when I was a kid. Going to the match on a Saturday afternoon was the highlight of my week until I went away to uni. And I still kept it up whenever I was at home. It was one of the few things that my dad and I had in common. And I know it’s part of the lives of the fans in just the same way. It’s still a family thing here, isn’t it? Passed on from generation to generation. I know the big clubs have moved into a different financial dimension, but it’s not like that at United. So it’s struggling? I think I can fix that. And I’m certainly going to give it a try.’

‘But it’s not just a question of money is it?’ Laura had asked. ‘You have to keep the club in the League to survive as well, don’t you? Isn’t that a much harder nut to crack?’

‘You mean do I know enough about the game to make it a success?’ Jenna had come back quickly. Laura shrugged.

‘My father had a lot of faith in the new manager, and he signed the Nigerian player, Okigbo, who’s certainly turned out to be very good. So we’ll have to see, won’t we? Why don’t you come to the Chelsea game on Saturday and see how we get on? Be my guest. You never know, we may give the commentators a surprise. Stranger things have happened in the Cup.’

‘Why not? Thanks,’ Laura had said, carried along by Jenna’s obvious enthusiasm and well aware that Bradfield was in a state of hysterical excitement over the forthcoming David and Goliath clash, with gold and blue favours and pictures of the so-far unexpectedly victorious local team appearing in every shop window.

Still considering her final paragraph, she was suddenly aware of a presence behind her shoulder and turned to find Tony Holloway unashamedly reading what she had written on her screen.

‘Tony, I’m not after your job, you know. This is just a profile of a woman taking on an unusual role.’

‘It’ll be very unusual if she runs the club into the ground,’ Holloway grumbled, still reading. ‘She rates Minelli, does she? I’m not sure I do. I think old Sam made a mistake with him.’

‘Well, she’s hardly going to announce that she thinks he’s a waste of space in a piece like this, is she?’ Laura countered. ‘This is pretty innocuous stuff. I’ve no doubt you’ll be the first to know when she runs into difficulties, as I’m sure she may do. She says herself it’s going to be a tough call, and from what you say it doesn’t look as if anyone’s going to give her
an easy ride at the club, or in the
Gazette
, for that matter. But I don’t see why we shouldn’t give her the benefit of the doubt. She’s a breath of fresh air and she’s nobody’s fool. She’s a successful businesswoman in a cut-throat profession, so I don’t see why we should pander to the whingers and whiners just yet. Give her a chance, for God’s sake.’