Blood At The Root Read online

  Confused at first, then angry, he read the printed words. Long before he had finished, tears came to his eyes. He told himself they were Scotch tears, just the burning of the whiskey, but he knew they weren’t. He also knew who had sent him the flyer. And why.

  II

  Some of the more modern mortuaries were equipped with video cameras and monitor screens to make it easier for relatives to identify accident or murder victims from a comfortable distance. Not in Eastvale, though. There, the attendant still slid the body out of the refrigerated unit and slipped back the sheet from the face.

  Which was odd, Banks thought, as the mortuary was certainly the most recently renovated part of that drafty old pile of stone known as Eastvale General Infirmary.

  Steven and Josie Fox had at first been unwilling to come and view the body. Banks could see their point. If it was Jason, they would have to face up to his death; and if it wasn’t, then they would have gone through all the unpleasantness of looking at a badly beaten corpse for nothing.

  Reluctantly, though, they had gone, refusing Banks’s offer of a police car and choosing to walk instead. Susan Gay had returned to the station.

  Because the hospital was small and old and too close to the tourist shops, another, much larger, establishment was under construction on the northern edge of the town. But, for now, Eastvale General was all there was. Every time he walked up the front steps, Banks shuddered. There was something about the dark, rough stone, even on a fine day, that made him think of operations without anesthetic, of unsterilized surgical instruments, of plague and death.

  He led the Foxes through the maze of high corridors and down the stairs to the basement, where the mortuary was. Banks identified himself to one of the attendants, who nodded, checked his files and touched Mrs. Fox lightly on the arm. “Please, follow me,” he said.

  They did. Along a white-tiled corridor into a chilled room. There, the attendant checked his papers again before sliding out the tray on which the body lay.

  Banks watched the Foxes. They weren’t touching one another at all, not holding hands or clutching arms the way many couples did when faced with such a situation. Could there really be such distance between them that even the possibility of seeing their son dead at any second couldn’t bridge? It was remarkable, Banks had often thought, how people who no longer have any feelings for one another can keep on going through the motions, afraid of change, of loneliness, of rejection. He thought of Sandra, then pushed the thought aside. He and Sandra were nothing like the Foxes. They weren’t so much separate as independent; they gave one another space. Besides, they had too much in common, had shared too much joy and pain over the years simply to go through the motions of a failed marriage, hadn’t they?

  The attendant pulled back the white sheet to reveal the corpse’s face. Josie Fox put her hand to her mouth and started to sob. Steven Fox, pale as the sheet that covered his son, simply nodded and said, “It’s him. It’s our Jason.”

  Banks was surprised at what a good job the mortuary had done on the boy’s face. While it was clear that he had been severely beaten, the nose was straight, the cheekbones aligned, the mouth shut tight to cover the shattered teeth. The only wrong note was the way that one eye stared straight up at the ceiling and the other a little to the left, at Mr. and Mrs. Fox.

  Banks could never get over the strange effect looking at dead people had on him. Not bodies at the crime scene so much. They sometimes churned his guts, especially if the injuries were severe, but they were essentially work to him; they were human beings robbed of something precious, an insult to the sanctity of life.

  On the other hand, when he saw bodies laid out in the mortuary or in a funeral parlor, they had a sort of calming effect on him. He couldn’t explain it, but as he looked down at the shell of what had once been Jason Fox, he knew there was nobody home. The pale corpse resembled nothing more than a fragile eggshell, and if you tapped it hard enough it would crack open, revealing nothing but darkness inside. Somehow, the effect of all this was to relieve him, just for a few welcome moments, of his own growing fear of death.

  Banks led the dazed Foxes out into the open air. They stood on the steps of the hospital for a moment, silently watching the people come out of the small Congregationalist church.

  Banks lit a cigarette. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked.

  After a few moments, Steven Fox looked at him. “What? Oh, sorry,” he said. Then he shook his head. “No, there’s nothing. I’ll take Josie home now. Make her a nice cup of tea.”

  His wife said nothing.

  They walked down King Street, still not touching. Banks sighed and turned up toward the station. At least he knew who the victim was now; first, he would let his team know, and then they could begin the investigation proper.

  III

  Detective Sergeant Jim Hatchley would normally have enjoyed nothing more than a pub crawl any day of the week, any hour of the day or night, but that Sunday, all he wanted to do as he walked into his fifth pub, the Jubilee, at the corner of Market Street and Waterloo Road, was go home, crawl into bed and sleep for a week, a month – nay, a bloody year.

  For the past two weeks, his daughter April, named after the month she was born because neither Hatchley nor his wife Carol could agree on any other name, had kept him awake all night, every night, as those bloody inconvenient lumps of calcium called teeth bored their way through the tender flesh of her gums with flagrant disregard for the wee bairn’s comfort. Or for his. And he hadn’t been well-enough prepared for it. In fact, he hadn’t been prepared for it at all.

  The first year or so of April’s life, you would never have known she was there, so quiet was she. At worst, she’d cry out a couple of times when she was hungry, but as soon as Carol’s tit was in her mouth she was happy as a pig in clover. And why not, thought Hatchley, who felt exactly the same way about Carol’s tit himself, not that he’d been getting much of that lately, either.

  But now April had suddenly turned into a raging monster and put paid to his sleep. He knew he looked as if he’d been on the piss every morning he went into work – he could see the way they were all looking at him – but if truth be told, he hadn’t had a drink in weeks. A real drink in a pub, that was.

  He remembered some story, an old wife’s tale, probably, about rubbing whiskey on a teething baby’s gums to quieten it down. Well, Carol wouldn’t let him do that – she said she had enough on her plate with one boozer in the family – so he had rubbed it on his own gums, so to speak, or rather let it caress them briefly and gently on its way down to his stomach. Sometimes that helped him get a ten-minute nap between screaming sessions. But he never had more than two or three glasses a night. He hadn’t had a hangover in so long that not only had he almost forgotten what they felt like, he was actually beginning to miss them.

  So it was with both a sense of nostalgia and a feeling that he’d rather be anywhere else, especially asleep in bed, that Sergeant Hatchley entered the Jubilee that Sunday lunch-time.

  Contrary to rumors around the station, Hatchley didn’t know the landlord of every pub in Eastvale. Apart from the Queen’s Arms, the station’s local, he tended to avoid the pubs near the town center, especially those on Market Street, which always seemed to be full of yobs. If there was trouble on a Saturday night, which there often was these days, you could bet it would be on York Road or Market Street.

  The Jubilee was also a chain pub: all fruit machines, theme nights, trivia and overpriced food. Overpriced ale, too. Rock bands played there on Friday and Saturday nights, and it had a reputation for getting some of the best up-and-coming bands in Yorkshire. Not that Hatchley gave a toss about rock music, being a brass-band man himself. The Jubilee was also reputed to be a fertile hunting ground for birds and drugs.

  On Sunday lunchtimes, though, it became a family pub, and each family seemed to have about six children in tow. All of them screaming at once.

  Hatchley leaned over the bar and presented his warrant card
to the barmaid as she pulled someone a pint.

  “Any trouble here Saturday night, love?” he asked.

  She jerked her head without looking up at him. “Better ask His Nibs over there. I weren’t working.”

  Hatchley edged down the bar and shoved his way through the drinkers standing there, getting a few dirty looks on the way. He finally caught the barman’s attention and asked for a word. “Can’t you see I’m rushed off my feet?” the man protested. “What is it you want?” Like everyone else behind the bar, he wore black trousers and a blue-and-white-striped shirt with THE JUBILEE stitched across the left breast.

  When Hatchley showed his card, the man stopped protesting that he was too busy and called one of the other bar staff to stand in for him, then he gestured Hatchley down to the far end of the bar where it was quiet.

  “Sorry about that,” he said. “I hate bloody Sunday lunchtimes, especially after working a Saturday night.” He scratched his thinning hair and a shower of dandruff fell on his shoulders. How bloody hygienic, Hatchley thought. “My name’s Ted, by the way.”

  “Aye, well, Ted, lad,” Hatchley said slowly, “I’m sorry to disturb you, but we all have our crosses to bear. First off, was there any trouble in here on Saturday night?”

  “What do you mean, trouble?”

  “Fights, barneys, slanging matches, hair-pulling, that sort of thing.”

  Ted frowned. “Nowt out of the ordinary,” he said. “I mean, we were busy as buggery, so there was no way I could see what were going on everywhere at once, especially with the bloody racket that band were making.”

  “I appreciate that,” said Hatchley, who had had the same conversation five times already that morning and was getting steadily sick of it. He slipped the sketch from his briefcase. “Recognize him?” he asked.

  The barman squinted at the drawing, then passed it back to Hatchley. “Could be any number of people, couldn’t it?”

  Hatchley wasn’t sure why, but he felt the back of his scalp prickle. Always a sign something wasn’t quite right. “Aye, but it’s not,” he said. “It’s an amateur artist’s reconstruction of a lad’s face, a face that were booted to a bloody pulp after closing time last night. So any help you could give us would be much appreciated, Ted.”

  Ted turned pale and averted his eyes before answering. “Well, seeing as you put it like that… But I’m telling you the truth. Nothing happened.”

  Hatchley shook his head. “Why don’t I find myself believing you, Ted? Can you answer me that?”

  “Look.” Ted held his hand up, palm out. “I don’t want any trouble.”

  Hatchley smiled, showing stained and crooked teeth. “And I’m not here to give you any.”

  “It’s just…”

  “Frightened of something?”

  “No. It’s not that.” Ted licked his lips. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to swear to owt, but there were a lad looked a bit like that in last night. It could’ve been him.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Having a drink with a mate.”

  “What did this mate look like?”

  “About my height. That’s five foot six. Stocky build. Tough-looking customer, you know, like he lifted weights or summat. Short fair hair, almost skinhead, but not quite. And an earring. One of them loops, like pirates used to have in old films.”

  “Had you seen them before?”

  “Only the one in the drawing, if it is him. Sometimes comes in on a weekend after a match, like, just for a quick one with the lads. Plays for United.”

  “Aye, so I’ve heard. Troublemaker?”

  “No. Not at all. Not even much of a boozer. He’s usually gone early. It’s just…” Ted scratched his head again, sending more flakes of dandruff onto the polished bar. “There was a bit of a scuffle Saturday night, that’s all.”

  “No punches?”

  He shook his head. “Far as I can tell, the lad in the picture bumped into another lad and spilled some of his drink. The other lad said something and this one replied, like, and gave him a bit of a shove for good measure. That’s all that happened. Honest. Pushing and shoving. It were all over before it began. Nobody got beat up.”

  “Could it have continued outside?”

  “I suppose it could have. As I said, though, it seemed like summat and nowt to me.”

  “This other lad, the one whose drink got spilled, did he have any mates with him?”

  “There were three of them.”

  Hatchley pointed to the sketch again. “Did you see this lad and his mate leave?”

  “Aye. I remember them because I had to remind them more than once to drink up.”

  “Were they drunk?”

  “Mebbe. A bit. They weren’t arse over tit, if that’s what you mean. They could still walk in a straight line and speak without slurring. Like I said, I’d seen the one in the picture a few times before, and he weren’t much of a drinker. He might have had a jar more than usual, but who hasn’t had by closing time on a Saturday night?”

  “And it wasn’t till after eleven o’clock that you got rid of them, right?”

  “Aye. About quarter past. I know some places are a bit lax, but there’s no extension of drinking-up time in the Jubilee. The manager makes that clear.”

  “What about the other three?”

  “They’d gone by then.”

  “Were they drunk, too?”

  “No. At least they didn’t act it.”

  “Anything else you can tell me about them?”

  Ted looked away.

  “Why do I get the impression you’re still holding something back, Ted?”

  “I don’t know, do I?”

  “I think you do. Is it drugs? Worried we’ll close the place down and you’ll lose your job?”

  “No way. Look, like I said… I don’t want to cause any bother.”

  “What makes you think you’d be causing bother by telling me the truth, Ted? All right. Let me guess. If it’s not drugs, then you’re probably frightened these three hooligans are going to come back and wreck your pub if they find out you ratted on them. Is that it?”

  “Partly, I suppose. But they weren’t hooligans.”

  “Oh? Who were they, then? Did you recognize them?”

  “Aye. I recognized them. Two of them, anyroad.”

  “Names?”

  “I don’t know their names, but one of them’s that lad from the shop off Cardigan Road. You know, the one opposite the bottom of the Leaview Estate. And the other one’s dad owns that new restaurant in the market square. The Himalaya.”

  Hatchley raised his eyebrows.

  “See what I mean?” Ted went on. “See what I’m worried about, now? I don’t want to get stuck in the middle of some bloody racial incident, do I? The lad in your picture called one of them a ‘Paki bastard’ and told him to get out of the fucking way. That’s what happened.”

  IV

  Gallows View, déjà vu, Banks thought, as he pulled up outside the Mahmoods’ shop. Of course, the street had changed a lot in six years, and the wire mesh that covered the display windows was one of the changes. Inside, the smell of cumin and coriander was another.

  The Mahmoods were one of three Asian families in East-vale. In these parts of Yorkshire north of Leeds and Bradford you saw very few visible minorities, even in the larger cities like York and Harrogate.

  Mahmood had enlarged the shop, Banks noticed. Originally, it had occupied the ground floor of only one cottage, and the Sharps had used the other as their living room. But now the shop had been extended to take up the frontage of both cottages, complete with extra plateglass window and a new freezer section. The Mahmoods sold a whole range of products, from bread, eggs, cigarettes, milk and beer to washing-up liquid, tights, magazines, lipstick, stationery and toothpaste. They also rented out videos. Pretty soon, when the new estate was finished, the shop would be a little gold mine.

  Unlike most people the racist bigots refer to as “Pakis,” Charles Mahmood actually did h
ail from Pakistan. Or rather, his father, Wasim Mahmood, did. Wasim and family emigrated to England in 1948, shortly after partition. Charles was born in Bradford in 1953, around the time of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, and he was, naturally, given the name of her only male child because the Mahmoods were proud of their new country and its royal heritage.

  Unfortunately for Charles, when his own son was born in 1976, the Prince of Wales had yet to marry and produce offspring. To name his child, Charles had to take the devious route of stealing one of the prince’s middle names. He chose George. Why he didn’t choose Philip, which might have been easier on the lad at school, nobody knew. As for George himself, he said he was only glad his dad hadn’t called him Arthur, which would have seemed even more old-fashioned than George to his classmates.

  Banks knew all this because George had been a contemporary of his own son, Brian, at Eastvale Comprehensive, and the two had become good friends during their last couple of years there. George had spent quite a bit of time at the Banks household, and Banks remembered his love of music, his instinctive curiosity about things and his sense of humor. They had all laughed at the story of the family names, for example.

  Now the kids seemed to have lost touch, drifted apart as people do, and Banks hadn’t seen George for a while. Brian had just started his third year at college in Portsmouth, and George was still in Eastvale, pretty much unemployed, as far as Banks knew, apart from helping his dad out at the shop. Even though they hadn’t see one another in a while, Banks still felt a little uneasy about interviewing George in connection with a criminal matter.

  Charles Mahmood greeted Banks with a smile of recognition; his wife, Shazia, waved from the other side of the shop, where she was stacking shelves with jars of instant coffee.

  “Is it about that brick-chucking?” asked Charles in his broad West Yorkshire accent.