Free Death in Dark Waters by Patricia Hall Page A

shut this beggar up and you can come in.” He waited while doors opened and shut at the back of the house and eventually the woman beckoned him inside. She evidently bore him no grudge for arresting her son because she waved him into the front room with a smile and sank back into the armchair from which she had been watching TV, turning the volume down very slightly with a remote control,
    â€œBloody dog were Nicky’s idea,” she said. “Security for me, he said. But the beggar’s more trouble than he’s worth. Let him run out on t’green and he’s off for hours at a time. I can’t catch him, can I? And if you keep him on a lead he pulls your bloody arm off. He’ll have to go.”
    â€œI was keen to have a word with Karen,” Thackeray said. “But Barry Foreman says she’s left him. I thought maybe she’d come back home.”
    Jean shook her head.
    â€œI’ve done my bit wi‘babies,” she said, lighting a fresh cigarette and flinging the match into an over-flowing ashtray on the cluttered coffee table. “Nappies, bottles, screaming in t’middle o’t’night. I can’t be doing with all that again. I told her. She’d made her bed, she’d have to bloody lie on it.”
    â€œSo do you know where she is?” Thackeray asked, slightly shaken by this lack of grandmotherly solidarity. But Jean only shrugged.
    â€œBarry said she were talking about going to London,” she said. “I reckon she’s got some new man in her life. You’ll be
seeing her in t’lobe next wi’some footballer with a tattoo on his bum.”
    â€œLondon? With two young babies?”
    â€œAye, well, I didn’t know t’wins were going with her, did I? I thought he were keen to keep them, Barry. He can afford a nanny or summat, can’t he? Any road, she’ll want to be somewhere where he can’t find her, won’t she? He’s got a vicious temper on him, has Barry Foreman.”
    â€œHas he now?” Thackeray said carefully. “He always seems as smooth as silk when I talk to him.”
    The woman glanced away and shrugged slightly.
    â€œYou ask our Nicky,” she said. “He were a damn’ sight more scared of Barry after that business wi’t’gippos than he was of you lot.”
    Even if that were true, Thackeray thought, and he had no reason to doubt Jean Bailey’s assessment of her son’s state of mind, there was little chance of the already jailed Nicky expanding on any threats Foreman might have issued to his girlfriend’s brother. He changed tack.
    â€œHas Karen got money of her own? I don’t imagine Barry sent her on her way with a generous redundancy cheque, do you?”
    â€œKaren never had owt, as far as I know. Spent it as fast as she earned it when she were living here. If she had one pair of shoes she had fifty, all t’colours o’t’ bloody rainbow. If she’s gone she’ll have found some beggar to pay her fare, you can bet on that.”
    â€œBut you haven’t heard from her?”
    â€œNot a friggin’ word,” Jean said, drawing hard on her cigarette. “Not for months now. She never were one to keep in touch, weren’t Karen. Only when she wanted summat. You know how it is?”
    Thackeray suddenly felt very cold although the room was stuffy. No one seemed to be worried about Karen Bailey and her twin girls, barely six months old: not their father, not their grandmother and certainly not their uncle banged up in
Armley for violence which still sickened Thackeray to think about. So why was he so certain that they ought to be? Perhaps he was going soft, he thought, but he didn’t really believe it. If only for his own peace of mind, he knew he needed to track Karen and her children down.
    Â 
    1got home that night tired and irritable. She had spent the best part of the afternoon at the Infirmary waiting for the