Free By Death Divided by Patricia Hall

minutes more. Laura followed Vicky into the sitting room with a hand on each boy’s shoulder, followed by Thackeray, his face impassive as he came to terms once again with a family life he bitterly envied and feared he would never now reproduce, having lost his chance so catastrophically the first time around. He took a proffered soft drink from David Mendelson with a nod of thanks and sank into a chair beside him, leaving the women and children chattering on the otherside of the room. He greeted his host’s immediate launch into a discussion of a recent case they had both been involved in with guilty relief.
    When Vicky had finally filled Laura in on Daniel and Nathan’s continuing achievements in primary school, and persuaded the boys in the direction of their bedrooms, Laura turned to the two men again and picked up the thread of their conversation.
    ‘The last I heard the stupid woman had gone back to the bastard,’ David said. ‘She’ll end up one of your murder victims, you’ll see.’
    ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Thackeray said. ‘But if the combined persuasion of the police and the Crown Prosecution Service can’t get a woman to give evidence, I don’t see what else we can do. According to our domestic violence people, there was no corroboration from anyone else with the Robinson woman. No neighbours, no frequent visits to A and E, nothing you could have proceeded on without her testimony. She just turned up the one time at the infirmary, beaten half to death, said her husband attacked her and then changed her mind and withdrew the complaint.’
    ‘What’s all this?’ Laura asked. ‘Battered wives? I’m supposed to be writing something about that. I suggested it to Ted Grant after Vicky’s friend Julie turned up here. She won’t make a complaint about her husband either. Says it would be bad for the child.’
    ‘Well, anything you can do in the
Gazette
to make people take it seriously would be good,’ David said. ‘It really isn’t easy to launch a prosecution never mind get a conviction. And there’s always that fear at the back of your mind that it’s going to end up with someone dead.’
    ‘I haven’t trawled through our archives yet,’ Laura said. ‘Can you remember any cases from the last few years that I should look at, cases where the husband has ended up in court?’
    ‘Not offhand,’ David said. ‘I think there was something in Leeds about ten years ago where the wife ended up killing her abusive husband. There was a great furore about whether she could plead provocation even if he hadn’t been attacking her at the precise moment she took a knife to him. I think he was asleep when she actually stabbed him.’
    Laura shuddered, avoiding Thackeray’s eye. She found it difficult to comprehend the curdled emotions that polluted and destroyed relationships which must have started off in harmony, although she knew he understood some of it only too well.
    ‘I’ll look it up,’ she said. ‘I do remember it vaguely.’ She glanced up as Vicky came back into the room, glad of the opportunity to change the subject.
    ‘So how is Naomi Laura?’ she asked brightly after the child the Mendelson’s had named after her. ‘I’m sorry we missed her bedtime.’

CHAPTER FIVE
    ‘Are we completely crazy?’ Vicky Mendelson asked Laura Ackroyd the next day as they pulled up outside a neat and tidy semi on the cheaper side of Southfield, close to the primary school that Anna Holden no longer attended.
    ‘Probably,’ Laura admitted as she turned the engine off and peered at the anonymous modern house. ‘But as Julie says, he can be charm and consideration itself if he chooses. I think in most cases like this the violence is only directed at one person.’ She fervently hoped she was right, knowing that she faced Thackeray’s justified wrath if this unannounced visit went pear-shaped.
    ‘I hope you’re right,’ Vicky said. ‘Anyway, perhaps he’s out.’ But Bruce Holden was in,