The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori

Robert Barnard

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781439125809
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The body of a young man, almost naked, found in the car park behind a Haworth restaurant marks the beginning of the case, and it is his identity that is the first puzzle for DC Charlie Peace and his superior, Detective Superintendent Oddie. But before long the puzzle that most concerns them is the nature of the close-knit artistic community where Declan O'Hearn had acted as odd-job boy. The little knot of people seem united less by their ability as painters than by a common worship of the distinguished artist Ranulph Byatt, who seems to prefer the adulation of his inferiors to the judgement of his equals. Peace soon starts to wonder if there isn't a sinister reason for this. And as the search for the killer gathers pace, Peace and Oddie uncover a series of dark secrets in the harsh Haworth landscape.

PART I

The Corpse

1

THE BODY OF AN UNKNOWN MAN

The last diners pushed away their plates of lamb biryani or chicken tikka masala, downed the last of their Tiger beers or their fruit juices, and began scrabbling in purses and feeling in back pockets as they made their way to the till. It had been a table for four, and they had arrived only shortly before ten o’clock. They had been talking incessantly, and had been quite unconscious that they had been watched for the past twenty minutes, that all the other tables were cleared and all the washing up had been done. The Haworth Tandoori was ready, indeed anxious, to turn off its lights and bolt its doors, but the late diners were quite unaware of the fact.

It was half past eleven at night.

“You two can go,” said Mr. Masud to his two waiters as he shut the door on the customers. The young men had been constantly on the go from six until business had slackened off to those last four diners about half past ten. “See you tomorrow. I’ll shut up.”

Taz and Bash nodded gratefully and slipped out through the back door and up to the car park behind the restaurant. Mr. Masud went to bolt the front door and the side door, switching off all the lights in the dining area before going back to the kitchen. He was just about to bend down and switch on the dishwasher for its last load of the evening when he was frightened out of his wits—Haworth on weekends was a rough, unpredictable place—by banging and shouting at the back door. A second later he was relieved to recognize Taz’s voice.

“Mo! Mo! Open the door!”

When he pulled back the bolts and opened it, he was confronted by a frightened face.

“There’s a body in my car!”

“What? What do you mean, a body?” demanded Mr. Masud. “Some drunk got into it by mistake?”

“I mean a body! A dead body! In the boot!”

Mr. Masud swallowed and went out into the dim area of the car park. With reluctance in his steps he went over to Taz’s ancient Fiesta and cast his eye down to the open boot: he saw first a hand, then the back of a head, then in the depths of the boot a scrap of white clothing that could have been underpants. Seconds later he was back in the kitchen and, seizing the receiver from his phone there, he pressed nine three times.

“Police. Keighley Police. . . . This is the Haworth Tandoori—you know it? Near the station. We’ve discovered a body. In the boot of a car. Yes, in the boot, left there. I think a man has been murdered.”

• • •

By the time Detective Constable Peace had arrived at the little car park behind the Tandoori, the SOCO people were already beginning to assemble to collect the scene-of-the-crime evidence: there was, after all, little question of a dead man stuffed into the boot of a car having died from natural causes.

Lights were beginning to go up around the car. Not welcoming, warming lights, but a piercing, pitiless illumination of the scene. With less reluctance than when he had started in the force, but with a slight sense of shame underlying his curiosity, Charlie Peace went over to look at the body. It was a white man, young-looking; it was male, but the face was indistinct, tucked into the mass of limbs and trunk, so it would not be clearly seen until it could be removed from the boot. Charlie caught the same glimpse that Mr. Masud had seen and looked closer: yes, the body was naked except for a pair of white underpants. He stood back to look at the car: a very old, B-reg Ford Fiesta—one of only two cars in the car park. The other was an almost equally old Mini. From the little he had been told he suspected they both belonged to the waiters at the Tandoori. He conjectured that the proprietor must live close enough to walk to and from work.

Charlie walked away from the car and looked around him. The road he had driven down was the road to the station, which lay on the other side of the buildings he was looking at. The road then lay flat for a hundred yards to his left, though he couldn’t see it, then began the steep climb up to what had once been the village proper—shops, church, parsonage on the edge of the sweep of moorlands, going southward to Hebden Bridge, westward to Burnley. Now the top of Haworth was taken up with cafés, shops selling tourist souvenirs, herbalists, and peddlers of the occult. Any real shops that sold things that people needed were at the bottom, around the station, and for anything except basics the people of Haworth had to hike up the hill to Crossroads or take the bus to Keighley. They had paid a heavy price for all the generations of their ancestors who had peddled tall stories about Branwell Bronte at the drop of a sixpenny piece.

Everywhere in Haworth, Charlie reflected, involved a stiff hike. He had a car, of course, but he wouldn’t mind betting that this case would involve making door-to-door inquiries of shopkeepers and café proprietors up and down Main Street. He remembered a previous case at Micklewike, on the other side of the moors. That had involved fearsome climbs as well. One of the (few) good things that Charlie could think of to say about his native Brixton was that it was flat.

Two cars arrived, driving in from the road and parking behind the Tandoori. More SOCO people in one of them, his boss Mike Oddie in the other. Charlie recognized the car in the dim light, and walked over to it. Oddie put his window down and raised a hand in salute.

“What have we got?” he asked.

“I haven’t got much more than I was told when I was called out,” admitted Charlie. “Body stuffed in the boot of a car—but I expect you know that. Body in question is young, male, nearly naked. Caucasian, but I think the car belongs to one of the waiters here.”

“Any connection?”

“I shouldn’t think so. From what I heard when I was called out he found the body in the boot when he was going home, and went screaming to the proprietor of the place.”

“Why his car, then?”

Charlie shrugged.

“It’s an old bomb. The lock on the boot looked dodgy. Whoever dumped it may have thought it was abandoned.”

“Well, let’s get talking to him,” said Oddie, climbing out of his car. “If you’re right and the body was just dumped on him, we can let him go for the moment.”

Taz had been waiting, with Bash his fellow waiter and his boss, in the kitchens of the Tandoori, compulsively drinking Cokes. His English was good, and his apprehension, which sometimes made him babble, seemed to spring mainly from his experience of finding the body and his reluctance to involve himself with the police rather than any irregularities in his status: he had been born in Bradford twenty-four years ago, he told Oddie, and he was a British citizen.

“So just go through what happened tonight,” Oddie said.

“We finish ’ere— There’s a party of four chatterin’ away an’ not carin’ they’re the last ones ’ere and everyone’s waitin’ to get ’ome. Anyway, they go— Arpast eleven it was. We’d cleared away, and Mr. Masud says we can go, Bash and me, and so we go out to Bash’s car.”

“Why Bash’s car?”

“Mine’s been out of order five or six days now.”

“Why did you go to it, then?”

“To get me anorak. Some nights are nice an’ warm still, but tonight’s chilly. Bash drops me off on the Thornton Road, and I have ten minutes’ walk from there.”

Oddie nodded.

“I see. Go on.”

“Well, I opened the boot, in the dark, and I felt in and—oh, God!—felt this body. Couldn’t believe it, but there was still a bit of light from the kitchens and—well, I knew that’s what it were. I ran to the back door, shoutin’, and Mr. Masud opened up and called the police.”

“I suppose you got no look at the man’s face?”

“No—didn’t even know it was a man.”

“You’ve got no quarrel with any young man? Anyone been making trouble here at the Tandoori? Any other reason why a body should be dumped in your car?”

“I got no quarrel with nobody, except my mother-in-law, who’s a pain.”

“Well, we’ll have to ask you to look at him when he’s been removed from the boot, maybe tomorrow.” Taz nodded unenthusiastically. “Just one last question: did you talk about your car with Bash or Mr. Masud in front of people who were eating here? Maybe said it was broken down and so on?”

Taz thought hard.

“Bash knew it was broken down because he gave me a lift the night I couldn’t start it and every night since. I probably told Mr. Masud the next day before we opened. I could have said somethin’ to Bash in front of the punters—like maybe I was goin’ to get someone from me garage at Thornton to ‘ave a look at it on Saturday. . . . I’ll ’ave to put ’im off now, won’ I?”

“You will. Could you have said this in English, or—”

“Urdu. Could be either. We go from one to the other, Bash and me—don’ know what we been talking ’alf the time. With Mr. Masud we mostly talk Urdu.”

That was all they could get out of him that evening. He went off to accept, finally, Bash’s lift home with perceptible relief on his face. The next day they took all three from the Tandoori to the mortuary at Keighley Police headquarters. They watched Taz’s reaction in particular when he saw the face, which was still a horrible sight. He shook his head, first with pity. But he looked as closely as he could bear, then when he had looked away he shook it again as a negation.

“I’ve never seen ’im. He’s never eaten with us while I was on.”

He had a sharp, waiter’s eye for customers, Charlie guessed. Assuming he was not personally involved, he believed him when he said the dead boy hadn’t been a customer. His negative was confirmed by the other two men from the restaurant.

When they had gone Charlie talked to the young pathologist who would be doing the autopsy.

“Strangled, without a doubt. A nasty, slow death, as you can see from the face. There are signs that the hands had been secured, perhaps behind his back. It would be difficult to do it any other way, unless he was drunk or sedated. Will you be wanting some kind of artist’s impression made?”

“Yes, I will,” said Oddie. “It’s the best hope we have of getting a lead on him at the moment. We can hardly show people a photograph of his face like that.”

Charlie turned away from the body. Once again he had the sinking feeling that sometime in the next few days he would be seeing a lot of the daunting gradient that was Haworth Main Street.

• • •

Charlie parked his car in the Old Hall car park and went out onto the road. He was at the crossroads halfway up the hill. He had chosen to park here rather than at the top because he was the sort of person who liked to get the slog over first—in food terms a vegetables-first person rather than a meat-first one. So it was uphill to start with, calling at all the little tourist-oriented shops and galleries and cafés, then maybe he could give Main Street a miss on the way down and take the gentler road back to the Old Hall, passing the school and the park. Coming down Main Street, he knew, with its cobbled steepness, would be almost as grueling as walking up it.

The artist had done his best, but over the next quarter of an hour Charlie began to get the idea that his best was not good enough. It was the tail end of summer, and tourist trapping was on the wane, but though the proprietors and assistants were polite and had time to give him, the picture aroused no memories in anyone.

“If he was here in the school holiday period, there’s Buckley’s chance of his being noticed, unless he did something to make himself conspicuous, like buying something,” said one disillusioned man in an art shop stuffed full of representations of Top Withens and sheep-populated moorlands. “You must know how chock-full of gawpers this place is then.”

“He could have been here in the last few days,” Charlie said.

“Oh, well, in that case, no, I haven’t seen him, and he didn’t come in here. Now you’ve got time, you notice.”

That was the burden of practically all the interviews he had, as he went methodically upward, calling at establishments on both sides of the street. He concluded that the boy could have gone up or down Main Street (practically everyone except the halt and the lame did that), but that he didn’t stop anywhere, perhaps because he had no money to spend, perhaps because he was not the type the trappers were aiming to catch.

There was, though, one flicker that could have been of recognition. Charlie had decided early on that the cafés were a better bet than the shops, because the shops sold nothing that a human being could actually need, but the cafés did. It was in a café called Tabby’s Kitchen that the proprietress blinked and considered long, before disappointingly shaking her head.

“No, it wouldn’t be right to say I recognized him,” she said, handing the picture back. “Just a vague memory that someone a bit like that was in here. But it would probably send you off on entirely the wrong track. After all, this picture’s . . . well, not very individual, is it?”

“Not very,” admitted Charlie. “We may be able to get a better one later on. What can you remember about this boy?”

“Not much. Not English, I se...