Dead Reckoning Read Online Free

hurt and often tainted by the remorseless nature of a murder investigation. The adrenaline, he knew from experience, would kick in eventually as evidence began to accumulate but on this chilly grey morning, with his own life on the brink of changes which he knew he should have concluded long ago, he felt nothing but a weary pity for the man whose violation he had so recently witnessed in the mortuary and for all those whose lives would be devastated by his death, even, he thought wryly, for the murderer himself. “You’re going soft,” he told himself as he picked up the phone. “Or maybe that’s your trouble. You always have been when it comes to the crunch. Laura would be proud of you.”
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    Laura Ackroyd had been at her own desk early that morning in spite of her encounter with the town’s racist youth, and by dint of taking a sandwich lunch in front of her computer screen she felt able to slide out of the busy newsroom by four. Much of the day’s news agenda had been taken up with rumours and counter-rumours that one of Bradfield’s three remaining textile mills, Earnshaws, which had been weaving high quality worsted cloth for the tailoring trade for more than a hundred years, was to close. Time was when the wool correspondent of the Bradfield Gazette had been a power in the town, dividing his time between the gothic Exchange, now converted into a shopping precinct, and the bar of the Clarendon Hotel, where the mill owners traditionally took a three course lunch, smoked several cigars and routinely cut local politicians off at the knees if their policies did not suit. Those days were long gone and, on the day the once staple industry looked like taking its terminal plunge into oblivion, Ted Grant was hard pressed to find a single reporter who could even distinguish between combing, spinning and weaving let alone a top from a noil. But Ted did not expect
female members of his staff to bother their pretty little heads about the local economy or industrial relations — which looked like becoming imminently stormy — and on this occasion Laura was keen to keep her head down. Fifteen minutes after leaving the office she was sitting with two young Asian women in dilapidated armchairs in a women’s centre just off Aysgarth Lane.
    â€œWhat I’d like to do in these radio interviews is give ordinary members of the Asian community space to tell people what it’s like at the moment with the tension so high,” Laura said. “I was horrified by what I saw this morning in town. This was an elderly woman being abused and no one took a blind bit of notice.”
    â€œHave you talked to councillor Khalid?” asked Amina Khan, a tall woman in dark shalwar kameez and severe white hijab covering every inch of her hair. But Laura shook her head quickly.
    â€œI don’t want to talk to the community leaders and politicians for this,” she said. “They get plenty of opportunity to have their say. I want to talk to people, especially women, about their own experience day to day, going shopping, taking children to school, going to the hospital like the women who were being abused this morning in the town centre. It’s not the politics that I want to talk about but the reality on the street.”
    Amina looked dubious and shook her head but her companion, Farida Achmed, fashionable in a black trouser suit, boots and a long silky scarf thrown back from her dark hair in defiance of tradition, nodded.
    â€œThe councillors are not always the best judges of that,” she said. “I work in the town hall in the housing department and I must say that no one has bothered me in the street or anywhere else for that matter. Maybe it’s because I look as
though I can stand up for myself. But the problems are getting worse. The men are starting to talk about taking women everywhere, which knocks us back a whole generation. And there are a lot of young men who are