By Death Divided by Patricia Hall Read Free Book Online Page B

over to Milford to see her? It’s not very far.’
    ‘We thought when school finishes we might go on the bus to visit her, didn’t we, Saira?’
    ‘We don’t like Imran Aziz much,’ Saira said. ‘But Faria is working all day in some travel agent’s, so we could only really see her in the evening when he would be there too.’ Sharif guessed that the girls’ new-found determination not to marry anyone from a Pakistani village had been reinforced by the arrival of Imran Aziz in their lives, the proverbial cousin from the old country, though not in this case, he believed, a country bumpkin.
    ‘Perhaps I’ll go over and see her myself,’ Sharif said. ‘Do you have her address? Or do you know where she works, perhaps? It might be easier to catch up with her there.’
    ‘Oh, would you?’ Jamilla said fervently, and Sharif realised just how seriously anxious she was about her sister. She went over to a small bureau on the other side of the room and rummaged through a drawer. She came back with a small notebook of addresses and phone numbers from which Sharif copied Faria’s details into his own notebook.
    ‘I’m not sure where she works, but it’s some sort of travelagency. Surely you could find it, Mohammad. You’re a detective.’
    ‘I’m sure I can,’ Sharif said. ‘No problem.’
    ‘I know my parents are worried about her,’ Jamilla said quietly. ‘They won’t admit it but I think they are afraid that she has run away from Imran Aziz. But she wouldn’t do that if there’s a baby coming, would she? I really wanted to tell my mother, but she made us swear not to.’ Saira gave her sister an anxious look and Sharif knew the scandal a runaway wife would cause in the family and the wider community and hoped for Faria’s sake her parents’ fears were not true.
    ‘Did she agree to this marriage?’ he asked. ‘I was never sure.’
    ‘Nor was I,’ Jamilla said quietly. ‘My father wanted it, I know that. But Faria would never talk about it. Like you, I was never sure.’ Her dark eyes filled with tears.
    ‘I’ll see what I can find out,’ he said, his stomach tight with foreboding. And when he left and glanced down the narrow, almost deserted street, few cars here, where many of the men were out of work, he wondered if he risked precipitating a family crisis by pursuing his cousin. But as he hurried back to his own car, close to the still bustling thoroughfare of Aysgarth Lane, he concluded he would have to risk it. The three sisters had always been close and if Jamilla and Saira were so worried about Faria then the least he could do was try to set their minds at rest. He would take a chance and track her down in Milford. It was, he thought, the least he could do. In the meantime he would cook for Louise, a simple thing that would shock his father and uncle to their core, but which in the new life he had created for himself seemed quite normal. He was, he thought, further adrift from his roots that anyone in his family could imagine.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Sergeant Kevin Mower walked the short distance from police HQ to Bradfield Infirmary and presented himself at the ward where the night’s apparent mugging victim had been found a bed. The doctor treating her had reported that she was now fit enough to be questioned, but showed few signs of being able to explain who she was or how she came to be lying on a patch of waste ground, battered and bruised about the face and at serious risk of hypothermia.
    She was, Mower thought as the nurse showed him to her bed, a good-looking elderly woman, in her seventies, he guessed, with almost white hair and intelligent blue eyes. But the gash on her cheek, which had been stitched, had caused the left side of her face to swell and discolour, and her hands, which clutched at the sheets nervously, were also bruised, although her nails were clean and carefully trimmed, not the hands of anyone who might have collapsed after an evening’s binge drinking. He introduced