"Step-brother," Laura said. "The boy was no relation, a child of a different partnership. The couple both had children from previous marriages."
"They called him her brother, all the same," Joyce said grimly. "At the time it seemed just as bad as if he'd been a blood relation. There were a lot of folk over there who'd have killed him if they'd got their hands on him." She nodded through her open window at the looming bulk of Bronte House. "These TV people, they really think he might not have done it after all?" Laura shrugged.
"I don't really know what they think," she said. "All they've asked me to do is have a preliminary talk to the girl's father and the boy's mother. They split up of course when Stephen was arrested. Do you remember the policeman on the case - chief inspector Huddleston?" Joyce laughed delightedly, her face suddenly animated at the memory of old battles.
"Once met, never forgotten, is Harry Huddleston. You'll get short shrift from him if you go suggesting he made a mistake. He's retired now, of course."
"Yes, I remember. Michael Thackeray's predecessor," Laura said half to herself, and immediately felt irritated that she had so readily called to mind the name of a man she was trying to forget. She felt Joyce's interest quicken but refused to meet her eyes, a faint flush colouring her pale red-head's skin, momentarily blotting out her freckles. She let her hair fall forward for a moment masking her face while she regained her composure.
"He won't have gone far, won't inspector Huddleston," Joyce said, restraining her intense curiosity. She knew better than to try to push Laura into confidences she was not prepared to offer willingly. "He'll not stray from the county cricket grounds at this time of the year, if I remember Harry. Almost as fanatical as your father was, before the sun went to his head." It was a source of never-to-be-forgotten resentment that Joyce's only son Jack, Laura's father, had sold out his local business interests and retired to Portugal well before the latest recession had begun to bite.
"There was a big splash when he retired, wasn't there?" Laura recalled. "After that drugs case? We did a big profile of him on the leader page. The funny thing is I can't remember much about the Tracy Miller murder." She glanced at the dates on the cuttings. "It all happened the year I was abroad after university."
"Thought he was God's gift to law and order, did Harry Huddleston," her grandmother said. "He'll not thank you for casting doubt on one of his greatest triumphs."
"Well, he can stay on the back burner for a while. They don't want me to stir up the police unless there seems to be something in what the mother's saying. But if Harry Huddleston's triumphantly locked up the wrong person, he'll have to put up with it," Laura said unsympathetically. "It won't be the first time the police have got it wrong, will it? They were making quite a habit of it ten years ago."
"It'll be the last straw up here," Joyce said thoughtfully. "There's no love lost now with the joy-riding, with one half saying the police did too little too late and the other half saying interfering at all last night was tantamount to murder."
"Is that what they're saying," Laura asked. "I need to talk to people about last night. I need some reactions." As if on cue, the door bell rang.
"That'll be Linda and Jackie," Joyce said. "You can talk to them for a start."
Laura waved her grandmother back into her chair and went to answer the door herself. She let in two young women in brightly patterned shorts and baggy tee-shirts, followed by two straw-headed children in swimming costumes, their fair skin pink and blotchy from too much sun. When they were all packed into the bungalow's tiny sitting room Joyce introduced Linda Smith, a plump pregnant pasty-faced woman in her mid twenties, Laura guessed, although she could have been younger, and Jackie Sullivan, taller, thinner, and some years older, with a face prematurely aging. Jackie puffed incessantly on a cigarette as she talked, her hands shaking slightly and her eyes darting this way and that as she tried to control her children.
"Linda and Jackie are trying to set up some sort of action group amongst the tenants," Joyce said by way of introduction across the children's noisy squabbling. "My grand-daughter works for the Gazette," she explained. "She can give you some useful publicity."
The two women looked Laura over with a chilly, neutral gaze and Laura felt, not for the first time, the gulf which separated her from so many women her age or less. With these two and the sticky, fractious children, she was embarrassingly aware of her well-cut cotton suit, her clear skin and eyes, her tanned legs and her glossy hair. At thirty, she knew that she was blooming while these two younger women were already aging, worn down by a poverty which she might resent as much as they did, but could not alleviate.
"We're starting a campaign to get families with kids off Wuthering," Jackie Sullivan said, stubbing out her cigarette without apology in one of Joyce's plant-pots and lighting another immediately. "We've had it up to here - noise, filth, bits of lasses on the game, drugs in the effing school playground, little kids molested, squatters! And now this joy-riding..." She broke off in a fit of dry coughing, too overcome to continue.
"We've not had a wink of sleep for three nights," Linda said, her voice cracked with tiredness. "We're getting up a petition to take to t'town 'all. They're talking about renovating the flats. Well, sod that, we say. We want them bloody well pulled down."
"Look at them two," Jackie came back, jumping out of her chair to prevent the little girl, hardly more than a toddler, from pushing Joyce's pot plants out of the open window. She slapped a bare arm and a leg and dumped both children unceremoniously onto the settee where they grizzled tiredly, rubbing grubby hands into bleary eyes. "You watch Chrissie, Darren, can't you? You're old enough," she said to the older child, a stocky boy of about six, who responded with a sulky glare.
"What sort of future is there here for them?" she asked bitterly, turning back to Laura and Joyce. "They'll be careering round in stolen cars before they're out of primary school if summat isn't done about this place."
Laura glanced at her grandmother who was sitting bolt up-right in her chair, hands clenched in her lap, her eyes filled with pain and frustration. Around the time Laura herself had been born, the Heights had been Joyce's other pride and joy, a monument to the brave new world she had hoped to build, a monument now collapsing in shoddy dilapidation and bitter recrimination. Laura pulled her tape-recorder out of her bag.
"Tell me what you're planning to do, who you're planning to talk to," she said quietly, defusing the tension. "I'll write something for tomorrow's paper."
CHAPTER TWO
"What's the point of community coppers if the community coppers don't know what the hell's going on?" detective chief inspector Michael Thackeray asked the head of Bradfield CID irritably as they walked back to their offices. They had just sat impotently through a management meeting called to discuss what was already openly being described around the station as the previous night's major cock up. Detective Superintendent Jack Longley shrugged wearily.
"Don't ask me, lad. Just thank your lucky stars crime prevention's not our brief, that's all. Those yobbos are running rings round us on Wuthering." He opened the door of his office and nodded the younger man inside. Thackeray crossed the room and stood by the window, looking bleakly down at the dusty, littered pavements of the town hall square outside, where a good proportion of Bradfield's unemployed gathered regularly in strictly segregated ethnic groups. The modernistic fountain, which might have provided a little relief as the temperature climbed inexorably to a heavy, humid 80 degrees, had been turned off to save water.
There are times, Thackeray thought, when I would give my right arm for a drink. He was a tall man, with the build of a rugby forward, a role he had taken enthusiastically when younger, and without the paunchiness that many of his beer swilling colleagues acquired as they approached middle age. Dark haired and blue eyed, he did not look like a Yorkshireman, although he had been born less than twenty miles from Bradfield, the son of a hill farmer in a Pennine village close enough in distance but remote from the town in c
ulture when he had roamed the moors as a boy.
"I don't envy the uniformed lads trying to keep the lid on that lot," he said turning back to his boss with the faintest look of interrogation in his eyes. He did not think that he had been invited in simply to continue the inconclusive discussion of how to handle the outbreak of near-anarchy on the Heights which had begun in the divisional commander's office. Crime management was the name of the game these days and Bradfield division, for all its liaison meetings and strategic plans, was not currently managing it very well.
Longley waved Thackeray to a seat.
"Keep me closely informed about what young Mower turns up, will you?" he said. The fact that CID had a detective sergeant on the estate incognito, looking into allegations of child molestation, had led to some sharp exchanges between Longley and chief superintendent Dobson on the sharing of intelligence.
"He won't close his eyes to other things," Thackeray said mildly. "Far from it, knowing Mower. But I've told him his top priority is the kids. It won't help the situation generally if the mothers are up in arms about that, on top of everything else up there."
"Aye, well, keep on top of the car theft angle, too. I don't believe those two lads went all the way to Harrogate to nick that Astra. It looks organised to me, in which case I want to know who by. A few tid-bits to throw in Les Dobson's direction won't come amiss, tell young Kevin."
Thackeray nodded.
"I'll have a quiet chat with the community bobby too," he suggested.
"Aye, well mind who's toes you're stepping on," Longley said. The tension between CID and the uniformed branch would not ease while part of the town teetered on the edge of violent disintegration and scapegoats were being urgently sought. Longley took off his jacket and loosened his tie and nodded to Thackeray to do the same.
"If the bloody weather broke it'd help," he said, subsiding heavily into his chair again, his almost bald head and heavily jowled face glistening. "I'd not last ten minutes in a hot climate."
Longley sat breathing heavily, looking at Thackeray speculatively, taking in the square-jawed face, with its dark shadows even early in the day, the sharp eyes and sombre mouth, slow to smile. They had not worked together long, and there was still a distance between them, made harder to bridge by a determined reticence on Thackeray's side. Longley knew the source of that, in so far as one could know anything from the bare bones of an officer's record and what he had gleaned on the grape-vine from colleagues elsewhere in the county. The full implications he could only guess at, not being an imaginative man. At last, apparently making up his mind, he opened a drawer and pulled out a file which he passed across the desk to Thackeray.
"I want you to have a look at that," Longley said slowly. "You probably won't remember it. It was a child murder up on the Heights ten years ago. A little girl, Tracy Miller. Caused a big stir at the time. No-one likes those cases." Thackeray took the buff folder and looked down at it, avoiding Longley's gaze. Least of all me, he thought bitterly. He should bloody well know that.
"I was still in Arnecliffe then, sir, " he said carefully. "I think I remember the case." That was a lie, and Thackeray guessed that Longley, who was never less than well-informed, knew it was likely to be. For him the year in question had begun in tragedy and gone down-hill. It was a time he flinched from thinking about, still less discussing. Longley recognised the frozen look on the younger man's face and went on quickly.
"Harry Huddleston wrapped it all up pretty fast. Just as well - there was a lot of aggro on the estate - another hot summer, as I recall. A good result, it looked like. The girl's brother, step-brother in fact, was sent down for life."
"And?" Thackeray asked, knowing there had to be more.
"A little bird tells me that television programme, Case Re-opened, is looking at it - seems to think it's another miscarriage of justice," Longley said, suppressed anger causing his colour to rise.
"And was it?" Thackeray persisted, knowing he was living dangerously. Longley took a deep breath before answering, and what he said was evidently not what he had first thought of saying.
"I worked with Harry Huddleston for twenty years," he said. "There may be coppers who've got cases badly wrong in that time, made mistakes, fitted people up even, for all sorts of reasons, but not here, not in this division, and not Harry Huddleston. No chance."
Thackeray shrugged imperceptibly. In his book it could happen anywhere, in any division, with any officer. Given the intense pressure there would be to make an arrest in a case of child murder it did not particularly surprise him that a mistake, deliberate or otherwise, might have been made. But that was not a view he intended to share with Longley in his present mood.
"If there are serious doubts raised they'll send some-one in from another force to look at it," he said quietly. "So what do you want me to do?"
Longley gritted his teeth in impotent fury.
"Read the file. There's a summary there of all the evidence. Then go and have a quiet word with Harry Huddleston. Off the record. Just between ourselves. Him, and his sergeant, a man called Jim Redding. He's retired now and runs a pub somewhere up the dales. It'll be on the files. Just see if you can pick any holes in it, to set my mind at rest, will you? I'll not see Harry's reputation ruined by some pinko telly journalist if I can do owt to avoid it." Thackeray raised his eye-brows imperceptibly. The request, while not precisely illegal was certainly irregular.
"Minding our backs, are we?" he asked.
"Looking after our own, more like," Longley snapped. "Nowt wrong with that, in my book."
"Wouldn't it be better if you talked to him yourself, sir?" Thackeray asked, suddenly formal, deeply reluctant to be rushed into an unofficial investigation in which he could foresee no winners.
"I'm too close to him. I've known him too long," Longley said. "Look at it with a fresh eye, Michael, and tell me what you think. That's all I'm asking." Longley was not a man to say please to a subordinate, but both men knew that this was a request, could not be an order, and there was a long pause before Thackeray finally nodded his aquiescence.
"I'd better take a couple of days' leave," he suggested.
"Aye, you do that," Longley said. "Go and watch some cricket with old Harry. I know you're a rugby man, but stretch a point, eh? And mind he doesn't bite your head off when he finds out what you're really about. I don't think he'll be right chuffed."
The long sultry afternoon, with thunder clouds piled up like fantastic leaden grey towers on the horizon but not apparently moving any closer, ended with Laura Ackroyd driving reluctantly back up to the Heights. She had gone back to the office, written her report on the mothers' action group for the next day's paper, only to find that there were a couple of points she needed to check. Neither Linda nor Jackie were on the phone so she ground out of the town again to visit them, her clothes clinging stickily to her body in the hot car, through the stifling fumes of the late afternoon traffic.
Laura was finding the summer in Bradfield oppressive for reasons which went beyond the insupportable weather: reasons which she shied away from examining too closely. She had spent a month earlier in the year in the sparkling sunshine of Portugal, overtly resting a broken ankle beside her parents' swimming pool but also nursing less visible wounds.
She had renounced men for the duration, she told her friend Vicky Mendelson with a toss of that astonishing head of copper hair on her return to Bradfield. Vicky smiled knowingly from the depths of her own pregnant complacency and forbore to tell Laura, as she might have done, that she had heard all that before.
Laura would confess to no-one that since her return she had sat alone in her flat evening after evening with a bottle of vodka waiting for a phone call which had not come and which she now no longer expected. Only Vicky could have guessed the truth and she had decided for the moment at least to avoid emotional minefields and leave the question of who had put the faintly puzzled look of hurt into Laura's grey-green eyes strictly alone.
Laura edged the ca
r forward jerkily in first gear and smiled faintly at a sudden vivid recollection of her father, spread out pinkly on his sun-bed beside the pool, cigar waving for emphasis, as he had vainly lectured his daughter on the short-comings of her present life-style: unconcernedly unattached, professionally under-developed and under-paid and therefore, he assumed, terminally discontented. Most of the time, she thought, it simply was not true.
There were times though, she had to admit, when she desperately wanted to get away from Bradfield, and this sticky, simmering summer was undoubtedly one of them. She had returned from her deeply resented girls' boarding school to study at the local university as a defiant response to her father's insistence that she should go away in the first place. But she had not expected her quixotic gesture of loyalty to Bradfield to last so long.
She had trained as a reporter on the Gazette, expecting to move on, as so many of her ambitious young colleagues had done, to greater things. Her father's heart attack had changed all that. In the space of eighteen months he had sold up his business and retired to his bougainvillea-draped villa near Estoril, leaving Laura as Joyce Ackroyd's only living relative in England, and her dearest anywhere.
While Joyce was alive, Laura told herself grimly as she waited at traffic lights to turn right, faintly nauseous from breathing the diesel fumes from the bus in front of her, she would stay in Bradfield, however frustrating that might prove to be. But she sometimes wondered, in moments of depression, whether she would have any career prospects left worth speaking of when she was finally free to look elsewhere for a job.
The call from the London TV company had come as a welcome relief, a break, however temporary, in what threatened to become the terminal monotony of a Bradfield summer. True, they were making no extravagant promises, she thought: just a small commission for a film which might never be made if the story did not stand up to investigation. The interviews would not take long, the promised cheque would not be large, the project would not interfere with her normal job. Even so it was a welcome sighting of a succulent big fish in the wider sea in which she sometimes ached to cast her net.
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