Dying Fall

by Patricia Hall

  The shattered glass in the door of Bronte House had been boarded up after the previous night's collision and the door itself was locked. The mound of flowers left there were already beginning to wilt in their cellophane wrappings. Laura tried to raise Jackie Sullivan on the entry-phone but got no reply. As she pushed her damp hair out of her eyes for the hundredth time that day and thought longingly of a cold shower - and even more longingly of that sparkling blue pool in Estoril - a bulky middle aged woman pushed past her to open the door with a key.

  "Who did you want, love?" she asked. And when Laura told her she pointed off to the right where the main road dropped away slightly and a huddle of prefabricated buildings backed on to a patch of waste ground, bright with yellow ragwort and pink willow-herb.

  "She'll have taken t'kids down to t'playground. They've got a paddling pool down there for t'little 'uns."

  Laura left her car parked outside Bronte and walked slowly down the dusty pavement to the adventure playground which ran every summer holiday in the hope of keeping at least some of the estate's children off the streets and out of trouble. The playground itself was fenced off from the road and the waste ground behind the doctor's surgery and clinic by a rusting chain-link fence.

  As she reached up to open the gate, which was secured by a high bolt, inaccessible to small children, it swung open and a tall man in dark jeans and a white shirt came out. They avoided a collision narrowly and Laura was conscious of an intense look before he turned sharply away and made his way briskly towards the flats.

  Laura smiled faintly before going in, securing the gate behind her. Since her early teenage years, she had taken male interest for granted, knowing that more often than not it was merely her hair that caught the casual eye. Skinny, her father used unflatteringly to complain every term when she came home from boarding school. And pretty skinny, she thought wryly, she remained.

  Children were milling around just inside the playground gate but she found herself face-to-face with a tall black woman in shorts and skimpy sun-top and, to her surprise, a dark-haired man in worn jeans and tee-shirt whom she recognised and who seemed desperately anxious to speak to her before she could speak to him.

  "Hi, Laura," he said urgently, almost pushing his way past the woman to greet her, though not forbearing to give her waist an apparently obligatory squeeze as he passed. "Kevin, Kevin O'Donnell? We met during the by-election campaign in the spring. You remember?"

  Laura remembered detective sergeant Kevin Mower very well, though at the time his hair had been shorter, his clothes a whole lot smarter and he had lacked the outbreak of dark designer stubble which did not conceal his embarrassment at her arrival.

  "I'm helping out here for the summer," Mower said, quickly overcoming his confusion. "This is Sue, by the way, Sue Raban, the play-leader. Sue - Laura Ackroyd from the Gazette." Sue cast an unenthusiastic eye over Laura. She looked hot and harassed and at the end of her tether.

  "If you're looking for comments about last night, you've come to the wrong place," she said uncompromisingly, in an accent which Laura could not instantly place. She looked, Laura thought, an uncompromising sort of person - dark skin untouched by make-up, hair cut close to her head, slim figure, though not without enviable curves, entirely unadorned except for a pair of dangling silver hoop ear-rings which swung gently as she moved.

  "I'm looking for Jackie Sullivan," Laura said unemphatically. "I was told I might find her here. I'm writing about her campaign." Sue's expression softened slightly at that and she waved a hand across the playground, where groups of youngsters, oblivious to the heat, were climbing and swinging and running in what looked like a cross between a jungle gym and an extremely dusty football pitch. At the far side of the enclosure a crescendo of screaming and splashing was coming from a bright blue plastic structure which evidently contained water.

  "I'll take you over," Kevin Mower said, putting a proprietorial hand on Laura's arm. "I think she's in the pool with her kids." Sue gave Mower a speculative look before giving Laura a considered nod of approval and turning her attention to two small boys who were tugging at her shorts and shouting at her in a simultaneous and incomprehensible frenzy of excitement.

  Once out of ear-shot Laura disentangled herself from Mower's grip.

  "So what's all this about?" she asked, in a tone which demanded an answer. He smiled placatingly, reminding her just how good looking he was beneath the incipient beard which gave him an unexpectedly disreputable air.

  "I'm doing my Miami Vice bit," he said. "Surveillance. I just happened to be the one no-one round here knows by sight - being a foreigner in these parts, as it were - a bloody southerner, and all that. This is a good base. They expect the odd harmless do-gooder up here during the summer so they don't notice me."

  "The joy-riders?" she asked softly, but he shook his head quickly.

  "Not primarily," he said. "A number of little girls have been complaining about being approached in dark corners around the flats by a man. Nothing very definite at first but getting worse and definitely not nice."

  "Not nice," she agreed soberly, recalling Jackie Sullivan's impassioned plea for somewhere safe for her children to grow up. "So who knows who you really are?"

  "No-one knows," he said quickly. "Not even Sue - especially not Sue. She's from South Africa but went to university in the States, some mainly black college in New York, or where-ever. She's got no time for cops. She makes that very clear. As far as she's concerned I'm a mature student on vacation, doing social work - which is what my boss thinks I'm doing half the time anyway." He gave Laura a disarming grin,

  She flashed him a sharp look but he had turned away, diplomatically she was sure, to help a child untangle a rope on a climbing frame. When he turned back his dark eyes were full of innocence and he made no further reference to his chief inspector, Michael Thackeray, whose recent silence irked her almost as much as she was irked with herself for expecting anything more.

  "There's Jackie," said Mower, waving at a familiar figure wrapping a towel around a small child on the far side of the pool. "I'll be through here soon. Do you fancy a drink? I'm gasping for a pint. All I get here is cola till it runs out of my ears. And there's no fridge so it's luke-warm cola most of the time."

  "Sue won't mind?" she asked, recalling his casual familiarity with the South African.

  "She's got a date," he said dismissively. "He just dropped in to see her." Laura recalled the tall man with the speculative eyes.

  "Why not then?" Laura said. "I'm parked up by Bronte. I'll wait for you there."

  They were early enough at the Malt Shovel in Broadley to secure one of the wooden tables in what had once been the inn's cobbled stable yard. A pergola now dripped swathes of climbing roses, fading in the heat, where once shire horses had rested prior to the climb over the moorland road to Wharfedale. This had once been a farming village, its cottages housing the families of shepherds and carters instead of retired bank-managers and aspiring artists, its fields home to over-wintering flocks instead of four and five bedroomed executive residences for professional families working in Milford and Bradfield and beyond.

  Laura had deliberately chosen an out-of-town pub. After phoning in the brief additions she wanted to make to her story for the next day's paper she had driven the temporarily car-less Mower, keen to maintain his impoverished student image, out of Bradfield with a sense of relief. Above the valley a whisper of a southerly breeze made the humid evening slightly more bearable as they respectively started into a vodka and tonic and a pint of Tetley's bitter. Laura watched Mower sink half his glass in one deep draught and smiled faintly.

  "You're not a tee-totaller, then, like your boss?" she said.

  "Not bloody likely," he said, knowing she was fishing but willing to indulge her, so far at least. He was content for the moment simply to be in the company of a woman whose startling red hair tumbling around an oval face and pale Renaissance skin, apparently untouched by the sun except for the freckles she hated
, turned heads at the other tables. The yard was quickly filling up with youngish regulars looking for the relief of cool drinks in the marginally less sweltering shade beneath the pub's old stone walls. "But then I don't have his reasons."

  She raised an eye-brow at that but would not be drawn into another overt question. Coming to the Malt Shovel, which she had not visited since an emotional trip in the company of that same boss, had been a way of challenging her own feelings and she was not at all sure what conclusion to draw from her equivocal reaction to the noisy, convivial scene.

  "It's turned into a long hot summer," she said neutrally. "Especially up at the Heights." Mower smiled a faintly knowing smile, running a hand down the unfamiliar stubble along a jaw-line that he knew was not unattractive.

  "Long, hot and quite likely very violent before it's over." His assessment was unemotional and all the more chilling for that.

  "Do you think so?" Laura asked, her mind switching sharply back into a professional mode.

  "I don't think it's over up there," he said. "The word on the street is that there'll be a reaction to the smash last night. I reckon the plods were lucky not to have a riot on their hands. You'll get plenty more head-lines out of it, I'd guess. Another?" He nodded at her empty glass.

  "I'll get them," she said firmly. Mower nodded with a smile and a shrug of acquiescence which said he could live with her independence and an intensity in his dark eyes which spelt out a desire for rather more than a drink.

  "Only if you come out to dinner with me," he said casually. Laura hesitated for a moment and then gave an imperceptible shrug herself.

  "Why not?" she said again, with a smile that held only the merest hint of mockery.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Chief inspector Thackeray had put off his meeting with Harry Huddleston for as long as he dared. He had spent the next morning at home reading through the file on the death of Tracy Miller until he knew the outline of the case almost as well, he suspected, as Huddleston himself would be able to recall it after a ten year interlude. He sat in an arm-chair close to the open window of his sparsely furnished flat, a Billie Holiday blues playing softly on the stereo and reflecting his sombre mood.

  It had been, he could see through the unemotional prose of the official record, a traumatic case for all those involved: not, it was true, one of those agonising affairs conducted under the glare of the television lights when a murdered child is missing for days or even weeks, but brutal and distressing all the same..

  Tracy had been discovered, half naked, sexually assaulted, and bundled into a black plastic dustbin bag only hours after she had been reported missing by her father when she failed to return home from school. The anguished wait had been short but the discovery of the body no less shocking for that. The ten year old had been strangled and her body hidden close to the huge dust-bins at the foot of the rubbish chutes at the rear of Bronte House, where her family - her natural father and younger sister, her step-mother and older step-brother, Stephen - lived on the top floor.

  She had, Thackeray had thought grimly, as he had sat gazing sightlessly at Amos Atherton's ten year old forensic report, been dumped like so much garbage, hidden by the rubbish spilling from the overflowing, and no doubt stinking, bins behind which her body had been concealed. A more suitable place than most to hide a horrific crime, he thought, and one which had offered the media no opportunity to wax sentimental about some little lost babe in the wood. In Thackeray's experience death was no less shocking for a covering of leaves and flowers.

  It had taken Huddleston a week, the record showed, to arrest Stephen Webster, who had not adopted his unofficial step-father's name. Tracy's father Paul and Stephen's mother June had apparently not bothered with the formalities of wedlock during the two years or more that they had lived together.

  The file, with its bald summaries of interviews and statements, gave no flavour of what that other hot summer week must have been like, but Thackeray could imagine. There was nothing like the death of a child to send hundreds of determined police officers onto the streets, many of them volunteers working in their off-duty time and thinking inevitably of the vulnerability of their own sons and daughters.

  And nothing was more likely to inflame communities far more stable than that living on the Heights even ten years ago. The combination of anger and fear which would have seized the estate's other parents, the brew no doubt stirred by the media, would have been palpable in the heavy summer heat. It would have born down on Huddleston and every officer on his team like a goad, just one more pressure to add to their own understandable determination to clear the case up and clear it up quickly.

  There would have been an overwhelming need to make an arrest, Thackeray thought, and within seven days Huddleston had apparently done just that. But was it just any old arrest? Thackeray could see no evidence for that unwelcome conclusion as he went meticulously over the files. Stephen had been vague about the time he had got home the evening Tracy died. The caretaker at Bronte House said he had seen him going out when he claimed he was already at home watching television. The boy had changed his story and floundered even more about his timings. And when Huddleston finally took him to the police station on the Sunday following the murder, he had eventually broken down and admitted killing Tracy.

  Photo-copies of his statements were there in the file signed carefully in a looping childish hand, each giving a slightly different and cumulatively more damning version of events that afternoon. Thackeray had no doubt that, given the evidence on offer, he too would have charged Tracy Miller's step-brother with murder and slept soundly in his bed for the full ten years which had followed the boy's conviction, in spite of his withdrawal of the confession at the trial.

  But Thackeray knew there were still questions to be asked. Those ten years had not just made television reporters and the public more sceptical as convictions had been regularly overturned and the veracity of police officers increasingly put in doubt. The whole criminal justice system had also become more rigorous.

  There was no Police and Criminal Evidence Act then, no tape-recording of interviews, few doubts about the confessions of the weak and suggestible, no genetic finger-printing to confirm the identity of killers and no tests which could indicate whether a confession had been tampered with. It had been a rougher, tougher world into which Thackeray had himself been inducted as a young detective and to which he occasionally still looked back with something close to shame.

  He had closed the file with a heavy sigh, not relishing the task Longley had thrust upon him. Yet he was quite sure that if Stephen's mother had enlisted the support of a television programme he would only be the first to question Huddleston, and undoubtedly the most sympathetically disposed.

  He had reluctantly drained the glass of lemonade which he had put on the window-sill beside him and glanced out at the view of Bradfield his third floor flat offered him, dispirited by the endless repetitiveness of crime. The modern block where he had set up a sort of home was perched high on one of the seven hills down which the suburbs tumbled to the huddled industrial town centre in the valley.

  Local wits of a classical turn of mind had not missed the comparison with Rome although for most of the couple of centuries that Bradfield had spread outwards and upwards from its low-lying heart around the squat parish church, the citizens of ashy Pompeii might have felt more at home under its sooty walls. A hundred years of smoke haze and grime had only recently been banished, the Yorkshire sandstone gradually restored to its soft natural gold, the meanest of the slums and most satanic of the mills demolished to make way for smart new housing and industrial estates.

  And yet, Thackeray thought, as he gazed down at what had so recently become his patch, the old evils were still there and if one sort of disease and squalor appeared to be vanquished another quickly rose up to take its place. He was not, he thought, much of an optimist where human nature was concerned. As Billie Holiday bade good-morning to heart-ache, he switched the stereo off with
a feeling that the song might suit the raking of old ashes well enough.

  He had arranged to meet Harry Huddleston at a pub some distance out of the town, on the main Manchester road beyond the suburb where the ex-DCI was beginning his retirement. The Yorkshire county cricket team, Thackeray had carefully ascertained, smiling faintly in recollection of Longley's suggestion of a pitch-side encounter at Headingley, was playing in Essex. There, the car radio told him as he drove up towards the moors to the west, a humiliating defeat seemed in prospect unless it could be averted by the thundery rain which was apparently forecast for Chelmsford.

  The Fox and Hounds seemed an odd venue for Huddleston to have chosen, a huge red-brick road-house surrounded by an extensive car-park where coaches were ominously welcome. Thackeray guessed that the former chief inspector was wary of meeting his successor in any of his old haunts in the town centre. In the Woolpack, favourite watering hole of Bradfield CID, tongues would wag all the sooner if he and Huddleston were observed in confidential conversation.

  The two men knew each other by sight, although their careers in the county CID had never brought them into more than occasional casual contact. Their eyes met appraisingly across the almost empty bar without much warmth on either side, both knowing too much , perhaps, of the other's weaknesses.

  "Now then, Michael," Huddleston said, assuming seniority by age which he could not claim by rank. He was dressed casually in slacks and a blue polo-shirt, open at the neck, and straining ineffectually over his belly. Thackeray felt absurdly formal in his shirt and tie, glad he had at least left his jacket in the car.