Above the blocks, which crowned the Heights like gap teeth, lightning split the clouds apart and thunder reverberated in the canyons between them. In the seconds it took for Laura to run from her car to her grandmother's front door she was drenched. She stood in Joyce's narrow hall laughing as she pummelled her hair and face with the kitchen towel the old woman had handed her as she bundled her into the house.
"Why can't you wear a coat, you daft ha'porth," Joyce grumbled contentedly. "You've not got the sense you were born with." Laura grinned and kissed her parchment cheek gently.
"And you should know by now that anyone under sixty goes round with the express intention of catching pneumonia just to annoy you," she said affectionately. "How are you?"
"Middling," Joyce conceded, leading the way into her living room, leaning heavily on her stick.
"The knees are no better?"
"The rain'll likely make them worse," Joyce said glancing out of the window where the downpour almost obscured the lowering flats where half a dozen police cars were still parked. Laura followed Joyce's eyes and her expression became serious.
"They've done the story of the attack for today's paper," she said. "It's the front page lead. Even squeezed United down to two columns. There'll not be anything to add unless they arrest someone."
"And that's not likely, if the other cases are owt to go by, is it," Joyce said bleakly. "They've got no-where with those. Men! I thought your generation were supposed to have tamed the beggars. If you ask me they're getting worse. Kiddies used to be able to walk the streets without getting molested."
"Have the police been round here?" Laura asked, not wanting to get into that endless debate between the generations.
"Aye, they came early. Had I seen anything unusual, heard the child screaming, anything." Joyce's eyes were full of hurt and Laura guessed that it was not only for the assaulted child, but for all the children condemned to the decaying wreckage of the flats which had been her dream.
"You know they're going to pull them down?" Joyce said fiercely. "They wanted to refurbish them, but that's fallen through. No-one's got the brass for ambitious schemes like that now, so they've decided to take them down."
"How do you know that?" Laura asked, surprised. There had been no hint of that decision in the office when she had left the previous evening.
"I've still got friends at the town hall," Joyce said with a small smile of satisfaction. "There was a meeting last night, apparently. I had a phone call late on. The meeting was private but some-one thought I should know."
"Great," Laura said. "The places are a disgrace. Can I write about it? Though it's a bit late for today." Saturday's Gazette was devoted mainly to sport and only the most extraordinary of new stories would persuade the editor to change the front page at this time of day. The likely demolition of the flats would not qualify, Laura was sure. The story would have to wait until Monday.
"Talk to the chair of housing, but don't tell him I told you," Joyce said, satisfied that even now she could still occasionally prove to be better informed than Laura. A notoriously independent spirit who had driven colleagues and family to distraction in her younger days, she resented old age with a deep and abiding resentment.
"I'm worried about it, even though it is what the mothers' were asking for," Joyce went on. "The plan is to get the squatters out straight off. There's dozens of them in Bronte. After that, they'll gradually move the legal residents out as houses come vacant."
"That's sensible, isn't it?" Laura said. "Bronte has always been the worst block and from what I saw of it the other day it's turned into a complete pig-sty."
"I told them when they were being built they were doing it on the cheap, but no-one would listen," Joyce said sadly. "What you don't remember are the back-to-back terraces those folk came from. They thought those flats were little palaces when they moved in. We all thought it was the new Jerusalem."
"It's thirty years, nan," Laura said. "Times change." She changed the subject, condemning the cowardice which made her veer away from the disappointments which were souring her grandmother's retirement and which she too resented but felt powerless to address.
"So what's the problem?" Joyce had telephoned her early that morning to ask her to call round but had been mysterious about the reason.
"Jackie Sullivan wants to see you again and she's not got a phone. She's coming over at eleven with that lass who runs the adventure playground. Sue something?"
"Yes, I've met her," Laura said thoughtfully, recalling the tall equivocal black woman who had allowed her into the playground with a slightly bad grace. Or was it perhaps not her own arrival but Kevin Mower's over-enthusiastic reception of her which had grated on Sue Raban's susceptibilities? Mower, she thought with cynical amusement, was not one to waste his opportunities. "Jackie will be delighted if they decide to pull the flats down, won't she?"
"Aye, mebbe, but I'd not bank on any of them sorting their problems out that easily," Joyce said. "It's not just Bronte that's driving them to distraction."
Within minutes the doorbell rang and Laura opened it to find a bedraggled cluster of people huddled in the porch for shelter against the rain. She let in Jackie Sullivan and Sue Raban, both with jacket hoods pulled well up against the downpour, and was surprised to see that they were followed by Kevin Mower himself, looking even more piratical than the last time she had seen him with his dark hair plastered to his head and water streaming down his face and thickening beard. He gave Laura a quizzical look but said nothing as he took off his leather bomber jacket, heavy with water, and hung it, dripping, on a hook by the front door.
“You're working overtime, aren't you?” Laura asked quietly.
"As ever," he said quietly, so as not to be overheard. "I seem to be part of an action committee, and very curious as to what the action may turn out to be."
“Well, don't push your luck," Laura said. "You may find I'm as bad at keeping confidences as you turned out to be."
"Ah," Mower said. "You've seen Michael Thackeray then? I'm sorry about that - it just slipped out. I take it the brass are not too keen on having the county constabulary starring in Case Re-opened?" Laura raised her eye-brows at that but said no more, following the two women into Joyce's living room where they settled down and waited for her expectantly.
"How can I help?" Laura asked. "Did you get any reaction from the town hall after the piece I wrote last week?" Jackie Sullivan drew deeply on her cigarette, sucking in her thin cheeks hungrily as she inhaled.
"Not so's you'd notice," she said flatly. Laura glanced at her grandmother who shook her head imperceptibly.
"The talk is that you'll hear something positive soon," she said carefully.
"It's all promises," Sue Raban said dismissively. The hint of America in her voice was more pronounced this morning. "We've decided it's time for some direct action - particularly since the attack on little Josie yesterday. We're calling a meeting at the community centre on Monday night, if you'd like to come."
"Of course," Laura said. "It may not be me but I'll tell my editor and someone will certainly be there. Do you have some particular direct action in mind?" Kevin Mower looked studiously down at his sodden trainers to hide the inevitable gleam of interest in his eyes.
"We're sick and tired of the police. They're not providing any protection for the kids," Jackie said explosively. "We're going to start our own patrols round t'flats at night. We reckon we're going to have to catch this bastard ourselves because no-one looks like doing it for us."
"You're beginning to look more and more like Heathcliff, which I suppose is fair enough at Wuthering," Laura said to Kevin Mower with an amused gleam in her eyes as she leaned across to open the passenger door of her car to let him in out of the rain.
"Fine, if you feel like playing Cathy," Mower said. Laura laughed slightly grimly.
"No chance," she said. "All that mooning about on the moors in this weather? Not my scene." She started the car and switched the wipers to max
imum speed to try to clear the windscreen of the downpour which showed no signs of easing.
"Anyway, I thought you had other fish to fry? Ms Raban seems to be keeping a very proprietorial eye on you."
"Huh, only when she feels like it," Mower said. "I think she's the one with other interests."
Laura glanced up at the walk-ways of the flats, where plain clothes and uniformed officers, collars turned up against the weather, worked their way doggedly from door to door.
"Shouldn't you be up there helping?" she asked.
"Not yet," Mower said. "Michael Thackeray thinks I'm more use on the ground."
"So I suppose you're going down to the nick to tell him all about Jackie and Sue's little plan?" Laura asked as she edged her way through the traffic towards the centre of town, unable quite to keep a note of contempt out of her voice. "A bit sneaky, isn't it, all this pretending to be someone you're not?"
"What's sneaky when a kid's been half strangled," Mower said, an edge of anger in his voice. "Next time he might try a bit harder and we'll be into a murder investigation."
"Seriously?" Laura asked, surprised at the raw nerve she seemed to have touched.
"Seriously," he said. "So we can't have Sue or anyone else messing with this operation. It's too important for that. Their vigilante games will have to be stopped if they get in the way."
At police headquarters that afternoon superintendent Longley and chief inspector Thackeray stared glumly at a wall chart of the Heights estate. They had just come back with their opposite numbers from the uniformed branch from a crisis meeting at the town hall.
"It's a compromise, Michael," Longley said. "Sometimes you have to compromise. You know that place is like a rabbit warren. This way at least we'll be sure we've had a look at every bloody bunny who's in there."
"And then what? We just let them vanish into thin air?"
The meeting with the police had been convened by the council's housing officials, taken aback by the speed of the previous evening's decision to demolish the Heights and begin the "decanting" of Bronte House immediately. Some-one had realised almost as an afterthought that a decision to evict all the block's squatters, who had already been served with court orders, might hinder the police inquiries at the flats.
A bad-tempered Longley had been summoned from home, where he had been staring at the rain streaming down the windows and keeping him from the golf course where he normally spent his Saturdays. Thackeray, hardly aware that a weekend was in progress, had been prised from the computer screens where CID were collating the accumulating evidence in the Josie Renton case.
They had both asked in vain for a postponement of the evictions. All they had gained was a few day's grace and the promise of immediate access to the tenants' lists from which the bailiffs would decide which flats were legally occupied and which were not.
"You know what politicians are like," Longley said. "They're under a lot of pressure from the rest of the town to clean that place up. There's no doubt that those empty flats are being used by kids on drugs and on the game, so there's political mileage in clearing them out. And I guess if you suggested to the mothers on the Heights that the fellow responsible for the assaults would be flushed out with them, they'd not fash themselves overmuch. At least he'd be gone."
"To start over somewhere else," Thackeray muttered, not mollified. "And the devil's own job to track him down if we do come up with some hard evidence."
"Much sign of that?"
"Damn all," Thackeray admitted. "He's careful, this one. We've not had a decent description from any of the kids. It's either been dark or he's bundled something over their heads. And forensic have come up with very little: a few hairs, mostly animal, a few fibres that could have come from anywhere, no bodily fluids. They reckon he must wear gloves and something over his face. We might get a DNA profile but that will take time and there's no guarantee just with hairs."
"He'll go too far in the end," Longley said grimly. "He's using some self-restraint at the moment but in the end he'll get carried away. And the worst of it is we almost need him to get carried away if we're to catch him." They looked at each other for a moment in silence as Longley put into words what Thackeray had been thinking.
"Christ," he said, appalled at the impasse they had reached. "There are times when I wonder what I'm doing in this job."
"You'll get there, Michael," Longley said, aware that Thackeray's despair was not fuelled simply by the present case, which had inspired a frenetic and in his view a not very productive anger in all his men. "Go steady. Take your time. There's nothing like solid detective work to get you there in the end. If he's made a mistake already, you'll find it."
"Maybe," Thackeray said without much confidence. "There's the other thing too. Huddleston and the television programme. I've seen Harry and sergeant Redding and there'll be no shifting them. They're convinced they got it right, and Huddleston reckons he's fire-proof, by the sound of him, on anything Case Re-opened can rake up to the contrary."
"And do you reckon he's fire-proof?" Longley asked, suddenly belligerent again. Thackeray shrugged, not in a mood to temper his words to suit Longley's prejudices.
"I don't know," he said flatly. "Either of them would be capable of a bit of heavy pressurising, not to say a quick thump where it wouldn't show a bruise if they thought they could get away with it. Redding virtually admitted they'd leaned on the lad. Coppers of the old school, both of them, and proud of it. If you want my honest opinion....." He hesitated because he was not totally convinced that was what Jack Longley did want in the matter of Harry Huddleston, but he ploughed on regardless.
"If you want my opinion, you don't stand a chance of proving they went further than they should have done, after all this time. You can't get them on disciplinary charges now they're out of the force so we're talking about criminal charges - beyond reasonable doubt." He shrugged dispiritedly.
"I'll keep trying if you want me to. D'you want me to talk to anyone else who was around the station when Stephen Webster was being questioned? Or the other witnesses at the trial? - the child's father, and the caretaker at the flats - Jerry Hurst. He's still there, as it happens. I was planning to ask him to go through the list of tenants with me on Monday. I thought he might be a useful source of gossip - perhaps more." Longley looked thoughtful, half closing his eyes for a moment as if trying to exclude Thackeray from whatever was going on behind that creased brow.
"Don't make a thing of it," he said at last, jaw clenched tight as if the words were being forced reluctantly from him. "I don't want it getting out that we're worried about that conviction. But if you make it your business to interview Hurst yourself - and Tracy Miller's father, for that matter - it wouldn't come amiss to remind them of the previous case, would it? Could this be the same man? Could we have got it wrong with Tracy....?" He let the question trail away, aware, as Thackeray was, of the implications of that possibility, which were about as unpleasant as they could be. The superintendent exploded suddenly.
"If we're going to be crucified by the media," he said, "let's make sure we're Jesus and not the other bugger - what's his name? Barrabas? - shall we? We want to be sure we're going to get resurrected, don't we?"
CHAPTER EIGHT
Laura took a rest after six lengths, floating lazily on her back gazing up at the complex pyramids of glass and steel which made up the roof of the leisure centre. The sunshine filtering through the angled glass created dazzling patterns of light against the egg-shell blue of the sky beyond. It was a shining Sunday morning after the rain of the day before, promising heat later but with a freshness which had been absent for weeks now.
She had got up early, wakened by the warmth of the sunlight falling on her bed and exhilarated by the prospect of a free day. She had decided when her live-in boy-friend of several years had moved out that this was the day of the week which had to be taken by storm if the single state she half welcomed and half feared was not to become a burden.
Often she f
etched Joyce from the Heights to her flat and cooked her a traditional Sunday lunch. They spent the afternoon companionably arguing over the Sunday papers if it was wet or driving out of town to one of Joyce's favourite beauty spots if it was dry. There had been a time when they had been able to tramp over the moors together, but now Joyce had to content herself with sitting close to the car with a rug round her treacherous knees looking at the spreading panoramas of the dales which they sought out with a pleasure which would always now be tinged with regret.
Today Laura was invited to lunch with what she regarded as her other family, the Mendelsons. She had rung Vicky early to ask if she wanted her to take the boys swimming with her, but they had other plans for the morning so she had come alone and set herself a target of twelve lengths. After six she awarded herself a rest, bobbing gently at the deep end, out of the way of the children splashing about in the shallows and the determined swimmers in caps and goggles who ploughed relentlessly up and down the lanes.
The motion of the water was soothing, and she thought idly about men and the lack of them. Joyce, widowed early in the war and left with a son to bring up alone, had survived and triumphed on her own, she thought. She herself as a teenager had tagged along behind Joyce on her many passionate crusades, red flag metaphorically flying. If she now needed evidence that it was possible for an Ackroyd to survive alone, then Joyce was the living proof of it.
Not so her mother, she thought, who was no doubt even now fussing around the swimming pool in Estoril making sure that Jack's chair was placed in the morning sun exactly where he liked to slump into it after his first swim of the day, sun umbrella at a precise angle, yesterday's Daily Telegraph and a jug of iced lemonade at hand. She didn't exactly iron Jack's morning newspaper, Laura thought grimly, but she might have done if the thought had occurred to her.
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