I can live without that, Laura thought angrily, just as easily as I can live without the departed Vince. I can live without a man, whatever Vicky and the columnists in Cosmo advise. I may miss Vince in bed but I sure as hell don't miss him trying to order my life for me. A bloke is an optional extra.
Anyway, she thought ruefully, it doesn't look as though at the moment I have much option. Kevin Mower was a pleasant enough diversion - good-looking, intelligent and no doubt good in bed, if it ever got that far. But not, she thought soberly, a man to be trusted. There was a ruthlessness behind those dark eyes that should have warned her that he would set personal relationships way behind his career. In that at least he was too much like Vince , she thought, and she would not make herself vulnerable in that way again.
Which left her with the enigma of his boss, she thought, a man she had been sure had more than a professional interest in her when they had met earlier in the year, but who had resolutely kept his distance since she had returned from her convalescence in Portugal, except for that chance and unsatisfactory meeting on the Heights.
She still recalled the time he had found her lying hurt and locked up with a certain chagrin, her impulsive pursuit of a story having ended in humiliation. She had been in pain and in shock, and she still could not be sure whether there was really no more concern in his eyes than there would have been for any other victim of violence he had stumbled across in the course of his work? And whatever the right-on might advise in the way of assertiveness, there was no way she intended to pursue a quarry who would be at best elusive and at worst positively antagonistic. The first move would have to be his.
At this conclusion, though, she turned in a lazy dog-paddle and glanced down the pool to where young mothers and fathers fussed over children in puffy orange arm-bands or watched anxiously as their fledglings took off with splashy strokes on their own for the first time. Blast, Laura said aloud, tears pricking her eyes which she blamed on the chlorine laden air though she knew she was deceiving herself. Damn and blast, she thought. She might be able to live contentedly without a man, but she was not at all sure that she could live without a child. That was a bleak and barren prospect which filled her with dismay.
She spun suddenly in the water and resumed her energetic lengths of the pool. Returning to the deep end for the final time, she took a huge breath and pushed herself off in a long shallow dive, head down, kicking vigorously, her eyes closed against the pressure of the water. She was only briefly aware that other swimmers had closed in on her before a grip like a vice took hold of her waist and pulled her deeper under the water and held her there.
Her first reaction was one of sheer panic as, heart thudding, she struggled against the two figures whom she could see vaguely through the swirling blue and white vortex around them. But she realised almost as soon as she had begun to try to free herself that this was a futile effort which wasted the small reserves of air she still had in her lungs, the precious air which was now bubbling fast and ominously upwards from her mouth and nose. Instead she tried to reach up to the sparkling surface which she could see above her but even that was unavailing as her attackers pulled her deeper so that not even a finger-tip broke the surface of the pool.
Surely someone must be able to see what is going on, she thought frantically, as a band wrapped itself around her chest, inexorably tightening its grip so that she knew that very soon she would open her mouth and gulp not the life-saving oxygen she craved but the water which would choke her. In a final despairing effort she twisted this way and that, clawing at her attackers, but they avoided her, their grip never slackening, one holding her by the waist and the other pressing down on her shoulders so that no attempts to fight upwards towards the air could be even remotely effective.
It's not true you see the whole of your past life flash in front of you, she thought, her mind racing now. What is agonizing is the life I might have had. It's a prank gone wrong, and it's going to kill me, she told herself in despair as the tightness in her chest became unbearable and she felt her eyes bulging with her last impotent effort not to breath in. The effort failed and she felt the water flood into her mouth and nose and throat with a sense of fury at what she would miss in the carefree world which was obliviously going about its business above her.
Then as suddenly and inexplicably as she had been dragged down, she was freed, and she felt herself shoot like a cork to the surface where she floated for a moment choking and spluttering uncontrollably as she tried to expel the invasive water from her lungs and draw in the life giving air. Strong hands took hold of her again and pulled her to the side of the pool, and two men in bathing caps and goggles pushed her bodily up onto the tiled edge where she sat coughing and shaking, with her head between her knees. A voice in her ear, cold as the grave which had just beckoned, cut through even her wracked breathing and the confusion of her mind.
"Keep away from the Heights," it said. "Right away from Wuthering. Mind your own effing business, or you might not come up next time." She was aware of other figures gathering round with sympathetic questions, a towel was draped around her shoulders and she heard one of her rescuers - or was it one of her attackers, she could not be sure - surmising that she had had an attack of cramp.
"Are you all right," asked one of the life-guards, a plump blonde young woman in shorts and Aertex shirt, who had bustled up from the shallow end looking anxious. "Do you need a doctor?"
"I'm OK", Laura said, her voice sounding croaky and hardly her own. "I'm fine now. I just got a mouthful of water. It's nothing." She glanced round, but she seemed to be surrounded now by concerned well-wishers. The two men in goggles and swimming caps had vanished.
"You were lucky someone spotted you were in trouble," the attendant said sharply. And unlucky you didn't, Laura thought. She felt disoriented, not sure that what she believed had happened had really occurred. Had no-one else noticed anything suspicious going on in that clear blue water? Had she really heard that harsh whisper in her ear? Had she got cramp and gone under and panicked and simply imagined some bizarre attack?
Helped by eager hands she got to her feet and made her way back to the changing rooms. She dressed and dried her hair slowly, watching dispiritedly as mothers dried small wriggling children and helped them into their clothes. The normality of it all made what she thought had happened in the pool seem all the more unreal. Above her head the glass roof sparkled and glittered just as brightly as it had before, but to Laura it seemed as though a dark cloud had blotted out the sun.
On the Heights an acrid haze did exactly that. It drifted around Stan Jackson's bungalow, where the fire brigade was still damping down a small fire which had blackened the kitchen and sent oily smoke streaming from the windows, every one of which had been shattered into jagged shards of glass. On the other side of the road, Stan's elderly neighbours clustered in anxious groups, watching the firemen go about their business. A little further away, chief inspector Michael Thackeray stood apart from the sightseers with PC Alan Davies facing another younger man in shirt-sleeves and slacks who was leaning against the door of a police-car as if he needed its support.
"Come on, Wilson," Thackeray said, not unkindly, for it was the young constable he had last met on the road to the Heights, in plain clothes now and with a succession of emotions contorting his boyish features as he glanced across the road at evidence of what he clearly feared would be taken as his failure. "Come on, lad," Thackeray said again. "You came on duty at twelve, you saw a Sierra go into the garage area at one, and reported in. Right?"
"Yes, sir," Wilson said miserably. "They told me to hang on and let them know if it moved."
"You couldn't see which garage it went into?"
"No, sir. It went round the corner, out of sight." He waved vaguely at the garage blocks which surrounded an enclosed court-yard area which was often littered with the half-dismantled bodies of cars which local residents worked on desultorily at most hours of the day and night.
"They told m
e to make a point of looking round there on my patrol," Davies intervened. "But there was no sign when I glanced in. If there's a Sierra in there, it's safely locked away out of sight now. But there is another way out. If you take it slowly you can squeeze a car out the far side where one of the garages was burned out a while back and has been demolished."
"It didn't come out this way," Wilson said vehemently. "I never took my eyes off the entrance until I heard the glass smash in the kitchen behind me."
"And then?" Thackeray prompted.
"I looked in the back," the young constable said, a note of disbelief still in his voice as he contemplated what had happened. "There was a gang of lads out the back. They'd chucked a brick through and when they saw me they threw another. Just missed me, as it happened. There were six or seven of them so I reckoned it was safer to come out the front way, but by the time I got the door open they'd started pelting the windows on that side as well. I sheltered behind the front door while I called control. There wasn't much else I could do on my own, sir," he appealed to Thackeray for support.
"How many all together?" Thackeray asked Davies, who had been the first to answer Wilson's appeal for help.
"A dozen or more," he said grimly. "Fourteen, fifteen year olds. They ran like hell when they saw me coming, disappeared into the flats. But they'd set the kitchen alight by then."
"A petrol bomb?" Thackeray asked.
"No, just some oily rags," Wilson said, still looking shaken. "But it had caught the curtains. It was more than I could put out on my own."
"Old Stan Jackson'll be staying with his sister in Halifax for longer than he expected," Thackeray said grimly. "Did you follow instructions about going in there without being seen?" he asked Wilson.
"Yes, sir," the constable said quickly. "Left the car down in Skinner Street, walked up the back ginnel and in the back door, just as instructed. I was very careful."
"Right, well, someone found out we were using the bungalow. And someone wants us off this estate pretty badly. And that's not going to go down too well at county. Right Alan," he said turning to the uniformed constable. "I want those garages taken apart. Stay here and check anyone going in or out until I get a couple of cars up with the right equipment. If that Sierra is still in there, we'll have it."
"Are you all right?" Vicky Mendelson asked Laura anxiously as they stacked the dishes into the dish-washer in Vicky's well-appointed kitchen that afternoon. A traditional Sunday roast had been consumed and David Mendelson had taken his two young sons for a kick-about in the neighbourhood park, ignoring the two women's only half-hearted jibes about sexual stereotypes and leaving them for a companionable and welcome hour on their own.
"You hardly said a word to David at lunch, and you look pale, but not interesting. Like death, in fact," Vicky persisted. Laura and Vicky's lawyer husband could usually be relied upon to keep up a humorous but deadly serious debate on local issues over these regular meals.
"Just because we don't all produce a Torremolinos tan like you and David do every time the sun peeps out", Laura parried, but her heart was not in it and she knew her friend would not be deceived. They had been close since their student days when they had shared a flat for two years, and Laura knew that this afternoon no careful application of make-up or combing of her copper hair loosely around her cheeks when she went home to change for lunch was likely to disguise the faint violet circles under her eyes or the prominence of her despised freckles against her unseasonably pale complexion.
"Tell me," Vicky persisted, as they settled into garden chairs on the paved terrace outside the french windows of the sitting room. Laura gave her friend a rueful smile, put her coffee cup down carefully on the teak garden table, trying to control the trembling of her hands, and told Vicky what had happened at the pool that morning.
"Go to the police," Vicky said flatly when Laura had finished and was leaning back in her chair looking drained. Laura shook her head emphatically at that.
"To tell them what?" she asked. "I'm not even sure now what happened. No-one seemed to have seen anything odd. I'm beginning to think I imagined it all."
"You're not the type," Vicky said scornfully. "In any case, you might have got into trouble in the water - anyone could get cramp and panic. But you couldn't have imagined the threats."
"Oh, I don't know," Laura said. "Those flats gave me the creeps, you know, when I went to interview Paul Miller. I've been thinking about Bronte House, having nightmares about it even."
"You're rationalising," Vicky said. "It couldn't be because there's another reason you don't want to go to the police, could it?"
Laura shrugged dispiritedly, wondering how she could have been plunged into such a deep depression on such an idyllic day, which had started so full of promise. The sun and a light breeze created a rippling, dappled composition of gold and green broken by an occasional splash of crimson and cream in the Mendelson's rose-decked midsummer garden.
"I don't know what I would tell them," she muttered petulantly.
"And you're worried Michael Thackeray might think it's an excuse to see him again?"
"I shouldn't think a detective chief inspector would bother himself with a silly complaint like this," Laura snapped. She saw Vicky flinch at her vehemence, and remembered that she too was fragile, in the late stages of a pregnancy which had become oppressive in the recent heat, and was instantly contrite.
"I'm sorry," she said. "You're right, you're always right, you can read me like a book."
"So you'll go to the police? Seek out some anonymous sergeant, if you like, but go?"
"Maybe," Laura conceded, thinking of a not-so-anonymous sergeant who might take her seriously.
"And tell Ted Grant that you've been warned off the Heights? You shouldn't go poking around up there on your own after this."
"Poking around is part of the job. If I can't ask questions where they need asking, I might as well give up," Laura said irritably. "Anyway, the interviews I was doing weren't for the Gazette. They were for Case Re-opened, and I didn't particularly want Ted to know about that little bit of moon-lighting."
"So you think that's what it's about?" Vicky asked. "I thought you were writing in the Gazette the other night about this campaign to get the place pulled down. Couldn't that be annoying some people?"
"That's a bit like shooting the messenger," Laura said. "If they want to intimidate somebody over that campaign I can't see why it should be me." Vicky shuddered, pulling a jacket from the back of her chair and slinging it around her shoulders over her thin voluminous maternity dress.
"Do you ever feel we're living our comfortable middle class lives on the edge of a volcano?" she asked.
"All the time," Laura said grimly. "I peek over the edge occasionally in my job, David must do it more often in his." Vicky nodded in agreement at that. "And someone like Michael Thackeray lives permanently on the brink, directing a hose pipe at the flames and hoping to God that the water doesn't run out."
"You think a lot about him, don't you?" Laura looked thoughtful.
"I think about him sometimes," she said. "If your question was purely temporal. If you meant it the other way, the answer is, I simply don't know what I think about him except that I'd like to get to know him better, given the chance. But he doesn't seem very likely to give me the chance. In fact, to judge by our last meeting, I suspect he disapproves of me, and disapproves of my job. He's not susceptible to your match-making, Vicky, so I should forget it." It had been at a dinner party at the Mendelsons that Laura Ackroyd and Michael Thackeray had first met, part of Vicky's long-standing plan to find Laura a suitable husband, a campaign which she denied as vehemently as Laura resisted.
Vicky looked at Laura with an expression half of sorrow and half of anger in her eyes, one hand suddenly on her swollen belly.
"Christ," she said softly, "this baby can't half kick. I've got it down for David's football team already."
"Should you be invoking Him in your Jewish mamma mode", Laura asked
waspishly. But she looked away, afraid of what Vicky might see in her eyes, though she was not to be denied anyway.
"It's not just a game, the match-making," Vicky said quietly. "I know you think you're OK on your own, but you're not really, are you? And don't think I haven't seen you with the boys. You can maybe kid yourself you don't want a man, but you can't kid yourself, or me, that you don't want children. It's written all over you." Vicky flushed with the intensity of saying what she had long thought and not dared to express. She was not wholly surprised to see Laura bite her lip to keep back her tears.
CHAPTER NINE
It took the emergency services fifteen minutes to arrive at Bronte House, which for Darren Sullivan was at least five minutes too long. By the time the firemen brought his limp body out of his smoke-logged bedroom he had stopped breathing, and not all the efforts of the paramedics in the ambulance or the casualty staff at Bradfield Infirmary could pummel or persuade his small lungs and heart into action again.
PC Alan Davies watched impassively through the small glass window in the door of the emergency room. Jackie Sullivan stood shivering beside the high table on which the medical team had struggled vainly to revive her son. She was swearing monotonously but with immense passion under her breath. Turning away from the small body at last, the young casualty doctor put an awkward hand on her shoulder.
"I'm sorry," he said, but Jackie did not appear to hear him and he turned away helplessly, seized by the bitter depression which follows failure. A nurse covered the child's body with a sheet up to his chin. They had wiped the black smoke-stains from his blotchy, sun-burned face. With his eyes closed, he could have been sleeping peacefully at the end of another exhausting summer day.
"He's not touched," Jackie said incredulously. "He's not burned at all."
"It was the smoke," the nurse said helplessly. "All the plastic in modern houses...the smoke's lethal. We did everything we could. If you'd like to stay with him for a little while, that'll be fine. No-one will bother you." Jackie brushed a straggle of sun-bleached hair from the child's brow and shook her head.
Dying Fall Page 10