"There's nowt I can do for him now," she said, turning away again.
"I thought the noise had wakened him," she went on in a monotone which the nurse could hardly hear. "I ran to get Chrissie out of her cot and I thought Darren were following. By the time I got out the flames were right across the hallway. I couldn't get back in to fetch him..." She broke off, wracked for the first time by a sob which seemed to come from so far within her that it had to struggle to escape. The nurse put an arm around her awkwardly and led her from the room into the corridor.
"I'll get you a cup of tea," she said, showing her into a small waiting room furnished with a few battered arm-chairs and a coffee table piled with bedraggled looking magazines. "And then we'll see about some transport for you. And there's a policeman waiting to talk to you, if you're up to it." Jackie refused to be helped into a chair, lit a cigarette with a shaking hand and stood staring out of the window at the hospital forecourt where ambulances came and went, filling the night with flickering blue light and urgency.
"Yes," she said vehemently. "I want a bloody policeman. I want the bastards who did that to Darren."
PC Alan Davies came into the room quietly, his broad face filled with concern, his tie loose at the neck of his uniform shirt as if it had been put on too quickly.
"I don't know what to say, Jackie lass," he said. "I came straight back on duty when I heard."
Jackie Sullivan turned towards him, her face grey, with traces of lipstick creating a bloody gash where her mouth should be. She had still not shed a single tear since she had thrust two year old Chrissie into her friend Linda Smith's arms and scrambled into the ambulance to come to the hospital with her son. The tension in her was palpable, from her staring eyes to the trembling nicotine stained fingers with which she stubbed out her cigarette end and lit another. Davies knew that it would take very little now to push her over the edge into hysteria. He recognised the signs.
"Sit down, love, while they bring us that tea," he said, his faith in the old remedies untarnished. She did as she was told, sagging at the knees slightly until she felt the chair behind her legs, and then sitting hunched over her cigarette, the blue smoke drifting defiantly past the no smoking notice on the wall behind her head. She was dressed in a skimpy sun-dress under a sagging cardigan, her legs bare above a pair of high heeled sandals, hands, legs and dress smudged here and there with dark stains. The nurse brought in two cups of tea and placed them on top of the magazines on the coffee table in the middle of the room.
"Are you sure you're up to this," she asked Jackie. "I'm sure the officer would wait until tomorrow if you preferred." Jackie glanced at the nurse, girlish in her neat, short blue uniform, her face absurdly young under her white cap, with something close to contempt.
"I'll be right," she said. "I want to talk about it now. Tomorrow might be too late.."
Alan Davies pulled out his notebook unobtrusively. It had been an unexplained fire on the top floor walkway of Bronte, he had been told by the duty inspector at HQ, a fire which had spread too quickly to allow Mrs. Sullivan to get both children out. It had been brought under control soon enough, the brigade running their hoses from a turntable ladder especially designed to cope with a high-rise outbreak. Officers in breathing apparatus had gone in through the choking black smoke and had found Darren quickly but not quite quickly enough. It was unlikely he had even woken up before the fumes had claimed him. Alan Davies had hurried back on duty as soon as a colleague called him because he knew that for Jackie Sullivan, who had been trying so fiercely for so long to get her children out of Bronte, what had happened would be too much to bear.
"Do you know how it started?" Davies asked tentatively.
"Oh aye," Jackie said, without hesitation. "I know exactly how it bloody well started. Some little bugger put a petrol bomb through t'window, didn't he? I were sitting there watching t'telly. You tell your bosses it weren't an accident that killed our Darren, it were murder. And it's about time your lot did summat about that estate before the whole bloody lot goes up."
Within an hour Davies was back at the Heights with chief inspector Thackeray, watching the aftermath of the fire from just outside the garden gate which stood guard on Stan Jackson's forlorn-looking bungalow, its windows boarded up. The plain-clothes constable who had been on duty in an unmarked car stood slightly behind them, a look of anxiety on his face.
"I was distracted by the fire, sir" he said miserably, not for the first time, seeing his chance of a transfer to CID slipping away. "I saw the flames and radio-ed in straight away, so I only caught a glimpse of the car." Thackeray turned away from his grim-faced surveillance of Bronte House with a sigh.
"No-one's blaming you," he said. The blame for Darren Sullivan's death would brush many people, he thought, not least himself for not having foreseen that Jackie might have been at risk, but he saw no need for the young constable who had volunteered for a night's overtime on the Heights to share it. "Just take me through it one more time."
"A dark car, black I think, looked like an Escort. I just caught it out of the corner of my eye as I was talking to control. By the time I turned it was well down the road, heading towards town, moving fast."
"So no registration number, no view of the driver, right?"
"Right, sir."
"And you saw nothing up on the walkway until the flames attracted your attention."
"No, sir. I was looking the other way, at the garages, then."
"But you're not sure the car came out from the garages?"
"No, sir. It just seemed to appear..."
"From nowhere," Thackeray said, trying to keep the frustration out of his voice. "We've taken those garages apart once today, and found absolutely nothing..."
"Except the ladders, sir," Davies reminded him.
"Except the ladders," Thackeray agreed, "which provides a neat back way from a first floor window of an empty flat in Bronte onto the roofs of the garages and then down. Which means people - kids no doubt - can get in and out without being seen. But cars? We still know damn all about cars, and two of them have been spotted up here today which sound as if they could have been stolen. Someone up here's making monkeys out of us."
"Do you want me to stay on watch, sir," the plain-clothes constable asked tentatively, still unsure whether he was being blamed for some sin of omission.
"Yes," Thackeray said, glancing around to where fire-men were still clearing up the debris. He noticed a white VW Beetle parked some way down the street outside one of the old-people's bungalows. Just for a moment he hesitated, before shaking his head imperceptibly and opening the door of his own car. "Reports on my desk by nine in the morning," he said to the two officers he left standing on the pavement. "This little lot will have the Gazette calling for public hangings."
Laura had driven up to the Heights in what she reckoned must be record time when her grandmother called. She found the front door wide open and the tiny bungalow crowded with people. Little Chrissie Sullivan was asleep on the sofa covered with a blanket, her face flushed and cherubic against the slightly sooty woolen lamb she clutched tightly in both hands. A boy of about ten was crouching close to the television watching a film with the sound turned very low. His back was turned to the rest of the room and he appeared to be concentrating with rigid determination on the flickering images of violence on the screen.
Linda Smith and another woman Laura did not know were standing at the living room window with their arms around each other watching the firemen. Reduced to dark shadows beneath their yellow helmets, they were still working on the top floor walkway of Bronte House, dragging smouldering furnishings from the Sullivans' flat in the chilly glare of arc lights rigged up to give them adequate illumination for the work.
At ground level a fire tender was parked close to the main doors, blue light blinking monotonously, with a police car not far behind. The scene was a desolate one, littered with abandoned hoses as groups of disconsolate fire-fighters cleared up their gear, watched over
by knots of pale-faced, silently accusing witnesses at windows and on the lower walkways.
Laura found Joyce in her tiny kitchen, hobbling from work top to table in her dressing gown brewing a pot of tea with Sue Raban in attendance pouring milk into mugs.
"That was quick, love," Joyce said, with relief in her voice.
"I rang Ted and he said if I was coming up here anyway I was to cover the story," Laura said. Her editor was never one to duplicate effort if it could be avoided. "There'll be a photographer on his way, I expect. Do we know what happened exactly?" Sue glanced at her, her dark eyes full of suppressed fury.
"It's just a question of how this place gets you, isn't it?" she said. "If it's not a fire when you're five it'll be heroin when you're twelve or a bit of heavy-handed policing when you're fourteen. The kid's probably better off out of it."
"Do we know he's dead?" Laura asked, ignoring Sue's outburst.
"I'd guess he was dead before they put him in the ambulance," Sue said. "I'd been at a meeting at the community centre. I saw them take him away."
"I'll call the hospital," Laura said, going back into the living room to make the inquiry on behalf of the Gazette. The news she was given confirmed their worst fears and Linda Smith turned away from the window in tears.
"The effing lift wasn't working," she said. "I'm just four doors along from Jackie and she came hammering on t'door. I ran down t'stairs and couldn't even raise Jerry Hurst to use his phone."
"That's the caretaker?" Laura asked, remembering her own encounter with the overweight and unhelpful Mr. Hurst.
"That's what he calls himself," Linda said contemptuously. "Not that he does much caretaking. Dead drunk, more than likely. Any road, I had to run over here to phone - got your gran out of bed - but the flames were out of the effing window by then. I could see folk up on the walk-way trying to stop Jackie going back in. Poor little beggar - he never stood a chance, it were so quick."
Feeling deeply depressed, Laura left her grandmother and Sue ministering to Jackie Sullivan's shocked neighbours and walked across the main road and the grassy surround of the flats to the front entrance to Bronte. The glass doors were propped open with a heavy fire extinguisher and wisps of sickly smoke, fishy with burnt plastic, drifted down the stair-well to meet her.
The caretaker was standing in his doorway dressed in what appeared to be exactly the same boxer shorts and dirty vest as he had worn the last time she had seen him. He took time from scratching his arm-pit to nod to Laura as she passed, his eyes blank and bleary, though whether from sleep or alcohol it was impossible to tell. Slowly she plodded up the stairs to the top floor. A policeman barred her way, but nodded her through when she showed him her press card.
She recognised the senior fire officer deep in conversation with one of his own men and a uniformed policeman just beyond the area where what was left of the contents of Jackie Sullivan's home were being unceremoniously dumped in a black and smoking heap outside the front door and sprayed down with a hose. Laura picked her way through the streams of dirty water and unrecognisable charred debris and joined the group.
"Do you know what caused the fire?" she asked the chief officer bluntly. He hesitated for a moment, pushing his white helmet back from his brow with a smoke blackened hand.
"You're writing something for tomorrow's paper?" he asked. When she nodded, he shrugged wearily.
"Officially, we think there may be suspicious circumstances," he said. "We'll be doing forensic tests. You know the drill."
"And unofficially?" Laura said, her stomach tightening in fear of what she was certain was to come.
"Unofficially, off the record for the moment, some little toe-rag chucked a milk bottle full of blazing petrol through the window," the officer said. "A bit more efficient than this morning's effort at the bungalow. I don't know what Mrs. Sullivan's done to annoy folk up here, but someone doesn't like her. It was a bloody miracle any of them got out alive."
Glancing down from the top walkway on her way back to her grandmother's house Laura had glimpsed the tall, broad-shouldered figure of Michael Thackeray below. Tonight, she thought, he was the last person she wanted to see. Even the faintest unspoken hint that her role there amongst the shocked and bereaved carried with it the taint of the ghoul would tip her into rage or despair, and quite possibly both. She waited in the shadows of the lift-shaft until she saw Thackeray get into a car and drive away before walking slowly back to Joyce's house and slumping disconsolately into a chair with a mug of tea.
Of the crowd of visitors who had been there earlier only Linda Smith, the sleeping Chrissie Sullivan and Linda's son, who was still gazing intensely at the television, remained. Joyce was dozing in her favourite chair, looking tired and fragile. It was after mid-night and the latest news from the hospital was that Jackie Sullivan had collapsed and would be kept in overnight. Linda had agreed to look after the little girl, but she too was staring dully into her mug of tea, obviously reluctant to return to her own flat just doors from the devastation.
A photographer from the Gazette had been and gone and Laura had accumulated all the information she needed to be able to write her story when she arrived at the office early next
morning. There was nothing now to prevent her from going home to bed except the shared sense of desolation which drifted around them like a fog.
"How do you come to terms with this?" Laura asked softly, as much to herself as anyone else, glancing at Chrissie, pink and cherubic in sleep and oblivious to the loss of her brother. The boy who still crouched by the television turned briefly to look at her, blue eyes sunk into violet pits with tiredness.
"What's your name?" she asked, more for something to say than with any real curiosity.
"Stephen," he said, turning back to his film indifferently. He was a stocky, fair-haired child, who did not favour his mother's much darker colouring. Laura glanced at Linda, the glimmer of an idea taking hold in her mind.
"You've waited a long time to have another, Linda," she said, glancing at Linda's pregnant bulge under her tee-shirt.
"Another bloody accident, you mean," Linda said bitterly. "You'd think I'd have learned more sense after the first time."
"Not Stephen's father, then?" Laura suggested. Linda stared down into her tea for a long moment without replying.
"You must have been quite young when you had him," Laura persisted.
"Fifteen," Linda said at last. "Under age. They were going mad at me to tell them who the father was but I never did. I thought it would get him into even more bother."
"Does Stephen's father know he exists?" Laura asked.
"No, no-one knows who he is. I left the space blank on t' birth certificate. DSS don't like it but there's damn all they can do about it now."
"The space where you should have written Stephen Webster?" Laura said softly.
"You're too bloody clever, aren't you," Linda said, but without much heat. She stared into the distance, as if trying to recall what had happened those ten summers ago.
"We used to go back to our place after school," she said. "Nobody knew about us. Stephen didn't have many friends because he'd not been at St. Mark's long. And my dad would have given me a right hiding if he'd found out. So we said nowt. We both lived in Bronte, me on t'second floor, him on t'top. We just met up at the bottom o't'stairs after school and if there were no-one in at home we'd watch telly, have a cup of tea, and then - you know -it all got more serious. It were a case of let 'im do it or lose 'im, so I let 'im. The old old story."
The prosaic little tale of teen-age romance tumbled out and there was every appearance of relief in Linda's face as if she had been longing for each and every day of those ten years for the chance to tell someone what had happened.
"And on the day Tracy died?" Laura asked, feeling the familiar spark of excitement at where her questions were leading. Perhaps her investigation for Case Re-opened had not run into the sand after all. "Were you with him on the day Tracy was killed."
"
Aye, but earlier. He went back to his place in a huff because I wouldn't have sex. My mum said she were coming home early that day and I was too scared to do owt in case she came in and caught us at it."
"So you couldn't give him an alibi?"
"I don't know if I could or not. I were never right clear what time he was supposed to have done what he'd done."
"You never said anything to anyone?"
"I did, though! After he were arrested I talked to one of t'coppers on the estate and he said he'd tell his inspector, and get back to me, but he never did...."
"Do you know his name, the policeman you spoke to?"
"No chance. There were so many of them about. He had a beard, but I never saw him again."
"And you never pursued it, never spoke to anyone else?" Laura tried to keep her voice neutral as she absorbed the full import of what Linda was saying. Linda hesitated and looked about her wildly for a moment.
"What could I do?" she exploded angrily. "I were only fifteen and I thought he'd effing done it, didn't I? I thought he'd killed her. And after what had happened at our house, I thought it were my fault he'd killed her. Don't you see? I were out of my mind they'd blame me as well as him? The whole place were going barmy about him, wanting him hanged and that. And then I found out I were pregnant an' all, and it were his kid. I kept bloody quiet then. What else could I do?"
CHAPTER TEN
"You'd better come in," Jerry Hurst muttered grudgingly to the two police officers he found on his doorstep at Bronte House on Monday morning. He unfastened the chain which had restrained the door from opening more than a narrow crack when they had banged on it and ungraciously waved chief inspector Thackeray and DC Val Ridley into a narrow hall-way which reeked of cigarette smoke and stale food and the all-pervading smell of damp decay which had returned to Bronte after the rain. The caretaker locked the door again carefully, revealing an inside surface reinforced with metal bars.
Dying Fall Page 11