Dying Fall

by Patricia Hall

  "You look as though you could withstand a siege," Thackeray said mildly, taking in Hurst's bulk, spilling this morning from a black sleeveless tee-shirt which he wore loose over stained corduroy trousers which sagged to buttock height at the back. There were thick folds of flesh around his chin and neck and it did not look as though he had shaved for days. If a bulldozer could have been made flesh, Thackeray thought, Jerry Hurst could have started work demolishing Bronte House himself single handed.

  Waving them into his cluttered living room, Hurst cleared a pile of old newspapers from one sagging arm-chair and dumped them on the floor, which was covered with a dark grey spongy material which looked as though it too might be beginning to decay. He chased an obese and bad-tempered ginger cat, spitting fury, from another chair, to make space for his visitors.

  "Town Hall said you'd be coming," Hurst muttered grudgingly. "Though there's bugger all I can tell you about t'squatters. They keep out o' my way and I keep out o' theirs. There's no joy in sticking your neck out round here. Look what happened to that silly cow Jackie Sullivan." Val Ridley, who had pulled out her notebook and was waiting to follow Thackeray's lead, flinched slightly at that but the chief inspector remained impassive.

  Hurst sat down on a hard chair close to the door, legs splayed, huge hands on his knees, as if ready to spring, although whether into flight or fight it was impossible to tell. He licked his lips as the silence lengthened, eyeing his visitors in turn. His eyes were pale blue, bright in a grey, putty coloured face which did not look as though it had been exposed for more than a few minutes to the recent brilliant sunshine, his hair a thin receding thatch, thick with grease, which might once have been described as blond but had now taken on the colour of dirty water.

  "I'm not a well man, you know," Hurst said suddenly into the silence which evidently un-nerved him. "It's bad enough here with the lift always out of action. I can't be running up and down those effing stairs after kids who shouldn't be here."

  "I'm sure it's a difficult job, Mr. Hurst," Thackeray said soothingly. "I don't think anyone's blaming you for what's been going on here recently. But there are a couple of things we think you might be able to help us with, especially since our inquiries now include the murder of Darren Sullivan last night."

  "Murder?" Hurst asked, licking his lips again.

  "It'll be treated as murder, Mr. Hurst. Whoever threw that petrol bomb should have had a reasonable expectation that it might kill someone," DC Ridley said. "Even if the charge was reduced to manslaughter there'd likely be a life sentence at the end of it. Where were you, by the way, when the fire broke out?"

  "Asleep," Hurst said flatly. "I heard nowt till the fire brigade near knocked the door down to fetch me out."

  "But Linda Smith says she tried to rouse you earlier than that to use the phone," DC Ridley persisted. "Did you not hear her?"

  "I'm a heavy sleeper," Hurst came back.

  "So heavy the place could burn down around your ears and you'd never know," Thackeray snapped suddenly. The fat man's eyes flickered momentarily.

  "I'd had a skinful, if you must know," he said. "It's not as if I'm on duty or owt at night. I'm not a bloody security guard. Any road the Sullivans are five floors up. You could let off a bomb up there and I'd hear nowt."

  "You'd been to the pub, then?" Val Ridley persisted.

  "No, not to t'pub," Hurst said. "I were drinking here. I fell asleep in front o't'telly, if you must know. I generally get a bottle o'summat on a Sunday, it helps the time pass. I hate bloody Sundays."

  Thackeray glanced towards the television set in the corner where a couple of empty spirit bottles lay alongside a congealed plate which might have been used for a meal at some indeterminate time in the past. It was a sight which roused old memories and old fears which he pushed from his mind impatiently. The past was a ravaged country from which few returned unscathed, he thought. It was best not visited.

  Turning back to Hurst with relief if not pleasure, he thought that if the man was lying, he had prepared his ground carefully and without obvious artifice. Indeed the notion of Hurst slumped in this very chair asleep had the ring of truth about it.

  "So you saw no-one come or go around the time of the fire?" he asked.

  "I told you, I were asleep. I weren't on duty on a Sunday night."

  It was pathetic, Thackeray thought, but he reserved the anger which drove him this morning not for this defensive jobsworth, but for whoever had so carelessly snuffed out the life of another child the previous night. He had no reason to suspect that this might be that person. The belated rousing of Jerry Hurst was too well attested for there to be much chance he had been up on the top floor throwing petrol bombs seconds before the alarm was raised.

  The police had been expecting a murder at the Heights, he thought, but not this one. Darren had not died because he had been out on the streets slaking a thirst for vicarious thrills by watching the stolen cars. He had not died because he posed a threat to anyone or even presented a fleeting target to the lust of some warped mind. He had suffocated in his own bed, in the care and safe-keeping of a mother who fought like a tiger for his welfare and must have thought him as safe from harm as she could keep him.

  Jackie's enemies had not cared whether he lived or died, and had found almost by chance the weapon which Thackeray knew was the cruellest of all. She had been warned, she had told told PC Alan Davies, when he had questioned her at the hospital the previous night. She had been told to stop making waves. She had ignored the warnings and had got, she had said in dull resignation, what she should have expected. It was the law of the jungle and had filled Thackeray with near despair as he had read the reports on his desk that morning.

  He had instructed Val Ridley to lead the interview with Hurst, preferring to watch and wait for the smallest hint that might unlock the stranglehold of violence and intimidation on the estate which had now claimed three young lives.

  He approved of Val Ridley, although he would never have dreamed of telling her so. She was a good detective, cautious and thorough and intelligent; one whose progress in CID he was watching with interest not least because she was a woman, and therefore, like himself, something of an outsider in the clubbable, boozy and often aggressively male world of the traditional copper. Still she waited for his nod to go ahead, not quite sure of him.

  "You know that the council intends to evict the squatters, don't you?" Val Ridley said at length, switching Hurst's attention to what was in fact their main concern.

  "Aye, they delivered t'court orders weeks ago, but they've done nowt about it."

  "Well, I think they may be getting close to doing something now," the detective constable said, carefully avoiding any indication of just how close that time might be. That was the deal the police had agreed with the housing department earlier that morning. Not even the caretaker at Bronte was to be told how soon the bailiffs and the police would arrive in force to clear the squats.

  "What we want to know," DC Ridley went on, "is just who you think is living where, so we've some idea who we should be talking to when the time comes." For half an hour Hurst grudgingly went through the lists with DC Ridley, filling in the details absent from the bare record of tenancies: how many adults and children lived in each flat, who came and went at what times of the day and night.

  "I don't know what makes you think I've got nowt to do all day but sit 'ere watching folk come in and out," Hurst complained grudgingly. "There's always summat. The bloody lifts are out of order more than they're bloody working: I spend half my life on t'phone to the engineers." Val Ridley raised an eye-brow at that but made no other comment. She opened a photo-copied plan of the flats, floor by floor, and spread it out on the low table.

  "What I want now is for you to mark the flats that are legally occupied and tell me which of the empty ones have squatters in them," she said. Hurst shrugged and moved closer to her, a procedure she did not find particularly pleasant as it was obvious he seldom took a bath.

  "
All them at that end are empty," he said, pointing with a stained finger at the northern-most extremity of the block. "They're all damp, wringing wet, some o'them. Everyone were moved out of them two years ago or more. Even the squatters won't go in theer. And most of the ground floor flats are empty, except mine. They're all boarded up, but the kids get into them any road. You can't keep 'em out."

  Reluctantly Hurst was persuaded to identify ten flats where the squatters lived, at least intermittently. He refused point blank, though, to make even a rough guess as to how many of them there where.

  "They come and go," he said obstinately. "I can't be expected to keep track of them. It's not my job, is it? It's yours."

  Thackeray watched and listened in silence for a while before leaving the flat to take a walk up the stairs to the top floor, where a haze of blue smoke still hung on the air and an acrid smell stung the eyes and nose. He strolled along the deserted walkway overlooking the main road. The estate was quiet in mid-morning, although he could hear the shouts and laughter of children from the adventure playground just out of sight around the corner of the building.

  He stood watching the scene below until he suddenly felt himself watched and turned to find a man standing at the door of one of the flats behind him, a tall figure in jeans and trainers and a black sports-shirt, brown hair cut short above a thin face and grey eyes which exhibited neither fear nor curiosity at Thackeray's presence on the walkway, more a sort of chilly disinterest .

  "Good-morning," Thackeray said. "Where you here when all this was going on last night?" He nodded towards Jackie Sullivan's flat, its windows now boarded up, the concrete above the frames stained black by smoke and flames. The man shook his head.

  "I got back from walking the dog just as the fire brigade arrived," he said. "Are you police? I already talked to one of your lads."

  "Fine," Thackeray said equably. "I was just getting the lie of the land, Mr..?"

  "Stansfield, John Stansfield." The reply was off-hand, as the man turned to attend to a young Alsatian which had thrust an inquisitive muzzle out of the door behind its master.

  "Do you have a garage down there, Mr. Stansfield?" Thackeray asked. The man shrugged.

  "There's one for each of the flats in Bronte and Holtby at that end, Priestley and Bentley in the other block. But not many of them are used. Not many folk up here have cars, do they?"

  "And you?"

  "An old banger. I only use it at weekends." A female voice from the flat behind attracted his attention then and he turned to go inside again with an easy smile.

  "If there's anything I can do to help...," he said as he closed the front door. Thackeray nodded almost absently himself and made his way back to the stairs and Jerry Hurst's flat five reeking flights below. Val Ridley had packed up her tenants' lists and notes and appeared to be ready to go. But Thackeray was not quite finished, and his return, apparently reinvigorated by the fresh air, threw Hurst off balance as he had intended it to.

  "There is the other business to talk about too," he said.

  "What other business?" Hurst asked, all his earlier unease returning.

  "It's a pity you don't pay closer attention to what goes on around here when there's some-one attacking little girls," Thackeray said grimly.

  "They've bin round asking questions about that," Hurst said sulkily. "I talked to your blokes the day after it happened. It weren't in t'flats, any road. It happened round the back. I can't be expected to know what's happening out there, can I?"

  "Were you here when Tracy Miller was murdered?" Thackeray asked, knowing the answer.

  "Aye, I was," Hurst said. "You should know that. I gave evidence at the trial of the little beggar that killed her."

  "Ah, right," Thackeray said innocently. "I wasn't in Bradfield at the time. I'm not well up on the details of that case. Someone at the station thought that Josie Renton was attacked in the same way as Tracy Miller. The injuries were similar."

  "Aye, well, if you've not let that little toe-rag out of goal it can't be t'same person, can it?" Hurst said.

  "Not unless they got the wrong person in the first place," Thackeray said softly, watching Hurst's reaction closely. But the large pasty face remained impassive.

  "He were t' right one," he said. "No doubt o' that. I saw him going down them stairs out there when he said he were at home watching t' telly. Lying little git. He were t'right one all right, no fear."

  Later that day, Sergeant Kevin Mower pulled his sweaty tee-shirt over his head as he came into the prefabricated hut which served as office, changing room and tea-bar at the adventure playground and rubbed himself down vigorously with a towel which he took from a hook on the back of the door.

  "That's the lot," he said to Sue Raban, his voice muffled as he wiped the sweat from his face and the back of his neck. "They've all gone now and I've locked the gate. You know, that lad Terry's not bad. He was running rings round me."

  Mower completed his rub-down and sprayed himself liberally with deodorant. He stood in his football shorts, gazing with some complacency at his tanned, well-muscled chest, where a fuzz of dark hair still gleamed damply after his exertions in the hot sun.

  "Are you doing anything tonight?" he asked. "Do you fancy a Chinese?"

  Sue did not respond or even look up from her perusal of the play-ground's account books. She sat with her dark head bent so low that eventually Mower realised that her's was not the silence of concentration but of something more. He put his towel down and crossed the room to stand beside the desk. Angrily Sue brushed at a splash on the cash-book in front of her and Mower realised that it had been caused by a tear.

  "Hey, what's this?" he asked gently, and she turned suddenly in her chair and put her arms around his waist and her damp face against his naked belly. He drew a sharp breath at the instant response of his body to her touch but he knew that this was the worst time and place to follow that instinct to its natural conclusion. Instead he took hold of her arms and loosened their grip, crouching down beside her chair to put himself on the same level with his hands resting lightly on her shoulders.

  "What's this?" he asked again. Sue sighed, wiping the tears from her face with the back of her hand as if irritated at being discovered in such a state.

  "It's this whole awful mess," she said. "Jackie told me she'd been threatened after the first article about her campaign appeared in the Gazette. Linda was frightened too. But I told them to be strong and keep going. Lots of stuff about solidarity and being tough - you know? It's important for people to take control of their lives..." She broke off, her dark eyes filling with tears again. "I guess I just didn't think it would come to this. I had this idea, you know, that England is a civilised place? I under-estimated those bastards, didn't I?"

  "Do you know which bastards we're talking about?" Mower asked, the police-man reasserting himself.

  "How would I know?" Sue said wearily. "Whoever gains from the existence of that dump, I guess. The ones who don't want it pulled down at any price. The squatters, drug-pushers, you name it."

  "Jackie had no idea who?"

  "No idea. Hey, what is this?" Sue put her arms round Mower's neck and kissed him on the lips, running dark fingers across brown shoulders in a way guaranteed to set his pulse racing again as her tongue slid for a moment between his lips and met his. It was a promise and he intended to ask her to fulfill it very soon.

  "You're good to know, Kevin," she said. "And no I'm not doing anything later. But first I must go home and change."

  "I'll walk you down the hill," he said, jumping to his feet and putting a dry tee-shirt on as Sue locked her books in a drawer and took the keys to the building from their hook. They secured the playground gates behind them and walked slowly together along the main road which would take them past Bronte House and down the hill towards the town centre. Sue Raban had a flat for the summer in one of the Victorian terraced houses on the lower slopes of the Heights, neat steps of stone dwellings which had once climbed in rank upon rank up t
he hills which surrounded the town before the redevelopments of the sixties and seventies had claimed most of them.

  The Heights were wound up to a quivering pitch that was almost palpable, Mower thought, watching the groups of teenagers on the grass wasteland which surrounded the flats with a wary eye. The gangs of youths and boys swaggered and strutted around the public parts of the estate, the alleyways and walkways, their eyes as sharp and watchful as scavenging animals waiting to move in on a kill. So far as he knew his cover remained intact, but he had no illusions that he would be in some danger if it emerged at this stage that he was a police officer.

  By the main door of Bronte a group of women were deep in conversation and as the couple approached, one of them waved at Sue.

  "Hold on a minute," she said to Mower. "I'll just see what Debbie wants." Mower watched admiringly as she walked across the grass. A tall, lithe figure in Bermuda shorts and a bright yellow tee-shirt, head held high, she had lost none of the grace of Africa while she had been sharpening her mind in cooler climates. She would not stay in Bradfield beyond the end of the summer, he knew: the playground job was intended to give her some practical experience while she studied at some obscure new university in outer London. If their relationship was to live up to its promise, he thought, they did not have much time.

  He perched himself on the arm of a wooden bench with half its seat missing on the edge of the grass and watched idly as the discussion at the door of Bronte became even more excited. He saw Sue glance in his direction once or twice and he pointed to his watch meaningfully, wanting her to hurry, but she turned away again.

  He was joined on the bench by a group of boys of about fifteen who occasionally hung around the playground watching the knock-about football games going on inside the wire fence, too old to take part themselves. They were lanky youths, almost fully grown but with muscles not yet filled out to adult strength and bulk, saplings still beside Mower's fully grown tree, but formidable enough in threes and fours to give even a seasoned copper pause for thought. They were dressed in the latest fashionable jogging gear and pristine training shoes, their eyes bright and confident and cold.