Dying Fall

by Patricia Hall

  "Am I too late?" Michael Thackeray asked, the voice cool, neutral, through the crackle of static. "I'm sorry. I got held up."

  "Come up," she said, opening the front door for him and unlatching her own door onto the landing. He doesn't know what's happened, she thought angrily. He's a bloody policeman, how could he not know what had happened to Joyce? They stood for a moment on the threshold, staring at each other, non-plussed. He looked weary and slightly dishevelled, his hair untidy and his tie loose.

  "I'm sorry," he said again. "It's been a bad night. There's all hell let loose up on the Heights again. The joy-riders are out in force. I got delayed at head-quarters. I tried to call you but I couldn't get through."

  "It doesn't matter," she said shortly, turning away from him. "I must have forgotten to switch the answer-phone on. I wasn't here myself for most of the evening. I went out in a hurry. But I suppose an old lady getting mugged is too minor a case for you." He moved quickly for such a big man, and was behind her in an instant, taking hold of her arm and spinning her round towards him with a force which could have become violent if it had not been so carefully controlled.

  "An old lady?" he said sharply, the blue eyes alert again. "Your grandmother? What's wrong? I haven't seen any report...?"

  Laura shook her head wildly as if to blot out the reality of what had happened, her knees giving way on her and her eyes filling with tears, and he took her in his arms as she swayed on her feet. She relaxed against him and for a moment he buried his face in her hair, breathing in the sweet smell of her, as her arms slid around him and they clung to each other. He broke away first, disturbed by the fierceness of his reaction. He led Laura to a chair and guided her into it.

  "You look like death," he said gently, examining her pale face and the dark circles beneath her eyes with concern. "Tell me what happened." Haltingly, she told him, her usual felicity with words deserting her as she shivered with delayed shock.

  "It's my fault," Laura said, wrapping her arms around herself desolately when she had finished. "I should have guessed they might try to get at me through Joyce. I'll never forgive myself."

  Thackeray got up from the arm of the chair where he had been sitting with one hand protectively on her shoulder and turned away. He looked grey as fatigue took him over again and he tried to conceal the pain which her words involuntarily provoked. He knew only too well, he thought, what it was to count oneself amongst the unforgiven.

  "Don't say that," he said, keeping the emotion carefully out of his voice . "You're not to blame. You couldn't have foreseen this. I just wish you'd come to me when you were threatened at the swimming pool."

  "So do I - now," she said soberly. "Though at the time it seemed too unreal to take seriously. No-one else seemed to have seen anything untoward. I began to doubt my own senses after a while, began to think I had imagined it all."

  "But tonight? It was the same man on the phone? You're sure?"

  "Quite sure. I'd recognise the voice anywhere", she said, shuddering.

  "Who knew you were making inquiries into the the death of Tracy Miller? Apart from Kevin Mower?" She was conscious of Thackeray watching her now and uncomfortably aware that she did not know whether the question in his eyes was professional or personal. She took the personal first.

  "He bought me a Chinese meal, that's all. It was a sort of reward for not blowing his cover, I think." Laura knew that this sounded like an excuse for choosing to do what she had a perfect right to do. She was annoyed with herself for feeling the need to offer it and with Thackeray for silently appearing to expect it. Sod you, Michael Thackeray, she thought as he continued to watch her gravely as if expecting her to go on. You can whistle for more information about my night out with the dishy Kevin. Thackeray nodded, almost as if reading her mind, and waited impassively for her to continue.

  "Apart from that I've talked to Paul Miller and Stephen Webster's mother." And Linda Smith, of course, she thought, but some professional instinct prevented her from telling Thackeray that. Linda had kept her secret for ten years and was not likely to be broadcasting it around the estate at this late stage, she thought.

  "And did they tell you anything which someone else would rather you didn't find out about the Tracy Miller case?" He was very evidently back in his neutral, policeman's mode now.

  "Nothing that incriminates anyone else, if that's what you mean." she said. "Though I was hoping it might be enough to persuade the programme to ask me to do some more interviews, at the very least. I was hoping to ask Jerry Hurst, the caretaker, a few questions when I bumped into you at Bronte House," she said. "But he didn't want to know. So I posted off my report to Case Re-opened anyway."

  "You haven't talked to Harry Huddleston yet?" Thackeray asked, a shade too casually, Laura thought. She looked at him sharply.

  "Not yet," she said. "I'm waiting to hear from the commissioning editor in London to see what he wants me to do next." Thackeray recalled Huddleston's fury at the implied accusation of impropriety he had made himself and gave a thin, smile.

  "I'd like to be a fly on the wall if you get near Harry," he said. "He won't be pleased to see you and I'll put money on the fact that he'll deny any irregularities point blank. He gave me short shrift."

  "Paul's mother's sure he'd been bullied into making that confession," she said. "Is covering their backs all the police can find to worry about?"

  "It's all some of the police can find to worry about," Thackeray admitted soberly. "My boss has nightmares about the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four."

  "And you?" she asked. Thackeray gave her another ghost of a smile.

  "I think if we got the wrong man it's about time we began looking for the right one. I like to think the wheels of justice are a bit like the mills of God, slow, but exceedingly certain in the end. And I happened to notice that there are a few similarities between the recent attacks on little girls up at the Heights and Tracy's death. Not carbon copies, exactly, but similarities."

  "Such as?"

  "The fact that they never see their attacker because he covers their head and face up, half smothers them, in fact. Tracy was wrapped in a bin-bag when she was found. What was never reported in any detail at the time, although it was touched on at the trial, was that she had been bundled into it before she died."

  "How do you know that?" Laura asked, her eyes full of horror, not really wanting to hear the answer.

  "Because she bit through it. Forensic found the holes, and there were bits of black plastic between her teeth."

  "Dear God," Laura said faintly. "How do you cope with that?"

  "By keeping my eye firmly on the bastard who did it," Thackeray said. "How else?"

  "And you're sure Paul Webster did it?"

  "I've honestly no idea. It wasn't my case and it was a long time ago. Given the evidence, I'm sure the jury was right to convict. And Harry Huddleston is still convinced he got the right man. He has no doubts, I've asked him. But if new evidence turns up then it should be looked at. Naturally."

  "And if Huddleston bullied the boy?"

  "Then that ought to be looked at too," he said levelly, but as she continued to look at him with her eyes full of doubt he sighed and shook his head in exasperation.

  "Think, Laura, use your imagination. Think what it's like to find a child who's been used and killed like that. It's easy to get angry if you think someone might get away with it, easy to press too hard, threaten, bully, hit out even." He had been trying to come to terms with the prospect of exactly such a case for days now and still found the threatened horror blotted out rational thought. Laura considered what he had said in silence for a moment.

  "Have you ever hit some-one in anger?"

  The question lay between them like a trap. Thackeray looked away for a moment, taking in Laura's comfortable secure living room, the thick curtains tightly drawn against the night. There were hundreds of thousands of citizens like her who would rather not know what was done in their name on the violent margins of soc
iety where he earned his bread. Laura, he hoped, would not want to be deceived or to deceive herself.

  "Yes, I've hit people when there was no lawful excuse for it," he said quietly. "Three, four times, maybe - not in an interview room, not in cold blood, but in the heat of the moment, making an arrest. And been torn off a strip in court for it once, too, which didn't do my prospects much good. You'd be hard pressed to find a copper who hasn't. Most just never admit it."

  Laura sat looking down for a moment, unsure whether he was waiting for sympathy or just an acceptance that life was seldom simple. She gave him a tentative smile.

  "I'd be very tempted to do something very unpleasant to the men who hit my grandmother." Thackeray shook his head angrily.

  "I'll find them," he said.

  "You're very defensive. You don't need to be."

  "We should have protected her."

  "So should I," Laura came back quickly. She pushed her hair away from her face wearily in a tired echo of the gesture which Thackeray found irresistible.

  "I was looking forward to this evening," she said too exhausted now to care how far she gave herself away.

  "So was I," he said. "One way and another it's been a sod of a day." She nodded, looking down at her hands which she had knotted together again on her lap and untwining them slowly.

  "Have you got anything to help you sleep," he asked. She shrugged and shook her head, smiling slightly at the thought that his presence in her bed, if only she dared to engineer it, might be better than any drug.

  "I'll be OK", she said, driving the temptation from her mind. "It's not turned out to be a very romantic first date, has it?" He could see how much she had wanted it to be and he was suddenly seized by a wave of panic. He took a deep breath.

  "Laura," he said quietly. "I don't think this is going to work. I'm not good at relationships. And there's the job. How many hours late was I tonight?"

  "Stop it," she said sharply. "We haven't even begun yet."

  "It might be better if we didn't..."

  "Balls," she said vehemently, making him smile again in spite of himself. "Sit there and I'll get us a drink." She stood up abruptly and then hesitated, remembering. "You don't, of course. Can't or won't?"

  His face tightened again and he glanced away, unwilling to answer.

  "Can't," she said quietly, almost to herself, divining what he did not want to admit but she had already half guessed. He nodded and wondered why he was telling Laura things he had not discussed with a living soul since he left Arnecliffe. But looking at Laura's concerned face he knew why and he felt that tiny shiver of fear again.

  "I must go," he said. "Don't bother with a drink. We both need some sleep."

  If I didn't think it would shock him rigid I'd ask him to stay, Laura thought again. She glanced at the two bedroom doors, behind one of which her grandmother slept soundly. Joyce, she thought, would approve of Michael Thackeray. Following her eyes, Thackeray guessed what she was thinking. He put an arm around her and kissed her on the cheek.

  "I'll call you about the concert next week," he said. "Let's take it a step at a time, Laura. As for the other business - come in tomorrow and make a statement and we'll see if we can nail these toe-rags before they kill some-one. Wuthering is a top priority this week, anyway. The council's taking the squatters out on Thursday. All right?"

  She nodded and watched him go, curbing every impulse to call him back until the front door had slammed shut and the sound of his car had faded away into the faint pervasive hum of the urban night. Only then did she pull back the curtains and press her hot forehead against the chilly glass with a sound half-way between a sigh and a sob. She knew now with absolute certainty what she had only half allowed herself to believe before, that she wanted Thackeray with a desire that she had not felt for anyone for a long time. What frightened her was the knowledge that all her considerable charm and guile might smash themselves to pieces against the rock of his reluctance to commit himself. "I'm not good at relationships," he had warned, and she believed him.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  At the Heights, PC Alan Davies started his day's work in the small office the council had allocated him on the ground floor of Priestley House in a more than usually gloomy frame of mind. His mood would have been even more pessimistic had he been able to eavesdrop on the meeting of senior officers taking place at police HQ that very moment.

  The place had been buzzing with suppressed tension as Davies had left to come on duty. The assistant chief constable (crime) had already swept in to chair the final planning meeting for the next day's evictions at Bronte House.

  "There would have been questions in Parliament by now about Wuthering bloody Heights if MPs had been sitting," the ACC had said flatly after outlining to the station's senior officers just why the chief constable himself expected the forthcoming operation to be thorough, efficient and effective. "When they're trying to nail us to the floor with performance indicators, this anarchy is the last thing we want." But while the ACC's expectations might be high, constable Davies's were not. He knew the place too well by now to have any confidence that the massive operation planned for the next day would bring results. And if it failed, he saw little future for community policing in general and himself in particular at Wuthering.

  The house-to-house inquiries which had been going on around the flats ever since the attack on Josie Renton had been temporarily suspended. He knew there would be regular car patrols around the flats today, in response to the defiant antics of the joy-riders the night before, but essentially he was back on his own, the sole representative of law and order for half a mile in any direction. Knowing what was coming the next day, he felt increasingly like a very small Dutch boy plugging a very large hole in a very leaky dyke. Tomorrow's operation, he thought, could not be worse timed, but when it came to it the opinions of community bobbies seemed to count for nothing in the wider scheme of things.

  Even before he had got out of his car he had been assailed by an angry middle-aged woman, her face creased with tiredness. Just when, she had wanted to know, would "his lot" get the car hooligans off the streets and give everyone a bit of peace.

  "It's not much to ask, is it?" she said shrilly. "I've not had a decent night's sleep for a week."

  "It's not much to ask, madam," Davies agreed pleasantly. "But we need a bit more help from you folk - someone must know who these lads are but no-one's telling us owt." She scowled at that, brushing strands of greying hair from her broad face, her eyes suddenly blank.

  "Aye, well, that's for you to find out, isn't it?" she said, backing away. "There's nowt we can do. Look what happened to Jackie Sullivan."

  She turned away then and stumped off, stiff-legged and stony-faced, leaving Davies to unlock his office, dispirited. There had been times when he thought being a community bobby might work. This last week had not been one of them. Residents he had known for years walked past him with their eyes on the ground, or crossed the road to avoid meeting him entirely, youngsters taunted him obscenely from the walkways, but when he looked up to try to locate them the grey pock-marked facade leered down at him, apparently devoid of life. He had begun to think that even the dogs which raced in snapping, snarling packs around the grassy spaces between the blocks were avoiding him.

  From the vantage point of his office, the window open only as far as the wire mesh which protected the glass from attack allowed, he had to squint slightly to get a good view of the outside world. He could just see the length of Priestley House itself, and most of the semi-derelict facade of Bronte.

  Outside Bronte a group of teenaged girls sat on the dusty grass gossiping over cans of cola. He recognised Kelly Miller, perched on a stone balustrade, her short skirt hitched up almost to her knickers, her long legs swinging. The way they dressed, he thought, it was no wonder there were attacks. Not that Kelly needed much persuasion to give the lads what they wanted, he thought sourly. The only thing he was unsure about was how much she charged them.

 
A mother with a push-chair came out of Bronte and headed off towards the shop, a neatly dressed woman who looked as though she might be a nurse or a social worker parked a red Metro opposite the flats and went in. A tall man in dark slacks and, for Bronte, an unusually formal shirt and tie, whom Davies recognised by sight though he could not put a name to him, came out, spoke briefly to Kelly and her friends and drove away in a Sierra which had been parked out of Davies's sight at the side of the building.

  The smart black car stirred his interest and Davies jotted down its registration number on the pad on his desk intending to check it out later. The fact that he did not know the man's name, although he had seen him about Bronte often enough, niggled him. With a sigh, he picked up his helmet, locked the office door carefully, and strolled across the grass, avoiding the tangible evidence of the semi-wild packs of dogs as he went.

  "Morning, girls," he said to the little group who had watched his approach in sulky silence. "Morning, Kelly." She was the only one whose name he knew. "Not patronising the adventure playground this morning?" This provoked an outbreak of snorts and giggles.

  "We're too old, aren't we?" said a tall, pale girl in an extremely short pink skirt and black top contemptuously. "You've got to be under 14, haven't you?" Davies nodded absent-mindedly at that and turned back to Kelly Miller.

  "That lad who just came out," he said casually. "What do they call him?"

  "You mean John ?" she said.

  "Does he live here?" Davies asked.

  "Of course he does. He lives next door to me, doesn't he? He's lived there for bloody yonks, hasn't he?"

  "He's a right raver, is John ," one of the other girls offered helpfully. "I don't know where we'd be without our John." This remark set off a small gale of giggles but when he pressed them to define just exactly what they meant by that the girls became evasive and decided as one that they had to catch the bus which was just grinding its way up the hill towards them. Davies took off his helmet and mopped his brow in exasperation as the scantily clad group ran off across the grass to the bus-stop, still laughing. If John lived in Bronte House, he thought, then how could he afford the high-powered car in which he had just sped down the hill towards the centre of Bradfield. Even more slowly than he had strolled from his office, he strolled back to check it out.