"Cheer up, it may never happen," he said. "Will you call me as soon as you get anything up at Wuthering?"
"No, I'll send the news by carrier pigeon," she said unhelpfully. "Will that suit?"
"Nope, they've all OD-ed on dope up there," Steve said. "Even the bloody sparrows are as high as kites."
Feeling ratty and dishevelled and short of sleep, Laura drove up to the Heights and parked outside her grandmother's bungalow. She glanced in that direction, taking in the boarded up front door with a shudder. She had already asked the council to repair the shattered door, but nothing seemed to have happened yet. Until it did, there was no way Joyce could fulfill her now vigorously repeated intention to return home as soon as it could be arranged. Deep down, Laura hoped that the
maintenance men would not hurry. The thought of Joyce returning to the Heights filled her with anxiety.
A fine rain was falling and she watched the scene around the flats with her windscreen wipers smearing a film of dust and grease across the glass. She pressed the washer impatiently but nothing happened and the murk merely thickened. There were still two police vans parked outside Bronte and a small crowd of residents standing near the entrance watching the latest police operations in sullen silence.
Up on the walkways uniformed police and civilians seemed to be busy, but she could see no-one she knew as she walked slowly over the damp, fouled grass towards Bronte. There was a sense of unease in the air. She knew that she was being watched, both by the knots of bystanders and by officialdom on the walkways above. Closer to the entrance she saw that one of the officers evidently standing guard at the door was the community policeman, Alan Davies.
"I was hoping to see Mrs. Tyson," Laura said. "There's no news about Nicky I suppose?" Davies shook his head grimly.
"Mrs. Tyson's not here," he said. "She's down at headquarters with CID. They're having a press conference or summat later on and they wanted her there, poor cow."
"They've not found the child?"
"They've not," Davies confirmed flatly. "They've taken the squatted flats apart and they're organising a search of the rest of the block later this morning. Every inch of the place. Much
good it's done them so far. As far as I know, they've not found as much as a stray joint of cannabis, much less any sign of the kiddie. How's your gran, by the way. That were a nasty business, an'all."
"She's recovering," Laura said bleakly, not convinced that it was true. She had left Joyce early that morning propped up in bed, an untouched and possibly unnoticed cup of tea beside her, and no sign that a couple of nights' sleep had erased the faintly puzzled, hurt look from her eyes.
"She's desperate to get back home. You know Joyce," she added. "But I want her to stay with me for a bit."
"That makes sense," Davies agreed sombrely. "Can you not get her away from here?"
"My grandmother does as she pleases. She always has and I expect she always will," Laura said, not sure whether that should be a source of pride or, in present circumstances particularly, regret.
"Keep her out o't'way. This estate's no place to be until they clear this little lot up," Davies said. "If then," he added grimly.
"You think there's going to be more trouble?"
"I know there is. They pay me to know these things. Not that they take a blind bit o'notice when I warn them, but there you go. The kids up here have got nowt to lose have they? A
bit of aggro just breaks the monotony."
He turned away from Laura towards a young couple, unisex clones in jeans and teeshirts, pale-faced, hollow-eyed and unkempt. The only indication that one of them might be female was the slight curve of a breast under a teeshirt, where she clutched a baby wrapped in a grubby shawl.
"Now then, what do you want? They've finished with you down at headquarters, have they?" Davies asked, not unkindly.
"All our gear's in there," the young man said sulkily, nodding upwards at the flats. "They've no right to keep that."
"Very true, lad," Davies said. "My instructions are to let you in one at a time to collect your belongings, which will be on the walkway in front of the flat where they were found. So look sharp." He stood aside from the door and let the squatter in.
"There's no harm in them two," Davies said a little later, as they watched the young couple drift off across the grass together carrying the bin-liners which apparently contained all their worldly possessions. "And that's more than you can say for most of them they brought out of there this morning. But I don't blame the kids. They've had nowt and they'll never have owt, the way things are. It's the ones living off them I'd like to nail, supplying them with drugs, pimping and the rest." He was interrupted again by a small, grey haired man who burst out of the door behind him and grabbed his arm urgently.
"What are you doing with our Kelly," Paul Miller demanded angrily. "Jerry Hurst says your lot took her off with the squatters. What the 'ell did you do that for?"
"I've no idea, Mr. Miller," Davies said. "As far as I know no-one was taken to headquarters who wasn't found in the illegally occupied flats." A look of doubt flickered across Miller's face at that and Laura wondered if he very often knew where his nubile daughter spent her time.
"You'd no right to take her at all without telling me," Miller said. "She's only fourteen."
"I'll check for you," Davies said, using his personal radio. "I shouldn't worry, though. As far as I can see they're letting them all out again now. Like as not she'll be home by dinnertime."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
"Zilch!" detective inspector Ray Wilkins of the drug squad said angrily. "Absolute zilch. Someone had been through that place with a bloody vacuum cleaner. We didn't find so much as a speck of ash from a spliff. Yet I know for a fact that one of the lads we brought in has been dealing in heroin. And practically every kid on Wuthering is a user of something. So what went wrong, sir? Who told them we were coming?"
Wilkins was leaning against the wall in chief inspector Michael Thackeray's office, hands thrust deep into the pockets of his jeans, a look of glowering discontent on his face. CID was reviewing the less than satisfactory results of the morning's operation on the Heights and after this postmortem, Thackeray knew he faced another with Jack Longley, a prospect he did not anticipate enjoying.
"Some of those kids are laughing at us in the interview rooms down there," Wilkins went on. "They know bloody well what we're after and that the operation's been a waste of time."
"For you, maybe," Thackeray said sharply, with a glint in his eye that told Wilkins that he had gone too far. "As far as we're concerned, the search isn't over yet. Our top priority is to find the missing child? If we come across anything else, we'll let you know."
"Right, sir," Wilkins said grudgingly. "I'll get back to county then." He hauled himself upright and nodded to Thackeray without warmth.
"See you, Kevin," he said as he went out to sergeant Mower, who was hunched at his desk, trying to make invisible the plaster over the cut on his forehead and the prominent bruise on his left cheek-bone. "Duck next time, eh?"
"Sir," Mower muttered resentfully. There was no love lost there, Thackeray observed with a flicker of amusement. He had never fathomed Mower's unproductive spell with the drug squad but suspected that there might have been a woman at the bottom of it. Which only served to remind him that there was justice in Wilkins's complaint about the handling of the evictions. There would inevitably be an inquest at a higher level than his own, and one in which he himself could conceivably be asked some embarrassing questions about a woman. He had not forgotten mentioning the forthcoming operation in an unguarded moment to Laura Ackroyd and felt bound to ask her – sooner rather than later, too – whether she had let it go any further. That was not a prospect that pleased, either.
"Right then," he said to Mower with an asperity which the sergeant did not understand. "Who knew what was going down?" Mower too had mixed feelings about answering that question but a quick calculation of his best interest came down on the sid
e of frankness, not least because he was sure that under the intense scrutiny that the Heights would attract if Nicky Tyson's disappearance turned into a murder inquiry, his over-enthusiastic involvement with Sue Raban would inevitably surface like some half-submerged log from stagnant water. It was a moment, he reckoned, to get his retaliation in first.
"Who knew? Officials at the town hall," Mower said consideringly. "Jerry Hurst probably. And Sue Raban."
"Sue Raban?" Thackeray's tone was quiet enough, but demanded an answer.
"The woman at the adventure playground, guv. I may have let it slip to her."
"Pillow talk, sergeant?" Mower avoided Thackeray's eyes and gave a barely perceptible shrug.
Thackeray sat silently for a moment, trying to weigh up the younger man and, as usual, feeling dissatisfied with his measurement of him. There was a sharp intelligence there, he knew, and a driving ambition, to some extent disguised by the good looks which women evidently found so attractive.
He was, in Thackeray's brief experience of working with him, enthusiastic and efficient. Yet he had never completely trusted him, and what trust there was looked like evaporating as the full truth about what had been going on at the Heights over the last few days began to emerge. He was less than convinced that the beating Mower had evidently taken last night was as fortuitous a mugging by unknown assailants as the sergeant had made out when he had reported for duty, still mopping at the blood from the cut on his forehead.
"She found out you were a police officer, did she, or did you let that slip as well?" Thackeray asked, his expression cold enough now to let Mower see quite clearly that he was not playing games.
"It wasn't deliberate, guv," Mower said resentfully. "She found my warrant card." Thackeray forebore to ask how. He thought he had a good idea.
"Just careless, then. And you compounded that by telling her when the evictions would be?" he said.
"I just wanted to convince her to keep quiet for another day – my last day up there. I thought something might turn up, you know, the way you always do....." Mower could see the chasm
opening at his feet even before Thackeray spoke again.
"We'd better talk to Miss – or is it Ms with this one? – Sue Raban," he said. "And Jerry Hurst. Get them down here, will you? And I'll concentrate on the Town Hall and see if there was any leak there. There's going to be a few people wanting answers on this one, from Jack Longley right on up."
"There's the other thing," Mower said slowly, knowing he had to pre-empt Sue. Thackeray looked at him coldly, waiting.
"I told you I followed Nicky when I saw her run off home," Mower said. He had given Thackeray a sketchy outline the previous evening of what had happened when Nicky Tyson left the
playground, but he still felt vulnerable. "She was out of the playground gate before I could stop her, and when I got to the flats the door had swung shut and locked and I lost her. Obviously she got home safely. We know that now. But I still feel bad about it. It might have made a difference if I'd caught up with her."
"I doubt it," Thackeray said. "This lad's never been seen. He's been keeping out of sight very effectively. I doubt he'd be daft enough to fall into your arms if he saw you following Nicky. And he would have seen you close behind, wouldn't he? If he saw her, he'd have seen you too, trying to catch up with her?" Mower nodded, relieved at Thackeray's response, but he knew he was not in the clear yet, and he shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Thackeray gazed at him in silence for a moment. There were, he thought, sometimes questions it was better not to ask unless you were prepared to follow them through to the bitter end. And this was not the time to smash the thin ice he suspected Mower had been skating on.
"Get someone to bring Hurst in," Thackeray said dismissively. "You can leave your dark lady for the moment. We'll talk to her later. And see what's come of the statements they've taken so far from the squatters. I think that's our best hope of a lead. I'm going to see the super. I've no doubt he's got the chief constable breathing down his neck."
"Right, guv," Mower said, a glimmer of his normal confidence returning. "Thanks," he added as the door swung shut behind his boss, a sentiment Thackeray neither wanted nor was intended to hear.
Downstairs, Kelly Miller gave sergeant Mower a hard time and enjoyed every minute of it. She leaned back in her chair, her legs crossed provocatively, her short skirt hitched high, and her loose tee-shirt pulled low of one shoulder, with what could only be described as a superior smile on her knowing young face.
"Coke?" she said. "Yeah, we had lots of coke. But that's not illegal, is it?"
"Cocaine? Where did that come from?" Mower snapped. The beating he had taken the previous night had made him more tired and edgy that he had realised, he thought. Val Ridley, who was with him in the interview room, merely smiled faintly, guessing what was coming.
"Coca-cola, stupid!" Kelly said, giggling helplessly. "Lots of coca-cola."
"Christ," Mower said in exasperation, annoyed with himself for letting the girl get under his skin. He had spotted Kelly's name on the list of arrested squatters while Thackeray was still closetted with superintendent Longley and taken over her interview from the uniformed officers on the off-chance of discovering something useful from a long-time resident of the flats.
"How well do you know John Stansfield, Kelly?" Val Mower broke in. Just for a moment a flicker of something which could have been alarm flashed across Kelly's pert features but it disappeared as her attention was distracted by chief inspector Thackeray who came quietly into the interview room behind Mower and stood against the wall watching.
"He's dishy, is John," the girl said quickly. "King John, they call him. But I just see him around, don't I? He says hello."
"Why King John?"
"Oh, I dunno, that's just what the lads call him," she said. "He wears those shirts with a little crown on."
"He's not interested in you?" Val Ridley pressed and was rewarded with a scowl. "Or any of the other girls in the flats?"
"He's got a girl-friend." Kelly said.
"Do you know her?" Mower asked quickly, but the girl's face closed up suddenly and she shook her head.
"How would I?" she said. Mower was sure she was lying but when he glanced at Thackeray, as if to seek permission to press her, the chief inspector shook his head imperceptibly.
"He's not short of a bob or two, your Mr. Stansfield, is he, Kelly?" Thackeray said as Mower hesitated. "Do you know where he works, by any chance."
"How should I know," the girl said sulkily. "He goes off somewhere. He's lucky to have a friggin' job, isn't he? No-one else has."
Two floors below, Laura Ackroyd waited at the main reception desk of police head-quarters with Kelly's father, Paul. Miller had begged a lift into town to try to discover what had happened to Kelly in the police sweep that morning and more out of curiosity than any genuine feeling of sympathy for a father, who had not even begun to worry about his absent daughter until he noticed she was missing at breakfast time, Laura had agreed to go with him to tackle the impregnable wall of police officialdom.
They had got little change and less sympathy from the uniformed inspector who eventually emerged to speak to them. There were still at least a dozen people from the flats to be
interviewed, he had said. No-one had been brought to police HQ who had not been in one of the illegally occupied flats. Therefore no-one, in his book, was anything other than a squatter. And
his instructions were to interview them all before releasing them.
"We're talking about a child of fourteen," Laura said, summoning up some asperity, when Miller's pleas seemed to have been exhausted. A momentary uncertainty flickered in the inspector's eyes at that.
"A lot of them are under-age," he said eventually. "At least we think they are. They don't all
let on."
"Then shouldn't they have an adult with them when they make a statement," Laura asked icily
"Not just for a witness statement," he said. "We're not acc
using them of anything. We didn't find any drugs."
"Didn't you?" Laura said, her interest quickening. "Can I quote you on that?"
"Quote me?"
"I'm from the Gazette," Laura said sweetly.
"Now look," the inspector came back quickly, faint alarm in his eyes.. "I'm not authorised to say anything to the Press. You know that... ."
"But surely you're authorised to let Mr. Miller see his daughter, if she's here," Laura said, not afraid to press her advantage.
"I'll see what I can do," the inspector said, his jaw clenched tightly and within a couple of minutes he had returned with Kelly, who gave her father a dismissive wave and Laura a grateful smile.
"It's awful in there," she said. "Gaz has been sick all over t'floor. He had ten pints last night. You remember Gaz? You met him on the stairs that day when he were right poorly. It were just lager this time, 'cause there weren't owt else. But they should've let him sleep it off. I told them when they came bashing t'door down, it wouldn't do him no good to be moved."
"What door? Who's Gaz?" Miller asked angrily.
"Me friend," Kelly said airily. "Here," she said, putting an arm round Laura's waist. "Do you want to know all about it for your television programme? They were right awful to us in the van, you know. Calling us layabouts and scroungers and that. Take me to Madison's for some chips and a shake and I'll tell you all about it." Laura looked at the girl's pale, old-young face and her knowing blue eyes and sighed. Kelly would be selling her life story to the Globe before she was sixteen at this rate, she thought.
It was the patient and time-consuming work of collating all the statements from the Heights which gave Thackeray his next break. Val Ridley spotted it, ran a print-out off the computer, and took it to Mower, who glanced at it and felt his pulse quicken.
"The crafty bastard," he said. "Come on." They went to Thackeray's office and waved the statement at him.
"I didn't think it was wrong to stay there. We paid rent to Jerry Hurst, ten quid a week, and he said that made it official like, the council didn't mind," Mower read out triumphantly.
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