Outside on the walkway she took a deep breath of the still humid summer air and walked back slowly towards the stairs, deep in thought. She would have to tell the police what she had just discovered. She had no confidence that Miller would take the initiative. If there was a quick new arrest in the Tracy Miller case, Case Reopened would have to reconcile themselves to producing a programmer after the trial, not before. She did not expect much thanks for her service from them or from the police. June Baker would be delighted to see her son free but elsewhere there would be anger and embarrassment as the full horror of the injustice became clear.
She pushed open the heavy door onto the landing unaware that her progress along the walkway had been observed. At the lift doors she hesitated, wondering if it was worth pressing the call button or whether it would be just as quick to walk down the five flights of concrete stairs.
She never took that simple decision. Even as she hesitated, she heard a sudden scuffling noise away to her left and a low moan as if someone was in pain. Startled, she hauled open the door onto the further walkway, but caught no more than a glimpse of a figure disappearing into a recessed doorway to one side of the lift shaft. A door thudded closed behind whoever had been on the landing.
Alarmed, she eased open the solid wooden door. According to a much-abused notice hanging from a single screw, which warned against entry, the door led to the roof and was strictly out of bounds to tenants of the block. She held the door open slightly with her foot and listened before very slowly and quietly beginning to climb the steep stairway at the top of which she could see nothing. The steps led to another door which was very slightly ajar, offering the meerest sliver of daylight, through which Laura could hear movements and the mumble of voices.
“Interfering bitch,” a voice said suddenly, quite clearly as voice she knew and feared, the voice from the swimming pool, and she thought for a heart-stopping moment that she had been seen. But the sounds on the roof receded slightly and, peering cautiously through the crack and the wall of the lift shaft, she realised that the invective had been aimed not at her but at another figure who was being bundled unceremoniously across the roof with head and arms swathed in a black plastic bin-bag by two men.
Suddenly breathless, Laura leaned back against the wall and tried to think clearly, the rooftop tableau imprinted on her mind in all its horror. The heavier of the two men she recognised. It was the caretaker Jerry Hurst. The muffled figure between them she could not identify for certain except that it was young and female and could quite possibly be Paul Miller's younger daughter Kelly. The other man was tall, young and powerful and, she knew from her own brief encounters with him, very frightening indeed.
We're on the top floor, she thought frantically, trying to stave off the panic that threatened to engulf her as the implications of the girl's plight sank in. She glanced through the door again as Kelly, if it was Kelly, wad dumped roughly on the floor on the far side of the roof. If the girl was conscious, or even alive, she gave no sign of it. She lay limply near the parapet, the black plastic pulled tightly across her face and Laura thought desperately how easy it must be to suffocate within that clammy embrace, as Nicky must have suffocated.
She had almost decided the push open the door and fling herself across the roof-space in an effort to save the girl when the hairs on the back of her neck prockled asa she realised that someone had crept up the stairs and was standing just behind her iin the gloom.
“Christ, you gave me a shock,” she breathed as she turned and recognised Carl Tyson, thin and gawky and clenching and unclenching his hands in frustration as he peered over her shoulder.
“Who is it?” he whispered.
“Never mind,” Laura said. “You go and find the police, quickly. I'll stay here and try to distract them somehow. Go on – quick!” She pushed the boy back down the stairs and, to her relief, he went, just as quietly in his soft trainers as he had arrived.
Easing the door open a fraction more she could see, if she craned her neck, the backs of the two men who now appeared to be leaning into a large galvanised tank next to the head of the lift-shaft. As she watched, Hurst gave a muffled grunt of satisfaction and withdrew a dripping wet hold-all. Apparently satisfied, they dropped the bag and walked deliberately back towards where the girl had been dumped.
“Is she dead? It doesn't take long to suffocate in one of them things,” she heard Hurst ask and the other man crouched down and lifted the girl's wrist where it protruded from the plastic and felt for a pulse.
“You should know,” the other voice said with a chilling acceptance of Hurst's experience in the matter. “But not this time. She's still alive.” He dropped the limp wrist to the ground. “Just unconscious. She'll never know what hit her.”
It took Laura a moment for Laura to absorb the horrific implications of that remark, by which time Hurst had unfastened the bond around the girl's arms and pulled the plastic bag away. She lay sprawled on the tarmac, her head lolling to one side, so limp that Laura found it hard to believe the other man's conviction that she was still alive.
“Right then,” the tall man said, close enough now for Laura to smell him – not the stale odour that Jerry Hurst carried with him but the fresh tang of some expensive aftershave she half recognised. “Over the edge with her and then we're away. It's the perfect distraction. They'll all be running round the back so no-one will even notice us nipping out the front. You can see the Escort from here, look, on the other side of the road next to the white VW. The blue Ford, that's mine. Come on, let's do it.”
Hurst took hold of the girl under the armpits and began to drag her closer to the parapet. Almost paralysed by horror Laura knew that she must do something but just as she pushed the door fully open and took a deep breath she was knocked to one side by Carl Tyson who had come silently up the stairs behind her again. Behind him she could hear the blessed sound of heavy running footfalls on the stairs.
“The pigs are here,” Carl said but did not wait for an answer. As the two men hesitated with Kelly's body now suspended between them the boy hurled himself at them with an eldritch shriek of rage. Head down, he took Jerry Hurst in the midriff, knocking him off balance, abnd for a long moment of slow-motion clarity Laura watched the two of them teeter on the edge of the roof before Carl broke free and gave Hurst a final shrug. They briefly glimpsed the big man's face contorted with fear before he disappeared, with a despairing scream, arms flailing, the black plastic bag, which had been caught up in the struggle, swooping behind him like a vengeful crow.
The other man, even in shock, was more controlled and no much more circumspect. Pushing the unconscious girl aside and ignoring Carl, who was now kneeling against the parapet looking down at his victim far below with his shoulders shaking uncontrollably, the second man turned swiftly, picked up the holdall and headed towards the top of the stairs to meet Laura face-to-face and behind her the uniformed police officers who now spilled out onto the roof. They were closely followed by DCI Thackeray and now spilled out onto the roof. The scuffle was brief and one-sided before Laura heard the handcuffs close.
Thackeray put a hand on Laura's shoulder.
“Are you all right?” he asked. He was breathing heavily and a nerve throbbed at the side of his jaw. She managed what she hoped was a reassuring smile.
“I'm fine,” she said a shade uncertainly. “You got here very quickly.”
“We were already on our way when the boy stopped us. Sue Raban had given us a pretty good idea of what's been going on.”
“Well, good for Sue,” Laura said faintly. She glanced at Carl Tyson, who had slowly turned away from the edge of the roof, his face drained of colour, his eyes staring and his lower lip unsteady.
“It's all right now, Carl,” Laura said. “It's over now.”
“He were the bugger who killed my little sister,” the boy said, as if he still could not take in what had happened so quickly on the roof's edge. He slumped down on the floor beside Kelly, whose eyes were alrea
dy flickering open in response to the ministrations of a couple of police officers. This thing had begun with the death of a little sister, Laura thought, and looked as if it would finally end the same way.
“Hurst?” Thackeray asked, scanning the windswept roof. Laura glanced at the windswept roof and shuddered.
“You didn't realise?” she asked, swallowing hard. “He went over the edge. Which was what they had in mind for Kelly. As the full enormity of the events she had witnessed began to sink in she buried her head in her hands, not wanting Thackeray to see the belated panic which thratened to overwhelm her.
Thackeray's face hardened and he turned towards the prisoner who stood watching impassively, his hands handcuffed behind his back. For a moment the two men faced each other in silence and Laura saw Thackeray's fists clench and unclench at his sides.
“Don't, Michael,” she said so softly that she was not even sure that he could hear her and the moment passed so quickly that she was never sure later whether or not she had imagined it. Mower came up to them with the holdall, now open. He lidted out several packets, carefully sealed in plastic to keep the water out.
“Enough of the hard stuff to keep in comfort for a life-time, guv,” he said. “Coocaine, heroin, Es...Could that be why we found damn all when we searched the squatted flats? He'd collected it all up and hidden it up here. Plus...” he rooted around in the bag again. “Plus car keys...” Mower jangled them at the prisoner. “A coupls of protable phones, a couple of balaclaves....you name it. Everything he didn't want us to find when we searched his place.”
The prisoner watched in silence as Mower carefully laid out the evidence on the floor at his feet. Only when Mower pulled out the very last exhibit did he show any sign of emotion and then it was to give a low murmur of anger as a small pair of pink and white training shoes emerged.
“Nicky's?” Mower asked, unable to keep the satisfaction from his voice. Carl gave an audible moan of distress at that and Laura moved closer to him and put an arm arouond his boney shoulders, feeling the uncontrollable trembling beneath his thin tee-short.
“That's down to Jerry,” Sissons said. “You can't hang that on me.”
“We'll see,” Thackeray said, his voice under control now. The prisoner stared impassively at Thackeray as he was cautioned, only the glittering eyes indicating his fury.
“Get him out of her quickly, sergeant. If the locals find out about the connection with Nickt Tyson, they'll have him. I'll follow you down.” Thackeray turned back to Carl and Laura as an ambulance crew put his sister onto a stretcher and carried her away.
“You'll have to come to the station with us,” he said to the boy gently. He beckoned one of the uniformed officers at the far side of the roof. “Take the lad down to his mother and then see that they both get down to the nick,” he said. Carl offered no objection and walked dispiritedly to the staircase, shoulders slumped and long thin arms dangling, with the constable close behind him.
“Was it deliberate?” Thackeray asked Laura. “Did he push him?” Laura shrugged.
“I'm not sure,” she said.
“And if you were, would you tell me?” he asked, trying to read her pale closed face.
“It all happened too quickly,” she said, avoiding the question. “If I were you I wouldn't strive too officiously with Carl. You might get a conviction but you wouldn't get justice.”
Thackerya put a hand lightly against her cheek and looked at her sombrely for a moment.
“You have a genius for finding trouble,” he said. “It frightens me.”
“I only came to do an interview,” she said, trying to look as innocent as she decently could. “I've got a tape of Paul Miller that you'll find very interesting. Jerry Hurst blackmailed him into giving evidence against Stephen Webster.”
“We were going to issue a picture of Hurst to the media,” Thackeray said. “The fibres on Nicky Tyson's clothes match the carpet in his flat. Plus a single hair from a ginger cat. We had him.”
“So it was him, not the other man – Sissons did you call him?”
“Oh yes, I think so. Sissons was covering for him but I doubt he was actually involved in Nicky's murder. Darren Sullivan's death in the fire is another matter. He'll have questions to answer on that one.”
“And Tracy Miller?”
“I imagine Tracy was the first child Hurst attacked,” Thackeray said. “Long before Sissons came on the scene. If Miller is withdrawing his evidence against his step-son that just makes it more certain. They found animal hairs on Tracy's body too, but of course tha place is over-run with cats and dogs so no-one thought too much about it at the time. Something else which was not regarded as particularly significant. Huddleston was happy with Stephen's confession, didn't think it was worth pursuing the girl-friend or looking hard at the forensic evidence. Sloppy, but not criminal. We'll have to live with that.”
“And you think Huddleston pressurized him?” Laura persisted, knowing this was the question Thackeray would be most reluctant to answer.
“I shouldn't think we'll ever be able to prove that one way or the other. He#ll never admit it and none of his lads will shop him. In Sicily they call it 'omerta'. Here it's just the Job.”
Thackeray glanced over the parapet at the crown which surrounded the spot where Hust had landed, close the the rubbish chute and the dustbins where he had dumped Tracy Miller's body all those years before, and there was no compassion in his eyes.
“I'd be lying if I said I was sorry he was dead,” he said.
“You'd like to have seen him hang?” Laura asked. Thackeray shrugged.
“No, not really,” he said wearily. “If they'd hung Stephen Webster, where would we be? Even so....”
“You got the bastard who did it. Isn't that enough?”
“Maybe,” Thackeray said. They watched as another ambulance arrived and made its way through the crowd towards Hurst's sprawled, crumpled body before Thackeray turned away, looking drained rather than triumphant, and put an arm round Laura.
“Come on, I'll need a statement from you as well anmd then I suppose you'd better get back to your office as you seem to have got yourself another story.”
“With a bit of luck Ted Grant will buy me a vodka and tonic tonight,” she said, without much satisfaction. “I'll be hackette of the month after this.”
The message from David Mendelson had been on Laura's desk when she finally returned to the Gazette. Vicky had gone into premature labour, it said. She called police headquarters to let Michael Thackeray know. It had been at the Mendelson's that she had first met him and she knew he would be concerned.
As soon as she was free she drove to the maternity wing in a state of high anxiety, only to be met in reception by Vicky' father-in-law Victor, his eyes bright with tears that were evidently provoked by good news not bad.
“It's a girl,” he said cheerfully. “Six pounds and three weeks early. Go up, go up, they're both fine. Gave us all a fright but they're both fine. I'm going home to tell Mama all about it.”
Laura raced up the stairs and found David Mendelson, the two Mendelson boys and Michael Thackeray in attendance on a smiling Vicky, who was sitting up in bed holding her new-born daughter in her arms. Her face, already radiant, lit up even more when she saw Laura.
“Take her,” she said, handing the tightly wrapped bundle to her friend. “This is Naomi Laura and just to make it quite perfect it looks as though she might have red hair.”
Laura held the child close. Her tiny face was screwed up, as if she was concentrating hard on the serious business of sleeping, the almost transparent eyelids flickering in the bright sunshine from the window as if she had not yet quite got used to the light of the world. Laura bent her head, her hair falling in copper strands around the paler copper down on the baby's head and kissed her very gently.
“That's a wonderful present,” she said to Vicky. Bright with happiness she turned to look for Thackeray, but as he had watched her take the child in her arms he had tu
rned away and walked out of the ward without a word.
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