Dust to Dust
Page 7
“D’you see your Billy? D’you visit him?” she asked. Baxter glanced away.
“Not for a long time,” he said. “I live in London. My mother keeps in touch.”
“That copper from London that’s snooping around came to see me, but I told him to go stuff himself. I don’t see why I should help the bloody police after what went on here back then.”
“They’ll not give up if they think they’ve found new evidence,” Baxter said.
“What new evidence?” Jackie said scornfully. “They believed what they wanted to believe at the trial, they’ll believe what they want to believe now an’all if it suits them. Isn’t that right, Laura?” Laura shrugged slightly, refusing to commit herself on that but not wanting to antagonise Jackie, but the other woman did not appear to notice as she switched her attention back to Baxter.
“I always wondered if you and Craig Atkinson saw owt that night,” she said.
“You knew we were out?”
“Billy knew you and Craig were sneaking around in the dark most nights,” she said. “He even wondered if Craig had a hand in the murder. He were a big lad, wasn’t he? But he wouldn’t say owt to involve anyone else after he were arrested. Even to help himself. He just said they had to prove it were him and they couldn’t because it wasn’t. I told him he was being right soft, but he took no notice. You and Craig didn’t do it, did you? It wasn’t you two he were protecting?”
“No, of course not,” Baxter said, though his dismissive laugh was strained and Laura guessed that although he was sure about his own actions that night he might not be so certain about his friend’s. “We never went far. I was supposed to be in the house minding Annie, while my mam went out to do the breakfasts. It was Craig’s idea to get up and go out when the men did. He was desperate to get onto the picket line, hitch a lift with the men, whatever. Failing that we’d be round the back of the welfare looking for any left-over breakfast after the men had gone. But he didn’t have to babysit Stevie. His dad never went picketing and his mother never helped at the canteen, so he could get away with more than I could.”
“Bren Atkinson,” Jackie said. “I’ve not seen her for years. She hated the strike, did Bren, I do remember that. She’d do nowt to help and made sure Pete kept out of the worst of it. Her and my mam had a furious row one morning in t’shop while Brenda were pushing an enormous trolley load of groceries through t’checkout. You’d have thought she’d have had the decency to do her shopping somewhere else while t’rest of us were going hungry. She were right brazen that one. And a bit of a slag an’all, some said, but I wouldn’t know about that. She left Pete in the end, after Craig went away. Went off wi’someone wi’a bit more brass. Pete being on t’dole didn’t suit her.”
“But if you’re both so sure Billy didn’t do it, is there any feeling in the village about who might have done?” Laura asked. Jackie looked at her with an expression of contempt.
“There’s no-one in the village who would help the police back then,” she said. “No-one believed Billy would go down, either. But no-one would shop anyone else to save him. And no-one ever has.”
Laura glanced at Baxter, with a feeling of despair. But Ian Baxter seemed to tense his shoulders with a renewed determination.
“What’s happened to Roy Atkinson?” he asked Jackie. “He was Billy’s best mate. Surely he’d be ready to help him after all these years.”
“Roy’s still around,” Jackie said. “Though he drive one of them big wagons that go abroad, so he’s often away.”
“And Col Randall’s still in Yorkshire, his dad said. We saw Vic earlier.”
“Aye, he and Billy were right close. Me and Billy used to go out with Col and Kelly Moorhouse. Col married her, you know, after he came out of jail. She stuck by him, any road. Last I heard they were running a little business near Huddersfield, or maybe it were Bradfield, market gardening or summat like that.” She pulled out her mobile phone and flicked through the directory.
“I’ve got Kelly’s number though I haven’t spoken to her for ages. It may be out of date. Here.” She handed Baxter the phone for him to copy the number.”
“He’s another who swears he was set up by the police, an’all,” she said. “The way things were back then, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
She stood up, towering over Baxter and Laura in her stiletto boots, and pulled her candy-floss jacket on again. “I’d best be off,” she said. “I work shifts and I’m due on in half an hour. Bloody slave labour minimum wage, but what else is there round here? A lot o’t’lads can’t even get that. Most folk live on handouts round here, us. And now they’re cutting t’dole back, an’all.”
“It’s good to see you again,” Baxter said awkwardly.
“You too,” Jackie said. “I’m right sorry it’s turned out like it has, wi’ Billy and now your dad. At least you did the right thing and got out when you could. It wasn’t just a copper got killed in Urmstone, you know. It were the whole bloody place got its heart ripped out. They can give us as many ski slopes and industrial units as they like, though most of them are empty now, but nowt’s going to give us back what we had then. There’s been too much damage done.”
When Jackie had gone, Baxter and Laura sat in the kitchen over yet another cup of tea.
“So what next?” Laura asked. “Do you want to go on with this?”
“Yes,” he said. “Do you? Will you?”
“If you think it would help,” Laura said. “I can’t stay today. I have to get my grandmother back home. But I could come back tomorrow. Who do you think we need to talk to?”
“Billy’s mates, Roy and Col. I’ll get Col’s phone number from his father. I should have thought of that when we saw him. And let’s hope Roy’s around and not half way to Turkey or wherever he drives to.”
“And what about your next door neighbour, the formidable Brenda? She sounds like an outsider who’d have a different take on what was going on.” Baxter gave her a look of distaste.
“I suppose so,” he said. “She’ll certainly have a different take on it. If we find Roy, he probably knows where his mother is. Or his father will. We can start with Pete. He’s still in the village by all accounts.”
Laura looked at him consideringly for a moment, wondering how strong this man with the haggard face and anxious eyes actually was.
“You do realise there are no guarantees you’ll find what you’re looking for?” she asked. “If we do break down this wall of silence you might uncover something even worse on the other side. It might not help your brother.” Baxter shrugged slightly.
“While there are people like Ferguson out to do him even more harm I don’t see that I have any choice. I was only a kid when all this happened the first time around. You’ve no idea how helpless I felt. Now I’m an adult, I’m a lawyer and I’ve got colleagues to back me up. If there’s anything I can uncover in Urmstone to help Billy’s case, I’ll do anything I can to find it.”
Laura hesitated for no more than a moment.
“OK,” she said. “Let’s have a go.”
CHAPTER SIX
As the days got shorter that winter of ‘84, the two boys had spent more and more evenings on the tip scrabbling for usable coal and Ian’s mother had stopped complaining. As the cold weather set in what Billy and the two younger boys brought home became not just valuable but essential if there was to be any warmth in the house at all. Miners’ homes had been heated with free coal from the pit for as long as anyone could remember, and the lack of it had the whole village shivering.
But by November things were changing. Much of the usable loose coal from the tip had by now been scavenged, so every chunk and lump had to be painfully dug out of the dusty detritus, if the weather was dry, or from black slurry if not. And the police were becoming more hostile, officers from further away now being deployed regularly to patrol the boundary fences and confiscate what was brought down, threatening prosecutions for theft if any of the scavengers risked an argument.
&n
bsp; It had been a night of driving rain the Thursday it happened. Ian and Craig had slipped out and taken the shadowy back ginnels to the pit head, so concerned to spot the hated coppers lurking in the shadows ahead that they were completely unaware they were being followed. The chain-link fence at the back of the muck-heaps had been breached so many times that the management had virtually given up repairing it and the two teenagers slipped through without much difficulty and scrambled up the mountain of pit spoil to a place about fifty feet above ground where they knew that there was usually still some usable coal buried in the soggy, pillaged remnants of the stack.
“Bloody hell, it’s wet,” Craig had muttered as he pulled out a torch which gave them just enough light to be able to distinguish between coal and chunks of stone amongst the sludge. Ian had pulled his hood up over his head to keep the rain out of his eyes and started digging silently with one of the garden trowels which were the only tools they had been able to get hold of. The men who spent hours at the same task had commandeered all the usable spades and shovels in the
village.
The two boys had been stopped with a full sack of picking that single time, when the local bobby had sent them home with unexpected kindness, but they knew that some of the police on duty now were from London and they were men they preferred to dodge. Ian could never remember how long they worked that night but they were tired, filthy and soaking wet when they finally decided to call the search off with their sack only half full as they scrambled and slid down the spoil mountain as silently as they could.
Towards the bottom Ian had caught his foot on something soft and cried out as he pitched forward and slid on hands and knees, ending up not far from the base of the stack, and letting go of the precious haul they had so laboriously quarried.
“Sssh,” Craig had hissed urgently.
“There’s summat there,” Ian remembered saying, hardly able to see with the rain in his eyes. Craig pulled his torch out again and the light played fitfully across the steeply sloping surface, where black rivers of water were cutting deep channels in the sludge. When the light refocussed on something pale both boys drew a sharp breath
“There’s summat buried,” Ian muttered, his heart thumping uncontrollably as his mind grappled with the unbelievable.
“Someone’s fucking stuck in t’mud,” Craig said, panic pitching his just broken voice to a squeak. Breathlessly the two boys had scrabbled desperately with their trowels and their bare hands to try to extricate the motionless body which was almost completely covered with debris from higher up the tip. But with the rain carrying more sludge down from above as fast as they could clear it with their inadequate tools, they could see no more than a training shoe and the sodden end of a pair of jeans. It was a pathetically small trainer, which Ian never forgot, as he came to the sick realisation that the night was going to end very badly indeed.
“You stop there,” he said to his friend. “I’ll get help. We need help. We’ll not get him out
on us own.”
Craig had collapsed backwards against the tip side and Ian had known without being able to see him clearly that he was already weeping with frustration and terror. He took a great gulp of air and launched himself downwards, sliding wildly through the sludge, to the bottom of the heap again and running through the puddles to the pit yard until he turned the corner of a building and almost careered into a couple of policemen drinking mugs of tea and sheltering in makeshift lean-to.
“Come quick,” he yelled. “There’s someone stuck on t’muck heap. “It’s a little kid. He’s in t’muck and we can’t get him out.”
He could still vividly recall the slow deliberation with which one of the policemen had finished off his tea and his cigarette before either of them began to move and scramble, cursing, up to where Craig was waiting, sodden and shivering uncontrollably. It had not taken long for the two grown men to dig the body out in the wavering beams of their flashlights, and even less time to turn the body over. Craig moaned as the rain washed the slithering dirt from the face of a young boy, and then began to howl in an outraged despair that Ian hoped he would never have to hear again.
“Do you know who it is?” one of the officers asked Ian, his voice harsh, as his colleague radioed for an ambulance, although it must have been obvious to the men as well as the boys that the child, his nose and mouth clogged with black filth, was already dead. The policeman’s accent was not local and his face was set in a near snarl of horror. He shook Ian’s shoulder roughly when he did not reply at once.
“It’s Stevie, his kid brother,” Ian had whispered, before sinking to his knees in the black mud and vomiting uncontrollably. Memories were vague after that: bright lights, angry questions hurled from all sides, from policemen, his parents and worst of all from Pete and Brenda Atkinson who had no idea that either of their sons had slipped out of the house long after ten year old Stevie and Craig had supposedly gone to bed.
There had been no police in Urmstone the day of Stevie Atkinson’s funeral. They wouldn’t dare, some said, but looking back Baxter thought that perhaps for once someone in the higher reaches of the force had had the sensitivity to realise that they were neither wanted nor needed as the whole village lined the route Stevie’s small white coffin took to the church. There had, by common consent, been no picketing that day and miners in black armbands had marshalled the crowds, with faces as grim and set as those of their families who stood in silence behind them. They knew about death by coal, those men, Baxter thought, but for it to engulf a ten-year-old in such circumstances was a horror too far for them all.
And then, weeks later, the inquest, and more insistent questions in a courtroom, and the feeling Ian shared with Craig that no-one really believed the answers: no, they hadn’t told Stevie where they were going; no, they hadn’t taken him with them; no, they hadn’t known he was following them; no, they hadn’t heard anything in the dark, with wind and rain howling around them; no, they had not realised that the tip was becoming unsafe during the hour they had spent filling a sack with a few paltry lumps of coal, the hour that Stevie had been suffocating to death just below them. No, no, no, they had not been to blame.
More nights than he could remember, Ian had jerked awake in the small hours to find himself gasping for breath even in the comfort of his wife, Carrie’s arms and, more often than not, crying out, years later, that no, it hadn’t been their fault, they swore to God, it had not been their fault.
He rubbed a sleeve to clear the window of his car which was parked outside Pete Atkinson’s neglected looking semi-detached house, and wondered how he could face the man again. Not easily, he thought, without the moral support of Laura Ackroyd who was supposedly on her way from Bradfield to join him. He could not do this alone. There was too much crushing baggage there.
He was not at all sure that Pete Atkinson would speak to him anyway. He recalled a man who was taciturn at the best of times and, according to Craig, given to unpredictable outbursts of anger if any of his three sons pushed him too far. Even so he had been the last man anyone had expected to go back to work before the strike ended. Certainly he had been the quietest of strikers, never one to raise his voice publicly in the loud arguments which had reverberated around the coalfield, and refusing point blank to go out picketing with the rest. But the other men had put this down the his wife’s vehement opposition to the strike and largely left him be. But his transformation from quiet striker to even quieter scab had never been forgotten or forgiven. Not even the loss of his youngest son and the descent of the woman some of the strikers called Baracking Brenda into hysterical grief, and the marriage into a battle-ground, would allow any latitude there.
Laura was driving slowly back to Urmstone the next morning to meet Ian Baxter as she had arranged. She felt nauseous, sleepless and, above all, guilty as she contemplated the tension she had thrown her relationship with Michael Thackeray into the previous evening. He had come home from work stony-faced and lost no time in telling her why.
Laura had turned away from the evening news on the TV open mouthed. For years the two of them had threaded their way with difficulty through the potential conflicts of interest their two jobs had brought them, but she had never known Thackeray try to warn her off like this before.
“I’m not ill any more,” she said. “Just recuperating. Being pregnant isn’t being ill. It’s a perfectly natural process. If it wasn’t for what happened with Murgatroyd, I’d still be at work at the
Gazette every day and doing far more than I’m doing to help Ian Baxter. You really don’t need to worry about me, Michael.”
“You know I worry about you, and the baby,” Thackeray said. “How could I not after what happened? Everything that’s happened? I spoke to people at the Met who remembered Ferguson, and to ex-DI Hartnett, who worked on the murder investigation in Urmstone. They all said the same thing. Ferguson is poison, he’s obsessed with that case. He was never convinced the investigation got to the bottom of it and the fact that Baxter’s lawyers are trying to get him released seems to have sparked his obsession off again. I’ve asked my own people to keep an eye open for him. I don’t want him on my patch and if I can lay hands of him I’ll find something to charge him with. But the local man in Urmstone couldn’t track him down when he went looking. So he’s still at large. We’ll keep looking.”