Thackeray glanced away. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘We’ve a big operation on this afternoon. That’s why I’m here.’
‘I’ll get back to the office, then,’ Laura said, pulling on her coat and hoping that Thackeray would not see the tears that welled up in her eyes. But he put a hand on her arm and she had to resist the overwhelming temptation to move so close to him that he had to take her in his arms. But that seemed to be very far from what he had in mind.
‘I thought I’d talk to Vince Newsom,’ he said. ‘Find out what he’s going to say. I don’t see why he should implicate you in his nasty tabloid tricks.’
‘Vince is OK,’ Laura said dully, pushing emotion firmly out of her voice. ‘He’s given evidence already, I think. I’ve not seen him this morning but I’d already spoken to him about his evidence. He’s already agreed to say he found the note accidentally in his car. That seems to be the best version of events for both of us, and as I told that lot in there, I really can’t really remember very clearly what happened, so I can’t dispute what he says.’
‘You’d spoken to Vince?’ Thackeray asked, an edge of angry disillusion in his voice. ‘You did a deal with that bastard?’
‘Oh, Michael,’ Laura said desperately. ‘He got hold of Val’s note somehow. I didn’t give it to him, but I can’t prove that.’
‘He stole it then, which is exactly what you’d expect.’
‘We don’t know that,’ Laura said. ‘I can’t say that for sure either. He may have just found it. I could have dropped it. Anyway, that’s what he’s said, and I agreed just now that it’s possible.’
‘Right,’ Thackeray said, his eyes stony. ‘And what did you tell them about the hostage situation?’
‘I told them that Christie was lapsing in and out of consciousness. I thought it was safe to go in, and I guessed you thought the same.’
‘If they swallow that they’ll swallow anything,’ Thackeray said bleakly, turning away.
‘Michael,’ Laura said, putting a hand on his arm in her turn. ‘We have to talk. We have to resolve all this.’
Thackeray shrugged her hand off and sighed.
‘I’ll call you when I’ve made arrests in this case I’m working on,’ he said. ‘That’s my first priority. And we can’t risk you and I getting tangled up in a live case again. It’s stupid and dangerous and has got to stop.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I’m due in a meeting five minutes ago,’ he said, turning again and heading away before Laura had any chance to reply.
She watched him walk down the corridor without looking back and turn into one of the doors at the end and pass out of her sight. She drew a sharp breath and pushed her way out of the glass entrance doors, the wind buffeting her and searing her eyes so that by the time she reached her car, tears were running down her reddening cheeks. She sat for a moment with the engine running, gazing through the icy windscreen and waiting for it and her mind to clear. Thackeray, she thought, had spoken to her almost like a stranger, and she wondered if that was what she was destined to be in future; a stranger or even perhaps an enemy. Could all that passion have come to this?
At two that afternoon, four police vans followed by a couple of unmarked cars made their way slowly and silently up Aysgarth Lane, as if not wanting to draw too much attention to themselves. They turned at traffic lights into the maze of dilapidated Victorian streets that huddled around the shell of St Jude’s church which was still hemmed in by corrugated iron barriers and scaffolding years after its tower had partially collapsed, almost taking Michael Thackeray and Laura Ackroyd with it. The church, like several of the streets of mainly boarded up houses, had been waiting years for the demolition men to finish the job. Halfway into the enclave the vans split up, two pulling up in Inkerman Street, where at least half the houses were boarded and derelict, and two making their way round to the alley that gave access to the backyards between the two rows of houses in adjacent streets.
DCI Michael Thackeray, in the passenger seat of one of the cars that had parked discreetly in Inkerman Street, listened as one by one the groups of officers reported that they were in position. Satisfied, he gave the order to enter number 52, a three-storey terraced house where all the windows were boarded and there was no external sign of human activity, but where comings and goings had been observed by his discreet observers over the last twenty four-hours.
The raid went smoothly and as planned. By the time Thackeray and Sergeant Mower picked their way across the overgrown strip of front garden to the door, now hanging half off its hinges, the uniformed officers had arrested several men who were detained, handcuffed and sullen, in the bleak front room of the house. Thackeray glanced at the prisoners, bitterly disappointed that none of them looked familiar. He raised an eyebrow at the uniformed sergeant who had led the assault.
‘This the lot?’
‘We haven’t been upstairs yet, sir,’ the officer said.
‘Right, let’s do it,’ Thackeray ordered, and he and Mower followed half a dozen uniformed men, batons in hand, up the rickety staircase into the upper reaches of the house. The boarded up windows made the whole place dark and not all the lights worked. On the first landing there was a musty smell of dirt and bad drains, and possibly something worse, which seemed to be coming from a filthy bathroom where the door was ajar. The other doors leading off the landing were locked with heavy bolts on the outside of the doors.
Thackeray nodded.
‘One at a time. Be careful,’ he said, and the Sergeant unbolted the first of the bedroom doors. There was no light inside but from the dim illumination offered by the bare bulb on the landing Thackeray could just make out three girls cowering on the far side of the room across the three beds that had been crammed into the meagre space. The Sergeant handed him a powerful torch and he crossed towards them, illuminating pale faces, huge, terrified eyes, and skinny, barely pubescent bodies in skimpy tops and skirts. They were shivering, though whether from cold or fear was impossible to tell. A combination of both, he guessed.
‘It’s all right,’ he said quietly, not able to tell whether they understood him or not. ‘You’re safe now. Do you understand me? We are the police. You’re safe now.’ Two of the girls sat down suddenly on a bed, as if their legs could no longer support them, and began to sob. The third stood rigid and still shaking against the wall as if waiting for her own execution.
Thackeray turned away abruptly and beckoned Mower and the uniformed sergeant out onto the landing where several uniformed officers were standing by, looking sick.
‘Are there girls in all the rooms?’ he asked, and the officers nodded, lost for words.
‘There’s a lass over here looks seriously poorly to me,’ a burly constable said, gesturing towards the door on the other side of the landing, which he had just unbolted.
‘Right, this is what we do,’ Thackeray snapped. ‘Get those bastards downstairs off to the nick. We’ll question them later. Then get some light in here, and send for social services, a doctor and an ambulance. These are children, most of them, and I’m not having them banged up in cells even for half an hour. They need proper care and medical attention and we’ll sort out who they are and how they got here later.’
‘Sir,’ the Sergeant said, and stomped down the stairs as if relieved that someone knew what to do in a situation that was entirely foreign to him.
‘Guv,’ came an urgent voice from the landing above. ‘Guv, I think you should see this.’
Thackeray and Mower exchanged a glance full of foreboding and climbed the final flight of stairs to the top of the house where a uniformed constable was leaning with his back to the wall outside a door that he had evidently just opened. He looked pale and sick and he waved a hand vaguely at the dark interior of the room.
‘In there,’ he said.
The stench and the swarming flies told Thackeray and Mower exactly what they would find in this final locked room. Taking a deep breath, Thackeray led the way. The room had two beds, one of them empty but the ot
her occupied by a small crumpled shape underneath a duvet, a shape that, as Thackeray gingerly pulled back the bedclothes, revealed itself as the body of a young girl, naked and lying on her side, her eyes closed, her flesh waxen and showing the first signs of bloating. But even in its incipient decay it was possible to see that the girl’s body was severely bruised, with contusions and abrasions on her back and shoulders and across one cheek. Thackeray pulled the duvet gently back up to cover her.
‘Get Amos Atherton,’ he said to Mower as he led the way out of the room and closed and bolted the door behind them. Mower nodded, finding it difficult to speak as the sickly smell of death filled their mouths and nostrils.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Thackeray said, as if reading his thoughts. ‘I need some fresh air.’ The two of them made their way downstairs and out of the front door where Thackeray lit a cigarette and pulled the smoke gratefully into his lungs while Mower got onto his mobile phone and set the wheels of another murder inquiry into motion. The four men who had been arrested were being loaded into one of the police vans and Thackeray beckoned the Sergeant back.
‘Suspicion of murder,’ he said flatly.
‘I heard there was a body,’ the Sergeant said. ‘Jesus. What the hell’s been going on in there?’
‘I think hell just about sums it up,’ Thackeray said. As he gazed bleakly away down the street where officers were beginning to thread blue and white tape across the road to isolate the crime scene, he was surprised to see two more officers heading in the direction of the house with, between them, an animated and struggling figure held firmly by the arms, his hands handcuffed behind his back.
‘He tried to slip out the back,’ one of the PCs said breathlessly. ‘Gave us a run for it.’
‘Did he?’ Thackeray said, running a satisfied eye over the portly figure of Emanuel Asida, who suddenly seemed to subside in the officers’ grasp, panting slightly from his exertions, as he recognised Thackeray. ‘Well, I don’t think he’ll be running very far for a long time now, will you Mr Asida? Emanuel Asida, I’m arresting you on suspicion of murder…’
‘What?’ Asida screamed, beginning to struggle frantically again. ‘I had nothing to do with murder. Nothing at all.’
‘Caution him, Sergeant,’ Thackeray said wearily, turning away in disgust. ‘And take him down to the nick. We’ll follow you. This looks like being a long, long day.’
Laura Ackroyd pulled back the curtain in her grandmother’s front room and gazed through the gloom of a murky, damp evening towards the looming shape of Priestley House, behind its barricade of fences.
‘Are you quite sure, Nan?’ she said. ‘You’ve only seen her picture in the paper.’
Joyce pursed her lips. ‘Of course I’m sure,’ she said. ‘I’m not entirely senile yet. It was the girl who’s run away, and if what you say is true, then Elena won’t be far away either. This lass was carrying a bag of shopping and she went in through the fence there, where the gap is. I saw her as clearly as I can see you now.’
‘What on earth are they doing still round here?’ Laura asked incredulously. ‘They must be crazy. I thought they’d be long gone by now.’
‘Well, I can’t answer that, but I think we should get them out of that filthy rabbit warren before they come to some harm. There’s all sorts of young tearaways use that block at night. If Elena’s frightened enough she might jump off the top. Even the police will terrify her. You know that. She’s threatened it before.’
Laura gazed again at the flats, wishing that she could call Michael Thackeray and hand this problem over to him, but knowing that Joyce was right, Elena’s panic could be triggered as much by the sight of police officers as by whoever else was trying to find her. She squared her shoulders.
‘I’ll go to the bottom and see if I can locate them,’ she said. ‘I expect they’ll come down if they know it’s only me.’ She tried to sound optimistic to reassure her grandmother, though she knew she was clutching at straws. Jasmin Ibramovic might respond to her voice but she very much doubted that a terrified Elena would. She pulled her coat back on and went to the front door.
‘Here,’ Joyce said, pulling open a drawer in the hall-stand and handing her a torch. ‘It’s getting dark.’
‘And if anything happens down here, call me on my mobile,’ Laura said, switching her phone to vibrate so that no one else would hear it ring.
Once outside, Laura glanced cautiously up and down the road between her grandmother’s house and the flats but could see no one about. Dusk was falling fast, and a light drizzle had slicked the road surface, turning the strip of grass on the other side to soggy mud.
She had not mentioned to her grandmother her own panic on the way up to The Heights as she became aware of a car close behind her that she was convinced was following her. Cautiously she had turned off the main road into a maze of small streets and become quite sure that her suspicions were right. Every turn she made was copied by a dark saloon with two people inside. Desperately anxious, she had stopped for a moment beside a streetlight and pulled out her mobile phone, making sure that whoever was behind her could see exactly what she was doing. The car seemed to hesitate for a moment and then overtook her and drove away quickly, but not before Laura was able to see the registration plate. She had dialled Kevin Mower’s number and was relieved to get straight through.
‘I may be imagining it,’ she had said. ‘But I think I’m being followed and it’s a bit scary.’ She had given the Sergeant the number of the car she suspected.
‘I’ll check it out,’ Mower had said, readily enough. ‘What are you doing, Laura? Where are you going?’
‘I’m on my way to my grandmother’s,’ Laura had answered. ‘Don’t worry. It’s probably nothing.’ But she knew as she cut the connection that Mower probably would not believe her and half hoped that he would pass on his concerns to Michael Thackeray.
She had not seen the suspect car again as she completed the journey to The Heights by a more devious route than normal, and there was no sign of it now as she stood outside Joyce’s garden gate, wondering if she had the courage to venture into the looming block of flats on the other side of the road. She glanced down at the smart shoes she had put on that morning to go to police headquarters and shrugged. At least she had not chosen high heels, or her beautiful new red boots.
Slowly, deciding she had no choice but to try to find the runaway girls, she crossed the road and made her way along the protective fence until she came to the gap that her grandmother had described. She slid through the narrow space where one of the wooden sheets had become loose and stepped into the deeper darkness beyond, where the street lights did not penetrate, and through which she could only just about make out the entrance to the block across a muddy patch of ground. She shivered slightly. The flats on Wuthering, as The Heights was known locally, had always been regarded as slightly sinister, and few tears had been shed when the families had finally been moved out and redevelopment had been promised. But the scheme had progressed slowly and although three of the original four blocks had now been reduced to rubble, Priestley House remained, the last to be emptied of its occupants by the council, still standing defiantly four-square in the teeth of the worst wind, rain and the occasional fire could do to it.
She pushed at the front door and it swung open easily. To her left, the two lifts stood derelict, the doors forced open and no sign of the cars which should have occupied the echoing shafts. The ropes and pulleys swung eerily in the void, occasionally banging and slapping against the walls with an irregularity that made her jump. To her right the concrete stairs stretched upwards, every tread littered with the detritus of the illicit users of the empty building, discarded syringes and trash of impossibly indeterminate origin trampled into a damp and stinking mulch. She did not want to climb up those stairs. Her whole mind and body fought against the idea and she had to gulp down her nausea.
From somewhere above a door crashed shut and set her heart racing. If Elena and Jazzy were
up there, she thought, she would have to find them before it became completely dark and the people of the night, who still terrorised the estate, came out and threatened them. Clutching her mobile phone in one hand and the torch in the other, she crossed the entrance hall and began to climb. The faint light from her torch cast shadows that moved as she took one slow step upwards after another, holding her breath as long as she could to avoid the stench. At the first landing she shone the beam along the outside walkway, where the doors of flats either lay shattered on the concrete floor or swung at crazy angles, occasionally creaking in the wind. She could see that most of the windows were smashed and here and there the concrete walls were blackened by smoke.
‘Jazzy,’ she called softly, not wanting to walk too far away from the stairs, her escape route if she needed one. She took a few tentative steps across the smashed glass which crunched under foot like pebbles on a beach, and then stopped, listening carefully for a moment, but could hear no response. Cautiously, she turned back to the stairs and went up the next flight, where she repeated the exercise.
Something Elena had said came back to her as she hesitated at the foot of the third flight. If she remembered correctly, the girl had said that she had found a safe haven on the top floor. As she turned back to the stairs this time she was startled by the sudden loud flutter of wings as a pair of birds flapped away upwards, driven in panic from their roosts by her approach. Heart thudding, she stopped for a moment, back to the wall, before she shrugged and pushed herself onward. At least if the birds were asleep, she thought, there was unlikely to be anyone else about.
After pausing on every landing and repeating her whispered call for the girls, she reached the top, feeling slightly more hopeful. The smell was less nauseating here, and the carpet of broken glass and litter less thick, but as the last of the daylight faded, the shadows were becoming more intense. Cautiously, she directed the beam of her torch along the landing, lighting up the same wrecked doors and windows as below, and the same the view of the derelict landscape surrounding Priestley, almost impossible to make out in detail now in the misty darkness beyond the reach of her feeble yellow light.
Death in a Far Country Page 24