Death in Dark Waters

by Patricia Hall

  “Right, I’ll get someone to delve into the club scene,” Thackeray said reluctantly. “But I don’t hold out high hopes.”

  Longley looked at the younger man with a hint of anger in his eyes.

  “Pull your finger out, Michael,” he said, not bothering to hide his irritation. “There are times when even you have to bend a bit, you know. It’s all politics, of course it is, but these beggars can make life difficult. And this one’s got a son in a coma. He’s bound to kick up a stink. I’d have thought you’d have understood that if anyone did.”

  Thackeray’s face tightened at that but he did not respond. He did not dare in case his own anger, which burned deep down but with a steady heat, spilled into the torrent of abuse he felt welling up like bile at the back of his throat.

  “Do your best,” Longley said, aware he had trespassed into areas he normally left well alone.

  “Sir,” Thackeray said quietly as he closed Longley’s office door with exaggerated care behind him. In the deserted corridor outside he took a deep breath to tamp down the fierce emotion Longley had stirred, before composing his face into the impassivity which passed for normality with him and strode back down the stairs to his own office.

  Laura Ackroyd parked her VW Golf at the back of Priestley House and took stock. On the minus side, it was getting dark and from the estate’s windswept vantage point a scatter of lights, hanging like strings of jewels across the valley, flickered in the wind beneath scudding dark clouds which were still lashing the town with showers. On the plus side, she could not see any of the roaming bands of teenagers who made the estate a threatening place for a lone female after dark. Even so, she got out of the car cautiously and activated the alarm before walking the short distance to the cluster of prefabricated huts which sheltered in the lee of the tall blocks of flats. She pulled up the collar of her coat and wrapped her pashmina more tightly around her shoulders against the biting northerly before setting off across the muddy pathway across the grass.

  She had driven from the Bradfield Gazette to the Heights as soon as she had finished work in response to a summons from her grandmother. It was not like Joyce Ackroyd to ask for help and Laura had been alarmed by the unexpected tremor in her voice when she had asked Laura to collect her.

  “Is everything all right, Nan?” she had asked and had not been convinced by Joyce’s evasive response.

  As she approached the Project, which was where Joyce had asked to be picked up from, Laura could see that something was far from all right. The main door to the first of the prefabricated huts was swinging open and appeared to have been decorated by some sort of make-over artist in a more than normal frenzy. Red paint in loops and swirls dripped from the doors and walls and windows, still glistening even in the dim light. As she approached, Laura was not surprised to hear voices raised in anger.

  Taking care not to brush against the recent redecoration, Laura stepped inside, pushed her damp and wind-blown red hair out of her eyes and drew a sharp breath. The Project, which she had described to the Gazette’s readers when it had opened six months before, was intended to bring the benefits of new technology and modern job training to the dissaffected youth on Bradfield’s most unruly estate. Fitted out with computers begged and borrowed from local companies, and staffed mainly by residents of the estate itself, it had appeared to be taming at least some of the intractable young who had been ejected from every school and college and emergency education programme in town.

  “Jesus wept,” Laura said as she surveyed the devastated reception area in horror. Potted plants had been hurled over the computer on the front desk, smashing the screen and burying the keyboard in dirt, and some of the furniture had been reduced to match-wood before having what was left of the red paint poured all over it. “The little bastards,” she said, anger bubbling up inside.

  She barely realised that she had spoken aloud, but a silence fell in one of the classrooms leading off the reception area and a door was quickly flung open. To her surprise she recognised the dark-haired man with an unexpected growth of beard who came into the room looking as angry as she felt herself. For a moment they gazed at each other in silence and it was Laura who regained her voice first.

  “What on earth are you doing here,” she asked sergeant Kevin Mower. “I thought you were off sick.”

  “You’d better believe it,” Mower said quickly, speaking quietly and glancing behind him as if anxious not to be overheard.

  “You’re not here officially then? Undercover or something? The whiskers are new. Suits you.”

  “I’m not here at all, as far as Michael Thackeray’s concerned,” Mower said, too quickly, Laura thought. She raised a sceptical eyebrow.

  “He told me you were in rehab.”

  Mower shrugged.

  “I was then. Now I’m not,” he said. “Don’t look so stricken, Laura. It’s not what you think. I’m as dry as the Gobi, clean as the proverbial whistle.”

  “So what …?”

  “Nothing heavy. I was just up here doing a bit of moonlighting, trying to get my head together before I have to decide whether to sign back on or not. And then this. I asked them not to call the police until I made myself scarce. They don’t know up here I’m a copper and I don’t want the nick to think I’ve gone soft as well as the other. This being the Wuthering, my mates here’ll just think I’ve unfinished business with the fuzz. I suppose Joyce called you, did she? I asked her not to mention my day-job to the people up here but I hadn’t reckoned on her calling you.”

  “She wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. When did this happen?” Laura glanced around at the devastation.

  “We close the place at four-thirty, after the afternoon classes finish. Open up again at seven. We were in the back having a coffee and talking things over when we heard some banging and crashing about out here.” Mower shrugged. “They can’t have been in here more than a couple of minutes,” he said. “I don’t know why I was so surprised. We should have expected it, I suppose.”

  “This was some of the kids you hadn’t got off the street, then?”

  “You can’t win ‘em all,” Mower mumbled. “You’d better come in. Your grandmother hasn’t taken it very well, I’m afraid. Donna’s plying her with tea and reassurances, but at her age it’s hard to cope with, I guess. You met Donna Maitland, didn’t you?”

  Laura nodded, recalling the local mother who had hauled herself out of the despair and depression which incapacitated so many on the Heights, got herself qualified and had then been appointed as the manager of the Project; a nervous, driven woman whose own nephew had been a casualty of the drug-culture which crippled so many of the estate’s young people.

  Mower led her through a tidy classroom, untouched by the marauders, and into a small kitchen where Joyce Ackroyd was huddled over a mug of tea at a Formica-topped table beside a blonde woman in a smart blue suit, thin almost to the point of emaciation, who drew hard and frequently on a roll-up cigarette.

  “Donna,” Laura said quietly. She had been impressed by Donna’s energy and her fragility on her first visit. Now the dark circles under her eyes seemed to have deepened in the intervening weeks and her bottle blonde cascade of hair offered a brittle sort of defiance around a carefully made-up, not unattractive face now trembling on the edge of angry tears.

  Laura put an arm round her grandmother’s thin shoulders and had her hand seized fiercely in return.

  “D’you know who would do this?” Laura asked.

  “There’s no helping some,” Donna said wearily. “There’s a few skag-heads out there who’d wreck owt just for t’sheer fun of it.”

  “Will you write something, love?” Joyce asked urgently. “Our budget won’t run to putting this lot right. We’ll need some extra help.”

  “I thought the council were backing you,” Laura said.

  “Only t‘running costs,” Donna said. She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue and ran her fingers through her hair in lieu of a comb, evidently determined to resum
e the role of manager in spite of her evident distress. “Capital came from t’Lottery and there’ll be no more of that.”

  “You’re not insured?”

  “You must be joking,” Donna said, angry now. “Have you never heard of red-lining? They drew a red line round the Heights so long ago the ink’s pretty well washed out. No banks or insurance companies’ll touch us - or any other poor sod up here. Why d’you think the loan sharks make such a killing? They’re the only beggars’ll help anyone get by. And I don’t think they’ll be holding a street collection for us.”

  Laura glanced at Mower.

  “Hadn’t you better call the police?” she asked. He shook his head.

  “Donna’ll deal with that shortly. We just thought you might like to take Joyce home before we get into all that hassle. Not that there’s much chance of finding the little toe-rags who did it. They’ll have had the sense to wash the paint off their hands by now.”

  “I could give you their names with a ninety-nine per cent chance of being right,” Donna said. “But making it stick’s another thing. They’ll all have been at home wi’their mates- or their mums - if a copper comes asking.”

  “I’ll give Joyce a ride home,” Laura said. “If anyone wants to talk to her they know where to find her.”

  She helped her grandmother into her coat and handed her the stick she needed to walk with now arthritis had made movement difficult.

  “It’s too late for today but I’ll talk to my editor first thing in the morning and come back up to see you,” she said to Donna. “I’m really sorry about this. It all looked as though it was going so well.”

  “It’s the first thing we’ve ever had up here that’s got some o’t kids off the street and sitting still for an hour or two,” Donna said, her voice husky with emotion. “Thrown out of school long ago, most of‘em. Given up on reading and writing. But they like computers. Got a bit o’street cred, they have. And because we’re on t‘spot, not a bus-ride down into t’town, they’ll come in, won’t they? Come in and stay in, some of’em. We’ve got a few of them into rehab, and I’ve real hopes of jobs for a few already. And now this.” She lit a fresh cigarette and drew smoke into lungs so damaged that Laura could hear them whistle from the other side of the room.

  “Tomorrow,” she promised, propelling her grandmother through the door.

  Joyce struggled into the passenger seat of the Golf and said nothing as Laura drove her the quarter mile to her tiny bungalow which stood in the shadow of the Heights’ three massive blocks of run-down flats. She too was breathing heavily by the time she had opened the front door, turned on the lights and allowed Laura to help her off with her coat and into her favourite armchair by the gas fire. Laura gazed at her grandmother for a moment, absorbing the pallor and the lines of weariness beneath the shock of white hair. But Joyce’s green eyes, so like her own, still gleamed with anger.

  “I’ll get onto the powers that be at the Town Hall tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll not see Donna defeated.”

  “Will they listen?” Laura asked carefully. There had been a time when Joyce Ackroyd had been the uncrowned queen of Bradfield Town Hall, but it was years since she had been forced into retirement by ill-health and she knew that the new faces of municipal Labour regarded the likes of Joyce, an unreconstructed admirer of heroes like Nye Bevan and Tony Benn, with as much incomprehension as she regarded them.

  “If we don’t make the Project work, they’ll privatise it, as like as not, or just close it down regardless,” Joyce said. “I want to see it succeed. But we’ll need some help. They’ve got all these schemes for reconstruction, partnerships, I don’t know what, but when you want some cash for something simple that actually works you can’t get a damn’ penny …” For a second she covered her eyes and Laura thought that she had never seen her combative grandmother so depressed.

  “You know they found another young lad dead last night, don’t you?” Joyce asked suddenly.

  “Not the one who was knocked down in town?”

  “No, the one who fell off the roof of Priestley House. Overdose, they’re saying, out of his head. That’s the fifth or sixth this year and no one seems to be doing a damn thing about it. I don’t know what that man of yours thinks he’s about, but heroin up here is wiping out a whole generation. Aren’t the police even interested?”

  “I’m sure they are, Nan,” Laura said, with more confidence than she felt. She suspected that the kids on the Heights who killed each other quickly with knives or slowly with heroin and crack rated much lower in official priorities than the grammar school boy from a wealthy home who had been run down the night before.

  “Well, put a bomb under them for us, will you, love?”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” Laura knew that her grandmother did not altogether approve of her relationship with DCI Michael Thackeray believing, with the same certainty with which she believed in the future of British coal and the need to renationalise the railways, that men and women should have the decency to tie a legal knot before embarking on life together. But she would use the connection ruthlessly if it suited her. Laura had been relieved to discover that Michael took Joyce’s reservations in his stride and found it in himself to approve very thoroughly of her.

  She made more tea and then slumped into a chair on the other side of the fire and shook her head in mock despair.

  “Are you ever going to take it easy?” she asked.

  “What do you want me to do?” Joyce snapped back. “Sit in this little box goggling at t’other one till the Grim Reaper pops in to put me in the final box of all? If there’s owt I can do to help folk like Donna while I’m still standing I’ll do it. And it’ll be a pity when they run out of folk like me, an’all.”

  Laura grinned, shame-faced.

  “Will someone at the Town Hall see you, d’you think?”

  “Oh, aye, they’ll see me all right, if only to shut me up,” Joyce said grimly. “Can you give me a lift down in your lunch hour tomorrow, pet?”

  Chapter Two

  Laura woke early to find herself tucked snugly into the curve of Michael Thackeray’s body with one of his hands comfortably beneath her breast. The closeness of him filled her with desire but she could see that it was not yet seven and chose not to rouse him so early. They had both fallen into bed exhausted the previous night and had fallen asleep before either of them could respond to the whispers of their bodies which suggested anything different.

  He had come home in a bad mood, although evidently reluctant to tell her why. And he had only seemed to half listen as she had passed on her grandmother’s unease about the state of Wuthering, the estate which caused the police as well as the local council the greatest trouble in a troublesome little town which prosperity still resolutely seemed to pass by. But he had not seemed to be very interested. Secrets and lies, she thought ruefully, lies and secrets: they had haunted their relationship since the beginning and even now that they had achieved a sort of truce together she still suspected that their jobs might one day drive them apart in some way which would be hard to forgive.

  She did not think too hard about the future at all these days, tiptoeing round it in a way she knew could not be sustained indefinitely. What she wanted and what Michael wanted seemed as far apart as ever. His divorce had drifted into the realms of sometime, perhaps never, and she had avoided talk of children since he had returned to her new flat only slightly shame-faced after their last serious difference of opinion. Apparently relaxed, he was helping her choose rugs and pictures to replace what she had lost when her last home had been trashed. But she knew, and she suspected he knew, that there was too much left unsaid for her to be sure of him any longer. Soon, she thought, they must thrash out where they were going together, if they were going anywhere at all.

  Carefully she slipped from his arms and went to take a shower. By the time she emerged, Thackeray was awake, his eyes wary as he watched her come back into the bedroom, throw off her towel and begin to dress.

/>   “It’s very early,” he said and she was not sure whether there was an invitation there. Once she might have been certain.

  “Busy day,” she said, pulling on black trousers and a silk shirt of deep green and beginning to brush her tousled copper curls with rather too much vigour. “I promised to take Joyce to the Town Hall at lunch-time so I need an early start. Otherwise Ted Grant will be ranting and raving again. I told you last night.”

  Thackeray put his hands behind his head and watched her pin her hair up in a severe pleat.

  “Tell her we really are working on the heroin problem up there,” he said carefully.

  “So why don’t they think you are?” Laura came back quickly.

  “It’s out of my hands, Laura. The drug squad do things their own way, you know that. They report to county, not to Jack Longley. I dare say he knows what’s going on but he hasn’t told me.”

  “And reassuring the local community isn’t part of the game plan?”

  “I doubt the drug squad would recognise a community if it jumped up and bit them,” Thackeray said.

  “Is that what was pissing you off last night?”

  “Oh, partly that and partly Jack Longley cuddling up to local businessmen,” Thackeray said. “His mates from the Lodge, a lot of them.”

  “You must be joking?”

  “The so-called business community can do no wrong these days. It’s official. You know how it is. Longley meets them at his wretched Masonic meetings and every now and again they think they can decide police priorities for him. This time it’s Ecstasy at the Carib Club taking priority over heroin up on the Heights.”

  “The schoolboy who was knocked down?”

  “Son of some local worthy, so we pull all the stops out to find the pusher. Chances are the lad got it off a friend who got it off a friend who bought it off someone he’d never seen before weeks ago in a pub he can’t remember the name of. But I suppose we’ll have to go through the motions to please Grantley Adams.”