Death in Dark Waters

by Patricia Hall

  “Grantley Adams was a mate of my father’s,” Laura said, suddenly thrown back to a childhood where she had seemed to be constantly at war with her father’s ambition to make a million before he was forty. “I remember him coming to the house years ago when I was just a kid. He’s quite old to have a son still at school.”

  “Second family, I think,” Thackeray said. “You know how it goes: boredom sets in and he swaps his middle-aged missus for a new trophy wife and another batch of kids.”

  “And this one’s let dad down big time? Still, it must be dreadful for the family.”

  “Yes,” Thackeray said quickly and Laura flinched at the look in his eyes. “But it’s police priorities I’m talking here, not family tragedies. Those I never could do much about.”

  She sat on the edge of the bed and kissed him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I think work’s getting us both down. See if you can get away at a sensible time tonight and we’ll go out for a meal. That new Thai place on the Manchester Road is supposed to be very good.”

  Thackeray relaxed slightly and returned her kiss with interest.

  “Things must be looking up if Thai food’s arrived in Bradfield,” he said. “I thought that was only available in poncy Leeds.”

  “We could try fusion cooking if you want to go that far …”

  “Let me get used to one thing at a time,” he said, laughing. “You know I’m only a roast beef and Yorkshire pud country lad at heart.”

  “Oh, I think you washed the last traces of muck off your boots a long time ago. And I’m sure that if you really want to get to grips with heroin on the Heights rather than recreational drugs in the pubs and clubs you’ll find yourself a way. But watch out for Grantley Adams. I can remember taking a very distinct dislike to him. A bullying man, as I recall. Managed to pat me on the head and tweak my hair at the same time without my dad noticing anything at all. Getting back at me for some cheeky remark I’d made; no doubt some socialist heresy I’d picked up at my grandmother’s knee and parroted without really understanding. But very nasty, as I recall.”

  “I’ll bear it in mind,” Thackeray said.

  The newsroom at the Bradfield Gazette was still quiet soon after eight when Laura got in, with only two reporters on an early shift concentrating on their computer screens. But the early morning peace was soon shattered when the editor, Ted Grant, arrived with the manic gleam in his eyes which Laura knew spelt trouble. Head down, she hoped that it would not involve her brief on the feature pages.

  But she was unlucky. By the time Grant had convened the morning meeting and Laura had taken her place at the untidy table in his office alongside her colleagues, she knew that the excitement which had brought a sharp flush to his cheeks and the first signs of sweat to the shirt which strained to encompass his beer belly, would include her. He had placed Bob Baker, the paper’s crime reporter, on his left-hand side from where he nursed a contented smirk which boded ill, Laura thought, for the rest of those there.

  “We’ll make it a Gazette campaign,” Grant said. “The war on drugs. The threat to our youth. What can Bradfield do to defeat the evil pushers? You know the sort of thing. Run a hotline for people who want to pass on information if the police are too dozy to do it. The Globe’s got it off to a tee, but we can do our own version. We’ll collate all the news stories, and Laura, you can run a series of features on families that have been affected. Start with this lad who was nearly killed at this club the other night, Grantley Adams’ boy.”

  Laura opened her mouth to object but, glancing round the table, realised that she was the only one there with any reservations about Grant’s plan.

  “There’s been another death up on the Heights too,” she said eventually.

  “Aye, well we’ll get to that one later,” Grant said. “The little toe-rags up there have got nowt else to do, have they? But this lad in intensive care was a high flyer, apparently. Going to Oxford, wanting to be a lawyer. That’s a better story for us. See if you can get an interview with his mum and dad - for today if you can, but tomorrow if not.”

  “Right,” Laura said, knowing that facing Grantley Adams again after all these years was unlikely to be a pleasant experience in the best of circumstances, and she would be a long way from those today.

  “You don’t look too chuffed with that assignment,” said Bob Baker a few minutes later, with an unwanted hand on Laura’s shoulder and an insinuating whisper in her ear, as they made their way back to their desks. “Surely your boyfriend is going to be chasing this one whatever we run with, isn’t he?” Baker, a sleek twenty-five year old with one eye on his career and the other on anyone female who would make eye-contact, was not Laura’s favourite colleague. She suspected that he saw in her a chance to pursue both of his objectives at once, not because she encouraged his advances but because he knew that she had a unique line to the police that he might be able to exploit if she did not concentrate hard enough on what she was saying in his vicinity.

  “Mr. Adams is an old friend of the family, as it goes,” she said sweetly, capitalising for once on her local connections which Baker, a recent arrival, could not match.

  “And a crack-down on E? Is that on your boyfriend’s agenda?”

  “I’ve really no idea,” she said. “We’ve much better things to do than talk shop after work. Why don’t you ask him yourself.” She knew that this would annoy Baker whose relationship with Michael Thackeray could best be described in terms of an armed truce.

  Baker shrugged and moved away, but not without a parting shot.

  “What I don′t understand is why Bradfield CID’s been cut right out of operations up on the Heights,” he said. “Funny, that.”

  “D’you want to sit in on this one, boss?”

  DC Val Ridley hesitated outside the door of an interview room, trim and contained as ever in spite of the dark circles beneath her eyes that Thackeray now regarded as permanent.

  “Who’ve you got?” he asked.

  “The girlfriend of the lad who was knocked down in Chapel Street. Jeremy Adams.”

  Thackeray hesitated and then nodded, curious almost in spite of himself.

  “Do we need a responsible adult?” he asked.

  “She’s seventeen but she’s got her mother with her anyway,” Val said quickly. “I told them an informal chat. No caution. Nothing heavy. At least she had the decency to hang around after the accident. Most of the little beggars vanished into the night.

  “And how’s the boy?”

  “Still critical.” Her voice was flat, without emotion. Thackeray knew that Val was good at that, but very occasionally the mask cracked to reveal a warmer and more erratic human being underneath the chilly exterior. He let her lead the way into the interview room where a young girl with long blonde hair and a sulky expression was sitting at the table alongside a woman almost as slim, certainly as blonde and apart from some faint lines around the eyes not apparently much older.

  “Mrs.-James, this is DCI Thackeray,” Val said. “And this is Louise.”

  Thackeray took the fourth seat at the table and nodded to Val Ridley to continue. Teenagers fascinated and disturbed him not least because his own son, had he survived, would by now have been hovering on the edge of these turbulent, truculent few years and he had not the faintest idea how he would have learned to cope with that. Badly, he suspected, if Ian had begun to display any of the alarming and often dangerous tendencies to self-destruction he saw amongst the young who crossed his path as a police officer. Would that have given him more insight with a child of his own, or just made him more afraid of what could go wrong? He did not know. But here, at least, he thought, was a child who appeared to have had all the advantages so many of CID’s clients had not. Had Louise James slipped over the edge in spite of that? Or was he simply assuming that because she fell into that age range she must be sad, or mad or bad. He smiled uneasily at the girl’s mother and tried to concentrate on what Val Ridley was saying.

  “So
tell me about Wednesday evening, Louise,” Val said. “What made you and Jeremy decide to go to the Carib Club?”

  “It was my birthday, wasn’t it?” Louise said, in a barely audible mumble.

  “She doesn’t usually go out in the week but because it was her birthday, her seventeenth, we made an exception,” Mrs. James broke in quickly. “They get so much homework. They’re at Bradfield Grammar, you know …”

  “But why the Carib?” Val persisted. “Is it somewhere you’ve been before?”

  Louise glanced at her mother.

  “Once,” she said. “Once or twice, at a weekend.”

  “We’d have stopped her if we’d known,” Mrs. James broke in again, her voice harsh. “That part of town. That sort of club.”

  “Mrs. James, I’d like to hear what Louise has to say for herself,” Thackeray broke in sharply. “If you don’t mind.”

  The girl shot him a glance which appeared almost grateful while her mother turned away, affronted.

  “We like the music,” Louise said. “And the DJs. Wednesday was Dizzy B. He’s cool.”

  “So you went down there at what time?” Val asked.

  “About ten, I suppose.”

  “Had you been anywhere else first?”

  “We had a couple of drinks in the Parrot and Banana.”

  “No difficulty getting served, I suppose,” Val said dryly. “And was it just the two of you went on to the club, or were you part of a larger group?”

  “We’ve tried to bring her up to drink sensibly,” the girl’s mother said quickly.

  Louise ignored her but hesitated, gazing down at her clasped hands on the table in front of her.

  “There was a whole gang going on from the pub,” she said eventually. “No one I knew very well.”

  “Names?”

  “Just first names. No one from our school. Not close friends.”

  Thackeray knew the girl was lying and guessed that the two women did too.

  “We’ll give you a pencil and paper later,” he said. “You can have a think about the names of anyone you can remember who was around that evening. Will you do that, Louise?”

  The girl nodded, not looking up, and Thackeray knew that the list would be short and the names unidentifiable, but he did not think it worth pressurising the girl at this stage.

  “We know from the hospital that Jeremy took at least one Ecstasy tablet during the evening,” Val Ridley went on, her voice calm. “Did you know that?”

  Louise nodded, a single tear drop splashing down onto the table in front of her. Irritably, she rubbed it away with a finger

  “Did you take any illegal substances, Louise?”

  Louise nodded again.

  “Just one tab,” she said, and there was a sharply indrawn breath from her mother. Thackeray shot her a warning glance.

  “You think Jeremy took more?” Val persisted.

  “I think he had two. He was wild …At the club later he was dancing like a mad-man. I couldn’t keep up with him. But we knew what to do. We drank plenty of water …”

  “So you know we have to ask, Louise. Where did you get the pills from?”

  “They were just passing them round in the pub,” the girl said, glancing at her mother. “I’d never had one before but Jez said it would be cool.”

  “Who was passing them round?”

  “Everyone,” Louise said, sulky now.

  “But someone must have been taking the money for them. These things don’t come free.”

  “I didn’t see anyone,” she said.

  “Did you pay for them, Louise?”

  “I never.” The girl flushed and more tears came.

  “So did Jeremy buy them?”

  “No, no, I never saw him pay anyone. I don’t know who bought them, where they came from, it was nothing to do with me.”

  “Right, we’ll leave that for the minute, Louise,” Val Ridley said, still calm, her voice still low as the girl scrubbed at her eyes with a tissue that her mother handed to her.

  “When you got to the Carib, there was someone on the door, right?”

  “Two black guys,” Louise said.

  “And did they check you for drugs?”

  “Yeah, yeah, they asked, and looked in my bag. I had a little black bag with me, but we’d taken them by then, so there wasn’t anything to find, was there? They were wasting their time.”

  “Maybe,” Val Ridley said. “But inside the club. Did you see anyone offering drugs in there? Pills, cannabis, anything at all?”

  Louise shook her head.

  “It was dark, and crowded and we were dancing, I didn’t see anything much. It was a great night until that happened …” She glanced at her mother.

  “It’s not fair the way everyone’s going on about the drugs,” Louise burst out suddenly, her voice choked with anger. “It was that taxi driver’s fault. He came round the corner too fast. He could have hit me too, lots of people jumped out of the way. Jez was unlucky that’s all. He didn’t see it coming. It was nothing to do with drugs. What harm does one tablet do? We had a great time. We were going home. If it hadn’t been for that driver no one would have been any the wiser. We’d have been at school the next morning and no one would have known anything about it.”

  Thackeray stood up abruptly.

  “We will want your daughter to sign a written statement,” he said to Louise’s mother. “And in view of what she’s told us about the availability of illegal substances the other night we’ll want to be sure that she has nothing else hidden at home ← or at Jeremy’s home, for that matter.”

  “What do you mean, hidden?” Mrs. James asked, her voice shrill.

  “We’ll need to search your house,” Thackeray said.

  “Oh, Mum,” Louise wailed, crumpling across the table and sobbing uncontrollably. “I really, really only took one. I only took one, ever.”

  “I’ll leave you with DC Ridley,” Thackeray said and left the room without looking back. A quick search for illegal substances would give Grantley Adams something to think about before he spoke to him, he thought with some satisfaction. For all his sympathy for a father with a child in intensive care, he was not averse to laying down a few ground rules before tackling Jack Longley’s Masonic acquaintances. And the first of those was to make clear that no one in Bradfield was above the law.

  Chapter Three

  Laura held her grandmother’s arm firmly as they made their way up the ramp alongside the broad stone steps which led to the massive mahogany doors at Bradfield Town Hall. The Victorians who had built the place had lacked nothing in confidence, Laura thought, any more than her grandmother did. Dressed in her best grey wool suit with a red scarf at her throat, Joyce looked far younger than Laura knew she was. But she could feel the effort that it was taking her to haul herself up the slope in spite of Laura’s supporting arm and the rail she was clutching on the other side.

  “Where are you meeting him?” she asked as Joyce paused to regain her breath in the doorway.

  “In the members’ lounge,” Joyce said. “It’s on the first floor but there’s a lift.”

  Just as well, Laura thought. She could not see Joyce making it to the top of the ceremonial stone staircase, with its ornate fountain on the half-landing.

  “Give me my stick now and I’ll be fine,” Joyce said firmly but when she marched ahead of Laura and pushed the heavy doors they did not budge.

  “Let me, Nan,” Laura said, ushering her through and pretending not to have noticed Joyce’s own attempt. “The lift’s round here, isn’t it?”

  On the floor above Joyce still led the way slowly but confidently, back on territory which had been her own for more than forty years. She tapped her way along the highly polished parquet corridors, the dark wood-panelled walls adorned with portraits of long dead mayors and aldermen in full robes, men who had dreamed their dreams for Bradfield ever since it had burgeoned from a small village of weavers’ cottages into a bustling manufacturing town of mills and wareh
ouses and back-to-back workers’ terraces during the fifty frantic years of the industrial revolution. Joyce had dreamed dreams here too, trying to alleviate the legacy of slum poverty that revolution had bequeathed the twentieth century, and she had made many of her dreams flesh, only to see them crumble into dust as prosperity ebbed away and grand schemes, like the Heights where she still lived, had decayed and turned sour.

  After a walk which Laura guessed she had completed on sheer determination, Joyce opened another heavy wood-panelled door and stepped inside.

  “Oh, they’ve never,” she said, standing in the doorway transfixed. The room, set out with armchairs and small tables, appeared to be empty.

  “What?” Laura asked.

  “They’ve taken down the chandeliers and put in those horrid little lamps,” Joyce said in disgust. “I was never a great one for tradition but I did reckon this town hall was summat to be proud of. They’ve vandalised it.”

  “Now then, Mrs. Ackroyd,” said a voice from behind them. “I didn’t think we’d be seeing you here again.” The grey-haired man who had spoken and who ushered the two women into the room with old-fashioned courtesy was not much taller than Joyce herself, but twice as broad. But the breadth was contained within a worsted suit of such evident Yorkshire provenance that Laura almost did what her father had traditionally done with his friends, feeling the cloth of the lapel and rubbing it gently between the thumb and forefinger in appreciation of the quality.

  “Len Harvey,” Joyce said in surprise. “I thought you’d stood down an’all. Councillor Harvey was leader of the Tory group when I led for Labour,” Joyce added for Laura’s benefit.

  “Aye, well, I did, five year ago. But they’ve set up this committee on regeneration and my lot reckoned I could represent them. Likely a sign they don’t give a tupenny damn, but I must say I’m quite enjoying popping back in here now and then. They’ve not asked you onto the same thing, have they, Joyce? That’d be a turn-up after all the schoolboys Labour’s been putting up recently. Makes me feel a right old fuddyduddy with my pacemaker and two pairs of specs.”