“How did she get hold of the booze. Was it her mother’s?” Laura asked cautiously.
“No, it bloody wasn’t.” Mower’s response was angry enough to startle the two women. “Some idiot gave it to them apparently, but the other girl didn’t like it so Emma drank the lion’s share.”
“How old is she?” Laura asked.
“Eight,” Mower said, his anger suddenly out of control. “Booze at eight! What do they get for their ninth birthday on this god-forsaken estate? A shot of heroin? When do they start pulling the bloody place down, because it can’t be soon enough for me.”
“Well, that’s a sore point, too,” Joyce said. “You could get rid of the drink and the drugs without pulling the whole community apart and punishing us all. And I do mean you, Kevin. We might as well be on the moon, I sometimes think, for all the attention we get from the police.”
“Come on, Nan, I don’t think this is the time or the place …” Laura began but Mower took hold of her arm urgently.
“I’d be grateful if you didn’t link me to the police when you talk to Donna. She’s going to have to know very soon, but I’d rather tell her myself.”
Laura looked at the sergeant curiously.
“Unravelling, is it, your cover?”
“No comment,” he said sharply. “Tell Donna I’ll be back in a couple of hours. I’ve some things to do. OK?”
“Fine,” Laura said, taking her grandmother’s arm again. “We’ll keep her company till you get back.”
Later Laura drove her grandmother the short distance from Priestley House to the small bungalow, one of the row perched on the brow of the hill overlooking the town. Laura had never thought of the tiny properties as in any way “desirable” in estate agents’ terms, but on a clear night, with the view across the town in the valley below sparkling like a scatter of jewelled necklaces thrown carelessly down on black velvet, she suddenly saw the potential of the site through Councillor Dave Spencer’s - and his developer friends’ - eyes and knew with a depressing certainty that Joyce and her elderly neighbours would not win their battle to stay put.
Joyce opened her front door.
“Come in a minute?” she asked. Laura glanced at her watch and shrugged. They had waited more than an hour for Kevin Mower to return to Donna Maitland’s flat and it was late now even by Michael Thackeray’s standards for supper at home.
“I must call Michael,” she said, pulling out her mobile. But his phone was switched off and she could only leave a message to say that she would be even later home.
“Can’t the beggar cook?” Joyce said, struggling out of her coat with inelastic difficulty. “Even my Jack could cook in an emergency, all those years ago before the war - egg and chips, any road.”
“He does sometimes,” Laura said irritably. “Don’t worry. I can pick up a take-away on the way back.”
Joyce sank into her favourite chair and Laura switched on the gas fire. She could see that her grandmother had exhausted herself but she knew better than to suggest that Joyce was doing too much to help her friends at the Project. One acerbic exchange was enough for one evening, she decided, although she knew very well that her own father was as much use in a kitchen as the proverbial bull in a china shop. What Joyce had evidently accepted as a welcome bonus from her husband during their brief marriage, she had not bothered to pass on to her fatherless son.
“Have you had your tea?” Laura asked. Joyce nodded.
“I eat early. It’s an old habit from when I used to be out at a meeting almost every night. No time for leisurely dinners then, so I never got into the habit.”
“They’re not listening to you at the town hall, are they?” Laura said. Joyce shook her head and glanced away.
“They don’t seem right interested in the Project,” she admitted. “They’d rather draw up their own grand schemes without asking anyone up here what they really want. Do you know how much Len Harvey reckons the land up here is worth on the open market? Twenty million. Just the land. You can’t believe it, can you? Even Len’s shocked and he’s a blasted Tory. I don’t think we spent more than a million tearing down the old back-to-back slums and building the whole new estate.”
“There’s no reason why they can’t build the Project into their calculations, though, is there?”
“No reason at all if they just took the trouble to ask people what they want. You’d think they’d have learned from the mistakes we made building this estate in the first place. But no, they just carry on doing good by force and then act surprised when folk don’t thank them for it.” Seeing Joyce so dispirited was almost more than Laura could bear.
“I’ll have another go at Ted Grant tomorrow and see if I can persuade him to take it all more seriously. But they’ve put him on the committee that’s planning the whole thing now, so I’m not very hopeful.”
“You could get that man of yours to take the drug problem more seriously too.”
“I’ve tried that,” Laura said. “He says it’s in hand.”
“I don’t think Donna Maitland thinks it’s in hand,” Joyce said. “A child that age with alcohol poisoning? It could just as easily been summat worse.”
“I know,” Laura said, recalling Donna’s stunned shock which they had been unable to alleviate at all. She wondered how she would cope with even more bad news from Kevin Mower.
“I’ll talk to Ted again tomorrow about my story. And if he won’t go for it, I’ll contact the magazine in London I’ve written for before. The whole thing’s getting big enough for it to go national, whatever Ted thinks.”
“You’re a good lass,” Joyce said. “I don’t know what went wrong between me and your dad, but you’ve more than made up for it, pet. You really have.”
Laura hugged her grandmother impulsively.
“It’ll be all right,” she said. “I promise.”
Chapter Eleven
“You don’t want me to handle the case then?” DCI Michael Thackeray’s question dropped into the silence in Superintendent Jack Longley’s office like a stone into deep water. When there was no immediate reply Thackeray shrugged and moved over to the window from where he could see the rain beating down onto the umbrellas of hurrying passers-by in the puddled square below. His anxiety felt like a physical weight on his shoulders. Longley shifted his bulk uneasily in the chair which never seemed quite commodious enough for him and grunted.
“What I want,” he said at length, and then paused again as if embarrassed. “What I always want is a bloody text-book murder investigation. And you just seem to have thrown the text-book away.”
“A quiet chat was all it was,” Thackeray said. “He was never a registered informant.”
“But should have been,” Longley said.
“You could argue.” The hollow feeling which had invaded Thackeray’s stomach some hours ago when he had been called to a suspicious death seemed to be affecting his breathing.
“I do bloody argue,” Longley snapped back. “He should have been registered if he was worth anything. But you’d no call to be chatting up Foreman’s staff behind his back without cause in the first place. And if you seriously thought Stanley Wilson had useful information you should have played it straight, taken someone with you, done it by the book. Now he’s dead it’ll all have to come out. You’re out on a limb, Michael, and for what? He gave you nothing and was never likely to give you anything. And now he’s dead and turns out to be a worse little scrote than we ever suspected.”
“So bring someone else in if you think I’m compromised,” Thackeray said, unable to keep his own anger, which was directed mainly at himself, under control any longer. “Appoint someone else senior investigating officer if you think it’ll help. Get the computer crime people in. It looks as if we’ll need them anyway. Sir.” The last word was added as an afterthought and Longley flushed slightly in response. But for the moment he contented himself with drumming his fingers on the file in front of him and breathing heavily.
Thackeray’
s mind flashed back an hour to his first sight of the ligature around Stanley Wilson’s neck, which had been pulled so tight that it had broken the skin and become caked in blood. Amos Atherton, sweating in his plastic coveralls, had glanced up at the DCI from his position crouched beside the dead man’s body as Thackeray struggled to conceal the awful realisation that this was a noose he might have provided himself.
“Didn’t mean to make any mistake about it, did he?” Atherton had asked, oblivious to the DCI’s inner turmoil. “You don’t get many men strangled. Gay, was he?”
Thackeray, shrouded in the same oversized white coveralls as the pathologist, had nodded slightly.
“Liked young boys,” he said, his mouth dry. “Or youngish, anyway. We’d not managed to do him for it.”
“Happen one got his own back then,” Atherton said unsympathetically, glancing at the dead man’s trousers and underpants which were rumpled round his ankles. “He’s been dead a while, that I can tell you. Probably killed some time yesterday, at a guess. He’s as stiff as a board. You’ll be looking for a boyfriend, I’d say. Popped in yesterday for a bit of nookie and it all got out of hand. Into S & M was he? There’s some odd marks on his arms.”
“I’ve no bloody idea,” Thackeray had said, although he was as certain as he could be that Wilson’s violent end had more to do with his own intervention in his affairs than the dead man’s sexual preferences. His mind sheered away from the thought that perhaps Wilson had been tortured before being killed, and that the information someone had been trying to extract had something to do with him.
“How was he found?” Atherton asked.
“Postman tried to deliver a packet and when he got no reply he looked through the window,” Thackeray said shortly.
“Must have got a nasty shock seeing his bare bum in the air like that.”
Atherton turned back to his examination of the body with a grim smile and Thackeray turned away. He had already glanced round the modestly furnished living room of the terraced house where Wilson had evidently eked out a pretty impecunious existence and wondered what Barry Foreman had paid him for his services. Not a lot, if the threadbare carpet and worn brown armchairs were anything to go by. Or perhaps Wilson had other uses for his money than interior decor.
He left Atherton to his examination and went upstairs where a different explanation for the impoverished appearance of Wilson’s house soon presented itself. In one bedroom an unmade bed and a few sticks of furniture indicated where Wilson had spent his final night. But in the back bedroom, where thick curtains kept out the daylight and the floor was deeply carpeted, it became clear what Wilson had been spending his money on as soon as Thackeray switched on the light. The DCI found himself facing a bank of high-tech equipment only some of which he recognised. A computer, video recorders and a wall stacked high with tapes and CDs crowded the single padded black leather chair from which Wilson had evidently indulged a hobby which Thackeray guessed, knowing Wilson’s tastes, would have seen him arrested without much ceremony had the law ever invaded his privacy here. And whatever he had earned, it was clear that a large proportion of it must have been spent on travel: the unlikely sight of Wilson clad in various unlikely combinations of swimming gear and sarongs smiled out from a wall of snapshots taken in exotic locations, young boys at his side. Even before examining a single tape Thackeray felt a shudder of revulsion go through him. This room alone, he thought, would launch an investigation which could last for years. He was thankful that the force had a special unit to deal with pornography and computer crime.
Without moving any further into the room he had looked around carefully, but the written records he sought were not in evidence. Everything, he thought, must be locked away in the computers, and to crack their passwords and codes he would need expert assistance. Quietly he left the room and closed the door behind him with a plastic gloved hand. It was possible, he thought, that Wilson’s extra-curricular activities had brought down the vicious retribution which Atherton was examining in the livingroom below. But the sort of images Wilson had been downloading from the Internet, and quite possibly copying and circulating amongst his friends, were more likely to involve young children on the other side of the world than anywhere near at hand. So why had someone killed him?
Superintendent Longley must have been talking again for some time before the sound of his voice jolted Thackeray back to the present and his unenviable situation on the boss’s carpet. He turned away from the window with a start.
“Are you bloody listening to me?” Longley asked irritably as his colour rose from pink to puce.
“Sir?”
“I was telling you why I’ll let you handle this case, if you could do me the courtesy of paying attention,” Longley snapped.
“Sorry,” Thackeray said. “I was just wondering how many thousands of images that bastard has been distributing.”
“Aye well, that’s one of the things you’ll have to find out, isn’t it? And who he’s been distributing them to. You can bet your life that the answer to his death’s somewhere in that disgusting trade, if that’s what he was into. We’ll get some help on the computer side of things. But you can go ahead and look at his bank accounts and any other financial information you can find. And find out where he went on his jaunts abroad. He must have been coining it if the scale of the thing’s as big as you say it is.”
“I’ll need to talk to Barry Foreman. He was his boss.”
“Of course you will,” Longley said. “And you’ll do it by the book. Background on the dead man’s what you’re after, not fantasies about Foreman’s affairs. Not unless and until they’re relevant. Understood?”
“Right,” Thackeray agreed without enthusiasm. “It’s at least possible that someone told Foreman I’d been talking to Wilson,” he said. “He wouldn’t be best pleased.”
“After your last chat with him he’s already wondering if you’re going off your rocker,” Longley said. “‘out’ he thought you were, when I met him at the regeneration meeting. Finding out you’ve been wasting your time investigating him through Wilson’ll confirm his worst suspicions.”
“Nice to know I’ve got your support,” Thackeray said. Longley looked at him for a moment, taking in the furrows of anxiety which seemed to have deepened around angry blue eyes since the previous day, and reckoned that Barry Foreman might have a point. He was more than usually aware that Thackeray had almost blown his career once and he wondered whether he was about to make the attempt again.
“You’ve got my support, Michael,” he said more calmly than he felt. “Get the incident room set up. By the sound of it Stanley Wilson’s not much loss to the world, but we need to know who put him down. They may not be so discriminating next time. Keep me on top of the investigation, will you? Oh, and by the way, what’s the state of play on the Adams boy? Have we come up with anything to shut his father up?”
“It’s run into the sand,” Thackeray said shortly. “Just as I always thought it would. The kids won’t say anything. But I think I’ve shut Grantley Adams up anyway, if that’s all you’re worried about. He’s found out the hard way what we’ve known for years - that the law’s an ass where soft drugs are concerned - and he’d much rather his precious Jeremy remained an innocent victim than got himself a criminal record for possession - or worse. I don’t think we’ll hear much more from Mr. Adams.”
“He’s raising his voice loud enough in the Gazette,” Longley said doubtfully.
“Well, he’s got what he wanted as far as the Carib Club’s concerned. The place is closed. He’ll have to be satisfied with that.”
Laura Ackroyd drove back to the Project on the Heights that lunch-time out of a sense of obligation rather than with any enthusiasm. She had spent much of the morning trying to persuade Ted Grant to find some space in the paper for a feature on the drug problems of Wuthering but without much success. His attention, never long-lasting, had switched overnight to the threat that the flood defences - protecting low-lyin
g parts of the town - were about to be overwhelmed by the rain which had been relentless for most of the winter. Reporters had been dispatched to talk to threatened householders, photographers sent out to snap the teetering walls of sandbags which were all that now protected some streets from inundation, page layouts had been sketched out and possible headlines tossed around the editorial meeting: Laura’s argument that there was an equally serious crisis on the Heights met blank looks of incomprehension. In exasperation she had called the magazine editor in London for whom she had written before, but gained only an equivocal promise to think about the idea and let her know.
“Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” she muttered as she heard the phone go down at the other end. “Thanks a bunch.”
“First sign of madness, talking to yourself,” Bob Baker had hissed in her ear as he passed behind her desk. “And by the way, I can’t get anyone at police HQ to take your murdered druggie seriously. I should stick to knitting patterns if I were you, love. Leave crime to those who understand it.”
Laura had swung round on her chair but Baker was already out of reach. Turning back to her computer screen angrily she wondered what would have happened if she had hit him. The sack did not seem too unpleasant a prospect today.
She parked as close as she could to the Project and wondered who owned the dark blue BMW which stood by the kerb on the other side of the road. She did not think much of its chances of survival, although the cluster of youths who habitually loitered around the flats appeared to be keeping well back in the shadows under the walkways on this occasion. She was aware of their hostile eyes following her progress across the muddy pathway to the doors of the Project.
Once inside she was surprised to find herself confronting a tall black man in designer jeans, expensive leather jacket and tigerish aspect.
“Yeah?” he asked.
“Sorry?” Laura said.
“Who are you?” the self-appointed gate-keeper demanded, barring Laura’s way with a faint smile and unfriendly eyes.
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