Death in Dark Waters

by Patricia Hall

  “The regeneration committee met yesterday,” Joyce said. “I did manage to find that out from Spencer’s secretary – or PA, as she calls herself.”

  “Yes, I know, I heard that much in the office, but they didn’t issue any statement afterwards. Apparently Spencer and some of his precious committee have gone to London for meetings today.”

  “The early flight,” Joyce said scornfully. “In my day we were lucky to get a train trip third class. They’ve gone to meetings at the department of the environment, according to little Miss Snooty.”

  Laura could see the tears of frustration in her grandmother’s eyes.

  “Did you try anyone else?” she asked, glancing at the long list of names and numbers on Joyce’s pad.

  “I tried everyone I could think of,” Joyce admitted, slumping back in her chair and letting the phone slide across her knees. Laura took it off her gently and put it back in its place on a side table. The defeated look in Joyce’s eyes caught her breath.

  “I’m too old, love, that’s the problem,” Joyce said. “All the folk I used to work with are long gone and no one else wants to know me. You can see why folk end up on the booze or drugs or on the rampage up here, can’t you? No one wants to listen to a word anyone on the Heights says. Me? They’ve forgotten Councillor Ackroyd. Now I’m just that stroppy old baggage who doesn’t want her bungalow knocked down. Standing in the way of progress, that’s what I’m doing now. You’ll see. Doesn’t your editor say as much in his editorial? “A great step forward for Bradfield’. I don’t know how he works that out.”

  “It’s not over yet,” Laura said gently. “It’s only just beginning. Remember, no one outside the town hall’s seen the details of the plans till this morning. No one up here’s going to like it when they see it spread out like that in black and white. They may want the flats down but they don’t want to be thrown out of the area to make way for luxury housing. And there’ll be lots of people who’ll fight for the Project and what that’s doing for the kids.”

  Laura knew that there had been a time when Joyce’s writ had run the length and breadth of the long polished corridors of Bradfield town hall, and even a time, for some years after she had retired, when if she wanted information for any of her many campaigns, friends and acquaintances would have produced it for her within hours. But gradually the number of councillors and officials she remembered and who remembered her had dwindled, and what Joyce still regarded as the golden age of municipal socialism had become an embarrassment to the new, young councillors. They were far too busy creating cabinets and executives and scheming about the powers of an elected mayor and the opportunities opened up by public-private partnerships. The new modernised town hall, Laura thought, must seem to Joyce like a foreign country. She had, inexorably, become an exile in her own land.

  “Come on,” Laura said. “I’ll run you up the hill. Donna will be wondering where you are.”

  Joyce tidied her papers on the table and folded the Gazette neatly into its original shape.

  “She’s a good lass, is Donna,” she said as she got painfully to her feet. “We need a few more like her to stir this estate up. Most of them are so ground down with it all they’ll let Councillor Dave Spencer walk rough-shod over the lot of us if we don’t do summat dramatic.”

  “I think the taste for marching on town halls may have died out,” Laura said carefully, as she helped the older woman manoeuvre her arms into her coat.

  “We’ll see about that,” Joyce said. “At least we’ve got a reporter on our side, pet.”

  Laura nodded, but with a sinking heart. Joyce might believe she carried some weight at the Gazette, but if Ted Grant had made up his mind on the issue of the Heights - and his editorial comment had been about as enthusiastic as Ted ever got for anything municipal - she knew only too well that there was going to be very little that she could do about it. She helped her grandmother lock up the house carefully and tucked her into the passenger seat of the car. Joyce’s increasing lack of mobility worried her more than she was prepared to admit to herself, and Joyce never admitted it at all, gritting her teeth against the pain of the arthritis which threatened to immobilise her completely. But Joyce, Laura reckoned, might have to give up the independence her small home afforded her even before the developers’ bulldozers moved in. And that would certainly break her heart.

  Donna Maitland was sitting at one of the Project’s more upto-date computers when Joyce and Laura arrived. She gave a small wave of greeting as the older woman hobbled in, took her walking stick off her granddaughter and kissed her on the cheek. Eventually Donna turned away from the Internet pages she had been studying with fierce concentration. She picked up a sheaf of papers from the desk beside her and waved them at Joyce.

  “I must have written to fifty of the bastards, all local companies, and not one of them’s even offered another clapped out computer for the kids to use,” she said. “Half of them haven’t even bothered to reply.”

  “And we need a lot more than that,” Joyce said.

  “I told them that when the redevelopment goes ahead we’ll be appealing for funds to rebuild this place and equip it properly,” Donna explained to Laura. “It’s obvious the bloody council’s going to do nowt for us, so I’m giving them plenty of warning that we hope local business will fill the gap. You can do us a bit of good an all, love, if you cover the story for us in t’Gazette.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Laura said feeling overwhelmed by the weight of expectation the two women were placing on her. “In the meantime I’m going to be late back. I’ll see you later, Nan.”

  “The council hasn’t actually said they won’t rebuild the Project yet,” Joyce said after the door had closed. She didn’t dare mention Laura’s conviction that Donna was right. But Donna shrugged, running a hand through blonde hair that had fallen across her eyes.

  “Look at this one. Grantley Adams. Isn’t he the bloke whose son nearly killed himself wi‘drugs. ‘It’s not our policy to donate to organisations which are not long-established charities.’ These beggars are screaming for computer literate staff and here we are trying to train some of them and all we get is a kick in the teeth. What’s the matter with these people? They don’t seem to see the connection. Is it because a lot of the kids are black or junkies or what?”

  “Of course it is,” Joyce said. “They’re frightened of the Heights, a lot of them. Scared witless, always have been. You give a neighbourhood a bad name and it’s impossible to get rid of.”

  “But they’re going to regenerate the bloody place,” Donna said. “It’s just the bricks and mortar though, is it? No plans for regenerating the kids as well? No seeing what they can do, given a bit of help and encouragement? No chance they’ll recognise that some of us are trying to live decent lives and do summat to help the rest? Just pull the place down and get rid of as many of us as they can, is that it?”

  Joyce looked weary and could offer no reassuring counter to that analysis. Increasingly she believed it was true.

  Donna flung the letters back onto the desk and turned back to the computer but within ten minutes she had to switch the machine off as the Project was invaded by half-a-dozen argumentative teenage girls who only gradually agreed to settle at the desks and switch on the collection of machines which Donna had already begged and borrowed from local businesses and families when she set up the Project. But, slowly, the raucous gibes and giggling gossip subsided as the two women persuaded the youngsters to concentrate on the elementary word-processing skills which were their objective, and for an hour a sort of peace reigned.

  Just before lunch-time Dizzy B Sanderson put his head round the classroom door to whoops of delight from the girls, ready for any distraction now.

  “Is Kevin around?” he asked.

  “Should be in any time,” Donna said.

  “I’ll wait out here,” the DJ said, ducking back out of the door, to dramatic groans of disappointment from the class.

  “Come on girls, fi
nish off now. We all need a break,” Donna said. But their concentration was broken and she had difficulty controlling their restlessness. But just before she gave in and dismissed them, there was a loud crash in the outer reception area and a muffled shout seconds before the door to the classroom burst open and several men in jeans and leather jackets burst in. Several of the girls squealed in alarm and Donna reached across her desk for a mobile phone which lay underneath some papers.

  “Police,” the evident leader of the group said loudly. “Everyone stay exactly where you are.”

  Joyce Ackroyd pushed herself painfully to her feet from the chair at the back of the room where she had been sitting next to one of the girls.

  “Can we see your identity cards, please,” she said firmly. The leading police officer glanced at her with something close to contempt and flashed a warrant card in her direction.

  “And your name is?”

  “DI Ray Walter, drugs squad,” he said. “Now just sit down, Gran, we’ve a warrant to search these premises.”

  “Whatever for?” Joyce said, still standing.

  “That’s for us to know,” the officer said. “For now I want all of you sitting exactly where you are while we look round. Then we’ll want names and addresses.”

  The girl next to Joyce began to sob noisily as one of the officers picked up her bag and began to root through it. Joyce’s lips tightened and she glanced at Donna who had gone pale and tense, one hand still grasping her mobile, until one of the men noticed it and took it roughly out of her hand. Outside they could hear Dizzy B Sanderson’s voice raised in anger and then recede as if he had left, or been taken out of the building. Systematically the men began to open every cupboard, desk and drawer in the room and go through the contents. When they had finished with the classroom, one of them remained behind to watch the occupants while his colleagues moved on through the rest of the building. After ten minutes or so, DI Walter came back into the room and nodded at his colleague.

  “Right,” he said. “We want you all down at the station for questioning. Now.”

  With her arm round the girl whose sobs had now become hysterical Joyce stood up again.

  “On what grounds?” she asked.

  “On suspicion of handling Class A drugs, which were found on these premises,” Walter said.

  “Are you arresting us?”

  “We’ll deal with the formalities at the nick,” the DI said.

  “What drugs?” Donna asked, her face like a white mask gashed by her red lipstick. “There are no drugs here. I make sure of that.”

  “You telling me we don’t know a kilo of heroin when we find it?” Walter sneered. “Get real. Now let’s have you. All of you.”

  From his car parked some hundred yards away from the Project, Sergeant Kevin Mower watched in fascinated horror as a procession of girls, closely followed by Donna Maitland and Joyce Ackroyd, filed out of the building and into two police vans parked with several squad cars on the road outside. He had pulled up sharply on his way to meet his own students when he had seen Dizzy B, in handcuffs, being similarly ushered out and into custody and decided that on this occasion he would forego any fraternal greetings the colleagues doing the ushering might expect from him. He recognised Ray Walter from an abortive stint he had done with the drugs squad some years earlier. He had not liked the squad or the man then and he liked him even less when he saw just how Donna was being roughly “assisted” into custody.

  “Hell and damnation,” he said softly to himself as he pulled his mobile out of his pocket.

  “Laura?” he asked as his call was answered. “Can you meet me at the Lamb? The shit seems to have hit the fan”

  Grim-faced, DCI Michael Thackeray replaced the receiver on his desk and gazed at the two visitors who had just arrived in his office.

  “They’ve been taken to Eckersley,” he said. “Apparently the drug squad’s running their operation from there. All done on a need to know basis and apparently I didn’t need to know.”

  “I’ll go to Eckersley then,” Laura said angrily. “I’ll get Victor Mendelson to go down and play hell with them about Joyce. But what about the rest of them? They won’t have any big guns out on their side, will they?”

  Thackeray swung round in his chair to face Kevin Mower, who was sitting as far away from his boss as he could manage and studiously avoiding catching his eye.

  “What the hell have you been playing at, Kevin?” Thackeray demanded. “What was wrong with telling me what you were doing? It’s not as if it’s illegal. Or did you have some idea of what’s been going on up there? That there was likely to be a kilo of heroin stashed away in the kitchen? Did you know that? It won’t just be me asking when it becomes known you’ve been working there. They’ll want you down at Eckersley too. Tell me you were playing some devious game of your own to find the pushers and I just might believe you, but Ray Walter won’t. You can bank on that. He’ll chew you up and spit you out. Is this how you want your career to end?”

  Laura and Sergeant Mower’s meeting at the Lamb had been brief. Five minutes discussion had presented them with only one course of action and they had walked across the centre of town to police headquarters together in gloomy silence to see Thackeray. The DCI had listened in increasing disbelief as Laura spelt out what little they knew before making the series of phone calls needed to discover where those arrested at the Project had been taken.

  Mower gazed at his Timberlands without answering Thackeray’s tirade. Then he shrugged wearily.

  “Anyone could have stashed heroin at the Project. The estate’s awash with the stuff. But I don’t believe for a moment Donna Maitland knew anything about it. She’s passionately against hard drugs. She lost her own nephew, for God’s sake. But the kids who use the place? Who knows?”

  “It’s true,” Laura said, willing Thackeray to believe her. “Donna couldn’t have known. It’s just not possible, any more than Joyce could have been involved. The whole thing’s absurd.”

  “It’s the drug squad you need to convince, not me,” Thackeray said. “And you’ll find they think they’ve heard all that before. If Donna’s in charge of the premises she has a duty to make sure no one brings anything in they shouldn’t. You know that, Kevin. People have gone to jail for less.”

  “You’re joking,” Laura said sharply. “Donna can’t search them every time they come through the door. Any one of those kids could have brought something in.”

  “Brought,” Mower said softly. “Or planted, maybe.”

  Laura glanced at him sharply.

  “Someone who wanted the place closed down, perhaps?”

  “You’re going to need solid evidence, one way or another,” Thackeray said sharply. “In the meantime Joyce and the others are in a lot of trouble. Laura, I suggest you get down to Eckersley with a lawyer and get Joyce out of there, at least.”

  “Right,” Laura agreed, although she glanced at Mower anxiously before slipping on her jacket. “I’ll keep you in touch with what’s happening,” she promised. The silence lengthened after she closed the office door behind her. Thackeray eventually stopped drumming his fingers on the desk and sighed.

  “How long have you been working up there?” he asked.

  “Three, four weeks,” Mower said.

  “And the booze?”

  “I’m OK, guv,” Mower said, very aware that Thackeray would see through evasion on that score. “They were happy with me at the clinic. It was an aberration. When I sat down and sorted my head out I discovered I could leave it alone.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Thackeray said, recalling the dozens of times he had told his superior officers much the same and proved himself wrong within days. “You’re going to need a clear head to get yourself out of this mess.”

  “So what happens next?” Mower asked, his face unusually pale beneath the beard.

  “You talk to the drug squad, I talk to Jack Longley. But before I do that I want to know one thing.”

  “That
I wasn’t dealing heroin?” Mower asked with a crooked smile.

  “I’ll take that as read,” Thackeray conceded. “I don’t know your friend Donna Maitland but you and Joyce Ackroyd don’t look much like candidates for Mr. Big up on the Heights to me. No, what I really want to know is whether or not you want your job back.”

  Mower shrugged again.

  “It looks like I may not have the choice,” he said.

  “Stop playing games, Kevin,” Thackeray said.

  “Do you want me back?”

  Thackeray’s chilly gaze weighed up the younger man, bearded and dishevelled in his jeans and sweatshirt, and softened slightly.

  “If you want me to fight your corner, I will,” he said. “But I don’t want to stick my neck out and then have you chop it off.”

  Mower rubbed a hand over his face with a faint rasping sound and attempted a smile.

  “Rita wouldn’t have wanted me to pack it in, would she?”

  “I can’t answer that, Kevin,” Thackeray said. “What I need to know is what you want.”

  “It’s another two weeks before I’m due back …”

  “It’s about two minutes before I have to see Jack Longley and tell him what’s been going on up at Wuthering. And I’ve a murder inquiry to run.”

  “Yeah, I heard.” Mower got to his feet wearily and opened the door. He hesitated only for a moment.

  “I don’t know what I want, guv. I can’t pretend I do. It’s not that I’m not grateful …”

  Thackeray shook his head impatiently.

  “Get down to Eckersley and talk to Ray Walter. Give him whatever help he needs.”

  “Sir,” Mower said and closed the office door behind him.