“Don’t worry. I’ve been officially warned off interfering on the Heights,” Mower said. “If I want to keep my job, that is.”
“And do you?”
Mower shrugged.
“I wish I knew,” he said. He emptied his glass and glanced at his watch.
“I tell you something odd, though,” Dizzy B said. “I saw Darryl at the Carib this morning. He’s furious about the closure. In fact he thinks he might get out of Bradfield there’s so much hassle here. He’s had an offer for the place from some developers he thinks he might take.”
“That figures,” Mower said. “That whole area’s being tarted up. But the Caribbean kids won’t be pleased. It’s the only place they can really call their own.”
“Tell me about it,” Dizzy said. “I tried to persuade him not to sell.” But Mower had lost interest in the Carib. He looked at his watch anxiously again and sprang to his feet.
“Will you stay here, mate?” he asked. “Do us a favour? I’ll go up the hill to see if I can find Donna. She was in a terrible state when she got home last night. She’s going to be late for this appointment if she’s not careful and that won’t go down well with the nannies at social services. Bell me if she turns up?”
“Safe,” Dizzy B said, curling his arms around his glass as if about to fall asleep over it.
By the time he had driven up the steep hill in the pouring rain to the Heights, Kevin Mower felt far from safe. He knew from what he had gleaned of the drug squad operation that there were likely to be eyes watching every move on the Heights, and what the drug squad saw Michael Thackeray might well hear of too. But the gnawing anxiety which had been growing while he had been waiting for Donna could not be denied.
He had been there to greet Donna at the flat the previous evening when she was eventually released on police bail and he had explained Emma’s absence as gently as he could. She had reacted more calmly than he anticipated, turning pale and tight-lipped but holding back the tears and contacting social services by phone without any great show of emotion. She had arranged to see them the next afternoon at a case conference to discuss Emma’s well-being. But Mower could see the tension quivering beneath the façade and had objected angrily when she had eventually asked him to leave at about nine o’clock.
“We’ll get her back,” he had said fiercely. “I promise you that. Let me stop over and I’ll go to the meeting with you tomorrow.”
“I’m OK, Kevin,” she had insisted. “I haven’t done anything wrong, whatever that bastard inspector Walter says. I need a decent night’s sleep. I’ve got some pills. Then I’m going to see the kids at the Project as usual. And at two o’clock you can come with me to see social services. They’re well out of order with what they’ve done and I’ll have Emma back tomorrow if it’s the last thing I do. I’ll see you in the morning.”
But she hadn’t, because at nine that morning DCI Thackeray had called Mower in and told him to keep away from the Heights, an instruction it had only taken him a couple of hours to decide to ignore. He could see even from a distance as he got out of the car and buttoned his fleece against the downpour that the Project was in darkness and the doors closed, which was normal enough at this time of day. A couple of girls lingered outside, clutching thin jackets around themselves against the sharp wind and bone-numbing wet but they would not be allowed in until the adults returned to unlock the doors at two.
Leaving his car at the foot of Priestley House he made his way up the concrete stairs where the rain ran down in small waterfalls between the litter. He splashed through puddles along the walkway until he reached Donna ’s door. There were no lights on inside the flat in spite of the gloom and when he tried the door he found that it was locked. He knocked again and again but there was no reply. Alarmed now, he called Dizzy B on his mobile.
“Anything?” he asked, but the answer was negative.
“Shit,” Mower said to himself. Looking round to make sure that he was still alone on the walkway, he pulled a credit card from his wallet and slid it against the lock, which held for a moment and then slid open, allowing him to slip into the flat apparently unobserved. Inside, when he turned on the light everything appeared normal enough. The small living room was tidy, and in the kitchen the glasses and plates which he and Donna had used the previous evening had been washed and left to dry on the draining board. He glanced into Emma’s small room where the bed had been neatly made and a Barbie doll leaned against the pillow, and then knocked lightly on the door of the main bedroom before opening it. There the double bed had evidently been slept in and the bedclothes left thrown back with a blue silky nightdress lying across the pillows. A bottle of pills stood on the bedside table and he glanced briefly at the pharmacist’s label without surprise, recognising the tranquilliser she had evidently been prescribed, although he had never seen her take them while he had been at the flat. But of Donna herself there was no sign.
Only the bathroom was left and Mower turned the door handle with a growing sense of alarm. At first he could see very little but as his eyes adjusted, even before he tugged on the light-pull, he could see that the water Donna was lying in was dark and he knew instantly what that meant. She was lying with her head still above the water and her eyes half open but sightless, her arms floating gently and revealing deep gashes across both wrists.
“Oh, God, no,” Mower said despairingly, leaning against the door as his knees threatened to give way beneath him. He fought back waves of nausea for a long time before he felt able to step across the damp floor and look down directly at the dead woman. He checked for a pulse in her neck but without any expectation of finding one. A single razor blade lay on the floor close to the side of the bath, he noticed. It was probably one of his own. Donna had been dead some time, the water in the bath was cool to the touch and her naked body felt cold. She must have been lying here, dying here perhaps, for hours, he thought bitterly. If only she had allowed him to stay the night as he had wanted. If only. He gently closed her eyes as if to allow her to rest in peace.
“Oh, Donna, why?” he whispered. “We were going to get her back. Why, oh why, did you give up on it now?” Desolation overwhelmed him, this new death reopening the still barely healed wound left by Rita Desai’s violent death. It was as if he was fated to bring destruction to women he allowed himself to grow fond of, he thought, as if what he touched he destroyed.
It was not until some time later, sitting in Donna’s living room, with tears drying on his face, that he realised that there were things he must do. He glanced at his watch. It was two thirty and the case conference Donna should have attended must have convened itself and dissolved itself by now. He called police HQ first and asked the duty officer to deal with what appeared to be a suicide, then he caught up with Dizzy B, still patiently waiting for news in the pub. Next he phoned social services and told them that Emma Maitland’s mother was dead. They seemed less than anxious for Mower to see the child and he had not the heart to argue his case. Still dazed, he went into the kitchen and splashed his face with cold water and dried it on a tea-towel. Then he stood on the balcony outside the flat, taking deep gulps of rain-sodden air waiting for the patrol cars and the officers who would deal with the incident to arrive down below.
As the fresh air cleared his brain he finally began to consider his own position which, he thought, whichever way you looked at it was not a comfortable one. While Michael Thackeray might just concede that fear for Donna’s safety was a reasonable excuse for ignoring his instruction to keep away from the Heights, he was sure that the drug squad would be less than impressed when they discovered his willingness to disobey orders, as inevitably they would now do. Worse, it was conceivable that they might read far more into his relationship with Donna and her death than was justified. If Donna had reached rock bottom during the night, Mower was sure it was the threat of losing her daughter which had reduced her to despair. Ray Walter might well see it differently, interpret her death as an admission of guilt and be even m
ore anxious to link Mower and Dizzy B, and quite possibly even Joyce Ackroyd, to whatever he believed had been going on at the Project.
Drenched by a particularly gusty squall, and seeing no sign of blue lights flashing on the approach to the estate, Mower went back into the flat to wait. He knew better than to touch anything just in case this apparently not very suspicious death turned into something more sinister when the pathologist had examined Donna’s body, but he wandered from room to room, partly for something to do and partly because he could not sit still. He knew that he had spent enough time in the flat over the last few weeks for forensic traces of his presence to be everywhere if it came to that.
He had hoped he and Donna had finally understood each other. She might have been keen to find a new father for Emma, but he had given her no reason to imagine that was how he saw a future for the three of them. He did not think he had deceived her. He did not think he had pushed her to this desperate solution. But he was no longer sure of anything, and he began to cast around the flat for a note or message of some kind, perhaps addressed to Emma rather than himself, but could find nothing. She had no answerphone on which she could have recorded a message. And as he searched, and the effects of shock began to dissipate and his mind cleared, he began to feel that what had happened could not be the whole story, not in the sense that he could not believe the evidence of his eyes and that Donna was not dead, but that the method and even more the timing of her death did not make any sort of sense for the woman he thought he had come to know well. She might have spent the previous night frantic with worry and far closer to desperation than she had anticipated when she had sent him away, but the one thing he was sure she would never have done was abandon her daughter. Her death might have all the hallmarks of a suicide, but somehow it did not ring true.
You’re losing it, Mower told himself, as at last he heard the faint sound of approaching police cars. You’re finally going round the twist. Seeing one girlfriend murdered might be regarded as an unfortunate. Suggesting another might have gone the same way was a sure means of being referred to the funny farm by over-solicitous trauma counsellors. When the knock on the door from his uniformed colleagues finally came Kevin Mower showed them in mutely and waved them towards the bathroom.
“I’d arranged to see her this lunch-time. She didn’t turn up so I came looking,” he said by way of explanation. “She’s in there.” And he let the investigation swing into gear around him as he sat slumped on Donna’s sofa, his eyes glazed and his head whirling with disconnected thoughts, in a posture that he knew his colleagues would put down simply to shock. But the shock had passed, to be replaced by a bitter anger as Mower watched the uniformed officers go through their routines. He had not the slightest shred of evidence to support his conclusion but he was nevertheless sure that Donna’s death was the climax of the campaign of violence on the Heights. He knew there was something profoundly wrong with the way Donna had died and by the time he left the flat, dismissed by the uniformed inspector in charge just as Amos Atherton lumbered in, gasping from the long climb up the stairs, he had convinced himself that she had been murdered.
For a long time he sat in his car outside the flats watching the rain stream down the windscreen and reluctant to do any of the things he knew he now had to do. Eventually he started the engine and eased the car into gear but only travelled the few hundred yards down the hill to the Project where, he thought, the worst of his obligations awaited him. The reception area was milling with youngsters when he arrived, some of them leaving Joyce Ackroyd’s class for remedial readers and some of them arriving for Donna’s three o’clock group of computer beginners which had evidently not been cancelled.
“Donna won’t be here this afternoon,” Mower shouted across the chatter of teenagers coming and going. “Sorry kids, the class is cancelled.” Cheers and groans greeted that news in equal measure and within a couple of minutes the Project had fallen silent as its clients disappeared in to the damp gloom outside. In the classroom doorway Joyce Ackroyd stood with one supporting hand on the handle and the other on her walking stick.
“What’s happened?” she asked sharply, evidently reading the expression in Mower’s dark eyes. “It’s not the drug squad messing us about again, is it?”
Mower shook his head silently and took her arm, leading her to one of the battered armchairs, still stained with red paint.
“Sit down,” he said gently. “This is bad news.”
“The worst?”
“The worst,” Mower said.
For a long time after he had told her what he had found at Donna’s flat, the two of them sat quietly, Mower with his arm round Joyce’s thin shoulders, Joyce clutching his hand as if to prevent herself drowning in grief.
“I can’t believe it,” she said quietly at last.
“That she’s dead?”
“No not that. You don’t have to reach my age these days to know death can come out of a clear blue sky. But I learnt early, any road, losing my man in the war. No, I mean I can’t believe that she killed herself. I can’t believe she’d ever do anything to hurt Emma, and what could hurt her worse that this?”
Mower nodded, relieved that someone else’s reaction was the same as his own.
“She had nothing to do with the heroin, did she?” he asked carefully. “I haven’t got that wrong?”
“Of course she didn’t,” Joyce said angrily. “She detested the drug dealers. She’d have done anything to clear them off the estate.”
“Maybe that’s it then,” Mower said. “Maybe she’s got too many powerful people annoyed with her campaigning, the Project, helping kids get clean. It’s not what the drug dealers want, or the men behind them, bringing the stuff in.”
“You want to look at that computer of hers in there,” Joyce said. “She’s been spending hours on that just lately, when the kids have gone home. Learning to use the Internet was what she said she was doing. Does that make sense?”
“It might,” Mower said. “Which one does she use?”
“The big one on the teacher’s desk in there,” Joyce said, indicating the classroom behind them. “It’s newer than most of them we’ve got, the cast-offs we’ve begged. We managed to get one new one by pestering the retailers in town. That’s the one she’s been on non-stop since all the fuss started about the redevelopment. When I asked her what she was doing she just said she was working on the campaign. But she was printing reams of stuff, I do know that. Kept it all in a drawer but when I tried it, looking for some Sellotape, it was locked.”
“Show me,” Mower said. But the drawer was no longer locked and apart from a few office sundries, it was empty.
“She had a lot of paperwork in there,” Joyce said obstinately. “And those disc things. A box of those.”
“Could the drug squad have taken them?”
“I didn’t see them taking paperwork. Why would they be bothered about the campaign for the Project?”
Mower switched Donna’s computer on briefly and gazed at icons on the desktop as if willing them to reveal their secrets. He glanced at his watch.
“I need to go into the nick,” he said. “But there may be files in her machine that will tell me what she’s been looking at. I don’t think it’s safe to leave it here. Donna may have taken her paperwork and hidden it somewhere, or it may have been stolen. If it’s been stolen, someone’s going to realise that the machine itself may have information in it.”
“Take it with you, Kevin,” Joyce said firmly. “Do whatever you have to do.”
They loaded the computer into the boot of Mower’s car and he drove Joyce back to her bungalow.
“Will you be OK?” he asked, as he helped her to the front door.
“I’ll ring Laura to tell her what’s happened,” Joyce said. “I dare say she’ll come round later.
“If Donna was killed, I’ll have them,” Mower said.
“Aye, I’m sure you will lad,” Joyce agreed as she opened her door. “But it won’t bring h
er back, will it? Nothing’s going to do that.”
Half an hour later Mower found himself back in Michael Thackeray’s office for his third uncomfortable session with his boss in less than that number of days. This time Thackeray was not unsympathetic. He had already been told about Donna Maitland’s apparent suicide when Mower arrived from making a statement about finding her body but he did not hide his scepticism when Mower began to question whether the cause of death was as obvious as it seemed to his colleagues and, apparently, to Amos Atherton.
“There’ll be a post-mortem, of course there will,” Thackeray said. “But off the record Amos says he can see no signs of foul play at this stage. It’s a bloody difficult suicide to fake without signs of violence on the body. She’d have to be semi-conscious at least to allow herself to be dumped in the bath without a struggle. Were there signs of a struggle, blood stains anywhere else …”
“Nothing I could see,” Mower said. “But she told me she was going to take something to help her sleep. She could have been semi-conscious … Has Amos any idea when she died?”
“He’s only guessing,” Thackeray said. “The water had gone cold but there’s no way of knowing how hot it was to start with. Anyway, the body wouldn’t cool at the normal rate.”
“She could have been there hours,” Mower said angrily. “Since last night, even. She had pills in the flat. If she’d wanted to kill herself why not just an overdose? Why cut your wrists if there are easier ways?”
“Kevin, you’re letting your imagination run away with you. I know you must be shattered by this …”
“But don’t go over the top again? Is that what you’re saying?” Mower asked angrily. He got to his feet slowly, as if every limb was heavy.
Death in Dark Waters Page 18