Death in Dark Waters

by Patricia Hall

  “I’ve done everything I can officially, guv,” he said. “I can see you think I’ve lost it. But there’s something wrong with Donna’s death. I’ll let you know when I’ve found out what it is.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Donna Maitland’s just another of the losers up there, isn’t she?” Ted Grant leaned back in his executive chair easily next morning and offered Laura Ackroyd what passed in his lexicon for a smile of sympathy. “You can’t make a bloody heroine out of her now, Laura.”

  “But that’s exactly what we did make her six months ago,” Laura said, spreading a copy of her feature on the opening of the Project in front of the editor. “You even wrote an editorial about her saying she was just the sort of feisty, enterprising person the Heights needed to pull itself out of the mire. People ready to make an effort instead of waiting for the State to provide, don’t you remember? Don’t you think our readers deserve some sort of explanation now she’s dead?”

  “I don’t suppose our readers will remember a word we said about her,” Grant said airily. “Anyway, she’s obviously run right off the rails since then.” He spun his chair round sharply on its castors and projected himself with remarkable speed for a heavy man towards the door of his office.

  “Bob!” he bellowed across the newsroom. “Spare us a minute, lad, will you?” Bob Baker appeared in the doorway at a velocity to rival the editor’s.

  “This Maitland woman,” Grant said. “What’s the score with the police?”

  “Not looking for anyone else in connection with the death,” Baker said. He glanced at Laura and smirked. “And you know what that means. Off the record, they seem pretty sure she’d been turning a blind eye to what some of the kids she was supposed to be setting on the straight and narrow were really up too. And she couldn’t hack it when the drug squad fingered her. But I don’t suppose we’ll ever know the truth of it now she’s topped herself.”

  “Who told you that?” Laura asked. “It’s not the way I hear it.”

  Baker tapped his nose and grinned at the editor.

  “Sources, my love, sources. Maybe mine are better than yours.”

  “According to Laura, she doesn’t have any police sources,” Grant said, his eyes sharp with malice. “Nowt so much as a comment on the state of the traffic on the Aysgarth Lane roundabout ever passes the Detective Chief Inspector’s lips. Allegedly.”

  Baker shrugged.

  “I’ll let you know if anything new develops, boss,” he said.

  “So that’s a no then, is it?” Laura asked the editor.

  “Of course it’s a bloody no,” Grant said. “You can’t pretend the woman was never arrested, and from what Bob says, was highly likely to be charged. Even if she wasn’t into drugs herself she knew the sort of kids she was dealing with. It was down to her to keep tabs on the little beggars when they were on the premises, wasn’t it? That’s the law. I’ve told you before. Zero tolerance is what the Heights needs, and if that’s what the drug squad is doling out now then that’s fine by me, and by the readers, if the letters we get are owt to go by. Donna Maitland slipped up and couldn’t face the consequences, which would likely have been a spell in jail. End of story.”

  Her face set, Laura folded up the paper, from which Donna Maitland’s photograph smiled out with the optimism of six months before. Whatever demons had driven Donna to take the course she had taken, she thought, they had left little room for her reputation to be redeemed.

  “Give us a couple of pars on what’s likely to happen to the Project now she’s gone,” Ted Grant conceded unexpectedly as Laura got up to go. “As I hear it, it’s not got much of a future once the redevelopment gets under way. Barry Foreman and Dave Spencer’ve got other plans for education and training up there. Summat a bit less amateur. You should be pleased about that.”

  “Barry Foreman’s an expert on these things now, is he?” Laura snapped.

  “He’s not daft, isn’t Barry,” Grant said. “That business of his seems to be growing by leaps and bounds. He’s got money to burn and he might as well put a bit of it back into summat useful. You and your lefty friends should approve of that.”

  “Me and my lefty friends might just be a tad suspicious where the money’s coming from before accepting it,” Laura shot back tartly. “You’d think there’d been enough dodgy donations to political projects recently to persuade even Dave Spencer to take care.”

  “Bright lad, that,” Ted said. “The next Tony Blair, I shouldn’t wonder. He’ll go far.”

  “One way or another,” Laura said, under her breath, recalling her grandmother’s fury at the council leader’s equivocations.

  “Get a quote out of him, any road. But keep it short. I’ve not got space to spare for sob stories from the Heights just now. They want to think themselves lucky up there. At least they’ll be keeping their feet dry. They’ve got flood warnings out at Lane End. If this rain doesn’t stop soon we’ll have half the town under water by the weekend.”

  “Right,” Laura said. She went back to her desk and binned the back copy of the Gazette she had culled from the archives to refresh her memory about the launch of the apparently now doomed Project. It had seemed to promise so much to the kids on the Heights, but after the events of the last few days she had no doubt that the efforts Donna and Joyce had been making to secure its financial future would run into the sand. No one would want to be associated with an enterprise tainted by violence and fingered by the drug squad. Her grandmother, she knew, would be heart-broken by the loss of Donna and what could well be her last effort on the Heights. She glanced out of the windows at the leaden skies and the relentless rain which was beating against the building and threatening to engulf Bradfield’s narrow valley. If the Project died with Donna, she thought, hope for the Heights would likely die too. And Joyce would find that hard to bear.

  On the rain-swept upper walkway of Priestley House, Kevin Mower pulled up his collar and banged hard on the door of the flat two doors along from Donna Maitland’s. He had already tried the six doors before Donna’s and raised only a whey-faced young mother clutching a screaming baby and a night-worker irate at being roused from his morning’s rest. Neither had heard anything suspicious during the night, they had told Mower irritably. One slept the sleep of exhaustion and the other had been on the other side of town at work. Neither of them knew Donna except by sight. Neither evinced either interest or concern at their neighbour’s death. Mower was beginning to think that he really was chasing ghosts of his own imagining, as Michael Thackeray had suggested, rather than anything more substantial. Except for the two small niggling facts which had been enough to launch him on his solo investigations that afternoon.

  He had woken from a restless sleep very early and stood at the back window of his flat gazing down at the scruffy garden where his downstairs neighbour’s German Shepherd dog was already snuffling along the muddy tracks he had worn around the boundary fence. Barely able to see the loping animal in the grey dawn light as it nosed around bushes beaten down by the rain and left its mark at regular intervals, he had gone over and over in his mind what he had observed when he had discovered Donna’s body. He knew that there was something wrong with what he had found at the flat, but also recognised that he had been far too distraught to be thinking clearly or professionally at the time. There was a lot of sense in the police rule that officers should not work on cases where they had any personal involvement. Even so he did not think he was letting his imagination run away with him, as the DCI obviously believed. If anything the bitter anger which consumed him had sharpened up his brain. Something about Donna’s death rang false and it was not just his conviction that she would not have despaired that night— when there was still so much to fight for on Emma’s behalf as well as her own - which convinced him that he had missed some vital piece of information when he had broken into the flat.

  But he could not pinpoint whatever it was that disturbed him and several cups of strong coffee later he had decided tha
t this was something he would have to pursue on his own, whatever Michael Thackeray said. By eight-thirty he was parking on the Heights and, head down against the driving rain, dodging through the hooded teenagers and mothers with push-chairs and small children in tow who were battling their way from the flats to schools and nurseries on the periphery of the estate. The third floor walkway was deserted when he reached it, slightly breathless from the climb, and the police tape which had been stretched across Donna’s doorway flapped forlornly in the wind. He detached the other end and stuffed it into his jacket pocket before using his credit card as before to gain easy entrance to the flat. He leaned against the front door, wiping the rain from his face and out of his eyes and breathing heavily, trying to reconstruct in his mind exactly what he had done the day before when he had come looking for his lover.

  As he made his way from room to room, he found that little had changed. If his colleagues had conducted any sort of a search it had not been a very thorough one. He glanced into some of the drawers and cupboards in the living room, but there was no sign of the files and computer discs Joyce said she had kept at the Project. Perhaps the police had found and taken those already, he thought.

  In the bedroom, Donna’s deep blue nightdress still lay where she had evidently tossed it onto the pillows at the top of the bed. He picked it up and held it against his cheek, smelling her perfume and remembering occasions when he had helped her slip out of it. One strap, he noticed, was held in place only by a thread, as if it had been pulled too hard to take some strain. Was that, he wondered, why Donna had apparently taken it off and walked to her death in the bathroom naked. Or could there be a more sinister explanation?

  He stood for a long time in the bathroom doorway. The room was empty now, the bath-water drained away leaving only a brownish tide-mark and some dark stains on the corktiled floor. But he could still see Donna as she had lain almost afloat in the brimming tub, eyes half open, her face surprisingly peaceful for someone who surely must have known that her life-blood was draining inexorably away. Had she taken enough pills, he wondered, to make the whole procedure stress-free, a painless exit from a life which had suddenly splintered apart? Or had she taken enough pills to make it easy for someone else to take her from her bed and put her into the bath with the minimum resistance? Why, if she had walked alone from her bed to the bathroom had she discarded her nightdress? It seemed an unlikely thing for a woman who knew she was going to be found dead to do, to choose to be found naked rather than even lightly clothed. Was it simply the lack of dignity in her death which made him so uneasy? Or something else?

  And then suddenly, he had it. He banged his fist on the door jamb in fury and turned the light off and then on again. It had been almost dark in the bathroom when he had arrived the previous day, he thought, even though it had been midday and he remembered now that he had pulled the lightswitch on without thinking. Again this morning he had found the room gloomy and had switched on the light automatically as he had gone in. But if Donna had died much earlier, as seemed likely, then this small airless room must have been pitch dark when she had got into the bath and slit her wrists if the light had not been switched on. That, Mower thought, was not just unlikely, it was almost impossible. Someone must have turned out the bathroom light after Donna died and before he arrived the next day to search for her. And that someone had more than likely killed her.

  The wave of red hot anger which threatened to overwhelm him subsided gradually and he splashed his face with cold water at the bathroom basin and dried himself roughly on one of Donna’s towels before going back into the living room and flinging himself into a chair. His first instinct was to call Michael Thackeray and insist that he launch a full scale murder inquiry. But a moment’s thought told him that might be counter-productive. He needed more, he thought, to break through the scepticism with which his new certainty would be greeted at police HQ. His credibility was already minimal, he thought, blown away by his difficulties over the last few months. It would take more than a sudden intuition in an empty flat to convince Thackeray that what looked like a perfectly comprehensible suicide was anything more. Superintendent Longley and the drug squad would be even harder to shift. What he needed was more evidence, and that might be hard to come by.

  He glanced at his watch and pulled out his mobile phone. Amos Atherton started work early but he caught him before he had moved into the lab.

  “She’s scheduled for eleven,” Atherton said in response to Mower’s inquiry about the post-mortem on Donna Maitland’s body. “There’s what’s left of two lads who drove into a lorry last night I’ve to look over first. I thought the Maitland women was a routine suicide. There’s nowt else I should know about, is there?”

  Mower hesitated. He knew that whatever he said to Atherton would get back to Thackeray, probably sooner rather than later.

  “Just a niggle,” he said. “There were people who had it in for her. I want to be sure that no one helped her on her way. She told me she was going to take some sleeping pills and get an early night.”

  “Friend of yours, was she?” Atherton asked. “Close friend?”

  “You could say.”

  “I’ll take a close look, then, lad,” Atherton said. “A blood test for the pills, any road. But the wrist wounds looked bad enough to have taken her out pretty quickly, I reckon, from a first glance yesterday. Down to the bone on her left wrist.”

  “Unusually deep? For a razor blade? That’s all I found in the bathroom with her.”

  Mower heard Atherton’s slight intake of breath at the other end followed by a long silence.

  “I’ll let you have the report a.s.a.p,” he said at last.

  “I’m not in the office,” Mower said and was unsurprised when this piece of information was greeted by another silence.

  “So you’ll not see it there?”

  “Can I call you?” Mower asked, knowing he was putting his head into a noose.

  “At home,” Atherton had said eventually, giving him a number and hanging up.

  Mower’s second call was to a mobile and was answered instantly.

  “Yo,” Dizzy B said when Mower had explained what he was doing. “Strikes me you’re taking all sorts of chances here, bro.”

  “I need your help,” Mower said. “Where are you? Can you come up to the Heights?”

  It took five minutes hard talking to persuade Sanderson that it was a good idea to return to the scene of his arrest and in the end it was only Mower’s conviction that Donna could have been murdered which overcame his reluctance.

  By the time he had finished his calls, the fire in Mower’s belly had turned to ice. He took one last look around the flat, let himself out of the front door, reattached the police tape and began his hunt for witnesses to anything untoward which might have happened along Donna’s walkway, or anywhere else in the block, the night Donna died. He was halfway down the concrete staircase when he caught a glimpse of movement below and began to hurry down two steps at a time. In the entrance hall he caught up with a skinny youth in a hooded top, grabbed his shoulder, spun him round and slammed him hard against the graffiti-covered wall.

  “What’s your problem?” he whispered in the boy’s ear. “Live here, do you?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  Mower tightened his grip on the boy’s neck and forced his head back against the rough concrete until he knew the pressure was hurting.

  “Live here, do you?” he asked again. This time the boy nodded, as he tried ineffectually to unlock Mower’s grip.

  “Craig Leaward. Top floor,” he said.

  “Were you out last night?”

  “Around,” the boy croaked. “Just around.”

  “Did you see anyone up on the third floor, where Donna Maitland lived? Late on, midnight maybe?” The boy’s eyes flickered momentarily and Mower knew that he had struck gold, though extracting it might be impossible. He bunched his fist and the boy’s eyes widened in fear.

  “Who was here, Cr
aig? I need to know.”

  “I can’t tell you that, man,” Craig whispered hoarsely, and Mower relaxed the pressure on his throat slightly in response. “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “Was it the man they call Ounce? Is he the main man up here when you want some gear?”

  But Craig’s eyes merely widened in terror and Mower knew that he could not break the vicious circle of intimidation and fear which controlled the estate so easily. He released the boy and turned away in disgust while Craig pulled his jacket straight and scuttled up the stairs without a backward glance.

  Laura’s frustrations had grown all day. With the office in turmoil all around her as the water levels in the Beck had threatened to spill over the concrete banks which protected the low-lying houses in the valley to the west of the town centre, she had found it difficult to contact Councillor Dave Spencer at the Town Hall. And when she finally tracked him down he seemed abstracted.

  “Nothing’s been decided in that sort of detail yet,” he said dismissively when she asked him about the future of the Project. “We’re waiting for government approval for the whole regeneration area. Not that I think there’ll be any difficulties, but it’s early days yet. Lots of detail to be sorted out, financial ends to tie up, the building consortium appointed. You can’t get something as big as this off the ground overnight, you know.”

  “So no thoughts on what’s happened to the Project over the last few days?”

  “You know I can’t comment on a police investigation,” Spencer said. “If you want an off-the-record opinion, I’d be looking to get my grandma out of there sharpish. But from what I’ve heard about Joyce, I’ve no doubt the Ackroyds think they know their own business best.”

  Laura had hung up quickly before the angry comment which sprang to her lips escaped and did her career no favours.