Death in Dark Waters

by Patricia Hall

  Barry Foreman’s headquarters lay at the furthest end of the street and, by four o’clock, regular visits by the firms’ own vehicles had taken away quantities of electronic equipment and paperwork. But some of the lights remained on inside the building and Mower knew that Foreman himself had not left the premises.

  “Do we know where all that stuff’s gone?” Dizzy B asked.

  “The boss has got someone checking that out,” Mower said. Outside the street was rapidly emptying, lights going out, doors being closed on the offices behind them, abandoning them to an uncertain fate. Soon only the streetlights and two remaining lights on the ground floor of Foreman’s building were left to reflect on the water swirling about the roadway and beginning to lap at the stone steps which led up to the main doors of each block.

  “Look,” Dizzy said softly and Mower turned the radio right down and picked up his mobile phone. A Land Rover had entered the street from the end furthest away from the water board vans, creating a bow-wave through the flood, and pulled up outside the security services office.

  “That’s Foreman’s four-by-four,” Mower said. He pressed a number on his phone. “Guv?” he said quietly. “I think we may have something.” He peered through the gloom. “It looks like our friend Jake from the drug squad’s just arrived to pick Foreman up.”

  “Jake?” Sanderson asked when Mower had disconnected.

  “You don’t need to know,” Mower said. “God knows what name he’s working under anyway.”

  “He’s bringing something out,” Dizzy said. “Boxes of stuff. And he’s a copper?” Mower quickly relayed that to Thackeray.

  “Looks dodgy, guv,” he said.

  “Good,” Thackeray said. “Dodgy’s all I need to know to convince Jack Longley we need to act. I’m coming down there. If the building’s going to be abandoned we need to get in there with a search team before it floods if we can. And I’ll get traffic organised to stop the Land Rover and search it as soon as it comes out of the flood zone. There’s only one route out.”

  “The water people seem to think eight o’clock tonight’s going to be the most dangerous time,” Mower said. “They want the area cleared by six.”

  “A good enough reason to get an emergency warrant to search the place then,” Thackeray said, and cut the connection.

  “Is this official now?” Dizzy asked Mower. The sergeant shrugged.

  “Looks like it,” he said. “Though I’m not sure what the Super’ll make of our little surveillance.”

  It was a couple of minutes later, as they sat watching Jake and Barry Foreman himself ferry more boxes and packages to the Land Rover, that Dizzy B took Mower’s arm.

  “We’ve got trouble,” he whispered, pointing to the side of the building where it was just possible to see a slight figure crouching in the shadows watching events just as they were doing from the other side of the street. Jake and Foreman went back inside the building together, leaving the doors half open and casting a single beam of light into the storm.

  “I’ve a very nasty feeling I know who that is,” Dizzy said. “And last time I saw him, as you’ll recall, he was in possession of a serious looking automatic.”

  “Stevie Maddison,” Mower groaned. He called Thackeray again.

  “I’m on foot three minutes away at the end of the street,” the DCI said. “Don’t do anything till I get to you.” But his instruction was too late. While Mower had been distracted by his phone call Dizzy B had opened the car door and was already sprinting, dreadlocks flying, through the ankle deep water which now spread right up to the front steps of the office buildings on the other side of the street. Mower watched, horrified, as the boy in the shadows, instead of fleeing as he expected, turned towards Sanderson and fired. Sanderson swerved but did not appear to be hit as the boy turned and made for the open doors of Foreman Security Services and dodged inside, closely followed by the DJ.

  “Where are they?” Michael Thackeray asked as he pulled open one of the rear doors of Mower’s car and dropped into the seat behind him, water dripping from his hair and jacket. “Where’s Sanderson? I thought you said he was with you?”

  “He is, he was, he’s gone playing James Bond,” Mower said. “Sorry, guv, I couldn’t stop him. He’s chasing after the kid with the gun and this whole operation’s going pearshaped.”

  “No way,” Thackeray said. He used his own mobile phone this time to call headquarters and summon up armed officers and as many other reinforcements as could be mustered in the middle of a civil emergency. “If that bastard’s Foreman’s got a Land Rover full of drugs out there we’ll hang him out to dry.”

  “Great,” Mower said. “But at this precise moment he’s also got Dizzy and a fourteen-year-old boy in there and at least one of them’s armed.”

  But even that no longer seemed to be the case as Foreman himself came out of the building holding a coat over his head to protect himself from the driving rain, ran down the steps and jumped into the four by four and drove off, swerving wildly through the water as he accelerated.

  “Don’t worry, he won’t get far,” Thackeray said. “Come on, we’d better take a look.” Procedure might have dictated waiting for reinforcements but Mower was not in a mood to argue. The two men waded across the flooded road and, as they approached the building carefully from one side, the door was flung wide open and they could see Dizzy B on the top step waving wildly in their direction.

  “I couldn’t stop him,” he shouted. “I was too fucking late.”

  “Where’s the gun?” Thackeray asked harshly.

  “It doesn’t matter now, does it?” Dizzy B replied, and it looked as if his cheeks were wet with tears rather than rain.

  They followed him through the reception area into an office with several workstations and immediately saw why he was so distraught. Stevie Maddison lay where he had fallen in front of a desk, his gun still clutched in his hand and a single bullet wound to the side of the head matting his short fair hair with rapidly darkening blood. His blue eyes were still open, gazing sightlessly at the world with a faint look of surprise in them, his jeans and t-shirt, sodden from the rain, clinging to a skinny body which appeared heartbreakingly small to the men crowded above him. The man Mower knew as DS Jake Moody lay sprawled on the other side of the room, close to a doorway leading to the rear of the building, his white shirt soaked with blood, another gun at his feet. Mower crouched down and felt his neck for a pulse.

  “He’s just about alive,” he said feeling a flicker beneath his fingers. “He’s our undercover man,” he said. “Drug squad. Name’s Moody.”

  “So what’s the fuck he doing shooting kids?” Dizzy screamed at Thackeray. “What the fuck’s going on? And where’s the other bastard who was here just now, the bastard who ran?”

  “Taken care of,” Thackeray said shortly, using his mobile to ask for an ambulance urgently. He glanced around the room.

  “Did you see exactly what happened?” he asked. Sanderson shook his head, looking dazed now as the full enormity of the situation sank in.

  “I heard the first shot as I came through the door,” he said, his voice husky now. “I kept down, man. I’m not kidding you. Over there, behind the reception desk. Then more shots and one guy ran out and after that nothing, silence.” Thackeray nodded.

  “This is a crime scene,” Thackeray said pointedly to Dizzy B, glancing at Stevie Maddison’s huddled body and wondering if it would ever be possible to establish who was assailant and who was victim here. “I want you to wait outside till the ambulance and the heavy mob turn up and tell them what’s happened. Kevin and I have something we must do before this place floods and evidence gets washed away.”

  They had all been conscious since they had entered the building that there was a rushing noise coming from further inside. As Dizzy B turned away to go outside, shoulders slumped, Thackeray led Mower further back through the offices until they traced the noise to an open door leading to descending stone steps. The rushing sound became l
ouder, drowning out coherent speech but Thackeray did not hesitate, leading the way down steps into a cellar where a single lightbulb still burned. The floor was dry except for a damp trail of footprints from the steps to the corner where a heavy metal plate had been lifted to reveal what Mower realised must be Bradfield’s hidden waterway, rushing beneath them with terrifying force.

  “Why?” Thackeray mouthed at Mower pointing at the trail of water. He hurried to the manhole and lay flat on the floor, his face, as he leaned into the cavity, splashed by the torrent, making it even harder to see anything at all. Reaching around as far as he could stretch, he realised that on the downward side of the icy cold flow there was something solid. He could make out the mesh of a thick wire cage of some kind, which had been attached to the roof of the culvert that for large parts of the year carried no more than a modest stream of water down to the River Maze.

  Suddenly something pale bobbed into view and wedged itself against the mesh. Thackeray reached forward to catch it but it was not easy to estimate the distance in the near-darkness and, after a frantic second’s scrabbling at the edge of the manhole trying to regain his balance, he pitched forward into the stream head first and the rushing water closed over his head.

  Shouting incomprehensibly and uselessly against the noise of the water, Mower flung himself flat and leaned as far as he dared into the opening, sick with fear and not seriously expecting ever to see Thackeray alive again. But to his astonishment after a few seconds he found that he could just make out the DCI wedged against some sort of grille with his nose and mouth barely above the waterline. More often than not the swirling stream rose and hid him completely, but every time he emerged again, his head bent under the culvert’s stone roof, fingers clinging grimly to the mesh behind him, coughing and choking but undoubtedly still alive. If the mesh gave way, Mower thought, he would be gone, carried helplessly for the mile or so it took the culvert to carry the torrent back into the open air of a rocky defile between the hills on the eastern side of the town, and no doubt drowned long before he reached the open air.

  For a moment the two men’s eyes locked and Mower seemed to hesitate. Thackeray knew why and, for a split second, as the water surged over his head again and he was left choking helplessly in his sliver of breathing space against the slimy stone of the roof, he saw the face of Rita Desai, her eyes as full of light and laughter as they had often been before he and Mower had last seen her sprawling lifeless in the dust of a haulier’s yard.

  Half drowned, his chest compressed by the sheer force of the rushing water so that breathing was almost impossible even when his nose and mouth were above the surface, Thackeray almost gave up only to see, when he had shaken the water out of his eyes one last time, that Mower was leaning down as far as he could and trying to reach him. With a desperation born of despair, Thackeray eased himself slowly towards Mower against the pressure of the stream until the two men could just clasp hands.

  With his own body now spreadeagled right across the open manhole, one hand clutching the edge with desperate determination, Mower hauled Thackeray inch by inch towards him until he too could gain a purchase with icy fingers on the edge of the manhole and, between them, arms locked, they could begin to haul themselves out of the reach of the greedy, sucking black torrent below.

  It took minutes, every one of which seemed like an hour, before Thackeray scrambled out to fling himself flat on the floor like a landed fish, choking and gasping, alongside Mower who had also rolled away from the manhole onto his back, utterly exhausted. It was Thackeray who finally found the strength to get back to his feet, shivering in his sodden clothes, to push the metal manhole cover back into place, hiding the deadly stream and reducing the noise to the point where conversation was just about possible. He held out a hand and pulled Mower upright.

  “I owe you,” he said, holding on to the sergeant’s hand for a second.

  “Think nothing of it, guv,” Mower said with an attempt at a smile. If it had been him who had gone into the water like that, he thought, he might not have made any particular effort to get out.

  “There’s a sort of cage down there which Foreman must have been using for storage,” Thackeray said. “In normal times it wouldn’t have interfered with the flow of water, so no one could have guessed. It’s only recently the water company started complaining about the flow of the Beck not being right. I guess if Foreman’s made off with his stash of heroin or cocaine or whatever, the water’s running more smoothly tonight. They might not get quite the inundation they were expecting.”

  “Shall we get out of here, just in case,” Mower said, glancing at the manhole cover which was rattling from the pressure below.

  “I don’t think it’ll come up that way, but this place will certainly flood if the water in the street gets into the offices and pours into the cellars from above,” Thackeray said. It was only then that Mower noticed that the DCI had reached inside his sodden jacket and was clutching something in his left hand.

  “What’s the fuck’s that?” he asked, not sure that he wanted to know the answer.

  Thackeray shook his head, his eyes unreadable in the gloom.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “But I think it’s a baby’s skull.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Mower whispered with a long slow sigh.

  Chapter Twenty

  “You’re not going to like this,” Michael Thackeray said to superintendent Jack Longley as he brought him up to date with developments the next morning. Apart from the darker than normal circles under his eyes he gave no indication that he had come so close to death the previous day. Only his wrenched muscles, and throat and lungs which felt as if they had been scoured with sandpaper, reminded him of how close to the edge he had been. His whole being now was focused fiercely on Barry Foreman and making sure that this time the security boss did not slip through his fingers.

  “Try me,” Longley said.

  “I want to interview DS Jake Moody under caution, as a suspect.”

  “The drug squad aren’t going to like that,” Longley said, although his own expression remained relatively unperturbed. “It’s when you tell me you want to interview me under caution that I might get alarmed these days. Did you read about the number of senior officers being suspended? Why Moody, any road? I thought he was a victim, not a suspect.”

  “Maybe,” Thackeray said. “Obviously I want his version of what happened when he was shot.” He hesitated.

  “But that’s not all?” Longley prompted. “You think he went over to the other side? He wouldn’t be the first undercover cop to do that.”

  “Ray Walter hinted he’d not been providing much intelligence. Why the hell not, I’d like to know,” Thackeray said.

  “You think he was taking back-handers from Foreman? Playing both sides against the middle?”

  “Maybe worse than that,” Thackeray said. “Now we’ve got Foreman’s fingerprints they turn out to match some on the dirty videos at Stanley Wilson’s place. And our own intelligence did come up with something interesting when they were trying to match the unknown prints from Wilson’s house. They came up with a Brian Freeman, who did a long stretch when he was in his twenties. He was an enforcer for a gangland boss in Manchester. One of the things he enjoyed was stubbing out cigarettes on people. And guess who he shared a cell with in Strangeways.”

  “Stanley Wilson?” Longley hazarded.

  “I guess Foreman was terrified Wilson had told me about his change of identity. That would really have scuppered him just at the point when he was ingratiating himself into the legitimate business community in Bradfield. I don’t know if anyone else was with him at Wilson’s place when he was killed but I’m sure Foreman was there himself. And I guess he enjoyed the violence just as much as he used to in the old days.” Thackeray hesitated.

  “I want Moody’s prints taken,” he said. “Wilson’s longtime boyfriend, Harman, reckoned that Stanley Wilson had a new black boyfriend but it’s just possible that if the person he saw wa
s actually Moody, he was visiting Wilson for his boss and Harman jumped to the wrong conclusion. I want Moody’s prints taken and I want to see if Harman can identify him. If he was there, I want to know why, and what he knows about Foreman’s visits.”

  “Moody’s not gay, is he?”

  “That’s not the point,” Thackeray said impatiently. “Foreman has been to Wilson’s place, the home of a man he says was nothing more than an insignificant clerk in his organisation. Foreman’s been paying him over the odds — bonuses he says, set-up money for Wilson’s porn business more likely, part of Foreman’s money laundering operations, like the development company in Leeds and God knows what else when we’ve finished going through his books. But recently, according to Val Ridley, who’s been trawling through Wilson’s bank statements, Foreman’s been paying Wilson £1000 a month, on top of his salary. That looks more like blackmail to me, and Foreman’s not a man to put up with that for long.”

  “You think Foreman tortured him and killed him?” Longley asked.

  “It’s a distinct possibility. So far we’ve only charged him with possession of the consignment of drugs he had in the Land Rover when he was arrested, but there was enough there to remand him in custody while we get our act together on the rest. And we’ve got his prints and a DNA sample so the forensic people can get to work on those. But before I start questioning him about Wilson I want to get to grips with Moody and find out just how far his undercover activities took him. Even if he’s clean he knows more about Foreman’s movements over the last few months than anyone else. We’ve possibly linked Foreman to one murder now and there are three more suspicious deaths being investigated. Mower says that he found a lad who saw something near Donna Maitland’s flat the night she died. That needs chasing up too. But I need Moody’s evidence first, and I need it quickly, not in a couple of weeks when the drug squad have debriefed him and decided what they want to tell us and what they don’t.”