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Authors: Patricia Hall

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Police Procedural

BOOK: Death in Dark Waters
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Mower led her through a tidy classroom, untouched by the marauders, and into a small kitchen where Joyce Ackroyd was huddled over a mug of tea at a Formica-topped table beside a blonde woman in a smart blue suit, thin almost to the point of emaciation, who drew hard and frequently on a roll-up cigarette.
“Donna,” Laura said quietly. She had been impressed by Donna's energy and her fragility on her first visit. Now the dark circles under her eyes seemed to have deepened in the intervening weeks and her bottle blonde cascade of hair offered a brittle sort of defiance around a carefully made-up, not unattractive face now trembling on the edge of angry tears.
Laura put an arm round her grandmother's thin shoulders and had her hand seized fiercely in return.
“D'you know who would do this?” Laura asked.
“There's no helping some,” Donna said wearily. “There's a few skag-heads out there who'd wreck owt just for t'sheer fun of it.”
“Will you write something, love?” Joyce asked urgently. “Our budget won't run to putting this lot right. We'll need some extra help.”
“I thought the council were backing you,” Laura said.
“Only t‘running costs,” Donna said. She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue and ran her fingers through her hair in lieu of a comb, evidently determined to resume the role of manager in spite of her evident distress. “Capital came from t'Lottery and there'll be no more of that.”
“You're not insured?”
“You must be joking,” Donna said, angry now. “Have you never heard of red-lining? They drew a red line round the Heights so long ago the ink's pretty well washed out. No banks or insurance companies'll touch us - or any other poor sod up here. Why d'you think the loan sharks make such a killing? They're the only beggars'll help anyone get by. And I don't think they'll be holding a street collection for us.”
Laura glanced at Mower.
“Hadn't you better call the police?” she asked. He shook his head.
“Donna'll deal with that shortly. We just thought you might like to take Joyce home before we get into all that hassle. Not that there's much chance of finding the little toe-rags who did it. They'll have had the sense to wash the paint off their hands by now.”
“I could give you their names with a ninety-nine per cent chance of being right,” Donna said. “But making it stick's another thing. They'll all have been at home wi'their mates- or their mums - if a copper comes asking.”
“I'll give Joyce a ride home,” Laura said. “If anyone wants to talk to her they know where to find her.”
She helped her grandmother into her coat and handed her the stick she needed to walk with now arthritis had made movement difficult.
“It's too late for today but I'll talk to my editor first thing in the morning and come back up to see you,” she said to Donna. “I'm really sorry about this. It all looked as though it was going so well.”
“It's the first thing we've ever had up here that's got some o't kids off the street and sitting still for an hour or two,” Donna said, her voice husky with emotion. “Thrown out of school long ago, most of‘em. Given up on reading and writing. But they like computers. Got a bit o'street cred, they have. And because we're on t‘spot, not a bus-ride down into t'town, they'll come in, won't they? Come in and stay in, some of'em. We've got a few of them into rehab, and I've real hopes of jobs for a few already. And now this.” She lit a fresh cigarette and drew smoke into lungs so damaged that Laura could hear them whistle from the other side of the room.
“Tomorrow,” she promised, propelling her grandmother through the door.
Joyce struggled into the passenger seat of the Golf and said nothing as Laura drove her the quarter mile to her tiny bungalow which stood in the shadow of the Heights' three massive blocks of run-down flats. She too was breathing heavily by the time she had opened the front door, turned on the lights and allowed Laura to help her off with her coat and into her favourite armchair by the gas fire. Laura gazed at her grandmother for a moment, absorbing the pallor and the lines of weariness beneath the shock of white hair. But Joyce's green eyes, so like her own, still gleamed with anger.
“I'll get onto the powers that be at the Town Hall tomorrow,” she said. “I'll not see Donna defeated.”
“Will they listen?” Laura asked carefully. There had been a time when Joyce Ackroyd had been the uncrowned queen of
Bradfield Town Hall, but it was years since she had been forced into retirement by ill-health and she knew that the new faces of municipal Labour regarded the likes of Joyce, an unreconstructed admirer of heroes like Nye Bevan and Tony Benn, with as much incomprehension as she regarded them.
“If we don't make the Project work, they'll privatise it, as like as not, or just close it down regardless,” Joyce said. “I want to see it succeed. But we'll need some help. They've got all these schemes for reconstruction, partnerships, I don't know what, but when you want some cash for something simple that actually works you can't get a damn' penny …” For a second she covered her eyes and Laura thought that she had never seen her combative grandmother so depressed.
“You know they found another young lad dead last night, don't you?” Joyce asked suddenly.
“Not the one who was knocked down in town?”
“No, the one who fell off the roof of Priestley House. Overdose, they're saying, out of his head. That's the fifth or sixth this year and no one seems to be doing a damn thing about it. I don't know what that man of yours thinks he's about, but heroin up here is wiping out a whole generation. Aren't the police even interested?”
“I'm sure they are, Nan,” Laura said, with more confidence than she felt. She suspected that the kids on the Heights who killed each other quickly with knives or slowly with heroin and crack rated much lower in official priorities than the grammar school boy from a wealthy home who had been run down the night before.
“Well, put a bomb under them for us, will you, love?”
“I'll see what I can do.” Laura knew that her grandmother did not altogether approve of her relationship with DCI Michael Thackeray believing, with the same certainty with which she believed in the future of British coal and the need to renationalise the railways, that men and women should have the decency to tie a legal knot before embarking on life together. But she would use the connection ruthlessly if it
suited her. Laura had been relieved to discover that Michael took Joyce's reservations in his stride and found it in himself to approve very thoroughly of her.
She made more tea and then slumped into a chair on the other side of the fire and shook her head in mock despair.
“Are you ever going to take it easy?” she asked.
“What do you want me to do?” Joyce snapped back. “Sit in this little box goggling at t'other one till the Grim Reaper pops in to put me in the final box of all? If there's owt I can do to help folk like Donna while I'm still standing I'll do it. And it'll be a pity when they run out of folk like me, an'all.”
Laura grinned, shame-faced.
“Will someone at the Town Hall see you, d'you think?”
“Oh, aye, they'll see me all right, if only to shut me up,” Joyce said grimly. “Can you give me a lift down in your lunch hour tomorrow, pet?”
Laura woke early to find herself tucked snugly into the curve of Michael Thackeray's body with one of his hands comfortably beneath her breast. The closeness of him filled her with desire but she could see that it was not yet seven and chose not to rouse him so early. They had both fallen into bed exhausted the previous night and had fallen asleep before either of them could respond to the whispers of their bodies which suggested anything different.
He had come home in a bad mood, although evidently reluctant to tell her why. And he had only seemed to half listen as she had passed on her grandmother's unease about the state of Wuthering, the estate which caused the police as well as the local council the greatest trouble in a troublesome little town which prosperity still resolutely seemed to pass by. But he had not seemed to be very interested. Secrets and lies, she thought ruefully, lies and secrets: they had haunted their relationship since the beginning and even now that they had achieved a sort of truce together she still suspected that their jobs might one day drive them apart in some way which would be hard to forgive.
She did not think too hard about the future at all these days, tiptoeing round it in a way she knew could not be sustained indefinitely. What she wanted and what Michael wanted seemed as far apart as ever. His divorce had drifted into the realms of sometime, perhaps never, and she had avoided talk of children since he had returned to her new flat only slightly shame-faced after their last serious difference of opinion. Apparently relaxed, he was helping her choose rugs and pictures to replace what she had lost when her last home had been trashed. But she knew, and she suspected he knew, that there was too much left unsaid for her to be sure of him any longer. Soon, she thought, they must
thrash out where they were going together, if they were going anywhere at all.
Carefully she slipped from his arms and went to take a shower. By the time she emerged, Thackeray was awake, his eyes wary as he watched her come back into the bedroom, throw off her towel and begin to dress.
“It's very early,” he said and she was not sure whether there was an invitation there. Once she might have been certain.
“Busy day,” she said, pulling on black trousers and a silk shirt of deep green and beginning to brush her tousled copper curls with rather too much vigour. “I promised to take Joyce to the Town Hall at lunch-time so I need an early start. Otherwise Ted Grant will be ranting and raving again. I told you last night.”
Thackeray put his hands behind his head and watched her pin her hair up in a severe pleat.
“Tell her we really are working on the heroin problem up there,” he said carefully.
“So why don't they think you are?” Laura came back quickly.
“It's out of my hands, Laura. The drug squad do things their own way, you know that. They report to county, not to Jack Longley. I dare say he knows what's going on but he hasn't told me.”
“And reassuring the local community isn't part of the game plan?”
“I doubt the drug squad would recognise a community if it jumped up and bit them,” Thackeray said.
“Is that what was pissing you off last night?”
“Oh, partly that and partly Jack Longley cuddling up to local businessmen,” Thackeray said. “His mates from the Lodge, a lot of them.”
“You must be joking?”
“The so-called business community can do no wrong these days. It's official. You know how it is. Longley meets them at his wretched Masonic meetings and every now and again
they think they can decide police priorities for him. This time it's Ecstasy at the Carib Club taking priority over heroin up on the Heights.”
“The schoolboy who was knocked down?”
“Son of some local worthy, so we pull all the stops out to find the pusher. Chances are the lad got it off a friend who got it off a friend who bought it off someone he'd never seen before weeks ago in a pub he can't remember the name of. But I suppose we'll have to go through the motions to please Grantley Adams.”
“Grantley Adams was a mate of my father's,” Laura said, suddenly thrown back to a childhood where she had seemed to be constantly at war with her father's ambition to make a million before he was forty. “I remember him coming to the house years ago when I was just a kid. He's quite old to have a son still at school.”
“Second family, I think,” Thackeray said. “You know how it goes: boredom sets in and he swaps his middle-aged missus for a new trophy wife and another batch of kids.”
“And this one's let dad down big time? Still, it must be dreadful for the family.”
“Yes,” Thackeray said quickly and Laura flinched at the look in his eyes. “But it's police priorities I'm talking here, not family tragedies. Those I never could do much about.”
She sat on the edge of the bed and kissed him.
“I'm sorry,” she said. “I think work's getting us both down. See if you can get away at a sensible time tonight and we'll go out for a meal. That new Thai place on the Manchester Road is supposed to be very good.”
Thackeray relaxed slightly and returned her kiss with interest.
“Things must be looking up if Thai food's arrived in Bradfield,” he said. “I thought that was only available in poncy Leeds.”
“We could try fusion cooking if you want to go that far …”
“Let me get used to one thing at a time,” he said, laughing.
“You know I'm only a roast beef and Yorkshire pud country lad at heart.”
“Oh, I think you washed the last traces of muck off your boots a long time ago. And I'm sure that if you really want to get to grips with heroin on the Heights rather than recreational drugs in the pubs and clubs you'll find yourself a way. But watch out for Grantley Adams. I can remember taking a very distinct dislike to him. A bullying man, as I recall. Managed to pat me on the head and tweak my hair at the same time without my dad noticing anything at all. Getting back at me for some cheeky remark I'd made; no doubt some socialist heresy I'd picked up at my grandmother's knee and parroted without really understanding. But very nasty, as I recall.”
“I'll bear it in mind,” Thackeray said.
 
The newsroom at the Bradfield Gazette was still quiet soon after eight when Laura got in, with only two reporters on an early shift concentrating on their computer screens. But the early morning peace was soon shattered when the editor, Ted Grant, arrived with the manic gleam in his eyes which Laura knew spelt trouble. Head down, she hoped that it would not involve her brief on the feature pages.
But she was unlucky. By the time Grant had convened the morning meeting and Laura had taken her place at the untidy table in his office alongside her colleagues, she knew that the excitement which had brought a sharp flush to his cheeks and the first signs of sweat to the shirt which strained to encompass his beer belly, would include her. He had placed Bob Baker, the paper's crime reporter, on his left-hand side from where he nursed a contented smirk which boded ill, Laura thought, for the rest of those there.
“We'll make it a Gazette campaign,” Grant said. “The war on drugs. The threat to our youth. What can Bradfield do to defeat the evil pushers? You know the sort of thing. Run a hotline for people who want to pass on information if the police are too dozy to do it. The Globe's got it off to a tee, but we can
do our own version. We'll collate all the news stories, and Laura, you can run a series of features on families that have been affected. Start with this lad who was nearly killed at this club the other night, Grantley Adams' boy.”
Laura opened her mouth to object but, glancing round the table, realised that she was the only one there with any reservations about Grant's plan.
“There's been another death up on the Heights too,” she said eventually.
“Aye, well we'll get to that one later,” Grant said. “The little toe-rags up there have got nowt else to do, have they? But this lad in intensive care was a high flyer, apparently. Going to Oxford, wanting to be a lawyer. That's a better story for us. See if you can get an interview with his mum and dad - for today if you can, but tomorrow if not.”
“Right,” Laura said, knowing that facing Grantley Adams again after all these years was unlikely to be a pleasant experience in the best of circumstances, and she would be a long way from those today.
“You don't look too chuffed with that assignment,” said Bob Baker a few minutes later, with an unwanted hand on Laura's shoulder and an insinuating whisper in her ear, as they made their way back to their desks. “Surely your boyfriend is going to be chasing this one whatever we run with, isn't he?” Baker, a sleek twenty-five year old with one eye on his career and the other on anyone female who would make eye-contact, was not Laura's favourite colleague. She suspected that he saw in her a chance to pursue both of his objectives at once, not because she encouraged his advances but because he knew that she had a unique line to the police that he might be able to exploit if she did not concentrate hard enough on what she was saying in his vicinity.
“Mr. Adams is an old friend of the family, as it goes,” she said sweetly, capitalising for once on her local connections which Baker, a recent arrival, could not match.
“And a crack-down on E? Is that on your boyfriend's agenda?”
“I've really no idea,” she said. “We've much better things to do than talk shop after work. Why don't you ask him yourself.” She knew that this would annoy Baker whose relationship with Michael Thackeray could best be described in terms of an armed truce.
Baker shrugged and moved away, but not without a parting shot.
“What I don′t understand is why Bradfield CID's been cut right out of operations up on the Heights,” he said. “Funny, that.”
 
“D'you want to sit in on this one, boss?”
DC Val Ridley hesitated outside the door of an interview room, trim and contained as ever in spite of the dark circles beneath her eyes that Thackeray now regarded as permanent.
“Who've you got?” he asked.
“The girlfriend of the lad who was knocked down in Chapel Street. Jeremy Adams.”
Thackeray hesitated and then nodded, curious almost in spite of himself.
“Do we need a responsible adult?” he asked.
“She's seventeen but she's got her mother with her anyway,” Val said quickly. “I told them an informal chat. No caution. Nothing heavy. At least she had the decency to hang around after the accident. Most of the little beggars vanished into the night.
“And how's the boy?”
“Still critical.” Her voice was flat, without emotion. Thackeray knew that Val was good at that, but very occasionally the mask cracked to reveal a warmer and more erratic human being underneath the chilly exterior. He let her lead the way into the interview room where a young girl with long blonde hair and a sulky expression was sitting at the table alongside a woman almost as slim, certainly as blonde and
apart from some faint lines around the eyes not apparently much older.
“Mrs.-James, this is DCI Thackeray,” Val said. “And this is Louise.”
Thackeray took the fourth seat at the table and nodded to Val Ridley to continue. Teenagers fascinated and disturbed him not least because his own son, had he survived, would by now have been hovering on the edge of these turbulent, truculent few years and he had not the faintest idea how he would have learned to cope with that. Badly, he suspected, if Ian had begun to display any of the alarming and often dangerous tendencies to self-destruction he saw amongst the young who crossed his path as a police officer. Would that have given him more insight with a child of his own, or just made him more afraid of what could go wrong? He did not know. But here, at least, he thought, was a child who appeared to have had all the advantages so many of CID's clients had not. Had Louise James slipped over the edge in spite of that? Or was he simply assuming that because she fell into that age range she must be sad, or mad or bad. He smiled uneasily at the girl's mother and tried to concentrate on what Val Ridley was saying.
“So tell me about Wednesday evening, Louise,” Val said. “What made you and Jeremy decide to go to the Carib Club?”
“It was my birthday, wasn't it?” Louise said, in a barely audible mumble.
“She doesn't usually go out in the week but because it was her birthday, her seventeenth, we made an exception,” Mrs. James broke in quickly. “They get so much homework. They're at Bradfield Grammar, you know …”
“But why the Carib?” Val persisted. “Is it somewhere you've been before?”
Louise glanced at her mother.
“Once,” she said. “Once or twice, at a weekend.”
“We'd have stopped her if we'd known,” Mrs. James broke in again, her voice harsh. “That part of town. That sort of club.”

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