Dying Fall

by Patricia Hall

  "Would you like to talk to a lady policeman?" Mrs. Renton asked the sobbing child, who nodded dumbly.

  "Fine", Thackeray said reluctantly, unwilling to waste the time it would need to comply, but he got to his feet.

  "I'll send someone in with some tea. Have a chat with Wendy here while you're waiting," he said, nodding to the WPC and leaving the interview room with a sense of relief. He pounded up the stairs to his own office two at a time to work off some of the anger and guilt this sort of case always engendered. Superintendent Jack Longley was standing by the window in his room waiting for him, a face as thunderous as the threatening weather outside.

  "Another one?" he asked. "Serious, is it?"

  "She wasn't raped. She's had a medical, and her clothes have gone to forensic." Thackeray said shortly. "Not that that's much consolation. She's in a state of shock and her mother's going bananas. Father's a long-distance truck driver, We're trying to trace him."

  "Statements?"

  "Not yet. I can't get hold of either of my women DCs and the kid's scared to death at the sight of me," Thackeray said bitterly.

  "Get on to Milford and see if they've got anyone on duty we can borrow," Longley said. "Is the community bobby - what's his name? - Alan Davies on duty?"

  "No, I've asked the duty inspector to call him in, and I've sent for Mower. In the mean-time the scene-of-crime lads are examining the alley-way where it happened and Craig has started to organise a house-to-house at the flats. We'll not get right round tonight, but they're starting with Bronte House. I'll start on the usual suspects here. We did it last time and they all seemed to be in the clear, but you never know. They'll scream blue murder about harassment, of course."

  "Pull all the stops out, Michael," Longley said. "Don't mess about. Four assaults in six weeks is bad news by any standards, and with all this other bother up there we'll have a Toxteth on our hands if we're not careful. I was at a conference about urban tensions last month, all analysis and how to measure the bloody pressure. An unnecessary load of cobblers if you want my opinion. A good copper knows his patch, and if you ask me Wuthering's about ready to blow." As Longley swept out, detective sergeant Kevin Mower stood aside to let him pass, getting an old-fashioned look from the superintendent for his trouble.

  "I thought he was going to tell me to get a short back and sides, guv," Mower said ruefully rubbing a hand over his stubble. "What does he want me to do? Wear a little badge saying "I'm a detective working under-cover" on my nice clean shirt and tie or what?"

  Mower was dressed in jeans and a none-too-clean tee-shirt and with his lengthening dark hair and unshaven, sun-tanned face had taken on a distinctly Mediterranean appearance. He slumped behind his desk, unable to disguise his weariness.

  "You look as if you're about to audition for a part in Il Trovatore," Thackeray said sourly. "So what's all this play-acting come up with? As far as I can see I've got another traumatised child downstairs and not a single clue as to who's terrorising them. So what's the news from the play-group, or where-ever it is you've been sun-bathing?"

  Mower gave a token smile at the joke, knowing that it was not entirely intended to be humorous. He could see the tension in Thackeray's face and knew that it pervaded the whole station, where off-duty officers had appeared as if summoned by magic to help with the inquiry. Even Mower, as a relative newcomer to the town, knew that The Heights was now threatening Bradfield like some unexploded bomb. He wiped tiny beads of sweat from his brow. It looked as if he too had run up the stairs, although he would never admit to being driven by that level of enthusiasm or anxiety.

  "The trouble is, the more frightened they get the harder it is to pin anything down," he said. "Most parents are bringing their kids to the playground and fetching them home again afterwards. If you set up a surveillance of the stairways and back alleys between the flats you could be there for a month before you saw a single child under fifteen out alone," Mower said soberly. "The older ones go round in gangs, the little ones are being taken everywhere."

  "Until they fail to do as they're told, like Josie Renton," Thackeray said. "She went to a friend's flat to watch a video and didn't wait for her mother to fetch her back." The chief inspector sat down wearily at his desk and ran his hands through his springy dark hair.

  "Each one is more violent than the one before," he said. "He had something over her face, his hands round her neck. She's badly bruised. You know where that's leading, don't you?" Mower nodded sombrely. They both knew that there was a pattern to this sort of crime and that with every attack the risk to a child's life grew more acute.

  "It looks as though we're going to have to do this the hard way," Thackeray said. "I've asked the boys doing the house-to-house to ask every man they interview not only where he was today at the relevant time, but at the time of the other attacks as well, and who can vouch for them. If we put it all onto the computer we should be able to get some sort of pattern established. It has to be some-one local, some-one who's on the spot and can seize the opportunity to grab a child when it presents itself. I think it might be better if you packed in the playground now and came back to base. I need you here." Mower shook his head angrily.

  "Not yet, guv," he said. "We knew it would take time. They're just beginning to trust me. Sue, the girl who runs the play-scheme, is into everything up there. She and I are getting on quite well." He gave Thackeray a faint smile, wondering whether to expand on that remark and thinking better of it in response to the chief inspector's chilly expression. "Sooner or later it will begin to pay off. They'll talk to me. I'll hear things."

  "We pay Alan Davies and the other community bobbies to hear things," Thackeray said. "And there's the lads from uniformed we've put in to watch the garages. There's a limit to the time they can be spared. I can't afford to keep you up there any longer."

  "They won't talk to Alan now," Mower said, controlling his anger with difficulty. "I have picked up that much. Since the kids were killed in the car they'll not give any copper the time of day if they can avoid it."

  "If that's the case they're going to find some little girl strangled next time," Thackeray said. He looked at the sergeant appraisingly, sensing the ambition which drove him and wondering whether it might not one day drive him too far.

  "All right," he conceded at last. "I'll give you another week. But I want daily reports on what you pick up. And watch what you're up to with your informants. We want a sex on the rates scandal all over the Gazette like we want a hole in the head." Mower grinned disarmingly at that.

  "In the meantime, you can hang on and interview the usual suspects with me. I've asked the uniformed lads to pick up everyone on the list again."

  "Right guv," Mower said, as detective constable Val Ridley put her head round the door looking distraught.

  "Another?" she asked.

  "She's downstairs with her mother and a WPC, who might have got something coherent out of her by now," Thackeray said. "What we desperately need, Val, is some identification evidence. On what we've got so far you'd be pushed to produce a photofit more life-like than Frankenstein. We desperately need a result on this one before the inevitable happens."

  "They don't see him, sir," DC Ridley said angrily. "He comes up behind them, pulls their clothes or something else over their head, they never get a proper sight of him." She was a competent looking woman, her fair hair cut short, her white shirt and green cotton skirt well pressed, apparently unfazed by the heat, but her grey eyes were bright with emotion. She had been working on the assaults since the beginning and was obviously taking the mounting pressure hard.

  "I thought our under-cover Don Johnson here was coming up with something special," she said, giving Mower a distinctly unfriendly nod. "From what I hear he's more interested in getting into some-one special." She slammed the door behind her, leaving Mower looking embarrassed under Thackeray's icy gaze.

  "One week," Thackeray said dismissively.

  "Sir," Mower said, knowing better than to argue furth
er, but cursing Val Ridley roundly under his breath.

  It was almost eleven before Thackeray and Mower left police headquarters. The sergeant declined a lift, intending to call in a club which he knew would still serve him a drink in spite of the lateness of the hour and disinclined to solicit Thackeray's increasingly ill-tempered company in that particular enterprise. The chief inspector flung his jacket dispiritedly onto the passenger seat of his car, loosened his tie, and slid into the driving seat, opening all the windows to let out the stale humid air although even then the car was only slightly more suffocating than the atmosphere in the station car-park outside. He had spent the last three hours with Mower closetted in interview rooms taking statements from the three known child molesters the uniformed patrols had been able to round up. Another on the files proved to be in Spain on holiday and a fifth turned out to already be a guest of the State, on remand in Manchester charged with interfering with a young boy on a train. As each man with a record of crime against children waxed eloquently indignant across the interview room table, Thackeray's distaste and depression had grown in tandem.

  "Anyone would think you've never laid a finger on a child when you've got a string of convictions as long as my bloody arm," he had shouted at his last suspect in exasperation as the elderly man had eloquently denied for the tenth time that the thought of little girls ever entered his head.

  "Not for years, inspector. Not for years," the long-ago dismissed school-teacher had said vehemently. "I promise you, that's all over and done with years ago."

  "You only came out of Strangeways eighteen months ago," sergeant Mower came back sharply, checking the computer print-out in his file. "Been a good boy since then, have you?"

  They did not believe his protestations of repentence and reformation but when it came to the nitty gritty detail of where he had been the previous night he, like the others, had an alibi which would probably stand up, and like the others, they had reluctantly had to let him go, close up the files and call it a day.

  Thackeray's depression was almost total, and he knew that it was as much due to his own dilemmas as to the inevitably disturbing effect on the whole station of the latest development on the Heights. He knew his mood was dangerous, that it was at times like this that the old craving could return like a form of madness and push him over a precipice which had almost killed him once. He started the car and drove, knowing that the concentration that required would distract him.

  His detectives had not stopped knocking on doors at Bronte House until ten o'clock, but at those doors where they got an answer there had been no help in pinning down the movements of Josie Renton or of a possible attacker. No-one had apparently seen the child on what should have been a couple of minutes' walk from the flat of her friend on the second floor of Bentley House to her own home on the third floor of Bronte. Her route had taken her between the flats, where most of the ground floor windows of Bronte were boarded up, close to the rubbish chutes and huge dustbins where Tracy Miller's body had been found ten years before.

  It had been seven in the evening, the thunder clouds bringing a premature dusk to an area which was gloomy on even the brightest days. There, in a patch of stinking dereliction, Josie had been grabbed from behind, her head bundled in her cardigan, fondled, half strangled and dumped just inside the entrance to the flats where she had been found five minutes later, screaming hysterically, by her own mother who was setting out to fetch her.

  Thackeray had long ago given up any serious attempt to make sense of the problems of good and evil. Religion had failed him when he needed it most. It had provided no answers when his instinct for self-destruction had destroyed in the end not himself but those he loved best. He had survived almost in spite of himself, and buried himself in his job but in no crusading spirit. He looked to do no more than try to protect those who required protection and pursue with apparent implacability those who sought to do them harm, without too much apportioning of blame. He left that to those who still saw the world in black and white. For his part it looked mostly to be painted in shades of grey, only on the worst days, like this, a murkier grey than on others.

  He had found a way of living with the mess he had made of his life and had begun to believe he was invulnerable at work and in what passed for the social life of a man who worked long hours and had few friends. There had been women on occasion, but no serious involvement on his part ever. That side of his life, he had told himself, was over and done with and he had meant it. Until, that is, he had met Laura Ackroyd, who had suddenly caused him a physical ache of desire he thought he was no longer capable of. Laura had erupted into his carefully disciplined life and thrown him into a confusion he was unsure how to deal with.

  He drove slowly out of town with the car windows wide open, creating a welcome draft which ruffled his hair and helped him keep his tired eyes focussed on the road. The storm which had been threatening all day had still not broken, although he could hear an occasional rumble of thunder far away over the western hills. He was not driving in any particular direction, certainly not home, where an empty and unwelcoming flat would have provided no sanctuary in his present mood. Here and there he passed the pools of golden light which spilled from the doors and windows of pubs on too many street corners. It was turning out time and groups of happy revellers pitched through swing doors onto littered pavements, buoyed up temporarily at least by the spirits which swilled about inside them. It was, he knew, too late to get served, even in the Woolpack, where CID officers were more liberally welcomed than the law strictly allowed, and he was glad of that. He was not totally sure that his usual resolve was proof tonight against temptation.

  It was not until a slight movement at the side of one of the long steep residential streets which led up to the Heights caught his eye that he realised that he had been inexorably drawn to the source of much of his present distress.

  He slowed the car and looked again. Several young girls stood on the street corners and there could be little doubt in anybody's mind what they were selling. He pulled into the kerb far enough away for them to be unlikely to approach him and watched. Within minutes another car had pulled up on the corner ahead and one of the girls, in short tight skirt and skimpy top, had evidently agreed a price and jumped enthusiatically into the passenger seat to be driven away.

  He sat for a long time, mesmerised by the brisk trade going on at the other end of the street. Even from this distance it was obvious that some of the girls who went off with men either in cars or on foot, up the hill towards the Heights, were very young indeed. The trade disgusted him and fascinated him at the same time and he wondered quite dispassionatly how much frustration it would take to drive him a little further along the kerb to open the door for one of the slim young whores and seek oblivion of a different sort, however brief.

  A sharp tap on his wind-screen made him jump and he looked up to see a uniformed constable leaning down towards him with a distinctly unfriendly look on his boyish face.

  "Good-evening sir. I wonder if you'd mind telling me what you're doing parked here."

  Thackeray laughed without humour, old guilts flooding his mind.

  "Thinking, constable." he said. "Although I wouldn't expect you to believe that," he said, half under his breath.

  "I wonder if you'd mind getting out of the car, sir. I'd like to see your driving license." Thackeray picked up his jacket and did as he was asked.

  "I can do better than that," he said wearily. "I can show you my warrant card." The flush of confusion on the young constable's face was visible even in the bluish glare of the street lights.

  "I'm sorry, sir, I didn't recognise you," he said stiffly.

  "There's no reason why you should," Thackeray said, taking back his warrant and putting it carefully away. "And you were quite right to question me. Kerb crawling's a menace round here."

  "Sir," the constable said, uncertain now.

  "Where do they take their clients, these kids?" Thackeray asked.

  "
Some of them go up to the flats," the constable said. "There's a lot of dark corners up there. And squatters' places."

  "So I believe," Thackeray said drily. "I'll be on my way then, Watson - it is Watson, isn't it? And no hard feelings?"

  "If you say so, sir," Watson said, but as he watched Thackeray's car accelerate away up the hill there was still a look of profound suspicion in his eyes.

  As Thackeray undressed, tossed the heavy cover off his bed and slid naked under a single crumpled sheet he was no nearer deciding what to do about Laura. He fell into a fitful sleep, interrupted by lurid dreams of scantily clad young girls sobbing inconsolably in each others arms. He woke soaked in sweat, still exhausted but dragged reluctantly back to wakefulness by his alarm to find the morning almost as dark as night and the flicker of reflected lightening dancing fitfully on the ceiling. He lay still for a moment, one hand behind his head, gazing unseeingly at the ceiling before deciding, with foreboding rather than relief, that he must contact Laura again and to hell with the consequences.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The rain came that morning, a Saturday, in torrents, bouncing off the dusty parched earth to make swirling rivers of muddy brown water along every gutter like some overdue monsoon. At Wuthering it gathered in pools on the flat roofs and cascaded through gaping joints in the prefabricated construction, running down already damp walls and dripping through ceilings where what was left of the plaster sagged under its weight.

  Weary mothers bundled children out of bed early and confined them to the rooms which were still weather-proof, rushing with buckets and bowls to catch the drips where the downpour outside became a constant drizzle of dirty water within. In Bronte House, which under this onslaught became as leaky as a sieve, even the squatters, heavy-lidded with drug or drink induced sleep, opened bleary eyes long enough to shuffle their matresses and sleeping bags out of the worst of the wet.