Dying Fall

by Patricia Hall

  "You have led me up the garden and back down again, you pig," Sue said, her dark eyes blazing. "You are a devious, lying, shitty cop. John said you weren't to be trusted."

  "John ?"

  "Never mind," Sue said quickly. "It's you I'm bothered about, you bastard. How dare you do this to me?" Mower held out his hands in a gesture of mock surrender.

  "I was watching out for the kids," he said. "I'd have told you but it's better not, you know? It's so easy to let it slip out. It's better not to tell anyone, however much you trust them."

  "Trust," she said. "You talk about trust? How dare you con me like that, you bastard. You'd better get out of my flat now, straight away. And if you've any sense, you'll keep off the Heights if you know what's good for you. I wouldn't vouch for your safety after this. You nearly got done over the other day. Next time there may not be anyone around to help you."

  She flung the warrant card at him contemptuously and moved over to the tall window where she stood with her back to him, breathing heavily. Mower shrugged, stood up and slipped quickly into his jeans and teeshirt. Cautiously he approached Sue and put a tentative hand on her shoulder. She shrugged him off immediately and turned towards him, and he was shocked to see the fierce dislike in her eyes.

  "We're on the same side," he said.

  "Oh no," she said bitterly. "You can't believe that. You are there to protect the status quo, sergeant. You're not there for the kids, not for the mothers, not for blacks like me, not for the homeless youngsters squatting in that dump of a block of flats. You weren't there for those two boys in the stolen car. I know about the police, remember? I've seen them in New York. I've seen them in South Africa, for God's sake. And don't tell me it's any different here. You Brits are great hypocrites, very good at pretending the world is what it's not. But I know. I've been there."

  "This isn't Africa." Mower responded angrily, guilt and fear of the damage Sue might do to him on the Heights making him doubly edgy. "There's some pervert up there molesting little girls, for Christ's sake. Don't you want him caught."

  "Of course I want him caught," she said, wiping away her tears with an angry gesture. "But if the people on the Heights have any sense they'll catch him for themselves. You bastards can't come up there one day and wipe out a couple of young kids and then persuade us the next day that you're there to protect us. Who do you think you're kidding?"

  Mower thought quickly. She would not be moved by any appeal to her better nature, that was clear. There was a life-time of fear and resentment in Sue's eyes which would be more than proof against any charm offensive he might launch. But if persuasion failed then coercion might just possibly buy him the time he was determined to have.

  "I've got a job to do," he said, "and I need your help for one more day. Then I'm due back at HQ for a big operation. I need to stay at the playground tomorrow and I need you to keep stum."

  "No way," she said, turning away angrily again. "I won't cover for you."

  "We could do it the hard way," he said, his eyes cold now, and his face as hard as hers.

  "Meaning?"

  "Meaning - maybe there's some irregularity in your passport, or your work permit....," he hesitated deliberately, knowing very well that her main reason for being in the country was to study. "You do have a work permit, I take it, as you're working? These immigration problems do take a hell of a lot of time to sort out with the Home Office, though they say Holloway's very comfortable now it's been refurbished...."

  She turned towards him again, striking out wildly, but he took hold of both of her wrists and with difficulty forced her hands to her sides until she relaxed and sank down onto the bed, her shoulders sagging.

  "OK, OK," she said wearily. "One more day. Then get the hell out of my life."

  "I can understand why you're angry," Mower said tentatively, moved in spite of himself by her defeated look.

  "Can you? Can you really? Can you really imagine how sick it makes me to think that I've just been to bed with a cop?" The contempt in Sue's eyes was absolute.

  "I'm sorry," he said, turning away.

  "I'm sorry too," she spat after him. "I'm sorry we had safe sex, because if we hadn't you'd never be sure I hadn't given you AIDs, would you, you bastard? Which would be no more than you deserve."

  "Jesus," Mower said to himself as he closed the door of the flat behind him. Deprived of that bizarre revenge he feared that Sue might well think up some other just as threatening if she put her mind to it. His presence on the Heights, he knew, had always carried some risk. From now on it would be distinctly dangerous. And just who, he wondered, was John.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Laura stood in the middle of her kitchen in a frenzy of indecision. She had come home from work with a bulging carrier bag of groceries which she had earlier hurled almost at random into her supermarket trolley, quite unable to decide what to cook for her supper guest. A jumble of mushrooms, new potatoes, red peppers, onions and aubergines lay on the work-top, next to packets of boneless chicken breasts, tagliatelle verde, egg noodles, pesto and sweet and sour sauce, like some manic internationalist illustration for a cookery book.

  "Help," she moaned, flinging open the door of her freezer and surveying the contents with a frantic eye. Slamming it closed again, she picked up the phone.

  "Vicky?" she said. "I've been trying to get you all afternoon." She barely listened to her friend's perfectly reasonable description of her afternoon at the ante-natal clinic and her equally rational complaint that this was not a good time to talk because she had to get the boys' supper.

  "It's supper I'm ringing you about," Laura said vehemently. "I've invited Michael Thackeray to supper and I haven't a clue what to give him." That piece of unexpected news distracted Vicky instantly from her domestic chores.

  "Hey," she said, surprised. "So how did you achieve that after all this time?"

  "Oh, I ran into him this afternoon - literally," Laura said airily. "We're going to a concert next week..."

  "A concert? What sort of a concert?"

  "Jazz, for goodness sake," Laura said soberly, suddenly brought up against her own impulsive deceit. "I don't know the first bloody thing about jazz. Wasn't David in the jazz club? He'll have to fill me in or I'll look a complete fool."

  "I never got the impression it was your knowledge of jazz which interested Mr. Thackeray," Vicky said drily. "And I doubt if it'll be your cooking, either."

  "Vic," Laura said. "This is serious."

  "I know," Vicky said, meaning it. "Cook him something simple. Policemen are always late. Almost as bad as Crown prosecutors."

  "Chicken," she said. "I bought chicken. In a sauce. And rice. When he gets here."

  "Sounds fine," Vicky said. "Listen, I must go. Daniel and Nathan are yelling for their fish fingers. Call me tomorrow and tell me all? Without fail?"

  That agreed, they hung up and Laura went into her bedroom, straightening the duvet distractedly and wondering when she had last changed the sheets before looking at herself in the tall mirror on the wall. She had changed into her only cotton dress as soon as she had come in from work, and she examined the jade shirt-waister minutely, piling her hair, which hung loose to her shoulders, on top of her head and assessing the effect critically.

  I look like a child with it down, she thought, and a child pretending to be a grown-up with it up. Why couldn't I have been born with conventional looks instead of this outlandish colouring and a baby face. And why, oh why, did I have to be drunk the first time Michael Thackeray came here. He's bound to remember and despise me for it. Those watchful eyes, she knew, missed little and judged much, and she could not yet gauge how ready they were to understand. The evening, she concluded, looked likely to be a complete fiasco.

  Back in the kitchen, with her hair demurely pinned up, she poured herself an abstemious tomato juice, shook in a hefty dose of Worcester sauce, and began to slice onions and mushrooms thinly, her eyes filling with tears as the juices reached them. Outside the open kitch
en window, evening scents rose from the long luxuriant garden, unkempt now as the collective of flat dwellers neglected what had been provided in abundance for a Victorian family. A blackbird sat on the nearby branch of a cherry tree and offered an aria which would have moved a treacherous Pinkerton to relent.

  Over the hills, though, the evening was turning threatening, dark clouds piling up on the western horizon and the sun reduced to a pale pinkish gleam between the towering cumulus. It would be dark unseasonably early and the night would bring thunder again, she thought. It was weather to reflect her tumultuous mood, she thought, still uncertain that her invitation had been wise.

  Neutral ground might have been preferable, she told herself irritably. He was not the sort of man who would look for a one night stand, altogether too remote, too serious, too old, perhaps, for casual sex. And yet - he had accepted easily enough, giving her that slow half-smile which lit up his normally grave features and took years and a certain sadness from around the eyes.

  She finished her cooking and glanced at her watch. It was eight o'clock, the stormy evening already drawing in. She went back into her living room with another tomato juice, tidying up the detritus of days and closing the bedroom door firmly on the neatly smoothed duvet.

  She watched television edgily for a while, getting up every now and again to glance out of the living room window at the street below where large spots of rain were now disturbing the dust and streaking the windscreens of the cars parked on either side of the suburban avenue. There would be nowhere for him to park when he did arrive, she thought anxiously, and then grinned at her reflection in the rain spattered window. You're behaving like a teenage virgin, she muttered, settling herself down again in front of a sit com which on past form might conceivably raise a couple of laughs in the course of half an hour.

  The phone call, when it came, made her jump. He's crying off, she thought at once. Policemen do it all the time. They lead even more disorganised and irregular lives than reporters do. Her mind was so distracted by her anticipated disappointment that it took her long seconds to realise that the voice on the line was, shockingly, not Thackeray's but another entirely. It was a voice she recognised with a horror that sent her shuddering back across the room to crouch on the sofa with the receiver clutched rigidly to her ear. It was the voice she had last heard at the swimming pool as, half drowned, she had gasped for life-saving breath after being pulled from the water. And if the menace it had held then had been terrifying, this was infinitely worse.

  "Can you hear me Miss Ackroyd?" The voice repeated, insistent, demanding response. Whatever sound it was that Laura dragged from the depths of herself it seemed to satisfy him, at the same time confirming what she thought she had heard him say at first and had refused to accept.

  "I am at your grand-mother's house," the caller said again, and this time in the background Laura thought she heard a faint cry - though whether of pain or fear she could not tell and dared not guess. "We told you to stay away from the Heights. Remember?" Again she offered a incoherent response, which the caller appeared to take for agreement.

  "You didn't take any notice. That's a shame." This time there was no mistaking the sound of someone in pain.

  "Stop it," Laura screamed at the receiver. "Leave her alone." The line went dead then, leaving her clutching the receiver in a shaking hand, shivering with a dread which she did not dare define.

  Laura could never remember driving back to the Heights that night. Outside her grandmother's house she found an ambulance and a police-car, blue lights flashing. Running through the open door she pushed past a tall uniformed officer in the narrow hall-way and went into the living room where she discovered Joyce, evidently unbowed if not unbloodied, sitting in a chair and issuing instructions to an ambulance-woman who was examining her solicitously.

  Joyce turned to Laura as she rushed in, and gasped as much in irritation at her own weakness as in pain. One side of her face was bruised and raw, her thin white hair was dishevelled but her eyes were as bright and as combative as ever. Laura was overwhelmed with a fierce emotion which combined relief and anger and admiration in equal parts.

  "You're all right?" she asked, finding it difficult to speak.

  "I'll live," Joyce said. "If only to spite the buggers."

  "We'll take her down to casualty for an X-ray," the ambulance-woman said, getting to her feet. "I don't think anything's broken, but we'd best make sure."

  "I'll come with her," Laura said faintly, wondering if in fact she was not as much in need of medical help as her apparently indestructible grandmother, who declined a stretcher, consented to a wheelchair and preceded the official procession from her house to the waiting ambulance like a queen with her retinue behind her and a distinctly aggressive gleam in her eye.

  By the time Laura returned to her own flat with Joyce in the car the defiant facade had begun to crack. Joyce had been examined for signs of concussion - none - and fractures - none, and had described in detail to PC Alan Davies, whom she treated as an old friend, how her bungalow had been invaded by two men she did not recognise.

  They had smashed open her flimsy front door under cover of the early darkness and rain, and the distracting presence of a couple of youths circling the flats in spectacular fashion in an evidently stolen Sierra Cosworth. If anyone in the row of old people's bungalows had noticed the noise of splintering wood and glass above the squeal of tyres and shouts of encouragement which were echoing round the estate, they had not dared to investigate its cause.

  The intruders, it was soon apparent, had not come to steal. They had burst into Joyce's living room before she could struggle to her feet from her chair by the fire. She had been roughly forced back into her seat and hit about the face, hard and deliberately, when she protested. She had been quiet then, accepting of what she could not change, unwilling to provoke the incipient violence which filled the tiny living-room with menace, conscious of her own frailty, flesh thin over bones which might snap like twigs in a gale if she provoked further assault.

  They had telephoned Laura then, the taller of them using the phone, the smaller, fatter figure, as anonymous as his companion in dark clothes and a black balaclava, hitting her again twice simply to emphasise what was being said and making her cry out in mixed fury and pain. Laura had herself cried out inwardly as she listened to her grandmother's outraged description of what had happened, as unable as Joyce was to comprehend the callous brutality which had been, Laura had no doubt, aimed primarily at her.

  "What's it all about?" Davies had asked Laura in bewilderment as they waited for Joyce to come back from X-ray. "She says they took nowt. I've done my best with that estate but if they've taken to beating up old ladies just for kicks I think I've had it. The women are at their wits end, the kids are out of control, the old folk aren't safe. I can't see where it's all going to end."

  "Did they say why?" Laura had herself whispered on the way home, after Davies had wearily closed his notebook and Joyce had refused to stay in the hospital overnight. But the older woman had shaken her head, exhausted now as the bruises around her eyes swelled up and the light of battle faded and shock took hold. The description of her assailants that she had been able to give PC Davies was sketchy in the extreme - dark jeans, dark jackets, dark gloves and those balaclava masks so comfortably familiar in television films but hideously menacing in reality. White men, not black, she said, judging by the glimpse of flesh and light eyes which was all she had been able to see of their faces; local men, from their accents; ruthless men from their actions.

  "If I'd been twenty years younger I'd not have been able to fend them off," Joyce had said sadly as Laura and an ambulance man half carried her up the three flights of stairs to Laura's flat. "There's always been crime up at Wuthering," she said. "You'd expect it. Folk up there are at the end of their tether in the good times, never mind now. But this? I don't understand this. What is it they're after, love? What do they want?"

  "I don't know," Laura said helple
ssly. "That's the trouble. I simply don't know what it's all about."

  She had put Joyce to bed in her tiny spare bedroom, tucking her up gently under the unfamiliar duvet and watching her fall into an uneasy, drug induced sleep, her bruised face cruelly dark against the white pillows. It was only then that she glanced at her watch and saw with a sense of shock that it was almost eleven and realised that the whole flat was filled with the smell of burning food. Her supper guest, she thought dully, must either have been and gone while she was out, or had not turned up at all. In the urgency of her departure she had forgotten to turn her answer-phone on.

  She glanced at the telephone uncertainly, realising that she did not know where Michael Thackeray lived and disinclined to try to find out. She went into the kitchen and switched off the oven, too disheartened even to open the door to examine the cremated chicken within. Instead she poured herself a large vodka and tonic and took it back into her living room, and slumped in a chair, depressed to the point of despair by the evening's events.

  The raw alcohol kicked at her empty stomach and she felt her cheeks flush and anger begin to push her brain back into gear. Step by step she began to go over what she had done on the Heights over the last two weeks which could have provoked this level of intimidation. Someone, she concluded grimly, must be very frightened indeed of what she knew, or perhaps just what they thought she knew, to go to these lengths.

  But the more she went through a mental roll-call of all the interviews and conversations she had had around the flats the more she became convinced that the nest of vipers she had evidently disturbed had been hidden there long before the current outbreak of unrest. The venom with which she was now being pursued must surely go back to the death of Tracy Miller ten years before. In which case her report to Case Re-opened, now sitting on her commissioning editor's desk in London, was a time bomb which might explode any day. The door-bell interrupted her reverie, but she had so far forgotten how the evening had begun that the voice on the entry-phone took her by surprise.