At the adventure playground the long hot day had passed slowly. Sue Raban had found it hard to even bring herself to speak to Mower. Mower had responded with a flippancy which had infuriated her further and the children, made fractious anyway by the increasingly sticky heat as the day wore on, became cheeky and impossible to please.
By four o'clock Mower found himself by the gate watching as anxious mothers began to straggle from the flats to take children home. He recognised Linda Smith coming in and raised a hand in greeting. He had not seen her since the fire at the Sullivan's flat.
"Steve's in the pool," he said. "They got so hot and dusty that Sue made them strip off and cool down as soon as the small children had gone home."
"I wouldn't mind joining him," Linda said, running a hand through damp straggly hair. "This isn't the weather to be pregnant."
"Are you back in Bronte now?" he asked.
"Aye, Steve wanted to get back to his mates so we moved back up there yesterday. They've found Jackie a flat over at Sutton Park for her and little Chrissie. She won't be coming back." She put a hand on the small of her back as if to relieve a pain and gazed up at the blank facade of Bronte with an expression of bewilderment.
"We were both desperate to get out, Jackie and me," she said. "But for it to be that way! The world's gone bloody mad."
"Did you get your patrol going last night?" Mower asked. The meeting earlier in the week had, at the women's insistence, drawn up a rota of somewhat less than enthusiastic men who would take turns to walk around the flats between tea-time and nightfall to watch out for the attacker of Josie Renton.
"Bloody men," she said. "They won't get off their backsides. They come in from work, have their tea and fall asleep in front o't'telly until it's time to go to t'pub, and they won't be shifted. We'll have to do it ourselves if it's going to be done at all. The women's group is meeting again tomorrow to talk about it again, tell Sue."
"I'll pass it on," Mower promised.
"Usual time, usual place," Linda said. With a bedraggled son in attendance, she made her way back towards the flats at a slow and weary waddle, like an overweight mother duck towing a gawky adolescent duckling in her wake. Back in the office, Mower wrote Linda's message down for Sue and stuck it on the notice-board. Relations had sunk into such a wasteland that he preferred not to distract her from her conversation on the other side of the playground. In any case his attention had been caught by something else.
Curiously he watched from the window as a small girl of about eight, dressed in brightly patterned shorts and a white teeshirt, slipped cautiously out from the side of the hut and scuttled towards the playground entrance. Standing on tiptoe, she unlatched the wire mesh gate and slid out, closing it carefully behind her.
Mower hesitated for no more than a second. Grabbing his jacket from its hook behind the door, he followed with a growing sense of excitement. But he was not unobserved. From the other side of the playground Sue Raban saw him go and moved quickly to the gate herself. From there she watched grim-faced as Mower quietly pursued the unaccompanied child, a careful distance behind, across the dusty grass towards Bronte.
"You're pushing your luck, my lad," Sue said to herself with some satisfaction. "And perhaps it's about to run out."
Nicky Tyson was not reported missing by her mother until eight o'clock that evening. In the circumstances, the police were not disposed to take the telephone call as lightly as they would normally have done if a school-child had been reported as coming home late. On the Heights these days they took no chances, and by nine chief inspector Michael Thackeray and DC Val Ridley were sitting in Mrs. Tyson's cramped living room on the fourth floor of Bronte House trying to extract information without fuelling her incipient hysteria.
"I've been meeting her every day," Shirley Tyson said for the fourth or fifth time. Thackeray had lost count but did not complain. He recognised and to some extent shared the deep sense of guilt which was driving Mrs. Tyson.
"But today I knew I had to work late so I told her to walk home with her friend Samantha and then run like hell up the stairs and stay inside with the door locked till I got in."
"But she wasn't here when you got back?" DC Ridley asked. "And what time was that, exactly."
"About half seven," Shirley Tyson said. "I went straight over to Samantha's. She lives in Bentley, top floor, but they'd not seen her, and Sam's mum said she'd taken Sam off from t'playground at lunch-time because she had to go to the dentist or summat."
"You hadn't made a definite arrangement, then, for the girls to go home together?"
"No, nothing definite. I didn't need to, did I? It's what they did every day until...." She hesitated and her face crumpled into an expression of near panic.
"Until the attack on Josie Renton," Val Ridley suggested gently, and the woman nodded dumbly, screwing the paper tissue she held in her hands into a tight ball. She was a slim woman in her mid-thirties, carefully though not expensively turned out and, Val guessed, still dressed for work, in a short, straight skirt and a formal blouse, her hair shining, her make-up carefully applied, although the mascara was beginning to run now where tears had already been shed. She was not now, Val thought, nor ever likely to be, a mother who neglected her children or took an unexplained absence casually. If Shirley Tyson said that Nicky's behaviour was out-of-character, then that was likely to be the simple truth.
"I thought it'd be all right, two on'em together," Shirley said desperately.
"I'm sure she would have been quite safe if they'd been together," Val Ridley said quietly. "Now just let me check what she was wearing, and then if you can find me a photograph?" Shirley Tyson stood up with some difficulty, evidently uncertain that her legs would support her, smoothed her skirt with an almost automatic gesture, and went into her bedroom. She returned quickly with a school photograph of Nicky, a rather plain, solemn little girl, blonde haired and blue eyed, in a white uniform blouse and red sweater, staring at the camera.
Thackeray, who had been listening to the two women impassively, took the photograph off her and gazed down at it for a moment with a frozen expression before hauling himself mentally back to the neatly if sparsely living room. He had come to Bronte personally when he had been called back to headquarters instead of delegating the interview to a more junior officer because of a deep conviction, which knotted his stomach up with dread, that the missing child was the murder victim he and Jack Longley had been expecting.
"Is there a Mr. Tyson?" he asked at last.
"There is if you look for him in Portsmouth," she said disparagingly. "He walked out six years ago and I've heard nowt from him since."
"Is Nicky's the only one?" Val Ridley asked.
"My lad, Carl, he's out with some of the men searching," Shirley Tyson said. "He's fourteen."
"There's no need for them to bother now, Mrs. Tyson," Thackeray said. "I've got men searching all round the flats, the stairs and walkways, the recreation field - even the adventure playground. We'll do as much as we can tonight before it gets dark - which won't be long now." He glanced out of the window where a murky dusk was already closing in and the street lights were beginning to flicker, each with a misty halo in the damp air.
"In the morning, if she hasn't turned up, we'll do a complete search of the flats, house-to-house inquiries. Very often in these cases children turn up unharmed, you know. Perhaps she lost her key, or got anxious because she hadn't done exactly as you'd told her and is too frightened to come home." To Thackeray himself the reassuring words sounded hollow and he hoped that for Shirley Tyson they carried at least a little conviction.
"Do you have anyone who can sit with you?" Val Ridley asked.
"Our Carl'll be back directly," Mrs. Tyson said.
"I'll get a police-woman to come up," Val Ridley promised as they left. At the head of the stairs Thackeray hesitated for a moment.
"One thing's for sure," he said. "The big effort in the morning won't be wasted, will it? If we needed any further excuse to
search this rabbit warren we've got it now." He glanced over the balcony at the road and grassy areas below where uniformed officers were moving away from the immediate area of the flats to search further afield.
"Let's go up to the top and see if the elusive John Stansfield is at home, shall we? According to our community bobby he was spotted driving a very smart car this morning with a registration number that doesn't exist, rather than the old banger he claims he owns. He's not been seen since."
Sergeant Kevin Mower drove up to the Heights at a speed likely to incur the wrath of any traffic policeman he encountered, a fierce anxiety gnawing at him. He pulled to a tyre-squealing halt outside Bronte, switched off his lights and looked around cautiously. In the distance, on the waste ground by the adventure playground, he could see uniformed officers conducting a search, already needing to use powerful torches to cast flickering pools of light into the dense undergrowth.
Twenty minutes earlier, he had put a ready-prepared meal into the micro-wave and gone for a quick shower, anticipating a relaxing evening at his local. He had emerged again cursing, with a towel wrapped around his waist, to answer the phone which had been barely audible through the rushing water. Thackeray had been brief and curt. A child was missing and he was to meet him at Bronte House at once.
Mower locked his car carefully and walked directly across the grass to the main door of Bronte. There was no sign of a police presence here, although the door was unlatched and swung open to his touch. The lift was not in evidence so he began to walk up the ill-lit stairs.
They were waiting for him on the second floor landing. For a fatal second Mower did not perceive the threat and made to pass the group of half-a-dozen burly men before he realised that this was not what they had in mind at all. In the confined space and with his mind already engaged with Thackeray and the self-justification he might have to indulge in to explain how a child had vanished in spite of his regular surveillance of the area, his street sense had temporarily deserted him. It took a swift kick from a heavy boot to make his mistake very clear and by then it was too late. The blow took his legs from under him while a well-aimed fist in the stomach doubled him up, before he could even cry out for help.
There were too many of them crowded onto the narrow landing to make resistance feasible even if Mower had been able to do more than gasp for air. Far from gentle hands hauled him upright again and held him with his face against the rough concrete of the wall with one arm pinioned behind his back. It was a position in which he had held a few suspects in his time and he knew that if he struggled it could get very painful indeed. Another blow across the back of the neck jerked his forehead against the concrete and he felt blood begin to trickle down his face and a tiny worm of fear begin to burrow into his guts.
"Now tell us where that little lass is, O'Donnell, you effing pervert," a voice demanded, distorted with raw emotion. "You're crazy," Mower said hoarsely. "I'm a police officer..."
Scornful laughter greeted that, emphasised by another couple of heavy blows to the head and back. Taking the occasional thumping, Mower reckoned, was all part of the job, an inevitable consequence of living almost as close to the edge as many of those whose activities he was paid to deter. But to get thumped twice in a week was careless, he thought, and to get thumped in a situation where he was alone and heavily outnumbered and at least one of his assailants was using force with murderous determination, was positively unhealthy. The tiny worm of fear grew larger and developed sharp little teeth.
"You were seen following that little lass," another voice broke in, cold and confident this time. "Now tell us where she is, pretty boy, or they'll be pushed to stick you together again when they pick up the pieces."
"You come up here and work with our kids all summer, just to get your dirty hands on them in back alleys. You should be bloody castrated," another voice added for good measure.
"Where's our Nicky, you bastard," a much lighter, younger voice with an edge of hysteria to it added.
"You tell 'im, Carl," some-one shouted approvingly.
"I'm a bloody copper, you idiots," Mower yelled in desperation, trying to look round in spite of the vicious twist to his arm the attempt provoked. But the blood from his head-wound was running into his eyes now and he could see very little in front or behind, though he could feel the heat and smell the sweat of the bodies crushing him against the rough concrete of the stairwell. Where the hell was a policeman when, you needed one, he thought, beginning to panic as the increasing vulnerability of his position grew on him.
"Where's Nicky?" the youngest of the voices repeated more shrilly and Mower guessed that the sharp kick on his ankle came from the same source.
"I don't know where Nicky is," Mower said desperately. "That's what I'm here to find out." He never knew whether he would ever have convinced them because the noise of the lift clanking into action above them silenced the general hubbub at that point.
"Teck 'im up onto t'walkway," one of the voices said urgently and to Mower's horror several hands began to push and shove him in the direction of the door leading out into the open air. Once out there, he thought, it would take no more than a moment to hurl him over the edge onto the concrete almost forty feet below, even if only one or two of the men seriously wanted to fulfil their threat to kill him.
With the upward pressure on his arm released he wasted no time and by a combination of long practice and good fortune dodged momentarily beyond the reach of his captors just as the lift door opened and threw a pool of brighter light onto the landing. Sue Raban stood in the lift doorway surveying the crowd with a look of some satisfaction on her face as a couple of the men, evidently determined that Mower should not escape, pressed close to where he stood, while he backed defensively against the concrete wall, not sure whether to be relieved or even more alarmed at the sight of Sue.
"Having fun, sergeant?" she asked, her dark eyes full of dislike. Mower took a handkerchief from his pocket and held it to his forehead, where the jagged gash was oozing blood.
"For Christ's sake, tell them who I am," he said, his voice hoarse. If she wanted him to beg, then in this situation he would beg, he thought. She let him sweat for a minute and then shrugged slightly.
"If you look in the back pocket of his jeans you'll probably find his warrant card," she said contemptuously at last and watched as one of the men took hold of an unresisting Mower and unceremoniously emptied his pockets. He held up the warrant card disbelievingly.
"So what the 'ell have you bin doing at the effing playground?" the vigilante's apparent leader came back, his voice still full of suspicion. "You've been there weeks."
"Watching after your kids," Mower said bitterly, addressing the burly man who had spoken but also acutely conscious of a slimmer, taller figure, wearing a dark shirt with some sort of logo on the breast pocket, on the edge of the group with his face was half hidden by a scarf. He was sure that he was the author of the most vicious blows, the ones which had been intended to hurt.
"Well you've not been much cop at it," the burly man said, spitting derisively in Mower's direction. "We'd have done better oursen if we'd got ourselves bloody sorted." I'll recognise you again, you bastard, Mower thought angrily. And I'll have you.
"You'd all have done better, if you'd listened to your wives," Sue said sweetly.
"So what if he is a copper," another voice broke in. "Who says coppers can't be perverts an' all? They get up to every other bloody thing."
"He were seen following our Nicky," Carl Tyson said, a tall, skinny youth, in jeans and white tee-shirt, his fists still clenched and his face blotchy and twitching with suppressed hysteria. "So what's the difference if he's an effing police sergeant?" There was a murmur of approval at that, but it was less convinced now.
"His boss is upstairs, I've just seen him on the top floor," Sue said placatingly. "You come with us, Carl, and we'll take sergeant Mower to him." She flashed a look of sheer malice at Mower, who also took on board that the tall member of the gro
up was slipping away down the stairs.
"Seriously," Sue said, addressing herself to the now uncertain vigilantes. "Sergeant Mower may be a lying bastard but I don't think he's been laying fingers on little girls. Have you, Kevin?"
Mower shook his head wearily, leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes for a moment. That the last extremely unpleasant five minutes were down to Sue Raban he had no doubt. And her revenge would be all the sweeter for knowing that he would never accuse her of it, because to do so would be to admit that she had good cause. And that was one aspect of his brief stay on the Heights that he did not want Michael Thackeray to uncover.
Silently the rest of the men drifted away, muttering their discontent, leaving Sue propping open the lift doors and Carl Tyson, his face still flushed with a mixture of excitement and fear, alone with Mower. Carl hopped impatiently from one foot to the other, waiting for one or other of the adults to make a move.
Mower wiped most of the blood off his face and gave Sue a thin-lipped smile of defeat before turning to Carl. The boy's state of high emotion he could forgive, but he knew there had been a sadist in the group of angry men whom he was very anxious to meet again on more equal terms.
"Let's see if we can find out who's really got your Nicky, shall we?" he said to the boy. "It's true I followed her back to the flats. Unfortunately, the door slammed shut behind her and I lost sight of her before I could get it unlocked again. I'd no reason to think she wasn't safe enough then, once she was inside."
"You should have known better," Laura Ackroyd said, making all three of them jump. She had come up the stairs quietly behind them, dispatched back to the flats by an almost apoplectic Ted Grant who had been tipped off about a child's disappearance at Wuthering by a source he regarded as highly reliable on police matters.
Dying Fall Page 17
