"Eaves-dropping, Ms. Ackroyd?" Mower said sharply, disconcerted that she should have heard his last remarks.
"It's a public place, sergeant Mower," Laura retorted. "And you seem to be hogging the lift."
"The vultures are gathering already, are they?" Sue Raban said, not moving from her position which secured the lift doors open and unavailable to anyone else. Laura glanced at her without much warmth.
"I should think if a child is missing the sooner the fact is broadcast to anyone who might have seen her the better," she said. "Or have you found her?" She addressed the last question to Mower, noticing his dishevelled appearance and the still oozing cut on his head for the first time as he shook his head.
"You don't seem to be very popular on Wuthering," Laura said. "Who's been having a go at you this time?" Mower glanced at Sue and the boy Carl and grinned faintly, some of his self-confidence seeping back.
"I was resisting arrest," he said with more truth than Laura could guess.
"And I wasn't here to whisk you away to safety this time," Laura said in mock sorrow. "I am sorry." Sue Raban listened to this exchange with growing irritation.
"Are we interested in finding Nicky Tyson or are we just passing the time of day here?" she asked and Carl nodded his agreement.
"We're wasting time," he said, his voice cracking, not entirely broken.
"And you are...?" Laura asked. Carl told her.
"Do you think your mum would talk to the Gazette?" Laura asked, because that was the reason Ted had dispatched her so urgently to the Heights. In his book the only real justification for having female staff at all was for the occasions when a feminine shoulder might prove more enticing for the victim of a tragedy to weep on than a masculine one.
This time, though, Laura did not feel she was intruding when Carl took her home with him, leaving Mower and Sue Raban to go one floor higher in the lift to track down Michael Thackeray. Laura did not particularly want to see Thackeray at that moment. However justified she might feel in her own mind about the call she was about to make, she wondered if Thackeray's level blue gaze might not hold a hint of disapproval. She knew he did not wholly warm to her job, and he would warm even less to the news that Case Re-opened had called her that afternoon and asked her to interview ex-chief inspector Harry Huddleston about the Tracy Miller murder as a matter of urgency.
She did not want to analyze her reluctance to see Thackeray again so soon. She had lain awake half the night furious that her every encounter with him seemed to put her at a disadvantage, and furious with herself for caring. But she did care, of that she had been just as convinced when the grey dawn crept into her bedroom, making her screw up her gritty eyes, as when he had left her the previous night.
Here at Bronte and on the fourth floor walkway safely out of Thackeray's sight, Shirley Tyson welcomed her into the flat enthusiastically enough when Carl explained who she was.
"Can you put her picture on t'front page of the Gazette?" she asked.
"Certainly, if she's not turned up by tomorrow morning," Laura said.
"I gave one snap to the police, her school photo, but I've got another here somewhere," Mrs. Tyson said, rummaging in a drawer in the sideboard. "It's of her and her friend Samantha, but it'll do, won't it? This one's our Nicky. It were only taken last Whitsun. We all went to Bridlington for the day."
Laura looked at the two little girls in shorts and anoraks, grinning cheerfully against a background of windswept beach and choppy grey sea. It seemed inconceivable that one of them might not still be alive. She shuddered, as if a cold draught had cut through the stuffy room.
"I'll show you her room, if you like," Mrs. Tyson said helpfully. "It might give you some ideas for your article." She led Laura out of the living room and across the hallway to a door with a small name-plate inscribed Nicola's Room and decorated with pink and blue flowers. Laura gritted her teeth as Mrs. Tyson opened the door and ushered her into a small bedroom decorated entirely in pink and pale blue, the curtains held back by bows, the duvet and pillows in a matching print, toys and books and drawing and painting equipment neatly stored on open shelves. Carl crowded in behind them and Laura heard him give a muffled sound, half groan, half sob, before he turned away down the hallway, where a door slammed behind him and loud and insistent pop music was turned on.
"He thinks the world of our Nicky," Mrs. Tyson said, a tremor catching at her voice now. "I don't know what we'll do if owt's happened to her." Laura stood by the child's bed, fingering the shiny nylon of the quilt cover, feeling helpless to offer any comfort.
"She enjoys painting," she muttered, glancing at the shelves.
"Yes, she's right good at art, her teacher says," Mrs. Tyson said. She followed Laura's eyes and looked puzzled. She crossed the room and picked up a drawing book and a pencil box.
"I thought she took these to the playground this morning," she said. Laura understood the significance of the remark at once.
"Are you sure?" she said. Mrs. Tyson glanced through the book.
"Look," she said, pointing to the last page that had been used - a pencil drawing of children splashing in a pool, carefully coloured in vivid primary colours. "She said they were going to do some drawing with Sue today. That wasn't there last night."
"You mean she's been home?"
"She must have. She must have been in and put this away. She's right tidy, is Nicky, not like Carl. You can't get into his room for the mess. I tell him and tell him about it but he takes not a blind bit of notice."
"You'd better tell the police straight away," Laura said. "It might be important." The flat did not have a phone so Laura offered to go and look for whichever of the police officers already on the estate was nearest. In the event it was sergeant Mower she found outside the main door, just about to get into his car. She told him what Mrs. Tyson had found and Mower looked at her strangely.
"Thank Christ for that," he said, to her surprise.
"Does it make a difference?" Laura asked.
"Only to me," Mower said. "It means that she did get home safely after I lost sight of her going up the stairs."
Laura hesitated for a moment, not liking the implication of Mower's comment.
"Did you set that child up?" Laura asked, understanding now what had been worrying him.
"Did you use her as a decoy?" Mower glanced away, refusing to meet her eyes.
"Not exactly," he said. "She set off from the playground on her own."
"But you could have stopped her? You could have taken her home and made sure she got there safely?" Laura guessed.
"I suppose," he said.
"You really are a bastard, Kevin, aren't you?" Laura said.
"Comes with the job," he said. "You won't tell the sainted Michael Thackeray, will you....?" His voice faded away uncertainly, his bruised face haggard in the harsh street-lights. Laura ran a hand through her hair tiredly.
"I won't tell the chief inspector anything," she said. Chance would be a fine thing, she thought. "Whatever you did, you evidently got away with, though God help you if you hadn't. It seems to be my role in life at the moment to find you up to your neck in trouble. But tell who-ever needs to know what Shirley Tyson's found, will you? I'm going home to bed."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The convoy of police vehicles followed two bailiffs' vans up the steep hill to Wuthering just after dawn. It was another muggy, heavy morning with dark clouds piled high on the western horizon and a hint of rain in the air. Chief inspector Thackeray sat silently at the wheel of an unmarked police car parked unobtrusively where he could obtain a good view of Bronte House.
Kevin Mower was slumped silently in the passenger seat, a plaster covering the cut on his forehead, and a polo-necked sweater concealing most of his other bruises. He looked haggard, in spite of the fact that for the first time in days he had shaved. He had collected Thackeray from his flat well before six as instructed the previous evening by an unsympathetic superior. Thackeray had sent him to the hospital casua
lty department for a check up with the comment that at his age he ought to know better than to get himself mugged on a dark stairway.
The silence in the car was strained. It was Thackeray's idea to observe the uniformed operation planned for the Heights before going in to headquarters to await developments and Mower, aching and short of sleep, dared not demur. In as far as his brain was working at all, he was trying to deduce just what effect the previous night's debacle would have on his career. Today, he thought sourly, he needed Brownie points as he had never needed them before.
Unusually it had been a peaceful night on the Heights. The joyriders had not emerged, no doubt deterred by the heavy police presence earlier in the evening. They had dashed the expectations of the excited knots of teenagers who had waited on the street corners until well after midnight, ignoring the imprecations of Old Testament ferocity from angry residents above.
The young people had drifted home gradually, leaving a litter of lager cans to roll tinnily in the gutters as the wind rose, driving the roaming dogs to distraction. After they had gone, a herbal scent wafted in stairwells and lifts and along the walkways, an overlay to the more usual sour smell of dirt and damp decay.
Within the grey concrete walls of Bronte itself there had been the usual thud of heavy bass music, giggling and scuffling, and the occasional muffled squeal which could havebeen provoked by fear or laughter. Few of the legitimate residents would ever venture beyond their front doors after dark. By dawn, though, the flats lay silent, like some huge exhausted animal, hardly breathing in the humid air.
Thackeray glanced at his watch as he caught a glimpse of the first police vehicle in his mirror.
"They're here," he said. "On time."
Mower pulled himself upright in his seat, wincing as his bruised muscles protested. Thackeray gave him an unfriendly look.
"Are you quite sure you can't identify any of your so-called vigilantes, now you've slept on it?" he asked, returning to his previous night's somewhat bad-tempered interrogation of his sergeant. Mower shrugged and decided the experiment was not worth the candle as pain shot from his neck across his shoulders.
"It was too dark and they had their faces well hidden, guv," he said. "I'll talk to Carl Tyson again if you like, but in the circumstances I didn't think it was a good idea to lean on him too hard."
"It's not going to be a good idea to lean on Carl at all until we find his sister," Thackeray said. "The Gazette would take us apart."
The police convoy had pulled up quietly in a side-street well away from the flats. Only the first two police vans moved closer, following two car-loads of civilian bailiffs. The vans contained uniformed officers who would support the bailiffs and organise the transport of the squatters down to the central police station for questioning. Half a dozen more police vans, with heavy mesh guards across their windows, waited out of sight. Only if there was violent resistance would the heavy mob move in with shields and batons to impose order.
The devoutness with which the police wished the riot squad to remain firmly behind their reinforced vehicle doors diminished sharply down the ranks. The chief constable might prefer a peaceful outcome to the operation, but the young men in their heavy protective gear looked forward to making their early morning overtime worthwhile by seeing some action. In the meantime, they sat where they were, high and ribald on adrenalin and hot sweet tea, sweating already in their thick
blue overalls and itching for the order to move.
At six o'clock precisely a car drew up alongside the vehicles parked directly outside the flats and a man in a grey suit got out and went to speak to the uniformed inspector who was waiting with the bailiffs at the door of Bronte.
"Good morning," he said cheerfully, shaking hands with the senior bailiff and nodding to the inspector. "Ken Lawson, Bradfield Housing services. I've got all the paperwork here, so we can go whenever you're ready." He took a bunch of keys from his pocket and opened the main door and went in, followed closely by the bailiffs.
"We'll be here if you need us," the inspector said, and deployed his men close to the door and at the back of the block and close to the garages, in case any residents decided to make an unorthodox exit via the not very securely boarded up windows at the rear. The inspector called headquarters on his personal radio.
"Stand by," he said. "They're just going in."
“Right," Thackeray said, starting his car and pulling away from the kerb. "We'd better make sure the reception committee is ready down at the nick."
"Why the hell didn't we know about it," Ted Grant asked his hastily convened news conference for the fourth time at eight o'clock that morning. "We should have had pictures at the very least." He scowled at his picture editor, Larry Savage, who sat opposite him wreathed in smoke, lighting one cigarette from the butt of another with hands that were not quite steady, although whether that was a result of the previous night's excesses or the early hour Laura could only guess.
Grant had phoned all his senior staff at seven o'clock that morning when news of the evictions on the Heights had reached him secondhand from the young reporter on the early shift. Laura bent her head over the elaborate doodle on the notebook in front of her. As features editor, a failure on the news front was not strictly her responsibility, but in one of these moods, Grant would not be deterred by that, hitting out at all directions like some small child in a tantrum.
And in this particular matter she was far more culpable that Grant could possibly know. It was not until the editor's early morning reveille had roused her from an uneasy sleep that she recalled that she already knew not only that the evictions were planned but that they were planned for this morning. Michael Thackeray had as good as told her so, and it had completely slipped her mind.
"I'll get onto the press office at county," the news editor, Steve Hardcastle said placatingly, surprised himself that Grant's own network of contacts had not come up with the merest whisper of the dawn raid which the police had concluded by seven a.m. "I'd guess it was a last minute thing, with this kid missing. They must be planning to take that place apart now they've got the squatters out."
"Right, so we make that connection in the intro, then run two parallel stories, one about the eviction, one on the hunt for little Nicky. Make the kid the splash. Laura's got us a nice pic. I want that run big on the front page. Right? Who's on today?" Laura smiled faintly, unaccustomed to even this faint praise, and aware that she could find herself back in the firing line as abruptly as anyone else.
Steve ran through his summer holiday depleted list of reporters and Laura knew, her heart sinking, that she was going to get dragged away from the office to supplement the news staff again even before Ted Grant's unfriendly blue gaze swivelled her way.
"You get back up to the Heights, Laura," he said. "See if you can get in to talk to Mrs. Tyson again. If the kid went home before she went missing check that out with the police too, Steve, we've had no confirmation yet. Any road, if she did go home, someone may have seen her going out again. Your grandmother's got plenty of contacts, hasn't she, Laura? See what she's heard on the grapevine. You know what the old biddies in these places are like. All gossip over cups of tea. Plug into it, will you."
"My grandmother's staying with me at the moment," Laura said carefully, knowing just how vitriolic Joyce's response to being called an old biddy would be. Laura had said nothing in the office the previous day about the assault and somehow the news seemed to have slipped through the net which the Gazette normally cast around the emergency services each morning. She wondered if she had Thackeray to thank that. And not for the first time she wondered about her own commitment to the job, which seemed to evaporate whenever a story came too close to home. The thought of anyone writing about Joyce's ordeal filled her with revulsion.
"That'll clip your wings a bit, won't it, having granny living in?" asked the chief sub, Frank Powers, with a smile that bordered on a leer. Laura had repulsed Frank's advances years ago and had never been forgiven. She refus
ed to rise this morning and contented herself with a small, private smile. She knew how little Joyce's presence would have inhibited her two nights ago if the moment she had regretted ever since could be relived.
The day's assignments allocated and Ted to some extent mollified now that firm plans to catch up on the morning's events had been made, Laura walked slowly back across the office to her
desk. It looked like being a hectic day. She picked up her phone and called Vicky Mendelson.
"I don't think I'm going to be able to find time to take the boys swimming this afternoon," she said. "Tell them I'm sorry and I'll make it up to them next time I see them, will you. All hell's broken loose here. There's a child missing on the Heights, and the police have evicted all the squatters....you name it. Perhaps tomorrow? It's supposed to be my day off."
Vicky acquiesced in that. Laura could almost feel her flinch at the news of a missing child and could imagine her instinctively anxious glance at her own boys whom she could hear chattering, probably around the breakfast table, in the background. But Vicky did not cut the call short.
"I thought you'd ring me yesterday. I was dying to know what happened to your dinner date," she said.
"Ah," Laura said softly. "That's a long and bruising story, and this is not the moment."
"Not a culinary triumph, then?" Vicky persisted. "Or any other sort?"
"No sort of triumph," Laura said, as Vicky's cheerful curiosity roused emotions she had spent more than twentyfour hours carefully burying. "I can't talk now, Vic," she said. "I'll ring you this evening, I promise."
"I thought you had real prospects there," Vicky said. "I'm sorry."
"Blast," Laura said loudly as she hung up, attracting a surprised look from Steve Hardcastle who was passing her desk, stripped down to shirt-sleeves and braces ready for the day's action.
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