"I had a feeling about Hurst," DC Ridley said. "He didn't smell right, literally or any other way."
"Did you send someone to pick him up?" Thackeray asked and Mower nodded.
"He's downstairs in an interview room, waiting to help us with our inquiries."
"Right, well, let him stew there for a bit while I talk to the housing department."
And that turned out to be another break. Ken Lawson, the housing manager, who had supervised the evictions, was more than willing to discuss his employee Hurst when Thackeray suggested that he had been engaged in a little free enterprise with the council's property. The words almost tumbled out, leaving Thackeray to wonder why, if the suspicion had been lurking in Lawson's mind for years, as he said it had, he had done nothing to catch Hurst out in his dealings.
"That block's been nothing but trouble for years," Lawson said. "And I've always suspected Hurst was part of the problem. But it's difficult to prove unless you get a specific complaint, and of course the squatters are the last people who'd complain about what he was doing. They're getting dirt cheap accommodation and a blind eye turned to whatever else they get up to, aren't they?"
"We've still got some of the squatters here," Thackeray said. "We'll get details of just what they have been paying Hurst."
"Great," Lawson said enthusiastically. "I'll be able to sack him and that'll save us paying him redundancy when the flats come down."
"There's one other thing that's been puzzling us," Thackeray said. "There's a flat on the top floor that used to be occupied by a Bill Stansfield, an elderly man who apparently died about five years ago. The place is now occupied by some-one who claims to be his son, John, but there seems to be some doubt about that."
Lawson spent a moment or two evidently tapping at his computer keyboard. "It's still in the name of William Spenser Stansfield," he said. "D'you think Hurst has put a mate of his in there?"
"Well, it's certainly worth asking him," Thackeray said. "Though I suppose if the rent has been paid it's not a significant fraud." He paused for a moment.
"Do you have a description of this Stansfield?" Lawson asked at length. Thackeray described the young man with the Alsatian dog he had met briefly on the top walkway at Bronte House. It was a sketchy enough description but Lawson seemed excited by it.
"I bumped into someone I knew this morning up on the top floor, a lad by the name of Sissons, John Sissons. Fits your description. Looked a bit shifty when he saw me. Said he'd spent the night with a lady friend up there and scuttled off with his sports bag as fast as he decently could when I told him what was going on."
"And where does John Sissons live, do you know?" Thackeray asked.
"No, I don't," Lawson said. "But I can easily find out. You see he works here in the housing department. He's one of my employees." He paused again and again the chatter of a computer terminal was clearly audible. "Though he's on leave at the moment," he came back eventually. "On leave for the whole of this week."
"And according to our community bobby he's riding around in a very flash car with a very dodgy number plate," Kevin Mower, who had been listening to the conversation on a second extension,
said quietly. Thackeray nodded and made a note of the address Lawson gave him. He passed the note to Mower as he hung up.
"Let's have him in for a chat too," he said. "King John they seem to call him and I think a bit of illicit property letting is just the bargain basement for him and Hurst. I think there's a hell of a lot more to it than that."
When Mower and Val Ridley had gone about their various tasks, Thackeray picked up the phone again reluctantly and dialled the Gazette. Laura answered brusquely, busy at her computer with a deadline to meet. She was startled to hear Thackeray's voice and annoyed that her heart seemed to jump when she recognised it. Like a bloody teenager, she thought.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm frantic..." He could hear the tension in her voice.
"I need to ask you something," he said. "I didn't want to do it on the phone. I thought perhaps a quick drink at lunch-time."
"No chance," she said. "Not today. I'm sorry. We're running around in circles to cover your dawn raid at Wuthering."
"So it'll have to be on the phone then," he said flatly. "You remember I mentioned the evictions the other night? That they'd be this morning?"
"Mmm," Laura said cautiously.
"Did you mention it to anyone else? Anyone at all?" There was a long silence at the other end and for a moment Thackeray thought the line had gone dead. When she finally answered, her voice seemed to come from a great distance.
"Are you trying to eliminate me from your inquiries, chief inspector?" she asked at last. "Or just covering your back?"
"Something like that," he said quietly. "I need to know, Laura. I'm sorry."
"Then no, I didn't tell anyone. Not even the paper, as it happens. If I had, we'd have been there, wouldn't we, instead of trying to catch up on the story hours later."
"Good," he said. The silence lengthened again until Laura ended it by bidding him goodbye and hanging up. With an irritated toss of her head she turned back to her computer screen, while at his end, Thackeray slammed the silent phone down with a quiet curse. You either went with the job and all its impossible demands, he thought, or you kicked against it and eventually found yourself flat on your face. Either way it was always the innocent who came off worst. He did not think he could risk taking hostages to fortune again. Laura deserved better than that.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Wuthering exploded that night. The trouble started with chief inspector Thackeray's apparently minor decision to obtain a search warrant for the flat occupied by John Stansfield/Sissons, which the uniformed searchers had found empty and securely locked when they had knocked at the door earlier. Inquiries at the home address the town hall had provided for Sissons had also proved fruitless. The address was that of a semi-derelict house in a suburban street where, according to the neighbours, no-one had lived for years.
Thackeray was increasingly convinced that Sissons was at the heart of the web of intrigue at Bronte, as much because of the lack of evidence of his involvement than because of any surfeit
of clues. When he and Mower eventually interviewed Jerry Hurst he made little attempt to deny what the police now had ample evidence to prove: that he had been making hundreds of pounds a
week out of the squatters in rent, even more from an informal "tax" he imposed on the young prostitutes who used the block and its environs to entertain clients.
"Effing scroungers, the lot of 'em," he declared in justification. "I have to work for my brass. Why should kids like that get away with it? Slags, dossers, druggies. What's it matter what I charge 'em? Who the fuck cares?" And when it came to the point, Thackeray thought bleakly, he was probably right. If anyone had cared much about the rootless, jobless, aimless children Hurst had battened onto like a blood-sucking insect, they would not have been washed up on the decaying shore of Wuthering in the first place, human flotsam that came and went on a tide of its own. But when Thackeray asked Hurst about Sissons, the fat slab of a face closed up and he shook his head.
"He asked me if he could use the flat as a favour," he said. "Said he worked for t'council and was short of a place to stay. Paid rent to t'council, not to me. There didn't seem no harm in it. Apart from that I don't know owt about him. He comes and he goes, keeps himself to himself, no trouble, no trouble at all. Of course he's not old Bill's son. He never said he were, to me, any road. But I guess he let t'council think he were."
And push as Thackeray and Mower might, that was all they could prise out of him about the top floor tenant. In the end they charged him with the relatively minor offences he had already admitted and let him go. There was little other option.
Nor were Mower's interviews with the remaining squatters to prove any more informative. They had as little information about John Sissons, whom most of them knew as Stansfield, in spite of
Hurst's claims to the c
ontrary, as they had about drugs or petrol bombs or assaults on children or any of the other criminal activities which the police now knew had been going on inside Bronte and probably in the other blocks of flats as well.
They knew John, yes, of course, they said. A good laugh, John was, and generous with his money if they happened on him in the pub, a king in fact, but apart from the fact that he lived at Bronte, his existence there appeared to be a blank sheet, with only the merest flicker of anxiety here or the inadvertent clenching of a fist there to suggest to Mower that almost all of the youngsters he interviewed were lying through their teeth. Whatever the police could say to scare them was clearly not nearly as effective as some-one else had been.
"He's done a runner, guv," Mower concluded as the frustrating afternoon wore on, the house-to-house search for Nicky Tyson having proved as unrewarding today as it had the previous night. "He's obviously scarpered. We've got to look at the flat. The kid could be in there, for all we know."
"Right," Thackeray said. "Get a warrant and persuade the duty inspector to give us some back-up. It looks like a sledge hammer job."
And so it proved when they arrived on the top floor of Bronte to find the flat as unresponsive to their knocking as it had been for days. With the front door hanging off its hinges, the two detectives stood in the middle of the living room and looked around in some surprise. Behind the council's cheap wooden door, Sissons, who-ever he was, had created a very comfortable haven for himself. Pale fitted carpets covered the floors, the modern furnishings and fittings were tastefully
chosen and elegantly arranged, the hi-fi was state of the art, the television and video system extravagant, the tiny kitchen equipped with every convenience, from a microwave to a food
processor, that a single man could possibly require.
"Well, he didn't buy this lot on a housing official's pay, guv," Mower said, not disguising the hint of envy in his voice. "That sound system must have set him back a couple of grand."
"If he paid for it," Thackeray said. "Take the serial numbers of anything that could be identified and check them out. Then take the place apart. I want to know a lot more about Mr.Sissons before the day's over. I'm going to see Alan Davies down below, to see what he's picked up."
Thackeray stopped for a moment on the walkway and looked down at the estate. The search for Nicky Tyson had moved on from Bronte and the other blocks back to the streets and open spaces beyond for a second time. Further afield he knew that the river banks, the canal towpaths, wasteland and derelict buildings for miles around were being combed.
From his vantage point he could see a line of uniformed officers working their way systematically again through the sun-browned grass and scrub beyond the adventure playground and the community centre, raising clouds of dust as they went.
There was an unusual number of people on the walkways and he knew that the violent assault on Stansfield's front door had attracted attention, not all of it friendly. A couple of black youths on the corresponding top walkway of Priestley House gavehim a V sign and ran off, laughing and scuffling wildly, towards the lift.
Thackeray took off his jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves. It was intensely, stickily hot and he was filled with a deep sense of foreboding. He did not think that his detectives would find Nicky Tyson's body in the immaculate flat they had just broken into and were now systematically taking
apart. But neither did he now hold out any hope to anyone, except with perhaps deceitful kindness to Mrs. Tyson, that the girl would be found alive.
Too much time had gone by now for it to be a childish disappearing act, too many appeals had been made, too many obvious places where she might have had an accident had been searched, too many other children had already been attacked. Time had run out for Nicky, he was sure. Soon he would have to face what he had feared and had not seen for years, the murdered and probably violated body of a child. The prospect filled him with dread.
Slowly he made his way down the dirty, graffiti scrawled staircase. It might have been his imagination, he thought, but he was sure that the number of messages inviting the police to
indulge in diverse obscenely self-destructive practices had burgeoned in a day or so. So too had the increasingly familiar logo, a J with a crude crown superimposed that he now realised must be the signature of the so-called King John. Whoever he was, and whatever his power, it was evidently pervasive.
On the ground floor the lift seemed to have expired totally, standing with its doors yawning open, unresponsive to a couple of children who were franticly stabbing the buttons. Barely more than eight years old, he guessed, they swore viciously at him as he passed.
The intensity of dislike his presence provoked alarmed him, although after the assault on Mower the previous night it did not surprise him. Bronte House, he thought grimly, was no longer a safe place for a police officer to be alone, even one as confident of his own physical capability as he was.
He went outside, thankful to breath fresh air. It was evidently the end of the day at the adventure playground, because as he left the main door of Bronte he was confronted by a number of mothers and children making their way back to the flats across the grass. PC Davies was not in sight.
"Have you found her, then?" one of the women asked him belligerently. Thackeray shook his head.
"I'm sorry," he said. "We're still looking." The circle of hot and sweaty faces accused him silently. Even the children, tow haired and blue eyed, hopping from one leg to another as they waited for their mothers, stared like an unsympathetic jury at a prisoner whose defence had just crumbled away.
"We're doing our best," Thackeray said with finality, forcing a way through the sullen group and walking determinedly away across the grass towards the playground the women had just left.
"Useless bastards", a single shrill voice screamed after him but when he glanced back over his shoulder the straggle of women and children had gone, swallowed up by the cavernous flats, and the walkways above were empty.
At the playground the chief inspector found Sue Raban alone, packing up bright plastic rings and water wings by the blue paddling pool. She straightened up slowly, wiping beads of sweat from her brow and glanced ironically at the warrant card he flipped in her direction.
"You're the organ grinder are you?" she said. "You'd be better served if you let people know when you're inflicting under-cover monkeys on them?"
"Wouldn't that rather defeat the object of the exercise?" Thackeray came back mildly. She shrugged.
"I wouldn't vouch for his safety up here any more," she said. "These people don't like being made fools of."
"Is that why he got thumped last night?" Sue shrugged again.
"Is that what he told you?"
"He didn't tell me anything much," Thackeray said. "I'm just curious to know whether those who did the thumping found out he was a policeman before or after they laid into him. It makes a difference."
"Does it?" she said, an edge to her voice. "How much difference? An extra six months in jail? A year? Because he's one of yours?"
Thackeray looked at her consideringly, taking in the slim hips and legs in cut-off jeans, the firm breasts, no bra, he guessed, under the sleeveless tee-shirt, the long neck and poised, proud head with its close-cropped hair, the dark, angry eyes. He recognised precisely what a challenge Kevin Mower had discovered in Sue Raban.
"You know that's not what I'm interested in, Ms. Raban," he said. "It's the motive that concerns me. I need to know just how lawless this place has become, just who's protecting whom, whether anyone knows, or just guesses, who's responsible for Nicky's disappearance, whether what happened last night was just a casual mugging or a deliberate assault on a police officer. Whether you set him up?"
Sue flashed him a quick look of dislike at that and then looked away, bending down to pick up an armful of toys and avoiding Thackeray's eyes as she set off across the grass towards the playground hut. He followed her slowly, giving her time to think. Inside the hut
, she dumped the pile of damp plastic in a heap on the floor. She picked up a couple of cans of coke from the table, handed him one and, opening her own and taking a long swig, and sat down at the cluttered desk, head bowed.
Thackeray stood in the doorway, leaning against the door-frame, apparently relaxed with his drink unopened, but never taking his eyes off her. At length she gave another expressive shrug and
looked up at him with a faint smile.
"OK," she said. "If it helps to find Nicky, what can I say? They didn't know he was a cop. Not until I came along and told them. They were knocking him about because he'd been seen following Nicky and they thought the worst. When they found out who he really was they split."
"And of course you couldn't identify any of the vigilantes on the staircase, I guess?"
"I guess not. It was very dark," she said firmly and Thackeray knew he would not budge her on that.
"And I don't suppose you know who made sure they knew sergeant Mower had followed Nicky?"
"Anyone could have seen him," she said. "I saw him myself." Thackeray nodded again. Sue Raban was quite composed now, and he knew that he would not persuade her to say any more than
she wanted to say.
"The evictions," he said, changing tack. "Did Mower let slip when they were going to be?" She shrugged.
"I guessed something was happening," she said. "Kevin said he wouldn't be here after yesterday. It was obvious something big was going down."
"So who did you tell?" Thackeray asked flatly.
"No-one. Why should I?" she said and would not be moved from that denial.
"Do you know John Stansfield?" he asked at length. "I want to talk to him. Lives on the top floor of Bronte?" Sue shook her head.
"I know who you mean," she said. "He was helpful with some of our committees, when it began to look as though the police couldn't protect the estate." Thackeray could think of many reasons apart from altruism why John Stansfield might be willing to undermine local confidence in the police.
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