Dying Fall

by Patricia Hall

  "So when did you see him last?" he persisted.

  "Two nights ago at a meeting," she said.

  "The night before Nicky went missing?"

  "You can't be thinking of John in that connection," she said, eyes wide, evidently shocked at the suggestion. "That's crazy."

  "Anyone who goes missing at the same time as a child...." Thackeray left the sentence hanging in mid-air but Sue said nothing else,

  “You've been talking to the mothers here today. Do they have any idea who might be responsible for her disappearance?" Thackeray asked at length. Sue shook her head vigorously.

  "If they did there'd have been more than a mugging, there'd have been a lynching," she said. "No-one knows. They're out of their minds with worry."

  "But not worried enough to cooperate with the police?" Thackeray said, half to himself.

  "You can't have it both ways, chief inspector," Sue came back, angry now. "You can't come in here like an occupying army with helicopters and riot shields, killing kids in cars, breaking down doors and throwing people out of the only homes they've got, like you did this morning, and then expect the community to come running to you with information, even when a child goes missing. They need you now, but a lot of them won't admit it yet. They don't trust you, Mr. Thackeray, and who can blame them?"

  By dusk that evening, the police had abandoned another day's fruitless search for Nicky Tyson. Every empty flat on the estate had been searched, every bungalow and back garden along the row of old-people's homes, every garage in the two blocks at the ends of the flats, every alley way leading down the steep hill to the town, every inch of the playground, the community centre and the doctor's surgery and all the waste ground around them, without a single clue as to the child's whereabouts being picked up.

  More than a thousand statements had been fed into the computer and were waiting to be analysed the following day. The man who called himself Stansfield's flat had been particularly

  minutely searched, to no avail. His description and that of the car Davies had seen him driving had been circulated across the county and beyond, with no sightings reported.

  In Thackeray's office the chief inspector and his sergeant were showing every sign of deep frustration as they found a final moment to flick through the Gazette, the front page of which was

  dominated by the face of Nicky Tyson, pink and white, the blue eyes solemn and accusing. Thackeray turned to an inside page and glanced at the editorial, in which Ted Grant, in excoriating form, castigated the inefficiency of the police in losing control of the Heights. He wondered if Laura shared her paper's sentiments, and if he would ever find either the time or the courage to ask her. He pulled on his jacket with a heavy sigh.

  "We might as well have abducted her ourselves, as far as the Gazette's concerned," Mower said bitterly.

  "Your friend Sue Raban thinks it's our fault too," Thackeray said, hesitating on his way to the door. Mower stiffened. Since they had come back from the Heights he had spent most of his time in front of a computer screen and had hardly exchanged a word with Thackeray, who had been deep in conference with Superintendent Longley for most of the early evening.

  "Right," he said cautiously. "I didn't know you'd spoken to her, guv."

  "Just a little off the record chat," Thackeray said enigmatically. "I gather you owe her for extricating you from a nasty situation last night." Mower could not disguise the look of surprise which flashed across his face.

  "I wouldn't have called it extricating, exactly," he said.

  "I want you to go up there and talk to her yourself tomorrow," Thackeray said. "I think we'd get a lot more help, especially from the women, if Sue Raban was seen to be cooperating with us."

  "She's very hostile," Mower said, uncertainly.

  "But she wants Nicky found just as much as the rest of us. See what you can do, sergeant. Use that fatal charm, whatever it is. We need her on our side." Thackeray went out without looking back at Mower, who watched him go with his mouth slackly open in astonishment.

  "You devious bastard," he muttered at last, and then relaxed with a tired smile at the thought that an instruction to mix business with pleasure legitimately, however grim the excuse, might not be so unwelcome after all.

  At the Heights, PC Alan Davies locked the door of the community police office as the street lights began to cast an orange glow across the grass in front of the flats. It was still warm enough for him to feel comfortable in his uniform shirtsleeves. But as he glanced around him before setting off along the pathway parallel to Bronte and Priestley Houses, he was aware of a low noise, which he could not immediately identify, rising and falling in the distance. Up on the walkways above him

  he could see groups of people moving around.

  With a slight feeling of anxiety he went to the main door of Bronte. It was locked and he pressed the caretaker, Jerry Hurst's bell-push a couple of times, but without response. Sure now that something was wrong he pressed a few more bells at random and someone above evidently activated the front door, because it suddenly swung open in front of him.

  Cautiously he pulled out his personal radio and called his control, but even before they could respond Davies knew that it was too late and that after three years on the Heights he had made what might be his most serious mistake. A tremendous blow from behind struck him at the base of the skull and as he fell forward he felt hands seize the radio from him and smash it onto the concrete floor beside him.

  The striking down of constable Davies could have been fortuitous or it could have been a signal. The police never knew the answer to that. But it was very soon afterwards that the stolen cars began their terrifying circuits of the flats, the streets and walkways filled up with excited crowds, the community policeman's car exploded in a roar of flames as the first of the night's petrol bombs was lobbed through its smashed windscreen. And not long after that, as the riot vans screamed incautiously up the hill from the centre of town and disgorged their helmeted troops onto the estate, a second petrol bomb was hurled down from the top walkway of Holtby and the disturbance proper began.

  When Alan Davies woke up on a hospital trolley several hours, a riot and dozens of arrests later, it was all over. Screwing up his eyes against the bright light of the casualty department and wishing he hadn't, he felt the bandage around his head gingerly and flexed his arms and legs experimentally. The face of the nurse who had noticed his return to consciousness swam into focus.

  "What...?" he managed, in a voice which did not sound as if it was his.

  "Concussion, dear," she said. "And a couple of cracked ribs. Nothing too serious. We'll keep you in overnight, though, after the knock on the head. You can't be too careful." You could be more careful than he had been, he thought bitterly. It was, he decided there and then, the end of it. They could have his resignation tomorrow. As far as he was concerned the day of the community bobby at Wuthering was over.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The next morning had not been one of Joyce Ackroyd's best starts to the day. She had slept fitfully again in Laura's spare bed and woken early, stiff and painful. She was not mollified by the irrepressibly vocal blackbird which had taken up a perch in the cherry tree just outside the window and proceeded to greet not just the dawn but the comings and goings of the milkman, the postman and children tumbling out of doors to play before Joyce thankfully heard her granddaughter moving outside the door.

  It was Laura's day off and she had resisted all hints and blandishments the previous evening to give it up in the interests of the Gazette's coverage of the ongoing troubles at Wuthering. She needed some time, she had insisted to Ted, time for Joyce, who was not well. In fact she desperately needed some time for herself, just to think and try to sort out her own jumbled emotions. She planned a quiet day, interrupted only by an invitation to tea with Vicky Mendelson and a swim with the boys.

  It was not to be. She got up at eight, switched on the local radio station and absorbed the news of the previous night's event
s with a sinking feeling in her stomach. There seemed to be no end to the violence, she thought, and wondered to what extent detective chief inspectors were normally the targets of the missiles and petrol bombs which had put six officers in hospital overnight and would put dozens of youngsters before the magistrates later that morning.

  She took Joyce a cup of tea, carrying the radio with her. The estate was calm now, the newsreader was reporting, although there was still a heavy police presence there. Joyce sat up in bed, looking frail and painfully thin in her high necked nightdress as she leaned back, her skin sallow and bruises dark against the plump white pillows. Laura shuddered at the thought of how close she might have come to losing Joyce. Although she often felt trapped in Bradfield she knew she had sprung the trap herself: Joyce neither asked nor expected her to stay. And when her grandmother did finally depart, as inevitably she must, Laura knew that in her new-found freedom she would still be bereft. Joyce was her anchor and she could not imagine life adrift.

  "I want to go up and make sure the house is all right," Joyce said in a tone which brooked no contradiction.

  "The front door's boarded up," Laura said, prevaricating without much confidence. "We can't get in."

  "Don't be daft," Joyce said. "You know I keep the key to the back door under a stone in the back yard." Laura did know. In fact she had remonstrated with Joyce a couple of times about the insecurity of the time-hallowed arrangement, to no avail. Joyce had grown up and learned her fierce politics in close-terraced streets where doors were never locked and community meant solidarity. In spite of what had happened two nights ago she would die, Laura thought ruefully, more trustful of her fellows than anyone of her own generation would ever be.

  "You'll never learn," she said fondly. "I'll take you up before I go to Vicky's for tea, and pick you up on the way back, if you like. Will that suit?" But within minutes the phone had rung, and Ted Grant had peremptorily demanded some help, day off or no day off, in the teeth of the overnight explosion of violence on the Heights.

  "Just do me the one interview, Laura," he said, as close to saying please as he was ever likely to come. "The beaten up community copper? Could have been another Broadwater Farm? You remember? Come on, you're the only person who can do it justice."

  Wearily, she succumbed to the flattery and caught up with Alan Davies at home soon after his discharge from hospital. His wife, a grey, worried looking woman who had evidently been crying very recently, looked uncertain when Laura rang her suburban doorbell and asked for an interview, but when she checked with her husband inside, he urged Laura in with unexpected good humour.

  "It's a load off my mind, now I've taken the decision to pack it in," he said from the sofa, which had been turned to face the garden. His strapped up chest was visible under his pyjamas and his face was bruised but he seemed to be genuinely pleased to have made a decision about which, he admitted, he had been brooding for some time.

  Laura perched on the worn armchair to which he waved her, and took out her tape-recorder, accepting Mrs. Davies' offer of tea as much to get her anxious, hovering presence out of the room as because she was thirsty.

  "To be honest, I've not been happy with the job for a while," Davies went on eagerly. "Community policing's fine in theory. But you can't do it for nowt, and that's what they've

  been trying to do. You never get owt for nowt in this life, do you?"

  The problem with this man is going to be persuading him to stop rather than persuading him to start, Laura thought to herself ruefully. There's twenty years of frustration just waiting to pour out.

  "Just let me switch on the tape, Mr. Davies," she said. An hour and several cups of tea later she had accumulated enough material for several background features on the breakdown of law and order on the Heights, which was what she was seeking. The "Why I quit" headline from the man who had been lucky to be carried out of the previous night's mayhem alive would satisfyTed Grant, she was sure. Davies's more thoughtful remarks on the plight of the families on the estate satisfied her.

  "So what will you do now?" she asked, after switching off the tape.

  "Oh, there's always jobs in security for ex-coppers," Davies said contentedly. "I hear old Harry Huddleston's looking in that direction. I reckon if he gets a job of that sort, he'd not say no if I applied to join him."

  "Do you remember the Tracy Miller case up at the Heights?" Laura asked. "That was one of Huddleston's, wasn't it?"

  "Aye, that was a nasty one and all," Davies said. "I was up there with old Harry, just as a constable, mind. A summer a bit like this one, right hot and muggy."

  "Do you remember a policeman with a beard up there then?"

  Davies hesitated for a moment, a wary look in his eyes.

  "Why do you ask?"

  "Just something someone said to me the other day," Laura said. Davies's eyes had slipped away from her for a moment and she followed his gaze to a photograph on the sideboard on the other side of the room. She got up slowly and walked over to it. It was a picture of a presentation ceremony, two senior police officers, one on each side of a younger, slimmer Alan Davies holding some sort of award and smiling out at his audience from behind a luxuriant growth of facial hair.

  "I shaved it off soon after," he said. "My wife went off it, said it tickled."

  "Do you remember a young girl called Linda Smith? Stephen Webster's girlfriend?" Davies nodded.

  "Aye, she were right upset when he was arrested. I told sergeant Redding about her, but by that time the lad had confessed. I don't think they ever talked to her in the end."

  "No, I don't think they ever did," Laura said.

  Laura went back to the office to write her feature and then took an early lunch break. But she did not go home, as she had half promised Joyce she would. She turned the car instead out of town in an easterly direction and pulled up thoughtfully outside a substantial semi-detached house, one of a row set back from the road behind what its neighbours clearly regarded as well-tended front gardens but the occupants of this particular patch had decided should become merely a car park.

  There was a red Ford parked untidily across the expanse of tarmac in front of the garage, which gave Laura hope that the person she sought was inside. This, she thought, was it. The local hero's castle, though she feared that in fact the pebble-dashed facade might conceal a dragon rather than St. George, and that there would be no-one to rescue the damsel if she found herself in distress.

  Harry Huddleston opened the door himself and nodded affably enough when she explained who she was.

  "I was wondering when you'd turn up," he said. "You'd best come in." A big man, running to fat, but with the watchful eyes Laura was beginning to associate with policemen. He showed

  her into a sitting room where a large screened television was tuned to a cricket score-board.

  "Rain stopped play at the Oval," he said dismissively, picking up the glass of beer he was evidently halfway through. "Else you'd have had to wait while the lunch interval." He waved her into a armchair and did not offer her any refreshment. There was no sound of anyone else in the house so Laura assumed that his wife was out.

  "You're the spitting image of your grandmother, do you know that, Miss Ackroyd? Or do you prefer Miz, like these bumptious bloody lesbians?" Huddleston offered as he settled himself again into his own armchair, adjusting his paunch under his blue sports shirt for maximum comfort.

  "Miss will do," Laura said, unable to conceal a small grin of delight as Huddleston lived up to all her preconceptions.

  "Aye, well, I always had a lot of time for your grandmother. Not politically, mind. She'd have had the bloody criminals knitting socks for their victims if she'd had her way. But I like a woman who speaks her mind. So what's on yours, Miss Ackroyd? Tracy Miller is it?"

  "Stephen Webster," she said, grateful for his bluntness when it came to the point. "Or his girlfriend, Linda. Did you know she existed? Were you told?"

  "So you've moved off the Huddleston thumped a confes
sion out of the little beggar tack have you?" the former chief inspector said thoughtfully. "That's summat to be thankful for, I suppose."

  "This is only preliminary research for this tv programme," Laura said. "I won't be making any of the final decisions. But I'll do something for the Gazette as well."

  "Just casting the first stone, is it?" Huddleston said, his tone suddenly more unfriendly. "Aye, well, these things become a fashion, don't they? They've done the Met, and the West Midlands, undermined public confidence nicely there, so I suppose your telly friends think it's Yorkshire's turn now. Do you ever wonder what their real motives are?"

  "Stephen Webster's been in goal for ten years," Laura began angrily, ignoring the challenge.

  "Aye, and that little lass's been dead for ten years an'all," Huddleston came back. "Just think on, Miz Ackroyd, when you go stirring up old tragedies, who's going to get hurt by it all."

  "If Stephen is innocent then the real murderer is still out there," Laura said. Huddleston looked at her for a moment before nodding with something like weariness, suddenly looking older and slightly deflated by her refusal to be intimidated.

  "You don't just look like your grandmother, do you?" he asked. "You're just as bloody persistent, an'all. And there's been more attacks on kiddies? I suppose that's what you're

  saying, is it? And another one missing?"

  "That's what I'm saying," she said quietly, almost unable to believe that she might have won so easily.

  "Aye, well," Huddleston said with a heavy sigh. "You're right, of course. Alan Davies told Jim Redding and Jim Redding told me. We knew about the girl friend. But the lad confessed,

  and there was corroborating evidence. We never interviewed her. Is that what you wanted to know?" Laura nodded, feeling more deflated than triumphant.

  "That's what I wanted to know," she said.