It was mid-afternoon when she parked the Beetle outside the bungalows and helped Joyce out of the passenger seat. It had been a struggle to get Joyce from her top floor flat to ground level and she had completed the journey bumping down the stairs on her bottom. Joyce had not complained but Laura could see from the humiliated look in her eyes that there was a strict limit to the time Joyce could remain with her. She would never consent to being totally housebound, she knew, and three flights of stairs were too much.
The estate seemed quiet this morning, a single burnt out car and several uniformed policemen patrolling in pairs the only sign of the previous night's disturbances. Joyce stood leaning
heavily on her stick outside the garden gate, surveying the scene.
"I know no-one learns from history," she said bitterly. "But you'd think they'd learn summat from geography. Instead of which they seem to be going out of their way to create another Los Angeles here. They're full of fine words about working with folk, the police are, but when it comes to the point they rape and pillage with the best of them."
"Oh, come on, nan," Laura protested. "From the sound of it they were on a hiding to nothing last night. I don't often agree with Ted Grant, but when he says you can't have no go areas, he's right."
"Then you shouldn't tolerate a third world ghetto in an affluent country," Joyce said angrily. "The police are there for the people, not t'other way around. If you can't get consent then there's summat far wrong, which there is, of course." She turned away to her front gate and made her way
painfully round the side of the house to the back door.
"Key's under there," she said to Laura who stooped down and lifted a stone by the dustbin and retrieved it for her. Laura went in first and held the door open while her grandmother negotiated the step.
"Go and sit down while I make you a cup of tea," she said. Joyce did not argue. She seemed depressed rather than pleased to be home and shuffled slowly into the living room without a word.
Laura put the kettle on and arranged two cups on a tray. She wondered now if it had been sensible to agree to leave Joyce here, but she desperately wanted to see Vicky and could think of no alternative now. She took the tray through. Lying in the tiny hall against the remnants of the smashed front door in a corner made gloomy by the boards across the entrance she noticed a large black rubbish bag.
"Is that rubbish to go out for the binmen?" she asked casually. "What day do they come?"
"What's that, love? They came on Tuesday. I didn't leave any rubbish." Joyce said. Laura looked at her curiously, a tiny seed of doubt at the back of her mind growing tendrils of fear almost before she could put what she had thought into words. Very slowly she walked back into the hall and reached out for the black shiny plastic with a hand that seemed to be weighed down with lead. Her imagination told her what was inside the black shroud, although she rejected its promptings with a fierce disgust.
The bag was not fastened and when she pulled gently at it the child's feet, in grubby white ankle socks, were uncovered, one neatly on top of the other as if her body had been arranged
for maximum decorum before she was dumped.
"Dear God," Laura breathed faintly still having to force her mind to accept what her eyes could now clearly see. She pulled the plastic back carefully to reveal the bright cotton shorts and the still clean white teeshirt and then the face she recognised well enough from the photograph Nicky's mother had given her and which had been blown up and printed tens of thousands of times on the front page of the Gazette.
"Dear God," she said again, turning her head as if dazzled by the sightless bright blue eyes which stared at her from the pale, waxen features. She sat back on her heels for a moment and covered her face with her hands. There was no nausea, just a chill which seemed to start at the very centre of her being and spread slowly out to every extremity. She shivered convulsively and covered the child's face again with the loose black plastic. She could not bear the accusation there. Like an automaton, not daring to look at Joyce, she went back into the living room, picked up the phone and called the police.
It was almost an hour later that Michael Thackeray came out of Joyce Ackroyd's back door to find her dozing in a garden chair on the tiny paved area behind the bungalow. Laura was beside her, sitting on the flag-stones with her back against the wall. She was in jeans and tee-shirt with her arms round her legs, and her chin on her knees, looking pale and disheveled, long strands of red-gold hair escaping from their clips and falling to her shoulders. She had not been aware of Thackeray's arrival although she had expected it. Once two uniformed constables had appeared and
set the wheels of the murder inquiry in motion, Laura had helped her grandmother out of the house, shielding her from the sight of the body bundled up like so much garbage, and settling her into the chair she found in the tiny store-room beside the back door. And there they had waited while the police went about their business inside.
Laura glanced up at the tall police-man who loomed darkly between her and the sun, and quickly looked away again, her eyes full of tears.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I can't bear it." Thackeray held out a hand and helped her to her feet, glancing at her grand-mother, who did not stir.
"I need to talk to you," he said quietly. His face was like stone, only a faint pulse near his jaw giving an hint of the tension within, his concern for Laura lurking far back in his blue eyes. He guided her round the side of the house to the front, where she could see that the police had prized the boarded-up front door open allowing a portly civilian figure to crouch over the body in the narrow hallway.
"Amos Atherton, the pathologist," Thackeray said as they passed the doorway. She nodded, still not trusting herself to speak. "Then the scene-of-crime people will take the place apart: fingerprints, samples of this and that, evidence of how the body came to be there..." He was talking for the sake of talking and dried up in mid-sentence, his face bleak and angry. He had already steeled himself to inspect the small body, curled up in a foetal position within its black covering, and had choked back the wave of helpless fury which had threatened to overwhelm him, burying it behind the granite mask with which he now faced Laura and the world. It had been the moment he had dreaded for years and it had passed without embarrassment, though not without pain.
He sat with Laura in the back of one of the police cars which were now lining the road outside the bungalows attracting inquisitive glances from the sullen groups of teenagers who had gathered on the grass outside the flats and the occasional adult making a foray to the shops, the betting shop or the pub.
"We'll need to fingerprint you both to eliminate you and your grandmother from amongst any other prints we find," he said awkwardly. She nodded her assent to that.
"You touched the plastic bag?" She nodded again.
"I guessed, but I wasn't sure," she said. "I had to open it to see ...."
"I'm sorry it had to be you," he said, feeling helpless to reach her through the numb indifference which seemed to have overwhelmed her. All her energy and her natural sparkle, everything in fact which he found so attractive about her, seemed to have drained away, leaving her face pale and almost ethereal, her eyes sunk into violet hollows, overshadowed by the mass of coppery hair.
"We'll need statements," he said cautiously. "From you and your grandmother. But it doesn't have to be now. It can wait. Just tell me one thing. How did you get into the house? Did your grandmother have the back door key with her?" Laura managed an almost imperceptible smile at that.
"It was under a stone," she said. "They all do it. You tell them not to but they take no notice."
"And anyone would have known?"
"Most people who know her," she said.
"Go home now, Laura," he said abruptly. Take your grandmother and I'll send someone down to see you later."
"You won't come yourself?" she asked, trying to keep her tone neutral, but he shook his head.
"I have to see the pathologist now. And then there'
ll be the postmortem. There's a routine to be followed to a murder inquiry. It's what keeps us sane." They got out of the car in an awkward silence. With an enormous effort of will she stopped herself from reaching out for him and, as if sensing what she wanted, he moved away towards the gaping front door and the cluster of busy technicians crouching there.
"I must find my WDC and go and tell Mrs. Tyson what we've found," he said. She looked at him, horrified.
"There are no words for that," she said.
"No," he agreed. "There are no words. Go home, Laura, you can't do anything to help here. Please go home. I'll see you later, if I can."
"Why wasn't that house searched earlier?" superintendent Jack Longley demanded angrily of chief inspector Thackeray.
"Somehow it got missed," Thackeray said. "They did a house-to-house right along that row of bungalows when she went missing, but didn't go back to do a search yesterday. The place was boarded up before the child vanished, so I suppose they thought it was clean."
"That's not good enough, Michael. You know it isn't."
“Sir,” Thackeray said, acknowledging the justice of the complaint. He regretted more personally than Longley could guess that the police had not found Nicky Tyson's body themselves.
"So what's Amos Atherton got to say for himself?" Longley went on abruptly.
"She'd been dead at least thirty six hours he thinks, so the chances are she was killed soon after she went missing. She was asphyxiated. There are faint bruises on her neck but he thinks it's more likely that she was suffocated than strangled, possibly by the plastic bag she was found in. There are bruises on her fore-arms too, which seems to indicate she was grabbed and held tightly by the arms, tied up perhaps. He can't be sure."
"Raped?" Longley spat the word out with evident distaste. Thackeray shook his head bleakly. He had steeled himself to attend the post©mortem and had come away feeling drained after watching a second violation of the child follow clinically on the first, legal this time but no less brutal.
"Interfered with, but not raped," he said. "There won't be much forensic evidence, apparently, though we've sent some fibres off for examination that were clinging to her socks. They don't appear to match the carpet where she was found or anything at her home."
"So I suppose you think it's a carbon copy of the Tracy Miller case, do you?" Longley said irritably. Thackeray gave that question some thought before replying.
"It could be copy-cat rather than carbon copy," he said. "It's certainly very similar. And some of the Tracy Miller cast are still around. Jerry Hurst gave evidence at Stephen Webster's trial and we know now he's as bent as the proverbial three pound note. And there's Miller himself. He could have lied to pin it on the step-son he disliked, or to cover himself. I don't think it's a possibility we can ignore. We'll have to talk to them all again."
"Damnation," Longley said. "We'll have every hack from every newspaper in the country on our door-step if we tell them that. Another bloody miscarriage of justice. Another poor bugger locked up for years for summat he didn't do. Another chance to clobber the police. I don't need that in my division. We've avoided that sort of nonsense so far and I was hoping I'd avoid it till I retired."
"We don't have to shout it from the roof-tops," Thackeray said mildly.
"The Press office at county have arranged a bloody press conference at six. With the Gazette already gunning for us over the state of the Heights, don't you think some clever hack is going to put two and two together?" Longley's normally jovial countenance was clouded with doubt and anger. "What about the Ackroyd lass, the one who found the body. She's not daft."
"No she's not," said Thackeray with feeling. "She will undoubtedly make the connection, if she hasn't already. She's not working today and she's very shocked. I might be able to persuade her not to go public for a while..." He shrugged, not wanting to pursue that line of thought but knowing that Longley would not let him off the hook.
"She's done inquiries for that bloody TV programme, I hear," Longley said. "I did wonder why you didn't tell me about that. Keeping your mind on the job, are you lad?"
"It's difficult to forget this one," Thackeray said grimly, his mind slipping back to the white tiles and green aprons of the post-mortem room, and the slight figure under Amos Atherton's scalpel on the slab. "In the middle of the night, I'll wish to God I could." Longley looked at him sharply at that, his pale blue eyes hard.
"Let's see if we can keep any ten year old connections under wraps for a bit," he said at length. "I'll take the Press conference and duck any suggestions of that sort if they come up. You see if you can use a bit of influence with the Ackroyd lass. Public interest, all that baloney. Turn on a bit of the charm, if you have to. I dare say you won't find that too difficult. And then go in hard on Miller and Hurst."
"Sir," Thackeray said as he left Longley's office. "Shit," he added under his breath as he walked slowly down the corridor to his own room, desperate enough to see Laura again on any pretext but the one Longley had provided. That was one she would be certain to reject out of hand.
Sergeant Mower looked up as Thackeray came back into the office. Thackeray, he thought, looked strained and grey. He must be taking this one to heart, he guessed, in a way which surprised him. He must surely, he thought, have seen it all before.
"I went back to Hurst's flat after we'd finished at the bungalow," he said. "There's no answer, and no-one seems to have seen him today."
"Do you think he's done a runner?" Thackeray asked, although the phrase did not seem very appropriate for the lumbering, over-weight caretaker.
"Val Ridley and I had a shufti through his window and she said the place looked much the same as it did when she interviewed him with you, guv."
"Right," Thackeray said wearily. "Ask uniformed to keep an eye on the place and let us know when he puts in an appearance, will you? If he's not turned up by tomorrow morning we'll put
out a call for him and search his flat. Any sign of Sissons?" Mower shook his head.
"Nope," he said. "And the gear in his flat appears to be legit. We've checked the stolen property lists."
"The same for him, then. If he's not turned up by tomorrow, we start looking in earnest. So what did you get at the bungalow?"
"Not a lot, guv. No sign of a break-in. He must have used the back door key which means it could have been pretty well anyone in the neighbourhood. They all know some of the old folk
hide keys like that. Silly old bats, they should have more sense. And the fingerprints on the key on the key will be Laura Ackroyd's. Not much chance of a previous user's surviving."
"And the plastic sack?"
"No distinguishing features. The sort you can buy at any supermarket. A few smudged prints at the bottom edge but they seemed to think they were probably the beautiful Laura's too. I sent Val Ridley round with the finger-print officer to see her and her granny and take their statements. The old lady's not mobile so I thought it was a bit much to bring them down here."
"Good," Thackeray said, absently, failing to provide the marks for sensitive policing which Mower thought he deserved.
"So do we dig back ten years on this one, guv?" Mower asked. Thackeray did not reply, hearing and yet not hearing the sergeant's innocent query, hearing in fact another voice entirely, asking quiet, persistent questions about the death of another child. He sat for a moment drumming his fingers on the desk, gazing out of the open office window at the square below where desultory midsummer crowds were drifting around the waterless fountain or drooping on the benches in the sweltering humidity.
In spite of the heat he shivered as if the chill of the post-morten room had entered into the very marrow of his bones. Nicky's coffin would be quite small, he thought, although not as small as the one he had carried himself up the aisle of the Sacred Heart on a day of bright sunshine and strong breezes which had sent the reflected light from the stained-glass windows dancing with cruel gaiety across the distraught congregation. He needed to break this case
quickly, he thought, or it might break him. He shook himself back to the present to find Mower watching him curiously.
“Tracy Miller, guv?” Mower said, keeping his thoughts to himself. “Do you seriously think there's a connection?”
“It's worth looking at,” Thackeray said. “It's too close for comfort. We;ll get a better picture when we see the full post-mortem and forensic reports, but on the face of it, it looks close. I'll want to talk to Paul Miller tomorrow. In the meantime, read the file. See what you think.”
“Harry Huddleston will be sick as a parrot if he got it wrong.”
“Not half as sick as Stephen Webster is, by all accounts,” Thackeray said grimly. “He's been inside for ten years, remember? So let's get it sorted once and for all, shall we.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Chief inspector Thackeray left police headquarters late, tired and depressed. He let himself into his car and sat at the wheel with the windows wide open for a moment before starting the engine. He was slightly cooler now, although he was still wearing his jacket, but he felt soiled in a way which he knew no amount of washing would cure.
No-one, he knew, was immune from the anger that the murder of a child provoked. It drove police officers to frenzied feats of stamina and long hours of overtime about which they would normally complain bitterly. But the feeling that had wrenched his guts ever since he had peered over Amos Atherton's shoulder as he made his preliminary examination of Nicky's small body was more than righteous indignation. It had a personal dimension which he feared might be as destructive as it was motivating, tending to distract rather than focus his attention on the problem in hand.
He had driven Mower and the other detectives in the incident room mercilessly all afternoon and evening as they checked and cross-checked the statements and reports that had been accumulating in the computer data-base since the child had disappeared. Mower had also sat for an hour reading the Tracy Miller case file with a lengthening face.
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