“They got it wrong, guv,” he said flatly when he had finished. “The forensic evidence is too similar. It can't be coincidence. I'd put money on it.” And for Mower there was no greater vote of confidence than that. Thackeray had nodded non-commitally, recalling Longley's perturbation at the possibility of a mistaken conviction and its inevitably bruising consequences for them all.
“We'll check it out,” he had said. “I'll talk to Harry Huddleston.”
“Rather you than me,” Mower had said with feeling.
Reluctantly Thackeray started his engine and drove out of the police yard into the late evening traffic, unwilling to take the road went towards his own bleak and unwelcoming flat and unsure where-else to go. He stoppped briefly outside an off-licence and watched the groups of young men coming out with their six-packs of lager, laughing girl-friends holding onto their arms. He could easily buy oblivion here, he thought, terminal oblivion if he chose. He put his arms on his steering wheel and his head on his arms and groaned.
High above the town Laura Ackroyd wandered moodily around her flat in a pair of loose silky pyjamas, her eyes heavy with tiredness but unable to sleep. After the police had finished taking their statements and dirtying their fingers with fingerprint ink, she and Joyce had picked at a meal and Joyce, unusually silent, has eventually hobbled to her bedroom with all the light gone out of her eyes.
Laura stayed up, unable to settle to anything. She watched the television news with half an eye, concentrating only on the two or three-sentence report on the finding of Nicky Tyson's body. She picked up a book and hurled it down again after five minutes, and thought with dissatisfaction about the next day's work which she was committed to start at eight o'clock the next morning.
Ted Grant had not been pleased to discover from the police press conference that one of his own staff had found the body of Nicky Tyson and had not bothered to tell him. He rang Laura to let her know of his displeasure and she had not even bothered to try to find excuses for her evident lack of journalistic zeal.
“I couldn't talk about it”, she had said flatly. “Tomorrow maybe, but not now”. Unexpectedly the unvarnished truth had seemed to satisfy Ted, whose last edition had gone to press almost before the news of the discovery of the body had reached the Gazette and long before the police announced formally that they were treating the case as murder. He therefore had nowhere to publish Laura's revelations until the next day.
But he expected her int the office at eight, he had said in a tone which left her iin little doubt that if she prevaricated she might not have had a job to go back to. “And don't talk to anyone else about it, either,” he had concluded. “If I find an eye-witness account on the front page of the Globe in the morning, I'll swing for you, girl, I promise.”
A couple of restless hours later she was sitting with her feet up, gazing at her bare toes, still trying to work out, not for the first time, whether she was in the right job. Most of the time she loved the work, but she knew that she lacked a certain ruthlessness – had been told do, in fact who had moved on to the Globe with scant regard for the human misery he caused on the way. She would never get to the top with her sentimental scruples, he had said, and she was inclined to believe it. What she could never decide was whether she cared.
Her reverie was disturbed by the doorbell. Wearily she went to the entryphone and was surprised to hear Michael Thackeray's voice.
“I'm not dressed,” she said with uncharacteristic uncertainty, and if he had come back with the flippant comment she would have provoked from most men she might not have let him in. But there was silence and after a moment's hesitation she pressed the button to open the front door and unlatched her own.
They stood for a moment on the threshold looking at each other. Thackeray looked tired and crumpled, his shirt-sleeves rolled up and his tie hanging loose at the neck, while she, for all that the creak silk revealed more than it concealed of the curved underneath, was pale and dark-eyed beneath the cloud of copper hair.
“I'm sorry,” Thackeray said awkwardly. “It's late. I needed to see you.”
“I think I needed to see you too,” she said simply. She hesitated for a moment and then cast caution aside and put her arms around him, comforted by the warmth and solidity of his body. He hesitated too before he touched her, instantly conscious when he did of the thin silk which slid beneath his fingers against the bare skin beneath. Determinedly restrained, he bent his head to kiss her on the cheek.
She pulled away after a moment and led him into the living-room where he slumped wearily into the corner of the sofa and ran a hand through his hair. He did not know where to begin and opted in the end for the impersonal, cursing himself for his own cowardice.
“My boss,” he began. “Superintendent Longley asked me to ask you, to ask the Gazette in fact, if you could not make the connection between Nicky Tyson and Tracy Miller – not for a while anyway. It would help us if the killer didn't know, if it's the same person. And we think now it is.”
“I'll talk to my editor,” she said, a distance opening up between them again. “I dare say he'll cooperate. So this is a business visit, is it?”
“Not really,” he admitted with a ghost of a smile. “It gave me an excuse, that's all.”
She stood gazing at him with cool green-grey eyes, unsure whether he needed an excuse for himself or some third party, until he looked away, discomforted.
“I needed to tell you something too,” she said awkwardly. “I found out that Stephen Webster had a girl-friend, Linda Smith. She doesn't give him an alibi exactly, but casts a little doubt maybe. Enough to interest Case Reopened.” Thackeray nodded, alert again.
“I'll talk to her,” he said.
“There's more....”
“And I won't like it?” he prompted. Laura shrugged uncertainly.
“Your ex-colleague Harry Huddleston,” she said. “He knew about her and did nothing about it. Didn't want inconvenient facts to interfere with a good case.”
“And never told the defence lawyers, I suppose? Wonderful.”
“I'm sorry,” Laura said.
“I'm sorry too,” he said again, wearily this time. “You've had a miserable day. I shouldn't have come round to burden you with my problems.” he glanced at the bottle of vodka on the coffee table and Laura's empty glass.
“You've been drowning your sorrows,” he said, carefully neutral. Laura picked up the bottle defensively.
“Not really,” she said.
“Is your grandmother all right?”
“As well as can be expected”, Laura said with a wry smile. “I suppose that's the best you can say for both of us. It's easy enough to write about these things, isn't it, from a safe distance. Different to see it in the flesh.” She put the bottle carefully on the side-table which housed her drinks and glanced at herself in the mirror above. She was wearing no make-up and felt uneasy and slightly vulnerable in her night-wear. She turned back to Thackeray and sat opposite him in a chair on the other side of the coffee table instead of beside him. He smiled faintly ay that but said nothing.
“You went to see Mrs Tyson? To tell her?”
“I took DC Ridley with me. I thought a woman would make it easier.” He shrugged dispiritedly. “The usual cop out. Nothing makes it easier.”
“I suppose it's naïve to think you get used to it,” she said.
“You never get used to it, and children are the worst thing.”
“But you must have seen it before, in your job.”
“Not really. I suppose I've been lucky. This is the first child murder I've had to handle since...” He stopped, his determination to tell Laura about his son faltering as he stood on the threshold of the confessional.
“Since?” she said softly, and he knew that if they were to go any further he must commit himself now or not at all.
“Since my son Ian died,” he said. “He was eighth months old.” She looked at him, appalled and moved that he should have told her what evidently cost him so much to tell.
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“That must be the cruellest thing.” He shrugged slightly.
“I sometimes go whole days now without thinking about him, but seeing Nicky Tyson today brought it back. Seeing her just filled me with anger, disgust, the sort of revulsion I shouldn't be feeling so personally if I'm to make any sense of this thing.”
“You stopped concentrating on the bastard who did it?”
“I should know better,” he said.
“Can't you hand it over to someone else?” she asked, but he shook his head at that.
“I can't pick and choose my cases because I'm too fragile to handle some of them, any more than I guess you can pick and choose your stories. You're in this business for better or for worse, like marriage I suppose. And this one is definitely for worse.”
“You had a wife,” Laura said quietly again. It was a statement, not a question. “Your son had a mother – but there's no help there?”
“We're not together any more,” he said, not looking at Laura.
Laura watched him for a moment in silence, trying to weigh up the previously elusive man who had unexpectedly opened himself up to her in a way that she guessed was very rare. But in search of what, she wondered. Comfort, certainly, although whether of the physical or emotional kind she was not sure. She could, at this moment, she was certain, end it and simply send him away and he would go without complaint, locking up his distress again, grateful for whatever it was he had briefly sought from her but not likely ever to insist that she should share his burdens. She was equally sure that was not what she wanted. Very deliberately she got up and sat on the arm of the settee beside him, leaning down from above to kiss him on the lips.
“Stay here tonight,” she said. He looked up at her. The front of her pyjama top has slipped open to reveal a breast that he could have touched without effort. Instead he cupped his hand round her face and pulled her close to return the kiss.
“My mother would have called you a brazen hussy,” he said. She laughed at that, suddenly releasing the tension between them.
“Your mother would probably be right, but it's a bit late for me to change my wicked ways now,” she said.
“And what about your grandmother? Will she approve?” he asked, glancing at the closed bedroom door with a hint of relieved amusement returning to his eyes.
“Totally,” Laura said, kissing him again.
The alarm went off too soon the next morning and Laura irritably reached out a hand and turned it off before she realised that she was not alone. She recalled now just why she was so unusually reluctant to face the day and smiled at the recollection. Michael Thackeray had not reacted to the insistent buzzer and carefully Laura eased herself into a sitting position so as not to disturb him. They had fallen asleep in each other's arms after making love urgently and without much sophistication, but he had turned away from her in the night and was sleeping now with his face half hidden in the pillows, broad back bare and one hand clenched above his head.
She watched the steady rise and fall of his shoulders as he slept and felt the same sense of tenderness and triumph with which she had slipped into his arms the previous night. She did not feel any confidence that having won him she would keep him. She knew very well that he had come to her as the lesser temptation in the dark night of his depression and that when he had found his balance again he might no longer feel the need for her that he had so passionately expressed last night. That she would still need him she had no doubt.
Gently she leaned over and kissed the soft hair at the nape of his neck. There were, she noticed, a few grey strands amongst the dark.
“Michael, it's time to wake up,” she said. He turned towards her sleepily, looking at her for a moment with puzzled eyes before he smiled.
“Laura,” he said in mock astonishment and she felt renewed desire flood her body. He evidently felt the same because he pulled her towards him and kissed her hungrily, pulling of her silky pyjama top as he did so. She glanced at the clock and pulled away regretfully.
“I can't be late after taking yesterday off,” she said, trying to convince herself as much as him. He let her go, his hands following her as she slid slowly from beneath the quilt to stand looking down at him, half naked and flushed with excitement.
“Ted Grant will probably sack me if I don't turn up on time,” she said. Thackeray groaned as the reality of the previous day crowded in on him again in all of its gothic horror.
And the not-so-good folk of Wuthering will probably lynch me if I don't lay hands on their child-killer sharpish,” he said. “And if they don't, the chief constable will probably oblige. I've a meeting with Jack Longley at nine and I need Kevin Mower to brief me before that.”
He hesitated, as if about to continue, but thinking better of it. She gave him a mischievous grin, evidently restored to something like normality by the night's events, and shook her head.
“We didn't, if that's what you're wondering, thought it wasn't for want of trying on his part,” she said.
“Nothing was further from my mind,” he exclaimed innocently. “I'm sure it takes more than a Chinese meal...”
She picked up his clothes from the floor where he dropped them and threw them at him.
“You're evidently a pig by nature as well as profession,” she said, laughing. “But I never did fancy your Kevin half as much as I fancied you.”
“I'm pleased to hear it,” he said lightly, though his eyes were sombre and she recognised, if she had not done before, that this was not a man who could be trifled with.
“The bathroom's yours for ten minutes while I take Joyce some breakfast,” she said, leaning over and kissing his cheek. “Then I must get moving myself.”
The newsroom was already busy when Laura arrived at the Gazette. Ted Grant looked up briefly from his consultations over page layout with Fred Powers, the chief sub-editor, as Laura walked in.
“In my office in five minutes,” he said and Laura nodded without enthusiasm. She switched on her computer terminal, checked through what other reporters had filed on the murder at the Heights and headed her own contribution DEATH with angry stabbing fingers. Before she had finished the first paragraph she heard Ted's rasping smoker's cough behind her as he read the screen over her shoulder.
“Right,” he said. “That's more like it. But I still want a word.” “A word” was the only understatement in Grant's vocabulary and generally meant a fierce and abusive bollocking which had left tougher nuts than Laura in pieces before now. But this morning Laura was floating ion a cloud of contentment and Grant had no means of bringing her to earth. She following him into his office and pre-empted his first strike by passing on the police request not to explore the similarities between the new murder and the death of Tracy Miller. Grant listened stony faced and then harrumphed in some displeasure, his colour rising dangerously.
“If Jack Longley wants to ask me owt, he should ask me himself, not employ monkeys to send messages.”
“I wouldn't under-estimate Chief Inspector Thackeray,” Laura said sweetly. “I think the request is his as much as Longley's.”
“Aye, well, it's Longley as runs CID, and it's Longley who'll have to do the asking, as far as I'm concerned ,” Grant snapped. “I'll give him a bell later on. “We'll have to see about keeping things from our readers, won't we? It's not summat I'll do lightly, isn't that. There'll have to be a bloody good cause. So now, let's hear all about this murder you stumbled into, shall we? Better late than never, I suppose.”
Sergeant Mower drove up to the Heights in a state of subdued fury and parked outside the adventure playground with a squeal of brakes. He was breathing heavily and for a moment he sat clutching the steering wheel, trickles of sweat running down his back which were not entire caused by the continuing heat.
He had been going about his business in the incident room half an hour earlier when Chief Inspector Thackeray had appeared at his shoulder with a look in his eyes that Mower knew instantly meant trouble. In his office Thackeray ha
d closed the door deliberately and handed Mower a file.
“You, my lad, have been conned,” he said quietly, his anger confined to his eyes. “The Raban women has been leading you by the nose. No wonder you wasted your time on the Heights.”
“Sir?” Mower said, opening the file with deep foreboding. It contained standard fingerprint forms from the forensic team, two of them juxtaposed and identical. Thackeray leaned over his shoulder and jabbed at each image in turn.
“That came from a can of Coca-cola Sue Raban had just handled. That was an unidentified print from Sissons's flat, one of dozens like it. She may not have actually lived there, but she certainly spent a lot of time there. Her prints are everywhere – kitchen, living room, bedroom.”
“His girlfriend,” Mower said faintly, remembering Kelly Miller's suggestion that there was a girlfriend and her refusal to identify her.
“I wondered,” Thackery said. “I saw her up on that top walkway the night Nicky Tyson went missing and it didn't register until later. I picked up the can at the playgound when I saw her with it yesterday, just on the off-chance.”
Mower looked at him, uncharacteristically lost for words as the implications of what Thackeray had discovered sank in,
“Guv,” he began hesitantly, but Thackeray did not give him the chance to continue.
“ If you ever let personal involvement get in the way of an investigation again,” he said coldly, “you'll be back down the M1 so fast you won't see the scenery before you hit the Edgeware Road. What is it they say in the Met? I'll do your legs? In fact if your friend Miss Raban has disappeared already I wouldn't bother to report back in. You might as well go home and pack your bags. Bring her in, and if she won't come voluntarily, arrest her.”
By the time he reached the playground, Mower's own anger and anxiety had stretched him taut. He opened the high playground gate and scanned the familiar scene. A game of football was inprogress, small children splashed in the paddling pool under the watchful eyes of their mothers. At first he could not see Sue and panic grabbed momentarily at his stomach. Then he spotted her, in a bright yellow teeshirt, kneeling in the dust at the side of a small girl who had obviously fallen and scraped her knee.
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