“No, I’m just here for a chat with Dave Spencer,” Joyce said abruptly. “I can’t get about the way I used to. My hips have given up on me.”
The smart tap of footsteps in the corridor outside heralded the arrival of a much younger man, sharp suited, fresh-faced, and with a haircut so close to the scalp that he could have played football for England. He glanced around the room, ignoring ex-councillor Harvey and waving the two women to a table and chairs in an alcove well away from the door. As they settled themselves down, Spencer, with his file and mobile phone lined up in front of him, glanced at the elaborate looking watch on his wrist.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Ackroyd - can I call you Joyce?” he said. “I’ve got an urgent sub-committee in fifteen minutes. Something’s come up. So perhaps if you just tell me what the problem is I can get back to you later?”
“I think it might take a little longer than that to explain exactly what the problems are at the Project,” Joyce said, an obstinate look coming over her face.
“You do know about the Project, Councillor Spencer, don’t you?” Laura asked sharply. “The Gazette did a big feature on it about six months ago.”
Spencer glanced at her sharply.
“You are?”
Laura told him.
“I didn’t make the connection,” he said, looking irritated with himself as if his omniscience had been challenged in some way.
“No reason why you should,” Joyce said. “Laura’s not here as a journalist. She gave me a lift. I’m not as good on my feet as I used to be but there’s nowt wrong with my brain.”
“And now there’s a problem at the Project?” Spencer asked, altogether more placatory now he realised that the Press was in on the meeting, if only unofficially.
Joyce told him exactly how the Project had been vandalised and, in outline, how their precarious financial position meant that unless they could improve their cashflow the whole enterprise might have to close.
“Training is certainly going to be part of the regeneration project that we’re discussing with the government,” Spencer said at last. “It’s a particular interest of some of our business partners, of course. We’ve a massive skills shortage building up in Bradfield. Far too many kids still leaving school too soon. Those who do go to university not coming back again to work. We need to address those problems if we’re to attract modern high-tech industries to the area. What sort of outcomes are you showing up there? Are they getting jobs?”
“Some are,” Joyce said. “Some aren’t. If your business friends don’t like the colour of their skin it’s harder. But you’d be aware of that, of course, on your regeneration committee.”
“Of course,” Spencer said, glancing quickly at Laura and away again.
“And then there’s the problem of drugs,” Joyce said firmly.
“At the Project?” Spencer sounded alarmed.
“Not if we can help it, no,” Joyce snapped. “But on the estate. Too many kids with nothing to do. Too many pushers. Who do you think wrecked the place for us? It wasn’t the ones we were helping, that’s for sure. They’re good as gold when they come to us. It’s the ones who won’t be helped. Another lad dead and the Project wrecked, all in two days. What we need is short-term help to keep going and long-term help to get drugs out of the community before any more youngsters die. Can I come and tell your regeneration committee what needs doing up there, before you make any more plans?”
“I’m sure that would be very helpful, Joyce,” Spencer said. “But I’ll have to put it to them first.”
“Can you raise it at this urgency sub-committee you’re off to now, then?” Joyce asked quickly as the councillor glanced at his watch again. He smiled faintly. Her grandmother still did not miss a trick, Laura thought.
“Not appropriate, I’m afraid, Joyce,” Spencer said. “It’ll have to wait until the next full meeting of the regeneration committee - if they agree. Perhaps in the meantime you can let me have something in writing, including the financial position you find yourselves in now. Our business partners will want to know just what value the project is adding …”
“I’ve got all that here for you,” Joyce said, delving into her bag and bringing out several closely handwritten sheets neatly encased in a plastic document folder. “I didn’t think you’d sign a cheque just on my say-so, lad,” she said. “I may be old but I’m not daft. You’ll find it all here. But I will say one thing. I’ve worked with folk up on the Heights for the last fifty years, on and off, and this is one of the best projects I’ve seen for the last thirty. But it’s no use the Lottery putting in thousands for the capital costs if we can’t insure against theft and vandalism. You can tell your business friends that, especially if some of them are from the banks and insurance companies. They’ll know what I’m talking about. And you’d best make sure that they don’t sell all your new schemes down the river the same way. Regeneration’s all well and good, but when summat goes wrong you’ve got to be able to pick up the pieces.”
She struggled to her feet, ignoring Laura’s arm.
“I’ll be hearing from you shortly, then, shall I, Councillor Spencer?”
Spencer got up and took a step towards the door, clutching Joyce’s folder as if it was giving off a faintly unsavoury smell.
“I’m sure,” he said. “I’m sure.” And he was gone, the door slamming behind him.
Joyce looked around the room with some satisfaction. On the far side, Len Harvey peered around his Daily Telegraph with a wicked grin.
“Not lost your tongue then, Joyce?” he said.
“Think they know it all, these sharp young men,” Joyce said.
“Same with us,” Harvey said more soberly. “Trouble is, I think some of them know nowt. Doesn’t matter what party they belong to, they’re all t’same. They’re ambitious, I’ll give you that. Full of big ideas but all mouth and no trousers, I reckon, a lot of them.”
“Well, we’ll see,” Joyce said, following Laura slowly to the door. “If they can’t solve a simple problem like we’ve got just now on the Heights, then I reckon you’re right. Business partners! Since when did business do owt for the poor? Unless there’s a fat rate of interest in it for them.”
DCI Michael Thackeray closed down his computer, stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette and sat for a moment in the half-light of the winter evening, with the rain beating against the window as it had done for weeks, reviewing an unsatisfactory afternoon. Superintendent Longley had marched into his office halfway through it as Thackeray expected he would. His face was flushed and his expression as angry as the DCI had ever seen it.
“I’ve just had Mrs. Adams on the phone,” Longley had said, without preamble.
“Sir?” Thackeray said, his face impassive.
“Did you have to search the bloody house?” Longley asked. “I told you to handle this with kid gloves and you choose to use a bloody great sledge-hammer. Did you go down there yourself?”
“Val Ridley was in charge,” Thackeray said. “I told her to handle it sensitively. She’s no fool. She knew the implications.”
“That’s not the impression I got from Mrs. Adams complaining about coppers in hob-nailed boots tramping around her home when the lad’s life is on a knife-edge. And I can’t say I blame her, either.”
“You wanted the drug aspect investigated, sir,” Thackeray had said as mildly as he could manage. “Unless we eliminate the two kids we know took Ecstasy that night we don’t know where to begin looking for the dealer. And unless we’d moved quickly we’d have had the parents doing a search before us and destroying any evidence there might have been. I told Mrs. James we’d need to search. I sent the teams out immediately so she couldn’t warn the Adamses.”
“And did you find any evidence?” Longley had asked, more quietly now, but still flushed.
“A small amount of cannabis in Jeremy Adams’s bedroom.”
“Bloody hell.” Longley had sunk into a chair, breathing heavily, while he took in the implications
of this news.
“Did you inform the parents?” he asked eventually.
“You’ll have to check with Val, but I don’t think so, no. Mrs. Adams took off for the hospital before the search was competed, apparently, leaving the cleaner to lock up the house. They probably don’t know yet.”
“A small amount, you say?”
Thackeray had reached into his desk drawer and handed Longley a plastic evidence bag containing some screwed up paper which Longley opened and sniffed suspiciously.
“Not much doubt about that then? Though you’d have difficulty making a charge of dealing stick,” he said.
“Maybe.” Thackeray did not try to hide the challenge in his eyes and eventually Longley looked away.
“I’ll keep this,” the superintendent said, putting the bag into an inside pocket. “If the lad snuffs it, it won’t have any evidential value any road, will it? If not, we can think about what to do about it when he’s in a fit state to be interviewed. Right, Michael?”
“Sir,” Thackeray had said, wondering what sort of a slippery slope Longley was threatening to slide down and determined he was not going to slide down it with him.
“A close friend, is he? Grantley Adams?” he ventured.
“He’s not a bloody friend of mine,” Longley said angrily. “Just a bloody acquaintance at the Lodge. But they’ve invited me to sit on this committee looking at the regeneration of the Heights, so I don’t want to queer our pitch there. It seems like a worthwhile thing for the Force to be doing, wouldn’t you say? Opportunities to build in security, consult on policing, community-minded, all that?”
“I’m sure it’s all of those things,” Thackeray conceded. “Though there’ve been more schemes to regenerate that estate than there’ve been modernisations of the Force. Pulling the whole lot down, like they said they would, might be a better bet.”
“Aye, well, that might be on the agenda, as I understand it. But never mind that. What about the bloody Carib Club? It might have been better to concentrate your efforts there, rather than going for a couple of respectable families who seem to be the victims rather than the villains in this mess, wouldn’t you say?”
“Perhaps,” Thackeray said. “Val Ridley and DC Sharif are down there now, as it goes.”
Only slightly deflated, Longley had departed, leaving Thackeray in a foul mood which was not improved by the mountain of paperwork which he tackled for the rest of the afternoon. According to the new management jargon, he was now Bradfield’s “crime manager” and it was not a job he thought particularly suited him. By five o’clock, with dusk settling over the square outside, he was sitting in his car deciding to make one last call before going home and it would be as unannounced as he had determined his officers’ raids had been earlier in the day.
Unannounced and unofficial.
The boss was in his office at Foreman Security Services when Thackeray arrived. With barely a nod of greeting, Barry Foreman crossed the room to the cocktail cabinet and waved a bottle of Scotch expansively in his visitor’s direction with a hand heavy with gold rings.
“You’re off duty by now, I take it?”
Thackeray shook his head, certain that the offer was intended to rile. Foreman was as tall as he was himself, though perhaps without the rugby-player’s breadth, but he dressed with a style and at a cost which Thackeray could only marvel at. If proof was needed that Foreman had interests which went far beyond the modest security company which was his only ostensible source of income, his vanity provided it. Those rings, the Italian suit, the hand-made leather loafers on which he padded across his thickly carpeted office, the silk tie that Thackeray knew he should recognise as the signature of some designer or other, all spoke of money and plenty of it. There was a new breed of criminal abroad - and the DCI had no doubt Foreman was a criminal although he had failed so far to prove it - computer literate and intelligent enough to keep well clear of the dirt that supported their lifestyle. While Thackeray assumed that it was the drug trade which funded Foreman’s extravagances, he admitted that it could just as easily be people trafficking, or some financial scam which bridged the gap between legitimate and illegitimate business worlds. He had trawled the man’s record with inexhaustible patience, wasting his own time as well as the police force’s, but Foreman had no criminal record and he could find no evidence apart from the vaguely circumstantial, to implicate him in any illegal activity.
Foreman was waiting for his answer, a faint smile on the thin lips, the eyes offering a chilly challenge, the bottle still poised.
“Not for me,” Thackeray said. Foreman shrugged and poured himself a large one.
“That little gypsy scrote with the shot-gun got sent down, I see,” he said as he dropped a couple of ice cubes into the drink and tasted it. “Didn’t even call me as a bloody witness in the end.” The faint note of complaint suggested that he would have enjoyed taking the stand.
“He pleaded guilty, but they don’t look kindly on fire-arms offences,” Thackeray said. “How are Karen and the babies?” The two men had not met face-to-face since the day Foreman’s girlfriend and her twin girls had been besieged briefly by the boy with a shot-gun though the security boss had seldom been far from Thackeray’s thoughts. Foreman shrugged again and Thackeray wondered if he had imagined the flash of anger in his pale eyes.
“She buggered off, didn’t she? Took the kids with her. I can’t say I was sorry. How am I ever going to know who’s kids they are?”
“You didn’t have the tests done then?” The paternity of Foreman’s children had been thrown into doubt by the doctor who had helped the couple conceive them.
“She wouldn’t have it, would she? Scared of the results, I dare say,” Foreman dropped heavily into his swivel chair behind an extensive desk unsullied by paperwork and waved Thackeray into an armchair. “Stupid cow.”
Thackeray watched as Foreman sipped his drink. The heavy, bland face gave nothing away and as Foreman told it there was nothing to give. But Thackeray had never glimpsed a spark of humanity behind those normally cold blank eyes.
“So what can I do for you, Chief Inspector?” Foreman asked eventually.
“The Carib Club,” Thackeray said. “Do you look after the doors for them?”
“Nope,” Foreman said. “Nowt to do with me that place. They make their own arrangements, as far as I know. Keep themselves to themselves, those black lads, don’t they? I heard they had a bit of trouble the other night. Just shows, they might be better off using FSS, mightn’t they?”
“You must hear a lot of things in your line of work,” Thackeray said mildly. “What about the supply of Ecstasy? Your lads hear anything about that lately?”
“At the Carib? Or generally?”
“Whatever?”
“There’s a lot of it about, I’m told. Kids can’t have a night out without it. I’d tan their backsides for them if they were mine. As to where they get it, I can’t help you there, Mr. Thackeray. As I think I’ve said to you before, I know nowt about the supply of drugs, and if any of my lads give me as much as a whiff that they’re dealing they’re out. Ecstasy, hash, crack, Charlie, I’ll not tolerate it. More than the company’s reputation’s worth.”
Thackeray smiled with as much sympathy as he could muster for a man who, in his book, had a reputation so fragile that it might shatter if a breath of wind disturbed it. But it had to be the right breath of wind and so far he had not managed to generate even an echo of the hurricane he believed Foreman and all his works deserved.
“You’ll keep me informed if you hear anything,” he said. “Anythmg at all.”
“Of course, Mr. Thackeray,” Foreman said, knocking his drink back and getting to his feet. “Anything I can do to help.”
Chapter Four
“You don’t have to pretend you’re in love with me and all that crap, you know,” Donna Maitland said as Kevin Mower rolled out of her bed and slipped into his jeans.
“Sorry,” Mower said, pulling up his zip viciou
sly. Donna slid from under the duvet, naked, blonde hair straggling down her back and her face, stripped of make-up, revealing fine lines that were usually carefully concealed. She was not quite the woman Mower had first seen belting out ‘I Will Survive’ at a karaoke night at one of the local pubs, but he had learned that in many ways she was much more than that woman throwing musical defiance at the world had appeared to be. Dozens of women from the Heights performed nightly on the pub and club circuit, casting off their bras and squeezing into too revealing dresses to exchange their pain and disappointment for a moment of glamour and whoops of drunken enthusiasm from the audience. He knew now that Donna was different. She saw life on the Heights as a challenge and had learned slowly and painfully that occasionally she could win and he admired her for it. But admiration and sex in the afternoon did not equate to anything more. They both knew that and most of the time accepted it. It was only occasionally Mower caught that look of longing in Donna’s eyes before they turned away from each other, he in sudden anger, she in embarrassment.
She pulled a blue silk nightdress over her head to conceal breasts that were beginning to droop and a stomach still flat from fevered dieting but not free of stretch marks, and reached out until Mower sat back down on the bed beside her and put an arm around her waist companionably.
“What is it about you?” she asked. “I’ve been watching you, you know. This weren’t just summat that came up on me today. I’ve watched you wi‘t’kids and seen you come alive wi‘them. And then when you come back to t’bloody adults you switch off, dead as summat that fell off back of a bin lorry. What’s that all about?”
“It’s a long story,” Mower said uneasily, getting up again to pull a sweatshirt over his head and moving out onto the balcony of the fourth floor flat where an icy blast from the Pennines made him recoil. Donna followed him, pulling a robe around herself and standing beside him shivering as they both gazed down at the littered car-park below. Donna’s lips tightened and she looked away so that the sergeant could not see eyes filled with tears which were only partly caused by the wind.
Death in Dark Waters Page 4
