Death in Dark Waters

by Patricia Hall

  Thackeray stood up and found, unusually, that he was in the company of a man as tall as he was himself and almost as broad, and about his own age. There was something about him which was familiar and brought a half-smile to his lips. This was, he knew, a rugby school, just as his own less exalted establishment had been, and he had a faint suspicion that he had once upon a time brought David Stewart down heavily and kneed him fairly unmercifully into the mud.

  Settled in the Head’s study in a comfortable chair close to the coffee table where Felicity Raven soon deposited a tray and poured them cups of tea from a silver teapot, Thackeray took a moment to look around the elegantly furnished room with its view over the extensive playing fields.

  “Were you a pupil here yourself?” he asked, accepting a cup and saucer.

  “I was, as it happens,” Stewart admitted. “Played rugger out there with far more enthusiasm than I had for my A Levels. But I scraped into university and teaching seemed like a good bet for someone with my sporting interests. And you? Are you an old Bradfielder too? I don’t remember …”

  “Arnedale,” Thackeray said shortly. “But I played rugby here once or twice.”

  “Ah yes. We did play Arnedale, even after …” Stewart hesitated. “I don’t think they compete in our league any more.”

  “Not many comprehensives do, I imagine,” Thackeray said dryly. “The rugby team was a hang-over from the grammar school days when I was there. A lot of lads preferred soccer even then.”

  “Pity,” Stewart said. “But I suppose I’m biased.” He gazed fondly at the playing fields. “Great days,” he said.

  “Jeremy Adams,” Thackeray said, breaking into Stewart’s nostalgic moment fairly brutally. “Did you have any idea he was indulging in illegal substances?”

  “I did not,” Stewart said. “And I understand Louise James was with him. I have to say I’m astonished, though perhaps that’s naive these days.”

  “Have you spoken to Louise?”

  “Not yet. I’m seeing her with her parents on Monday. I’m afraid I’ll have to ask her to leave.”

  “That seems harsh for something which happened out of school,” Thackeray said. Stewart glanced out of the widow for a moment without speaking.

  “That’s easy to say, Chief Inspector, and I know the police don’t do much about young people using drugs these days, but our parents expect the highest standards. After the publicity there’s been, my chairman has already indicated that we can’t afford to take her back. Or Jeremy, for that matter, should he recover. Our reputation depends on us taking a strong line. We’re in a cut-throat market.”

  “Have you said anything to your other sixth-formers yet?” he asked.

  “Not yet. Everyone is waiting to see what progress Jeremy makes.”

  “You make it very difficult for them to contact the police with information if they think they’ll be expelled if you find out,” Thackeray said. “I’m pretty sure there were others out celebrating with Jeremy and Louise but no one has come forward yet. I want to ask you to urge them to contact us. We need to find the source of the Ecstasy tablets. It’s the least we can do for Jeremy’s parents. You can tell the youngsters they can talk to us in the strictest confidence.”

  Stewart nodded enthusiastically.

  “Of course, of course, we can do that,” he said, although Thackeray had no confidence at all that exhortations from the headmaster would have much effect on his clubbing sixth-formers who must know very well what was going to befall Louise James.

  “And you won’t threaten them with any sort of consequences here as a result? You can’t assume that just because they were at the club they took drugs as well.”

  Stewart looked more doubtful at that, as well he might, Thackeray thought. You could probably count the number of young people who went clubbing without the use of illegal stimulants on the fingers of one hand.

  “Parents will talk,” Stewart said. “You know what the grapevine’s like, Chief Inspector. If it’s drawn to my attention that someone else is involved I don’t see how I can avoid taking some sort of action.”

  “It’s not helpful at the moment,” Thackeray said.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” Stewart insisted. “I’ll turn as deaf an ear as I can - but I can’t afford to harbour known drug users. It does the school no good at all.”

  And with that Thackeray had to be content. He drove away from the school in a dissatisfied mood and instead of turning back into town and on towards Laura’s flat he joined the stream of rush hour traffic heading for the suburbs and beyond. His objective was a street of run-down semidetached houses on the very edge of the town with a view from generally untended gardens over the moorland countryside between Bradfield and the commuter village of Broadley. Turning off the main road, he drove gingerly over the rutted surface and parked outside one of the last houses in the row and sat for a moment contemplating the muddy garden, the broken fences and the light spilling from the uncurtained front window. The last time he had been here an angry youth with a shot-gun had been threatening the family inside the house. Since then the son who had been threatened had been gaoled, as had the attacker he had provoked, and he fervently hoped that the authorities had shown enough sense to send them to different institutions. Where the rest of the family had gone he needed to discover, although as Superintendent Longley kept reminding him, the basis for his inquiries was flimsy, little more than a hunch which in a junior officer he would himself have dismissed with contempt.

  He locked his car carefully and knocked on the door, which offered neither knocker nor bell-push, several times before it was eventually opened by a middle-aged woman, with a cigarette clutched in one hand and the collar of a fierce-looking Staffordshire terrier in the other.

  “Oh, it’s you Mr. Thackeray,” Jean Bailey muttered pulling the growling dog back into the house. “Just let me shut this beggar up and you can come in.” He waited while doors opened and shut at the back of the house and eventually the woman beckoned him inside. She evidently bore him no grudge for arresting her son because she waved him into the front room with a smile and sank back into the armchair from which she had been watching TV, turning the volume down very slightly with a remote control,

  “Bloody dog were Nicky’s idea,” she said. “Security for me, he said. But the beggar’s more trouble than he’s worth. Let him run out on t’green and he’s off for hours at a time. I can’t catch him, can I? And if you keep him on a lead he pulls your bloody arm off. He’ll have to go.”

  “I was keen to have a word with Karen,” Thackeray said. “But Barry Foreman says she’s left him. I thought maybe she’d come back home.”

  Jean shook her head.

  “I’ve done my bit wi‘babies,” she said, lighting a fresh cigarette and flinging the match into an over-flowing ashtray on the cluttered coffee table. “Nappies, bottles, screaming in t’middle o’t’night. I can’t be doing with all that again. I told her. She’d made her bed, she’d have to bloody lie on it.”

  “So do you know where she is?” Thackeray asked, slightly shaken by this lack of grandmotherly solidarity. But Jean only shrugged.

  “Barry said she were talking about going to London,” she said. “I reckon she’s got some new man in her life. You’ll be seeing her in t’lobe next wi’some footballer with a tattoo on his bum.”

  “London? With two young babies?”

  “Aye, well, I didn’t know t’wins were going with her, did I? I thought he were keen to keep them, Barry. He can afford a nanny or summat, can’t he? Any road, she’ll want to be somewhere where he can’t find her, won’t she? He’s got a vicious temper on him, has Barry Foreman.”

  “Has he now?” Thackeray said carefully. “He always seems as smooth as silk when I talk to him.”

  The woman glanced away and shrugged slightly.

  “You ask our Nicky,” she said. “He were a damn’ sight more scared of Barry after that business wi’t’gippos than he was of you lot.”

 
Even if that were true, Thackeray thought, and he had no reason to doubt Jean Bailey’s assessment of her son’s state of mind, there was little chance of the already jailed Nicky expanding on any threats Foreman might have issued to his girlfriend’s brother. He changed tack.

  “Has Karen got money of her own? I don’t imagine Barry sent her on her way with a generous redundancy cheque, do you?”

  “Karen never had owt, as far as I know. Spent it as fast as she earned it when she were living here. If she had one pair of shoes she had fifty, all t’colours o’t’ bloody rainbow. If she’s gone she’ll have found some beggar to pay her fare, you can bet on that.”

  “But you haven’t heard from her?”

  “Not a friggin’ word,” Jean said, drawing hard on her cigarette. “Not for months now. She never were one to keep in touch, weren’t Karen. Only when she wanted summat. You know how it is?”

  Thackeray suddenly felt very cold although the room was stuffy. No one seemed to be worried about Karen Bailey and her twin girls, barely six months old: not their father, not their grandmother and certainly not their uncle banged up in Armley for violence which still sickened Thackeray to think about. So why was he so certain that they ought to be? Perhaps he was going soft, he thought, but he didn’t really believe it. If only for his own peace of mind, he knew he needed to track Karen and her children down.

  1got home that night tired and irritable. She had spent the best part of the afternoon at the Infirmary waiting for the interview which had been promised by Grantley Adams, only to have the man brush her off without a word of apology at five o’clock as he strode angrily out of the hospital, stonyfaced and unbending. His wife, a fragile-looking woman much younger than her grey-haired husband, who had been following almost at a run, hesitated when she saw Laura with her tape-recorder at the ready.

  “We can’t stop now,” she said. “Grantley has a meeting in half an hour he can’t miss.”

  “How’s Jeremy?” Laura had asked, but the boy’s mother had shrugged wearily, pushing wisps of what Laura guessed would usually be elegantly coiffed hair out of her eyes.

  “There’s no change,” she said, and scuttled after her husband who had glanced back impatiently from the swing doors. She had tried calling the Adams family home a couple of times later but had only got an recorded message telling her that Grantley and Althea Adams and family were not available. Eventually she drove out to Broadley and parked outside the Adams’s substantial stone house, set well back from the road, and pressed the answerphone on the heavy iron gates. Somewhat to her surprise, Mrs. Adams responded and opened first the gates and then the front door. But it turned out to be an unsatisfactory encounter. Althea Adams had taken her into the kitchen and poured herself a gin and tonic which she drank quickly with shaking hands while she made Laura a coffee. Somewhere else in the house the sound of pop music indicated the presence of the Adams daughters but they did not appear and Jeremy’s mother seemed almost incoherent with anxiety.

  “I only came home because of the girls,” she had said. “I ought to be at the hospital. I shouldn’t really have let you in. Grantley would be furious …”

  “Your husband couldn’t have cancelled his meeting, with Jeremy so ill?” Laura asked curiously, but Mrs Adams simply shrugged.

  “It was very important,” she said.

  “You don’t work yourself,” Laura asked.

  “I used to before we were married. I was an accountant. I worked for Grantley for a couple of years, that’s how we met. But there’s no need now and with three children there’s a lot to do here.” She smiled faintly. “Grantley’s first wife had her own career but I don’t think that worked out very well. He’s a very demanding man. I should know. I worked for him before his divorce.”

  “And neither of you had any idea Jeremy was into drugs?”

  “No of course not,” Mrs. Adams said sharply. But when Laura suggested that a profile of the family might help others in a similar situation, she panicked.

  “Grantley would hate that,” she said. “In fact he’d hate you being here. Perhaps you’d better go now.”

  And with that Laura had to be content, although she knew it would in no way satisfy Ted Grant’s desire for an in-depth interview for the next morning’s first edition. But before she could get too broody about the fragile state of her career, her mobile rang and she heard her grandmother’s voice again, full of emotion.

  “Have you got time to come up to the Project after work, pet?” Joyce asked. “I won’t keep you long but there’s someone I’d like you to meet.” Laura had smiled to herself as she agreed. Even at almost eighty her grandmother, with the bit between her teeth, was a formidable force. So for the second evening running she had ground her way up the steep hill to the Heights and picked her way across the puddled pathways to the Project where she found Joyce and Donna Maitland drinking tea with a small dark man with deep pouches under fierce black eyes.

  “This is Dr. Khan,” Donna said. “He wants to tell you about the drug problems up here.”

  “Donna tells me you’re going to write something in the Gazette,” Khan said. “It’s time someone took some notice of what is happening on the Heights. The problem is getting out of control.”

  “I know there’s been a spate of deaths from overdoses … .”

  “Twelve years old one of them was,” Khan said, evidently outraged. “But there have been other deaths. The boy who went over the top of the flats the other day, another who was killed by a car. I think they are all connected. It is an epidemic. And apart from this place, and Donna here, no one is taking it seriously or doing anything to help. I can’t get kids into rehab when they need it. I can’t persuade the police that some of these deaths are tantamount to murder.”

  “The younger children carry knives, some of the older ones have got guns,” Joyce broke in.

  “My nephew was fourteen,” Donna said quietly. “Started sniffing glue, moved on to heroin. I’m frightened to let our Emma out of my sight …”

  “Murder?” Laura concentrated on the doctor with exhaustion written all over him. “What makes you say that?”

  “I’ve no evidence,” Khan said. “Just rumours, sideways looks. I wasn’t called to all the deaths, but I’ve treated some of the bereaved families. Everyone assumes that all the kids who have died brought it on themselves. That they were rubbish because they were junkies. But that is not my impression. The mother of one of the boys who died of an overdose says he was not on drugs, that he hated them, that he worked hard at school and had ambitions. The boy who fell off the roof was not a user, apparently. They haven’t held the inquest yet so I don’t know what they found at the post-mortem. But his mother is adamant he was not a junkie now, even if he had been once.”

  “You think there’s some sort of war going on between dealers?” Laura asked doubtfully. “No one’s suggested that publicly. There’s not been any shooting.”

  “Yet,” Donna said bitterly. “All t’kids are saying there’s guns on the estate.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t see any signs of anyone trying to find out either,” Khan said. “What we really need to do is get a campaign going to tackle the problem up here. Some of the families are keen to help …”

  “If you can do it without using their names,” Donna broke in. “Don’t underestimate just how bloody scared people are.”

  “But we need some backing,” the doctor went on. “Not a lot but some funds to get started, and we need some publicity. That’s where we thought you could help. You could write about it in the Gazette.”

  Laura had listened to Dr. Khan’s complaints with a growing sense of unease. She thought of the effort the police seemed to be putting into investigating the incident at the Carib Club, and about Thackeray’s scarcely veiled lack of faith in the drug squad’s efforts on the Heights, and wondered if she could persuade Ted Grant to let her write about Donna’s fears and Dr. Khan’s campaign. To catch his interest she had to hav
e a good story and that, she thought, would involve some serious research.

  “Where’s Kevin Mower today?” she had asked, a germ of an idea forming in the back of her head.

  “He doesn’t tell me what he’s doing,” Donna said, and Laura could see the pain behind her carefully composed facade. “I’ve a genius for hooking bastards who don’t tell you what they’re doing, didn’t you know? He’s not due in here today, any road.”

  Laura had taken that unasked for piece of information on board with no more than a sympathetic glance. It was not the time, she thought, to fill Donna in with details of Mower’s chequered history. So she had driven home, increasingly determined that she would pursue Dr. Khan’s problems and find a story she could realistically sell to her unsympathetic editor, and wondering how far her own man was willing to share his plans with her and how safe it would be to share hers with him on this particular occasion.

  In the end the decision was made for her. She had cooked a meal without much enthusiasm but Thackeray was late and she ate alone, too hungry by nine o’clock to wait any longer. It’s a bit soon to be behaving like an old married couple, putting the dinner in the oven and waiting with a rolling pin behind the door, she thought wryly as she sat in the silent flat listening for the sound of a car outside. When he finally arrived, she had switched on the TV and curled up on the sofa to watch a documentary about the melting ice-cap in Antarctica. And as if that were not sufficiently gloomy, she could see from a quick glance at Thackeray’s face as he hung up his coat that he was in a dark mood too.

  He flung himself onto the sofa beside her, lit a cigarette and zapped the TV off.

  “Where would you run to if you had two young babies and no obvious means of support?” he asked.

  Laura shrugged.

  “Some sort of women’s refuge?”

  “I’m not sure she was running away from violence, though her mother thinks it’s possible” Thackeray said. “Anyway, I’ve checked the local women’s centres out. She’s not there.”