“You want to stop more kids getting into this mess?” Dizzy asked, his voice harsh.
“That’d be summat,” the boy said. “But there’s no way you can stop it. It’s the way it is. You try to stop it and you end up dead, one way or another.”
“Is that what happened to the boy who fell off the roof?” Laura asked gently.
Stevie shuddered and wrapped his arms round himself, shivering more violently.
“He were a friend of our Steven’s,” Lorraine Maddison said. “They were in t’same class at school. When they went to school”
“He went to rehab,” Stevie said. “They don’t like that.”
“Who doesn’t like it?” Laura asked angrily.
“The dealers, of course,” the boy said contemptuously. “They don’t like losing customers, do they? They don’t like rehab, do they? They don’t like projects, they don’t like employment schemes, they don’t like people getting their lives together … Bad for business, know what I mean?” For a moment or two he looked animated but the light in his eyes soon began to fade.
“Is it the dealers who are trashing the Project?”
“spect so,” Stevie said, his interest waning. Laura turned to his mother.
“Why isn’t Stevie in rehab?” she asked.
“Stevie won’t go for treatment. He’s too scared of what they might do to him, so we’re trying to do it on our own,” his mother said. “Any road there’s a waiting list for places, isn’t there. He might be dead before one comes up. Donna at the Project persuaded him to give it a try but even she couldn’t find him a place in a clinic. Months he had to wait, getting worse all t’time.”
“She’s all right, is Donna,” Stevie muttered unexpectedly. “She’s cool.”
“Tell us about the boy who fell off the roof, Stevie?” Dizzie asked. “What was his name again?”
“Derek, Derek Whitby. He were my best mate. And he didn’t fall, man.”
“I thought he was high …” Laura began.
“So he was high. Maybe he was, more likely not. I don’t think he was using again, man. Last time I saw him he were clean. Any road, he didn’t fall,” Stevie said. “I was there. I saw him.”
“You mean he jumped? Killed himself.”
“I don’t mean that, neither. I mean he were pushed. I were down below. I’d been waiting for him. I saw him on t‘roof wi’ some other lads. But there were nothing I could do. I were too far away. I saw him up there and I saw him pushed over t‘edge. I heard him scream all t’way down.”
“Who? Who pushed him?” Laura asked but the boy just looked at her contemptuously again. It was obvious that there were some things he was never going to tell them, even if he knew.
“So what did you do, Stevie?” Sanderson asked quietly.
“I ran didn’t I? I went back home, didn’t I? I thought them bastards’d be coming for me next.”
“Have you told the police this?” Laura asked. The boy looked at her again and held a shaking hand up in front of his face.
“This stuff maybe goin’ to kill me,” he said. “And maybe not. But if I talk to t’ police I’m dead. Any fool knows that on t’Heights. See nowt, say nowt, that’s the way it is.”
“I think it’s time you went,” Stevie’s mother said quietly from the other side of the room where she had been listening to her son as intently as her visitors had. “This lad’s going to stay alive. I’ll make sure of that.”
“But if Derek was murdered …That’s what he’s saying?” Laura began.
“He’s saying nowt,” Lorraine Maddison said, glaring at her visitors defiantly. “He knows nowt. That’s the way you stay alive round here. If the police want to find summat out they’re on their own. And if you tell them owt about what Steven’s said, we’ll just deny it. There’s no help for it. That’s the way it is on Wuthering.”
Reluctantly Dizzy B led the way back down the damp and stinking staircase.
“He knows who it was,” he said. “I’m bloody sure he knows, but unless the police are prepared to get him and his mother off the estate he’ll never talk.”
“I thought that’s what the police did with witnesses,” Laura said.
“Sometimes,” Dizzy said. “But at the moment the local nick doesn’t even believe this Derek boy was murdered so they won’t be taking any interest at all, will they?” Just inside the doors to the block he hesitated.
“You up for talking to Derek’s mother?” he asked. Laura glanced at her watch. Her lunch-hour was rapidly running out but her instinct was to follow where the story led and risk Ted Grant’s wrath.
“You know where she lives?”
Dizzy nodded.
“Your amazing granny told me,” he said with a grin.
“Is there anything she doesn’t know?” Laura asked with genuine wonderment.
“I doubt it,” Dizzy said. “He actually lived in the block where he fell off the roof. His parents are still there, poor sods.”
“So let’s do it,” Laura said, the laughter fading from her eyes. Picking their way across the soggy grass they made their way to the identical entrance of Priestley House, the most westerly of the three blocks of flats on the Heights and the most exposed to the wind and rain. Most of the cellophane wrappings had been blown off the flowers which had been left in tribute to Derek Whitby, and the pale carnations and roses were gradually disintegrating into the mud, a frail memorial to real flesh and blood, Laura thought.
“It’s like bloody Siberia up here,” Dizzy complained, pulling the collar of his fleece up to his nose.
“They’re not joking when they call it Wuthering,” Laura said. “And the buildings soak up water like a sponge. They should have pulled them down years ago but they’ve never been able to find the money - or the commitment. There’s some who believe that the people who live up here don’t deserve anything better.”
Inside the bleak entrance hall where the lifts displayed the familiar out-of-order signs and a couple of hypodermic syringes rolled into a corner in the draught from the open door, she glanced up the staircase quizzically.
“How far this time?” she asked. “I’m not fit enough for this. I’ve been skipping my exercise lately, putting on the pounds.”
Dizzy B glanced at her appreciatively.
“You look fine to me, woman,” he said. “Number ten, first floor. Think you can manage that?” He led the way up again and onto another puddled landing where the wind howled like a banshee between the panels of the walkway. Leaning against the gale, eyes half closed against the driving rain, they staggered to the door of number ten and knocked. This time the door was opened quickly, though held on a restraining chain, and two dark eyes peered through the gap.
“Mrs. Whitby?” Laura said. “I’m from the Gazette. I’m writing about the drug problem on the estate and I wondered if you could spare me five minutes?” The eyes widened slightly and for a moment Laura thought that the door was going to be slammed in their faces but eventually the chain was eased off and the door pulled wide to reveal a middle-aged black woman in a formal dark dress who glanced anxiously along the landing before beckoning her two visitors inside.
“You wan’ to be careful, girl,” she said. “It ain’t safe for folk like you to be roun’ here asking questions like that.” She glanced at Dizzy B her eyes full of accusing anxiety. “You should know better than to bring her here, man,” she said.
“We’re OK,” Dizzy said. “We’ll be fine. But we just saw Stevie Maddison and that boy’s not fine. Is that the way your Derek was before he died?” Laura thought that Dizzy B’s casual brutality would dissolve Mrs. Whitby in front of their eyes but after turning away from them for a moment, her shoulders slumped and her plump features almost collapsing in misery, she turned back with a spark of anger in her eyes.
“He was like that,” she said at last. “For a long time he was like that. And then he decided he want to change. And believe me we did everything we could to help that boy. An’ Donna from th
e Project. She a brave lady, that one. She helped me an’ Derek. I tol’ the police. Derek was not a junkie no more. But out there there’s people who do the opposite. They don’ want no one to change. They like things just the way they are with these kids. Lots of profit in it for them if things stay the same, I dare say. They come knocking at my door with cheap offers for Derek, special deals … Can you believe that? Like travellin’ salesmen? I tell them he not a junkie, that’s he’s clean and I intend he goin’ to stay clean, and then suddenly he’s dead, high on something, they say, and falling off a roof. Is that convenient for someone? After all the trouble he went to get himself clean, booking into rehab, everything? Can you believe that is what really happened?”
“What do you think happened, Mrs. Whitby?” Laura asked quietly, switching on her recorder again.
“I think he was killed, that’s what I think. That’s what Stevie says and I believe him.”
“And have you told the police that?”
“I told the police that. And they don’ believe me, do they? They don’ want to believe me, maybe. Maybe the dealers pay them not to believe me. That’s what I think. So now we goin’ home. We’d decided that before Derek died. Since 1965 my family been in this country, my mother and father came on the boat all that time ago, and it’s been nothin’ but trouble all the way. Derek was my youngest boy, my last child, and I’ve lost him, and there’s no justice for black people in this country so we going back to Jamaica. It’s all over here, finished. My man is giving up his job at the end of the month. I stopped already when I was helpin’ Derek get clean. I worked at the Infirmary but I’ll not go back, I haven’t the heart now.” She crossed the room and took an envelope from behind the clock on the mantelpiece.
“We’ve bought our tickets,” she said. “We’ve one too many now.”
“I’m sorry,” Laura said. “When do you fly?”
“At the end of next month. The coroner say we can fix the boy’s funeral for next week. There’ll be an inquest, but it was an accident, they saying’. I don’t believe that, but what can we do?”
“So if we can persuade the police to look at Derek’s death more seriously you could help them?”
“Why they listen to you when they won’ listen to the boy’s own parents?” Mrs. Whitby asked bitterly.
“I think there are people who know things who haven’t talked to the police yet,” Dizzy B said, his face grim. “D’you know who might have been threatening Derek?”
“I know what they look like, but I don’ know no names. You have to ask the kids. In the end it’s the kids who have to stop this trade. The good Lord knows, it took me long enough to persuade Derek to give it up but in the end I succeeded. I prayed for him and prayed with him, and in the end I thought I’d won. And then …” She shrugged and turned away again to hide the raw emotion which overcame her.
“Come here,” she said suddenly drawing her visitors to the window which overlooked the bleak spaces between the flats. She turned out the light so that they could not be seen from outside and pointed to where a small group of hooded men and youths huddled in the gloomy shadows under the inadequate shelter of the balconies of Holtby House.
“They dealing there in broad daylight. We never see a policeman trying to stop them. They fearless, those men. They brazen with it. They wait for the kids coming home from school ← and soon them they trap don’ bother going to school no more. They ain’t afraid of no one. That black boy there, see, the tall one. I know he is called Ounce.”
“Ounce,” Dizzy said. “That’s a seriously odd name.”
“That’s what they call him. He come and he go in a big car and I reckon when he come the drugs come with him. That’s how it was with Derek. He was twelve when they got hold of him. A little boy.”
“Do you have a photograph of Derek I could use?” Laura asked. “I’d like to make his story the centre of my feature about the estate.”
Mrs. Whitby flicked the lights back on and took a school photograph of her son, smiling tentatively at the camera, from the mantelpiece.
“I pray to God it do some good,” she said, pressing the picture into Laura’s hand. “It won’t bring my son back but maybe it will help some others.”
Chapter Eight
Laura lay in bed the next morning, rigid with an anger that had not been dissipated by a restless night’s sleep. She listened to Michael Thackeray moving around in the bathroom next door and wondered whether reopening their differences again in the grey half-light of morning was worth the risk of deepening the rift between them in the unpropitious cause of changing a mind that had seemed set in stone the previous evening.
She had got home from work already seething. When she had returned to the office she had braved Ted Grant in his glass-walled watch-tower at the end of the newsroom and outlined the results of her researches on the Heights. He had not seemed impressed, and after she had played her taperecordings of the two distraught mothers to him he had merely opened his office door and summoned Bob Baker, the crime reporter, from his computer with his customary bull-like bellow.
“It’s as likely nowt as owt,” Grant had said as the younger man glanced inquiringly at the editor. “Laura reckons folk up on the Heights are putting that lad Whitby’s death down as murder. What do the police think?”
“What I hear is that Mrs. Whitby’s gone off her rocker since the lad died,” Baker had said dismissively. “He’s a bit of a militant, the father. The Anti-Racist League, works for the council and took them to court over discrimination, all that stuff. Complaints about police harassment a couple of years ago. Nothing substantiated, of course. They see discrimination round every bend, some of these people.”
“That’s not fair,” Laura said. “I’ve got a witness on that tape who says he saw the other boy pushed over the edge of the roof.”
“Black, is he?” Baker asked.
“No, he’s not, as it goes,” Laura snapped.
“On drugs then?”
“Getting off them, actually. Or trying. He saw what happened and he’s scared out of his wits.”
“And has he told the police that?” Baker asked. “Because my information is that there’s not a scrap of evidence that it was anything but an accident. Derek Whitby was high as a kite, fooling about on the roof, went too near the edge and bingo! He’s mince-meat.”
“And the other lads who were on the roof with him have come forward to confirm that, have they?” Laura asked sweetly, but Baker just shrugged.
“You know what it’s like up there. They won’t confirm their own names if they can avoid it,” he said.
“Well my information is that the dealers up there are using all sorts of violence to keep the kids in line, and that this was just the most vicious instance,” Laura said.
Ted Grant had glanced at his two warring journalists with something like a smirk of satisfaction. Suddenly he pushed Laura’s cassette tape in Baker’s direction.
“You have a listen to this, Bob,” he said. “Then have a word with your contacts up there, and in the Force. Laura’s too busy with other stuff to get stuck into a crime story right now - if there’s a story there, which I very much doubt.”
Laura opened her mouth to protest and then closed it again. She knew from the glint in both men’s eyes that it would do no good and would only provoke further humiliation. As she spun on her heel to go, hair flying, face set, she heard Baker’s low laugh and Grant pull open a drawer in his desk.
“I had my invitation this morning to join this committee to redevelop the Heights,” she heard him say. “That was a good move to put my name forward. It’ll give us the inside track on a lot of good stories up there.”
“I thought you’d be pleased,” Baker said. “It was Barry Foreman’s idea. Thought you’d be an asset.”
“Close the door, lad,” Grant had said suddenly, realising that Laura was still within earshot.
White-faced with suppressed anger she had made her way back to her desk, pounded out
the last few hundred words of the feature she was working on and had stormed out of the office a good hour before she should have done to drive back up to the Heights as fast as she could weave her Golf through the heavy late afternoon traffic. If remaining on the Gazette meant being passed over in favour of flash young men ten years younger than herself, she wondered how much longer she could hang on. All her half-buried ambition to get out of Bradfield came flooding back. Joyce, she had long ago decided, she could take with her if she decided to move and apart from her grandmother there was only one other person to keep her in her home town any longer. Unfortunately, in spite of their differences, Michael Thackeray remained the most important person in her life. She had pounded the steering wheel in frustration as she waited at the traffic lights to turn onto the Heights again.
Not many cars ventured into the narrow streets beneath the flats and there were few people about on foot in the wet winter dusk as she parked. More aware than usual of the brooding bulk of the estate and the menacing shadows beneath the walkways, she hurried to the Project where she found Donna drinking tea with Kevin Mower in the brightly lit back room.
“Your gran’s gone home, love,” Donna said, stubbing out her cigarette into her saucer and lighting another. “She looked right tired this afternoon so I told her to go and have a rest. I reckon she’s trying to do too much, you know.”
“Try telling her that,” Laura said. “The day Joyce stops fighting will be the day we need the undertaker.”
“How did you get on with Dizzy,” Mower had asked and Laura told them everything they had learned from their visits to Stevie Maddison and Derek Whitby’s bereaved mother.
“D’you think Derek could have been pushed?” she asked when she had finished. “He can’t have been able to see that clearly in the rain and the dark.”
Death in Dark Waters Page 9
