Death in Dark Waters

by Patricia Hall

  “What have you got on Barry Foreman?” Grant asked.

  “He seems to have gone into the building trade, in a secretive sort of way,” Laura said sweetly. “And as he’s a member of your committee that’s going to be involved in handing out hefty contracts for rebuilding The Heights, I thought we should be asking a few questions. Don’t you?”

  Grant sighed melodramatically.

  “But not today, Laura, for God’s sake. Not now. For one thing these floods are going to take up every inch of news space we can prise out of the management’s sticky fingers. Nothing like this has ever happened in Bradfield since the 1940s. I can’t give you the time to go chasing wild geese this week. And if what Jack Longley says is true, the police are onto Foreman anyway, so the whole thing may be put on ice if they charge him with anything. It’d be all so much wasted effort. Can’t that boyfriend of yours give you a steer on this. He must know what’s going on. In the meantime concentrate on putting the flood pages together. I’m hoping to run eight extra pages on this and so far I’ve got bugger all to put on them.”

  “Right,” Laura said more sweetly than she imagined Grant had anticipated. She went back to her desk and used her mobile phone to call Kevin Mower.

  “Remind me of the names of the directors of City Ventures,” she said. Mower read out the list of names.

  “I’ve discovered another connection,” he said then. “Althea Simpson is Grantley Adams’ wife. It’s her maiden name and Donna had sussed that out by getting their marriage certificate.”

  “And I know for a fact that she used to be an accountant,” Laura said. “Well, well, what are the ever-so-respectable Adamses doing in the company of Barry Foreman’s girlfriend who, as I recall, was a lass from Benwell Lane, born and bred and effin’ proud of it, as she might say.”

  “I’m going in to see the boss at two,” Mower said. “He invited me in — no excuses accepted.”

  “Good,” Laura said. “It’s time you two got your act together.”

  “Fat chance,” Mower said gloomily.

  “Well, in the meantime I might call on Mrs. Adams in my lunch hour — to ask her about young Jeremy’s progress, you understand? And if the subject of City Ventures just happens to come up I’ll try to find out exactly who those other directors are, and when she last saw Karen Bailey.”

  “Be careful,” Mower said.

  “You sound like Michael,” Laura said softly. “But Donna deserves someone to follow this up.”

  “Donna deserved a hell of a lot more than she got,” Mower said, his voice tight. “But take care, Laura. There’s some very nasty people out there.”

  Laura spent the rest of the morning conscientiously sifting through the incoming tales of teachers arriving at school that morning to find water running through their classrooms; householders rescued by boat as streams broke their banks, inundating everything in their path; and the distraught farmer who had been innocently over-wintering his ewes, which had miraculously escaped the foot and mouth epidemic, in a normally dry fold in the hills only to find them trapped and drowning in a quagmire created overnight by the relentless rain.

  “If this is global warming I think I’ll pass on the Pennine olive groves,” Laura muttered to herself as she fitted together grim tales and grimmer pictures of an uniquely sodden winter into a kaleidoscope of local catastrophe.

  By lunchtime the job was done and the Gazette building began to shudder slightly as the presses began to roll. Laura switched off her computer terminal, buttoned up her waterproof jacket and made the dash across the puddled car park to her Golf. The low-lying part of the town centre was now cordoned off by police and fire brigade and she had to make a lengthy detour to reach the Adams house in one of the leafy suburbs in the surrounding hills. Mrs. Adams push-buttoned her through the gate and the front door as easily as she had done the first time and waved her into the sitting room overlooking the dripping, dark mid-winter garden.

  “You look as though you were expecting me,” Laura said as her hostess brought in a tray with coffee cups and a percolator.

  “I’ve been expecting someone,” Althea Adams said. “I wasn’t sure whether it would be the Press or the police.”

  “Because of Jeremy? How is he?” Mrs. Adams nodded with a wry smile as if she knew that the question was mere prevarication on Laura’s part.

  “He’s going to be fine. And the school is taking him and Louise back.”

  “So what’s the problem?” Laura asked.

  “I suppose it’s just that the Jeremy business meant that Grantley has been throwing his weight about even more than usual. I began to think it would only be a matter of time before someone took serious exception to Grantley. I thought it would be that policeman, what’s his name? He seemed unlikely to be either conned or intimidated.”

  “DCI Thackeray?” Laura smiled faintly to herself.

  “Him. I knew he’d be furious about what went on. I heard my husband on the phone to Superintendent Longley, to the Deputy Chief Constable, to anyone he thought had some influence. I knew he’d get up someone’s nose and that might expose him in ways he really doesn’t need.”

  “But I turned up instead,” Laura said.

  “I didn’t really rate you, any more than Grantley did. You were young and a woman. Just shows how sexist you get when you live with someone like Grantley for all these years. He’d not have seen you as any sort of a threat, any more than he would me. We’re just women, after all, here to do as we’re told and keep quiet about it.”

  “Do I take it that you’re not so keen to do as you’re told any more?” Laura asked, taken by surprise by the vehemence of Mrs. Adams’s complaints. “Or to keep quiet?”

  “I’m fed up to the back teeth with all the lies and deceit,” Althea Adams said. “At first it was just cutting corners. I knew all about that even before I married him. I did work for him, after all.”

  “As an accountant? I remember you saying …?”

  “I did his books when the firm was still quite small,” she said. “He never missed the main chance, even then. But now …”

  “You’re a director of City Ventures, aren’t you? Using your maiden name? Althea Simpson?”

  “You worked that out, did you? Yes, it’s all a cover of course, women standing in for their men. We don’t actually do anything, you understand. Just meet now and again as a board to rubber stamp whatever the blokes have decided.”

  “Like Karen Bailey stands in for Barry Foreman?”

  “And Jane Peace, Jim Baistow’s married daughter. The men on the board are the apparatchiks — company secretary, finance director and so on, but we four women are there representing other people, though Karen wasn’t at the last meeting we had. Nominees, I suppose you could call us. Grantley persuaded me it’s not illegal — just a convenience, he said, so that things didn’t get muddled.”

  “Muddled” was one way of putting it, Laura thought, as she looked at the list of City Ventures’ directors that she and Kevin Mower had downloaded from the Internet. Muddled, she thought, was not the word she would have chosen to describe the links between the committee members planning the redevelopment of the Heights and the building company which looked likely to be selected to do the work.

  “So who’s Annie Costello?”

  “Oh, she’s Dave Spencer’s girlfriend.”

  “Councillor Spencer?”

  “The same,” Althea Adams said. “Which is when I decided that I wanted out. You could end up in prison for less.”

  “I expect you could,” Laura said.

  “And it’d be no good pleading ignorance because we all knew bloody well what was going on. And who was going to get the contract to regenerate the Heights. That was it as far as I’m concerned. I’m not going to jail for that gang of crooks.”

  “So what will you do now?”

  “I’ve had it up to here with Grantley and his schemes. I’ve had my bags packed for weeks just waiting for the moment to leave. Jeremy can stay here
but I’ll take the girls with me. I think the moment’s come, don’t you? What will the Gazette pay me for my story do you think? Or do I have to go to the Globe in London?”

  “I’d make it DCI Thackeray first, if I were you,” Laura said. “When you’ve given me chapter and verse for the Gazette, of course.”

  Michael Thackeray gazed at Kevin Mower, slumped in his office looking just as unkempt as the last time he had seen him, and wondered whether Superintendent Longley might not have been right to turn down flat his request for Mower to rejoin CID immediately. The sergeant inspired no confidence in his boss although Thackeray had tried to persuade Jack Longley that it would be preferable, now that it had been decided to treat Donna Maitland’s death as suspicious, to have him back on board rather than careering around the Heights like a white knight looking for a dragon to slay.

  “You know someone’s trashed Donna’s flat, don’t you?” Mower asked angrily. “Looks like the drug squad went in there with an enforcer and the locals finished the place off. Your crime scene’s as good as wrecked. We’ll never get a result there now.”

  “I’ll talk to Ray Walter about what they found,” Thackeray said. “Amos is not one hundred per cent certain we’re dealing with murder here. She could have cut her own wrist with a knife.”

  “A knife that dematerialised? There was no knife in that bathroom, guv,” Mower said flatly. “No trail of blood from anywhere else. And the light was out. You don’t slash your own wrists in the bath in the pitch dark. That’s what bugged me at first — I switched the light on when I went in and didn’t realise till later what I’d done. What about the toxicology? How many sleeping pills had she taken?”

  “Amos says she must have been pretty heavily sedated,” Thackeray said.

  “So what more do you want? She didn’t kill herself. I knew that from the very beginning.”

  “Kevin, you’re too involved in this to make any sort of judgement …”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Mower said wearily. “I know you don’t think I’m off the booze but I am, you know. That’s all history.”

  “You’ll be OK when you have your medical, then, won’t you? But that isn’t what’s worrying Jack Longley anyway. You were emotionally involved with Donna Maitland. That’s a good enough reason for keeping you off the case. We want you as a witness on this one, Kevin, not an investigating officer. So my advice to you is to use the couple of weeks you’ve got left on leave to get yourself fit so you sail through the medical …” Thackeray hesitated, aware of the anger in Mower’s dark eyes. He did not want to provoke him into doing or saying anything terminally stupid.

  “So no one can come up with any excuse not to take me back, you mean?”

  “I don’t think anyone’s looking for excuses,” he said. “But you need to show you can cope.”

  “And in the meantime, I sit on my backside while you decide how much energy to put into finding the toe-rag who killed Donna? Whatever the drug squad thinks, she was a good woman. She didn’t deserve what was happening to her. Ask anyone on the Heights.”

  Thackeray suppressed the sudden spurt of anger which threatened to overwhelm him too.

  “You know we’ll put in exactly the same amount of effort into clearing up Donna’s death as anyone else’s.” His voice crackled like ice and Mower knew he had overstepped the mark.

  “I didn’t mean …” He shrugged. “Sorry.”

  “In the meantime, there is some good news,” Thackeray said, changing the subject abruptly. “It looks as if we may be able to pin something on that bastard Barry Foreman at last, with what you and Laura unearthed about his business dealings with the council, and some unexplained payments Val Ridley turned up on Stanley Wilson’s bank records. Bonuses, in theory, but I reckon it’s much more likely that Foreman’s been bankrolling Wilson’s porno empire. I think Foreman has access to far more cash than his legitimate activities could possibly support and he’s been syphoning it off into other activities, legal and illegal. It may take months to track his dealings down, but at least we’ve got a lead now.”

  “Still no sign of our unexpected company director Karen Bailey, though?”

  “No sign of Karen, no sign of her twins.”

  “It might be an idea to keep an eye on Foreman,” Mower said carefully. “In my spare time, guv.”

  “What you do in your spare time, Kevin, is entirely up to you,” Thackeray said, equally non-committal. “You’re on leave, after all.”

  It was not until the sergeant had closed the door behind him that Thackeray relaxed and smiled quietly to himself, a small satisfied smile which broadened when he answered his phone a few seconds later to be told that Mrs. Althea Adams was in reception, anxious to make a statement about her husband’s business affairs. But foremost in his mind was another question he wanted to ask her: just how long was it since Mrs. Adams and her fellow directors of City Ventures had seen Karen Bailey. In spite of his gnawing anxieties about Laura, this was turning out to be a good day after all, he decided. And not before time.

  The hair on the back of Dizzy B’s neck prickled and his throat tightened. He was sitting in his car, parked on the main approach to the Heights, watching through a rainstreaked windscreen as a group of hooded boys and young men congregated under the shelter of the walkways close to the entrance to Priestley house. It was only seven-thirty in the evening but pitch dark as squalls of wind threw icy rain against the doors and the whole vehicle shuddered under the impact. The few streetlights which still worked lit the roadway and the grassy approach to the flats, but dimly. The car’s lights were off and he was pretty sure that the gang would not see him. But only pretty sure. As they milled around and some appeared to look in his direction he slid down in his seat, making himself as invisible as possible. It would be ironic, he thought, if one of the sudden surges of destructive energy such groups were prone to fixed on an unwisely parked car and he found himself the focus of a random attack on his wheels. Unwary drivers on Wuthering regularly found their tyres slashed, windows shattered or their vehicles reduced to a heap of twisted and burnt metal if the mood took some of the local kids. But he suspected that the group he was watching had other things on their mind. They looked as if they were waiting for something or someone. He fingered his mobile phone, knowing he might need back-up and very aware that the little he could call on might not save him if things turned ugly.

  Sanderson had driven up to the Heights in response to Lorraine Maddison’s frantic appeal to him to help her find Stevie. He guessed that if anyone knew where the boy was hiding it had to be one or other of his friends in the neighbourhood. But he knew from bitter experience that tackling large groups of youths on an out-of-control estate was a risky enterprise even with a warrant card to back you up. Out of the Force, out on a limb, far from his own turf, it was not a risk he was prepared to take. Only if a single youth passed by would he take a chance and ask a few questions. In the meantime he was content to watch what was going on at Priestley House, just so long as he did not attract any attention.

  He did not see the unlit car which passed him until it swooped into the pool of light from the single lamp outside the doors of Priestley. Slightly unnerved, he slid even further down in his seat and watched obliquely out of the side window as the youths outside the flats approached the new arrival with a caution that surprised him. A single figure got out of the parked vehicle and the youths gathered round at what appeared to be a respectful distance, providing a bizarre guard of honour for a tall slim figure who made his way quickly towards the entrance and went inside. After a few cautious glances around the now deserted and rainswept estate, the rest of the group followed him and the doors swung shut behind them.

  Sanderson remained where he was for a moment and then started his own engine, letting the car roll quietly down the hill and slowing almost to a stop opposite the doors. With some difficulty, he deciphered the registration number of the dark-coloured BMW which had been left unattended outside the flats and wrote it in ba
ll-point on his hand. Either the owner was very confident that no one would touch his wheels, or did not care whether they did or not — which seemed less likely. Respect, Sanderson muttered to himself as he let in the clutch and moved off down the hill. And there was generally only one way of gaining that on an estate like Wuthering.

  He pulled up again outside the old people’s bungalows which gave him an unrestricted view of the parked car and the entrance to Priestley House through his rear view mirror and called Kevin Mower on his mobile.

  “I think I’ve got one of the main men up here as we speak,” he said softly. “D’you want to come up and take a look?”

  “Give me ten minutes,” Mower said. “Where are you exactly?” Sanderson told him where he had parked, but before he could slide down in his seat again he noticed that the nearest bungalow, the one which he guessed from its boarded up windows belonged to Laura Ackroyd’s grandmother, was showing just the faintest sliver of light beneath its door. Cautiously he slid across to the passenger door and out of the car, ducking low so that he could not be seen from the flats and dodging quickly into the deep shadow at the side of the small house. Further down the row he could hear the sound of television sets turned up high by residents too hard of hearing to be able to pick up any sound other than Coronation Street. Cautiously he worked his way round to the back of Joyce Ackroyd’s house, narrowly missing the dustbin, which was lying on its side, its contents scattered and sodden across the paving. He pushed gently at the kitchen door and to his surprise it swung open at his touch. He hesitated for a moment but the decision whether to step inside or not was taken for him when a hard object was thrust into his back and a hefty shove propelled him over the threshold onto his knees in the dimly lit kitchen.