Death in Dark Waters (20 page)

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Authors: Patricia Hall

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Police Procedural

BOOK: Death in Dark Waters
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“What's happened?” she asked sharply, evidently reading the expression in Mower's dark eyes. “It's not the drug squad messing us about again, is it?”
Mower shook his head silently and took her arm, leading
her to one of the battered armchairs, still stained with red paint.
“Sit down,” he said gently. “This is bad news.”
“The worst?”
“The worst,” Mower said.
For a long time after he had told her what he had found at Donna's flat, the two of them sat quietly, Mower with his arm round Joyce's thin shoulders, Joyce clutching his hand as if to prevent herself drowning in grief.
“I can't believe it,” she said quietly at last.
“That she's dead?”
“No not that. You don't have to reach my age these days to know death can come out of a clear blue sky. But I learnt early, any road, losing my man in the war. No, I mean I can't believe that she killed herself. I can't believe she'd ever do anything to hurt Emma, and what could hurt her worse that this?”
Mower nodded, relieved that someone else's reaction was the same as his own.
“She had nothing to do with the heroin, did she?” he asked carefully. “I haven't got that wrong?”
“Of course she didn't,” Joyce said angrily. “She detested the drug dealers. She'd have done anything to clear them off the estate.”
“Maybe that's it then,” Mower said. “Maybe she's got too many powerful people annoyed with her campaigning, the Project, helping kids get clean. It's not what the drug dealers want, or the men behind them, bringing the stuff in.”
“You want to look at that computer of hers in there,” Joyce said. “She's been spending hours on that just lately, when the kids have gone home. Learning to use the Internet was what she said she was doing. Does that make sense?”
“It might,” Mower said. “Which one does she use?”
“The big one on the teacher's desk in there,” Joyce said, indicating the classroom behind them. “It's newer than most of them we've got, the cast-offs we've begged. We managed to get one new one by pestering the retailers in town. That's
the one she's been on non-stop since all the fuss started about the redevelopment. When I asked her what she was doing she just said she was working on the campaign. But she was printing reams of stuff, I do know that. Kept it all in a drawer but when I tried it, looking for some Sellotape, it was locked.”
“Show me,” Mower said. But the drawer was no longer locked and apart from a few office sundries, it was empty.
“She had a lot of paperwork in there,” Joyce said obstinately. “And those disc things. A box of those.”
“Could the drug squad have taken them?”
“I didn't see them taking paperwork. Why would they be bothered about the campaign for the Project?”
Mower switched Donna's computer on briefly and gazed at icons on the desktop as if willing them to reveal their secrets. He glanced at his watch.
“I need to go into the nick,” he said. “But there may be files in her machine that will tell me what she's been looking at. I don't think it's safe to leave it here. Donna may have taken her paperwork and hidden it somewhere, or it may have been stolen. If it's been stolen, someone's going to realise that the machine itself may have information in it.”
“Take it with you, Kevin,” Joyce said firmly. “Do whatever you have to do.”
They loaded the computer into the boot of Mower's car and he drove Joyce back to her bungalow.
“Will you be OK?” he asked, as he helped her to the front door.
“I'll ring Laura to tell her what's happened,” Joyce said. “I dare say she'll come round later.
“If Donna was killed, I'll have them,” Mower said.
“Aye, I'm sure you will lad,” Joyce agreed as she opened her door. “But it won't bring her back, will it? Nothing's going to do that.”
 
Half an hour later Mower found himself back in Michael Thackeray's office for his third uncomfortable session with his
boss in less than that number of days. This time Thackeray was not unsympathetic. He had already been told about Donna Maitland's apparent suicide when Mower arrived from making a statement about finding her body but he did not hide his scepticism when Mower began to question whether the cause of death was as obvious as it seemed to his colleagues and, apparently, to Amos Atherton.
“There'll be a post-mortem, of course there will,” Thackeray said. “But off the record Amos says he can see no signs of foul play at this stage. It's a bloody difficult suicide to fake without signs of violence on the body. She'd have to be semi-conscious at least to allow herself to be dumped in the bath without a struggle. Were there signs of a struggle, blood stains anywhere else …”
“Nothing I could see,” Mower said. “But she told me she was going to take something to help her sleep. She could have been semi-conscious … Has Amos any idea when she died?”
“He's only guessing,” Thackeray said. “The water had gone cold but there's no way of knowing how hot it was to start with. Anyway, the body wouldn't cool at the normal rate.”
“She could have been there hours,” Mower said angrily. “Since last night, even. She had pills in the flat. If she'd wanted to kill herself why not just an overdose? Why cut your wrists if there are easier ways?”
“Kevin, you're letting your imagination run away with you. I know you must be shattered by this …”
“But don't go over the top again? Is that what you're saying?” Mower asked angrily. He got to his feet slowly, as if every limb was heavy.
“I've done everything I can officially, guv,” he said. “I can see you think I've lost it. But there's something wrong with Donna's death. I'll let you know when I've found out what it is.”
“Donna Maitland's just another of the losers up there, isn't she?” Ted Grant leaned back in his executive chair easily next morning and offered Laura Ackroyd what passed in his lexicon for a smile of sympathy. “You can't make a bloody heroine out of her now, Laura.”
“But that's exactly what we did make her six months ago,” Laura said, spreading a copy of her feature on the opening of the Project in front of the editor. “You even wrote an editorial about her saying she was just the sort of feisty, enterprising person the Heights needed to pull itself out of the mire. People ready to make an effort instead of waiting for the State to provide, don't you remember? Don't you think our readers deserve some sort of explanation now she's dead?”
“I don't suppose our readers will remember a word we said about her,” Grant said airily. “Anyway, she's obviously run right off the rails since then.” He spun his chair round sharply on its castors and projected himself with remarkable speed for a heavy man towards the door of his office.
“Bob!” he bellowed across the newsroom. “Spare us a minute, lad, will you?” Bob Baker appeared in the doorway at a velocity to rival the editor's.
“This Maitland woman,” Grant said. “What's the score with the police?”
“Not looking for anyone else in connection with the death,” Baker said. He glanced at Laura and smirked. “And you know what that means. Off the record, they seem pretty sure she'd been turning a blind eye to what some of the kids she was supposed to be setting on the straight and narrow were really up too. And she couldn't hack it when the drug squad fingered her. But I don't suppose we'll ever know the truth of it now she's topped herself.”
“Who told you that?” Laura asked. “It's not the way I hear it.”
Baker tapped his nose and grinned at the editor.
“Sources, my love, sources. Maybe mine are better than yours.”
“According to Laura, she doesn't have any police sources,” Grant said, his eyes sharp with malice. “Nowt so much as a comment on the state of the traffic on the Aysgarth Lane roundabout ever passes the Detective Chief Inspector's lips. Allegedly.”
Baker shrugged.
“I'll let you know if anything new develops, boss,” he said.
“So that's a no then, is it?” Laura asked the editor.
“Of course it's a bloody no,” Grant said. “You can't pretend the woman was never arrested, and from what Bob says, was highly likely to be charged. Even if she wasn't into drugs herself she knew the sort of kids she was dealing with. It was down to her to keep tabs on the little beggars when they were on the premises, wasn't it? That's the law. I've told you before. Zero tolerance is what the Heights needs, and if that's what the drug squad is doling out now then that's fine by me, and by the readers, if the letters we get are owt to go by. Donna Maitland slipped up and couldn't face the consequences, which would likely have been a spell in jail. End of story.”
Her face set, Laura folded up the paper, from which Donna Maitland's photograph smiled out with the optimism of six months before. Whatever demons had driven Donna to take the course she had taken, she thought, they had left little room for her reputation to be redeemed.
“Give us a couple of pars on what's likely to happen to the Project now she's gone,” Ted Grant conceded unexpectedly as Laura got up to go. “As I hear it, it's not got much of a future once the redevelopment gets under way. Barry Foreman and Dave Spencer've got other plans for education and training up there. Summat a bit less amateur. You should be pleased about that.”
“Barry Foreman's an expert on these things now, is he?” Laura snapped.
“He's not daft, isn't Barry,” Grant said. “That business of his seems to be growing by leaps and bounds. He's got money to burn and he might as well put a bit of it back into summat useful. You and your lefty friends should approve of that.”
“Me and my lefty friends might just be a tad suspicious where the money's coming from before accepting it,” Laura shot back tartly. “You'd think there'd been enough dodgy donations to political projects recently to persuade even Dave Spencer to take care.”
“Bright lad, that,” Ted said. “The next Tony Blair, I shouldn't wonder. He'll go far.”
“One way or another,” Laura said, under her breath, recalling her grandmother's fury at the council leader's equivocations.
“Get a quote out of him, any road. But keep it short. I've not got space to spare for sob stories from the Heights just now. They want to think themselves lucky up there. At least they'll be keeping their feet dry. They've got flood warnings out at Lane End. If this rain doesn't stop soon we'll have half the town under water by the weekend.”
“Right,” Laura said. She went back to her desk and binned the back copy of the Gazette she had culled from the archives to refresh her memory about the launch of the apparently now doomed Project. It had seemed to promise so much to the kids on the Heights, but after the events of the last few days she had no doubt that the efforts Donna and Joyce had been making to secure its financial future would run into the sand. No one would want to be associated with an enterprise tainted by violence and fingered by the drug squad. Her grandmother, she knew, would be heart-broken by the loss of Donna and what could well be her last effort on the Heights. She glanced out of the windows at the leaden skies and the relentless rain which was beating against the building and threatening to engulf Bradfield's narrow valley. If the Project died with Donna, she thought, hope for the
Heights would likely die too. And Joyce would find that hard to bear.
 
On the rain-swept upper walkway of Priestley House, Kevin Mower pulled up his collar and banged hard on the door of the flat two doors along from Donna Maitland's. He had already tried the six doors before Donna's and raised only a whey-faced young mother clutching a screaming baby and a night-worker irate at being roused from his morning's rest. Neither had heard anything suspicious during the night, they had told Mower irritably. One slept the sleep of exhaustion and the other had been on the other side of town at work. Neither of them knew Donna except by sight. Neither evinced either interest or concern at their neighbour's death. Mower was beginning to think that he really was chasing ghosts of his own imagining, as Michael Thackeray had suggested, rather than anything more substantial. Except for the two small niggling facts which had been enough to launch him on his solo investigations that afternoon.
He had woken from a restless sleep very early and stood at the back window of his flat gazing down at the scruffy garden where his downstairs neighbour's German Shepherd dog was already snuffling along the muddy tracks he had worn around the boundary fence. Barely able to see the loping animal in the grey dawn light as it nosed around bushes beaten down by the rain and left its mark at regular intervals, he had gone over and over in his mind what he had observed when he had discovered Donna's body. He knew that there was something wrong with what he had found at the flat, but also recognised that he had been far too distraught to be thinking clearly or professionally at the time. There was a lot of sense in the police rule that officers should not work on cases where they had any personal involvement. Even so he did not think he was letting his imagination run away with him, as the DCI obviously believed. If anything the bitter anger which consumed him had sharpened up his brain. Something about
Donna's death rang false and it was not just his conviction that she would not have despaired that night— when there was still so much to fight for on Emma's behalf as well as her own - which convinced him that he had missed some vital piece of information when he had broken into the flat.
But he could not pinpoint whatever it was that disturbed him and several cups of strong coffee later he had decided that this was something he would have to pursue on his own, whatever Michael Thackeray said. By eight-thirty he was parking on the Heights and, head down against the driving rain, dodging through the hooded teenagers and mothers with push-chairs and small children in tow who were battling their way from the flats to schools and nurseries on the periphery of the estate. The third floor walkway was deserted when he reached it, slightly breathless from the climb, and the police tape which had been stretched across Donna's doorway flapped forlornly in the wind. He detached the other end and stuffed it into his jacket pocket before using his credit card as before to gain easy entrance to the flat. He leaned against the front door, wiping the rain from his face and out of his eyes and breathing heavily, trying to reconstruct in his mind exactly what he had done the day before when he had come looking for his lover.
As he made his way from room to room, he found that little had changed. If his colleagues had conducted any sort of a search it had not been a very thorough one. He glanced into some of the drawers and cupboards in the living room, but there was no sign of the files and computer discs Joyce said she had kept at the Project. Perhaps the police had found and taken those already, he thought.
In the bedroom, Donna's deep blue nightdress still lay where she had evidently tossed it onto the pillows at the top of the bed. He picked it up and held it against his cheek, smelling her perfume and remembering occasions when he had helped her slip out of it. One strap, he noticed, was held in place only by a thread, as if it had been pulled too hard to
take some strain. Was that, he wondered, why Donna had apparently taken it off and walked to her death in the bathroom naked. Or could there be a more sinister explanation?
He stood for a long time in the bathroom doorway. The room was empty now, the bath-water drained away leaving only a brownish tide-mark and some dark stains on the corktiled floor. But he could still see Donna as she had lain almost afloat in the brimming tub, eyes half open, her face surprisingly peaceful for someone who surely must have known that her life-blood was draining inexorably away. Had she taken enough pills, he wondered, to make the whole procedure stress-free, a painless exit from a life which had suddenly splintered apart? Or had she taken enough pills to make it easy for someone else to take her from her bed and put her into the bath with the minimum resistance? Why, if she had walked alone from her bed to the bathroom had she discarded her nightdress? It seemed an unlikely thing for a woman who knew she was going to be found dead to do, to choose to be found naked rather than even lightly clothed. Was it simply the lack of dignity in her death which made him so uneasy? Or something else?
And then suddenly, he had it. He banged his fist on the door jamb in fury and turned the light off and then on again. It had been almost dark in the bathroom when he had arrived the previous day, he thought, even though it had been midday and he remembered now that he had pulled the lightswitch on without thinking. Again this morning he had found the room gloomy and had switched on the light automatically as he had gone in. But if Donna had died much earlier, as seemed likely, then this small airless room must have been pitch dark when she had got into the bath and slit her wrists if the light had not been switched on. That, Mower thought, was not just unlikely, it was almost impossible. Someone must have turned out the bathroom light after Donna died and before he arrived the next day to search for her. And that someone had more than likely killed her.
The wave of red hot anger which threatened to overwhelm him subsided gradually and he splashed his face with cold water at the bathroom basin and dried himself roughly on one of Donna's towels before going back into the living room and flinging himself into a chair. His first instinct was to call Michael Thackeray and insist that he launch a full scale murder inquiry. But a moment's thought told him that might be counter-productive. He needed more, he thought, to break through the scepticism with which his new certainty would be greeted at police HQ. His credibility was already minimal, he thought, blown away by his difficulties over the last few months. It would take more than a sudden intuition in an empty flat to convince Thackeray that what looked like a perfectly comprehensible suicide was anything more. Superintendent Longley and the drug squad would be even harder to shift. What he needed was more evidence, and that might be hard to come by.
He glanced at his watch and pulled out his mobile phone. Amos Atherton started work early but he caught him before he had moved into the lab.
“She's scheduled for eleven,” Atherton said in response to Mower's inquiry about the post-mortem on Donna Maitland's body. “There's what's left of two lads who drove into a lorry last night I've to look over first. I thought the Maitland women was a routine suicide. There's nowt else I should know about, is there?”
Mower hesitated. He knew that whatever he said to Atherton would get back to Thackeray, probably sooner rather than later.
“Just a niggle,” he said. “There were people who had it in for her. I want to be sure that no one helped her on her way. She told me she was going to take some sleeping pills and get an early night.”
“Friend of yours, was she?” Atherton asked. “Close friend?”
“You could say.”
“I'll take a close look, then, lad,” Atherton said. “A blood test for the pills, any road. But the wrist wounds looked bad enough to have taken her out pretty quickly, I reckon, from a first glance yesterday. Down to the bone on her left wrist.”

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