Death in Dark Waters (6 page)

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Authors: Patricia Hall

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

BOOK: Death in Dark Waters
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“Close friend or just friend?”
“Just friend,” Laura said.
“Ah,” Dizzy B said. “And was the amazing Rita a friend of yours too?”
“I never met her,” Laura said. “But it was a big thing when she was shot, front page story in the nationals, the lot. She was very beautiful. Kevin was devastated.”
“So I'm told, so I'm told,” Dizzy B said, glancing away.
As the club's cleaner appeared with his broom and began to sweep away the debris of the fire into the running water of the gutter, a car cruised slowly down the street and stopped beside them. Laura was surprised to recognise DC Val Ridley with DC Mohammed Sharif - universally known to colleagues as Omar, an alternative he seemed to approve of - beside her.
“Did you call the police?” she asked Darryl.
“No point,” the club proprietor said, surprised.
“Well, you've got them anyway,” Laura said as the two officers got out of their car and crossed the road.
Val nodded at Laura without much warmth.
“Just leaving, are you?” she asked.
“Looks as though I'll have to,” Laura said, realising she would get no further now. “Some kids just lit a fire here. Dangerous that.”
Ridley and her companion looked at the still smoking rubbish.
“Did you see who it was,” Sharif asked.
“There was a gang of lads outside when I arrived,” Laura said. “Asian lads.”
“Most of them are round here,” Sharif said without acrimony. “Could you identify any of them again?”
“I doubt it,” Laura said. “I wasn't taking much notice. They just seemed to be larking about at that stage.”
“It's not the first time it's happened,” Darryl Redmond broke in. “We don't seem to get much protection.”
“I'll get one of my crime protection colleagues to call,” Val Ridley, the sarcasm heavy. “In the meantime, can we get on?”
“The guest list seems to be wide open this morning,” the club proprietor said, following the two officers and Dizzy B inside and leaving Laura facing the doors again, frustrated in her morning's work.
But when she got back to the office it did not seem to matter. Ted Grant waved her into his office with an unusually benign look on his face.
“Owt or nowt in that?” he asked, barely giving her time to reply before pointing at his flickering computer screen where Laura could half see a front-page layout. “Bob Baker came up with the goods any road,” Grant said and she knew that the editor had used his increasingly frequent tactic of setting one reporter up against another to see how far he could push them into sensation. He spun the computer monitor round in Laura's direction with a wolfish grin so that she could read the headline: “Imam lashes ‘Satanic' clubs.”
“Got an interview with the top man at the mosque and some good quotes from the local councillors. The Asians are launching a petition to get the place closed down. You can add a couple of pars at the end if you got owt of interest from the club people. You'll just catch the edition if you're quick.”
“They say they do their best to keep drugs out,” Laura said, but she recognised a deaf ear turned her way as clearly as if Ted Grant had worn a Position Closed notice on the offending orifice and she shrugged again.
“I'll do a short add on,” she said. Ted Grant beamed as kindly as his habitually belligerent countenance would allow.
“You can get back to your features then,” he said. Laura gritted her teeth although she knew that she was being told with crystal clarity that the girls should keep out of the big boys' games. Bob Baker, she thought, would have to be seen to, and the sooner the better.
DCI Michael Thackeray waited with ill-concealed impatience in the well-appointed ante-room of the headmaster's secretary at Bradfield Grammar School. It was the first time he had ever been inside the school which stood in mock-classical splendour in leafy grounds on the outskirts of the town. From the moment he had entered by the heavy mahogany doors, obligingly held open for him by a tall Sikh boy in turban of regulation school navy blue, and found his shoes squeaking on the highly polished parquet floor of the corridors, he had recognised the smell of what money could buy. Somewhere in the distance he could hear a choir singing, the young boys' voices pure and clear, a sound from his own past which sent a shiver of recognition down his spine.
He knew the school accepted girls these days, a sure sign of the competitive times, but the building still reeked of male exclusivity. From his own modern and slightly tatty country comprehensive school you could imagine students moving on to work in offices and factories, garages and farms. Here the atmosphere spoke of similarly panelled lawyers' and accountants' offices, the great wool exchange which had once been the hub of this part of Yorkshire, even the gentlemen's clubs of London and Parliament itself. The school had narrowly missed producing a prime minister but the gold inscribed honours boards listing scholarships to Oxford and Cambridge would have easily taken that in their stride. This was solid, expensive, traditional education and if the students found it rather dull even they probably reckoned that was a fair price to pay for well-nigh guaranteed security later.
Thackeray had come alone, knowing that brow-beating the headmaster of this particular school was more than most of his detectives would be able to do. And brow-beating was certainly his intention if it came to it. The latest hospital report on
the condition of Jeremy Adams was not encouraging and, in spite of his reservations about superintendent Longley's motives, he owed it to the boy to make some gesture towards tracing the source of the drug which looked as though it might have killed him. And the best place to start, he was sure, was amongst the sixth-formers at his school.
He glanced at his watch and then at the attractive middle-aged woman who was busy at a word-processor on the other side of the room. She smiled at him sympathetically and, he thought wryly, possibly slightly hopefully. The name on the door had indicated that she was Miss Raven - there were no concessions to politically correct language here in spite of the recent influx of girls, he noticed - and Miss Raven wore no wedding ring.
“He shouldn't be too long,” she said. “He has the chairman of governors on the phone. This business with Jeremy is not what any school wants to hear these days. It frightens the horses - or in this case the parents.”
“It was not only Jeremy who was involved,” Thackeray said without letting too much sympathy creep into his voice. A desperately sick student merited rather more than a revamp of the school's marketing strategy in his book. Miss Raven pursed her lips, picking up his disapproval.
“His parents must be distraught,” she said. “I hear he's on life support.”
Thackeray nodded, unwilling to get involved in a discussion of the medical details. He did not need reminding of the horrors of watching the professionals lose a battle for the life of a much-loved son. It was an experience he had relived every night for years until he had met Laura, who seemed to have the capacity most of the time to lighten the darkness.
At that moment the communicating door between Miss Raven's office and the head's study was flung open and a tall, broad-shouldered man with a head of gleaming silver hair and a ruddy, out-of-doors complexion hurried in, hand outstretched in Thackeray's direction.
“Chief Inspector, I'm so sorry to have kept you waiting,” he said. “David Stewart, headmaster for my sins. And I think you're here to discuss some of the less creditable activities of some of our sixth-formers? Do come in. Tea, Felicity, I think? Will that suit you, Chief Inspector?”
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.

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