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Authors: Patricia Hall

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

BOOK: Death in Dark Waters
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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 have 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.”
“Perhaps she's got money. What makes you think she hasn't?”
“Because this is Barry Foreman's girlfriend we're talking about and I don't reckon he's the sort of man who'd let her have more than peanuts for spending money. And according to her mother she's never ever had two pennies of her own to rub together, even when she lived with her.”
“New boyfriend?”
“With two tiny babies?”
“Some men like babies,” Laura said, and could
immediately have bitten off her tongue. She turned to Thackeray and reached out a hand which he avoided.
“Sorry,” she said. “That was stupid of me.”
Thackeray looked at her for a long moment, although what he saw was not Laura's stricken face but a peacefully sleeping infant in another mother's arms. He shook himself sharply.
“I'm the one who should be sorry,” he said. Impulsively she leaned over and kissed him and the kiss turned into a longer embrace.
“I'm all right,” she said, when they came up for air. “
It
'
s
all right. We'll get by.”
“I'd hoped we'd do a bit better than that,” he said.
“We will, we will,” she said and kissed him again, and this time they did not break off.
Alderman Sir Jebediah Hustler, whose portrait gazed down from above the ornate stone fireplace in Committee Room B at Bradfield town hall, would have felt at home amongst the grey suits and iridescent ties which assembled there the next morning for a meeting of the Heights Regeneration Zone Action Committee - HR-Zac for convenience. Jebediah had been a man who combined a harsh regime in his mills and the rows of back-to-back hovels which he rented to his workers with a shrewd self-interest when it came to local government. If there was owt in democracy for the masters, then Jebediah wanted his share, whether it came in the shape of prestige and a knighthood or harder currency. The cold blue eyes set in a face of florid self-satisfaction almost entirely surrounded by well-combed iron-grey hair and whiskers, could have been overseeing the proceedings of HR-Zac, and would certainly have presided over its deliberations with approval.
Councillor Dave Spencer who was actually in the chair was a less imposing figure, but he dressed with as much vanity as his Victorian predecessor and watched with equally sharp and self-interested eyes as his hand-picked committee took its seats around the highly polished boardroom table - not least to make sure that the regulation complement of women and ethnic minorities was present. It was so much more convenient when they could be combined in the figure of one Zufira Ahmed, a director of her father's import-export business and a governor of Sutton Park school, he thought, as Miss Ahmed took her place and slipped her long white head-scarf back from her dark hair, letting it trail elegantly across her darksuited and much admired breasts.
Spencer had made sure that Zufira's father's support for the regeneration project was assured before he had secured the daughter's nomination. Dave Spencer prided himself on
his business savvy. If only he had not committed himself to a career in politics when he was sixteen and still filled with anti-Thatcherite zeal, he thought, he might have been on one of those rich lists himself, at least for the county of Yorkshire. Still, he consoled himself, there was time. He did not have to go on chivvying dozy officials and timid councillors into the twenty-first century forever. As his girlfriend, who was in management herself kept telling him, it was where the chivvying might lead which was important at his stage of career, after all.
Spencer tapped his pen against the carafe of water in front of him to bring the meeting to order.
“Glad you could all make it,” he said. “And I'm delighted to welcome a new member to our ranks. Superintendent Jack Longley from Bradfield police HQ, who I'm sure will give a very welcome perspective to our discussions. Welcome, Jack. We're glad to have you on board. Let me introduce you to the rest of the action group: Grantley Adams you may know - and all our sympathy goes out to you and Althea at the moment of course - no change there, Grantley?”
Adams shook his head sourly, glancing round the table and reserving a particularly vicious glare for Jack Longley.
“And next to Grantley is Geoff Wright from Wright and Purser up at Long Moor, another of our generous industrial sponsors, Zufira Ahmed, from Ahmed Trading in Aysgarth Lane, Steve Brady from the town planning department here at the town hall, Jim Baistow from Baistow Construction, Jude Laythwaite from education and leisure services, and Barry Foreman who runs his own security company. I've had apologies unfortunately today from the housing department and from Ray Hayter of the Afro-Caribbean community liaison committee. And from our Tory representative, Mr. Harvey. No surprise there, I suppose, as there's not much in this for them - politically speaking, of course. You'll soon get to know everyone, Jack, and although we don't expect you to be carrying a police cheque book you
can rest assured we'll value your contribution as much as anyone's.”
Jack Longley had nodded dourly at each of the committee members as they were introduced but he glanced down at his council blotter before meeting Barry Foreman's bland smile of welcome. He was sure that Thackeray's suspicions of the man were unlikely ever to be proved, even if justified: and Foreman was embedding himself into Bradfield's establishment too securely to be vulnerable to anything but a case of the most cast-iron variety. But Longley was not above hedging his bets. Thackeray was not given to wild flights of imagination and experienced enough to pick up a faint odour of corruption which others might miss. Longley gazed resolutely into the sharp blue eyes of Jebediah Hustler on the wall facing him and did not look away until the rest of the introductions were completed.
Spencer zipped through the printed agenda quickly and it was obvious to Longley that his own presence at the meeting was purely cosmetic. Many of the crucial decisions around rebuilding the Heights and upgrading the infrastructure in that part of town had already been taken in principle and most of the business people round the table had evidently committed funds to the programme and been allotted roles in its implementation, subject to Whitehall approval. That some of them might add financial gain in the long term to the undoubted kudos their involvement brought in the short did not seem to cause anyone any unease. Longley increasingly wondered what he was doing there. He was not used to playing a violet of the shrinking or the hothouse variety. But as Councillor Spencer announced item ten on the agenda his antennae quivered and he decided that as he was there, at Spencer's invitation and with the Chief Constable's approval, he might as well make his presence felt
“Right, we'll turn to youth policies now,” Spencer said briskly with a glance in Longley's direction. “As most of you know this has been one of the most difficult areas to tackle as
it involves so many agencies: education, youth service, the courts, the police, probation, community groups, social services - you name it they're all in there - all failing together.” Longley kept a straight face although the little sally was greeted with chuckles of approval from the businessmen present. Zufira Ahmed merely looked pained. Those who knew Longley better might have been concerned at the way his almost bald crown flushed slightly under the electric lights but Spencer did not know him well enough to be perturbed.
“Not to put too fine a point on it, kids on the Heights are running wild and no one so far has come up with a means of cutting crime and getting them into employment,” the councillor went on. “So we're open to suggestions, the more innovative the better. What we need to build into this scheme is something to get the kids off the streets and into jobs so that whatever we invest doesn't get vandalised the moment the construction workers move out.”
“Performance in the schools is improving …” Jude Laythwaite, the representative of the education department said tentatively.
“But how long will that take to work through, Jude?” Spencer came back sharply. “We need results now not in ten years' time.” In ten years' time, Longley thought unsympathetically, Spencer's political career might have been destroyed by the impact of the lawless young. He was aware that the councillor's sharp gaze was now focused in his direction.
“What chance more intensive policing, superintendent? Residents up there complain they never see a bobby until there's a crisis.”
“We have a community officer up there most of the time,” Longley said mildly. “Like everything else, it's a question of resources. I'd have thought your best bet was that project they've already started up there, give the kids some skills to get decent jobs …”
“That's just an amateur effort, isn't it?” Barry Foreman put
in unexpectedly. “Not enough capital, not enough security, as I hear it. What you need is summat much more hard-edged and professional.”
“As it happens the Project is seeking some extra funding from the council right now,” Spencer said, without enthusiasm. “They've had some trouble with vandalism …”
“Just what I'm saying,” Foreman said. “You can't have tinpot prefabricated classrooms where any little toe-rag can barge in off the street and chuck computers around. Stands to reason. You need it done properly.”
“With respect, Chair, I think Mr. Foreman's right. This is something the college could do much more effectively,” Jude Laythwaite said. “At the moment it's just a few untrained people who live locally. There's one old girl who's eighty if she's a day. If we get approval for the private finance initiative and rebuild, I'm sure accommodation could be provided for these sort of activities and for proper staffing instead of amateurs who've just strolled in with their own agendas.”
“And how long will that take?” Longley asked. “I thought you were looking for quick results?” He glanced at Spencer who was watching the exchange with a faintly satisfied look in his eyes.
“Well, we are,” Jude Laythwaite came back quickly. “But I rather think that's where the police could be helping. Half the problem is these gangs of marauding youngsters drugged up on God knows what up there.” The education officer was evidently not prepared to give an inch of her professional territory.
“If you locked a few more of them up there wouldn't be half the problem, would there?” another voice broke in. “If we're seriously going to put some private sector housing up there we've got to make the place safe. Folk won't pay good money to live in a jungle.” The speaker was Jim Baistow, head of the largest of the local construction firms and Longley guessed that he had a sharp eye on the chance of his company building some of the new housing on the Heights. The views
alone would be worth an extra ten thousand on a decent house on the hill, he thought. All you needed to do to make a killing was to subdue some of the current residents - or better still, perhaps, get rid of them altogether.
“I'll take back what you say to headquarters,” Longley said, face flushed, unable to conceal his anger any longer. “But if the success of this project depends on more police officers on the Heights, then I think you're on a hiding to nothing. We don't have the resources. In the meantime it might do some good if the council paid some attention to security in those tower blocks, to the inadequate street lighting, and to keeping kids in school during the day instead of letting them play truant and wreak havoc around the neighbourhood. You can't rely on one or two police officers to solve all the problems that exist on the Heights. All we can realistically do is pick up the pieces when things get out of hand. You need a coordinated effort up there. And I wouldn't have thought rubbishing this computer project the locals have got going was a very bright idea. Surely what you need is exactly that sort of community involvement. If you've got it, flaunt it. Isn't that what they say? Don't uproot the bloody thing just because it doesn't fit your bureaucratic model. Christ, I thought it was the police force which was supposed to be behind the times.”
The rest of the committee gazed at Longley in amazement for half a minute before a babble of members tried to take him up at once.
“Order, order,” Dave Spencer said, tapping the water carafe with his pen again and again before the meeting calmed down.
“Well,” he said, when silence was restored. “Thank you for that very interesting contribution, Superintendent. I'm sure that's given us all some very useful talking points to take back to our constituencies with us. Perhaps we can defer this discussion until our next meeting when perhaps we will all have had the chance to come up with some constructive suggestions for youth work on the Heights. Does that seem
reasonable?” Longley glowered at the chair but the rest of the members nodded or mumbled their assent and Spencer moved quickly on to the next business, with an encouraging smile.
The meeting dragged on for another half hour with Longley increasingly convinced that he had nothing useful to offer. When it broke up he found himself waylaid by Jim Baistow as he gathered his papers together.
“Interesting point you made there about policing,” Baistow said. “I'd like to bend your ear some time about the possibilities of private security up there, something Barry Foreman over there has raised a couple of times.”
“Really?” Longley said noncommittally. Foreman was obviously another one with his eye on the main chance.
“Are you interested in the horses at all?” Baistow changed track so suddenly that Longley could only look at him with some bemusement.
“Racing,” Baistow explained. “I've got a box at York in a couple of week's time if you'd like to join me. Some of the other committee members are coming. Should be a grand day out.”
“Thanks, but no thanks,” Longley said ungraciously. “I'm not a betting man.” He turned away only to find himself following Barry Foreman into the lift. Longley hesitated for a moment before he stepped inside, afraid that Foreman would refer back to his outburst in the meeting but to the superintendent's surprise he too took an entirely different tack.
“All right, is he, that DCI of yours?” Foreman asked pleasantly enough as he pressed the button for the ground floor. “Thackeray?”
“As far as I know. Why shouldn't he be?” Longley said carefully, a tiny niggle of unease at the back of his mind.
“It's just that he popped in to see me for no apparent reason the other day,” Foreman said. “I thought he looked stressed out, to be honest. Involved in this big operation on the Heights, is he? I thought it was a bit rich you pleading poverty just now when you've got all that going on up there.”

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