Текст книги "Death in Dark Waters"

Автор книги: Patricia Hall

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Chapter Thirteen

“You could say that whoever garrotted him did us all a favour,” DC “Omar” Sharif muttered loudly enough to be heard across the incident room at that morning’s briefing on the investigation into the death of Stanley Wilson.

“You could say that,” Michael Thackeray agreed. “But as far as I’m aware we haven’t restricted the protection of the law to people we approve of– yet. Perhaps that’s something you should think about, Omar. There’s a lot of people in this town who might like to count you out. Now, can we get on and summarise exactly what we know so far, please. Val? Progress report?”

“Everyone’s seen the post-mortem report, guv. He was strangled with a piece of electric flex. No sign of anything similar in the house. No evidence of sexual activity immediately prior to death, in spite of his state of undress. No sign of a struggle but some curious marks on his arms, under the shirt sleeves, which Mr Atherton thinks are fresh cigarette burns. There’s no sign of a break-in and all the doors were locked so we have to assume Wilson let his killer, or killers, in and that he or they left by the front door, which has a Yale lock which would close automatically. No witnesses so far to anyone seen arriving or leaving the day before he was found.”

“What about regular visitors?” Thackeray asked. “Have the neighbours seen anyone coming or going at other times. My guess is that Stanley hadn’t given up his interest in young men, but it’s possible he never invited them home, I suppose. We need to know whether he had a boyfriend. And then there’s the computer stuff. How was he distributing that? Did people call to collect packets with videotapes in them? Or did he post stuff out? Try the local post office. See if he was a regular customer there.”

“The house-to-house inquiries are continuing this morning, guv,” Val Ridley said. “We’ll bear all that in mind. We’re still waiting on the computer unit at county to come up with details on what was in that machine. According to Foreman Security he was being paid into an internet bank, so it will take some time to get hold of his records although some of them may be in the machine as well. And if he was distributing the pornography– and the rest of the equipment and the copies of tapes he had stacked away there certainly indicates that he was– then there must be names and addresses somewhere.”

“If they come up with those sort of lists, you’ve been offered some help from the computer porn experts,” Thackeray said. “There are international databases available.”

“Some beggars get all the fun,” someone muttered but a scowl from Thackeray quelled incipient laughter.

“There might be hundreds of customers on Wilson’s list,” Val Ridley said.

“There might,” Thackeray conceded. “It’s a line of inquiry we’ll have to follow if the list exists and if it seems relevant to the killing. But in the meantime we’ll stick to the local angles. What about fingerprints?”

“A few apart from Stanley’s,” Val Ridley said. “They’re looking for a match with records.”

“Right. And it’s certainly worth chatting up the local gay scene. See if Stanley was known and who his contacts were. Whether there’s a boyfriend, or ex-boyfriends around. I think it would be a good idea for Omar to follow that line of inquiry, don’t you?” Thackeray glanced across the room at the young Asian DC who flushed in embarrassment as a ripple of laughter went round the assembled detectives.

“Nice one, guv,” someone called out.

“By the book, Omar,” Thackeray said.

“Sir”, Sharif muttered, through gritted teeth.

Thackeray made his way back to his own office, feeling slightly ashamed of himself for baiting Sharif. But he could see no other way of impressing on him the fact that prejudice worked in all sorts of directions than by forcing him to confront the reality. In a town where tensions were high and seemed to be rising, young Mohammed Sharif uncurbed posed a risk the police could not afford to take.

He sat for a moment at his desk before turning to the pile of files which had proliferated since Stanley Wilson’s body had been found. He had slept badly after a devastating evening spent bickering with Laura who had returned from her grandmother’s house aflame with indignation at the behaviour of the drug squad, who had released Joyce without too much delay but had decided to keep Donna Maitland and David Sanderson at Eckersley overnight for further questioning.

“You must know who the dealers up there are,” Laura had protested. “Donna’s one of the few people who might actually be willing to give evidence against them, if she had any to give. Joyce too. And Dizzy B’s an ex-copper and a mate of Kevin Mower’s. What sort of impression are you putting across if you arrest the good guys and ignore the crooks?”

“Donna has a responsibility to keep the stuff out of the Project,” Thackeray had said, toeing the official line. If he had misgivings about it, he did not think this was the moment to discuss them with an already outraged Laura. “Somebody took that heroin in there. Somebody must have seen something.”

“Perhaps the police took it in. No one saw them find it, Joyce says. They simply announced that it was there.”

“Come on, Laura,” Thackeray had protested. “Your grandmother’s view of the police hasn’t changed much since she was manhandled out of Grosvenor Square in 1969, has it? Be honest. Times have changed. I’ve no more reason to think the drug squad’s bent than I have to imagine you make up your stories as you go along. There’s a few dodgy characters in any profession, but thankfully not a lot.”

“Joyce said they were thugs, most of them.”

“You don’t get into the drug squad without being able to handle yourself,” Thackeray said. “They’re hard as nails. They need to be.”

“This was women and girls they were dealing with,” Laura objected. “Not armed criminals.”

“If there was heroin there, there might have been guns not far away. This is nasty, brutal, violent crime we’re talking about, Laura, not a Sunday School outing. This is why I was so anxious when you went snooping around up there. Perhaps you’ll believe me now when I say you’re taking too many risks.”

“And perhaps you’ll believe me when I tell you that some of those kids on the Heights were murdered.”

“Did you tell Ray Walter that?”

“I didn’t tell Ray Walter anything. They wouldn’t let me in to see Joyce. Victor went in and I sat kicking my heels for an hour till they both came out. Then I took her home and went back to the office where Ted Grant was doing his nut, of course, because I’d taken most of the afternoon off. I don’t think I can put up with him much longer either.”

“What do you mean, either?” Thackeray had asked quietly. Laura had looked at him for a long time before she answered.

“I feel, with you, sometimes, that there’s a brick wall between us,” she said at last. “I thought for a long time that we might be able to break it down. But now I’m not so sure. I think you’ve boxed yourself in there with your guilt for so long that you’re never going to be able to break out. Aileen and the Pope between them have killed something in you, and nothing I do seems to bring it alive again for long. It’s as if you’re in a glass coffin. I can see you, and talk to you but I can’t really touch you. Not in any way that really matters.” And with that Laura had turned away and gone into the bedroom where Thackeray, frozen by her unexpected assault, listened to her sobbing to herself for a long time before he dared to follow her, only to find her sprawled across the double bed, her face stained with tears, fast asleep. He had gone to bed himself, much later, alone in the spare room.

Wrenching himself back to the present, Thackeray suddenly thumped the desk in frustration and instead of turning to his files picked up the phone.

“Amos?” he said when it was answered. “Did you get anywhere with that little query I left with you?”

“I did, as it happens,” Amos Atherton said. “As you suspected, there was no match with the sample they provided from the putative father.”

“So tests were done, then?”

“Oh, aye. They were done when the babies were two months old.”

“But they weren’t Foreman’s kids and we don’t know whose they were?”

“That’s about it, unless they went elsewhere with a sample from another candidate, as it were.”

“Right,” Thackeray said. “I can think of one likely candidate but I don’t think there’s a cat in hell’s chance of persuading him to take a blood test. It wouldn’t do his case any good at all. Anyway, that’s a great help. Thanks, Amos. I owe you one.”

“A pint of Tetleys’ll do nicely some time,” Atherton said. Thackeray hung up with exaggerated care.

“I’ll have you yet, Foreman,” he said to himself. “If I can catch you out in one lie I’ll catch you out in the rest.”

For an hour he tried to concentrate on the work in front of him, but was not sorry when his door was flung open without ceremony and superintendent Jack Longley dropped yet another file onto his desk and eased his bulk into his visitor’s chair.

“What the bloody hell’s going on up at the Heights?” Longley asked. “I’ve had the ACC in charge of the drug squad bashing my ear for half an hour about out-of-control coppers and interfering reporters and general slackness and insubordination getting in the way of his operations.”

“I told you Mower got involved more or less inadvertently,” Thackeray said mildly. “He had no reason to think that this Project they’re running up there was anything more than it seemed. If indeed it is.”

“Well, according to the ACC someone’s been running round alleging that at least one of the kids who’s died up there was murdered. Was that Mower?”

“Ah,” said Thackeray carefully. “Laura certainly believes that some of the deaths may not be as straightforward as they seemed. She’s talked to people …”

“Apparently Ray Walter thinks it’s all a load of bollocks,” Longley said. “And given that not a single person has suggested anything like that to us, he’s most likely right.”

“Laura’s no fool,” Thackeray said defensively.

“Look, I realise you’re in a difficult position where the Gazette is concerned. But have a quiet word, will you Michael? The squad’s got a man undercover up at Wuthering and they don’t want a loose cannon mucking up the operation. He was the one who tipped them off about drugs at the Project, apparently. As for Mower, you can tell him to pack in this moonlighting he’s been doing and keep away from ongoing operations or he’ll have no bloody job to come back to. He’s lucky they didn’t arrest him yesterday, from what I hear.”

“Right,” Thackeray said wondering where an ultimatum like that would push an over-involved Mower and fearing that it might be over the edge. To his surprise, Longley remained perched on the edge of his seat.

“I had Grantley Adams on the phone this morning too,” he said eventually. Thackeray said nothing, but his lips tightened.

“His lad’s recovering well now,” Longley said. “He was anxious to know how far your investigation’s got on the Ecstasy front.”

“I told Adams we’d want to talk to the boy again when he had recovered, but I don’t expect to get any further. He and the girlfriend have closed up tighter than clams. Has the school taken any action against them?”

“Grantley’s been throwing his weight about there too, I hear,” Longley said. “I don’t know to what effect.”

“Well, I can’t see there being any charges. The cannabis we found wasn’t worth a fiver. Perhaps being booted out of their posh school is just about what they deserve. I didn’t get the impression the head would worry too much about a little matter of evidence.”

Longley smiled, though it was a mirthless effort.

“I thought you wanted to pin Grantley to the ground,” he said.

“It crossed my mind,” Thackeray said. “He’s an arrogant bastard, but you can hardly blame kids for the sins of their parents, can you? Not when we all pay for them in so many other ways.”

“Aye, well, I’d not know about that,” Longley said. “Anyway, keep me in touch, will you. The brass are not happy bunnies right now. I don’t want to give them owt else to fret about if I can help it.”

Kevin Mower glanced at his watch with some anxiety. It was half-past-one and he had arranged to meet Donna Maitland at twelve-thirty in the Woolpack in the centre of town. Dizzy B sat across the table from him with both hands wrapped around a pint of Stella Artois looking as tired and gloomy as Mower himself.

“She not have a mobile, man?” he asked.

“No, she’s mislaid it,” Mower said shortly. “I can’t understand it. She’s arranged to be at social services at two o’clock to talk about Emma. She won’t want to be late.” He had already called the Project and Donna’s flat and got no reply from either.

“They didn’t waste any time grabbing the kid,” Dizzy said.

“If I could get my hands on whoever tipped them off she’d been arrested …”

“The drug squad wouldn’t give a monkey’s how many kids she had or what happened to them. You know they’re a law unto themselves, that lot.”

“But I don’t see why they’d go out of their way to shop her to the council.”

“Maybe,” Dizzy said doubtfully. “Though if they thought it would bring extra pressure to bear …”

“I think I’m losing my grip,” Mower said, running a hand across his beard. “Time was I wanted to be part of the bloody drug squad.”

“You’re too involved with this case. Unless you’re going to pack the job in completely, you should keep your head down or DI Walter’ll chop it off. He’s still got me down as some sort of major dealer, even though there isn’t a shred of evidence to link me to anyone on the Heights ever. I’d never even heard of the bloody estate till last week. At least he let Donna out last night. He kept me sweating till this morning when he bloody well had to let me go. His time was up.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve been officially warned off interfering on the Heights,” Mower said. “If I want to keep my job, that is.”

“And do you?”

Mower shrugged.

“I wish I knew,” he said. He emptied his glass and glanced at his watch.

“I tell you something odd, though,” Dizzy B said. “I saw Darryl at the Carib this morning. He’s furious about the closure. In fact he thinks he might get out of Bradfield there’s so much hassle here. He’s had an offer for the place from some developers he thinks he might take.”

“That figures,” Mower said. “That whole area’s being tarted up. But the Caribbean kids won’t be pleased. It’s the only place they can really call their own.”

“Tell me about it,” Dizzy said. “I tried to persuade him not to sell.” But Mower had lost interest in the Carib. He looked at his watch anxiously again and sprang to his feet.

“Will you stay here, mate?” he asked. “Do us a favour? I’ll go up the hill to see if I can find Donna. She was in a terrible state when she got home last night. She’s going to be late for this appointment if she’s not careful and that won’t go down well with the nannies at social services. Bell me if she turns up?”

“Safe,” Dizzy B said, curling his arms around his glass as if about to fall asleep over it.

By the time he had driven up the steep hill in the pouring rain to the Heights, Kevin Mower felt far from safe. He knew from what he had gleaned of the drug squad operation that there were likely to be eyes watching every move on the Heights, and what the drug squad saw Michael Thackeray might well hear of too. But the gnawing anxiety which had been growing while he had been waiting for Donna could not be denied.

He had been there to greet Donna at the flat the previous evening when she was eventually released on police bail and he had explained Emma’s absence as gently as he could. She had reacted more calmly than he anticipated, turning pale and tight-lipped but holding back the tears and contacting social services by phone without any great show of emotion. She had arranged to see them the next afternoon at a case conference to discuss Emma’s well-being. But Mower could see the tension quivering beneath the façade and had objected angrily when she had eventually asked him to leave at about nine o’clock.

“We’ll get her back,” he had said fiercely. “I promise you that. Let me stop over and I’ll go to the meeting with you tomorrow.”

“I’m OK, Kevin,” she had insisted. “I haven’t done anything wrong, whatever that bastard inspector Walter says. I need a decent night’s sleep. I’ve got some pills. Then I’m going to see the kids at the Project as usual. And at two o’clock you can come with me to see social services. They’re well out of order with what they’ve done and I’ll have Emma back tomorrow if it’s the last thing I do. I’ll see you in the morning.”

But she hadn’t, because at nine that morning DCI Thackeray had called Mower in and told him to keep away from the Heights, an instruction it had only taken him a couple of hours to decide to ignore. He could see even from a distance as he got out of the car and buttoned his fleece against the downpour that the Project was in darkness and the doors closed, which was normal enough at this time of day. A couple of girls lingered outside, clutching thin jackets around themselves against the sharp wind and bone-numbing wet but they would not be allowed in until the adults returned to unlock the doors at two.

Leaving his car at the foot of Priestley House he made his way up the concrete stairs where the rain ran down in small waterfalls between the litter. He splashed through puddles along the walkway until he reached Donna ’s door. There were no lights on inside the flat in spite of the gloom and when he tried the door he found that it was locked. He knocked again and again but there was no reply. Alarmed now, he called Dizzy B on his mobile.

“Anything?” he asked, but the answer was negative.

“Shit,” Mower said to himself. Looking round to make sure that he was still alone on the walkway, he pulled a credit card from his wallet and slid it against the lock, which held for a moment and then slid open, allowing him to slip into the flat apparently unobserved. Inside, when he turned on the light everything appeared normal enough. The small living room was tidy, and in the kitchen the glasses and plates which he and Donna had used the previous evening had been washed and left to dry on the draining board. He glanced into Emma’s small room where the bed had been neatly made and a Barbie doll leaned against the pillow, and then knocked lightly on the door of the main bedroom before opening it. There the double bed had evidently been slept in and the bedclothes left thrown back with a blue silky nightdress lying across the pillows. A bottle of pills stood on the bedside table and he glanced briefly at the pharmacist’s label without surprise, recognising the tranquilliser she had evidently been prescribed, although he had never seen her take them while he had been at the flat. But of Donna herself there was no sign.

Only the bathroom was left and Mower turned the door handle with a growing sense of alarm. At first he could see very little but as his eyes adjusted, even before he tugged on the light-pull, he could see that the water Donna was lying in was dark and he knew instantly what that meant. She was lying with her head still above the water and her eyes half open but sightless, her arms floating gently and revealing deep gashes across both wrists.

“Oh, God, no,” Mower said despairingly, leaning against the door as his knees threatened to give way beneath him. He fought back waves of nausea for a long time before he felt able to step across the damp floor and look down directly at the dead woman. He checked for a pulse in her neck but without any expectation of finding one. A single razor blade lay on the floor close to the side of the bath, he noticed. It was probably one of his own. Donna had been dead some time, the water in the bath was cool to the touch and her naked body felt cold. She must have been lying here, dying here perhaps, for hours, he thought bitterly. If only she had allowed him to stay the night as he had wanted. If only. He gently closed her eyes as if to allow her to rest in peace.

“Oh, Donna, why?” he whispered. “We were going to get her back. Why, oh why, did you give up on it now?” Desolation overwhelmed him, this new death reopening the still barely healed wound left by Rita Desai’s violent death. It was as if he was fated to bring destruction to women he allowed himself to grow fond of, he thought, as if what he touched he destroyed.

It was not until some time later, sitting in Donna’s living room, with tears drying on his face, that he realised that there were things he must do. He glanced at his watch. It was two thirty and the case conference Donna should have attended must have convened itself and dissolved itself by now. He called police HQ first and asked the duty officer to deal with what appeared to be a suicide, then he caught up with Dizzy B, still patiently waiting for news in the pub. Next he phoned social services and told them that Emma Maitland’s mother was dead. They seemed less than anxious for Mower to see the child and he had not the heart to argue his case. Still dazed, he went into the kitchen and splashed his face with cold water and dried it on a tea-towel. Then he stood on the balcony outside the flat, taking deep gulps of rain-sodden air waiting for the patrol cars and the officers who would deal with the incident to arrive down below.

As the fresh air cleared his brain he finally began to consider his own position which, he thought, whichever way you looked at it was not a comfortable one. While Michael Thackeray might just concede that fear for Donna’s safety was a reasonable excuse for ignoring his instruction to keep away from the Heights, he was sure that the drug squad would be less than impressed when they discovered his willingness to disobey orders, as inevitably they would now do. Worse, it was conceivable that they might read far more into his relationship with Donna and her death than was justified. If Donna had reached rock bottom during the night, Mower was sure it was the threat of losing her daughter which had reduced her to despair. Ray Walter might well see it differently, interpret her death as an admission of guilt and be even more anxious to link Mower and Dizzy B, and quite possibly even Joyce Ackroyd, to whatever he believed had been going on at the Project.

Drenched by a particularly gusty squall, and seeing no sign of blue lights flashing on the approach to the estate, Mower went back into the flat to wait. He knew better than to touch anything just in case this apparently not very suspicious death turned into something more sinister when the pathologist had examined Donna’s body, but he wandered from room to room, partly for something to do and partly because he could not sit still. He knew that he had spent enough time in the flat over the last few weeks for forensic traces of his presence to be everywhere if it came to that.

He had hoped he and Donna had finally understood each other. She might have been keen to find a new father for Emma, but he had given her no reason to imagine that was how he saw a future for the three of them. He did not think he had deceived her. He did not think he had pushed her to this desperate solution. But he was no longer sure of anything, and he began to cast around the flat for a note or message of some kind, perhaps addressed to Emma rather than himself, but could find nothing. She had no answerphone on which she could have recorded a message. And as he searched, and the effects of shock began to dissipate and his mind cleared, he began to feel that what had happened could not be the whole story, not in the sense that he could not believe the evidence of his eyes and that Donna was not dead, but that the method and even more the timing of her death did not make any sort of sense for the woman he thought he had come to know well. She might have spent the previous night frantic with worry and far closer to desperation than she had anticipated when she had sent him away, but the one thing he was sure she would never have done was abandon her daughter. Her death might have all the hallmarks of a suicide, but somehow it did not ring true.

You’re losing it, Mower told himself, as at last he heard the faint sound of approaching police cars. You’re finally going round the twist. Seeing one girlfriend murdered might be regarded as an unfortunate. Suggesting another might have gone the same way was a sure means of being referred to the funny farm by over-solicitous trauma counsellors. When the knock on the door from his uniformed colleagues finally came Kevin Mower showed them in mutely and waved them towards the bathroom.

“I’d arranged to see her this lunch-time. She didn’t turn up so I came looking,” he said by way of explanation. “She’s in there.” And he let the investigation swing into gear around him as he sat slumped on Donna’s sofa, his eyes glazed and his head whirling with disconnected thoughts, in a posture that he knew his colleagues would put down simply to shock. But the shock had passed, to be replaced by a bitter anger as Mower watched the uniformed officers go through their routines. He had not the slightest shred of evidence to support his conclusion but he was nevertheless sure that Donna’s death was the climax of the campaign of violence on the Heights. He knew there was something profoundly wrong with the way Donna had died and by the time he left the flat, dismissed by the uniformed inspector in charge just as Amos Atherton lumbered in, gasping from the long climb up the stairs, he had convinced himself that she had been murdered.

For a long time he sat in his car outside the flats watching the rain stream down the windscreen and reluctant to do any of the things he knew he now had to do. Eventually he started the engine and eased the car into gear but only travelled the few hundred yards down the hill to the Project where, he thought, the worst of his obligations awaited him. The reception area was milling with youngsters when he arrived, some of them leaving Joyce Ackroyd’s class for remedial readers and some of them arriving for Donna’s three o’clock group of computer beginners which had evidently not been cancelled.

“Donna won’t be here this afternoon,” Mower shouted across the chatter of teenagers coming and going. “Sorry kids, the class is cancelled.” Cheers and groans greeted that news in equal measure and within a couple of minutes the Project had fallen silent as its clients disappeared in to the damp gloom outside. In the classroom doorway Joyce Ackroyd stood with one supporting hand on the handle and the other on her walking stick.

“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.