Текст книги "Death in Dark Waters"

Автор книги: Patricia Hall

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“You know they found another young lad dead last night, don’t you?” Joyce asked suddenly.

“Not the one who was knocked down in town?”

“No, the one who fell off the roof of Priestley House. Overdose, they’re saying, out of his head. That’s the fifth or sixth this year and no one seems to be doing a damn thing about it. I don’t know what that man of yours thinks he’s about, but heroin up here is wiping out a whole generation. Aren’t the police even interested?”

“I’m sure they are, Nan,” Laura said, with more confidence than she felt. She suspected that the kids on the Heights who killed each other quickly with knives or slowly with heroin and crack rated much lower in official priorities than the grammar school boy from a wealthy home who had been run down the night before.

“Well, put a bomb under them for us, will you, love?”

“I’ll see what I can do.” Laura knew that her grandmother did not altogether approve of her relationship with DCI Michael Thackeray believing, with the same certainty with which she believed in the future of British coal and the need to renationalise the railways, that men and women should have the decency to tie a legal knot before embarking on life together. But she would use the connection ruthlessly if it suited her. Laura had been relieved to discover that Michael took Joyce’s reservations in his stride and found it in himself to approve very thoroughly of her.

She made more tea and then slumped into a chair on the other side of the fire and shook her head in mock despair.

“Are you ever going to take it easy?” she asked.

“What do you want me to do?” Joyce snapped back. “Sit in this little box goggling at t’other one till the Grim Reaper pops in to put me in the final box of all? If there’s owt I can do to help folk like Donna while I’m still standing I’ll do it. And it’ll be a pity when they run out of folk like me, an’all.”

Laura grinned, shame-faced.

“Will someone at the Town Hall see you, d’you think?”

“Oh, aye, they’ll see me all right, if only to shut me up,” Joyce said grimly. “Can you give me a lift down in your lunch hour tomorrow, pet?”

Chapter Two

Laura woke early to find herself tucked snugly into the curve of Michael Thackeray’s body with one of his hands comfortably beneath her breast. The closeness of him filled her with desire but she could see that it was not yet seven and chose not to rouse him so early. They had both fallen into bed exhausted the previous night and had fallen asleep before either of them could respond to the whispers of their bodies which suggested anything different.

He had come home in a bad mood, although evidently reluctant to tell her why. And he had only seemed to half listen as she had passed on her grandmother’s unease about the state of Wuthering, the estate which caused the police as well as the local council the greatest trouble in a troublesome little town which prosperity still resolutely seemed to pass by. But he had not seemed to be very interested. Secrets and lies, she thought ruefully, lies and secrets: they had haunted their relationship since the beginning and even now that they had achieved a sort of truce together she still suspected that their jobs might one day drive them apart in some way which would be hard to forgive.

She did not think too hard about the future at all these days, tiptoeing round it in a way she knew could not be sustained indefinitely. What she wanted and what Michael wanted seemed as far apart as ever. His divorce had drifted into the realms of sometime, perhaps never, and she had avoided talk of children since he had returned to her new flat only slightly shame-faced after their last serious difference of opinion. Apparently relaxed, he was helping her choose rugs and pictures to replace what she had lost when her last home had been trashed. But she knew, and she suspected he knew, that there was too much left unsaid for her to be sure of him any longer. Soon, she thought, they must thrash out where they were going together, if they were going anywhere at all.

Carefully she slipped from his arms and went to take a shower. By the time she emerged, Thackeray was awake, his eyes wary as he watched her come back into the bedroom, throw off her towel and begin to dress.

“It’s very early,” he said and she was not sure whether there was an invitation there. Once she might have been certain.

“Busy day,” she said, pulling on black trousers and a silk shirt of deep green and beginning to brush her tousled copper curls with rather too much vigour. “I promised to take Joyce to the Town Hall at lunch-time so I need an early start. Otherwise Ted Grant will be ranting and raving again. I told you last night.”

Thackeray put his hands behind his head and watched her pin her hair up in a severe pleat.

“Tell her we really are working on the heroin problem up there,” he said carefully.

“So why don’t they think you are?” Laura came back quickly.

“It’s out of my hands, Laura. The drug squad do things their own way, you know that. They report to county, not to Jack Longley. I dare say he knows what’s going on but he hasn’t told me.”

“And reassuring the local community isn’t part of the game plan?”

“I doubt the drug squad would recognise a community if it jumped up and bit them,” Thackeray said.

“Is that what was pissing you off last night?”

“Oh, partly that and partly Jack Longley cuddling up to local businessmen,” Thackeray said. “His mates from the Lodge, a lot of them.”

“You must be joking?”

“The so-called business community can do no wrong these days. It’s official. You know how it is. Longley meets them at his wretched Masonic meetings and every now and again they think they can decide police priorities for him. This time it’s Ecstasy at the Carib Club taking priority over heroin up on the Heights.”

“The schoolboy who was knocked down?”

“Son of some local worthy, so we pull all the stops out to find the pusher. Chances are the lad got it off a friend who got it off a friend who bought it off someone he’d never seen before weeks ago in a pub he can’t remember the name of. But I suppose we’ll have to go through the motions to please Grantley Adams.”

“Grantley Adams was a mate of my father’s,” Laura said, suddenly thrown back to a childhood where she had seemed to be constantly at war with her father’s ambition to make a million before he was forty. “I remember him coming to the house years ago when I was just a kid. He’s quite old to have a son still at school.”

“Second family, I think,” Thackeray said. “You know how it goes: boredom sets in and he swaps his middle-aged missus for a new trophy wife and another batch of kids.”

“And this one’s let dad down big time? Still, it must be dreadful for the family.”

“Yes,” Thackeray said quickly and Laura flinched at the look in his eyes. “But it’s police priorities I’m talking here, not family tragedies. Those I never could do much about.”

She sat on the edge of the bed and kissed him.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I think work’s getting us both down. See if you can get away at a sensible time tonight and we’ll go out for a meal. That new Thai place on the Manchester Road is supposed to be very good.”

Thackeray relaxed slightly and returned her kiss with interest.

“Things must be looking up if Thai food’s arrived in Bradfield,” he said. “I thought that was only available in poncy Leeds.”

“We could try fusion cooking if you want to go that far …”

“Let me get used to one thing at a time,” he said, laughing. “You know I’m only a roast beef and Yorkshire pud country lad at heart.”

“Oh, I think you washed the last traces of muck off your boots a long time ago. And I’m sure that if you really want to get to grips with heroin on the Heights rather than recreational drugs in the pubs and clubs you’ll find yourself a way. But watch out for Grantley Adams. I can remember taking a very distinct dislike to him. A bullying man, as I recall. Managed to pat me on the head and tweak my hair at the same time without my dad noticing anything at all. Getting back at me for some cheeky remark I’d made; no doubt some socialist heresy I’d picked up at my grandmother’s knee and parroted without really understanding. But very nasty, as I recall.”

“I’ll bear it in mind,” Thackeray said.

The newsroom at the Bradfield Gazette was still quiet soon after eight when Laura got in, with only two reporters on an early shift concentrating on their computer screens. But the early morning peace was soon shattered when the editor, Ted Grant, arrived with the manic gleam in his eyes which Laura knew spelt trouble. Head down, she hoped that it would not involve her brief on the feature pages.

But she was unlucky. By the time Grant had convened the morning meeting and Laura had taken her place at the untidy table in his office alongside her colleagues, she knew that the excitement which had brought a sharp flush to his cheeks and the first signs of sweat to the shirt which strained to encompass his beer belly, would include her. He had placed Bob Baker, the paper’s crime reporter, on his left-hand side from where he nursed a contented smirk which boded ill, Laura thought, for the rest of those there.

“We’ll make it a Gazette campaign,” Grant said. “The war on drugs. The threat to our youth. What can Bradfield do to defeat the evil pushers? You know the sort of thing. Run a hotline for people who want to pass on information if the police are too dozy to do it. The Globe’s got it off to a tee, but we can do our own version. We’ll collate all the news stories, and Laura, you can run a series of features on families that have been affected. Start with this lad who was nearly killed at this club the other night, Grantley Adams’ boy.”

Laura opened her mouth to object but, glancing round the table, realised that she was the only one there with any reservations about Grant’s plan.

“There’s been another death up on the Heights too,” she said eventually.

“Aye, well we’ll get to that one later,” Grant said. “The little toe-rags up there have got nowt else to do, have they? But this lad in intensive care was a high flyer, apparently. Going to Oxford, wanting to be a lawyer. That’s a better story for us. See if you can get an interview with his mum and dad – for today if you can, but tomorrow if not.”

“Right,” Laura said, knowing that facing Grantley Adams again after all these years was unlikely to be a pleasant experience in the best of circumstances, and she would be a long way from those today.

“You don’t look too chuffed with that assignment,” said Bob Baker a few minutes later, with an unwanted hand on Laura’s shoulder and an insinuating whisper in her ear, as they made their way back to their desks. “Surely your boyfriend is going to be chasing this one whatever we run with, isn’t he?” Baker, a sleek twenty-five year old with one eye on his career and the other on anyone female who would make eye-contact, was not Laura’s favourite colleague. She suspected that he saw in her a chance to pursue both of his objectives at once, not because she encouraged his advances but because he knew that she had a unique line to the police that he might be able to exploit if she did not concentrate hard enough on what she was saying in his vicinity.

“Mr. Adams is an old friend of the family, as it goes,” she said sweetly, capitalising for once on her local connections which Baker, a recent arrival, could not match.

“And a crack-down on E? Is that on your boyfriend’s agenda?”

“I’ve really no idea,” she said. “We’ve much better things to do than talk shop after work. Why don’t you ask him yourself.” She knew that this would annoy Baker whose relationship with Michael Thackeray could best be described in terms of an armed truce.

Baker shrugged and moved away, but not without a parting shot.

“What I don′t understand is why Bradfield CID’s been cut right out of operations up on the Heights,” he said. “Funny, that.”

“D’you want to sit in on this one, boss?”

DC Val Ridley hesitated outside the door of an interview room, trim and contained as ever in spite of the dark circles beneath her eyes that Thackeray now regarded as permanent.

“Who’ve you got?” he asked.

“The girlfriend of the lad who was knocked down in Chapel Street. Jeremy Adams.”

Thackeray hesitated and then nodded, curious almost in spite of himself.

“Do we need a responsible adult?” he asked.

“She’s seventeen but she’s got her mother with her anyway,” Val said quickly. “I told them an informal chat. No caution. Nothing heavy. At least she had the decency to hang around after the accident. Most of the little beggars vanished into the night.

“And how’s the boy?”

“Still critical.” Her voice was flat, without emotion. Thackeray knew that Val was good at that, but very occasionally the mask cracked to reveal a warmer and more erratic human being underneath the chilly exterior. He let her lead the way into the interview room where a young girl with long blonde hair and a sulky expression was sitting at the table alongside a woman almost as slim, certainly as blonde and apart from some faint lines around the eyes not apparently much older.

“Mrs.-James, this is DCI Thackeray,” Val said. “And this is Louise.”

Thackeray took the fourth seat at the table and nodded to Val Ridley to continue. Teenagers fascinated and disturbed him not least because his own son, had he survived, would by now have been hovering on the edge of these turbulent, truculent few years and he had not the faintest idea how he would have learned to cope with that. Badly, he suspected, if Ian had begun to display any of the alarming and often dangerous tendencies to self-destruction he saw amongst the young who crossed his path as a police officer. Would that have given him more insight with a child of his own, or just made him more afraid of what could go wrong? He did not know. But here, at least, he thought, was a child who appeared to have had all the advantages so many of CID’s clients had not. Had Louise James slipped over the edge in spite of that? Or was he simply assuming that because she fell into that age range she must be sad, or mad or bad. He smiled uneasily at the girl’s mother and tried to concentrate on what Val Ridley was saying.

“So tell me about Wednesday evening, Louise,” Val said. “What made you and Jeremy decide to go to the Carib Club?”

“It was my birthday, wasn’t it?” Louise said, in a barely audible mumble.

“She doesn’t usually go out in the week but because it was her birthday, her seventeenth, we made an exception,” Mrs. James broke in quickly. “They get so much homework. They’re at Bradfield Grammar, you know …”

“But why the Carib?” Val persisted. “Is it somewhere you’ve been before?”

Louise glanced at her mother.

“Once,” she said. “Once or twice, at a weekend.”

“We’d have stopped her if we’d known,” Mrs. James broke in again, her voice harsh. “That part of town. That sort of club.”

“Mrs. James, I’d like to hear what Louise has to say for herself,” Thackeray broke in sharply. “If you don’t mind.”

The girl shot him a glance which appeared almost grateful while her mother turned away, affronted.

“We like the music,” Louise said. “And the DJs. Wednesday was Dizzy B. He’s cool.”

“So you went down there at what time?” Val asked.

“About ten, I suppose.”

“Had you been anywhere else first?”

“We had a couple of drinks in the Parrot and Banana.”

“No difficulty getting served, I suppose,” Val said dryly. “And was it just the two of you went on to the club, or were you part of a larger group?”

“We’ve tried to bring her up to drink sensibly,” the girl’s mother said quickly.

Louise ignored her but hesitated, gazing down at her clasped hands on the table in front of her.

“There was a whole gang going on from the pub,” she said eventually. “No one I knew very well.”

“Names?”

“Just first names. No one from our school. Not close friends.”

Thackeray knew the girl was lying and guessed that the two women did too.

“We’ll give you a pencil and paper later,” he said. “You can have a think about the names of anyone you can remember who was around that evening. Will you do that, Louise?”

The girl nodded, not looking up, and Thackeray knew that the list would be short and the names unidentifiable, but he did not think it worth pressurising the girl at this stage.

“We know from the hospital that Jeremy took at least one Ecstasy tablet during the evening,” Val Ridley went on, her voice calm. “Did you know that?”

Louise nodded, a single tear drop splashing down onto the table in front of her. Irritably, she rubbed it away with a finger

“Did you take any illegal substances, Louise?”

Louise nodded again.

“Just one tab,” she said, and there was a sharply indrawn breath from her mother. Thackeray shot her a warning glance.

“You think Jeremy took more?” Val persisted.

“I think he had two. He was wild …At the club later he was dancing like a mad-man. I couldn’t keep up with him. But we knew what to do. We drank plenty of water …”

“So you know we have to ask, Louise. Where did you get the pills from?”

“They were just passing them round in the pub,” the girl said, glancing at her mother. “I’d never had one before but Jez said it would be cool.”

“Who was passing them round?”

“Everyone,” Louise said, sulky now.

“But someone must have been taking the money for them. These things don’t come free.”

“I didn’t see anyone,” she said.

“Did you pay for them, Louise?”

“I never.” The girl flushed and more tears came.

“So did Jeremy buy them?”

“No, no, I never saw him pay anyone. I don’t know who bought them, where they came from, it was nothing to do with me.”

“Right, we’ll leave that for the minute, Louise,” Val Ridley said, still calm, her voice still low as the girl scrubbed at her eyes with a tissue that her mother handed to her.

“When you got to the Carib, there was someone on the door, right?”

“Two black guys,” Louise said.

“And did they check you for drugs?”

“Yeah, yeah, they asked, and looked in my bag. I had a little black bag with me, but we’d taken them by then, so there wasn’t anything to find, was there? They were wasting their time.”

“Maybe,” Val Ridley said. “But inside the club. Did you see anyone offering drugs in there? Pills, cannabis, anything at all?”

Louise shook her head.

“It was dark, and crowded and we were dancing, I didn’t see anything much. It was a great night until that happened …” She glanced at her mother.

“It’s not fair the way everyone’s going on about the drugs,” Louise burst out suddenly, her voice choked with anger. “It was that taxi driver’s fault. He came round the corner too fast. He could have hit me too, lots of people jumped out of the way. Jez was unlucky that’s all. He didn’t see it coming. It was nothing to do with drugs. What harm does one tablet do? We had a great time. We were going home. If it hadn’t been for that driver no one would have been any the wiser. We’d have been at school the next morning and no one would have known anything about it.”

Thackeray stood up abruptly.

“We will want your daughter to sign a written statement,” he said to Louise’s mother. “And in view of what she’s told us about the availability of illegal substances the other night we’ll want to be sure that she has nothing else hidden at home ← or at Jeremy’s home, for that matter.”

“What do you mean, hidden?” Mrs. James asked, her voice shrill.

“We’ll need to search your house,” Thackeray said.

“Oh, Mum,” Louise wailed, crumpling across the table and sobbing uncontrollably. “I really, really only took one. I only took one, ever.”

“I’ll leave you with DC Ridley,” Thackeray said and left the room without looking back. A quick search for illegal substances would give Grantley Adams something to think about before he spoke to him, he thought with some satisfaction. For all his sympathy for a father with a child in intensive care, he was not averse to laying down a few ground rules before tackling Jack Longley’s Masonic acquaintances. And the first of those was to make clear that no one in Bradfield was above the law.

Chapter Three

Laura held her grandmother’s arm firmly as they made their way up the ramp alongside the broad stone steps which led to the massive mahogany doors at Bradfield Town Hall. The Victorians who had built the place had lacked nothing in confidence, Laura thought, any more than her grandmother did. Dressed in her best grey wool suit with a red scarf at her throat, Joyce looked far younger than Laura knew she was. But she could feel the effort that it was taking her to haul herself up the slope in spite of Laura’s supporting arm and the rail she was clutching on the other side.

“Where are you meeting him?” she asked as Joyce paused to regain her breath in the doorway.

“In the members’ lounge,” Joyce said. “It’s on the first floor but there’s a lift.”

Just as well, Laura thought. She could not see Joyce making it to the top of the ceremonial stone staircase, with its ornate fountain on the half-landing.

“Give me my stick now and I’ll be fine,” Joyce said firmly but when she marched ahead of Laura and pushed the heavy doors they did not budge.

“Let me, Nan,” Laura said, ushering her through and pretending not to have noticed Joyce’s own attempt. “The lift’s round here, isn’t it?”

On the floor above Joyce still led the way slowly but confidently, back on territory which had been her own for more than forty years. She tapped her way along the highly polished parquet corridors, the dark wood-panelled walls adorned with portraits of long dead mayors and aldermen in full robes, men who had dreamed their dreams for Bradfield ever since it had burgeoned from a small village of weavers’ cottages into a bustling manufacturing town of mills and warehouses and back-to-back workers’ terraces during the fifty frantic years of the industrial revolution. Joyce had dreamed dreams here too, trying to alleviate the legacy of slum poverty that revolution had bequeathed the twentieth century, and she had made many of her dreams flesh, only to see them crumble into dust as prosperity ebbed away and grand schemes, like the Heights where she still lived, had decayed and turned sour.

After a walk which Laura guessed she had completed on sheer determination, Joyce opened another heavy wood-panelled door and stepped inside.

“Oh, they’ve never,” she said, standing in the doorway transfixed. The room, set out with armchairs and small tables, appeared to be empty.

“What?” Laura asked.

“They’ve taken down the chandeliers and put in those horrid little lamps,” Joyce said in disgust. “I was never a great one for tradition but I did reckon this town hall was summat to be proud of. They’ve vandalised it.”

“Now then, Mrs. Ackroyd,” said a voice from behind them. “I didn’t think we’d be seeing you here again.” The grey-haired man who had spoken and who ushered the two women into the room with old-fashioned courtesy was not much taller than Joyce herself, but twice as broad. But the breadth was contained within a worsted suit of such evident Yorkshire provenance that Laura almost did what her father had traditionally done with his friends, feeling the cloth of the lapel and rubbing it gently between the thumb and forefinger in appreciation of the quality.

“Len Harvey,” Joyce said in surprise. “I thought you’d stood down an’all. Councillor Harvey was leader of the Tory group when I led for Labour,” Joyce added for Laura’s benefit.

“Aye, well, I did, five year ago. But they’ve set up this committee on regeneration and my lot reckoned I could represent them. Likely a sign they don’t give a tupenny damn, but I must say I’m quite enjoying popping back in here now and then. They’ve not asked you onto the same thing, have they, Joyce? That’d be a turn-up after all the schoolboys Labour’s been putting up recently. Makes me feel a right old fuddyduddy with my pacemaker and two pairs of specs.”

“No, I’m just here for a chat with Dave Spencer,” Joyce said abruptly. “I can’t get about the way I used to. My hips have given up on me.”

The smart tap of footsteps in the corridor outside heralded the arrival of a much younger man, sharp suited, fresh-faced, and with a haircut so close to the scalp that he could have played football for England. He glanced around the room, ignoring ex-councillor Harvey and waving the two women to a table and chairs in an alcove well away from the door. As they settled themselves down, Spencer, with his file and mobile phone lined up in front of him, glanced at the elaborate looking watch on his wrist.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Ackroyd – can I call you Joyce?” he said. “I’ve got an urgent sub-committee in fifteen minutes. Something’s come up. So perhaps if you just tell me what the problem is I can get back to you later?”

“I think it might take a little longer than that to explain exactly what the problems are at the Project,” Joyce said, an obstinate look coming over her face.

“You do know about the Project, Councillor Spencer, don’t you?” Laura asked sharply. “The Gazette did a big feature on it about six months ago.”

Spencer glanced at her sharply.

“You are?”

Laura told him.

“I didn’t make the connection,” he said, looking irritated with himself as if his omniscience had been challenged in some way.

“No reason why you should,” Joyce said. “Laura’s not here as a journalist. She gave me a lift. I’m not as good on my feet as I used to be but there’s nowt wrong with my brain.”

“And now there’s a problem at the Project?” Spencer asked, altogether more placatory now he realised that the Press was in on the meeting, if only unofficially.

Joyce told him exactly how the Project had been vandalised and, in outline, how their precarious financial position meant that unless they could improve their cashflow the whole enterprise might have to close.

“Training is certainly going to be part of the regeneration project that we’re discussing with the government,” Spencer said at last. “It’s a particular interest of some of our business partners, of course. We’ve a massive skills shortage building up in Bradfield. Far too many kids still leaving school too soon. Those who do go to university not coming back again to work. We need to address those problems if we’re to attract modern high-tech industries to the area. What sort of outcomes are you showing up there? Are they getting jobs?”

“Some are,” Joyce said. “Some aren’t. If your business friends don’t like the colour of their skin it’s harder. But you’d be aware of that, of course, on your regeneration committee.”

“Of course,” Spencer said, glancing quickly at Laura and away again.

“And then there’s the problem of drugs,” Joyce said firmly.

“At the Project?” Spencer sounded alarmed.

“Not if we can help it, no,” Joyce snapped. “But on the estate. Too many kids with nothing to do. Too many pushers. Who do you think wrecked the place for us? It wasn’t the ones we were helping, that’s for sure. They’re good as gold when they come to us. It’s the ones who won’t be helped. Another lad dead and the Project wrecked, all in two days. What we need is short-term help to keep going and long-term help to get drugs out of the community before any more youngsters die. Can I come and tell your regeneration committee what needs doing up there, before you make any more plans?”

“I’m sure that would be very helpful, Joyce,” Spencer said. “But I’ll have to put it to them first.”

“Can you raise it at this urgency sub-committee you’re off to now, then?” Joyce asked quickly as the councillor glanced at his watch again. He smiled faintly. Her grandmother still did not miss a trick, Laura thought.

“Not appropriate, I’m afraid, Joyce,” Spencer said. “It’ll have to wait until the next full meeting of the regeneration committee – if they agree. Perhaps in the meantime you can let me have something in writing, including the financial position you find yourselves in now. Our business partners will want to know just what value the project is adding …”

“I’ve got all that here for you,” Joyce said, delving into her bag and bringing out several closely handwritten sheets neatly encased in a plastic document folder. “I didn’t think you’d sign a cheque just on my say-so, lad,” she said. “I may be old but I’m not daft. You’ll find it all here. But I will say one thing. I’ve worked with folk up on the Heights for the last fifty years, on and off, and this is one of the best projects I’ve seen for the last thirty. But it’s no use the Lottery putting in thousands for the capital costs if we can’t insure against theft and vandalism. You can tell your business friends that, especially if some of them are from the banks and insurance companies. They’ll know what I’m talking about. And you’d best make sure that they don’t sell all your new schemes down the river the same way. Regeneration’s all well and good, but when summat goes wrong you’ve got to be able to pick up the pieces.”

She struggled to her feet, ignoring Laura’s arm.

“I’ll be hearing from you shortly, then, shall I, Councillor Spencer?”

Spencer got up and took a step towards the door, clutching Joyce’s folder as if it was giving off a faintly unsavoury smell.

“I’m sure,” he said. “I’m sure.” And he was gone, the door slamming behind him.

Joyce looked around the room with some satisfaction. On the far side, Len Harvey peered around his Daily Telegraph with a wicked grin.

“Not lost your tongue then, Joyce?” he said.

“Think they know it all, these sharp young men,” Joyce said.

“Same with us,” Harvey said more soberly. “Trouble is, I think some of them know nowt. Doesn’t matter what party they belong to, they’re all t’same. They’re ambitious, I’ll give you that. Full of big ideas but all mouth and no trousers, I reckon, a lot of them.”

“Well, we’ll see,” Joyce said, following Laura slowly to the door. “If they can’t solve a simple problem like we’ve got just now on the Heights, then I reckon you’re right. Business partners! Since when did business do owt for the poor? Unless there’s a fat rate of interest in it for them.”

DCI Michael Thackeray closed down his computer, stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette and sat for a moment in the half-light of the winter evening, with the rain beating against the window as it had done for weeks, reviewing an unsatisfactory afternoon. Superintendent Longley had marched into his office halfway through it as Thackeray expected he would. His face was flushed and his expression as angry as the DCI had ever seen it.