Текст книги "Death in Dark Waters"

Автор книги: Patricia Hall

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Chapter Seven

Laura stood on the muddy grass at the centre of the Heights and gazed up at the three dilapidated blocks of flats in something close to despair. The driving rain which had beaten down on Bradfield all morning had only just eased off and the concrete sides of the building were streaked with dark, damp patches. She could see a woman in a red fleece pushing a baby in a buggy along one of the walkways three floors up in Priestley, immediately above the rain-tattered bunches of flowers which lay on the concrete where the boy called Derek Whitby had fallen from the roof to his death. In the other direction she spotted a couple of youths, hoods drawn around their faces so tightly that only their eyes were visible, sauntering out of the doors of Holtby leaving them swinging open behind them instead of securely locked as the council intended. She watched them watching her as they made their way under the relative shelter of the balconies towards the bus-stop on the main road which skirted the estate. She knew they were young enough to be in school and was equally sure that was not where they were going.

It was the third day in a row that Laura had driven up the steep hill to the Heights during her lunch-hour and today, as she had waited at the traffic lights to turn onto the estate, she had admitted to herself that she was seriously worried about her grandmother. Joyce was looking as old and frail as Laura had ever seen her. Even the sparkle was beginning to disappear from her eyes. Laura knew she was depressed about the vandalism at the Project but guessed that she was finding her inability to pull strings at the Town Hall to push-start the rescue attempt she had set her heart on was even more to blame for her depression.

She followed what had once been a footpath, but which now resembled a quagmire, towards the Project. It had been the wettest winter on record and she knew that the ceaseless rain was getting to people in unpredictable ways. As January slid gloomily into February the tempers of even the most equable souls were beginning to fray, and equable was not an epithet she would ever apply to herself or to Michael Thackeray. She knew that the tension in their relationship was growing rather than receding as they had both hoped it would, and the knowledge was as dark and heavy as the rainclouds which rolled incessantly down from the high moors to the west.

Donna met her at the door of the Project. She had tied her hair up in a scarf, like a war-time factory worker, and was wearing a sleeveless t-shirt under paint-stained dungarees.

“Watch yourself, pet,” she said by way of greeting as she stood aside to let Laura into the reception area which reeked of white spirit. Her smile was warm, though she looked tired.

“We’ve got most of the red paint off, but if you light a match the place’ll go up like a bomb,” she said.

“Don’t give the tearaways ideas,” Laura said. “Is my grandmother here?”

“In t’ back with Kevin,” Donna said. “He’s brought some mate of his from London with him. A DJ? To talk to t’ kids?” Donna rolled her eyes to heaven in mock despair at the preoccupations of teenagers and waved Laura on into the building.

Laura made her way into the small kitchen where she found Joyce in animated conversation with Mower and Dizzy B, one white head and two dark ones, and, unexpectedly, three pairs of laughing eyes.

“Did you know your amazing grandmother saw Louis Armstrong in the 1950s?” Mower said, glancing up as Laura came in. “Satchmo himself and I didn’t even know she was into jazz. The boss would be impressed.”

“There’s lots of things I don’t know about what Joyce got up to in her misspent youth,” Laura admitted with a grin. “She’s not old enough to have been a suffragette but you can bet your life she’d have been chaining herself to railings if she’d had the chance.”

“Tried that at Greenham Common,” Joyce said tartly.

“She told me she was on the first Aldermaston march too, and every one after that, and the riot in Grosvenor Square,” Laura said. “Though I’m sure that’s not for police consumption. I bet MI5 have still got her on their files.”

Mower put a finger to his lips and glanced at the door to where Donna could be heard belting out ‘Look for the Hero Inside Yourself’ as she worked.

“We don’t know any coppers here, remember?” he said. “And certainly not any spooks.”

“They came to interview me once, M15,” Joyce said unexpectedly, a wicked gleam in her eyes. “When George Blake escaped. You remember? The Russian spy? Thought I might know summat about it.”

“And did you?” Mower asked.

“Well if I did, I don’t think I’d tell you, even after all these years,” Joyce said primly. “What you youngsters forget, though, is that we won most of those battles in the end. Only the miners lost and I’ll never forgive some folk who should have known better for that.”

Mower grinned, and glanced at Dizzy B.

“This is Laura,” he said. “A chip off the old block.” Mower looked happier behind his piratical black beard than she had seen him for months, Laura thought, and her own heart lifted slightly in response.

“I’ve met the reporter lady,” the DJ said, a wary look in his eyes. “Was it you who put me on the front page of your rag this morning?”

Laura shook her head.

“That was our enterprising crime reporter, Bob Baker,” she said. “Nothing to do with me.” Dizzy B glanced at Mower uncertainly.

“You can believe it,” Mower said. “Baker’s got someone at the nick in his back pocket and the brass would dearly love to know who. It’s been going on for a while.”

“I thought that sort of thing only happened in American crime novels,” Dizzy B said.

“Well, if you imagine the Gazette’s paying anyone to leak stuff I should think again,” Laura said. “Getting your bus fare to the town hall paid by my boss is like getting blood out of a stone. I don’t think even Bob Baker could persuade him to bribe coppers, not because of any moral scruples, you understand, but because he’s too damn tight with the petty cash.”

Joyce stood up suddenly, as if irritated by the younger generation’s chatter.

“Have you heard anything from the town hall about funding for this place, pet?” she asked. And when Laura shook her head her face tightened and aged perceptibly.

“I can’t get any sense out of that lad Spencer,” she said. “One minute it’s all in hand, and the next he’s making excuses. I don’t think he gives a tuppeny damn about the kids up here when it comes to the point. Calls himself a councillor but all he’s really after is a safe seat at the next general election. And he’ll more likely get that by buttering up businessmen than by looking after the folk who elected him, more’s the pity. They’ve lost sight of what they’re there for, a lot of them. It’s a disgrace.”

“I’ll talk to the guy who covers the town hall when I go back to the office,” Laura said. “He must have some idea of what’s going on.”

“I reckon they’ve got some scheme for rebuilding up here which ignores what the locals want,” Joyce said bitterly. “You’d think they’d have leant from the mistakes we made when we built these flats. Thought we knew best. Never asked folk if they actually wanted to live in prefabricated concrete rabbit warrens. You’d think they’d know better than to make the same mistake again.”

“I’ll check it out, Nan,” Laura said feeling helpless. “Do you want me to run you home now?”

Joyce shook her head vigorously.

“There’s a couple of young lasses coming in with their babies at three,” she said. “We’re going to do some reading. They’re worried out of their heads because they’re being told to help their kiddies with books and all that and they can barely read themselves.”

“What are you like?” Laura said, giving Joyce an enthusiastic hug.

“There’s always summat to do,” Joyce said, her eyes shining again. “It’d be nice to think things have got better for folk up here, but there’s not much sign of it.”

“Give it time,” Laura said, although she knew that Joyce had already given it a lifetime.

“Do you have some time?” Mower broke in. “You know what you were talking about with Dr. Khan? Dizzy met some kids this morning he’d like us to talk to. One of them’s a mate of the lad who went off the roof of Holtby House. You said you wanted to write about what’s going on up here. They might make you some good copy.”

Laura glanced at her watch and nodded.

“Half an hour,” she said.

“You’ll have to go without me then,” Mower said. “I’ve got some kids coming in to work on the computers in five minutes.” Laura glanced at Kevin Mower with affection.

“Michael won’t know where you’re coming from when you get back to work,” she said.

“If,” Mower said so softly that Laura was not sure she heard him.

“Anyway, I’m sure Dizzy and I can cope for now,” she said.

Laura followed the DJ out into the relentless rain. As they hurried in silence across the muddy grass towards Holtby House there was a dull explosion of splintering glass behind them. Laura glanced back and saw that there was a smashed bottle on the concrete where a smashed bottle had not been before. She glanced up at the walkways of Priestley House above them but could see no one. Dizzy B shrugged.

“Someone round here doesn’t like strangers,” he said.

“It’s getting worse,” Laura said. “It’s more threatening than it’s ever been.”

“It can’t be bad if they’re pulling these stinking places down, can it?” Sanderson said as they pushed open the swinging doors of Holtby and set off up the steep concrete stairway where the justice of his epithet became immediately apparent. They hurried to the top and stepped slightly breathlessly out onto the walkway where the slanting rain struck them again with icy force but at least the air smelt clean.

“Of course it’s not bad,” Laura said. “It’s what they replace them with that’s the issue. And what’s going to happen to the people who live here now. That’s what’s bothering my grandmother.”

“You mean they might dump them on some other sink estate?”

“They’re talking about building private housing up here. In that case there may well be a problem re-housing the tenants. They’re not the sort of people who can afford to buy.”

“Yeah, yeah, we’ve seen all that in London. Put some gates on the council estates, turn the hallway into an atrium, paint the railings round the balconies bright colours, call the flats apartments and flog them off to yuppies. Not only do you upgrade the property but you get lots of middle-class voters in as well. Before you know it you’ve guaranteed your majority on the local council and put a Tory MP into Parliament as well.”

“Only here it’s the other lot that’s trying to gentrify the place,” Laura said. “That’s what’s driving my grandmother bananas.”

They stopped outside the last door on the landing, a flimsy stained affair reinforced with strips of metal around the lock. Dizzy knocked hard but there was no response.

“If his mother’s not around he may not come to the door,” Dizzy said. He pushed the letter-box experimentally but it would not budge. It had been sealed shut on the inside. Dizzy cupped his hands against the door and shouted.

“Stevie! Stevie. It’s me, Dizzy B. Are you in there, man?”

The silence inside the flat continued and Laura was about to give up when they heard footfalls on the walkway behind them and turned to see a tall fair-haired woman bundled up in a black puffa jacket hurrying towards them, looking anxious.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said when she recognised Sanderson. She glanced more suspiciously at Laura and seemed less than impressed when she introduced herself.

“I don’t think we’ve owt to say to reporters.”

Dizzy glanced at the pharmacist’s bag which the woman carried.

“You’ll get no peace up here until you talk to someone, Mrs. Maddison,” he said. “The police and the newspapers are the only ones who can help you, and if you won’t talk to the police then why not give the Gazette a try. Laura won’t identify you if you don’t want her to, will you Laura?”

“Dizzy thought that a feature about your son would get some official attention directed up here. It’s about time, isn’t it?” Laura added with her most persuasive smile.

“Official attention? That’s a bloody joke, isn’t it? The only attention we get is when they come to arrest t‘kids who take stuff and leave t’dealers running around to get t‘little ‘uns hooked an’all.”

“So you have to stop it,″ Dizzy said.”Come on, Lorraine. It is Lorraine isn’t it? You’ve got to draw a line somewhere.”

“Did Stevie say he’d do this?” Lorraine Maddison asked, her face still clouded with suspicion. “I just went to get his methadone from t‘chemist. It takes half the day to get down to town on t’bus but I told him not to answer t’door to no one.”

“I told him I’d come back again,” Dizzy said. “Ask him if he’ll see us. Please?”

Still looking doubtful, the woman unlocked the door with two keys and led them into a darkened living room where they could dimly see a figure curled up under a blanket on the sofa.

“Stevie, love,” she said. “Here’s Dizzy B back with a lady who wants to talk to you. D’you want to do that, son?”

Slowly the figure stirred and they could make out Stevie Maddison’s face, grey and strained, the cheeks sunken and the eyes so bloodshot that he seemed to have difficulty focusing on his visitors. He glanced at Laura’s tape-recorder and shrugged, his whole body shrinking as though he could not even find the energy to acquiesce or dispute their presence.

“Dizzy B, man,” the boy said faintly, trying to feign an enthusiasm he clearly did not feel. “You again. I never found that demo tape I promised you. My mate Derek’s rap. When I feel a bit better …”

“Later, Stevie,” Dizzy said. “It’ll be fine later.”

“Take your medicine, lad,” Stevie’s mother said, handing him a small glass with some liquid in it. The boy drank and sighed heavily.

“It’s no bloody good, this stuff,” he said to Dizzy. “They tell you it’s as good as t’real thing, but no way. I’m turning into a right wreck.” With difficulty he hauled himself upright, revealing emaciated arms, scarred and reddened by continuous infection, and a hollow chest within an over-large t-shirt. He shivered convulsively, although the room was warm and airless. This wrecking of a life, Laura thought, must have begun long ago.

“You want to stop more kids getting into this mess?” Dizzy asked, his voice harsh.

“That’d be summat,” the boy said. “But there’s no way you can stop it. It’s the way it is. You try to stop it and you end up dead, one way or another.”

“Is that what happened to the boy who fell off the roof?” Laura asked gently.

Stevie shuddered and wrapped his arms round himself, shivering more violently.

“He were a friend of our Steven’s,” Lorraine Maddison said. “They were in t’same class at school. When they went to school”

“He went to rehab,” Stevie said. “They don’t like that.”

“Who doesn’t like it?” Laura asked angrily.

“The dealers, of course,” the boy said contemptuously. “They don’t like losing customers, do they? They don’t like rehab, do they? They don’t like projects, they don’t like employment schemes, they don’t like people getting their lives together … Bad for business, know what I mean?” For a moment or two he looked animated but the light in his eyes soon began to fade.

“Is it the dealers who are trashing the Project?”

“spect so,” Stevie said, his interest waning. Laura turned to his mother.

“Why isn’t Stevie in rehab?” she asked.

“Stevie won’t go for treatment. He’s too scared of what they might do to him, so we’re trying to do it on our own,” his mother said. “Any road there’s a waiting list for places, isn’t there. He might be dead before one comes up. Donna at the Project persuaded him to give it a try but even she couldn’t find him a place in a clinic. Months he had to wait, getting worse all t’time.”

“She’s all right, is Donna,” Stevie muttered unexpectedly. “She’s cool.”

“Tell us about the boy who fell off the roof, Stevie?” Dizzie asked. “What was his name again?”

“Derek, Derek Whitby. He were my best mate. And he didn’t fall, man.”

“I thought he was high …” Laura began.

“So he was high. Maybe he was, more likely not. I don’t think he was using again, man. Last time I saw him he were clean. Any road, he didn’t fall,” Stevie said. “I was there. I saw him.”

“You mean he jumped? Killed himself.”

“I don’t mean that, neither. I mean he were pushed. I were down below. I’d been waiting for him. I saw him on t‘roof wi’ some other lads. But there were nothing I could do. I were too far away. I saw him up there and I saw him pushed over t‘edge. I heard him scream all t’way down.”

“Who? Who pushed him?” Laura asked but the boy just looked at her contemptuously again. It was obvious that there were some things he was never going to tell them, even if he knew.

“So what did you do, Stevie?” Sanderson asked quietly.

“I ran didn’t I? I went back home, didn’t I? I thought them bastards’d be coming for me next.”

“Have you told the police this?” Laura asked. The boy looked at her again and held a shaking hand up in front of his face.

“This stuff maybe goin’ to kill me,” he said. “And maybe not. But if I talk to t’ police I’m dead. Any fool knows that on t’Heights. See nowt, say nowt, that’s the way it is.”

“I think it’s time you went,” Stevie’s mother said quietly from the other side of the room where she had been listening to her son as intently as her visitors had. “This lad’s going to stay alive. I’ll make sure of that.”

“But if Derek was murdered …That’s what he’s saying?” Laura began.

“He’s saying nowt,” Lorraine Maddison said, glaring at her visitors defiantly. “He knows nowt. That’s the way you stay alive round here. If the police want to find summat out they’re on their own. And if you tell them owt about what Steven’s said, we’ll just deny it. There’s no help for it. That’s the way it is on Wuthering.”

Reluctantly Dizzy B led the way back down the damp and stinking staircase.

“He knows who it was,” he said. “I’m bloody sure he knows, but unless the police are prepared to get him and his mother off the estate he’ll never talk.”

“I thought that’s what the police did with witnesses,” Laura said.

“Sometimes,” Dizzy said. “But at the moment the local nick doesn’t even believe this Derek boy was murdered so they won’t be taking any interest at all, will they?” Just inside the doors to the block he hesitated.

“You up for talking to Derek’s mother?” he asked. Laura glanced at her watch. Her lunch-hour was rapidly running out but her instinct was to follow where the story led and risk Ted Grant’s wrath.

“You know where she lives?”

Dizzy nodded.

“Your amazing granny told me,” he said with a grin.

“Is there anything she doesn’t know?” Laura asked with genuine wonderment.

“I doubt it,” Dizzy said. “He actually lived in the block where he fell off the roof. His parents are still there, poor sods.”

“So let’s do it,” Laura said, the laughter fading from her eyes. Picking their way across the soggy grass they made their way to the identical entrance of Priestley House, the most westerly of the three blocks of flats on the Heights and the most exposed to the wind and rain. Most of the cellophane wrappings had been blown off the flowers which had been left in tribute to Derek Whitby, and the pale carnations and roses were gradually disintegrating into the mud, a frail memorial to real flesh and blood, Laura thought.

“It’s like bloody Siberia up here,” Dizzy complained, pulling the collar of his fleece up to his nose.

“They’re not joking when they call it Wuthering,” Laura said. “And the buildings soak up water like a sponge. They should have pulled them down years ago but they’ve never been able to find the money – or the commitment. There’s some who believe that the people who live up here don’t deserve anything better.”

Inside the bleak entrance hall where the lifts displayed the familiar out-of-order signs and a couple of hypodermic syringes rolled into a corner in the draught from the open door, she glanced up the staircase quizzically.

“How far this time?” she asked. “I’m not fit enough for this. I’ve been skipping my exercise lately, putting on the pounds.”

Dizzy B glanced at her appreciatively.

“You look fine to me, woman,” he said. “Number ten, first floor. Think you can manage that?” He led the way up again and onto another puddled landing where the wind howled like a banshee between the panels of the walkway. Leaning against the gale, eyes half closed against the driving rain, they staggered to the door of number ten and knocked. This time the door was opened quickly, though held on a restraining chain, and two dark eyes peered through the gap.

“Mrs. Whitby?” Laura said. “I’m from the Gazette. I’m writing about the drug problem on the estate and I wondered if you could spare me five minutes?” The eyes widened slightly and for a moment Laura thought that the door was going to be slammed in their faces but eventually the chain was eased off and the door pulled wide to reveal a middle-aged black woman in a formal dark dress who glanced anxiously along the landing before beckoning her two visitors inside.

“You wan’ to be careful, girl,” she said. “It ain’t safe for folk like you to be roun’ here asking questions like that.” She glanced at Dizzy B her eyes full of accusing anxiety. “You should know better than to bring her here, man,” she said.

“We’re OK,” Dizzy said. “We’ll be fine. But we just saw Stevie Maddison and that boy’s not fine. Is that the way your Derek was before he died?” Laura thought that Dizzy B’s casual brutality would dissolve Mrs. Whitby in front of their eyes but after turning away from them for a moment, her shoulders slumped and her plump features almost collapsing in misery, she turned back with a spark of anger in her eyes.

“He was like that,” she said at last. “For a long time he was like that. And then he decided he want to change. And believe me we did everything we could to help that boy. An’ Donna from the Project. She a brave lady, that one. She helped me an’ Derek. I tol’ the police. Derek was not a junkie no more. But out there there’s people who do the opposite. They don’ want no one to change. They like things just the way they are with these kids. Lots of profit in it for them if things stay the same, I dare say. They come knocking at my door with cheap offers for Derek, special deals … Can you believe that? Like travellin’ salesmen? I tell them he not a junkie, that’s he’s clean and I intend he goin’ to stay clean, and then suddenly he’s dead, high on something, they say, and falling off a roof. Is that convenient for someone? After all the trouble he went to get himself clean, booking into rehab, everything? Can you believe that is what really happened?”

“What do you think happened, Mrs. Whitby?” Laura asked quietly, switching on her recorder again.

“I think he was killed, that’s what I think. That’s what Stevie says and I believe him.”

“And have you told the police that?”

“I told the police that. And they don’ believe me, do they? They don’ want to believe me, maybe. Maybe the dealers pay them not to believe me. That’s what I think. So now we goin’ home. We’d decided that before Derek died. Since 1965 my family been in this country, my mother and father came on the boat all that time ago, and it’s been nothin’ but trouble all the way. Derek was my youngest boy, my last child, and I’ve lost him, and there’s no justice for black people in this country so we going back to Jamaica. It’s all over here, finished. My man is giving up his job at the end of the month. I stopped already when I was helpin’ Derek get clean. I worked at the Infirmary but I’ll not go back, I haven’t the heart now.” She crossed the room and took an envelope from behind the clock on the mantelpiece.

“We’ve bought our tickets,” she said. “We’ve one too many now.”

“I’m sorry,” Laura said. “When do you fly?”

“At the end of next month. The coroner say we can fix the boy’s funeral for next week. There’ll be an inquest, but it was an accident, they saying’. I don’t believe that, but what can we do?”

“So if we can persuade the police to look at Derek’s death more seriously you could help them?”

“Why they listen to you when they won’ listen to the boy’s own parents?” Mrs. Whitby asked bitterly.

“I think there are people who know things who haven’t talked to the police yet,” Dizzy B said, his face grim. “D’you know who might have been threatening Derek?”

“I know what they look like, but I don’ know no names. You have to ask the kids. In the end it’s the kids who have to stop this trade. The good Lord knows, it took me long enough to persuade Derek to give it up but in the end I succeeded. I prayed for him and prayed with him, and in the end I thought I’d won. And then …” She shrugged and turned away again to hide the raw emotion which overcame her.

“Come here,” she said suddenly drawing her visitors to the window which overlooked the bleak spaces between the flats. She turned out the light so that they could not be seen from outside and pointed to where a small group of hooded men and youths huddled in the gloomy shadows under the inadequate shelter of the balconies of Holtby House.

“They dealing there in broad daylight. We never see a policeman trying to stop them. They fearless, those men. They brazen with it. They wait for the kids coming home from school ← and soon them they trap don’ bother going to school no more. They ain’t afraid of no one. That black boy there, see, the tall one. I know he is called Ounce.”

“Ounce,” Dizzy said. “That’s a seriously odd name.”

“That’s what they call him. He come and he go in a big car and I reckon when he come the drugs come with him. That’s how it was with Derek. He was twelve when they got hold of him. A little boy.”

“Do you have a photograph of Derek I could use?” Laura asked. “I’d like to make his story the centre of my feature about the estate.”

Mrs. Whitby flicked the lights back on and took a school photograph of her son, smiling tentatively at the camera, from the mantelpiece.

“I pray to God it do some good,” she said, pressing the picture into Laura’s hand. “It won’t bring my son back but maybe it will help some others.”