“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 â 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.”
Laura lay in bed the next morning, rigid with an anger that had not been dissipated by a restless night's sleep. She listened to Michael Thackeray moving around in the bathroom next door and wondered whether reopening their differences again in the grey half-light of morning was worth the risk of deepening the rift between them in the unpropitious cause of changing a mind that had seemed set in stone the previous evening.
She had got home from work already seething. When she had returned to the office she had braved Ted Grant in his glass-walled watch-tower at the end of the newsroom and outlined the results of her researches on the Heights. He had not seemed impressed, and after she had played her taperecordings of the two distraught mothers to him he had merely opened his office door and summoned Bob Baker, the crime reporter, from his computer with his customary bull-like bellow.
“It's as likely nowt as owt,” Grant had said as the younger man glanced inquiringly at the editor. “Laura reckons folk up on the Heights are putting that lad Whitby's death down as murder. What do the police think?”
“What I hear is that Mrs. Whitby's gone off her rocker since the lad died,” Baker had said dismissively. “He's a bit of a militant, the father. The Anti-Racist League, works for the council and took them to court over discrimination, all that stuff. Complaints about police harassment a couple of years ago. Nothing substantiated, of course. They see discrimination round every bend, some of these people.”
“That's not fair,” Laura said. “I've got a witness on that tape who says he saw the other boy pushed over the edge of the roof.”
“Black, is he?” Baker asked.
“No, he's not, as it goes,” Laura snapped.
“On drugs then?”
“Getting off them, actually. Or trying. He saw what happened and he's scared out of his wits.”
“And has he told the police that?” Baker asked. “Because my information is that there's not a scrap of evidence that it was anything but an accident. Derek Whitby was high as a kite, fooling about on the roof, went too near the edge and bingo! He's mince-meat.”
“And the other lads who were on the roof with him have come forward to confirm that, have they?” Laura asked sweetly, but Baker just shrugged.
“You know what it's like up there. They won't confirm their own names if they can avoid it,” he said.
“Well my information is that the dealers up there are using all sorts of violence to keep the kids in line, and that this was just the most vicious instance,” Laura said.
Ted Grant had glanced at his two warring journalists with something like a smirk of satisfaction. Suddenly he pushed Laura's cassette tape in Baker's direction.
“You have a listen to this, Bob,” he said. “Then have a word with your contacts up there, and in the Force. Laura's too busy with other stuff to get stuck into a crime story right now -
if
there's a story there, which I very much doubt.”
Laura opened her mouth to protest and then closed it again. She knew from the glint in both men's eyes that it would do no good and would only provoke further humiliation. As she spun on her heel to go, hair flying, face set, she heard Baker's low laugh and Grant pull open a drawer in his desk.
“I had my invitation this morning to join this committee to redevelop the Heights,” she heard him say. “That was a good move to put my name forward. It'll give us the inside track on a lot of good stories up there.”
“I thought you'd be pleased,” Baker said. “It was Barry Foreman's idea. Thought you'd be an asset.”
“Close the door, lad,” Grant had said suddenly, realising that Laura was still within earshot.
White-faced with suppressed anger she had made her way back to her desk, pounded out the last few hundred words of the feature she was working on and had stormed out of the office a good hour before she should have done to drive back up to the Heights as fast as she could weave her Golf through the heavy late afternoon traffic. If remaining on the Gazette meant being passed over in favour of flash young men ten years younger than herself, she wondered how much longer she could hang on. All her half-buried ambition to get out of Bradfield came flooding back. Joyce, she had long ago decided, she could take with her if she decided to move and apart from her grandmother there was only one other person to keep her in her home town any longer. Unfortunately, in spite of their differences, Michael Thackeray remained the most important person in her life. She had pounded the steering wheel in frustration as she waited at the traffic lights to turn onto the Heights again.
Not many cars ventured into the narrow streets beneath the flats and there were few people about on foot in the wet winter dusk as she parked. More aware than usual of the brooding bulk of the estate and the menacing shadows beneath the walkways, she hurried to the Project where she found Donna drinking tea with Kevin Mower in the brightly lit back room.
“Your gran's gone home, love,” Donna said, stubbing out her cigarette into her saucer and lighting another. “She looked right tired this afternoon so I told her to go and have a rest. I reckon she's trying to do too much, you know.”
“Try telling her that,” Laura said. “The day Joyce stops fighting will be the day we need the undertaker.”
“How did you get on with Dizzy,” Mower had asked and Laura told them everything they had learned from their visits to Stevie Maddison and Derek Whitby's bereaved mother.
“D'you think Derek could have been pushed?” she asked
when she had finished. “He can't have been able to see that clearly in the rain and the dark.”
“Anything's possible with some of the scumbags we have to live with up here,” Donna said bitterly.
“Do you know this man they call Ounce? Mrs. Whitby's sure he's behind the dealing.”
“I've not come across him, though I've heard the kids mention the name. We ⦔ She hesitated and glanced guiltily at Mower. “I'll ask around. See what's being said. But I guess if the police didn't investigate Derek's death straight away they'll not be right interested now. The lad's funeral's next week.”
Laura glanced at Mower who almost imperceptibly shook his head. So he still had not told Donna that he was a policeman, Laura thought, even though that unexpected pronoun had hinted again at a much closer relationship than was apparent to the naked eye. She smiled slightly.
“I'll chase Bob Baker so we get a story out of it somehow,” she said. “That's a promise.”
But when she had got home and turned to the person she had hoped would be her closest ally in an attempt to expose what was happening on the Heights, she met a lack of enthusiasm that at first surprised and then infuriated her.
“You're taking a real risk knocking on doors up there,” Thackeray had said, propped up on the pillows beside her in too unyielding a position for Laura to feel able to get as close to him as she usually did. He took up their debate where they had left it earlier in the evening. “Especially if you're with someone who may well be a dealer himself. David Sanderson has form for drug use, and he's up to his eyes in the Carib Club which seems to be awash with the stuff.”
“It's not a bit of dope we're talking about up there, is it?” Laura said. “These kids are dying from heroin overdoses, crack cocaine, cocktails of the real hard stuff. Dizzy B's just as horrified by what's going on as any of us. He's a nice guy. And he's not too impressed by the attitude of some of your people,
as it goes. Says he was nicked by a racist DC, an Asian. Who would that be then?”
“Sharif,” Thackeray said shortly. “Just arrived from Leeds, but he's a Bradfield boy. And if Sanderson's got a complaint he should make it through the official channels, not go broadcasting his grievances to the Press and God knows who else.”
“I'll tell him,” Laura had said, her temper on a very short fuse. “So stick to the main issue, Michael. What's being done about the heroin crisis on the Heights? Why do people think a murder's being covered up? Why does everyone up there - including Joyce, incidentally - think no one gives a damn about their kids? Is everyone just waiting for the flats to be pulled down and hoping that the problem will disappear with them? It's not very likely, is it? It'll just move somewhere else.”
“Laura, Laura, you're jumping to conclusions again. I never said nothing was being done. But I can't tell you about everything we're doing, you know that. It's not all my responsibility. As far as I'm concerned I'm still trying to discover who got the Adams boy so far out of his head on Ecstasy that he walked in front of a taxi.”
“Is he still unconscious?” Laura asked.
“As far as I know, yes. But slightly improved, apparently.”
“But if this other boy, Derek Whitby, was pushed off the roof that would be murder and surely that would be your responsibility, even if the drug squad is up on the Heights,” she had persisted.
“I never said anything about the drug squad,” Thackeray came back irritably. “And I've absolutely no evidence that the Whitby boy was murdered. Bring me the witnesses, and then we can talk about it. In the meantime, please don't take risks up there. You're right on one count at least - the place is run by the dealers and some of them are very unpleasant indeed. They'd think nothing of throwing a reporter off a roof if she got in their way.”
“I can look after myself,” Laura had said, with more
confidence than she really felt. “And I think I can get you the witnesses.”
Thackeray groaned.
“You are the most pig-headed person I have ever met,” he said.
“And you love me for it,” Laura had come back quickly, reaching a tentative hand for his. But he had pulled away.
“Just now I'd like to go to sleep,” he said. “You're not the only one who's had a bad day.” And with that she had to be content. In the cold light of morning, finding herself alone in the bed, Laura had quickly realised that she had not forgiven him for his lack of understanding and she guessed - as he had not roused her with his usual kiss - that he felt much the same.
“Damn and blast,” she muttered into the pillows, before burying her head under the bedclothes and remaining there without moving until she heard the front door close behind him. “Oh, Michael,” she said to herself as she shrugged herself into her bathrobe and wandered into the kitchen for orange juice. “Are we ever going to make this work?”
Â
Thackeray carried his ill-humour to the office with him. His track record with women, he thought as he drove into town, didn't bear thinking about. His marriage to the sweetheart he had met at sixteen had collapsed early into acrimony on Aileen's part and heavy drinking on his. By the time their son Ian had been born it had been too late to rescue much from the wreckage and he had been too drunk most of the time to notice that his wife was sliding into the suicidal depression which soon claimed her sanity and the life of their baby. Since then he had drifted from one brief unsatisfactory relationship to another until he met Laura Ackroyd and rediscovered the sort of intense happiness which he thought had slipped beyond his grasp for good. And now he found himself wondering how long it could last - and how long he could last if she left him. He knew she was frustrated by her job, by
Bradfield and increasingly, he felt, by his own limitations. They paddled endlessly around the jagged reefs of his fears: of commitment, of permanence, of having another child. He adored her for her resilience, her determination and her humour, but these were the very things he was afraid he was wearing down. She deserved more, and he was very afraid that he would never be able to give it to her.
He parked his car in his space at the central police station and made his way gloomily to his office where he flicked idly through overnight reports. The name Adams caught his eye and he saw that Jeremy, who had been in the Infirmary for almost a week now, had regained consciousness. Squaring his shoulders to face the day's work, he picked up the phone and asked DC Val Ridley to come in to see him.
“Can we interview the Adams boy today?” he asked when she had presented herself, all brisk efficiency in a dark suit and a powder blue shirt which matched her wary eyes.
“Possibly,” she said. “But doting dad says he wants his solicitor to be there.”
“Taking no chances then?”
“He wouldn't would he, boss?”
“Let me know when you get a slot to see him,” Thackeray said. “I might come with you. If they feel the need to put up their big guns perhaps we should do the same.”
Val Ridley smiled faintly as if she approved of that but she did not comment.
“Did you hear about the trouble at the Carib Club last night?” she asked.
And when Thackeray shook his head, she expanded.
“Running battles between the black kids coming out and some Asian youths who were evidently waiting for them outside.”