“Oh, sod off,” Laura said, pushing her way past her tormentor. “I've had enough of bloody men for one day.”
“So it's true what they say about redheads, then?”
Laura ignored the final jibe from behind her and, following the sound of voices, made her way across the refurbished, if still slightly scarred, reception area and into the main classroom where she found Joyce sitting at the teacher's desk with Kevin Mower at her shoulder. A smartly suited Barry Foreman sprawled across a table in front of them, listening to Joyce in full flow with a condescending smile on his face. He glanced at Laura without great surprise when she came in, before turning back to Joyce.
“It's much more important to get the local folk behind you themselves if you want to make any long-term difference to these families,” Joyce was saying. “It's not the same if you just drop facilities in their lap. It has to be something they need and want. They have to be involved.”
“We'll still be waiting for this lot to get involved come the next bloody millennium,” Foreman said dismissively when she had finished. “Any road, there won't be so many of your precious deprived families up here when we've finished rebuilding the place. What the new community'll need is a purpose built college with all the trimmings.”
“Which'll throw the most difficult kids out just like all the others have done,” Kevin Mower said quietly.
“And you've turned these kids lives around, have you?” Foreman asked. “Sent 'em all off to the university and all that? Not what I hear.”
“We've got half a dozen of them into rehab,” Mower said. “That's worth the effort. And some of them are learning something for the first time in their lives. It's a slow process ⦔
“Too bloody slow,” Foreman said. “You've not got the resources to make any serious difference. Nor the staff. What's a copper like you wasting his time up here for, any road? You're not a bloody teacher. You should be out chasing villains.”
Laura saw Mower's expression harden and she wondered whether he had told Donna yet about his day job.
“We'll not agree, Mr. Foreman,” Joyce said. “I dare say Councillor Spencer and his new cabinet will have to decide which way to go. But we'll make a strong case for a voluntary centre when we see him. You can be sure of that. Money's all very well, but it's not everything. People are important too.”
“Aye, well, we'll see about that,” Foreman said.
He slid off the desk and made his way to the classroom door.
“Don't hold your breath,” he said as he went out and was joined by the tall figure of his bodyguard who had been lounging against the wall outside.
“That man is a bastard,” Laura said, giving first Joyce and then Mower a fierce hug of consolation. “If he thinks he's running the town, what chance do ordinary people have?”
“The DCI doesn't trust him further than he can throw him,” Mower said. “Yet he seems to have got onto some sort of inside track with the council. I don't understand it.”
“Have you told Donna that you're in the Force?” Laura asked. “Because I don't give much for your chances there if you haven't. It'll be all round the estate shortly.”
“I told her last night when I got back,” Mower said. “She wasn't best pleased. She couldn't come in today because she's gone to fetch Emma home from the Infirmary, but it's maybe just as well. I don't think Donna and I are much of a team any more.”
“I'm sorry,” Laura said.
“You don't have to be. There was no future in it and I think we both knew that.”
“Nothing seems to be going right up here,” Laura said. “I came up to tell you that I can't persuade Ted Grant to do much about the problems on the estate. Floods are his top priority this week. Apparently the Beck's going to burst its banks, the Maze will back up and half the lower part of the town's going to be under water by the end of the week.”
“The Beck?” Mower asked, looking blank.
“Ah, you can tell you're an off-cum-d'un,” Joyce said, smiling.
“A what â¦?”
“A stranger, not a local, a bloody southerner,” Laura explained with a grin. “What you probably don't realise is that there's a river runs right under the centre of Bradfield. Or a big stream, anyway. Comes down from the hills and joins the Maze at Eckersley. But some bright Victorian decided it got in the way of his regeneration scheme in about 1860 and shoved the whole thing into an underground culvert. Pushed up land values a treat, I dare say. Nothing changes, does it? Anyway according to the environment people, the culvert isn't going to take the strain when all the rain we've been having runs off the Pennines and no one knows quite what'll happen then. There'll be a lot of water sloshing about, anyway, and Ted Grant is issuing the troops with their Wellie boots, just in case.”
“It flooded once back in the forties,” Joyce said. “But they deepened the culvert and it was supposed to take anything after that.”
“But not global warming,” Laura said. “No one anticipated that.”
“Aye, well, there's a lot to be said for living on a hill, even if it is Wuthering,” Joyce said. “One thing we won't need up here is Noah's Ark.”
No, Laura thought angrily, but you might need the cavalry before long.
Â
Michael Thackeray and DC Val Ridley - acting sergeant in Kevin Mower's absence - sat in Barry Foreman's comfortable office later that afternoon listening to the security boss's dismissive description of an employee so incompetent that it seemed to Val Ridley a wonder that he had been employed at all. Foreman fingered through the buff file on his desk.
“I'd have sacked him but his dad did me a favour years
ago, lent me some money when I was setting up. I'm not generally a sentimental sort of bloke but I felt I owed Stanley. But I always thought there was summat a bit odd about him. Gay, of course. You'll know that, I expect?”
Thackeray nodded non-commitally.
“Good enough at his job, though, was he?” he asked.
“Good enough. It was only a bit of low level accounting he did. Clerking really. Seemed to be enough for him. He never complained. Of course he'd no family to support. He wouldn' t have, would he, being that way inclined?”
“Was he liked in the office?”
“Give over,” Foreman said. “They're not right politically correct, the sort of lads I employ. They put up with Stanley. Made his life a misery now and then with their shirt-lifter cracks. What d'you expect?”
“Protection?” Val Ridley said. “From his boss?” Foreman looked at her for a moment with contempt.
“He were lucky to have the job. He knew that, I knew that and everyone else in the bloody company knew that. He didn't ask for any favours and he didn't get any. Tell me the police are any different and I'll die laughing.”
“And his pay? How much was that?” Thackeray asked.
“I'll get a computer print-out for you,” Foreman said. “He did some overtime sometimes. Mind I did sometimes think he must be making a bit on the side somehow. Took some exotic holidays now and again, did Stanley. Thailand a couple of times. Goa. Odd, that.”
“We'll need to talk to everyone he worked with,” Thackeray said.
“And how long's that going to be carrying on?”
“Just as long as it takes,” Thackeray snapped back. “He doesn't sound the most popular man on your payroll and he may have made enemies you don't know about.” Or friends, he thought, wondering whether any of Foreman's other staff shared Wilson's interest in pornography.
“Right,” Foreman said with evident lack of enthusiasm.
“But they work shifts, you know. You'll have to catch them when you can.”
“So do we, Mr. Foreman,” Val Ridley said. “If you give me a list of when your lads come in and clock off I'm sure we can match it.”
Thackeray got to his feet slowly as Foreman relayed the police's requirements to someone in an outer office. He glanced up at the DCI.
“Is that all?”
“For now,” Thackeray said. “Except I was still wondering if you ever heard anything more from Karen. Those babies of yours must be getting quite big now. Don't you feel the need to keep in touch?”
“If I thought they were mine I might,” Foreman said. “As for Karen? Turned out a slag, didn't she? They're all the same.” For a second Thackeray thought he saw real rage behind Foreman's usual bland expression but it vanished before he could be sure and was replaced by a smile which came across as more of a grimace.
“Still with that red-headed lass from the Gazette yourself, are you?” he asked. Val Ridley hesitated by the door and stood very still though Thackeray did not reply and the silence lengthened.
“I met her, remember, when we had that bit of trouble wiâ²Karen's brother?”
Thackeray nodded carefully, his heart thumping, knowing that there must be a reason for Foreman's questions and frantically trying to work out what it might be.
“Laura,” he said at last.
“Aye, that's her. Laura. I saw her the other day up at Wuthering. She was with that sergeant of yours, the dark, good-looking lad, the one who came over all heroic with the little scrote with the shotgun that time. Pretty lass. Make a nice couple, those two. So I just wondered if she's buggered off and left you, an'all. A moment of fellow feeling, as you might say. Tarts!”
Thackeray did not reply. He spun on his heel and Val Ridley followed him out of Foreman's office aware only that the DCI's face appeared to have turned to stone.
Â
Laura got home late, hair flying, carrier-bag full of food for the evening meal threatening to spill all over the floor as she struggled to close the front door of the flat behind her with one foot. She found Thackeray sitting in front of the television with an expression so frozen that even in her haste she could not fail but notice that he did not respond in any way to the scrambled kiss she offered the back of his neck. She dumped the shopping in the kitchen and slipped out of her jacket, flinging it onto the back of a chair.
“What?” she asked. “What is it?” Her mind skipped through the sorts of bad news which could have led to this reaction and her breath caught in her throat as panic threatened to overwhelm her. Her mind flew to her grandmother.
“Is it Joyce?”
Thackeray shrugged and turned the volume down with the remote control.
“Not Joyce,” he said quickly.
“Then what? There was a murder today I heard about it in the office â¦?”
“Not that,” he said. He gazed at the flickering images on the screen for a moment as if unable to speak.
“It's you, I suppose,” he said at last, not looking at her directly. She slid onto the sofa beside him, trying to control a wobble of relief and trepidation in her voice.
“And just what have I done this time?” she asked, as lightly as she dared. “Or is it the Gazette that's annoyed you again? I refuse to take the blame for the sins of Bob Baker.”
“It's nothing to do with that.”
“Then what, for God's sake? You sit here looking like a thunderstorm and won't tell me. What sort of a welcome is that when I come in after a hard day at the office.”
“Was it, Laura? Was it really?” Thackeray snapped back.
“Was it what?”
“Was it a hard day at the office? Or did you find time to go and chat up Kevin Mower up at Wuthering? They make a nice couple, I was told. What's that all about? And why didn't you tell me you'd seen Kevin? That he was back in Bradfield? As far as I knew he was still in Eckersley trying to sort himself out at a clinic.”
“Ah,” Laura said more soberly. “That's what the fuss is all about, is it?”
“So it's true? You have been seeing him?”
“Michael Thackeray, I do believe you're jealous,” Laura said wonderingly, a flicker of amusement in her green eyes.
“No,” Thackeray said fiercely. “I didn't think I had anything to be jealous about. Until I discovered you'd been deceiving me.”
“Deceiving! That's a bit strong, isn't it?”
“I don't know,” Thackeray said. “People tell me he's an attractive lad, our Kevin. I think even you told me that once. And we both know he's not exactly restrained where women are concerned. So what am I to think when you apparently forget to tell me you've been meeting my sergeant behind my back.”
“I knew it wasn't a good idea not to tell you,” Laura groaned. “But he asked me not to.”
“And of course you always do exactly what Kevin Mower asks?”
“Yes, I mean no, of course not,” Laura said. “He had his reasons.”