“And did you have your reasons too?”
“Oh, Michael, this is crazy. Yes, it's true, I have been seeing Kevin, as it goes, but not in the sense you mean. I bumped into him quite by chance when I went up to the Project that Joyce is working at on the Heights. He's helping out there too, working with the kids ⦔
“He's supposed to be in rehab,” Thackeray objected.
“Well, I think it is a sort of rehab for Kevin,” Laura said.
“He says he's off the booze, but I'm not sure he's convinced he wants to stay in the Force, which is hardly surprising after everything he's been through. That's why he asked me not to tell you what he was doing. He's trying to get his head together before he decides what to do next. And there - you've made me break all sorts of confidences now.”
“And I suppose he's been egging you on to investigate what's going on up there too. You know how dangerous that is.”
“Not really,” Laura said. “No more than Joyce and Donna Maitland, anyway. They're all distraught about what's happening to the kids on the Heights. You know that.”
Laura reached out to take Thackeray's hand but he shrugged her off and got up to stand by the window, gazing out at the shadowy garden where the bare branches made a faint tracery against the slate grey sky. Laura followed him and put an arm round his waist.
“I'm sorry,” she said. “You know I wouldn't deceive you about anything important.”
“To hear that from a bastard like Foreman ⦔ Thackeray said quietly.
“Foreman,” Laura said. “Of course, he was up there today, as if he owned the place.”
“ â¦it was like being kicked in the balls.” Thackeray continued as if he had not heard her.
“He's a seriously unpleasant man.”
“You don't begin to understand just how seriously unpleasant I think that man is. And I'm not even beginning to be able to prove it.”
Thackeray leaned his head for a moment against the cold window-pane. Laura felt him shudder and tightened her grip.
“I'm sorry,” she said. “You must know there's nothing going on between me and Kevin. He's found himself some female company up there anyway. You know what he's like. But he's as keen as I am to help sort the kids up there. It's getting completely out of hand.”
“Leave it alone, Laura,” Thackeray said turning and taking her in his arms. “It's too dangerous for anyone but the drug squad to be asking questions up there. Please, please leave it alone.”
But Laura stiffened in his embrace.
“I have my job to do too,” she said, her face obstinate. “It's not as if I'm chasing after dealers or anything stupid like that. I'm just describing the effects, what's happening to innocent people like Donna Maitland and the kids who've died. Someone has to do that, and if it's not the Gazette, who will?”
Thackeray suddenly pushed away from her and strode to the front door without looking back.
“I need some air,” he said, before the front door slammed behind him, leaving Laura leaning against the window where he had been standing, too shocked to move.
“Oh, shit,” she said softly to herself. “One of these days I'll blow this sky high, and then where will I be?”
“So, do you want me to take you up there?” Laura asked her grandmother, trying to keep the tension she was feeling out of her voice. She was standing in the middle of Joyce's tiny living room on what seemed to be becoming her daily ritual of a lunch-time visit to the Heights. Joyce had rung to say she needed a lift to the Project but when Laura had let herself into the bungalow she had found her grandmother sitting stock still in her favourite armchair, a look of frozen anger pinching her usually cheerful features. In front of her on the coffee table was a list of names and phone numbers. Laura's two page feature, illustrated with photographs of the planners' models of the new development on the Heights, was spread on the floor beside her with crucial passages outlined firmly in fluorescent marker. The telephone cord extended tightly from the plug in the wall to the apparatus on Joyce's lap.
“I tried to get hold of you first thing,” Joyce had complained bitterly as soon as Laura had walked through the door. “How can you be so certain the Project is for the chop? Who told you?”
“Dave Spencer wouldn't say yes or no,” Laura admitted. “I was reading between the lines when I wrote that. But I'd put money on it. They're not interested in what the residents want. They want the whole thing wrapped up neatly so as not to frighten the yuppies they want to sell the new houses to. It stands to reason, Nan. You know what they're like. They don't want facilities for young junkies on the doorstep of the posh new executive homes.”
“The regeneration committee met yesterday,” Joyce said. “I did manage to find that out from Spencer's secretary â or PA, as she calls herself.”
“Yes, I know, I heard that much in the office, but they didn't issue any statement afterwards. Apparently Spencer and
some of his precious committee have gone to London for meetings today.”
“The early flight,” Joyce said scornfully. “In my day we were lucky to get a train trip third class. They've gone to meetings at the department of the environment, according to little Miss Snooty.”
Laura could see the tears of frustration in her grandmother's eyes.
“Did you try anyone else?” she asked, glancing at the long list of names and numbers on Joyce's pad.
“I tried everyone I could think of,” Joyce admitted, slumping back in her chair and letting the phone slide across her knees. Laura took it off her gently and put it back in its place on a side table. The defeated look in Joyce's eyes caught her breath.
“I'm too old, love, that's the problem,” Joyce said. “All the folk I used to work with are long gone and no one else wants to know me. You can see why folk end up on the booze or drugs or on the rampage up here, can't you? No one wants to listen to a word anyone on the Heights says. Me? They've forgotten Councillor Ackroyd. Now I'm just that stroppy old baggage who doesn't want her bungalow knocked down. Standing in the way of progress, that's what I'm doing now. You'll see. Doesn't your editor say as much in his editorial? “A great step forward for Bradfield'. I don't know how he works that out.”
“It's not over yet,” Laura said gently. “It's only just beginning. Remember, no one outside the town hall's seen the details of the plans till this morning. No one up here's going to like it when they see it spread out like that in black and white. They may want the flats down but they don't want to be thrown out of the area to make way for luxury housing. And there'll be lots of people who'll fight for the Project and what that's doing for the kids.”
Laura knew that there had been a time when Joyce's writ had run the length and breadth of the long polished corridors
of Bradfield town hall, and even a time, for some years after she had retired, when if she wanted information for any of her many campaigns, friends and acquaintances would have produced it for her within hours. But gradually the number of councillors and officials she remembered and who remembered her had dwindled, and what Joyce still regarded as the golden age of municipal socialism had become an embarrassment to the new, young councillors. They were far too busy creating cabinets and executives and scheming about the powers of an elected mayor and the opportunities opened up by public-private partnerships. The new modernised town hall, Laura thought, must seem to Joyce like a foreign country. She had, inexorably, become an exile in her own land.
“Come on,” Laura said. “I'll run you up the hill. Donna will be wondering where you are.”
Joyce tidied her papers on the table and folded the Gazette neatly into its original shape.
“She's a good lass, is Donna,” she said as she got painfully to her feet. “We need a few more like her to stir this estate up. Most of them are so ground down with it all they'll let Councillor Dave Spencer walk rough-shod over the lot of us if we don't do summat dramatic.”
“I think the taste for marching on town halls may have died out,” Laura said carefully, as she helped the older woman manoeuvre her arms into her coat.
“We'll see about that,” Joyce said. “At least we've got a reporter on our side, pet.”
Laura nodded, but with a sinking heart. Joyce might believe she carried some weight at the Gazette, but if Ted Grant had made up his mind on the issue of the Heights - and his editorial comment had been about as enthusiastic as Ted ever got for anything municipal - she knew only too well that there was going to be very little that she could do about it. She helped her grandmother lock up the house carefully and tucked her into the passenger seat of the car. Joyce's increasing lack of mobility worried her more than she was prepared
to admit to herself, and Joyce never admitted it at all, gritting her teeth against the pain of the arthritis which threatened to immobilise her completely. But Joyce, Laura reckoned, might have to give up the independence her small home afforded her even before the developers' bulldozers moved in. And that would certainly break her heart.
Â
Donna Maitland was sitting at one of the Project's more upto-date computers when Joyce and Laura arrived. She gave a small wave of greeting as the older woman hobbled in, took her walking stick off her granddaughter and kissed her on the cheek. Eventually Donna turned away from the Internet pages she had been studying with fierce concentration. She picked up a sheaf of papers from the desk beside her and waved them at Joyce.
“I must have written to fifty of the bastards, all local companies, and not one of them's even offered another clapped out computer for the kids to use,” she said. “Half of them haven't even bothered to reply.”
“And we need a lot more than that,” Joyce said.
“I told them that when the redevelopment goes ahead we'll be appealing for funds to rebuild this place and equip it properly,” Donna explained to Laura. “It's obvious the bloody council's going to do nowt for us, so I'm giving them plenty of warning that we hope local business will fill the gap. You can do us a bit of good an all, love, if you cover the story for us in t'Gazette.”
“I'll do my best,” Laura said feeling overwhelmed by the weight of expectation the two women were placing on her. “In the meantime I'm going to be late back. I'll see you later, Nan.”
“The council hasn't actually said they won't rebuild the Project yet,” Joyce said after the door had closed. She didn't dare mention Laura's conviction that Donna was right. But Donna shrugged, running a hand through blonde hair that had fallen across her eyes.
“Look at this one. Grantley Adams. Isn't he the bloke whose son nearly killed himself wiâdrugs. âIt's not our policy to donate to organisations which are not long-established charities.' These beggars are screaming for computer literate staff and here we are trying to train some of them and all we get is a kick in the teeth. What's the matter with these people? They don't seem to see the connection. Is it because a lot of the kids are black or junkies or what?”
“Of course it is,” Joyce said. “They're frightened of the Heights, a lot of them. Scared witless, always have been. You give a neighbourhood a bad name and it's impossible to get rid of.”
“But they're going to regenerate the bloody place,” Donna said. “It's just the bricks and mortar though, is it? No plans for regenerating the kids as well? No seeing what they can do, given a bit of help and encouragement? No chance they'll recognise that some of us are trying to live decent lives and do summat to help the rest? Just pull the place down and get rid of as many of us as they can, is that it?”
Joyce looked weary and could offer no reassuring counter to that analysis. Increasingly she believed it was true.
Donna flung the letters back onto the desk and turned back to the computer but within ten minutes she had to switch the machine off as the Project was invaded by half-a-dozen argumentative teenage girls who only gradually agreed to settle at the desks and switch on the collection of machines which Donna had already begged and borrowed from local businesses and families when she set up the Project. But, slowly, the raucous gibes and giggling gossip subsided as the two women persuaded the youngsters to concentrate on the elementary word-processing skills which were their objective, and for an hour a sort of peace reigned.
Just before lunch-time Dizzy B Sanderson put his head round the classroom door to whoops of delight from the girls, ready for any distraction now.
“Is Kevin around?” he asked.
“Should be in any time,” Donna said.
“I'll wait out here,” the DJ said, ducking back out of the door, to dramatic groans of disappointment from the class.
“Come on girls, finish off now. We all need a break,” Donna said. But their concentration was broken and she had difficulty controlling their restlessness. But just before she gave in and dismissed them, there was a loud crash in the outer reception area and a muffled shout seconds before the door to the classroom burst open and several men in jeans and leather jackets burst in. Several of the girls squealed in alarm and Donna reached across her desk for a mobile phone which lay underneath some papers.
“Police,” the evident leader of the group said loudly. “Everyone stay exactly where you are.”
Joyce Ackroyd pushed herself painfully to her feet from the chair at the back of the room where she had been sitting next to one of the girls.
“Can we see your identity cards, please,” she said firmly. The leading police officer glanced at her with something close to contempt and flashed a warrant card in her direction.
“And your name is?”
“DI Ray Walter, drugs squad,” he said. “Now just sit down, Gran, we've a warrant to search these premises.”
“Whatever for?” Joyce said, still standing.
“That's for us to know,” the officer said. “For now I want all of you sitting exactly where you are while we look round. Then we'll want names and addresses.”
The girl next to Joyce began to sob noisily as one of the officers picked up her bag and began to root through it. Joyce's lips tightened and she glanced at Donna who had gone pale and tense, one hand still grasping her mobile, until one of the men noticed it and took it roughly out of her hand. Outside they could hear Dizzy B Sanderson's voice raised in anger and then recede as if he had left, or been taken out of the building. Systematically the men began to open every cupboard, desk and drawer in the room and go through the
contents. When they had finished with the classroom, one of them remained behind to watch the occupants while his colleagues moved on through the rest of the building. After ten minutes or so, DI Walter came back into the room and nodded at his colleague.
“Right,” he said. “We want you all down at the station for questioning. Now.”
With her arm round the girl whose sobs had now become hysterical Joyce stood up again.
“On what grounds?” she asked.
“On suspicion of handling Class A drugs, which were found on these premises,” Walter said.
“Are you arresting us?”
“We'll deal with the formalities at the nick,” the DI said.
“What drugs?” Donna asked, her face like a white mask gashed by her red lipstick. “There are no drugs here. I make sure of that.”
“You telling me we don't know a kilo of heroin when we find it?” Walter sneered. “Get real. Now let's have you. All of you.”
From his car parked some hundred yards away from the Project, Sergeant Kevin Mower watched in fascinated horror as a procession of girls, closely followed by Donna Maitland and Joyce Ackroyd, filed out of the building and into two police vans parked with several squad cars on the road outside. He had pulled up sharply on his way to meet his own students when he had seen Dizzy B, in handcuffs, being similarly ushered out and into custody and decided that on this occasion he would forego any fraternal greetings the colleagues doing the ushering might expect from him. He recognised Ray Walter from an abortive stint he had done with the drugs squad some years earlier. He had not liked the squad or the man then and he liked him even less when he saw just how Donna was being roughly “assisted” into custody.