“What the hell is going on, Laura?” Ted Grant tipped back in his leather chair, paunch straining against his shirt and the top button of his trousers, eyes popping like blue marbles, as he scowled massively at Laura Ackroyd. Laura shrugged.
“What do you mean?” she asked. Behind them the newsroom was almost deserted, most of the Gazette's staff already rushing out and about in the town which was sandbagging itself against a now almost certain flood unless the rain, which had not eased now for seven days, suddenly ceased. The lowering grey clouds, which meant that the newspaper offices were fully lit in the middle of the morning, gave no indication that any such salvation was likely. And in any case the forecasters were sure that the water now pouring down every deep gorge and shallow depression between the town and the waterlogged moorland above would overwhelm the flood defences regardless. Houses on the west side of the town were already being evacuated and the water board had begun its investigation of the Beck's concrete culvert, into which several cellars in the business district gave access. Earlier that morning, in the controlled chaos which the newsroom had quickly become, Laura had been allotted the task of coordinating the “human interest” stories which would shortly start pouring in as schools were closed and householders moved out of their homes and into emergency rest centres with whatever belongings they could carry. She had not had the chance to raise her suspicions about Councillor Spencer and his regeneration committee colleagues with Ted Grant, who was in Montgomery of El Alamein mode. Now she thought, it looked as if that particular can of worms had been opened some other way.
“What do you mean?” she asked, at her most disingenuous.
“Why have I had Jack Longley bending my ear this morning about the risk of reporters interfering with ongoing police investigations?” Thank you, Michael, Laura thought to herself ruefully, although she should know by now that if Thackeray set himself on a course of action he was as difficult to divert as she was herself.
“What have you got on Barry Foreman?” Grant asked.
“He seems to have gone into the building trade, in a secretive sort of way,” Laura said sweetly. “And as he's a member of your committee that's going to be involved in handing out hefty contracts for rebuilding The Heights, I thought we should be asking a few questions. Don't you?”
Grant sighed melodramatically.
“But not today, Laura, for God's sake. Not now. For one thing these floods are going to take up every inch of news space we can prise out of the management's sticky fingers. Nothing like this has ever happened in Bradfield since the 1940s. I can't give you the time to go chasing wild geese this week. And if what Jack Longley says is true, the police are onto Foreman anyway, so the whole thing may be put on ice if they charge him with anything. It'd be all so much wasted effort. Can't that boyfriend of yours give you a steer on this. He must know what's going on. In the meantime concentrate on putting the flood pages together. I'm hoping to run eight extra pages on this and so far I've got bugger all to put on them.”
“Right,” Laura said more sweetly than she imagined Grant had anticipated. She went back to her desk and used her mobile phone to call Kevin Mower.
“Remind me of the names of the directors of City Ventures,” she said. Mower read out the list of names.
“I've discovered another connection,” he said then. “Althea Simpson is Grantley Adams' wife. It's her maiden name and Donna had sussed that out by getting their marriage certificate.”
“And I know for a fact that she used to be an accountant,”
Laura said. “Well, well, what are the ever-so-respectable Adamses doing in the company of Barry Foreman's girlfriend who, as I recall, was a lass from Benwell Lane, born and bred and effin' proud of it, as she might say.”
“I'm going in to see the boss at two,” Mower said. “He invited me in â no excuses accepted.”
“Good,” Laura said. “It's time you two got your act together.”
“Fat chance,” Mower said gloomily.
“Well, in the meantime I might call on Mrs. Adams in my lunch hour â to ask her about young Jeremy's progress, you understand? And if the subject of City Ventures just happens to come up I'll try to find out exactly who those other directors are, and when she last saw Karen Bailey.”
“Be careful,” Mower said.
“You sound like Michael,” Laura said softly. “But Donna deserves someone to follow this up.”
“Donna deserved a hell of a lot more than she got,” Mower said, his voice tight. “But take care, Laura. There's some very nasty people out there.”
Laura spent the rest of the morning conscientiously sifting through the incoming tales of teachers arriving at school that morning to find water running through their classrooms; householders rescued by boat as streams broke their banks, inundating everything in their path; and the distraught farmer who had been innocently over-wintering his ewes, which had miraculously escaped the foot and mouth epidemic, in a normally dry fold in the hills only to find them trapped and drowning in a quagmire created overnight by the relentless rain.
“If this is global warming I think I'll pass on the Pennine olive groves,” Laura muttered to herself as she fitted together grim tales and grimmer pictures of an uniquely sodden winter into a kaleidoscope of local catastrophe.
By lunchtime the job was done and the Gazette building began to shudder slightly as the presses began to roll. Laura
switched off her computer terminal, buttoned up her waterproof jacket and made the dash across the puddled car park to her Golf. The low-lying part of the town centre was now cordoned off by police and fire brigade and she had to make a lengthy detour to reach the Adams house in one of the leafy suburbs in the surrounding hills. Mrs. Adams push-buttoned her through the gate and the front door as easily as she had done the first time and waved her into the sitting room overlooking the dripping, dark mid-winter garden.
“You look as though you were expecting me,” Laura said as her hostess brought in a tray with coffee cups and a percolator.
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“I've been expecting someone,” Althea Adams said. “I wasn't sure whether it would be the Press or the police.”
“Because of Jeremy? How is he?” Mrs. Adams nodded with a wry smile as if she knew that the question was mere prevarication on Laura's part.
“He's going to be fine. And the school is taking him and Louise back.”
“So what's the problem?” Laura asked.
“I suppose it's just that the Jeremy business meant that Grantley has been throwing his weight about even more than usual. I began to think it would only be a matter of time before someone took serious exception to Grantley. I thought it would be that policeman, what's his name? He seemed unlikely to be either conned or intimidated.”
“DCI Thackeray?” Laura smiled faintly to herself.
“Him. I knew he'd be furious about what went on. I heard my husband on the phone to Superintendent Longley, to the Deputy Chief Constable, to anyone he thought had some influence. I knew he'd get up someone's nose and that might expose him in ways he really doesn't need.”
“But I turned up instead,” Laura said.
“I didn't really rate you, any more than Grantley did. You were young and a woman. Just shows how sexist you get when you live with someone like Grantley for all these years.
He'd not have seen you as any sort of a threat, any more than he would me. We're just women, after all, here to do as we're told and keep quiet about it.”
“Do I take it that you're not so keen to do as you're told any more?” Laura asked, taken by surprise by the vehemence of Mrs. Adams's complaints. “Or to keep quiet?”
“I'm fed up to the back teeth with all the lies and deceit,” Althea Adams said. “At first it was just cutting corners. I knew all about that even before I married him. I did work for him, after all.”
“As an accountant? I remember you saying â¦?”
“I did his books when the firm was still quite small,” she said. “He never missed the main chance, even then. But now ⦔
“You're a director of City Ventures, aren't you? Using your maiden name? Althea Simpson?”
“You worked that out, did you? Yes, it's all a cover of course, women standing in for their men. We don't actually do anything, you understand. Just meet now and again as a board to rubber stamp whatever the blokes have decided.”
“Like Karen Bailey stands in for Barry Foreman?”
“And Jane Peace, Jim Baistow's married daughter. The men on the board are the apparatchiks â company secretary, finance director and so on, but we four women are there representing other people, though Karen wasn't at the last meeting we had. Nominees, I suppose you could call us. Grantley persuaded me it's not illegal â just a convenience, he said, so that things didn't get muddled.”
“Muddled” was one way of putting it, Laura thought, as she looked at the list of City Ventures' directors that she and Kevin Mower had downloaded from the Internet. Muddled, she thought, was not the word she would have chosen to describe the links between the committee members planning the redevelopment of the Heights and the building company which looked likely to be selected to do the work.
“So who's Annie Costello?”
“Oh, she's Dave Spencer's girlfriend.”
“Councillor Spencer?”
“The same,” Althea Adams said. “Which is when I decided that I wanted out. You could end up in prison for less.”
“I expect you could,” Laura said.
“And it'd be no good pleading ignorance because we all knew bloody well what was going on. And who was going to get the contract to regenerate the Heights. That was it as far as I'm concerned. I'm not going to jail for that gang of crooks.”
“So what will you do now?”
“I've had it up to here with Grantley and his schemes. I've had my bags packed for weeks just waiting for the moment to leave. Jeremy can stay here but I'll take the girls with me. I think the moment's come, don't you? What will the Gazette pay me for my story do you think? Or do I have to go to the Globe in London?”
“I'd make it DCI Thackeray first, if I were you,” Laura said. “When you've given me chapter and verse for the Gazette, of course.”
Â
Michael Thackeray gazed at Kevin Mower, slumped in his office looking just as unkempt as the last time he had seen him, and wondered whether Superintendent Longley might not have been right to turn down flat his request for Mower to rejoin CID immediately. The sergeant inspired no confidence in his boss although Thackeray had tried to persuade Jack Longley that it would be preferable, now that it had been decided to treat Donna Maitland's death as suspicious, to have him back on board rather than careering around the Heights like a white knight looking for a dragon to slay.
“You know someone's trashed Donna's flat, don't you?” Mower asked angrily. “Looks like the drug squad went in there with an enforcer and the locals finished the place off. Your crime scene's as good as wrecked. We'll never get a result there now.”
“I'll talk to Ray Walter about what they found,” Thackeray said. “Amos is not one hundred per cent certain we're dealing with murder here. She could have cut her own wrist with a knife.”
“A knife that dematerialised? There was no knife in that bathroom, guv,” Mower said flatly. “No trail of blood from anywhere else. And the light was out. You don't slash your own wrists in the bath in the pitch dark. That's what bugged me at first â I switched the light on when I went in and didn't realise till later what I'd done. What about the toxicology? How many sleeping pills had she taken?”
“Amos says she must have been pretty heavily sedated,” Thackeray said.
“So what more do you want? She didn't kill herself. I knew that from the very beginning.”
“Kevin, you're too involved in this to make any sort of judgement ⦔
“Yeah, yeah,” Mower said wearily. “I know you don't think I'm off the booze but I am, you know. That's all history.”
“You'll be OK when you have your medical, then, won't you? But that isn't what's worrying Jack Longley anyway. You were emotionally involved with Donna Maitland. That's a good enough reason for keeping you off the case. We want you as a witness on this one, Kevin, not an investigating officer. So my advice to you is to use the couple of weeks you've got left on leave to get yourself fit so you sail through the medical ⦔ Thackeray hesitated, aware of the anger in Mower's dark eyes. He did not want to provoke him into doing or saying anything terminally stupid.
“So no one can come up with any excuse not to take me back, you mean?”
“I don't think anyone's looking for excuses,” he said. “But you need to show you can cope.”