Stewart nodded enthusiastically.
“Of course, of course, we can do that,” he said, although Thackeray had no confidence at all that exhortations from the headmaster would have much effect on his clubbing sixth-formers who must know very well what was going to befall Louise James.
“And you won’t threaten them with any sort of consequences here as a result? You can’t assume that just because they were at the club they took drugs as well.”
Stewart looked more doubtful at that, as well he might, Thackeray thought. You could probably count the number of young people who went clubbing without the use of illegal stimulants on the fingers of one hand.
“Parents will talk,” Stewart said. “You know what the grapevine’s like, Chief Inspector. If it’s drawn to my attention that someone else is involved I don’t see how I can avoid taking some sort of action.”
“It’s not helpful at the moment,” Thackeray said.
“Well, I’m sorry,” Stewart insisted. “I’ll turn as deaf an ear as I can - but I can’t afford to harbour known drug users. It does the school no good at all.”
And with that Thackeray had to be content. He drove away from the school in a dissatisfied mood and instead of turning back into town and on towards Laura’s flat he joined the stream of rush hour traffic heading for the suburbs and beyond. His objective was a street of run-down semidetached houses on the very edge of the town with a view from generally untended gardens over the moorland countryside between Bradfield and the commuter village of Broadley. Turning off the main road, he drove gingerly over the rutted surface and parked outside one of the last houses in the row and sat for a moment contemplating the muddy garden, the broken fences and the light spilling from the uncurtained front window. The last time he had been here an angry youth with a shot-gun had been threatening the family inside the house. Since then the son who had been threatened had been gaoled, as had the attacker he had provoked, and he fervently hoped that the authorities had shown enough sense to send them to different institutions. Where the rest of the family had gone he needed to discover, although as Superintendent Longley kept reminding him, the basis for his inquiries was flimsy, little more than a hunch which in a junior officer he would himself have dismissed with contempt.
He locked his car carefully and knocked on the door, which offered neither knocker nor bell-push, several times before it was eventually opened by a middle-aged woman, with a cigarette clutched in one hand and the collar of a fierce-looking Staffordshire terrier in the other.
“Oh, it’s you Mr. Thackeray,” Jean Bailey muttered pulling the growling dog back into the house. “Just let me shut this beggar up and you can come in.” He waited while doors opened and shut at the back of the house and eventually the woman beckoned him inside. She evidently bore him no grudge for arresting her son because she waved him into the front room with a smile and sank back into the armchair from which she had been watching TV, turning the volume down very slightly with a remote control,
“Bloody dog were Nicky’s idea,” she said. “Security for me, he said. But the beggar’s more trouble than he’s worth. Let him run out on t’green and he’s off for hours at a time. I can’t catch him, can I? And if you keep him on a lead he pulls your bloody arm off. He’ll have to go.”
“I was keen to have a word with Karen,” Thackeray said. “But Barry Foreman says she’s left him. I thought maybe she’d come back home.”
Jean shook her head.
“I’ve done my bit wi‘babies,” she said, lighting a fresh cigarette and flinging the match into an over-flowing ashtray on the cluttered coffee table. “Nappies, bottles, screaming in t’middle o’t’night. I can’t be doing with all that again. I told her. She’d made her bed, she’d have to bloody lie on it.”
“So do you know where she is?” Thackeray asked, slightly shaken by this lack of grandmotherly solidarity. But Jean only shrugged.
“Barry said she were talking about going to London,” she said. “I reckon she’s got some new man in her life. You’ll be seeing her in t’lobe next wi’some footballer with a tattoo on his bum.”
“London? With two young babies?”
“Aye, well, I didn’t know t’wins were going with her, did I? I thought he were keen to keep them, Barry. He can afford a nanny or summat, can’t he? Any road, she’ll want to be somewhere where he can’t find her, won’t she? He’s got a vicious temper on him, has Barry Foreman.”
“Has he now?” Thackeray said carefully. “He always seems as smooth as silk when I talk to him.”
The woman glanced away and shrugged slightly.
“You ask our Nicky,” she said. “He were a damn’ sight more scared of Barry after that business wi’t’gippos than he was of you lot.”
Even if that were true, Thackeray thought, and he had no reason to doubt Jean Bailey’s assessment of her son’s state of mind, there was little chance of the already jailed Nicky expanding on any threats Foreman might have issued to his girlfriend’s brother. He changed tack.
“Has Karen got money of her own? I don’t imagine Barry sent her on her way with a generous redundancy cheque, do you?”
“Karen never had owt, as far as I know. Spent it as fast as she earned it when she were living here. If she had one pair of shoes she had fifty, all t’colours o’t’ bloody rainbow. If she’s gone she’ll have found some beggar to pay her fare, you can bet on that.”
“But you haven’t heard from her?”
“Not a friggin’ word,” Jean said, drawing hard on her cigarette. “Not for months now. She never were one to keep in touch, weren’t Karen. Only when she wanted summat. You know how it is?”
Thackeray suddenly felt very cold although the room was stuffy. No one seemed to be worried about Karen Bailey and her twin girls, barely six months old: not their father, not their grandmother and certainly not their uncle banged up in Armley for violence which still sickened Thackeray to think about. So why was he so certain that they ought to be? Perhaps he was going soft, he thought, but he didn’t really believe it. If only for his own peace of mind, he knew he needed to track Karen and her children down.
1got home that night tired and irritable. She had spent the best part of the afternoon at the Infirmary waiting for the interview which had been promised by Grantley Adams, only to have the man brush her off without a word of apology at five o’clock as he strode angrily out of the hospital, stonyfaced and unbending. His wife, a fragile-looking woman much younger than her grey-haired husband, who had been following almost at a run, hesitated when she saw Laura with her tape-recorder at the ready.
“We can’t stop now,” she said. “Grantley has a meeting in half an hour he can’t miss.”
“How’s Jeremy?” Laura had asked, but the boy’s mother had shrugged wearily, pushing wisps of what Laura guessed would usually be elegantly coiffed hair out of her eyes.
“There’s no change,” she said, and scuttled after her husband who had glanced back impatiently from the swing doors. She had tried calling the Adams family home a couple of times later but had only got an recorded message telling her that Grantley and Althea Adams and family were not available. Eventually she drove out to Broadley and parked outside the Adams’s substantial stone house, set well back from the road, and pressed the answerphone on the heavy iron gates. Somewhat to her surprise, Mrs. Adams responded and opened first the gates and then the front door. But it turned out to be an unsatisfactory encounter. Althea Adams had taken her into the kitchen and poured herself a gin and tonic which she drank quickly with shaking hands while she made Laura a coffee. Somewhere else in the house the sound of pop music indicated the presence of the Adams daughters but they did not appear and Jeremy’s mother seemed almost incoherent with anxiety.