“I only came home because of the girls,” she had said. “I ought to be at the hospital. I shouldn’t really have let you in. Grantley would be furious …”

“Your husband couldn’t have cancelled his meeting, with Jeremy so ill?” Laura asked curiously, but Mrs Adams simply shrugged.

“It was very important,” she said.

“You don’t work yourself,” Laura asked.

“I used to before we were married. I was an accountant. I worked for Grantley for a couple of years, that’s how we met. But there’s no need now and with three children there’s a lot to do here.” She smiled faintly. “Grantley’s first wife had her own career but I don’t think that worked out very well. He’s a very demanding man. I should know. I worked for him before his divorce.”

“And neither of you had any idea Jeremy was into drugs?”

“No of course not,” Mrs. Adams said sharply. But when Laura suggested that a profile of the family might help others in a similar situation, she panicked.

“Grantley would hate that,” she said. “In fact he’d hate you being here. Perhaps you’d better go now.”

And with that Laura had to be content, although she knew it would in no way satisfy Ted Grant’s desire for an in-depth interview for the next morning’s first edition. But before she could get too broody about the fragile state of her career, her mobile rang and she heard her grandmother’s voice again, full of emotion.

“Have you got time to come up to the Project after work, pet?” Joyce asked. “I won’t keep you long but there’s someone I’d like you to meet.” Laura had smiled to herself as she agreed. Even at almost eighty her grandmother, with the bit between her teeth, was a formidable force. So for the second evening running she had ground her way up the steep hill to the Heights and picked her way across the puddled pathways to the Project where she found Joyce and Donna Maitland drinking tea with a small dark man with deep pouches under fierce black eyes.

“This is Dr. Khan,” Donna said. “He wants to tell you about the drug problems up here.”

“Donna tells me you’re going to write something in the Gazette,” Khan said. “It’s time someone took some notice of what is happening on the Heights. The problem is getting out of control.”

“I know there’s been a spate of deaths from overdoses … .”

“Twelve years old one of them was,” Khan said, evidently outraged. “But there have been other deaths. The boy who went over the top of the flats the other day, another who was killed by a car. I think they are all connected. It is an epidemic. And apart from this place, and Donna here, no one is taking it seriously or doing anything to help. I can’t get kids into rehab when they need it. I can’t persuade the police that some of these deaths are tantamount to murder.”

“The younger children carry knives, some of the older ones have got guns,” Joyce broke in.

“My nephew was fourteen,” Donna said quietly. “Started sniffing glue, moved on to heroin. I’m frightened to let our Emma out of my sight …”

“Murder?” Laura concentrated on the doctor with exhaustion written all over him. “What makes you say that?”

“I’ve no evidence,” Khan said. “Just rumours, sideways looks. I wasn’t called to all the deaths, but I’ve treated some of the bereaved families. Everyone assumes that all the kids who have died brought it on themselves. That they were rubbish because they were junkies. But that is not my impression. The mother of one of the boys who died of an overdose says he was not on drugs, that he hated them, that he worked hard at school and had ambitions. The boy who fell off the roof was not a user, apparently. They haven’t held the inquest yet so I don’t know what they found at the post-mortem. But his mother is adamant he was not a junkie now, even if he had been once.”

“You think there’s some sort of war going on between dealers?” Laura asked doubtfully. “No one’s suggested that publicly. There’s not been any shooting.”

“Yet,” Donna said bitterly. “All t’kids are saying there’s guns on the estate.”

“I don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t see any signs of anyone trying to find out either,” Khan said. “What we really need to do is get a campaign going to tackle the problem up here. Some of the families are keen to help …”

“If you can do it without using their names,” Donna broke in. “Don’t underestimate just how bloody scared people are.”

“But we need some backing,” the doctor went on. “Not a lot but some funds to get started, and we need some publicity. That’s where we thought you could help. You could write about it in the Gazette.”

Laura had listened to Dr. Khan’s complaints with a growing sense of unease. She thought of the effort the police seemed to be putting into investigating the incident at the Carib Club, and about Thackeray’s scarcely veiled lack of faith in the drug squad’s efforts on the Heights, and wondered if she could persuade Ted Grant to let her write about Donna’s fears and Dr. Khan’s campaign. To catch his interest she had to have a good story and that, she thought, would involve some serious research.

“Where’s Kevin Mower today?” she had asked, a germ of an idea forming in the back of her head.

“He doesn’t tell me what he’s doing,” Donna said, and Laura could see the pain behind her carefully composed facade. “I’ve a genius for hooking bastards who don’t tell you what they’re doing, didn’t you know? He’s not due in here today, any road.”

Laura had taken that unasked for piece of information on board with no more than a sympathetic glance. It was not the time, she thought, to fill Donna in with details of Mower’s chequered history. So she had driven home, increasingly determined that she would pursue Dr. Khan’s problems and find a story she could realistically sell to her unsympathetic editor, and wondering how far her own man was willing to share his plans with her and how safe it would be to share hers with him on this particular occasion.

In the end the decision was made for her. She had cooked a meal without much enthusiasm but Thackeray was late and she ate alone, too hungry by nine o’clock to wait any longer. It’s a bit soon to be behaving like an old married couple, putting the dinner in the oven and waiting with a rolling pin behind the door, she thought wryly as she sat in the silent flat listening for the sound of a car outside. When he finally arrived, she had switched on the TV and curled up on the sofa to watch a documentary about the melting ice-cap in Antarctica. And as if that were not sufficiently gloomy, she could see from a quick glance at Thackeray’s face as he hung up his coat that he was in a dark mood too.

He flung himself onto the sofa beside her, lit a cigarette and zapped the TV off.

“Where would you run to if you had two young babies and no obvious means of support?” he asked.

Laura shrugged.

“Some sort of women’s refuge?”

“I’m not sure she was running away from violence, though her mother thinks it’s possible” Thackeray said. “Anyway, I’ve checked the local women’s centres out. She’s not there.”

“Perhaps she’s got money. What makes you think she hasn’t?”

“Because this is Barry Foreman’s girlfriend we’re talking about and I don’t reckon he’s the sort of man who’d let her have more than peanuts for spending money. And according to her mother she’s never ever had two pennies of her own to rub together, even when she lived with her.”

“New boyfriend?”

“With two tiny babies?”

“Some men like babies,” Laura said, and could immediately have bitten off her tongue. She turned to Thackeray and reached out a hand which he avoided.

“Sorry,” she said. “That was stupid of me.”

Thackeray looked at her for a long moment, although what he saw was not Laura’s stricken face but a peacefully sleeping infant in another mother’s arms. He shook himself sharply.

“I’m the one who should be sorry,” he said. Impulsively she leaned over and kissed him and the kiss turned into a longer embrace.