“What are you doing turning me over anyway?” the DJ asked as he flung his leather jacket round his shoulders and prepared to follow the DC downstairs. “I’ve only been in Bradfield five minutes, and I won’t be here again in a hurry, I can tell you.”
“We’re checking up on everyone connected with the Carib Club,” Sharif said. “You just come under the general heading of associates. There’s folk in this town want that dump closed down. And if you’re the excuse that’s just fine by me.”
“In other words you’re just fishing, man,” Dizzy said with disgust.
“Oh, no, it’s you idle bastards go fishing. We go tiger hunting. And if you know who the tiger is in this particular jungle you could do yourself a lot of good by filling us in. Guarantee your ticket back to Manchester or London or whichever swamp you surfaced from, I’d say, instead of a spell at Her Majesty’s. Know what I mean?”
“Up yours,” Dizzy B muttered as he took the back seat offered in DC Sharif’s unmarked car. DC Val Ridley glanced round at him from the driving seat.
“To what do we owe this pleasure?” she asked Sharif as she started the engine.
“What do you think? Do they ever go anywhere without their stash?”
“That could be construed as a racist remark,” Dizzy B said.
“Could it?” Sharif asked with a smile that could have been construed as a sneer in the DJ’s direction. “I thought I was talking about musicians. Colour don’t come into it, bro!”
At the police station the DJ found himself being processed behind two men he recognised.
“They’re not leaving anyone out then?” he said to one of the two doormen from the Carib.
“Got us out of bed, man.”
“And they’ve brought Darryl in, an’all,” his companion said.
“Let’s have less chat and more attention to what’s going on here,” the custody sergeant said, waving the two doormen towards the cells. “Name?”
“David Sanderson,” Dizzy B said abruptly as he listened contemptuously to Mohammed Sharif’s summary of his arrest and emptied his pockets with all the familiarity of one who had not only stood in front of a custody desk but behind it as well. “Can we get this over with? I’ve got things to do, places to go.”
“CID want to talk to him about other matters, sarge,” Sharif said quickly as the sergeant glanced quizzically at the tiny amount of cannabis the DC handed him in a plastic evidence bag. “When Val Ridley’s ready”
“My guest, Mr. Sanderson,” the sergeant said, gesturing towards the cells where the Carib’s doormen had already been incarcerated. As Sharif personally slammed the heavy door behind his prisoner, the two men’s eyes met in mutual dislike through the peep-hole before Sharif closed that too.
“Paki bastard,” Dizzy B Sanderson shouted loudly enough for Sharif to hear before flinging himself angrily onto the bunk on the other side of the cell. “Let’s see the race relations industry sort that out, shall we?”
Four hours later Dizzy B was sipping a vodka and cranberry juice in Bar Med, the stylish new café bar which had just opened in premises near the university that had once been a bank. Kevin Mower leaned back on his tubular steel chair and grinned sympathetically.
“You and Omar didn’t hit it off then?”
“Bastard thinks we’re all just down from the trees,” Sanderson grumbled. “Less than an eighth I had. There was no way they could make out I was dealing. I accepted a caution, but they kept me there two hours trying to get me to grass up my supplier. Did I buy it in Bradfield? Did I buy it at the club? He’s in London, for God’s sake. What’s it to them?”
“They seem to be going over the top about the Carib,” Mower said, pulling a face over his orange juice cocktail. “There’s no sense in it when it’s the kids up at Wuthering who are really running out of control. It’s awash with the hard stuff up there.”
“Look at this,” the DJ said, flinging a copy of the Bradfield Gazette across the table in Mower’s direction. “Who gave them all that? Someone’s got a hotline to the local rag.” The front-page carried a photograph of him under the headline “DJ in drugs bust” and a short item on his recent compulsory trip to the police station.
“I told you. There’s people want the Carib closed down, not least the local mosque,” Mower said.
“So your mate Omar likely leaked it? He’ll be well in at the mosque, I guess.”
“I wouldn’t jump to conclusions,” Mower said quickly. “Bob Baker their crime reporter’s always snooping around the nick. He could have picked it up from anyone. There’s a few clubbers around who could have recognised you on your way in.”
“Too many, by the look of it,” Sanderson said bitterly. “What is it with this town?”
“I’ll see if I can find out what’s going on,” Mower said. “In the meantime, you can do me a favour.”
“Oh, sure, like I’m right into helping the police with their inquiries just now.”
“Come on, this has got nothing to do with the police. I’m putting in some hours at a computer club for disaffected kids, a lot of them black. If you came up to visit you’d give my street cred a boost and they’d be right chuffed, as they say up here. What do you say?”
Dizzy B groaned but finished his drink.
“Community bloody service, is it now? What did I ever do to you, man?”
“Better than digging old ladies’ gardens,” Mower said without much sympathy.
Chapter Seven
Laura stood on the muddy grass at the centre of the Heights and gazed up at the three dilapidated blocks of flats in something close to despair. The driving rain which had beaten down on Bradfield all morning had only just eased off and the concrete sides of the building were streaked with dark, damp patches. She could see a woman in a red fleece pushing a baby in a buggy along one of the walkways three floors up in Priestley, immediately above the rain-tattered bunches of flowers which lay on the concrete where the boy called Derek Whitby had fallen from the roof to his death. In the other direction she spotted a couple of youths, hoods drawn around their faces so tightly that only their eyes were visible, sauntering out of the doors of Holtby
It was the third day in a row that Laura had driven up the steep hill to the Heights during her lunch-hour and today, as she had waited at the traffic lights to turn onto the estate, she had admitted to herself that she was seriously worried about her grandmother. Joyce was looking as old and frail as Laura had ever seen her. Even the sparkle was beginning to disappear from her eyes. Laura knew she was depressed about the vandalism at the Project but guessed that she was finding her inability to pull strings at the Town Hall to push-start the rescue attempt she had set her heart on was even more to blame for her depression.
She followed what had once been a footpath, but which now resembled a quagmire, towards the Project. It had been the wettest winter on record and she knew that the ceaseless rain was getting to people in unpredictable ways. As January slid gloomily into February the tempers of even the most equable souls were beginning to fray, and equable was not an epithet she would ever apply to herself or to Michael Thackeray. She knew that the tension in their relationship was growing rather than receding as they had both hoped it would, and the knowledge was as dark and heavy as the rainclouds which rolled incessantly down from the high moors to the west.
Donna met her at the door of the Project. She had tied her hair up in a scarf, like a war-time factory worker, and was wearing a sleeveless t-shirt under paint-stained dungarees.