“Only here it’s the other lot that’s trying to gentrify the place,” Laura said. “That’s what’s driving my grandmother bananas.”
They stopped outside the last door on the landing, a flimsy stained affair reinforced with strips of metal around the lock. Dizzy knocked hard but there was no response.
“If his mother’s not around he may not come to the door,” Dizzy said. He pushed the letter-box experimentally but it would not budge. It had been sealed shut on the inside. Dizzy cupped his hands against the door and shouted.
“Stevie! Stevie. It’s me, Dizzy B. Are you in there, man?”
The silence inside the flat continued and Laura was about to give up when they heard footfalls on the walkway behind them and turned to see a tall fair-haired woman bundled up in a black puffa jacket hurrying towards them, looking anxious.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said when she recognised Sanderson. She glanced more suspiciously at Laura and seemed less than impressed when she introduced herself.
“I don’t think we’ve owt to say to reporters.”
Dizzy glanced at the pharmacist’s bag which the woman carried.
“You’ll get no peace up here until you talk to someone, Mrs. Maddison,” he said. “The police and the newspapers are the only ones who can help you, and if you won’t talk to the police then why not give the Gazette a try. Laura won’t identify you if you don’t want her to, will you Laura?”
“Dizzy thought that a feature about your son would get some official attention directed up here. It’s about time, isn’t it?” Laura added with her most persuasive smile.
“Official attention? That’s a bloody joke, isn’t it? The only attention we get is when they come to arrest t‘kids who take stuff and leave t’dealers running around to get t‘little ‘uns hooked an’all.”
“So you have to stop it,″ Dizzy said.”Come on, Lorraine. It is Lorraine isn’t it? You’ve got to draw a line somewhere.”
“Did Stevie say he’d do this?” Lorraine Maddison asked, her face still clouded with suspicion. “I just went to get his methadone from t‘chemist. It takes half the day to get down to town on t’bus but I told him not to answer t’door to no one.”
“I told him I’d come back again,” Dizzy said. “Ask him if he’ll see us. Please?”
Still looking doubtful, the woman unlocked the door with two keys and led them into a darkened living room where they could dimly see a figure curled up under a blanket on the sofa.
“Stevie, love,” she said. “Here’s Dizzy B back with a lady who wants to talk to you. D’you want to do that, son?”
Slowly the figure stirred and they could make out Stevie Maddison’s face, grey and strained, the cheeks sunken and the eyes so bloodshot that he seemed to have difficulty focusing on his visitors. He glanced at Laura’s tape-recorder and shrugged, his whole body shrinking as though he could not even find the energy to acquiesce or dispute their presence.
“Dizzy B, man,” the boy said faintly, trying to feign an enthusiasm he clearly did not feel. “You again. I never found that demo tape I promised you. My mate Derek’s rap. When I feel a bit better …”
“Later, Stevie,” Dizzy said. “It’ll be fine later.”
“Take your medicine, lad,” Stevie’s mother said, handing him a small glass with some liquid in it. The boy drank and sighed heavily.
“It’s no bloody good, this stuff,” he said to Dizzy. “They tell you it’s as good as t’real thing, but no way. I’m turning into a right wreck.” With difficulty he hauled himself upright, revealing emaciated arms, scarred and reddened by continuous infection, and a hollow chest within an over-large t-shirt. He shivered convulsively, although the room was warm and airless. This wrecking of a life, Laura thought, must have begun long ago.
“You want to stop more kids getting into this mess?” Dizzy asked, his voice harsh.
“That’d be summat,” the boy said. “But there’s no way you can stop it. It’s the way it is. You try to stop it and you end up dead, one way or another.”
“Is that what happened to the boy who fell off the roof?” Laura asked gently.
Stevie shuddered and wrapped his arms round himself, shivering more violently.
“He were a friend of our Steven’s,” Lorraine Maddison said. “They were in t’same class at school. When they went to school”
“He went to rehab,” Stevie said. “They don’t like that.”
“Who doesn’t like it?” Laura asked angrily.
“The dealers, of course,” the boy said contemptuously. “They don’t like losing customers, do they? They don’t like rehab, do they? They don’t like projects, they don’t like employment schemes, they don’t like people getting their lives together … Bad for business, know what I mean?” For a moment or two he looked animated but the light in his eyes soon began to fade.
“Is it the dealers who are trashing the Project?”
“spect so,” Stevie said, his interest waning. Laura turned to his mother.
“Why isn’t Stevie in rehab?” she asked.
“Stevie won’t go for treatment. He’s too scared of what they might do to him, so we’re trying to do it on our own,” his mother said. “Any road there’s a waiting list for places, isn’t there. He might be dead before one comes up. Donna at the Project persuaded him to give it a try but even she couldn’t find him a place in a clinic. Months he had to wait, getting worse all t’time.”
“She’s all right, is Donna,” Stevie muttered unexpectedly. “She’s cool.”
“Tell us about the boy who fell off the roof, Stevie?” Dizzie asked. “What was his name again?”
“Derek, Derek Whitby. He were my best mate. And he didn’t fall, man.”
“I thought he was high …” Laura began.
“So he was high. Maybe he was, more likely not. I don’t think he was using again, man. Last time I saw him he were clean. Any road, he didn’t fall,” Stevie said. “I was there. I saw him.”
“You mean he jumped? Killed himself.”
“I don’t mean that, neither. I mean he were pushed. I were down below. I’d been waiting for him. I saw him on t‘roof wi’ some other lads. But there were nothing I could do. I were too far away. I saw him up there and I saw him pushed over t‘edge. I heard him scream all t’way down.”
“Who? Who pushed him?” Laura asked but the boy just looked at her contemptuously again. It was obvious that there were some things he was never going to tell them, even if he knew.
“So what did you do, Stevie?” Sanderson asked quietly.
“I ran
“Have you told the police this?” Laura asked. The boy looked at her again and held a shaking hand up in front of his face.
“This stuff maybe goin’ to kill me,” he said. “And maybe not. But if I talk to t’ police I’m dead. Any fool knows that on t’Heights. See nowt, say nowt, that’s the way it is.”
“I think it’s time you went,” Stevie’s mother said quietly from the other side of the room where she had been listening to her son as intently as her visitors had. “This lad’s going to stay alive. I’ll make sure of that.”
“But if Derek was murdered …That’s what he’s saying?” Laura began.
“He’s saying nowt,” Lorraine Maddison said, glaring at her visitors defiantly. “He knows nowt. That’s the way you stay alive round here. If the police want to find summat out they’re on their own. And if you tell them owt about what Steven’s said, we’ll just deny it. There’s no help for it. That’s the way it is on Wuthering.”
Reluctantly Dizzy B led the way back down the damp and stinking staircase.
“He knows who it was,” he said. “I’m bloody sure he knows, but unless the police are prepared to get him and his mother off the estate he’ll never talk.”
“I thought that’s what the police did with witnesses,” Laura said.
“Sometimes,” Dizzy said. “But at the moment the local nick doesn’t even believe this Derek boy was murdered so they won’t be taking any interest at all, will they?” Just inside the doors to the block he hesitated.