“You up for talking to Derek’s mother?” he asked. Laura glanced at her watch. Her lunch-hour was rapidly running out but her instinct was to follow where the story led and risk Ted Grant’s wrath.
“You know where she lives?”
Dizzy nodded.
“Your amazing granny told me,” he said with a grin.
“Is there anything she doesn’t know?” Laura asked with genuine wonderment.
“I doubt it,” Dizzy said. “He actually lived in the block where he fell off the roof. His parents are still there, poor sods.”
“So let’s do it,” Laura said, the laughter fading from her eyes. Picking their way across the soggy grass they made their way to the identical entrance of Priestley House, the most westerly of the three blocks of flats on the Heights and the most exposed to the wind and rain. Most of the cellophane wrappings had been blown off the flowers which had been left in tribute to Derek Whitby, and the pale carnations and roses were gradually disintegrating into the mud, a frail memorial to real flesh and blood, Laura thought.
“It’s like bloody Siberia up here,” Dizzy complained, pulling the collar of his fleece up to his nose.
“They’re not joking when they call it Wuthering,” Laura said. “And the buildings soak up water like a sponge. They should have pulled them down years ago but they’ve never been able to find the money - or the commitment. There’s some who believe that the people who live up here don’t deserve anything better.”
Inside the bleak entrance hall where the lifts displayed the familiar out-of-order signs and a couple of hypodermic syringes rolled into a corner in the draught from the open door, she glanced up the staircase quizzically.
“How far this time?” she asked. “I’m not fit enough for this. I’ve been skipping my exercise lately, putting on the pounds.”
Dizzy B glanced at her appreciatively.
“You look fine to me, woman,” he said. “Number ten, first floor. Think you can manage that?” He led the way up again and onto another puddled landing where the wind howled like a banshee between the panels of the walkway. Leaning against the gale, eyes half closed against the driving rain, they staggered to the door of number ten and knocked. This time the door was opened quickly, though held on a restraining chain, and two dark eyes peered through the gap.
“Mrs. Whitby?” Laura said. “I’m from the Gazette. I’m writing about the drug problem on the estate and I wondered if you could spare me five minutes?” The eyes widened slightly and for a moment Laura thought that the door was going to be slammed in their faces but eventually the chain was eased off and the door pulled wide to reveal a middle-aged black woman in a formal dark dress who glanced anxiously along the landing before beckoning her two visitors inside.
“You wan’ to be careful, girl,” she said. “It ain’t safe for folk like you to be roun’ here asking questions like that.” She glanced at Dizzy B her eyes full of accusing anxiety. “You should know better than to bring her here, man,” she said.
“We’re OK,” Dizzy said. “We’ll be fine. But we just saw Stevie Maddison and that boy’s not fine. Is that the way your Derek was before he died?” Laura thought that Dizzy B’s casual brutality would dissolve Mrs. Whitby in front of their eyes but after turning away from them for a moment, her shoulders slumped and her plump features almost collapsing in misery, she turned back with a spark of anger in her eyes.
“He was like that,” she said at last. “For a long time he was like that. And then he decided he want to change. And believe me we did everything we could to help that boy. An’ Donna from the Project. She a brave lady, that one. She helped me an’ Derek. I tol’ the police. Derek was not a junkie no more. But out there there’s people who do the opposite. They don’ want no one to change. They like things just the way they are with these kids. Lots of profit in it for them if things stay the same, I dare say. They come knocking at my door with cheap offers for Derek, special deals … Can you believe that? Like travellin’ salesmen? I tell them he not a junkie, that’s he’s clean and I intend he goin’ to stay clean, and then suddenly he’s dead, high on something, they say, and falling off a roof. Is that convenient for someone? After all the trouble he went to get himself clean, booking into rehab, everything? Can you believe that is what really happened?”
“What do you think happened, Mrs. Whitby?” Laura asked quietly, switching on her recorder again.
“I think he was killed, that’s what I think. That’s what Stevie says and I believe him.”
“And have you told the police that?”
“I told the police that. And they don’ believe me, do they? They don’ want to believe me, maybe. Maybe the dealers pay them not to believe me. That’s what I think. So now we goin’ home. We’d decided that before Derek died. Since 1965 my family been in this country, my mother and father came on the boat all that time ago, and it’s been nothin’ but trouble all the way. Derek was my youngest boy, my last child, and I’ve lost him, and there’s no justice for black people in this country so we going back to Jamaica. It’s all over here, finished. My man is giving up his job at the end of the month. I stopped already when I was helpin’ Derek get clean. I worked at the Infirmary but I’ll not go back, I haven’t the heart now.” She crossed the room and took an envelope from behind the clock on the mantelpiece.
“We’ve bought our tickets,” she said. “We’ve one too many now.”
“I’m sorry,” Laura said. “When do you fly?”
“At the end of next month. The coroner say we can fix the boy’s funeral for next week. There’ll be an inquest, but it was an accident, they saying’. I don’t believe that, but what can we do?”
“So if we can persuade the police to look at Derek’s death more seriously you could help them?”
“Why they listen to you when they won’ listen to the boy’s own parents?” Mrs. Whitby asked bitterly.
“I think there are people who know things who haven’t talked to the police yet,” Dizzy B said, his face grim. “D’you know who might have been threatening Derek?”
“I know what they look like, but I don’ know no names. You have to ask the kids. In the end it’s the kids who have to stop this trade. The good Lord knows, it took me long enough to persuade Derek to give it up but in the end I succeeded. I prayed for him and prayed with him, and in the end I thought I’d won. And then …” She shrugged and turned away again to hide the raw emotion which overcame her.
“Come here,” she said suddenly drawing her visitors to the window which overlooked the bleak spaces between the flats. She turned out the light so that they could not be seen from outside and pointed to where a small group of hooded men and youths huddled in the gloomy shadows under the inadequate shelter of the balconies of Holtby House.
“They dealing there in broad daylight. We never see a policeman trying to stop them. They fearless, those men. They brazen with it. They wait for the kids coming home from school ← and soon them they trap don’ bother going to school no more. They ain’t afraid of no one. That black boy there, see, the tall one. I know he is called Ounce.”
“Ounce,” Dizzy said. “That’s a seriously odd name.”
“That’s what they call him. He come and he go in a big car and I reckon when he come the drugs come with him. That’s how it was with Derek. He was twelve when they got hold of him. A little boy.”
“Do you have a photograph of Derek I could use?” Laura asked. “I’d like to make his story the centre of my feature about the estate.”
Mrs. Whitby flicked the lights back on and took a school photograph of her son, smiling tentatively at the camera, from the mantelpiece.
“I pray to God it do some good,” she said, pressing the picture into Laura’s hand. “It won’t bring my son back but maybe it will help some others.”