Chapter Eight

Laura lay in bed the next morning, rigid with an anger that had not been dissipated by a restless night’s sleep. She listened to Michael Thackeray moving around in the bathroom next door and wondered whether reopening their differences again in the grey half-light of morning was worth the risk of deepening the rift between them in the unpropitious cause of changing a mind that had seemed set in stone the previous evening.

She had got home from work already seething. When she had returned to the office she had braved Ted Grant in his glass-walled watch-tower at the end of the newsroom and outlined the results of her researches on the Heights. He had not seemed impressed, and after she had played her taperecordings of the two distraught mothers to him he had merely opened his office door and summoned Bob Baker, the crime reporter, from his computer with his customary bull-like bellow.

“It’s as likely nowt as owt,” Grant had said as the younger man glanced inquiringly at the editor. “Laura reckons folk up on the Heights are putting that lad Whitby’s death down as murder. What do the police think?”

“What I hear is that Mrs. Whitby’s gone off her rocker since the lad died,” Baker had said dismissively. “He’s a bit of a militant, the father. The Anti-Racist League, works for the council and took them to court over discrimination, all that stuff. Complaints about police harassment a couple of years ago. Nothing substantiated, of course. They see discrimination round every bend, some of these people.”

“That’s not fair,” Laura said. “I’ve got a witness on that tape who says he saw the other boy pushed over the edge of the roof.”

“Black, is he?” Baker asked.

“No, he’s not, as it goes,” Laura snapped.

“On drugs then?”

“Getting off them, actually. Or trying. He saw what happened and he’s scared out of his wits.”

“And has he told the police that?” Baker asked. “Because my information is that there’s not a scrap of evidence that it was anything but an accident. Derek Whitby was high as a kite, fooling about on the roof, went too near the edge and bingo! He’s mince-meat.”

“And the other lads who were on the roof with him have come forward to confirm that, have they?” Laura asked sweetly, but Baker just shrugged.

“You know what it’s like up there. They won’t confirm their own names if they can avoid it,” he said.

“Well my information is that the dealers up there are using all sorts of violence to keep the kids in line, and that this was just the most vicious instance,” Laura said.

Ted Grant had glanced at his two warring journalists with something like a smirk of satisfaction. Suddenly he pushed Laura’s cassette tape in Baker’s direction.

“You have a listen to this, Bob,” he said. “Then have a word with your contacts up there, and in the Force. Laura’s too busy with other stuff to get stuck into a crime story right now - if there’s a story there, which I very much doubt.”

Laura opened her mouth to protest and then closed it again. She knew from the glint in both men’s eyes that it would do no good and would only provoke further humiliation. As she spun on her heel to go, hair flying, face set, she heard Baker’s low laugh and Grant pull open a drawer in his desk.

“I had my invitation this morning to join this committee to redevelop the Heights,” she heard him say. “That was a good move to put my name forward. It’ll give us the inside track on a lot of good stories up there.”

“I thought you’d be pleased,” Baker said. “It was Barry Foreman’s idea. Thought you’d be an asset.”

“Close the door, lad,” Grant had said suddenly, realising that Laura was still within earshot.

White-faced with suppressed anger she had made her way back to her desk, pounded out the last few hundred words of the feature she was working on and had stormed out of the office a good hour before she should have done to drive back up to the Heights as fast as she could weave her Golf through the heavy late afternoon traffic. If remaining on the Gazette meant being passed over in favour of flash young men ten years younger than herself, she wondered how much longer she could hang on. All her half-buried ambition to get out of Bradfield came flooding back. Joyce, she had long ago decided, she could take with her if she decided to move and apart from her grandmother there was only one other person to keep her in her home town any longer. Unfortunately, in spite of their differences, Michael Thackeray remained the most important person in her life. She had pounded the steering wheel in frustration as she waited at the traffic lights to turn onto the Heights again.

Not many cars ventured into the narrow streets beneath the flats and there were few people about on foot in the wet winter dusk as she parked. More aware than usual of the brooding bulk of the estate and the menacing shadows beneath the walkways, she hurried to the Project where she found Donna drinking tea with Kevin Mower in the brightly lit back room.

“Your gran’s gone home, love,” Donna said, stubbing out her cigarette into her saucer and lighting another. “She looked right tired this afternoon so I told her to go and have a rest. I reckon she’s trying to do too much, you know.”

“Try telling her that,” Laura said. “The day Joyce stops fighting will be the day we need the undertaker.”

“How did you get on with Dizzy,” Mower had asked and Laura told them everything they had learned from their visits to Stevie Maddison and Derek Whitby’s bereaved mother.

“D’you think Derek could have been pushed?” she asked when she had finished. “He can’t have been able to see that clearly in the rain and the dark.”

“Anything’s possible with some of the scumbags we have to live with up here,” Donna said bitterly.

“Do you know this man they call Ounce? Mrs. Whitby’s sure he’s behind the dealing.”

“I’ve not come across him, though I’ve heard the kids mention the name. We …” She hesitated and glanced guiltily at Mower. “I’ll ask around. See what’s being said. But I guess if the police didn’t investigate Derek’s death straight away they’ll not be right interested now. The lad’s funeral’s next week.”

Laura glanced at Mower who almost imperceptibly shook his head. So he still had not told Donna that he was a policeman, Laura thought, even though that unexpected pronoun had hinted again at a much closer relationship than was apparent to the naked eye. She smiled slightly.

“I’ll chase Bob Baker so we get a story out of it somehow,” she said. “That’s a promise.”

But when she had got home and turned to the person she had hoped would be her closest ally in an attempt to expose what was happening on the Heights, she met a lack of enthusiasm that at first surprised and then infuriated her.

“You’re taking a real risk knocking on doors up there,” Thackeray had said, propped up on the pillows beside her in too unyielding a position for Laura to feel able to get as close to him as she usually did. He took up their debate where they had left it earlier in the evening. “Especially if you’re with someone who may well be a dealer himself. David Sanderson has form for drug use, and he’s up to his eyes in the Carib Club which seems to be awash with the stuff.”

“It’s not a bit of dope we’re talking about up there, is it?” Laura said. “These kids are dying from heroin overdoses, crack cocaine, cocktails of the real hard stuff. Dizzy B’s just as horrified by what’s going on as any of us. He’s a nice guy. And he’s not too impressed by the attitude of some of your people, as it goes. Says he was nicked by a racist DC, an Asian. Who would that be then?”

“Sharif,” Thackeray said shortly. “Just arrived from Leeds, but he’s a Bradfield boy. And if Sanderson’s got a complaint he should make it through the official channels, not go broadcasting his grievances to the Press and God knows who else.”