The boy glanced at his lawyer and shook his head helplessly.
“That’s the way it is, you know?” he said. And Thackeray almost believed him.
Outside in the corridor he found Grantley Adams waiting, his broad face still suffused with colour. His wife fluttered to one side of him like a nervous bird. Adams opened his mouth as if to launch a new tirade but Thackeray was determined to get in first.
“We won’t bother Jeremy again until he’s recovered,” he said. “But we may well want to talk to him again at some point, Mr. Adams. He doesn’t deny he’s been taking illegal drugs.”
“Did he tell you where he got the stuff? The Ecstasy?” Adams asked.
“No, he didn’t,” Thackeray said. “Nor where he got the cannabis we found in his bedroom. Did you know he had cannabis in the house, Mr. Adams?”
“Of course I bloody didn’t,” Adams said. “I’d have tanned his backside for him if I had, never mind how big he’s grown. What I want to know is where he’s been getting it from. I’d put odds on it being that bloody club.”
“That’s what we’d like to know too,” Thackeray said. “But hasn’t it crossed your mind that Jeremy may not just have been buying drugs, but selling them too. That he may have been a dealer …” Mrs. Adams gave a faint moan at that.
“You what?” Adams said, his face becoming even more flushed. “What the hell are you suggesting now, man?”
“I’m not suggesting anything, Mr. Adams,” Thackeray said, aware that Victor Mendelson had followed him out of the ward and was watching him with what appeared to be a thin smile. “You have every right to know what line our inquiries might take when Jeremy’s a bit more able to recall what he’s been involved in recently. As I think you’ve said yourself, drugs are a menace and those who deal in them need to be identified.”
Adams appeared to deflate suddenly and turned a sickly shade of pale. He glanced at his lawyer for help but Mendelson was studying the no-smoking notice on the other side of the corridor with unusual interest.
“Thank you for your help,” Thackeray said to no one in particular and led Val Ridley away down the long hospital corridor at a brisk pace leaving Adams to berate his lawyer in a fierce whisper.
“That was a bit over the top, wasn’t it, boss?” Val said as soon as they were out of earshot. “You don’t really think the boy’s been dealing, do you?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Thackeray said. “The whole thing is a complete charade. He’ll never tell us where he got the Ecstasy and his cannabis stash isn’t even worth cautioning him for. But Adams himself was the one screaming for retribution. It doesn’t hurt to let him know just where that might lead.”
Val glanced at her boss with some curiosity. She recognised a bombastic bully in Adams when she saw one but she had not often seen the DCI react so overtly to such a challenge. Canteen gossip, in this case originating she guessed with Kevin Mower, suggested that Laura Ackroyd has been known to indulge in a spliff now and again - although how Kevin had come by that piece of compromising information she could not begin to guess. Perhaps Kevin had shared one with her. She would not put it past him. Or perhaps the reporter had been passing round a relaxing joint at home these winter nights, Val thought with a secret smile.
“We waste too much time chasing kids with dope,” she said cautiously. Thackeray glanced at her as they waited for the lift.
“Maybe,” he said. “Though in this case you’re certainly right. If Grantley Adams didn’t regard himself as the great moral arbiter for the whole of Bradfield …”
“Or its grand master, more like,” Val said sharply. “We wouldn’t be here, right?”
“I couldn’t possibly comment,” Thackeray said. Thackeray let the detective constable go back to police HQ without him and made his way through the long hospital corridors and down a back staircase to where the mortuary and pathology departments lived discreetly separate lives in the basement. Amos Atherton was not in his office, and after glancing through a small window into the main operating room, Thackeray saw the pathologist untangling his bulky frame from green blood-stained overalls. He nodded at the DCI through the glass as he struggled out of his boots.
“Give me two minutes, lad,” Atherton mouthed, holding up his fingers in a Churchillian salute.
Thackeray waited in the corridor wondering whether he could get away with a cigarette immediately beneath the large red no-smoking notice on the tiled wall. It was not a place he had ever felt comfortable. Too many memories stalked the infirmary corridors for his peace of mind, and they were not just of people he had met professionally, lying naked and ultimately exposed in the room behind him, victims of a second assault under Atherton’s dispassionate scalpels and saws, although those ghosts were bad enough. Once he had roamed these tiled depths for hours, without authority and crazed with grief and alcohol, while a pathologist - and he had never dared ask Atherton if it had been him — had ascertained the cause of death of his tiny son. Upstairs his wife had lain comatose hooked up to life-support machines, and while every fibre of his being had wished Ian back to life, he had just as fervently wanted Aileen dead. In the end the cries of pain he was hardly aware he had uttered had brought officialdom in his direction and sympathetic but firm hands had led him away. He had never set foot in the hospital again without a shudder of fear and shame.
Atherton’s two minutes were up and the pathologist shambled out of the morgue straightening his jacket across broad shoulders and making a vain attempt to button it across his ample stomach.
“Now then?”
Thackeray hesitated for no more than a second.
“The lad on the Heights who fell off the roof,” he said at length. “Open and shut, was it? Nothing to suggest it might not have been an accident?”
“Ah, now I’m glad you asked me that. I’ve been meaning to complete the report and get it back to you,” Atherton said, looking slightly flustered. “I’d been expecting to find him full of heroin. The tolerance these kids build up never ceases to amaze me. But even though he had plenty of old scars and track marks on his arms, the blood tests came back clean.”
“His mother’s insisting he was murdered,” Thackeray said shortly.
“Well, I can’t say that’s what I concluded. There were no injuries I could find that weren’t consistent with him simply hitting the ground from a great height. He could have been pushed, I suppose, but I’m not sure that’s what the coroner will decide, on the evidence we’ve got. He could have just been fooling about up there, the way lads do. All I can tell you is that he wasn’t high on drugs, for what that’s worth.”
Thackeray shrugged.
“It’s probably nothing. Though in the natural course of events, there’s too many people dying up there. Take each case on its own and it looks like an overdose or some other sort of accident. Take them together and you begin to wonder.”
“If you want to kill an addict there’s one foolproof way to do it,” Atherton said. “And that’s to give them an overdose, or a dose full of rubbish like sink cleaner. Who’s going to ask questions any road? Most folk just write it off as no more than they deserve. And kids on the Heights all get tarred with the same brush. Are the police any different?”
“Probably not,” Thackeray admitted.
“Now if it’s Grantley Adams’s son, then a few stops get pulled out …” Atherton offered with a tight smile.
Thackeray groaned. “Not you as well,” he said.
“Bit close to the mark, is it?”
“I’d not have wasted half a day on it myself, to be honest,” Thackeray said. “Essentially it was a traffic accident.”
“It’s all politics, lad, you should have learned that by now. Why do you think this department’s still stuck down here in the bowels of the earth with equipment that bloody Burke and Hare would have found familiar. It’s because I won’t play their games and butter up the chief executive of the hospital trust on the golf course like some folk I could name. Golf clubs, Masonic Lodges — if your only outside interests are a bit of course fishing and a ramble on t’Pennine Way on a Sunday afternoon you’re out of the loop. QED.”