“No. That’s summat to be thankful for. He’s been booked for dangerous driving, apparently, but Adams seems to accept that his lad probably wouldn’t have noticed an Eddie Stobart juggernaut coming up Chapel Street, the state he was in.”
“But he’s alive?” Thackeray asked, hoping that the his face gave away nothing of the turmoil inside at the thought of another man losing a son.
“Not so’s you’d notice,” Longley said. “In intensive care, two broken legs, fractured skull, possible internal injuries. The taxi was moving at quite a lick, apparently.”
“So not talking?”
“No chance. But his dad is. Shouting and screaming, more like. He’s good at that, is Grantley Adams, when someone’s upset him.” Thackeray smiled faintly. He could imagine just how good a man like Adams was at throwing his weight about if it suited him.
“So what does he want us to do?” he asked without enthusiasm.
“Find the pusher. Close the club down. Lock up whoever we can find to blame and throw away the key.”
“Is that all? Doesn’t he know it’s likely the lad’s best friend who got him the tablets?”
“That’s not what our Grantley wants to hear right now.”
“Mind you, it’d please the folk at the mosque,” Thackeray said. “I’m told they’ve been complaining about the Carib to the community relations people for months.”
“It’d infuriate the blacks, though,” Longley said. “There’s no love lost there. If it’d been a black lad got knocked down by an Asian driver I reckon we’d have had a riot on our hands last night. They’d likely had lynched him.”
“Presumably the Adams boy wasn’t there on his own. Do we know who he was with?”
“Most of his mates melted away, apparently, which no doubt tells you something,” Longley said. “His girlfriend hung on, went to hospital with him. Uniform have got the details. They’re both sixth formers at Bradfield Grammar. You’d think they’d know better.”
Thackeray shrugged non-commitally. Young people and risk went together, in his experience, and he had seen no evidence that affluent middle class kids from the leafy side of town were much different from the rest.
“We’re up to our eyes with these burglaries in Southfield. There’s been another possibly drug related death up on the Heights. And as far as that goes, I’m still trying to get a handle on Barry Foreman. But I’ll put someone onto the girlfriend and see if she knows where the tablets came from. But you know what it’s like. This stuff’s everywhere. Even if they bought it in the club they probably don’t know who the dealer was. They don’t wear name badges.”
“Aye, well you can leave Barry Foreman and the heroin problem to the drug squad for now. If there’s anything in that, they’ll cover it in this operation they’ve got going up on the Heights. So give me something for Grantley Adams and get him off my back, Michael, will you? Check out the girlfriend, check out the club. I reckon Grantley had his lad down for an Oxford degree and next Tory prime minister but one. He’ll not want some upstart slap-head from the south to up-stage him for long now our Willy from Rotherham has set a precedent. So he’ll want answers if all that’s had to be put on the back burner.”
“Only son, is he?” Thackeray asked, his eyes opaque.
“A couple of little lasses, I think, but yes, Jeremy’s the blueeyed boy in that family. Nothing’s too good.”
“Right, I’ll get someone to delve into the club scene,” Thackeray said reluctantly. “But I don’t hold out high hopes.”
Longley looked at the younger man with a hint of anger in his eyes.
“Pull your finger out, Michael,” he said, not bothering to hide his irritation. “There are times when even you have to bend a bit, you know. It’s all politics, of course it is, but these beggars can make life difficult. And this one’s got a son in a coma. He’s bound to kick up a stink. I’d have thought you’d have understood that if anyone did.”
Thackeray’s face tightened at that but he did not respond. He did not dare in case his own anger, which burned deep down but with a steady heat, spilled into the torrent of abuse he felt welling up like bile at the back of his throat.
“Do your best,” Longley said, aware he had trespassed into areas he normally left well alone.
“Sir,” Thackeray said quietly as he closed Longley’s office door with exaggerated care behind him. In the deserted corridor outside he took a deep breath to tamp down the fierce emotion Longley had stirred, before composing his face into the impassivity which passed for normality with him and strode back down the stairs to his own office.
Laura Ackroyd parked her VW Golf at the back of Priestley House and took stock. On the minus side, it was getting dark and from the estate’s windswept vantage point a scatter of lights, hanging like strings of jewels across the valley, flickered in the wind beneath scudding dark clouds which were still lashing the town with showers. On the plus side, she could not see any of the roaming bands of teenagers who made the estate a threatening place for a lone female after dark. Even so, she got out of the car cautiously and activated the alarm before walking the short distance to the cluster of prefabricated huts which sheltered in the lee of the tall blocks of flats. She pulled up the collar of her coat and wrapped her pashmina more tightly around her shoulders against the biting northerly before setting off across the muddy pathway across the grass.
She had driven from the Bradfield Gazette to the Heights as soon as she had finished work in response to a summons from her grandmother. It was not like Joyce Ackroyd to ask for help and Laura had been alarmed by the unexpected tremor in her voice when she had asked Laura to collect her.
“Is everything all right, Nan?” she had asked and had not been convinced by Joyce’s evasive response.
As she approached the Project, which was where Joyce had asked to be picked up from, Laura could see that something was far from all right. The main door to the first of the prefabricated huts was swinging open and appeared to have been decorated by some sort of make-over artist in a more than normal frenzy. Red paint in loops and swirls dripped from the doors and walls and windows, still glistening even in the dim light. As she approached, Laura was not surprised to hear voices raised in anger.
Taking care not to brush against the recent redecoration, Laura stepped inside, pushed her damp and wind-blown red hair out of her eyes and drew a sharp breath. The Project, which she had described to the Gazette’s readers when it had opened six months before, was intended to bring the benefits of new technology and modern job training to the dissaffected youth on Bradfield’s most unruly estate. Fitted out with computers begged and borrowed from local companies, and staffed mainly by residents of the estate itself, it had appeared to be taming at least some of the intractable young who had been ejected from every school and college and emergency education programme in town.
“Jesus wept,” Laura said as she surveyed the devastated reception area in horror. Potted plants had been hurled over the computer on the front desk, smashing the screen and burying the keyboard in dirt, and some of the furniture had been reduced to match-wood before having what was left of the red paint poured all over it. “The little bastards,” she said, anger bubbling up inside.
She barely realised that she had spoken aloud, but a silence fell in one of the classrooms leading off the reception area and a door was quickly flung open. To her surprise she recognised the dark-haired man with an unexpected growth of beard who came into the room looking as angry as she felt herself. For a moment they gazed at each other in silence and it was Laura who regained her voice first.
“What on earth are you doing here,” she asked sergeant Kevin Mower. “I thought you were off sick.”