Joyce opened her front door.

“Come in a minute?” she asked. Laura glanced at her watch and shrugged. They had waited more than an hour for Kevin Mower to return to Donna Maitland’s flat and it was late now even by Michael Thackeray’s standards for supper at home.

“I must call Michael,” she said, pulling out her mobile. But his phone was switched off and she could only leave a message to say that she would be even later home.

“Can’t the beggar cook?” Joyce said, struggling out of her coat with inelastic difficulty. “Even my Jack could cook in an emergency, all those years ago before the war - egg and chips, any road.”

“He does sometimes,” Laura said irritably. “Don’t worry. I can pick up a take-away on the way back.”

Joyce sank into her favourite chair and Laura switched on the gas fire. She could see that her grandmother had exhausted herself but she knew better than to suggest that Joyce was doing too much to help her friends at the Project. One acerbic exchange was enough for one evening, she decided, although she knew very well that her own father was as much use in a kitchen as the proverbial bull in a china shop. What Joyce had evidently accepted as a welcome bonus from her husband during their brief marriage, she had not bothered to pass on to her fatherless son.

“Have you had your tea?” Laura asked. Joyce nodded.

“I eat early. It’s an old habit from when I used to be out at a meeting almost every night. No time for leisurely dinners then, so I never got into the habit.”

“They’re not listening to you at the town hall, are they?” Laura said. Joyce shook her head and glanced away.

“They don’t seem right interested in the Project,” she admitted. “They’d rather draw up their own grand schemes without asking anyone up here what they really want. Do you know how much Len Harvey reckons the land up here is worth on the open market? Twenty million. Just the land. You can’t believe it, can you? Even Len’s shocked and he’s a blasted Tory. I don’t think we spent more than a million tearing down the old back-to-back slums and building the whole new estate.”

“There’s no reason why they can’t build the Project into their calculations, though, is there?”

“No reason at all if they just took the trouble to ask people what they want. You’d think they’d have learned from the mistakes we made building this estate in the first place. But no, they just carry on doing good by force and then act surprised when folk don’t thank them for it.” Seeing Joyce so dispirited was almost more than Laura could bear.

“I’ll have another go at Ted Grant tomorrow and see if I can persuade him to take it all more seriously. But they’ve put him on the committee that’s planning the whole thing now, so I’m not very hopeful.”

“You could get that man of yours to take the drug problem more seriously too.”

“I’ve tried that,” Laura said. “He says it’s in hand.”

“I don’t think Donna Maitland thinks it’s in hand,” Joyce said. “A child that age with alcohol poisoning? It could just as easily been summat worse.”

“I know,” Laura said, recalling Donna’s stunned shock which they had been unable to alleviate at all. She wondered how she would cope with even more bad news from Kevin Mower.

“I’ll talk to Ted again tomorrow about my story. And if he won’t go for it, I’ll contact the magazine in London I’ve written for before. The whole thing’s getting big enough for it to go national, whatever Ted thinks.”

“You’re a good lass,” Joyce said. “I don’t know what went wrong between me and your dad, but you’ve more than made up for it, pet. You really have.”

Laura hugged her grandmother impulsively.

“It’ll be all right,” she said. “I promise.”

Chapter Eleven

“You don’t want me to handle the case then?” DCI Michael Thackeray’s question dropped into the silence in Superintendent Jack Longley’s office like a stone into deep water. When there was no immediate reply Thackeray shrugged and moved over to the window from where he could see the rain beating down onto the umbrellas of hurrying passers-by in the puddled square below. His anxiety felt like a physical weight on his shoulders. Longley shifted his bulk uneasily in the chair which never seemed quite commodious enough for him and grunted.

“What I want,” he said at length, and then paused again as if embarrassed. “What I always want is a bloody text-book murder investigation. And you just seem to have thrown the text-book away.”

“A quiet chat was all it was,” Thackeray said. “He was never a registered informant.”

“But should have been,” Longley said.

“You could argue.” The hollow feeling which had invaded Thackeray’s stomach some hours ago when he had been called to a suspicious death seemed to be affecting his breathing.

“I do bloody argue,” Longley snapped back. “He should have been registered if he was worth anything. But you’d no call to be chatting up Foreman’s staff behind his back without cause in the first place. And if you seriously thought Stanley Wilson had useful information you should have played it straight, taken someone with you, done it by the book. Now he’s dead it’ll all have to come out. You’re out on a limb, Michael, and for what? He gave you nothing and was never likely to give you anything. And now he’s dead and turns out to be a worse little scrote than we ever suspected.”

“So bring someone else in if you think I’m compromised,” Thackeray said, unable to keep his own anger, which was directed mainly at himself, under control any longer. “Appoint someone else senior investigating officer if you think it’ll help. Get the computer crime people in. It looks as if we’ll need them anyway. Sir.” The last word was added as an afterthought and Longley flushed slightly in response. But for the moment he contented himself with drumming his fingers on the file in front of him and breathing heavily.

Thackeray’s mind flashed back an hour to his first sight of the ligature around Stanley Wilson’s neck, which had been pulled so tight that it had broken the skin and become caked in blood. Amos Atherton, sweating in his plastic coveralls, had glanced up at the DCI from his position crouched beside the dead man’s body as Thackeray struggled to conceal the awful realisation that this was a noose he might have provided himself.

“Didn’t mean to make any mistake about it, did he?” Atherton had asked, oblivious to the DCI’s inner turmoil. “You don’t get many men strangled. Gay, was he?”

Thackeray, shrouded in the same oversized white coveralls as the pathologist, had nodded slightly.

“Liked young boys,” he said, his mouth dry. “Or youngish, anyway. We’d not managed to do him for it.”

“Happen one got his own back then,” Atherton said unsympathetically, glancing at the dead man’s trousers and underpants which were rumpled round his ankles. “He’s been dead a while, that I can tell you. Probably killed some time yesterday, at a guess. He’s as stiff as a board. You’ll be looking for a boyfriend, I’d say. Popped in yesterday for a bit of nookie and it all got out of hand. Into S & M was he? There’s some odd marks on his arms.”

“I’ve no bloody idea,” Thackeray had said, although he was as certain as he could be that Wilson’s violent end had more to do with his own intervention in his affairs than the dead man’s sexual preferences. His mind sheered away from the thought that perhaps Wilson had been tortured before being killed, and that the information someone had been trying to extract had something to do with him.

“How was he found?” Atherton asked.

“Postman tried to deliver a packet and when he got no reply he looked through the window,” Thackeray said shortly.

“Must have got a nasty shock seeing his bare bum in the air like that.”

Atherton turned back to his examination of the body with a grim smile and Thackeray turned away. He had already glanced round the modestly furnished living room of the terraced house where Wilson had evidently eked out a pretty impecunious existence and wondered what Barry Foreman had paid him for his services. Not a lot, if the threadbare carpet and worn brown armchairs were anything to go by. Or perhaps Wilson had other uses for his money than interior decor.