“Yeah?” he asked.

“Sorry?” Laura said.

“Who are you?” the self-appointed gate-keeper demanded, barring Laura’s way with a faint smile and unfriendly eyes.

“I’m looking for my grandmother. She works here,” Laura said, attempting without success to sidle past her interrogator.

“Grandma?” The expression was incredulous now.

“Joyce,” Laura insisted. “Can I come in please?”

“Oh, that grandma,” the man said. “So you must be Laura?”

“If it’s any business of yours,” Laura said, feeling her temper, already reduced to the shortest of fuses by her morning in the office, flare again.

“You’d better go through then.”

“Who are you anyway?” Laura insisted. “What business is it of yours?”

“You remember that old TV programme called Minder? That’s what I am - a minder. Name’s Pound. I’m with Barry Foreman who’s paying your grandma and her friends a visit, as it goes. Dodgy area, this. You should know that, girl.”

“Oh, sod off,” Laura said, pushing her way past her tormentor. “I’ve had enough of bloody men for one day.”

“So it’s true what they say about redheads, then?”

Laura ignored the final jibe from behind her and, following the sound of voices, made her way across the refurbished, if still slightly scarred, reception area and into the main classroom where she found Joyce sitting at the teacher’s desk with Kevin Mower at her shoulder. A smartly suited Barry Foreman sprawled across a table in front of them, listening to Joyce in full flow with a condescending smile on his face. He glanced at Laura without great surprise when she came in, before turning back to Joyce.

“It’s much more important to get the local folk behind you themselves if you want to make any long-term difference to these families,” Joyce was saying. “It’s not the same if you just drop facilities in their lap. It has to be something they need and want. They have to be involved.”

“We’ll still be waiting for this lot to get involved come the next bloody millennium,” Foreman said dismissively when she had finished. “Any road, there won’t be so many of your precious deprived families up here when we’ve finished rebuilding the place. What the new community’ll need is a purpose built college with all the trimmings.”

“Which’ll throw the most difficult kids out just like all the others have done,” Kevin Mower said quietly.

“And you’ve turned these kids lives around, have you?” Foreman asked. “Sent ’em all off to the university and all that? Not what I hear.”

“We’ve got half a dozen of them into rehab,” Mower said. “That’s worth the effort. And some of them are learning something for the first time in their lives. It’s a slow process …”

“Too bloody slow,” Foreman said. “You’ve not got the resources to make any serious difference. Nor the staff. What’s a copper like you wasting his time up here for, any road? You’re not a bloody teacher. You should be out chasing villains.”

Laura saw Mower’s expression harden and she wondered whether he had told Donna yet about his day job.

“We’ll not agree, Mr. Foreman,” Joyce said. “I dare say Councillor Spencer and his new cabinet will have to decide which way to go. But we’ll make a strong case for a voluntary centre when we see him. You can be sure of that. Money’s all very well, but it’s not everything. People are important too.”

“Aye, well, we’ll see about that,” Foreman said.

He slid off the desk and made his way to the classroom door.

“Don’t hold your breath,” he said as he went out and was joined by the tall figure of his bodyguard who had been lounging against the wall outside.

“That man is a bastard,” Laura said, giving first Joyce and then Mower a fierce hug of consolation. “If he thinks he’s running the town, what chance do ordinary people have?”

“The DCI doesn’t trust him further than he can throw him,” Mower said. “Yet he seems to have got onto some sort of inside track with the council. I don’t understand it.”

“Have you told Donna that you’re in the Force?” Laura asked. “Because I don’t give much for your chances there if you haven’t. It’ll be all round the estate shortly.”

“I told her last night when I got back,” Mower said. “She wasn’t best pleased. She couldn’t come in today because she’s gone to fetch Emma home from the Infirmary, but it’s maybe just as well. I don’t think Donna and I are much of a team any more.”

“I’m sorry,” Laura said.

“You don’t have to be. There was no future in it and I think we both knew that.”

“Nothing seems to be going right up here,” Laura said. “I came up to tell you that I can’t persuade Ted Grant to do much about the problems on the estate. Floods are his top priority this week. Apparently the Beck’s going to burst its banks, the Maze will back up and half the lower part of the town’s going to be under water by the end of the week.”

“The Beck?” Mower asked, looking blank.

“Ah, you can tell you’re an off-cum-d’un,” Joyce said, smiling.

“A what …?”

“A stranger, not a local, a bloody southerner,” Laura explained with a grin. “What you probably don’t realise is that there’s a river runs right under the centre of Bradfield. Or a big stream, anyway. Comes down from the hills and joins the Maze at Eckersley. But some bright Victorian decided it got in the way of his regeneration scheme in about 1860 and shoved the whole thing into an underground culvert. Pushed up land values a treat, I dare say. Nothing changes, does it? Anyway according to the environment people, the culvert isn’t going to take the strain when all the rain we’ve been having runs off the Pennines and no one knows quite what’ll happen then. There’ll be a lot of water sloshing about, anyway, and Ted Grant is issuing the troops with their Wellie boots, just in case.”

“It flooded once back in the forties,” Joyce said. “But they deepened the culvert and it was supposed to take anything after that.”

“But not global warming,” Laura said. “No one anticipated that.”

“Aye, well, there’s a lot to be said for living on a hill, even if it is Wuthering,” Joyce said. “One thing we won’t need up here is Noah’s Ark.”

No, Laura thought angrily, but you might need the cavalry before long.

Michael Thackeray and DC Val Ridley - acting sergeant in Kevin Mower’s absence - sat in Barry Foreman’s comfortable office later that afternoon listening to the security boss’s dismissive description of an employee so incompetent that it seemed to Val Ridley a wonder that he had been employed at all. Foreman fingered through the buff file on his desk.

“I’d have sacked him but his dad did me a favour years ago, lent me some money when I was setting up. I’m not generally a sentimental sort of bloke but I felt I owed Stanley. But I always thought there was summat a bit odd about him. Gay, of course. You’ll know that, I expect?”

Thackeray nodded non-commitally.

“Good enough at his job, though, was he?” he asked.

“Good enough. It was only a bit of low level accounting he did. Clerking really. Seemed to be enough for him. He never complained. Of course he’d no family to support. He wouldn’ t have, would he, being that way inclined?”

“Was he liked in the office?”

“Give over,” Foreman said. “They’re not right politically correct, the sort of lads I employ. They put up with Stanley. Made his life a misery now and then with their shirt-lifter cracks. What d’you expect?”

“Protection?” Val Ridley said. “From his boss?” Foreman looked at her for a moment with contempt.

“He were lucky to have the job. He knew that, I knew that and everyone else in the bloody company knew that. He didn’t ask for any favours and he didn’t get any. Tell me the police are any different and I’ll die laughing.”

“And his pay? How much was that?” Thackeray asked.

“I’ll get a computer print-out for you,” Foreman said. “He did some overtime sometimes. Mind I did sometimes think he must be making a bit on the side somehow. Took some exotic holidays now and again, did Stanley. Thailand a couple of times. Goa. Odd, that.”