“Look at this one. Grantley Adams. Isn’t he the bloke whose son nearly killed himself wi‘drugs. ‘It’s not our policy to donate to organisations which are not long-established charities.’ These beggars are screaming for computer literate staff and here we are trying to train some of them and all we get is a kick in the teeth. What’s the matter with these people? They don’t seem to see the connection. Is it because a lot of the kids are black or junkies or what?”
“Of course it is,” Joyce said. “They’re frightened of the Heights, a lot of them. Scared witless, always have been. You give a neighbourhood a bad name and it’s impossible to get rid of.”
“But they’re going to regenerate the bloody place,” Donna said. “It’s just the bricks and mortar though, is it? No plans for regenerating the kids as well? No seeing what they can do, given a bit of help and encouragement? No chance they’ll recognise that some of us are trying to live decent lives and do summat to help the rest? Just pull the place down and get rid of as many of us as they can, is that it?”
Joyce looked weary and could offer no reassuring counter to that analysis. Increasingly she believed it was true.
Donna flung the letters back onto the desk and turned back to the computer but within ten minutes she had to switch the machine off as the Project was invaded by half-a-dozen argumentative teenage girls who only gradually agreed to settle at the desks and switch on the collection of machines which Donna had already begged and borrowed from local businesses and families when she set up the Project. But, slowly, the raucous gibes and giggling gossip subsided as the two women persuaded the youngsters to concentrate on the elementary word-processing skills which were their objective, and for an hour a sort of peace reigned.
Just before lunch-time Dizzy B Sanderson put his head round the classroom door to whoops of delight from the girls, ready for any distraction now.
“Is Kevin around?” he asked.
“Should be in any time,” Donna said.
“I’ll wait out here,” the DJ said, ducking back out of the door, to dramatic groans of disappointment from the class.
“Come on girls, finish off now. We all need a break,” Donna said. But their concentration was broken and she had difficulty controlling their restlessness. But just before she gave in and dismissed them, there was a loud crash in the outer reception area and a muffled shout seconds before the door to the classroom burst open and several men in jeans and leather jackets burst in. Several of the girls squealed in alarm and Donna reached across her desk for a mobile phone which lay underneath some papers.
“Police,” the evident leader of the group said loudly. “Everyone stay exactly where you are.”
Joyce Ackroyd pushed herself painfully to her feet from the chair at the back of the room where she had been sitting next to one of the girls.
“Can we see your identity cards, please,” she said firmly. The leading police officer glanced at her with something close to contempt and flashed a warrant card in her direction.
“And your name is?”
“DI Ray Walter, drugs squad,” he said. “Now just sit down, Gran, we’ve a warrant to search these premises.”
“Whatever for?” Joyce said, still standing.
“That’s for us to know,” the officer said. “For now I want all of you sitting exactly where you are while we look round. Then we’ll want names and addresses.”
The girl next to Joyce began to sob noisily as one of the officers picked up her bag and began to root through it. Joyce’s lips tightened and she glanced at Donna who had gone pale and tense, one hand still grasping her mobile, until one of the men noticed it and took it roughly out of her hand. Outside they could hear Dizzy B Sanderson’s voice raised in anger and then recede as if he had left, or been taken out of the building. Systematically the men began to open every cupboard, desk and drawer in the room and go through the contents. When they had finished with the classroom, one of them remained behind to watch the occupants while his colleagues moved on through the rest of the building. After ten minutes or so, DI Walter came back into the room and nodded at his colleague.
“Right,” he said. “We want you all down at the station for questioning. Now.”
With her arm round the girl whose sobs had now become hysterical Joyce stood up again.
“On what grounds?” she asked.
“On suspicion of handling Class A drugs, which were found on these premises,” Walter said.
“Are you arresting us?”
“We’ll deal with the formalities at the nick,” the DI said.
“What drugs?” Donna asked, her face like a white mask gashed by her red lipstick. “There are no drugs here. I make sure of that.”
“You telling me we don’t know a kilo of heroin when we find it?” Walter sneered. “Get real. Now let’s have you. All of you.”
From his car parked some hundred yards away from the Project, Sergeant Kevin Mower watched in fascinated horror as a procession of girls, closely followed by Donna Maitland and Joyce Ackroyd, filed out of the building and into two police vans parked with several squad cars on the road outside. He had pulled up sharply on his way to meet his own students when he had seen Dizzy B, in handcuffs, being similarly ushered out and into custody and decided that on this occasion he would forego any fraternal greetings the colleagues doing the ushering might expect from him. He recognised Ray Walter from an abortive stint he had done with the drugs squad some years earlier. He had not liked the squad or the man then and he liked him even less when he saw just how Donna was being roughly “assisted” into custody.
“Hell and damnation,” he said softly to himself as he pulled his mobile out of his pocket.
“Laura?” he asked as his call was answered. “Can you meet me at the Lamb? The shit seems to have hit the fan”
Grim-faced, DCI Michael Thackeray replaced the receiver on his desk and gazed at the two visitors who had just arrived in his office.
“They’ve been taken to Eckersley,” he said. “Apparently the drug squad’s running their operation from there. All done on a need to know basis and apparently I didn’t need to know.”
“I’ll go to Eckersley then,” Laura said angrily. “I’ll get Victor Mendelson to go down and play hell with them about Joyce. But what about the rest of them? They won’t have any big guns out on their side, will they?”
Thackeray swung round in his chair to face Kevin Mower, who was sitting as far away from his boss as he could manage and studiously avoiding catching his eye.
“What the hell have you been playing at, Kevin?” Thackeray demanded. “What was wrong with telling me what you were doing? It’s not as if it’s illegal. Or did you have some idea of what’s been going on up there? That there was likely to be a kilo of heroin stashed away in the kitchen? Did you know that? It won’t just be me asking when it becomes known you’ve been working there. They’ll want you down at Eckersley too. Tell me you were playing some devious game of your own to find the pushers and I just might believe you, but Ray Walter won’t. You can bank on that. He’ll chew you up and spit you out. Is this how you want your career to end?”
Laura and Sergeant Mower’s meeting at the Lamb had been brief. Five minutes discussion had presented them with only one course of action and they had walked across the centre of town to police headquarters together in gloomy silence to see Thackeray. The DCI had listened in increasing disbelief as Laura spelt out what little they knew before making the series of phone calls needed to discover where those arrested at the Project had been taken.
Mower gazed at his Timberlands without answering Thackeray’s tirade. Then he shrugged wearily.
“Anyone could have stashed heroin at the Project. The estate’s awash with the stuff. But I don’t believe for a moment Donna Maitland knew anything about it. She’s passionately against hard drugs. She lost her own nephew, for God’s sake. But the kids who use the place? Who knows?”