“I’ve done everything I can officially, guv,” he said. “I can see you think I’ve lost it. But there’s something wrong with Donna’s death. I’ll let you know when I’ve found out what it is.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Donna Maitland’s just another of the losers up there, isn’t she?” Ted Grant leaned back in his executive chair easily next morning and offered Laura Ackroyd what passed in his lexicon for a smile of sympathy. “You can’t make a bloody heroine out of her now, Laura.”
“But that’s exactly what we did make her six months ago,” Laura said, spreading a copy of her feature on the opening of the Project in front of the editor. “You even wrote an editorial about her saying she was just the sort of feisty, enterprising person the Heights needed to pull itself out of the mire. People ready to make an effort instead of waiting for the State to provide, don’t you remember? Don’t you think our readers deserve some sort of explanation now she’s dead?”
“I don’t suppose our readers will remember a word we said about her,” Grant said airily. “Anyway, she’s obviously run right off the rails since then.” He spun his chair round sharply on its castors and projected himself with remarkable speed for a heavy man towards the door of his office.
“Bob!” he bellowed across the newsroom. “Spare us a minute, lad, will you?” Bob Baker appeared in the doorway at a velocity to rival the editor’s.
“This Maitland woman,” Grant said. “What’s the score with the police?”
“Not looking for anyone else in connection with the death,” Baker said. He glanced at Laura and smirked. “And you know what that means. Off the record, they seem pretty sure she’d been turning a blind eye to what some of the kids she was supposed to be setting on the straight and narrow were really up too. And she couldn’t hack it when the drug squad fingered her. But I don’t suppose we’ll ever know the truth of it now she’s topped herself.”
“Who told you that?” Laura asked. “It’s not the way I hear it.”
Baker tapped his nose and grinned at the editor.
“Sources, my love, sources. Maybe mine are better than yours.”
“According to Laura, she doesn’t have any police sources,” Grant said, his eyes sharp with malice. “Nowt so much as a comment on the state of the traffic on the Aysgarth Lane roundabout ever passes the Detective Chief Inspector’s lips. Allegedly.”
Baker shrugged.
“I’ll let you know if anything new develops, boss,” he said.
“So that’s a no then, is it?” Laura asked the editor.
“Of course it’s a bloody no,” Grant said. “You can’t pretend the woman was never arrested, and from what Bob says, was highly likely to be charged. Even if she wasn’t into drugs herself she knew the sort of kids she was dealing with. It was down to her to keep tabs on the little beggars when they were on the premises, wasn’t it? That’s the law. I’ve told you before. Zero tolerance is what the Heights needs, and if that’s what the drug squad is doling out now then that’s fine by me, and by the readers, if the letters we get are owt to go by. Donna Maitland slipped up and couldn’t face the consequences, which would likely have been a spell in jail. End of story.”
Her face set, Laura folded up the paper, from which Donna Maitland’s photograph smiled out with the optimism of six months before. Whatever demons had driven Donna to take the course she had taken, she thought, they had left little room for her reputation to be redeemed.
“Give us a couple of pars on what’s likely to happen to the Project now she’s gone,” Ted Grant conceded unexpectedly as Laura got up to go. “As I hear it, it’s not got much of a future once the redevelopment gets under way. Barry Foreman and Dave Spencer’ve got other plans for education and training up there. Summat a bit less amateur. You should be pleased about that.”
“Barry Foreman’s an expert on these things now, is he?” Laura snapped.
“He’s not daft, isn’t Barry,” Grant said. “That business of his seems to be growing by leaps and bounds. He’s got money to burn and he might as well put a bit of it back into summat useful. You and your lefty friends should approve of that.”
“Me and my lefty friends might just be a tad suspicious where the money’s coming from before accepting it,” Laura shot back tartly. “You’d think there’d been enough dodgy donations to political projects recently to persuade even Dave Spencer to take care.”
“Bright lad, that,” Ted said. “The next Tony Blair, I shouldn’t wonder. He’ll go far.”
“One way or another,” Laura said, under her breath, recalling her grandmother’s fury at the council leader’s equivocations.
“Get a quote out of him, any road. But keep it short. I’ve not got space to spare for sob stories from the Heights just now. They want to think themselves lucky up there. At least they’ll be keeping their feet dry. They’ve got flood warnings out at Lane End. If this rain doesn’t stop soon we’ll have half the town under water by the weekend.”
“Right,” Laura said. She went back to her desk and binned the back copy of the Gazette she had culled from the archives to refresh her memory about the launch of the apparently now doomed Project. It had seemed to promise so much to the kids on the Heights, but after the events of the last few days she had no doubt that the efforts Donna and Joyce had been making to secure its financial future would run into the sand. No one would want to be associated with an enterprise tainted by violence and fingered by the drug squad. Her grandmother, she knew, would be heart-broken by the loss of Donna and what could well be her last effort on the Heights. She glanced out of the windows at the leaden skies and the relentless rain which was beating against the building and threatening to engulf Bradfield’s narrow valley. If the Project died with Donna, she thought, hope for the Heights would likely die too. And Joyce would find that hard to bear.
On the rain-swept upper walkway of Priestley House, Kevin Mower pulled up his collar and banged hard on the door of the flat two doors along from Donna Maitland’s. He had already tried the six doors before Donna’s and raised only a whey-faced young mother clutching a screaming baby and a night-worker irate at being roused from his morning’s rest. Neither had heard anything suspicious during the night, they had told Mower irritably. One slept the sleep of exhaustion and the other had been on the other side of town at work. Neither of them knew Donna except by sight. Neither evinced either interest or concern at their neighbour’s death. Mower was beginning to think that he really was chasing ghosts of his own imagining, as Michael Thackeray had suggested, rather than anything more substantial. Except for the two small niggling facts which had been enough to launch him on his solo investigations that afternoon.
He had woken from a restless sleep very early and stood at the back window of his flat gazing down at the scruffy garden where his downstairs neighbour’s German Shepherd dog was already snuffling along the muddy tracks he had worn around the boundary fence. Barely able to see the loping animal in the grey dawn light as it nosed around bushes beaten down by the rain and left its mark at regular intervals, he had gone over and over in his mind what he had observed when he had discovered Donna’s body. He knew that there was something wrong with what he had found at the flat, but also recognised that he had been far too distraught to be thinking clearly or professionally at the time. There was a lot of sense in the police rule that officers should not work on cases where they had any personal involvement. Even so he did not think he was letting his imagination run away with him, as the DCI obviously believed. If anything the bitter anger which consumed him had sharpened up his brain. Something about Donna’s death rang false and it was not just his conviction that she would not have despaired that night— when there was still so much to fight for on Emma’s behalf as well as her own - which convinced him that he had missed some vital piece of information when he had broken into the flat.