“Craig Leaward. Top floor,” he said.
“Were you out last night?”
“Around,” the boy croaked. “Just around.”
“Did you see anyone up on the third floor, where Donna Maitland lived? Late on, midnight maybe?” The boy’s eyes flickered momentarily and Mower knew that he had struck gold, though extracting it might be impossible. He bunched his fist and the boy’s eyes widened in fear.
“Who was here, Craig? I need to know.”
“I can’t tell you that, man,” Craig whispered hoarsely, and Mower relaxed the pressure on his throat slightly in response. “You know I can’t tell you that.”
“Was it the man they call Ounce? Is he the main man up here when you want some gear?”
But Craig’s eyes merely widened in terror and Mower knew that he could not break the vicious circle of intimidation and fear which controlled the estate so easily. He released the boy and turned away in disgust while Craig pulled his jacket straight and scuttled up the stairs without a backward glance.
Laura’s frustrations had grown all day. With the office in turmoil all around her as the water levels in the Beck had threatened to spill over the concrete banks which protected the low-lying houses in the valley to the west of the town centre, she had found it difficult to contact Councillor Dave Spencer at the Town Hall. And when she finally tracked him down he seemed abstracted.
“Nothing’s been decided in that sort of detail yet,” he said dismissively when she asked him about the future of the Project. “We’re waiting for government approval for the whole regeneration area. Not that I think there’ll be any difficulties, but it’s early days yet. Lots of detail to be sorted out, financial ends to tie up, the building consortium appointed. You can’t get something as big as this off the ground overnight, you know.”
“So no thoughts on what’s happened to the Project over the last few days?”
“You know I can’t comment on a police investigation,” Spencer said. “If you want an off-the-record opinion, I’d be looking to get my grandma out of there sharpish. But from what I’ve heard about Joyce, I’ve no doubt the Ackroyds think they know their own business best.”
Laura had hung up quickly before the angry comment which sprang to her lips escaped and did her career no favours.
“Shit,” she said under her breath as she struggled to concoct the couple of paragraphs Ted Grant had asked for. But by the end of the afternoon Joyce had raised her anxiety levels to new heights in a single phone call.
“Can you come up, love?” Joyce asked and Laura knew immediately from the quaver in her voice that something was seriously wrong. “Some beggar’s put a brick through the window,” Joyce said, so quietly that Laura could barely hear her.
As soon as she could get away from the office she drove to the Heights, leaving a stream of irate drivers hooting in her wake as she cut corners and chanced her luck with changing traffic lights across the town centre and up the hill to Wuthering. She parked outside her grandmother’s bungalow with a squeal of brakes and realised before she even got out of the car that Joyce had played down exactly what had happened. Not just one, but as far as Laura could see, every one of Joyce’s windows had been systematically broken, and the walls daubed with red painted obscenities.
“Bastards, bastards, bastards,” she said aloud as she pushed open the front door, where even that small glass pane had been splintered and crazed by a heavy blow. In the living room Joyce seemed a shrunken figure, sitting alone in her armchair by the gas fire, shivering and on the verge of tears.
Laura took her in her arms for a moment, trying to control her own seething anger as the tears began to flow down Joyce’s cheeks.
“When did this happen?” Laura asked at last, glancing round at the shards of glass which lay strewn around the room.
“I went up to the Project just to fetch some books. I was going to help some of the lasses with their reading down here. I wasn’t away more than half an hour,” Joyce said.
“You shouldn’t have walked so far,” Laura said, knowing how much of a struggle the short trip must have been.
“I can’t stop here all the time, pet,” Joyce said, scrubbing her eyes dry with a tissue. “I’ll go barmy. I need to see folk.”
“Have you called the police?”
“The community bobby called in about ten minutes ago. He gave me the name of a glazier to get the windows boarded up till they can be mended properly. But I hadn’t the heart.”
“Give me the number. I’ll sort it,” Laura said. She went into the small kitchen and cleared glass splinters off the worktop so that she could make tea. The back door, out of sight of the street, had been kicked almost off its hinges, she discovered. While Joyce sipped her tea she called the emergency glazing company and arranged for them to board up the house.
“You’re coming home with me,” she said flatly when Joyce protested. “You can’t stay here. If you’d been in the house you could have been killed with all this glass flying around. Even when the windows are mended there’s no guarantee they won’t be back for another go.” Still consumed by anger, she went into her grandmother’s bedroom and bundled as many of her possessions as she could into the suitcase which she knew she kept under her bed.
“What do you want to take from here?” she asked as she went back into the living room. Joyce looked at her with a sort of dazed fear which broke Laura’s heart.
“My photographs,” she said, nodding at the collection of framed family snapshots which she kept on her mantelpiece. “I’d not like them lost.” Laura collected up the pictures of her parents, of the grandfather she had never known, and several of herself as a child and a young woman, and piled them into the case. This is what it must be like to be a refugee, suddenly forced by brute violence to shovel a lifetime into a suitcase and flee, she thought. That Joyce should be reduced to this filled her with horrified rage.
As she helped her grandmother on with her coat, a knock at the front door set her heart thumping but when she glanced out of the shattered window, where the rain had already soaked the curtains, she was relieved to see Kevin Mower and Dizzy B Sanderson on the doorstep. She let them in quickly.
“We saw your car,” Mower said. “And then the rest.” He glanced around the room angrily. “Who the hell did this?” he asked, glancing anxiously at Joyce who offered the faintest of smiles.
“I wish I knew,” Laura said, clinging to Mower’s arm for a moment.
“Seems to me you’ve got real trouble up here,” Sanderson said. “Tearaways out of control.”
“This isn’t random,” Laura said. “Someone’s got it in for Joyce …” She stopped and wondered if maybe she too was part of the target. “I’m taking Joyce home with me until we can get this place cleared up,” she said.
“The boss’ll love that,” Mower said, with a wry smile.
“I’ll not stop long, pet,” Joyce said with an attempt at her usual fierceness. “Just while they patch up the windows.”
“Well, we’ll have to see about that,” Laura mumbled. Outside they heard a heavy vehicle rumble to a stop. The men had arrived to make the bungalow safe, or as safe, Laura thought, as it was ever likely to be again which would not be safe enough. Though whether she could convince her grandmother of that, she very much doubted.
Chapter Fifteen
When Laura had driven Joyce away, the two men sat in Mower’s car for a moment watching the men in overalls board up the windows of Joyce’s tiny home. Along the row of old-people’s dwellings, an occasional curtain twitched and a pale, frightened face peeped out.
“I’m not having this,” Mower said suddenly, swinging himself out of the car again. Sanderson followed reluctantly. But when they began knocking at the doors of Joyce Ackroyd’s neighbours they met the same frozen stares and shaken heads that they had already encountered on the walkways of Priestley House. It was as if mental doors had been slammed, bolted and barred, and nothing Mower suggested in the way of encouragement persuaded any of them to open again. The elderly neighbours had seen nothing, and he knew that even if they had they would not tell him. They were too afraid.