“I don’t know. But yes, in general terms you’re right. There’s a reign of terror going on up there and the drug squad seems to be compounding it rather than making it any better.”

“And then there’s Karen and the missing babies,” Laura said. “No progress there, I take it?”

“I’ve put their mother on the missing persons’ list,” Thackeray said. “Mother and babies, as it goes. And asked social security to find out if she’s picking up her child benefit and if so, where. Jack Longley would go spare if he knew how I was wasting police time but I still think there’s something deeply suspicious there. But no one I’ve mentioned it to has come up with anything concrete. She just went, without a word, and no one seems to think it even slightly odd.”

“You don’t sound very hopeful of finding them.”

“I’m not really. I’ve never underestimated Barry Foreman’s intelligence. What I got wrong was the ease with which he could take other people in, whether it’s Karen’s mum or the local establishment. He’s going to end up running this town if someone doesn’t stop him buying friends and influencing people.”

Laura ran her fingers through Thackeray’s hair gently.

“Don’t you think you’re maybe getting a bit obsessive about Foreman,” she said carefully. “You’ve got enough problems without taking on the whole of Bradfield’s great and good. You say he’s a bastard, so perhaps his girlfriend just got fed up and bunked off with her twins. If he’s as bad as you say, she’ll have taken care he won’t be able to find her, maybe.”

“I thought this sort of thing was meat and drink to journalists,” Thackeray teased her, although his heart was not in it.

“If he’s getting involved in the regeneration scheme I think that’s interesting. I’d dearly like to find out what Councillor Spencer and the rest of that committee are getting out of this project. They’ve even got Ted Grant on board now, and the only reason I can think of for inviting him in is to make sure the Gazette doesn’t ask too many questions when the contracts are handed out.”

“Jack Longley goes to those meetings too,” Thackeray said gloomily. “He doesn’t seem to have picked up anything dodgy and he’s got a nose like a ferret.”

“Well, I expect they’d make sure they kept anything dubious away from him. I get the feeling that some of that committee are in the know and others are there as window-dressing.”

“Or could it just be that this is a pot and kettle job?” Thackeray asked. “You don’t like Spencer any more than I like Foreman. Maybe we’re both letting our emotions cloud our judgement.”

“Maybe,” Laura said, getting to her feet and stretching lazily. “Anyway, with the Beck about to flood the town and your murder case, plus the mayhem on the Heights, a little bit of council corruption’ll have to go on the back burner for now, won’t it? It’s getting to the stage where Ted’s going to have us in the office twenty-four-seven. I’m going to bed. I’m whacked.”

A short time later, when Thackeray slipped into bed beside, as he thought, a sleeping Laura, she turned towards him and slid her arms around him, running her hands down to his hips and pressing her body into his, with predictable effects.

“Don’t let all this stuff get between us,” she murmured.

“It’d be difficult just now,” he said, kissing her neck and ears. “I just want to keep you safe. You know that.”

“Life’s an unsafe enterprise, or else it’s very, very dull.”

“Keep Joyce here where we can keep an eye on her is all I’m saying,” he said, cupping her left breast so that he could kiss that next. “And let’s hope she sleeps soundly because this bloody bed creaks.”

Chapter Sixteen

It only became clear the next day, after fire officers and police had begun to work their way through the smouldering rubble, and Bradfield Infirmary had patched up half a dozen young men sufficiently to allow detectives to talk to them, that the fire which gutted the Carib Club was the cause and not the result of the Chapel Street riot. Laura Ackroyd and Bob Baker arrived together at the scene of the previous night’s disturbance, in unlikely partnership at the insistence of their editor who for once seemed almost overwhelmed by the pace of events. The irony of one section of the town threatened with inundation and another burning was not lost on Laura who gazed in dismay at the still smouldering ruin of the club, a couple of wrecked and gutted cars and a fire-engine, like a beached whale, with its tyres slashed.

“Didn’t they have a lovely time?” Bill Baker said.

“It was an arson waiting to happen,” Laura said, stepping cautiously over broken glass and half bricks scattered across the roadway where Jeremy Adams had been run down. “The last time I was here someone set a fire against the door. Leaving the place empty for a week or so was asking for trouble.”

“Licensing a club like this so close to Aysgarth Lane was asking for trouble, actually,” Baker said.

“You’d accept a no-go area, would you? Here? Or on the Heights, maybe? That’s exactly what the drug gangs want,” Laura said, but she did not wait for a response. On the other side of the police cordon she saw a dishevelled looking Darryl Redmond, one hand bandaged, being helped out of the remains of the entrance by Dizzy B Sanderson. Behind them she could see fire officers sifting through the blackened interior of the club.

“Look,” she said to Baker. “I’ll talk to the owner again, as I’ve already interviewed him. Why don’t you see what you can get from the fire service and the cops. There’s Val Ridley over there looking as if she’s not keen to get her hands dirty. You know Ted wanted a definitive piece for the front page an hour ago.” And before Baker could object to this allocation of responsibilities, which she knew he would if he could think of a reason quickly enough, she waved at Redmond and Sanderson and picked her way across the rubble strewn street to meet them.

“I’m sorry,” she said to the club owner. “What a mess.”

“Ah, miz reporter,” Redmond said. “I told you last time we needed more protection here from those mad Pakis raving on about girls in mini-skirts and satanic music. You’d think Asian kids never went to clubs or sold drugs, the way they talk. But the police don’ seem to have paid any mind to me. They couldn’t even get a fire engine close enough to make a difference. They might as well ’a’bin pissing on the fire for all the good they did.” He waved an angry hand at the crippled appliance further down the street.

“By the time they got hose pipes up and running the fire was out of control,” Sanderson said. “The little bastards pelted the first crew with stones and bottles. They couldn’t get near. The place is a write-off.”

“Six years of my life up in smoke,” Redmond said gloomily.

“Weren’t you insured?” Laura asked, and then wished she hadn’t. Redmond looked at her pityingly.

“What good’s that?” he said. “The building is ‘structurally unsound’, according to the firemen. It’ll have to come down - so you lose the kids for months, p’raps years, while you put the place together again and expect them to come back when you reopen? No way. No chance. The Carib’s dead, which is what the men in pyjamas wanted anyway. I reckon they were inciting the kids to cause trouble here.”

Laura glanced at the blackened wall facing the street and at the only windows, gaping holes in the brickwork now, at second story level above them.

“It was a petrol bomb, was it?” she asked. “It must have been someone with ambitions to play cricket for Yorkshire to get one through those windows.”

Redmond shrugged again.

“They got different theories,” he said. Laura glanced at Dizzy B, for further explanation.

“I had a talk with one of the fire service investigators,” he said. “It doesn’t look as if it was a petrol bomb at all. The seat of the fire’s at the back of the building.”