“Tell Michael what you’ve found,” Laura said. “He’ll have seen Atherton’s report as well by now, won’t he? And you know how much he distrusts Foreman. This is just the lead he needs.”
“Yes, I’ll talk to him later,” Mower said, although Laura thought she caught a note of reluctance in his voice. “Come up to the Heights with me, Dizzy, will you. I may need back-up.”
Laura glanced at her watch and pulled on her jacket.
“I need to get back to work. But I’ll tackle Councillor Dave Spencer about this redevelopment company. Even Ted Grant won’t be able to rubbish this story. It’s all getting very smelly indeed.”
Chapter Seventeen
Mower drove back to the Heights in silence with Dizzy B slumped in the passenger seat beside him, headphones turned up high. Neither man seemed willing to talk and Dizzy Sanderson glanced out of the car window with increasing anxiety as they approached the tall blocks of flats which were almost obscured by the driving rain. He put his Walkman away as Mower parked in the lee of Priestley House.
“This place is beginning to give me the creeps,” he said. “I reckon you have to assume you’re being watched up here — by both sides.”
“Probably,” Mower said. He glanced towards Joyce Ackroyd’s bungalow where the glass in her windows had still not been replaced, boards facing the street blindly. “If I were the drug squad I’d have video cameras up here full time. But we’re on the side of the angels, remember?”
“They might still believe you are, man,” Sanderson said. “But I reckon my credibility’s all blown away.”
Up on the walkway as they made their way towards Donna Maitland’s flat, Mower glanced down. The whole estate seemed deserted, as the rain gusted in bitter squalls across the muddy grass and the puddled car parks while the concrete of the blocks above and below them turned dark and streaky with damp. But even a casual glance convinced Mower that Sanderson was right. There were eyes which watched: here and there a curtain twitched and behind some massive dustbins he caught a flicker of movement which could have been a hooded head. But before he could focus he was distracted by Sanderson who had reached Donna’s doorway first, to find the lock broken open and the door hanging drunkenly on its hinges.
“Shit,” Mower said angrily, shouldering his way past his friend and into the living room, where a scene of devastation faced them. The television and video and anything else of value had gone, and the rest of the flat, from the bedrooms to the kitchen and bathroom, seemed have been systematically wrecked. Mower stood in the door to Emma Maitland’s room, where soft toys had been ripped up and the pretty bedcover torn and tossed on the floor, and felt tears prickle at his eyes.
“Bastards,” he muttered as Sanderson came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder as he peered at the wreckage of the child’s room.
“Her friends or ours?” Dizzy asked quietly.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t both,” Mower said, swallowing hard. “If the drug squad bust in here the neighbourhood toe-rags would be close behind to see what pickings they could find.”
“Let’s look for what we came for and then get out of here,” Sanderson said. “Though if your colleagues have been through the place the chances are they’ll have taken anything of interest.” And as they picked through the remains of Donna’s home Mower soon became convinced that Sanderson was right. No files, no computer discs, no paperwork of any kind, not so much as an electricity bill, did they find amongst Donna’s scattered belongings.
“Zilch,” Mower said at last. “It’s all been cleaned out and I don’t believe the toe-rags took her phone bills and address book any more than the drug squad took the TV and video.”
“Let’s go,” Sanderson said, his anxiety showing. “You may be able to get away with this, but I’m out on a limb here.”
“Right,” Mower said, following the DJ to the door, but before they reached it they heard a tap on the cracked glass panel and a postman, water streaming off his red and blue jacket, put his head round the drunken door, raised an eyebrow at the chaos and held out a single letter.
“Mrs. Maitland live here?” he asked.
“I’ll take it,” Mower said. The postman shrugged and moved on, leaving Mower in possession of an envelope which he ripped open without ceremony. Inside he was surprised to find a copy of a certificate from the Public Records Office in Southport. Why, he wondered, could Donna have possibly applied for a copy of Grantley Adams’s marriage lines. With Sanderson displaying signs of increasing impatience he tucked the letter away in his jacket pocket and followed him out of Donna’s wrecked home.
The two men made their way down the concrete staircase, which had been converted into a waterfall by leaks in the roof above. On the ground floor a woman stood by the glass doors, huddled into a thin mac and with a sodden scarf over her head, her face haggard and her eyes reddened with crying.
“I thought it were you,” she said to Dizzy Sanderson. “I were looking out o’t’window and saw you come over here.” That was one set of watching eyes accounted for at least, Dizzy thought, not quite recognising the mother of Stevie, the young junkie he had only seen in semi-darkness a few days before.
“Mrs Maddison? Lorraine?” Sanderson asked. “How’s Stevie?”
“That’s it,” the woman said, clutching his arm in a frantic grip. “I don’t know. I don’t know where he is. He’s run off, hasn’t he? When he heard that Donna Maitland were dead he got into a terrible state, crying, he were. I’ve not seen him cry since he were a little lad.”
“He was fond of Donna,” Sanderson said by way of explanation to Mower who was listening with some bemusement.
“She got him sorted, did Donna. He’d never have done it without her,” Lorraine said. “But he were right scared when he heard the news. Said that if they could get Donna they could get him too.”
“He thought she’d been killed?” Mower asked. “Why should he think that?”
“Don’t you?” Lorraine Maddison snapped back, verging on hysteria now. “Stevie thought they’d be coming for him next because he saw too much that night Derek died. I reckon he saw someone he knew, though he’d never tell me who. So he’s run and I reckon he’ll be the next body they find. Can you help me find him? He trusted you, Mr. Sanderson. You’re the first person he’s talked to about that night. I could never get owt out of him, not a bloody word. I need someone to help me look.”
“This is DS Kevin Mower from Bradfield police …” Sanderson began but the woman grabbed his arm and pulled him away from Mower.
“I want nowt to do wi’t’police,” she said. “I don’t trust bloody police. Look what they did to Donna. They’re either bloody fools or in wi’t’dealers themselves. Donna Maitland were t’best thing that’s happened for the kids on this estate for years, and now look where we are. I just want you to help me find Stevie, that’s all. I don’t want any trouble, just to know he’s safe. I’ve not got him off junk to see him killed now.”
Sanderson glanced at Mower, who shrugged.
“I’ll wait outside,” he said, and went out into the downpour without looking back.
Michael Thackeray lay back in his armchair with a sigh and closed his eyes as he listened to Laura clattering around the kitchen next door as she made coffee. There were times when he thought that the wall he had carefully constructed around himself over the years would prove impregnable against even Laura’s best efforts to undermine it. And there were evenings when he slid imperceptibly into a contentment he had seldom known when he got home to find Laura watching the TV news or beginning to cook a meal. He had promised half-heartedly to hone his own rudimentary domestic skills and take a share of the cooking and chores when they had moved into the new flat, but deep down lurked an unreconstructed Yorkshireman who secretly believed that everything beyond the kitchen door was a woman’s domain. Even watching his father struggle with domesticity as his mother became increasingly disabled had not convinced him that there was an obvious solution to the boredom engendered by endless meals out of cans or a frying pan slammed straight from the stove onto the table.