“I’m fed up to the back teeth with all the lies and deceit,” Althea Adams said. “At first it was just cutting corners. I knew all about that even before I married him. I did work for him, after all.”
“As an accountant? I remember you saying …?”
“I did his books when the firm was still quite small,” she said. “He never missed the main chance, even then. But now …”
“You’re a director of City Ventures, aren’t you? Using your maiden name? Althea Simpson?”
“You worked that out, did you? Yes, it’s all a cover of course, women standing in for their men. We don’t actually do anything, you understand. Just meet now and again as a board to rubber stamp whatever the blokes have decided.”
“Like Karen Bailey stands in for Barry Foreman?”
“And Jane Peace, Jim Baistow’s married daughter. The men on the board are the apparatchiks — company secretary, finance director and so on, but we four women are there representing other people, though Karen wasn’t at the last meeting we had. Nominees, I suppose you could call us. Grantley persuaded me it’s not illegal — just a convenience, he said, so that things didn’t get muddled.”
“Muddled” was one way of putting it, Laura thought, as she looked at the list of City Ventures’ directors that she and Kevin Mower had downloaded from the Internet. Muddled, she thought, was not the word she would have chosen to describe the links between the committee members planning the redevelopment of the Heights and the building company which looked likely to be selected to do the work.
“So who’s Annie Costello?”
“Oh, she’s Dave Spencer’s girlfriend.”
“Councillor Spencer?”
“The same,” Althea Adams said. “Which is when I decided that I wanted out. You could end up in prison for less.”
“I expect you could,” Laura said.
“And it’d be no good pleading ignorance because we all knew bloody well what was going on. And who was going to get the contract to regenerate the Heights. That was it as far as I’m concerned. I’m not going to jail for that gang of crooks.”
“So what will you do now?”
“I’ve had it up to here with Grantley and his schemes. I’ve had my bags packed for weeks just waiting for the moment to leave. Jeremy can stay here but I’ll take the girls with me. I think the moment’s come, don’t you? What will the Gazette pay me for my story do you think? Or do I have to go to the Globe in London?”
“I’d make it DCI Thackeray first, if I were you,” Laura said. “When you’ve given me chapter and verse for the Gazette, of course.”
Michael Thackeray gazed at Kevin Mower, slumped in his office looking just as unkempt as the last time he had seen him, and wondered whether Superintendent Longley might not have been right to turn down flat his request for Mower to rejoin CID immediately. The sergeant inspired no confidence in his boss although Thackeray had tried to persuade Jack Longley that it would be preferable, now that it had been decided to treat Donna Maitland’s death as suspicious, to have him back on board rather than careering around the Heights like a white knight looking for a dragon to slay.
“You know someone’s trashed Donna’s flat, don’t you?” Mower asked angrily. “Looks like the drug squad went in there with an enforcer and the locals finished the place off. Your crime scene’s as good as wrecked. We’ll never get a result there now.”
“I’ll talk to Ray Walter about what they found,” Thackeray said. “Amos is not one hundred per cent certain we’re dealing with murder here. She could have cut her own wrist with a knife.”
“A knife that dematerialised? There was no knife in that bathroom, guv,” Mower said flatly. “No trail of blood from anywhere else. And the light was out. You don’t slash your own wrists in the bath in the pitch dark. That’s what bugged me at first — I switched the light on when I went in and didn’t realise till later what I’d done. What about the toxicology? How many sleeping pills had she taken?”
“Amos says she must have been pretty heavily sedated,” Thackeray said.
“So what more do you want? She didn’t kill herself. I knew that from the very beginning.”
“Kevin, you’re too involved in this to make any sort of judgement …”
“Yeah, yeah,” Mower said wearily. “I know you don’t think I’m off the booze but I am, you know. That’s all history.”
“You’ll be OK when you have your medical, then, won’t you? But that isn’t what’s worrying Jack Longley anyway. You were emotionally involved with Donna Maitland. That’s a good enough reason for keeping you off the case. We want you as a witness on this one, Kevin, not an investigating officer. So my advice to you is to use the couple of weeks you’ve got left on leave to get yourself fit so you sail through the medical …” Thackeray hesitated, aware of the anger in Mower’s dark eyes. He did not want to provoke him into doing or saying anything terminally stupid.
“So no one can come up with any excuse not to take me back, you mean?”
“I don’t think anyone’s looking for excuses,” he said. “But you need to show you can cope.”
“And in the meantime, I sit on my backside while you decide how much energy to put into finding the toe-rag who killed Donna? Whatever the drug squad thinks, she was a good woman. She didn’t deserve what was happening to her. Ask anyone on the Heights.”
Thackeray suppressed the sudden spurt of anger which threatened to overwhelm him too.
“You know we’ll put in exactly the same amount of effort into clearing up Donna’s death as anyone else’s.” His voice crackled like ice and Mower knew he had overstepped the mark.
“I didn’t mean …” He shrugged. “Sorry.”
“In the meantime, there is some good news,” Thackeray said, changing the subject abruptly. “It looks as if we may be able to pin something on that bastard Barry Foreman at last, with what you and Laura unearthed about his business dealings with the council, and some unexplained payments Val Ridley turned up on Stanley Wilson’s bank records. Bonuses, in theory, but I reckon it’s much more likely that Foreman’s been bankrolling Wilson’s porno empire. I think Foreman has access to far more cash than his legitimate activities could possibly support and he’s been syphoning it off into other activities, legal and illegal. It may take months to track his dealings down, but at least we’ve got a lead now.”
“Still no sign of our unexpected company director Karen Bailey, though?”
“No sign of Karen, no sign of her twins.”
“It might be an idea to keep an eye on Foreman,” Mower said carefully. “In my spare time, guv.”
“What you do in your spare time, Kevin, is entirely up to you,” Thackeray said, equally non-committal. “You’re on leave, after all.”
It was not until the sergeant had closed the door behind him that Thackeray relaxed and smiled quietly to himself, a small satisfied smile which broadened when he answered his phone a few seconds later to be told that Mrs. Althea Adams was in reception, anxious to make a statement about her husband’s business affairs. But foremost in his mind was another question he wanted to ask her: just how long was it since Mrs. Adams and her fellow directors of City Ventures had seen Karen Bailey. In spite of his gnawing anxieties about Laura, this was turning out to be a good day after all, he decided. And not before time.
The hair on the back of Dizzy B’s neck prickled and his throat tightened. He was sitting in his car, parked on the main approach to the Heights, watching through a rainstreaked windscreen as a group of hooded boys and young men congregated under the shelter of the walkways close to the entrance to Priestley house. It was only seven-thirty in the evening but pitch dark as squalls of wind threw icy rain against the doors and the whole vehicle shuddered under the impact. The few streetlights which still worked lit the roadway and the grassy approach to the flats, but dimly. The car’s lights were off and he was pretty sure that the gang would not see him. But only pretty sure. As they milled around and some appeared to look in his direction he slid down in his seat, making himself as invisible as possible. It would be ironic, he thought, if one of the sudden surges of destructive energy such groups were prone to fixed on an unwisely parked car and he found himself the focus of a random attack on his wheels. Unwary drivers on Wuthering regularly found their tyres slashed, windows shattered or their vehicles reduced to a heap of twisted and burnt metal if the mood took some of the local kids. But he suspected that the group he was watching had other things on their mind. They looked as if they were waiting for something or someone. He fingered his mobile phone, knowing he might need back-up and very aware that the little he could call on might not save him if things turned ugly.