“OK. Call your boss and summon up the armed response vehicles,” Dizzy said wearily, rolling a spliff as he watched Mower pull out his mobile phone. “What’s another dead kid on the Heights?”
“Let’s get out of here,” Mower said when he had finished his call. “You don’t want to be around when they start searching for Stevie, and I don’t think I do either.”
As they walked back to their cars Sanderson glanced back up the hill towards the entrance to Priestley House, which now lay silent and deserted.
“Did you see the BMW?”
“I saw the driver too,” Mower said. “He was just leaving as I came past. He’s one of ours, Dizzy. I recognised him. He’s the drug squad undercover man, best left strictly alone.”
“Tall black dude, driving a Beamer? Very nice.”
“If he’s got himself in with the suppliers he could be driving a Roller.”
“Check it out, Kevin,” Dizzy said. “You know it stinks.” Mower shrugged and made another call on his mobile, dictating the registration number Sanderson had written on his hand to someone at the other end.
“Right, thanks,” he said eventually when he had evidently acquired the information he wanted. He glanced at his friend who was leaning against his own car still smoking.
“It’s registered to Barry Foreman,” Mower said. “And if I don’t tell my guv’nor that, I’m as good as dead.”
Chapter Nineteen
“I don’t think my business affairs are anything to do with you or the Bradfield Gazette, Ms Ackroyd.” Annie Costello, general manager of the Three Ridings Housing Association tapped an immaculately manicured scarlet fingernail insistently on her crescent shaped desk and glanced slightly impatiently at the screen saver on her computer which was twirling languidly in front of her. “But I can assure you that if I were to be appointed as a director of a company it would be on my own merits, not as the nominee of anybody else. I’m not married, not even divorced, and I can assure you that any career decisions I make are entirely my own. I should imagine you’d say the same.”
Annie Costello raised a faintly amused eyebrow, disturbing for a moment the perfect symmetry of her near professionally made-up ivory and gold features. She was, Laura thought, a unnervingly attractive woman, dark-haired and blue eyed and with an elegance, impeccably set off by black suit, cream shirt and heels, which made Laura, in cords, boots and a heavy waterproof jacket suitable for flood watch, her damp hair clinging in copper strands to her forehead, feel terminally scruffy.
“So the fact that you’re a director of a firm bidding for a contract which your partner is involved in awarding is entirely coincidental?” Laura said, rather more truculently than she intended.
“If you know that City Ventures has a bid in you know more than I do,” Annie Costello said, her voice frigid with dislike. “As far as I am aware tenders haven’t even been asked for yet. There’s a long way to go.”
“Councillor Spencer would keep you up to date on that, would he?”
“Dave Spencer and I are busy people pursuing careers that are parallel but not linked. We don’t waste the little time we spend together discussing the day’s work, I can assure you. We’ve better things to do.” Annie Costello’s expression implied that she doubted very much whether Laura could be so blessed.
“Even when it might be to your financial advantage?” Laura pressed sweetly though she recognised a blank wall when she hit one, especially as it was not the first she had crashed her head against today. In the very short time she had persuaded Ted Grant to give her to investigate what she was convinced was a major case of corruption, Annie Costello had turned out to be her only hope of adding anything to what Althea Adams had told her the previous day. When she had called Barry Foreman inquiring after the whereabouts of Karen Bailey, she had been met with a spitting, obscene fury, all urbanity thrown aside, which frightened her. She would not, she had decided, tell Michael Thackeray just how offensive the security boss had been about her personally and her partner indirectly. The fact that he seemed to know far more than he should about their relationship terrified her and she knew it would infuriate Thackeray.
And to add to her woes, she had discovered quite easily that Jane Peace, the fourth member of the quartet of women directors at City Ventures and daughter of another of Bradfield’s major wheelers and dealers, now lived in Southport and was in any case on holiday in the Bahamas. Annie Costello, cool, high-powered and contemptuously dismissive, remained her only hope.
“Isn’t there a conflict of interest anyway, if you run a major housing association and play a major role in running a local construction company as well?” Laura asked. “Do City Ventures build houses for this company too?”
Just for a second Annie Costello’s response was not immediate and she glanced away. Laura knew she had scored a hit, but the respite was brief and Costello came back, all guns blazing.
“You do realise that if you put any of these lurid fantasies into the Gazette the next place we’ll meet will be the libel court?” she asked. “And believe me, the damages would not be small. Quite enough, I should think, to see your career washed down the plug-hole. I’m really quite surprised that Ted Grant lets you out on a so-called assignment like this without a nanny. You really do seem to be out of your depth. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have another appointment in fifteen minutes at the Town Hall. If I see Dave, I’ll certainly tell him you were asking after him, shall I?”
Annie Costello rose to her not inconsiderable height and pressed a buzzer on her desk. When her assistant poked her head around the office door, she waved at Laura, her eyes flashing with suppressed anger.
“Ms Ackroyd is just leaving,” she said. “Please see her out.” The last thing Laura noticed out of the corner of her eye as she was escorted ignominiously out of the office was Ms Costello reaching for her phone and punching in a number with enough force to splinter the enamel on her nails.
Outside the Three Ridings building, Laura found the rain lashing down with its now customary fury. She glanced at her watch. What she really wanted to do was to talk to Michael Thackeray to discover if he had made any progress with his inquiries into City Ventures and its unexpectedly connected female directors, but she knew she was already overdue at the Gazette office, where Ted Grant was preparing for a campaign of World War Two proportions as the council finally issued evacuation plans for the areas of the town now imminently threatened with inundation. In any case, she thought as she pulled up the hood on her waterproof jacket and yanked the toggles tight under her chin, Michael would not appreciate her inquiries any more than Annie Costello had done. And she had, she thought, suffered enough humiliation for one morning.
Cautiously she negotiated her way across the town centre where the gutters had turned into torrents on the hilly shopping streets and water was beginning to form lakes across the town hall square. It was only the middle of the morning but the street lights flickered in indecision unsure how to respond to the dark clouds which hid the hills above the town and pressed down onto the gilded top of the town hall’s Italianate tower. A bus lurched past sending a wave of dirty water over pedestrians who had strayed too close to the carriageway. The whole town, Laura thought, with its unexpected lakes and streams and inhabitants scurrying to find shelter from the relentless downpour, was beginning to take on an atmosphere of crisis. She had no doubt at all that Ted was bashing out his latest Churchillian editorial at that very moment.
She turned down Chapel Street, which offered a short cut back to the office, and glanced briefly at the blackened ruin of the Carib Club, propped up now by scaffolding, as she stepped into the roadway to avoid the hoarding which protected the ground floor of the building from intruders. There were no Asian youths loitering now and she had glanced behind her to check for approaching traffic but saw none. Nor, muffled up in her waterproof hood, did she hear anything behind her before she was struck a crushing blow across the head and shoulders and fell face down on the puddled roadway. Her last thought as blackness engulfed her was that the Carib was collapsing on top of her and that this was a supremely pointless way to die.