“I’ll bear it in mind,” Thackeray said.

The newsroom at the Bradfield Gazette was still quiet soon after eight when Laura got in, with only two reporters on an early shift concentrating on their computer screens. But the early morning peace was soon shattered when the editor, Ted Grant, arrived with the manic gleam in his eyes which Laura knew spelt trouble. Head down, she hoped that it would not involve her brief on the feature pages.

But she was unlucky. By the time Grant had convened the morning meeting and Laura had taken her place at the untidy table in his office alongside her colleagues, she knew that the excitement which had brought a sharp flush to his cheeks and the first signs of sweat to the shirt which strained to encompass his beer belly, would include her. He had placed Bob Baker, the paper’s crime reporter, on his left-hand side from where he nursed a contented smirk which boded ill, Laura thought, for the rest of those there.

“We’ll make it a Gazette campaign,” Grant said. “The war on drugs. The threat to our youth. What can Bradfield do to defeat the evil pushers? You know the sort of thing. Run a hotline for people who want to pass on information if the police are too dozy to do it. The Globe’s got it off to a tee, but we can do our own version. We’ll collate all the news stories, and Laura, you can run a series of features on families that have been affected. Start with this lad who was nearly killed at this club the other night, Grantley Adams’ boy.”

Laura opened her mouth to object but, glancing round the table, realised that she was the only one there with any reservations about Grant’s plan.

“There’s been another death up on the Heights too,” she said eventually.

“Aye, well we’ll get to that one later,” Grant said. “The little toe-rags up there have got nowt else to do, have they? But this lad in intensive care was a high flyer, apparently. Going to Oxford, wanting to be a lawyer. That’s a better story for us. See if you can get an interview with his mum and dad - for today if you can, but tomorrow if not.”

“Right,” Laura said, knowing that facing Grantley Adams again after all these years was unlikely to be a pleasant experience in the best of circumstances, and she would be a long way from those today.

“You don’t look too chuffed with that assignment,” said Bob Baker a few minutes later, with an unwanted hand on Laura’s shoulder and an insinuating whisper in her ear, as they made their way back to their desks. “Surely your boyfriend is going to be chasing this one whatever we run with, isn’t he?” Baker, a sleek twenty-five year old with one eye on his career and the other on anyone female who would make eye-contact, was not Laura’s favourite colleague. She suspected that he saw in her a chance to pursue both of his objectives at once, not because she encouraged his advances but because he knew that she had a unique line to the police that he might be able to exploit if she did not concentrate hard enough on what she was saying in his vicinity.

“Mr. Adams is an old friend of the family, as it goes,” she said sweetly, capitalising for once on her local connections which Baker, a recent arrival, could not match.

“And a crack-down on E? Is that on your boyfriend’s agenda?”

“I’ve really no idea,” she said. “We’ve much better things to do than talk shop after work. Why don’t you ask him yourself.” She knew that this would annoy Baker whose relationship with Michael Thackeray could best be described in terms of an armed truce.

Baker shrugged and moved away, but not without a parting shot.

“What I don′t understand is why Bradfield CID’s been cut right out of operations up on the Heights,” he said. “Funny, that.”

“D’you want to sit in on this one, boss?”

DC Val Ridley hesitated outside the door of an interview room, trim and contained as ever in spite of the dark circles beneath her eyes that Thackeray now regarded as permanent.

“Who’ve you got?” he asked.

“The girlfriend of the lad who was knocked down in Chapel Street. Jeremy Adams.”

Thackeray hesitated and then nodded, curious almost in spite of himself.

“Do we need a responsible adult?” he asked.

“She’s seventeen but she’s got her mother with her anyway,” Val said quickly. “I told them an informal chat. No caution. Nothing heavy. At least she had the decency to hang around after the accident. Most of the little beggars vanished into the night.

“And how’s the boy?”

“Still critical.” Her voice was flat, without emotion. Thackeray knew that Val was good at that, but very occasionally the mask cracked to reveal a warmer and more erratic human being underneath the chilly exterior. He let her lead the way into the interview room where a young girl with long blonde hair and a sulky expression was sitting at the table alongside a woman almost as slim, certainly as blonde and apart from some faint lines around the eyes not apparently much older.

“Mrs.-James, this is DCI Thackeray,” Val said. “And this is Louise.”

Thackeray took the fourth seat at the table and nodded to Val Ridley to continue. Teenagers fascinated and disturbed him not least because his own son, had he survived, would by now have been hovering on the edge of these turbulent, truculent few years and he had not the faintest idea how he would have learned to cope with that. Badly, he suspected, if Ian had begun to display any of the alarming and often dangerous tendencies to self-destruction he saw amongst the young who crossed his path as a police officer. Would that have given him more insight with a child of his own, or just made him more afraid of what could go wrong? He did not know. But here, at least, he thought, was a child who appeared to have had all the advantages so many of CID’s clients had not. Had Louise James slipped over the edge in spite of that? Or was he simply assuming that because she fell into that age range she must be sad, or mad or bad. He smiled uneasily at the girl’s mother and tried to concentrate on what Val Ridley was saying.

“So tell me about Wednesday evening, Louise,” Val said. “What made you and Jeremy decide to go to the Carib Club?”

“It was my birthday, wasn’t it?” Louise said, in a barely audible mumble.

“She doesn’t usually go out in the week but because it was her birthday, her seventeenth, we made an exception,” Mrs. James broke in quickly. “They get so much homework. They’re at Bradfield Grammar, you know …”

“But why the Carib?” Val persisted. “Is it somewhere you’ve been before?”

Louise glanced at her mother.

“Once,” she said. “Once or twice, at a weekend.”

“We’d have stopped her if we’d known,” Mrs. James broke in again, her voice harsh. “That part of town. That sort of club.”

“Mrs. James, I’d like to hear what Louise has to say for herself,” Thackeray broke in sharply. “If you don’t mind.”

The girl shot him a glance which appeared almost grateful while her mother turned away, affronted.

“We like the music,” Louise said. “And the DJs. Wednesday was Dizzy B. He’s cool.”

“So you went down there at what time?” Val asked.

“About ten, I suppose.”

“Had you been anywhere else first?”

“We had a couple of drinks in the Parrot and Banana.”

“No difficulty getting served, I suppose,” Val said dryly. “And was it just the two of you went on to the club, or were you part of a larger group?”

“We’ve tried to bring her up to drink sensibly,” the girl’s mother said quickly.

Louise ignored her but hesitated, gazing down at her clasped hands on the table in front of her.

“There was a whole gang going on from the pub,” she said eventually. “No one I knew very well.”

“Names?”

“Just first names. No one from our school. Not close friends.”

Thackeray knew the girl was lying and guessed that the two women did too.