“We’ll give you a pencil and paper later,” he said. “You can have a think about the names of anyone you can remember who was around that evening. Will you do that, Louise?”
The girl nodded, not looking up, and Thackeray knew that the list would be short and the names unidentifiable, but he did not think it worth pressurising the girl at this stage.
“We know from the hospital that Jeremy took at least one Ecstasy tablet during the evening,” Val Ridley went on, her voice calm. “Did you know that?”
Louise nodded, a single tear drop splashing down onto the table in front of her. Irritably, she rubbed it away with a finger
“Did you take any illegal substances, Louise?”
Louise nodded again.
“Just one tab,” she said, and there was a sharply indrawn breath from her mother. Thackeray shot her a warning glance.
“You think Jeremy took more?” Val persisted.
“I think he had two. He was wild …At the club later he was dancing like a mad-man. I couldn’t keep up with him. But we knew what to do. We drank plenty of water …”
“So you know we have to ask, Louise. Where did you get the pills from?”
“They were just passing them round in the pub,” the girl said, glancing at her mother. “I’d never had one before but Jez said it would be cool.”
“Who was passing them round?”
“Everyone,” Louise said, sulky now.
“But someone must have been taking the money for them. These things don’t come free.”
“I didn’t see anyone,” she said.
“Did you pay for them, Louise?”
“I never.” The girl flushed and more tears came.
“So did Jeremy buy them?”
“No, no, I never saw him pay anyone. I don’t know who bought them, where they came from, it was nothing to do with me.”
“Right, we’ll leave that for the minute, Louise,” Val Ridley said, still calm, her voice still low as the girl scrubbed at her eyes with a tissue that her mother handed to her.
“When you got to the Carib, there was someone on the door, right?”
“Two black guys,” Louise said.
“And did they check you for drugs?”
“Yeah, yeah, they asked, and looked in my bag. I had a little black bag with me, but we’d taken them by then, so there wasn’t anything to find, was there? They were wasting their time.”
“Maybe,” Val Ridley said. “But inside the club. Did you see anyone offering drugs in there? Pills, cannabis, anything at all?”
Louise shook her head.
“It was dark, and crowded and we were dancing, I didn’t see anything much. It was a great night until that happened …” She glanced at her mother.
“It’s not fair the way everyone’s going on about the drugs,” Louise burst out suddenly, her voice choked with anger. “It was that taxi driver’s fault. He came round the corner too fast. He could have hit me too, lots of people jumped out of the way. Jez was unlucky that’s all. He didn’t see it coming. It was nothing to do with drugs. What harm does one tablet do? We had a great time. We were going home. If it hadn’t been for that driver no one would have been any the wiser. We’d have been at school the next morning and no one would have known anything about it.”
Thackeray stood up abruptly.
“We will want your daughter to sign a written statement,” he said to Louise’s mother. “And in view of what she’s told us about the availability of illegal substances the other night we’ll want to be sure that she has nothing else hidden at home ← or at Jeremy’s home, for that matter.”
“What do you mean, hidden?” Mrs. James asked, her voice shrill.
“We’ll need to search your house,” Thackeray said.
“Oh, Mum,” Louise wailed, crumpling across the table and sobbing uncontrollably. “I really, really only took one. I only took one, ever.”
“I’ll leave you with DC Ridley,” Thackeray said and left the room without looking back. A quick search for illegal substances would give Grantley Adams something to think about before he spoke to him, he thought with some satisfaction. For all his sympathy for a father with a child in intensive care, he was not averse to laying down a few ground rules before tackling Jack Longley’s Masonic acquaintances. And the first of those was to make clear that no one in Bradfield was above the law.
Chapter Three
Laura held her grandmother’s arm firmly as they made their way up the ramp alongside the broad stone steps which led to the massive mahogany doors at Bradfield Town Hall. The Victorians who had built the place had lacked nothing in confidence, Laura thought, any more than her grandmother did. Dressed in her best grey wool suit with a red scarf at her throat, Joyce looked far younger than Laura knew she was. But she could feel the effort that it was taking her to haul herself up the slope in spite of Laura’s supporting arm and the rail she was clutching on the other side.
“Where are you meeting him?” she asked as Joyce paused to regain her breath in the doorway.
“In the members’ lounge,” Joyce said. “It’s on the first floor but there’s a lift.”
Just as well, Laura thought. She could not see Joyce making it to the top of the ceremonial stone staircase, with its ornate fountain on the half-landing.
“Give me my stick now and I’ll be fine,” Joyce said firmly but when she marched ahead of Laura and pushed the heavy doors they did not budge.
“Let me, Nan,” Laura said, ushering her through and pretending not to have noticed Joyce’s own attempt. “The lift’s round here, isn’t it?”
On the floor above Joyce still led the way slowly but confidently, back on territory which had been her own for more than forty years. She tapped her way along the highly polished parquet corridors, the dark wood-panelled walls adorned with portraits of long dead mayors and aldermen in full robes, men who had dreamed their dreams for Bradfield ever since it had burgeoned from a small village of weavers’ cottages into a bustling manufacturing town of mills and warehouses and back-to-back workers’ terraces during the fifty frantic years of the industrial revolution. Joyce had dreamed dreams here too, trying to alleviate the legacy of slum poverty that revolution had bequeathed the twentieth century, and she had made many of her dreams flesh, only to see them crumble into dust as prosperity ebbed away and grand schemes, like the Heights where she still lived, had decayed and turned sour.
After a walk which Laura guessed she had completed on sheer determination, Joyce opened another heavy wood-panelled door and stepped inside.
“Oh, they’ve never,” she said, standing in the doorway transfixed. The room, set out with armchairs and small tables, appeared to be empty.
“What?” Laura asked.
“They’ve taken down the chandeliers and put in those horrid little lamps,” Joyce said in disgust. “I was never a great one for tradition but I did reckon this town hall was summat to be proud of. They’ve vandalised it.”
“Now then, Mrs. Ackroyd,” said a voice from behind them. “I didn’t think we’d be seeing you here again.” The grey-haired man who had spoken and who ushered the two women into the room with old-fashioned courtesy was not much taller than Joyce herself, but twice as broad. But the breadth was contained within a worsted suit of such evident Yorkshire provenance that Laura almost did what her father had traditionally done with his friends, feeling the cloth of the lapel and rubbing it gently between the thumb and forefinger in appreciation of the quality.
“Len Harvey,” Joyce said in surprise. “I thought you’d stood down an’all. Councillor Harvey was leader of the Tory group when I led for Labour,” Joyce added for Laura’s benefit.
“Aye, well, I did, five year ago. But they’ve set up this committee on regeneration and my lot reckoned I could represent them. Likely a sign they don’t give a tupenny damn, but I must say I’m quite enjoying popping back in here now and then. They’ve not asked you onto the same thing, have they, Joyce? That’d be a turn-up after all the schoolboys Labour’s been putting up recently. Makes me feel a right old fuddyduddy with my pacemaker and two pairs of specs.”