Dying Fall Read online

  Patricia Hall has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patent Rights Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this book.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Dying Fall was first published in 1994 by Little Brown and Company (UK) Ltd,

  ISBN no: 0 316 91023 6

  DYING FALL

  by

  Patricia Hall

  An Ackroyd and Thackeray Mystery

  CHAPTER ONE

  "Jacko, there's a pig car on your left coming up Salter Street." The black clad figure on the roof spoke quietly but urgently into his mobile phone. In the broad street a hundred feet below Jacko slammed on the hand-brake of the stolen Astra and expertly skidded the car round in a 180 degree arc. He accelerated hard away from the approaching police car with tyres smoking and engine screaming. His passenger, even smaller and slighter than Jacko himself, crowed with delight.

  "Go on, Jacko," the younger boy cried, eyes alight. "They'll not catch us now!"

  With a grunt of satisfaction muffled by his balaclava the man on the roof moved like a shadow to the other side of the building to watch the white Astra circle the block of flats, weaving between shifting knots of people on the street corners, their excited murmur clearly audible even at roof level. It was the third night of joy-riding he had organised around the Heights, the four massive blocks of flats which loomed on the western slopes above Bradfield town centre, and so far the reckless display of turbo-power had gone as smoothly as the others.

  The stolen cars had attracted large crowds onto the streets and the walkways of the flats. The weather was hot and humid, thunder storms had been rumbling around the hills to the west for days, and whole families, some carrying fractious babes in arms, had spilled from their stifling living rooms to watch the free entertainment.

  Until now, the police had been slow to appear and when they did they were easily tracked from the flat roof of Bronte House. A word of warning from above allowed the stolen cars to disappear at will into the maze of older streets which linked the Heights to the town centre in the valley below.

  So far the joy-riders, audacious by conviction as much as necessity, had easily evaded their more cautious pursuers. Close encounters with crushed metal and mangled flesh had been too close and too frequent to allow the pursuing drivers to follow their reckless quarry with total dedication. There was no reason yet to suppose that tonight would be any different.

  "Jacko, he's turned down Oldfield. You're in the clear now."

  Jacko's reply was no more than an unintelligible stutter through the distorting crackle of static, but the man on the roof saw the Astra turn again in response and head back up to the broad strip of road between the flats and some old people's bungalows where the main displays took place. As he watched he heard a faint clatter behind him and, scanning the darkly orange urban sky with a vaguely stirring anxiety, he spotted the flashing navigation lights of a helicopter thirty seconds before it switched on its searchlight and began sweeping the entire estate with a dazzling funnel of light.

  With a muttered curse the man ducked into the deep shadow beneath the roof's low parapet and froze, knowing that the sharp eyes in the helicopter would be focussed on the road below rather than the cluttered roof of the block as it was swept momentarily by the unforgiving beam.

  The racket of the helicopter engine became deafening as it moved up fast and hovered directly overhead, sending clouds of dust and debris swirling around the roof and flapping curtains wildly at the open windows below. The light swung apparently at random before focussing and holding steady. Cautiously the man raised his head above the parapet to see the Astra fixed in the search-light's harsh eye as it accelerated away again down the road beneath. The scream of its engine was drowned out now by the overwhelming clatter of the chopper's engine.

  "Get out of there, Jacko," the watcher shouted into his transmitter, feeling the first hint of alarm as events began to slip away from his control. This time there was no reply. Helplessly he watched as the white car swung round the corner of the flats, still gaining speed, into a side road where several patrol cars and a heavy police van, its windows covered with thick wire mesh, had quietly assembled under cover of the noisy diversion above.

  In a panda car, parked unobtrusively behind the vans, PC Alan Davies, a green anorak over his uniform shirt indicating that he was, technically at least, off duty, sat hunched over the steering wheel as if in pain. He cursed virulently and monotonously under his breath as he watched three years' patient hard work destroyed.

  In the Astra the boy driving, eyes dilated in concentration and fear, saw the approaching police vehicles too late. He attempted another handbrake turn, but the road was too narrow and he lost control, realising in that final moment of terror that he was not, after all, immortal. The off-side wheels mounted the kerb at speed, flipping the car over into a series of crunching somersaults which hurled debris from lights, bumpers, doors and wings across the roadway. It ended abruptly when what remained of the car slammed engine first into the solid concrete door-way of Bronte House.

  The search-light was unmoving now, fixed like the eye of God on the wreckage-strewn street and the still spinning wheels of the upturned car as residents and police shook themselves out of shock and began to run in a light as harsh as a desert noon. There was little enough left that was recognisable as a car or of the two boys who had been in it. The wreckage enfolded crumpled forms like some bizarre man-trap of metal and glass making it impossible for even the most willing hands to free the life-less bodies.

  "Fire brigade and ambulance!" said the police inspector who had taken charge of the abortive rescue sharply to the sergeant at his side. He eyed the gathering crowd of spectators warily. "And get this lot back," he said. "In fact clear the street or we'll have a riot on our hands." As out-stretched uniformed arms urged the murmuring spectators away a single shrill voice cried out in anguish.

  "They were only kids, you bastards." There was a low growl of agreement from the crowd but the spark needed to ignite their fury did not come, and gradually they allowed themselves to be shepherded from the scene. The inspector, grim-faced, picked up the mobile telephone from where it lay in the gutter, smashed and sticky with blood, and caught his sergeant's eye across the wreckage in a moment of shared pity and anger.

  "Blasted kids," the sergeant muttered. "Blasted stupid kids." Behind him PC Alan Davies echoed the sentiment more obscenely and turned back to his panda car in disgust, his jacket collar turned up to conceal his face. High above, the man in black watched, his eyes glittering behind the balaclava mask, as the crowd was chivvied away and police reinforcements and a fire tender arrived, blue lights flashing. Imperceptibly the helicopter gained height and began to edge away.

  "Shit," the watcher said viciously before slipping silently towards the door at the head of the lift shaft and disappearing from sight.

  It was lunch-time the next day before Laura Ackroyd could get away from her office at the Bradfield Gazette to visit her grandmother who lived alone at the heart of the Heights. The news-room had been frantic all morning as the paper had handled its biggest story for months. Ted Grant, the Gazette's irascible editor, had prowled between the desks, reading computer screens over people's shoulders, as piece by piece the events of the previous night had been put together and assembled into some sort of coherence for the readers of the first edition. This was a bit different from the usual lowlights of an August newsroom, Laura thought wearily, pushing a damp strand of red hair away from her eyes as she sent her own contribution to the front page to be set in type by the computer system and the adrenalin high on which she had b
een carried along all morning ebbed away, leaving her drained and irritable.

  The paper's staple summer diet of exam results and the occasional holiday accident were normally dealt with easily enough by a depleted staff. A three night orgy of car crime at the Heights, culminating in last night's tragedy, was something else, and Laura, diverted from her less hectic world of the feature pages, had been drafted in at eight o'clock that morning to augment the inexperienced team of young reporters who were all Grant had to call on that day.

  Grant, with one eye on the clock, came towards her between the rows of work-stations. He was a heavy, grizzled figure, shirt sleeves rolled up, belly slackly rolling over his belt, a cigarette as always drooping from one corner of his mouth, his colour high enough under stress to make his colleagues debate, some with more hope than concern, the state of his blood pressure. He'd risk a green eye-shade if he thought he could get away with it, Laura thought with momentary amusement, though without affection, as he approached.

  She had, not without some spectacular battles, learned to live with Grant's one-man war against the incursions of the management accountants, the computer experts and the graduate trainees into the craft he had been apprenticed to as a sixteen year old copy boy. Grant was one of a dying breed and deeply resented it. He still bashed out his editorials on an arthritic typewriter which lived under a green dust-cover in the corner of his office, leaving it to subordinates to put his staccato prose into the computer system. He filed his used papers on a lethal spike and long and often regretted the passing of the noisy telex machines and the clatter and smell of hot metal.

  For his part, he had learned to tolerate Laura better than most of his staff on the simple ground that although she was female she had at least been born and bred in the borough and had chosen, unlike so many of her contemporaries, to remain there.

  "I think that's as far as we can take it today," he said. "I've done my leader, so that about wraps it up."

  "Who've you blamed this time?" Laura asked, a touch sourly. "The parents, the teachers or the police?"

  "The whole bloody lot of them," Ted said. "They get not a scrap of discipline, these kids."

  "They should bring back National Service," Laura said, solemnly. "That would get them off the streets."

  Grant looked at her for a moment with his pale watery blue eyes, well aware he was being sent up, but the explosion Laura half expected did not come. Instead he glanced down at the proof of the front page which lay across Laura's desk, his eyes on the blurred school photographs of the two teenagers who had died in the stolen car.

  "It's a bloody tragic waste," he said, and Laura felt herself more reproved than she would have been if she had succeeded in provoking his anger by her levity. She ran a hand through her hair distractedly and gave Grant a wan smile.

  "It gets to you when it's kids," she said quietly.

  "For tomorrow," Grant said, aggressively, as if anxious to cover up his momentary lapse into sentiment. "Brief Jane and Howard, will you? We'll want interviews with the families, anything else they can get up there this afternoon. See if you can find the head-master of St.Marks, though I expect he's staying in some bloody gite in the Dordogne. That's where the lads went to school, apparently."

  "If they ever went," Laura said. There were no jobs for school-leavers who bore the stigma of living on the Heights. At Wuthering, as the Heights had been irreverently dubbed by the locals, Laura knew the children were quickly demoralised and spun away, out of school and out of control, almost before they were tall enough to see over the steering wheels of the stolen cars which were their single passion in life.

  "Aye, well, see what you can dig up," Ted Grant said dismissively. "I'm away to the Lamb. I need a jar. Are you coming?"

  Laura shook her head. The court Ted Grant conducted each lunch-time and early evening in the Gazette's local, the Lamb and Flag, was not one she had felt much like frequenting recently and this lunch-time she had other urgent business.

  "I want to go and see my grandmother," she said. "I'll see what I can pick up while I'm up there."

  Grant nodded. He had spent most of his working life in Bradfield, apart from a brief and not very productive foray to Fleet Street in its fading days, and he knew Joyce Ackroyd, Laura's formidable grandmother, as a force to be reckoned with.

  "You want to get her off that bloody estate," Grant said grimly. "At her age."

  "Fat chance", Laura said. "She'll come down from the Heights in a box, and not before."

  "Aye, well, you're an obstinate bloody family," Grant said. "Must be the red hair."

  "It won't be so bad if the council gets funds for this plan to renovate the flats," Laura said placatingly. Wuthering's squat, 1960s blocks suffered all the woes that prefabricated concrete construction and inadequate insulation were heir to. Named, with literary insouciance, after Yorkshire authors, Bronte, Holtby, Priestley and Bentley, they threatened to collapse into complete dereliction.

  "Last I heard, that had all fallen through," Grant growled. "That's not for public consumption yet," he added hastily, and Laura wondered which councillor had let the indiscretion fall over a Scotch in Grant's second favourite haunt, the bar of the Clarendon Hotel. It had to be someone sufficiently influential to persuade Ted that his scoop was not for revealing yet.

  She drove thoughtfully out of town and up the hill to the Heights, taking a detour around the blocks, which appeared deserted now apart from a few gangs of boys desultorily kicking balls about on the dusty grass which surrounded them. It was another insufferably hot day, the sun hidden behind a bronze haze of high cloud, the temperature climbing into the eighties, as it had for weeks now. There was not a breath of wind to cut the almost palpable humidity.

  Down the narrow road at the side of the flats a couple of uniformed policemen loitered in the entrance to Bronte. The debris had been cleared overnight, the only evidence of the fatal smash the boarded up glass panels in the doors and a smear of black rubber on the tarmac where the car had spun out of control. A large oily stain near the doors had been sprinkled with sand. But the dead boys had their memorial. Right at the policemen's feet a small pyramid of flowers was already growing on the spot where they had died. Wuthering, she knew, would not deny its own.

  Laura drove her white Beetle slowly past the scene and turned left into the main thoroughfare. Here the tyre marks were more extensive, making a tarry track which swung in a tight semi-circle where the constant hand-brake turns had excited the spectators for three hot and sticky nights, patterns of defiance indelibly marked on the road-way.

  She parked outside the row of bungalows immediately facing Bronte and Holtby, tiny refuges for the elderly built in hope to enable grandparents to be close to their young families but in reality, more often than not, leaving the old stranded under the lowering shadow of the blocks from which their own children and grand-children had long fled.

  Joyce Ackroyd was standing at her door waiting as Laura locked the car and opened the wicket gate on its retaining strand of thick wire. She was a small, wiry woman, white haired and neatly dressed in a blue and white spotted blouse and navy skirt, leaning heavily on a stick. Laura kissed her on the cheek, aware of the papery thinness of the old woman's skin and the faint smell of scented soap. She took her arm as she turned back into the house.

  "You've not got that awful walking frame thing today," Laura said as Joyce moved painfully slowly into her living room.

  "I thought I might try growing ivy up it in the back yard," Joyce said dryly. Laura grinned, knowing how hard Joyce was fighting the arthritis which was crippling her.

  "Take it easy," she said. The older woman sank thankfully into her favourite armchair and Laura noticed a new fragility around her eyes, the skin darker than it should be and slightly puffy.

  "You had another bad night," she said. Joyce nodded grimly.

  "No-one got much sleep," she said. "I've asked a couple of the lasses from Bronte to come over for a chat a bit later on. I think you shou
ld talk to them for the Gazette."

  Laura glanced at her watch. After her early start she reckoned she could get away with an extended lunch-hour, just so long as she took something of interest back to the office with her later.

  "I wanted to ask you about something different," she said, switching her mind to a preoccupation which had been thrust aside by the events at the Heights. She rooted in her capacious shoulder-bag and brought out a sheaf of cuttings from the Gazette.

  "Do you remember this murder?" she asked, handing them to Joyce who skimmed through them quickly.

  "Aye, well, no-one up here's likely to forget it," she said at length, her expression sombre. "There's nowt upsets folk like a child being killed. It must have been just after I moved in here. All of ten years. What of it?"

  "You know that television programme, Case Re-opened?" Her grandmother nodded. She still took a keen interest in the world although it was the best part of that decade since she had had to retire from her beloved council.

  "They rang me the other night from London," Laura said. "They want some local research done into the case. The mother of the lad who was convicted is still swearing blind that he's innocent. She contacted the programme because they're proposing to commit him to Broadmoor or somewhere because they reckon he's gone completely off his head. She reckons if that happens she'll never get him out."

  "I dare say she's right," Joyce said grimly. "If he's not mad already they'll soon make sure he is." She flicked through the newspaper cuttings again. "I thought he confessed," she said.

  "He seems to have confessed and then retracted it in court. But they found him guilty just the same. There was some other circumstantial evidence," Laura said.

  "Aye, I remember now. It was a nasty business." Joyce glanced at the cuttings again, her eyes thoughtful. "Little Tracy Miller," she said softly. "You can imagine the panic it caused up here, mothers not letting their youngsters out of their sight. And then they arrested her own brother."