Dying Fall Read online

  He waved her into the living room, where a well-developed teen-aged girl still in short satin pyjamas was sitting on a worn sofa gazing at a morning chat show on a large screen television. She looked up irritably as her father showed Laura in, switched the set off and flounced out without a word, leaving a faint odour of sweat and a heavy perfume behind her.

  "That's Kelly," Paul Miller offered. "She were just a little lass when we lost our Tracy. I'm not right sure she even remembers her now." Miller's eyes flickered towards a series of photographs on a wooden sideboard which took up one whole wall of the small room. There were five of them all told, each of the same child growing up, golden haired and blue eyed, from the chubby toddler to the thinner faced, already faintly sophisticated blonde ten year old in school uniform, which must have been taken shortly before her death. It was the picture of Tracy which had appeared in blurred black and white in the Gazette and Laura recognised the technicolour version with a shudder. There was no photograph of Miller's younger daughter Kelly on view.

  She turned her attention back to the dead girl's father, taking in the thin disappointed mouth, the lines of strain around the eyes and the prematurely aged hands, which he twisted nervously in his lap as he sat slumped in the corner of the sagging sofa, as stained and frayed by the years as he was. He looked at Laura with a faint interrogation in his eyes.

  "You said you wanted to talk about our Tracy," he said, unable to suppress a tremor in his voice. Laura had been deliberately vague on the telephone when she had asked for this appointment and knew that her deception of this still living victim of that old crime had been unconscionable. There was no alternative now, she thought, but to be straight-forward. It was the least the man deserved. She told him why she had come and pulled out a notebook, guessing that a tape-recorder would panic him.

  "Did you know that your wife - is it ex-wife? - is trying to get Stephen's case re-opened?" she asked bluntly. Miller looked at her without apparent comprehension for a moment, before two spots of angry colour appeared high on his thin cheeks.

  "She weren't my wife," he said. "She were never my wife. She just ... she just...." he searched for the word he wanted and failed to find it. "She just lived with me," he said at last, loading the phrase with contempt for a situation in which he must at the time have been a willing partner.

  "What's she saying now?" Miller asked. "That he never done it?" Laura nodded and told him what she knew of the letter the former Mrs. Webster, now apparently Mrs. Baker - Laura was not sure whether she had reverted to her own name or had never used Miller's - had sent to the television programme. Miller sat for a moment gazing out of the window at the heavy sky outside with unseeing eyes. The atmosphere in the room was insufferably stale and airless, the windows tightly closed, and Laura felt the sweat prickling her back and beginning to form damp patches beneath her loose shirt. From the next room came the incessant thudding beat of pop music, switched on and turned up as if deliberately to cut out the conversation taking place in the living room. Miller's face hardened.

  "He were crazy for sex," he said harshly. "Don't you know what they found in his room when they searched it? It all came out at t'trial. Great piles of them magazines, stuff they put on t'top shelf – you know – dirty pictures."

  "It's not uncommon for teenaged boys," Laura said mildly. "It doesn't mean they'll turn round and murder their little sisters."

  "She weren't his sister, and June weren't her mum neither. I never said nowt at the time, but I'd not be surprised if June didn't know what were going on. They were my girls, both on 'em. I should never 'ave let that young bugger in. I told June I didn't want him when she first moved in. He were a sly little beggar. He should 'ave stayed with his own father. That's what I wanted. But no, he had to stay with his mum, he needed his mum, and look where that got us." The depth of the man's bitterness filled the room with a sourness which could almost be tasted.

  In the next room the insistent pop beat reached a new crescendo, resonating through the thin walls. Laura flinched and even Miller seemed affected. He dragged himself wearily to his feet and opened the door.

  "Turn that effing noise down, Kelly," he shouted, and the sound decreased by a fraction in response.

  "How long were you all together?" Laura asked.

  "Two years, more or less," Miller said. "Two years too bloody long. We were all right on us own, the girls and me, before June came along organising things, moving in, shifting t'furniture." He lapsed into silence.

  "And the girls' mother?" Laura prompted.

  "Did a flit, didn't she, when Kelly were born? Never wanted either of them, if you ask me. 'Took precautions' she said. Never wanted kids in t'first place, she said. But Kelly turned up when Tracy were just on five. That finished her off, she said. Any road, she were off before Kelly were out of nappies. I brought that babby up, fed her, put her on her potty, the lot. And much thanks I get for it now from the little tart. Out all hours. Tracy weren't like that. Tracy were a good little lass. She'd come in from school and help me get the tea ready, set the table, the lot."

  "You weren't working, then?"

  Miller looked at Laura with an expression of near contempt.

  "How can you work when you're left with a couple of bairns to bring up?" he said. "I've not worked for fifteen years."

  "And how soon before you met June Webster and she and Stephen moved in?"

  "Aye, that were when Tracy were about eight. Kelly'd be three or four."

  "And Stephen?"

  "He were older. He were fifteen when it happened. A big lad for his age. Like a baby elephant about t'place. And noisy." Miller's eyes flickered towards the music still hammering through the adjacent wall. If two people seemed to fill the flat with noise and tension, Laura thought, what must it have been like with five crammed here on top of one another.

  "And you never had any idea he might have been a danger to Tracy?" Laura chose her words carefully, but Miller responded with fury anyway, his face contorted and his fists clenching and unclenching impotently as if deprived of the physical revenge they sought.

  "I'd have effing killed him if I'd known," he said.

  Laura was suddenly conscious that they were no longer alone, and turned to see Kelly standing in the doorway listening. She had changed into a short, tight skirt and a skimpy sun-top. She did not speak, turning away abruptly when she was spotted, slamming the living room door behind her.

  Laura was suddenly overcome with a deep depression at the unresolved pain of this shattered family. There would be no comfort for Paul Miller from young Kelly as she grew up, she thought. Tracy might have turned out much the same as her sister but Miller would never suffer the disillusion of that adolescent transformation. Tracy had died the innocent child who set the table and adored her dad, and Kelly had paid the price.

  "You've no doubts, then, about Stephen's conviction?" Miller looked at her again with that cold contempt which threatened to dry up her questions completely.

  "What do you think?" he asked. "I'm just sorry they couldn't hang the little bastard."

  Outside on the concrete walk-way which linked the flats, Laura took a deep breath of warm air. Over the balustrade she could see figures moving languidly in the oppressive heat, and a couple of parked cars, well out of range of the missiles which occasionally hurtled from these balconies in apparently random protest, accepted by the world below as one of the natural hazards of life on the Heights.

  On the landing she waited impatiently for the lift to come, but insistent pressing of the button brought no response and she began to walk irritably down the littered, grafitti ridden concrete staircase where obscenities vied with anti-police slogans and a strange logo, the letter J linked to a shape like a crown.

  On the next landing she discovered the reason for the lift's non-appearance. The doors stood wide open on this level, and a body lay slumped across the threshold, effectively preventing them from closing. For a moment Laura stood paralysed by a cold fear that the sprawled
body of indeterminate sex in jeans and a tee-shirt was dead. But as she approached the figure groaned faintly and gave a convulsive movement, like a marionette twitched into life by strings.

  Behind her the clatter of heels on concrete caused Laura to turn. Kelly Miller was following her down the stairs and was also brought to a halt by the scene on the landing. She pushed past Laura impatiently and rolled the body onto its back with scant respect.

  "It's Gaz," she said. "He's one of t'squatters. He's always OD-ing on summat. Tell Jerry the caretaker on your way out and he'll get an ambulance." The girl's face was cold, eviedently neither surprised nor moved unmoved by the plight of the boy of about eighteen who lay between them, moaning faintly now, and his eyes beginning to flicker and focus intermittently on Kelly.

  "Jerry?" Laura asked.

  "Flat two, next to the front door. He'll fix it," Kelly said, backing away. "There's nowt you can do for him." As if to confirm that diagnosis the boy struggled convulsively into a sitting position, where he stuck, leaning against the wall and grinning inanely at them both.

  "Kelly," Laura said sharply, seizing the girl's arm before she could get away, reassured that the boy was recovering. "I wanted to ask you. Do you think Stephen killed Tracy?" Faced with this unavoidable question the girl hesitated, her eyes blank as she ran a hand through her spiky blonde hair.

  "I dunno, do I?" she said dully. "I can't hardly remember her. But I'll tell you summat for nowt. Kids who can remember her say she weren't such a little angel as my dad thinks she was. He thinks the sun shone out of Tracy's backside." Laura digested this slowly.

  "What else do kids say about Tracy? And about Stephen?" she asked. The girl shrugged, as if the events of ten years ago were no concern of hers.

  "You should talk to Stephen's girl-friend," she said.

  "I didn't know he had one," Laura said, surprised. Nothing in the briefing she had received from the television company had mentioned a girl-friend.

  "I remember her," Kelly said. "She used to come round our place when my dad were out sometimes. She were called Lyn or Linda. They used to give me sweets to keep me quiet and then shut themselves up in t'bedroom. I didn't know what they were at, did I? I were only a little kid."

  "Lyn who?"

  "Don't ask me. I never saw her after Tracy were killed." Laura glanced at the boy, who was now holding his head in his hands.

  "Hey, Gaz, d'you want the doc?" Kelly asked without much warmth. The boy shook his head from side to side, although whether this was to indicate a negative or simply to clear it was not immediately apparent. He pulled up the bottom of his teeshirt and used it to wipe his mouth and eyes, revealing a thin pale stomach and chest, as undernourished as some third world refugee.

  "Nah, I'll be all right," he mumbled. "I gotta go in a minute. Gotta go."

  "And I gotta go," said Kelly. "Talk to Lyn. I would." she said, and swung away down the walkway leading to the front-doors on this level.

  Laura looked at the boy dubiously, noting that a little colour was returning to his hollow cheeks.

  "S'all right," he said. "S'all right."

  With a sense of utter impotence she turned away and continued on her way down the stairs. At the bottom she hesitated for a moment before knocking on the door of Flat 2, which had Caretaker scrawled in marker pen where a more official notice had clearly been wrenched from the woodwork. There was no immediate response, and Laura had almost given up hope of an answer when she heard a shuffling sound behind the door. It eventually opened, with much noise of bolts being pulled and chains being unfastened.

  The caretaker evidently found it necessary to barricade himself into his home as if against a marauding army of vandals, which was probably not an inaccurate description of the gangs which did roam the walkways in broad daylight as well as by night. Eventually the door opened a crack and a heavy pasty face appeared in the gap and scowled at her in interrogation.

  "Are you Jerry, the caretaker?" she asked. The face pushed itself a little further forward, revealing an equally heavy body dressed only in boxer shorts and a grubby white cotton vest which barely stretched across a flabby expanse of heavily tattooed chest and stomach.

  "Who wants to know?" The eyes were bleary and hostile, as if the man had just woken from a long sleep.

  "I just thought you ought to know that there's a boy on the landing up there who looks ill," Laura said irritably.

  "It'll be one o't'squatters," the caretaker said. "They're all bloody druggies. Nowt to do wi'me."

  "What do you mean?" Laura asked angrily. "He could die, for all I know..."

  "Nowt to do wi'me," the man repeated, slowly and loudly, as if Laura were deaf and had not quite heard him the first time. "The council know they're theer, it's up to t'council to get 'em out. They not my responsibility. I'm here for tenants who pay their rent." And with that he slammed the door in Laura's face.

  "Jesus wept," Laura said furiously to the pock-marked woodwork. She glanced up the stairs and was relieved to see that the boy was apparently fit enough to be making his way slowly down the second flight of stairs, clinging to the iron bannister for support but non-the-less upright and apparently not too seriously the worse for wear. Thankfully she turned and pushed through the main doors out into the open air, resolved to persuade Ted Grant to let her write a series of features on the degradation of the Heights. If the blocks could not be renovated, as Ted had suggested, then it really was about time someone decided to pull them down.

  Police Constable Alan Davies sat uncomfortably in the front seat of chief inspector Michael Thackeray's car surveying from the anonymity of plain-clothes and an unmarked vehicle the beat which he normally patrolled in uniform. The Heights was his patch, and in normal circumstances he would have felt flattered that a DCI had requested a background briefing from him personally. On this occasion, though, there had been a perceptible frostiness in his own inspector's mien when Thackeray's request had been granted and Davies was an old enough hand to know that he was a pawn in a much bigger game which was being played by his superiors at division.

  Davies had been a community police-officer at the Heights for three years, ever since a directive from the chief constable had attempted to re-instate something like the traditional bobby to the beat. A dogged man, Davies had done his best to fulfill his brief, which was to keep his ears open and feed regular intelligence back to HQ. More hopefully, and it was very hopefully he felt with an increasing sense of impotence as time passed, he was supposed to win friends and influence people to occasionally help the police stem the rapidly rising tide of crime around the estate.

  It was, he had concluded reluctantly over the years, an impossible job. It had now been effectively derailed by the recent collision between lawlessness and brute force in which the two joy-riders had been killed. Davies had made his views known on that score bluntly enough to his own inspector at HQ, but was wary of sharing his reservations with a senior officer from CID.

  He eased a finger between the collar of his short-sleeved cotton shirt and his neck, and lifted himself gently off the car seat for a moment, feeling the sweat run down the small of his back in rivulets. Even with all the windows open, the heat in the car was almost intolerable. Thackeray had parked opposite Bronte House where half an hour before there had been a patch of shade. But the morning advanced, and the sun now shone directly onto the rear windscreen. Davies glanced at the chief inspector in wordless entreaty, but he was watching the comings and goings on the estate intently, apparently oblivious to discomfort.

  Thackeray too was casually dressed. This was the second of the two days' that Longley had allotted him to talk to Huddleston and his sergeant about the Tracy Miller murder, but he had decided to use the morning to talk to Davies as informally as he could manage about more immediate problems at Wuthering. So far without noticeable success.

  Davies was a stocky, sandy-haired man with a broad, untroubled face, whose career had remained obstinately on the bottom rung for much longer than
it had taken Thackeray to climb to his present relative eminence. He evidently regarded this intrusion by CID into the affairs of the uniformed branch with deep suspicion.

  "I don't know what more I can tell you, sir," Davies said, his uneasiness showing in his pale blue eyes.

  "It's not facts I'm after," Thackeray said, taking pity on him at last. "More impressions. We know what we know about what's going on up here, we know the established villains, we can haul them in any time we like. But this is different. This is new. And there has to be more to it than un-cordinated mayhem by a few young tearaways. Why was that car nicked in Harrogate, for instance? That's a long trip for youngsters of that age. And why a mobile phone? That was nicked too, but not with that car. It came from an Escort which disappeared in Leeds and hasn't turned up since. They weren't carrying that on the off-chance their mums would call them up, were they? Did they organise all that themselves or were they helped? Don't tell me about the villains we know. Tell me about the ones we're only guessing at. Give me the whispers, the rumours, give me a feel for the place, Alan."

  Davies hesitated, wondering how far he could trust the dark, impassive man who had only recently arrived in Bradfield and who remained something of an enigma, apparently, even to his junior officers in CID, still more to the uniformed branch whose efforts to contain the simmering lawlessness on the Heights had so far been so conspicuously unsuccessful.

  Davies looked for veiled criticism of his own role in Thackeray's unexpectedly blue eyes but could read nothing there except curiosity, an apparently genuine desire to know and comprehend the towering blocks looming above them, the burnt-rubber streaked streets, and the occasional aimless group of young people who drifted across the estate like so much flotsam on the tide.