Death in Dark Waters

most of them now thoroughly drenched and cooled down by the rain, and gradually those on the edge of the crowd, who had arrived last and seen least, began to drift away down Chapel Street in the direction of the brighter lights of Aysgarth Lane and the taxi ranks where they would find transport home.

Almost casually the DJ stepped down from his vantage point beside Mower and shouldered his way through those who remained as far as the taxi and pulled open the driver’s door.

“If I was you, man, I’d sit quiet there till the police come down,” he said, ushering the driver back into his seat and taking the keys out of the ignition in one easy movement. “You is safe now.”

He moved on to where the injured boy lay, the dark pool around his head bigger now and beginning to trickle away towards the gutter, the mini-skirted girl more distraught. He held his umbrella protectively over them for a moment while he looked down at the boy. He shook his head almost imperceptibly before helping the girl to her feet.

“Here’s the ambulance now, honey,” he said. “You come inside and get dry and then I’ll take you down the Infirmary to see how he’s doing.”

“I’m all right,” the girl said, pulling away from the DJ’s arm as the ambulance and a police car inched their way through the stragglers and halted beside the victim. “I’m with some friends.” But when she scanned the crowd for her friends she could not find them. Suddenly most of the clubbers had melted away.

“Can you tell us who he is,” asked one of the paramedics minutes later, crouching beside the injured boy, his feet in the pool of blood and rainwater which now surrounded the victim.

“His name’s Jez, Jeremy, Jeremy Adams,” the girl said, her voice high with panic. “I’m not sure of his address, but he goes to the grammar school, we’re in the sixth form. His dad owns that big warehouse place on Canal Road. And he’s going to be absolutely livid that we came clubbing down here.”

Back on the steps the DJ took Kevin Mower’s arm, let down his umbrella and shook it fastidiously before pulling the policeman back inside.

“Racist little bitch,” he said without a smile. “You see her jump when I touched her? My car’s out back. We can get through the fire doors.”

“Cool,” Mower said, turning his back on the incident with a sense of profound relief.

At much the same time that the ambulance pulled away from Chapel Street, siren blaring in anticipation of heroic efforts to save Jeremy Adams’ life, a younger boy was crouching under the shelter of the overhead walkways of Holtby House, one of the blocks of crumbling flats which dominated Bradfield’s skyline to the west. Stevie Maddison felt sick and he shivered as the chilly rain soaked through his thin jacket and t-shirt. He pulled nervously on his cigarette, shielding the glowing tip with his hand, anxious not to be seen. Unable to sleep, he had called his best friend on his mobile and arranged to meet him, hoping to blag some skunk from the lad he had gone around with at school, in the days when he bothered to go to school. These days he clung to Derek with the frantic clutch of a drowning man, because Derek had been where he was now, stick thin, light-headed and nauseous in turn, desperate for a fix and yet desperate not to have one. Derek had been a heroin user but now Derek was clean. But tonight Derek, who usually answered his urgent phone calls promptly, did not show and his mobile remained on voice-mail, the cool cultured woman’s voice seeking messages that Stevie was in no state to give.

He pinched out the end of his roll-up between finger and thumb and was about to turn back towards his home three floors above to resume his elusive search for sleep when he caught a flicker of movement a hundred yards away at the entrance to Priestley House, the most westerly of the three surviving blocks on the Heights. At last, he thought, expecting Derek to emerge from the swing doors but before he could shout a greeting he realised that what he had seen was not someone coming out but three figures in hooded jackets going in, one tall, the others smaller and, he thought, younger. Stevie shrank back into the shadows. He knew most of the drug dealers on the estate only too well, but this group was too far away in the swirling rain for recognition. His heart thumped hard against his skinny ribcage as he watched and waited close to the doors of Holtby ready to bolt into his burrow like a terrified rabbit at any threat closer to hand. For long minutes he heard only the relentless lashing of the rain against concrete and, far away the whine of a car being driven until its engine screamed and tyres squealed. Some kids somewhere on the other side of town getting their kicks, he guessed. But then a shout snapped his eyes upwards to the roof of Priestley where, in spite of the rain, he could just make out a figure silhouetted against the reddish glow of the night sky, then another and another, until three or four shapes merged into one and then one became detached, apparently swimming through the downpour, arms and legs flailing, as he fell to earth like a wounded bird.

“Oh God, oh God,” Stevie muttered, wondering if this was all hallucination but sure in the sick pit of his churning stomach that it was not. “Oh God, oh God,” he said as he waited, back pressed against the wall, until the remaining figures on the roof had disappeared before he pushed open the door to Holtby and slipped inside, to race up the concrete stairs to his mother’s flat. “Oh God, oh God,” he said as he glanced over the walkway balcony and saw the three figures he had seen enter Priestley House come out again, laughing, hoods thrown back now and at least one dark face clearly recognisable as he clutched a mobile phone to one ear. “Oh God, oh God,” he said as he fell onto his sweaty crumpled bed and lay there shuddering, not wanting to know what he knew and terrified of what he didn’t. The long scream of whoever had fallen repeated itself like a faint echo in his ears. But what really made him retch with fear and grief was the belief, much more than a suspicion the more he thought about it, that it was Derek who had plunged to earth, that it was his friend who had died.

DCI Michael Thackeray stood in his superintendent’s office next morning with a distinct feeling of déjà vu. Arriving in Bradfield from a far-flung corner of the county a few years before, he had learned to live with the glimmer of suspicion which had never seemed to leave Jack Longley’s slightly protuberant blue eyes. However much Thackeray thought he had served out his time after almost destroying a promising career some ten years earlier, he had known then that he would have to prove - and keep on proving – to his new boss that he had buried the past and could be trusted. Second chances were hard to come by in the police force and no one had been less convinced than he was himself that he deserved one. But after a couple of years, with those blue eyes watching him every inch of the way, and some successful investigations and even more interesting accommodations achieved, he thought he had seen the suspicion fade for good. Yet this morning it was back and he did not know why. That worried him.

Longley shifted uneasily in his seat and ran a finger round the back of his shirt collar as if it were too tight.

“Grantley Adams, he’s been on to the chief constable already’” he said. “And that’s likely only the start of it.”

“Right,” Thackeray said cautiously. He knew that Grantley Adams ran one of the largest building supplies firms in Yorkshire, if not in the country, a self-made man employing hundreds, with all the expectations of thanks from a grateful nation that seemed to imply these days. “But this is a road traffic accident we’re talking about? Nothing for CID?”