Michael Thackeray raced into the accident and emergency department at the Bradfield Infirmary as if pursued by all the hounds of hell. He had not bothered with a coat, and his hair and the shoulders of his jacket were sodden and his eyes wild. The sights and sounds and smells of the busy waiting area choked the breath out of his body as he hesitated close to reception and tried to steady himself on palsied arms against the desk. But before the harassed reception clerk could turn her attention to him, he caught a glimpse of a police uniform across the room, changed his mind and spun away through the crush in that direction, grabbing the startled officer’s arm in a fierce grip.
“Did you come in with Laura Ackroyd? An accident in Chapel Street?”
“Sorry, sir. You are …? The young constable unwittingly put his career on the line as Thackeray’s face suffused with fury.
“DCI Thackeray,” he spat. “Where is she, for Christ’s sake? She’s my wife.” It was not until he had followed the now redfaced officer along the row of emergency cubicles that Thackeray realised what he had said and groaned.
A young Asian doctor Thackeray recognised vaguely was coming out of the end cubicle as the two policemen approached. The constable nodded and turned on his heel without speaking.
“How is she?” Thackeray asked, his voice almost failing him now.
“She’s fine,” the doctor said brusquely. “Badly bruised but conscious now. No fractures, fortunately. But we’ll keep her in overnight. Concussion, you know …” But Thackeray was no longer listening. He pushed past the doctor and pulled back the flimsy curtains round the cubicle to find Laura lying on a high bed, her red hair scraped back and partly confined under bandages, her face pale where it was not disfigured with multi-coloured bruises already darkening from red to black, and her eyes dull. He stood still for a moment, hardly able to breathe before walking the few steps to the bed and kissing her cheek and taking her hand in a grip so fierce that she thought he would crush her fingers.
“Jesus Christ,” he said. “I thought you were dead.”
“They’ll have to try harder than that,” Laura croaked, her eyes full of tears, as she gently extricated her hand from Thackeray’s. Every bone in her body seemed to be complaining at once and the painkillers the doctor had prescribed had either not begun to kick in yet or were too mild to help.
“They? They told me it was a car …?” Thackeray said. Laura tried to shrug and winced instead, dosing her eyes for a second or two until the pain subsided.
“I don’t think cars kick you in the ribs,” she said. “I’ve apparently got a nice clear boot print on my back. A pretty effective way of telling me to mind my own business, I suppose.”
“Foreman?” Thackeray asked.
“I talked to him,” Laura admitted faintly. “He wasn’t very happy.”
“I asked you …” Thackeray began and then shook his head helplessly, knowing that this was not the place and that in any case he was wasting his time.
“I’ll have him,” he said instead, as a nurse pulled back the curtains and came into the cubicle. “I’ll have that bastard if it’s the last thing I do.” The nurse looked startled and glanced behind her as if seeking help.
“There’s a bed for Laura in the ward now,” she said. “The porters will be here in a minute to take her up.”
“And the other thing,” Laura said quickly, grabbing Thackeray’s hand. “Take a look at Three Ridings Housing. I think City Ventures has been doing their building too. Annie Costello’s effectively been commissioning herself.”
“You never give up, do you? Forget all that for now,” Thackeray said as a porter began to push a wheelchair alongside the bed. He leaned over Laura and took her bruised face in his hands, gentle now, as he kissed her cheek.
“Don’t do this to me,” he whispered, his voice hoarse. “Please, Laura. It was like …Well, never mind.”
“I’m sorry,” Laura whispered back, but Thackeray had already turned on his heel and marched back into the reception are where the uniformed constable was chatting to the young woman on the desk. When he saw Thackeray approaching he flushed again and stood to attention.
“Sir?” he said.
“Stay at her bedside till I tell you otherwise,” Thackeray said. “I’ll clear it for you back at the nick. I’m treating this as a case of attempted murder.”
Dusk came early that evening, like a wet grey blanket over the town, so dense that the streetlights, which had flickered into life in mid-afternoon, could barely penetrate the gloom. Kevin Mower, with Dizzy B beside him, parked unobtrusively in a small car park almost opposite the offices of Foreman Security Services and watched as the rain drummed on the car roof and poured down the windscreen, and the water level in the roadway swirled across the tarmac and began to lap over the kerbstones. Water company vans were parked at the far end of the street and through traffic had been diverted as officials worked their way from one tall stone Victorian building to the next, issuing evacuation notices to the businesses in each block. Gradually most of the employees had picked their way through the flood to higher ground while lorries arrived outside some of the offices and people began moving out filing cabinets and boxes of documents, computers — even furniture. Mower had been listening to the local radio station, which was providing regular updates on the floods, and he knew that this particular street in the lower-lying part of the town, had been built directly over the subterranean channel of the Beck soon after it had been enclosed. Some of the cellars even had inspection manholes which the water company now feared would give way under the pressure of the water beneath, allowing water to gush upwards and in all likelihood weaken the foundations of the buildings above. If that happened all bets were off and Mower was not surprised that the threatened firms were making every effort to salvage what they could.
Barry Foreman’s headquarters lay at the furthest end of the street and, by four o’clock, regular visits by the firms’ own vehicles had taken away quantities of electronic equipment and paperwork. But some of the lights remained on inside the building and Mower knew that Foreman himself had not left the premises.
“Do we know where all that stuff’s gone?” Dizzy B asked.
“The boss has got someone checking that out,” Mower said. Outside the street was rapidly emptying, lights going out, doors being closed on the offices behind them, abandoning them to an uncertain fate. Soon only the streetlights and two remaining lights on the ground floor of Foreman’s building were left to reflect on the water swirling about the roadway and beginning to lap at the stone steps which led up to the main doors of each block.
“Look,” Dizzy said softly and Mower turned the radio right down and picked up his mobile phone. A Land Rover had entered the street from the end furthest away from the water board vans, creating a bow-wave through the flood, and pulled up outside the security services office.
“That’s Foreman’s four-by-four,” Mower said. He pressed a number on his phone. “Guv?” he said quietly. “I think we may have something.” He peered through the gloom. “It looks like our friend Jake from the drug squad’s just arrived to pick Foreman up.”
“Jake?” Sanderson asked when Mower had disconnected.
“You don’t need to know,” Mower said. “God knows what name he’s working under anyway.”
“He’s bringing something out,” Dizzy said. “Boxes of stuff. And he’s a copper?” Mower quickly relayed that to Thackeray.
“Looks dodgy, guv,” he said.
“Good,” Thackeray said. “Dodgy’s all I need to know to convince Jack Longley we need to act. I’m coming down there. If the building’s going to be abandoned we need to get in there with a search team before it floods if we can. And I’ll get traffic organised to stop the Land Rover and search it as soon as it comes out of the flood zone. There’s only one route out.”