‘I’m sure you would, sir,’ said Gerry. ‘But I came to see if you could help us. After all, you do patrol the streets around here, even if you don’t venture as far as Hollyfield. You know better than we do what’s going on in the neighbourhood. How many of you are there?’
‘In the Watch? Oh, it varies,’ said Myers. ‘We don’t wear uniforms or anything, you know. We’re not some paramilitary militia or vigilante outfit. We just walk the streets, usually in groups of two. My son Chris is also involved on occasion. And Lisa’s father and brother. There’s my next door neighbour, Bill Parsons; Harry, the landlord of The Oak at the bottom of the hill; the Farrars. Several others. Women as well as men. About twenty in all, but not all active at once, of course. We take turns.’
‘Can you give me a list of the members?’
‘Of course,’ said Myers. ‘I’ll run off a copy for you before you leave.’
‘Thank you, sir. Have you noticed anything unusual in the neighbourhood lately?’
‘As you said, we don’t patrol Hollyfield,’ said Myers, ‘and we certainly advise our children not to go there, so I can’t really tell you anything about this drug addict. We do know Hollyfield’s a haven for addicts and hooligans. They cross the park sometimes. We’ve had two break-ins lately, as well as the assault, you know, but since we’ve increased our patrols, things haven’t been so bad. We might seem a bit like Dad’s Army to you professionals, but we definitely act as a deterrent.’
Gerry wanted to say they hadn’t been much of a deterrent on the night Lisa Bartlett was assaulted, but fortunately she was smart enough to realise before opening her mouth that it would be wiser to refrain. ‘I know, sir,’ she said. ‘And we really do appreciate your help.’
‘It’ll be a red letter day when that whole bloody Hollyfield Estate has been rased to the ground, but until then we have to live next to it.’
‘So you haven’t noticed any strangers or suspicious characters in the neighbourhood?’
‘No. Things have been fairly quiet lately.’
Gerry took the picture of Samir out of her briefcase. Banks had told her to ask about him whenever she talked to anyone in the area, no matter what she was talking to them about. She passed it over to Myers, and he made an expression of distaste as he looked at it.
‘The dead boy, I suppose?’ he said.
‘Yes. Have you ever seen him at all?’
‘Around here?’
‘Anywhere.’
‘No,’ said Myers, pushing the photo back over the wooden surface. ‘And I think I would have noticed. What would he be doing here? I thought his body was found on the East Side Estate?’
‘That’s correct,’ said Gerry. ‘But he wasn’t necessarily killed there. And we have no idea what he was doing in Eastvale. That’s what we’d like to find out.’
‘Do you think he had something to do with the other drug addict’s death? Is that what this is about?’
‘Other drug addict?’
‘This latest one. I’m assuming the boy was on drugs, too, or somehow involved?’
‘We have no evidence to suggest that, sir, or reason to think it.’ Gerry certainly wasn’t going to tell him about the cocaine in Samir’s pocket. That piece of information hadn’t been released to the media. ‘As far as I know, there’s no connection between the two. Maybe your son would know something?’
‘I can’t imagine Chris having anything to do with him, either. I mean, there’s the age difference, for a start. Eighteen-year-olds don’t usually hang out with younger kids. Besides, Chris is busy with his A-levels at the moment. We’re hoping he’ll get into Oxford. The teachers have high hopes for him.’
‘That’s excellent, sir. Where does he go to school?’
‘St Botolph’s.’
‘Ah.’ St Botolph’s was a minor public school in a moorland hollow a few miles north of Lyndgarth. It had an excellent reputation, and accepted day boys as well as boarders. Gerry knew that schools like St Botolph’s also took quite a few foreign students, and for a moment the idea passed through her mind that Samir could have been a pupil there. He was the right age, and he could easily have come from a wealthy Syrian family. But he hadn’t, as they had just discovered. ‘Do you know anything at all about Howard Stokes, the dead drug addict?’ she asked.
‘Me? Why would I? All I know is what I’ve heard on the news.’
Gerry showed him a photograph. ‘Have you seen him around?’
‘He was that scruffy old bloke on the mobility scooter, wasn’t he?’
‘That’s one way of describing him.’
Myers tapped the photo and nodded. ‘I thought so. We had a bit of trouble with him once, hanging around the playground in the park, scaring the kids.’
‘What did he do to scare them?’
‘It was just his being there. He didn’t have to do anything. His mere presence scared them. I mean, just look at the photo. Don’t you think he’s pretty scary?’
‘Right, sir.’ Gerry gathered her stuff together. ‘I’ll be off, then,’ she said. ‘Sorry to trouble you again. And thank you very much for your time.’
‘I’ll just run off that copy for you. Won’t be a sec.’
Myers disappeared upstairs. Gerry heard a humming sound, and he was back in no time waving a sheet of paper.
‘Thanks,’ she said.
Myers saw her to the door. ‘I hope you catch him,’ he said. ‘Whoever assaulted Lisa. Believe me, I know you have other serious demands on your time, but somehow, when it hits close to home, when it could have been one of your own...’
‘I understand, sir. And we are doing our best.’
When she had made her escape, Gerry took a deep breath and paused on her way back to Elmet Hill. She should have known what to expect from Myers, even though she had a lot of sympathy with his concerns. The police couldn’t patrol as they should, as they used to do. The bobby on the beat was a thing of the past, as the patrol car was quickly becoming, too. The money and the manpower just weren’t there. More and more local Neighbourhood Watches like Myers’s, and even private security companies, were having to fill the gaps. It was worse in the urban areas, of course, but there was plenty of crime in the counties these days, a lot of it due to drugs. And county lines.
When she got to the corner of the Close and Elmet Hill, instead of turning left back to North Market Street and the police station, she turned right, towards the park and the Hollyfield Estate beyond. One or two people still lived there, and they were more likely to have noticed anything unusual than the denizens of the hill.
Blaydon’s driver Frankie Wallace was an ex-middleweight boxer who had never amounted to much more than a second-rate scrapper in the ring. Fortunately for him, he had the brains to retire before he lost the capability to do so. He drifted into low-level criminal activity in the Glasgow gang scene for a while, working as a ‘debt collector’ for slum landlords and partaking in various other dodgy activities, including illegal gambling and protection rackets. After his second jail term, he came to what little senses he had left and gained honest employment first as a club bouncer, then as chauffeur-cum-bodyguard, first for a wealthy banker in London, then for Connor Clive Blaydon back up north. He was fifty-one years old and had been working for Blaydon for five years when Banks went to talk to him in his small terrace house just outside the York city centre.