Read Death in Dark Waters Online
Authors: Patricia Hall
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Police Procedural
Death in Dark Waters (9 page)
“Dizzy thought that a feature about your son would get some official attention directed up here. It's about time, isn't it?” Laura added with her most persuasive smile.
“Official attention? That's a bloody joke, isn't it? The only attention we get is when they come to arrest tâkids who take stuff and leave t'dealers running around to get tâlittle âuns hooked an'all.”
“So you have to stop it,â³ Dizzy said.”Come on, Lorraine. It is Lorraine isn't it? You've got to draw a line somewhere.”
“Did Stevie say he'd do this?” Lorraine Maddison asked, her face still clouded with suspicion. “I just went to get his methadone from tâchemist. It takes half the day to get down to town on t'bus but I told him not to answer t'door to no one.”
“I told him I'd come back again,” Dizzy said. “Ask him if he'll see us. Please?”
Still looking doubtful, the woman unlocked the door with two keys and led them into a darkened living room where they could dimly see a figure curled up under a blanket on the sofa.
“Stevie, love,” she said. “Here's Dizzy B back with a lady who wants to talk to you. D'you want to do that, son?”
Slowly the figure stirred and they could make out Stevie Maddison's face, grey and strained, the cheeks sunken and the eyes so bloodshot that he seemed to have difficulty focusing on his visitors. He glanced at Laura's tape-recorder and shrugged, his whole body shrinking as though he could not even find the energy to acquiesce or dispute their presence.
“Dizzy B, man,” the boy said faintly, trying to feign an enthusiasm he clearly did not feel. “You again. I never found that demo tape I promised you. My mate Derek's rap. When I feel a bit better ⦔
“Later, Stevie,” Dizzy said. “It'll be fine later.”
“Take your medicine, lad,” Stevie's mother said, handing him a small glass with some liquid in it. The boy drank and sighed heavily.
“It's no bloody good, this stuff,” he said to Dizzy. “They tell you it's as good as t'real thing, but no way. I'm turning into a right wreck.” With difficulty he hauled himself upright, revealing emaciated arms, scarred and reddened by continuous infection, and a hollow chest within an over-large t-shirt. He shivered convulsively, although the room was warm and airless. This wrecking of a life, Laura thought, must have begun long ago.
“You want to stop more kids getting into this mess?” Dizzy asked, his voice harsh.
“That'd be summat,” the boy said. “But there's no way you can stop it. It's the way it is. You try to stop it and you end up dead, one way or another.”
“Is that what happened to the boy who fell off the roof?” Laura asked gently.
Stevie shuddered and wrapped his arms round himself, shivering more violently.
“He were a friend of our Steven's,” Lorraine Maddison said. “They were in t'same class at school. When they went to school”
“He went to rehab,” Stevie said. “They don't like that.”
“Who doesn't like it?” Laura asked angrily.
“The dealers, of course,” the boy said contemptuously. “They don't like losing customers, do they? They don't like rehab, do they? They don't like projects, they don't like employment schemes, they don't like people getting their lives together ⦠Bad for business, know what I mean?” For a moment or two he looked animated but the light in his eyes soon began to fade.
“Is it the dealers who are trashing the Project?”
“spect so,” Stevie said, his interest waning. Laura turned to his mother.
“Why isn't Stevie in rehab?” she asked.
“Stevie won't go for treatment. He's too scared of what they might do to him, so we're trying to do it on our own,” his mother said. “Any road there's a waiting list for places, isn't there. He might be dead before one comes up. Donna at the Project persuaded him to give it a try but even she couldn't find him a place in a clinic. Months he had to wait, getting worse all t'time.”
“She's all right, is Donna,” Stevie muttered unexpectedly. “She's cool.”
“Tell us about the boy who fell off the roof, Stevie?” Dizzie asked. “What was his name again?”
“Derek, Derek Whitby. He were my best mate. And he didn't fall, man.”
“I thought he was high ⦔ Laura began.
“So he was high. Maybe he was, more likely not. I don't think he was using again, man. Last time I saw him he were clean. Any road, he didn't fall,” Stevie said. “I was there. I saw him.”
“You mean he jumped? Killed himself.”
“I don't mean that, neither. I mean he were pushed. I were down below. I'd been waiting for him. I saw him on târoof wi' some other lads. But there were nothing I could do. I were too far away. I saw him up there and I saw him pushed over tâedge. I heard him scream all t'way down.”
“Who? Who pushed him?” Laura asked but the boy just looked at her contemptuously again. It was obvious that there were some things he was never going to tell them, even if he knew.
“So what did you do, Stevie?” Sanderson asked quietly.
“I ran
didn't I? I went back home, didn't I? I thought them bastards'd be coming for me next.”
didn't I? I went back home, didn't I? I thought them bastards'd be coming for me next.”“Have you told the police this?” Laura asked. The boy looked at her again and held a shaking hand up in front of his face.
“This stuff maybe goin' to kill me,” he said. “And maybe not. But if I talk to t' police I'm dead. Any fool knows that on t'Heights. See nowt, say nowt, that's the way it is.”
“I think it's time you went,” Stevie's mother said quietly from the other side of the room where she had been listening to her son as intently as her visitors had. “This lad's going to stay alive. I'll make sure of that.”
“But if Derek was murdered â¦That's what he's saying?” Laura began.
“He's saying nowt,” Lorraine Maddison said, glaring at her visitors defiantly. “He knows nowt. That's the way you stay alive round here. If the police want to find summat out they're on their own. And if you tell them owt about what Steven's said, we'll just deny it. There's no help for it. That's the way it is on Wuthering.”
Reluctantly Dizzy B led the way back down the damp and stinking staircase.
“He knows who it was,” he said. “I'm bloody sure he knows, but unless the police are prepared to get him and his mother off the estate he'll never talk.”
“I thought that's what the police did with witnesses,” Laura said.
“Sometimes,” Dizzy said. “But at the moment the local nick doesn't even believe this Derek boy was murdered so they won't be taking any interest at all, will they?” Just inside the doors to the block he hesitated.
“You up for talking to Derek's mother?” he asked. Laura glanced at her watch. Her lunch-hour was rapidly running out but her instinct was to follow where the story led and risk Ted Grant's wrath.
“You know where she lives?”
Dizzy nodded.
“Your amazing granny told me,” he said with a grin.
“Is there anything she doesn't know?” Laura asked with genuine wonderment.
“I doubt it,” Dizzy said. “He actually lived in the block where he fell off the roof. His parents are still there, poor sods.”
“So let's do it,” Laura said, the laughter fading from her eyes. Picking their way across the soggy grass they made their way to the identical entrance of Priestley House, the most westerly of the three blocks of flats on the Heights and the most exposed to the wind and rain. Most of the cellophane wrappings had been blown off the flowers which had been left in tribute to Derek Whitby, and the pale carnations and roses were gradually disintegrating into the mud, a frail memorial to real flesh and blood, Laura thought.
“It's like bloody Siberia up here,” Dizzy complained, pulling the collar of his fleece up to his nose.
“They're not joking when they call it Wuthering,” Laura said. “And the buildings soak up water like a sponge. They should have pulled them down years ago but they've never been able to find the money - or the commitment. There's some who believe that the people who live up here don't deserve anything better.”
Inside the bleak entrance hall where the lifts displayed the familiar out-of-order signs and a couple of hypodermic syringes rolled into a corner in the draught from the open door, she glanced up the staircase quizzically.
“How far this time?” she asked. “I'm not fit enough for this. I've been skipping my exercise lately, putting on the pounds.”
Dizzy B glanced at her appreciatively.
“You look fine to me, woman,” he said. “Number ten, first floor. Think you can manage that?” He led the way up again and onto another puddled landing where the wind howled like a banshee between the panels of the walkway. Leaning against the gale, eyes half closed against the driving rain, they staggered to the door of number ten and knocked. This time the door was opened quickly, though held on a restraining chain, and two dark eyes peered through the gap.
“Mrs. Whitby?” Laura said. “I'm from the Gazette. I'm writing about the drug problem on the estate and I wondered if you could spare me five minutes?” The eyes widened slightly and for a moment Laura thought that the door was going to be slammed in their faces but eventually the chain was eased off and the door pulled wide to reveal a middle-aged black woman in a formal dark dress who glanced anxiously along the landing before beckoning her two visitors inside.
“You wan' to be careful, girl,” she said. “It ain't safe for folk like you to be roun' here asking questions like that.” She glanced at Dizzy B her eyes full of accusing anxiety. “You should know better than to bring her here, man,” she said.
“We're OK,” Dizzy said. “We'll be fine. But we just saw Stevie Maddison and that boy's not fine. Is that the way your Derek was before he died?” Laura thought that Dizzy B's casual brutality would dissolve Mrs. Whitby in front of their eyes but after turning away from them for a moment, her shoulders slumped and her plump features almost collapsing in misery, she turned back with a spark of anger in her eyes.
“He was like that,” she said at last. “For a long time he was like that. And then he decided he want to change. And believe me we did everything we could to help that boy. An' Donna from the Project. She a brave lady, that one. She helped me an' Derek. I tol' the police. Derek was not a junkie no more. But out there there's people who do the opposite. They don' want no one to change. They like things just the way they are with
these kids. Lots of profit in it for them if things stay the same, I dare say. They come knocking at my door with cheap offers for Derek, special deals ⦠Can you believe that? Like travellin' salesmen? I tell them he not a junkie, that's he's clean and I intend he goin' to stay clean, and then suddenly he's dead, high on something, they say, and falling off a roof. Is that convenient for someone? After all the trouble he went to get himself clean, booking into rehab, everything? Can you believe that is what really happened?”
these kids. Lots of profit in it for them if things stay the same, I dare say. They come knocking at my door with cheap offers for Derek, special deals ⦠Can you believe that? Like travellin' salesmen? I tell them he not a junkie, that's he's clean and I intend he goin' to stay clean, and then suddenly he's dead, high on something, they say, and falling off a roof. Is that convenient for someone? After all the trouble he went to get himself clean, booking into rehab, everything? Can you believe that is what really happened?”
“What do you think happened, Mrs. Whitby?” Laura asked quietly, switching on her recorder again.
“I think he was killed, that's what I think. That's what Stevie says and I believe him.”
“And have you told the police that?”
“I told the police that. And they don' believe me, do they? They don' want to believe me, maybe. Maybe the dealers pay them not to believe me. That's what I think. So now we goin' home. We'd decided that before Derek died. Since 1965 my family been in this country, my mother and father came on the boat all that time ago, and it's been nothin' but trouble all the way. Derek was my youngest boy, my last child, and I've lost him, and there's no justice for black people in this country so we going back to Jamaica. It's all over here, finished. My man is giving up his job at the end of the month. I stopped already when I was helpin' Derek get clean. I worked at the Infirmary but I'll not go back, I haven't the heart now.” She crossed the room and took an envelope from behind the clock on the mantelpiece.
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