Death in a Far Country (20 page)

‘I’ll go to the bottom and see if I can locate them,’ she said. ‘I expect they’ll come down if they know it’s only me.’ She tried to sound optimistic to reassure her grandmother, though she knew she was clutching at straws. Jasmin Ibramovic might respond to her voice but she very much doubted that a terrified Elena would. She pulled her coat back on and went to the front door.

‘Here,’ Joyce said, pulling open a drawer in the hall-stand and handing her a torch. ‘It’s getting dark.’

‘And if anything happens down here, call me on my mobile,’ Laura said, switching her phone to vibrate so that no one else would hear it ring.

Once outside, Laura glanced cautiously up and down the road between her grandmother’s house and the flats but could see no one about. Dusk was falling fast, and a light drizzle had slicked the road surface, turning the strip of grass on the other side to soggy mud.

She had not mentioned to her grandmother her own panic on the way up to The Heights as she became aware of a car close behind her that she was convinced was following her. Cautiously she had turned off the main road into a maze of small streets and become quite sure that her suspicions were right. Every turn she made was copied by a dark saloon with two people inside. Desperately anxious, she had stopped for a moment beside a streetlight and pulled out her mobile phone, making sure that whoever was behind her could see exactly what she was doing. The car seemed to hesitate for a moment and then overtook her and drove away quickly, but not before Laura was able to see the registration plate. She had dialled Kevin Mower’s number and was relieved to get
straight through.

‘I may be imagining it,’ she had said. ‘But I think I’m being followed and it’s a bit scary.’ She had given the Sergeant the number of the car she suspected.

‘I’ll check it out,’ Mower had said, readily enough. ‘What are you doing, Laura? Where are you going?’

‘I’m on my way to my grandmother’s,’ Laura had answered. ‘Don’t worry. It’s probably nothing.’ But she knew as she cut the connection that Mower probably would not believe her and half hoped that he would pass on his concerns to Michael Thackeray.

She had not seen the suspect car again as she completed the journey to The Heights by a more devious route than normal, and there was no sign of it now as she stood outside Joyce’s garden gate, wondering if she had the courage to venture into the looming block of flats on the other side of the road. She glanced down at the smart shoes she had put on that morning to go to police headquarters and shrugged. At least she had not chosen high heels, or her beautiful new red boots.

Slowly, deciding she had no choice but to try to find the runaway girls, she crossed the road and made her way along the protective fence until she came to the gap that her grandmother had described. She slid through the narrow space where one of the wooden sheets had become loose and stepped into the deeper darkness beyond, where the street lights did not penetrate, and through which she could only just about make out the entrance to the block across a muddy patch of ground. She shivered slightly. The flats on Wuthering, as The Heights was known locally, had always been regarded as slightly sinister, and few tears had been shed when the families
had finally been moved out and redevelopment had been promised. But the scheme had progressed slowly and although three of the original four blocks had now been reduced to rubble, Priestley House remained, the last to be emptied of its occupants by the council, still standing defiantly four-square in the teeth of the worst wind, rain and the occasional fire could do to it.

She pushed at the front door and it swung open easily. To her left, the two lifts stood derelict, the doors forced open and no sign of the cars which should have occupied the echoing shafts. The ropes and pulleys swung eerily in the void, occasionally banging and slapping against the walls with an irregularity that made her jump. To her right the concrete stairs stretched upwards, every tread littered with the detritus of the illicit users of the empty building, discarded syringes and trash of impossibly indeterminate origin trampled into a damp and stinking mulch. She did not want to climb up those stairs. Her whole mind and body fought against the idea and she had to gulp down her nausea.

From somewhere above a door crashed shut and set her heart racing. If Elena and Jazzy were up there, she thought, she would have to find them before it became completely dark and the people of the night, who still terrorised the estate, came out and threatened them. Clutching her mobile phone in one hand and the torch in the other, she crossed the entrance hall and began to climb. The faint light from her torch cast shadows that moved as she took one slow step upwards after another, holding her breath as long as she could to avoid the stench. At the first landing she shone the beam along the outside walkway, where the doors of flats either lay shattered
on the concrete floor or swung at crazy angles, occasionally creaking in the wind. She could see that most of the windows were smashed and here and there the concrete walls were blackened by smoke.

‘Jazzy,’ she called softly, not wanting to walk too far away from the stairs, her escape route if she needed one. She took a few tentative steps across the smashed glass which crunched under foot like pebbles on a beach, and then stopped, listening carefully for a moment, but could hear no response. Cautiously, she turned back to the stairs and went up the next flight, where she repeated the exercise.

Something Elena had said came back to her as she hesitated at the foot of the third flight. If she remembered correctly, the girl had said that she had found a safe haven on the top floor. As she turned back to the stairs this time she was startled by the sudden loud flutter of wings as a pair of birds flapped away upwards, driven in panic from their roosts by her approach. Heart thudding, she stopped for a moment, back to the wall, before she shrugged and pushed herself onward. At least if the birds were asleep, she thought, there was unlikely to be anyone else about.

After pausing on every landing and repeating her whispered call for the girls, she reached the top, feeling slightly more hopeful. The smell was less nauseating here, and the carpet of broken glass and litter less thick, but as the last of the daylight faded, the shadows were becoming more intense. Cautiously, she directed the beam of her torch along the landing, lighting up the same wrecked doors and windows as below, and the same the view of the derelict landscape surrounding Priestley, almost impossible to make out in detail now in the misty
darkness beyond the reach of her feeble yellow light.

‘Jazzy? Elena? Are you there?’

There was still no obvious response but she wondered if she had not heard the faintest movement further along the walkway. She hesitated, but only for a moment. She switched off the torch and, relying on the last vestige of daylight that was left, felt her way carefully along the passageway, glancing into each doorway as she passed. At the end she found a door that had been restored to an almost upright position and propped closed, though drunkenly.

‘Jazzy?’ she said, more loudly this time. ‘It’s Laura. Are you there?’ Suddenly the door was pushed open, catching Laura off balance as it fell towards her and pushed her across the walkway hard against the retaining rail, which sagged alarmingly under her weight. Before she could regain her balance two figures rushed out of the flat and ran away from her, back towards the main staircase.

‘Jazzy, Elena!’ Laura cried out involuntarily as the two figures disappeared onto the top landing. ‘It’s me. Come back, please. Jazzy, please come back.’

But there was no response, and rubbing her elbow, which had taken a glancing blow from the falling door, she hurried after the fleeing pair. On the landing she hesitated, glancing down into the inky blackness below but, to her surprise, hearing nothing. They did not seem to be running down the stairs. But then she noticed the faintest hint of daylight on the floor to her left, just visible below another door, which she guessed led up to the roof. She felt for a handle, found it, and the door swung open. Above her, at the top of another flight of steps, she could see the night sky and she felt the force of
the wind, which was blasting across the open roof. She felt sick with apprehension. Once, several years ago, she had seen a man fall off a roof like this. She did not want to witness the same thing again.

Forcing herself up the concrete steps she stepped out into the gusts of sleety rain, silently scanning the empty expanse of roof, broken only by the top of the lift shaft. She could see no one but she was absolutely sure that the two girls were there, no doubt hiding on the far side of the shaft. Cautiously, she made her way towards the structure.

‘Jazzy,’ she called as she got closer and thought her voice could be heard above the gusty wind. ‘Elena. Please, it’s me, Laura. I don’t mean you any harm.’ Then she saw them, not, as she had thought, behind the shaft, but crouching in the lee of the parapet on the side of the roof that overlooked the road. She changed direction and slowly walked towards the girls, but as she got closer, what she feared most suddenly happened. One of the figures jumped out of the shadows and climbed onto the parapet, where she stood for a moment, silhouetted against the faint light from the streetlights below and swaying slightly in the wind. Elena’s friend Jazzy screamed and grabbed hold of her but the Albanian girl struggled as Laura ran towards them, her heart pounding, expecting Elena to lose her balance and disappear before she reached her. But she was quick enough to grab hold of the girl’s emaciated body as she swayed between life and death and, between them, Laura and Jazzy managed to pull her down until she was sitting on the parapet with her legs safely on the inside.

‘Elena,’ Laura gasped. ‘You mustn’t, you mustn’t! You’re going to be all right.’

‘Men down there,’ Elena said, her voice shrill. ‘Look, men down there.’ Laura glanced down at the road and saw that the girl was right. A car that looked very like the one she had suspected of following her through the town earlier was now parked at the front of the flats and two figures could be seen making their way towards the gap in the fence. Her mouth went dry and she drew the two girls closer to her, so that they could not be seen from below, but Elena suddenly wriggled out of her grip and half climbed back across the parapet again.

‘No,’ Laura said. ‘Please believe me, Elena. If we’re quick we can get out of here before they find us. Come on, Elena. You said you did it yourself. We can do it too. If they come up the main stairs we’ll go out the other way, down the emergency stairs. But you need to be quick.’ The girl was sitting with her legs over the void now and Laura doubted that she could pull her back a second time if she was determined to launch herself over the edge.

‘She doesn’t understand,’ Jazzy said dully. ‘How can she understand you. She wants to die. She told me that over and over. She wants to die. I wanted her to come away from Bradfield but she wouldn’t. I couldn’t get her to go on the train with me…’ Jasmin shuddered, evidently on the verge of collapse herself.

Laura tried to get a firmer grip around Elena’s waist, feeling the tension in her thin frame as she flexed her arms ready to fling herself forward. But her own desperation and fury that the girl had been driven to this gave her extra strength.

‘Help me,’ she said to Jazzy through gritted teeth. ‘For goodness sake, help me pull her back.’ Almost reluctantly, it seemed, the other girl took hold of Elena’s arms and between
them they eased her back onto the floor. When they had got their breath back Laura hauled the weeping Albanian girl onto her feet and hung onto her arms grimly.

‘We’re going down now,’ she said firmly. ‘No argument. We’re going down.’ Very slowly the three of them, Elena supported on each side, made their way back down the first flight of stairs to the top landing, where they stood for a moment listening. Elena trembled between them but no longer offered any serious resistance, but she stiffened as they all saw a flicker of light far below and heard the sound of someone ascending the main stairs. Laura pulled the two girls onto the top walkway and they made their way to the far end where the second staircase led downwards. Not daring to use her torch, Laura led the way, feeling the sides of the stairwell with her hands and reaching for each tread tentatively with her feet. On the landings they could clearly hear noises from the other end of the building, but no one had apparently worked out that there was another exit. Breathlessly, they reached the ground floor, pushed open the door and ran across the muddy expanse of grass to the gap in the fencing.

To their amazement, as they struggled out of the darkness into the road, they were met by several burly policemen heading in the opposite direction. Behind them Laura saw parked police cars and vans and, amid the confusion, the welcome sight of Michael Thackeray and Kevin Mower at the kerbside deep in conversation with her grandmother. Seeing the three of them approach, the two men hurried in their direction.

‘Look after the girls, Kevin,’ Thackeray said, brusquely. Mower had watched Thackeray’s growing anxiety, verging on panic, ever since he had discovered that the car number
Laura had relayed to him on her way to The Heights was Stephen Stone’s. His visible distress had intensified when Joyce Ackroyd had told him where Laura had gone to seek the runaway girls, and Mower could only sympathise with his boss’s distraught expression now as Laura ignored him and addressed herself to Mower alone.

‘Elena needs a doctor,’ Laura said. ‘Urgently, I think.’

‘No problem. I’ll take care of them,’ Mower said, taking the two girls gently by the arm and leading them over to an ambulance that had just arrived, blue light flashing.

Thackeray stood speechless for a moment looking at Laura, while uniformed men streamed through the gap in the fence and into Priestley House. Laura turned to him slowly, and gave a small helpless shrug, her own face drained and pale as the shock kicked in.

‘I think she would have jumped if I hadn’t got there first.’

‘Are you always going to live so dangerously?’ Thackeray asked quietly, his voice hoarse.