Читать книгу COLD KILL - Neil White - Страница 6

It was a few days later when Jack Garrett got the call.

He was on the Whitcroft estate, for an assignment for the local paper’s newest editor, Dolby Wilkins, who had been brought in to cut costs and increase circulation. Dolby was all shiny good looks and old money confidence, always in jeans and a casual linen jacket, and his mantra was that two types of stories sold newspapers: sex and prejudice. The local paper left the sex to the red top nationals, so all Dolby had left was prejudice. So he went for the social divide, the quick fix, shock stories over good copy. Immigrants breaking laws, or people on benefits making a decent life for themselves. The first thing he did was to have his business cards printed. That told Jack all he needed to know.

Jack had been staring through his windscreen, uncomfortable with the assignment. He knew that repackaging poverty as idleness got the tills ticking, but Dolby was new to Blackley and he didn’t understand the place. He hadn’t seen how a tough old cotton town had been stripped of its industry, with nothing to replace it, just traces of its past lying around the town, dismembered, like body parts; huge brick mill buildings, some converted into retail units that held craft fairs on summer weekends, while others had been left to crumble, stripped of their lead, the wire and cables ripped out of the walls, cashed in for cigarette money, the light spilling in through partial roof collapses. The stories were more about no prospects in hard times, but sympathy for the unlucky didn’t sell as many papers.

Jack understood that the Blackley Telegraph was a business, but he was a freelance journalist, not a businessman, the court stories his thing, with the occasional crime angle as a feature. But the paper bought his stories, shedding staff writers and using freelancers to take up the slack, some of them just kids fresh out of college or unpublished writers looking to build a CV. So Jack had agreed to write the story of the estate, bashed out on an old laptop in his cottage in Turners Fold, a small forgotten place nestled in the Lancashire hills, a few miles from Blackley.

The Whitcroft estate was on the edge of Blackley, the first blight on the drive in. Built on seven hills that were once green and rolling, Blackley seemed like the ugly big brother to Turners Fold. Traces of former wealth could still be seen in the Victorian town centre though, where three-storey fume-blackened shop buildings were filled by small town jewellers and century-old outfitters that competed with the glass and steel frames of the high street. The wide stone steps and Roman portico of the town hall overlooked the main shopping street and boasted of grander times, when men in long waistcoats and extravagant sideburns twirled gold watches from their pockets.

The Whitcroft estate had been built in the good times, an escape from the grid-like strips of terraced housing that existed elsewhere in the town. Here, it was all cul-de-sacs and crescents, sweeps of privet, indoor toilets, but it had divided the town, had become the escape route for the whites after the Asian influx in the sixties. Mosques and minarets were sprinkled amongst the warehouses and wharf buildings now, the call to prayer the new church bells, and so the Whitcroft estate had become white-flight for those who couldn’t afford the countryside.

Jack pondered all of this as he sat in his car, a 1973 Triumph Stag in Calypso Red. Young mothers walked their prams on a road that circled the estate. The morning sun gave the place a glow and highlighted the deep green of the hedges, the gleam of the brickwork, and brought out the vivid violets and pinks and reds of the flower baskets. He could hear laughs and screams from the local school, which he could see through some blue railings on the curve of the road.

But that was just gloss.

The entrance to the estate was marked by two rows of shops that faced each other across gum-peppered paving stones, making a funnel for the cold winds that blew in from the moors that the estate overlooked. A Chinese takeaway and a grocer occupied three units, along with a bookmaker’s and a post office. On the otherside, a launderette and a chemist. There were grilles on the windows and the doors looked old and dirty.

Behind the shops were blocks of housing, four houses to each small row, with pebble-dashed first floors and England stickers in the windows. Some had paint on the walls or wooden boards over the windows. They formed cul-de-sacs that were connected by privet-lined ginnels, so that the quick routes were the most dangerous. Crisp packets and old beer cans lodged themselves in the hedges.

There were small signs of affluence though. The streets were busy with workmen in overalls and young office girls heading out to work, calling in for newspapers or cigarettes at the grocer’s. There were porch extensions, gleaming double-glazing, new garden walls. The estate wasn’t just for lost causes. A private security van patrolled every thirty minutes, with bald men in black jackets who stared at Jack as they went past. Maybe Dolby wasn’t going to get the article he wanted.

Jack climbed out of his car and wandered towards the shop, looking for some local views. Outside the shop, a young mother stood over her pram with a cigarette in her hand, cheap gold flashing on each finger, her hair pulled back tightly.

Jack gave the door of the shop a push. It let out a tinkle as he went in, and he pretended to browse through the magazines until the shop became empty. He went to the counter.

The man behind it barely looked up. Middle-aged and with a cigarette-stained moustache, he was flicking through a newspaper and only stopped reading when Jack coughed.

‘Jack Garrett,’ he said, and tried a smile. ‘I’m a reporter, writing about the estate.’ He pointed towards the windows. ‘What’s it like for you, with the grilles and the bars?’

He stared at Jack, weighing up whether to answer or not. ‘The council ruined this place,’ he said, eventually.

‘How so?’

‘Because they turned it into a dumping ground,’ he said. ‘Have everyone in one place, so they said.’

‘Have you been here long?’

‘More than twenty years,’ he said. ‘I inherited it from my father, back when this was a decent place to live.’

‘What went wrong?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem like people want to work anymore. The young girls get a house when they get pregnant, but the father never moves in. Or, at least, that’s what they tell everyone, but I see them leaving in the morning.’

‘I see people heading out to work,’ Jack said. ‘It doesn’t seem that destitute.’

‘There are still some people left that make me proud to live here, but it’s getting harder every day.’

‘Why is that?’

‘The kids,’ he said. ‘They hang around here all evening, circling customers on their bikes, asking people to buy their booze and fags for them, because I know most are too young. If I try and get rid of them, I get abuse. All my customers want is to come in and buy some milk or something, maybe some cans for later, but the kids put them off.’

‘Have you spoken to their parents?’ Jack said.

The shopkeeper gave a wry smile. ‘Drunk most of the time.’

Jack returned the smile and guessed his predicament. ‘You sell them the booze,’ he said.

‘They’d only go somewhere else for it. And they do mostly, stocking up on the three-for-two offers. They come here when they run out, or when they want to start early and don’t want to drive to the supermarket.’

‘Do the police come round much?’ Jack said.

The shopkeeper scoffed. ‘Hardly ever, and when they do, the kids treat it like a game, looking for a chase. They shout abuse and then starburst whenever the van doors open. Sometimes one of them trips and the police catch them, but nothing ever happens.’

‘Is that why the estate has private security?’ Jack said.

‘It makes people feel safer.’

‘Who pays for it?’

‘Whoever wants it.’

‘What about drugs?’ Jack said. ‘Could the police be doing more about that around here?’

‘No, not drugs around here,’ he said. ‘Maybe some weed, but it’s booze mainly. Always has been. I’m not saying that no one round here does drugs, but the kids that cycle around causing trouble aren’t on drugs. They’re pissed.’

‘You don’t paint a glowing picture,’ Jack said.

He nodded to the voice recorder in Jack’s hand. ‘And I bet you won’t either, by the time it makes the paper.’

When Jack started to protest, the shopkeeper jabbed his finger at the paper. ‘I read them as well as sell them, and I’ve seen the way the Telegraph has gone.’ Then he returned to whatever had occupied his attention before.

Jack turned away, frustrated, and left the shop. He watched the cars heading in and out of the estate. They were mainly old Vauxhalls and Fords, most driven by young men who didn’t look like they could afford the insurance. His phone buzzed in his pocket. When he checked the screen and saw that it was Dolby, he thought about not answering, but he knew he needed to keep on Dolby’s good side.

He pressed the button. ‘Dolby, what can I do for you?’

‘There’s been another murder,’ he said, his voice a little breathless. ‘A young woman.’

Jack paused as he tried to work out what he meant, but then his mind flashed back to the young woman found in a pipe by the reservoir on the edge of town a few weeks earlier, a gruesome find for a father and son on an angling trip.

‘Whereabouts?’

Dolby told him, and Jack realised that he was only half a mile away.

‘Do you want me to cover it?’ Jack said.

‘I’m not calling to spread the gossip,’ Dolby said, some irritation in his voice.

‘On my way,’ Jack said, and jabbed at the off button.

He gave the shopkeeper a smile, but there was no response.