Death in Dark Waters Read Online Free PDF

what she was saying in his vicinity.
    â€œMr. Adams is an old friend of the family, as it goes,” she said sweetly, capitalising for once on her local connections which Baker, a recent arrival, could not match.

    â€œAnd a crack-down on E? Is that on your boyfriend’s agenda?”
    â€œI’ve really no idea,” she said. “We’ve much better things to do than talk shop after work. Why don’t you ask him yourself.” She knew that this would annoy Baker whose relationship with Michael Thackeray could best be described in terms of an armed truce.
    Baker shrugged and moved away, but not without a parting shot.
    â€œWhat I don′t understand is why Bradfield CID’s been cut right out of operations up on the Heights,” he said. “Funny, that.”
    Â 
    â€œD’you want to sit in on this one, boss?”
    DC Val Ridley hesitated outside the door of an interview room, trim and contained as ever in spite of the dark circles beneath her eyes that Thackeray now regarded as permanent.
    â€œWho’ve you got?” he asked.
    â€œThe girlfriend of the lad who was knocked down in Chapel Street. Jeremy Adams.”
    Thackeray hesitated and then nodded, curious almost in spite of himself.
    â€œDo we need a responsible adult?” he asked.
    â€œShe’s seventeen but she’s got her mother with her anyway,” Val said quickly. “I told them an informal chat. No caution. Nothing heavy. At least she had the decency to hang around after the accident. Most of the little beggars vanished into the night.
    â€œAnd how’s the boy?”
    â€œStill critical.” Her voice was flat, without emotion. Thackeray knew that Val was good at that, but very occasionally the mask cracked to reveal a warmer and more erratic human being underneath the chilly exterior. He let her lead the way into the interview room where a young girl with long blonde hair and a sulky expression was sitting at the table alongside a woman almost as slim, certainly as blonde and
apart from some faint lines around the eyes not apparently much older.
    â€œMrs.-James, this is DCI Thackeray,” Val said. “And this is Louise.”
    Thackeray took the fourth seat at the table and nodded to Val Ridley to continue. Teenagers fascinated and disturbed him not least because his own son, had he survived, would by now have been hovering on the edge of these turbulent, truculent few years and he had not the faintest idea how he would have learned to cope with that. Badly, he suspected, if Ian had begun to display any of the alarming and often dangerous tendencies to self-destruction he saw amongst the young who crossed his path as a police officer. Would that have given him more insight with a child of his own, or just made him more afraid of what could go wrong? He did not know. But here, at least, he thought, was a child who appeared to have had all the advantages so many of CID’s clients had not. Had Louise James slipped over the edge in spite of that? Or was he simply assuming that because she fell into that age range she must be sad, or mad or bad. He smiled uneasily at the girl’s mother and tried to concentrate on what Val Ridley was saying.
    â€œSo tell me about Wednesday evening, Louise,” Val said. “What made you and Jeremy decide to go to the Carib Club?”
    â€œIt was my birthday, wasn’t it?” Louise said, in a barely audible mumble.
    â€œShe doesn’t usually go out in the week but because it was her birthday, her seventeenth, we made an exception,” Mrs. James broke in quickly. “They get so much homework. They’re at Bradfield Grammar, you know …”
    â€œBut why the Carib?” Val persisted. “Is it somewhere you’ve been before?”
    Louise glanced at her mother.
    â€œOnce,” she said. “Once or twice, at a weekend.”
    â€œWe’d have stopped her if we’d known,” Mrs. James