Dead End Page 2

  ‘They never told us they were coming,’ said Roy Moores, who was a nice feller but could never have been described as the sharpest pencil in the box.

  ‘No, they didn’t tell us,’ Archie agreed. ‘Has anybody let the rest of the lads know what’s happening?’

  All the other men shook their heads.

  Suppressing a sigh of exasperation, Archie reached into his pocket, and pulled out a handful of change, and it gave it to Moores.

  ‘There’s a phone box on the corner of Jubilee Street,’ he said. ‘Ring as many of the lads as you know have phones, and ask them all to let the rest know what’s going on.’

  Moores’ brow pursed at the thought of being given so much responsibility.

  ‘Wouldn’t you rather do it yourself?’ he asked hopefully.

  ‘No, I can be of more use here,’ replied Archie, who had just noted that the convoy had slowed to a halt, and that a man in a brown suit was making his way slowly but steadily towards the allotments.

  Roderick Hardcastle was five yards from the mesh gate when he heard someone call out, ‘That’s far enough, Mr Hardcastle.’

  He might have known it would be Archie Eccleston who’d be the one to issue the warning, Hardcastle thought.

  ‘We need to talk, Archie,’ he said.

  The other man shrugged. ‘There doesn’t really seem to be much point in doing that, not now that you’ve joined the enemy.’

  ‘I have not joined the enemy,’ Hardcastle replied, keeping his anger under control – but only just. ‘I’ve stood shoulder-to-shoulder with you every inch of the way.’

  Archie glanced up the road. ‘Doesn’t look like it to me,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not here for them,’ Hardcastle said, gesturing behind him. ‘I’m here for you. We’ve lost, Archie – that’s an indisputable fact – and if you refuse to bow to the inevitable, you’ll only be hurting yourself.’

  ‘We haven’t lost,’ Archie said stubbornly. ‘There’s still the High Court to appeal to, and if that fails, we’ll go right up to the House of Lords.’

  Hardcastle shook his head, pityingly. ‘The National Association of Allotment Holders isn’t prepared to pour any more money into this case, because they can see it’s a lost cause.’

  ‘Then we’ll raise the money ourselves.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Whist drives and raffles, and that sort of thing.’

  ‘You could have a hundred whist drives and a thousand raffles, and you’d still not raise anything like enough.’ Hardcastle switched his attention from Archie to the others. ‘Come on, lads, admit defeat and let the contractors do what they need to do.’

  ‘Will they give us a day or two to shift our sheds?’ asked Ted King, raising what was, in effect, an invisible white flag.

  Hardcastle sighed. ‘I’m afraid they won’t,’ he said. ‘They’ll say you’ve already had six months, and, if I can be frank, they’re as pissed off with you as you are with them.’

  ‘We could maybe have it done by this afternoon, if we really put our backs into it,’ the other man said.

  Hardcastle shook his head again, wearily. ‘You just don’t get it, do you, Ted?’ he asked. ‘The council employs the contractors to put a road through the allotments, and the moment they start work, the clock is ticking. So if they can’t work and it’s not their fault, the council still has to pay them. Which means that if the council loses a day’s work, it shells out ten thousand pounds for nothing.’

  The other man whistled softly. ‘It can’t be as much as that,’ he said.

  ‘It’s exactly as much as that,’ Hardcastle insisted, though, in fact, he’d just plucked that figure out of the air.

  He turned back to Archie, and saw that in the minute or so it had taken to answer the other man’s question, Eccleston had produced a thick steel chain from a bag at his feet and was proceeding to wrap it around himself.

  ‘Now come on, Archie,’ Hardcastle coaxed, ‘this is no time for a pointless gesture.’

  Ignoring him, Eccleston threaded the two ends of the chain through both gates and then linked them together with two padlocks big enough to grace a medieval castle.

  He’s been practicing, Hardcastle thought. He couldn’t have done that half as smoothly if he hadn’t practiced it.

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Archie, how long do you think that’s going to hold them up?’ he asked.

  ‘Maybe long enough for the rest of the allotment holders to get here,’ Archie said.

  ‘And what good will it do if they do get here?’ Hardcastle wondered. ‘There’s enough police here to arrest you all – if there aren’t, they’ll just bring more in. So what’s the point of it all?’

  Archie wanted to explain that points didn’t come into it – that you felt about these matters in your gut, rather than working them out in your head.

  Of course the allotment holders couldn’t stop it!

  He knew that.

  And of course the new strip of land the council gave them would probably be just as good – looked at objectively – as the one they’d sweated over and loved all these years.

  But if they gave up just like that, without even the hint of a fight, it would be like letting the land down – turning their backs on the friable black soil which clung to them.

  And he, personally, would be losing the land on which Patrick took his first few tentative steps – the land that would be marked forever with footprints which could only be seen through the eyes of love.

  ‘Do your damnedest,’ Archie snarled. ‘You and the council both.’

  ‘I’ve told you a dozen times, Archie, that it’s nothing to do with me,’ the MP said.

  But as he was speaking, he was turning to face the police cars, a prearranged signal that he’d done his damnedest, and now he washed his hands of the whole business.

  As she walked along the corridor that ran down the middle of the intensive care unit of the Whitebridge General Hospital, Ward Sister Diana Sowerbury was aware that all the nurses on ward duty were following her progress with their eyes, asking themselves what kind of sister she would turn out to be, and perhaps – and this must really be puzzling them – what the hell the hospital was doing bringing in a woman from the other side of the Pennines.

  Well, they’d get the answer to their first question soon enough. She was – to use an old-fashioned term she rather liked – a bit of a stickler. She was universally loved by the doctors, since her wards always ran like clockwork, and feared and respected (in equal measure, she liked to think) by her nurses, because wards do not run like clockwork without someone having to suffer a little. She did not have much to do with the actual patients herself, but when she did happen to come across them, she treated them with a sterile compassion which could almost have been mistaken for the real thing. And as far as visitors went, she was quite prepared to treat them with compassion, too, as long as they stuck rigorously to her rules.

  The second question her new nurses might be asking themselves was more problematic. On its most basic level, the answer was simple. She was there because she had been offered a job in the best ICU in the north of England, and she had accepted it without a second thought. On a more complex level, it was rather strange that she had been offered a position she’d never applied for, in a county she’d never even visited, and even stranger that her transfer should have been effected in a mere thirty-six hours.

  The reason couldn’t be her nursing skills – though she’d been a bloody good nurse and she was an even better ward sister – she was sure about that.

  So it had to be because of the other thing.

  She had reached the edge of her new realm, and was standing in front of the double doors which led into the main corridor and the outside world. To her left, there was a door which led into a private room which was currently being paid for by the Central Lancs police force, and looking through the window she was horrified to see that there was a man inside it wearing overalls.

  She swung the do
or open.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing here?’ she demanded. ‘This is a restricted area!’

  The man, who was crouched down by an electric socket in the wall, looked up at her.

  ‘I’m fixing the circuit, Sister,’ he said. ‘Can’t afford to have the hospital’s system going down, especially in its ICU, now can we?’

  And, as if to demonstrate the need for power, he indicated the bed, on which a woman connected to a number of wires and tubes lay deathly still.

  ‘So you’re from the maintenance department, are you?’ Diana Sowerbury asked, still far from mollified. ‘And why didn’t your supervisor let me know about this?’

  The man straightened up. He was quite tall, quite young and rather good looking, Diana Sowerbury quickly decided – not that any of that mattered one way or the other.

  ‘I’m not from the maintenance department,’ he said. ‘To be honest with you, your maintenance department does a great job as long as nothing breaks down, but they realize – and thank goodness they do – that something like this requires the expert touch.’

  He ran his finger along top of his pocket, where the words: ‘Harrison Electrical – the Expert Touch’ had been embroidered.

  ‘Even if it’s an external contractor, I should be informed,’ Diana Sowerbury said, unyieldingly. ‘Especially if it’s an external contractor.’

  The man grinned. He had a rather nice grin, she thought.

  ‘Oh, I get it,’ he said. ‘You don’t trust us because we were born in the wagon of a travelling show.’

  Diana Sowerbury frowned. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not entirely sure what you mean.’

  ‘Us external contractors are all gypsies, tramps and thieves – like in the Cher song.’

  Diana Sowerbury didn’t want to smile, but became aware that her facial muscles had betrayed her, and she was doing just that.

  ‘Such an idea never crossed my mind,’ she protested, ‘but I do think I might have been—’

  ‘Tell you what it must have been,’ the electrician interrupted. ‘All this was set up last week, and you were still in Sheffield then, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I was,’ Diana Sowerbury agreed.

  ‘Well, there you are, then,’ the man said. He picked up his toolbox, checked his watch, and headed for the door. ‘Well, time and tide wait for no man,’ he continued, cheerfully. ‘I’ll see you around.’

  ‘Yes,’ Diana Sowerbury agreed, ‘I expect you will.’

  She walked over to the bed and looked down at the patient. The woman was a blonde, and though it was never easy to calculate the age of someone in her position, Diana Sowerbury guessed she was somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five. Her name was Monika Paniatowski, which accounted for the rather large (though not unattractive) middle-European nose. She was well-known locally, largely due to the fact that she was a detective chief inspector, and thus her picture was always appearing in the papers. She had been discovered in the woods, with the back of her head caved in. She was in a coma, and though the specialists said she might come out of it any minute, they also accepted that she might never come out of it at all.

  Diana Sowerbury wondered if Monika was aware of what was going on around her. And if she was aware, would she want to stay alive in the hope that she might make a recovery, or would she prefer to put an end to this life of perpetual ennui?

  If it was me, I think I’d prefer the latter, she told herself.

  ‘But we’ll never know, will we?’ she said aloud. ‘Because none of us can get inside your brain.’

  She turned and walked away. It was only when she was back in the corridor that she began to wonder how the young electrician – who didn’t even work at the hospital – had known she’d been in Sheffield until a few days earlier.

  TWO

  The policemen standing behind the roadblocks at both ends of Old Mill Road were not wearing riot gear, but the shields, helmets and gas masks that comprised the gear had been unloaded from one of the vans and left in a conspicuous spot, as a visual warning that though they were not looking for trouble, they were more than prepared to deal with any that might arise.

  In fact, it seemed unlikely that there would be trouble. True, there were at least a couple of dozen allotment holders crowded in front of the roadblock and shouting furiously at the police, but most officers could normally sense when a brick was about to be thrown, and were under no apprehension that that was about to happen here. Still, the ritual, once begun, must be played through to the end, so allotment holders bombarded the police with questions they already knew the answer to, and the policemen answered with a predictability that was almost stupefying.

  ‘Why can’t I go to my allotment?’ one of the allotment holders demanded. ‘This is still a free country, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, yes, it certainly seemed to be the last time I looked,’ the taciturn sergeant agreed.

  ‘Then, I can go where I want to, can’t I?’

  ‘Yes, sir, you can – but only within reason. You see, it’s our duty to protect you – even from yourself, if necessary – and it’s been judged too dangerous for you to go the allotments.’

  ‘Too dangerous! What are you worried about? That I’ll be bitten by a rogue parsnip? Or that I’ll be run over by a rampaging Brussels sprout?’

  ‘With a wit like yours, sir, you should give serious consideration to going on the stage,’ the sergeant said. ‘But let’s be honest, we both know what I’m talking about, don’t we? That bulldozer could plough you into the ground and not even realize it had done it. I’m not prepared to let you risk that.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, we take a risk every time we step through our front doors,’ the allotment holder said. He glanced up at the sky. ‘Looks like there’s a real storm brewing up there. I could be struck by lightning, even as I’m standing here and talking to you.’

  ‘Yes, you could be,’ the sergeant agreed. ‘But if you were, nobody could lay the blame for your charred remains on me.’

  Louisa Paniatowski was standing close to the police van that had brought her team from the station. Though she had been informed she was on observation, no one had actually told her what to observe or how to observe it, and she was beginning to suspect that what ‘observe’ really meant was, ‘We’re lumbered with this cadet, and we can’t think of anything useful to do with her.’

  When she was a detective chief superintendent, she wouldn’t allow that kind of thing to happen, she promised herself.

  When she was a DCS, she would have a whole programme worked out which tapped into the enthusiasm and idealism of the young cadets.

  If my mum heard me talking like that – all self-righteous and pompous – she’d take the piss out of me for days, she thought – and though she didn’t mean to, she giggled.

  ‘Is something amusing you, Cadet?’ asked a voice to the left, and turning, she saw Inspector Metcalfe standing there.

  She said nothing, hoping he’d just walk away.

  He didn’t.

  ‘Well?’ the inspector repeated. ‘Is there some joke I’ve missed?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Louisa said, looking down at the ground.

  ‘What are you supposed to be doing here, anyway?’ the inspector asked.

  ‘Observing, sir.’

  ‘Observing what?’

  ‘The operation in general, I think.’

  The inspector gave a loud sigh of exasperation. ‘I’ll give you a job if you can handle a video camera,’ he said. ‘Can you handle a video camera?’

  ‘Yes, sir, we did this course on …’

  The inspector sighed again. ‘It was a simple question and requires only a simple answer,’ he said. ‘Can you handle a video camera?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good.’ The inspector reached into the back of the van and produced a video camera the size of a small aircraft carrier. ‘We’re using these as an experiment. What the top brass want is for us to produce training films. What I want to do is to use
them to cover my lads’ backs. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘I’m not sure, sir.’

  ‘Look over there.’

  She turned her head in the direction he’d been pointing, and saw two uniformed constables carrying heavy-duty bolt cutters.

  ‘You see what that idiot’s done, don’t you?’ Metcalfe asked.

  ‘He seems to have chained himself to the gate, sir.’

  ‘Yes, he does, doesn’t he? Those two officers are about to extricate him, and when they do, I want you to film it, so when the bastard claims later that we used excessive force, we can prove that we didn’t. Understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Of course,’ the inspector continued, ‘if one of the officers is actually a little rougher than he meant to be …’

  And he winked – he actually bloody winked.

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  The conspiratorial edge drained from the inspector’s face.

  ‘If such a situation does arise, then I urge you to take the greatest possible care not to erase that from the tape,’ he said formally.

  Then he tapped his nose twice with his index finger, in case Louisa was incapable of reading between the lines.

  Archie Eccleston had chained himself to the fence in such a way that his back was against the wire, and so in order to talk to him face-to-face, the two officers had first to cut a swathe out of the wire next to the gate, and step through it.

  Louisa followed them, and as she did so, she hoped they made a quick job of cutting the man free, because while the camera might look like an aircraft carrier, it felt as heavy as the Empire State Building.

  Before even approaching Archie Eccleston, one of the constables – his name was Jeff Sutton, Louisa remembered – turned to the other four allotment holders who’d been the overnight guards.

  ‘Top marks for trying, lads, but you must surely see that you’re on a hiding to nothing here.’ He glanced down at his watch. ‘It’s market day, so the Black Bull will already be open. Why don’t you go and drown your sorrows with a couple of pints of best bitter?’