This story continues from Book 1

 

Chapter 13

 

Wendy had started a letter.

 

Slackhurst, as usual, Tuesday night.

 

Dear Rick,

I was summoned to another meeting today, and it's official - at the end of the month I'm out of social services. I'll be glad to go. Maybe my career and my life deserve to be ruined.

 

She'd spent a couple of hours writing those three sentences, with the assistance of a bottle of gin. As she re-read them on Wednesday morning - not by the light of day, for it wasn't yet eight o'clock and the sky was pitch black and pouring with rain - she suffered from a thumping headache, a churning stomach and an overwhelming sense of her own foolishness. A pack of lies believed, a child murdered, a job lost and an evening wasted. She found her pen and wrote another sentence.

 

Maybe I don't deserve to live.

 

Well, that was exaggerating. She'd been extremely unlucky. Born under a bad sign, perhaps. Her birthday was October 29 and she tried to think of some famous Scorpios who were examples of cosmic prejudice.

She was still trying when there came a polite tap at the door of her flat.

It was her landlord, an earnest man with thin white hair and pale blue eyes. "Morning, Mr Grimes."

"Did you see the paper last night?"

"I don't read the papers any more."

"No, I don't blame you," he said kindly. "But here's a bit you should see." He held up a page which had been clipped neatly from the Messenger, a column with the heading CORDELIA THURSTON - SPEAKING OUT FOR SLACKHURST. Below the heading was a picture of Cordelia looking fearlessly into the photographer's camera.

"'No Child Is Safe From This Menace'?" Wendy read out the column's headline.

"That's about them drugs and happenings," said Mr Grimes in embarrassment. "Down there..." He pointed to an item near the foot of the page. Wendy read:

 

'... I hear that Wendy White, the social worker involved in the Barney Binman murder case, is facing the sack from her job. Regardless of how well or badly she does her work, her cause can't have been helped by the press attention focused on her since her famous outburst. Children see their parents' newspapers,and can't be expected to confide their problems to a person nicknamed Foulmouth Wendy or Chump Counsellor.

I was present on the day when Miss White came out of the Binman home after visiting the murdered boy's family. A mob of journalists and photographers, most of them people who'd never heard of Slackhurst a week previously, surrounded her and refused to let her pass, badgering her with questions although (perhaps I should say because) she was plainly in an emotional condition. She told them it was none of their ******* business how she looked. I might well have done the same in her place. And who was she talking to? There may be British journalists who never use that particular word, but I imagine they work on the Church Times or the War Cry, not on any national tabloid. The whole business is ridiculous - and if Miss White does get the push, I for one will find it more than a little unfair. ...'

 

She sighed. "At last some positive press. Pity I didn't get more sooner."

"Is she right about you losing your job?"

"I'm afraid so. I'll be moving out in the near future."

Mr Grimes clicked his tongue. "Well, that's bloody terrible. I'm awful sorry. Here," he suggested, "why don't you get on to her and see if she can help? Write an interview with your side of the story?"

"I'm afraid it's too late. But thanks for showing me this cutting."

"You keep it. Mrs Thurston might help you, if you ask her."

"I don't think she could help now I'm actually sacked," Wendy explained awkwardly. "I'm sure she would if she could - she doesn't say so here, but she actually came to the rescue when they were mobbing me. So I agree with you that she's a nice person."

 

***

 

Hours had passed and Cordelia had travelled a long distance from Slackhurst, but the weather was no better. She sat in the back of a taxi as it passed through residential London streets, all of them unfamiliar to her, all wet and dismal. She had an A-Z of the city and consulted it as the cab drew near to her stated destination. When she got out she opened an umbrella and walked confidently through the rain in a shiny trench coat and elegant knee-length rubber boots. The route she had to follow had been described for her very well and she arrived at a certain ordinary terraced house just on time for her appointment.

She was there to meet a man whose face she'd never seen before. They'd spoken on the phone, and he looked the way he'd sounded: big and burly - slightly more so than Cordelia - with cropped black hair and a well-trimmed beard. "Mr Taylor?"

"Mrs Thurston? Let me take your coat."

He showed her into his front room. "Do you live here by yourself?"

"Yeah, divorced. She left me. Nothing to do with business."

Cordelia wasn't sure whether he was unwilling to chat about his divorce, or keen to stress that his ex-wife had had no objection to his line of work. She got down to business. "I'm a friend of Aldreth Denvell. You built a device for him. I want you to make a similar device for me."

"No trouble at all," said Taylor. "I've got the bits and pieces all ready to hand. You could spend the afternoon in town, come back here round five and I'll have it done for you. I'd like cash in hand, though."

"That's extremely obliging of you, but I must explain that I want my bomb to be different from the other one in two important respects. The first is that I require it for use in a much larger room. The second is that I want the gas it contains to be poisonous."

Taylor became thoughtful. "You're talking about a much more expensive piece of work."

"You can bill Mr Denvell for it. He and I are close friends."

He nodded. "Might I ask who you're intending to use it against?"

"I gathered that you were willing to do almost anything, provided you're paid."