Free Acid Row by Minette Walters Page A

in loops.
    How did he look after himself? Who cared for him? She felt swamped by misery as she stared at the accumulated years of grease on the cooker and the tidal mark of scum in the sink. She wanted to cleanse her hands but the smell from the drain made her nauseous. There were germs everywhere. She could feel them burrowing under her skin, attacking her brain, undermining her resolve. Where was the point in living like this? Where was the point in living at all?
    That thought had circled her head all the time she was speaking to him and now she wondered if she'd voiced it aloud, because he rounded on her impatiently. “What's that?” he demanded again, saliva shooting from his mouth in droplets. “Speak up, girl, I can't hear you.”
    “I have to go,” she repeated, pronouncing her words as carefully as a drunk.
    He frowned. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
    How many times had he asked her that? How many times had she answered?
    “I'm a police officer, Mr. Deny.”
    “Did you find the boys?”
    It was like listening to a cracked record. She shook her head. "I'll be putting in a request for a health visitor to come and talk to you,"
    she told him. "She'll assess your circumstances and probably recommend a move to sheltered accommodation, where you'll receive more care and protection than you have here."
    He turned back to the television. “They should have sent a man,” he said scathingly.
    “I'm sorry?”
    "I wanted a real copper .. . not a namby-pamby creature who's scared of her own shadow. It's no wonder there's so much crime in this place."
    It was the last straw. Her head had been splitting since she came on to the estate, and shouting through Mr. Derry's deafness had made the pain worse. She wanted to scream at him, tell him what she really thought, but she was too repressed to do anything so dramatic. "A man wouldn't have bothered to listen to you," she said tightly, preparing to stand up.
    "You think so, do you? Well, maybe I'm not bothered about lazy little chits who'd rather sit around than do their jobs. What do you say to that, eh?"
    She hated him with a passion. He was senile, he was rude and he was filthy. Everything she'd touched in this disgusting place had left its mark on her. “What do you expect me to do?” she asked. "Go out and arrest the first three boys I find just because you say your money's been stolen? There's no proof you even had it." She stood up abruptly and swept a trembling arm around the room. "You wouldn't be living like this if you'd had 200 in a tea caddy."
    Her sudden movement frightened him. He seized the heavy, antiquated telephone on the table beside his chair and brandished the receiver at her. “Get away from me,” he shouted. "I'm calling the police. Who are you? What are you doing here?"
    She knew she was going to faint, but there was a moment of clarity when she saw the funny side. “I am the police,” she heard herself say with a laugh in her voice, before her knees gave way and she fell towards him.
    Flat 406, Glebe Tower, Bassindale Estate The elderly woman in the flat below Mr. Deny paused in the middle of her telephone call to listen to the noisy banging from upstairs. "That senile old bugger's up to something again," she told her friend crossly. "He's going to bring my ceiling down if he's not careful.
    What do you suppose he does? Throw his furniture about whenever he has a tantrum?"
    The friend wasn't interested. “Oh, for goodness' sake, Eileen!” she wailed anxiously from five storeys up. "Why won't you listen? There's something terrible going on. I've been looking through Wally's binoculars and there are boys everywhere. Do you think they've been drinking?"
    “How would I know?”
    "I wish you'd look out of your window. There's hundreds of them.
    They're turning cars over at the entrance to Bassindale Row."
    Eileen Hinkley was curious enough to peer round her curtain, but she was lower down and her view was obscured by roofs. "Have you