There was a faraway look in her eye, and Tyler wondered what exactly she was seeing. Mills, returning from his duties in the kitchen, took the opportunity of serving up the cups of tea. But all the time Sheila Dale’s focus didn’t shift. ‘I moved up to Leek,’ she said, still gazing into a past visible only to herself. ‘I wanted to be away from it, but not so far away that I couldn’t visit their resting places.’
A long pause followed, growing steadily into an awkward silence.
‘Mum’s grave. Dad’s grave. I got a job in the library here, when my nerves allowed me to work at all. Four lives were ruined that day, not just one.’
‘That day?’ said Mills.
‘June 16. It was a Friday, one week before the start of Potters.’
‘Potters?’ asked Tyler.
‘An old tradition unique to the city of Stoke,’ said Mills. ‘Potters Holidays: Last week of June, first week of July.’
‘I see,’ said Tyler, slightly stunned by his sergeant’s show of pride in explaining the concept.
‘Rained every year at Potters,’ added Mills. ‘You could count on it.’
As though on cue, Dale was crying again. And even with DS Mills back in charge of drinks, this time the crying didn’t stop.
The officers sat with their drinks until Tyler, recognising no sign of a break in the deluge, offered to come back another time. ‘Is that okay? Miss Dale, is that okay?’
When Sheila Dale realised she was being asked a question, she nodded weakly, and put down the second untouched drink. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘No reason to apologise,’ said Mills. ‘Not everybody likes my tea. It’s an acquired taste.’
They were preparing to leave the woman to her freshly re-opened grief, when she gestured to them to wait a moment. Walking over to the walnut cabinet standing in the corner of the living room, she took out a sealed envelope and handed it to Tyler.
‘You might find this helpful,’ she said.
7
The officers stood at the top of The Stumps looking out over the city.
‘This village,’ said Tyler, ‘would make an excellent base for a runner. There’s always a hill to climb to get anywhere.’
Mills eyed him. ‘Are you a keen runner?’
‘I’m trying to be. There are worse ways of dealing with this job.’
Mills could think of better ways. A decent pint in a decent boozer being top of the list, and a season ticket at Stoke City wouldn’t go amiss either.
‘So, the million-dollar question: what do you think the chances are of Alan Dale turning up on his sister’s doorstep with the Roller parked outside?’
Mills considered the question. ‘About the same as Stoke winning the Champions League,’ he said.
‘I take it that’s not a hopeful forecast.’
‘I take it you’re not a football fan.’
Tyler smiled. ‘You follow the local team?’
‘I try to. You get a choice of two teams, living here.’
‘You must tell me more.’
And out of spite he did.
‘Port Vale and Stoke City. Vale play in the north of the city. City used to play in Stoke, at the old Victoria Ground, the second oldest club in the country after Notts County. Nicknamed The Potters.’
‘Fascinating,’ said Tyler.
‘City have a new ground now,’ said Mills, carrying on regardless. He pointed to an impressive stadium, visible in the distance. ‘They don’t play in Stoke anymore.’
‘They are the bigger club?’
‘And the more expensive to watch. Hardly the sport for working folk these days, I’m afraid.’
‘Perhaps you should change your allegiance?’
‘You must be joking. The red and white stripes of Stoke City run through me like a stick of rock,’ he said, and somewhat defiantly, thought Tyler. ‘That’s what my wife says, anyway. Vale aren’t in the same league but the rivalry’s still bitter.’
Not the only thing that’s bitter around here, thought Tyler. ‘I take it that you don’t favour the under-dog.’
Mills cast a sharp look at Tyler. ‘Don’t get much time for football these days.’
‘Overtime and country living?’
Mills’ eyes narrowed. ‘Anything interesting in the envelope?’ he said.
Tyler ignored the question. ‘And now the added inconvenience of thirty-year-old corpses turning up on the patch.’
He suggested they walk down The Stumps towards the higher barricade. A uniformed officer was still keeping guard and Tyler flashed his ID. ‘Not many tourists around today?’
‘School and work, I suppose, sir.’
‘No doubt the coaches will be arriving later.’
‘Wouldn’t surprise me.’
The human remains had been removed and dispatched to the lab, but the SOCOs were still picking around in the dirt and the rubble of no-man’s land between the barricades. The officers looked on, but there was little to see. The area where the body had been found was canvassed off, and watching the mysterious figures dressed in white observing their daily rituals wasn’t much of a spectator sport, in Tyler’s opinion.
The officers moved back up to the bottom park gate, just below the concrete posts. Tyler gazed up the path, through the two posts, trying to picture something. When he spoke, he did so without once taking his eyes off the path.
‘So, what do we know?’ he said. ‘According to Pathology, a backward fall likely shattered the spine and fractured the skull. But did he die immediately? Was he alone and was he conscious? The cheek bone was broken by means other than the fall. He may well be thirty-years dead and he may have died aged fifteen. According to Sheila Dale, his name is Alan. Thirty years ago, this place was a building site, the same as it is now.
‘But was it murder?’
Tyler turned around, though not to look at his sergeant for answers to the questions fizzing through his head. He looked down beyond the patrolled barricade, then back up, through the posts. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Just one lap today, I think.’
With Mills a yard or so behind him, Tyler made a single circuit of the small park, entering at the bottom gate, all the time looking back to gain a fresh perspective on the site where the body had been discovered.
Walking at a snail’s pace, and constantly stopping to look back over the ground covered, he appeared lost in thought, confiding nothing, while Mills took the beating of the afternoon sun, which was doing nothing for his humour.
They emerged from the top gate, back onto The Stumps a few feet below the two concrete posts that, along with those at the bottom, had given the path its unofficial name.
‘They were put there to stop cars trying to use the path as a short cut into the village,’ Mills said, in answer to the question.
‘Ingenious.’
‘We know a thing or two,’ said Mills. ‘Contrary to popular belief.’
‘Tell me, do you remember this place thirty years ago?’
‘Not really,’ said Mills. ‘I lived in Longton. That’s east of here.’
‘Far?’
‘Three miles or so.’
‘Ah, Longton.’
‘Something funny, sir?’
‘I heard a story, a local legend, you might say. That there are Longton people who have never visited Tunstall, which, I believe, lies in the north of the city. You ever visited Tunstall?’
Mills didn’t appear amused by the question.
‘I mean to say, can such parochialism truly exist in this day and age? And here, in the very centre – the very heart – of the country?’
‘It’s as true as people from Tunstall never visiting Longton, I imagine.’
‘I see. And never the twain … perhaps this really is a city like no other. What do you think? Maybe that explains the intense rivalry between the warring football clubs. Tribalism, I find that scary, I always have done. Would you say this was a city at war with itself?’
Mills took a deep breath that didn’t quite su
ck all of the sour air out of the atmosphere. ‘Thirty years ago, the site looked pretty much as it does today.’
‘Coming back to you, is it?’
‘Research, sir. I thought that it might be relevant to the present enquiry.’
‘Good work,’ said Tyler, still not acknowledging the acid tone. ‘They knocked down a factory and built a pottery warehouse and outlet store. And now that’s gone and next up is a visitors’ centre, I believe.’
‘That’s progress, sir. I understand it was either that or more housing.’
‘Not so good for attracting the tourists. Pottery on view in the Potteries – how could such a concept fail? But my guess is that now the place has blood in its soil, it will attract a good deal more, and not merely lovers of ceramics. What do you reckon?’
‘I don’t know about that, sir. All I know is they went bust. Not many new businesses have survived around Stoke in recent years. Everybody goes up to Hanley these days. This place has become derelict; a haven for druggies. With all the regeneration that’s going on, or that’s supposed to be going on, some chancer decided it would make a good location for building new houses. There’s the park behind – I’ve seen worse locations.’
‘And someone else decided a visitors’ centre was the better bet.’
‘Personally, I’d go with the houses.’
‘Perhaps we should have another look inside that envelope, what do you think?’
‘Can’t see the harm in it.’
Back in the car, Tyler took out a pile of crisp A4 sheets. A careful hand had filled them up with black ink. He handed them to Mills and watched as the DS cast an eye over them.
But Mills was giving nothing away, and Tyler was soon gazing out towards the site below them, a place that Sheila Dale knew well. A place that had no doubt haunted her dreams these past years, one way or another.
‘So, any thoughts?’ asked Tyler at last.
Mills seemed to be mulling something over.
‘Let’s drive and think,’ said Tyler.
With the pages tucked carefully back into the envelope, they headed back towards Hanley.
Winding their way through the heavy traffic, Tyler said, ‘Perhaps we should have brought her in. Get the rest of the story and be done with it.’
Mills took his eyes off the road ahead and glanced at the passenger. ‘You’re saying Dale knows what happened? She knows who—?’
‘She knows a hell of a lot.’
Something in Tyler’s tone rang a strange note, and Mills couldn’t help but be unnerved. ‘What are you reading between the lines, sir?’
‘What is there to read? Tell me, what is there, what’s she telling us?’
‘That’s not a confession she’s given us?’
Tyler looked at Mills. ‘That’s a remarkably astute remark.’
Mills let the compliment whistle past into the congested air outside. Then he said, ‘It is a confession or else it isn’t. And you’ve read it.’
‘And so have you.’
The vibrations from the conversation were still resonating as Mills pulled into Hanley.
In sight of the police station, Tyler spoke again, but in a tone mindful of the echoes. ‘Yes, I have read it,’ he said. ‘But not in that light. Come on, let’s get a drink and take another look.’
8
The central police station looked every bit the ugly relation, standing across from the new court buildings, adjacent to the library and museum. Tyler had heard that the museum held the finest collection of pottery in the world; it was just that he didn’t give a damn about pottery, fine or otherwise.
And neither, he suspected, did Danny Mills. The court buildings, splendid as they undoubtedly were, would no doubt play host to the same old dramas that the old buildings had; heroes and villains letting it all come down to which brief had the bigger brain, and was paid for from the deeper wallet.
Coffees in hand, the two detectives sat in the third-floor office, away from the hullabaloo, and went over the pages that Sheila Dale had prepared for them. They had an hour before CS Berkins arrived, a man renowned not only for a prize-winning moustache, but also a self-proclaimed ability to see the ‘bigger picture’.
And he was going to have to make some decisions about what exactly the press and the media needed to tell the city and the nation about the late Alan Dale.
Alan was a few days off fifteen and one day he didn’t come home from school. He attended River Trent High School and had done for almost four years. He lived all of his short life in the village of Penkhull at the geographical centre of the city of Stoke-on-Trent, and the oldest settlement in the city. Alan lived with his parents and sister, Sheila.
Alan was a quiet boy, bright but a little immature. He was what people might describe as naïve. He was too trusting. He was scared a lot of the time, too, because people like to pick on easy targets.
Alan wore glasses and his arms were almost as thin as the skin on them. He had skin that could barely conceal his frightened little heart beating in terror every time he took a kick or a punch or an unkind word.
He was good at making friends, but little by little I saw him losing the will to even try. People let him down every day of his short life but he still always did his best to smile and do the right thing like the lovely, shy boy that he always was.
The teachers at his school kept saying that he would do better if he concentrated. But how could a young boy like Alan concentrate when he was living in fear all the time? How could he?
His form teacher the year before he died was named:
MAGGIE CALLEER
Alan thought that she was kind. I went to the same school, though I was in the higher year, my last year. What I saw of Miss Calleer, I would say that she probably was kind. But she didn’t do nearly enough, nobody did. Who was it who said, someone famous I think, that all it takes for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing? Someone very clever indeed.
I believe that when Miss Calleer retired, she moved out of the city, but I don’t think she strayed too far. There was only so much she could have done, but at least with her, Alan had a fighting chance.
Then Alan moved into the lion’s den.
HOWARD WOOD
And Howard Wood was, believe me when I say this, an uncaring bully with a drink problem. Actually, I didn’t know that he had a big drink problem back then, I only heard the rumours. But he was certainly an uncaring bully. He was Alan’s so-called ‘form teacher’ for the last year of my little brother’s life. He was also the worst thing that could have happened to Alan at that time. Or any time.
The Headmaster at the school was named:
FREDRICK WISE
Wise by name, foolish by nature. He couldn’t see what was going on underneath his own stupid nose. Good at one thing he was, and that was defending his position. When my parents went up to the school and tried to complain about what was happening to Alan, Wise just made sure that nothing could ever reflect badly on his precious school and, therefore, himself. He was a glory-hunter, a scoundrel who is now enjoying a fat retirement on the shores of Rudyard Lake. (I sometimes think that he lives too close to me for comfort and I haven’t got it in me to wish him a long and prosperous old age.)
Alan had a friend:
ANTHONY TURNOCK
Alan always called him Tony. Tony was what you would call ‘the fat kid of the class’. Because of this he knew what Alan was going through, as he got some of it too. But Alan would never give them what they wanted, and so they never stopped.
They never stopped.
Tyler looked at Mills. ‘What do you suppose she means by that?’ he asked. ‘What didn’t Alan Dale give them that they wanted?’
Mills shrugged. ‘I think she’s trying to tell us that her brother was killed by these people, whoever they were – are. There’s no confession in it that I can see.’
‘Confession was your word, not mine.’
Mills didn’t respond to that and Tyler turned the page.
Sheila Dale had documented the death of her father, her mother’s illness, her time spent working as a librarian. ‘She has a curious style. A curious lady altogether,’ said Tyler. ‘But look at this. This interests me.’
I went over to look at the place where they found Alan. Around the time that he went missing it was a building site, too. But they didn’t close it off like they have done now. They left the path open so that people could take the short cut from the village down into Stoke and back, cutting between the allotments and the park.
One of my favourite memories is of me and Alan cutting along that path, down into Stoke on Saturday mornings to get the shopping from Stoke Market. In the village, in those days, there were lots of corner shops that served us during the week. But on weekends it was always the market in Stoke, because it was cheaper and the food was fresher, or at least that was the idea. On hot days we used to sweat bucketfuls carrying the shopping back up the steep path by the park, all the way to the top of The Stumps and all the way home.
The other day, when I went back there, I took the long way around and went back into the village. I went up to Alan’s old school, my old school. Looking at that building I realised that I have no happy memories of that place, because of what it did to my brother.
It placed an angel amongst devils.
I hate it and I hate them. I hate all of them.
Alan did not walk home alone that day. He would have walked straight home, as he always did. He would have had no business around a building site where adolescent devils went to try and kill the pain of their own lives by inflicting evil on the innocent. They took him there and they killed him. One way or another they killed him.
You’ll find all the answers to what happened to Alan by going back to that place, and to the legion that passed through it.
The final page was signed, Sheila Dale.
Tyler stood up, walked over to the window and looked out. It wasn’t the best view he’d seen since arriving in the city. The bulldozers had certainly been busy, he thought, giving the impression that a bombing raid had recently taken place. Blink and you could be looking out on a scene from World War Two. Vast areas of debris dotted the landscape, providing intermittent impressions of desolation and abandonment.
Red is the Colour Page 3
