No Name Lane (Howard Linskey)

by Howard Linskey

  Boys were dogs too.

  Daz barely glanced at her as he climbed eagerly into a friend’s mam’s car, the offer of a lift home to the neighbouring town proving too good for him to pass up in this weather. She’d watched him go, wondering to herself whether she should perhaps give in to him, in order to keep him, or if he really wasn’t worth the trouble.

  Michelle glanced at her watch. The last bus would be here soon, if it was going to come at all. It was often cancelled without explanation but the weather was foul and it would take a fair while to walk home. There’d been a lot of stuff in the papers about young girls going missing lately too. Some of them had been found later. It made her shudder when she thought about how it must have felt to be them during their last moments. Her mother always drummed it into her, ‘Never come home on your own Michelle, it’s not safe, always get the bus or make sure that boyfriend-of-yours …’ she never called Darren by his name, ‘… walks you home if he’s s’posed to be seeing you.’ That was a laugh. There were few things more dangerous than allowing Daz Tully to walk you home.

  Michelle began to tug absent-mindedly at the St Christopher medallion around her neck, stretching its silver chain. The rain took on a new level of determination, whipped down onto the shelter’s roof by a malicious, swirling wind, which prevented her from hearing the man, the drops tumbling onto the wooden roof of the shelter masking his footsteps. The first sign of his presence was a slight change in the light, an almost imperceptible darkening of the path in front of her as the glow from one of the street lamps caught his back, casting a shadow that changed shape as he drew near. She looked up just as he reached the shelter. Back lit as he was by the street lamps, she could hardly make out his features. Michelle started, sensing danger but unsure of what to do about it. When he finally spoke, the sound of his voice made her jump. It was deep and undeniably masculine and she realised she was holding her breath, fear and anticipation competing inside her.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Michelle’s mother snored so hard she woke herself up. Fiona’s head lolled onto one shoulder and she opened her eyes suddenly, blinking at the room in a panic as she attempted to get her bearings. Shit, fallen asleep on the couch again. She looked at the little brass carriage clock on the mantel, nearly one o’clock. Bugger it. She should have gone to bed hours ago instead of opting for that last little glass of wine. Now she’d have a thick head in the morning and work would be even more of a drudge than usual.

  Fiona had thought that switching from gin to wine had been a good idea. It would get her off the hard stuff and make her little evening tipple seem that bit more innocent. She didn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea about it; like her dear husband for example, or her delightful daughter, both of whom seemed to think that she had been put on this earth purely to wait on them. The bottles of sweet German wine had the added advantage of being cheaper than gin and Fiona convinced herself they were doing her body less harm in the long run. After all, wine was made from grapes and grapes were fruit, so how bad could it be to drink fruit? If anyone asked, not that they would, she could tell them she had one, maybe two glasses, two or three nights a week, but in reality she knew she was drinking a lot more than that every night. Since she never finished a glass, always topping it up as she went along, instead of draining it and starting again from the beginning, she could never be sure how many glasses she’d had, which was her intention, because she didn’t want to know. Fiona didn’t exactly feel that she needed a drink every night, it was just that life always felt a lot less stressful after she’d had a couple.

  Coming round slowly in a fog of alcohol, she moved her foot and immediately connected with the half-empty wine bottle standing there, which tumbled like a skittle, knocking over the glass next to it. Miraculously they both remained intact, though a little of the wine was lost on the carpet before she could rescue the upended bottle. Fiona swore then walked into the kitchen and stowed the remnants back in the fridge. Already her head had begun to throb. Best not to think about the morning and just go to bed.

  Fiona climbed the stairs and, as she neared the top, spotted the tell-tale crack of light coming through the gap under Michelle’s door. What on earth was her daughter doing lying awake till all hours with school in the morning? Fiona wasn’t having that. She put her hand up, ready to rap her knuckles on the door, then she stopped. Fiona knew she should give her daughter a rollicking but realised she was hardly setting a good example herself, a point her daughter would doubtless use to her advantage, undermining her mother’s already fragile authority even further. And there was always the possibility that, being this tired, Fiona might struggle to pronounce the words as clearly as she would have liked. What sarcastic response would she get from Michelle about passing out on the sofa again? Her daughter would have seen her when she came in, sprawled there, hardly at her best. Fiona didn’t have the energy for another row with Michelle, a girl who was getting lippier and more ungrateful with every passing day. And to think she used to be such a sweet, nice-natured child. Fiona stood on the landing and leaned in close so that her ear was almost pressed against her daughter’s bedroom door. No sound from within. Michelle had probably fallen asleep with the light on, while reading one of those stupid fan magazines she was obsessed with. Her walls were covered with pictures of Take That – another one of Michelle’s teen bands that would be here today and gone tomorrow, like the Osmonds or the Bay City Rollers in Fiona’s day. She was boy-daft, that one.

  It was one of Fiona’s recurring nightmares that her daughter would fall pregnant before she was out of her teens. The very last thing she needed right now was to become a grandmother at her age. The thought made her shudder. She was already knackered all of the time as it was and financially they were barely surviving, without a new baby to feed, clothe and buy bloody toys for. She hoped her dippy daughter still had enough sense in her head not to let her spotty boyfriend do what he doubtless wanted to do, but she was far from sure of this.

  Fiona turned away from the door and headed for her own room. At least Denny was already off in the lorry, so she wouldn’t have to put up with his disapproval or his half-hearted pawing at her for sex. And Michelle would be fine. She’d sleep all night with the light on then emerge in one of her usual, grumpy moods, hating everything and everybody, just like she did every morning.

  Fiona would always blame herself for not knocking that night. The guilt would stay with her. If she had gone into her daughter’s room, she would have realised that Michelle was gone, had never returned in fact. If only she’d known about it then and reported Michelle missing long before morning, gaining the police precious hours in the process, perhaps something could have been done sooner. Then things might have worked out so very differently for everyone.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Day One

  As the Jubilee line train juddered round a corner, Tom Carney gazed at the newspaper’s front page with its accompanying banner headline, ‘Grady And The Tramp’. A dark-haired, middle-aged man in a blue pinstripe suit angrily attempted to repel a photographer’s lens with an outstretched palm. The man in the photograph oozed wealth, status and entitlement.

  Tom had been up much earlier than usual, eager to see his first front page lead for a national tabloid – and not just any article. Hell, this was the story of the year. It was a defining moment for Tom, a vindication after long, hard years of puzzled frowns and dismissive comments from friends when he’d told them he was going to be a journalist. No other paper had the story. Tom and his colleagues at The Paper had scooped them all. He imagined it being read on every bus and train in the country. It had already been the breaking news on the radio and breakfast TV channels. In Downing Street, they’d be reading Tom’s words in The Paper that morning and fretting over them. It was an exhilarating thought.

  Their newspaper was always referred to as ‘The Paper’ by the journalists who worked on it. That was a golden rule, for to utter its real nam
e was to concede that it was not the only newspaper and there might, just might, be other, admittedly less worthy, contenders for the accolade of paper of the working man. Tom had been on the receiving end of a particularly violent outburst from his editor after just one hour in the job during his first editorial meeting. Unfortunately for Tom, Alex ‘the Doc’ Docherty had been walking by and overheard the new boy refer to the paper by its actual name, because he had no idea that it was forbidden to do so.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ Tom was shocked to see the legendary Alex Docherty staring down at him with a look of venomous hatred plastered on his face. ‘I take it you’re the new boy,’ he answered his own question, ‘which is why you have just committed blasphemy in my office.’

  Docherty stared malevolently down at the new boy, ‘are you a prole?’

  ‘Pardon?’ was all Tom could offer in reply.

  ‘Part of the great unwashed, the ones out there?’ and the Doc pointed through the enormous windows that faced the Wapping skyline. ‘The folk who don’t know who to vote for, what to think, who to love, hate or ignore, the type of person who doesn’t even know which hand to use to wipe their own arse, unless we tell them. If you are one of them, then you can call my paper by its name. If, on the other hand you wish to survive here for another five minutes then you can do me the simple courtesy of calling it The Paper, like everyone else.’

  The Doc went down on his haunches so his face was level with Tom’s, as if he was about to confide something. ‘Because my paper is The Paper. There is no other,’ Tom opened his mouth to say something but Docherty prevented him with a raised hand, ‘Oh, I know you might think there are other newspapers out there, you may even be labouring under the misapprehension that they are serious competition but they are not. Fact: we are read on every building site and football training ground, in every office and station platform, council canteen and school staff room in the country, which means we matter. I can ruin careers, put people in prison and keep them there, I can sack ministers, topple prime ministers, swing the vote in marginals by ten, even twenty per cent with a few well-chosen words in my editorials, all of which makes us players.’ He looked around at the smiling journos he was now holding in the palm of his hand. He turned back to his sub. ‘What is the circulation of our nearest rival, Terry?’

  ‘Nit shit chief,’ Terry parroted back instantly.

  ‘Nit shit,’ the Doc nodded and he turned back to Tom. ‘If you want to go and work on a broadsheet no one reads, except for a few retired colonels from Tewksbury, then join the Torygraph; if it’s a paper with a history but no future then The Times is definitely for you; if you like to goose-step your way into work every morning then the Daily Mail will welcome you with open arms; the Guardian will have you in a flash, if you can knit your own sandals. But if you want to work for a real paper there is only one, and it’s mine. Only I get to call it My Paper, you get to call it The Paper and if I hear you use any other word in future, you will be out of this door so fast your arsehole will fly past your nose on the way out, got that?’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ Tom nodded emphatically, eager to get off stage and retreat back into his shell again as soon as possible.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it then.’ And he walked away muttering, ‘I’ve got a country to run.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’ asked one of the older journalists, ‘an hour?’ and he shook his head in wonderment. ‘We’ve had probationers here who never merited a word from the great man in their entire six months,’ he drawled in an Edinburgh accent that was barely a whisper. ‘Well done son.’

  Having barely survived his first day, Tom knuckled down to learn the ropes from his fellow journalists. He quickly learned that they wrote in euphemisms. ‘Single-parent’ meant scum, ‘benefit-claiming, single-parent’ meant vermin, ‘teenaged-benefit-claiming-single-parent’ meant ‘council-house-snatching-good-for-nothing-idle-vermin-scum’.

  Women who had affairs were ‘love-cheats’, who took their lovers to ‘love-nests’ for ‘sordid, extra-marital affairs’ that were exposed in kiss-and-tell stories, in the interests of public morality, by journalists who were the worst bunch of coke-snorting, binge-drinking shag-arounds Tom had ever known. The paper was the scourge of the unmarried mum, the benefit claimant, the football fan, the Europhile and the paedophile; the latter being two crimes so heinous in the Doc’s eyes that they almost shared top billing on the paper’s front pages.

  Tom Carney kept out of the Doc’s way from then on. The next time he stood before the great man, he had a story to tell. Tom had met the hooker, a woman called Trudy Nighton who went by the working nickname of ‘Mistress Sparkle’, and was convinced she was telling the truth. The Doc took some persuading but eventually he believed it too and personally assigned the team to cover it, on the understanding that evidence, real corroborating evidence, of the ‘photos-of-Grady-with-his-todger-out’ variety, was what was needed here.

  The surveillance operation recorded the comings-and-goings and cumings-and-goings of the uber-respectable and very-married Defence Secretary, Timothy Grady, who until that point had been widely tipped as a future Conservative Prime Minister. His much-vaunted support for ‘family values’ did not however prevent Grady from meeting ‘Mistress Sparkle’ and her friends in his London apartment, with her services billed at an eye-watering three hundred quid an hour, though he of course had negotiated a discount. Not for nothing was Timothy Grady known in politics as ‘the Lion,’ a nickname he had acquired while renegotiating Britain’s budget rebate from the EEC. So intransigent had been his stance on this issue that French and German politicians had started referring to him, in a derogatory manner, as the ‘Lion from London’ and when the right-wing press picked up on it, renaming him ‘The Lion of Brussels’, Grady did nothing to stifle this heroic image.

  Even though he knew every salacious word virtually by heart, Tom Carney sat on the train and read and re-read the story he had co-written all the way along the Jubilee line. For the first time, Tom walked into the newspaper’s headquarters like he truly belonged there. As he passed rows of desks manned by veteran reporters he adopted what he hoped was a laid-back demeanour, as if destroying the career of a future Prime Minister and landing the front page in the process was all in a day’s work for this young reporter. A couple of journos actually bothered to mumble a greeting. A pretty young girl he had once unsuccessfully flirted with by the water cooler even smiled at him.

  ‘The chief wants to see you,’ said Terry-the-sub when Tom reached his desk, looking like he begrudged the congratulations Tom was about to receive.

  ‘Careful,’ said Jennifer, the Doc’s secretary, as he arrived at the huge, glass-walled office that dominated the enormous newsroom, ‘he’s not a happy bunny.’ She made it sound like she’d just invented the nauseating phrase everybody seemed to be using at the moment.

  ‘Well,’ Tom said, ‘it’s nothing I’ve done,’

  His reverie was short-lived however, cut cruelly short by a familiar, booming voice that had more than its usual level of malice behind it. ‘Carney, get in here now!’

  Tom walked into the office in disbelief.

  ‘Chief?’ he asked uncertainly.

  ‘You prat!’ shouted the Doc and he immediately threw a folded copy of that morning’s edition at Tom, who ducked as it sailed harmlessly over his head and out though the opened door behind him. ‘You complete and utter fucking prat!’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  DC Ian Bradshaw was staring at the ceiling again. He’d spent a lot of time looking at ceilings lately, during the long nights of sleeplessness that followed his recuperation. Then there were the hours of listless staring when his depression left him with so little energy he couldn’t even stretch out a hand to change the TV channel with the remote control. Instead he would leave the inane daytime chat, stupefying game-shows and saccharin-coated kiddies’ programmes running. Every lunchtime in Bradshaw’s flat, ‘Mr Benn’ would go about his business of escaping from the re
al world, via the magic tailor’s shop, before returning to number 52 Festive Road, always with a new souvenir in his pocket, while Bradshaw lay on the couch watching him, wondering how he could similarly escape from reality and just how he had managed to ruin his entire existence so spectacularly by the age of thirty.

  It had been a long, slow road to recovery, taken in baby steps and punctuated by small victories; the ability to make a proper breakfast in the morning, two slices of toast with a couple of fried eggs on top, was considered an important milestone. When Bradshaw finally returned to work, months after the ‘incident’, as his counsellor had taken to calling it, he noticed a change in the way his colleagues regarded him. It wasn’t so much what they said, for they rarely said anything to him at all these days. It was more subtle than that; the look in their eyes or the way they pretty much shunned him when he was in the room, as if his ill luck or incompetence might rub off on them if they came too close. He was a wash-up. That’s how they saw him and, he had to admit, as he pondered his lot during the many more hours of ceiling-staring which followed while he tried and failed to conquer his insomnia, that they were, on the whole, correct and fair to view him that way. He had fucked up, therefore he was a fuck-up. There was no denying the cold, hard logic of it. He had messed up and somebody else had paid very dearly for his mistake. As he played the events over and over again in his mind, wondering how he could have been so stupid, it seemed to somehow compound his misery to know that he’d had the best education of any of them. At school, Bradshaw had always found success so effortless. Tall, good-looking and clever, he was never short of a girlfriend, captained the football team and was the hero of the swimming galas. Bradshaw attained good grades and a university degree, literally becoming a poster-boy for Durham Constabulary when during his early days he appeared in an advertising campaign for graduate recruits, under the strapline ‘Join the Fast Track’.