No Name Lane (Howard Linskey)

by Howard Linskey

  ‘We are doing absolutely everything in our power …’ Kane began but he was interrupted.

  Reporters began shouting over each other as they competed to be heard. Trelawe knew he’d lost control. ‘That is all for now ladies and gentlemen, thank you!’ He quickly gathered his papers and got to his feet. ‘You will be kept informed,’ he assured the reporters who did not let up, continuing to call out to him as the police officers left the room.

  Tom Carney followed the landlord up the narrow, creaking staircase to a gloomy first-floor landing with four small rooms. It had taken him five and a half hours to get from London to Great Middleton, which included a short rest for a soggy bacon sandwich and a cup of overpriced instant coffee that still tasted faintly of washing-up liquid. He was tired but at least his car hadn’t broken down on the way.

  ‘You’re at the end on the right,’ Colin explained, handing him the key, ‘bathroom’s opposite.’

  ‘Thanks Col,’ said Tom, ‘you sure you don’t want any more for the room? I feel bad.’

  ‘How many times have you put my pub in the local paper?’ the landlord demanded. ‘Karaoke nights, charity do’s, pool contests, darts matches, leek shows and football games; you’ve had them all on your district page over the years. I owe you.’

  ‘A pint would have done.’

  ‘I don’t usually let the room out,’ Colin explained, ‘there’s no real demand for it. It’s yours for as long as you need it,’ he shrugged, ‘what you’re paying is covering my costs. I don’t need any more.’

  ‘Cheers mate.’

  Tom let himself into the room. It was tiny but it would do: containing a bed, an old wardrobe and a wash basin set against a wall. A portable television was perched on a chest of drawers next to a small kettle with two mugs, a few sachets of coffee and some tea bags. Tom put his bag on the bed and walked to the window, drawing a net curtain aside for a view of the street below and the rusting pub sign with a lean grey dog on it and the word ‘Greyhound’.

  ‘This’ll do.’ He quite liked the idea of staying above a pub.

  Tom went down to the bar, where a pint of the Greyhound’s famous IPA was poured for him by Colin. Tom accepted it gratefully. Someone had left a copy of that week’s Messenger on a table and he picked it up and read it for the first time since he’d left the newspaper for London. It was strange to read a copy that did not contain a page lead with his name on it and he realised that, like countless other journalists at thousands of other newspapers, his contribution had only ever been a fleeting one and would soon be forgotten. As far as he could see, the Messenger seemed to be surviving perfectly well without him.

  He took a long sip of beer, finished his pint and paid for another.

  Two more pints slipped down fairly quickly and Tom was starting to feel much better about himself and the world. There was nothing like beer to give a man a temporary uplift, even though he was not in the habit of having so many this early in the day. The bar started to fill up with the lunchtime trade, swelled by journalists who’d attended that morning’s press conference and stayed on looking for an angle.

  ‘Tom,’ called a voice from somewhere over his shoulder and he half turned to find Mike Newton smiling at him, ‘I didn’t know you were back.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Tom stammered, ‘I’m covering this story,’ he would have been far less bothered about bumping into somebody from the Messenger if his position at The Paper had been halfway secure.

  ‘Your old stomping ground,’ Mike nodded, ‘makes sense,’ and it was clear he believed Tom had been sent back there by The Paper, ‘so how’s it going?’

  ‘Great, mate, great, absolutely loving it.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  Mike seemed keen to hear all about the legendary Alex ‘The Doc’ Docherty and seemed mightily impressed that Tom dealt with the great man on a daily basis. ‘Hey, it’s good to see you,’ he said. ‘Malcolm took an age to replace you,’

  ‘That’s because I’m irreplaceable.’

  ‘Could be,’ Mike smiled, ‘or he was just dragging his heels so he could cut the wage bill while he got the rest of us to do your work?’

  ‘Sounds like Malcolm. So what’s the new girl like? I heard she’s a bit of a princess, parachuted in from down south?’ Mike’s face froze and he looked deeply uncomfortable then. Tom was just about to ask him what was wrong when a second voice interrupted him.

  ‘I drove here actually,’ and Tom turned to see a young, attractive, well-spoken woman regarding him with something like disdain. She was holding a pint of beer, which she handed to Mike.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Tom, this is Helen Norton.’

  Tom Carney normally prided himself on his ability to think quickly and dig himself out of any situation but not this time. He’d had no idea Helen was standing behind him. She must have gone to the bar to get the drinks then quietly joined them without introduction. In her other hand Helen held a glass of wine and she took a sip while Tom tried to think of something to say to rescue the situation.

  The best he could come up with was, ‘Pleased to meet you, Helen.’

  ‘I’ll bet,’ she said, without enthusiasm.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  When their sandwiches arrived, Helen and Mike took them to a corner table but Tom made no attempt to join them. Instead, he went round the room, chatting to the locals and renewing old acquaintances. He quickly noted that, although some were happy to see him again, others treated him with suspicion now he had graduated to working for a tabloid, as if he had somehow crossed over to the dark side and could no longer be trusted. None of them could tell him anything about Michelle Summers that he did not already know, so he left the pub and let the fresh air sober him up. He needed to speak with someone who actually knew what was going on in this village.

  Tom tried the old vicarage but Mary Collier’s housekeeper informed him she had a hospital appointment. Next he went to Roddy Moncur’s house and banged on the door but there was no answer. Tom’s two best contacts weren’t around and he felt he was getting nowhere.

  Tom had hoped to spend the afternoon sniffing out new leads on the disappearance of Michelle Summers but he’d drawn a complete blank. He had assumed that contacts and local knowledge would give him a head start over the cloud of reporters who’d descended on Great Middleton but nobody he’d spoken to had anything to say about Michelle, except how awful her disappearance was.

  Tom trudged through the village, trying not to think about Timothy Grady as he took in the surroundings, experiencing the mixed feelings of an exile returning home. He didn’t know if he was gaining comfort from the familiar or feeling the dread of being trapped in a small, provincial place he had spent years trying to escape. The several pints he’d consumed meant that at least he didn’t feel the difference in temperature. It had to be at least three or four degrees colder here than in London. Nothing like a beer blanket, he thought to himself as he headed for the only sensible port of call after the dispiriting day he’d had; the Red Lion.

  The Greyhound was a good choice for a quiet lunchtime pint and a handy base while he was back here but if you wanted a decent atmosphere in the evening it had to be the Lion, with its younger, slightly rougher crowd. Everything in the pub was hazy, obscured by the thick veil of cigarette smoke which always hung over the place. The Lion was half full already and Tom knew virtually everyone in there. Soon the older guys would drift home and the young ones would come out to take their place. He squeezed into a gap at the bar and ordered a pint of bitter from Harry the landlord. He was immediately pulled up on his accent.

  ‘No way,’ he protested.

  ‘It’s changed man,’ Harry assured him, ‘you’ve gone posh on us.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ he said but there were smiles from regulars who were going along with the wind-up. Tom endured a few minutes of good-natured banter on the subject of him turning into a soft southerner after just a few months in London.

  ‘If it’s any consolation, I get even more gri
ef,’ the comment came from the bar stool next to him, from a man Tom had never spoken to before. The guy was way too young to be an alkie but he was a definite barfly: one of those fellas whose leisure time pretty much consisted of hours spent in one pub. Tom had noticed him before, sitting quietly in the corner, nursing a pint while reading a book or gazing off into space, lost in his private thoughts. He looked out of place among the other, far older regulars; mostly retired guys who’d been shooed out of their homes by wives who wanted a bit of peace or some cleaning time without their men getting under their feet.

  ‘Not from round here then?’ asked Tom.

  The man, who was about Tom’s age, replied, ‘I’m from that mythical place known as “down south”, which covers anything the wrong side of Scotch Corner. Everyone’s been great since I arrived but if I stayed another twenty years I reckon they’d still all think I was just passing through.’

  ‘You could be right,’ admitted Tom, ‘but I am actually from here.’

  ‘And now you’re back?’

  ‘I’m a journalist. I go where the news is,’ Tom said quickly. ‘It just happens to be here right now.’

  ‘I never read newspapers,’ he said it matter-of-factly, ‘news depresses me,’ and when he noticed Tom’s disbelief, he added, ‘I’m serious, it’s only ever bad. If newspapers or the TV news ever covered anything happy, I’d pay more attention but they don’t, so I won’t.’

  Tom was taken aback by the innocence of that statement. It was so unusual it was almost refreshing. ‘Blimey, doesn’t it feel a bit strange not knowing what’s going on in the world?’

  ‘I do know what’s going on in the world. I just don’t get it from newspapers. I read specialist stuff, magazines.’

  ‘Specialist stuff?’

  ‘Rugby, fishing, history,’ he shrugged, ‘all kinds of things. I just can’t be bothered with politics or other people’s tragedies.’

  Tom contemplated a world without newspapers or the TV bulletins and wondered how long he’d be able to survive without them. ‘I’m one of those people who has to walk miles to get a copy of yesterday’s English newspaper when I’m on holiday.’

  ‘Can’t remember when I last opened one.’

  ‘I’m glad you are in the minority or I’d be out of a job. So how did you end up in Great Middleton?’

  ‘I’m a teacher.’

  ‘A teacher who doesn’t read newspapers?’ Tom was even more surprised.

  ‘I teach the little ones. They’re not big on world affairs. I’m at the junior school.’

  ‘I used to go there,’ said Tom. ‘I’m Tom Carney. I didn’t get your name.’

  ‘Andrew Foster,’ answered his new friend. ‘I spend my days with nine-year-olds and most of my evenings in this pub. I’m sure those two facts are not entirely unrelated.’

  ‘I’ll bet. Do you know this missing girl then: Michelle Summers?’

  ‘Before my time, mate, never taught her. She was at the local comp.’

  It was almost a relief. Freed from the necessity of speaking professionally to the school teacher, Tom began to relax. The two men drank together and exchanged stories on the perils of teaching gobby infants or interviewing gormless models who’d been shagging footballers. Despite having absolutely nothing in common with this solitary, young man, except perhaps their age, Tom found Andrew Foster to be excellent company. He had a dry sense of humour and what could only be described as a healthy cynicism that dovetailed neatly with Tom’s own world-view.

  Someone tapped him on the shoulder then and Tom turned to see Boring Bryan, as he was known locally, ‘I need a word,’ the old man said importantly.

  ‘Okay,’ but Bryan indicated Tom should follow him to a quiet corner. Reluctantly he left the bar stool and followed the pub regular to a table. They sat either end of a large ashtray piled high with stale cigarette butts.

  ‘You want to find out what happened to poor little Michelle?’ he asked conspiratorially once they were seated.

  ‘Well, yeah.’

  ‘Did you see the press conference?’

  Tom shook his head, ‘I was driving up here.’

  ‘Take a look at it on the late news,’ Bryan urged him, ‘take a good, long look.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he did it,’ announced the old man firmly.

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘The stepdad,’ he told Tom, as if it was obvious.

  ‘Right,’ said Tom, hesitantly, ‘and what makes you think that, Bryan?’

  ‘I saw it on the telly at lunchtime. He showed no emotion. His stepdaughter’s gone missing, his wife is in pieces and he just sits there staring out with those dead eyes of his like all’s well with the world.’

  ‘Yeah but that’s not evidence, Bryan, just because he wasn’t crying in a press conference. Those things affect people in different ways.’

  ‘He did it,’ Bryan jabbed a finger into Tom’s chest, ‘you mark my words.’ Then he got to his feet and ambled off to the gents.

  Tom was left to ponder the fact that Boring Bryan’s conviction, that Michelle’s stepdad looked shifty so he must be a murderer, was the strongest lead he was going to get that day. ‘Christ almighty,’ he muttered as he wandered back to the bar. The school teacher held up his empty glass and mouthed the word ‘pint?’ at him. Tom nodded. Maybe just a few, he thought, for where was the harm in that?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Day Two

  ‘Get away from there, you small boys!’ the headmaster’s voice was loud and so full of implied threat that the half dozen seven-year-olds immediately turned and fled, dashing away from the enormous vehicle that captivated them. They ran all the way back up the hill and across the playground, without looking up to meet the disapproving gaze of Mister Nelson. He watched them go, the last stragglers from the morning break, before continuing to walk down the hill towards the freshly dug earth. He turned his head to address Theo Hutton, who was frowning at him. The headmaster belatedly realised the borough councillor wasn’t used to seeing his more aggressive side, the one he saved for unruly children, and that it might not exactly be the image he wanted to convey to one of the north east’s more renowned political power brokers.

  He forced a smile to crease his face. ‘Boys will be boys.’

  The two men watched the yellow JCB with its enormous, sharp-toothed iron bucket on the end of a long metal arm, as it came crashing down once more to chew the ground in front of it. A huge scar stretched behind the digger, marking its progress across the land, its body juddering each time the mechanical arm dipped and scraped the bucket into the ground, turning green sod into rich, dark soil. Some way behind the digger, another vehicle followed at a more measured pace, its front end ploughing the earth into a flat surface.

  ‘Making quick work of that,’ said the councillor.

  Councillor Hutton glanced behind him at the primary school; a single-storey building with a flat roof, and walls made almost entirely out of glass and metal frames.

  ‘This all used to be part of Mackenzie’s farm,’ he told the headmaster.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And that,’ said the councillor, pointing out at the land being dug up by the JCB and carrying on regardless, ‘used to be nowt but a bloody marsh. You could walk on it half the year, but a lot of the time it was covered in tadpole-infested water.’

  ‘So I hear,’ answered the headmaster. He lacked the patience for one of Councillor Hutton’s ‘it-were-all-fields-round-here-when-I-was-a-lad’ speeches today. ‘And the decision to drain it has been the most cost-effective part of the new building project, transforming useless marsh into prime building land.’

  ‘We’re not facing the planning committee now,’ Nelson was a self-satisfied prick, thought the councillor, determined to bask in the success of his pet project, a new building incorporating two additional classrooms, as well as a swimming pool and dining room that could accommodate children from the neighbouring village, dooming their own school to closure.


  As they drew nearer to the digger, both men’s thoughts were interrupted by a harsh squealing noise as the driver hastily applied the brakes and it lurched alarmingly. The driver leaped from the vehicle, losing his yellow hard hat in the process, which bounced along the ground. He ignored it and ran round to the front of the digger. The head teacher experienced an illogical fear that a child had somehow become trapped under the digger but surely they would have seen him. They drew nearer as the driver peered down at the freshly dug hole. They couldn’t see what had alarmed him but they could hear his panicked murmurings.

  They advanced cautiously until the driver sensed their presence and turned. ‘Get the police,’ he called and when they simply stared back at him, he swore and started to run towards the school building. Councillor Hutton and the headmaster looked at each other then walked towards the hole, the rich, wet soil clinging to their shoes.

  They drew right up the edge and peered in.

  ‘Oh my good God,’ said the headmaster.

  ‘Jesus-Christ-almighty,’ added the councillor for good measure.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Ian Bradshaw took the call. The first voice he heard was a woman’s, the police sergeant on the front desk, asking to speak to Kane.

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Kane is at Michelle Summers’ mother’s home,’ he said precisely.

  ‘DI Peacock then?’ she asked hopefully, as if she couldn’t possibly entrust her news to the station half-wit.

  ‘He’s with the DCI. Perhaps I can help?’ he added reasonably, knowing their absence had painted her into a corner.

  There was a pause while she weighed this up. Was he considered that much of a liability these days? It seemed he was. Finally she spoke and there was a trace of resignation in her voice. ‘They’ve found a body,’ she told him, ‘at Great Middleton School.’

  Bradshaw was determined to be discreet. He would take the DCI to one side and quietly inform him the girl’s body had been found. He would spare the family any unnecessary anguish until the time came when they could be spared it no longer. He knew if they realised Michelle had been found their first instinct would be to go to her, but how could forensics pick up anything if the grieving relatives contaminated the crime scene? Bradshaw climbed out of the car, straightened his jacket, marched purposefully up to the front door and rang the bell.