No Name Lane (Howard Linskey)

by Howard Linskey

  ‘Shame he didn’t have a wallet or something. Still, a village this size, someone’s got to know who he is. Here one minute and gone the next. I mean, it can get a bit rough round here when the pubs are turning out but people don’t usually get stabbed in the back.’

  ‘I don’t know about witnesses,’ the young constable was dismissive. ‘They’ll all be coffin dodgers: senile or dead already. Most of them don’t know what they did yesterday, let alone half a century ago.’

  ‘Oh well, good luck with it.’ Tom thought it best to make a quick exit before anyone witnessed him tapping the constable for information.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  He didn’t like swearing. There was no need for it but he had to force himself not to utter a curse word as they narrowly failed to beat the lights. He’d been going a little too quickly and had to brake harder than usual to avoid passing through on a red and his daughter made a big deal out of it, as she did with pretty much everything now she was almost a teenager.

  ‘Woah!’ said Lindsay, as if the car was an out-of-control horse. He would have chastised her for being overly dramatic but he didn’t have the energy, having already quarrelled with her bitch of a mother when he’d come to pick her up that afternoon. This wasn’t even an official visit. Instead he had to take Lindsay shopping for school shoes because her mother insisted this was somehow his responsibility, even though he was already giving his ex-wife virtually all of his money.

  Now they would have to wait ages because these lights were on a crossroads and they always took an eternity to marshal cars from all directions.

  ‘Dad?’ Lindsay asked him in that sing-song voice she always used when she wanted something, turning one syllable into two, ‘Da-ad.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When I come and see you for my next visit,’ she began and he felt irritated because this one had barely begun and she was already talking about the next, ‘would it be okay if I had money instead of a present?’

  ‘Money? Why do you need money?’ he couldn’t conceive of a reason.

  ‘So I can get something I really want,’ she told him, ‘clothes and stuff.’

  ‘We’ll have to see.’ He hoped his tone would be enough to convey his disappointment with her and she’d drop it.

  ‘Oh go on,’ she’d gone all smiley then, almost flirty in tone, which made him want to cuff her across the face with the back of his hand, ‘it is my birthday,’ she reminded him and for a moment he was struck by how close she was to turning into one of them. A dirty slag, using her smiles and her eyes and her cajoling ways to get what she wanted. He took a deep breath and tried to blot out the thought but he was sure it would all start soon enough. First there’d be boys, then grown men. There’d be tears and manipulation until she got what she wanted and then his daughter would be just like all of the others. It was an unbearable notion.

  ‘I said, we’ll see,’ he snapped and this time she had the good sense to shut up about it.

  How did it begin, he wondered … with the first plea for a new dolly? As early as that? And it would go on forever; a new house, then a new kitchen to put in the house, new clothes and jewellery; never satisfied. Right up until the day she grew tired of her husband and lay down and did disgusting things with the next man, just like her slag of a mother had done. For a fleeting moment he was revisited by the image of Samantha lying on their living room floor with their neighbour’s hand wedged down the front of her jeans, all the way down into her knickers, touching her most private place, sticking his fingers in her as if it meant absolutely nothing, like they were simply shaking hands. Disgusting, dirty, filthy … and what had he done when he had discovered her lying there?

  Nothing.

  And, as she had struggled to remove their neighbour’s coarse hand while she sat upright and tried to compose herself, still he had said nothing, even as he watched his whole life slide away from him in a moment.

  Paul, their neighbour, had walked right past him and out of the front door without a word.

  Even then; nothing.

  He had realised it almost immediately. He wasn’t a man. Not any more. Thanks to her. He had been one before but she derailed him, knocked him off-kilter, emasculated him to such a degree that he couldn’t even raise a hand against the man who had debased his home and debauched his wife. The one consolation he clung to was that they would both go to hell and burn in agony forever for what they had done to him. For it is set down in the commandments, written by the finger of God himself on stone tablets, that he will judge all adulterers.

  And when it was over she didn’t even look at him, couldn’t probably, wouldn’t say a word either, just pulled up the zipper on her jeans then walked into the kitchen and got on with doing the dishes, eyes fixed forwards. He had watched her for a moment, his mind racing, a sick feeling in his stomach, for he couldn’t think of anything to say. In that moment when he found his wife and his neighbour together he realised everything he had ever believed until that point was a lie.

  He had perhaps been guilty of placing his wife on a pedestal, he knew that now, but wasn’t that what a husband was supposed to do: love her, adore her, worship her? She had proven herself so completely unworthy of that love. His eyes had gone to the knife block and, for a moment, he had seriously contemplated taking the largest one and plunging the sharp point of it deep into the soft flesh at the back of her neck. He was sure he would have done it too if it hadn’t been for little Lindsay. He couldn’t have left her with a dead mother and a father behind bars for life.

  In the end he had been unable to put words together to form a sentence. His voice had broken and he had asked her, ‘why?’ in a high-pitched, whiny voice he hated, for he was on the verge of tears.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ she slammed down a plate on the work top. How could she be angry? ‘You have to ask “why?” You have no idea, have you? You’re not a man, you’re a bloody robot.’ And she’d burst into tears then, ‘I am so trapped!’ she concluded before storming out of the kitchen and marching upstairs to their room, slamming the door behind her like an ungrateful teenager.

  He slept on the couch that night, though of course he didn’t sleep at all, just lay awake torturing himself, replaying images of his neighbour’s grubby hand down his wife’s knickers, his fat fingers wedged deep inside her. He churned it over and over in his mind, wondering how many times they had done this while he’d been working late. How many times had he returned from a shift to find her calmly preparing dinner with another man’s seed dripping out of her? Was their neighbour the only one or was there a queue of men turning him into a laughing stock? How many more had there been? The realisation that he would never know hit him with the suddenness of grief and he knew there was no going back for him.

  He never returned to the marital bed.

  The terms of the divorce had been the real scandal. He’d agreed to her suggestion that they stay ‘civilised’ for the sake of their daughter, even though he felt anything but towards her. Instead of ‘my whore of a wife’s adultery’ the grounds became ‘irreconcilable differences’, a helpful suggestion by her solicitor to prevent their daughter from discovering that her mother’s a dirty slag. So he had gone along with the idea, but he had been an idiot. They had used his wholly natural concern for his daughter against him and taken the little girl from him. It was decided she would stay with her mother and he was ordered to move out of the family home; his home, the one he had spent the best part of his free time fixing up. He had not been the one who had spread his legs for a stranger in that house, so why did his wife get to keep it?

  But he was the one who had to pay for his wife and daughter to have a life as good as the one they’d always known, while he lived off beans on toast and fried eggs in a shitty one-bedroom flat because he had never been much of a cook and hadn’t the money for anything decent. They were doing okay, because almost all of his money went on them. They could afford the mortgage and the heating and to put good food on their plates and,
before long, just when he thought his resentment couldn’t reach a higher level, the bitch-whore-slag started ‘seeing someone’. And how had he found this out? His own daughter had told him. ‘Mam’s got a boyfriend,’ she’d said matter-of-factly, as if her mother had just bought a new pair of shoes. He didn’t know why he was so shocked. He already knew she was a whore but perhaps he hoped she might not be so blatant about it while she was living off his money.

  He was handing over nearly all of his wages so she could raise his daughter without him, paying for a house that another man was screwing his wife in. Where was the justice in that? It made him sick to his stomach whenever he thought of them doing it in his home, with his daughter asleep in the next room, his ex-wife rutting like a pig with a new man. It made him want to kill them both.

  ‘Dad? Dad!’ Lindsay was calling and she was agitated. He hadn’t heard her at first. Sometimes he got so lost in his dark thoughts about his ex-wife that he let his coffee go cold or forgot there was food in the oven, until an acrid smell of burnt plastic reminded him that his supermarket ready meal was ruined. He became dimly aware of a sound then; a continuous jarring noise that was competing for his attention along with his daughter’s urgent voice.

  ‘What?’ he asked her groggily and he felt as if he had just been woken from a very deep sleep.

  ‘The lights,’ she informed him, ‘they’re green.’

  And when he finally looked he realised she was right, they were, and the noise in his head was the sound of a car horn blaring continuously, as if the owner of the car behind them had finally lost all patience. He thought it best not to acknowledge his foolishness to his daughter, so instead he drove silently away.

  Tom drove to the highest point in the village and parked up by the church. He even had to climb out of his car to get a signal. ‘Please work, please work,’ he told the phone, and it did. It rang three times then, to his great relief, Terry answered. He sounded like he was at the opposite end of a wind tunnel and Tom was forced to shout to be heard. He told Terry about the body in the field, silently praying he would be interested in the story.

  ‘We’re on it already,’ said Terry and Tom realised he’d been wasting his time, ‘our Northern correspondent’s got it. He has a contact at police HQ, someone high up. He wouldn’t be much of a correspondent if he didn’t. You haven’t given me anything I don’t already know.’

  ‘I figured as much,’ said Tom with forced cheerfulness, ‘thought I’d better call it in anyway, just in case,’ he was trying hard to hide the crushing disappointment he was feeling, ‘how are things there?’

  ‘Awful,’ he was informed, ‘we’re not just dealing with a cabinet minister here. It’s his wife too.’

  ‘His wife?’

  ‘She’s a barrister and a psycho from hell. Her nickname in legal circles is “The Bitch”, which is quite something, coming from other lawyers. They reckon even the PM is shit-scared of her. Everybody is.’

  ‘Including the Doc?’

  ‘Especially the Doc,’ conceded Terry, ‘she phoned him this morning, had his balls in a vice for over an hour. We might as well have put a white flag on the roof of the building.’

  ‘So what will he do?’

  ‘You did not hear this from me,’ Terry told him, ‘but we might have to settle.’

  ‘You’re kidding?’ This couldn’t be happening. Surely the legendary Doc wasn’t really going to roll over at the first mention of a libel case.

  ‘It’s a strong possibility,’ admitted Terry, ‘substantial damages, a retraction, an apology.’

  ‘Doesn’t this woman care that her husband was shagging hookers?’ Tom was incredulous.

  ‘Doesn’t believe it,’ said Terry, ‘or chooses not to. She’s tied her entire life, her future and the future of her children to that man. If he rises they rise, if he falls, they come crashing down to earth with him. So, if he’s been dipping his wick elsewhere, that’s not her priority.’

  ‘Jesus, I can’t believe the Doc’s going to settle. The man’s as guilty as sin.’

  ‘It’s under consideration,’ Terry lowered his voice to a whisper, ‘the atmosphere is terrible here right now. There are people crying in the toilets and I’m not just talking about the women.’

  ‘I must be pretty popular.’

  ‘Don’t expect an invitation to the Christmas party.’

  ‘How did it go?’ asked Peacock, who’d been waiting in his DCI’s office for Kane to return.

  ‘Four men,’ Kane told him.

  ‘What?’ Peacock didn’t bother to hide his frustration.

  ‘But we can choose them.’

  ‘Right,’ his tone became more measured, but DI Peacock still wasn’t happy, ‘so the Super actually wants us to remove four men from an ongoing investigation into a missing girl to put them onto this?’

  ‘Look, John,’ Kane lowered his voice as a uniformed WPC walked by the opened door, ‘he’s basically given me the go-ahead to take our most feeble blokes off the Michelle Summers case and plonk them onto the-body-in-the-field. Draw me up a dead-wood list, containing the four men least likely to provide us with any kind of breakthrough. I’ll reassign them to this …’ he was searching for the right word, ‘… skeleton.’

  ‘I can think of four I wouldn’t shed any tears over and that’s just off the top of my head.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Vincent obviously.’

  ‘Obviously,’ Kane nodded, ‘he’s as much use as a condom machine in a nunnery.’

  ‘Davies, because he’s always on the sick; Wilson, because he’s always on the sauce, and Bradshaw because he’s always bloody wrong.’

  ‘I wouldn’t argue with any of those.’

  Betty Turner was sitting upright in her bed, her back ramrod-straight, waiting. It was late and raining outside but that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, except letting the other woman know that she knew.

  She knew all right.

  The old lady had waited till the house was silent and her three grown sons all asleep, before she padded softly down the stairs and slipped the raincoat on over her nightie. She opened the door, the rain was coming down hard. She stepped out into it and closed the door softly behind her. Betty walked over the wet pavement in her slippers, ignoring the cold, thinking only of her destination.

  The streets were empty at this hour and nobody witnessed the old lady’s slow and unsteady progress across the village. Her slippers were sodden and her feet soaking but she did not turn back. Betty was soaked through by the time she reached the front door of the old vicarage.

  ‘It was you,’ Betty told the locked, heavy wooden door as she slapped her palm hard against it, knowing that somewhere within those walls, someone was listening. She banged again, harder this time, ‘It was you!’ The rain stuck Betty’s hair to her scalp and she wiped it away with an impatient hand, ‘It was you!’

  Betty had been right. Mary Collier wasn’t sleeping. She was lying in bed with the covers pulled up to her chin, eyes tightly closed and she could hear the slap of Betty’s hand on her front door, as regular and insistent as a drum beat, ‘It was you …’

  Mary knew who was out there, taunting her. The voice was muffled by the door and the rain but the words were still audible, ‘… it was you …’ and each one of them pierced Mary Collier like a blade.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Day Three

  DC Bradshaw didn’t have to be told he was on the subs bench. One glance around the room that morning at his fellow misfits was all it took for him to realise he was no longer part of the first team. There was the pot-bellied, permanently booze-flushed figure of Trevor Wilson, who made no secret of the fact that all he really wanted was a quiet life. Bob Davies was probably contemplating how soon and with what ailment he could feasibly go back on the sick again. In the past couple of years, Davies had taken long spells off work with a number of complaints, including backache, neck-pain, anxiety, stress, depression and, impressively, Crohn’s disease. The one c
ommon factor all of these ailments shared, aside from the fact that Davies claimed to be afflicted by them, was the difficulty in diagnosing or, more importantly, disproving them, which meant Davies’ suspiciously lengthy absences from work continued to go unpunished.

  ‘I’ve got stress,’ he protested once, when challenged by a colleague in the canteen, as to whether he was ever coming back for more than a week at a time; then he’d searched the room for a potential ally until his eyes rested on Bradshaw and he announced loudly that ‘he knows what it’s like,’ instantly giving Bradshaw an association with a lazy, skiving bastard he could ill afford at that point. When Bradshaw failed to give a response, Davies had hissed, ‘Thanks for your support,’ at him, ensuring that nobody in the room retained any respect for Bradshaw, not even the malingering Davies.

  The rest of the group was made up of Vincent Addison and Ian himself. We are the misfits, thought Bradshaw, too old or too young, too lazy, too sick or too damaged. He knew what this was. It was a dead-wood squad.

  DI Peacock briefed them. ‘You are to conduct a thorough and methodical door-to-door in Great Middleton, in an attempt to identify the corpse in the school field and uncover a possible motive for this murder. Your presence on the streets sends an important message to the population of the village and crucially, the media, as to how seriously this case is being taken. However, we do not want you to rush this enquiry, in case you miss something vital and all leads will be reported back to me before any follow-up action is taken. Is that clear?’

  In other words, acting on their own initiative was actively discouraged. None of the other men seemed bothered by this limitation, but Bradshaw still itched for the opportunity to prove he was not a complete idiot, even though he had begun to doubt that himself.

  DI Peacock concluded his briefing by conceding their task was far from easy, ‘Forensics reckon the body has been there for nigh-on fifty or sixty years, so this killing could have happened during the war or even before it, which obviously means the usual plea for witnesses is going to be redundant. However, you have got a sizeable retired population in Great Middleton, so find the old fogies and question them, see if we can’t find something out about this man. Who was he, who did he fall out with and why, when did he die, why was he killed and how come nobody reported him missing all those years ago? Didn’t he have any friends or was the whole village delighted to see the back of the poor bastard so they all kept quiet in some big criminal conspiracy? I doubt it, don’t you?’ Nobody replied, Peacock continued, ‘Was he living there or passing through? Did he con someone, fall out with somebody or knock someone’s daughter up? Remember, it was a very different world back then. Stuff we’d consider trivial now was a big deal half a century back, so change your outlook and think differently. A lot of those old dears can’t remember their own names but I’ve got an aunt like that and all of a sudden she’ll start telling you about the coronation or World War Bloody Two as if it happened yesterday, so use that.’ He noted the men’s lack of enthusiasm. ‘If nothing else, you’ll get a few cups of tea and the odd slice of Battenberg cake.’ And he looked at the apathetic faces before him, ‘maybe that’ll motivate some of you,’ before he gave up and left them to it.