Betty thought for a moment. Tom was sure there was more to her nighttime trek to Mary Collier’s house than early senility but would she give a journalist her reasons? While Tom waited for her to answer, he heard a sound from upstairs. One of her sons must have been moving around up there. They were all the same; large, thick-set men who liked to throw their weight around, bullies who’d barely worked a day in their lives between them. He knew they weren’t likely to take kindly to this intrusion. Tom needed answers from Betty and he needed them quick.
‘Not talk to, no.’ she finally answered. She seemed uncertain now he had challenged her about it.
‘Why did you go there then?’
Upstairs, a door slammed and male voices were having a muffled conversation. There was more than one of them in the house but they were unaware of his presence.
‘To tell her I knew,’ said Betty simply.
‘That you knew what, exactly?’
‘That it was her.’
There was the sound of another door opening, then footsteps across the landing above him. Please don’t come down, thought Tom. Not now.
‘What was?’
‘That it was all down to her,’ Betty said it as if he must surely know what she was referring to. Tom began to wonder if maybe she was losing it after all. ‘I wanted her to know that I knew,’ she said firmly.
There was a creak from upstairs that sounded as if someone had trodden on a loose floorboard, then heavy feet were on the stairs. Someone was coming down.
Tom only had seconds, ‘Was this something to do with the man?’ he asked quickly, ‘the body-in-the-field?’
‘Of course,’ she said, as if he was an idiot, ‘that’s what I’m telling you.’
The footsteps grew louder and a voice called, ‘Mam? Who are you talking to?’
Tom ignored this and ploughed on. ‘Who is it, Betty? Do you know? Who was buried in that field?’ Betty looked visibly upset, her bottom lip came out like a child’s and she looked as if she was about to cry. ‘If you know then tell me,’ urged Tom, just as the thump-thump of heavy boots ended. Someone had reached the hallway and would be with them in an instant. ‘Please,’ he said.
‘Sean,’ was all she managed to say before the tears began to fall.
‘Sean?’ repeated Tom, hoping he might get more than this but just then the kitchen door flew open.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ a well-built and very angry middle-aged man, who Tom recognised as Frankie, Betty’s middle son, was standing in the kitchen doorway. Then the man noticed the tears on his mother’s cheeks. ‘Have you been upsetting her?’ demanded Frankie and he set his face in a snarl and took a step towards Tom.
Tom held up a hand to placate him. ‘No, it’s okay,’ he said, ‘I’m a journalist.’
With hindsight, Tom would realise this was not the best response he could have given. ‘I know who you are and it’s not okay,’ hissed Frankie Turner and he grabbed Tom’s jacket by the lapels. ‘You’ve made my mam cry.’
‘Simmer down, man,’ Tom urged him, ‘I was only asking her some questions …’ but he wasn’t allowed to explain further. Instead he was flung forcibly from the room and propelled through the hallway. ‘She was happy to talk to me,’ Tom protested but another shove sent him closer to the door, then Frankie seized him by the hair and banged his head against the front door, causing him to cry out in pain.
‘Don’t come back here, you bastard, or I’ll break your back,’ and with that Frankie Turner released him, opened the front door and pushed Tom out through it, hard. He left the house so quickly that he tripped on the stairs and fell, landing heavily on his side. ‘Now fuck off!’ The door was slammed in his face.
Tom lay there for a moment to see how badly he was hurt but there seemed to be no lasting damage, apart from a sharp pain where his head had connected with the front door before he went through it and a bang on his arm where he had landed roughly. He picked himself up gingerly.
There was a row going on inside the Turner home now, with a shout of ‘Why did you let him in?’ from one male voice, then another joined in. It crossed Tom’s mind that a second member of the Turner clan might think he had been dealt with too leniently, so he didn’t hang about.
Welcome home, Tom thought, as he dragged his bruised body back to the car.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Day Four
Though the dead-wood squad were now working another case, their presence in the morning briefings was still obligatory, in case they came up with something that might help in the search for Michelle Summers. Detective Superintendent Trelawe was giving them all what he considered a much-needed kick up the arse.
‘We have had twenty-five detectives working on this case and still not a single lead worth a jot,’ he told them. ‘It’s not good enough and it won’t do. So far, we’ve all been asleep at the wheel,’ by we, he of course meant they had all been asleep at the wheel, ‘so from now on, I shall be conducting the morning briefing myself, every day, until the case is cleared up.’ He knew they wouldn’t appreciate that. ‘Thoughts, gentlemen?’ he demanded.
There was a long pause, during which Trelawe wondered if everyone was actually going to ignore him.
Finally, it was DC Skelton who broke the silence. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘has anyone given some thought to the fact that it might not actually be the Kiddy-Catcher?’
‘Please don’t use that offensive nickname in this room,’ Trelawe told him.
Skelton continued unabated, ‘I mean there’s a stepdad isn’t there?’
‘Yes,’ confirmed DCI Kane, ‘there is.’
‘Well, there you go,’ Skelton said with some finality, ‘that’s got to be worth it,’
‘Worth what exactly?’ asked Trelawe.
‘A look, Sir,’ Skelton frowned, ‘well I mean, if there’s a stepdad and the girl was what? Fourteen?’
‘Fifteen,’ DCI Kane corrected him.
‘Even better,’ Skelton nodded emphatically, ‘fifteen, all those hormones, and what with her not really knowing what it’s for and him having it paraded up and down in front of him all the time like that, and her not a blood relative,’ Skelton shrugged. ‘His missus is no looker either,’ he looked around him, as if drumming up support for his view. ‘Well I mean, that’s got to be worth a look, hasn’t it?’
Some of the men chuckled. The detective superintendent showed no emotion.
‘He’s a lorry driver isn’t he?’ it was DS O’Brien’s turn to pipe up.
‘Yes he is,’ confirmed Kane.
‘There you go,’ said Skelton.
‘What do you mean by that, Detective Constable?’ asked Trelawe.
‘Most of them are dirty pervs, for starters,’ Skelton told him. There were more chuckles from the squad, who were clearly loving this. ‘It’s all that time they spend on their own,’ Skelton added.
‘You’re saying that all long-distance lorry drivers are potential murderers?’ asked Trelawe.
‘Well, not all of them,’ Skelton qualified his statement, ‘not murderers, no,’ then he looked to his DS for support, ‘but, I mean, how many of them have we banged up over the years, for all kinds of things?’
‘A fair few,’ answered O’Brien, a shorter, squatter man who was slumped so low in his chair he was almost horizontal. The two men were affectionately known as Durham’s Regan and Carter, by colleagues in awe of their cavalier attitude to the law they were sworn to uphold. Bradshaw despised them both.
Skelton started counting the crimes off on his fingers, ‘assault, lewd conduct, gross indecency, sexual assault, rape, whore-battering …’ he said the last one like there was an official criminal offence of ‘whore-battering’, ‘… domestic abuse … incest … and, yes, murder, at least one I can think of,’
‘At least,’ mumbled DS O’Brien.’
‘Wasn’t the Ripper a lorry driver?’ asked someone and Trelawe looked at them as if he couldn’t be sure whether they were joking or not. Here they were, trained detectives, and a
ll ruminating on the weirdness of lorry drivers per se versus the rest of the population. Thousands of men out there all day, every day, driving lorries, delivering the goods that kept British industry afloat and the nation’s larders stocked and they’d all just been dismissed as sickos and perverts.
‘Come on, Sir. Let us sweat him a little?’ urged Skelton.
Trelawe shook his head, ‘No, nothing official. No formal questioning.’
‘At least let us take a look around the house,’ urged Skelton. ‘Who knows what we might find?’
The detective superintendent thought for a moment. All eyes were on him. Finally he said, ‘no,’ and the sighs from the men were audible. They didn’t even bother to hide their disgust. Trelawe looked rattled but he held up his hand to silence them. ‘There will be no warrant to search the household, not without any evidence linking either of them to Michelle’s disappearance. If we do that the press will find out about it in a heartbeat …’
‘Is that all we care about, Sir?’ sneered DS O’Brien, ‘what the press think?’
The detective super appeared on the verge of rebuking O’Brien for the tone of his question but he obviously thought better of it, ‘if the press report that we casually searched their home, and they have a nasty habit of finding that sort of thing out, the family will be tried and convicted by a million armchair jurors whether they are snowy white or not. You know that. Now let’s get back out there, people,’ he urged them as he abruptly terminated the briefing.
Bradshaw was last to shuffle out of the room. As he followed the departing detectives he was surprised to see Vincent Addison hanging back, as if waiting for the younger man. By the time Bradshaw reached him they were alone.
‘What?’ he asked, not expecting much in return, ‘what is it, Vince?’
To Bradshaw’s surprise, Vincent looked eager to confide in him. He first checked that no one was in earshot then lowered his voice.
‘We don’t need a warrant to look round their house.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Helen was sitting alone in a quiet corner of the Greyhound, with her head down, feverishly scribbling on a notepad, and he knew what she was writing. She didn’t notice Tom until he placed a fresh glass of wine on the table in front of her. Without even looking up at him, she slid the glass away from her with an outstretched hand. Tom reasoned she was either massively preoccupied, incredibly rude or both.
‘I bought that for you,’ he informed her.
She stopped writing then and glanced up at Tom, ‘Oh, I thought you were one of the locals,’ she said, but her face did not soften.
‘I am,’ he said.
‘Unlike me,’ she bridled, ‘I was parachuted in, remember?’ Then she regarded the drink he’d bought her. ‘What’s this?’ he opened his mouth to reply, ‘and don’t say it’s a glass of wine.’
He closed his mouth again, for that was exactly what he was about to say. Instead he shrugged, ‘A peace offering,’ and when she said nothing in reply, he explained, ‘Look, I’m sorry. I was a prat. I’d had more than a couple of beers and I was showing off but I didn’t mean a word of it. I don’t even know you.’ She was watching him with what seemed like interest. ‘There, I’ve admitted it. I’m an idiot. Can we start again?’
‘Apology accepted,’ she said stiffly. She used the same hand to slide the wine glass back towards her, then carried on writing, leaving him standing there. He realised the regulars would be watching this encounter from the bar by now and he felt a little foolish.
‘Busy?’ He was determined not to be thrown by her indifference.
‘Very.’
‘If I guess what you’re doing, can I join you for five minutes? There’s something I want to ask you.’
Helen sighed, covering her notes with an arm as she did so. She was pretty sure her spidery scrawl, all squiggles in boxes, with arrows pointing to random, supporting notes, was indecipherable to anybody but herself. ‘Go on then,’ she challenged him.
‘You’re writing up your district page,’ he told her confidently.
‘How could you possibly have known that?’ she asked. ‘I could have been writing up any story.’
He took the seat opposite her. ‘You’re sitting in the Greyhound on your lonesome, which is unusual for a woman. Don’t give me that look. Women don’t normally sit in pubs on their own, especially boozers like this one,’ he told her, ‘you’ve got my old patch and it’s Monday, which is the usual day for panic about the district page because you’ve only got forty-eight hours till the next edition. All week long we worked on the big stuff, well biggish stuff, it’s all relative after all.’
‘All right mister hot-shot tabloid man. I know you think the Durham Messenger is crap.’
‘No, I don’t,’ he assured her, ‘I worked on the Messenger for six years, remember. I was a lot older than you before I managed to take the next step up.’
‘Well, you took it so good for you.’
‘I recognise district page panic when I see it. We always left it till the last minute because it’s so damn dull and difficult to fill.’
She looked down at her scrawl of notes and let out a long sigh. ‘You’re right,’ she admitted, ‘I am panicking. This happens every week and it never gets any better. How did you do this for six years?’
‘The district page is a Catch 22,’ he explained, ‘once you understand that, you’re halfway there.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed eagerly, ‘that’s exactly what it is.’ The district page was the bane of every reporter’s life on the Messenger. As well as reporting on general news, each journalist was assigned a territory, comprising a few villages and expected to fill a page devoted to news solely from that patch, ‘if your story isn’t good enough, it won’t get on the district page but if it is good enough …’
‘The editor nicks it for his news pages?’
‘Exactly!’ he was amused by her frustration at the newspaper’s defiance of logic, ‘every week I spend hours on it. It’s driving me mad.’
‘Like I said, it’s a paradox. You’ve just got to find stories that occupy that middle ground.’
She shook her head, ‘you make it sound easy,’ she said. ‘Maybe it was, for you,’ and she took a sip of the wine. ‘Anyway, what was it you wanted to talk to me about?’
‘We keep meeting.’
‘And you’re worried people will talk?’ she answered drily.
‘No, I’m worried we’ll get in each other’s way.’
‘I believe I was here first,’ she waived a hand airily.
‘Today, yes, but technically I beat you to it by years.’
‘Want me to leave?’
‘This isn’t about the pub.’
‘I gathered that.’
‘I’m talking about the way that whenever I go to see someone you’ve just been there.’
‘We are both journalists,’ Helen said, ‘I assume we are covering the same stories?’
‘Perhaps but people are less likely to open up if we are both door-stopping them.’
‘It used to be your patch, now it’s mine. Maybe you resent that?’
‘He won’t let you run with them,’ he said. ‘Malcolm will either spike your articles or tone them down so much people will fall asleep on the bus reading them.’
‘You speak from experience?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Maybe so but I have to at least try, otherwise I might as well pack up and go home and I’m not about to do that.’
‘I wasn’t going to ask you to stop. You are reading me all wrong, Helen.’
‘What did you want then?’
‘I figured, since we keep on bumping into each other that we might as well use this to our advantage.’
‘How?’
‘By working together.’
‘Together?’ she surveyed him for signs he might be mocking her. ‘You’re serious?’
‘Totally.’
She took a long sip of wine while she was thinking. ‘What wou
ld you get out of it? You’re the whizz-kid journalist who works for the famous tabloid, I’m just the girly cub-reporter.’
‘That’s not how I view you. You’ve got a brain on you, you’ve only been here five minutes and you’re already speaking to the right people, contacts it took me six years to accumulate, and I’ve read your stuff. It’s good, you can write, not everybody at the Messenger can. Plus you’ve still got the local-paper credentials.’ When she appeared unconvinced, he added, ‘I do work for the biggest tabloid in the country but that’s a double-edged-sword; sometimes it opens doors, sometimes I get them slammed in my face.’ The memory of being thrown out of Betty Turner’s house mid-interview was still a fresh one.
‘Okay, so what do I get out of it?’
‘I know the area and I know people, particularly around here. I’ve been doing this a while. I figure we have different strengths and I’m suggesting we share what we find. There are two big stories here and a lot of doors to knock on.’
‘The police are already doing that.’
‘They won’t get very far round here.’ She wondered why he was so certain about that. ‘It wouldn’t be such an ordeal would it? We could make a pretty good team.’
‘I’d be taking a risk,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘If my editor found out I was teaming up with the infamous Tom Carney he’d hit the roof.’
Tom smiled, ‘How I have missed Malcolm. Well I won’t tell him if you don’t. Tell you what; if I write your district page for you in two minutes will you spend some time looking at these stories with me?’
‘Two minutes? How could you …’
‘Trust me,’ and when she gave him a look that clearly indicated she did not trust him, he added, ‘or you are no further forward. I could solve your problem like that,’ and he clicked his fingers.
‘I don’t see how you can,’ she informed him.
‘Okay, well, there are a series of staple local non-news stories you can run again and again with subtle variations.’
‘Like?’
‘Grass verges.’
‘What?’
No Name Lane (Howard Linskey) Page 11
