No Name Lane (Howard Linskey)

by Howard Linskey

  ‘Leaving their poor wives to pick up the pieces.’

  ‘Women disappear too.’

  ‘Bet it’s mostly men.’

  ‘Not always,’ and his mood seemed to darken at that.

  ‘You have an example?’ she asked him. ‘I’ll bet it’s the exception that proves the rule.’ She wasn’t going to let him get away with thinking that women were as likely to run off and abandon their families as men.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Tom said. ‘My mother.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Helen felt like a complete fool. In her keenness to challenge Tom Carney’s prejudices, she had gone charging in with both feet and now she was mortified. ‘I didn’t realise …’ She began, but he interrupted her.

  ‘How could you?’ he asked reasonably.

  She tried to continue but he put a finger to his lips then pointed out of the window. Betty’s front door had opened and three stocky men, aged between forty and fifty, emerged, including the son who had ejected Tom.

  ‘Barry, Mark and Frankie,’ Tom said, ‘which means the only person left in that house should be Betty Turner.’

  ‘But you’re not sure.’

  ‘I’m as sure as I can be,’ he said.

  ‘That’s not very comforting.’

  ‘They’re probably off to sign on,’ Tom said, as the three men climbed into an ancient red Datsun Sunny and drove away.

  ‘What if they’ve just gone round the corner for a newspaper or some cigarettes?’

  ‘The Turner clan can’t read and they’d never run out of fags,’ he told her with conviction. ‘Go on, off you go.’ Then he added, ‘Better be quick, mind, just in case.’ Helen sighed and got out of the car. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I told you, I’ve got your back.’

  It was as if Tom’s visit had never happened. As soon as Helen explained who she was, Betty Turner admitted her. They sat opposite one another in the old lady’s front room. When Helen asked about her early-hours visit to the old vicarage, Betty did not disappoint.

  ‘Mary bloody Collier? She’s no better than she ought to be.’ Betty was using the understated code of the elderly Northern gossip, leaving her listener to fill in the gaps but giving enough of a hint for Helen to draw the right conclusion.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Helen.

  ‘The headmaster’s wife … with her airs and graces … thinks she’s Lady Docker.’ Betty fell silent again as if she had said her piece.

  Helen prompted her. ‘What about Mary?’

  ‘Vicar’s daughter,’ she mumbled, ‘had them elocution lessons and called herself a teacher but we knew what she was,’ she said it like Mary Collier was a secret the village owned.

  ‘And what was she?’ asked Helen.

  Betty carried on as if she was talking to herself and Helen wasn’t in the room, ‘Gadding about like that when she was supposed to be nearly wed, making a show of herself.’

  ‘Gadding about? Who was she gadding about with?’

  ‘Sean, of course,’ snapped Betty, as if she had just mentioned this and Helen had forgotten already.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me all about that?’ asked Helen.

  Tom had been waiting in the car for a good ten minutes. He’d tried to phone The Paper three times on his mobile but the signal was too weak at this end of the village, rendering it useless. He gave up then glanced in his side mirror as another car came into view. This time it was a red Datsun Sunny. ‘Oh shit,’ he said.

  The Turner brothers hadn’t been gone long and now Tom didn’t know what to do. His first instinct was to intervene to make sure Helen was all right. Catching a journalist from the local paper in their house wouldn’t please them but maybe they’d go lighter on a woman. However, knowing she was working with a man who had already been thrown violently out through their front door might provoke them into a more extreme reaction, so maybe he should let her try and talk her way out of this one. ‘Damn it,’ he said, banging the steering wheel with his fist in frustration but electing to stay in his car for now.

  Tom watched as the three brothers went into their home and closed the door.

  Then he waited.

  And waited.

  Moments passed, which became minutes. Tom had his window down listening intently, but he could hear no raised voices, no cries of alarm from Helen or shouts of rage from the Turner brothers. He would give her five minutes, no more. Then he would bang on their door and somehow force them to release her, whatever the consequences. He couldn’t even phone the police, thanks to the non-existent mobile signal.

  Every few seconds he glanced at his watch, so he would know when five minutes had passed. He lasted four before he was out of his car. He walked quickly, eyes fixed firmly on their front door. Tom crossed the road and was almost at their front gate when the door suddenly opened and he stepped to one side, shielding himself behind the bushes that ran between the Turner’s garden and a neighbour’s house. It took two words to banish the worry from his mind.

  ‘Thank you,’ Helen said brightly, as she stepped onto the path and the door was closed quietly behind her. Tom waited for Helen to spot him as she came through the front gate.

  ‘I thought you had my back?’ She frowned at him.

  ‘I did,’ he said. ‘I do. I was just giving you a few minutes to see if you could wriggle out of it.’ Helen looked sceptical. ‘What happened?’

  ‘They weren’t happy to start with,’ she said, ‘when they realised I was a journalist.’

  ‘What did you say to them?’

  ‘I told them I was doing a piece for the Messenger on the effects of long-term unemployment on hard-working families.’

  ‘ “Hard-working families”?’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of those round here but I wouldn’t include the Turner clan amongst them.’

  ‘They seemed flattered to be asked,’ she confirmed. ‘I got quotes,’ and she held up her notebook to prove it.

  They crossed the road and climbed back into Tom’s car. ‘Did you get anything out of Betty?’

  ‘I only had a few minutes with her but she did confirm our man was not a local. If she is telling the truth and isn’t entirely barking then Sean was an Irishman who visited Great Middleton one summer a few years before the war.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘I never got that far but, according to Betty, Sean was her beau; her first love in fact.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘She was smitten,’ confirmed Helen, ‘and guess who stole him away from her?’

  Tom smiled, ‘Mary Collier.’

  ‘Got it in one.’

  ‘I knew this would make a great story,’ he said, beaming. ‘So what happened? Why does Betty blame Mary for Sean’s death?’

  ‘That’s when it all got a bit vague. Betty is old and more than a little confused. She told me “Mary Collier killed him” then a moment later, she said “as good as killed him”, I pressed her, but she wasn’t making much sense at that point, then her sons came back. I don’t think she really knows what happened to Sean.’

  ‘Damn it.’

  ‘I did get one thing though,’ she said as he started the engine.

  ‘What?’

  ‘His full name. The body-in-the-field is Sean Donnellan.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Roddy Moncur took in the sight of Helen and Tom standing on his doorstep together. ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, eh?’ he said, then he invited them in.

  ‘Sean Donnellan?’ he repeated when they gave him the Irishman’s name a few moments later. They were sitting at Roddy’s kitchen table surrounded by the detritus of his disordered life, quietly hoping. Helen and Tom watched him expectantly, waiting for Roddy to blow the case wide open and singlehandedly solve the mystery of the body-in-the-field.

  ‘He came to the village before the war,’ Helen prompted, ‘we don’t know why.’

  Roddy shook his head slowly. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, before finally admitting, ‘it doesn’t ring
any bells.’ Then he pointed towards the front of the house. ‘Come on,’ he told them.

  They followed Roddy down the hallway. ‘Where are we going?’ Helen asked.

  ‘To consult the oracle,’ replied Roddy. He climbed the stairs with a ‘mind how you go’ over his shoulder. They stepped gingerly around piles of old books stacked helpfully on the stairs in Roddy’s own unique brand of filing system before he found them a more permanent home.

  They climbed a second set of stairs and emerged into a large, low-ceilinged loft which was Roddy’s share of the old school attic and was now partitioned so that each house had its own loft space. Roddy flicked a switch and a bare bulb hanging from the centre of the room illuminated a chaotic scene that made his kitchen seem neat by comparison. The dusty room was filled with ancient machines that looked as if they had been stolen from a museum: a mangle, a solid metal frame housing an old sewing machine, a pile of vinyl 78s stacked next to a gramophone in a walnut cabinet that cohabited with an ancient rocking chair, a 1930s wash stand in a wooden surround, a battered dressing table, an upright lamp of singular ugliness and two bedside cabinets. Here and there vases and old pots, toby jugs and pewter tankards were dotted amongst other pieces of memorabilia from a bygone age. Everything had been arranged in a haphazard manner against the low, sloping walls of the attic and there was a musty smell in keeping with the age of the building and its ancient contents. This appeared to be Roddy’s private collection, his pride and joy in fact.

  ‘Ta-da!’ said Roddy.

  ‘What?’ asked Tom.

  ‘The archive,’ Roddy told him, surprised that Tom hadn’t understood the significance of the place, ‘it’s all in here.’

  Tom looked again and noticed a large pile of cardboard boxes stacked at the far end of the attic. Then his eyes adjusted to the relative gloom and he spotted two metal filing cabinets nearby. Roddy strode towards them, the floorboards creaking alarmingly beneath his feet, and Tom half expected Roddy to plunge through the floor, but he reached the cabinets and pulled out a drawer to illustrate his point. ‘If it happened in this village,’ he told them proudly, ‘it’s in here.’

  Helen wanted to say something encouraging but she felt dwarfed by the sheer amount of paper Roddy had amassed. If every box was full, it would take hours, even days to go through it all and there was no guarantee they would find anything, ‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ he said.

  ‘That’s great, Roddy, thanks,’ she managed.

  He gave her a proud smile. ‘Newspapers, parish magazines, minutes of council meetings, school records, amateur dramatics productions, births, death and marriages. It’s all there; the hatched, matched and despatched,’ he smiled again. ‘If this fella made any impact during his time here, he’ll get a mention some place. I’ve got to go out for a bit but I trust you to treat my archive with the respect it deserves, so you’re welcome to stay and get cracking. I’ll be back in a few hours.’

  Roddy climbed back down the stairs. When he was gone, Helen stared at the piles of records then she looked at Tom, who shrugged. ‘Okay then,’ he said, ‘I’ll start with the boxes, you take the filing cabinets.’

  Tom dragged the first two boxes towards him and sat down on the floor. He began to pull out the papers and sift them though them one by one, sorting them into neat piles that could go straight back in the box once he had finished with them. ‘Once you’ve read something, for God’s sake put it in a pile at the other end of the room, I don’t want to look at any of this twice.’

  ‘Okay,’ Helen said as she started to tug documents from Roddy’s filing cabinet, ‘but this could take hours.’

  Tom smiled then, ‘and you can think of a place you’d rather be than here?’ he asked waving his hand expansively at the musty room.

  ‘Nowhere that springs to mind.’ She gave him a rueful grin then flopped into the old rocking chair, pilling the first heap of dusty papers onto her knee as she did so.

  The birthday visit had not gone well. This was not what he had wanted. He had planned it all in advance, even taken a day off work, and it was meant to include all of the ingredients she usually loved on her special day, her surrogate birthday; for she would be spending her actual twelfth birthday with her bitch of a mother.

  Lindsay had always enjoyed the park when she was little, even when it was raining and her mother would always blame him when their daughter came home in muddied clothes when all he had tried to do was please his little girl. Predictably, this time it also rained, but he didn’t think she would mind. They could still feed the ducks and he’d promised her ice cream afterwards but this only made her roll her eyes. He was not sure why. Now he thought about it, his daughter often rolled her eyes when he said things. It made him feel foolish, even though he was an adult and she was still a child who knew absolutely nothing of the world.

  They hadn’t spent long in the park but she had complained incessantly. ‘Dad, it’s freezing,’ a childish exaggeration, when the air was merely crisp, or ‘Dad, it’s raining or haven’t you noticed?’

  ‘Don’t be cheeky, Lindsay,’ he’d told her but this just led to more eye-rolling and the simultaneous positioning of hands on hips.

  Lunch had to be brought forward due to her lack of interest in the outdoors. And no, she did not want to go to the café they had always visited on special occasions. ‘But you loved the place when you were little,’ he protested.

  ‘Yeah, and that’s the point, Dad.’ He felt hurt, put out. He had been looking forward to going there. It was a treat after months of living off cheap crap and would have brought back memories of a happier time when the three of them were still a family, before all of the unpleasantness, the nastiness and vileness he tried not to think about.

  ‘Well, where do you want to go then, Lindsay? We have to have lunch somewhere,’

  ‘Can I go anywhere?’ she’d asked pleadingly.

  ‘Within reason,’ he’d answered, then chastised himself for thinking she might be asking to eat somewhere expensive. His little girl wasn’t like the women he had tried dating since his marriage imploded. The ones who thought you had to ply them with presents and meals before they would let you do things to them. Lindsay wasn’t like them.

  ‘Can we go to McDonald’s?’ His daughter was excited at the prospect but he couldn’t stomach the idea of more stodgy, greasy food.

  ‘Oh no, Lindsay, not McDonald’s. Can’t we go somewhere a bit nicer than that?’

  ‘Oh, please!’ and her face took on a pained expression, as if he was being the most unreasonable father that ever lived. Sometimes he felt he didn’t really know his daughter any more, not really. That’s what came from no longer living under the same roof. She was like a stranger to him now. He wanted to grab her and shake her and tell her to stop changing like this, to stay the way she’d been when she was Daddy’s little girl. Instead he just looked back at her and said, ‘All right then, just this one time,’ and she beamed again but for him the day was already ruined. He was getting one of his headaches, a searing pain behind the eyes he’d been told was stress-related.

  ‘Yay!’ she shouted once he’d given in, her moods as fickle as the weather and just as hard to predict.

  He wasn’t sure how it all went quite so badly wrong from there but it started when they saw the older boys she knew. Lindsay immediately went to them then stood flirting while he queued alone for their lunch, which seemed to take an age even though it was supposed to be fast-food. When they finally served him, he carried the wobbling plastic tray to a table by the window as far away from the boys as possible. Lindsay didn’t even notice, having seemingly forgotten her own father existed. He watched as she waved her arms excitedly while she told them some silly tale; as she giggled and flicked her hair and basically acted like her mother. He wondered if it was too late for her already. How long until he would have to save her? The boys just smirked, trying to play it cool, but he knew what they wanted.

  ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me,�
� he spoke the words while he watched his daughter making a fool of herself. He hadn’t even realised he’d said it aloud until he caught the eye of a woman close by and she quickly looked away. No one else heard him, thankfully, but he felt foolish now and angry.

  ‘Lindsay,’ he called but she either didn’t hear him or chose not to, ‘Lindsay!’ then finally ‘Lindsay! Your food’s getting cold!’ at a volume that made other diners turn to look at him and he realised his face must have been contorted with anger. A young couple on the next table did that lowering of the eyes and exchanging glances thing, as if he was some kind of nutter to be silently tolerated and that enraged him even more. Then he saw the look Lindsay was giving him and it made their disapproval seem trivial. Her face was a picture of embarrassment and shame. She marched over to the table, sat down theatrically and asked, ‘Can’t you ever just be normal?’

  ‘The food you wanted, the food you ordered,’ he was almost grinding his teeth now, ‘in the place you asked me to bring you to … is getting cold.’

  ‘Yeah?’ she replied. ‘Well, I’m not hungry any more.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  By now each of them had large piles of discarded papers stacked neatly to one side or placed back in their boxes and dragged out of the way to avoid confusion. Between them they had surveyed records of all kinds but found no mention of any missing Irish man.

  ‘If I see another flyer for the 1953 Coronation and its accompanying street party, I’m going to tear it into small pieces,’ Tom said.

  ‘I’ll gladly trade you,’ she told him. ‘You can take thirty years of Women’s Institute meeting minutes. I’ll swap your tea and buns for my jam and Jerusalem.’

  They continued to work in silence for another half hour until Tom finally revealed his thoughts. ‘There’s no pattern, as far as I can make out,’ Tom said, ‘with the Kiddy-Catcher, I mean. I’ve read all the articles and the crimes seem random, unplanned.’