No Name Lane (Howard Linskey)

by Howard Linskey

  ‘Right,’ he said uncertainly, ‘well they would, wouldn’t they, once they knew she was safe.’

  ‘How could they know she was safe?’ Helen asked. ‘How did I know she was safe, come to that?’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ he said, ‘you saw her mum.’

  ‘Did I? Was it her mum or a child molester trying to kidnap a fleeing toddler?’

  He gave a little laugh then. ‘Well, I mean …’

  ‘Because it was a woman,’ she told him firmly, ‘it never crossed our minds that it could be anything sinister because it was a woman. If it had been a man the whole scene would have looked very different.’

  ‘So, what are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying that could be how he gets them to go with him so easily.’

  ‘By using a woman?’ Tom asked and she nodded, while his mind raced at the thought of smiling women luring young girls into cars, feigning messages from their parents or a manufactured emergency of some kind. It slowly registered with Tom that Helen could be right. ‘Jesus, you know what that would mean?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we’d have another Myra Hindley on our hands.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Day Five

  ‘You,’ Trelawe addressed the young detective in front of everyone, ‘what do you think you’re doing, coming late to my briefing?’ Trelawe broke off to focus on Bradshaw’s tardiness. ‘You’d better have a damn good reason.’

  ‘Sorry, Sir,’ answered Bradshaw. The truth was he hadn’t been able to drag himself out of bed that morning, unable to shake the feeling that nothing he did seemed to matter any more, but he could hardly confess to that. ‘I was in Great Middleton, following up a lead.’

  Trelawe looked momentarily confused. Lateness for the morning briefing was a capital offence but he could hardly chastise an officer who had taken the trouble to go out onto the streets already that morning. ‘Which case?’ asked Trelawe, postponing Bradshaw’s public humiliation till he had heard him out.

  ‘The body-in-the-field, Sir,’ answered Bradshaw and he felt the pressure that comes when every ear in the room is listening to you.

  Trelawe felt a pang of disappointment. He should have known it would be the less more important case. Clearly this detective had been assigned to Kane’s dead-wood squad and it was little wonder. He remembered Bradshaw because of the reams of paperwork following the previous year’s incident. ‘So you have a lead?’

  ‘Possibly, Sir.’

  This was the wrong answer. ‘Is it a lead or isn’t it?’ Trelawe demanded.

  ‘It is, Sir,’ and Bradshaw found an ounce of defiance from somewhere, ‘I have a name for the victim.’

  This information was greeted by a surprised murmur from his fellow officers, who’d obviously assumed the likelihood of Bradshaw coming up with anything worthwhile was next to zero. Trelawe raised a hand to silence them. ‘Go on,’ he urged Bradshaw.

  ‘It will need checking of course.’ He knew he was in deep now. All Bradshaw really had was Tom Carney’s half-baked theory, ‘but I think the dead man is Sean Donnellan, an artist from Dublin who visited Great Middleton back in 1936 to produce illustrations for a book. I don’t have a suspect or a motive yet but it could be sexual jealousy. He was quite a hit with the ladies apparently.’

  When Bradshaw had finished he was aware that everyone in the room was staring at him silently, including the detective superintendent. ‘And how did you come by this information?’ asked Trelawe.

  Bradshaw was never going to admit that. ‘I picked it up from the door-to-door,’ he said, hoping that would be vague enough, ‘a little bit at a time.’

  Trelawe said nothing at first. Instead he glanced at DCI Kane, then looked round the room at his officers. Finally his gaze settled back on Bradshaw and he nodded, ‘you see that is what I am talking about: proper police work, information gained from diligent, door-to-door questioning and a strong lead to follow up. What a pity Bradshaw is the only one who has been listening to me.’

  At the earliest opportunity, Tom rang his editor. He used the pay phone in the corner of the Greyhound’s empty bar before it opened. As expected, the Doc’s PA intercepted the call.

  ‘Jennifer, it’s Tom.’

  Her silence told him everything.

  ‘Can I have a quick word with the Doc?’

  ‘He’s busy.’

  ‘Yeah, I know he’s busy,’ said Tom, ‘he’s always busy. I was just hoping that I could squeeze a word in with him between everything else.’

  ‘And I just told you no,’ she was being the gatekeeper, protecting her boss from unwanted interruptions. ‘He doesn’t want to speak to you, Tom.’

  ‘Did he tell you that?’ Tom demanded. ‘Did he use those exact words?’

  ‘I know the Doc,’ she said, ‘he doesn’t want to speak to you.’

  ‘Bitch,’ Tom whispered to himself but his mouth was still too close to the phone.

  ‘What did you just say?’ her voice was shrill with indignation.

  ‘I said “son-of-a-bitch”,’ he answered quickly. ‘Look, I’ve got a good story here and I need to speak to the Doc about it. He’s going to like it. Can you at least tell him that and get him to give me a call?’ he implored her. ‘Please, Jennifer.’

  She took so long to answer he wondered if she had cut him off because he’d been stupid enough to call her a bitch. Eventually she said, ‘I’ll pass the message on.’

  ‘Thank you,’ and before he let her go he made sure she took down the number of the Greyhound’s phone in case the Doc couldn’t get through to him on the mobile.

  ‘Are you doing this to me deliberately?’ Peacock asked Bradshaw when he hauled the younger man into his office.

  ‘Doing what, Sir?’ he asked uncomprehendingly.

  ‘Ignoring the chain of command,’ Peacock told him, ‘going over my head.’

  ‘But I haven’t …’

  ‘You just did!’ Peacock snapped, ‘out there, in the morning briefing.’

  ‘But the super asked me …’

  Again, Peacock interrupted him, ‘I know what he asked you. You should have said you were pursuing a number of leads and were hoping for something concrete soon.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Bradshaw protested, ‘I thought you’d be pleased I’d come up with something.’

  Peacock sighed, ‘I know you don’t get it, son, so at least I can put this latest round of stupidity down to ignorance and not malice. When you uncover something you come to an adult; meaning, me. What you don’t do is offer it up to cover your own arse in the middle of a collective bollocking. You made me and the DCI look like clueless tossers and gave everybody else in your squad another reason to hate you. Now have you got it?’

  And he had.

  The familiar, debilitating weariness enveloped Bradshaw, along with the realisation, reinforced on a daily basis by his superiors until he had started to believe it himself, that he was useless. All he wanted was to accept this latest kicking, get out of Peacock’s office, go home and pull the covers over his head. He was pretty sure they would neither notice nor care if he did. ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘We will check out this fellah Sean Donnellan. You get back on the streets and carry on with your door-to-door.’ Bradshaw supposed he should have been grateful to have avoided another afternoon sitting in the canteen. ‘Now get out.’

  A little before midday, Tom walked back into the bar of the Greyhound.

  ‘A lass phoned for you,’ Colin told Tom, ‘Helen-something; said she couldn’t meet you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ muttered Tom. His day, which had started promisingly enough, was not panning out the way he had intended. By now, he had hoped to have given the Doc a new story for The Paper, based on Ian Bradshaw’s confidential tip-off, which would have reminded his editor that Tom’s contract might be worth renewing after all. He had also hoped for confirmation from Bradshaw that his superiors were treating Sean Donnellan’s name as a promising new lead in their enquiry into the body-i
n-the-field. But Bradshaw’s silence was deafening, Helen had blown him off, and the Doc still hadn’t called him back. He was reluctant to leave the Greyhound in case he missed a return call from his editor and he couldn’t trust the mobile phone, which meant he was stuck here in the pub.

  ‘Been stood up, have you?’ asked Andrew Foster, who was smiling at him from a stool at the end of the bar.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be teaching unruly kids?’

  ‘School’s closed till they’ve finished with that body.’

  ‘As if you lot don’t get enough holiday,’ said Tom. ‘Ain’t you got better things to do than hang round here with us natives?’

  ‘Only dropped in for a swift one,’ Andrew told him, ‘joining me then?’

  ‘Why not?’

  When Helen returned from interviewing the mother of a ‘miracle baby’, her intention had been to write up the story as quickly as possible then creep out to meet Tom in the village. Instead she was intercepted by her editor.

  ‘The bloody baby can wait,’ Malcolm informed her. ‘Get yourself down to Great Middleton Junior School. I want some reaction from the headmaster about that body in the field.’

  Being sent back to Great Middleton certainly suited Helen but her positive mood did not last long. On her way out, Jason, one of the more experienced reporters, gleefully informed her that, ‘You’ll not get him to say owt. Nelson’s always happy to talk to us when it suits him; if it’s the school sports day, prize-giving or summer fête you won’t be able to shut him up but if it’s anything negative he won’t speak to you. Malcolm’s already had a go and so has Martin.’

  Helen immediately realised she had been given this thankless task because others had tried and come back empty-handed. She was expected to fail.

  As she drove to Great Middleton she thought about Peter. They had argued again, this time over the phone. When she’d called him the previous night she’d been eager to tell him all about the cases she was looking into. She had thought that, if he could hear the details of the work she had been doing he might understand the buzz it gave her, but Peter wasn’t interested. At first he made no comment if Helen said something and she thought he was waiting patiently to hear her out but each time she mentioned something about her week, he started telling her something about his day instead.

  Perhaps, Helen reasoned, Peter, with all of his ambition, sometimes felt threatened by her own. Maybe all men did. She didn’t think this was right or justifiable but Peter had certainly become a different person since she had left to take on her job at the Messenger.

  Their phone call had continued in a similar vein. It was like a tennis match where, every time she tried to insert a topic into the conversation, he hit back with something irrelevant that he or his mother and father had done recently. She persisted though, in the vain hope that he might at least feign interest but it was clear he was still irked with her for taking a job so far away, even though he had repeatedly told her it was fine.

  ‘Can you stop going on about this bloke please?’ he’d asked suddenly in a tone that belied the seemingly polite request. ‘I thought you were ringing to talk to me.’

  This bloke was of course Tom Carney and perhaps Helen had mentioned him once too often but it was hard not to talk about the man she had been working with so closely. Her assurances that he shouldn’t be jealous of her fellow journalist were met with a surly, ‘I don’t feel threatened, Helen, just a bit bored of hearing about him.’

  The argument escalated then and, though they both attempted to end the conversation politely before she hung up, Helen had been particularly hurt by his lack of interest in a career she was so passionate about.

  By the time Helen reached Great Middleton School she’d managed to convince herself the argument was her fault. Perhaps she had been insensitive in failing to ask Peter more about his new job, though she knew he did not face half the obstacles she had to contend with when he was working for his father.

  Possibly she had been too gushing in her assessment of Tom Carney, a man Peter had never met. He was many miles from her back in Surrey and must be imagining all kinds of things. Peter’s jealousy was understandable then, even if he denied feeling threatened, and she would tread more carefully in future. It was one of the many little compromises Helen had been training herself to make recently. You had to work hard at a relationship and put the other person first sometimes. Wasn’t that what she had always been told? Her mother often explaining that ‘give and take’ was the secret to the long marriage she had maintained with Helen’s father, though in her daughter’s view Mrs Norton had always been more likely to give than take. Perhaps all women did this. Maybe it was the great, unspoken secret they all shared. Women backed down and gave in, at least on the little things, the ones that didn’t matter so much, and they hoped that the big things would naturally sort themselves out as a result. Maybe that was just how it was.

  She’d been made to wait on the mat like an unwanted tradesman while the caretaker sent for the headmaster. The school was eerily silent today. Normally at this hour she would have been able to hear the whoops and excitable screams of dozens of young children enjoying the last remnants of their morning break but the school had been closed to pupils while the body was examined and photographed, samples taken and the corpse removed for forensic analysis.

  Mr Nelson however was still ‘manning the barricades’ as one wag at the Messenger had put it, neatly summing up the siege mentality of a headmaster who liked to control everything in his domain, even when there were no pupils prowling the corridors. Nelson probably preferred the place this way, thought Helen, with no children and just a skeleton crew of caretaker and school secretary to support him while he tackled his admin. The first Helen knew of the headmaster’s impending presence was the sound of his shoes on the wooden floor as he strode purposefully towards the front door. Was there anger in that unstinting stride? She was about to find out. Helen had spoken to Nelson before and figured he wasn’t the kind of man to despatch a messenger to turn her away. He was the sort who would want to speak to you while he told you he was not going to speak to you, enjoying the power of a refusal. She was struck by the realisation that the headmaster wouldn’t talk to her because he didn’t need to. He had no reason to say anything, so she would have to give him a reason. But how was she going to do that?

  ‘Headmaster?’ she started brightly when he opened the door. ‘I’m writing a story for the Messenger about the body that was found in the grounds of the school and it would be a big help to me if I could just get a short quote from you on …’

  ‘Good God,’ he hissed, ‘do you people never learn? I have told your editor and your deputy editor that I have absolutely no comment to make on this matter and now they send you,’ he made the last word sound deeply insulting, as if the Messenger really had resorted to scraping the dregs from the very bottom of their barrel.

  ‘That’s fine,’ she said, smiling, ‘no problem at all,’ and he seemed momentarily taken aback by this response, ‘I can write the piece without any quotes from the school. It really doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. Was the ego dented by her dismissal of his contribution? ‘Good then.’

  ‘It’s just,’ and she gave a contrived grimace, ‘I was a bit worried about how it might look.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well,’ she continued, in a confiding tone that made it sound as if the school’s best interests were her prime concern, ‘obviously if I don’t get a quote from you, I will have to put “the headmaster of Great Middleton Junior School refused to comment”,’ she let that sink in for a moment, ‘but I always think that sounds as if you have something to hide, which of course you don’t.’ She definitely had his full attention now.

  ‘But what could I say about the discovery of a body on land we didn’t even own when it was placed there?’

  ‘It might be appropriate to express some form of sorrow for the departed individual,’ Helen offere
d, ‘or perhaps a few words of sympathy for family members who may have lost a loved one?’

  ‘Mmm,’ he said unsurely and she could tell the cogs were whirring, ‘perhaps,’

  ‘I’d be happy to assist you with the preparation of a statement,’ she said, ‘if you think it would help?’

  ‘Well,’ he was weakening and Helen was silently praying, for he had no idea how wonderful it would be if she could return to the Messenger with a quote when her editor and his experienced deputy had failed to secure one. ‘All right then,’ and she had to stop herself from punching the air in triumph, ‘perhaps you should come in. Would you like a cup of coffee, Miss Norton?’

  ‘Coffee would be lovely.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Andrew Foster had long since left the Greyhound, but he promised to be back in a few hours, ‘It’s quiz night at the Lion!’ he reminded Tom, as if this was the undisputed highlight of the week. Tom was still sitting there, nursing a beer, making it last. He didn’t want to spend too much money or end up drunk at lunchtime. It was more than four hours since he’d left the message with Jennifer and still the Doc had not called him back. He couldn’t wait any longer.

  He left the Greyhound to get some air then bought a phone card from the village shop, which he used in a draughty telephone box that had half of its windows missing.

  Jennifer was even less amused this time. ‘I gave him the message,’ she assured him through what must have been clenched teeth.

  ‘You told him I had a story, one he would like?’

  ‘That was the message,’ she seemed to think he was questioning her professionalism now.

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing? He must have said something.’

  ‘He just grunted, like he does when he’s preoccupied.’

  ‘But is he going to call me?’