‘The Kiddy-Catcher case?’
‘Yes, well, no. That’s what everyone thought but it turned out she wasn’t Girl Number Five after all. She’d just run off with her old school teacher.’
‘No?’
‘Yep,’ and Tom explained it all to the Doc.
‘That’s amazing! What a bloody story. I hope Jake’s all over it.’
Tom knew The Paper’s Northern correspondent was not all over it. ‘Want to hear something that’s even more amazing?’
‘What?’
‘I found out about it before the police and got their side of the story,’ Tom informed the editor, ‘the girl and the teacher.’
‘You’re kidding me?’
‘Nope and I’m the only one who’s got it. They arrested the teacher afterwards. They’ll be questioning him for the next couple of days while they piece it all together but they haven’t formulated the charges yet, so this could all be published in tomorrow’s paper without prejudicing a court case. “Our story”, by the teacher and the teenage runaway who hid while her mother thought she’d been murdered.’
‘Oh my God! I don’t believe it, son. That’s incredible. You are one in a million! Get yourself down here pronto, next train, you hear, no, forget that. I’ll arrange for a car to pick you up. We’ll get you to Newcastle airport and fly you down. Write your notes up on the plane and Jennifer can type them up for you when you get here.’
‘You think it’s a good story then?’
‘A good story? This is bloody dynamite!’
‘So it’s worth a few bob?’
There was a silence on the line for a moment. ‘Oh, I get it. It’s like that is it? Listen son, I know you’re a bit narked at me right now but … I’ll see if I can’t bump your salary up when you get back here,’ Tom stayed silent, ‘and we’ll get you two or three grand extra in readies as well. You know, a nice brown envelope to welcome you back. How does that sound?’
‘Two or three grand for this story? You know the other red tops would all pay ten times that and don’t try and tell me you haven’t got the authority to match them, because I know you have.’
‘Match them? Are you kidding me? You work for me, son or have you forgotten that, so don’t come over all lippy just ’cos you fell on a story while you were on gardening leave, ’cos it won’t wash.’
Tom stayed silent again until the Doc calmed down. ‘Okay, he added finally, ‘I’ll up your pay by ten grand a year and I’ll slip you ten grand in readies from the kiss-and-tell fund.’ Tom could tell the Doc was excited, champing at the bit for this story. The doc chuckled, ‘We won’t tell the tax man if you don’t. How does that sound?’
‘Not good enough, I’m afraid, Doc.’
‘What?’
‘I think I’ll be taking my story elsewhere, if it’s all the same to you. The Mirror has already offered me forty grand.’
‘Elsewhere? Have you gone stark raving bonkers? You work for me, you ungrateful little shit, which means that everything you write belongs to me! It’s called intellectual property and we’ll bloody sue you if you try to give it to anybody else. Now get your arse back down here! You can kiss that ten grand goodbye for starters, which will teach you never to piss me off again! Have you finally got it, you stupid bastard?’
‘I have, Doc,’ answered Tom. ‘I fully understand about the intellectual property argument. I got it in one, in fact. There’s just one little problem.’
‘What’s that?’ snarled the doc.
‘My contract with you expired two days ago,’ Tom said and there was another lengthy silence on the line while Tom allowed the Doc to digest that piece of information, ‘which means I’m officially freelance, so I can sell my stories to anyone I want and right now I want to sell this one to the Daily Mirror. I believe you once sacked their current editor? They’re actually gonna pay me extra because they know how pissed off it’ll make you to see my story plastered all over his front page. Enjoy reading that over your cornflakes.’
The Doc went mad then. Tom had never heard anybody lose it to quite such a degree. Nobody had, in fact. The entire newsroom stopped what it was doing and collectively turned to listen as Alex ‘The Doc’ Docherty unleashed an absolutely unparalleled deluge of four-letter filth down the phone at Tom Carney. The tirade went on for a good two minutes.
Tom listened calmly until the Doc was finally spent. When the editor had at last run out of breath and invective Tom could finally get a word in edgeways. ‘You finished, Doc? Calmed down have you? Good,’ said Tom. ‘Now do me a favour and go fuck yourself.’
Tom had the last word, but only because he managed to hang up before another foul-mouthed blast began.
Tom Carney became a legend in the newsroom that day, chiefly for being the cause of the Doc’s most violent meltdown, even though he didn’t get to hear the culmination of it. As soon as the Doc realised he had been entirely shafted by his former junior reporter and that Tom was no longer on the line, Alex Docherty ripped his phone out of the wall by its socket and hurled it as far away from him as possible.
Jennifer was still sitting outside the great man’s office, trying to make herself look very small indeed until her boss’s fury finally died down. She had seen the Doc lose it before, but never quite like this. Even she jumped at the almighty crash as the Doc’s phone came flying through his office window, shattering it in the process, showering glass all over the carpet and her desk while her boss let out a cry like a wounded bull, which had everybody wondering how they could vacate the building discreetly. Jennifer went and hid in the ladies.
Tom dialled Paul Hill at the Mirror. ‘You can have everything,’ Tom told him. ‘I’ve enough on the teacher and his runaway pupil for a front-page splash and a double-page spread inside.’
‘Nice one,’ said Hill, ‘our editor is well happy with you right now.’
‘Thought he might be and I’ve got another story he’s going to like. My inside angle on the Timothy Grady takedown. How we got the story, how we trapped the Lion and I’ve a nice angle on how he used British libel laws to stifle freedom of speech. As a bonus, I’ll even add a few hundred words on why Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper bowed to pressure from his lawyers and threw me to the wolves.’
‘Ooh,’ said the voice on the end of the line, ‘I like that last bit.’
‘I thought you might,’ said Tom. ‘There’s just one small thing.’
‘Name it,’ said Hill.
‘I want to write the headline.’
The next morning Tom rose early and drove to the Rosewood café. On the way there he bought the newspapers and placed them on the table so he could read them while he ate his breakfast. Tom ordered a fry-up with coffee then turned his attention to that day’s front pages, all of which were running with follow-up stories on the wreckage of Timothy Grady’s career and marriage. The front page of the Mirror was particularly striking, with a banner headline promising the inside story of a Romeo teacher and his gymslip runaway pupil, while underneath there was a lead story about the Defence Secretary that this time proudly carried Tom’s by-line. This was followed by a detailed analysis of Timothy Grady’s career implosion, including his wife’s conniving, malevolent influence and the strong whiff of corruption that surrounded them both.
The headline read: ‘The Lion, The Bitch and The Fraud Probe’.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Day Twelve
Three Days Later
‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ he asked the girl and she visibly jumped. ‘Don’t you know there’s a killer out there? Don’t your parents read the newspapers?’
The girl was frightened to death of him, he could see that. She had already started edging forwards out of the bus shelter in case she had to run for it or shout for help. Instead of answering him, her eyes were darting around looking for someone to help her in case he was a crazy man.
‘It’s all right, love,’ he told her wearily and he reached into his inside jacket pocket, br
ought out the warrant card and showed it to her. ‘I’m a copper.’ Then he said, ‘It’s okay, you are not in any trouble. What’s your name, eh?’ and he smiled at her in what he hoped was a reassuring manner.
‘Kimberley Russell.’
‘And how old are you?’
‘Eleven,’ she looked a bit older but it was so hard to tell these days.
‘Well, Kimberley, you shouldn’t be out this late, not on a school night, not on any night at the moment. Should you?’
‘No, Sir,’ she automatically afforded him the courtesy she was used to giving her school teachers, ‘I had Guides.’
‘Girl Guides?’
She nodded.
‘That explains it,’ he put on his most kindly face. ‘Used to be in the Boy Scouts myself. Be prepared eh?’ And she smiled nervously at that.
‘Live near here, do you?’
‘Church Street.’
‘Climb in the back and I’ll drive you home. Save your parents worrying about you.’
She hesitated then. He could tell it was against her better instincts. She was wavering, they always did for a moment, and a little flash of panic ran through him. He was about to start the car and drive off before she could clock the registration then he composed himself and went for the tactic that always worked; the voice of authority, for she was used to obeying her elders and betters. ‘Don’t mess about, Kimberley,’ he barked, ‘get in the car,’ and he frowned at her like the important man he was. ‘I haven’t got all night.’ She hesitated for just a moment longer then relented, eager to avoid his disapproval. She walked to the door behind him. He heard it open and the swish of her skirt as she slid onto the seat behind him then the soft click as she closed the door.
‘I don’t think you shut it properly, Kimberley,’ he told her, his heart pounding like it was about to burst, ‘try it again, love.’
Silence. Should he not have used the word love? Could she actually hear the nervousness in his voice? Was she going to make a break for it? He heard the door swing open once more and for a moment he was convinced she was going to run off, then it slammed back hard and she gasped a little, as if she had put all of her strength into it.
‘There’s a good girl,’ he told her.
He had another look round to make sure no one had seen her get in. Not a soul nearby. He put the car into gear and moved away. He knew a quiet spot nearby where he could quickly drag her from the back seat and throw her into the boot then he could take his time, transporting her to the place he had chosen: the old quarry. No one would be able to see or hear her there.
Soon he would save another one.
Suffer the little children to come unto me.
Three days after Tom’s front-page story, Helen finally gave up waiting for him to call her and walked into the Greyhound.
‘He’s gone back to London, pet,’ Colin told her from the other side of the bar.
‘Is he coming back?’ she asked, ignoring the scrutiny of the Greyhound’s curious regulars.
‘Don’t know,’ he said, ‘but he took all of his stuff with him. He said something about a job down there,’ and he must have seen the disappointment in her face because he added, ‘I expect he’ll let you know.’
‘Thanks,’ Helen said, feeling a lot less sure about that than he seemed to be.
‘I’ll tell you what this is, shall I?’ offered DC Trevor Wilson, as he scrunched up the packet of chips and threw the empty newspaper and its greasy wrapper out of the car window into the nearest bush.
‘If you like,’ answered Bradshaw, knowing that he would anyway, whatever his reply.
‘A waste of my time,’ and he exhaled loudly, ‘and yours,’ he added, almost as an afterthought.
‘Not a lot of choice in the matter though, is there?’ Bradshaw told his new partner. Vincent Addison was still on the sick so the two DCs had been on nights together for three consecutive days now, flagging down passing motorists at random to see if they knew anything about the disappearance of the missing girls. There had been a justification of sorts from their DI but they both knew it was little more than a box-ticking exercise, so that DCI Kane could say he’d come up with some new tactics to apprehend the Kiddy-Catcher, now that he was officially in charge. Detective Superintendent Trelawe was gone and he wasn’t coming back. The shit had really hit the fan following that newspaper piece on the fake professor and now everyone reckoned Trelawe was for the guillotine.
The Michelle Summers case had been solved and public interest in the body-in-the-field had begun to wane, so DI Peacock had taken Wilson and Bradshaw off the dead-wood squad and reassigned them, along with some of the less indispensable members of the larger squad. Six detectives were now working in pairs on roads connecting key spots in the Kiddy-Catcher investigation, backed up by uniformed officers who patrolled these ‘arteries’ as the routes were known in the incident room.
The two men were on the Durham Road, a few miles outside Great Middleton, and so far, in three nights, they had pulled over eighty-six motorists. Aside from a few drivers that were over the limit and a couple of common-or-garden perverts who had no good explanation for why they were out after dark, all they had uncovered of a criminal nature was one man with a boot full of lead he had just swiped from a church roof.
Now they sat in Bradshaw’s car with two uniformed officers backing them up in a marked police car, waiting for their next flag-down.
‘How many we got so far then?’
Bradshaw checked his records, ‘Eighteen tonight,’ just as a car’s headlights came into view at the opposite end of the long straight road they were blocking.
‘Your turn,’ said Wilson smugly because the rain was lashing down now.
‘Bloody hell,’ moaned Bradshaw but he climbed from the car anyway.
Bradshaw watched as the car’s headlights came into view. It was moving pretty briskly so he bent low enough to speak to the officers in the squad car, who turned on the flashing lights. PC Harrison got out of the driver’s side. The advancing motorist saw the lights and began to slow before he reached the cones and the warning sign with ‘Police – Stop’ written on it. Another sign with an arrow guided him to the side of the road where Bradshaw was waiting to begin the usual round of questions. Harrison stood nearby, holding a torch.
The car was a boxy old Volvo, about as boring as you could get. When Bradshaw approached it, the driver’s side window wound down with a squeak then an arm came out. The hand attached to it was clutching a warrant card. Normally Bradshaw would have relaxed at that point but he had been in the room when they first discussed the possibility that the Kiddy-Catcher could be impersonating a police officer, so he had to be sure. He bent to look into the car and a familiar face blinked back at him.
‘Bloody hell, Vincent,’ smiled Bradshaw, ‘what you doing out here? You come to take over? We could do with a break.’
‘Sorry, mate,’ came the soft reply, ‘still on the sick, just out for a drive. I find it helps when I’m feeling bad.’
‘At this hour?’ asked Bradshaw and he immediately regretted it. He knew that, like himself, Vincent had his problems and probably dealt with them in much the same way as he did. In Bradshaw’s case, his demons sometimes left him with little or no energy to do anything but there were other occasions when he would suddenly feel a manic vitality that could only be calmed by a blaze of activity, when a week’s chores could be completed in an evening. That mania sometimes culminated in a long, fast drive down empty motorways or silent country roads in the middle of the night. Maybe Vincent needed similar therapy. ‘Sorry for flagging you down. We’ve been pulling over everyone; Chief’s orders.’
‘No problem.’
But Bradshaw didn’t wave Vincent through because he knew he was just about the only one in CID who bothered to speak to him these days and he felt guilty for judging him so harshly when he first went on the sick.
‘Dreadful bloody night eh? I’d be tucked up at home with some hot chocolate if I were you, or
maybe something stronger.’
‘Insomnia,’ said Vincent, ‘I get it terrible. I’ve tried sleeping on the couch, watching TV, reading books. Only thing that works sometimes is if I go for a drive, until I start to feel tired.’
‘I get that sometimes,’ said Bradshaw. ‘I wake up at four in the morning and can’t get back to sleep, my mind’s racing so much, know what I mean?’
‘Yeah.’
The windscreen wipers on Vincent’s car were still going full pelt and one of them stuck on something but kept going. It made a squeaking sound that was jarring and both men were momentarily distracted. Each time they swept back and forth the rubber from the nearest wiper caught on some invisible obstacle and shuddered then squealed in protest before continuing its task. ‘Kill that for a sec, will you,’ winced Bradshaw, ‘it’s like nails scraping a blackboard.’
Vincent complied with the request, killing the windscreen wipers but not the engine. The squealing ceased and now the only sound was raindrops hitting the car and the low murmur of its engine. Then Bradshaw heard a door open and he turned to see Trevor Wilson leaving the car, which surprised him because Wilson had been moaning incessantly about the rain. His colleague marched towards the bushes, presumably to empty his bladder.
Bradshaw was about to share a joke with Vincent about what a nightmare Wilson was to work with but he was distracted again, this time by a noise.
‘What was that?’
‘What?’ asked Vincent.
‘That sound?’
‘I didn’t hear anything.’
‘Shhh!’ hissed Bradshaw and he strained to hear it.
There was silence, apart from the staccato pat-pat of dozens of rain drops on the roof and bonnet.
‘What are we listening for?’ asked Vincent.
Bradshaw held up a hand to silence him and they both froze for a moment while Bradshaw listened. Then it happened.
A thump.
The hollow sound of something hitting metal.
‘That,’ said Bradshaw, but he was still unsure of the source.
No Name Lane (Howard Linskey) Page 34
