Fallen Idols

by Neil White

  And now this. A one-night stand turned into an affair. It was sporadic, igniting itself every few weeks, but it had grown into a habit. He had tried to break it, but she had said it was her or the media. His wife would find out anyway, so why not get some happiness out of it?

  He looked around, pretending to talk into his phone. It was what all footballers did. Talked into a phone, just to stop people from talking to them. But the phone was where his trouble had begun. Meet him or she goes public; text messages telling him what to do.

  He’d had no choice. At least this way he might be able to talk her out of it.

  He spun around, looking for her, hoping no one else had seen him. This wasn’t a time for photographs.

  He heard a crack, and then it hit him in the head like a hammer blow.

  As he went to the floor he saw faces. People on the street, twitching from the noise, eyes wide. Then he saw his children, smiling at him, laughing with him. His wife. The warm smell of her body. They rushed through his head as he saw the pavement get nearer, all the time getting darker.

  The world had already turned black by the time his head hit the floor.

  TWELVE

  It was late afternoon before I arrived in Turners Fold.

  I was surprised at how nothing had changed, like it had a different time-frame, existing in a bubble; like driving around a photograph album, sepia print, reminders of why I’d had to leave.

  I entered the Fold the usual way. There were just two ways in, from the north and from the south. All the roads that headed for the hills either turned into tracks or turned back on themselves. Pre-war bay fronts were at the entrance to the town, and then came the terraces. But these weren’t the narrow two-storey strips found nearer to the centre of town, the old mill-workers terraces with doors right onto the street. These were much grander, three storeys high, with neat gardens at the front protected by low stone walls. They gave way eventually to shops, but they were tiny affairs, crammed into Victorian fronts with stone-edged door frames, the insides dark and uninviting.

  There was grey as far as I could see, lines and lines of it, the severe stripes brightened only by the fake red of suburbia as new developments filled the gaps left behind by derelict industry. I dodged slow drivers and bolting dogs for half a mile and then passed my old high school. I gave a look left. I always did when I passed it, the sign by the entrance announcing what it was, the view over the town reminding me why I had to get away.

  I saw a flash of the sports fields just behind. There was a football field, goals warped and irregular, and beyond that there was a cricket pitch, really just a rectangle of short grass protected by a rope, surrounded by benches framed against the rising hills. That would be a good place to get a picture, and so I made a mental note to call back early in the morning, when the light would be sharp blue. It was where the career of David Watts had started, where he had dominated the school league and ended up signing for Burnley before making the trip to the south. From then on it had been millionaire and superstar.

  I shrugged off my school memories when I drove into the town triangle. I pulled over at Jake’s and stepped out of the car, feeling the Pennine breeze on my face for the first time since Christmas. The air felt clean, like it was coming in straight off the craggy tops, packed full with chill. It didn’t have that urban warmth of London, where the air was sodden with smoke and fumes. I’d forgotten what it was like, this clarity, this purity.

  I looked up at Jake’s Store and smiled.

  Jake’s had been there as long as there’d been Turners Fold, or at least that’s how it seemed. It had an old wooden frame around the front, painted blue, casting shadows over the windows, making it impossible to see in. The front had been painted many times, the wood now bending with age and the effects of the sun, when it came, so the paint had chipped and flaked and pointed jagged fingers.

  As I walked towards it, I could hear the sound of a brush on the old tiled floor drifting out to the street, like it always did when trade slackened off.

  I turned as I heard a car rumble over the cobbles running alongside the town hall. It was an old Mondeo, windows down, someone from my old school at the wheel. His arm rested lazily out of the window as he drove slowly along, tapping lightly to the beat of his radio. Robbie Williams swirled around the square and washed over me like cleanser, the simple pop anthem a change from the usual club-land thump that seemed to bang out of every bar in London. The music matched the slow crunch of the tyres as I watched them roll away.

  I walked into Jake’s. The shop was dark and shaded, so it took my eyes a couple of seconds to adjust, and when they did I saw Jake by his broom, nodding his head and smiling.

  ‘Well, look who it is,’ he chuckled. ‘Jack Garrett. You tired of old London town?’

  I grinned and held out my hand. Jake took it and gave it a gentle shake. His fingers felt old and brittle in mine. His skin was soft and cold, and I could feel the thinness of the skin. He looked bonier than I remembered, and he seemed to be stooping more than he used to. His skin just didn’t fit as tight these days.

  ‘I think London’s tired of me,’ I replied, laughing. ‘How are you, Jake?’

  He skimmed the brush across the floor absentmindedly. ‘I’m fine, Jack. The winters get colder and the summers make me want to sleep, but I feel fine.’

  ‘How’s Martha? Is she still working?’

  ‘Oh, she’s still with the police. They tried to retire her a couple of years ago, when she got to sixty, but the inspector talked the big shirts around. She mans the front desk now, checking for forged car insurance.’

  ‘And looking out for my father?’

  He cocked his head. ‘And some of that.’

  Martha, Jake’s wife, had worked for the police for as long as my father had been in the service. Her title was now a Civilian Support Officer, but in a small place like Turners Fold, it had always seemed like she was the station mother. She used to man the radio, draw up the shift roster, kept the station running properly. She did it so well that no one noticed, but when it was all centralised and taken out of the Fold, things never went as smoothly again. Ask any police officer who they treasured most at the station, and they would all reply Martha, because she looked after everyone. When she was in charge of things, if a young officer had a baby he didn’t get a night shift for the first year. Martha made sure of that. Things had changed now, but people remember.

  ‘You here to see your dad?’ asked Jake.

  I shook my head. ‘He doesn’t know I’m here. I’m here for work.’

  He gave a small laugh. ‘You won’t find much around here.’

  ‘No, no, I’m here for a story, connected with the Henri Dumas shooting, the footballer.’

  He looked surprised for a moment, and then glanced out of the window. ‘The world is going crazy. And now Nixon as well.’

  I felt my stomach turn. ‘What do you mean, “Nixon”?’ I asked, my head already telling me the answer.

  Jake looked surprised. ‘Haven’t you heard the news?’

  I gave a thin smile and shook my head. I’d had the radio on for the first part of the journey, the stop–start crawl out of London, but once I got onto the motorway, flying through grey and green emptiness, I needed more lift, so I did the last hundred miles with the CD player on.

  Jake stood up straight and flicked his brush across the floor again. ‘Same as Dumas. Johnny Nixon, stood on the corner of a street in Manchester.’

  I leant against the counter. If this was just some nutcase, it was a well-organised nutcase. Two cities a couple of hundred miles apart.

  Jake snapped me from my thoughts by asking what I wanted. I looked around the shop at a loss. I couldn’t remember. Maybe I had just wanted to say hello. He smiled at that and told me that was free. Everything else in the shop had a label on it.

  Then I thought of something.

  ‘I’m going home next. Does he still have a sweet tooth?’

  Jake smiled and nodded to
a shelf at the back of the shop. ‘Army and navy.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll take some of those. Is it ounces or grams in here?’

  He tapped his nose like it was a secret. ‘For you it can be ounces, but don’t tell everyone.’

  He walked to the back of the shop, slow and deliberate, and then said over his shoulder, ‘He’ll miss you when you go back.’

  Jake’s comment halted me for a second, made my throat catch. ‘Oh, he’ll survive,’ I said glibly. I paused then, realising that I didn’t know what my father did with his time. What did he do when he went home to that empty house?

  Jake sensed my thoughts. ‘He spends most nights in the Swan.’

  I felt a kick of guilt, thinking of my father with just a pub and his job to keep him company. Then I thought of how he could have called me. I would have come up, if he’d asked. He never had.

  I paid Jake for the sweets and went outside, leaving him with a promise that I’d call back before I returned to London. Then I went for a walk round the triangle.

  I knew where I was headed: the Valley Post, the start of my career.

  Laura looked out of the window of Dumas’s home.

  It was a tall Georgian house with pillars, bright white, part of a sweeping crescent, overlooking a small patch of green. This would normally be a quiet street, apart from the purr of Ferraris. It wasn’t quiet today, she thought, the street outside packed with reporters and cameras. They were kept back by two policemen, the line broken periodically by the delivery of flowers, the pavement outside now bright with colour and cards.

  Tom was upstairs with two other detectives, going through drawers and cupboards, looking for any hint of a secret life. Laura had been left downstairs with the grieving fiancée.

  There weren’t too many signs of grief. Anger was the first emotion Laura had detected, as if a major business deal had been lost. She had dressed all in black for the flight back, but it was designer T-shirt and jeans, a Mets cap and shades shielding her face. For the last thirty minutes she had been on the other side of a glass door talking into a phone. Laura guessed that she was working out how to use all the angles.

  Maybe when she was on her own, she would begin to think about the man she had lost, but Laura wasn’t sure about that. It seemed like their life together had been more about what they were rather than who they were.

  Laura sighed. She was being too harsh on her, she knew that. Laura didn’t know what it was like to live with the press writing up her every move. And let’s not forget the obsessives, those fans who want more than a smile or an autograph. Being good-looking and famous had a pretty high death rate.

  Then Laura noticed activity in the press camp. They were talking into phones, getting their cameras ready. She went out of the room and looked up the stairs. She could hear Tom on the phone, talking quietly.

  When he started to come down the stairs towards her, she couldn’t tell if the look in his eyes was anger or relief.

  ‘There’s been another shooting,’ he said. ‘In Manchester. Johnny Nixon.’

  Laura was shocked. ‘Definitely connected?’

  ‘Shot in the street from a distance.’

  They would lose it now, Laura knew. It would go to a much bigger task force.

  Then she realised why Tom looked relieved.

  As she went back into the room, she saw Dumas’s fiancée still on the phone. She would have to share the limelight now. Laura sensed that would be the biggest blow of all.

  THIRTEEN

  I kept on walking, away from the triangle to the buildings just behind, to the Valley Post premises. It had been stone-built for the Wesleyan Society but then taken over by the Weavers Union, with church windows and steps that ran to the first floor, so that the ground floor seemed more like a basement. Wooden beams ran along the ceiling, and the ground floor still had the original York stone flags, thick and grey. It used to be in most of the houses, but if it wasn’t ripped out to modernise in the sixties, it was stolen by thieves whenever a house stood empty. The windows had their blinds down on one side. I remembered how the sun caused reflections on the computer screens as it came over to the west in late afternoon.

  As I walked into the building, a buzzer went off, set to alert them that someone wanted to place an advert or buy a photograph. After a few seconds, a woman in her early thirties came to the small hatch, and it took a couple of seconds for my face to register.

  ‘Hey, Jack Garrett,’ she said eventually, ‘what you doing here? Come to pinch our big stories?’

  She was joking, but I sensed it held barbed traces, maybe that I thought I was too big for the Fold. Maybe I did.

  ‘Hi Traci.’ She spelled it with an ‘i’. ‘How’s life treating you?’

  She tilted her head in a flirt. ‘Oh, you know, same as ever. Come to work. Pay for childcare.’ She leant forward. ‘There’s been nothing nice to look at since you left.’

  ‘Maybe you scared them off. Is Tony around?’

  She smiled and lifted up the gate on the corner. ‘Yeah, where he always is. Come through.’

  I went through into the office and had another look at where my career had started. It was open plan, with clusters of desks splitting a big team into lots of smaller ones, the space broken only by large black iron pillars. I glanced over towards my old desk. It didn’t look like it had changed much. A few photographs had appeared on the desk, a young child and a dog, but other than that it was as if I had never left. I looked at the desk behind it, and I saw my old mentor, Tony Davies, tapping away on his keyboard. I recognised his head, huddled as it always was in front of the screen, the light from the monitor reflecting back off his baldness.

  I nodded Traci away and then walked over to him. He was intent on finishing whatever he was doing, not looking up. It was only when I began to say hello to people as I went, and someone shouted, ‘Hey, big shot,’ that he looked up. As soon as he saw me, he grinned, that strange lopsided grin, a rugby match costing him his two front teeth many years ago, replaced with false ones, but his smile always looked like he still felt the impact.

  He stood up and walked around his desk. I thought he was going to hug me, but he didn’t. He just stuck his hand out towards me, and when I shook he squeezed hard until my knuckles crackled.

  ‘Jack Garrett, good to see you.’ His deep voice sounded rich in the newsroom, as warm as ever.

  I grinned back. ‘How you doing, Tony?’ I looked down at his jumper. Reindeers in spring. ‘Your dress sense hasn’t improved.’

  He let go of my hand and tugged at his jumper. Maybe he was too old now to care, but he had worn bad jumpers for as long as I’d known him. ‘Hey, I like it. And how the hell are you? Sit down.’ He gestured towards my old desk.

  I sat down in the old swivel chair, the smell and feel all too familiar, taking away my time in London as if I’d never left.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.

  ‘Working. I’m doing a feature on David Watts, because of these football shootings, trying to get the hometown angle. You know, simple northern lad in the big bad city.’

  Tony nodded, whistling. ‘I can see the angle, but a feature. You must be doing something right.’

  I shook my head. ‘I just liked the idea of coming home.’

  ‘Well, forget about coming back here because your job’s gone.’

  ‘It’s been over two years. Even I know that broken hearts mend. Who have they got?’

  Tony looked past me and towards the other side of the room.

  I looked round and saw someone coming towards me carrying two cups of coffee, a woman, I would guess in her early twenties, eyes concentrating downwards, making sure the coffee didn’t spill. Her hair was long and dark, falling in straight lines like a waterfall, running over her shoulders and down her back. Her skin was tanned, and even from a few feet away I could see eyelashes that curled upwards in long black flicks. When she got near the desk, she looked up and saw me, and I saw deep brown eyes twinkle with surprise. />
  ‘Sorry, I’m in your seat,’ I said, getting up to give her the seat back.

  ‘Alice, this is Jack Garrett. He worked here before you started.’

  Alice placed the cups down and smiled. ‘I know.’

  That made me curious. I moved out of the way to let her take her seat, and I noticed how tall she was. I’m six feet tall, but Alice wasn’t much underneath that.

  She must have seen me looking quizzical, so she said, ‘You went out with my sister.’

  I shrugged. ‘That narrows it down, but not enough.’

  ‘I’m Alice McDermid.’

  My eyes flashed wide and surprised. ‘You’re Megan’s sister?’

  Alice grinned now, nodding. I looked her up and down, disbelieving. The last time I’d seen Alice, she was a gangly, clumsy girl not yet in her teens, and I was going out with her older sister.

  ‘It’s the Funfest again next month,’ she said quietly, her eyes dancing with mischief.

  I blushed. I could feel it, my cheeks getting hot.

  My first time was with Megan. We’d spent weeks talking about how special it was going to be, but in the end it had happened as an uncomfortable rush in the long grass at the Funfest, the annual Turners Fold fair. The day always ended with a folk festival, and while the town was dancing nearby, we slipped away into the grass at the edge, just where the lights from the stalls and rides wilted into darkness.

  ‘Fiddles and waltzers aren’t my thing any more,’ I stammered, trying to dismiss her. ‘How is Megan?’

  ‘She’s got two kids,’ she said, nodding at the photograph on the desk, ‘and a husband who works in insurance. Other than that, she hasn’t changed.’ She looked amused again. ‘And neither have you.’

  I laughed. ‘You have. You were all, well…’