SALFORD MURDERS: The Private Investigator Gus Keane Trilogy

by Bud Craig

  “Oh, my God,” he groaned. “If not you then who?”

  He ran both hands through his hair, bunching it and pulling hard.

  “I don’t know,” I lied. “She did tell me she was pregnant and the relationship with the father is over. It has no future.”

  He began to get up from his chair and turned towards the door.

  “I’m sorry about this.”

  I got up too.

  “Does Karen know you’re here Gary?”

  He turned back.

  “No, she doesn’t actually.”

  “I won’t tell her if you don’t,” I said, as we left the room together.

  “I’m bloody sick of this,” I muttered to myself on the way back to my desk. “Why do I get involved with other people’s affairs? Why can’t they leave me alone?”

  Sitting down, I paused for thought. I let out a guffaw. I shouldn’t laugh really but it was hard not to.

  * * *

  Walking through the car park on my way to Ordsall Tower the following Tuesday I recognized Pam Agnew’s car. The sun glinted off the windscreen so it was difficult to see the people inside. The woman in the driving seat was presumably Pam but I had no idea who the man in the passenger seat was. This was partly because of the sunlight, partly because Pam was snogging him with all the enthusiasm of a teenager. The ‘very much married’ man no doubt. Bloody hell. Not the best way to keep a secret.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, Children’s Services staff were squashed in the team room.

  “I’d like to welcome Cal McIntyre, Bill Copelaw’s daughter,” said Pam Agnew.

  All eyes were on the curly-haired woman on Pam’s left. She was casually dressed in jeans and a dark blue T-shirt, holding a piece of paper in her hand. I looked over at Pam as she went on.

  “This has been an extraordinarily difficult period for the family and for all of us who knew Bill as a friend and colleague. We will always remember him.”

  A mumbled ‘hear, hear’ from a handful of people could be heard. Pam’s good at this, I said to myself. To the manner born, one might almost say. The half-smile said, ‘this is a sad occasion but let’s remember the good things about Bill’.

  “And today’s modest little ceremony is another small sign that he is still in our minds and hearts. Mourners at Bill’s funeral were asked to make a donation towards buying play equipment for children in the Women’s Aid Refuge.”

  I looked round the room, picking out Don Bird, looking stern, and Karen at the back of a group near the partition. I wondered how she felt, as Pam went on with her speech. When it was over, Cal, after explaining how her mother had found it ‘too difficult’ to attend today, thanked everyone for their support and handed over a cheque to the manager of the refuge.

  Over tea and biscuits later, I got talking to Cal.

  “It’s Gus, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, well done for remembering.”

  “Dad mentioned you. You played Rugby League, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. I played for Salford. A long time ago now.”

  “Well, it meant you could do no wrong in Dad’s eyes. Men and their sport, eh?”

  She looked me up and down as if wondering how tall I was.

  “Do you always wear a suit?” she asked.

  “Hardly ever,” I smiled. “I was in court this morning for a case I’m dealing with. And I’ll be going to visit my mother’s grave in a couple of minutes.”

  “Oh?”

  “I only work part time. I have this idea my mam would like me to wear a suit when I go and see her.”

  “You’re probably right. Which cemetery is it?”

  “Weaste.”

  She looked me up and down again in a way that was becoming disconcerting.

  “I hope you don’t mind me asking,” she said, “but would it be OK if I came with you?”

  “Yeah, fine.”

  She looked me in the eye, her expression giving nothing away.

  “My dad’s buried there. I’d like to visit him and, well, I’d be glad of some company.”

  “Fine.”

  “And mummy’s still very fragile.”

  “Were you close to your mother?” she asked as we got into my car a few minutes later.

  There was to be no small talk then, I thought, as I considered my reply.

  “Not in the way I think you mean,” I said. “I was only 18 when she died.”

  “How sad.”

  “Yeah. I suppose I never got to know her. I mean my relationship with my dad has changed out of all recognition since then.”

  We went on down the dual carriageway along Regent Road, overtaking two over-laden lorries.

  “Do you talk to her?” asked Cal.

  I nodded.

  “It’s a mixture of…making up for lost time and trying to have a sort of fantasy relationship with her.”

  I realised I had never told anyone about this before. Losing a parent, no matter what the circumstances, was a powerful thing to have in common.

  “You mean a better relationship than you could have had in real life.”

  Again I nodded as I bore left into Eccles Old Road.

  “Spot on,” I said, remembering what my mam was really like and how hard it would have been to confide in someone so judgemental.

  “You know Dad and I didn’t get on, I suppose,” she said.

  She glanced out of the corner of her eye, her hands in her lap. She twiddled her thumbs as she waited for my response. I couldn’t see the point of lying.

  “Your mother said something about it, yeah.”

  “We weren’t exactly at daggers drawn but not the best of pals either. There was a kind of truce.”

  “I see.”

  Weird that a social worker should have the same problems as clients, I thought. Not really, I told myself, after quickly re-considering, not weird at all.

  “My ex-husband always said I was a control freak. I’m beginning to think the bastard was right.”

  “I’m saying nowt.”

  Someone else wanting to open her heart to me, I thought. They seemed to be queuing up to do it.

  “A wise man,” she smiled. “Dad was the same, always wanting to be in control. That’s why we clashed.”

  I continued to say nowt.

  “Of course when daughters and fathers fall out…well, I can imagine what a social worker might think.”

  Oh, no, I said to myself, what’s she gonna say next? Is this why she wanted to come with me today?

  “Of course they’d be wrong,” she said, putting me out of my misery.

  “Nearly there,” I said as we turned down Cemetery Road.

  In the cemetery, we turned from the main path and approached Bill’s grave. Cal smoothed her hands down her jeans as if to prepare herself. For what, I wondered. She lowered her head.

  “Listen, I’ll leave you to it for a while,” I said, “I need to go and see my mam. I’ll be back shortly.”

  Again I approached the grave with the familiar headstone and stood up like a soldier on parade. As I told Cal, I was trying to make up for lost time, to re-create the relationship I had in fact never had with my mother.

  “That’s Cal over there, mam,” I said. “She never got on with Bill, her dad. I don’t know why she’s here, whether she feels guilty or what.”

  I listened to the wind through the trees, the birdsong.

  “It makes you wonder what goes on beneath the surface of people’s lives though.”

  I smiled at the gravestone as events from my life passed through my mind as though I were dying too.

  “Keep everything covered up, that was always your way. All top show. And you know what? Everyone’s like that. That could be what’s at the heart of Bill’s murder, I’ll bet.”

  I shook my head, wondering what she would have thought of me now.

  “What would you have thought about Louise walking out? Did you ever feel like walking out, mam? We all do.”

  “You know I’v
e got a girlfriend now. I know what you’d say: what do you want a girlfriend for at your age, our Gus? And: I’ve nothing against coloured people but.”

  I looked over to where Cal stood by her father’s grave.

  “Better go.”

  “You OK, Cal?” I said, as I arrived back at Copelaw’s grave.

  She nodded, wiping tears from her face with a tissue.

  “It’s just…oh, I dunno,” she said. “The fact he’s gone forever, well, I don’t know what to say.”

  My eyes held her gaze for a moment longer as she tried to smile.

  “Not like me to be stuck for words.”

  I glanced down at the gravestone.

  WILLIAM COPELAW

  DEVOTED HUSBAND OF JEAN

  LOVING FATHER OF CAROL

  “Carol,” she said. ‘How I hate that name.”

  Funny things, names, I said to myself, thinking of my son. He’d go mad at being addressed as Daniel. It always had to be Danny.

  “What am I doing here?” Cal asked.

  We stood still as if waiting for an answer to that question. Cal sniffed and wiped away more tears.

  “Let’s go.”

  We walked along the path. For a time we said nothing, thinking our own thoughts.

  “It’s hard to walk and talk at the same time,” she said, stopping at a bench and sitting down.

  I sat down next to her. She paused as if not knowing what else to say.

  “Mum and Dad wanted the best for me. They’d neither of them had much education. Dad did a social work course after being made redundant from Carborundum in the eighties. Mum was shop girl in M&S and worked her way up the ladder.”

  “Working class heroes,” I said.

  “Precisely. Not me, though. I won a scholarship to St Edmunds Academy in Cheshire. Suddenly I was flung into a crowd of posh girls who went skiing in St. Moritz every Christmas.”

  “And you had to adjust?”

  “And how. That’s how I got this accent.”

  I had been wondering.

  “The trouble was they wanted me to be different and somehow stay the same.”

  “A tough one.”

  “Plus I was the most appalling little snob in my teenage years. Mum just took the line of least resistance but Dad and I constantly clashed.”

  She brushed away some soil that had somehow got onto her jeans.

  “I went to uni in Canterbury when I was 18,” she said, “I knew I would never come back home.”

  She drew patterns on the gravel with her boot.

  “It’s the sort of thing people do.”

  I tried to remember what was happening to me at that time. Kids growing up, me working in Social Services, Louise climbing the career ladder in Human Resources. Rachel went off to University but only as far as Sheffield. Now she was back in Salford. Back home.

  “I wish I could have made it up with him before he died. I never thought I’d say this but I feel guilty.”

  She got up and we walked away together. On the way towards the exit. I occasionally glanced at the other graves, wondering what kind of lives the people buried there had. Had they left behind people with guilt and regrets?

  “I was helping Mum sort through the house the other day. Do you know what I found?”

  I shook my head.

  “A Manchester Building Society book. I’d had it as a kid. The last time I saw it there was about 10p in it.”

  I nodded. What was this about?

  “It turns out Dad has been feeding money into it bit by bit over the years. With what he’s put in plus all the interest that has accrued there’s, well, a tidy sum.”

  She wiped away a tear and looked at me.

  “On the day he died Mum picked me up at the station. She drove to Dad’s office to see him about something.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I waited in the car so I never saw him again. What kind of behaviour is that from a grown woman? It’s the way a teenager treats her boyfriend for not sending her a Valentine card.”

  “You weren’t to know.”

  “Suppose not, but it wouldn’t have taken much to go in and see him. I could have tried to be nice.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Well, Gus,” said the woman in the comfortable chair opposite me the next day. “At the last session you said you were kind of moving on.”

  Not my exact words, Fiona, I almost said but I decided not to quibble.

  “Getting there, yeah,” I said.

  I glanced at the wall clock behind Fiona Pemberton-Wisely. Just after three thirty. We had started dead on time as usual. That had reassured me from the start, seeming to show she could be relied upon. My initial apprehension had increased when I heard her accent – so posh as to be almost incomprehensible – and her double barrelled name. Looking round the room, I saw the table in the corner with leaflets for FPW Counselling Services.

  “I feel like I’m getting on with things more,” I added.

  She pulled a baggy jumper over her voluminous skirt, her chubby hands reminding me of a baby. She fiddled with her grey hair, which was twisted into a sort of bun. Then from a still, upright position she looked up at me over half-moon glasses.

  “You’re looking well,” she said, before looking at me as though about to give a medical diagnosis. “Physically, I mean. You look more, I don’t know, purposeful.”

  I nodded. We had once spent about ten minutes discussing the psychological benefits of regular exercise and a healthy diet. Looking at her now, I couldn’t help thinking she should take a leaf out of my book.

  “Right,” she said, looking down at the notes in her lap. “Last time we agreed we’d have two more sessions, making the one after this the last.”

  At this, I wondered how I felt about finishing off the counselling. Ambivalent, that’s what a social worker would say. For three months now, once a fortnight. I had been getting off the tram at Heaton Park and following a now familiar route east through the park. Memories of the rare treat of childhood visits to what was then a wondrous place would fill my mind. The gentle half-mile stroll between the boating lake and the Parkside Centre onto Sheepfoot Lane brought me here. I would always arrive relaxed yet psyched up.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I’d be relieved at the thought I would not need it any more. At the same time I would miss it, despite an occasional reluctance to talk about the painful stuff that had brought me here. Where else, after all, can you talk about yourself or whatever you fancied for an hour?

  “Now, what’s been happening since last we met?”

  “Quite a lot,” I said with my impeccable grasp of the art of understatement.

  A list appeared in my mind. The events ran forward like scenes from a silent film: the misunderstanding with Tanya and my altercation with Askey; finding Bill’s body; getting together with Marti; Bill’s funeral and Cal’s hypocrisy; my return to work and starting the investigation into Bill’s murder; taking on Paul as assistant; the DNA test. Charlotte, Liam, Jean, Karen and Gary flitted through the pictures at random.

  “Such as?” she asked.

  Where to start? Making a snap decision, I began to go through it all in chronological order. I could change the names to protect the innocent. Fiona responded with her usual nods, taking the odd note here and there. When there was a natural pause she would seek clarification.

  “Well, now,” she said when I showed signs of running out of steam, “that’s life in the fast lane all right. Do you feel you’re taking on too much?”

  Was I? It would be bound to give that impression, I thought. My account had made it sound as though it had all happened at once. In fact, most of the time I was getting on with the ordinary things of life. If anyone had asked me I would have said I was enjoying life more than I had for years. I tried to explain that to Fiona.

  “Are you sleeping OK?” she asked.

  Sleep or the lack of it, coupled with my reluctance to go to sleep in case I didn’t wake up, had formed a large p
art of our discussions.

  “Fine,” I said, “though I have been having a recurring dream.”

  “A recurring dream? How often?”

  “A couple of times a week, I suppose.”

  “I see. What’s it about?”

  I closed my eyes momentarily and saw the dream again in my mind’s eye.

  “I’m back playing rugby for Salford again, trying to tackle Gus Risman…”

  “Sorry?”

  I explained who Gus Risman was and told her about being named after him. For what felt like the millionth time, I wondered about my dad’s motivation. He had never given a satisfactory explanation as to why he had called me after his sporting hero. At least it had meant I wouldn’t do the same to my kids.

  “Anyway, I’m making a right hash of this tackle. To add to the surreal atmosphere Eddie Waring is commentating.

  “I remember him. Didn’t he used to commentate on Rugby League for the BBC?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The up and under chap,” she said, quoting one of Eddie’s catchphrases.

  “That’s right. In the dream he says, ‘Gus, lad, you might just as well try and tackle death.’”

  “I’m no expert on dreams, but that sounds like it’s connected with the murder.”

  Yes, and with my own mortality, I said to myself. Fiona looked pensive for a moment.

  “How fascinating. It does sound as if you’re struggling to come to terms with everything. At the same time, you’re more capable of doing so now.”

  After a moment’s thought I had to agree. I thought back to the frequent flashbacks that had plagued me in the weeks following the stroke. The way I would relive the events of that day. All that had happened recently would, I couldn’t help thinking, test me as severely. The session ran on as I talked about all I had to think about in the coming weeks and months. Before long I would be a grandfather.

  “Thanks a lot, Fiona,” I said as I got up to leave. “You’ve really sorted things out for me.”

  “That’s not quite true,” she insisted. “I’ve just listened to you and helped you draw conclusions,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “However it’s happened,” I said, “I feel a lot more positive about things.”

  “That’s good. Just remember there’s no certainty.”