Dead Silent

by Neil White

  I put my phone back in my pocket and looked at my watch. It was time to go to court, the crime reporter’s fallback option, low-life tales of shame from the grim streets of Blackley, a weather-beaten Lancashire town built on seven hills that had once hummed with the sound of the cotton mills, the valleys shrouded in smoke and once green fields changed into grids of terraced streets. All that industry was gone now, just the shadows left, although traces of Blackley’s former wealth could still be seen in the Victorian town centre, where three-storey fume-blackened shop buildings, filled with small town jewellers and century-old outfitters, compete with the glass and steel frames of everyday High Street. The wide stone steps and Roman portico of the town hall that overlooked the main shopping street carried echoes of men in long waistcoats and extravagant sideburns twirling gold watches from their pockets.

  The town has changed since those times though. The Asian influx in the sixties added an ethnic buzz, when textile workers from Pakistan headed to England to do the shifts the local population wouldn’t do, and so mosques and minarets were sprinkled amongst the warehouses and wharf buildings now, the call to prayer the new church bells.

  The court building had survived redevelopment though, four storeys of millstone with tall windows and deep sills, decorative pillars built into the walls on the upper floors. The police station had once been next door, the way into court through a heavy metal door at the end of the cell corridor and then up the stairs, but the move to an office complex by the motorway meant the prisoners now get to court in a van and in chains. The court carried on though, dispensing justice from draughty courtrooms with bad acoustics and plaster crumbling from the walls.

  The drive into town from the murder scene was pleasant though, with the wind in my hair, the roof down on my 1973 Triumph Stag in Calypso Red, my father’s pride and joy, and as I walked quickly up the court steps, I had a bounce in my stride. So I didn’t notice at first how quiet it was, my usual guard of honour up the court steps, of tobacco haze and glazed looks, not there, no throng of unwashed track-suits and last night’s booze. All I had was the echo of my feet as I walked into the waiting area, really just a long tiled corridor cast in yellow lighting with interview rooms to one side. Then I noticed that it was nearly deserted, just three people waiting, all of them staring into space. I glanced at the clock. Eleven thirty. It seemed too early to have cleared the morning list.

  The duty solicitor room was busy, but the small square room designed for client interviews was filled with bored lawyers moaning about how they couldn’t make a fortune any more.

  I put my head in to ask if anyone had a case worth free publicity. There was a general shake of the head and then it went quiet. I wasn’t part of the club, and so they waited for me to pull my head out again before the mutter of conversation restarted.

  I sighed. A quiet court meant nothing to report. Then I heard a noise from the corridor that led from one of the back courts. It was the sound of footsteps, bold clicks on the tiles, and I guessed the owner before I saw him: David Hoyle.

  Most of the lawyers in Blackley were sons of old names, the firms passed through the generations, sometimes split up and married off to other firms, but the lineage of most Blackley lawyers was based on history rather than ability. They moaned because the good lives their fathers had enjoyed had been snipped and cut back. But David Hoyle was different from the rest. He was sent to Blackley to head up the new branch of Freshwaters, a Manchester firm trying to establish a foothold away from the big city. No one had expected it, and Hoyle just arrived at court one day, in a suit with broad pinstripes and a swagger that no one seemed to think he had earned.

  The other lawyers didn’t like him. Client loyalty was generational in Blackley, where the children of criminals become the clients of lawyerss’ children, and David Hoyle upset that arrangement, because he made bold promises that made clients shift loyalties. Low level crooks, usually just people who had acquired a habit of making bad life choices, want nothing more than someone to shout on their behalf, and David Hoyle did that. The prosecution liked him even less, because he upset the give and take, where a weakness shouldn’t be probed too deeply, except for those special clients, the high-rolling money spinners, because one day the favour might have to be repaid.

  David Hoyle didn’t play that game. He didn’t care who he upset, because he accepted that losing was part of the game, except that he didn’t lose that often. And he didn’t work out of an office. Freshwaters had premises, but it was really just somewhere for Hoyle to park his Mercedes. He ran his files from home and visited his clients in theirs.

  His client trotted behind him, a red-faced man in a grey suit, his stomach pushing out the buttons, his shoes shiny underneath the pressed hems of his trousers. He wasn’t the usual court customer. Hoyle turned to smile and shake hands with his client, but from the look of regret Hoyle gave, I guessed that things hadn’t gone his way.

  I checked my pocket for my camera, get the picture first, the story later, because the shame sells better if there’s a face a neighbour might recognise, and headed after them as they made their way to the steps outside. As I put my hand in my pocket, I felt my phone buzz against my fingers.

  When I saw the number on the screen, I thought about letting it go to voicemail, but I knew that he would not give in. He had a newspaper to fill.

  ‘Morning, Harry,’ I said. ‘Let me guess: Night Wire.’

  I heard a chuckle and then a cough. Harry’s new-found health drive was trying to repair too many years of abuse.

  Harry had lived the newspaper life, with decades spent in the smoke and alehouses of Fleet Street, the deadline an excuse to go drinking. Things were different now, the news industry worked around the clock, with websites to be updated, the online adverts as important as the space in the paper the next day.

  ‘Night Wire is still posting and winding up your people,’ he said, his voice hoarse from the cough.

  ‘They’re not my people,’ I said.

  ‘They’re Laura’s people.’

  ‘So that’s her business.’

  Harry didn’t say anything for a while, and so I let the silence gather momentum, hoping that it might let the call end. But Harry had other ideas.

  ‘You need to get back on the horse,’ he said. ‘Write some decent stuff.’

  ‘I’ve told you,’ I said. ‘I’m having some time out. The court stuff pays the bills, that’s all.’

  ‘But if you take too much time away, you can never get back in. Things are changing, Jack. I haven’t got long left now. I’m retiring in two months, and so once I’m gone, you’ve got little sway at this place. They’ll take whoever feeds them the story, and you’ll spend your life as a small town hack.’

  ‘I know you, Harry,’ I said. ‘You’re a newsdesk editor. You don’t care about me. I don’t do the big scoops any more, Harry, you know that.’

  ‘What, because it got dangerous once or twice?’

  I sighed and looked around. I saw the lawyers watching me from the duty solicitor room. The mention of Night Wire must have grabbed their attention.

  ‘You know he’s going to get an award, don’t you, Jack?’ Harry said.

  ‘Who, Night Wire?’

  ‘Some civil liberties group wants to laud him for speaking the truth, for giving ordinary people a voice.’

  I gave a small laugh. ‘Being an anonymous police blogger will make the acceptance speech tricky,’ I said.

  ‘And so you can help him out,’ he said. ‘Let him have his day in the spotlight.’

  I sighed. I could feel that tickle of interest, and so I fought against it, tried not to think about Night Wire.

  ‘What do you see from your window, Harry?’ I said.

  He grunted. ‘You know what I see: Canary Wharf. Glass, metal, and egos. What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘Because I work from home, and all I have are hills and sky, and I’m starting to like it that way.’

  ‘Okay Jack, I ge
t the message. If you hear anything though, let me know.’

  I smiled. ‘No problems, Harry,’ I said. ‘Stay well,’ and then I hung up.

  The court corridor was silent again, just the occasional shuffle of someone’s foot as they waited to go into court and the mumbles of the watching lawyers. I glanced at the security guards by the entrance, old men in crisp white shirts, security wands in their hands. They were already counting the minutes until lunch. So this was it? Jack Garrett, hotshot reporter, my career dwindling away to nothing.

  I tapped my lip with my phone. Night Wire.

  Then I put my phone away and went after David Hoyle. Harry was sucking me in, and I knew I wanted to fight it.

  Chapter Four

  Laura leaned against her car and peeled off her forensic suit. The hood had made a mess of her hair, and so she used the car wing mirror to tease it back to life and then wiped the perspiration from her eyes.

  The body had been taken away, rolled onto plastic sheeting and then wrapped up in a bag, and was now heading to the lab. Now it was time for the fingertip search of the undergrowth, and she could see the cluster of police in blue boiler suits waiting to crawl their way through the small patch of woodland. Joe was looking back towards where the body had been found, his hood pulled from his head. Carson was in his car, talking into his phone.

  ‘What is it, Joe?’ Laura said, reaching into her car for her suit jacket.

  He didn’t answer at first, his gaze trained on where the stream headed under the estate. Then he turned round, chewing his lip.

  ‘Something about this isn’t right,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Laura said.

  ‘The location. It doesn’t make any sense. Why here?’

  Laura looked around and saw the housing estate that backed onto the crime scene, a line of wooden panel fences forming the boundary on both sides.

  ‘The seclusion?’ she guessed. ‘Only overlooked by the backs of the houses.’

  ‘But it isn’t secluded,’ Joe said. ‘One scream from her and all of those lights are going to flicker on, and what escape route is there? There is only one way to the street, because the other way is down that path, into the woods, but he couldn’t get a car down there. So if he drove to the location, he would have to leave his car on the street, and so he would be blocked in and easy to catch.’

  ‘Perhaps she was just walking past?’ Laura said. ‘You know, the wrong place at the wrong time, and he was hiding in there, waiting to pull someone in.’

  Joe shook his head. ‘Same thing applies. Too many houses. What if she fights back? If she runs or screams, there is a whole community to wake. And you saw how the body was concealed, just left on the ground and covered in leaves and bark. She was always going to be discovered.’ He sighed. ‘It just doesn’t feel right.’

  ‘You’re giving the killer too much credit,’ Laura said. ‘How many people do we catch because they do dumb things?’ She checked her hair in the wing mirror again, and then pulled away when the sun glinted off some grey strands, her fortieth birthday getting too close. ‘So what do you think?’

  Joe looked around and chewed on his lip. ‘I just don’t know,’ he said.

  They both turned as they heard a noise behind them, and they saw it was Carson, grunting as he climbed out of his car.

  ‘We’ve got a possible name for her,’ Carson said. ‘Jane Roberts.’

  ‘Don’t know it,’ Laura said.

  ‘No, me neither,’ Carson responded. ‘But I know her father. Don Roberts.’

  Laura shrugged, the name didn’t mean anything to her, but she saw the look of surprise on Joe’s face.

  ‘The Don Roberts?’ Joe said.

  Carson nodded. ‘It was called in two days ago, when she didn’t return home at the weekend.’

  ‘Why would he leave it so long?’ Laura asked.

  Joe turned to her. ‘Because it involves calling us,’ he said. ‘Don Roberts will not want us snooping around his life. He’s a drug dealer, but high up the chain. You won’t see him hanging around phone boxes with dirt under his nails, and you won’t find any drugs in his house, but he avoids us, because if we had the chance to scour his phone records and computers, we might find something we weren’t supposed to see.’

  ‘And he put that before his daughter?’ Laura said, incredulous.

  ‘Don Roberts is business first,’ Carson said. ‘What if he had invited us in and then it turned out that she’d taken off for a wild weekend with her friends? No, he wouldn’t do that, but I can tell you one thing: we’ve got trouble now.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Laura said.

  ‘Because this is one of two things: turf war or bad luck. We need to look into the last murder again, see if there is any link with drugs, and if it is, we can expect the revenge killings.’

  ‘And if it isn’t a turf war?’ Laura asked.

  Carson almost smiled at that. ‘The killer just has to hope that we catch him first, because if Roberts gets to him, he will die, but it won’t be quick and it won’t be pleasant.’

  I skipped down the court stairs towards David Hoyle, who was straightening his tie and his hair, using the glass panel in a door as a mirror, a freshly-lit cigarette in his mouth.

  ‘I’m too good for this place,’ he said to his reflection, and then turned round and blew smoke towards me. ‘Mr Journo, you’re looking twitchy.’

  ‘Has your client gone?’ I said.

  He took another long pull on his cigarette. ‘Now, what do you want with that poor man?’ he said, wagging a finger at me.

  ‘There isn’t much going on, and so I have to chase what I can,’ I said.

  ‘Didn’t you have bigger ambition than that when you first started out?’ he said. ‘Dreams of travel, interviewing presidents, uncovering conspiracies?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He grinned, smoke seeping out between his teeth. ‘This?’ he said, and he pointed up the stairs. ‘Was this your plan when you left reporting school, or wherever you people graduate from, trying to shame people for stepping on the wrong side of the line sometimes?’

  ‘It’s not like that,’ I said, bristling defensively.

  ‘So what is it like?’

  ‘It’s the freedom of the press,’ I said. ‘It’s about letting the wider community know what is going on around them, where the threats lie. Over the years, it paints the town’s history.’

  Hoyle raised his eyebrows.

  ‘And you planned this too?’ I said. ‘Did you always dream of giving speeches to a bench of bored greengrocers in a backwater Lancashire town? What about the big city, uncovering rough justice?’

  ‘I can change lives,’ he said, stepping closer. ‘You just tell other people about the things I do, a gossip, tales over the garden fence, pandering to everyone’s instinct, revelling in someone else’s downfall. God help us if the world is ever as bad as the papers make out.’

  ‘I can’t believe I’m having a debate about morals with a lawyer,’ I said.

  He checked his watch and then winked at me. ‘You’re not,’ he said, as he flicked his cigarette onto the pavement outside. ‘You’ve been delayed. My client should be in his car by now, and well away from your camera lens.’

  I sighed. Doesn’t Hoyle ever stop playing the game?

  ‘You need to stop wasting your time in there,’ he said, pointing back up the court steps. ‘Go after Night Wire.’ When I looked confused, he added, ‘I heard you mention him when you were on the phone before.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, wearily. ‘Let’s do it your way. Why should I go after Night Wire?’

  ‘Because he lets out too much,’ he said. ‘I know a lot of the rank and file love him, I’ve heard them talk about the blogs. I suppose he speaks their language, with his bile, his prejudices, but he’s breaking the rules.’

  ‘Why does that bother you,’ I said.

  ‘Why do you say that, because I’m a defence lawyer?’ he said. ‘Being a lawyer is about w
orking within the rules.’

  ‘No, being a lawyer is about trying to weasel your way around the rules,’ I said.

  He smiled at that. ‘Still all about rules though,’ he said. ‘Night Wire is ignoring them, and he’s skewing the game.’ He patted me on the shoulder. ‘Next time, ask my client the questions, not me, because I’ll just protect my client every time,’ and then he set off walking away from the court, a brown leather bag thrown over his shoulder.

  I leant against the doorframe and watched him go. Night Wire again. I had two people telling me to go after better stories. And I knew they were right. I did need to kickstart my life again, instead of trying to get by on inquests and court stories.

  My life as a reporter seemed like past tense though. I hadn’t written anything worth reading for nearly a year now, and I softened the blow by pretending that I had taken some time out to write a book. But it felt like a lie. I had written some scenes, a searing satire on modern living, or so I thought, but I spent most days surfing the internet and rewriting scenes that didn’t say much to start off with. I couldn’t do it, I realised that now. Every time I went to the keyboard, my fingers hovered over the letters and waited for the stream of consciousness to transfer to the screen, but they didn’t, and so I spent another aimless day wondering where the rest of my life was going to take me.

  I knew what the problem was though: it had become too dangerous too often. Criminals are bad people, it comes with the job description, but reporters don’t come with the protection that police or lawyers enjoy, because we are not players in the game. We’re on the sidelines, observing, annoying, interfering. I had gotten sick of the risk, had been hurt a couple of times.

  I laughed at myself. I knew what Harry English was doing. He was trying to tweak my curiosity, knowing that it’s what drives me, why I became a reporter, because I wanted to know what was happening out there, the stories going on behind the suburban curtains.

  Night Wire? What was different about him? Police bloggers were nothing new, they have been around for as long as the internet, jaded and weary cops having an anonymous rant at the system.