Beck le Street

by Tony McHale

  Then suddenly in front of him one of the mourners appeared. He had to hit his brakes heard to avoid hitting her. Through the windscreen she looked Charlie directly in the face and recognised him immediately.

  “It’s him,” she said. “It’s him!”

  Her cry created curiosity from other mourners and some started to drift across to discover who ‘him’ was.

  “It’s him,” the mourner shouted again.

  Charlie couldn’t drive on without running her over. He was trapped.

  Other mourners now started to crowd round the car, looking at him like an object in a museum. Charlie didn’t know what to do.

  The mourners started to ask if he was alright … could they do anything for him, then the police officers came and quickly dispersed them, giving Charlie freedom to move on, which he did with a great sense of relief.

  Twenty minutes later Charlie pulled up in the Holiday Inn’s car park. He moved swiftly into the reception area. As he came through the glass doors the first thing he saw was the reception desk with Cassie ensconced behind it. She’d heard the doors open and looked up expecting to see some stranger who was going to tell her about a booking they’d made. Instead she saw Charlie. Instinctively she looked to her left where Georgie was in his wheelchair working away on his little lap top computer.

  “What you doing here?” she almost whispered, as she moved swiftly from behind the desk. Georgie kept on working.

  Cassie took Charlie by the hand and led him back towards the entrance, where the doors were still automatically closing.

  “I had to see you.”

  “Not here.” She kept moving out of the hotel and back into the car park, once again glancing at Georgie, who still hadn’t registered Charlie’s arrival.

  “I went to your cottage.”

  “Was Tyler there?” was Cassie’s first thought.

  “No.”

  “Look … just go. I’ll ring you.”

  But Charlie was determined. This was something that couldn’t wait until later.

  “No. You have to tell me the truth … here and now.”

  “The truth? What truth?”

  Charlie detected something in Cassie’s tone that said she was worried. Had she guessed what was coming?

  “Is Georgie my son?”

  Whatever Cassie was worried about it, wasn’t this. It hit her like a bolt from the blue. She thought that was all gone … all behind her. She just looked at Charlie, not sure what to say.

  “Well is he?” Charlie pressed her.

  Cassie looked in the hotel through the now closed glass doors. Georgie was still working on his laptop. And still with her head turned from Charlie, she gave a slight nod.

  Charlie wasn’t sure how to react. It was like he’d been winded … punched hard in the stomach.

  “I … I … I don’t understand,” he stammered.

  “I tried to tell you.”

  “When … when did you try and tell me?” demanded Charlie.

  “That Christmas … when I called you. The Christmas after you left.”

  Then it hit Charlie, the call that had stuck in his head all these years, wasn’t the call he thought it was. He’d always thought Cassie was ringing with the hope that he would ask her to join him, not to tell him she was pregnant. That had never entered into his mind. The irony was, had his situation been better, he would have asked her to join him. But at the time he felt a failure. A huge failure. He was working in a 7/11 and living in a bedsit sharing a bathroom with four people he didn’t even know. At that stage his bid for fame and fortune wasn’t going too well.

  “You rang to tell me you were pregnant … but you never did?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it would have meant the end of your dream. I couldn’t ask you to do that, not when things were starting to lift off for you.”

  Charlie remembered that during that phone call he’d told her he’d got a job as an assistant to a photographer working in St Johns Wood. She photographed mainly actors and rock stars. At the time he’d claimed she’d allowed him to start taking some shots himself. All of it was a lie of course.

  “So you just went off and had Georgie …” he stated simply, knowing it couldn’t have been that simple.

  She hesitated before replying simply, “Yes.”

  “I feel …” Charlie’s voice trailed off.

  “Angry,” she filled in the silence.

  “No … I feel like I let you down. All these years … and I wasn’t there to help you. It can’t have been easy. Georgie can’t have been easy.”

  “Tyler’s been good.”

  “Does he know Georgie’s mine?”

  “Of course … why do you think he hates you so much?”

  “He never did like me … I just thought we were picking up where we left off.”

  “No … he knew … like most of the village knew. Even though I never told anyone … most guessed. We were pretty close … you and me.”

  “Did my mum know?”

  “No. She asked me once, but I told her no. She’d have made you come back. That’s not how I wanted you Charlie.”

  Charlie looked at her. She was as beautiful now as she was then. Was he in love with her then? Probably … yes he probably was. And if he were to tell her the whole truth, then he would have said that his plan was to come back for her, come back for her and whisk her away to his new life, with all its new trappings. But by the time his career had started to lift off, he’d heard from his mother that Cassie had married, got a child and had settled down. As far as he was concerned he’d missed the boat. Cassie was living in contented bliss in Beck le Street and only some Elizabethan lothario would come and try and destroy what she had. So he pushed her to the back of his mind and the longer she was there the less he thought of her. That’s how he handled it.

  “How did you find out?” she continued in a subdued tone.

  “Someone from the press had been digging. I think it must have been Amos or Lucas who told them. My name’s on the birth certificate.”

  “Because you’re the father.”

  “I should have been doing things.”

  “I think it would have only made things worse …”

  “In what way?” he asked.

  “With Tyler. As long as you were in London, you were the man that ran away, the coward, the spineless creature who couldn’t face up to his responsibilities. That’s what you were in his eyes … and he liked it that way. You coming back has rocked him a bit.”

  “I should be down on my knees thanking him.”

  “I wouldn’t if I were you. To Tyler, Georgie’s his son. And because it’s been so long, that’s how most people in Beck le Street think. So the last thing he needs is someone coming along and telling him otherwise. If you have any feelings for me or Georgie, the best thing is not to even mention it. Do what you have to do here and then leave us in peace.”

  “If that’s what you want … then that’s what I’ll do. The only problem is the press now have hold of it and they may not let it go.”

  “You can stop them … can’t you? These are the people you work with. Stop them printing it … you have to.”

  “I can try … but Gary Turner … he’s pretty low grade.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He’d sell his mother if the price was right.”

  “You have to try.”

  “I will. I’ll go speak with him now.”

  Charlie starts to head for his car.

  “Charlie …” Cassie called after him.

  Charlie stopped and turned to look at her. She approached him and looked in his eyes.

  “There’s something else you should know …”


  “Go on.”

  “After I spoke to you that Christmas … and I knew you weren’t coming back …”

  “I would have come back … if I’d known …”

  “And maybe I should have told you … but I didn’t. None of that matters now, because none of it happened … what did happen is I tried to abort my baby … I tried to kill Georgie.”

  Charlie was overcome with a desire to hold Cassie, hold her tight and safe.

  “You must have been desperate,” was all he could say.

  “No … I was lonely. I was by myself … and if you’d have been there … then …”

  “Then what?”

  “I wouldn’t have tried to abort him and he wouldn’t have been disabled … and I wouldn’t hate myself the way I do.”

  It took Charlie a few seconds to comprehend what Cassie had just told him. She believed she was responsible for Georgie’s disabilities and for all Charlie knew she was right in that belief. He had no intention of asking her for details of the failed abortion, but he knew Cassie wasn’t stupid, she’d have seen doctors and read the relevant material, this wasn’t some glib assumption she’d arrived at; this would have been a firm conviction.

  “You should have told me.”

  “You think that now … but would you have thought that at the time?”

  Charlie had enough knowledge of himself to know that Cassie was right - at the time he’d have wished she hadn’t told him.

  Cassie quite naturally took hold of Charlie’s hands.

  “I’m sorry you found out like this. But it’s okay. I’m fine. I’m not lonely now. I’ve got Georgie and I am just desperate, desperate to hold onto what I have, desperate to help Georgie as much as I can. I can’t let anything harm his world, this is all he knows and this is all he’s got. I have to keep it safe.”

  “I see that. If I can stop this going to press, I will do.”

  Cassie’s gratitude showed in her eyes. She looked at Charlie and for a moment he went back sixteen years. It was sixteen years since he’d seen that look. They were teenagers passionately in love, in the way that only teenagers can be in love. That time when you become Romeo and Juliet and nothing in the world matters but your lover. That moment when you would die for each other. And Charlie would have died for her. He left because he did love her. He didn’t want her forced into doing something she didn’t want to. She loved her parents and he believed that this would have eventually caused them to break up. She would have had to return to them. How wrong he was. It was a modern day Shakespearean tragedy. Two people in love and one of them reads the wrong signs. Cassie’s parents went onto abandon her and her unborn child. There would have been no decision for Cassie. She would have followed Charlie blindly, but he didn’t want her … or so she thought. For the majority of the sixteen interceding years Charlie had longed for the girl he left behind. He wanted her to share his success, share his bed and share his life. But it never happened.

  Now here they are once again, looking at each other. The tragedy continuing, but somewhere in them both was the realisation of what they lost. Cassie felt the emotion well up inside her. Without thinking, she leaned forward and kissed Charlie lightly on the lips. It seemed so right for both of them.

  And it was at that moment that Georgie chose to look up from his homework.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Gary Turner was holed up in a Premier Inn in Scarborough. Charlie had called him and arranged a visit, a call Turner had been expecting. Turner wasn’t sure if the fact that Charlie Ashton had once fathered a disabled kid and then left him and the kid’s mother to it was indeed news worthy.

  His thinking - maybe not.

  If it was David Beckham – definitely yes.

  But it was probably big enough to worry Charlie into giving him something that was newsworthy.

  Charlie arrived at the Premier Inn, which boldly advertised its rooms for just £29 per night, although nobody had ever met anyone who had paid only £29 per night. Turner was insisting they meet in his room. Charlie guessed he’d be able to hide his recording devices easier in the room than say in a bar. Charlie was right. Turner had three hidden recording devices all happily recording away from the moment Charlie stepped into the room.

  There were no niceties. It was straight down to business.

  “I don’t want it hitting the media,” stated Charlie from the very start.

  “What are we actually talking about?” asked Turner with a transparent air of innocence.

  “You need this for the recording, I take it,” said Charlie challengingly. This was going to be a no holds barred encounter.

  “There’s no recording,” Turner lied and Charlie knew he was lying.

  “Like hell. But if that’s the only way of moving this on …” Charlie then enunciated clearly and deliberately … “I don’t want the fact I left a girl to have a disabled child all by herself … hitting the media.” Charlie smiled at Turner, then spoke in his normal way. “ That do for you?”

  “Very nicely,” said Turner smugly.

  Charlie looked at him. Turner always looked unshaven, not in that designer way, but in that tramp way. His hair was always unkempt and in need of a wash, while his clothes seemed to have been chosen from a catalogue company that went out of business twenty years previously. But none of that really mattered, what mattered was what would Turner settle for?

  “So what can I do to stop it?” was Charlie’s next direct question.

  “You tell me,” came Turner’s evasive reply.

  “I can tell you the police are barking up the wrong tree with their investigation about my mother’s death.”

  “Got any proof?”

  “No.”

  Charlie couldn’t see them getting anywhere with this, there was nothing he could give him. But there was no doubt in his mind that for the last fifteen years he’d let down Cassie and Georgie. He had done nothing for them and he was determined to stop this becoming public. Then a thought struck him.

  “There was a letter,” Charlie offered up mysteriously.

  “What letter?” asked an intrigued Turner.

  “It was a letter that was left by my mother at her solicitors. It was stolen from that solicitors and Devika had it her possession when she crashed. Then it went missing.”

  “What was in this letter?”

  “Not sure – but I believe it did one of two things, or maybe both.”

  “What?”

  “It either named the person who killed her, or it explained the reason she was killed. Or as I said … it could do both.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Just take my word for it, that I know this letter existed and I know Devika had it. The police were first on the scene at the accident. Maybe they know what happened to it.”

  “Have you asked them?”

  “Difficult, because it would prove that I knew Devika had the letter, which means I might know who stole it from the solicitors.”

  “So you don’t really have anything.”

  “Yes I do. Shaw and Shermans … my mother’s solicitors … ask them if they had a break in and ask them what went missing. They should have no reason to lie.”

  Turner seemed impressed with this. For Charlie he knew it could serve him two purposes – it could stop Turner going to the press about Charlie’s relationship with Cassie and it could get the missing letter into the public domain. This in turn could force someone to make another move and if they did that, they could very well show themselves.

  Charlie looked at Turner – he knew he was ready to cut a deal.

  “I’ll check it out.”

  “And you won’t try and sell the other stuff?”

  “Look it’s out there. Someone’s going to try and use it.”

  “But w
ho’s going to buy it, unless there’s another angle?”

  “Three murders. All may be linked in some way … come on Charlie, someone’s going to be on it.”

  “I don’t want the kid hurting,” said Charlie, hoping to appeal to the better side of Turner’s nature.

  “Then you shouldn’t have shagged his mother.”

  “I was sixteen.”

  “And now you’re paying the price. Look I won’t try and sell it … Okay?”

  This was some sort of a result for Charlie, but he was pretty certain he was going to have to work a lot harder to stop the press running with the story.

  * * * * *

  As Charlie was leaving Scarborough, Cassie was returning home from her evening shift along with Georgie. He’d been strangely quiet on the journey home and Cassie was starting to suspect he’d seen Charlie at the hotel. She’d asked him outright if there was anything the matter and he’d said there wasn’t.

  At the cottage all was dark. She knew Tyler would have gone down to The Black Dog and would probably return half cut in the early hours of the morning. After all there was more than usual to discuss over pints of beer.

  Cassie wheeled Georgie inside with still the most predominant thought in her head that Charlie knew the truth about Georgie.

  Of course she realised that a number of the villagers had known who Georgie’s real father was, but like other things in Beck le Street, there was an unwritten code of silence. Certain things were best kept amongst themselves … like what had happened to the youths who had stolen from Jenny Pearson’s shop. Had it not been for Charlie that would never have been spoken about. But the fact someone had mentioned Georgie’s paternity to some journalist or other - worried her. They may have gossiped amongst themselves, but to actually talk to an outsider, that was most disconcerting. Cassie had always felt safe here, which is why she stayed. Beck le Street had it’s own rules; the two main ones being they were a law unto themselves and … your secrets were safe. Now Lucas and Amos had broken one of those rules.