The four men stood silently looking at one another for a moment, then Vincent spoke.
‘I’ll put the kettle on, should I?’ Christ he couldn’t even make that decision without checking with everybody first, ‘I mean, he said there was no hurry and it’s a bit early for a door-to-door.’
Nobody bothered to give Vincent the courtesy of an answer, nor did they contradict him. He shuffled away to make a brew. Wilson and Davies sat back down. Davies even picked up a newspaper and started to read the sports pages.
‘I think I’ll get going,’ said Bradshaw to universal disinterest, ‘make a start,’ and he left before any of them could summon up the energy to tell him he was wasting his time.
Helen called into the police station for her meeting with Inspector Reid. Each day one of the Messenger’s journalists went through the same routine; Reid would detail every crime reported in the previous twenty-four hours and they would write down the numerous acts of vandalism, burglary and TWOC, hoping for a story.
Inspector Reid was close enough to retirement to not mind spending fifteen minutes every day in the company of a young, female reporter but even he seemed to lack enthusiasm that morning. Perhaps he felt excluded while his plain-clothed counterparts searched for missing girls or dug up ancient corpses while he manned a desk at HQ. His voice was a monotone, ‘Burglary in Newton Hall, not much taken; set of golf clubs and a bike.’
‘Did they break into the house?’ asked Helen hopefully, thinking that sleeping residents terrified in the night by burglars might make half a story.
‘Garden shed,’ he answered, shattering that idea, then he glanced down at his list again, ‘Got a car taken without consent from Coronation Avenue? Joyriders probably,’ he looked up at her, ‘no?’
‘Not exactly the great train robbery.’
The Inspector smiled at her, ‘I’d have thought there’d been enough excitement on your patch lately.’
‘There has,’ she conceded, ‘but we’ve still got our district pages to fill. Is there nothing else,’ she was almost pleading now, ‘that doesn’t involve stolen cars, golf clubs or broken pub windows?’
‘Nothing out of the ordinary,’ he said, ‘well … one incident … but it was nothing really.’ Her face told him she was interested. ‘Our lads escorted an old lady home,’ then he stopped himself, ‘I’m not sure I should be telling you this. No crime was committed.’
Helen smiled. ‘Between us then.’
‘I doubt you’ll be able to do anything with it. An old dear in Great Middleton walked half the length of the village in the pouring rain in her slippers and dressing gown. Our lads got her back home before she caught pneumonia. It’s not really news, but you did ask me if there was anything out of the ordinary and that doesn’t happen every night.’
‘I did,’ she admitted, ‘and you’re right, I probably couldn’t use it; wouldn’t be fair on the old lady, if she’s senile.’
‘I wouldn’t say Betty Turner was senile exactly.’
‘You know her?’
‘I know the family,’ he said, ‘she’s a nice old dear but she’s got three sons and no control over them. We’ve been to the house countless times, nothing serious but you know,’ and he shrugged to indicate that Betty Turner’s offspring were basically low-lifes.
‘And she’s not senile?’ asked Helen. ‘So what was she doing out in the pouring rain in her nightie?’
‘That was the weird part,’ said the Inspector, ‘she wouldn’t tell us but when our lads caught up with her she was standing outside the old vicarage, banging on the door and shouting.’
‘Really?’ asked Helen, ‘what was she shouting?’
‘ “It was you”,’ he said.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Bradshaw drove down to ‘the cottages’, a series of council-owned old-folk’s bungalows filled with ex miners. The ones who survived thirty-odd years of cave-ins and coal dust could spend a humble retirement here, in a simple one-bedroomed property with a small, rectangular, allotment-style garden at the rear. Bradshaw was not from Great Middleton but knew from his years as a County Durham police officer that he was more likely to engage with the pensioners who lived here if he went round the back of their properties, avoiding the formality of a knock on their front door. Sure enough, at the first house in the street, an old man was sitting out the back on a tiny porch overlooking neat rows of vegetables, while he read the racing pages of his newspaper. He could have been in his early seventies. Old enough, thought Bradshaw.
He hoped for a head start over the rest of the dead-wood squad. If he was extraordinarily lucky, perhaps someone would even tell him who the dead man was. Bradshaw had not known optimism for a while but he experienced the merest flicker of it as the man with the paper looked up while he bent to open the tiny gate and enter the garden, calling a cheerful ‘hello,’ as he did so.
‘What do you want?’ asked the old man suspiciously.
‘Sorry to bother you, Sir. I’m a police officer. You probably heard we found a body in a field next to the school and it’s very old. We’re trying to find out who it might be.’
The man put down his newspaper and rose to his feet. Maybe Bradshaw would get that cup of tea after all. ‘You’re a police officer?’ he asked calmly.
‘That’s right,’ confirmed Bradshaw.
‘Well you can fuck right off then.’ And without another word he turned his back on a stunned DC Bradshaw, closed the door of his home firmly behind him then turned the key in the lock. Bradshaw had not known exactly what to expect from his door-to-door, but he wasn’t expecting that.
A little wooden sign had been added to the gate of Roddy Moncur’s home since Tom last paid the man a visit. It had the word ‘Dunroamin’ painted on it. Tom watched from his parked car with interest as Helen Norton emerged from Roddy’s house. He’d been about to climb out when Helen walked through that gate, stuffing her notebook into a leather bag that was slung over her shoulder. Roddy didn’t seem to be in too much of a hurry to close the door behind her. Instead he followed the girl with his eyes, only finally closing his door when she was in her car. Tom waited until she had driven away.
Judging by the smile that was fixed on Roddy’s face, he must have assumed Helen had forgotten something. It vanished when he saw Tom on his doorstep.
‘Police been round yet?’ asked Tom, with no preamble.
Roddy Moncur blinked at Tom. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you’re back,’ then he added, ‘no but I don’t think they are aware of …’ he thought for a moment before settling on the right words, ‘… my little hobby.’
Roddy Moncur was in his mid-fifties, with greying hair and a beard. He was wearing the type of chunky sweater favoured by fishermen and real ale aficionados. He quizzed Tom about his reappearance and received the same story as Mike Newton from the Messenger.
‘Can I come in then?’ Tom asked, ‘or do you only admit blondes in tight jeans these days?’
‘You saw her,’ Roddy looked a little sheepish, ‘well, she’s got your old patch.’
‘What did she want?’
‘Same as you, I should imagine,’ Roddy held the door wider, ‘howay in then.’
Tom walked into one of Great Middleton’s larger houses. When the old junior school finally closed its doors in the seventies, replaced by a new building built on former farmland, the shell of the old Victorian school remained. For a while nobody knew what to do with the place; a dark and imposing, dirty brick building with small windows that blotted out the light, as if it was specifically designed that way so that generations of schoolchildren, trapped in dingy classrooms with creaking floorboards, could not be distracted by the outside world. Finally a developer stepped in, turning the old school into not one but three houses. Floorboards were sanded and varnished, windows ripped out and replaced by large double-glazed ones, the ancient boiler was carted off on a lorry for scrap, with modern central heating installed in its place.
One of the buyers was Roddy Moncur, a man whose
work sometimes took him to foreign climes for months at a time, his engineering skills being constantly in demand in exotic, far-off locations like Oman and Dubai, where his salary was said to be large and his tax bill negligible, due to some little-understood bending of the rules on ex-pat allowances. Soon after Roddy turned fifty however, his globe-trotting ended when he returned to Great Middleton, ostensibly to bury his mother. A week after the funeral, he made an offer on the remaining house.
‘There’s not many round here get to retire at fifty,’ Tom had told him then.
‘I’ve enough to see me out,’ Roddy said, ‘you don’t need a lot round here and you can’t take it with you. I’m not one of those blokes who’s willing to break his back till he’s sixty-five then drops down dead a year after he retires. Not my idea of a life, that. Anyway, I keep myself busy.’
Roddy’s way of keeping himself busy was the reason he was an important name in Tom Carney’s contact book. If Tom wanted to know what was going on in Great Middleton, he could ask any number of people; including councillors, policemen, pub landlords and their regulars. If he wanted to know what happened in the village at just about any point in the past century however, he’d go and see Roddy Moncur.
Evidence of Roddy’s little hobby was all around them. The man’s house contained piles of old newspapers and magazines and there were programmes from long-forgotten amateur dramatic theatre productions. Every surface of every wall housed framed black-and-white photographs of the village and the county it lay in, while some were stacked in piles awaiting a more permanent home. There were old books everywhere, even piled on the stairs because he had nowhere else to put them. Roddy was a collector and amateur historian. He also viewed himself as a custodian of village life, keeping alive memories of the place he was born and raised in. Tom thought of Roddy as a hoarder, a man with a bizarre obsession about the past that left his house a disorganised mess, but he was an invaluable source of local trivia.
Tom followed Roddy down the hallway towards his kitchen, which was as cluttered as the rest of the house. The sink contained the previous evening’s dirty dishes; further evidence that Roddy Moncur lived alone and didn’t give a monkey’s what anybody thought of his way of life. They sat at the kitchen table.
‘I’m surprised you’ve not volunteered your services.’ Tom said.
‘To the police? I would have,’ he assured Tom, ‘if I thought I’d be any use, but I don’t see how I can be.’
‘Come on Roddy, you must know something,’ and Roddy gave him a blank look, ‘or know someone who knows something?’
‘I’m as much in the dark on this as anybody.’
‘I thought if anyone farted in this village in the past hundred years you knew about it.’
‘I thought that too,’ and Tom could see it pained Roddy to admit his ignorance where the body-in-the-field was concerned.
‘All those school fêtes, beauty pageants and am-dram productions, W. I. meetings and parish council minutes, you’ve got them all at your fingertips, but look at you now,’ and Tom shook his head.
‘Don’t knock it. I’ve been filling your local history pages for years,’ it was true that when Tom had been given the poisoned chalice of the local history column, a double-page spread in the Messenger that needed nostalgia pieces each and every week, it was widely seen as a punishment for one of his misdemeanours but Roddy had continually bailed him out. Week after week, he provided Tom with photographs and background information on all kinds of long-forgotten events that could grace the pages of the Messenger’s ‘Days Gone By’ column. With Roddy’s help, Tom managed to boost the popularity of the almost forgotten column to the point where the Messenger actually started to get letters from readers about it. This was a double-edged sword, as Malcolm made sure he kept the column thereafter. Tom also became something of a pin-up for ladies of a certain age, receiving Christmas cards and even chocolates from the ‘blue rinse brigade,’ as the elderly readers were known. He took a bit of stick for that from the girls: ‘One of your lady friends left you a chocolate orange in reception. You’re such a stud, Tom.’ The lads were even more direct, accusing Tom of being a ‘Granny-shagger’.
‘You know I’m grateful but there’s an old murder on your own doorstep and that just doesn’t happen round here. Are you seriously saying you’ve never heard anything about it?’
‘No I haven’t. You grew up here too, Tom,’ Roddy reminded him tetchily, ‘you never heard about it, the police didn’t and nor did the Durham bloody Messenger.’
‘Have to hold our hand up to missing that one; must have been a busy news week. Perhaps Germany invaded Poland.’
‘Well you wouldn’t have run that story, would you?’ replied Roddy drily. ‘Hitler wasn’t a local lad.’
‘True,’ and he grinned at Roddy, enjoying the banter. ‘What’s your gut feel then?’
‘About what?’
‘Those bones in that field were walking around once. He was a living, breathing person. So who was he?’
‘That’s the weird thing,’ admitted Roddy, ‘the village hasn’t got that many people in it. Aside from two world wars and a couple of pit disasters, most people round here die of natural causes, some of them long before their time but not usually in suspicious circumstances. A murder would have stood out a mile and if somebody went missing without an explanation the police would have been all over it, the newspapers too.’
‘So it was a murder nobody knew about. You’re the expert; why would someone’s sudden departure from the village not throw up any questions?’
‘A man could enlist in the forces, join the merchant navy or go and work in ship-building on the Tyne. Swan Hunters took a lot of men and blokes followed the work when it was scarce, which was most of the time, unless you wanted to go down the mine and not everybody fancied that.’
‘Isn’t that a bit close to home? Wouldn’t it look odd if someone never came back, not even for a visit?’
‘People didn’t travel much, pre-war. They tended to stay put, as long as there was work, but you’re right, you’d expect them to come back and see family.’
‘What about someone just passing through?’ offered Tom.
‘Perhaps,’ admitted Roddy, ‘but who?’
Tom realised he had no idea who, ‘it would be unusual to make enemies that quickly,’ he admitted, ‘look, do us a favour and ask around, will you? It would be a massive help to me if I could get a lead on this one. Somebody in this village must know something.’
‘Will do, mate.’
Tom scrawled the number of his mobile phone onto a piece of paper from his notebook then gave it to Roddy, who put it into his pocket and followed Tom to his front door. Halfway down the path, Tom turned back to him.
‘By the way,’ he asked, ‘did she want the same thing as me?’
Roddy just smiled inscrutably at Tom, then slowly shut the door.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Helen hadn’t received much of a briefing when she started at the Messenger but she did learn that Tom Carney used two main sources for local information in Great Middleton. One of them was Roddy, the local amateur historian. The other was just letting herself back into her home when Helen approached her.
‘Miss Norton,’ said Mary Collier, retaining that air of formality she’d picked up from years in the staffroom, ‘looking for material for the local history page?’ Helen had already visited Mary’s home on a number of occasions to piece together articles for her district page or the ‘Days-Gone-By’ column she’d inherited from Tom Carney. ‘Well, don’t let the draught in,’ added the old lady as she ushered Helen through her front door.
She stood in Mary’s living room, perusing her bookcase while she waited for her host to organise some tea. There were rows of classic novels in matching leather-bound editions, as well as a complete set of Encyclopaedia Britannica and Gibbons’ The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. One volume in particular caught Helen’s eye and she retrieved it from the boo
kcase for a closer look.
When old Mary Collier walked back into the room she seemed a little affronted to find Helen holding one of her books.
‘Wuthering Heights,’ Helen smiled, ‘I read it at school.’
‘What did you think?’ Mary’s tone was neutral, giving no clue as to her own view on the book’s literary worth.
‘I really liked it.’
Mary snorted, ‘I thought it was absurd.’
‘Really? It was quite romantic as I remember.’
‘All of that fire and ice, that passion,’ Mary said sharply, ‘sentimental rubbish.’ Helen was a little taken aback by the strength of Mary Collier’s feelings on the subject of Wuthering Heights in particular and romance in general. ‘You have to work on love – and it takes work. That’s what the young ones never realise,’ Helen couldn’t help wondering if the ‘young ones’ Mary mentioned might include her and she braced herself for a lecture. ‘You ask anybody how they stayed with their husband or wife for years and they’ll all tell you the same thing: “give and take”. It can’t just be take,’ and she snorted, ‘Cathy and Heathcliff; all that anger, all that passion and how long did they last? Five ruddy minutes. He was a monster and she was a spoilt brat. If everybody studies those two for their O levels, or whatever they’re called these days, they’ll come out of school at the end of it looking for something that’s just not there.’
No Name Lane (Howard Linskey) Page 9