No Name Lane (Howard Linskey)

by Howard Linskey

  ‘Has he called you?’

  ‘No,’ he said and she waited for him to cotton on. ‘He’s not going to call, is he?’ and when she didn’t even bother to answer, he added, ‘Jennifer, it’s been a pleasure speaking to you, as always,’ then he hung up before she could respond.

  When Tom got off the line, his first instinct was to slam the receiver into the phone repeatedly until it shattered into dozens of tiny, plastic pieces. It took him a minute or two to calm down and come up with a plan B and even longer to wonder if he had the balls to actually implement it. If the Doc ever found out what he was about to do he’d fire Tom on the spot, maybe even take legal action against him. Tom would be blacklisted forever in the tabloid world but it looked as if that might be about to happen to him in any case and, if his contract expired without renewal, in a few weeks he’d be broke. He desperately needed money and he had to get the story he was sitting on out there before someone else did.

  Tom fished inside his jacket pocket for his contact book, leafed through it until he found the number he was looking for, then dialled.

  ‘Daily Mirror,’ said an unfamiliar voice.

  ‘Put me through to the news desk …’

  There was a begrudging acceptance at the Messenger that Helen had done a good job. She had returned with quotes from the headmaster of Great Middleton School and woven them into an insightful news story about the mysterious body-in-the-field, which had shocked a village already reeling from the disappearance of one of its children. It would probably knock everything else off the next morning’s front page. She was however left with the impression that she was no better thought of for any of this and that took much of the gloss from what should have been a big moment for her.

  The passive hostility of the newspaper’s older, male colleagues stopped her from telling them everything she knew about the body-in-the-field. If she wrote that the body was Sean Donnellan, Malcolm would have spiked it before a word had been written. He wasn’t the type to idly speculate on the identity of a corpse before the police had come out with an official statement, so for now she decided to keep this information to herself.

  When her working day was over, Helen quietly left the office and went straight to the Durham University library. Writing up her first front-page lead had forced her to postpone her time with Tom Carney and she was keen to make amends. She had some digging to do on the Sean Donnellan case.

  ‘The thing about the quiz …’ Andrew Foster was talking too loudly for a quiet residential street after kicking-out time, ‘… is that it makes you both a winner and a loser,’

  ‘How do you mean?’ asked Tom who was enjoying the combination of fresh air and a beer buzz.

  ‘We won ’cos we knew all the history questions and the trivia; the films, the books, the songs and the sport, which makes us basically …’ and he looked at Tom as if he were prompting one of his slower pupils to come up with the answer.

  ‘Losers?’ asked Tom and Andrew nodded emphatically. ‘Aw, don’t be like that. We just pissed off all the old buggers who’ve been winning the quiz week-in, week-out for donkey’s years. We are the champions!’ Tom roared those last words.

  ‘Stop it, man,’ Andrew was laughing, ‘before people draw back their curtains and realise I teach their horrible kids.’

  ‘What did you say?’ shouted Tom.

  ‘I said I teach their horrible kids!’ and he cracked up laughing. Andrew sneaked a look around him at the lifeless streets and silent houses then he made a shushing noise and said, ‘let’s have a nightcap.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘My house. It’s on your way. Come on, you’ve nowt to get up for have you?’

  ‘That’s very true!’ said Tom emphatically. ‘Go on then. I’ll have a small, sweet sherry.’

  ‘You’ll have vodka and like it.’

  Helen had spent her evening at the library staring at ancient pages of the Messenger, dating back to 1936. It was pretty desperate stuff and she knew it, but she was hoping for anything that might relate to the disappearance of a young man in Great Middleton that summer.

  Hours later, when her eyes had grown tired from the effort involved in endlessly staring at the blurred pages on the microfiche machine, she was about to give up. Helen had seen no reference to an Irish artist. Nor was there any reported quarrel, grievance, fight or assault in Great Middleton that might have led to a murder and she was beginning to feel foolish for even thinking there might have been, when something caught her eye.

  Helen read the piece carefully and straightaway she knew it must have involved Sean in some way, even though he was not mentioned in the story by name. The date was around the time he was meant to have disappeared, so she took out her notebook and copied the small news item word for word.

  Helen had left the library eager to share her discovery with Tom and was disappointed when she couldn’t reach him at the Greyhound or on his reliably unreliable mobile phone, so instead she returned to her tiny home: a gloomy, one-bedroom, ground-floor flat in a crumbling part of town, whose rent she could only barely afford. She microwaved a rubbery lasagne then washed the taste away with two glasses of cheap white wine before finally heading for her bed.

  ‘I love this movie,’ Tom told him as they watched The Godfather, which was one of the videos from the school teacher’s extensive collection. You could tell Andrew was single the moment he turned the key in his door. There wasn’t a sign of a woman’s touch anywhere. Instead there were plain wooden shelves filled with videos, some bought, some taped from the television onto blank cassettes with handwritten movie titles scrawled on them. The décor was pure teenage-boy-with-money, even though Andrew was in his mid-twenties. On the wall were two World War Two-era bayonets and Tom did a double take before realising they were the real thing. They took pride of place above Andrew’s mantelpiece, just below the paintings of a Spitfire and an England rugby match. Andrew owned a turntable and a large collection of vinyl albums. There were car magazines on the rickety coffee table, along with a dog-eared, paperback copy of Frederick Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal. An old bus ticket served as a bookmark. Andrew was a great guy but all any woman would see if she visited his home was a big kid locked in an adult male’s body.

  They were drunk enough to be sitting on the floor, with their backs against the couch and armchair respectively while they watched the film.

  ‘Thanks Andrew,’ said Tom, ‘for taking my mind off stuff.’

  ‘What stuff?’ enquired the teacher.

  ‘Oh, you know, problems.’

  ‘You don’t sound like a man who has too many problems, Tom.’

  ‘Don’t bet on it.’

  ‘What have you got to worry about?’

  ‘Not much,’ and before he really knew what he was doing, Tom found himself telling Andrew all about his banishment from the paper and Timothy Grady’s potentially ruinous lawsuit. He also explained that his master plan was to unearth a story big enough to convince his editor to keep him on but now the Doc wasn’t even returning his calls.

  ‘So you need a big story?’ asked the teacher.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you got one?’

  ‘No,’ before adding, ‘well, not yet.’

  When he was done, the school teacher thought for a moment then said, ‘well, it doesn’t sound all that bad,’

  ‘Really?’ Tom was incredulous.

  ‘No,’ answered Andrew, ‘actually it sounds awful. I’d say you’re pretty much fucked.’

  And for some reason that he couldn’t quite explain, Tom started to laugh. The brutal honesty of Andrew’s deadpan appraisal and the seriousness of his predicament hit him all at once and he laughed some more, Andrew started laughing too and pretty soon they were both in hysterics.

  ‘Thanks for that, mate,’

  ‘No problem,’ spluttered Andrew, wiping his eyes, ‘any time.’

  ‘You should work for the Samaritans,’ Tom told him and that set them both off again.

  CH
APTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Day Six

  Detective Superintendent Trelawe reached his office at his customary early hour. He liked to get a head start on the paperwork before everybody else arrived. Trelawe went to place his briefcase on his desk then stopped as he realised there was something there already. A copy of a newspaper had been placed neatly on the desk so its occupier would see the front page as soon as he sat down. Trelawe paused then glanced suspiciously around his empty office, as if he expected the culprit to still be hiding somewhere. When he was satisfied this was not the case he took his seat then picked up the paper.

  There, on the front page of the Daily Mirror was an exclusive story about the latest development in the hunt for the missing schoolgirl Michelle Summers, accompanied by the helpful headline, ‘Psycho Hunter’ and the strapline; ‘Desperate Police Hire FBI Super-Shrink to Hunt Reaper.’

  Trelawe read the article quickly, hoping for a positive angle, for it had been his personal decision to enlist the help of a proven forensic psychologist to help track this serial child abductor. He was to be disappointed.

  The Mirror journalist Tom had called was an old acquaintance from the North East who, like him, had moved to the capital. He’d given Tom his number so they could meet for a pint some time. Paul Hill had listened with interest to Tom’s story about Durham Constabulary’s hiring of the professor and promised to call him back. One of the Mirror’s contacts, a detective in the force, corroborated Tom’s claim and, twenty minutes later, Hill rang him at the Greyhound to buy the story, on the proviso that Tom’s name would not appear on it, since he was still contracted to the rival newspaper that had suspended him. After waiting in vain for hours for the Doc to show an interest, the process had been remarkably straightforward. Hill even stated that it might make the front page, as it had been a slow news day.

  Unfortunately for Trelawe, Paul Hill’s editor decided the story was nowhere near spicy enough and he rewrote the whole thing till it became a scathing critique of a hapless police force that was so desperate it was shelling out taxpayers’ money on an FBI shrink, using pseudo-scientific techniques as yet entirely unproven in the UK. The Mirror even paid a retired former Metropolitan Police detective of some standing to dismiss the new-fangled methods as ‘completely bonkers’. The final nail in the coffin was the picture of Anthony Hopkins playing Hannibal Lecter that had been helpfully inserted next to the article, which made it look as if Trelawe, who was named in the story, had been influenced more by Hollywood than science in his choice of expert.

  ‘Oh dear God,’ muttered Trelawe, for he knew his day was about to go downhill rapidly.

  Ian Bradshaw took a break from his latest door-to-door to buy some cigarettes. As he waited for his change, his eyes went to the rack of newspapers and, more specifically, the Mirror’s front page lead. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he exclaimed when he saw what they had done.

  ‘You all right?’ asked the newsagent as he handed over the cigarettes.

  Bradshaw snatched a copy of the newspaper and dropped some change onto the counter to pay for it before hastily leaving the shop without another word. A moment later he was sitting in his car, re-reading the article for a second time to see if it got any better.

  It didn’t.

  How the hell had the newspaper taken an innocuous piece of information like the recruitment of an FBI expert and twisted it into such a negative piece? Bradshaw knew that if this was traced back to him, he would be finished. He was going to kill Tom Carney.

  ‘Please tell Helen Norton that Tom called,’ he told the receptionist at the Durham Messenger with his hand between his mouth and the receiver to disguise his voice, ‘Miss Darlington’s brother. I’m at the Rosewood café this morning if she wants to stop by. Tell her I’m over the moon.’

  The bemused receptionist took the message. Tom hung up his mobile phone and walked into the café with the papers under his arm. He ordered coffee and a double bacon sarnie then sat down, swallowed two ibuprofen for his hangover and turned his attention to that morning’s headlines. He surveyed the front page of the Daily Mirror with grim satisfaction. He had just written his second front-page, lead story for a national tabloid but was happy that his name was nowhere to be seen on this one. Then he read the piece through and quickly realised it had changed a great deal since Paul Hill jotted it down. His thoughts immediately went to Detective Constable Bradshaw.

  Ian Bradshaw was staring straight ahead, trying to make his face into a blank canvas as he listened to an increasingly irate DCI Kane.

  ‘By now most of you will have seen the front page of a certain national newspaper,’ Kane told the detectives at the morning briefing, this time without Trelawe, who was busy fielding press enquiries. ‘Once again this force has been subject to ridicule. What pains me most is that the story must have come from somebody inside this room,’ he paused to let that sink in before adding, ‘and we will find the culprit, believe me.’ He scrutinised them all carefully and Bradshaw found himself frowning at this act of treachery to try and avoid outward signs of a guilty conscience.

  ‘If it was you,’ Kane told them all, ‘you’d better come and see me afterwards with a damned good explanation; do that and you might avoid crucifixion. If you don’t, you’ll be sorely wishing you had when we find you.’

  Kane seemed to take their deep and heavy silence as comprehension and when the briefing was over, he took O’Brien and Skelton to one side. ‘I reckon this is a job that’s suited to your skills,’ he told them, ‘pull up some stones until you get me a name. The super’s in the mood for a human sacrifice so you’d better find me one quick. Otherwise it’s the Siberian gulag for me,’ and he gave them a meaningful look, ‘and you two won’t be able to take a piss round here without getting Trelawe’s permission in advance.’

  ‘Leave it to us,’ O’Brien assured him, ‘we’ll ask around, see who’s been cosying up to journalists. You’ll have that name in twenty-four hours.’

  ‘I’m really sorry about yesterday,’ Helen told Tom as she joined him at the cafe, ‘I just couldn’t get away.’

  ‘I read your front-page lead,’ he told her then he repeated the headline, ‘Headmaster’s Shock at Playing Fields Murder, by Helen Norton,’ and he smiled at her.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, without enthusiasm, ‘that’s why I couldn’t meet you. I had to write it up.’

  ‘You got Nelson to talk. Well done you.’

  ‘Malcolm sent me down there expecting me to fail,’ she admitted.

  ‘But you didn’t?’ he reminded her and she nodded. ‘And of course they were gracious and full of congratulations,’ Tom added drily.

  She didn’t want to admit it: ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ he said, ‘Martin sulked, Brendan didn’t believe you and good old Malcolm accused you of flashing your tits at him?’

  It wasn’t far from the truth. ‘What Malcolm actually accused me of was using my feminine wiles on the headmaster, but you’re close enough,’

  ‘Malcolm must like you or perhaps he still hopes you’ll go to bed with him because he is normally much cruder than that.’

  Tom was right about that too. Helen had often overheard snippets of the conversation coming from the editor’s office when his door was ajar. ‘Tits’ were a recurring theme, as was ‘shagging’ and ‘cock teasers’. For variety, the senior editorial team liked to tell jokes about ‘arse-bandits’ as well. When Helen had been in the middle of her post-grad in journalism, this was not how she had envisaged her first newsroom.

  ‘I don’t think any of them actually like me,’ she said.

  ‘They are the ones with the problem. They don’t like it when they’re not the biggest heroes in the room, that’s all.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I got my first front-page lead and we have a week till the next edition, which means I have time to work on more important things,’ she said significantly, ‘like this,’ and she took out her notepad and handed it to Tom.

  �
�Thieves plunder vicarage,’ he read aloud then he looked up at her.

  ‘From the university library,’ she said, ‘they’ve got all the old Messengers on microfiche. This story is from 1936.’

  He gave her a look that told her he was impressed then went back to reading. ‘Desperate thieves forced their way into the vicarage at Great Middleton in the night, to steal a quantity of gold sovereign coins belonging to the Reverend Albert Riley. The criminal act took place Thursday 10th September while the reverend was absent. The money has not yet been recovered nor anyone detained by police.’ Tom stopped reading and looked back up at Helen.

  ‘It’s too much of a coincidence, isn’t it?’ she asked.

  ‘Gold sovereigns being stolen from Mary Collier’s dad around the same time Sean Donnellan was murdered? I’d say so.’

  ‘But what does it actually mean?’ she seemed to be thinking aloud, ‘are we thinking Sean stole them?’

  ‘That’s my assumption,’ said Tom, ‘he didn’t have enough money to pay his rent, he was close to Mary.’ ‘Suppose she told him about the money or he found out somehow, then he helped himself?’ He was speaking slowly, piecing it together in his mind. ‘Somebody found out and …’

  ‘They killed him?’ she asked, ‘Murdered by the vicar?’ she offered flippantly.

  ‘I know,’ he said, ‘and it’s usually the butler.’

  ‘I’m not sure this gets us much closer to the truth,’ she said.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Tom told her. ‘You might just have found us our motive.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  ‘The DCI’s not happy with you,’ announced O’Brien as he brought his lunch tray down hard on the table in front of Bradshaw’s. Skelton joined O’Brien and they sat opposite Bradshaw, who looked about him. The canteen was almost empty so they had plenty of other seats to choose from. Vincent was still at the counter and didn’t seem to have noticed the intrusion. More likely he was ignoring Bradshaw after his harsh comment in the corridor following their bollocking. Vincent kept his back to them as he waited for a fresh supply of treacle tart to be brought out from the kitchen.