No Name Lane (Howard Linskey)

by Howard Linskey

  ‘Scaring a helpless old man like that, you’re bloody vermin,’ and he raised his voice as Tom went through the front door of the station, ‘and if you didn’t have friends in high places, you’d still be in here!’

  ‘Friends in high places?’ asked Helen as they walked to the car.

  ‘I used my phone call to get through to Ian Bradshaw,’ explained Tom, ‘asked him if he couldn’t get someone to have a word with his Geordie counterparts, see if he could clear this mess up.’

  ‘And he did?’

  ‘Seemingly.’

  ‘And it was a mess,’ she told him, ‘I’ve never even been arrested before, much less spent time in a cell.’

  ‘Worth it though,’ he said, ‘to finally get to the truth.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied, ‘was it?’

  ‘’Course it was,’ he assured her. ‘You’re out now, aren’t you?’

  ‘I meant Stephen.’

  ‘Oh, him.’

  ‘Yes him; you scared an old man witless,’ and when he said nothing, she added, ‘you don’t seem to care.’

  ‘I didn’t scare an old man witless,’ Tom explained, ‘I interrogated someone who got away with murder years ago, or at least helped his brother to get away with it. All his life, Stephen escaped punishment for what he and his brothers did, never having to account for any of it. None of them did. Henry Collier should have gone to the gallows for that. Instead he got on with his life as if nothing happened.’

  ‘You can’t know that.’

  ‘He killed his rival then married the girl,’ said Tom, ‘got the wife he wanted, carried on teaching, even became headmaster and all the while Sean Donnellan’s body was rotting in that field on the edge of the village. Christ, Helen, does none of that make you the least bit angry?’

  ‘Yes it does. I already told you it did but his simple-minded brother wasn’t to blame.’

  ‘He helped to bury the poor bastard, didn’t he? Then he kept quiet about it all these years.’

  ‘What choice did he have? He was living with his brothers. He was entirely dependent on Henry,’ then she added, ‘until they carted him off to an institution.’

  ‘It was too late to dob his brother in it by then and nobody would have believed him.’ Tom sighed. ‘The other brothers are almost as guilty as Henry. Even at today’s rates they’d all be doing serious jail time. You know they would. Instead they got away scot-free.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘You know I’m right, Helen,’ he told her firmly, ‘deep down you know I did the right thing. If I hadn’t scared that old man we’d still be charging round trying to discover the truth.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she conceded, ‘but I can’t help liking you a little less because of it.’

  ‘Ha,’ he snorted, ‘and that makes a difference to us exactly how?’

  ‘How long are you going to keep on hating me?’

  ‘I don’t hate you,’ he replied, ‘the exact opposite in fact.’

  ‘Just get in the car,’ she told him.

  They drove in silence all the way back to Great Middleton. They both knew where they were going without mentioning it. Tom parked outside the old vicarage. Helen rang the bell and when Mary answered she said, ‘Can we come in?’

  The sound of Stephen Collier’s voice filled the room, followed by Tom’s. ‘He said it was the only way to make Mary believe Sean had left without her. He was right. It’s what everybody believed.’

  ‘What happened to the money?’

  ‘Jack threw it at Henry.’

  ‘Jack didn’t keep it?’ asked Tom.

  ‘No,’ the old man said, ‘Jack didn’t want any of it.’

  Tom reached for the tape player and turned it off before the sound of banging and the shouted commands of the police officer. The old woman regarded it silently. Even though it had been in Tom’s jacket pocket, every muffled word was still discernible.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Helen.

  Mary took a moment to answer and when she finally did she said, ‘Lord no,’ then added, ‘how could I be?’

  ‘Would you like a glass of water?’ asked Helen and Mary nodded weakly. Helen walked into the kitchen, filled a glass and returned, handing it to Mary. Tom watched as she gulped the water then Helen took the glass from her shaking hand.

  ‘Did you know?’ asked Tom simply.

  Mary shook her head, ‘No, not all of it but …’

  ‘You had your suspicions?’

  ‘Not at first,’ and she started to cry then. ‘For a long time I thought I’d been love’s biggest fool. Imagine the guilt I have borne all these years. I spent most of my life imagining that the man I loved had conned me, stolen my father’s life savings then abandoned me. Now I finally know the truth and still the guilt won’t leave me.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Helen, ‘why would you feel guilty now?’

  ‘A man was killed because of me, a good man committed murder because of me.’

  ‘Was he a good man?’ asked Tom but she didn’t answer.

  ‘I was a disappointment to my husband,’ Mary said, ‘I’ve known that for a long time. He wanted me too much, you see. No one could possibly live up to that. I know I couldn’t. I knew it on our wedding day when I walked up the aisle and he beamed at me like he couldn’t quite believe I was entirely real. In the end I was a disappointment to him and to my father.’ She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, ‘Father never really looked at me again,’ she said as if this was entirely to be expected, ‘and I never saw him smile. Not once.’

  ‘There was only one man I didn’t disappoint and for fifty years I thought he never really wanted me. Can you imagine how that made me feel? Do you understand why I was so pathetically grateful when Henry forgave me, how astonished I was when he offered to take me back, to act like nothing had happened, even though I wasn’t pure? I thought what a good, noble, honourable man he is to take care of me like this. And he was of course, in many ways; just not then, not that time.

  ‘I think that was why he worked so hard with those children. To make amends. He knew he’d done a terrible thing and could never tell anybody about it, even me – especially me – and he knew I wasn’t worth it in the end. I couldn’t even give him children and he’d have loved to have been a father. He must have realised he should have let me leave with Sean and found someone else. I think the guilt and the shame knocked years off his life.’

  ‘When did you first suspect?’ asked Tom and Mary looked as if she was about to deny suspecting anything but either she was too tired or she knew he would have seen through that.

  ‘I have something to show you but you’ll have to be patient,’ she said. ‘I’ll need your help to climb the stairs.’

  Tom held out a hand and she planted her cold, tiny hand in his. Her skin was paler than parchment paper and he could see the blue veins that ran beneath.

  Together they shuffled out of the living room to the stairs. Helen followed their tortuously slow progression and they eventually reached the landing where she unlocked the room and they went inside. Mary opened the drawer then she took out the leather-bound journal and an old mahogany box.

  ‘My husband died quite suddenly and I mourned him,’ she announced, ‘he was only fifty-five and never had the time to get his affairs in order. It took me nearly a year to sort everything out; his personal things, papers, everything. Then one night, more than twenty years ago now, I went up into the loft. I wanted to see what junk he had stored there. I found this.’

  She handed Tom the wooden box and he opened it. Helen and Tom stared at its contents: four gold coins.

  ‘The sovereigns,’ said Helen.

  ‘Some of them,’ said Mary, ‘not all. After my father died we bought this house. Henry said we could manage, even on a school teacher’s salary, and I accepted that. Back then, women didn’t question their husbands where money was concerned; housekeeping perhaps, but not on the big things. Love, honour and obey, that was the vow. I shou
ld imagine that in some warped way, by buying this house for us, my husband felt he was keeping the money in the family. He never spent any of it on anything else, as far as I am aware.’

  Tom closed the box and placed it back on the dresser.

  ‘Henry took them,’ she said simply. ‘It was him, whether Jack broke into that drawer or not. Henry stole the sovereigns from my father. Not because he was greedy or needed them. He took them so everybody would blame Sean. I didn’t want to believe it when I found them. I kept thinking of ways that he could have come by them innocently but he wasn’t there to ask and …’ she sighed to show that she had never been able to find a rational explanation for their presence in her attic, ‘… then I simply tried not to think about it because the alternatives were too awful.’

  ‘That Sean was dead and your husband responsible?’ he asked her.

  ‘I didn’t make that link, honestly I didn’t, even then. Instead I wondered if my father had somehow left some coins in the attic and forgotten about them but he hoarded his money like a miser. Then I wondered if he had perhaps given Henry some money without me knowing about it or perhaps not all of the coins had been stolen and these were left behind. On darker days I wondered if Henry had stolen all of the money himself but blamed it on Sean’s disappearance. I never once thought that he could have killed Sean,’ she told them, ‘but then I wasn’t in the least surprised when they found his body. Devastated yes, but not surprised.’

  ‘That’s because you knew all along,’ he said and she looked shocked.

  ‘But I just told you …’

  ‘Deep down, I mean. You couldn’t bring yourself to entertain the one possibility that turned out to be true but when Sean’s body was found it all fell into place.’

  She nodded slowly. ‘I think I always knew that Sean hadn’t just left me and when they found him in that field I suppose I felt vindicated in a way. Isn’t that awful? If I really loved Sean I should surely have preferred him to have run off with Father’s money for a new life in America.’

  ‘So Henry Collier was a thief and a murderer and he left your father penniless.’

  ‘He could hardly have given the money back to my father,’ said Mary, ‘those sovereigns were an alibi, weren’t they? They explained Sean’s sudden disappearance in a way that everyone accepted. Sean was the thief, he’d taken the sovereigns and run away. If people couldn’t find him, it was because he didn’t want to be found. Nobody realised that he never left the village.’

  ‘I spent my whole married life thinking I was the wicked one; that Henry rescued me from myself. It took me thirty years to realise my husband might be a thief and a liar and another twenty to discover he was a murderer, though I couldn’t be sure of that until you finally told me.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t be. I should know the truth after all these years. I didn’t go out for days when I found what was left of those coins. I just stayed in the house and cried and cried.’ She must have seen her reflection in the dressing-room mirror then, ‘They used to say I was a beauty, years ago.’

  ‘You were a beauty,’ said Tom, ‘we’ve seen the drawings, remember?’

  ‘But I’d have been better off plain. Don’t you think I’d have been happier? I do. Looks aren’t a blessing, they’re a curse, if they make a man steal for you, fight for you, do anything to keep you, even kill another man.’

  She handed him the leather-bound book then.

  ‘My journal. I used to keep one, back when I was a silly young girl. This volume goes right up to the time when I agreed to marry Henry. It’s all in there. The whole story; everything that happened and how I felt about it at the time. I’ve kept it all these years. It’s yours to do with as you please.’

  Tom took the slim volume from her hand then opened it. The ink on the yellowing pages had faded over the years but it was still faintly legible. Tom recalled the portrait of the young girl who had written them all those years ago. As he turned the pages of Mary’s journal and her story unfolded he noticed how her words became more unruly, spilling onto the pages, like frightened people stumbling from a burning building. He could see the haste here and the distress. This wasn’t a story, it was a scream.

  ‘I do have one condition,’ Mary said, snapping him out of his thoughts.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You wait till I’m in my grave.’

  ‘Before I write the story, you mean?’ he looked decidedly uncomfortable about that.

  ‘I have months. Three they think, six if I’m lucky, but no more than that.’

  ‘But you don’t want to be lucky, do you?’ Helen said.

  ‘My life is already over,’ she explained. ‘It ended on a filthy night more than fifty years ago. God has been punishing me every day since and I am more tired now than I ever imagined it was possible to be.’

  ‘You still believe in God?’ asked Helen.

  ‘Oh, I know there is a God and I know he is waiting but what more could he do to me? I spent my life with the man who murdered my Sean.’ She shook her head, as if trying to compose herself. ‘And children … we never had children … couldn’t have them … my fault, apparently. That’s why I know there is a God. He was punishing me for what I did. He chose to deny me children but kept me wedded to that man.’

  ‘But you didn’t do anything,’ protested Helen.

  ‘I betrayed Henry, I planned to run away with Sean, so Henry killed him. It was my fault, all of it.’

  ‘No!’ Helen shook her head. ‘You didn’t force Henry to do what he did.’

  ‘Please tell me you don’t think you’re going to hell,’ Tom said.

  ‘Hell? Do you know what hell is?’ she asked. ‘Hell is knowing your entire life has been a waste, founded on a lie. That’s hell, Tom.’

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  Tom needed a drink. He had just spoken with an old lady whose life had been ruined before she’d reached the age of nineteen, a woman who had spent the past fifty-seven years torturing herself every day because she thought God had chosen to personally punish her for her sins. So Tom definitely needed a drink. But when they came out of Mary Collier’s house they found Detective Constable Bradshaw waiting for them. He was leaning against his car and seemed calm enough. ‘You owe me,’ he told Tom matter-of-factly. ‘My colleagues at Northumbria police think I’ve been hanging out with the wrong sort.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ asked Tom.

  ‘You weren’t hard to find,’ said Bradshaw. ‘You’ve just caused a ruck at an old folk’s home housing Mary Collier’s brother-in-law. I figured you had a reason and this would be your next port of call. So spill,’ he demanded.

  Tom figured they really did owe Bradshaw and there was little point in trying to hold out on him, so Helen, Tom and the detective walked together and the two reporters took it in turns to fill in the gaps of Sean Donnellan’s story. They were halfway across the village by the time they had finished.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Bradshaw, as he sat down heavily on a bench by the common, ‘so the future headmaster of the village school murdered his love rival?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tom, as they joined him on the bench, ‘fifty-seven years ago. It took that long for the truth to come out.’

  ‘I’ve only just received confirmation that Sean Donnellan disappeared back then and was never seen by his family again. It looks like we can finally wrap this all up and put a pretty bow on it.’

  ‘You seem pretty relaxed about it,’ said Tom.

  Bradshaw shrugged. ‘Well, let’s see,’ he ruminated, ‘one of our own men, a guy I have been working with personally, turned out to be a multiple child killer and he killed himself in front of me. Compared to that, this is a walk in the park.’ And he let that sink in before adding, ‘And who are we going to arrest? The murderer is dead, so is his elder brother and Stephen, from what you tell me, isn’t fit to stand trial.’

  ‘No,’ admitted Tom reluctantly, ‘he probably isn’t
.’

  ‘Case closed then,’ Bradshaw said and when Tom failed to contradict him he added, ‘So, what does the future hold for you now? You off back to London?’

  ‘He’s been offered a job on a lads’ mag,’ Helen said before Tom could answer.

  ‘A job on a what?’ asked Bradshaw.

  ‘It’s a new magazine for men,’ Tom said. ‘They want me to interview a bunch of celebrities, actresses, models, singers, easy work.’

  ‘I guess it would be for most people,’ said Bradshaw.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Won’t you get a bit bored? I mean you’ve got a skill, anyone can see that. You’re more like a copper than a reporter.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ said Tom guardedly, ‘but only because it’s coming from you.’

  ‘Be a shame to waste it though.’

  ‘I haven’t said I’ll take the job,’ said Tom, deliberately not looking at Helen. ‘I might not. Maybe I’ll stay up here for a while. Do a bit of freelance.’

  ‘The North East is a big place and if you had a bit of inside knowledge,’ Bradshaw was regarding Tom intently, ‘then who knows what you might turn up?’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Cards on the table, eh?’ Bradshaw looked tired then. ‘We are about to take a pounding from all sides. One of our own men turned out to be the one we were looking for all that time and we had no bloody idea. The press will say there’s no trust left between us and the people we police any more. They will try to paint a picture of an incompetent force that couldn’t spot a certified nutter when he was sitting in their own canteen.’

  ‘Well,’ answered Tom, ‘it’s true, isn’t it?’

  ‘I thought you might have been a bit more understanding,’ Bradshaw told him, ‘since you’ve been drinking with a paedophile.’

  ‘Fair point,’ conceded Tom, ‘so you’re saying guys like that just can’t be spotted.’

  ‘I don’t quite know what I’m saying, except that there are still good people in this force and their morale is on the floor right now because one lone crazy man completely lost touch with reality. Maybe you could write something to that effect.’