Monk was sat at the table, looking at something.
“Get a load of this.” He said without looking up. He was spreading out a fan of Polaroids and yellowed newspaper clippings. His fingers traced out occasional headlines until they settled over one of the photographs and stopped. Something about it seemed familiar. It took Richie a moment to realise what it was. There were two people in the frame. The face of the one nearest the camera was obscured by the slanted bar of sunlight falling across it, but the other was plain enough. It was a woman. Her midnight blue eyes were blackened by bruises, and dulled by a mixture of Dopamine and shock. She was being led by the arm through the main doors of Pilgrim’s Hall.
She bore little resemblance to the woman with the swollen irisless eyes locked in the Land Rover.
“Recognise her?” Monk asked, sliding a yellowed clipping out from the fan.
“Yeah.” Richie nodded.
The three week old headline read: 'FELLWALKER MISSING'.
Beneath the headline was a blurred photograph of Jude Kenyon. The face, though fuzzy and distorted by printing and old paper, mirrored that of the woman being led through the doors of Pilgrim’s Hall.
The woman in the Land Rover.
“Jesus…” Richie offered quietly.
“Oh, I think it's bypassed Jesus and gone all the way to the Big Guy.” Monk said, standing. The legs of chair scraped across the wooden floor as he pushed it back. He gathered the photographs and clippings together, and stuffed them into the pocket of his coat.
“What the fuck are we going to do, Monk? Think we should show the photos to Richards?” Richie palmed a film of rainwater from his face. “What about… the head?”
He shook his head. “What's it they say? Ignorance is bliss. Shouldn't take long, just dig a shallow pit under the tree, and no one's any the wiser. After that, I say we get the boys and girls and go home, fix ourselves a stiff drink and hit the sack.”
- 9 -
At quarter to two on Thursday morning, Mike Shelton popped the tab on his sixth can of Exhibition and drank deeply. The beer was warm and pleasantly smooth going down, spreading a soothing heat through his stomach. An expression of grim determination was stamped on his careworn face. He was sat on the edge of his unmade bed, blankets rumpled up behind his back. The previous five cans stood stacked in a rickety pyramid on the caravan's narrow table, dribbles of muddy brown ale staining warm, wet circles on the teak surface beside the aluminium foil of an empty lasagne tray. Mark Knopfler's distinctive lead guitar sang through the tinny speakers of the portable stereo sat on the bench, its discordant voice jarringly loud in the cramped lounge-come-sleeping area.
He took another deep swig, and added the still half-full can to the growing pyramid, then settled back on the bed, kicking off his boots. His dove-grey eyes couldn't help but fasten on their twins reflected in the network of metallic strips running the length of the ceiling, before looking away, unable to hold the intensity of their own troubled gaze.
He fumbled for the crumpled packet of Embassy Regal's on the bedside shelf, peered inside and saw two little coffin nails, side by side. He stuck one of the cigarettes in his mouth then leaned over to light it with a taper from the gas stove. He inhaled once, deeply, savouring the gritty, aromatic taste before crushing the smoke out on the lid of an empty beer can.
He pulled a pillow under his neck and dragged the blankets over his body, and waited for sleep to come.
Six months had made him familiar with every pattern on every plate propped on the shelf running above the windows. Most had been broken at sometime in the past, runnels of dried glue sealing their rough-edged cracks.
Moonlight seeped through the chinks in the curtains, painting a staggered slash across the wardrobe.
In the fields outside, the rain was dying, the strength of the storm spent. Drizzle still spattered on the glass, but it was all but washed out.
He stretched and pulled the blankets up over his head to close out the rest of the world, and drifted into thoughts of Hannah and little Holly. . .
* * * * *
The plaintive cry of a car engine disappearing down the hill dragged him from a soupy state that wasn't really sleep but a kind of dream-haunted, alcohol induced, doze.
The pillow beneath his head was damp with sweat.
He didn't sleep much these days, but when he did, he dreamed of the girls. Waking up to his own hoarse cries no longer surprised him much. He supposed it would pass, someday, but wasn't prepared to bank on it.
The ragged tail of a dream bobbed in his mind, something about the garage and the fire, but even that was fading, and the rest was already gone. Not that he needed the subconscious reminder it threatened. It was enough to know that Hannah and Holly were in Swallowship Hill Cemetery without having it rammed down his throat whenever he closed his eyes.
He opened his eyes, but there was precious little to see. They felt gummy with sleep, and his mouth tasted like something that had been left in a cat’s litter-tray overnight. His whole body was horribly stiff, especially the areas across his shoulders and at the base of his neck, as if he had slept for a long time with his head propped up on an uncomfortable angle.
He lay motionless inside his own sweaty outline on the sheet, letting the shakes subside and his eyes adjust to the dim light, then pushed himself up. The ache was both hot and cold, rooted deep in his skull, as if someone was pushing blunt needles into the backs of his eyeballs.
He groaned, realising that he had fallen asleep still dressed in his oil smeared overalls, and swung his legs around, hitting the squat table and toppling the pyramid of cans with a clatter.
Pre-crack of dawn light was peeking through the thin curtains, throwing its own peculiar perspective over the room.
Mike felt his way carefully across to the stove, stepping over the clutter of cans on the floor, pulled back the small curtain above the sink unit, filled the kettle and put it on the burner.
He let out his breath in a long, tortured sigh that made a fog-flower on the window.
His hands slowly balled themselves into fists.
Things were bad and getting worse. He was drinking too much, smoking too much and not sleeping enough. Sure signs of depression in anyone's book. Understandable, the guilt loving Jiminy Cricket of his interior voice returned, but something had joined with its familiar tone of guilt. It sounded plaintive, almost lost. Mike found himself feeling pity for that voice, not self-pity, because the voice had never sounded so unlike his own as it did at that moment.
He opened the refrigerator door, lifted out a small Tupperware dish filled with nameless leftovers, and a carton of milk which he opened with his teeth as he nudged the door of the fridge closed with his hip. He took a drink of milk then opened the door on the morning.
Whether it was understandable or not wasn't the question. The question was, what was he going to do about it?
The answer was simple: he didn't know.
- 10 -
“It’s the middle of the night, Richie. I don’t appreciate being woken at four in the morning.”
“I know sir, I’m sorry, but I needed to talk to you.”
“What’s the matter? Can’t you sleep?”
“No sir. I think we may have a problem.”
“Yes?”
“Someone was killed, sir.”
A pause, then: “Why wasn’t I informed immediately?”
“Monk suggested that what you didn’t know wouldn’t hurt you.”
That pause again on the other end of the line. Thoughts ticking over. “And you went along with this?”
“Yes…”
“Please tell me appropriate steps were taken to clean up the mess.”
“Yes sir.”
“Well, that’s something, at least.”
“There’s more, I’m afraid.”
“Go on.”
“The dead man had collected a handful of newspaper cuttings and Polaroids linking Pilgrim’s Hall with Jude Kenyon.”
“And where are these Polaroids now?”
“Monk has them, sir.”
“Was he planning on sharing them with me?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Well, thank you, Richie. I appreciate your call. I think I will have to have words with our Mr. Sanders in the morning. Help him see the error of his ways.”
“Yes sir.”
“And Richie?”
“Yes sir?”
“Get some sleep. You sound exhausted.”
- 11 -
The scratchy whisperings of an old clock radio dragged Kristy French from the comfort of her lazy hazy doze. The day’s already bleak headlines rolled out for as long as it took her to fumble the snooze button down. The regained silence was soothing. Comfortable. She savoured both it and the snug warmth trapped between the bedding and her skin.
Fresh off the North Sea, a cold early morning wind rattled the sash windows of the Tyneside Flats along both sides of the street and blew the tattered pages of yesterday’s news along the gutters.
When the alarm chorused again ten minutes deeper into the day, Kristy swung her legs around and clambered out of bed. Heat from the cast-iron radiator wasted itself on filming condensation on the window.
In the bathroom, she splashed her face with icy water and instantly regretted it. Blinking water out of her eyes, she groped around for a towel and began filling the basin.
Kristy stared at her face in the mirror. Panda-eyes of slept-in make-up frowned back blearily. Her hair, the colour and texture of straw cut in a long bob, looked as if she’d spent the night wrestling gorillas in her sleep. Back-combing wet fingers through it she teased out some of the tatted knots. Closing her eyes, Kristy watched cool blue spots dance in the false darkness.
The throaty grumbles of a rubbish truck moved through the world outside. Birds chit-chatted lazily, welcoming the morning sun. Kristy felt the warmth of the sun on her back as she washed; its heat was a confident, lingering caress.
Next-door’s terrier started yapping while Kristy was rooting through her wardrobe for something to wear, its insistent little yammers sounded like a squeaky toy by the time they had been filtered by the thick dividing walls. She settled on a pair of close-cut grey trousers and a heavy cowl-necked olive sweater. Plain hiking socks and a pair of beige Neubuck Cats completed the outfit.
The tantalising aroma of cooking crept into the bedroom from somewhere else. The savoury odours of a full fry-up. Next door again. Her own breakfast never ran to much more than a couple of slices of toast slathered with butter.
To say that life was good at the moment was an understatement; after a string of dead-end jobs she was finally doing something she loved, in a town she already liked a whole lot more than her native Liverpool. Newcastle. One of the old hacks at The Gazette had told Kristy on her first day that she’d walked into a town with more secrets stashed away amid its dirty streets than the average Cabinet minister had lurking in his closet. After six months with The Gazette she was beginning to understand what he meant, despite the fact that those six months had been filled with school reviews, subbing on the fashion page, interviewing a couple of local authors, covering the Battle of The Bands and a suicide from the Tyne Bridge. Watching the bread brown beneath the grill, she smiled to herself: it was safe to say she was still looking for her niche. Still, she enjoyed the hunt, the challenge. There was a buzz about The Gazette that promised pay dirt, the big break into Fleet Street before she was too old to enjoy the rat-race. Not that Fleet Street was in Fleet Street anymore, but it was still difficult to think of Wapping and Canary Wharf as the hubs of journalistic England. Fleet Street had something about it – an indefinable quality, an air of history – and for that reason Kristy kept on dreaming of a Big Time that still involved The Street.
Still, she was living in a flat she had recently started decorating herself, not that she was Picasso by any stretch of the imagination. Her artistic temperament hadn’t pushed her much beyond a coat of emulsion and a floral border in two rooms.
What more, she wondered idly, could a girl ask for?
- 12 -
Kristy walked to work, as she did most mornings, to avoid the claustrophobic crush of the underground system. The familiar craggy faced tramps with their greasy hair, baggy layers of worn-out coats and toeless pumps shuffled aimlessly through the familiar reeks of the city; the fresh perfumes of Stowell Street’s ginger and soy vendors, sweat, urine, petrol and dirt. Market traders were hard at work in the pay-and-display parking lot, cuffing together the tubular frames of their stalls and fighting the wind to drape them beneath plastic tarpaulins.
A flock of starlings banked overhead, cutting a black swathe through the rich azure sky.
Kristy dug her hands deeper into her pockets as she cut into the back-alley beside Rosie’s Bar. The rotating mechanical heads behind the bar turned to follow her. The effect, fake people, fake faces, tending bar still gave her the creeps.
Across the street workmen picked their way through the burned out frame of an old Victorian shopping arcade. A hundred metres away the spangled mirrors of the new Eldon Garden Bridge dazzled with all the beauty of the rising sun. Tubercular busses passed by in both directions, exhausts coughing out great grey plumes. People were ducking in and out of the huge shopping centre. Students comfortable with their designer jumble sale chic black and denim, trudged along sleepily, heads down, toward the sprawl of the university campus.
The Gazette’s staff entrance was down a side-street that housed a row of lockup garages and five cut-price Italian restaurants. There was an overflowing skip up against the wall of one of the restaurants, filled with junk, slabs of masonry and metal oddments. The eyeless head of a plastic doll stared blindly through the jumble of bric-a-brac.
Kristy shouldered the narrow door open and went into a dingy concrete-floored lobby, through a set of fire doors and on up a concrete stairwell. A second set of smoke doors opened onto the warren of cubicles that was the newsroom. Most of the cubes were already occupied. The newsroom buzzed with the twin senses of vibrancy and urgency, those ever-presents of the early morning chaos. The newsroom was an over-wound spring set to slowly unwind during the day as each of the five editions went to the presses.
The sun was barred from the room by slatted blinds. The soft flutter of keys replaced the need for conversation. The news reporters were in and mumbling to themselves over their copy. The sub-editors were clustered in conversation around the Pictures Desk, arguing over the cover shot for the noon issue. Only a few years ago threads of cigarette smoke would have curled from too many mouths, blue-grey wisps rising until they curled around the light fittings and wrapped in with the low-lying smog, but now they were working in the healthy modern office. The smokers had to stand outside, huddling up in the pouring rain as they chain-smoked through their addiction.
Kristy nodded to Jack Bray, one of the News Editor’s lackeys, as she bustled past the literary-come-theatre-come-TV reviewer’s desk stacked waist-high with a jumble of hardbacks, videos and Styrofoam cups. Jennie Stephenson sat two desks down from Kristy. She was typing to her own two-fingered rhythm and chewing on her bottom lip.
Kristy sank down into her chair; her own personal gateway into Hell. First things first, she called up the overnight files and scanned the headlines come fresh down the wire, skimming them for stories within The Gazette’s catchment area, the city of Newcastle and its surrounds: TWO KILLED IN FIREBOMB ATTACK ON WEARSIDE ESTATE; VICAR FACES SEX CHARGES, DRUGS SWOOP ON TYNESIDE PUBS, INJURY WORRIES FOR UNITED STAR.
She hadn’t been specifically assigned a story so it was down to her to scare up something worth covering; free rein as long as she could sell the idea to Spencer Abel, The Gazette’s News Editor.
She tapped an uncapped biro on the desk, looking for something even vaguely interesting to occupy herself with. She was still scanning the headlines when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Abel walking toward her holding a glossy sheet of fax paper. Abel was
a quietly intense man in his late forties recovering from a drink problem that had almost killed him. He had the pronounced slouch so typical of long time journalists, from the permanent tension and the countless hours hunched over a keyboard. His hair was pulled back in one of those trendy mini-ponytails. He answered to two names beside his own; both with a suitable biblical twist. Orson, accompanied by the inevitable string of “Mork Calling…” jokes and Kane, both lifted from Welles’ seminal slice of cinematic history.
“Morning, kiddo,” Abel said cheerfully. Kristy smiled up at him. “Looks like we might have something for you this morning. Could be something or nothing. Still, check it out.”
“Spill.”
“Jude Kenyon. The missing fellwalker.”
He handed Kristy the fax and grinned his best attempt at a crooked charmer. She read the short printout:
PHONE REPORT: 8:10 p.m., April 11. Source: Rogan, Frank. Moses Hill Farm, Westbrooke. Possible sighting of walker plus abductors. Wants to talk tomorrow a.m..
Kristy blew the loose strands of fringe out of her eyes. “Abductors? Seriously?”
“Hell, don’t shoot the messenger. I didn’t take the call, Jennie did. Said he mentioned pictures but you’re right, he’s probably some lonely old man looking to get his name in the papers. Still, pull all the stories on Kenyon’s disappearance. Take Kelso along. Get some photos. Who knows, eh?”
- 13 -
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