The girls arrived with one small suitcase each: two teenage lives squashed into two small cases. That’s all they had. Tom had bought new posters for the girls’ room. They still wanted to sleep together, even though he’d offered to decorate the spare room and make it exactly the way they wanted. Meg was pleased to see the back of her spiteful roommate in the home, Debbie Simmonds.
On the day that they arrived at number nine Tower View Street, Meg finally felt safe. They were out of the children’s home, they had real parents at last, and they were together. She and Hannah, adoptive sisters, what more could she have wished for? Tom had already been like a father to them, showing them how to wire electrical sockets, replace washers in taps, and many of the other life skills that slipped through the net in the home.
Like Bob Taylor, Tom had been one of the good ones, an adult who deserved their trust. Both men were easy with the youngsters. They didn’t judge them, and genuinely seemed to enjoy their company. For those two men, looking after and talking to the kids at Woodlands Edge wasn’t just a job, it was a pleasure.
Slowly, Meg began to forgive Tom Yates. She knew that he was not directly to blame for the terrible things that had happened. As she began to trust him more as a father, she started to forgive him a little for not intervening. After all, what could any of them have done to stop Gary Maxwell?
It all began to unravel the night Bob Taylor knocked at the door. They’d been watching the TV together. Tom had been on the early shift that day and by seven o’clock they were all curled up on the settee watching Home Improvement. The heavy knock surprised them. It was a dark night. The football pools collector wasn’t due, so it was unexpected.
Tom opened the door. The girls recognised the voice immediately. When they saw Bob Taylor standing in their lounge, they were pleased to see him, but something told them it wasn’t a social call. Bob exchanged the briefest of pleasantries with Mavis and the girls, and then he and Tom made their way to the dining room, closing the door behind them. They were in there some time. The rumble of deep voices could be heard whenever there was a moment of silence on the TV.
‘What do you think that’s about?’ Mavis had asked.
She didn’t know Bob, but she’d heard the girls – and Tom – chat about him, and she knew that he was liked. She kept out of Tom’s life at Woodlands Edge, but she knew that Bob had left the home after a row with his boss.
Bob left late. It was almost ten o’clock. They all remembered that because the ITN news was about to start on the TV. Tom and Mavis still had a black and white television. The licence was much cheaper – it made a real difference if you were short of money. Tom looked serious. Deadly serious. He tried to make light of it, but the girls could tell that something was up. What was the reason Bob had left the home? They knew he’d had a row with Gary – something to do with David’s death. It had been heated, and it had certainly thrown Gary, whatever it was.
The girls were ushered to bed. It was school the next day and the cosy night in watching the TV together was over. They lay awake listening to Tom and Mavis talking. The voices were earnest, and there was no laughter. They were in the lounge until after one o’clock in the morning, even though Tom was on the early shift the next day.
Meg and Hannah didn’t need to know the specifics of what was going on. They weren’t stupid. Serious voices, weighty conversations deep into the night, and an atmosphere at the breakfast table the next day that was heavy and tense. This must be something to do with the home. This had to do with what was happening up there. It involved them.
We couldn’t get off the train fast enough. Alex and I spent the remainder of the journey talking about Steven Terry and trying to find more scraps of information online.
It was a Saturday so the news teams were at their diminished weekend levels. All we got was a couple of lines of news copy lifted directly from a police statement on their news line. I even phoned into the office, but on a Saturday, once the sports team were done, there was only one person left in the entire building. Saturday was the day where they tucked the obscure programmes which weren’t quite unloved enough to be relegated to Sundays. Saturday was for country music and the seventies night. Classical and gardening would wait for Sunday’s programming. Either way, it meant that nobody could throw any light on what had happened to Steven Terry.
‘We’re going straight to the police station,’ I said as soon as the news had sunk in. We’d obviously been spotted breaking into the home by some local do-gooder or dog walker. Once the body had been found, like good citizens, they’d have reported our presence to the police.
Alex wasn’t saying anything, but we both knew it already. We’d seen this before. Something shitty happening – a death – and somewhere we’d only recently been. I got a bad feeling about this death, but I wasn’t ready to share my fears with Alex yet. I think she was doing the same thing, working through the surely not? can this be happening? not again? type of questions.
This was too much of a coincidence. We start snooping around Woodlands Edge, we catch the scent of something not being right, and all of a sudden Tony Dodds is dead, his body left by the tree where two boys had killed themselves in the early nineties. Of course Steven Terry was nothing to do with it. We’d march straight into the police station and spend our Saturday evening giving statements and making sure that our psychic friend spent no more time in police custody than was necessary.
In fact, Steven probably knew we were on our way already.
‘I bet he didn’t see that one coming!’ Alex said, reading my mind. We couldn’t help it. For a journalist every news story is an opportunity for a dry and tasteless one-liner. Alex hadn’t lost the habit, even though she’d been out of newsrooms for several years.
We grabbed some fast food on the way over to the police station and went directly to the desk when we got there. It wasn’t late enough for the pissheads to have started surfacing, and we’d only just finished our burgers and chips when we got to speak to the duty officer. In a matter of minutes we were taken to separate interview rooms and assigned different officers. This was a murder investigation, after all.
I’d seen quite a few interview rooms over the past year – they were beginning to feel like a second home. This one had two plastic chairs placed on either side of a hefty wooden table. There were a couple of dog-eared posters stuck on the wall. The officer who’d been allocated to take my statement handed me one of the most disgusting coffees I’d ever drunk. I did my best to extract details about the murder from her, but she was having none of it. All she would repeat was the general information that had already been cascaded to the news outlets.
Steven Terry’s words urging me to tell the truth rang in my ears as I shared every detail of what we’d been doing at Woodlands Edge. I knew that Alex would be telling exactly the same story as me; there was no need for us to get our stories straight, we just had to tell the truth and Steven’s role in all of this would be clear to the police. They’d got the wrong guy.
After about thirty minutes she left the room and offered to get me another coffee before she returned. I declined. She was gone for some time, and I needed to use the toilet. I wasn’t a suspect, so I decided to leave the room and use the facilities. They were only up the corridor – I’d seen them when we walked down. I could hear Alex’s voice coming from the other interview room across the hallway. She was still going strong. At least I knew better than to pop my head round the door and say hello.
As I was walking back to the interview room, I heard a familiar female voice. At first I thought it was Alex, but it wasn’t, it was somebody else. I knew that voice. It was DCI Kate Summers. What was she doing in Blackpool? It was only over the county border, not a million miles away, but this was not her policing patch. I knew that I’d get into trouble for it, but there was no way I wasn’t sticking my head around that office door to say hello. I’d got to know Kate well as a result of all the crap that had happened previously in my life and I was certain t
hat she’d be pleased to see me. Who wouldn’t want to say a cheery hello to the man who’d left such a trail of carnage in his wake?
‘DCI Summers, hi, what are you doing down here?’
I knew immediately that I should have returned to my interview room and kept my mouth shut. What’s that saying about farts and space suits? Well, that’s how welcome I was. I got evil glances from the small group that was assembled in the room. Some senior guy stepped straight in to have me ushered out. DCI Summers looked thoroughly embarrassed by my presence. I was escorted back to the interview room and was told, in no uncertain terms, to stay there. I heard stern voices further up the corridor and my interviewing officer came back into the room looking rattled and flustered. She’d obviously dismissed me as being no flight risk, but she hadn’t realised what a prat I can be.
We got the paperwork signed off and she took me back to the waiting area. Alex wasn’t done yet, so I had another fifteen minutes to kill. Her statement was probably much more literary than mine, she was always better at using the English language. The news updates online were dead. Nobody had managed to add anything useful to their breaking news stories, which just gave out the bare bones of the case: Tony Dodds found strangled … body deposited by the oak tree outside derelict children’s home … Steven Terry being questioned by police. That was it.
At last Alex emerged.
‘How did it go?’ I asked.
‘The coffee tasted like shit!’
I laughed. If there was ever a great deterrent to a life of crime, the police coffee was it.
‘Did they ask you anything interesting?’
‘No, the usual questions. I had to sign some autographs. They have a poster of me in the office apparently: my head stuck on the body of Wonder Woman. They think of me as a crime fighter according to the chap who interviewed me. Crime Beaters has quite a reputation among the Blackpool constabulary.’
Although we were laughing, this was serious. There had been a murder. Steven Terry was being held by the police and Alex and I had been at the murder scene close to the time the body was dumped. DCI Summers was away from her policing patch, embroiled in some serious pow-wow with the Blackpool police.
I was getting better at seeing death coming. It’s a feeling at first, a sense that things aren’t quite right. With DCI Summers on the scene, it must involve me, and I knew it would all be connected with Meg.
Sundays are a pain in the butt. I suppose they used to be worse – at least the entire world doesn’t shut down these days. I wanted it to be Monday. I would be able to get to Bob Taylor then. I was very interested to hear what he had to say about Tony Dodds’ death. I wanted to get more information from the police, but they’d be on press office lock down over the weekend. They’d probably call a press conference on the Monday morning. Monday again. I wanted to fast-forward Sunday and just get on with it.
Alex and I had arrived back late at the flat. The young idiot upstairs was having a noisy row with his girlfriend over even louder music. I fleetingly considered going up there and beating the shit out of him, but I thought better of it.
We went to bed early and decided to get up when we woke naturally and head to one of the local supermarkets for a Sunday morning fry-up: everything you need to hasten a heart attack and all for under two pounds. By ten o’clock we were enjoying our bacon and eggs, refreshed from our trip to Milton Keynes and ready to move things on.
‘Steven Terry’s out,’ Alex said, looking at her phone.
‘Is there anybody you don’t know in the justice system?’ I asked. Her contacts seemed to be everywhere.
‘You get to talk to a lot of people doing a show like Crime Beaters. The police don’t see us as normal press, because we’re generally helping with difficult cases rather than hauling them over the coals for things that have gone wrong, the way you do.’
She said those last words smiling.
‘It’s all over the nationals this morning. They love this story.’
I flicked through the pile of tabloids that we’d bought – a bad journalistic habit, devouring the papers every Sunday and spending a small fortune in the process.
‘They smell a rat, that’s why. The tabloids love a good historical child abuse story and this one goes way back. They may still have reporters who remember the original case – if they haven’t replaced them all with internet journalists.’
‘Do you recognise any of the names, Alex? The reporters, I mean?’
She flicked through the papers.
I recalled a conversation I’d had with Hannah. She told me how the journalists used to refer to her and Meg as the fire sisters. That sounded like the tabloids alright. What a horrible name to use for a couple of teenage girls. But she’d also mentioned that one journalist, who’d known Tom Yates, wouldn’t let it drop – kept chasing them. He was a complete bastard.
He would have been an old-style journalist, the tenacious type, the kind of guy who never forgot a story. He’d have kept on digging and digging. Since the nineties, most of them would have been pensioned off or deployed to lighter social media tasks, such as summarising complex news stories in 140 characters.
‘I recognise two of them,’ Alex interrupted my thoughts. I’d forgotten that I’d even asked the question.
‘Two what?’ I replied.
‘Two old hacks in there: Patrick Eaves and Charlie Lucas. Both old boys. The sort who would have kicked up a fuss when smoking in the office had to stop. They must be in their sixties now. Lucas, in particular, is a bit of a bastard.
‘Hannah told me that they were hounded by a guy like that. A journalist, I mean. She described him as a complete bastard.’
‘That’s how I’d describe him too. I think he’s freelance now, but if you look at the by-line you can see they’ve brought him in as a special reporter.’
I read how he was described in the article: ‘Senior reporter Charles Lucas reported on the Woodlands Edge scandal in Blackpool 1993–1994’. There was no such description of Patrick Eaves. I wondered if Charlie Lucas was our man. I googled him on my phone.
‘He’s semi-retired, and they only wheel him out for the big jobs – things that require a real journalist rather than somebody who learned what to do on a podcast. He must be the guy that Hannah was talking about. Hang on a minute ...’
I opened up Skype on my phone to see if Hannah was online. We’d kept in touch since I went to visit her in Spain, and we’d agreed to share any news about Meg. Fat chance of that, the way things were going. Her status was showing as away so I sent her a message instead. She’d pick it up later. I tried to remember if Spain were an hour ahead or an hour behind. Interestingly, her Skype location was showing as the UK. Unusual that. I wondered if she was back in the country again.
Hi Hannah, does the name Charles – or Charlie – Lucas mean anything to you? Check the UK papers if you haven’t already. You’ll want to see what’s happening over here. Speak soon, Pete
I should have tipped Hannah off a bit sooner really. She’d want to know what was going on, especially since we’d paid a visit to the home. Why hadn’t I done that? I took a few moments to think it over.
Hannah’s name was coming up alongside Meg’s more and more. They were adoptive sisters and friends, or at least they had been, but I was beginning to wonder if she’d been telling me the whole truth. I’d stay quiet about visiting her mum and finding the old newspaper stash covering the entire history of the investigation into the children’s home. I’d start to probe a bit more with Hannah, to see if what she’d been telling me was consistent with what everybody else was saying. Steven Terry’s comment about there being a demon in that bedroom was troubling me. Who was he alluding to? Both sisters had slept in there – but so had many other kids.
I couldn’t believe that I was writing off my wife – my estranged wife – as one of Steven Terry’s demons. What a treacherous shit I was turning out to be. Besides, it was a ridiculous notion to condemn someone based on a psychic’s say-so.
‘I’ve asked Hannah about Charlie Lucas. I’ll bet he’s the guy she was talking about. Can you see if you can get an email address for him at the newspaper and see if we can make contact? Do you know him?’
‘Yes I do know him, but we have a bit of a past. He came on the show once – it was ages ago – and we had a row before the programme went live. It’s still on YouTube if you want a look. Let’s just say it was a bit tense during the interview.’
‘What did you fall out about?’
‘He’s one of those people who wind you up. It’s probably great in his line of journalism, but not so nice if you’re on the receiving end.’
‘This could be a chance to heal old wounds, Alex. Why don’t you see if you can raise him? Give him a hint of our involvement. Get his journalistic juices flowing.’
Alex picked up her smart phone and began some online research. I decided it would be better to call Steven Terry rather than send a text. I dialled his number and his phone began to ring. I didn’t expect it to be picked up, and I had a mouth full of Alex’s discarded bacon when he answered straight away.
‘Peter – Pete – thank you so much for coming to my rescue last night.’
‘Steven, hi. They let you out then?’
‘Yes, as soon as you and Alex cleared things up they released me without any further questions. We have a lot of disappointed fans in town – we’re trying to get last night’s show rescheduled for this evening.’
‘Did you pick up on anything while you were being held, Steven? Any snippets which might be useful? You can see why I’m interested.’
Alex had paused from her online research and was listening in to my conversation now. She moved closer so that she could hear his voice coming out of the speaker.
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