by Neil White
Clients never blamed themselves. Sam knew that. It was either the police, or the judge, or the lawyer who prepared the case.
But this was something different. Terry was genuinely angry, resentful. Terry was saying that his father-in-law was involved in a conspiracy to conceal a murder. He could accept that Terry had been set up, an easy fall guy, some drunk sleeping off a bottle nearby, but by Harry Parsons? Never. Harry’s mantra had always been the same: be ruthless, but be honest.
But Sam couldn’t shake it off, because Terry had blamed Luke King, and Sam knew something about Luke that Terry didn’t.
He couldn’t speak to Terry for a few hours yet, even if he had wanted to. There had been a warrant for his arrest as they went to leave, for non-payment of fines. He was staying in the cells until morning.
Sam looked in on Helena before he left. Terry had been talking about her father, the grandfather of his children. Helena murmured and pulled the sheets down. Sam watched her breasts rise and fall and wished he could just climb back in with her. But he knew what would happen: he would be pushed away.
As he clicked the front door shut and blipped off the car alarm, Sam knew he would be looking further into what Terry McKay had said. He just didn’t know why.
I was up first, toasting bagels and filling a tray with a teapot and glass of orange juice. The air smelled of warm butter. Bobby watched me as he worked his way through a bowl of Ricicles. I winked at him. ‘Do you think Mummy will like this?’
He smiled at me, his eyes still sleepy. ‘How do you do that?’
‘Do what?’
‘Blink with one eye.’
I raised my eyebrows. ‘Practice,’ I said, full of adult mystery, and took the tray upstairs.
Laura murmured when I opened the bedroom door. The sunlight was streaming through the curtains, giving the room a hazy look.
‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘Thought you might like a pick-me-up.’
She smiled, her eyes still half-closed. ‘You mean a get-me-up,’ she drawled, and then pulled the sheets back. ‘You could get in.’
I sighed, seeing her naked body against the sheets, long and slender, but as I leaned towards her I put the tray there instead. ‘Bobby’s downstairs.’
She groaned and turned over. ‘Just food then.’
I started to pull on my shoes. ‘I’ve got to go out,’ I said. ‘Can you take Bobby to school?’
She sat up and wiped her eyes. ‘Of course.’ She leaned forward and wrapped her arms around my neck. I could smell the sleep on her. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Just a feature I’m working on.’
‘Can’t you tell me?’
I lifted her arms from me, and then kissed her on the nose. ‘Confidential,’ I whispered.
She smiled as I left the bedroom. I skipped downstairs, and when I headed for the front door, I saw Bobby blinking hard.
‘Just one eye,’ I shouted.
‘I can’t,’ came the shout back.
‘Keep trying!’ I was still smiling as I climbed into my car.
Chapter Twenty-one
Sam was at his desk, the first to arrive, as ever, but he couldn’t work. Every time he thought of something to do, his mind kept on going back to Terry McKay.
McKay was a drunk. McKay was a thief. McKay was dishonest. No prosecutor would build a case based on his evidence.
Sam sat poised with his hand on top of a file that needed work. The rest of the office was in darkness, the computer monitors blacked out, the soft tick of the clock in reception the only sound in the building. Sam wasn’t paid to care. Ignore Terry McKay, he told himself. He should process the damn police-station file and do some billable hours at his desk. His job was not to investigate. His job was to earn money for Parsons & Co.
He rubbed his cheeks. He hadn’t shaved that morning, hadn’t wanted to wake Helena. His second coffee of the day was on his desk. He felt anxious, edgy, but maybe it was the caffeine.
He powered up the computer, the terminal clicking and stuttering, until the XP logo flashed up followed by the blue desktop, the screen uncluttered, just a few icons aside from the standard Internet Explorer and My Documents. Lawtel, Criminal Law Weekly, Westlaw, widely used legal search engines providing access to the latest authorities. Being a lawyer wasn’t always a huge skill. It was often just about knowing where to look for the answers.
Sam clicked on the PMS icon, the Practice Management System. It threw up the server page, and in the middle was a search bar. He looked at the file in his hand, ready to type in the name, when he paused. He took a gulp of coffee. He typed in Terry McKay instead and pressed return.
A list came up. Terry wasn’t the only McKay to use Parsons, but when Sam clicked on Terry’s client number, it was obvious that Terry was the main one.
The entries were all repeat nuisance offences. Drunk and disorderly, damage, minor public order offences, thefts from shops. It was the routine work that provided cash flow. Offend, arrest, court, guilty, bill. Nice and regular, and Terry McKay had troubled the courts and police for fifteen years. The last five of them were recorded on the computer.
And then Sam saw it, standing out above the rest of his skirmishes. A murder, from two years ago.
Sam made a note of the reference number and the storage location and headed out of the room.
The dead files were stored in the dark basement in order of month of destruction and then reference number, lined up in red jackets on metal shelves. They gathered dust and then they were shredded as soon as the Law Society rules allowed. A marker moved along every month, showing the next series of files for destruction.
He had to fumble for the light switch at first, his shoes loud as they shuffled on the concrete floor. The strip lighting flickered into life, and then as he searched his nose began to itch, his hands throwing up dust. It only took him a few minutes to find the file, and he was soon back at his desk, the file lying on top, wiping his hands clean on his handkerchief.
He looked at the cover for a few minutes, a red front with Parsons & Co across the top. He was nervous about opening it; Terry McKay’s anger was still fresh in his mind. But then he realised the obvious: that he wouldn’t know the contents if he didn’t open the cover.
He turned the cover slowly, and the familiar look of a police-station attendance sheet was the first thing he saw, all made out in Harry’s neat script. It was a form that all lawyers had to complete, just so that they could satisfy the bureaucrats that they had asked all the right questions. It didn’t seem to matter whether or not the right advice was given.
That shocked Sam. Terry had been right; it had been Harry who had gone to the police station. But Harry hadn’t been for years. What made this case so special?
As he went through the form, Sam read a story just like Terry had told him the night before. He had been drinking and was sleeping it off somewhere when he was approached by a man. He was given a purse so that he could claim the reward. Terry said yes, just because you didn’t say no to much when you were down to sleeping off booze in parks. Even when drunk, Terry could still plan how to pay for his next bottle. He described the man as an Asian man in his thirties, stocky build and a scruffy moustache. That was as far as the description went.
It seemed that Terry had said nothing in his police interview, just relied on a pre-prepared written statement that said all he had told Sam the night before, except that the attacker was described as Asian not ‘Paki’.
Terry McKay was locked up for thirty hours before he was eventually released. The police got an extension, were getting ready to charge, but then the prosecution said that they wouldn’t run it. The whole case was based on possession of a portable item: the purse. Terry went from suspect to witness, and the murderer was never caught.
Sam put the file down. He didn’t know what to make of it all. The story Terry had told him was contained in the papers he’d just read. There was nothing to back up Terry’s revised story other than his word. And the word of Terry M
cKay wasn’t worth a great deal.
But then Sam looked at the file again. There was something about it that looked strange. He went through the pages again. There was the front sheet, the one that contained all of Terry’s personal details. Then there was a middle page, which contained Terry’s story. On the back page, there was space for signature, and a box underneath to write in the attendance times.
Then he spotted it.
The middle page looked different. The paper was brighter, cleaner. The attendance sheets came as a three-page pack, stapled together. They shouldn’t be different colours. And the ink looked different, the blue slightly darker.
Sam tilted the back page to the light coming in from the window, tried to see if he could spot the indentation of what had been written on the middle page, just to see if they were different. He thought he could see something, tiny grooves, but he couldn’t make out what they said.
Sam remembered the look in Terry’s eyes, the anger, the certainty. Clients lied, they lied all the time, but he could usually tell. Sam had believed Terry.
Had Harry re-written Terry’s instructions? The pre-prepared statement was the easy part. Harry would have read that out, with the barest of detail, and from then on Terry would have made no comment to the questions. It was the re-written sheet that contained the detail, the words which would protect Luke if Terry tried to go back on the story and help the police.
As Sam looked at the page, saw how Harry’s neat script told a coherent tale, he realised that Harry could have done just that. Which meant that his father-in-law had bribed a drunk to cover up a murder.
Chapter Twenty-two
The first part of my journey from Turners Fold was through green fields, the early-morning mist sitting between the trees, picking out the hills like paper cutouts. By the time I reached Blackley the dawn light was making the copper dome of a local mosque blink flashes of light over the terraced streets.
I skirted the town centre, and headed towards a complex of flats just where the ring road made the houses dirty. I drove around a few streets and saw the same thing, decay, until eventually I came across a collection of u-shaped blocks, three storeys high, with balconies running around the two upper floors. Some of the windows were boarded up, and others were covered by metal grilles. I could spot the drug dealers: they had metal doors held fast by large locks. It marked them out, but stopped a quick entry and gave them a tactical advantage. I spotted a couple of men hanging around between the blocks, eastern European, dark-haired and twitchy I knew how it worked with the dealers: they preyed on the needy to do the street stuff, usually asylum seekers, and paid young mothers a small rent to store the drugs in their lofts. The police swept up the street dealers, but every time they raided those higher in the chain they came back empty.
I eventually found the address I was looking for and parked next to a basketball court. The roads were starting to get busy with cars, people from other parts of Blackley heading into work.
I looked again at the cutting that had brought me to this address. It was the one I had seen the night before. Darlene Tyler’s son, Tyrone, had been the first boy to go missing during the summer. He had been playing with his friends but became separated. His friends wouldn’t say much about what they had been doing, and for ten days the local paper was filled with images of Darlene looking distraught.
But that wasn’t why I was here. I was at her address because in one of the pictures there had been an old man, looking nervous, as if he was avoiding the gaze of the camera. There was a sidebar on him, and it was Eric Randle, described as a local psychic trying to help the family.
I folded the cutting and put it in my pocket. Eric Randle’s name had cropped up in the two biggest stories in Blackley. The town wasn’t big, but it wasn’t that small either.
Darlene’s home was on the first floor and in the middle of a long balcony. The stairs didn’t smell good, but I had been to worse places in London. At least I didn’t need a lift.
When I reached the door, I listened for a few seconds. I could hear the sound of laughter inside. I was about to knock when the door was flung open and a young teenage boy ran past me.
As I watched him go, I saw that he was smiling, turning round to wave, his school bag over his shoulder. I looked back towards the doorway and saw a woman in front of me. Darlene Tyler.
As Tyrone disappeared down a stairway, she turned to look at me. She was suspicious straightaway.
I smiled and held out my press card.
‘Hello, I’m Jack Garrett, I’m a reporter. I’d like to talk, if you have a moment?’
At first I thought she was going to tell me to get lost, but instead asked me to come in. We walked along a small hallway, marked out by a ‘murder carpet’, as the police call them, of patterned brown swirls. Most dead bodies are found on carpets like that.
As we got into her living room, she turned to me and smiled. ‘I didn’t used to like the press—vultures, or so my dad used to say. But,’ and then her face softened, her eyes watered, ‘they helped me get my Tyrone back, so I suppose I owe you one.’ She lit a cigarette. ‘What do you want to know?’ she asked, blowing smoke out of the side of her mouth.
As I thought about how to start, my eyes took in the details of her lounge. Whether the article needed any social commentary depended on who bought it, so it was better to have it and not need it. There were some trophies on the mantelpiece, darts tournaments, and on the wall were two Samurai swords, crossed over one another. The settee looked threadbare on the arms, and the carpet looked worn near the large television, gleaming silver in the corner of the room.
But the place looked clean. Darlene looked after her home the best she could.
‘I was reading some press clippings from when Tyrone was missing,’ I said, ‘and I wondered if you would mind giving me an update.’
‘What sort of update?’
‘Just how your life has been since you got Tyrone back.’
Darlene sat down and started to tell me, and I let her. The art is to get people talking. The right talk can come later.
Darlene told me how she lived alone with Tyrone, how his father had gone to prison a few years earlier. Darlene had two jobs, cleaning work in a couple of the town-centre pubs, and then bar work in the evenings.
‘I won’t go on benefits,’ she said determinedly. ‘I pay my way.’
‘How did Tyrone fit in with your jobs?’
Darlene took a hard pull on her cigarette.
‘He didn’t,’ she said. ‘And that’s why he went wrong.’ She shook her head and looked down. ‘I should have been there for him, but I wasn’t. I trusted him to go to school on his own, but he didn’t. I trusted him to stay in, but he went out. You’ve seen what it’s like round here. It’s hard enough when you try to do the right things. To do the wrong things round here, well, it’s always easy.’
She wiped her eye, a stubby nicotine finger taking away the tears.
‘I let him down,’ she continued, her voice breaking. ‘I know that now, but I wanted to give him the same things his friends had. I got it wrong, because all he really wanted was for me to be home.’
‘So you don’t have two jobs any more?’
Darlene shook her head. ‘I work for an agency now. They get me jobs when they can, just odd days in different places, but only ever during the day. I’m home when Tyrone is. It’s like he’s learned how to smile again. And he’s going to school every day,’ she added proudly.
I watched her and I sensed an uncomfortable thought in her, that Tyrone’s abduction had been the thing that had saved him. And her. It had given them a second chance.
‘What can you tell me about Eric Randle?’ I asked.
She stopped smiling, her expression growing uncertain.
‘He was an oddball,’ she said. ‘Came round and told me about how he had dreams and he could find people—people who were missing.’
‘Did you pay any attention to him?’
She stubbed out
her cigarette in an old Boddingtons ashtray. ‘Not really, but you’ve got to try everything, haven’t you?’
‘I saw the article with you and Eric in it. He seemed like he was pretty involved.’
She scowled. ‘Once Tyrone was found, he stopped coming round.’
‘Sam?’
Sam opened his eyes. He was in his office. He looked around quickly, checked his watch. How long had he been asleep?
It was Alison. He looked down at himself. His shirt was dirty from the archive cellar and he looked unusually dishevelled.