Alternative outcome

by Peter Rowlands

  “Not really. Someone thought she might have lived in the north of England, but it was pretty vague.”

  “Aha! Well I might be able to flesh that out a bit more for you.” She called over to one of her colleagues, “Dan – are we still on for that curry later?”

  “Certainly are.”

  She turned to me. “A bunch of us are going out for a meal when they release us from this place. If you’re free, maybe you’d like to join us?” She paused, then more tentatively added, “Or … no, you probably have something to get home to, do you?”

  “No, nothing. That sounds great.”

  “OK. Well, you’ll have to twiddle your thumbs for a while till they close the exhibition, but then we’ll be all set. We’ll be meeting up at the White Hart at six thirty – that’s the pub down the road. I can update you about our friend Trina.”

  Chapter 13

  “Cheers to you Mike. Thanks for an excellent article. You set us up nicely for this show.”

  This was Tony, Latimer’s sales manager – a genial man of about forty, and the first of Ashley’s five colleagues to arrive in the pub from their nearby hotel.

  “Glad to know it helped.”

  “Ashley was over the moon with it.”

  This seemed unlikely, but these were all sales and marketing people, accustomed to putting a positive spin on everything. I accepted the praise and watched as the others arrived together – three men and a woman in their twenties or early thirties, plus Ashley herself.

  She was the last to walk in, and as I briefly caught her gaze I felt a sudden jolt of awareness between us. Or had I imagined it? She was wearing jeans and a blue top with a cinched black waistcoat, and looked stunning.

  “Thank god that’s over,” she announced as she picked up the beer Tony had lined up for her. “One day down, one to go.”

  I commented, “I don’t envy you spending the whole day on the stand.”

  She turned to me. “You’re well out of it, Mike. Be glad you can swan around the show the way you do, just chatting to people.”

  I found myself admiring the way her expression seemed to settle so readily into a look that was at once a question and a challenge. She was even-featured, yet at the same time she was distinctively herself and no one else.

  I felt her jibe needed some sort of riposte. “You wouldn’t say that if you had to do it yourself. It’s hard work.”

  “I’d forgotten – you’re interviewing everybody.” She turned to her colleagues. “Remember, Mike’s a journalist. You’re all on the record.” She gave me a barely detectable wink.

  “Bollocks.” I scowled at her, then put my beer down and held up my hands. “Look! No notebook. No pen. No microphone. Not listening.”

  “Not to worry, Mike.” Tony slapped me rather too hard on the back. “We’re all off duty here.”

  * * *

  We progressed to an Indian restaurant down the street. I ended up sitting diagonally opposite Ashley, facing a Londoner called Joe who proceeded to spend an inordinately long time telling me about the delights of surfing. “That’s why I moved to Cornwall,” he told me. “Fantastic to have it all there on tap. Lovely lifestyle, too. I’d never come back here now.”

  The meal ran its course. I couldn’t easily converse with Ashley on her own, but I was strongly aware of her voice and personality, and this evening she seemed more animated than I remembered. I was aware of her colleagues teasing her from time to time, but I could tell it was teasing borne out of respect, and she parried it with self-deprecating grace.

  Eventually Joe disappeared to the men’s room, and Ashley shuffled into his place opposite me and leaned forward. Though we’d had so little direct conversation, in a strange way it felt as if we’d spent the entire evening in unspoken dialogue.

  “Michael.”

  “Ashley.”

  She grinned at me. “Is that what people call you? Michael?”

  “Not really. When I’m good I’m just Mike.”

  She nodded to herself several times.

  “Michael, I have intelligence for you. Brought to you courtesy of Patrick.” Unthinking, she took a sip of Joe’s beer. “Fuck! What’s this stuff?” She thrust it down, reached over for her own glass and took a sip from that. “Patrick is my older brother.”

  “OK.”

  “Thing is, I was telling him about you.” She broke off. “Not that I want you to get the impression that I was thinking about you. No way.”

  “Right.”

  “But somehow you came up in conversation. And he remembered Trina Markham quite well. I think he probably fancied her, stupid twat. He always fancied all the girls at the Fairmile.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yes, and he says she was from Altrincham. Her father was an accountant or something, and they had a posh house up there.” She looked at me in triumph. “What do you think of that?”

  “Is that it?”

  She smiled at me with her eyes. “That’s gold-plated information there! Normally I charge for this kind of thing.”

  “It’s greatly valued, I assure you.”

  “Yes, I believe you.”

  We continued to smile at each other for a moment, perhaps unsure where to take the conversation next.

  “How’s Jack?” I asked finally. I hated myself for bringing him into the conversation, but somehow couldn’t help myself.

  “Jack is fine, thank you.” She looked away from me for a moment, then back. “We’ve known each other forever.” She took another sip of beer.

  “When are you planning on getting married?”

  “Oh, no date yet. Probably next year.” An airy shake of the head. “It’s a moveable feast.” She pondered this for a moment. “It’s a virtual engagement – that’s what it is. Virtual.”

  * * *

  The meal finally came to an end, and our little group gathered outside the restaurant. Joe and Laurie, the other girl, announced that they were going clubbing in the West End, and a couple of the others were talking about reconvening in their hotel bar, but Ashley demurred. “Long day tomorrow. I need my beauty sleep. You should all take a leaf out of my book.”

  The rest of them started to drift away, and we were on our own, facing each other.

  “Michael,” she said.

  “Ashley.” I paused. “Thank you for a lovely evening.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “I’m really glad I chanced on your stand.”

  “So am I.”

  We stood there for a moment, smiling at each other. The engaged girl, the divorced man. I had an extraordinarily strong instinct to reach out and touch her. Instead, I found myself asking in a slightly choked voice, “What now?”

  She gave me a wry look and shrugged slightly, shaking her head. “I don’t know.” Then she pulled her jacket tighter. “I’d better go.”

  We looked at each other a moment longer, then she executed a pantomime swivel and started off in the same direction as the others. But after a few paces she turned and looked back at me. “So we did stay in touch with each other. I knew we would.”

  Chapter 14

  That night I slept the sleep of the dead, but when I woke in the morning, Ashley slammed straight into my consciousness. I felt as if she’d been injected into my bloodstream. It had been too long since I’d felt this kind of connection with anyone at all, let alone anyone as appealing as she was. I was unprepared.

  The only trouble was, I couldn’t visualise our relationship having any good outcome. She was engaged to someone else and lived hundreds of miles away, and I was a disenchanted hack. If she really knew me she would soon discover that. In any case, events like that logistics show were notorious for creating unlikely pairings. People were inclined to let their hair down when far from home.

  Yet I couldn’t shake her out of my mind. A vague yearning seemed to have settled on me, and it stayed with me as I attempted to catch up on an article I was preparing on international trade. Ashley was attractive, bright and funny – an
d for some reason she seemed to like me. It was a combination I’d seldom encountered before. I kept thinking about that roguish grin.

  I glanced at the clock. Eleven thirty. I could picture her now, back on the Latimer stand at the Logistics Fair, conscientiously attending to visitors. She was still in London for the whole day, yet I had no legitimate excuse to see her, and the minutes were ticking away. It was a kind of torture.

  My office phone jarred me out of my reverie.

  “Is that Mike? Mike Stanhope?” Amazingly, it was her.

  “The same.”

  “Oh, brilliant. I’ve had a hell of a run-around getting your number. I ended up talking to someone called Don, and he didn’t want to give it to me.”

  Don was Jason’s assistant at the magazine – a jobsworth with no imagination.

  “They have a policy of not giving out numbers if they think the call is from a PR person.”

  “Huh.”

  She said nothing for a moment, then we both started speaking at once. I said, “Sorry, you first.”

  “Oh, it’s just that I remembered something basic that I forgot to tell you yesterday. About your friend Trina. That’s why I’m calling. My brother thought he knew the name of the street in Altrincham where she lived. It was something like Eyebrow. He always remembered because it was so strange.” She seemed to reflect on this for a moment. “Don’t ask me why they were exchanging address details in the first place. I’m sure they weren’t that pally. In fact I doubt if she would have given him the time of day.”

  “Anyway, that’s brilliant. Much better than just a town name.” I hesitated. “Er, I don’t suppose he had the house number? No, course he didn’t. Stupid question.”

  “Reality check on that one.”

  But then I remembered that Facebook posting: West End Lodge. It might not be a house number, but it was almost as good as one. Surely I should be able to find the address from that?

  There was another pause, then Ashley said, “I hope I didn’t disgrace myself too much last night. I know I tend to get carried away at these events. Too much unwinding – too fast.”

  “Not as far as I could see.”

  “Well, that’s good to know.”

  A longer pause, then I heard myself saying, “Funnily enough, I was thinking about you just now.” I winced as I said it: too much information.

  She said nothing for a second, then quietly, “You shouldn’t.”

  I couldn’t think of any suitable response to this, so I just let it hang in the air. Finally I said, “Well, thanks for the extra information. I really might be able to do something with that.”

  “I hope so.” She cleared her throat. “I’d love to hear if anything comes of it.”

  “You will. Definitely.”

  “I’ve got to go. People on the stand. Take care.” And she was gone.

  * * *

  I struggled on with the article for another hour, trying to flush Ashley from my mind. Finally I’d had enough. By way of distraction I opened my browser and did a web search on Altrincham. Like many people, no doubt, I’d heard of it, even professed to know what it was like. Actually my knowledge of it was minimal.

  “A market town in Greater Manchester,” I was informed. I opened a web map and typed the street name into the search box, but nothing came up. Frustrated, I zoomed in over Altrincham and pored over the street names. Eyebrow seemed a somewhat implausible name for a street, and indeed there was no sign of such a name anywhere. Had Ashley’s brother been winding her up?

  However, I then spotted an Eyebrook Road in a district called Bowden, and when I zoomed out, I could see that this was adjacent to, or possibly part of, Altrincham. Could this be it? From a bit of quick research I found that this was a famously affluent area. I wasn’t sure quite where it got me, but it was something.

  Over a lunchtime sandwich I sat mulling over all this. Was there a mystery here or not? All I knew so far was that I’d failed to track down these people, but that might be because I wasn’t being very organised about looking for them.

  And yet … something was nagging at my investigative instincts. Since first doing a web search for the Markhams I’d made a couple more attempts, but again without luck. Why was there apparently no trace of them on the internet, no hint of their existence in the present day? Had they in fact disappeared off the face of the earth? I didn’t actually know, but the harder they proved to track down, the more I felt inclined to keep looking on for them.

  It was quite possible, of course, that I was missing the obvious. They could for instance have emigrated, or been killed in a catastrophic motorway pile-up. I had to be realistic; all kinds of explanation were possible. Whatever the case, there must be documentary evidence somewhere; I just wasn’t looking in the right place.

  What I wasn’t so clear about was what I would do if I found them. Was there really another book in this? Was there a magazine article? If so, who would publish it? It was hardly a logistics story.

  Or was I simply playing into Joanna’s hands, living out her “let’s rehabilitate Mike” campaign?

  I decided I’d worry about my intentions later. For the next stage, I felt I should visit Eyebrook Road, Altrincham – to see what it suggested to me in the flesh. However, even in my current somewhat obsessive frame of mind I wasn’t inclined to fund such a long, time-consuming and potentially fruitless journey out of my own pocket. I needed some excuse to make the trip.

  I rang Jason Bright to see if he had scheduled any articles involving a trip to the North West. He hadn’t, so I tried a materials handling magazine I sometimes wrote for.

  “The answer to my prayer,” said the editor, a hard-pressed man called Phil Connor who seemed to run the publication virtually single-handedly. “I need someone to go and see a plant hire company in Ashton under Lyne the week after next. It’s all set up. I was going myself, but I’ve just realised I’m double-booked. How does that suit you?”

  1988

  “Police are looking for members of an armed gang this evening, following the attempted theft of a large consignment of valuables that has left a security guard dead and one of the thieves critically injured.

  “The armoured truck was held up at gunpoint at an intersection outside Newbury in Berkshire, and the thieves are thought to have transferred the stolen goods to a waiting van, then made off. In the course of the theft, one of the guards was fatally injured.

  “Early reports suggest that the thieves subsequently switched the haul to a further vehicle at a prearranged point. However, police tracked this vehicle down to a farm not far away. An armed response team was called in and a gun battle followed, during which one of the thieves was wounded and most of the others were arrested.

  “However, it is thought that at least one gang member may have fled under cover of darkness. Police are warning that anyone connected to the robbery is armed and dangerous, and should not on any account be approached.

  “The vehicle was in the process of transferring the contents of a safety deposit vault from Newbury to new premises in Reading.

  “The value of the haul has not been disclosed, but informal estimates suggest that cash and securities thought to be worth at least eleven million pounds may have been recovered at the scene.”

  Chapter 15

  The M25 was hardly my favourite place, but for once it seemed a glorious release from the confines of my home office. That trip to the West Country a month ago had reminded me of the pleasures of travel, which these days seemed all too infrequent. Today the motorway was my friend. The sun was even shining. My trip to the North West had started well.

  Three and a half hours later I was feeling slightly less sprightly as I pulled up outside the plant hire firm in Ashton under Lyne, a satellite town east of Manchester. It wasn’t far from the M60 motorway, which encircled the Manchester conurbation, but there’d been a snarl-up on the M56, and the last part of the journey had taken an age.

  However, the people at the firm were open and fri
endly, and once I’d thought myself into the world of hydraulic cranes, bulldozers and JCBs, we were on a roll. Clouds floated across the sun as I emerged into the yard to do some photography, but then they receded, leaving a brilliant sun staring out of a dramatic grey sky. Against that backdrop, even yellow cranes looked breathtaking.

  By mid-afternoon I was free, and I headed back westwards along the M60, then forked off through Timperley to Altrincham.

  The town’s bustling central area seemed unremarkable. Its mix of styles – red-brick and grey-brick Victorian alongside ultra-modern – bespoke a solid middle class.

  Eyebrook Road was something else. The street itself was narrow, but grass verges separated the pavements from walls and hedgerows, opening out the aspect, and the houses were calculated to impress: palatial, some of them, and even the more modest were large detached structures, mostly surrounded by trees and shrubs. This was more than aspirational; this was where you lived when you’d well and truly arrived.

  I drove slowly down the road and round a dog-leg half-way along it, trying to make out house names. Some were in view, some weren’t. Many of the properties probably just had a street number.

  I felt slightly thwarted. I hadn’t visualised somewhere quite as prosperous, as dispersed, as this. I’d imagined maybe picking a house at random and knocking on the door. “Sorry, I thought the Markhams lived here. Do you happen to know them?” That wasn’t going to cut any ice in this environment. If anybody even answered the door to me, it would probably be a nanny or retainer of some kind, with no knowledge of the street’s history and no inclination to pass the time of day with me.

  I stopped and parked the car. I had a distinct feeling that if I appeared to be cruising without any purpose I might be pulled over and asked what I was up to. Maybe my car had already been flagged by hidden cameras.

  I stared round me. There was no consistent architectural style to these houses; mock-Tudor sat cheek by jowl with Edwardian, post-war and post-modern. One of the puzzles was that many of the houses looked quite recent, and probably hadn’t even existed when the Markhams supposedly lived here.