Dead Dream Girl (3 page)

Crane felt like sighing but didn’t. Benson would love any sign of how impossible he felt it was to wring any more from a case a bunch of skilled policemen and women had given up on so long ago. ‘You want another drink, Ted?’

‘Best not. Said I’d try and be in early tonight. The kids …’

One day, maybe they would buy each other drinks as they’d done in the past, and only then would Crane know their old close friendship was genuinely on the mend. He
said, ‘I had a private word with Patsy Jackson last night. She mentioned a Marvin.’

‘The brother. Comes between Patsy and Donna age-wise. He has a very nice dark suit he wears for court appearances.’

‘He’s done time?’

‘Burglary, more than one conviction. He mixes with the Dougie Mahon mob too. The rotten apple in the Jackson barrel, the others are as straight as a stick.’

‘And he doesn’t figure in any of this? Wouldn’t
he
know where Bobby really was that night if he’s in bed with the Mahons?’

‘We don’t think so. We had him in, Christ, we had half the Willows in. But he wasn’t at the Mahons that night and checks out, and the Mahons aren’t pretending he was one of the ones who was. There’s nowhere to go, Frank.’

Crane wasn’t prepared to agree, not if he was going to take the Jacksons’ money. ‘Donna herself, Ted. Patsy
reckoned
she might already have been living a dodgy life.’

‘We’re certain she was putting it about, but no definite proof. I mean, he’s seriously bad news that photography bloke, Clive Fletcher. We know he’s into video filth, but we can’t prove that either, and that’s another story. As far as Donna goes, he checks out. But we got bad vibes about her, felt she might have been her own worst enemy.’

It was the second time Crane had heard similar words. ‘What about Hellewell? Leaf and Petal man?’

Benson said, ‘He seemed kosher. Good looker. I reckon he had the hots for her. He wasn’t alone, not by a long shot. But he looked to be in a stable marriage and his story for where he was that night’s as tight as a crab’s arse.’ He stubbed out his final cigarette, prepared to go. ‘Do you know Geoff Anderson?’

‘
Standard
’s crime reporter? Took over from old Harold? The Jacksons mentioned him.’

‘He gave it the column inches. It was a story that had everything going for it anyway, but he was like a dog with a bone. He’s young, bright, very ambitious.
Sharp
– he couldn’t have been more than five minutes behind us at the SOC.’

‘How could he manage that?’

‘He sweet-talks the WPCs into dropping him the word. Charm the knickers off a Carmelite nun. Anyway, he lived and breathed the story. Can’t be faulted for following it up either. Rings every week: any developments?’

‘The Jacksons think it might help to have a word with him.’

‘He went into the background of everyone involved with a toothcomb. What he doesn’t know about the Jackson killing isn’t worth knowing.’

‘I’ll look him up.’

‘All the best,’ Benson said flatly. ‘All you need to do is break Mahon’s alibi.’

Crane was to remember those words before very long with a wry smile.

T
he
Standard
’s library was both state-of-the-art and user friendly. There was a small room where people wanting to study back numbers could sit at a VDU
undisturbed
.

Crane was rapidly able to key to the relevant editions, scroll through the pages and bring up the reports on Donna’s death. He started with the front page splash, when Liam Patterson, the underwater swimmer, had touched first a plastic bag that seemed full of something hard and uneven, which was connected by a cord to
something
soft and smooth. ‘DONNA’S BODY FOUND’, the headline blared.

There was a quarter-page photo of Donna Jackson’s face. The expert lighting and technique indicated
professionalism
. Maybe the man called Fletcher had taken it. She really had been incredibly attractive. Smooth, silky, shoulder-length hair in a highlighted honey colour, perfect regular teeth, a small, well-shaped nose, big round eyes that would have seemed luminous even without a key light. The eyes riveted. They seemed to hint at an odd soulful quality, a refinement, an innocence even, that seemed well out of synch with what Crane was beginning to learn about her. He held an old envelope over the left side of her face, then transferred it to the right. Each side seemed a perfect, near geometrical match for the other. He’d read that this precision of feature in an already
attractive
woman was an extra subliminal turn-on for men.

The man he kept hearing about, Geoff Anderson, was bylined at the head of the report, and on the ones that followed. They became briefer as the search for the killer went on, and though a man was reported to be ‘helping the police with their enquiries’, no other reference was made to him.

Earlier reports, those published when Donna had simply been missing, included interviews Anderson had had with the Jacksons, plus several with various of Donna’s friends and work mates. He’d described her more than once as a high-spirited and outgoing eighteen-year-old
with dazzling looks, who was highly regarded at the Leaf and Petal garden centre, and quite possibly on the verge of a brilliant career as a fashion model. She liked to be out and about a lot, but had never been in any kind of trouble and had always been seen at home as an ideal and much-loved daughter and sister.

Crane sat back sceptically. It was all too anodyne. He’d been given the impression Anderson had his ear to the ground. The young woman he was writing about could have been any one of the bright kids you could see most nights in the city pubs and clubs. But there’d been a darker side to Donna Jackson. A Donna who was streetwise and needed no lessons in pulling the men. A Donna who seemed to have a dangerous fascination for being handed a bunch of fives. No hint of any of that in Anderson’s reports, though he was said to have researched her
background
intensively. Could that mean he’d taken Connie and Malc’s rose-tinted view of their younger daughter at face value? Acrime reporter supposed to have a hard nose?

‘I’d not read on. They never do get their man.’ Crane turned around. ‘Geoff Anderson, Mr Crane. I saw your name in the book. I’ve heard quite a bit about you.’

Crane gave a crooked smile. ‘None of it good, I daresay.’

‘Terry Jones always speaks very highly of you.’

‘Until my spot of trouble, yes, I know.’

Crane didn’t want to talk about it and Anderson could tell. He perched on the edge of a side table. He looked to be mid-twenties and had fair wavy hair, dark blue eyes, a bluntish nose and a full wide mouth. He was strongly built and near six foot but carried no extra weight. He wore a pale blue poplin shirt, open at the neck, fawn woollen trousers and brown loafers.

‘I don’t see a man in your line looking up the Donna Jackson story out of idle curiosity,’ Anderson said, smiling.

‘I was aiming to contact you, Geoff. Connie and Malc, you obviously know them well, have hired me and want me to see if I can turn up anything new about the killing.’

‘About Bobby Mahon?’

‘Everyone’s keen to write his name on the charge sheet.’

He shrugged. ‘He’s not helped himself. If he’s innocent why not admit where he really was the night she
disappeared
? He certainly wasn’t at home playing three-card brag. I had a go at them myself, Mahon’s pals. Were they really at his place that night? I had a go at the neighbours: brick wall. They said that if the Mahons
said
they were at home that night they were at home, wherever they really were. On the Willows no one messes with the Mahons. But if they weren’t at home where were they, especially master Bobby? Nowhere I could find out.’

‘You really have given it a lot of time,’ Crane said evenly, not wanting to give any hint of the frustration the case was already giving him.

‘The story had legs. A local
cause célèbre
. Just about everyone on the Willows knew her, because of those incredible looks. It was like someone had killed a rare butterfly. It got everyone worried about their own teenage daughters, in case the killer struck again.’

‘Knew her yourself?’

He shook his head. ‘I’d seen her around. I trawl the scene: the pubs, the clubs, the casinos. You couldn’t miss her, seemed to be everywhere. You should have seen her, strutting her stuff with the strobes flickering on her hair. Out of this world. Why do you ask?’

Crane gave him a steady look. ‘It seems to me you’ve
written her up like the girl next door. I’ve already picked up that that wasn’t the case.’

He gave Crane a wry grin. ‘You’re right, it wasn’t. She had a taste for the wild side. Could have been doing flesh-market photos for Fletcher, if not worse, we’ll never know for sure. I’m pretty certain she was screwing around, probably for the loot, but no punter’s going to come forward and put his hand up. On top of that, she played her cards incredibly close, so close even her pals didn’t really know what she was up to, even if they had a bloody good idea.’

‘Why not write some of that up, or at least hint at it? She certainly wasn’t helping herself to stay out of trouble.’

Anderson watched him in a brief silence. ‘The wench was dead, Frank, and I’d spent a
lot
of time with Connie and Malc. They had such a shed-load of misery on their backs I felt it would finish them off if there was any hint their beautiful girl was less than perfect. I couldn’t prove anything, it was all hints and murmurs, after all, so I wrote her up as they wanted her to be seen. You’re looking cynical.’ He smiled in the engaging way he had. Crane guessed it must have got him across many a hostile doorstep.

He said, ‘When did a seasoned reporter ever worry too much what anyone thought if he believed he was telling the truth?’

Anderson shook his head, still smiling. ‘You don’t miss too many tricks do you? All right, I left out the dodgy bits. And why, because the editor wanted it that way, and he said the public wanted it that way. You’ve seen her picture,
no one
wanted to believe that that innocent-looking slip of a kid was anything other than she seemed. The killing was
big local news. It was also a circulation booster. So I didn’t bend the truth, I just left bits out. We call it editing.’

‘And that’s why you’re so keen for a result? Another circulation boost? Benson says you follow it up on a weekly basis.’

The reporter was again silent for a short time. ‘Between you and me, Frank,’ he said finally, ‘I see London as my next career move, working for one of the nationals. Sounds a bit of a cliché, I know. And whether Donna’s killer’s nailed or not, I’m aiming to write the big one, the in-depth feature about Donna’s life and times. The Willows is falling apart and we know why: unemployment, broken homes, drugs, teenage pregnancies, apathy. The situation with the inner cities has been written up endlessly. Well, I want my feature to be based on Donna’s short tragic life. Donna will symbolize the Willows’ decline and the Willows in the end destroying one of its rarest possessions. Even if it wasn’t Mahon who killed her, I’m certain her fate was dictated by her environment. I want this article to touch the spot, maybe even taken up and syndicated. It could do wonders for my CV.’

Crane nodded. That had to be the real reason he’d not wanted to write up Donna as a streetwise tramp, or even hint at it. He needed an apparently artless innocent to contrast with the slum the Willows was becoming. Journalists were an odd breed. He accepted that they had feelings like everyone else, yet people’s tragedies were their livelihood and their ambitions were based on them. Though Crane had to remind himself that he also was using Donna’s fate as his own livelihood, if not a welcome change from routine.

‘Did you have any dealings with Mahon?’ he asked.

‘I talked to him when they let him go. Asked him about their relationship and whether he suspected anyone himself. Tried to catch him out. Fat chance, if two bobbies hammering away couldn’t break his story. He just banged on about it not being him, he’d been at home, the same old bullshit. Near to tears at times.’

‘I’d heard he could get emotional.’

‘You aim to see him yourself?’

‘I’ll have to. If I can’t break that alibi of his I can forget it. He just might
not
be guilty, but there’s no point in looking any further until I know for certain. Where do I find him? The Goose and Guinea?’

‘I’ll go with you, if you like. He’s always there early doors, except when he’s sitting quietly at home the one night his girlfriend ends up at the bottom of a reservoir.’

Crane’s instinct was to turn him down. He worked alone and Anderson could be a distraction. On the other hand, it might help if the ice was broken with Mahon by someone who knew him. ‘You can find the time?’

‘No problem. Mahon might think he’s off the hook now. Could give him a nice little turn, me drifting back into his life with a PI.’

The sort of turn that might just get him to let something slip.

‘Free this evening?’

‘Unless something comes up between now and then. I’ll contact you.’

‘Thanks a lot.’ Crane gave him his card, gave a final glance at the VDU, then cleared the screen. ‘I’m finished here.’

They walked from the library and halted at the top of the steps, Crane to leave, Anderson to return to the big
open-plan office he shared with the other journalists, from where the soft endless sound of phone bells could just be heard.

‘Look,’ Anderson said, ‘there’s not much I haven’t ferreted out about Donna and who she knew. I’ll do anything I can to help. And, like you, I don’t work nine to five.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Crane said evenly, still not keen to get too involved with a reporter who would very much have his own agenda. At the same time, he had to admit that Anderson was sitting on gold-plated information it would take him hours to put together himself.

They stood on the balcony overlooking the reception area. A sepia-tinted wall of glass encased the ultra modern complex and silent cars and buses seemed to float along the road below, their windows and brightwork flashing in the afternoon sun. ‘It’s not just the brownie points, Frank,’ Anderson said, as if he’d sensed what Crane had been thinking earlier. ‘I really did feel sorry about the kid. We all did. She wasn’t a very nice girl, but I honestly think she was a victim of her background. The Willows has a lot to answer for.’

Just then, three young women came out of the
open-plan
room, all prettyish and cheerful looking. ‘Geoff, you’re back?’ one of them said. ‘Now you see him, now you don’t. You are coming to the Tav, aren’t you?’

‘Darlings, how
could
I refuse?’ he said, giving them his peculiarly endearing smile. Apart from being good looking he was also fanciable, going by the way they
clustered
round him. Crane knew the two things didn’t always go together. One of the women, who had green eyes, rosy cheeks and black curly hair, was clearly mad about the bloke.

‘All right,’ she said, ‘see you there then, and if anything should pop up let’s hope it’s nothing to do with work.’

‘Saucy.…’

They went off giggling, the dark-haired one turning back for a last glance.

‘Tell you what,’ Anderson said, still grinning faintly, ‘it’s a custom here, meeting up at the Tavern, whoever’s around, about six. Your office is in the Old Quarter, why not drop in? I’ll know by then if I’m free and we can go on to the Goose.’

The Tavern occupied the ground floor of what had once been a wool warehouse. It had become known as the Glass-house. There was glass everywhere, along the walls and the bar facings. The tables were glass, the chandeliers dripped shards of it, partitions had frosted glass panels. It drew a young crowd.

Eight or nine people sat at one of the oblong central tables when Crane walked in, and he could hear the rapid gun fire of Anderson’s voice. ‘Some things just are,’ he was saying. ‘There’s no rational explanation, they just
are
. Why are women called Dawn always overweight and have badly bleached hair? Have you ever known a man called Bernard to be entirely right in the head? Have you ever been able to watch any film that had heart in the title? See what I mean?’

‘How about wind?’ Crane said from behind him. ‘I have the same trouble with films that have wind in the title.
Gone with the
being the exception that proves the rule.’