No Name Lane (Howard Linskey) (11 page)

‘You’ll get me shot if I do,’ said the bobby. ‘Get your arse down the hill and ask them. Maybe they’ll tell you something.’

Whatever they’d found it must have been important, judging by the number of police officers moving backwards and forwards between the field and the school building, many of them dressed in protective clothing to ensure they did not pollute the crime scene. A large white canopy had been erected to keep out prying eyes, while a JCB stood idle by the spot.

Tom approached a detective. ‘I can’t tell you anything at this stage,’ he was told firmly. ‘This is a crime scene, give us room to do our job,’ and when Tom tried to ask a question he was told, ‘and I do mean now.’ The response was so
emphatic there seemed little point in arguing, so Tom did as he was told, walking back up the hill away from the scene. He still couldn’t say with any certainty whether there were human remains under that white tent or if something else had aroused police suspicion. He could hardly come up with a news story based on a rumour overheard by Colin.

Tom hung around the periphery, taking pictures of the activity on his old Olympus camera. It was ten years out of date but still worked and suited him because it was small enough to slip into a jacket pocket, along with its compact telephoto lens. He spotted her then, as she walked down one side of the school building, questioning a detective who was batting her enquiries away. Even from this distance and without hearing a word, he knew she’d be getting the usual, non-committal bullshit replies with nothing ruled in or out, by a police force that was becoming highly sensitive to journalistic criticism right now.

Tom raised his camera and took a picture of Helen. Maybe she sensed it, for she turned to look straight at him before asking the detective another question. Tom went back to the school gates and the uniformed police constable.

‘Thanks,’ he told the bobby, ‘I got everything I need,’ before adding, ‘How long will you be stuck here then?’ as if he was just passing the time of day. ‘These things must take an age.’

‘They do,’ confided the constable, ‘I’ll probably be here all day.’

‘Really? Will you not even get a lunch break? Do you want me to grab you a sandwich from the shop round the corner?’

‘One
of the lads will sort me out,’ he replied, ‘but thanks anyway.’

‘No bother,’ said Tom. ‘Oh shit.’

‘What’s up?’ asked the copper.

‘I forgot to ask who found it,’ said Tom, ‘and I don’t really want to go back down there again and annoy your lot when they’re busy. You don’t need them in a bad mood, today of all days.’

‘Too right,’ said the constable, ‘it was the JCB driver. He was flattening the land for the new school building. His digger went into the soil and up it came.’

Tom wondered how far he could push this without giving himself away. ‘Must have been a shock?’ he offered.

‘You’re telling me. It’s not every day you accidentally dig up an old corpse.’

Tom felt a surge of excitement. He now had confirmation that a body had been found on the school grounds and, if it was old, it couldn’t have been Michelle Summers. He almost had a story but he would need more than that.

‘It’s one to tell his mates down the pub I suppose,’ and the copper smiled at this. ‘Must have been there a while?’ Tom ventured.

The constable sniffed, ‘Didn’t they tell you that?’ There was suspicion in his words.

‘They didn’t have to,’ said Tom casually, ‘if he dug it out of Cappers Field. It’s not much more than marsh half the year, always has been.’

The constable seemed satisfied with that explanation. ‘They won’t know exactly how long he’s been down there until the forensic guys have had a prod but they’re
guessing fifty, maybe sixty years or more. Who knows whether we’ll ever be able to identify the guy?’

‘It’s difficult when he’s been down there that long if there isn’t anything distinctive about him.’

‘Apart from the knife in his back, you mean,’ and Tom experienced another thrill as he was given this key information.

‘Shame he didn’t have a wallet or something. Still, a village this size, someone’s got to know who he is. Here one minute and gone the next. I mean, it can get a bit rough round here when the pubs are turning out but people don’t usually get stabbed in the back.’

‘I don’t know about witnesses,’ the young constable was dismissive. ‘They’ll all be coffin dodgers: senile or dead already. Most of them don’t know what they did yesterday, let alone half a century ago.’

‘Oh well, good luck with it.’ Tom thought it best to make a quick exit before anyone witnessed him tapping the constable for information.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

He didn’t like swearing. There was no need for it but he had to force himself not to utter a curse word as they narrowly failed to beat the lights. He’d been going a little too quickly and had to brake harder than usual to avoid passing through on a red and his daughter made a big deal out of it, as she did with pretty much everything now she was almost a teenager.

‘Woah!’ said Lindsay, as if the car was an out-of-control horse. He would have chastised her for being overly dramatic but he didn’t have the energy, having already quarrelled with her bitch of a mother when he’d come to pick her up that afternoon. This wasn’t even an official visit. Instead he had to take Lindsay shopping for school shoes because her mother insisted this was somehow his responsibility, even though he was already giving his ex-wife virtually all of his money.

Now they would have to wait ages because these lights were on a crossroads and they always took an eternity to marshal cars from all directions.

‘Dad?’ Lindsay asked him in that sing-song voice she always used when she wanted something, turning one syllable into two, ‘Da-ad.’

‘What?’

‘When I come and see you for my next visit,’ she began and he felt irritated because this one had barely begun and
she was already talking about the next, ‘would it be okay if I had money instead of a present?’

‘Money? Why do you need money?’ he couldn’t conceive of a reason.

‘So I can get something I really want,’ she told him, ‘clothes and stuff.’

‘We’ll have to see.’ He hoped his tone would be enough to convey his disappointment with her and she’d drop it.

‘Oh go on,’ she’d gone all smiley then, almost flirty in tone, which made him want to cuff her across the face with the back of his hand, ‘it
is
my birthday,’ she reminded him and for a moment he was struck by how close she was to turning into one of them. A dirty slag, using her smiles and her eyes and her cajoling ways to get what she wanted. He took a deep breath and tried to blot out the thought but he was sure it would all start soon enough. First there’d be boys, then grown men. There’d be tears and manipulation until she got what she wanted and then his daughter would be just like all of the others. It was an unbearable notion.

‘I said, we’ll see,’ he snapped and this time she had the good sense to shut up about it.

How did it begin, he wondered … with the first plea for a new dolly? As early as that? And it would go on forever; a new house, then a new kitchen to put in the house, new clothes and jewellery; never satisfied. Right up until the day she grew tired of her husband and lay down and did disgusting things with the next man, just like her slag of a mother had done. For a fleeting moment he was revisited by the image of Samantha lying on their living
room floor with their neighbour’s hand wedged down the front of her jeans, all the way down into her knickers, touching her most private place, sticking his fingers in her as if it meant absolutely nothing, like they were simply shaking hands. Disgusting, dirty, filthy … and what had
he
done when he had discovered her lying there?

Nothing.

And, as she had struggled to remove their neighbour’s coarse hand while she sat upright and tried to compose herself, still he had said nothing, even as he watched his whole life slide away from him in a moment.

Paul, their neighbour, had walked right past him and out of the front door without a word.

Even then; nothing.

He had realised it almost immediately. He wasn’t a man. Not any more. Thanks to her. He had been one before but she derailed him, knocked him off-kilter, emasculated him to such a degree that he couldn’t even raise a hand against the man who had debased his home and debauched his wife. The one consolation he clung to was that they would both go to hell and burn in agony forever for what they had done to him. For it is set down in the commandments, written by the finger of God himself on stone tablets, that he will judge all adulterers.

And when it was over she didn’t even look at him, couldn’t probably, wouldn’t say a word either, just pulled up the zipper on her jeans then walked into the kitchen and got on with doing the dishes, eyes fixed forwards. He had watched her for a moment, his mind racing, a sick feeling in his stomach, for he couldn’t think of anything to say. In that moment when he found his wife and his
neighbour together he realised everything he had ever believed until that point was a lie.

He had perhaps been guilty of placing his wife on a pedestal, he knew that now, but wasn’t that what a husband was supposed to do: love her, adore her, worship her? She had proven herself so completely unworthy of that love. His eyes had gone to the knife block and, for a moment, he had seriously contemplated taking the largest one and plunging the sharp point of it deep into the soft flesh at the back of her neck. He was sure he would have done it too if it hadn’t been for little Lindsay. He couldn’t have left her with a dead mother and a father behind bars for life.

In the end he had been unable to put words together to form a sentence. His voice had broken and he had asked her, ‘why?’ in a high-pitched, whiny voice he hated, for he was on the verge of tears.

‘Jesus Christ!’ she slammed down a plate on the work top. How could she be angry? ‘You have to ask “why?” You have no idea, have you? You’re not a man, you’re a bloody robot.’ And she’d burst into tears then, ‘I am so trapped!’ she concluded before storming out of the kitchen and marching upstairs to their room, slamming the door behind her like an ungrateful teenager.

He slept on the couch that night, though of course he didn’t sleep at all, just lay awake torturing himself, replaying images of his neighbour’s grubby hand down his wife’s knickers, his fat fingers wedged deep inside her. He churned it over and over in his mind, wondering how many times they had done this while he’d been working late. How many times had he returned from a shift to find
her calmly preparing dinner with another man’s seed dripping out of her? Was their neighbour the only one or was there a queue of men turning him into a laughing stock? How many more had there been? The realisation that he would never know hit him with the suddenness of grief and he knew there was no going back for him.

He never returned to the marital bed.

The terms of the divorce had been the real scandal. He’d agreed to her suggestion that they stay ‘civilised’ for the sake of their daughter, even though he felt anything but towards her. Instead of ‘my whore of a wife’s adultery’ the grounds became ‘irreconcilable differences’, a helpful suggestion by her solicitor to prevent their daughter from discovering that her mother’s a dirty slag. So he had gone along with the idea, but he had been an idiot. They had used his wholly natural concern for his daughter against him and taken the little girl from him. It was decided she would stay with her mother and he was ordered to move out of the family home; his home, the one he had spent the best part of his free time fixing up. He had not been the one who had spread his legs for a stranger in that house, so why did his wife get to keep it?

But he was the one who had to pay for his wife and daughter to have a life as good as the one they’d always known, while he lived off beans on toast and fried eggs in a shitty one-bedroom flat because he had never been much of a cook and hadn’t the money for anything decent.
They
were doing okay, because almost all of his money went on them. They could afford the mortgage and the heating and to put good food on their plates and, before long, just when he thought his resentment couldn’t reach
a higher level, the bitch-whore-slag started ‘seeing someone’. And how had he found this out? His own daughter had told him. ‘Mam’s got a boyfriend,’ she’d said matter-of-factly, as if her mother had just bought a new pair of shoes. He didn’t know why he was so shocked. He already knew she was a whore but perhaps he hoped she might not be so blatant about it while she was living off his money.

He was handing over nearly all of his wages so she could raise his daughter without him, paying for a house that another man was screwing his wife in. Where was the justice in that? It made him sick to his stomach whenever he thought of them doing it in his home, with his daughter asleep in the next room, his ex-wife rutting like a pig with a new man. It made him want to kill them both.

‘Dad? Dad!’ Lindsay was calling and she was agitated. He hadn’t heard her at first. Sometimes he got so lost in his dark thoughts about his ex-wife that he let his coffee go cold or forgot there was food in the oven, until an acrid smell of burnt plastic reminded him that his supermarket ready meal was ruined. He became dimly aware of a sound then; a continuous jarring noise that was competing for his attention along with his daughter’s urgent voice.