No Name Lane (Howard Linskey) (19 page)

Bradshaw slowly rose to his feet and he hung over Denny like a black cloud. ‘I wasn’t sure until just now,’ he told the terrified lorry driver, ‘I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt until I watched your reaction to your …’ he seemed to be searching for the right words, ‘dirty little secret,’ and he leaned even closer, ‘and then I knew, I just knew. You’re a wrong ’un. You’re hiding something and we know what it is. What have you done with her? What have you done with Michelle?’

‘I …’ Denny’s voice was a squeak and he cleared his throat. ‘I want a lawyer.’

Vincent and Bradshaw exchanged looks.

‘No
need for that Denny,’ said Vincent amiably, ‘we’re done, for now.’

‘We’ve been sitting here for over an hour,’ she told him.

‘That’s journalism.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ Helen said, ‘journalism is writing things. Staking out people’s houses, waiting for them to leave is police work or private eye stuff.’

‘You could try knocking on their door but I suspect that might not work. I speak from experience,’ Tom reminded her.

They sat for a while in silence, watching Betty Turner’s house through the windscreen of Tom’s car.

‘How does he do it?’ asked Tom suddenly, as if Helen was privy to his innermost thoughts.

‘Do what?’

‘Get them to come with him,’ he shrugged and she realised he was talking about the Kiddy-Catcher. ‘They’re not little girls. They are ten or eleven years old. They know not to talk to strangers. All girls do at that age. Don’t they? Didn’t you?’

‘I suppose,’ she thought for a moment, ‘yes I did know at that age, of course I did.’

‘You would,’ he said. ‘The most naïve girl in the world would know not to get into a strange man’s car,’ and he looked at her, ‘wouldn’t she?’

Helen nodded. She tried to remember how much she really know about men and rape and murder when she was twelve years old. Not much but enough, even then. It was drummed into you. You did not speak to strange men
or get in their cars and go for a drive. If you did, something awful could happen.

‘I don’t know. Unless he is snatching them from the streets, bundling them into his car …’

‘No,’ he said with the kind of finality that brooked no objection, ‘no struggles, no witnesses, nobody has ever reported seeing the Kiddy-Catcher dragging a lass into a car. Not once. Despite what people say, if a young girl screams loud enough, people come running. Of course they do.’

‘So how is he doing it?’

‘Dunno,’ he admitted, ‘and why have the police not found Michelle’s body yet? All of the others were found quickly. He doesn’t burn or bury them, just leaves them out in countryside and waits for the first person to find them.’

‘Perhaps the spot is more isolated and nobody has stumbled across her yet.’

‘Or he still has her – or she isn’t a victim of the Kiddy-Catcher at all. Perhaps someone else took her or she just disappeared.’

‘People don’t just disappear,’ she said, ‘not like that.’

‘Yeah they do. People disappear all the time, loads of them. You just don’t notice it. No one does. You know how many people were reported missing last year in this country?’

‘No.’

‘Guess,’ he urged her.

‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

‘Try, you’re an educated lady. How many people do you
think just upped and disappeared into thin air, leaving their friends and families with absolutely no clue to their whereabouts or even if they are alive or dead.’

‘A lot I should imagine,’ she answered, ‘it must be more than we would think, so I’m going for three thousand.’

‘Not even close.’

Her eyes widened at that, ‘and she thought for a moment, recalibrating her expectations, ‘forty thousand then.’

He shook his head. ‘More than two hundred thousand.’

She seemed genuinely shocked. ‘I’d no idea it was so many.’

‘We tend to think of it as teenagers running off to London and getting mixed up with drugs or prostitution but they come from all ages and walks of life. Some come back within a few days or weeks but others disappear for years. You get middle-aged guys who crack under the pressure of a job or a mortgage and they just vanish.’

‘Leaving their poor wives to pick up the pieces.’

‘Women disappear too.’

‘Bet it’s mostly men.’

‘Not always,’ and his mood seemed to darken at that.

‘You have an example?’ she asked him. ‘I’ll bet it’s the exception that proves the rule.’ She wasn’t going to let him get away with thinking that women were as likely to run off and abandon their families as men.

‘Yes, I do,’ Tom said. ‘My mother.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Helen
felt like a complete fool. In her keenness to challenge Tom Carney’s prejudices, she had gone charging in with both feet and now she was mortified. ‘I didn’t realise …’ She began, but he interrupted her.

‘How could you?’ he asked reasonably.

She tried to continue but he put a finger to his lips then pointed out of the window. Betty’s front door had opened and three stocky men, aged between forty and fifty, emerged, including the son who had ejected Tom.

‘Barry, Mark and Frankie,’ Tom said, ‘which means the only person left in that house should be Betty Turner.’

‘But you’re not sure.’

‘I’m as sure as I can be,’ he said.

‘That’s not very comforting.’

‘They’re probably off to sign on,’ Tom said, as the three men climbed into an ancient red Datsun Sunny and drove away.

‘What if they’ve just gone round the corner for a newspaper or some cigarettes?’

‘The Turner clan can’t read and they’d never run out of fags,’ he told her with conviction. ‘Go on, off you go.’ Then he added, ‘Better be quick, mind, just in case.’ Helen sighed and got out of the car. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I told you, I’ve got your back.’

It was as if Tom’s visit had never happened. As soon as
Helen explained who she was, Betty Turner admitted her. They sat opposite one another in the old lady’s front room. When Helen asked about her early-hours visit to the old vicarage, Betty did not disappoint.

‘Mary bloody Collier? She’s no better than she ought to be.’ Betty was using the understated code of the elderly Northern gossip, leaving her listener to fill in the gaps but giving enough of a hint for Helen to draw the right conclusion.

‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Helen.

‘The headmaster’s wife … with her airs and graces … thinks she’s Lady Docker.’ Betty fell silent again as if she had said her piece.

Helen prompted her. ‘What about Mary?’

‘Vicar’s daughter,’ she mumbled, ‘had them elocution lessons and called herself a teacher but we knew what she was,’ she said it like Mary Collier was a secret the village owned.

‘And what was she?’ asked Helen.

Betty carried on as if she was talking to herself and Helen wasn’t in the room, ‘Gadding about like that when she was supposed to be nearly wed, making a show of herself.’

‘Gadding about? Who was she gadding about with?’

‘Sean, of course,’ snapped Betty, as if she had just mentioned this and Helen had forgotten already.

‘Why don’t you tell me all about that?’ asked Helen.

Tom had been waiting in the car for a good ten minutes. He’d tried to phone The Paper three times on his mobile but the signal was too weak at this end of the village,
rendering it useless. He gave up then glanced in his side mirror as another car came into view. This time it was a red Datsun Sunny. ‘Oh shit,’ he said.

The Turner brothers hadn’t been gone long and now Tom didn’t know what to do. His first instinct was to intervene to make sure Helen was all right. Catching a journalist from the local paper in their house wouldn’t please them but maybe they’d go lighter on a woman. However, knowing she was working with a man who had already been thrown violently out through their front door might provoke them into a more extreme reaction, so maybe he should let her try and talk her way out of this one. ‘Damn it,’ he said, banging the steering wheel with his fist in frustration but electing to stay in his car for now.

Tom watched as the three brothers went into their home and closed the door.

Then he waited.

And waited.

Moments passed, which became minutes. Tom had his window down listening intently, but he could hear no raised voices, no cries of alarm from Helen or shouts of rage from the Turner brothers. He would give her five minutes, no more. Then he would bang on their door and somehow force them to release her, whatever the consequences. He couldn’t even phone the police, thanks to the non-existent mobile signal.

Every few seconds he glanced at his watch, so he would know when five minutes had passed. He lasted four before he was out of his car. He walked quickly, eyes fixed firmly on their front door. Tom crossed the road and was almost at their front gate when the door suddenly opened and he
stepped to one side, shielding himself behind the bushes that ran between the Turner’s garden and a neighbour’s house. It took two words to banish the worry from his mind.

‘Thank you,’ Helen said brightly, as she stepped onto the path and the door was closed quietly behind her. Tom waited for Helen to spot him as she came through the front gate.

‘I thought you had my back?’ She frowned at him.

‘I did,’ he said. ‘I do. I was just giving you a few minutes to see if you could wriggle out of it.’ Helen looked sceptical. ‘What happened?’

‘They weren’t happy to start with,’ she said, ‘when they realised I was a journalist.’

‘What did you say to them?’

‘I told them I was doing a piece for the
Messenger
on the effects of long-term unemployment on hard-working families.’

‘ “Hard-working families”?’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of those round here but I wouldn’t include the Turner clan amongst them.’

‘They seemed flattered to be asked,’ she confirmed. ‘I got quotes,’ and she held up her notebook to prove it.

They crossed the road and climbed back into Tom’s car. ‘Did you get anything out of Betty?’

‘I only had a few minutes with her but she did confirm our man was not a local. If she is telling the truth and isn’t entirely barking then Sean was an Irishman who visited Great Middleton one summer a few years before the war.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘I
never got that far but, according to Betty, Sean was her beau; her first love in fact.’

‘Really?’

‘She was smitten,’ confirmed Helen, ‘and guess who stole him away from her?’

Tom smiled, ‘Mary Collier.’

‘Got it in one.’

‘I knew this would make a great story,’ he said, beaming. ‘So what happened? Why does Betty blame Mary for Sean’s death?’

‘That’s when it all got a bit vague. Betty is old and more than a little confused. She told me “Mary Collier killed him” then a moment later, she said “as good as killed him”, I pressed her, but she wasn’t making much sense at that point, then her sons came back. I don’t think she really knows what happened to Sean.’

‘Damn it.’

‘I did get one thing though,’ she said as he started the engine.

‘What?’

‘His full name. The body-in-the-field is Sean Donnellan.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Roddy
Moncur took in the sight of Helen and Tom standing on his doorstep together. ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, eh?’ he said, then he invited them in.

‘Sean Donnellan?’ he repeated when they gave him the Irishman’s name a few moments later. They were sitting at Roddy’s kitchen table surrounded by the detritus of his disordered life, quietly hoping. Helen and Tom watched him expectantly, waiting for Roddy to blow the case wide open and singlehandedly solve the mystery of the body-in-the-field.

‘He came to the village before the war,’ Helen prompted, ‘we don’t know why.’

Roddy shook his head slowly. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, before finally admitting, ‘it doesn’t ring any bells.’ Then he pointed towards the front of the house. ‘Come on,’ he told them.

They followed Roddy down the hallway. ‘Where are we going?’ Helen asked.

‘To consult the oracle,’ replied Roddy. He climbed the stairs with a ‘mind how you go’ over his shoulder. They stepped gingerly around piles of old books stacked helpfully on the stairs in Roddy’s own unique brand of filing system before he found them a more permanent home.