No Name Lane (Howard Linskey) (2 page)

‘I understand.’ If she was legit then this could be just the kind of kiss-and-tell story the paper might be interested in but who really cared if some town councillor, minor actor or daytime game-show host had been dipping his wick where he shouldn’t? ‘Is he someone I will have heard of?’

‘Everybody has heard of him.’

‘He’s
not a politician then?’ The public were notoriously awful at recognising politicians unless they were either the Prime Minister or some lunatic with flog-em and hang-em views that turned them into a ‘character’, and eventually, a national treasure.

She must have grown tired of his questions. ‘He’s only in the bloody government, all right?’ she snapped at him, ‘the cabinet. Now how much is that worth to you?’

Tom Carney straightened. He gripped his pen firmly in his hand and let it hover over the page of his notepad. If this woman really was telling the truth and she could prove it then this was dynamite. The Tory government with its back-to-basics, family values had a cabinet member who was shagging hookers? It couldn’t be better. ‘Quite a bit I should think,’ he said in a voice that was a lot calmer than he was, ‘if you can prove it. Now, why don’t we meet to discuss this further?’

‘I asked how much,’ her voice was hard, with a trace of fear behind it.

At this point, Tom wasn’t about to let her know his true status at The Paper, a probationer on a six-month contract so the editor could see if he ‘had the chops’ to make it there, and so he blagged it. ‘Top end of five figures, six even, maybe, but you have to be able to prove it.’ There was a silence on the line that told him she was still interested. ‘So why don’t you tell me where you want to meet and I’ll be there. That’s what you want isn’t it, to sell your story?’

Maybe it was the use of the word
sell
that finally landed her.

‘All right,’ she said.

CHAPTER TWO

Girl Number Five

Six Weeks Later

It had taken Michelle Summers fifteen long and singularly uneventful years to realise it but tonight, as she stood shivering in the dark, beneath the rotting timbers of the ancient bus shelter, while the rain beat down in a steady, staccato rhythm on the roof above her, she finally acknowledged the sad and simple fact: she hated her mother. Hated … hated …
hated
her … the stupid, fat cow.

If her mam ever said anything to her these days it would start with the words, ‘you used to’. ‘You used to be so nice … you used to be fun … you used to be such a pretty little thing,’ implying of course that she was no longer any of these things. Michelle Summers had little enough self-confidence without her own mother repeatedly reminding her that she wasn’t nice, pretty or fun any more.

Michelle watched as rivulets of water rolled down the inner walls of the shelter till they met in pools on the rutted, grey concrete floor. The spreading water forced Michelle out of the bus stop’s innermost corners and the wind whistled through the wooden shelter. In Michelle’s view, she lived in a shabby village in the middle of nowhere, at the arse end of the north east of England, and there was nothing that wasn’t at least a bus ride away,
even her home. Michelle swore that when she was finally old enough, she would leave Great Middleton forever, because there was absolutely nothing great about it. Everybody knew everyone else, everybody’s parents knew everyone else’s parents and everybody minded everyone else’s business. You couldn’t get away with anything in Great Middleton.

Michelle had arrived at the shelter just in time to see the penultimate bus of the night pulling asthmatically up the hill ahead of her, farting black smoke out of its rear end, as it forced itself slowly over the summit like the little-engine-that-could. Now she was glad she had given in when her mam insisted on her wearing a coat, even though it covered the cool top she had worn that night and the body that was developing very nicely, thank you very much. Even her mam was jealous of that. ‘Eh, I wish I had a flat stomach like you our Shell,’ she’d say, ‘and a bum that small. It’s like a peach!’

Denny had certainly noticed the change in her this past year, the dirty perv. Michelle hated her stepdad almost as much as her mam and loathed the way they both called her ‘Shell’, like she was something washed up on a beach. With a bit of luck her stepdad would be out in his lorry by now. He did more and more night jobs these days, ‘to beat the traffic’, he said, but she wondered if he was just as sick of living in their house as Michelle. Her mam would likely be asleep on the couch, a lukewarm gin and orange cordial congealing on the table next to her. It would be half-drunk, just like her mam, and Michelle could creep quietly upstairs to her room.

It wasn’t a very nice thing to admit you hated your
mother. Michelle knew that. She was supposed to love her mam, go out on shopping trips with her, share jokes, talk to her about boyfriends and stuff, buy her chocolates on Mother’s Day, that sort of thing. She knew girls who did have that kind of relationship.

‘My mam’s pretty cool,’ they’d say, ‘she talks about sex and everything, she’s going to put me on the pill when I’m older.’ But Michelle wasn’t going to talk about sex with her mam, not in this life. Her sole pronouncement on the subject, once her daughter had started seeing Darren ‘Daz’ Tully on a fairly regular basis, was to mutter ‘don’t forget, Shell, nothing below the waistline.’

She didn’t want to go shopping with her mam either, the fat cow would probably only want to buy chocolates, crisps or gin. The woman had completely given up. She wondered what Denny saw in her at all. Really, did they even still do it any more? They were both over forty after all. Maybe they just didn’t bother. Perhaps you didn’t when you were that old.

That would explain why Denny was such a perv; always hanging round outside the bathroom with that stupid grin on his face. The first time wasn’t long after her fifteenth birthday and she’d come out of there with only a bath towel wrapped round her. There he was, standing on the landing like he’d just that minute climbed the stairs, but she knew differently. ‘Whoops,’ he’d said, like it was all a big accident, but his eyes had given him away; they’d lit up like a kid’s on Christmas morning, and he had definitely given her the once over, just like the boys at the youth club; his glance travelling south from top to bottom; face, tits then bits. Michelle had wanted to retch. She’d rushed
past him to her room, ignoring his ‘night, night, pet,’ before slamming the door hard behind her. Men were dogs, all of them. She’d learned that much already.

Now she didn’t dare go anywhere near the bathroom unless she was fully dressed in neck-to-ankle PJs and towelling dressing gown. Not that it mattered these days, as the house was colder than a morgue. Heating being just one more thing they couldn’t afford.

She’d told Suze all about Denny.

‘He probably thinks about you when he plays with his thingy,’ her best mate had offered matter-of-factly.

‘Suze!’ Michelle shouted, ‘you’re disgusting!’ But she’d laughed when she’d said it.

Suze was still laughing, ‘I bet he does you know, loads. I reckon that’s all he does.’ She had a point. It had been a long while since Michelle had been disturbed in the night by her mam and Denny rattling the head board. The first time they’d done that Michelle was still a little girl and she’d woken abruptly, filled with concern for her mam’s safety because the thumping against the wall was accompanied by moaning sounds. Dull with sleep, she’d wandered into their room, only to discover Denny lying on top of her mother, who screamed when she saw Michelle. Denny shouted then swore and Michelle turned on her heels and fled. Her mother walked into her room moments later, in her ratty old dressing gown. She sat down next to Michelle on the corner of her bed and explained that there was nothing to be frightened of, that Uncle Denny was giving Mummy a special hug and they had both screamed because Michelle had startled them. Not long after that Michelle was moved into the smaller,
draughtier back bedroom, ‘Uncle Denny’ began living with them on a permanent basis and a date for the wedding was set. Things had been okay with Denny before then, when he was trying to wheedle his way into her mother’s life by taking her and Michelle on trips to the pictures or the zoo, buying her ice creams and dollies. All that soon stopped ‘once he’d got his boots under the kitchen table’, as her Nan put it. There were no more trips, precious few presents and the ice creams became less and less frequent. Money was ‘tight’, her mother and stepfather repeatedly explained to her, though she suspected it was actually her new stepdad that was tight.

Michelle was snapped from her thoughts quite suddenly by a fresh torrent of rain water that broke free from the wind-rattled guttering and tumbled to the ground in front of her, splashing her in the process. Why could she not have been born somewhere else, like London or even twenty miles away in Newcastle? At least there was stuff to do in a city. There was nowt to do in a village except smoke cigs and get felt by boys round the back of the village hall. That was all Darren Tully wanted to do. They’d been going together for a little over two months now and already Michelle could only vaguely remember how excited she had been when he first asked her out. Even Suze had confirmed that Darren Tully was officially ‘lush’ and for once in her life she’d felt special and wanted. But the reality of going out with Daz had been quite different from her imaginings. Tonight had been typical. There was always a bit of snogging, he made that much effort at least, but the persistent thrusting of his tongue in and out
of her mouth and his tobacco-flavoured kisses behind the village hall were hardly the stuff of a girl’s dreams. The continuous groping always ended with her pushing his hands away and him muttering ‘You are so tight,’ like she was the last virgin in the village, before informing her that he’d have to dump her soon unless he started ‘getting summat’.

‘I have to get summat. There’s no point if I don’t get owt,’ he’d informed her that evening, as if this was a suggestion so romantic she would never be able to resist it.

Boys were dogs too.

Daz barely glanced at her as he climbed eagerly into a friend’s mam’s car, the offer of a lift home to the neighbouring town proving too good for him to pass up in this weather. She’d watched him go, wondering to herself whether she should perhaps give in to him, in order to keep him, or if he really wasn’t worth the trouble.

Michelle glanced at her watch. The last bus would be here soon, if it was going to come at all. It was often cancelled without explanation but the weather was foul and it would take a fair while to walk home. There’d been a lot of stuff in the papers about young girls going missing lately too. Some of them had been found later. It made her shudder when she thought about how it must have felt to be them during their last moments. Her mother always drummed it into her, ‘Never come home on your own Michelle, it’s not safe, always get the bus or make sure that boyfriend-of-yours …’ she never called Darren by his name, ‘… walks you home if he’s s’posed to be seeing you.’ That was a laugh. There were few things more dangerous than allowing Daz Tully to walk you home.

Michelle
began to tug absent-mindedly at the St Christopher medallion around her neck, stretching its silver chain. The rain took on a new level of determination, whipped down onto the shelter’s roof by a malicious, swirling wind, which prevented her from hearing the man, the drops tumbling onto the wooden roof of the shelter masking his footsteps. The first sign of his presence was a slight change in the light, an almost imperceptible darkening of the path in front of her as the glow from one of the street lamps caught his back, casting a shadow that changed shape as he drew near. She looked up just as he reached the shelter. Back lit as he was by the street lamps, she could hardly make out his features. Michelle started, sensing danger but unsure of what to do about it. When he finally spoke, the sound of his voice made her jump. It was deep and undeniably masculine and she realised she was holding her breath, fear and anticipation competing inside her.

‘Hello,’ he said.

CHAPTER THREE