No Name Lane (Howard Linskey) (3 page)

Michelle’s mother snored so hard she woke herself up. Fiona’s head lolled onto one shoulder and she opened her eyes suddenly, blinking at the room in a panic as she attempted to get her bearings. Shit, fallen asleep on the couch again. She looked at the little brass carriage clock on the mantel, nearly one o’clock. Bugger it. She should have gone to bed hours ago instead of opting for that last little glass of wine. Now she’d have a thick head in the morning and work would be even more of a drudge than usual.

Fiona had thought that switching from gin to wine had been a good idea. It would get her off the hard stuff and make her little evening tipple seem that bit more innocent. She didn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea about it; like her dear husband for example, or her delightful daughter, both of whom seemed to think that she had been put on this earth purely to wait on them. The bottles of sweet German wine had the added advantage of being cheaper than gin and Fiona convinced herself they were doing her body less harm in the long run. After all, wine was made from grapes and grapes were fruit, so how bad could it be to drink fruit? If anyone asked, not that they would, she could tell them she had one, maybe two glasses, two or three nights a week, but in reality she knew she was drinking a lot more than that every night. Since she never finished a glass, always topping it up as she went along,
instead of draining it and starting again from the beginning, she could never be sure how many glasses she’d had, which was her intention, because she didn’t want to know. Fiona didn’t exactly feel that she
needed
a drink every night, it was just that life always felt a lot less stressful after she’d had a couple.

Coming round slowly in a fog of alcohol, she moved her foot and immediately connected with the half-empty wine bottle standing there, which tumbled like a skittle, knocking over the glass next to it. Miraculously they both remained intact, though a little of the wine was lost on the carpet before she could rescue the upended bottle. Fiona swore then walked into the kitchen and stowed the remnants back in the fridge. Already her head had begun to throb. Best not to think about the morning and just go to bed.

Fiona climbed the stairs and, as she neared the top, spotted the tell-tale crack of light coming through the gap under Michelle’s door. What on earth was her daughter doing lying awake till all hours with school in the morning? Fiona wasn’t having that. She put her hand up, ready to rap her knuckles on the door, then she stopped. Fiona knew she should give her daughter a rollicking but realised she was hardly setting a good example herself, a point her daughter would doubtless use to her advantage, undermining her mother’s already fragile authority even further. And there was always the possibility that, being this tired, Fiona might struggle to pronounce the words as clearly as she would have liked. What sarcastic response would she get from Michelle about passing out on the sofa again? Her daughter would have seen her when
she came in, sprawled there, hardly at her best. Fiona didn’t have the energy for another row with Michelle, a girl who was getting lippier and more ungrateful with every passing day. And to think she used to be such a sweet, nice-natured child. Fiona stood on the landing and leaned in close so that her ear was almost pressed against her daughter’s bedroom door. No sound from within. Michelle had probably fallen asleep with the light on, while reading one of those stupid fan magazines she was obsessed with. Her walls were covered with pictures of Take That – another one of Michelle’s teen bands that would be here today and gone tomorrow, like the Osmonds or the Bay City Rollers in Fiona’s day. She was boy-daft, that one.

It was one of Fiona’s recurring nightmares that her daughter would fall pregnant before she was out of her teens. The very last thing she needed right now was to become a grandmother at her age. The thought made her shudder. She was already knackered all of the time as it was and financially they were barely surviving, without a new baby to feed, clothe and buy bloody toys for. She hoped her dippy daughter still had enough sense in her head not to let her spotty boyfriend do what he doubtless wanted to do, but she was far from sure of this.

Fiona turned away from the door and headed for her own room. At least Denny was already off in the lorry, so she wouldn’t have to put up with his disapproval or his half-hearted pawing at her for sex. And Michelle would be fine. She’d sleep all night with the light on then emerge in one of her usual, grumpy moods, hating everything and everybody, just like she did every morning.

Fiona
would always blame herself for not knocking that night. The guilt would stay with her. If she had gone into her daughter’s room, she would have realised that Michelle was gone, had never returned in fact. If only she’d known about it then and reported Michelle missing long before morning, gaining the police precious hours in the process, perhaps something could have been done sooner. Then things might have worked out so very differently for everyone.

CHAPTER FOUR

Day One

As the Jubilee line train juddered round a corner, Tom Carney gazed at the newspaper’s front page with its accompanying banner headline, ‘Grady And The Tramp’. A dark-haired, middle-aged man in a blue pinstripe suit angrily attempted to repel a photographer’s lens with an outstretched palm. The man in the photograph oozed wealth, status and entitlement.

Tom had been up much earlier than usual, eager to see his first front page lead for a national tabloid – and not just any article. Hell, this was the story of the year. It was a defining moment for Tom, a vindication after long, hard years of puzzled frowns and dismissive comments from friends when he’d told them he was going to be a journalist. No other paper had the story. Tom and his colleagues at The Paper had scooped them all. He imagined it being read on every bus and train in the country. It had already been the breaking news on the radio and breakfast TV channels. In Downing Street, they’d be reading Tom’s words in The Paper that morning and fretting over them. It was an exhilarating thought.

Their newspaper was always referred to as ‘The Paper’ by the journalists who worked on it. That was a golden rule, for to utter its real name was to concede that it was
not the only newspaper and there might, just might, be other, admittedly less worthy, contenders for the accolade of paper of the working man. Tom had been on the receiving end of a particularly violent outburst from his editor after just one hour in the job during his first editorial meeting. Unfortunately for Tom, Alex ‘the Doc’ Docherty had been walking by and overheard the new boy refer to the paper by its actual name, because he had no idea that it was forbidden to do so.

‘Who the hell are you?’ Tom was shocked to see the legendary Alex Docherty staring down at him with a look of venomous hatred plastered on his face. ‘I take it you’re the new boy,’ he answered his own question, ‘which is why you have just committed blasphemy in my office.’

Docherty stared malevolently down at the new boy, ‘are you a prole?’

‘Pardon?’ was all Tom could offer in reply.

‘Part of the great unwashed, the ones out there?’ and the Doc pointed through the enormous windows that faced the Wapping skyline. ‘The folk who don’t know who to vote for, what to think, who to love, hate or ignore, the type of person who doesn’t even know which hand to use to wipe their own arse, unless we tell them. If you are one of them, then you can call my paper by its name. If, on the other hand you wish to survive here for another five minutes then you can do me the simple courtesy of calling it The Paper, like everyone else.’

The Doc went down on his haunches so his face was level with Tom’s, as if he was about to confide something. ‘Because my paper is
The
Paper. There is no other,’ Tom opened his mouth to say something but Docherty
prevented him with a raised hand, ‘Oh, I know you might think there are other newspapers out there, you may even be labouring under the misapprehension that they are serious competition but they are not. Fact: we are read on every building site and football training ground, in every office and station platform, council canteen and school staff room in the country, which means we matter. I can ruin careers, put people in prison and keep them there, I can sack ministers, topple prime ministers, swing the vote in marginals by ten, even twenty per cent with a few well-chosen words in my editorials, all of which makes us players.’ He looked around at the smiling journos he was now holding in the palm of his hand. He turned back to his sub. ‘What is the circulation of our nearest rival, Terry?’

‘Nit shit chief,’ Terry parroted back instantly.

‘Nit shit,’ the Doc nodded and he turned back to Tom. ‘If you want to go and work on a broadsheet no one reads, except for a few retired colonels from Tewksbury, then join the
Torygraph
; if it’s a paper with a history but no future then
The Times
is definitely for you; if you like to goose-step your way into work every morning then the
Daily Mail
will welcome you with open arms; the
Guardian
will have you in a flash, if you can knit your own sandals. But if you want to work for a real paper there is only one, and it’s mine. Only I get to call it
My
Paper, you get to call it
The
Paper and if I hear you use any other word in future, you will be out of this door so fast your arsehole will fly past your nose on the way out, got that?’

‘Yes, boss,’ Tom nodded emphatically, eager to get off
stage and retreat back into his shell again as soon as possible.

‘I’ll leave you to it then.’ And he walked away muttering, ‘I’ve got a country to run.’

‘How long have you been here?’ asked one of the older journalists, ‘an hour?’ and he shook his head in wonderment. ‘We’ve had probationers here who never merited a word from the great man in their entire six months,’ he drawled in an Edinburgh accent that was barely a whisper. ‘Well done son.’

Having barely survived his first day, Tom knuckled down to learn the ropes from his fellow journalists. He quickly learned that they wrote in euphemisms. ‘Single-parent’ meant scum, ‘benefit-claiming, single-parent’ meant vermin, ‘teenaged-benefit-claiming-single-parent’ meant ‘council-house-snatching-good-for-nothing-idle-vermin-scum’.

Women who had affairs were ‘love-cheats’, who took their lovers to ‘love-nests’ for ‘sordid, extra-marital affairs’ that were exposed in kiss-and-tell stories, in the interests of public morality, by journalists who were the worst bunch of coke-snorting, binge-drinking shag-arounds Tom had ever known. The paper was the scourge of the unmarried mum, the benefit claimant, the football fan, the Europhile and the paedophile; the latter being two crimes so heinous in the Doc’s eyes that they almost shared top billing on the paper’s front pages.

Tom Carney kept out of the Doc’s way from then on. The next time he stood before the great man, he had a story to tell. Tom had met the hooker, a woman called Trudy Nighton who went by the working nickname of
‘Mistress Sparkle’, and was convinced she was telling the truth. The Doc took some persuading but eventually he believed it too and personally assigned the team to cover it, on the understanding that evidence, real corroborating evidence, of the ‘photos-of-Grady-with-his-todger-out’ variety, was what was needed here.

The surveillance operation recorded the comings-and-goings and cumings-and-goings of the uber-respectable and very-married Defence Secretary, Timothy Grady, who until that point had been widely tipped as a future Conservative Prime Minister. His much-vaunted support for ‘family values’ did not however prevent Grady from meeting ‘Mistress Sparkle’ and her friends in his London apartment, with her services billed at an eye-watering three hundred quid an hour, though he of course had negotiated a discount. Not for nothing was Timothy Grady known in politics as ‘the Lion,’ a nickname he had acquired while renegotiating Britain’s budget rebate from the EEC. So intransigent had been his stance on this issue that French and German politicians had started referring to him, in a derogatory manner, as the ‘Lion from London’ and when the right-wing press picked up on it, renaming him ‘The Lion of Brussels’, Grady did nothing to stifle this heroic image.

Even though he knew every salacious word virtually by heart, Tom Carney sat on the train and read and re-read the story he had co-written all the way along the Jubilee line. For the first time, Tom walked into the newspaper’s headquarters like he truly belonged there. As he passed rows of desks manned by veteran reporters he adopted what he hoped was a laid-back demeanour, as if destroy
ing the career of a future Prime Minister
and
landing the front page in the process was all in a day’s work for this young reporter. A couple of journos actually bothered to mumble a greeting. A pretty young girl he had once unsuccessfully flirted with by the water cooler even smiled at him.

‘The chief wants to see you,’ said Terry-the-sub when Tom reached his desk, looking like he begrudged the congratulations Tom was about to receive.

‘Careful,’ said Jennifer, the Doc’s secretary, as he arrived at the huge, glass-walled office that dominated the enormous newsroom, ‘he’s not a happy bunny.’ She made it sound like she’d just invented the nauseating phrase everybody seemed to be using at the moment.