This Little Piggy (5 page)

“No. It’s about the miners’ strike.”

“You should do something else about the baby,” Amy said. She paused for a moment. “I’ve got a big story for you.”

“Yeah?” Clare was cradling the phone receiver between her head and shoulder, while continuing to type her picket line story. “What’s it about?”

“Baby Jamie, of course.” Amy gave a little sigh. “Stupid.”

Clare laughed. “Sorry. Has something happened?”

“Come over and I’ll tell you. It’s really important.”

Clare glanced at the clock. 11.15am. “Okay, listen, Amy. I have to finish writing this story but it won’t take me long. Then I’ll pop over for a few minutes. About twelve? How’s that?”

“
Yessss
. Could you bring some chips?”

Clare hesitated. “Chips? As in fish and chips?”

“Yeah, but no fish, thanks, just gravy?”

“What for?”

“For me dinner, you stupid.”

“Yes, I realise that, but where’s your mum? Is she not giving you some lunch?”

“She’s out. She said it was okay for you to bring me some chips in.”

“She did, did she?” Clare shook her head at the phone. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Clare typed out her miners’ copy and three shorter local stories, then left them in an envelope with Jai. The paper sent a runner out to pick up Clare’s copy at around mid-day, if there was nothing urgently needed before that. The miners’ stuff would get in the later edition and the rest would be held over until tomorrow. She told her newsdesk she was going to have another scout around Sweetmeadows to see if there were any new lines on the baby’s death. And before she left the newsagent’s shop, she bought a shiny red Silvine notebook and a cheap black pen.

Pressing down the niggling feeling that she shouldn’t get involved, she bought two bags of chips and a carton of gravy at the shop next door. When she pulled up in the car, she could see Amy hanging over the fourth-floor balcony, waiting for her.

“You shouldn’t lean over like that,” Clare told her, as she reached the top of the stairs and Amy grabbed the bag of chips out of her hands. “You could fall. I felt sick just watching you.”

“Yeah, I know. Me mam’s signed a… a… thingy about it.”

Amy had two little plastic chairs and a table waiting out on the balcony. “It’s kind of like a picnic, isn’t it?”

Clare looked at the brutalist blocks of flats, with the pit head in the near distance, and waved away a couple of wasps. “I’m not sure it’s a very scenic view. But yes, let’s sit here and have a chat. It’s too sunny to be inside. Although,” she went on, giving Amy a mock-glare. “You really shouldn’t have bunked off school.”

Amy swallowed a mouthful of gravy-smeared chips. “It’s the last week before the summer holidays. We’re just messing about, watching telly and drawing pictures. I can do that here.”

“Hmm. Do you like school, usually?”

Amy wrinkled her nose and shook her head. She stuffed in another handful of chips.

Clare decided not to press on that subject. “What did your mam sign about the balconies?”

“It was like a long piece of paper with people’s names on it? There’s a word for it.”

“Petition?”

“That’s it. You’re right clever. Do you have to be clever to be a reporter?”

Clare laughed. “Not if some of the idiots in my office are anything to go by. Anyway, you’re clever too. I can tell. Thanks for telling me about the petition. I’ll do a story about it for tomorrow’s paper.”

Amy licked gravy off her fingers. “That wasn’t my real story. That wasn’t the one I’m going to tell you about. Mine is more important.”

Clare raised her eyebrows. “Let’s hear it, then.”

Amy wiped a hand across her mouth and shook her head. “You have to teach me the writing first. Don’t you want those chips? I’ll finish them for you.”

Clare grinned. Amy was pretty good at getting what she wanted out of people. “Okay. Just for ten minutes, though. I have to get back to work.” She pulled out the brown paper bag. “For you. A reporter’s notebook, for practising your Teeline.”

“
Thanks
.” Amy sat with the notebook and pen poised, just like Clare.

Clare started off writing down the alphabet in Teeline. She explained that one of the ways that made it faster than other writing was that it missed the vowels out of most of the words. She showed her a few: ‘mum’, ‘flats’, ‘dinner’. Then she showed her how to write ‘Amy’, marking two little dashes under it to show it was a proper name.

Amy chewed her lip while she was writing and the end of the pen when she wasn’t. “It’s dead hard,” she grumbled.

“It’s not. At least, maybe it is at first. But you get used to it really quickly. So over the next few days, practise writing out the alphabet and then put some letters together to make some words. We can do some more another day.”

Clare pushed her own pen and notebook back in her bag. “Okay, I need to find the woman who started that petition. Where’s her flat?”

“Number 440. But don’t you want to hear the other story? My story?”

Clare glanced at her watch. “Come on then.”

Amy looked around and lowered her voice a little. “I saw them do it. I saw them drop baby Jamie over the balcony.” Then she fixed her gaze on Clare, who saw the child’s eyes go a little watery.

For a moment, Clare didn’t know what to say. “You’re telling me you saw it happen?”

Amy nodded. Clare leaned forward. “Listen, Amy. It’s really important that anything you say about this is true, right? You mustn’t make anything up about baby Jamie. Because the police are trying really hard to find out who did it. If someone sets them off down the wrong path, then a real killer could get away. Or even do it again. You understand?”

Amy’s grubby face flushed a little and she blinked back tears. “I’m not making this up. Why does everyone say that?”

“Amy, I’m not actually saying you’ve made anything up. I’m just… I don’t know. I’m a bit shocked, that’s all. Tell me what you saw.”

“I was looking down over the balcony. I saw everything. This man came and he picked Jamie out of his pram. He held him up and there was another man down on the ground and he threw the baby down to him. I think maybe he was supposed to catch the baby but he missed.”

Clare squinted at Amy in the bright sunlight, trying to make out the expression on her face. “Then what happened?”

“The man on the ground, he picked Jamie up and ran off. The other one ran down after him. There was a bit of blood on the ground. I saw it. The police saw it too, when they came.”

“Did you see where the two men went?”

“I saw one of them go over there,” Amy pointed towards the concrete stalls where the bins were kept. “I never saw where the other one went though.”

“Did you go and tell anyone? Straight away?”

Amy shook her head.

“Didn’t you think you should? The police? Or Jamie’s mum?”

“I was scared.”

“Yes, I’m sure you were, but…” Clare noticed that Amy’s chin had dimpled as she started to cry, silently.

“Hey.” Clare reached over and put a hand on Amy’s clammy arm. “Have you told anyone else, Amy?”

Amy sniffed and nodded. “Yes, I told the policemen. When they came knocking round all the doors and taking everyone’s fingerprints. But they never believed me. And my mum said I make up stories all the time, so she told them I’d probably made this one up too. But I never. Not this time.”

“What did these men look like, Amy?”

“The one on the balcony had a baseball cap on. Dark blue, I think. And it was pulled down low, so I couldn’t see his face.”

“And what else did you notice? About their clothes or anything?”

Amy stared down at her feet. “Just that they were wearing jeans and stuff. That’s all. I know I should’ve written it down or something but I never.” She looked up at Clare. “You would’ve writ it all down, wouldn’t you?”

“Did you see the other guy’s face? The one who picked up Jamie from the ground?”

“Yes, a bit, but,” Amy shrugged. “I don’t know how to tell about it. It wasn’t, you know, special. Like, I didn’t see a scar or a big nose or anything.”

“After the men ran away, what did you do?”

“Nothing. I just sat and watched. I knew Debs was going to come out and go mad when she saw the baby was gone.”

“You didn’t think you should go and tell her what you’d seen?”

“Thought I’d get into trouble.” Amy started to cry again.

“Amy.” Clare squeezed the little girl’s sticky hand. “Would you know either of them if you saw them again?”

“Maybe. Yeah, the one on the ground. I thought it was someone from round here, but I’m not sure.”

“Last question: did either of the men see you?”

Amy shook her head. “Don’t think so.”

“That’s good,” Clare said.

“But what if they did? Would they come back for me?” Amy’s eyes went huge and round. She suddenly looked much younger than nine years old.

“That’s not going to happen.” Clare put her notebook away.

“No one else believes me.” Amy folded her arms and looked at Clare. “But you do, don’t you?”

Clare paused for just a moment. “I’ve got no reason not to believe you, Amy.” A tactical answer, one that would get past most adults, never mind a nine-year-old, but Clare couldn’t help feeling a guilty little twinge inside when Amy’s face broke into a gap-toothed smile.

Even after leaving the estate, it was hard for Clare to push Amy’s face out of her head. If she was mine, Clare found herself thinking, what would I do with her? Get her to write her stories down, for a start. Let that crazy imagination run wild. Clean her up, she couldn’t help thinking too. For Tina, who seemed too bored and impatient to be a really good parent, Amy was just a nuisance. Whereas Clare could have… she shook the thought away and reached in her bag for some headache pills.

Later, Clare called at the police station and asked to speak to the chief inspector. Seaton was always pleased to see her, especially on her own, when he could flirt more outrageously. He sent a secretary to make Clare some tea, which arrived dark and strong in the regulation thick white cup and saucer. She tried not to wince when she took a sip.

“Any developments on Jamie Donnelly?” Clare started.

Seaton blew air noisily out of his wide nostrils. “One or two lines of enquiry.”

“Anything the paper could help with? An appeal, or…”

Seaton gave a snort of a laugh. “Nice try. But there’s nothing I’m about to go public on, not just yet.”

“Nothing from the scene? You know, fingerprints or… there was blood, wasn’t there, on the ground?”

“There was. Young Jamie’s blood. No one else’s, though. As for the fingerprints…” Seaton shook his head, looking exasperated. “The baby’s body was found beside the bins. The tenants put their rubbish there, the bin men come and collect it every week, the kids play round there and the local druggies meet there at night. You can imagine how many people’s fingerprints are left behind. And not just that, they’re all mixed up with each other. All we’ve got is a load of partials.”

“So what can you do with them?”

“Not much, to be honest. We’ve had officers doing the whole house-to-house, eliminating as many local people’s prints as we can. Fat lot of use it’s been.”

“This is going to sound daft.” Clare crossed her legs and looked down at her notebook. Seaton leaned back in his chair and made it obvious he was enjoying the view. “There’s a kid up on Sweetmeadows who says she saw a man throw the baby over the balcony. She says there was a second man on the ground who picked the kid up and that they ran off towards the bins, where Jamie’s body was found.”

Seaton gave another sharp laugh. “You’ve been talking to young Amy Hedley.”

“That’s right.”

Seaton took a slow sip of tea. “I wouldn’t pay her too much attention, Miss Jackson. She’s a fantasist. The mother’s been known to us for a while. Nothing serious, just the odd bit of shoplifting. Class B drugs. Drunk and disorderly.”

“Tina?” Clare couldn’t keep the surprised tone out of her voice. “She seemed quite responsible.”

“She is, if you’re comparing her with most of the tenants on that estate. Though I wouldn’t set too much store by anything she says.”

“But little Amy? She seems really bright. And I got the sense that she was quite scared by the whole thing.”

Seaton shook his head. “She has, how shall I say it… a very vivid imagination. Does it sound likely to you? It doesn’t to me.”

“You checked it out, though?”

Seaton raised his wiry brows. “We did. We check out every line of inquiry, no matter how far-fetched it seems.”

“Sorry. I’m not suggesting you ignored her. It’s just that it seems to be a massive thing to make up, even for a kid with a vivid imagination.”

“I’d have thought journalists would be used to people making things up. That you would come up against that every day.”

Clare gave Seaton a small smile. “We do. But children, they tend to tell it how it is, in my experience.”

Seaton shrugged. “Welcome to my world, Miss Jackson. Sometimes the kids are worse than the adults. Even Amy’s mother swears the lass made it up, just to get some attention. Anyway, we asked her some questions. Her story kept changing around, from one version to another. It just doesn’t get us anywhere, I’m afraid.”

Clare chewed the end of her pen. “So are you checking out this idea that it was some kind of payback for Rob Donnelly breaking the strike?”

Seaton gave a low sigh. “We have to look into it, because that’s what the family are saying. Some of the family, anyway. Not Rob Donnelly, I notice. He thinks it’s all rubbish.”

Clare sat forward a little. “But what do you think? Is there anything in it?”

“We’re asking questions, of course we are. But you know, I’ve known these men all my life. My dad was a miner, my granddad was a miner. I was the first lad in our family not to leave school and head straight down the mine. Things aren’t good between the miners and the police at the moment, but that’ll all blow over soon enough.”

He shook his head again. “Most of these men are the absolute salt of the earth, if you ask my opinion. Decent men with wives and kids, pushed into a hopeless strike, all wanting nothing more than to get back to work and bring some money in. You’re not telling me that any one of the strikers from round here would harm a kiddie. I don’t believe it.”