Game Over (22 page)

‘Why the
Telegraph
?’ she asked out of idle curiosity.

‘It’s what me dad reads. Anyway, the
Courier
puts my story in, but it’s hardly gone to bed when I get a call from Colin to say it was all a mistake, there was no-one in the van, it just broke down, and someone was having a laugh with him, telling him there was an escaped prisoner. I was well gutted, and the next thing the editor calls me in and chews my arse off. It was too late to stop the story, but nobody else had run it and in the end he just left it, cause he said it would look worse to print a retraction. And that was that. I never heard anything more about it.’

‘How did your editor know the story was wrong?’

‘Someone rang him from Ring 4 – the controller down in Luton – Trish Holland, I think her name is. Apparently this bloke
was
going to be moved, and then it was all cancelled at the last minute. That’s why they thought he was in the van, I s’pose. Anyway, it’s a shame, because it would have been a lot of fun if he really was on the run. We had one over the wall last year and we got three days’ front pages out of him before they caught him.’

‘The
Telegraph
didn’t print his name, I notice,’ she said.

‘Well, it was only a stop press, and I s’pose they wanted to check it before they ran it properly. Lucky for them they did. Unlucky for me, though – I’ll never get a job there now.’

She felt rather sorry for him, with his forlorn hopes and his lost scoop. She said, ‘The real news is always local. That’s the news that affects peoples’ lives.’

‘Are you local press?’

‘Yes,’ she said, and it was true, though New York was a rather more seething metropolis than Woburn.

The control centre at Luton was sited in a modern block on a small industrial estate, and Trish Holland was a middle-aged woman with a cosy figure and hard make-up. She allowed Emily into her presence with the ease most people seemed to accord to the press, but she grew defensive when she learned the subject for discussion.

‘There never was an escape,’ she said angrily. ‘It was all in the mind of that stupid reporter from Woburn. I suppose he thought he was having a joke. Everyone seems to like poking fun at Ring 4. I’d like to see them do a job like ours.’

‘Yes, and I want to do an article exactly on that point,’ Emily said warmly. ‘I want to put Ring 4’s side of things. It’s all too easy to make cheap jokes without knowing the facts.’

She ceased to bridle. ‘You’re completely right there. Facts were pretty thin on the ground in that story. It wasn’t even one of our vans.’

‘The reporter says he saw the Ring 4 logo on it.’

‘Doesn’t matter. All of our vans were accounted for. And it’s easy enough to hire a suitable van and fake a logo. Film companies do it all the time.’

‘That’s true. But you did, in fact, have a movement order for Trevor Bates?’

‘Yes, he
was
going to be moved, to Woodhill, and we had the usual paperwork to collect him from Wormwood Scrubs—’

‘The paperwork was all correct?’

‘Of course it was. A copy was sent to me and it was completely in order, otherwise I wouldn’t have put it through. Then at the last minute I was notified that he wasn’t being moved after all, so I cancelled the movement, and that was that. Far from having escaped, he was never in transit at all. He’s still in Wormwood Scrubs, as far as I know.’

‘Who was it who notified you of the cancellation?’

‘One of the directors of Ring 4, Mr Mark. He’d said he’d been notified by the Home Office of the change of plan. He faxed through the paperwork, I stood down the team, and no movement of any sort was made that evening.’

‘Well, thank you, that’s all very clear,’ Emily said. ‘I’m certainly glad to have heard your side of the story. Fortunately it never made it to the national press.’

‘No, and that boy will be more careful in future, after the wigging I gave his editor. But it’s all of a piece with the general attitude that Ring 4 is fair game.’ She went on to complain at length and in detail about various other bad stories Ring 4 had had told against it, and Emily listened for as long as she could bear it before apologising and extracting herself. She needed to get back to her computer to do some more checking.

Hart had discovered long ago in the Job that the recently bereaved rarely resent people coming and asking them questions. It accounted for how often people could be seen on television screens talking about their loss at a time when the uninitiated would have expected them to be prostrate, with the curtains closed. The big, savage grief generally held off for some time, and arrived when everyone else had got tired of the subject and gone away, leaving the bereaved unsupported.

Mrs Masseter lived in a tiny house in a dismal, raw new estate outside Reading. The estate was as featureless as the fields it had replaced, but not nearly so green or pleasant. Each little yellow-brick house had a paved-over front area to make up for the lack of a garage, and the tiny back gardens were mostly still nothing but bumpy developer’s grass between the cheap orange fencing, except where young inmates had already trampled them bare. The approach roads were laid in a series of unnecessary twists and cul-de-sacs, presumably to make the place look friendlier, and here and there along the pavements puny saplings were struggling to survive, shackled like starving prisoners to thick posts. Elsewhere empty holes showed where two out of three had already been uprooted by vandals. You can’t be nice to some people, Hart thought.

The Masseter house was tiny, the front door leading straight into a single sitting/dining-room with a kitchen alcove off it and French windows leading into the garden. Halfway along one wall an open-plan staircase led up to what could only be, Hart judged from the dimensions and some experience, two tiny bedrooms with a bathroom in between. Mrs Masseter was shapeless, grey-haired and hopeless, though probably only in her late fifties. She was pathetically eager to talk to Hart, and had her sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea listening to her life story before you could say knife.

Not that there was much to tell. The most important thing that ever seemed to have happened to her was her husband running off with the teller from the Halifax in Castle Street, a dyed blonde divorcée who was fifty-five if she was a day (the age seemed an additional affront to Mrs Masseter, as if she could have borne a twenty-year-old rival much more gracefully). The running off accounted for why she was living in this place, which was all she could afford once the value of the family home was split between her and her husband.

‘The law’s a terrible thing,’ she said, ‘when it can turn a person out of her own home just so her husband can buy a place for his fancy woman. The solicitor told me it was because Danny was grown up, so I was only due half the house. I said Danny’s still going to live with me – because there was no way he’d live with his dad and
that woman
– but they said he was nearly thirty and that’s all that mattered. He counted as a grown-up so he was reckoned to fend for himself. But my Danny’s
never
been able to look after himself. If it wasn’t for me, he’d never have a clean shirt to his back.’

The other important thing that had happened in her life was Daniel’s death, but she didn’t seem to be coming to grips with that. She spoke about her son in the present tense, as though death was some kind of trip he had gone off on, and from which he would be returning eventually with a haversack full of dirty clothes for her to wash.

‘He’s always going off on his protests,’ she said proudly, when Hart got the conversation round to him. ‘He’s a member of all those things, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and what have you. He really
cares
about things, animals and the environment and global warming and all that. And unlike
some
people I could name, he puts his money where his mouth is. His dad’s always griping about him not having a job, but I say to him, our Danny
does
have a job – saving the planet. And you can’t have a more important job than that, can you?’

‘He’s had some trouble with the police in the past, hasn’t he?’ Hart asked.

The question didn’t seem to bother Mrs Masseter. ‘Well, it’s bound to happen, isn’t it? I mean, the police have got to be on the side of the landowners, stands to reason. I’m not blaming you, dear, because I can see it’s your job. You can’t afford to worry about right and wrong. But Danny has to do what’s right for the planet and that. If it means clashing with the police – well, there you are. More tea? Help yourself to sugar. No, my Danny would never have got into trouble in the normal way. He’s a good boy and he’d never break the law, except in a protest. But he has to do what’s right, and he does, whatever it costs him. He’s that sort of boy.’

‘Do you know what he was involved with just lately? I gather he’d been back home?’

‘Yes, since he came back from Scotland, about three weeks ago.’

‘What was he up to in Scotland?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, dear,’ she said. ‘It was something to do with—’ She screwed up her face with effort. ‘Oh, he did tell me. Something about water, was it? And Cadbury’s? Oh dear, I can’t remember. Cadbury’s came into it, and Beryl somebody. Not Beryl Reid, but something like that.’

‘Cadbury’s?’ Hart queried. ‘Their factory’s not in Scotland.’

‘I’m sure he said Cadbury’s. Anyway, I know it was Scotland because he’d been going up and down for months now. To tell you the truth, I don’t really understand a lot of what he goes on about, with his scientific words and all that. But I do know he said this one was very important and secret and the less I knew about it the better. He said it was high-powered stuff and it was going to cause a stink when it got out. Quite excited about it. And it’s the same one he’s been on for ages.’

‘Are any of the organisations involved? You know, Greenpeace and so on?’

‘I don’t think so. He never said they were. In fact – ’ she frowned again, considering – ‘he seems to be doing this one all alone. Usually there’s his friends tramping in and out – scruffy lot, and don’t some of ’em smell! But their hearts are in the right place, I suppose – and having meetings in his bedroom and making leaflets and placards and I don’t know what. But there’s been none of that this time, so I suppose he’s been doing it on his own. If it was deadly secret, maybe he couldn’t trust anyone else.’ She stared at nothing for a moment, and then said, ‘Except he did have this journalist person who was going to help him, a high-up, he said, who’d been in the government.’

‘Ed Stonax?’ Hart asked.

‘Could have been,’ she said. ‘Yes, I think that was his name. He was into all that eco stuff himself, this journalist, which was why Danny went to him. He sent him a load of stuff just recently – documents and that.’

‘Danny sent it to Mr Stonax?’

‘Yes, and sent it registered post, so that shows you how important it was. Danny was going up to London to see him after, only he had his accident.’ For a moment she faltered, as the jagged spike of the accident refused to fit into the woolly shape of her reality. ‘He sent me flowers,’ she went on. ‘When he heard about it.’

‘Mr Stonax did?’

‘He rang to see why he hadn’t heard from Danny, and I told him. And the next day these flowers arrived. Those big lilies that smell. Ever so posh.’ She looked round vaguely as if she expected to see them. ‘They don’t last long, that sort, but they’re nice.’

‘That was kind of him.’

‘Danny always said he was a real gentleman. A right proper sort. He was upset when he heard about the accident. It wasn’t Danny’s fault, you know,’ she added anxiously. ‘He wasn’t a tearaway. He wouldn’t have been speeding or anything. He was never in trouble that way. You can check if you like – never even had any points on his licence. It was a hit-and-run driver, they said – your lot said, only the locals, I mean. Hit-and-run.’ She paused, staring again. ‘So I suppose they’ll never find out who it was.’

She looked strangely stunned by the end of the last sentence. Hit-and-run, Danny with a broken neck and never coming home again, were things outside her experience. At some point she would have to come to terms with them, but for the moment her mind was defending itself like anything against realisation.

‘Would you mind if I had a look at Danny’s room?’ Hart asked.

Mrs Masseter jerked out of a reverie, and smiled as though she was glad to do so. ‘You can have a look, and welcome, but if it’s his papers or anything to do with his protests you’re interested in, you won’t find anything like that. Your lot have already got them.’

‘My lot?’

‘The police. A policeman came that same day and said they wanted all his papers and his computer. It was quite late when he came. Mike – my husband – had just gone, and I thought it was him come back when the doorbell rang. But no, he’d gone off home to be with
her
. Said she’d be upset, though what she’d got to be upset about I don’t know.’

‘This policeman—’ Hart prompted.

‘He was one like you,’ Mrs Masseter said, and as Hart was thinking he must have been black, she added, ‘not in uniform, I mean. A plain-clothes one, a detective, whatever you call yourselves.’