No Name Lane (Howard Linskey) (20 page)

They climbed a second set of stairs and emerged into a large, low-ceilinged loft which was Roddy’s share of the
old school attic and was now partitioned so that each house had its own loft space. Roddy flicked a switch and a bare bulb hanging from the centre of the room illuminated a chaotic scene that made his kitchen seem neat by comparison. The dusty room was filled with ancient machines that looked as if they had been stolen from a museum: a mangle, a solid metal frame housing an old sewing machine, a pile of vinyl 78s stacked next to a gramophone in a walnut cabinet that cohabited with an ancient rocking chair, a 1930s wash stand in a wooden surround, a battered dressing table, an upright lamp of singular ugliness and two bedside cabinets. Here and there vases and old pots, toby jugs and pewter tankards were dotted amongst other pieces of memorabilia from a bygone age. Everything had been arranged in a haphazard manner against the low, sloping walls of the attic and there was a musty smell in keeping with the age of the building and its ancient contents. This appeared to be Roddy’s private collection, his pride and joy in fact.

‘Ta-da!’ said Roddy.

‘What?’ asked Tom.

‘The archive,’ Roddy told him, surprised that Tom hadn’t understood the significance of the place, ‘it’s all in here.’

Tom looked again and noticed a large pile of cardboard boxes stacked at the far end of the attic. Then his eyes adjusted to the relative gloom and he spotted two metal filing cabinets nearby. Roddy strode towards them, the floorboards creaking alarmingly beneath his feet, and Tom half expected Roddy to plunge through the floor, but he
reached the cabinets and pulled out a drawer to illustrate his point. ‘If it happened in this village,’ he told them proudly, ‘it’s in here.’

Helen wanted to say something encouraging but she felt dwarfed by the sheer amount of paper Roddy had amassed. If every box was full, it would take hours, even days to go through it all and there was no guarantee they would find anything, ‘I thought you’d be pleased,’ he said.

‘That’s great, Roddy, thanks,’ she managed.

He gave her a proud smile. ‘Newspapers, parish magazines, minutes of council meetings, school records, amateur dramatics productions, births, death and marriages. It’s all there; the hatched, matched and despatched,’ he smiled again. ‘If this fella made any impact during his time here, he’ll get a mention some place. I’ve got to go out for a bit but I trust you to treat my archive with the respect it deserves, so you’re welcome to stay and get cracking. I’ll be back in a few hours.’

Roddy climbed back down the stairs. When he was gone, Helen stared at the piles of records then she looked at Tom, who shrugged. ‘Okay then,’ he said, ‘I’ll start with the boxes, you take the filing cabinets.’

Tom dragged the first two boxes towards him and sat down on the floor. He began to pull out the papers and sift them though them one by one, sorting them into neat piles that could go straight back in the box once he had finished with them. ‘Once you’ve read something, for God’s sake put it in a pile at the other end of the room, I don’t want to look at any of this twice.’

‘Okay,’ Helen said as she started to tug documents from Roddy’s filing cabinet, ‘but this could take hours.’

Tom
smiled then, ‘and you can think of a place you’d rather be than here?’ he asked waving his hand expansively at the musty room.

‘Nowhere that springs to mind.’ She gave him a rueful grin then flopped into the old rocking chair, pilling the first heap of dusty papers onto her knee as she did so.

The birthday visit had not gone well. This was not what he had wanted. He had planned it all in advance, even taken a day off work, and it was meant to include all of the ingredients she usually loved on her special day, her surrogate birthday; for she would be spending her actual twelfth birthday with her bitch of a mother.

Lindsay had always enjoyed the park when she was little, even when it was raining and her mother would always blame him when their daughter came home in muddied clothes when all he had tried to do was please his little girl. Predictably, this time it also rained, but he didn’t think she would mind. They could still feed the ducks and he’d promised her ice cream afterwards but this only made her roll her eyes. He was not sure why. Now he thought about it, his daughter often rolled her eyes when he said things. It made him feel foolish, even though he was an adult and she was still a child who knew absolutely nothing of the world.

They hadn’t spent long in the park but she had complained incessantly. ‘Dad, it’s freezing,’ a childish exaggeration, when the air was merely crisp, or ‘Dad, it’s raining or haven’t you noticed?’

‘Don’t be cheeky, Lindsay,’ he’d told her but this just led to more eye-rolling and the simultaneous positioning of hands on hips.

Lunch
had to be brought forward due to her lack of interest in the outdoors. And no, she did not want to go to the café they had always visited on special occasions. ‘But you loved the place when you were little,’ he protested.

‘Yeah, and that’s the point, Dad.’ He felt hurt, put out. He had been looking forward to going there. It was a treat after months of living off cheap crap and would have brought back memories of a happier time when the three of them were still a family, before all of the unpleasantness, the nastiness and vileness he tried not to think about.

‘Well, where do you want to go then, Lindsay? We have to have lunch somewhere,’

‘Can I go anywhere?’ she’d asked pleadingly.

‘Within reason,’ he’d answered, then chastised himself for thinking she might be asking to eat somewhere expensive. His little girl wasn’t like the women he had tried dating since his marriage imploded. The ones who thought you had to ply them with presents and meals before they would let you do things to them. Lindsay wasn’t like them.

‘Can we go to McDonald’s?’ His daughter was excited at the prospect but he couldn’t stomach the idea of more stodgy, greasy food.

‘Oh no, Lindsay, not McDonald’s. Can’t we go somewhere a bit nicer than that?’

‘Oh, please!’ and her face took on a pained expression, as if he was being the most unreasonable father that ever lived. Sometimes he felt he didn’t really know his daughter any more, not really. That’s what came from no longer living under the same roof. She was like a stranger to him now. He wanted to grab her and shake her and tell her to stop changing like this, to stay the way she’d been when
she was Daddy’s little girl. Instead he just looked back at her and said, ‘All right then, just this one time,’ and she beamed again but for him the day was already ruined. He was getting one of his headaches, a searing pain behind the eyes he’d been told was stress-related.

‘Yay!’ she shouted once he’d given in, her moods as fickle as the weather and just as hard to predict.

He wasn’t sure how it all went quite so badly wrong from there but it started when they saw the older boys she knew. Lindsay immediately went to them then stood flirting while he queued alone for their lunch, which seemed to take an age even though it was supposed to be fast-food. When they finally served him, he carried the wobbling plastic tray to a table by the window as far away from the boys as possible. Lindsay didn’t even notice, having seemingly forgotten her own father existed. He watched as she waved her arms excitedly while she told them some silly tale; as she giggled and flicked her hair and basically acted like her mother. He wondered if it was too late for her already. How long until he would have to save her? The boys just smirked, trying to play it cool, but he knew what they wanted.

‘Suffer the little children to come unto me,’ he spoke the words while he watched his daughter making a fool of herself. He hadn’t even realised he’d said it aloud until he caught the eye of a woman close by and she quickly looked away. No one else heard him, thankfully, but he felt foolish now and angry.

‘Lindsay,’ he called but she either didn’t hear him or chose not to, ‘Lindsay!’ then finally ‘Lindsay! Your food’s getting cold!’ at a volume that made other diners turn to
look at him and he realised his face must have been contorted with anger. A young couple on the next table did that lowering of the eyes and exchanging glances thing, as if he was some kind of nutter to be silently tolerated and that enraged him even more. Then he saw the look Lindsay was giving him and it made their disapproval seem trivial. Her face was a picture of embarrassment and shame. She marched over to the table, sat down theatrically and asked, ‘Can’t you ever just be normal?’

‘The food you wanted, the food you ordered,’ he was almost grinding his teeth now, ‘in the place you asked me to bring you to … is getting cold.’

‘Yeah?’ she replied. ‘Well, I’m not hungry any more.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

By
now each of them had large piles of discarded papers stacked neatly to one side or placed back in their boxes and dragged out of the way to avoid confusion. Between them they had surveyed records of all kinds but found no mention of any missing Irish man.

‘If I see another flyer for the 1953 Coronation and its accompanying street party, I’m going to tear it into small pieces,’ Tom said.

‘I’ll gladly trade you,’ she told him. ‘You can take thirty years of Women’s Institute meeting minutes. I’ll swap your tea and buns for my jam and Jerusalem.’

They continued to work in silence for another half hour until Tom finally revealed his thoughts. ‘There’s no pattern, as far as I can make out,’ Tom said, ‘with the Kiddy-Catcher, I mean. I’ve read all the articles and the crimes seem random, unplanned.’

Between them they’d been through every article they could find on the victims of the Kiddy-Catcher, looking for a link.

‘I had a look on a map,’ she said. ‘I don’t know the area as well as you so I thought it might help if I marked everything: the victims’ homes, where they were taken and where they were found, and it does look random,’ she agreed, ‘apart from the fact that they are all within the
county boundary. Sarah Hutchison was taken from a bus stop right at the edge but it was still in County Durham.’

They continued to speed-read their piles of papers while they talked, dropping the pieces of paper onto the floor when they were done with them.

‘So there’s no pattern,’ he said, ‘unless that’s the pattern.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘People understand more about police work these days. It’s all on the telly. They know they’ll have a map on their wall with the locations of the abductions on it and the sites where the bodies were discovered. They’ll be trying to spot a trend or seeing if they can mark the centre of the killer’s zone. He wouldn’t want to murder on his own doorstep so he’d head out. Maybe the next time he’d choose a different direction. If he continues like that you end up with a pattern that’s like spokes on a wheel, with a victim at the end of each spoke and the killer’s home right in the centre.’

‘But that’s not happening here, so he doesn’t think like that or perhaps he has offended before,’ Helen said, ‘been to prison, for something less serious and learned from the experience.’

‘And he doesn’t want to go back.’

‘If he’s assaulted women or girls previously and they tracked him down, maybe he’d know how they did it and that would explain why he avoids a pattern.’

‘Possibly,’ he agreed, ‘I’ve heard that serial killers don’t normally start with murder. There’s usually some minor offending that gradually gets more serious until …’

‘They go the whole hog and kill someone.’

He
nodded. ‘And if he has been to prison before and doesn’t want to go back that would be another reason to kill the girls after he has taken them.’

Helen felt no comfort from that realisation. ‘No witnesses,’ she said.

‘Of course what we really need are Malcolm’s files,’ he said.

‘What files?’

‘Your editor might be an anally retentive idiot but he is a very organised one. He keeps clippings of files so he can check things if the top brass panic about something that could get them sued. Every front and page lead has a little file that contains the first unedited draft, contact details of the people in it, the photographs and any notes deemed to be significant, such as the information that didn’t end up in the final story.’

‘You mean stuff that was too contentious?’

‘Yes.’

‘You think there could be something useful in there?’

‘Who knows, but it’s not as if I can ask him for it. I’m persona non grata at the
Messenger
.’

‘And I’m not, but I soon will be if I hang around with you.’

‘I just thought you could borrow the files for each victim,’ he announced.

‘ “Borrow” them?’

‘Only for one night,’ he assured her, ‘just stay until everyone has left, slip them in your bag and walk out of there. You can go in early the next day and return the files after we’ve looked at them.’

‘I’m not sure I like the sound of this.’

‘They
won’t be missed for one night, I’m telling you.’

‘You can’t be sure of that.’ She was recalling her experience with the Turner brothers.

‘I am and it’s the only way we are going to get the inside track. You know he edits out loads of stuff. We need to see the unedited version of the reports.’