No Name Lane (Howard Linskey) (28 page)

‘Been
stood up, have you?’ asked Andrew Foster, who was smiling at him from a stool at the end of the bar.

‘Aren’t you supposed to be teaching unruly kids?’

‘School’s closed till they’ve finished with that body.’

‘As if you lot don’t get enough holiday,’ said Tom. ‘Ain’t you got better things to do than hang round here with us natives?’

‘Only dropped in for a swift one,’ Andrew told him, ‘joining me then?’

‘Why not?’

When Helen returned from interviewing the mother of a ‘miracle baby’, her intention had been to write up the story as quickly as possible then creep out to meet Tom in the village. Instead she was intercepted by her editor.

‘The bloody baby can wait,’ Malcolm informed her. ‘Get yourself down to Great Middleton Junior School. I want some reaction from the headmaster about that body in the field.’

Being sent back to Great Middleton certainly suited Helen but her positive mood did not last long. On her way out, Jason, one of the more experienced reporters, gleefully informed her that, ‘You’ll not get him to say owt. Nelson’s always happy to talk to us when it suits him; if it’s the school sports day, prize-giving or summer fête you won’t be able to shut him up but if it’s anything negative he won’t speak to you. Malcolm’s already had a go and so has Martin.’

Helen immediately realised she had been given this thankless task because others had tried and come back empty-handed. She was expected to fail.

As
she drove to Great Middleton she thought about Peter. They had argued again, this time over the phone. When she’d called him the previous night she’d been eager to tell him all about the cases she was looking into. She had thought that, if he could hear the details of the work she had been doing he might understand the buzz it gave her, but Peter wasn’t interested. At first he made no comment if Helen said something and she thought he was waiting patiently to hear her out but each time she mentioned something about her week, he started telling her something about his day instead.

Perhaps, Helen reasoned, Peter, with all of his ambition, sometimes felt threatened by her own. Maybe all men did. She didn’t think this was right or justifiable but Peter had certainly become a different person since she had left to take on her job at the
Messenger
.

Their phone call had continued in a similar vein. It was like a tennis match where, every time she tried to insert a topic into the conversation, he hit back with something irrelevant that he or his mother and father had done recently. She persisted though, in the vain hope that he might at least feign interest but it was clear he was still irked with her for taking a job so far away, even though he had repeatedly told her it was fine.

‘Can you stop going on about this bloke please?’ he’d asked suddenly in a tone that belied the seemingly polite request. ‘I thought you were ringing to talk to me.’

This bloke
was of course Tom Carney and perhaps Helen had mentioned him once too often but it was hard not to talk about the man she had been working with so closely. Her assurances that he shouldn’t be jealous of her
fellow journalist were met with a surly, ‘I don’t feel threatened, Helen, just a bit bored of hearing about him.’

The argument escalated then and, though they both attempted to end the conversation politely before she hung up, Helen had been particularly hurt by his lack of interest in a career she was so passionate about.

By the time Helen reached Great Middleton School she’d managed to convince herself the argument was her fault. Perhaps she had been insensitive in failing to ask Peter more about his new job, though she knew he did not face half the obstacles she had to contend with when he was working for his father.

Possibly she had been too gushing in her assessment of Tom Carney, a man Peter had never met. He was many miles from her back in Surrey and must be imagining all kinds of things. Peter’s jealousy was understandable then, even if he denied feeling threatened, and she would tread more carefully in future. It was one of the many little compromises Helen had been training herself to make recently. You had to work hard at a relationship and put the other person first sometimes. Wasn’t that what she had always been told? Her mother often explaining that ‘give and take’ was the secret to the long marriage she had maintained with Helen’s father, though in her daughter’s view Mrs Norton had always been more likely to give than take. Perhaps all women did this. Maybe it was the great, unspoken secret they all shared. Women backed down and gave in, at least on the little things, the ones that didn’t matter so much, and they hoped that the big things would naturally sort themselves out as a result. Maybe that was just how it was.

She’d
been made to wait on the mat like an unwanted tradesman while the caretaker sent for the headmaster. The school was eerily silent today. Normally at this hour she would have been able to hear the whoops and excitable screams of dozens of young children enjoying the last remnants of their morning break but the school had been closed to pupils while the body was examined and photographed, samples taken and the corpse removed for forensic analysis.

Mr Nelson however was still ‘manning the barricades’ as one wag at the
Messenger
had put it, neatly summing up the siege mentality of a headmaster who liked to control everything in his domain, even when there were no pupils prowling the corridors. Nelson probably preferred the place this way, thought Helen, with no children and just a skeleton crew of caretaker and school secretary to support him while he tackled his admin. The first Helen knew of the headmaster’s impending presence was the sound of his shoes on the wooden floor as he strode purposefully towards the front door. Was there anger in that unstinting stride? She was about to find out. Helen had spoken to Nelson before and figured he wasn’t the kind of man to despatch a messenger to turn her away. He was the sort who would want to speak to you while he told you he was not going to speak to you, enjoying the power of a refusal. She was struck by the realisation that the headmaster wouldn’t talk to her because he didn’t need to. He had no reason to say anything, so she would have to give him a reason. But how was she going to do that?

‘Headmaster?’ she started brightly when he opened the
door. ‘I’m writing a story for the
Messenger
about the body that was found in the grounds of the school and it would be a big help to me if I could just get a short quote from you on …’

‘Good God,’ he hissed, ‘do you people never learn? I have told your editor and your deputy editor that I have absolutely no comment to make on this matter and now they send
you
,’ he made the last word sound deeply insulting, as if the
Messenger
really had resorted to scraping the dregs from the very bottom of their barrel.

‘That’s fine,’ she said, smiling, ‘no problem at all,’ and he seemed momentarily taken aback by this response, ‘I can write the piece without any quotes from the school. It really doesn’t matter.’

‘Oh,’ he said. Was the ego dented by her dismissal of his contribution? ‘Good then.’

‘It’s just,’ and she gave a contrived grimace, ‘I was a bit worried about how it might look.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well,’ she continued, in a confiding tone that made it sound as if the school’s best interests were her prime concern, ‘obviously if I don’t get a quote from you, I will have to put “the headmaster of Great Middleton Junior School refused to comment”,’ she let that sink in for a moment, ‘but I always think that sounds as if you have something to hide, which of course you don’t.’ She definitely had his full attention now.

‘But what could I say about the discovery of a body on land we didn’t even own when it was placed there?’

‘It might be appropriate to express some form of sorrow for the departed individual,’ Helen offered, ‘or
perhaps a few words of sympathy for family members who may have lost a loved one?’

‘Mmm,’ he said unsurely and she could tell the cogs were whirring, ‘perhaps,’

‘I’d be happy to assist you with the preparation of a statement,’ she said, ‘if you think it would help?’

‘Well,’ he was weakening and Helen was silently praying, for he had no idea how wonderful it would be if she could return to the
Messenger
with a quote when her editor and his experienced deputy had failed to secure one. ‘All right then,’ and she had to stop herself from punching the air in triumph, ‘perhaps you should come in. Would you like a cup of coffee, Miss Norton?’

‘Coffee would be lovely.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Andrew
Foster had long since left the Greyhound, but he promised to be back in a few hours, ‘It’s quiz night at the Lion!’ he reminded Tom, as if this was the undisputed highlight of the week. Tom was still sitting there, nursing a beer, making it last. He didn’t want to spend too much money or end up drunk at lunchtime. It was more than four hours since he’d left the message with Jennifer and still the Doc had not called him back. He couldn’t wait any longer.

He left the Greyhound to get some air then bought a phone card from the village shop, which he used in a draughty telephone box that had half of its windows missing.

Jennifer was even less amused this time. ‘I gave him the message,’ she assured him through what must have been clenched teeth.

‘You told him I had a story, one he would like?’

‘That
was
the message,’ she seemed to think he was questioning her professionalism now.

‘And what did he say?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing? He must have said something.’

‘He just grunted, like he does when he’s preoccupied.’

‘But is he going to call me?’

‘
Has
he called you?’

‘No,’
he said and she waited for him to cotton on. ‘He’s not going to call, is he?’ and when she didn’t even bother to answer, he added, ‘Jennifer, it’s been a pleasure speaking to you, as always,’ then he hung up before she could respond.

When Tom got off the line, his first instinct was to slam the receiver into the phone repeatedly until it shattered into dozens of tiny, plastic pieces. It took him a minute or two to calm down and come up with a plan B and even longer to wonder if he had the balls to actually implement it. If the Doc ever found out what he was about to do he’d fire Tom on the spot, maybe even take legal action against him. Tom would be blacklisted forever in the tabloid world but it looked as if that might be about to happen to him in any case and, if his contract expired without renewal, in a few weeks he’d be broke. He desperately needed money and he had to get the story he was sitting on out there before someone else did.

Tom fished inside his jacket pocket for his contact book, leafed through it until he found the number he was looking for, then dialled.

‘
Daily Mirror
,’ said an unfamiliar voice.

‘Put me through to the news desk …’

There was a begrudging acceptance at the
Messenger
that Helen had done a good job. She had returned with quotes from the headmaster of Great Middleton School and woven them into an insightful news story about the mysterious body-in-the-field, which had shocked a village already reeling from the disappearance of one of its children. It would probably knock everything else off the next
morning’s front page. She was however left with the impression that she was no better thought of for any of this and that took much of the gloss from what should have been a big moment for her.

The passive hostility of the newspaper’s older, male colleagues stopped her from telling them everything she knew about the body-in-the-field. If she wrote that the body was Sean Donnellan, Malcolm would have spiked it before a word had been written. He wasn’t the type to idly speculate on the identity of a corpse before the police had come out with an official statement, so for now she decided to keep this information to herself.

When her working day was over, Helen quietly left the office and went straight to the Durham University library. Writing up her first front-page lead had forced her to postpone her time with Tom Carney and she was keen to make amends. She had some digging to do on the Sean Donnellan case.

‘The thing about the quiz …’ Andrew Foster was talking too loudly for a quiet residential street after kicking-out time, ‘… is that it makes you both a winner and a loser,’

‘How do you mean?’ asked Tom who was enjoying the combination of fresh air and a beer buzz.

‘We won ’cos we knew all the history questions and the trivia; the films, the books, the songs and the sport, which makes us basically …’ and he looked at Tom as if he were prompting one of his slower pupils to come up with the answer.

‘Losers?’ asked Tom and Andrew nodded emphatically. ‘Aw, don’t be like that. We just pissed off all the old
buggers who’ve been winning the quiz week-in, week-out for donkey’s years. We are the champions!’ Tom roared those last words.

‘Stop it, man,’ Andrew was laughing, ‘before people draw back their curtains and realise I teach their horrible kids.’