No Name Lane (Howard Linskey) (39 page)

But Tom was a great deal closer than Frankie was expecting. He was waiting just round the corner for his attacker to catch up with him. Before Frankie could do anything, Tom twisted his body and brought something crashing towards him. Frankie managed to put his arms
up to parry the blow but Tom adjusted his stance and brought the wooden strut he’d pulled from one of the saplings down low so it missed Frankie’s hands and face, instead landing a sickening blow to his torso.

Frankie groaned and gasped at the same time and went down hard, clutching his stomach. That blow would have been enough to end the fight on its own, because Frankie wasn’t going to be getting up in a hurry, but Tom wasn’t finished yet. He dropped the wooden strut and instead lashed out with a boot that caught Frankie full in the face, sending him hurtling backwards. Frankie groaned as he rolled along the ground. ‘Did you think I was running away from you, Frankie? No chance! I’ve been waiting for this, you bastard!’ The next kick went in hard on Frankie’s knee and he cried out in pain. ‘Did you reckon I was going to stand in the street and trade punches with you? No way. You like to fight dirty, well, that’s fine by me.’ The next kick was aimed at the face and Frankie tried to shield it with his hands but Tom anticipated that and redirected his kick so it connected with Frankie’s ribs. He groaned again and tried to crawl away but Tom saw his opportunity and the end of his shoe went in hard between the other man’s legs. Frankie let out a strangled, coughing choke and rolled over, clutching his balls.

‘Not done yet,’ Tom assured him, his fury increasing as he recalled the cowardly attack he had endured at Frankie’s hands.

‘No,’ pleaded Frankie, ‘stop,’ he gasped.

‘Fuck you,’ Tom told him and the next kick went into Frankie’s shin, causing another cry of intense pain as he rolled on the ground. Weeks of anger and frustration
seemed to roar out of Tom then and Frankie Turner took the brunt of it all; his betrayal by the Doc, fury at Timothy Grady, anger at the two rogue detectives who’d left him stranded five miles away and, of course, there was Helen and her idiot boyfriend.

As Frankie took another blow from Tom’s boot, he pleaded, ‘Enough.’

‘No,’ Tom assured him, ‘you don’t get to decide when you’ve had enough,’ and he knelt down next to the man, drew back his arm and punched him hard in the mouth, ‘I get to decide!’ another punch in the face then another, this time opening up a big cut above Frankie’s eye. ‘I get to decide!’ he gripped the other man’s shirt with one hand and it ripped as his other fist slammed into Frankie’s face once more. Tom drew back his arm to administer one final punch.

‘Tom!’ screamed Helen and he looked up to see her standing there. He hadn’t even heard her car draw up at the side of the road and now she was out of it and screaming at him, ‘Stop! For God’s sake, stop! You’ll bloody kill him!’

Tom did stop then. He looked at Helen’s wild eyes then glanced down at the man he had been pummelling. Frankie Turner was conscious, just, but his head was lolling and he was making an unnatural gurgling noise caused by the blood in his nose and mouth. His face was battered and bloody and there was no way he was going to be able to stand unaided.

Tom took a step away from Frankie and viewed his handiwork while Helen moved closer. ‘Fuck him.’

‘You can’t just leave him in the street like this,’ she told him, ‘he needs help!’

‘If
you care about him that much, you help him!’ he snapped and before she could reply he turned his back on her and was gone.

By the time Helen caught up with him again Tom was already sitting in the corner of the Lion, clutching a half-drunk pint but still flushed from the exertion of fighting Frankie Turner. Helen was breathless from the effort of catching up with him, which she did just as soon as she’d confirmed that Frankie Turner wasn’t in a critical condition. He’d merely snarled at her and staggered to his feet, swearing and brushing her away before limping from the scene. She was stunned that he could walk at all after such a savage beating and she watched him until he disappeared round a bend, convinced he was likely to collapse at any minute.

‘You’ll be lucky if he doesn’t press charges!’ her voice was loud enough to attract the attention of the men in the bar, all of whom had been sensible enough not to ask Tom how he had bloodied his hands.

‘Press charges?’ sneered Tom. ‘Frankie Turner? That’s the last thing he’ll do. He knows the police would shake me by the hand for giving that arsehole a beating.’ Helen saw that the skin on his knuckles was broken and bloody. ‘He came after me. It was a fight and he bloody lost. I gave him more chance than he gave me the other night and he’d have done worse if I hadn’t got the drop on him.’ He could tell she was unconvinced, ‘I don’t want to talk about it, Helen,’ he told her firmly, ‘I don’t want to talk about anything.’

‘Well that’s going to be difficult, since we are supposed to be working together. Sulking isn’t going to help.’

‘I
am not sulking.’

And she gave him a look that said
you clearly are
then reminded him, ‘We were supposed to be seeing Mary Collier.’

‘Just give me a minute, will you, for Christ’s sake,’ and when she said nothing. ‘Can I not have just one minute to myself without you standing there, looking at me like that!’ He drained the beer from his glass.

‘Like what?’

‘Like I’ve crawled out from under a rock. Can we not have a one-minute holiday from that?’ He was scowling at her now and she was stunned by the ferocious look on his face.

‘You can have as many minutes as you like,’ Helen told him quietly and she walked away from him then, leaving Tom staring into the bottom of his glass.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

Mary Collier was alone that afternoon but she did not invite Helen in. ‘What is it this time, Miss Norton?’

Helen was still angry after her argument with Tom and in no mood for chit-chat. ‘We’ve been to see Sam Armstrong,’ she informed Mary, ‘he told us all about you and Sean Donnellan.’ There was a look of resignation on the old lady’s face then as she opened the door wider to admit her.

This time Mary poured two glasses of sherry and passed one to Helen, who took it from the old lady’s trembling hand and sat down opposite her.

‘Where’s Tom,’ asked Mary, ‘you two had a tiff?’ She looked Helen directly in the eye. ‘You are sleeping with him, I assume?’ she asked, catching Helen completely off guard. Mary smiled but there was no warmth behind the smile. ‘I could tell he’s interested you,’ she explained. ‘It’s perfectly all right,’ she added, ‘it’s the duty of every generation to shock the one that came before it? Though you’d have to do something pretty racy to shock the generation after mine.’

Helen surprised herself with her choice of words: ‘Who I’m sleeping with is none of your business.’

‘Quite,’ agreed Mary, ‘though you seem to think the whole world might be interested in who I may have been sleeping with.’

‘Yes,’
answered Helen, ‘that’s because your boyfriend was murdered.’

Mary let out something between a gasp and a startled laugh then she regained her composure. ‘My boyfriend? He
was
a boy, a man actually, twenty-two years old when he came here, so young but seemed so worldly and sophisticated somehow and of course you want to know all about us, like we’re public property all of a sudden.’

‘I just want to know what happened to him, that’s all.’

‘Why?’ Mary asked sharply. ‘So it will make your name, set you on your way to a glamorous career as a journalist? Is that it?’

‘Maybe,’ conceded Helen, ‘that’s what we do. We find out what happened and we write about it and yes, if I can write a good piece about this then it might not do me any harm, but there’s more to it than that.’

‘How so?’

Helen could feel her anger rising at this old woman who seemed to care more for her reputation than the truth, ‘a young man came to this village one day and never left. Something bad happened here and he was killed because of it and his body buried in a marshy field, with no headstone, no funeral and no mourners. He probably had a mother, a father, sisters, brothers, friends who cared for him. They never saw Sean again and if any of them are still alive I think they deserve to know what happened to him. I think this secret has been haunting you for years and you need to tell us the truth.’

‘What makes you so sure about that?’

Helen opened her mouth to say something, but was interrupted.

‘Because
you’re dying,’ the male voice came from the doorway behind her and she spun round.

‘The door was unlocked,’ Tom explained, ‘so I let myself in.’ The look in his face told Helen he’d had enough of the usual niceties too. Tom looked grimly determined. ‘I was going to call but I heard voices and, yes, I’ve been listening at the doorway. You can ask me to leave if you like.’

‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Mary challenged him.

‘Because Helen’s right, you want to tell us what happened,’ he sat down opposite her. ‘My Nan had rheumatoid arthritis for years and she never had a tenth of the doctor’s appointments or hospital visits you get through. I thought it was some fancy private health care scheme at first but then you had the visit from Graham Heath yesterday,’ his tone was hard, unbending. ‘I’m assuming our local solicitor was updating your will?’

Mary turned to Helen, ‘Oh, he’s good,’ she said as if she was particularly impressed by a young protégé, ‘he’s very good. What a sharp one, he’s so sharp he’ll cut himself one day, he will. I’d keep this one if I were you, young Helen. You two could go far together.’

‘So it’s true?’ asked Helen, ‘you are ill?’

‘Small cell lung cancer,’ said Mary, ‘sounds almost harmless, doesn’t it? But those small cells are killing me. It’s inoperable, at my age at least,’ and she shook her head dismissively. ‘Everybody smoked in my day. We didn’t know any better and by the time we did it was too late,’ she said the last part as if she really didn’t care one way or the other.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Helen.

‘Don’t
be,’ she replied firmly, leaving them to draw their own conclusions about her desire to continue living, ‘so, what’s Sam Armstrong got to say about me?’ she asked, drawing the subject to a close.

Mary didn’t bother to deny any of it this time. Instead she listened without offering any response until they were done. Tom and Helen recounted everything they had learned from the farmer, expecting her to pick Sam Armstrong’s account of her young life apart when they were through but instead she just said, ‘The devil finds work for idle hands, as my father was fond of saying.

‘He wanted me to be a lady and ladies didn’t work. He wanted me to marry, keep house and stay out of trouble but it left me with too much free time. Teaching came later, during the war, when the men went off to fight.’

‘What did you do all day?’ asked Helen.

‘Helped Mrs Harris, baked, read my books,’ she said listlessly, ‘and I used to go for a long walk every day on my own – a woman could back then and she’d be safe. My walks often took me down No Name Lane. Sean Donnellan was always by the river. I would stop and talk to him, little by little I got to know him and I realised I had been hasty in my judgement.’

‘How so?’

‘He was kind and considerate, he cared about my opinion on things, which was rare for a man in those days, still is, and he knew so much. Sean had read so many books, he had travelled, he knew writers, poets, artists and he had such big plans for his future. We became close. It was a gradual thing that happened slowly, over a whole summer.’

‘What
about Betty? They were courting weren’t they?’

‘Hardly,’ she said dismissively. ‘Sean stepped out with Betty for a while but it was never …’ her voice trailed away then she said, ‘men were expected to sow their wild oats before they settled down. Girls like Betty were foolish enough to let them. Sean never made her a promise of anything.’

‘At least that’s what he told you,’ said Tom but she ignored this. Helen was trying to understand a society that expected men to sow wild oats while condemning the girls that granted them the opportunity.

‘Sean wasn’t courting anyone when it started and nor was I,’ Mary insisted primly, ‘I broke it off with Henry when I realised I had feelings for Sean.’

‘How did Henry take it?’ asked Tom, knowing the answer already.

‘Badly.’

‘Sam Armstrong said he pinned all his future hopes on you and when you broke up with him, he pretty much lost his mind.’

‘He kept saying he had done it all for me,’ she assented, ‘made himself into something so he could be with me, pleaded with me to give him another chance but I just couldn’t,’ she said, then added, ‘not then.’

‘Most teenage romances end dramatically,’ said Helen, ‘but this was different wasn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Mary admitted.

‘What happened?’ asked Tom.

‘Nothing for a while,’ she told him, ‘I stopped seeing Henry, much to my father’s disapproval, and started to walk out with Sean.’

‘Did
your father know?’ asked Helen.

Mary shook her head. ‘He would never have allowed it,’ her eyes widened, ‘the vicar’s daughter and the Irish Catholic boy? But it’s impossible to keep a secret for long in a village.’