No Name Lane (Howard Linskey) (4 page)

‘Well,’ Tom said, ‘it’s nothing I’ve done,’

His reverie was short-lived however, cut cruelly short by a familiar, booming voice that had more than its usual level of malice behind it. ‘Carney, get in here now!’

Tom walked into the office in disbelief.

‘Chief?’ he asked uncertainly.

‘You prat!’ shouted the Doc and he immediately threw a folded copy of that morning’s edition at Tom, who ducked as it sailed harmlessly over his head and out though the opened door behind him. ‘You complete and utter fucking prat!’

CHAPTER FIVE

DC Ian Bradshaw was staring at the ceiling again. He’d spent a lot of time looking at ceilings lately, during the long nights of sleeplessness that followed his recuperation. Then there were the hours of listless staring when his depression left him with so little energy he couldn’t even stretch out a hand to change the TV channel with the remote control. Instead he would leave the inane daytime chat, stupefying game-shows and saccharin-coated kiddies’ programmes running. Every lunchtime in Bradshaw’s flat, ‘Mr Benn’ would go about his business of escaping from the real world, via the magic tailor’s shop, before returning to number 52 Festive Road, always with a new souvenir in his pocket, while Bradshaw lay on the couch watching him, wondering how he could similarly escape from reality and just how he had managed to ruin his entire existence so spectacularly by the age of thirty.

It had been a long, slow road to recovery, taken in baby steps and punctuated by small victories; the ability to make a proper breakfast in the morning, two slices of toast with a couple of fried eggs on top, was considered an important milestone. When Bradshaw finally returned to work, months after the ‘incident’, as his counsellor had taken to calling it, he noticed a change in the way his colleagues regarded him. It wasn’t so much what they said,
for they rarely said anything to him at all these days. It was more subtle than that; the look in their eyes or the way they pretty much shunned him when he was in the room, as if his ill luck or incompetence might rub off on them if they came too close. He was a wash-up. That’s how they saw him and, he had to admit, as he pondered his lot during the many more hours of ceiling-staring which followed while he tried and failed to conquer his insomnia, that they were, on the whole, correct and fair to view him that way. He
had
fucked up, therefore he
was
a fuck-up. There was no denying the cold, hard logic of it. He had messed up and somebody else had paid very dearly for his mistake. As he played the events over and over again in his mind, wondering how he could have been so stupid, it seemed to somehow compound his misery to know that he’d had the best education of any of them. At school, Bradshaw had always found success so effortless. Tall, good-looking and clever, he was never short of a girlfriend, captained the football team and was the hero of the swimming galas. Bradshaw attained good grades and a university degree, literally becoming a poster-boy for Durham Constabulary when during his early days he appeared in an advertising campaign for graduate recruits, under the strapline ‘Join the Fast Track’.

And look at him now, still languishing as a Detective Constable. Ian Bradshaw’s early run of achievement had left him singularly unprepared to deal with the spectacular failure of his police career. None of the academic or sporting stuff mattered if it turned out that you were basically clueless. Everyone had always told him when he was growing up that he could be anything he chose to be
but when it came down to it, he couldn’t even become the one thing he really wanted to be; a police officer; or at least a competent one.

Now he was staring at the ceiling once more as he lay on the soft leather couch, while his counsellor, Doctor Mellor – recommended and paid for by Durham Constabulary in an effort to prove they had not entirely washed their hands of him – tried once again to forge some form of empathetic bond between them.

‘This is our fifth session,’ Doctor Mellor’s soft and faintly hypnotic voice drifted over to Bradshaw from his seat in the middle of the airless room, ‘and I think we have established enough trust between us to begin to explore the matter of your self-esteem, right?’ The doctor had a habit of ending his pronouncements with the word
right
, an annoying little verbal tick that made his voice rise in pitch at the end of every sentence. The good doctor clearly didn’t know he was doing it but Bradshaw had taken to answering his questions literally, because he suspected it might irritate the older man.

‘Not right.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Sixth,’ answered Bradshaw. He couldn’t see the doctor, he was still looking at the wooden blades of the ceiling fan, but he knew the man would be frowning while he attempted to understand his patient’s meaning. ‘This is our
sixth
session.’

‘Is it?’ the voice was disbelieving.

‘Yes it is.’ Bradshaw wanted to add, ‘Believe me, I know!’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ the doctor’s face would be a picture of geniality now but if Mellor couldn’t get a simple
fact like this right then what chance was there that he could actually help Bradshaw to conquer his ‘demons’, as they were both encouraged to call them?

‘I am,’ confirmed Bradshaw.

The doctor cleared his throat and asked, ‘would you like some tea?’

Always the same offer, always the same reply. ‘No.’

‘I
will
have some, if you don’t mind,’ the doctor said.

‘Why would I mind?’

He heard the doctor pad across the carpet then the snick of the kettle as he switched it on. ‘So, as a young man, how did you feel about yourself, Ian? Would you mind telling me that? Take as long as you need.’

‘If you like.’ Ian Bradshaw didn’t really care. He just wanted the seconds to tick by until they made minutes, and then for the minutes to accumulate as quickly as possible until there were sixty of them and the hour was up, whereupon the doctor would solemnly announce, as he always did, that ‘alas and alack our time is through,’ before moving on to his next victim – the money-grubbing old goat.

Bradshaw thought for a long while before answering, so long that he heard the kettle hiss then bubble as its watery contents slowly began to drift to the boil, then the words came out, seemingly of their own accord. ‘When I was a boy I used to think the world was a movie about my life and I was its star.’

‘Interesting,’ said the doctor and he began to pour.

‘Is it?’

‘Yes, it is,’ Bradshaw could hear the clink, clink, clink of the metal spoon against the bone-china cup as the doctor
stirred. ‘And now, Ian,’ he probed gently, ‘how do you feel about yourself now?’

Again, there was a long silence before the younger man spoke.

‘Like a bit-part player,’ answered Bradshaw, ‘non-speaking.’

Mellor contemplated DC Bradshaw’s response for a time.

‘Shall I tell you what I think?’ asked the good doctor eventually.

‘Isn’t that the whole point of the exercise?’ replied Bradshaw.

‘Therapy is a two-way street, Ian,’ Doctor Mellor reminded him, ‘you talk to me, we establish a bond of trust, over time. I feel it’s only fair for me to repay that trust.’

‘So, you’re going to tell me about your childhood?’ asked Bradshaw.

‘No, no, Ian,’ a slight grimace of irritation from the usually unruffled doctor, ‘that’s not what I am going to do and I suspect you know that. No, I am going to tell you what I think. What we have here is a classic case of a life failing to live up to really quite unrealistic expectations. I believe you to be a romantic at heart, Ian, with a romantic’s overblown view of the world and I don’t just mean where the fairer sex is concerned, though you are currently single,’ the doctor needlessly reminded him. ‘We have spoken before about your long-held desire to join the police force, which I feel was the nearest thing to your childhood comics filled with heroes who would somehow
save the day. You expected that the job of a police officer would be something you could fall into quite naturally and were subsequently quite unprepared for the frustrations of the job.

‘Don’t you see, though, that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with you,’ the doctor suddenly announced cheerfully, ‘apart from a quite temporary sense of shock and despair caused by the trauma of the … er …
incident
of which we have previously spoken at length. Aside from that, the realities of day-to-day life simply fail to live up to your expectations.’ The doctor spoke those last words as if he had just discovered a cure for cancer or at least the particular tumour that afflicted Bradshaw. This time the silence went on for so long the doctor felt compelled to prompt the detective constable with a ‘right?’

‘I know that,’ said Bradshaw and he sat bolt upright on the couch. ‘I bloody know that. Jesus Christ, six sodding hours for you to finally come out with the bleeding obvious! Life hasn’t lived up to my earlier hopes and aspirations; well then, that’s just me and about nine-tenths of the rest of the planet isn’t it? I don’t suppose you wanted to do
this
when you were a kid, did you?’

‘Calm down, Ian,’ cautioned the doctor.

‘Calm down? Bollocks to that!’ Bradshaw sat up suddenly, ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ and he climbed down from the couch and struggled into his jacket.

‘But Ian,’ protested the dumbstruck doctor, ‘we’ve barely had forty minutes, you’ve still got twenty left.’

‘Keep the change!’ called Bradshaw as he went through the door.

He
hadn’t gone more than a few yards when the receptionist reached him. They were both moving at speed and almost barged into one another.

‘Detective Constable,’ she said, ‘I have a call for you. They say it’s urgent.’

They walked quickly back to the front desk together and Bradshaw picked up the phone. It was Peacock.

‘Get your arse back here sharpish, Bradshaw,’ the Detective Inspector ordered, ‘the boss wants everyone assembled in half an hour.’

‘What’s happened?’ Ian asked, and when Peacock answered, Bradshaw felt a stone where his stomach had been.

‘Another girl’s been taken.’

CHAPTER SIX

Jesus, thought Tom Carney, what the hell did he have to do to please this man? ‘What’s the matter?’ he protested weakly. The alpha male within him had run for cover at the first sound of the Doc’s booming voice and he already sounded like a small child caught licking the icing off a cake by his mother.

‘He’s suing us!’ yelled Docherty, ‘and, according to our lawyers, he’s going to bloody win!’

Tom rallied then. ‘Of course he’s going to sue us. What choice does he have? He’s not going to admit it, is he? If he does that he’s finished. Timothy Grady’s a politician, so he’s got to sue or at least
say
he’s going to sue – but he isn’t going to win. He can’t win!’

‘Oh, can’t he? Which law school did you go to? Or are you George Carman in disguise?’ Tom kept silent. ‘No? Well perhaps you can get me his number because I think we are going to need the best libel lawyer in the country thanks to you, that stupid bitch Anna-Louise and that nugget Jonathan. The only person I blame for this disaster more than you lot is my deputy. He, at the very least, should have known better!’

In that instant it all became clear. Alex Docherty was already distancing himself from the story, the front page lead on his own paper, on the hard-to-disprove point that he was technically on leave on the day it was cleared to
run, at a Buckingham Palace garden party of all things, and poor, unfortunate Martyn Tracy had taken on the job of Editor in the great man’s absence for a day; a single day that would probably destroy him and everyone who worked on the story, if Grady won his libel case. It mattered little that Docherty was in touch with every aspect of it right up until virtually the hour that it ran. He would only have to claim that he would never have agreed to run the story in its entirety and it would be the deputy editor who’d carry the can. Editors lost their jobs over this kind of thing. Newspapers weren’t made of money and their owners did not like to lose libel cases. Juries had a nasty habit of awarding massive pay-outs to the wronged, even when they were as guilty as sin and everybody knew it. It was one thing to know someone was dodgy, another thing entirely to prove it beyond doubt in a court of law. Alex Docherty had consulted the paper’s lawyers and he was already running for cover. So much for it being ‘his paper’.