Read No Name Lane (Howard Linskey) Online
Authors: Howard Linskey
‘I bet you do.’
It was late and DI Peacock was just about to call it a night and get off home to his wife when Bradshaw and Vincent sauntered in with their news.
‘So you were right,’ he told Bradshaw, ‘Denny did have a secret. He’s knocking off a teenage waitress.’
‘We followed them,’ said Bradshaw, ‘she’s got a ground-floor flat. My guess is Denny is helping her with the rent.’
‘It looks like he’s moved in with her,’ added Vincent.
‘We went back and had a discreet word with the café owner too,’ Bradshaw told Peacock, ‘Denny’s been using the place for a while. She’s over-age, but not by much. The owner didn’t know if she was seeing him or not but he didn’t look like he gave a shit one way or the other.’
‘Did
you tell his missus?’ asked Peacock in a tone that did little to indicate his feelings on the wisdom of that.
‘We thought we should,’ said Bradshaw, ‘if she was protecting him or refused to think badly of him, this might be just what was needed to get her thinking more clearly about him and Michelle.’
‘How’d she take it?’
Vincent shrugged, ‘not well but …’
‘She didn’t say much,’ admitted Bradshaw, ‘just slumped there on her sofa and got a bit teary. Maybe she already suspected something or it just wasn’t that important any more, with her daughter still missing.’
‘She didn’t give us anything we don’t already have,’ admitted Vincent.
‘He’s a bit of a one isn’t he, this Denny?’ asked Peacock, as if he was talking to himself, ‘trouble is I don’t know what this really tells us other than the fact that he likes teenage muff,’ he added, ‘and he’s already getting some of that. Right now we can prove that Denny is an old perv but not that he killed his stepdaughter.’
‘What more do we need?’ asked Vincent but he said it quietly, as if to himself.
‘We need a body,’ Peacock told him.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Day Nine
Tom slept late that morning. There didn’t seem to be any point in getting up early. He’d reached a dead end in the Sean Donnellan case, was reduced to peddling stories to a rival newspaper, was about to get his arse sued off by a member of the cabinet and then there was Helen.
The old familiar feelings of hurt and rejection swept over him now. This was exactly why he had always been so careful not to get seriously involved with anybody. Tom knew you could never fully trust or rely on anyone else in this world. He had learned that lesson from a very young age. Basically you were on your own and the sooner you accepted that the better but there had been something about Helen Norton that had made him forget all of his usual rules and he had stupidly let his guard down. Now he felt like an idiot and he was determined to take his mind off Helen and the way she had calmly driven off after their time with Mary Collier.
Something came back to him then: Fiona Summers’ words about Nelson, the headmaster at Great Middleton School, ‘slapped her right across the face he did. I can’t even remember why but it was something-or-nothing’. This had jarred with him at the time, the notion of the in-control headmaster being pushed beyond his limit by
the little girl and, even though the incident had been some time ago, in Tom’s eyes it still merited an explanation.
Tom reasoned he was more likely to gain an audience with the oh-so-busy headmaster once the school day was over. He knew that Nelson liked to stay behind for a couple of hours after the children had gone. On arrival, Tom told the school secretary it was about a story that would be in tomorrow’s paper but he was deliberately vague about this. It would do no harm to put the shits up the headmaster, as it was likely to be the only way he would be permitted to see the man at short notice.
Tom wanted to know why Nelson would slap a girl like Michelle Summers. What was it about her in particular that made the head lose control? Nelson’s explanation might be a trivial one and was likely to have no bearing on the girl’s disappearance years later but the incident had been nagging at Tom and he kept coming back to it. He knew it was liable to be a waste of time but there was no harm in rattling the headmaster’s cage to see what would come of it.
The school reception was a sizeable open space with skylights and magnolia walls but no furniture. Tom occupied himself by taking in the gallery of photographs while he waited for the school secretary to return. It must have been a relatively recent addition, for he had never seen these pictures before. Generations of children were featured here in rows of framed group portraits. The headmaster must have reasoned the one thing the new school lacked was a sense of history, so he’d decided to import one, by fishing out these old pictures from the previous school building. The collection started at one
end, with a handful of black-and-white images. Tom recognised Henry Collier in one of those earlier photographs, which, judging by the clothes he was wearing, dated from the early sixties. He had a serious but not unkind face and the children seemed relaxed in his presence, the boys in shorts and the girls in dresses, their hair tied in bows, an image of a more innocent, unknowing era. The one thing he did not look like was a murderer.
Tom worked his way along the wall, glancing at each photograph in turn, as the pictures slowly became more modern, the short trousers replaced by long ones, the black-and-white photographs by colour pictures as he finally reached the seventies, the decade that taste forgot. The male teachers had beards and long hair that covered their ears. They wore brown jackets in tweed or corduroy, while the women were decked out in shapeless dresses with coloured hoops or spots in green, brown and purple, or they wore pleated A-line skirts and white blouses with ruffled collars and beige jumpers. The kids wore chunky, hand-knitted sweaters with clumsy patterns, bright T shirts or coloured check shirts and there was a lot of gingham and even tartan, as if the brightly coloured clothes could make up for the drab days of power cuts and the three-day-week.
Tom wondered what these kids were all doing now and who they had grown up to be. Then he found what he was really looking for. It was an old, colour photograph, slightly faded from being in direct sunlight for a long time, but the figures in it were still recognisable. It was a group shot, around twenty years old, featuring two rows of children and a woman stood to one side of them. Mary Collier
was dressed primly in a woollen dress, her hair tied back and pinned with a precision bordering on military. She could have been in one of those old war films that showed women in blue uniforms, moving toy planes around to chart the progress of the Battle of Britain. Mary Collier would have been ideal casting as a harsh, middle-aged NCO, disciplining the young WAAFs for lateness or wearing too much make-up on duty.
His eye left Mary and settled on the rows of children in her charge. They must have been aged about seven or eight.
‘Are you in that one?’ He had been so absorbed by the photograph that he hadn’t heard the receptionist return.
He pointed at a short, worried-looking kid at the end of the front row. ‘That’s me.’
‘Oh bless,’ she said it kindly, ‘you look like you’ve got the troubles of the world on you there,’ and she was right, he did.
‘He’ll be finished in a few minutes,’ she told him, ‘would you like a coffee while you’re waiting.’
‘No thanks.’
‘Then I’ll leave you with your memories.’
When she was gone, Tom continued to gaze at the photograph, trying to remember how it felt to be that age. He looked so serious. Of course this could have been an illusion. Perhaps the shutter clicked at the wrong moment and he had been smiling and happy a second earlier but he doubted that. Tom knew it would be years before he could shrug off abandonment by his mother as something of no real consequence. He wondered what thoughts were going through that troubled little mind of his.
As
he progressed along the line of photos, the pictures became brighter. This was the modern age of the new school and the images hadn’t yet succumbed to the debilitating effect of the light. One photograph in particular caught Tom’s eye and he stopped and stared at it.
At first he couldn’t quite take in its significance, his interest was more instinctive than anything else, but he began to gaze closely at the faces of the little boys and girls and the teacher who was standing there with them until everything gradually came into view. A thought dropped into Tom’s head and exploded there like a bomb. The sudden shock was a physical sensation that he felt in his blood and all over his skin, which prickled at the realisation.
Moments later the headmaster finally emerged. Mr Nelson pushed open the swing doors hard so he could make his point. He was far too busy to waste any more of his precious time with journalists but as he came through the door and out into reception he stopped in his tracks and looked disbelievingly around the room, because there was nobody there. Tom had gone.
Tom rang the doorbell and waited until he heard footsteps coming down the stairs, then the door finally opened.
‘There’s something I want to ask you,’ he told Andrew Foster from his doorstep. ‘It’s important.’
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
‘Really?’ his friend seemed perplexed by his directness. ‘Everything all right, is it?’ and he made a show of looking beyond Tom to see if something was going on outside that he didn’t know about. Did the teacher seem nervous? ‘Okay, mate. Come in then.’
Tom followed Andrew into his front room, which was exactly as he remembered it from the night they had been drinking together, minus the vodka bottle but with the addition of sunlight through the windows.
‘Ask away.’
‘It’s about Michelle Summers,’ he said, ‘the missing girl.’
‘Right.’
‘That night when we first met in the Lion, you said you didn’t know her.’
There was a fraction of a second’s hesitation. ‘I don’t.’
‘You said you’d never known her, that she was before your time.’
‘Yeah,’ answered the teacher, ‘that’s right.’
‘But that’s
not
right is it, because you do know her, or at least you did.’
‘I don’t follow you, mate.’
‘You taught her, for a whole year. In 1988, the first year you were at the school in fact, she was in your class.’
Andrew was trying to force a bemused look onto his face but it wasn’t working. The only genuine emotion that
Tom could see written there was fear. ‘I’ve seen the class photo on the school wall. It might be five years old but there’s no mistaking her.’
‘It can’t have been her, mate. One ten-year-old girl looks very like another, that’s all. You’ve seen another girl and thought it was Michelle what’s-her-name.’
‘Her name is Summers; Michelle Summers.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘Say it then.’
‘What?’
‘Say her name.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I want you to,’ insisted Tom, ‘say her name.’
‘Michelle Summers,’ Andrew gave Tom a look like he was humouring a drunk, ‘happy now?’
‘No. Christ, man, she’s standing next to you at the end of the row in the picture. It’s her. There she is in your first school photo as a teacher, part of your first form class, which had to be a big deal for you, and she’s standing next to you. Yet you told me you never even knew her.’
‘Hang on,’ Andrew held up a hand in an ‘I can explain’ sort of way.
‘No, you hang on. I want to know why you said you never knew her.’
‘Tom, relax will you. You’ve got the wrong girl, I’m telling you.
‘No, I haven’t. I know I have the right girl because I checked. That’s what journalists do, we check things, and I checked this. I’ve just been to see Michelle’s mother and I asked her. You definitely taught her.’
‘Okay, okay, I’ll take your word for it. So it was Michelle
and I’m sorry for being such a forgetful tosser but I don’t get that attached to the kids, mate. It’s just a job,’ and he shrugged in an exaggerated manner, ‘I didn’t realise she’d been in my class. It was five years ago and I forgot about it, all right?’
‘No, not all right. I don’t believe you, Andrew, and do you know why?’
‘What the hell is this, Tom?’