No Name Lane (Howard Linskey) (43 page)

‘Do you know why?’ Tom shouted it at him.

‘No, I don’t. And I want to know just what this is actually, Tom. I want you to tell me.’

‘Because when I went round to see Michelle’s mother, do you know what she told me about you? Do you?’

‘How could I?’ Andrew Foster looked very rattled now.

‘Only good things.’

‘Right, well then,’ he seemed relieved.

‘Lots and lots of good things and all because Michelle thought you were the best thing since sliced bread. Apparently you were all she talked about for a while there. It was Mr Foster this and Mr Foster that.’

‘Well, that’s okay isn’t it?’

‘According to her mam, Michelle had a bit of a schoolgirl crush on you but she didn’t mind because you helped her daughter with her reading and handwriting, which was always so untidy before Mr Foster got involved, giving her extra help, a bit of one-to-one tuition. Fiona even made a point of thanking you at the parents’ night.’

‘That’s not my fault,’ he swallowed as if his mouth was suddenly dry, ‘if she had a bit of a crush. It can happen to any teacher; male or female.’

‘Yes and it’s not as if you were likely to reciprocate were you, not at her age? You’re not a paedo, after all.’

‘Of
course not! How could you even say something like that? She was only ten.’

‘Yeah, only ten back then,’ said Tom quietly, ‘but she was fifteen when she disappeared.’

There was a long pause. The silence stretched out in front of them. Each waited for the other to speak. More than once Andrew opened his mouth to say something but no words came out. Eventually he settled on, ‘I don’t know what it is you think …’ then he shook his head as if he felt his friend had gone crazy.

‘It’s very simple. I think you are hiding something, Andrew. I was pretty sure of it when I came round here. I’m certain now.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re scared. In fact you’re shitting it, which makes me wonder what you’ve done. You’ve lied about a missing girl. She thought you were the doggy’s little bollocks but you denied knowing her … and now she has disappeared,’ and he reached into his jacket pocket and took out the mobile phone. ‘So if you won’t tell me, it’ll have to be the police.’

‘Oh come on, don’t be stupid.’

Andrew’s house was on high ground so Tom managed to get a signal and he started to dial.

‘Don’t call the bloody police, mate,’ Tom finished dialling the number and they listened as the faint sound of a ringtone began. ‘What are you going to say? They won’t take you seriously!’

Tom knew he was right. All he had was a hunch that his friend had something to hide but there was not a shred of real evidence that Andrew had anything to answer for,
except a poor memory. Tom was bluffing him. And it looked as if Andrew was going to call that bluff. The phone rang out for what seemed like an age. He had dialled the direct line for the station that he knew by heart and they were taking a bloody long time to answer it but that was just as well, because Tom had no idea what he was going to say when they did. Tom and Andrew watched each other as the phone continued to ring and ring.

‘This is just …’ and Andrew shook his head again, ‘… madness.’

Finally the ring tone stopped and a voice said ‘Police?’

‘Hello,’ said Tom and all he could think to add to this was, ‘Sorry, wrong number’ but before he could say it, Andrew took a step forward and spoke.

‘Wait, I’ll explain,’ he urged Tom, ‘I’ll explain it all. Please.’

Tom hung up without another word. ‘What have you done, Andrew?’

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

‘Just give me a moment, wait there,’ Andrew Foster was an agitated man, ‘there’s something I have to show you. It will put your mind at rest, I promise. Just wait there.’ He was waving his arms in an effort to reassure Tom and keep him from moving then he disappeared and could be heard running up the stairs.

Tom was left on his own to attempt to put his thoughts in some sort of logical order. This was crazy, Andrew Foster wasn’t a murderer, surely; the man he had grown to know over pints in the Greyhound and the Lion couldn’t be a killer, could he? But what else could explain his bizarre behaviour? He had reacted like a man whose life depended on quickly coming up with answers he didn’t possess and he had been desperate to prevent Tom from talking to the police.

And now he had disappeared upstairs. To do what? Escape from a first-floor window or to get something? Tom looked at the living-room walls with their bayonets and the weapons suddenly took on a more sinister appearance. Tom had Andrew pegged as an immature loner with a liking for boys’ toys but what if he was a crazy man who’d become a teacher so he could get at little girls? Could Andrew be the Kiddy-Catcher and if he was, would he let Tom Carney back out into the world so he could tell everybody about it? What if he had used one of those bayonets on Michelle? What if he owned a gun? Christ, if Andrew
was mad enough to try and shoot Tom to keep him quiet, would it be any consolation that the teacher would be arrested as soon as the shots were heard? Not if he lay bleeding to death on the living room carpet it wouldn’t.

It was too late to do anything about that now. He could hear Andrew’s footsteps on the stairs. The teacher was coming back down. Tom told himself that his new friend was unlikely to try and kill him in his own front room in broad daylight but, up until a few minutes ago, he would not have suspected the man of murdering a schoolgirl. Tom tensed in readiness so he could rush Andrew and disarm him if he had a weapon, but he didn’t fancy his chances.

The living-room door swung open and Tom’s gaze immediately went to Andrew’s hands, which were empty. Any gratitude Tom may have felt for that small mercy was instantly forgotten when his gaze travelled upwards and he took in the scene in front of him. Tom’s mouth fell open in astonishment and he felt his skin tingle. ‘You have got to be kidding me?’

‘No, Tom,’ admitted Andrew, ‘we are not kidding you.’

But Tom Carney ignored the words of his friend. He was too busy gazing at the figure standing behind the school teacher. She was a slight young girl with dark hair, a faint trace of lipstick on her mouth and a silver chain around her neck with a St Christopher medallion attached to it. Michelle Summers wasn’t dead or buried in a ditch, miles from Great Middleton. She wasn’t Girl-Number-Five, the latest victim of the Kiddy-Catcher, and she wasn’t a teenage runaway, sleeping rough in London or Manchester and getting mixed up in drugs or prostitution.

Michelle Summers was very much alive.

She
looked well, with no signs of ill treatment, and she was standing in Andrew Foster’s living room, less than a mile from her mother’s house.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Tom, ‘she’s alive.’

The teacher nodded, ‘and completely unharmed,’ Andrew assured him with a benign look on his face, as if that would make it all okay somehow.

‘Oh my God,’ Tom was struggling to find the words, beyond a succession of callings to the Almighty, ‘what have you done, Andrew?’ he asked again.

Then Andrew did a strange thing. He turned back to the girl he had been holding captive in his home, while the police frantically searched for her all over the country, and said, ‘Tell him, darling. I think it should come from you.’

Tom was struggling to process the information he was receiving now. Did her abductor just call Michelle Summers, darling? What kind of brainwashing was this?

‘It’s very simple,’ the girl told Tom with a steely confidence that belied her years. ‘We knew this day would come sooner or later. We want you to listen to us, to hear us out, before you call the police, I mean. We’d like to explain everything, so everybody knows and understands why we did it,’ and if all of this wasn’t astonishing enough, the young girl then did something that sent Tom’s world rotating on its axis. She reached out an arm to one side and the schoolteacher took her hand in his, then they held on to each other like the star-crossed lovers they were convinced they’d become.

‘We are going to tell you everything, Tom,’ said Andrew calmly. ‘We want you to hear our story.’

‘He loves me,’ said the girl with conviction, ‘and I love him too.’

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

Tom took some persuading. His first reaction was to reach for his phone again and call the police. ‘Please don’t do that!’ begged the girl. ‘Not yet. Everybody has to know the truth first. Otherwise there’s no hope for us, ever! Don’t you understand?’ she seemed frantic now.

‘No hope for you? Are you crazy?’ Tom asked Michelle. ‘Don’t you know what’s been going on while you’ve been hiding in here? A nationwide man hunt! Every police officer in the country has been looking for you. Have you any idea how much of their time and manpower you’ve wasted or the hurt you’ve caused?’ He then looked into the calm face of his friend. ‘Oh I just remembered, you don’t read the papers or watch the news,’ he told him, ‘but you must have bloody known!’

‘Yes Tom, we did know,’ Andrew continued to talk to him as if he was an entirely reasonable man who was trying to calm somebody down, ‘and that certainly wasn’t our intention. Things just spiralled out of control – but I know you will understand when you hear what we have to say.’

‘Understand?’ then he remembered something. ‘Was she here when I came back for that drink? Was Michelle hiding upstairs while we were downing your bloody vodka? She must have been!’ He was furious then.

‘Just give us a few more minutes, please, then you can call anyone you like.’ Tom hesitated. ‘Please,’ Andrew said
again. ‘It’s a good story and that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? A really good story.’

Tom shook his head, ‘I must be crazy.’

‘Thank you,’ said the girl, beaming at him, as if her problems were solved instead of just beginning.

‘You won’t regret it,’ Andrew told him.

‘I already am.’

Ian Bradshaw sat at his desk at HQ thinking about his partner, if that was the right word to describe his unofficial pairing with Vincent Addison, and the fake professor, both of whom had let him down badly. He was praying that Burstow’s intense questioning would not reveal the private conversation the mad fantasist had enjoyed with DC Bradshaw in the pub, for no good could ever come of that. If Bradshaw was annoyed at himself and more than a little embarrassed at having been taken in by the fake professor, he was hardly alone, however. The entire Durham force had been listening to the lunatic’s theories for weeks and it was all the fault of one man. Detective Superintendent Trelawe had told them Burstow was an expert, so why would they ever have cause to doubt him? Still, it galled Bradshaw that he had ever taken the trouble to listen to the man’s bullshit, assuming it to be science and not fantasy.

Then there was Vincent. Like Bradshaw, he had been discouraged by the realisation that although they’d rumbled Denny as a pervert, with a liking for girls who were borderline legal, they were unable as yet to pin the disappearance of his young stepdaughter on the man.

When they’d been out on the road tailing Denny,
Vincent had seemed livelier and more positive than usual. Bradshaw reasoned his partner secretly enjoyed doing a bit of real police work for a change, even if he was unlikely to admit it. DI Peacock’s grim assessment of the lack of evidence connecting Denny to Michelle’s disappearance seemed to dent his partner’s morale, however. Sure enough, when Bradshaw enquired after his whereabouts the next morning he was told by Peacock that Vincent had gone sick with depression, the DI adding the word ‘again’ to his sentence, before concluding, ‘He’s about as much use as a toffee kettle and just as reliable.’

Bradshaw was gutted. He had spent the rest of the morning on the admin that plagued every modern detective: statements, filing, endless form filling, the stuff they never showed you on TV. Now he was eager to get going once more. He had an idea that this might be a good time to revisit Michelle’s mother. If he could have another word with her in the cold light of day, once she’d had a few hours to allow Denny’s betrayal to sink in, she might prove more open; freed from a conflicting loyalty, Fiona might remember something significant. It was certainly worth a try but he would have liked Vincent to be in the room with him. One of them would make the tea and provide sympathy; the other could derail Fiona with a few harsh questions about the appropriateness of Denny’s relationship with Michelle. Good cop, bad cop this time. He wanted to get back out there with Vincent and show everybody just what they were capable of when they put their minds to it but it seemed his new partner just didn’t have the stamina to see things through to the end, so Bradshaw was on his own again.