The Last Winter of Dani Lancing: A Novel (48 page)

Tom pushes the swing and sees the child flash in the air—weeeeeeeeee it cries. Dani waves at them both. “I don’t care that he isn’t mine—I will love you both forever,” he hears himself say. This is my family.

“The baby … she lost the baby.”

“You fucker.” Tom’s truncheon is in his hand again and he smashes into Duncan’s thigh. The older man screams and drops to the bottom of the phone box.

“You will never see Dani again.”

“Please, no …”

“Say it or your wife and daughter will wish they were dead.”

Tom hands him the phone.

In the cathedral, Patty and Jim feel their hearts break. For Dani, for Tom, for the baby … even for Duncan Cobhurn. And in the shadows Dani remembers the emptiness—the pain rushes back into her. She remembers the pit opening inside her soul when she heard Duncan on the phone that night.

“I hate you. You won’t trap me again with your brat—I’m glad it’s dead,” he had told her. Tom had made him say that—how could he? He was supposed to be her friend—he had been her protector and confidant. How could he? And Duncan, her poor Duncan.

She looks to Tom. His head is bowed. She fades from where she is and reappears, floating in mid-air below him, looking directly
into his face. Tears drop from his cheek and fall toward her … flaring slightly as they pass through before striking the flagstones. She sees his pain and yet cannot understand how the gentle boy she once knew beat a man and left him broken in the bottom of a phone box. Forced him to break a woman’s heart. How can this man be her Tom?

“Tom?” she whispers.

He looks right through her—there are no answers from him. He stands up and looks back to Patty.

“My plan had been to make him dump her on the phone and then I’d turn up an hour later. I had a cake and flowers. It was just gonna be by chance—on her birthday …”

Dani understands.

“… and she’d be all sad from Cobhurn—but all happy to see me. She’d fall into my arms and realize we were meant to be together. I just wanted her to love me like I loved her. I even wanted to … I thought we could raise the baby. Our baby. I didn’t care that it was his.”

“But?” Patty asks.

“When I heard she had lost the baby I thought she’d need time. I decided to wait for twenty-four hours. Go back the next day. I still thought she’d be so happy to see me that …”

“Tom, I loved you but I was never in love with you,” Dani tells the air.

“I just loved her so much,” Tom repeats.

“I know you did, Tom. I know you did,” Patty says in a tired voice.

“But when I got to her flat the next day—the … the door was open. The place was empty. I sat down and waited. I stayed in her flat all that day and night but she never came back. She never came
back. I killed her, Patty. I killed her because I couldn’t let her be with him.”

Patty takes his hand. “Christ, what a mess.”

“Oh Jesus, this is desperate,” sneers Keyson. “Then what are you telling us? That while she was walking around she was taken by a gang and killed a month later? Is that the shit you’re pedaling?”

“No. No, you aren’t saying that are you, Tom?” Jim asks. He has walked out of the shadows. “She went back to him, didn’t she?”

“Who?” asks Patty.

“Seb Merchant.” Jim looks at his wife with, sad, soulful eyes. “In that first year at university, she got involved with drugs. Merchant was the bastard who dragged her into it. She kicked it, though, she was so strong—and I was so proud of her. She promised me she would never go back to him—she promised me.”

“Dad, I am so sorry,” Dani calls to him.

Patty shakes her head. “But Seb Merchant wasn’t in the country when Dani went missing—he’d gone to Australia months before. I found him when he came back to England. I interviewed him and he wasn’t involved.”

Tom shakes his head. “It wasn’t Seb Merchant; I wish it had been. I looked for her for days after that night, but there was no trace. I thought she’d just gone away to think, I was sure she’d call me or Izzy soon. Come home and cry on our shoulders … but nothing. I didn’t know about the trouble she’d been in that first year, she never told me. I kept waiting to hear … then you reported her missing and I just couldn’t believe it.”

“No.” Dani feels so cold.

“I went straight round to you but you didn’t know anything. I couldn’t tell you what I’d done—couldn’t tell anyone. So I carried on searching, kept calling the Durham police—drove up there any
time I had off work. Then Ben Bradman’s piece came out in the
News of the World
—I was so angry I had to confront him. He told me he’d heard rumors about Dani from a jazz musician but he had no name. It took days to track him down.”

Tom finds him in a rehearsal room, alone. Trumpet player, big with a thick neck that oozed gold chains and an enormous crucifix that hung over his heart and danced as he played. In his mid-thirties, shaved head—a large man, but slow, no muscle. Clyde Trent.

Tom pulls the heavy door closed as he goes through. The room had once been an old bank vault, now it’s used for cheap bands to rehearse and make tinny recordings. Dead acoustics.

“I done nothing …” are his first words as soon as he sees the uniform.

Tom pulls Dani’s photo out from his jacket and he holds it out with one hand. In his pocket his other hand slips inside his knuckleduster. Violence is coming so easily to him now.

“Dani Lancing. Remember her? You told a reporter that you knew her, that she was involved with drugs in a big way.”

“Oh Christ, man.” He makes a break for the door to the outside, but Tom is quicker and bars the way.

“I need to know just what you told him.”

“You got the wrong m—”

“Bradman was very clear. Now we can do this messily, which ends badly for you, or you can tell me what you know and I leave you alone and go back to London. That way nobody but you and me know we had this conversation. Which option do you like?”

Clyde is impassive, but Tom can see that inside the large man the cogs are starting to shift.

“The newspaper paid me,” he says finally.

“Lucky you. I hope you got at least thirty pieces of silver. I am offering you something far more rewarding than money.”

“Shiiiit …” He grinds his teeth and shakes his head. “These are bad men.”

“Then help me save her from them.”

Clyde looks incredulous for a second and then laughs a deep braying laugh. “She don’t want no saving. Man, she chose the gig.”

“What?”

“I know her a while back. She was with some small-time pusher, worked the university—some spliff then on to H, but she could afford it. She didn’t turn no trick. Not then.”

Tom begins to feel everything start to unravel. “Now?”

Clyde hesitates, before he leans forward and speaks softly. “A few weeks back I were at a party, she came looking for her ex but no one seen him. She seem desperate for somewhere to crash and get lost, she make an offer. She was pretty, so she got owned,” he shrugs. “She knew what she were doing.”

Tom feels bile rise in his throat. “Owned,” he repeats slowly. He knows what that means. He thinks of the branded girl at Franco’s.

“One man?”

“A gang.”

Tom wants to be sick but has to keep it all inside. “I need a name.”

“Come on, I can’t …”

“If you don’t, I will list you as an informant and have it leaked to every scumbag in this city. They will nail you to a fucking cross.”

Clyde shakes his head. Tom feels his fingers tighten inside the cold metal in his pocket. He has come too far, he will do anything now.

Clyde is quiet for quite some time, before he finally speaks. “Jackson. They known as the Jackson Five. Big joke.”

“Address?”

“Ain’t got.”

Tom nods, he can see the big man has given him all he knows.

“Thank you,” he says in what must sound so hollow to the other man—then he’s gone.

Tom runs back into the early evening gloom and heads toward the center of town. He finds a phone box and places a call to Franco. It takes some time to make his way through the entourage surrounding him, but finally he gets to speak to the man himself and ask his favor. Franco listens to Tom’s story.

“I see how you love this girl, Mr. Policeman. I hope there is a sweet outcome here … so I will help, but you owe me. You owe me personally, and you owe me big. I will collect on this debt, you can be sure of that. One day you will return these favors.”

“I will, Franco. You have my word.”

“Your word is your heart and your soul, PC Bevans. You understand that?”

“I do.”

He pauses for a moment. “Okay, give me an hour.”

It takes twenty minutes. Twenty minutes where Tom stands in the phone box and tries to keep all thoughts out of his head, all thoughts of what
being owned
by a gang might mean. But that is impossible as the image of the beautiful girl in the sarong forces itself into his mind. She was owned, kept junked up, oblivious to the world and whatever she was trying to escape from. And in return she was used whenever the gang wanted, for whatever the gang wanted. He sees again the carved F on her shoulder, her brand.

“Dani,” he moans.