Dead Silent (8 page)

He lifted his goggles onto his crash helmet. She looked surprised, startled almost, although he didn’t know why. He always wore them, particularly in summer. They kept the flies and fumes out of his eyes.

He smiled. She was wearing a vest top, and he could see the outline of the lace on her bra-cup. He liked that.

‘What can I do for you?’ she said.

Frankie thought she sounded nervous. He watched her delicate fingers as they toyed with a pen in her hand. He wondered where she lived.

‘I’m Frankie,’ he said quietly, ‘and I’m looking for a reporter.’

‘You’ve come to the right building, Frankie.’

He shook his head. She didn’t understand. ‘No, not any reporter. He drives a red sports car. Jack Garrett.’

‘Why do you want him?’

‘He’s writing about Claude Gilbert.’

She raised her eyebrows at that. ‘He doesn’t work for us. He’s freelance, lives somewhere in Turners Fold.’

‘Do you have an address?’

Frankie thought she was about to tell him, but she stopped and looked embarrassed. ‘I can’t give out addresses,’ she said.

‘But I need it,’ he said, and he leant forward onto the counter. It made her step back quickly.

‘Just wait there,’ she said. ‘What’s your name again?’

‘Frankie.’

‘Just Frankie?’

He nodded.

She disappeared into the doorway again, and Frankie could hear her whispering to someone. They were talking about him. He felt tears prickle his eyes. He had blown it again.

He should have found the reporter on the internet, made his own way there.

He turned to leave, his fists clenched with frustration, and as he rushed for the door, his footsteps set off the entry buzzer again.

He took some deep breaths and put his fingers to his cheeks when he reached the street. They felt hot. He slipped his goggles back over his eyes and then sat astride his scooter, fumbling quickly for the keys. He shouldn’t have gone there. Now they had a name. His name. He pressed down on the kickstart pedal, and then raced down the bus lane, working quickly through the gears until he was out of sight of the building.

I sat in my car and thought about Bill Hunter. He had remembered my father’s death and, as soon as he had mentioned it, I knew I would call at the cemetery. It was quiet, and I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel, wondering whether I should go in.

I hadn’t been for a few months; visits had recently become confined to Father’s Day and Christmas and I felt bad about that. I looked along the rows of granite slabs, broken up by the occasional splash of colour from flowers left in memoriam. Our house had memories of him dotted around, his Johnny Cash records, old photographs, but I knew I should visit the grave more often, to keep the dirt from the gold-etched words: ‘Robert Garrett—Beloved Husband and Father’.

I closed my eyes and swallowed, fought the wetness in my eyes. This was why I didn’t come often—because whenever I saw the patch of grass, I imagined him under the ground, in the box, still and cold. I fought the images, tried to see the grave as merely a marker, a focal point, because that wasn’t how I wanted to remember him. I wanted to think
of the man who had been in my life, strong and quiet and caring, not the police officer who had been shot in the line of duty.

Losing both parents had toughened me up, perhaps too much. When I looked at Laura, saw her smile or heard her laugh, or whenever I caught her in an unguarded moment, vulnerable and soft, unlike the tough cop I knew she could be, I felt a need to hold her, to be the strong man. But most times I stopped myself; something inside of me held me back, as if I was waiting for the rejection.

So maybe losing both parents hadn’t toughened me up at all. Maybe it had made me too fragile, so that I was scared of the knockbacks.

I turned the key in the ignition.

‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ I whispered, ‘but I’m going to have to sell the car.’ Then I laughed at myself. Not really for talking to myself, but because it was about something as trivial as a car. It wasn’t that simple though. My father had owned that car throughout my childhood. It was how I remembered Sunday mornings, my father with a sponge in his hand, washing it down. I had friends at school whose fathers owned better cars than a 1973 Triumph Stag in Calypso Red, but to my father it was a reward for his police work, the drives on sunny days his escape from the humdrum of family life.

I let my words hang there for a minute or so, just giving him a chance to hear them, to know that I wasn’t being disrespectful. It was my last real connection with my father and somehow I wanted him to know that I was doing it for the right reason, not because I was trying to dim his memory.

My thoughts were interrupted by my phone ringing. I took a couple of deep breaths before I answered.

‘Hello?’

‘I’ve got some material for you.’

I smiled. It was Tony Davies.

‘What like?’

‘Just the archive stuff we used for the Gilbert anniversary edition. I’ve done you copies. I’ll drop them off later.’

I thanked him and hung up. I gave a quick salute to the lines of headstones. At least I was making progress.

Mike Dobson closed his eyes as he lay back on the sofa. It was one of those summer evenings when the heat never really disappears and the neighbourhood children seem to play too late, the laughs and shrieks drifting in through the open windows.

The television was on in the corner of the room, but he couldn’t concentrate. Why was it that the memories came back to him so strongly? He could go for months when there was nothing, but then it took just a small thing, like the sight of his naked wife, frigid and cold, or the flowery sweetness of the scent of Chanel. He was swept more than two decades back, and the images assaulted him, mixed up the past with the present, as if she was in the room with him.

Summer nights like these were the worst, when the sun took all evening to set over the lavender bushes in the garden, their delicate smell drifting in through the open window. And with the smells came the sounds, the sensations. He felt her touch for a moment, that spark, that excitement, her hand in his, her fingers soft and light, sitting together in the park. Then he remembered those other moments. His mouth on her breast, soft murmurs, loud moans, two bodies together.

But then came the blood, as always. He could feel it on
his hands, and his eyes shot open as he heard the thumps, the knocking, like a desperate drumbeat, the shouts, the muffled cries.

Mary was watching him. He glanced over quickly and he thought he saw a shadow behind her, someone moving through the door. He blinked and it was gone, and all he could see were Mary’s cold eyes.

He clambered to his feet to go to the fridge. When he got there, he leant against the door for a moment, his forehead damp, before reaching for a beer.

When he walked back into the room, Mary looked pointedly at the bottle. ‘Do you think you should?’ she said.

‘I feel like I want to,’ he replied, taking a long swig. When she shot a stern look at him, he added, ‘I’ve had a long day. No one’s buying, and I’m hot.’

He went outside, to wait for the sun to drop lazily behind the houses, catching the duck and dive of evening birds and the buzz of midges over the laurel bush in the corner of his garden.

He closed his eyes for a moment and let the scents creep back in again, and he was taken back to stolen hours, a country drive, the weight of her in his arms, laughing, his mouth on hers, the caress of her fingers in his chest hairs, the summer of innocence.

He heard a sound, like a thump on wood; as he looked up, he saw Mary step away from the window. She had been watching.

He took another pull on his beer. He knew he shouldn’t think of it, but then he felt that burn, that familiar need.

He went back into the house and took his car keys from the hook by the door.

‘I’m going for a drive,’ he said, and he was met by silence as he slammed the door.

I was sitting in my garden as I flicked through the newspaper articles Tony had dropped through my door. I had views over Turners Fold to distract me, the strips of grey terraced houses and small fingers of chimneys sitting between the slopes, and towards the jagged lines of drystone walls dividing up the hills, black and white dots of cattle sprinkled as far as I could see.

I took a sip from my wine glass and noticed how Claude Gilbert’s house looked different in the old black and white photographs, the garden slightly overgrown, less formal. I smiled as I held up a photograph of Claude, the one that had spread to the nationals, his dark hair thick, a superior smirk. Did he really want to come home? I plucked an article from the bottom of the pile and saw that the picture used was the full photograph, with Nancy Gilbert sitting next to him, an austere look on her face. The photographs used later were more relaxed shots, showing her laughing and happy, as if they were meant to prick the general conscience—the public wouldn’t warm to the hunt if she was some uptight rich bitch.

As I read the articles, I saw nothing new, just stuff that had been rehashed countless times since. I slipped the cuttings back into the envelope when I heard the hum of
car tyres and watched as Laura’s charcoal-grey Golf crunched onto the gravel outside our gate. As she stepped out of the car, her white shirt open at the neck, I raised my wine glass. ‘It’s open,’ I said.

‘So I see,’ she replied, and gave me a weary smile. When she joined me at the table, a glass in one hand, she put her arm around my neck and her head on my shoulder. I could feel the collar of her stiff white shirt, and, as I reached behind and felt her legs, my hands brushed over the coarse regulation black trousers and my fingers crackled with static.

‘It still seems strange, seeing you in your uniform,’ I said, as I got the waft of her perfume mixed in with the sweat of the cells. I had put Bobby to bed, but from the shouting I could hear drifting through the open window he must have heard the car. ‘I’ll go say goodnight in a minute,’ she said sleepily. ‘I just need to slow down for five minutes.’

‘Life tough at the top?’

‘I’ll tell you when I get there,’ she said, and stretched out a yawn. ‘I’ll need to do some revision soon though. It feels like I’ve forgotten how to study. I wasn’t the best at it in university, but I must have done it at some point.’

‘I was a crammer,’ I said. ‘Go out until Easter, and then just rush it through at the end.’

‘But you were younger then. So was I. This is a sergeant’s exam. I’m supposed to know the stuff already.’

‘You’ll do it easily,’ I said. ‘It’s just about staying cool enough to remember what you already know.’

She sighed. ‘I’m already the old stager.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I was holding the hand of a new one today,’ Laura said. ‘He didn’t look old enough to be crossing the road on his own.’

‘I’m sure someone said that about you once,’ I said.

Laura grimaced. ‘That’s why I don’t like it. It just feels like it’s all slipping by too fast.’ She squeezed me and then murmured in my ear, ‘Will you still love me when I pass my exams?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ll have to stay in this uniform for a while longer,’ she said, ‘at least until I can go back into CID.’

I turned to face her, and sneaked a soft kiss. ‘I like it,’ I said, and then I raised my eyebrows mischievously. ‘Could we, you know, just once, in the uniform?’

‘And the handcuffs?’ She tapped my nose playfully. ‘I’ll try not to make them too tight,’ she said, and then she peeled away from me. ‘I’m going to say goodnight to Bobby.’

I grabbed her hand. ‘Before you go, I’ve got a scenario for you,’ I said. ‘Think of it as revision.’

Laura turned and looked at me. ‘Go on.’

‘Someone is wanted by the police. If there was a sighting of him, would I be obliged to report it?’

‘Who is it?’

I shook my head. ‘No names.’

She paused at that and tapped her lip with her finger. ‘I’m trying to think of what crime it would be if you didn’t.’ After a few more seconds, she said: ‘It would depend on what you did with the information. If you alerted him to help him get away, or gave him shelter, then yes, but if you just failed to report it, I’m not sure we could do much.’

I nodded to myself. ‘That’s what I thought,’ I said quietly, and let go of her hand.

As I took a sip of wine, I realised that Laura was staring at me.

‘Is it something to do with the woman who was here this morning?’ she said.

‘I don’t reveal my sources, you know that,’ I replied.

‘I don’t need to pass my sergeant’s exam to work out that she’s connected,’ she said. ‘But is it anything that will get you into trouble?’

I raised my glass and smiled. ‘I’ll tell you when I find out more. There is one thing I have to do though.’

‘Which is what?’

‘Go to London,’ I said.

‘And what will you do when you get there?’

Laura looked at me strangely when I said, ‘Hopefully, make us rich.’

Frankie stared through his binoculars from behind a stone wall, his knees in long grass.

He had ridden into Turners Fold and asked questions about the reporter in the old red sports car. He got lucky, because the third person he asked knew where Jack Garrett lived.

It had been a long time since he had been in Turners Fold. It had once been on his cycle route, the long pull out of Blackley, and then a fast green run into Turners Fold, freewheeling along a road bordered by straggly grass verges and drystone walls until he hit the fringes of the town, as the country views turned into small-town huddles. He used to like sitting by the canal and eating ice cream as the barges drifted past, and the people on board always waved back at him as he sat by the bridge, dipping his feet into the water as he rested his legs.

But that had been a long time ago, when his mother had been alive. She would run him a bath for when he got back, sweaty and tired, always hungry, and he would tell her what he had seen. He missed that more than anything. It was all part of her being around, more than just someone to clean for him or make his meals. He’d had someone to share his
secrets with, the things he could see from his window, who wouldn’t laugh at him for thinking like he did.