FALLEN IDOLS. Neil White
Martha? Is she still working?’
‘Oh, she’s still with the police. They tried to retire her a couple of years ago, when she got to sixty, but the inspector talked the big shirts around. She mans the front desk now, checking for forged car insurance.’
‘And looking out for my father?’
He cocked his head. ‘And some of that.’
Martha, Jake’s wife, had worked for the police for as long as my father had been in the service. Her title was now a Civilian Support Officer, but in a small place like Turners Fold, it had always seemed like she was the station mother. She used to man the radio, draw up the shift roster, kept the station running properly. She did it so well that no one noticed, but when it was all centralised and taken out of the Fold, things never went as smoothly again. Ask any police officer who they treasured most at the station, and they would all reply Martha, because she looked after everyone. When she was in charge of things, if a young officer had a baby he didn’t get a night shift for the first year. Martha made sure of that. Things had changed now, but people remember.
‘You here to see your dad?’ asked Jake.
I shook my head. ‘He doesn’t know I’m here. I’m here for work.’
He gave a small laugh. ‘You won’t find much around here.’
‘No, no, I’m here for a story, connected with the Henri Dumas shooting, the footballer.’
He looked surprised for a moment, and then glanced out of the window. ‘The world is going crazy. And now Nixon as well.’
I felt my stomach turn. ‘What do you mean, “Nixon”?’ I asked, my head already telling me the answer.
Jake looked surprised. ‘Haven’t you heard the news?’
I gave a thin smile and shook my head. I’d had the radio on for the first part of the journey, the stop–start crawl out of London, but once I got onto the motorway, flying through grey and green emptiness, I needed more lift, so I did the last hundred miles with the CD player on.
Jake stood up straight and flicked his brush across the floor again. ‘Same as Dumas. Johnny Nixon, stood on the corner of a street in Manchester.’
I leant against the counter. If this was just some nutcase, it was a well-organised nutcase. Two cities a couple of hundred miles apart.
Jake snapped me from my thoughts by asking what I wanted. I looked around the shop at a loss. I couldn’t remember. Maybe I had just wanted to say hello. He smiled at that and told me that was free. Everything else in the shop had a label on it.
Then I thought of something.
‘I’m going home next. Does he still have a sweet tooth?’
Jake smiled and nodded to a shelf at the back of the shop. ‘Army and navy.’
‘Okay. I’ll take some of those. Is it ounces or grams in here?’
He tapped his nose like it was a secret. ‘For you it can be ounces, but don’t tell everyone.’
He walked to the back of the shop, slow and deliberate, and then said over his shoulder, ‘He’ll miss you when you go back.’
Jake’s comment halted me for a second, made my throat catch. ‘Oh, he’ll survive,’ I said glibly. I paused then, realising that I didn’t know what my father did with his time. What did he do when he went home to that empty house?
Jake sensed my thoughts. ‘He spends most nights in the Swan.’
I felt a kick of guilt, thinking of my father with just a pub and his job to keep him company. Then I thought of how he could have called me. I would have come up, if he’d asked. He never had.
I paid Jake for the sweets and went outside, leaving him with a promise that I’d call back before I returned to London. Then I went for a walk round the triangle.
I knew where I was headed: the Valley Post, the start of my career.
Laura looked out of the window of Dumas’s home.
It was a tall Georgian house with pillars, bright white, part of a sweeping crescent, overlooking a small patch of green. This would normally be a quiet street, apart from the purr of Ferraris. It wasn’t quiet today, she thought, the street outside packed with reporters and cameras. They were kept back by two policemen, the line broken periodically by the delivery of flowers, the pavement outside now bright with colour and cards.
Tom was upstairs with two other detectives, going through drawers and cupboards, looking for any hint of a secret life. Laura had been left downstairs with the grieving fiancée.
There weren’t too many signs of grief. Anger was the first emotion Laura had detected, as if a major business deal had been lost. She had dressed all in black for the flight back, but it was designer T-shirt and jeans, a Mets cap and shades shielding her face. For the last thirty minutes she had been on the other side of a glass door talking into a phone. Laura guessed that she was working out how to use all the angles.
Maybe when she was on her own, she would begin to think about the man she had lost, but Laura wasn’t sure about that. It seemed like their life together had been more about what they were rather than who they were.
Laura sighed. She was being too harsh on her, she knew that. Laura didn’t know what it was like to live with the press writing up her every move. And let’s not forget the obsessives, those fans who want more than a smile or an autograph. Being good-looking and famous had a pretty high death rate.
Then Laura noticed activity in the press camp. They were talking into phones, getting their cameras ready. She went out of the room and looked up the stairs. She could hear Tom on the phone, talking quietly.
When he started to come down the stairs towards her, she couldn’t tell if the look in his eyes was anger or relief.
‘There’s been another shooting,’ he said. ‘In Manchester. Johnny Nixon.’
Laura was shocked. ‘Definitely connected?’
‘Shot in the street from a distance.’
They would lose it now, Laura knew. It would go to a much bigger task force.
Then she realised why Tom looked relieved.
As she went back into the room, she saw Dumas’s fiancée still on the phone. She would have to share the limelight now. Laura sensed that would be the biggest blow of all.
I kept on walking, away from the triangle to the buildings just behind, to the Valley Post premises. It had been stone-built for the Wesleyan Society but then taken over by the Weavers Union, with church windows and steps that ran to the first floor, so that the ground floor seemed more like a basement. Wooden beams ran along the ceiling, and the ground floor still had the original York stone flags, thick and grey. It used to be in most of the houses, but if it wasn’t ripped out to modernise in the sixties, it was stolen by thieves whenever a house stood empty. The windows had their blinds down on one side. I remembered how the sun caused reflections on the computer screens as it came over to the west in late afternoon.
As I walked into the building, a buzzer went off, set to alert them that someone wanted to place an advert or buy a photograph. After a few seconds, a woman in her early thirties came to the small hatch, and it took a couple of seconds for my face to register.
‘Hey, Jack Garrett,’ she said eventually, ‘what you doing here? Come to pinch our big stories?’
She was joking, but I sensed it held barbed traces, maybe that I thought I was too big for the Fold. Maybe I did.
‘Hi Traci.’ She spelled it with an ‘i’. ‘How’s life treating you?’