Behind Dead Eyes (15 page)

‘You think that's what happened to Sandra?'

‘I hope to God I'm wrong, but it's my best guess,' and he fell silent for a moment before eventually adding, ‘though I've imagined worse things.'

‘She wasn't gone long though, from home I mean. What was it, a term and a half?'

‘It doesn't take long,' he said sadly.

‘How do you think she would get her hands on hard drugs in her first year at university, particularly a posh one like Durham?'

‘Forgive me, Tom, but that's one of the things I'm asking you to find out, though if you don't mind me saying so, you're being a bit naïve. There's a drug dealer in every city, town and village in this country; they hang round every playground, pub and university campus. They have to; dealers are parasites and the only way they can make a living is to find new users. Drugs are the ultimate growth industry. I've read the reports, I've seen the stats. They call it a war on drugs and I can tell you this, we are losing it.'

‘Did she have a boyfriend? Someone who could have got her started with drugs?'

‘She never told us about one, but somebody must have got to her. I don't think she would have gone looking for a dealer. Somebody must have taken advantage.'

‘That line of enquiry went cold but I'll look into it again.'

Jarvis took out a packet of cigarettes then and offered one to Tom, who shook his head. ‘Very sensible.'

‘I saw a fellah on the way up here,' Tom said, ‘by the name of Harry.'

‘Old misery guts?'

‘He told the police you rowed with your daughter a few days before she disappeared.'

‘I told them that too,' said Jarvis.

‘Did she come up here to have a row with you or did one just develop?'

‘Why would she come all the way up here to start a row?' asked Jarvis.

‘I don't know,' admitted Tom. ‘She obviously felt the need to see you. She could just have waited for you to come home but instead she walked all the way up here, so either it was important or she wanted to talk to you in private, away from her mam and grandma.'

Jarvis nodded and gave a grim smile. ‘You are a perceptive man. She did want to talk to me in private. It didn't start as a row but soon developed into one, I'm sorry to say.'

‘What was it about?'

‘The future,' said Jarvis, ‘her future, to be exact. She wanted to drop out of college.'

‘Why?'

‘She wasn't enjoying it, it wasn't what she was expecting, she couldn't see the point of it and wasn't making many friends.' He paused. ‘I think Sandra thought I'd hear her out, agree with her reasoning and give her my parental blessing.'

‘But you didn't?'

‘I told her not to be so bloody stupid. Me and my daughter are both cut from the same cloth. We can be strong-willed, stubborn even, so we clash. She was born several weeks premature you know, so she's had to fight to survive from day one. I've always encouraged her to question everything but she is still a young woman and can be naïve. I was the same when I was her age,' he admitted. ‘I was the big idealist who thought I could change the world. She thought she could drop out of college and travel then somehow magically have a career, despite a bloody big hole in her CV and no proper
qualifications. I told her she was an idiot for thinking that way after all the hard work she'd put in to get there. Look, if I could go back in time I would handle it differently. I was too harsh on her and she got upset.' He looked downcast. ‘She then said some things that I wouldn't tolerate.'

‘What kind of things?'

‘She was rude to me,' Jarvis seemed embarrassed at the recollection, ‘saying I knew nowt about the real world. She started shouting at me so I shouted back. I'm not proud of my behaviour or hers but I was worried she was throwing her life away.'

‘What brought the argument to an end?'

‘She did,' he said. ‘She stormed off.'

‘And you let her go?'

‘I thought it might be for the best,' Jarvis said. ‘Let her cool off and try to talk some sense into her later.' Tom could tell he was hurt by the implication he did not care enough to go after his daughter. Maybe Frank Jarvis wondered if Sandra might still be here now if he hadn't let her go. He visibly slumped then. ‘I never realised it would be the last time I'd see her,' he said, obviously fighting back the tears.

‘Not the last time,' Tom assured him, for he was embarrassed by the man's discomfort and the fact he had caused it. Tom never liked to plant false hope in anyone but he couldn't help himself now. ‘We'll find her.'

He'd
started the argument but it was only now he realised Karen was right. He
had
been an arse. When Bradshaw saw his girlfriend that night after a long, tiring day he was still feeling righteously indignant, which is why he greeted his girlfriend with the words, ‘How come everybody thinks we are shacked up together?'

‘Eh?'

‘What have you been saying to make them think that? Even Kane said it to me.'

‘I haven't been saying anything,' said Karen, ‘and I certainly haven't been talking to your DCI about us.'

He had intended the conversation to be a relatively mild one, during which he would tell his girlfriend he didn't appreciate people discussing them behind his back. Unfortunately, he had not foreseen the conclusion Karen would naturally come to.

‘Oh, so you're ashamed of me, are you?'

‘What? No, of course not!'

‘I'm good enough to be seen with, good enough to be shagging – but not good enough for anyone to think we might be in a proper relationship.'

‘Don't be daft. We
are
in a proper relationship.'

‘Yeah, course we are … just so long as it doesn't involve me staying over too many nights a week and I take my toothbrush with me when I go?'

While he usually felt he might be a little more intelligent than his girlfriend, Bradshaw had to admit he was absolutely
no match for her in an argument. They rowed for over an hour and she seemed to effortlessly move between all of the emotional states: from anger, to sadness and despair then back to rage, via tears and some highly imaginative industrial language. Karen even threw cushions at him at one point while he desperately tried to placate her. In the end she opted to leave and Bradshaw belatedly realised this had been a problem entirely of his own making, so he very quickly went into reverse gear and apologised – a lot.

‘I hate it when we row,' she said as she snuggled up to him in bed an hour later, following make-up sex that had somehow pleasingly evolved from the high state of adrenalin they were both in by the end of their argument.

‘Well we don't do it very often, Karen,' he said as he drew her closer to him.

‘I can see why people might get confused by us though,' she said. ‘We do spend a lot of time with each other but that's cos we're good together, babe.' She laughed again. ‘I mean I do
practically
live here.'

‘I s'pose you do,' he admitted. ‘You've got a key, you're here more nights than you're not.'

‘Yeah, I know,' she said. ‘You get your meals cooked for you all the time and sex on tap. It's not all bad, is it?' They both laughed at that. ‘And there's me paying rent on a place and I'm never there.'

He knew she was hinting, but just this once he didn't mind. He'd been an idiot. Karen was a cracking lass but his fragile ego had been dented by the idea of people at work talking about them. Where was he going to get another girl as nice as this one, as good-looking as this one, as accommodating in bed as this one?

He didn't mind her folks either, not really, although her
mum did have an annoying habit of mentioning Karen's ex every time she saw him, since the bloke still lived close by and wasn't over Karen.

‘Come on, Mum, we were eighteen,' blushed her daughter the last time the former boyfriend came up in conversation. ‘It was years ago and I'm with Ian now.' And she held Bradshaw's hand as if to assure him when she said that.

‘I know that,' her mother replied, as if he wasn't in the room, ‘I just think it's nice that he always speaks to us when he sees us. He even came round last Christmas to see how we were doing.'

‘To see how Karen was doing, more like,' said her father without looking up from his newspaper, ‘and I told him, she's got a boyfriend.' He said that bit as if he had seen the other bloke off with his shotgun.

All the same, Bradshaw didn't like to think of Karen with this other man, this first love that must have been so significant her parents kept mentioning him.

He remembered that moment now and how jealous he had been at the thought of Karen with another man, even if it had been years before, and realised he would be gutted if she went with someone else – not that he gave her much incentive to be faithful, with his commitment-phobic attitude. He would just have to grow up.

And just like that, all of his resistance to their relationship was suddenly swept away.

‘You might as well, you know,' he said it lightly, ‘move in, I mean. There's plenty of room here and, like you said, it's not all bad is it?'

‘Oh my God,' Karen said, ‘do you mean it?' And there were tears in her eyes then. ‘I can't tell you how happy you've just made me. I just never thought we'd end up as a permanent item.'

Neither had he, until she put it like that.

Moving in together didn't necessarily mean forever in Bradshaw's eyes but clearly Karen thought otherwise. ‘Yeah,' he said, ‘well, there you go.'

‘Good to see you, Tom.' There was a brisk handshake at the door of the newsroom. ‘It's been a while,' Graham Seaton reminded him as they walked briskly across the newsroom.

‘It has,' agreed Tom and he tried not to think about their divergent career paths. Since Graham Seaton and Tom Carney last worked together at the
Durham Messenger
more than five years earlier, Seaton had gone on to become a reporter then a senior reporter for his Newcastle daily and finally, in a move that no one saw coming but Seaton, its youngest-ever editor. Meanwhile, Tom could, at best, describe himself as a failed author, former journalist, part-time amateur builder and ‘property developer'. Tom was grateful when Seaton didn't ask him how his life was just now. Instead he was immediately business-like.

‘You're looking into Sandra Jarvis's disappearance?' he said. ‘Well we've run a lot of stuff on that in the past six months. Her father never lets up, poor bastard. You're welcome to take a look at it all.'

‘I will, thanks,' Tom said, ‘but it's background I'm after, which is why I want to speak to your best crime reporter, if he can spare me the time.'

‘Fair enough.' Graham nodded towards the frosted glass door of the conference room. ‘Don't take all day though, mate, we've got an edition to get out.'

‘Half an hour, tops,' Tom assured him.

‘We keep her in here,' said Graham, as if she were a cell mate of Hannibal Lecter, and he opened the door to reveal
a solitary figure sitting at the far end of the conference table. The woman's head was down but there was no mistaking her. She was busy writing notes on a pad. He might have known she wouldn't sit staring out of the window while she waited for him, even for a few minutes.

‘Bloody hell,' he said and she looked up, ‘small world.'

‘I was about to say, “This is Helen Norton, our resident crime expert,” ' said Graham, ‘but I can see your paths have already crossed. I hope you remembered your manners, Tom.'

‘He was the perfect gentleman,' said Helen.

‘We worked on the Sean Donnellan case together,' Tom told her editor.

‘Of course, the book! How's it doing?'

‘Great.'

When Tom offered nothing further, Graham took this as his cue. ‘Okay, I'll leave you to it then.'

Tom drew out the chair next to her so they could sit at right angles to one another,

‘How are you, Tom?' she asked a little stiffly.

‘Surviving.'

‘I haven't seen you since …'

‘Mary Collier's funeral,' he said. ‘You stayed for one drink.'

Mary Collier wasn't quite Eleanor Rigby; when she died and was buried people came, but not many. There was the vicar of course, her housekeeper who ‘did for her' as she used to say and three elderly ladies who had known Mary their whole lives and hadn't allowed the gossip that followed her in later years to prevent them from paying their respects. One of the few pleasures of elderly widowhood was the opportunity to dress in Sunday best to attend the funeral of one of your peers, gaining a visceral thrill at having outlived them.

Other than that small gathering and Tom, the funeral party
consisted of two people; Detective Sergeant Ian Bradshaw, who sat quietly at the back of the church, and Helen, who had donned a black dress she last wore for a job interview at the paper where she now worked. Both of them attended the funeral service partially out of respect but also because Mary Collier's death marked the end of something more than just her life. It effectively brought down the final curtain on the Sean Donnellan case, which would then become the subject of
Death Knock
, because Tom had agreed with Mary that his book would not be published until she was gone.

‘Thought you might have made it to the book launch,' he added, trying to sound like it was no big deal.

‘I was going to,' she stammered. ‘I wasn't sure you if you wanted me there.'

‘How can you say that?' he asked. ‘I invited you and you were in the bloody book.'

‘I know, I'm sorry. It was stupid … I read it though.'

‘Really?'

‘Of course. I thought it was brilliant,' she said this with such earnestness that he actually let out a laugh.

‘Well I'm glad someone did.'

‘I wasn't the only one,' she said, ‘the reviews were great. Was it a good event? The launch, I mean. Bet you had loads of people there.'

‘Ian Bradshaw came,' he said quickly, ‘with his girlfriend, Karen. I think he wanted to know what I'd written about him.' He could have admitted that a little piece of him had quietly died when she hadn't shown up, but he wasn't quite ready for that level of honesty. In truth he didn't have too many people to invite. There were his sister and brother-in-law, a handful of friends from school or the pub but precious few fellow journalists. He later found out that Malcolm had issued
an unofficial fatwah on him, meaning colleagues from his old job at the
Durham Messenger
lived in fear of being spotted at his book launch. So Tom had said a few thank yous and signed a handful of books before retiring to the nearest pub to drink too much while trying not to wonder where Helen was.

‘What are we going to tell our grandchildren when they ask me why you didn't turn up to my book launch?'

‘You don't want kids,' she reminded him.

‘Yeah, well not this minute but who knows? I could change my mind, one day.'

‘Can't see it,' she chided. ‘You'd have to evolve into a functioning adult first.'

‘Ouch.'

‘Sorry,' she said, ‘I've been hanging out with the blokes in the newsroom and the banter is just vicious here. It tends to rub off.'

‘I can take it,' he said. ‘They treating you well then?'

‘It's been great.'

‘Surprised to see you cooped up in the conference room, not out and about exposing wrongdoing.' He was joking but it struck a nerve. After her experience in the multi-storey car park Helen felt safer in the office even though she knew she couldn't hide herself away forever.

‘What brings you to our door then?' she asked. ‘I could tell by your face you weren't expecting to see me, so it can't have been a social call.'

‘I used to work with Graham, so I called him and asked if I could speak to his best crime reporter,' said Tom. ‘I was expecting some middle-aged hack but he brought me to you.' And Tom went on to explain to Helen the sequence of events which led him to the
Record
's office, including his interest in the Rebecca Holt murder and his agreement to help Frank Jarvis find his missing daughter.

‘And what do you need from me?' she asked when he was finally through.

‘Well,' he seemed hesitant now, ‘nothing necessarily …'

‘Tom, I'm happy to help,' she said firmly, ‘any time.'

‘Thanks,' he said, relaxing a little, ‘it's just that I don't have a newspaper behind me these days, so anything you come across on either of the cases I'm looking into would be really useful. We'll probably end up going over the same ground but …'

‘That never stopped us before.'

‘No, it didn't.' It was how they had first met, in fact. ‘Thanks, Helen. I appreciate it.'

‘Least I could do.' Tom took this as a form of apology.

‘So how are things with you?' he asked.

‘Good,' she said. ‘Graham has been great.'

‘Who wouldn't be, compared to Malcolm?' he asked.

‘Even so,' she replied, ‘he has been letting me write some interesting stuff about local politicians and their links to some pretty ropey people.'

‘Newcastle has always had its fair share of gangsters,' he smiled, ‘some of them in City Hall. You must be pissing people off.'

‘There is that possibility,' she conceded.

‘Be careful,' he told her, ‘articles on corruption tend to upset people.'

‘You ought to know,' she reminded him.

‘Yeah, well, just don't do anything I wouldn't do. I'm not preaching. I realise you know what you're doing. Things are going well then? You're okay, I mean?'

‘Yes, thanks.'

He noticed she hadn't mentioned the boyfriend. He had to assume he was still on the scene though.

‘You seeing anyone else?' she asked and he must have
looked a little surprised by the directness of the question. ‘Today I mean, while you're in town,' she added quickly.

‘I'm going to the Highwayman on the Quayside. Sandra Jarvis worked behind the bar there part time and in the holidays. Maybe I'll find someone who worked with her. They might know something.'

‘I don't know it,' she said, ‘but the name rings a bell.'

‘Then I'm going to Northumbria Police HQ to read the case files, though that might take a while as there are loads of reported sightings.'