Chapter Thirty

The parting at Blackley station had been brief, just a promise to call Susie when I found out more. She was suspicious, obviously worried that I would sell the story and keep her share, but I wasn’t like that. Journalists can be unscrupulous, but they have to be loyal to sources or else the sources dry up. Now I was heading back to my house, the taxi meter ticking over as I had made a detour to collect Bobby. Laura was still at work and so he had been picked up from school by old friends of my father, Jake and Martha, who lived on a quiet estate at the edge of Turners Fold.

Bobby was quiet in the back of the car, almost as if he resented me for going away, but I knew he had been hurt badly by his real father, who chose to sleep around rather than look after his child. He made do with contact visits every fortnight, two nights in the capital, but his vowels were getting flatter and London was becoming just a memory for him now. I ruffled his hair to extract a smile, but he just looked at me, his brown eyes wide, his hair across his forehead in wisps. I noticed that it was getting darker.

‘Are the flowers for Mummy?’ he asked, and pointed to the bunch of pink roses that I’d picked up outside the station, the petals emerging from the buds.

I smiled. ‘Yes, they are.’ I lifted them to his nose so he could smell them.

He screwed up his nose as he sniffed at the flowers, and then he asked, ‘Is that man coming again tonight?’

My smile faltered. ‘What man?’

‘There was a man in the house last night. I heard him. Mummy was scared, I could tell.’

My stomach rolled as Bobby said the words and I felt the flowers shake in my hand. Someone in the house, when I was away? I caught sight of the taxi driver watching me in the rearview mirror.

‘No, I know who that was,’ I said, but my voice was hoarse. I tried to smile, just so that Bobby wouldn’t be scared, but I knew that I didn’t sound convincing.

Bobby was silent the rest of the way home, and as the taxi made the long climb to the cottage, I saw my red car parked up ahead, bright against the grey stone walls. Then I noticed a car further along, and a man knocking on my door. As he turned towards the taxi and stepped out of the shadows, I saw that it was Tony Davies, and that he had a bag in his hand.

As I climbed out of the taxi, he said, ‘It’s not booze in here. Sorry, Jack. Just long forgotten secrets.’

His smile died when I didn’t offer much of a response. ‘Everything okay?’

I nodded towards Bobby and raised a finger to my lips. Tony winked that he understood; once Bobby had darted upstairs to get changed, he asked, ‘What’s wrong?’

‘It’s Laura,’ I said. ‘Bobby told me that someone was here last night, and that she was scared.’

Tony cocked his head, concerned. ‘What, you think it might be something to do with your Claude Gilbert story?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe Laura can tell me more, but it doesn’t sound good.’

I went through to the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of white that had been in the fridge for a few days. I asked Tony what he had brought while I poured us both a drink.

Tony put the bag onto the table, and then he looked up at me, his teeth crooked in his smile. ‘Did you find Claude?’

I faltered for a moment, unsure whether I should be truthful.

He banged the table and laughed. ‘You did!’ he exclaimed. I raised my finger to my lips again and pointed upstairs, from where I could hear Bobby making banging noises. Tony leant forward and whispered, ‘You found Claude Gilbert, didn’t you?’

I felt a smirk tug at the corners of my mouth.

His eyes widened, and then he pointed at his bag. ‘Jesus Christ, Jack. This is all too late now.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’ve got the front page of the nationals now. You’ve made it.’

I grimaced. ‘It’s not quite as simple as that.’

‘Why not?’

I put my hands on top of my head and sighed.

‘Jack?’

‘You know how it is when you have a great story, but you think it can become fantastic?’ I said.

‘Yes, I do,’ Tony replied. ‘And I know what to do: you write the good one and put the fantastic one to the back of your mind—because a deadline has to be met, a page has to be filled.’

I put my hands down and shrugged in apology. ‘I know that, you taught me it when I first started out, and it was good advice. But Claude has a different plan.’

‘Oh Jack, what have you done?’

I took a deep breath. There was no other way to put it. ‘Claude Gilbert wants me to prove his innocence,’ I said.

Tony’s mouth opened, and then closed again.

I nodded. ‘I did that too.’

‘But he’s not innocent,’ Tony said. ‘His wife was buried alive. He emptied his account and ran. Cut and dried.’

‘That’s not what he says.’

Tony shook his head. ‘I cannot believe we’re having this conversation. You sat in a room with Claude Gilbert, you knew it was him, and you left him there?’ He scratched his head, leaving red trails on his bald pate. ‘What kind of story have you got now?’

‘I’ve still got one. I found Claude Gilbert. I have his address.’

‘A picture?’

‘That was one of the conditions of the interview: no pictures,’ I said.

‘How do you know it was Claude Gilbert? Because he told you?’ Tony laughed. ‘Did he look anything like Claude Gilbert?’

‘No longer slim and stylish,’ I said. ‘Just a worn-out old man, scruffy and fat.’ When I spotted Tony’s sceptical look, I said, ‘He’s a man in disguise. He could hardly step out of the history books. He’d be spotted immediately.’

‘Come on, Jack. You don’t really believe him, do you?’

‘I’ve met him, and he convinced me.’

‘So what name is he using?’ Tony asked.

‘Josif Petrovic.’

‘What kind of name is that?’

‘A Serbian name,’ I replied. ‘He was disguised as some kind of Serbian mystic. He said that he fled there first because the authorities were less inclined to help the West in checking out the truth of his past. When the Balkan Wars started, things got a little trickier, so he came back to England.’

Tony sighed. ‘You’ve been taken in by a Serbian conman.’

‘But Susie knows him from back then in the eighties.’

‘So she tells you.’

‘She checks out.’

‘So it’s the perfect con,’ Tony said. ‘She gets her Serbian boyfriend to pretend to be Claude Gilbert, and she knows enough about the case to make it realistic. The papers buy the story, pay you, and she gets her cut. Then somebody comes up with proof that he really is Josif Petrovic, and the story dies. The paper won’t care too much about Petrovic because they sold papers that day, but every time you try and pitch another big story to the nationals, they’ll laugh down the phone at you, just before they slam it down.’

‘But if that’s what he was doing, why did he send me away on some pointless search?’

‘To increase the price. There’ll be leaks, anticipation, the cheque books start to appear. They cash in as your story goes around the world, and then disappear when the debunking starts.’

I blew out. ‘You think I’ve been twirled?’

‘Definitely,’ he said. When I looked disappointed, he added, ‘Don’t worry. I know someone who wants to fill in some of the gaps.’

‘Who?’

‘Frankie Says.’

I was puzzled. ‘What kind of name is that?’

‘Not his real one, but I got a call from Jackie at the Telegraph. He was in their office the other day, looking for you, talking about Claude Gilbert.’

‘How did he know, and who is he?’

‘He lives across the road from the Gilbert house. He must have seen you snooping around, because he did the same with us when we did that nostalgia piece. Reckoned he knew some big secret, but he would only pass it on if we wrote him a hefty cheque. We told him that it wasn’t that sort of piece and so he slunk back across the road.’

‘And do you think he had a big secret?’ I said.

‘If he has, he’s sat on it for more than twenty years,’ he said. ‘No, he’s just some oddball who fancied a moment in the spotlight.’

‘Why the name, Frankie Says?’

‘It was an eighties piece,’ Tony said, ‘and you remember those T-shirts, with the big lettering? “Frankie Says Relax”, and all that? Joking around in the office ended up with him getting that name.’

I tugged on my lip as I thought about him, and I remembered what Bobby said, that someone had been in the house. ‘It means he tracked me down,’ I said. ‘Is he dangerous?’

Tony shook his head. ‘He’s harmless.’

‘Okay,’ I said nodding, unconvinced. ‘I’ll check him out tomorrow. Just to add some interest to the story.’ Then I looked towards the bag on the table. ‘Is that all the major parts of the story?’

‘Most of what I could find that was useful,’ he said, pushing it towards me.

‘Plenty about her unborn child?’

He grimaced again. ‘That’s the final tragedy of the case.’

‘Does it say anywhere that the baby wasn’t Gilbert’s?’

Tony paused and then looked at me. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said slowly, and then, ‘Should it?’

I smiled. ‘You know it doesn’t, because it’s the first I’ve heard of it too. And if I was faking it as Gilbert, I wouldn’t start with that revelation. It’s too easy to disprove.’

‘But it certainly gets a headline,’ Tony said, still sounding sceptical, but then he stroked his chin. ‘So Petrovic is saying that Nancy Gilbert was having an affair?’

‘With a man called Mike Dobson.’

Tony gasped. ‘You’ve got a name?’ he said, incredulous.

‘Straight from the mouth of our Serbian conman,’ I said. ‘Now, do you still think he’s fake?’

Tony shook his head slowly. ‘Unless it’s a distraction. You’ll now look at that and not him.’

‘But he’s making me put off his payday. If it was a con, he’d just want the quick exposé, the cheque in the bank.’ I patted Tony’s bag. ‘So show me what you’ve got.’

Tony reached in and pulled out a bundle of clippings, fanning them out over the table, just photocopies, something we could write on.

‘This is the report the day after the body was found,’ he said.

I picked it up and read. Barrister’s wife found dead. A simple headline, giving the facts that had since spawned hundreds of pages of newsprint.

‘What have you got that hints at Gilbert being innocent?’ I said.

‘Nothing,’ he said, and then he paused, before delving into the pile of papers. ‘This is a different angle though.’ He pulled out a piece of paper with a bold headline: Lake trial collapses after Gilbert disappearance.

‘Alan Lake?’ I queried.

‘The one and the same.’

I whistled. That made it more interesting.

Alan Lake was a well-known figure on the northern arts circuit, a beloved sculpture artist, famed for being a reformed criminal who discovered his talent for art while in prison. It rescued him, gave him an outlet for his aggression, and his work sold well, his name now the cachet.

But he was like a pet to the air-kissing classes. I had seen some of his sculptures: a reclining woman portrayed by sweeping lines of smooth white stone, or a kissing couple, the stone carved so that thin columns curved around each other. Although they were pretty in their own way, they were nothing special, but the social glitterati liked the danger of the work of a violent criminal in their homes. So now he did the dinner party circuit, where he fine-dined on hints of gangland, tough talk from the back streets of Manchester, but no specifics. I wasn’t sure whether it was because there were bad things he couldn’t confess, or whether the hint of it, genuine or not, just made his prices higher.

‘So what had he done?’ I asked, skim-reading the article.

‘Glassed a girl during a pub fight.’

‘Hardly the stuff of gangsters,’ I said. ‘How did Lake get implicated?’

‘Eye witnesses. The victim seemed keen on her day in court, and one of the barmen was giving evidence.’

I winced. ‘Did he have a death wish?’

Tony could only shrug. ‘The trial was going okay, by all accounts. People had shown up in court, given their evidence well. It was looking bad for Alan Lake.’

‘And Gilbert was his defence lawyer,’ I said, looking at the paper.

‘That’s right, but when Gilbert went missing, the trial had to start again a couple of months later. New counsel, new jury, but the same old witnesses. But the witnesses weren’t so keen second time around. Some changed their stories, and the main man, the barman from the club, he said the police had threatened him and put words into his mouth, that he had been told what to say. Remember, this was the eighties. The years before had been filled with tales of the police beating confessions out of people. Remember the campaigns for the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four? They were still in prison then, but it was in the public consciousness, and so the jurors lapped it up. The barman did a runner to Spain afterwards, with rumours of a cash windfall, if you get my drift. So the case collapsed.’

‘And Alan Lake walked free.’

Tony nodded. ‘And it seemed like Alan Lake got his artistic conversion when he was inside, waiting for his trial.’

‘So Gilbert’s disappearance was very convenient for Alan Lake,’ I said.

‘Yes, it was, but putting pressure on a barman is in a different league to burying alive the wife of your barrister, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘Maybe he wasn’t in control?’ I said. ‘He was facing a few years in prison, and then suddenly his barrister goes missing. Perhaps he just got some of his heavies to put some pressure on Mrs Gilbert to find out where he’d gone and they went too far. Perhaps it was Mrs Gilbert’s death that led to Lake’s conversion into one of the good guys.’

‘But if you are going to run an exposé on Alan Lake and accuse him of murder, you’ll need good evidence,’ he said. ‘Stick to the adulterer for now, Mike Dobson.’

I started to shuffle through the papers, glancing at the headlines, looking for something I hadn’t heard of before.

‘How much did you tell Laura?’ Tony asked.

I looked up. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I didn’t think it was fair on her.’

‘Why?’

‘Because she’s a policewoman. How will it look if it comes out that she had access to the location of the most wanted man in Lancashire?’

‘Whether she knows or not,’ Tony said, his eyebrows raised, ‘it will look like that anyway.’

‘I know, but there’s nothing I can do about it. For now, it’s a press secret, and part of my story will have to be that I didn’t even tell my police sergeant girlfriend.’

‘Sergeant?’

‘That’s what she’s going for.’

Tony nodded. ‘Good on her,’ he said. ‘So what now?’

‘It’s getting complicated,’ I said. ‘Alan Lake is something new into the mix. I’ll look into that, and then I’ll try and find out about this Mike Dobson. But there’s one other thing first: I need to find out who was in my house last night, and whether it’s got anything to do with me going after Claude Gilbert.’