he asked suspiciously.
‘Of course,’ snapped Bradshaw. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get the help you asked for.’
‘Oh, so that’s it.’
‘What?’
‘He asked you to do the helping didn’t he,’ Tom told him, ‘which explains why you are narked. Well you should have seen that coming.’
‘I’m not narked. I’m just dripping wet and you’re the one with the beer.’ Bradshaw sipped his orange juice then pulled the face a small child makes tasting medicine.
‘I thought you’d be happy. You got Kane what he wanted.’
‘And you got what you wanted too,’ Bradshaw reminded him. ‘I’m just the one stuck in the middle.’
‘Cheer up. It’ll be like old times.’
‘I’m just very busy right now but maybe I’ll have more luck with another case. So, where do we start?’
Tom shrugged. ‘Anywhere,’ he said, ‘everywhere.’
‘That’s helpful.’
Tom realised Bradshaw was determined to play the grump, so he began with the case the detective cared about most. ‘Okay, answer a question I have about Sandra Jarvis. According to the file you left me, she was seen around the city for a couple of days after her father saw her last. They had an argument, she stormed off and didn’t come back, but where did she go?’
‘They drew a blank on that,’ said Bradshaw, meaning his compatriots in Northumbria Police.
‘She didn’t crash with a friend?’
‘If she did, they couldn’t find her … or him … or someone was lying,’ said Bradshaw.
‘So if she didn’t stay at a mate’s, what did she do between rowing with Dad and leaving the city two days later?’
‘We don’t know, but we got a number of sightings when we appealed for witnesses after her disappearance. She was seen in the Grainger market and Northumberland Street. There were also sightings in the Quayside and one at the Metro Centre.’
‘So she went shopping? Doesn’t sound like Sandra Jarvis was too stressed at that point then, but she was definitely last seen at the railway station?’
‘They have a whizzy new CCTV system. An eagle-eyed detective went through hours of footage until he spotted her.’
‘Good for him,’ said Tom and he meant it. ‘And they say your job isn’t glamorous.’
‘It has its moments,’ said Bradshaw, ‘but most of the time it’s mundane slog, like the case I’m working on right now in fact.’ And he told Tom Carney a little about the burned girl and the problems they were having identifying her.
‘And there’s no chance your burned girl could be Sandra Jarvis?’ Tom asked. ‘Not that I’m saying you haven’t thought of that, but if you can’t identify her?’
‘We can rule that out. Sandra Jarvis is considerably taller.’
‘This picture of Sandra taken from the CCTV,’ Tom asked, ‘where is it?’
‘It will be in the case files in Newcastle,’ said the detective,
‘I’d like to see it.’
‘I’ll get you in there,’ he told Tom. ‘They’re holding a lot of information about her that you’ll want to wade through.’
‘And while I’m doing that …’ Tom said slowly.
‘Sounds ominous,’ replied Bradshaw. ‘What do you want?’
‘We had a deal, remember?’ said Tom. ‘I help you with your case and you help me with mine.’
‘Yeah, yeah, what do you need me to do?’
‘Check out the local perverts for me,’ said Tom.
‘Excuse me?’
‘I need you to look into Lonely Lane,’ he told the detective. ‘I want to know everything that goes on down there.’
As Tom drove back into Newcastle he kept the radio on out of habit. At this time of the day, between the lunch-time news and drive-time, the local station hardly played any music, having long since realised phone-ins with unpaid members of the general public were far cheaper than paying royalties for songs. In this instance, talk really was cheap. Today’s topic was a popular one, as it involved the region’s unofficial religion, football. Newcastle United were top of the league and finally poised to end their decades-long wait for a trophy. They were so far ahead of anyone else that failure seemed a virtual impossibility.
‘Howay man,’ a caller assured a sceptical radio host, ‘even Newcastle couldn’t cock this up.’
‘Don’t bet on it,’ muttered Tom as he steered his car into a street full of red-brick, two-up-two-down terraced houses then parked it behind a white van that was so caked in grime someone had used a finger to write, ‘I wish my missus was this dirty,’ in the muck on its rear doors.
Tom knocked at number twenty. She took so long to answer he assumed no one was in, and was about to walk away when the front door swung open.
‘Mrs Jarvis?’ he asked