I got out of the car, pissed off.
Barry leant over to close the door. “I told you, you owe me one.”
“Yeah. Cheers.”
And laughing Barry was gone.
Brunt Street, Castleford.
One side pre-war terrace, the other more recent semi detached.
Number 11 was on the terrace side with a bright red door.
I walked up and down the street three times, wishing I had my notes, wishing I could phone first, wishing I didn’t stink of drink, and then rapped quietly and just once upon the red door.
I stood in the quiet street, waited, and then turned away.
The door flew open. “Look, I don’t know where the fuck he is. So will you just piss off!”
The woman paused, about to slam the red door shut. She dragged a hand through her dirty yellow hair and pulled a red cardigan tight around her gaunt frame. “Who are you?” she whispered.
“Edward Dunford.” My little red ape rattling the bars of his cage.
“You here about Johnny?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“Jeanette.”
She put three thin fingers to her white lips and closed her blue eyes.
There at death’s door, with the sky above breaking into a December blue, I took out my pen and some scraps of paper and said, “I’m a journalist. From the Post.”
“Well then, you’d better come in.”
I closed the red door behind me.
“Sit down. I’ll put the kettle on.”
I sat down in an off-white leather armchair in a small but well-furnished front room. Most of the stuff was new and expensive, some of it still wrapped in plastic. A colour TV was on with the sound off. An adult literacy programme was just beginning, the title On the Move written on the side of a speeding white Ford Transit van.
I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to lose my hangover.
When I opened my eyes, there she was.
On top of the TV was the photograph, the school portrait I’d dreaded.
Jeanette Garland, younger and fairer than Susan and Clare, was smiling at me with the happiest smile I’d ever seen.
Jeanette Garland was mongoloid.
Out in the kitchen the kettle began to scream and then abruptly went dead.
I looked away from the photograph, glancing at a cabinet stuffed with trophies and tankards.
“Here we are,” said Mrs Garland, putting down a tray on the coffee table in front of me. “Just let it stand a moment.”
“Quite the sportsman, Mr Garland,” I smiled, nodding back at the cabinet.
Mrs Garland pulled her red cardigan tight again around her and sat down on the off-white leather sofa. “They’re my brother’s.”
“Oh,” I said, trying to calculate the woman’s age: Jeanette had been eight years old in 1969, making her mother maybe twenty-six or twenty-seven then, early thirties now?
She looked like she hadn’t slept in days.
She caught me looking. “What can I do for you, Mr Dunford?”
“I’m doing an article on the parents of children who have gone missing.”
Mrs Garland picked at some flecks on her skirt.
I went on, “There’s always a lot of publicity at the time and then it dies down.”
“Dies down?”
“Yeah. The article is about how the parents have coped, after all the fuss has died down, and…”
“About how I’ve coped?”
“Yeah. For example, at the time, do you think the police could’ve done anything more to have helped you?”
“There was one thing.” Mrs Garland was staring straight at me, waiting.
I said, “And what was that?”
“They could have found my bloody daughter, you ignorant, heartless, fucking bastard!” She closed her eyes, her whole body shaking.
I stood up, my mouth dry. “I’m sorry, I didn’t…”
“Get out!”
“I’m sorry.”
Mrs Garland opened her eyes and looked up at me. “You’re not sorry. If you were capable of feeling sorry, you wouldn’t be here.”
I stood in the centre of her front room, my shins trapped between the coffee table and the armchair, suddenly thinking of my own mother and wanting to go over and hold the mother before me. Awkwardly I tried to stride over the coffee table and the pot of tea, unsure of what to say, saying only, “Please…”
Mrs Paula Garland rose to meet me, her pale blue eyes wide with tears and hate, pushing me back hard against the red door. “You fucking journalists. You come into my house talking to me about things you know nothing about, like you’re discussing the weather or some war in another fucking country.” She was crying huge tears now as she struggled to open the front door.
My face on fire, I stepped backwards into the street.
“This thing happened to me!” she screamed, slamming the door in my face.
I stood in the street, in front of the red door, and wished I were anywhere else in the world but Brunt Street, Castleford.
“How’d you get on then?”
“Fuck off.” I’d had an hour and three pints to brood over by the time Barry Gannon showed up. It was now almost last orders and most of the Swan had fucked off home for Sunday lunch.
He sat down with his pint and took a cigarette from my pack. “Didn’t find their Johnny hiding under the bed then?”
I was in no fucking mood. “What?”
Barry spoke slowly, “Johnny Kelly. Great White Hope?”
“What about him?” I was on the verge of cracking him.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Eddie.”
The tankards, the trophies, fuck. “He’s related to the Garlands?”
“Give the boy another fucking prize. Paula Garland’s bloody brother. Been living there since her husband died and that model left him.”
Face on fire again, blood boiling. “Husband’s dead?”
“Fuck, Dunford. You’ve got to know these things.”
“Shit.”
“Never got over Jeanette. Ate a shotgun two or three years ago.”
“And you knew this? Why the fuck didn’t you say?”
“Fuck off. Do your fucking job or ask.” Barry took a big bite out of his pint to hide his bloody grin.
“All right, I’m asking.”
“The husband topped himself about the same time their Johnny started making a name for himself, on and off the pitch.”
“Bit of a Jack the Lad?”
“Aye, right lad about town. Married Miss Weston-super-Mare 1971 or something. Didn’t last. So, when she upped and left him, it was back to his Big Sister’s.”
“The Georgie Best of Rugby League?”
“Don’t suppose you followed it much down South?”
Salvaging some pride, I said, “Wasn’t exactly Front Page stuff, no.”
“Well it was here and you should’ve fucking known.”
I lit another cigarette, hating him for rubbing it in and the smile on his cakehole that went with it.
But fuck pride and the fall. I said, “So Paul Kelly at work, he’s what?”
“Some cousin or something. Ask him.”
I swallowed, swearing this would be the last time ever, “And Kelly didn’t show up for the game today?”
“I don’t know. You’ll have to find out, won’t you?”
“Yeah,” I muttered, thinking please God don’t let my eyes fill up.
A voice boomed, “Time gentlemen please.”
We both drained our glasses.
I said, “How’d you get on with Mrs Dawson?”
“She told me my life was in danger,” smiled Barry as he stood up.
“You’re joking? Why?”
“Why not? I know too much.”
We walked out through the double doors to the car park.
“You believe her?”
“They have something on everyone. The question’s just when they’ll use it.” Barry stubbed out his cigarette in the gravel.
“Who’s they?”
Barry was rummaging through his pockets, looking for his car keys. “They don’t have names.”
“Fuck off,” I laughed, the three pints and the fresh air giving me guts.