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Back Harbour Street Save as PDF
Chapters (47)
  1. Contents
  2. Chapter One
  3. Chapter Two
  4. Chapter Three
  5. Chapter Four
  6. Chapter Five
  7. Chapter Six
  8. Chapter Seven
  9. Chapter Eight
  10. Chapter Nine
  11. Chapter Ten
  12. Chapter Eleven
  13. Chapter Twelve
  14. Chapter Thirteen
  15. Chapter Fourteen
  16. Chapter Fifteen
  17. Chapter Sixteen
  18. Chapter Seventeen
  19. Chapter Eighteen
  20. Chapter Nineteen
  21. Chapter Twenty
  22. Chapter Twenty-One
  23. Chapter Twenty-Two
  24. Chapter Twenty-Three
  25. Chapter Twenty-Four
  26. Chapter Twenty-Five
  27. Chapter Twenty-Six
  28. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  29. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  30. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  31. Chapter Thirty
  32. Chapter Thirty-One
  33. Chapter Thirty-Two
  34. Chapter Thirty-Three
  35. Chapter Thirty-Four
  36. Chapter Thirty-Five
  37. Chapter Thirty-Six
  38. Chapter Thirty-Seven
  39. Chapter Thirty-Eight
  40. Chapter Thirty-Nine
  41. Chapter Forty
  42. Chapter Forty-One
  43. Chapter Forty-Two
  44. Chapter Forty-Three
  45. Chapter Forty-Four
  46. Chapter Forty-Five
  47. About the Author

‘The search team has just found a body under the shed in Malcolm Kerr’s yard.’ She was fizzing, but tried to keep her voice calm and factual. ‘The concrete there is as thin as eggshell apparently. Replaced after the fire in the original building. No details yet. Paul Keating and Billy Wainwright are on their way. But the team leader reckons the skeleton of a male.’ Now she allowed herself to look out at them, to bask in their glory. ‘A young male.’

There was a round of applause, a few cheers.

‘Time to bring in Malcolm Kerr, don’t you think?’ she said. ‘See to it, Charlie.’ A moment’s pause. She knew that in a performance timing was everything. ‘Didn’t I tell you this would all be over by Christmas?’

Chapter Thirty-Six

It turned out that Val Butt wasn’t as old or as frail as Joe had expected. Prof. Craggs’s photograph of the group outside the Coble had been taken in 1975; the date was written faintly on the back in pencil. Margaret would have been thirty-two. Val Butt, large and ungainly, would have been just in her forties, already looking tired and middle-aged, and her son Rick in his mid-twenties. Val would have been hardly more than a child herself when she’d had him, and it would have been hard to be a teenage mother then. Joe tried to take the imaginative leap back to Harbour Street in the year before he was born, but the effort was too much for him. Better to find Val and talk to her.

The woman lived on her own in a single-storeyed miners’ welfare cottage in a small estate on the outskirts of Mardle. It astonished him how many of the players in the case still lived in the town, or had connections with the place. It was as if they’d had no ambition, or lacked the confidence to uproot themselves and try life elsewhere. He wondered if Kate Dewar would move away now, whether she and Stuart and the kids would set up home in a new town, make a fresh start. He hoped they would. He wasn’t given to strange thoughts, but it occurred to him suddenly that Mardle was toxic. There was something unhealthy in the air.

He hadn’t made an appointment and it took the woman so long to get to the door that he was about to turn away. Then he heard a painful wheezing and the door opened slowly. Val Butt was huge. She was still in her nightclothes, and the pink candlewick dressing gown hardly met around her waist. She walked with the aid of a Zimmer frame and, before speaking, she let go of it with one hand and flicked ash from her cigarette onto the path beyond him. ‘Who are you?’ Eyes narrowed. The same look, he thought, she would have given the underage drinkers in the Coble, before serving them anyway.