Shining Lights Page 5

  He made a point of arguing for the most popular causes; against landmines, for example, or against the prejudicial treatment of people with AIDS. I mean, how the hell could you lose a debate on a subject like that? Even if he didn’t believe a word of what he said, he always argued for what he saw as the winning position.

  Victory was everything to Eric. When I seconded him, my role was not to bugger up the victory he’d already assured, and not to undermine the scale of the humiliating defeat he’d inflicted on his opponents.

  Isaac was different. Sometimes, he’d argue a motion from a position of strong belief, like animal rights and atheism, but then he would take a contrary position and speak against his own beliefs, advocating totalitarianism, favouring the death penalty and, on one memorable occasion, supporting Mao Zedong. Sometimes, he dragged me along to act as his second, once advocating a point of view which still makes me cringe at the very thought.

  A Woman’s Place is in the Home.

  Yeah, that was a real winner, just after we’d joined with the girls’ grammar school as part of the new academy. The funny thing was, his arguments, presentation, poise—his sheer presence—raised him in everyone’s esteem, despite the subject. Whereas I sank lower than a dachshund’s genitals.

  If you truly want to challenge and defeat a particular worldview, he once said to me, immerse yourself in the arguments in its favour. Understand the true believers in order to arm yourself against them. Then he grinned, as he stepped towards the podium. Watch and learn, my boy, he said, as the laughter and the boos rose from his eager audience. And he spoke for twenty minutes with absolute conviction.

  Eric often won their head-to-head debates, but the victory was always a shallow one. Everyone knew the real victor, and it was Isaac. At the end of the debate, Isaac would find himself surrounded by admiring supporters, while Eric slunk away alone, victorious but eaten by envy. I slipped away, too, but usually with a smile on my face.

  The three of us were heavily involved in the seedy world of inter-school debates for a couple of years. They were often against renowned independent schools where I imagine they used the competitions to prepare their students for future roles in local and national politics, or careers in the diplomatic service. Eric, Isaac and Sandra Buchan were a truly formidable team, even with me there acting as back-up, and going for the sympathy vote. But whatever friendship existed between Eric and Isaac eventually fractured like an iceberg from a continental shelf. Malignant envy replaced it on one side, and complete indifference on the other.

  Finally, bored I suspect with the entire debating business, Isaac abdicated from the society. I joined him, pleading excess exam work, and we left Eric in possession of an emptying field.

  That’s how it was. That’s how it always was. Eric raising a triumphant fist to a hollow hall, winning a battle no-one cared about.

  It was hard, sometimes, not to feel sorry for him.

  Chapter 10

  When I awake the next morning, I know it’s time to call in some back-up. I need help from someone who can forge a path into the dark world of the internet to get me the information I need. My own forays have turned up little or nothing.

  Jon back at the Sefton Independent is my go-to guy for stuff like this. The Sefton Independent is where I spend my days when I’m not pursuing ridiculous mysteries involving shadowy old school friends. I love the place. Wendy says it’s my second home, and she’s right. Working there with Jon and Liz, our editor, keeps me grounded, close to the people I like, close to the sort of everyday news I enjoy writing. Close to everything, good and bad, in my home town. Jon is a good friend; the best. He always has been, ever since we started working together. We have a financial stake in the paper now, but while Jon devotes himself to the day-to-day grind, we’ve agreed that I can slip the leash occasionally, and follow my own investigative path, when the opportunity arises.

  Like now.

  Jon enjoys digging into the rich online earth, searching the depths, extracting nuggets of journalistic gold. He’ll love a challenge like this.

  I give him a ring and leave him with the names I’ve encountered so far: Eric and Isaac, Forrester and Mather, and Lingard. Especially Lingard. The way they dropped that name into the conversation was too obvious to be accidental.

  ‘I tried Googling Lingard,’ I tell him. ‘But all I got were four million links to Nordic types with unpronounceable names, and a few boring Swedish businesses to do with house construction and land drainage. Oh, and a weird sex site which I chose not to enter. There was nothing remarkable, and certainly nothing to suggest a link with Blackpool or the Fylde coast. Not on the first few pages at any rate. I gave up after half an hour.’

  ‘Leave it with me,’ Jon says.

  I can imagine him rubbing his hands together, his eyes bright and sharply focused, eager to get started. Jon is like that.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ he asks.

  ‘Take some paracetamol, sleep for a while, and wait for this evening and my daily constitutional.’

  ‘The weather forecast is crap,’ he tells me. ‘Wind and rain again.’

  I thank him and hang up.

  Eight o’clock eventually comes around and I bury myself in some waterproofs I found in the bedroom wardrobe—probably left there by Nina—and head out. The weather isn’t as bad as Jon forecast, but the waterproofs are an invaluable source of insulation. For the first hour, it’s very much a repetition of previous evenings. Nothing is open—not even the café in Bispham where I met Forrester and Mather—and there are very few people about. I reach Gynn Square and I’m about to turn back when I’m disturbed from my reverie by a flurry of movement and noise.

  A police car, siren blaring, approaches at speed along the promenade from the direction of Blackpool North Pier, swings round with a screech of brakes, and pulls up sharply at the kerbside fifty yards away. I feel the usual shock at the sound of sirens and stand still, momentarily frozen. In the headlights, I glimpse a figure writhing on the ground beside a low wall. Behind the wall, a curtain twitches in a window, and a flicker of light escapes. An anxious female face peers out; she’s in her seventies, I’d say.

  On the opposite side of the road from the casualty, half hidden in the shadows, someone else looks on. She has a West Highland terrier, which yaps with excitement at her heels and jumps up and down. The female owner neither acknowledges it nor moves; she just stands still and watches the scene impassively.

  Another siren blares as an ambulance arrives with the same screeching urgency. A second police car follows it. The occupants of the ambulance run quickly towards the person on the ground, and then one of them stands up and runs across to where another figure lies in the shadows against a shop front. His arms hang by his side, palms upwards. He isn’t moving.

  A second ambulance arrives, passing perilously close to where I stand on the kerbside. I step quickly back. Two people leap out, and a police officer directs them to where the motionless figure lies.

  ‘Maybe it’s Tillerman,’ I murmur to myself, and an irrational fear takes hold of my throat. I run across to where the woman with the dog stands to get a better look. I stand a discreet distance away from her and watch while fumbling for the face mask in my pocket.

  The guy lying against the wall is too short for Tillerman, and the other looks too old. I feel a surge of relief that it isn’t Isaac, followed by a second surge of guilt for feeling relief when someone is lying there, badly hurt, maybe dead.

  The woman from the window appears in a flood of light at her front door.

  ‘Is he alright?’ she calls.

  The policeman is abrupt, his voice urgent and insistent.

  ‘Go inside,’ he orders. ‘There’s nothing you can do here. Go now.’

  She slips back into the house and closes the door.

  What the hell has happened here? In normal times, my first reaction would be to assume it was a fight, maybe a stabbing; but nowadays, with the pandemic and everything, I find my br
ain swerving towards a different cause, especially seeing the younger guy struggling for breath so desperately. But to witness two people succumb to severe symptoms in the same place and at the same moment is distressing and disturbing.

  I glance towards the woman with the terrier and I’m surprised to see her stare back at me. I try to smile, at least as much as I can in the half-dark with a black mask which covers my face. She continues to stare, without reciprocating my masked smile, then turns away. Understandable, I suppose. She won’t be eager to engage in conversation with a dodgy looking stranger at this time of night. I turn back to watch the action across the road.

  In the beam of the police car headlights, the paramedics—masked, gloved, wearing tight white head coverings and gowns that come right off the set of Holby City—are feeding oxygen through a mask to the guy who gasps for breath. After a few minutes’ work, he relaxes and stops fighting. The paramedics lift him onto a stretcher and carry him into the ambulance, where one of them climbs in with him. The other runs to the driver’s door. A minute later, the sirens erupt again, and the ambulance passes through the rapidly erected cordon and accelerates towards a distant hospital.

  The other paramedics aren’t in the same hurry. It doesn’t take more than a glance to assess their body language and to realise, with an awful sinking of the stomach, that the other guy is beyond their help.

  ‘Poor sod,’ I say.

  The woman turns towards me, as if I’m speaking to her.

  ‘Do you think so?’ she asks. ‘Who knows what sort of man he was?’

  Not exactly oozing sympathy, this one.

  ‘Does it matter?’ I ask. ‘It looks like he’s a dead man now.’

  She continues to stare at me for a moment, then turns away. ‘Perhaps it matters,’ she sighs, ‘or perhaps not. It’s a matter of degree, don’t you think?’

  Well, that’s a definite zero out of ten for compassion. I look at her more closely, sensing something vaguely familiar. Mid-thirties maybe, slight build, sharp featured. I can’t really make out anything more, but it’s her manner that strikes me more forcibly than her looks. She’s watching the events unfold as if she’s in a laboratory observing some minute species of pond life. Interested, yes, and curious enough to study everything. But indifferent to the battle of life and death going on before her, or the suffering of the two men.

  By contrast, I’m appalled by everything I’ve just seen. My voice shakes and no doubt she can see the shock on my face, even with the mask.

  ‘Was it you who phoned the police and ambulance?’ I ask.

  She looks surprised. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I thought maybe you saw what happened.’

  ‘I did,’ she says.

  Thankfully, there’s time for nothing more. An unmarked car screams to a halt and a man and a woman—plain-clothed police—emerge in haste. Even from this distance, I can see them snap questions and demand immediate answers. No masks for these two; just raincoats and hats, and scarves which they pull over their mouths when they turn towards us.

  Their eyes settle like they can’t quite grasp why we’re there and, after the briefest exchange, the woman strides across. She flashes a card I have no time to scrutinise and re-pockets it.

  ‘Can you tell me who you are, please, and how long you’ve been here?’

  ‘What’s going on?’ I ask. ‘The second guy looked bad.’

  ‘Do you have any identification in case we need to contact you?’ she snaps.

  The young woman beside me is calm and remarkably well-equipped for a dog walker. She immediately locates her driving licence and a couple of credit cards, while I struggle through my pockets and finally emerge with a crisp packet and a bedraggled press card.

  That catches the plain-clothed officer’s attention.

  ‘Philip Tyler,’ she says. ‘What brings a Sefton journalist all the way over here during a pandemic?’

  Time to hide behind the usual defences.

  ‘A story,’ I say with a smile. ‘I got here before the lockdown tightened. I’m kind of stuck here for a while now.’

  The young woman beside me turns her head with sudden interest. I can feel her eyes on me—a not altogether pleasant feeling—and again I have a fleeting sense of something familiar about her manner.

  ‘What’s the story you’re following?’ the detective demands. There’s no messing in that voice; it’s a voice that wants an answer.

  She doesn’t get one.

  ‘I can’t divulge that,’ I tell her.

  She hits me with one of those looks that could melt a hole in glass.

  ‘Oh, I think you can, Mr Tyler.’

  I restrict myself to a shake of the head.

  ‘Can you at least tell me if you are here, on this corner at this time of night, by accident or because someone tipped you off?’

  ‘Just out for a stroll,’ I tell her. ‘Why? Is there a story here? Why should someone tip me off?’

  That stops her for a moment.

  ‘Where are you staying?’ she asks.

  I indicate a general direction, northwards towards Cleveleys, without being specific. Call it instinct, but I’m unwilling to share that information, especially within earshot of the young woman who stands two metres away from me. There’s something about her; something in the way she’s studying me. I don’t look, but I think the dog is eyeing me, too.

  ‘I need your address,’ the detective says. ‘We may want to speak to you again.’

  I wave a hand at the notebook she’s holding. ‘Let me write it down for you,’ I say. ‘It’s a strange spelling.’ I hold out my hand and, with a sigh, she turns the book for me to take. I scribble an address. There isn’t much else I can do.

  ‘You’d better get out of here,’ she says, pocketing the book. ‘This area is cordoned off and will remain so. The further away you get, the safer it will be for you. Now go.’

  I’m more than happy to go, and I set off across the road back to the promenade. I’m confused too. The detective, if she was a detective and not another member of Forrester’s outfit, was far too keen to get rid of us. She was nervous, especially when she saw my press card. I’m left wondering what the hell I’ve just stumbled upon. What happened to those two guys? A criminal assault of some sort? Something associated with the Covid pandemic? What?

  Once again, lots of questions and few answers.

  When I check the tram track, the young woman and her terrier run across the road towards me.

  ‘Would you mind if I walk back with you?’ she asks with a pale-lipped smile. ‘I’m only going a few streets, but this business has rather shaken me up. I don’t want to walk on my own.’

  ‘Sure, no problem,’ I smile.

  ‘Shaken’ is the last word I would choose to describe her attitude to the events we’ve just witnessed. Indifferent would be better. She looks pale, though, and I remind myself that you can never know the true depths of feeling that might exist under the most impassive of surfaces.

  Then I remind myself that Gullible is my middle name—ask anyone—so I revert to suspicious mode.

  We walk in silence for a few minutes before she pauses.

  ‘Are you the Philip Tyler who used to go to Sefton Grammar School? I’m going to feel very foolish if you say no, but you really look like him.’

  ‘Yes, some years ago now.’

  ‘I thought so as soon as I saw you, and then I heard you say your name to that detective. I bet you don’t recognise me, do you?’

  She removes her mask so I can look at her more closely, and everything falls into place.

  ‘Good god! Sandra Buchan. What on earth are you doing here?’

  ‘I work here.’ Her face relaxes into a familiar smile. ‘I’ve been living here for five or six years now. I work at a health and well-being clinic. People come to us to escape the grind and bustle of ordinary life. It’s like a detox for the body and the soul.’

  That scenario comes as no surprise. When Sandra got her teeth into a
fad, whatever it might be, dynamite couldn’t shift them. Turning now towards health foods, aromatherapy, alternative medical treatments, herbalism, meditation and anything Far Eastern would all be grist to her spiritual mill. She always was a bit of a latter-day hippie chick, even back in the English literature classes we shared in sixth form.

  ‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ I say, for want of anything else to contribute.

  ‘You’ve made quite a name for yourself.’ She bestows a smile on me, which seems to come from somewhere in the spiritual beyond. ‘Who’d have thought it? Where are you living now? Still back in Sefton?’

  I nod.

  ‘Local boy made good, eh?’ She gazes at me, weighing me up. ‘What brings you to Blackpool?’ The edge in her voice sharpens. ‘A story?’

  ‘Kind of,’ I grin. ‘Blackpool is full of them.’

  ‘Anything juicy?’

  ‘Sadly, no. Just a guy who runs illegal raves. I wanted to see what makes morons work.’

  She flicks her head in a manner I can remember from years ago. ‘But there’s a pandemic,’ she says, almost as an afterthought.

  I’m ready for that one. ‘It doesn’t stop morons. They’re at their stupidest at times like this.’

  She seems to accept my answer.

  ‘Where are you staying?’ she asks.

  I pretend not to hear her and we walk on.

  ‘This is where I cross the road,’ she says, pointing towards a narrow street of semi-detached houses. ‘I stay down there when I’m in Blackpool. It’s a small place, but it suits me. Number 36. Are you here long?’

  She gathers the terrier into her arms and cradles it. The poor thing shivers with the cold. Like me, it’s probably longing for a warm fireside. Only in my case, there’s a minibar to add inner warmth.

  ‘A few days. Not long.’ I glance at my watch and feign a surprised gasp. ‘Jeez, I’d better get going. I was due to call Wendy about half an hour ago.’

  ‘Wendy?’

  ‘My wife. We have a little boy, Noah. He’s one.’

  ‘That’s nice for you.’ She compliments me without emotion. ‘Maybe we could meet up while you’re here? Talk about the old days. Perhaps I could call on you.’