No Name Lane (Howard Linskey) by Howard Linskey

to the rear window that afternoon, just as the police cars started to arrive.
    The old vicarage overlooked the school fields from an outcrop at the very top of Church Lane next to St Michael’s church. The house had been used by generations of clerics until the Church of England had decided it could make more money from selling the place andputting the vicar in a humbler property at the foot of the hill. Mary had lived here first with her father, when he had been vicar of Great Middleton, then later with her husband when he became headmaster of the old junior school. Henry had somehow managed to scrape together the money to purchase the property. Mary’s husband had been dead for almost twenty years now, her father for more than forty, but, to the people of Great Middleton, who seemed to still regard her with a combination of mild deference and suspicion, Mary was always the vicar’s daughter or the headmaster’s wife, never a person in her own right.
    Mary often watched as the children swarmed across the playing fields during their break or spilled noisily out of the building at home time. The ambitious, modernist, self-publicising headmaster was almost always in her local paper these days; full of grand ideas but not a patch on her Henry. He’d been a real teacher and a proper headmaster. This one was all crust and no meat, as her father would have said.
    The gnarled, arthritic knuckles of one hand gripped the heavy velvet curtains for support in case her ageing legs betrayed her. She watched as men walked purposefully to and from a vivid, dark brown scar that had been carved into the field that morning. Call it instinct, call it a premonition or a ghost from the past but whatever it was, Mary Collier watched the events unfolding below her with a sad and heavy heart and a growing sense of trepidation.



CHAPTER FOURTEEN
    Fiona Summers was alerted by a loud banging on her front door, the volume alone indicating its urgency. She was closer than the female police liaison officer and had a head start. ‘I’ll get it,’ she told her.
    Fiona opened the door to find her sister standing on the doorstep, wild-eyed with a tear-streaked face, ‘Susan,’ was all Fiona could manage, ‘have they found her?’
    Susan had dashed to her sister’s house as soon as word reached her that the police had discovered something at Great Middleton junior school and that something was a body. Now that she’d arrived on her sister’s doorstep, panting, breathless and tearful, she realised she didn’t know what to say. How could she find the words to tell Fiona that her precious daughter was gone? Instead all she managed was a nod.
    ‘Oh my God,’ gasped Fiona, ‘where?’
    It was becoming an overcrowded crime scene and DI Peacock took control, telling the uniformed officers to move back and fan out to keep everybody away from it. Kane, Peacock and Bradshaw moved away to let the forensics guys do their thing.
    Bradshaw felt sick. How could he have been so stupid?
    When Ian Bradshaw had taken the call he hadn’t bothered to check if the body was a young girl. Instead heworked on the understandable assumption that two bodies in one week, in a place the size of Great Middleton, was a statistical impossibility and that it must have been Michelle Summers who had been found dead in the school grounds.
    Bradshaw had concentrated on the current whereabouts of the JCB driver, the headmaster and councillor, then shot down to the house to pick up his DI and DCI. When they had all stepped forward to peer into the hole however, it did not contain the remains of young Michelle Summers. Instead they were confronted by the spectacle of an ancient skeleton, one that, even to Bradshaw’s untrained eye, had clearly been underground for decades, judging by the state of its yellowing bones, dirt-encrusted eye sockets and the greying rags wrapped round its body. The gaping mouth, as if caught by surprise at the moment of death, mirrored Bradshaw’s own