“All right?” I said, pulling back the tarpaulin door of an unfinished house.
Four men chewing sandwiches, slurping tea from flasks.
“Help you?” said one.
“Lost are you?” said another.
I said, “I’m actually looking for…”
“Never heard of them,” said one.
“Journalist are you?” said another.
“Shows does it?”
“Yeah,” they all said.
“Well, do you know where I can find Terry Jones and James Ashworth?”
A big man in a donkey jacket stood up, swallowing half a loaf of bread. “I’m Terry Jones.”
I stuck out my hand. “Eddie Dunford.
He ignored my hand. “Going to pay me are you?”
Everybody laughed into their tea.
“Well, we can certainly discuss it.”
“Well, you can certainly piss off if you don’t,” said Terry Jones to more laughter.
“Seriously,” I protested.
Terry Jones sighed and shook his head.
“Got a right bloody nerve, some folk,” said one of the men.
“Least he’s fucking local,” said another.
“Come on then,” yawned Terry Jones, before swilling out his mouth with the last of his tea.
“Make sure he bloody coughs up,” shouted another man as we went outside.
“Have you had a lot of papers here?” I asked, offering Terry Jones a cigarette.
“Lads said there was a photographer from
There was a thick drizzle in the air and I pointed to another half-built house. Terry Jones nodded and led the way.
“Police keep you long?”
“No, not really. Thing like this though, they’re not going to take any bloody chances are they?”
“What about James Ashworth?” We were standing in the doorway, the rain just missing us.
“What about him?”
“They keep him a long time?”
“Same.”
“Is he about?”
“He’s sick.”
“Yeah?”
“Something going around.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Terry Jones dropped his cigarette and ground it out with his boot and added, “Gaffer’s been off since Thursday, Jimmy yesterday and today, couple of other lads last week.”
I said, “Who found her, you or Jimmy?”
“Jimmy.”
“Where was she?” I said, looking out across the mud and the piss.
Terry Jones hawked up a massive piece of phlegm and said, “I’ll show you.”
We walked in silence over the building site to the trough of wasteland that runs parallel to the Wakefield- Dewsbury Road. A ribbon of blue and white police tape was strung along the ridge of the ditch. Across the ditch, on the road side, two coppers were sat in a Panda car. One of them looked across at us and nodded at Terry Jones.
He waved back. “How long do they keep this up?”
“No idea.”
“They had tents all over this until last night.”
I was staring down into Devil’s Ditch, at the rusted prams and the bicycles, at the cookers and the fridges. Foliage and litter snaked through everything, pulling it down into its mouth, making it impossible to see the bottom.
“Did you see her?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Fuck.”
“She was lying on top of a pram, about halfway down.”
“A pram?”
He was staring off at something far, far away. “Police took it. She had, aw fuck…”
“I know.” I had my eyes closed.
“Police said we hadn’t to tell anyone.”
“I know, I know.”
“But, fuck…” He was fighting with a lump in his throat, tears in his eyes.
I handed him another cigarette. “I know. I saw the photo graphs from the post-mortem.”
He pointed with the unlit cigarette at a separately marked piece of ground. “One of the wings was over there, near the top.”
“Fuck.”
“I wish to Christ I’d never seen her.”
I stared into Devil’s Ditch, the photos on the wall at the Redbeck swimming through my mind.
“If only it hadn’t been her,” he whispered.
“Where does Jimmy Ashworth live?”
Terry Jones looked at me. “I don’t think that’s a right good idea.”
“Please?”
“He’s taken it badly. He’s only a lad.”
“It might help him to talk,” I said, looking at a dirty blue pram halfway down the slope.
“That’s bollocks,” he sniffed.
“Please?”
“Fitzwilliam,” said Terry Jones and turned and walked away.
I ducked down under the blue police ribbon and, leaning into Devil’s Ditch by the root of a dead tree, I plucked a white feather from a bush.
An hour to kill.
I drove up past the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, parked, and jogged back into Wakefield through the rain, quick ening my pace as I passed the school.
Fifty minutes to kill.
Being Tuesday, I walked round the second-hand market, smoking cigarettes and getting soaked to the skin, staring at the prams and the children’s bicycles and the pickings from the house clearances of the dead.
The Indoor Market stank of wet clothes and there was still a book stall where Joe’s Books had been.
I glanced at my father’s watch, leafing through the pile of old superheroes.
Forty minutes to kill.
Every Saturday morning for three years, my father and I had got the 126 at half-past seven from Ossett bus station, my father reading the Post, talking about football or cricket, the empty shopping bags on his lap, as I dreamt of the pile of comics that was always my wage for helping Joe.
Every Saturday morning until that Saturday morning Old Joe hadn’t opened up and I had stood there waiting, my father coming by with two bags of shopping, the cheese wrapped in paper on the top.
Thirty-five minutes to kill.
In the Acropolis at the top of Westgate, where I’d once fancied the waitress, I forced down a plate of Yorkshire Pudding and onion gravy and then puked it straight back up in the little toilet in the back, the toilet where I’d always
