No Name Lane (Howard Linskey) Read Online Free PDF Page A

finally come out with the bleeding obvious! Life hasn’t lived up to my earlier hopes and aspirations; well then, that’s just me and about nine-tenths of the rest of the planet isn’t it? I don’t suppose you wanted to do this when you were a kid, did you?’
    ‘Calm down, Ian,’ cautioned the doctor.
    ‘Calm down? Bollocks to that!’ Bradshaw sat up suddenly, ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ and he climbed down from the couch and struggled into his jacket.
    ‘But Ian,’ protested the dumbstruck doctor, ‘we’ve barely had forty minutes, you’ve still got twenty left.’
    ‘Keep the change!’ called Bradshaw as he went through the door.
    Hehadn’t gone more than a few yards when the receptionist reached him. They were both moving at speed and almost barged into one another.
    ‘Detective Constable,’ she said, ‘I have a call for you. They say it’s urgent.’
    They walked quickly back to the front desk together and Bradshaw picked up the phone. It was Peacock.
    ‘Get your arse back here sharpish, Bradshaw,’ the Detective Inspector ordered, ‘the boss wants everyone assembled in half an hour.’
    ‘What’s happened?’ Ian asked, and when Peacock answered, Bradshaw felt a stone where his stomach had been.
    ‘Another girl’s been taken.’



CHAPTER SIX
    Jesus, thought Tom Carney, what the hell did he have to do to please this man? ‘What’s the matter?’ he protested weakly. The alpha male within him had run for cover at the first sound of the Doc’s booming voice and he already sounded like a small child caught licking the icing off a cake by his mother.
    ‘He’s suing us!’ yelled Docherty, ‘and, according to our lawyers, he’s going to bloody win!’
    Tom rallied then. ‘Of course he’s going to sue us. What choice does he have? He’s not going to admit it, is he? If he does that he’s finished. Timothy Grady’s a politician, so he’s got to sue or at least say he’s going to sue – but he isn’t going to win. He can’t win!’
    ‘Oh, can’t he? Which law school did you go to? Or are you George Carman in disguise?’ Tom kept silent. ‘No? Well perhaps you can get me his number because I think we are going to need the best libel lawyer in the country thanks to you, that stupid bitch Anna-Louise and that nugget Jonathan. The only person I blame for this disaster more than you lot is my deputy. He, at the very least, should have known better!’
    In that instant it all became clear. Alex Docherty was already distancing himself from the story, the front page lead on his own paper, on the hard-to-disprove point that he was technically on leave on the day it was cleared torun, at a Buckingham Palace garden party of all things, and poor, unfortunate Martyn Tracy had taken on the job of Editor in the great man’s absence for a day; a single day that would probably destroy him and everyone who worked on the story, if Grady won his libel case. It mattered little that Docherty was in touch with every aspect of it right up until virtually the hour that it ran. He would only have to claim that he would never have agreed to run the story in its entirety and it would be the deputy editor who’d carry the can. Editors lost their jobs over this kind of thing. Newspapers weren’t made of money and their owners did not like to lose libel cases. Juries had a nasty habit of awarding massive pay-outs to the wronged, even when they were as guilty as sin and everybody knew it. It was one thing to know someone was dodgy, another thing entirely to prove it beyond doubt in a court of law. Alex Docherty had consulted the paper’s lawyers and he was already running for cover. So much for it being ‘his paper’.
    ‘But we’ve got photos of Grady coming out of his apartment and pictures of her going in,’ Tom protested.
    ‘Not the apartment,’ the Doc corrected him, ‘the apartment block . She could have been shagging anybody in those flats, or so his lawyers will claim,’ countered his