Black Moss (Manc Noir Book 1), page 1
BLACK MOSS
This edition first published 2018 by Fahrenheit Press.
ISBN: 978-1-912526-33-8
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
www.Fahrenheit-Press.com
Copyright © David Nolan 2018
The right of David Nolan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher.
F 4 E
Black Moss
By
David Nolan
Fahrenheit Press
For the dark, Satanic hills of Manchester.
PART I
ONE
7.05 am Friday 6 April 1990
The location instructions that Danny Johnston had been given by the news desk were odd, even by the standards that he’d come to expect over the last six months: Take the A62 out of Oldham. Pass through Diggle. Stop at Brun Clough Reservoir car park. Pennine Way sign on your right. Walk PW path until you reach another reservoir (Redbook). Next one is Black Moss Reservoir, with Little Black Moss next to it. Look for a beach and police activity.
Look for a beach… Seriously? It was bad enough being sent this far out of his patch. The radio station Danny worked for as a reporter was supposed to cover Greater Manchester and no more; Danny was almost certain that this far up the moorland A62 road he could practically smell Yorkshire. There was certainly a glow of amber light over the next heather-covered brow and he had a strong suspicion it was coming from Huddersfield. This isn’t our patch – this is wild goose chase bollocks. That’s bad enough in itself. But look for a beach? Come on. That’s taking the piss.
Spotting the wooden Pennine Way marker that the instructions had mentioned, Danny parked up the radio car with its distinctive rooftop mast and yellow-and-blue Manchester Radio logos. He turned off the cassette that he’d been playing as he drove – Technique by New Order.
Pulling a can of Coke from his pocket, he popped the ring pull and drank half of it. His head throbbed, and his throat was parched. The shock of sugar and caffeine didn’t cure it, but experience told him it would see him through the next twenty minutes or so.
As he got out of the car he pulled a tie out of his pocket – it was already looped into a tight knot – and pulled it over his head and around his neck, tucking it roughly under his collar. Proper reporters wear ties, he’d been told on his first day at Manchester Radio. In some of the places you’ll be going, people treat you like God if you’re wearing a tie.
Danny put the strap of a black, Marantz cassette recorder over his shoulder, shoved the microphone attached to it into his trouser pocket and locked the car. You could always tell reporters from independent radio stations from their BBC counterparts by the tape machines they used. The BBC favoured hefty, reel-to-reel German Uher machines. The indie reporters were issued with the much lighter Japanese Marantz units. The BBC are slow and safe, like their tape machines – another piece of wisdom he’d been issued with – we are light on our feet and fast. In and out. No messing.
Lighting up a cigarette and swearily muttering about the boggy conditions and his inappropriate footwear, Danny set off down the windy Pennine Way path. The gravel soon gave way to paving slabs, which rocked and squelched under his feet – the ground below was soaked through with water. Pockets of icy snow still lined either side of the path, the result of a slightly freakish series of spring-time snow showers earlier in the week.
The path forked right at the first reservoir and then headed upwards, following the soft, rolling flow of the moorland. The slabs that formed the path were drier here, the slope of the route allowing the moisture to drain off the watershed. Danny looked right; down through the valleys he could see the lights of Manchester.
He looked left. More lights, telecommunications towers and buildings, that’s definitely Huddersfield, he thought. There’s no story out here and even if there is one, it probably doesn’t belong to us.
Danny had never been out here before. He’d heard the moors were bleak, but he wasn’t prepared for the sheer unrelenting nothingness of the area. It was like the world had been horizontally cut in two – sky at the top, moor at the bottom, with nothing to provide any form of relief from the two themes. Not even a tree. Not one. In any direction. Bleak.
As he crested the hill he could see a second reservoir; there were figures there. Activity. There was clearly something going on – whether it was happening within the Manchester Radio broadcast area was quite another matter.
The thin blue jacket and off-white shirt that Danny wore gave precious little protection from the wind as it nipped and pinched at his upper body. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that halfway down the front of his shirt, one of the buttons was missing. Every push of wind seemed to find the gap. Danny pulled his jacket together, held it shut around his slight frame with both arms and continued.
The wind pushed his dark brown hair back from his face. Danny’s hair had been fashioned into the floppy, fringey haircut adopted by the majority of Manchester males in their mid-twenties over the last eighteen months. The hairdo was so omnipresent it was probably no longer fashionable, but Danny hadn’t had the time or the inclination to do anything about it.
He got closer to the second, grey sheet of reservoir he’d been told to head for. The wind pushed tiny, quick waves across the top of the water. The Pennine Way’s paving slabs gave way to grit and small stones and then to sand. Danny saw two police officers close to a patch of land between the path and the water’s edge of Black Moss. One policeman was waving his arms at the other, shouting at him. Danny looked past the officers and his eyes were drawn to a dark, yellowy strip that separated the mossy moorland from the reservoir. Next to the reservoir – there was no other word for it – was a beach.
The police close to the water spotted Danny approaching and held up a shiny, white sheet to mask something in the sand. The sheet made a plasticky, crackling sound, like something used on a building site to wrap up bricks. ‘Morning,’ Danny said. ‘I’m from Manchester Radio. Is the senior officer about, please?’
‘Fuck off mate,’ one of the PCs shouted, struggling in the wind with the white sheet. ‘We’re not supposed to talk to you... But fuck off anyway.’ The officer was a similar age to Danny. His face was as pale as the sheet he was grappling with and he appeared to have vomit down the front of his uniform. His helmet was lying on the floor close to his feet. It was speckled with wet sand.
Danny was about to go into his spiel – the one he had been told to trot out in circumstances like these – about how that this was a public right of way and he wasn’t causing any obstruction. The usual stuff. As he was about to start speaking the harsh moorland wind whipped hard against the sheet and pulled it from the hand of one of the policemen. One side of the plastic flipped left to right and flew into the face of the other PC, exposing the area of beach they’d been trying to hide. Danny looked down and saw the body of a small child lying face down in the sand. His tiny legs just touched the path. It was a boy. At least, it looked like a boy. A bloated, puffy, white thing, but a boy nonetheless. Nine, maybe ten years old. He was wearing socks, sandals and grey school shorts. His hands were bunched into fists and looked unnaturally dark, like they’d been dipped in black paint. His arms and neck were bare, but his torso was covered with a shiny black strapping that had been wrapped around and around his back and chest. His face was almost entirely buried in the sand, but Danny could just make out the corner of his mouth. It was curled up. Like he was smiling. Danny had never seen a dead body before. Ever. ‘Christ Almighty,’ said Danny. ‘Poor kid. Christ.’
‘No pictures, you fuckin’ vulture,’ said a third officer, who ran towards the group as his colleagues struggled to put the sheet back in place. ‘Get back to the road. I mean it. Fuck off out of it. Right now.’
Danny half-heartedly waved his microphone in the policeman’s direction and stepped back. ‘I’m from the radio,’ he said quietly. ‘We don’t do pictures. We do sound. Christ. Poor kid.’
Danny began to walk back up the path. Then he glanced back at the scene and again caught a glimpse of the body, this time over the top of the sheet. The officers were still struggling with it against the wind and they were arguing between themselves again. The strapping across the child’s back seemed to shine in the early morning light. Then the wind eased, and the sheet began to behave, doing the job it had been commandeered for in the first place: that of stopping people from seeing the body of a little boy, half buried in sand next to a grim, moorland reservoir in the middle of nowhere.
Halfway back to the radio car, Danny saw a middle-aged man in a dirty, fawn-coloured rain mac and crumpled suit walk towards him. Here’s the boss, Danny thought. He must be in charge – he has a moustache and he looks pissed off. Danny recognised him: Detective Inspector… Smithdown? Yes. DI John Smithdown from Greater Manchester Police. Good bloke. Old school cop. Meat and potatoes… as straightforward as his name. Snap out of it and do your job. Talk to him.
‘Mr Smithdown? Danny Johnston from Manchester Radio. Remember me? I interviewed you about a thousand times over the Oldham prostitute murder a few months back. Good result for your team that was.’ Shameless flattery, but it might work.
‘Yes Danny
‘I got a mild nosebleed as I drove through Diggle, but it soon passed,’ Danny replied. The slightest of smiles appeared briefly across DI Smithdown’s face. Good sign, Danny thought. The golden rule of Manchester Radio was: Never Come Back to the Station Without an Interview. Ever. So, he continued trying to engage the DI in chat. ‘This is bloody miles away from anywhere though,’ added Danny. ‘Where’s the border with Yorkshire?’
‘You’re standing on it, young man,’ said the policeman. The two looked at the stone-flagged Pennine Way path beneath their feet. The DI stamped his feet. ‘This is the border right here.’
‘Terrible business down there at the... well, beach I suppose,’ Danny continued. The two men looked at each other. The officer was in his late forties. His face was grey, so was his moustache. And his eyes. Danny suddenly felt very young and inexperienced. Long pause. DI Smithdown said nothing.
‘Your lads let the sheet slip for a second,’ Danny said, pointing down the path with his microphone. ‘Easily done in this wind. Not their fault, I’m sure.’
Danny looked directly at DI Smithdown and made a point of holding eye contact with him. ‘I saw the kid’s body. Just awful. Couldn’t have been more than nine or so, would you say?’ Again – the pause. Danny instinctively wound the flex of his microphone in a loop around his hand. This stopped the lead from touching the ground, in case anyone was to step on it and disconnect the mic. Habit. ‘Could I get a few words, Mr Smithdown? For our next bulletin?’ Very long pause. ‘I’ve come a long way. As you yourself pointed out.’
DI Smithdown looked away from Danny and up the path towards the road. There were headlights approaching. Forensics, more officers, scenes of crime personnel – they’d make a better job of shielding the boy’s body than two PCs with a sheet. He looked back at Danny and pulled a crumpled, black pack of John Player Special cigarettes from his coat pocket. There was one left. He lit it and again looked directly at Danny – so much so, it made the reporter feel slightly uncomfortable. ‘How come you were here so quickly?’ the detective asked. ‘You journos normally hunt in packs. There’s always a huddle of you. You’re streets ahead of everyone this morning. How come?’
‘We got a tip off,’ Danny said. ‘An anonymous call about an hour and a half ago. I suppose I was the next person due on shift, so they got me out of bed and sent me straight here. Everyone else has been too busy covering the riot. Just my bad luck, really. And yours.’
The riot that had started at Strangeways Jail on Sunday of that week had electrified the Manchester Radio newsroom. Ever since prisoners had broken through the upper ceiling of the jail and taken up residence on the roof, coverage had been wall to wall and the story led every bulletin. Nothing else seemed to matter other than the latest news on the rooftop protests at the prison. There’d been talk that dead bodies were piled high inside the jail and that the SAS were preparing to go in. One remand prisoner, who’d been attacked by other inmates on day one of the disturbances, had already died in hospital from his injuries. Danny had gleaned most of this by listening to the radio and reading the Manchester Evening News, because he hadn’t been near the jail since the riot had started.
‘All the proper reporters are covering the riot, I reckon,’ said DI Smithdown. You probably have a point there, Danny thought. ‘Right,’ sighed the detective. ‘Get your microphone out. But, let’s be clear...’ The DI took a pull on his cigarette and took a step closer to Danny. He was head and shoulders taller and smelled of alcohol and mints. ‘You didn’t see the body, did you?’ he said, softly but very, very firmly. ‘No, I did not, Mr Smithdown,’ the DI said, providing his own answer before Danny could reply. ‘Because my lads never dropped that sheet, did they? No, they did not, Mr Smithdown. So, you can’t ask me anything specific about the body, can you? No, I cannot, Mr Smithdown. Clear?’
‘Crystal clear, Mr Smithdown,’ said Danny. He pressed play and record on the Marantz recorder and held the microphone about six inches from the DI’s mouth. ‘Could you identify yourself for the tape please?’
‘DI John Smithdown, Oldham CID, Greater Manchester Police... tired, hungry, pissed off and eager to get this over with very quickly indeed.’
Okay. Best keep this straightforward, Danny thought. ‘DI Smithdown, what can you tell us about the discovery officers have made out here this morning?’
DI Smithdown switched immediately into copperspeak, the bland, verbal autopilot that the police tended to use when they wanted to give as little away as possible: ‘At approximately 5.30 am this morning the body of a juvenile male was discovered by a man out walking his dog. The area is currently being sealed off and a fingertip search of the scene will commence shortly. The age and identity of the juvenile male are not yet known, and I have no further details to give at this present moment in time.’
The officer gave Danny a small nod, a semi-polite half smile and walked off towards Black Moss. More vehicles and officers had arrived. Not the greatest interview ever, thought Danny, but it will have to do. He looked at his watch: 7.45 am. If he could get a decent signal going from the radio car, he’d be able to make the 8 am bulletin. He rewound his tape, turned up the volume on the built-in speaker and pressed play to check that the interview – such as it was – had recorded. He heard Smithdown’s words about a ‘juvenile male’ – all was well. ‘Thank you, Mr Smithdown,’ he half shouted at the officer as he walked behind him up the path. Then he thought of something. ‘Mr Smithdown?’ The policeman half turned. ‘Who’s in charge then, Greater Manchester or Yorkshire?’
‘We are,’ the DI shouted back. ‘The body’s lying right across the border but the bloke who found it called it in from Diggle. That makes it GMP.’ He carried on walking.
There were more police vehicles gathering now. It looked to Danny like they were setting up an incident room. Soon the scene and the story would be locked down. The police press office would take over and there would be no more opportunities to talk to officers at the scene like this. ‘Mr Smithdown? One more thing. The recorder’s off by the way – what was that stuff wrapped around the kid’s chest?’
DI Smithdown carried on walking but half raised both hands in a universal gesture that anyone would recognise for how the hell should I know? He carried on down the path towards the reservoir.
Danny ran the opposite way up the Pennine Way and arrived back at the radio car; he unlocked it and sat in the driver’s seat. He had things to do and they needed doing quickly – the eight o’clock news was now less than ten minutes away. He pulled a small pad from his inside jacket pocket, took a green, Pentel pen from the breast pocket and pulled off the cap with his teeth. At the same time, he pushed a large red button on a control panel behind the handbrake. It operated the mechanism that raised the huge, sectioned mast that sat in the middle of the car. The motorised mast groaned, scraped and moved upwards, its sections separating one by one, pushing the mast from the roof of the car and into the bright, moorland sky. Danny had to keep one hand on the button at all times to keep it moving. There was a reason for this: if he had forgotten to check for overhead power lines and was electrocuted, the mast would stop moving upwards, thus reducing any further damage to the expensive radio car.
With his other hand, Danny started to write a rough script for his piece. It came in two sections: first a cue – a few sentences for the newsreader to say to introduce the piece – then Danny’s report, with a gap in the middle for DI Smithdown’s ‘interview’. The words came quickly: murder squad detectives... that was always a good way of suggesting it’s a murder without actually saying it. Grim discovery... Dramatic. The station bosses loved that kind of stuff. He decided to put the name of the reservoir in his SOC – the ‘standard out cue’ that signified the end of his piece. Black Moss Reservoir: that sounds spooky.
