Chapter 6: Meeting Mum

It was early on Monday morning when Ralph and Mike Haroldson called round to the sheltered accommodation flat where Ann Barlow lived. She was already dressed, with her coat on, and the flat door open, waiting for them. They chattered throughout the forty-five minute journey fighting their way through the rush hour traffic between Nottingham and Chesterfield. They mostly talked about what Tommy was like, firstly as a teenager and then as a young adult.

The Haroldsons learned that Tommy was an only child, who had been a bit of a tearaway at school. The main calming influence in his life was Sally Chapman, who was his childhood playmate, best friend and eventually lover and soulmate. She made him knuckle down at school, study hard and pass his exams. She had helped him win his engineering apprenticeship and keep it. They married just a year prior to his disappearance. Ann simply couldn’t believe he had any reason for wanting to vanish into thin air. Sally didn’t even know she was pregnant herself until a week after he failed to come back, after going down to the corner shop for a bottle of milk.

“Did he walk down to the shop?” asked Mike, from the driver’s seat, to Ann sitting in the front next to him.

“Yes, they couldn’t afford a car. Newlyweds, they could barely afford that tiny flat they rented,” Ann then chuckled, “Young love, they just had to get married early, to be together even through they hadn’t a brass penny between them to rub together.”

“What happened to Sally after Tommy failed to come back, Ann?” Ralph asked from the back seat.

Ann twisted a little in her seat to see him face to face, “She moved to Australia in 1986, and remarried, took my grandson Brett with them. Sally didn’t have much in the way of family over here to visit. They’ve not been back since, not even for a holiday.”

“How did you feel about that, Ann?” Mike asked.

“I was very sorry to see little Brett go, Alan was, too. He was all the family we had left. Brett was only three at the time and we had got quite attached. He was such a cheerful, lovely little boy. I used to look after him because Sally had to go out to work. She couldn’t afford the rent on the flat on her own, we couldn’t help her out much financially, Alan had to retire early through ill-health, and so very soon she moved back in with her dad and step-mum, neither of who she got on with.” She straightened up in the car seat and stretched out her legs.

“Sally was so good with Brett, though,” she continued to no-one in particular, “She worked hard and lived just to get home to see him and she looked after him so well. She bought secondhand clothes for him and altered and repaired them all herself. Sally was an excellent seamstress. She is the daughter we never had, she was lovely. Then she met this nice chap called George, who was prepared to take her on even with Brett in tow. Not many men would do that. He was quite a bit older than Sally and already had a house he had inherited from his parents. Eventually they moved in together.”

“What took her to Australia?” Mike asked.

“It was being in and around Nottingham all the time. Sally had known Tommy ever since she could remember living in the town. Everything she saw reminded her of him, the park, the picture house, even the buses and roads she walked or travelled down. She refused to marry George at first, thinking Tommy could come back to her any day. She told me she would go back to Tommy in an instant, whatever reason he gave for leaving, but eventually she gave up looking for him. She needed a new life for Brett’s sake, and that it had to be a long way away from Nottingham, I could understand that. Anyway, George applied for a job out there in Melbourne and so they upped sticks and went away in 1985.”

“That must’ve been hard on you, with Tommy being your only child and Brett your only grandchild, wasn’t it?” Mike commented.

“Aye, it was. I get regular cards and letters from them though, on birthdays, Christmas, and Sally always sends me a lovely card for Mother’s Day, she’s always been such a sweetheart. She sends me lots of photos.” She patted the bag on her lap, “I’ve brought a whole bunch of them to show Tommy when we get there.”

Rachel had been rushing around this Monday morning, she had a lot of things to do and “Hermann” was really starting to get on her case. Firstly, the Inspector had grabbed her as soon as she had come in, even before her first hot sweet black coffee of the day, and quizzed her about this string of burglaries that she had barely made any progress on at all. Rachel fobbed him off with the news that the two laptops in the boot of the recovered car were not the Cottons’. Told him she had called back to the station where the car was being kept to see if a computer expert could be found who could get into the laptops and check out the files. They said they would get back to her. If they haven’t sorted something out in a couple of days she’d have to fill in the blasted forms so she could collect the computers herself.

Secondly, and this was where Rachel was most concerned, “Hermann” had picked up from somewhere that the John Doe case at the Royal Hospital was getting more and more interesting by the minute. Apparently a couple of guys from the Nottingham Division were on their way to the Hospital to see Tommy Barlow, with his Mum in tow and had called the intentions into “Hermann” in advance by way of curtesy. Damn! Now he was insisting on regular updates from Rachel. She knew that once this case got to where she thought it was heading, that she would be pushed out of the way and “Hermann” would take over. Damn Goring, he was such a bloody glory hunter!

First thing to do, she thought, was to get down to that Hospital again and charm her way into that interview between Tommy and the Nottingham law. She left her untouched coffee to get cold.

She got there first, which was a blessed relief to her. Tommy was on his own and smiled broadly when he saw her. Rachel noticed that the lighting was almost up to normal in his room.

“How are your eyes this morning, Tommy?” she asked brightly after the initial pleasantries had been exchanged.

“Almost brilliant,” he laughed, “If my eyes didn’t feel as gritty and bloody as Dracula’s and looked less like a panda’s I’d be one hundred percent.”

“You are really looking good, Tommy. I remember the first time I saw you, well, you looked half dead; eyes covered up, nose and mouth connected up to the air supply, all sorts of blood and liquid drips going into you, as well as being connected up to the National Grid.”

“Like Frankenstein, was I?”

She smiled at him. “Pretty much. At that point the medical opinion seemed to be that they weren’t very confident you’d make it. Glad to see they underestimated the fight you had in you.”

“Yeah, Doc Harding was in earlier, poking and prodding me, as usual. He’s not the gentlest of quacks, but Ben tells me he’s pretty sound. That’s good enough for me. Says he’s pleased with my progress for an old timer - which is a bloody cheek, sorry about my language, considering he’s old enough to be, well my older, less handsome brother, at any rate.”

Rachel laughed, “You sound like you are really on the mend now, if you can joke about how you feel!”

“Yeah, laugh a minute in this place. It still bloody hurts my chest when I laugh, though, and you’re not helping much! The Doc says I can go home almost any day and in a week’s time or so I can take up a bit of light running again.”

“Do you remember going out running on Sunday?”

“I don’t remember running at all, ever. Not since school anyway, maybe a quick kick around with a plastic football during lunchtimes at the factory. Never done any dedicated running that I am aware of. Doc says though that I’m honed and trained like a whippet, with superb muscle conditioning he says.”

Rachel smiled.

“Those are his words, not mine, and he’s worked out from that I must run regularly five miles or so on very much a daily basis. In fact, he reckons on Sunday, from my home in Buxton, I must have run anything from 25 to 30 miles, assuming I had gone in a reasonably straight line. I may have been wandering around for hours with no water, and this gash on my arm was leaking blood all the time, they could tell that from the blood patterning on my shirt, shorts, even socks and running shoes. No wonder I was so completely out of it.”

“So you’ve accepted you are this...” Rachel consulted her notes again, although more by ingrained habit than anything else, she now knew the answer off by heart, “Robert Morris?”

“Yeah, I guess so, no alternative, really,” Tommy pondered, “Bloody confusing though, ain’t it, being two people an’all? Then Ben tells me when I was half awake and still dreaming when he came on shift I was mumbling away in German.”

“German?”

“Yeah, Ben said they had a German doctor here as a locum last year who could barely speak English and I sounded like him.”

“Well, Tommy, for now, you are certainly keeping me in an interesting job.”

“Well, Rach,” he smiled, “You’re a bit more than just an investigator, you know. Along with Ben, Helen and Sharon, you are just about the only mates I have.”

“Are you flirting with me, Tommy Barlow?”

“Well, you are very pretty, Rach. But no, not really, it’s almost impossible to believe that in a matter of a few days I’ve gone from being a happy-go-lucky 23-year-old with everything to live for into someone old enough to be, well, old enough to be your father for one. Quite honestly, I’d be mad to flirt with anyone, with two families already under my belt so to speak, both of which seem to have conveniently forgotten me. So I don’t what that says about my ability to maintain relationships.”