1979

by Val McDermid

  ‘I’m Maggie McNab,’ she said, tucking her long dark hair behind one ear. She smiled, lighting up a strong-boned face with deep-set dark blue eyes. ‘Thanks for coming tonight. Before I go any further, I need to say that we’re not affiliated with the SNP or associated with them in any way, shape or form. We regard the SNP as collaborators in colonialism and we believe their slavish support of the devolution offered by their Westminster masters is nothing short of a betrayal of the interests of Scotland and her people. We believe nothing less than full independence is what our country needs and deserves. If you’re uncomfortable with that, then we’re not the crew for you.’ She spoke with the confidence and the accent that came from a Scottish private school education.

  There was a moment’s silence, then one of the trio of young men said, ‘Well said, Maggie,’ and his friends clapped in a half-hearted way.

  Allie sat back and listened while Maggie gave a fifteen-minute lecture on the economic and social reasons why Scotland would be stronger as an independent nation. She outlined the promised land that lay in wait for the country once it had shaken off the shackles of Westminster with a zeal Allie found unsettling. She hadn’t previously given independence or even devolution a great deal of thought. It looked like that was going to have to change.

  Maggie ceded the floor to one of the older men. Professor Alexander Jameson held a chair in Modern History, which had always seemed like an oxymoron to Allie. He held forth about the existing divisions between Scotland and England – the legal systems, the educational syllabi, the practice of Christianity, the cultural landmarks. Here, Allie could see some substance to the ideas. Her years in England had driven home to her differences that were far from obvious.

  Maggie took the floor again. ‘We have to take advantage of the devolution conversation to change the agenda,’ she began.

  ‘How are we going to manage that?’ The question came from the same man who had shouted his support earlier.

  ‘We need to hijack the conversation, Deke. We need to remind people at every opportunity that it’s time to stop going cap in hand to anybody else.’

  ‘Practical terms, though, Maggie. How do we hammer home the point in practical terms? How do we make them pay attention the way they’ve been forced to do in Northern Ireland?’

  There was a moment’s silence. Everyone in the room knew very well the tactics that the IRA had used in the province. But it hadn’t brought the UK government to its knees. It hadn’t even brought them to the negotiating table. ‘We go to every single meeting, Deke. Friends and foes, we don’t differentiate. We make our points in the guise of asking questions. There are six different official campaign groups, and we need to hit them all. Yesses and Noes, equally. Deirdre’s brought a box of leaflets too, you should all grab a handful and take them with you. And don’t forget the commercial radio stations. They do phone-ins as part of their schedule. Check them out whenever you can, get on air whenever you can. If we’re going to win hearts and minds, we need to work at it.’ There was more in the same key from a couple of other speakers.

  Deke and his pals seemed unimpressed. One was grumbling in a low voice. Deke muttered something that sounded like, ‘the same old song’.

  But another spoke more sharply. ‘Keep it buttoned. You’ll get your say later. Jeez!’ Obediently, they settled down.

  His words intrigued Allie. What did he mean by them? There were signs that the meeting was close to breaking up. Allie slipped out and laid in wait in one of the dark corners of the quad with the aim of unobtrusively picking up their trail. At last they emerged in a tight knot. Now she could see their faces, she thought they looked a bit too old to be undergraduates. Perhaps they were doing postgrad degrees, or maybe they were on the first rungs of their careers. They had the bounce and energy of young men who were still buoyed up with possibility.

  They walked swiftly off the campus without a glance to either side. She followed them down the hill to the Spaghetti Factory on Gibson Street. Allie had been there a couple of times. There was a line of booths up one side; if the men chose one of them, she might be able to get close enough to eavesdrop. She didn’t think they’d paid enough attention to her earlier to recognise her.

  Allie hung back, pretending to study the menu while she watched where the men ended up. It could scarcely have been better. They’d gone for the booth farthest from the door. Although the restaurant was fairly busy, there was a half-booth beyond them that was vacant. She’d be sitting with her back to them, hidden by the high seat backs, but probably close enough to hear what they were saying. She hurried to the table, face averted from them and shrugged out of her coat.

  The men ordered three pints of lager and, when the waitress returned with their beers, three pizzas with the speed of familiarity. Allie discovered that if she leaned right back in her chair, she could hear most of the conversation.

  ‘Honest to Christ, what a bloody talking shop.’ She recognised Deke’s voice.

  ‘If they’d had that much hot air on the Titanic, that iceberg would have stood no chance.’

  The other two hooted with laughter. ‘Nice one, Ding-dong,’ Deke said.

  ‘It’s true, though. I mean, leaflets. Most folk throw them straight on the fire. We need to put on our thinking caps and come up with something with a bit more oomph.’

  ‘But what? You’re always saying that, Gary, but we never get any further.’ The third voice was quieter, but all the more insistent for it.

  ‘I know, Roddy. We need a plan. Look, let’s put some serious thought into this. We’ll go to the next round of meetings – all the bloody meetings – and we’ll reconvene in the pub. And we’ll each come up with a concrete idea, OK?’ It was Gary, aka Ding-dong in the driving seat now.

  ‘What? You’re giving us homework?’ Deke, incredulous.

  ‘What’s the alternative? We keep going to meetings just so’s we can bitch about them afterwards?’

  Deke guffawed. ‘You got a point there, Ding-dong. OK. Next week it is. Now, what are the chances of the weather letting us get to the football tomorrow? Will we get some games or will we be stuck with the bloody pools panel?’

  And they were off on one of those arcane sports conversations that might as well be in Swahili for all Allie understood or cared. Somehow it kept them going through their pizzas and another couple of rounds of drinks. Allie ate as slowly as she could, but in the end, she gave up on the hope that they might say something more interesting. She settled her bill and slipped out into the night.

  All the way home, Deke’s words at the meeting swirled round her head like a murmuration of starlings. How do we make them pay attention the way they’ve been forced to do in Northern Ireland?

  18

  Allie’s long weekend ended at ten on Tuesday morning when she clocked on for the late day shift. She’d heard nothing from Danny since the meeting in Angus’s office. She didn’t want to admit it, but she was disappointed. She’d thought there was the start of something between them, but maybe that had been wishful thinking.

  She’d barely got her coat off, however, when Danny appeared at her elbow with a couple of grease-stained paper bags. ‘Bacon or Lorne?’ he said.

  Allie hadn’t grown up on the square sliced sausage so beloved in the West of Scotland. Quite why something so chewy and fatty had attained its heroic status escaped her. ‘Bacon,’ she said without a moment’s hesitation.

  Danny shrugged. ‘Win some, lose some. I had you down as a gourmet.’ He passed her one of the bags and pulled out his own well-fired morning roll, brown sauce oozing over the edges of the Lorne sausage.

  ‘What have I done to deserve this?’ Allie bit into the roll, savouring the crispy bacon fat that burst into flavour on her tongue.

  ‘We’ve got a meeting with the lawyer in half an hour. I thought you might need building up.’

  She studied him as she ate. She wasn’t the o
ne who needed building up, she thought. There were dark smudges under his eyes and his fingernails were shorter than nail clippers could manage. ‘Have you had much to do with the lawyer before?’ she asked.

  Danny shook his head. ‘A couple of queries, that’s all. Just clarifications. You?’

  ‘I’ve never spoken to the guy. I presume it’s a guy?’

  ‘It’s four different guys. They take it in turns.’

  ‘Are you nervous?’

  He looked incredulous. ‘Why would I not be? This is the biggest deal of my career.’

  Allie smiled, hoping she looked more reassuring than she felt. ‘But the story’s copper-bottomed. You’ve stood it up. You shouldn’t be nervous, you should be walking in there like you’re the king of the world and he’s the footman.’

  Danny shook his head, wondering. ‘You’ve got more balls than me, Allie. No, let me rephrase that. You’ve got more balls than the entire day shift.’

  ‘I’ve had more practice, that’s all. I’m a woman in a Neanderthal’s world. Every single day I have to face down somebody, just to prove I’ve got the right to be here.’ She grinned, to take the edge off. ‘You’re already one step ahead of me. And your story’s solid.’

  He grunted. ‘It’s solid because you wrote it solid.’

  ‘So, we’re a team. It’ll be fine, Danny.’ Allie said it like she believed it.

  Five minutes with the lawyer and she wasn’t so sure. They met in Angus Carlyle’s office – McGovern, Danny, Allie and Carlyle. The lawyer was a compact man somewhere around forty. Everything about him was neat and designed to put everyone else in their place – the parting in his perfectly barbered hair; the well-trimmed moustache; the smoothly ironed shirt; the knot in a tie that signified some affiliation that those who mattered would recognise; the advocate’s striped trousers and black waistcoat, bottom button undone; the French cuffs with the heavy gold links. He could have been the second lead in a fifties Hollywood movie – Cary Grant’s best friend, James Stewart’s sidekick, Katharine Hepburn’s about-to-be-dumped fiancé. He greeted McGovern cordially. ‘Peter, good to see you.’ Then he turned to the others. ‘We’ve not met. I’m Fraser Drummond. Fraser the Razor to my opponents. Because I’m so sharp.’ A neat little triangular smile.

  Carlyle stirred. ‘Let’s see how you do against Rock and Paper here.’

  Drummond was flummoxed. ‘Sorry?’

  The news editor sighed. ‘Rock, paper, scissors. Or in your case, razor.’

  Drummond looked momentarily murderous. ‘Quite. Now, to business. I’ve read the copy and I have some questions for you. This will take a while, so make yourselves comfortable.’ He sat at the desk, pulled a pad towards him and uncapped a heavy gold pen.

  The three reporters sat. Allie eyed the lawyer warily. She’d met men like him at Cambridge and time hadn’t mellowed her feelings.

  ‘How did you come across this story in the first place?’ Drummond asked.

  Danny looked at Carlyle, who nodded. He took a deep breath. ‘My brother works at PII. Paragon Investment Insurance. We have a family dinner every Sunday and we were talking about how hard inflation is on most families. And my brother started boasting about how Paragon’s clients didn’t have to worry about inflation. That they had ways round it. So I went to Paragon and picked up a brochure and showed it to Peter, who explained it to me. But it still didn’t add up. So the next chance I got, I took a look in my brother’s bedroom and I found a piece of paper with a list of names on it, a note of a large sum of money against each one and what sounded like the name of a racehorse.’ Danny managed a tight smile. ‘I know now they’re the names of boats. There were a couple of other names too, which I later tracked down to boatyards. One in Southampton and one in Nassau in the Bahamas.’

  Allie realised that the version Danny was giving the lawyer wasn’t exactly how it happened. For a moment she wondered if that was accidental and whether she should correct him, but she chose to bide her time. And moments later, she was grateful she’d done it. Drummond’s next question was, ‘How did you start to make sense of all these fragments of information?’

  ‘I spoke to Peter. And he pointed out that the men on the list are successful businessmen who all run companies that deal in large amounts of cash. We thought this might be a money laundering scheme.’ Danny’s voice cracked and he coughed. ‘Sorry. Dry throat.’

  Drummond studied him. Allie could feel her pulse racing; it wasn’t hard to imagine how much worse it was for Danny. ‘The copy mentions wads of cash. Did you actually see these “wads of cash”?’ His tone placed quotation marks round his words.

  Danny took a deep breath. ‘Yes. It was in used notes of mixed denominations. I have a pic.’

  ‘And where did you see it?’

  ‘In my brother’s room. On a subsequent occasion. The day before he made one of his regular trips out of town. A trip I now know was to a boatyard in Southampton, where the yard owner confirmed that he knew my brother.’

  This was a bigger lie. Allie understood why Danny was misleading the lawyer. If he confessed to secretly entering Paragon’s offices, it would undermine the whole story. The dubious legality of how he’d obtained his evidence would be used by Paragon’s lawyers to throw dust in everyone’s eyes. Carlyle’s eyes narrowed as Danny’s words sank in. He knew the truth was being massaged.

  But Carlyle was sitting out of Drummond’s eyeline and the lawyer continued, oblivious. ‘How do you know that money came from Paragon? How do you know it had ever been in their offices?’

  ‘Where else would my brother get his hands on a hundred thousand pounds? My dad’s a delivery driver, we grew up in a rented tenement in Gorgie. I’ve never seen a thousand pounds in notes, never mind a hundred thousand. It was in Joseph’s briefcase. It goes to the office with him every morning and comes home with him every evening. The boat broker, he confirmed he deals with Paragon. That his arrangement is with them. My brother’s just the messenger.’

  Drummond sighed. ‘It’s not exactly proof, though, is it?’

  ‘The note of the names and the details? It was on Paragon headed paper.’

  Drummond tapped the end of his pen on his pad then turned to Carlyle. ‘Who’s doing the Paragon showdown?’

  ‘Peter. Danny needs to keep his distance, we’re trying to keep his brother out of it as far as we can.’

  ‘Well, that’s something to be grateful for. But Paragon might not be so considerate. What if they were to suggest that this scheme was nothing to do with them? That it was all the brainchild of your brother?’

  Allie could almost feel the tension vibrating off Danny. Instinctively, she spoke. ‘How would a junior clerk manage to run a scheme like this? Even if he’d worked it out, how would he get clients to come on board? Businessmen like these, they deal with the organ grinder, not the monkey. And how would he explain his monthly absences for his trips to Southampton? It would be a pretty feeble attempt at getting off the hook.’

  Drummond raised one eyebrow. She wondered how long he’d practised that in the mirror. ‘Good points, all of them. Peter, bear all Miss Burns’ points in mind when you meet with Gregor Menstrie.’ He turned to Carlyle. ‘I presume Danny and Miss Burns will be doing the showdowns with the two most recent contributors to the scheme?’

  Carlyle grunted his assent.

  ‘And Southampton?’

  ‘Gil Patterson from the London office.’

  Drummond made a note. ‘Good. Always reliable, young Gilbert. Now, I hate to tell you how to do your job, Angus, but I think it would be a good idea to send Miss Burns and Danny along to one of the men earmarked for a future transaction.’

  After a long moment’s silence, Allie asked, ‘I don’t understand. What’s the point of that?’

  Carlyle rolled his eyes and leaned forward. ‘Sometimes I forget how new you are here. It’s possible you and Danny will
get nothing out of Brown or McGillivray except flat denials and the names of their lawyers. I’m hopeful that Gil will be able to persuade Maclays that it’s in their best interests to confirm the scam for us and pretend they didn’t really know what was going on, but if that doesn’t work, our best chance is to go for the ones who haven’t committed their crimes yet. You explain to them that we’re about to run the story, and we’ve been told that they were among the businessmen who were approached, but we understand they decided not to touch it with a bargepole. And we’d like to show people that there are honest businessmen around, blah, blah, bloody blah. And so we get our confirmation that way. Do you see?’

  Allie nodded, feeling stupid. ‘I get it.’

  Carlyle’s answering smile was surprisingly warm. ‘Lucky for you the lassie was here to ask the question, eh, Danny? Right away youse go and make your arrangements. Simultaneous showdowns, please.’

  In the corridor, Danny leaned against the wall, faint patches of colour reappearing in his cheeks. Peter strolled past, one hand in his jacket pocket, already taking out the Café Crème tin. ‘I’m away to the pub, I’ll see you later. Shall we say ten for the showdowns?’ He didn’t wait for a reply.

  ‘Let’s go down to the canteen,’ Allie suggested. ‘We’ll get more peace there than in the newsroom.’

  They huddled in a corner, hunched over milky coffee. ‘Pushy bastard, Fraser the Razor,’ Danny said.

  ‘If it ever came to a court case, the other side’s lawyers would be a lot more pushy.’

  ‘I suppose.’ He let out a puff of breath. ‘At least they didn’t kick it into touch.’

  ‘And you got away with avoiding the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’ Her smile was wry.