by Val McDermid
He was spookily right. It wasn’t Carlyle’s fault that she’d ended up writing tabloid news stories when she’d once dreamed of being on the features desk of the Guardian or The Sunday Times investigation team. She sometimes feared her grasping at the first opportunity that came along had closed off all other possibilities. ‘Once a tabloid hack, always a tabloid hack,’ one of her tutors on the training course had said, more than once, in a tone that reflected his own disappointments.
Which made stories like this all the more important. Especially because it proved she was a self-starter. She’d brought this story in herself and made it happen. It showed she didn’t depend on whatever crumbs the newsdesk threw her way. If Allie was going to break into the world she aspired to, she’d have to make sure she was impossible to ignore. In a good way, obviously. And this was a very good way.
43
It was a few minutes after three when Allie typed ‘ends’ on her final piece of copy. Now came the tedious part. Stray pieces of information still buzzed round her head, clamouring for attention like toddlers in a playgroup. She had to drag each of them into the light to check whether they really had any place in her story or whether she could safely leave them to fend for themselves. Some of her colleagues, desperate for a taste of the glory, had pumped up insignificant details with inflated importance, but she couldn’t throw them aside without checking whether those scraps had any heft. She was determined not to leave any gaps the lawyers or the nitpicking subs could crowbar open into a chasm of doubt.
She separated the pads into separate piles, yawning. Danny had long since finished his account of the evening and once Carlyle had gone through it with him line by line, he’d sent him home. ‘Get some sleep. I need you sharp for the lawyers and probably the polis as well,’ he’d said. Carlyle had been next to depart, but he hadn’t gone far. There was a sofa in the photographers’ room, long and deep and chosen with the specific purpose of providing somewhere the night shift snapper could sleep. ‘Wake me when you’re done,’ he said, yawning so wide Allie could count his fillings.
Allie wasn’t ready to endure his inquisition yet. She needed to let the story settle, and she needed different air. A glance out of the window revealed sleet, driven almost horizontal by the wind. Not a night to go for a stroll along the Clyde. That left the vanway under the building that allowed access for the massive trucks that delivered the paper to railheads and wholesalers round the country. It was grey and dismal and smelled of diesel and ink, but it was unquestionably different from a room that reeked of cigarettes and sweat and testosterone.
She went down the stairs rather than taking the lift, nodded at the security man in his booth and found shelter from the wind behind a pallet of newsprint. Allie lit a cigarette and leaned against the wall, trying to let the knots in her shoulders unravel. Now it was over, she could allow herself to admit that she’d been the opposite of gung-ho earlier in the evening. She’d stifled her apprehension that Danny might not return, telling herself the comforting lie that journalists didn’t get killed. Well, not very often, and mostly in war zones. She shied away from the uncomfortable conviction that the idiots Danny was with seemed intent on turning Scotland into just that.
The question that kept resurfacing was whether she’d have been willing to put herself in Danny’s shoes if that had been possible. Could she have been convincing enough? Could she have held her nerve? In a way, Danny spent most of his life playing a part, hiding the heart of himself from the world. It must almost have been second nature for him to take on another role with the conspirators. Allie lacked that experience. Yes, she’d felt like an outsider at Cambridge, but there was little risk involved in that. They might have mocked her accent and made jokes about Scots being tight-fisted, but nobody would have killed her if they’d found out how little she felt like one of them.
How could she aspire to being an investigative journalist when she still hadn’t mastered the art of fitting in? Allie could usually play the chameleon for as long as it took to persuade a story target to talk to her. She was good at getting them on side. In a back-handed compliment, her old boss had once said, ‘You do so well because you’re the opposite of glamorous. Women don’t see you as a threat, and men treat you like a sister.’ But that was as far as it went. All these months at the Clarion and she was still firmly an outsider. She watched the easy to-and-fro between her colleagues and wondered how they did it. Danny was the only reporter who had become anything like a friend. And it wasn’t simply a matter of the all-pervasive misogyny. The other two women reporters were as closed to her as the men. Only Rona had broken the pattern, and she was from a completely different department. Actually, Allie thought with a smile, Rona was from a completely different planet.
Maybe she was misreading them. Maybe they were all riven with the same self-doubt? Maybe they also looked around the newsroom and thought they were inadequate to the task? Then she paused to consider. Donny Park, who’d once promoted himself to prime suspect in a murder inquiry by walking through the crime scene leaving footprints and fingerprints galore; Lance Brown, who spent the night shift phoning random numbers in New York and had once ended up chatting to Kurt Vonnegut; Campbell Macleod who had answered the office medical examiner’s query of, ‘What do you drink?’ with, ‘What have you got?’ No, these were men who had no doubts at all that they deserved their substantial salaries and inflated expense accounts.
Allie considered. She should compare herself to her colleagues more often. Set alongside them, she had no reason to worry. She needed a new motto. ‘More gallus, less feart,’ as her grandmother would put it.
She’d show them. And right now, she’d show Angus Carlyle that he’d been right to give her a job.
Before Danny had left the office, he’d made a phone call. It was late, but the answering service was staffed round the clock. He made his arrangement, then went home in a taxi on the office account. By the time his doorbell rang twenty minutes later, he’d washed off the day before in the shower and poured a couple of whiskies.
While Allie sat at the typewriter sprinkling his rough draft with stardust, Danny was driving out his demons in a far more congenial way. His anxieties exorcised, he happily handed over twenty pounds with a kiss for the young man who had become a regular visitor to his flat. It was a transaction that left both temporarily satisfied. Danny dreamed of an escape to Fleet Street; in London, he might find love as well. But for now, when he considered all the risks, this was the safest sex he could imagine.
Allie could hear Angus Carlyle snoring the length of the newsroom. She walked into the photographers’ den to find him sprawled like a stranded starfish on the sofa. Gingerly, she shook his shoulder. He started awake, spluttering incoherent nonsense. He blinked and focused as he struggled to sit up. ‘Burns,’ he grunted. ‘Are you finished?’
‘Copy’s on your desk,’ she said.
He squinted at his watch. ‘Five to four.’ He heaved himself upright. ‘Good job.’ He lumbered through the door and dropped like a stone into his desk chair, grabbing the copy and frowning at it.
Allie sat in the deputy news editor’s chair, steeling herself for a barrage of queries. But Carlyle confined himself to marking the copy with his red pencil, changing words and sometimes whole sentences. It seemed his issues were solely with her prose rather than the meat of the story. At last, he looked at her. ‘I’ve made a few notes. You’ll need to retype some pages. You’ve done a not bad job, though. You’ve strayed into possible contempt in a couple of places, but let’s see what the Razor has to say. I’m hoping he’ll take the view that the public interest in bringing this conspiracy into the light outweighs the likely contempt of naming your boys. But he’s paid to be the doom and gloom merchant.’
She took the proffered pages. ‘I’ll do that now.’
‘And then go home and get a sleep. Back for noon so we can go through the legals. And then we put the polis on standby.’
Allie pulled a face. ‘The shit’s really going to hit the fan for those boys tonight.’
‘No question. But you know what they say. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime. Now bugger off, Burns. I don’t want to see your face before noon.’
On the other side of the city, another player in the drama was also awake. Thomas Torrance sat wrapped in his dressing gown chain-smoking and staring out at the night. He’d lain awake, his brain refusing to shut down. Eventually, he’d given up and stopped pretending sleep was going to come.
He’d spent years being careful. His alibi was permanently at the ready; if any of his colleagues were to spot him entering or leaving a gay bar or nightclub, he’d been keeping tabs on a suspect in an ongoing investigation which, by the way, was none of your business. He’d never had to use it, but he felt confident in its power.
He didn’t worry about the men he had sex with. They had much more to lose than he did, because his word, the word of the law, would always trump their ‘malicious accusations’. Everything was hunky-dory.
And then he’d met Roddy Farquhar. Roddy was different. He was smart and well-informed. He read books and talked about films in a way that delved beneath the surface. They had conversations that went beyond which way they liked it.
Over the past few months, Roddy had wormed his way under Torrance’s skin. He’d even let slip what he did for a living. And now Danny fucking Sullivan was casting a vast shadow over their lives. Torrance had thought he might be able to blackmail Sullivan into sabotaging his own story, but by the time he’d realised what was going on, things were too far along. Even if he did somehow get Sullivan to fuck it up, that bitch Burns wouldn’t let it go. He’d realised that.
He couldn’t sit back and let Roddy be arrested. If he was arrested, he’d be convicted, no question of that. He’d face years in jail. And Torrance knew exactly what those years would be like. Torrance crushed out his cigarette and took another from the pack. He put it between his lips but didn’t light it.
The problem was, the very thing that had attracted him to Roddy could be his undoing. Roddy was smart. If he was in Roddy’s shoes, sitting in a stinking police interview room with the walls closing in, he knew what he’d do. He’d claim Torrance. He’d say he was acting as a snout for the Special Branch man. That he’d realised his friends were plotting something far beyond what he was willing to contemplate and he’d brought the information to Torrance. Who had persuaded him to continue, to prevent the plot reaching fruition.
It was a good line.
It would break as soon as it was tested. How did Roddy come to know Thomas Torrance? How did he know that Torrance was Special Branch, when the Branch officers were supposed to lie about their role to even their nearest and dearest? When detectives began to dig deep, secrets and lies would be dragged out into the light of day. Roddy would go down, no question. But he’d also take Torrance with him.
And that was one thing Torrance couldn’t let happen.
44
The lawyers had had their way with Allie’s copy. It had been a long hard road, both sides pushing for what they swore was necessary. For most of the time, the editor had been in the room. It had been the first time Allie had worked alongside him; she’d only ever known him as a distant figure who was the butt of jokes and complaints. But this was newspapers, and everyone in a position of authority was subjected to the same treatment.
Seeing him work close up, she understood why Alexander Garioch had occupied the editor’s chair for the past five years. He listened more than he spoke, but when he did speak, it was with authority and incisiveness. He reminded her of the black-and-white line drawing of Dixon Hawke, the Scottish detective, whose stories had occupied a page in the late Saturday edition of the Evening Telegraph. After her father had studied the football results and the match reports, he’d tear out the page with the story for Allie to amuse herself with. Hawke was a Scottish pulp version of Sherlock Holmes, but Allie had known no better and had loved the tales. The memory was probably what convinced her that Garioch was on her side.
Allie and Danny were mostly bystanders in the discussion, called on only to clarify details or sequences of events. There were two main stumbling blocks: the source of the money for the explosives, and the issue of interference with a fair trial.
‘There’s no getting away from the fact that putting up the money not only makes you agents provocateurs but also providing funds to terrorists. Two sets of terrorists, in fact,’ the Razor had protested. ‘First to your tartan terrors to buy the explosives, and then by extension to the murdering brutes of the IRA. Arguably, Sullivan and Burns have suborned acts of terrorism.’
‘Their actions prevented acts of terrorism,’ Garioch replied, his bass voice adding gravitas to his words. ‘There is no doubt in my mind that had our people refrained from providing the money, those young fools would have found it somewhere else. And without our active involvement at that stage, there’s no guarantee that the other three would have included Sullivan in their plans. So nobody would have had any idea what was going on until these idiots either blew themselves up or sent the Scott Monument into orbit. And that, Mr Drummond, is an argument I will defend in a court of law as well as the court of public opinion.’
The Razor threw up his hands in a gesture of frustration. ‘I’ve offered my advice. I can’t force you to take it. I’m sure you’ll make sure your employees are taken care of if they end up in jail.’
‘Stop trying to terrorise my staff, Mr Drummond. That’s my job.’ Garioch cracked a savage smile. Allie felt less reassured.
‘Jeopardising a fair trial is equally serious,’ the Razor continued, undaunted. ‘The criminal issue only applies to Burns and Sullivan, but the contempt charge can potentially have a huge impact on the paper too. There’s precedent for substantial fines both for the individuals and the publisher.’
Garioch steepled his long fingers and considered. ‘As I understand it, prosecutions for contempt have centred round the publication of details relating to the accused once the crime has been committed and they’ve been arrested. Either before or during the trial itself. But we’re not interfering with a police investigation or a trial. Nobody’s been arrested. At this point, there is no trial to prejudice. There may never be, for all we know.’ The Razor scoffed but Garioch was not derailed. ‘We’re exposing a crime the police knew nothing about. How are we to do that if we don’t carry out our journalistic obligations? Publish and be damned is still a decent motto for editors to live by.’
‘I’m afraid that’s exactly what you will be,’ the lawyer muttered. ‘On your own head be it, Alexander. Or rather, on the lesser heads of Burns and Sullivan.’
Allie glared at the lawyer. She’d settle for having the editor in her corner any day of the week. The Razor’s warnings about the Paragon affair had come to nothing; nobody was accusing Danny of any wrongdoing. Apart from his mother, obviously. She was slowly coming to realise that the lawyer’s job was to be ultra-cautious so that when the shit did hit the fan, he’d be well below the splatter zone.
The final copy was signed off just before six, with one exception. ‘We need the SNP to give a rousing condemnation of violence,’ Carlyle pointed out. ‘I’m sure they’ll be delighted to cover their arses. Burns, call their press officer and warn them that you’ll want to talk to them around nine o’clock so we can get a late quote to drop in at the bottom of the story.’
Garioch stood up and stretched. ‘And now I am off to present the police with a vague outline of what to expect when the paper hits the street. They’ll be all set to scoop up our villains before breakfast and we’ll be the heroes of the hour. Well done, everybody. You too, Mr Drummond. It’s good to be kept on my toes.’ He swept out, leaving the room somehow diminished.
The Razor gathered his papers together. Then from his waistcoat pocket, he produced a couple of business cards. He handed
one each to Danny and Allie. ‘When you get arrested, this is the man to call. He’s the best criminal brief in the city. Good luck. You’re going to need it.’
Thomas Torrance parked fifty yards from the entrance to Maxton High School. Most of the pupils had already left, but the stragglers and the few staff members who didn’t have cars were too committed to keeping the teeming rain out of their eyes to notice his nondescript grey Cortina. He kept the engine running. The last thing he wanted was to miss his target because the windows had steamed up.
He recognised the familiar figure of Roddy Farquhar crossing the playground even though he was hunched against the weather. Torrance eased the car forward level with the gates and leaned across to lower the passenger window a few inches. ‘Roddy,’ he called. ‘Get in.’
Startled, Roddy looked round, checking instinctively for watchers. But in the rain, nobody cared. Hastily he pulled the door open and dived in. White-faced, he said, ‘You’re not supposed to come here. That’s what we agreed.’
Torrance smiled. He hoped it was reassuring but doubted it. ‘That’s not much of a welcome, Roddy.’
‘No risks, remember?’
‘I’m sorry. But this is an emergency.’
‘What do you mean, an emergency? What’s going on? You said everything was under control.’
Torrance put a hand on Roddy’s thigh and squeezed gently. ‘Your new pal, Paul Reilly? Turns out he’s not a fairy godmother after all. He’s the big bad wolf, Roddy. He’s a reporter for the Clarion. And you guys are going to be all over the front page of the paper tomorrow morning.’
Roddy’s eyes widened and his nostrils flared as he drew in breath. ‘No,’ he exhaled in a long sigh. ‘How’s this happened? You said I’d be safe.’
