by Shari King
‘Buggering bollocks.’
She tossed her phone on the desk and then stretched back in her chair. The offices of the Daily Scot were in darkness, except for a couple of night-shift subs working in cubicles at the furthest corner of the room.
The rest of the staff were at Epicures, in the upmarket Hyndland, a former wine merchant’s that had been transformed into a two-level cafe and bar for the trendies of the West End. It was a going-away party for a guy on the news desk who’d decided to toss in the dark side and head to Australia to live life on a beach. Sarah could see why that would be an attraction. This wasn’t an easy job, an easy life. But for her, there was something intoxicating about it. She told the news. Exposed the wrongs. Challenged the establishment.
But for now she was happy with challenging Zander Leith’s PR people. So she’d left her colleagues dreaming of a better life and trudged through the torrential rain all the way back to the office.
The huge clock on the wall in front of her clicked to 9 p.m. Watching that happen had become a regular occurrence in her life since she’d become obsessed with this case. She spent hours trawling archives and the internet looking for something, anything that would help, and came up blank every time. Not a single interview or feature on the families of Johnston, McLean or Leith existed. Not one. Had anyone else ever noticed that was odd? Irritation was making it difficult to decide whether to head home or stay here and continue searching the Web until it was time to pick Simon up at midnight from some black-tie law thing at the Hilton.
‘Would you stop swinging on those chairs? Health and safety will shut us down.’
Sarah instinctively smiled at the sight of her boss. In his early sixties, with a grey complexion that suggested accurately that he had lived life under fluorescent lights, Ed McCallum had been the editor at the Scot for twenty years. He was considered old school. Traditional. Still rumoured to have a half-bottle in the filing cabinet. There weren’t many of that ilk left these days. In an industry that had changed beyond recognition, evolving from ink to internet, most of the newspaper heads were dynamic media guys who talked about critical mass and click rates and had strategies for pulling back the readers that had been lost to the twenty-four-hour news channels and the instant gratification of the online update. They also couldn’t smell a great story if it was served up with their morning skinny frappuccino, semi-skimmed, vanilla twist.
That wasn’t to say he was fully on board with her latest line of enquiry. Cutbacks from London had left the paper so short of those little wheel cogs called journalists that she was covering it, with his knowledge, in her spare time.
‘So where are you at?’
‘The square root of nothing.’
Her foot absent-mindedly tapped against the edge of her desk and she twirled a cork- screw of her deep auburn, shoulder-length hair round her index finger. Ed had watched her do that in times of stress since she joined the paper as a twenty-one-year-old rookie fresh out of Napier College.
Even then she’d stood out from the rest. The quiet ambition. The dogged determination. And the complete lack of awareness of the impact she had when she crossed a room. If she wasn’t young enough to be his daughter, Ed might be just a little bit in lust with her.
‘The only glimpse of progress was when Davie Johnston’s PA acknowledged my request for an interview, but now she’s not taking my calls. Not surprising given the shit he’s in, right enough. The press conference the other day made my toes curl.’
Ed’s trademark pause of contemplation lasted just a little longer than usual, before he – as always – cut right to the issue.
‘Have you gone back to the start?’
Sarah nodded. ‘They all grew up in the same street, all only children. Strange, huh?’
‘Did you go chap on doors there?’
‘Ed, it was twenty years ago and their kids are multi-millionaires. There’s no way their parents are still going to be living in Crofthill council houses.’
One of his excessive eyebrows raised just a fraction. Sarah caught on quick.
‘You have got to be kidding me? You think they could still be there?’
Ed shrugged, knowing the effect it would have. With an irritated growl she was out of her seat and heading to the door before he could say another word.
Traffic was quiet, so it took her twenty minutes to get from the office on the Broomielaw to Crofthill, an area that commentators and council officials labelled ‘urban deprived’. It took another two to locate the block that Hollywood’s dream team had grown up in. It was difficult to say what it looked like back then, but now the buildings had been recently painted, the communal garden was tidy, and the only blot on the landscape was the squad of hoodies sitting on a wall next to a row of garages, sharing four bottles of Buckfast between eight.
With the synchronized movements of a tennis audience, they stared at her, looked at her Audi A3 and then back at her. Sarah pulled a wallet out of her pocket, opened it, flashed it in their direction and then closed it again. ‘Police. If there’s so much as a scratch on that when I come back, I’ll hunt you down.’
She congratulated herself on the grit she’d managed to inject into her voice, while praying that at that distance they couldn’t make out that they’d just been served with a membership card for her local health club.
Number 11 was at the nearest end of the block, and she knocked loudly at the door and then stood back, suddenly realizing that making unannounced visits at this time of night hadn’t been a particularly well-thought-out plan.
Right on cue there was a scurry of activity inside, a bang at the back of the door and then a half-dozen teenage boys in tracksuits jumped over the side fence and ran off into the night. Safe to say that unless Zander Leith’s sixty-year-old mother was harbouring a street crew of teenagers, then the house had been taken over by new owners.
There was no point even trying Mirren McLean’s old house. The windows were boarded up, and each one had the telltale signs of smoke damage round the perimeter, natty accessories to a large hole in the roof that was covered with tarpaulin and wooden sheeting.
As she banged on the door of number 15, Davie Johnston’s old house, she cursed herself for wasting time. She’d been right all along. Why would the mother of one of the biggest stars in Hollywood live in a scheme that had more burnt-out cars than employed adults?
‘She’s no’ in.’ One of the Buckfast Eight auditioned for the role of Neighbourhood Watch officer. ‘Works on the soup bus at night.’
An even unlikelier scenario.
‘Who are you talking about?’ Sarah asked.
The helpful pillar of the community spat on the pavement before he answered. ‘You should know – yer banging oan her door.’
His mates laughed, enjoying the show, but Sarah ignored the cheek. ‘I’m looking for Mrs Johnston.’
‘Aye. And she’s no’ in.’ A half-pissed delinquent was talking to her like she was the one with coherence issues. ‘She’s on the soup bus,’ he repeated.
‘In town?’
‘Aye. Nae wonder yer a detective,’ the hoodie replied, to more hilarity from his gang.
Despite the piss-take, Sarah tossed them a tenner for the alcohol fund as she passed them, eliciting cheers of thanks. Subsidizing the destruction of a youth’s liver wasn’t normally on her charitable acts list, but this was the closest she’d come to a break since she’d begun.
Five minutes were shaved off her previous time as she raced back into Glasgow City Centre, careful to slow down at every one of the hated, cash-generating speed cameras.
The Thursday-night party squad were out in force as she drove along St Vincent Street and turned left, then right, onto West George Street. This was the young, wilder side of town at night, a sea of short skirts, bare legs and heels that started the night adding eight inches to their owner’s height and ended the night being carried by a bare-footed clubber to a kebab shop. It was a stark contrast to the Merchant City half a mile across t
own, with its older, classier crowd and up-market bars and restaurants.
Sarah spotted a space right next to the white double-decker and pulled her Audi into it.
This wasn’t the first time she’d been here. Only last month, the paper had run a series of features on the work done by the volunteers who ran and staffed the bus. It was a lifeline to those who used it: mainly homeless people in the early evening and street workers at night. As well as food, there were free toiletries and second-hand clothes, and practical help was available from a drugs and alcohol counsellor, a paramedic and a social worker who specialized in finding refuge for the seriously vulnerable or the ones who were committed to changing their lives. They all gave their time for free and they saw everything on this bus, every heart-breaking tale of desperation, every violent pimp determined to get his whore back on the street, every victory snatched by someone with the strength to accept help and turn their life around.
The driving force behind it was an incredible woman, Isabel Ross, who relentlessly badgered companies for donations, rallied volunteers for the cause and treated every customer with dignity and respect. On the night Sarah had spent there researching the feature, she had been blown away by Isabel’s strength and conviction, and had decided this was the Glasgow that people should know about. This was the heart of the city. A piece about street vice had become a human-interest story of inspiration and courage. Ed had splashed it across the front page and donations had come in by the sack-load to the office.
Oh, the irony that this could be the place that could throw up a lead on the biggest case of her career. The whole way back, Sarah had recalled her memories from that night, pulling up mental photofits of everyone on the bus. Nope, no one even came close to the demographic of Ena Johnston. Not really surprising. The volunteers tended to work a maximum of one night a week, rationed because Isabel felt that a few hours per week spent swimming in this quagmire of desperation and pain was more than enough for anyone.
Two young girls who looked like they should be at home and in bed under posters of One Direction sat on the bottom step of the entrance, both smoking, one of them with a fierce blue bruise on her right cheek. Sarah’s hackles instantly rose. Who the fuck would do that to a kid? Even one who sat there, in her miniskirt and hooker shoes, looking at her with such vicious defiance that it made Sarah want to take her home, talk to her, find out what had been done to her to make her hate the world that much.
Isabel had just put a plate of toast and two mugs of tea in front of a pair of women with hardened expressions that said they’d seen too much and now cared too little, when she spotted Sarah.
‘Sarah, oh goodness, love, what brings you back out here?’ She wrapped her in a hug and pulled her over to a free bench. The seats that once ferried workers and travellers across Glasgow had been replaced by long padded benches that sat, train style, on either side of a Formica table.
‘Just checking up on you, Isabel. Making sure you hadn’t decided to swap this bus for a Saga tour and take off round the Highlands.’
Isabel’s worn face crinkled when she laughed, but not a single strand of her peroxide beehive so much as trembled out of place. ‘Chance would be a fine thing. Listen, thanks so much. Bloody van-loads of stuff has been arriving every week for our clients since you wrote that bit in the paper.’
Sarah reached over and put her hand on top of her friend’s.
‘Anytime. You deserve it.’
Isabel chuckled again. ‘Aye, you’re right. Ah deserve that George Clooney tae, but he’s no’ been dropped off yet.’
More laughter, still not even an escaped wisp from the beehive.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Sarah told her. Behind them, there was a flurry of activity as four new arrivals staggered on and shuffled into seats. Isabel’s eyes scoped them and sussed them out immediately, and Sarah could see that this had to be wrapped up to let Isabel do her job.
‘Look, I won’t keep you, but can you tell me do you have anyone called Ena Johnston working here? A volunteer maybe?’
Isabel shook her head. ‘Nope, sorry, love . . .’
Damn. So close. Sarah’s fists clenched with disappointment. At exactly the same time one of the new arrivals screamed and Sarah turned to see her being dragged by the hair along the aisle by the young girl from the front step.
Isabel leaped to her feet and dived towards the altercation, with a loud ‘Right, that’s enough! Come on, Chelsea, put her doon.’
It was only when the screaming subsided that Sarah realized what she’d said as she sprang into action.
‘But we’ve got an Ena Dawson who works a Sunday-night shift. Could that be her?’
16.
‘Counting Stars’ – OneRepublic
Jenny didn’t even let the door hit her perfectly shaped ass on the way out. The only thing that might have slowed her down was the traffic jam in the driveway caused by the fleeing forms of Al, his team and everyone who’d participated in the sham of a press conference.
Every one of them gone now.
Jenny and Darcy had a month-long hiatus from Streets of Power, so they were heading over to Darcy’s house to hang out there.
Al rounded up his team and cleared them out with the precision and cold efficiency of a serial killer leaving a dump site.
‘Lie low for a few days and try to stay out of fucking trouble’ had been his parting shot.
And then they were gone. All of them. It was just him, Davie Johnston, alone, sitting in the games room, like a spare prick at a wedding, contemplating places he’d like to slam the pool cue he was twirling between his trembling fingers.
Lie low. The only time he ever lay low was when the setting included a twenty-one-year-old pageant winner and a five-star hotel suite on a Cabo beach.
For a man who was the ultimate chameleon, this situation was proving to be difficult to adapt to.
It was inconceivable that it could all fall apart. He was Davie Johnston. He was Golden Bollocks long before Beckham had tried to claim the title. It didn’t go wrong for guys like him. They were untouchable.
Look at Zander Leith. The guy was a wasted, boozed-up, coked-out disaster and yet the public still loved him.
His shaking hands were sweating now too. Zander. In the early days after the Oscar, Davie had tried, really tried to get through to him, but Zander had cut him dead. It had devastated him, wounded, hurt, until Davie had just stopped trying. He’d bumped into him a few times over the years – in this town, that was unavoidable – but every time his old mate’s eyes would blaze with warning and Davie would back off. It had been a lesson. Mirren. Zander. Both of them gone. Proof that friends fucked you over whenever it suited them. Davie had taken that on board and lived by it. Sure, he had acquaintances, drinking buddies, mates in a celebrity football team he turned out for on free Sundays, but that was as close as he got to friendship.
He thought again about the contact from the reporter on the Scot. The initial shock and panic had worn off and now he’d applied a layer of perspective and it seemed to have gone away. The interview request had been refused, end of story. Dear God, please make it the end of story. Desperate for an ally, looking for support, he’d reached out again to Mirren’s people. Still no reply. For the first time he wondered if he should call Zander, give him a heads-up. But no. What was the point? It would probably all blow over, and right now he had bigger things to worry about.
He could hear his mum’s voice in his head saying, ‘It’s all about family. Just me and you, David – that’s all we need, isn’t it?’ Then she’d slip him a fiver for the chip shop and dispatch him down for the dinner. How long was it since they’d spoken? A year? Two? He’d brought her out to Los Angeles once, but she’d hated it. ‘Can’t walk anywhere. Too big. And why do you need a house with more bathrooms than bedrooms?’ She’d wanted to spend the whole time in the garden playing with the kids, and got real upset when he pointed out that’s what the nannies were for. ‘Well, we didn’t have nannies w
hen you were a boy and we did OK, son,’ she’d said. He’d been desperate to please her, to impress her with his home and life. Instead, she’d watched him bicker with Jenny, watched the way the kids were cared for by others and asked him where it had all gone wrong. At the time, he’d been furious. Now, he wondered if maybe she’d had a point.
He was Davie Johnston and he had nowhere to go. So he was sitting in a games room, with walls that were lined with frames containing every Scotland football top for the last forty years.
With the strength that came from a thousand workouts with a sadist ex-boxer, he launched the pool cue and then flinched as it smashed through the glass display cabinet on the wall. Some of the most valuable sports memorabilia in the country tumbled out. A jersey worn by Babe Ruth. Muhammad Ali’s shorts. Home-run balls from a dozen baseball legends. A bat from the first World Series. NFL balls from ten Super Bowls.
And his prized possession – a jersey signed by Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Kobe Bryant and Shaq. He’d met them all at a charity dinner and bought the top for $1 million. Because he was Davie Johnston and he could do that.
Bollocks to lying low.
He was in the car in ten minutes and pulling up outside the Staples Center half an hour later.
A $100 tip to the expectant valet, then through the VIP entrance and he was in his regular courtside seat. Tip-off in ten – no time to stop at the bar. Usually his appearance got a cheer from the crowd, but there was nothing tonight. That was OK. His baseball cap was pulled low, and all eyes were on court, where the teams were finishing their warm-up. The Brooklyn Nets had a swagger about them since Jay-Z took over and renamed the club, and the Lakers were on home turf, so they had something to prove.
This is what he needed. A battle. A couple of hours of sweat and pain, and the bonus was that none of it was his. The buzz from the crowd got his adrenalin going. Yes!
