DM for Murder

by Matt Bendoris

  April could see that quote being made into a ‘talkie’ headline already. It hadn’t been a wasted journey, after all. Lacey went on to detail how she had met Bryce at some function in London and they had immediately hit it off. She was at pains to stress that it wasn’t sexual… at first.

  ‘Despite what you may have heard about my reputation, I don’t jump straight into bed with anyone,’ she insisted.

  Whether that was true or not, April had no way of knowing, not that it mattered to her. But their relationship had ‘moved on to the next phase’ when Lacey was commissioned to write a weekly column, Racy Lacey – The Girl in a Hurry, for Bryce’s newspaper. She explained how the strapline was a play on her hectic broadcasting style – speaking at ten to the dozen – and her chaotic Bridget Jones-style love life.

  ‘Ironic, really, considering at that point I had a boyfriend and was banging Bryce,’ Lacey offered.

  April thought ‘banging’ was a strange term for a woman to use. Lacey almost looked disgusted with herself for saying it, her self-esteem at rock bottom.

  ‘How long did the relationship last?’ April asked.

  Lacey blew smoke into the air, giving herself time to decide whether to be truthful or not. It was a routine April had seen before with Patricia Tolan. She wondered if they knew each other.

  ‘Until nine months ago,’ Lacey eventually replied.

  April flicked through her notepad. She knew she’d jotted down somewhere a timeline of Bryce’s career from cuts. She finally found it. Bryce had been working in New York for the last two years.

  ‘So it continued after he’d gone to America?’ she asked, already knowing the answer.

  ‘Yeah. I’d fly to New York for the weekend. He’d pay for me, most of the time. After Bryce left the paper, my column was eventually dropped by the next editor. I don’t mind telling you that everything started turning to shit,’ Lacey said, lighting yet another ciggie.

  ‘My boyfriend was also the producer of my radio show. When we fell out, management took the opportunity to move me to an evening show. They said it was because of personal conflict but that was crap. They wanted rid of me and I knew it.’

  April knew there would be two sides to her story. She chanced her arm by asking, ‘Were you doing drugs?’

  That was one area of her life Lacey had not planned on going into. She still clung to the hope of one day rebuilding her once bright broadcasting career. But she sighed and gave in, ‘Yeah, I was doing coke. All the time by the end. I was just so knackered living in London and trying to keep up this “Racy Lacey” persona. Then someone gave me a line of coke and suddenly I was my old self again. Eventually I was doing a line every morning before going on air – then midway through my show, too. Management spotted me once. I was behind the mic with white nostrils, but they turned a blind eye: my ratings were going through the roof, I had a national newspaper column. I was getting the station noticed. I was the girl of the moment,’ Lacey said, smiling at the memory of when her star shone brightly.

  ‘But you were doing more and more drugs?’ April predicted correctly.

  ‘Yeah. I was also in a circle where everyone was doing it too. It seemed the done thing,’ Lacey said, as if it was just a matter of fact.

  ‘Bryce too?’ April asked.

  ‘Oh God, yeah,’ Lacey laughed, before trying to light another cigarette. But her lighter was empty and she leaned down to get a replacement from the handbag at her feet. Lacey’s V-neck jumper gaped open to reveal most of her breasts, barely contained in a black bra. It wasn’t that which caught April’s eye, though. It was the angry-looking injuries on her chest, which looked suspiciously like bite and scratch marks, similar to ‘Pasty’ Tolan’s.

  ‘And what about Bryce’s fiancée, Patricia Tolan?’ April saw a marked change in Lacey’s demeanour as soon as Patricia’s name was mentioned. She suddenly looked wary.

  ‘Pasty? I don’t think she knew of our affair,’ Lacey said unconvincingly.

  ‘Did you know her? Ever meet her? Can’t imagine your paths never crossed,’ April enquired.

  ‘Yeah, we knew each other. But only as nodding acquaintances,’ Lacey said. April knew a lie when she heard one.

  After an hour and a half, April had more than enough for her article. The interview was good without being great, although it helped paint the picture of Bryce as a predatory, sex-mad egotist and showed how far he was prepared to go in order to seduce his targets. It also told the sad story of a girl from the sticks who had it all and blew it. But April knew she didn’t have the whole truth. Not even half of it. A cocaine addiction only partially explained her rapid fall. By the look of her, Lacey had clearly been through so much more. She was frightened – as if waiting for something from her past or present to catch up with her. April thought perhaps Lacey hadn’t returned to Scotland to rebuild her life, but to hide from the old one.

  Not getting the full story gnawed away at April for the whole of the return journey home. She knew she wouldn’t be able to rest easy until she had filled in all the blanks. April’s journalist instinct told her she was onto something important. She needed to speak to Connor.

  ***

  ‘Whaddups, A-Lav?’ Connor said on answering April’s call.

  ‘Are you drunk?’ she replied.

  ‘Nah, just gone Stateside.’ But Connor could tell by his colleague’s tone that she was all business.

  ‘I spoke to Lacey Lanning. Same old story of Bryce being a bit of a bastard, ruined her life, etc,’ April said unsympathetically.

  ‘Pin all your problems on the dead guy?’ Connor retorted.

  ‘Exactly,’ she said.

  ‘But you don’t believe her?’ Connor continued.

  ‘Not entirely. I think I got the heavily abbreviated version,’ April explained.

  ‘The radio edit?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘The radio edit – when all the bad bits and swearing are cut out of songs so they can be played on air.’

  April got it now. ‘Yes. I definitely got the broadcast version. She did cough to being a coke addict, but she can hardly blame Bryce for that. But the biggest revelation wasn’t in what she said, but from her breasts.’

  ‘I’m all ears,’ Connor assured her.

  ‘They were bitten or scratched to ribbons, a bit like Pasty’s injuries. Then, when I mentioned Tolan’s name, Lacey clammed up. Pretended she hardly knew her, which was a lie. They even smoked the same way.’

  ‘And they both scurried home to Scotland at the same time, shortly before Bryce ended up dead. Interesting. Very interesting,’ Connor said, pondering the possibilities.

  ‘What the hell is going on, Connor?’ April asked.

  ‘Damned if I know, but I have a funny feeling you will find out.’

  41 #TheWire

  ‘Lieutenant Haye? This is Detective Chief Inspector Crosbie from Police Scotland. How are things in Bawlmore? Send any vics down the chop shop this morning?’ Crosbie said, using a mixture of local dialect for Baltimore and police jargon he’d picked up from watching all five series of The Wire back to back.

  Haye frowned, wondering what sort of fruit-loop had been assigned as his liaison officer. He decided to play him at his own game. ‘No vics this morning for me. What about you, detective? Any running battles with English garrisons today?’

  Crosbie laughed. ‘A Braveheart fan, huh? That has to be the best Scottish film ever made by an Aussie, written by an American and shot in Ireland,’ he said, before descending into raucous laughter at his own lame joke.

  Haye was tired and now finding the conversation irksome. ‘Hilarious, detective. Okay, let’s move on from kilt-wearing freedom fighters and TV cop shows, if we may. The day Bryce Horrigan died his iPhone received hundreds of calls, as you can imagine. All of them were accounted for as they were in his phone’s contacts. But two numbers weren
’t. One was a Scottish reporter, Connor Presley…’

  Crosbie cut off his US counterpart. ‘Ah, Elvis. He’s in your neck of the woods right now, I believe.’

  ‘Correct,’ Haye said, not welcoming the interruption, ‘but the other was a UK number from persons unknown. It’s a cell. We’ve tried calling it, but it’s dead now.’

  ‘Ah, a ten-seven, as you Yanks would say,’ Crosbie said, clearly enjoying himself.

  ‘Indeed, detective. A ten-seven does mean “out of service”.’ Crosbie was now starting to really piss off Haye. ‘My captain would like you to try to trace the caller, if that’s okay?’

  ‘Easy peasy. Your wish is my command. When I find them, do you want me to snap on the “silver bracelets”? What if they’ve been “aced” already? Will I wait for the medical examiner to “roll them”?’ asked Crosbie, now in full swing.

  ‘Goodbye, detective,’ Haye replied, slamming the phone down. The lieutenant shook his head and stared at the receiver. ‘That sonofabitch is crazy.’

  42 #TheHerogram

  April Lavender @AprilReporter1955

  Lacey interview is spread. Tomorrow. How you?

  Connor Presley @ElvisTheWriter

  No need to communicate like a World War I telegram. Stop. Can use conjunction in tweets. So please. Stop.

  April Lavender @AprilReporter1955

  You. Cheeky. Wee. Fecker.

  April loved tweeting. She liked how instantaneous it was and the fact she could have a live conversation with someone like Connor so far away. She had fewer than a hundred followers, but wondered what it would be like to instantly speak to ten million with a single tweet, as Bryce had been able to do. April could see why Horrigan had become so addicted to the micro-blogging site.

  She had filed her copy on the interview with Lacey Lanning from the train back to Glasgow and, on her way back to the broom cupboard, she received a herogram email from Big Fergie, informing her it was to make a two-page spread for tomorrow’s paper.

  April tweeted the news to Connor, but then she was interrupted by her office phone, which rarely rang these days. In an old-fashioned newsroom, phones were ringing all the time. Now, even the public tended to contact reporters by emails, or text lines, which were printed at the bottom of every article.

  ‘Hello, is that April Lavender?’ asked a well-spoken voice. ‘This is Edwina Tolan. You know my daughter, Patricia?’

  There was silence as April desperately wracked her brains. She was given a little prompt by the caller. ‘You might know her as Pasty Tolan? Bryce Horrigan’s fiancée?’

  ‘Ah yes, Pasty. Sorry, Patricia. How can I help you?’

  ‘I understand you’ve been to see Lacey Lanning in Inverness,’ said Edwina, more as a statement of fact than a question.

  April wondered how she knew.

  ‘I don’t know what she told you and frankly it’s none of my business.’

  You’re right there, April thought to herself.

  ‘It’s just, Lacey isn’t in a good place,’ Edwina continued. ‘I don’t mean to speak ill of someone, but Patricia – Pasty – and Lacey were very close at one point.’

  April knew Lacey hadn’t been truthful when she claimed they were just ‘passing acquaintances’.

  ‘It’s true Lacey cheated with Bryce behind Pasty’s back. But my daughter was used to that. She knew he’d soon dump Lacey when he became bored, as he inevitably always did. But Lacey took it very badly. I’m afraid she has gone a bit off the rails. She really hasn’t been the same. I’d just be careful with what she told you.’

  April remained quiet. She didn’t like being told how to take people – she was more than capable of making up her own mind. And anyway, apart from a few little white lies, Lacey Lanning had seemed perfectly sane to her.

  ‘There’s more to it, you see. A lot more. But I’d rather tell you face to face sometime,’ Edwina said suggestively.

  ‘How did you know I had been to see Lacey, anyway?’

  ‘I have eyes everywhere. Actually, she told me and I was worried. I’m trying to protect Lacey from herself more than anything,’ Edwina explained. But April wasn’t buying it.

  Edwina Tolan helpfully left her number, urging April to get in touch if she had any other questions. April rechecked the Lacey copy she had filed. She was satisfied with it. If anything, Edwina’s phone call had only helped confirm Lacey’s version of events about having an affair with Bryce Horrigan.

  April concluded Edwina Tolan was a control freak, guessing correctly she had been head girl at her private school – the sporty type who would have clobbered any opponent with a hockey stick had they dared to get the better of her during a match, then offer them a firm handshake afterwards. She would have made life a misery for someone like April at school. Today, Edwina would never encounter April’s type unless she’d been hired to do the housework. But that meant Edwina underestimated April Lavender, thinking of her as an inferior. It was a dangerous assumption to make.

  43 #CyberAttack

  Bryce Horrigan @BryceTripleB

  Cops still haven’t caught my killer. Tell captain

  @BernardSorrell if you think he’s doing a good job or not.

  ‘Haye, Fidel,’ Sorrell hollered from his office, ‘I’m under attack here.’

  Both Haye and the IT consultant burst into the captain’s office. Haye had his gun cocked and ready.

  ‘Not physically attacked, dumb-ass. Cyber attacked. Look,’ Sorrell said, holding up his cell. He had over 10,000 notifications.

  ‘Sorry, cap’n,’ Haye said, putting his gun away. ‘I’ve been on the phone to cops from just about every goddamn state in America. They’ve been lifting Horrigan trolls all day. I didn’t see the tweet.’

  ‘I can’t work for all the alerts. My cell’s pinging so much it’s almost one continual sound,’ Sorrell complained.

  Fidel chuckled. ‘You’re trending, cap’n. Not so long ago, you were a Twitter virgin. Now you’ve gone viral.’

  ‘I’m glad you find it funny.’

  The IT man changed the captain’s notifications settings and the cell fell silent.

  ‘Here you go, that should give you some peace for a while,’ Fidel said, still smiling. Haye gave him a discreet shake of the head behind Sorrell’s back. He knew his boss well enough to know he wasn’t in the mood for games.

  ‘Funny how they’re always at the same time of day,’ Fidel said aloud as he flicked through Horrigan’s Twitter feed.

  ‘What?’ Sorrell snapped.

  ‘Look, cap’n, ever since Horrigan was killed, whoever has been tweeting from his account mainly does so at 3am or 3pm, like just now. They’re rarely late. Maybe a few minutes either side, but that’s it.’

  ‘What do you think that means?’ Sorrell asked.

  ‘At first I thought the 3am tweets were designed for maximum effect, something for Twitter to wake up to and the news outlets to follow up. The same would almost work in reverse with the media picking up a 3pm tweet, while many Twitter users are at work. Now I’m starting to think it’s either the only time the hacker can physically tweet, or it’s a time when they’re most confident they won’t be caught using whatever method they’ve got to access his account.’

  ‘Good. Over-confidence always leads to a mistake,’ Sorrell said knowingly.

  44 #Lonely

  With Connor in America, April was alone in the cramped broom cupboard office. She was rarely lonely though, as she always had herself to talk to, but even that was starting to bore her, so she took herself one of her regular tea breaks to the breakout area.

  ‘Why do they have to rename everything? It’s not a breakout area, it’s a cafeteria,’ she moaned to anyone within earshot, while stirring three heaped teaspoons of sugar into her mug.

  These days, apart from a few familiar old faces, she barely recognised any of the ne
w staff. Since the beginning of the newspaper’s eternal spiral of decline, management had been cost-cutting, with redundancies and early retirements eroding the workforce. It felt strange to be part of a dying industry that was still a big business, with the Daily Chronicle bought and read by over a million people per week. But success wasn’t judged by growth anymore, just the hope you weren’t dropping sales faster than your competitors.

  The figures were there in front of their faces every day, with a round robin email sent from the circulation manager with the previous day’s sale. Every email revealed that year on year sales were down by around fifteen per cent – and that figure was rising rapidly. It didn’t take a mathematician to work out that losing around 40,000 of your customers every year was a pretty unsustainable business model.

  Another bunch of seasoned journalists had recently gone to make way for the new online department, full of fuzzy-haired and weirdly-dressed kids on a fraction of the journalists’ salaries. April would eye them with suspicion whenever she saw them in the breakout area. It was as if they were a totally different breed of human being. When she strained her ears to overhear their conversations, it was like a foreign language: ‘domains’ this and ‘streaming’ that. Just what the hell did it all mean? All April knew was, despite the rhetoric and assurances from the experts that newspapers would never die, the sands of time were surely running out on the business. She treated each monthly salary as a bonus and told herself to make hay while the sun was shining.

  April decided the ‘hay’ would extend to a packet of crisps from the vending machine, assuring herself she would finally slim down when she was inevitably made jobless.

  ‘Why so glum, old yin?’ asked Davie Paterson, one of the few real journalists left. Davie was a sub-editor but also a rough, old-fashioned union man. He was the paper’s staff representative, helping April out the previous year with a series of trumped-up accusations from a boss determined to sack her. He may have only been around 5’4” and getting on a bit like April, but management were still scared of Davie Paterson.