DM for Murder

by Matt Bendoris

  ‘Aw, Davie, is it that obvious? I was just dreaming of the day they put me out of my misery,’ April replied, unable to lift her gloom.

  ‘Then whit?’ he asked with his usual gruffness. ‘Are you going to take up cookery classes? Get fit? Be a lady who lunches? My wife took early retirement and she’s tried all that crap. Now she just drinks most of the day. She’s desperate for me to retire too to be her booze buddy. I’m telling you, retirement is just a myth. A fantasy we build up in our heads to get us through the years. This is living. Right here, right now. Not out there, wandering around art galleries, trying to fill your day.’

  April didn’t like where this conversation was going at all. Retirement dreams were all she had.

  ‘Listen, you and I may be old,’ Davie continued, ‘but we’re only old in here. What are you fifty-eight, fifty-nine?’

  ‘I’m fifty-seven,’ April quickly corrected him.

  ‘Well, you know what they say, the older the violin, the sweeter the music. These young’uns may have all the energy but we have all the wisdom. They still need us behind the scenes to pull the strings.’ Davie gave her a nudge, collected his awful coffee from the vending machine and left April to pick up her shattered dreams.

  But her mind soon wandered to Patricia Tolan’s mother, Edwina. It was Edwina who had all the wisdom. She couldn’t help thinking she was also trying to pull April’s strings.

  45 #Charade

  Patricia Tolan @PastyGirl70

  Busy day meeting clients. So wish I could be chilling with a glass of Chardonnay.

  Patricia ‘Pasty’ Tolan sent the tweet to her 5,000 followers. She had once boasted four times that amount, but that had been in the days when she was Bryce Horrigan’s other half, working the London scene for new, exciting clients. Her tweets were always in the ‘busy girl’ style of a professional woman, bemoaning the fact she had business to attend to when all she wanted to do was kick back and enjoy herself.

  Patricia took a swig straight from the neck of some brutal, cheap red plonk, purporting to be from the Bortelli vineyards around Italy’s lush Lake Garda region, but tasting like Bulgarian anti-freeze. She wouldn’t be meeting any clients today. She wouldn’t be ‘chilling’ either.

  She gazed out of the back window of her Edinburgh town flat at the mass of overgrown grass and weeds that were once an immaculate lawn. Just like Patricia, the garden had seen better days.

  ***

  Just fifty miles away in Glasgow, April sat in front of her work’s computer screen with her half-moon reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. She always concentrated fully while typing, as though the computer would suddenly bite her if she dropped her guard.

  Before he’d left, Connor had told her to check out Pasty’s PR company to try to get a feel for how well it was doing. He hadn’t elaborated, insisting he was merely curious. He told her not to bother with an in-depth check at Companies House, where records and accounts of every public listed business are held, but to merely find out who her clients were.

  April had googled the name of Patricia’s firm and was soon on her slick-looking website. She scanned through the ‘About us’ tab, which was Pasty’s opportunity to brag about her career, experience and contacts, and to explain why your company simply could not do without her PR expertise. April then clicked on ‘Our clients’ to see the logos of around twenty companies, some of them major businesses such as Scottish Power and British Telecom. She took a note of half a dozen of the biggest names, then set about calling the in-house press and marketing department of the first.

  ‘Hello, this is April Lavender from the Daily Chronicle. Is it possible to speak to Patricia Tolan?’

  ‘I’m sorry we have no one here by that name,’ replied a young and eager woman. April suspected her enthusiasm meant she was new to the job.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I think she has her own agency, PTPR. Can you please check if you work with them at all?’ April asked politely but firmly.

  The girl put her on hold to speak to someone who had been at the company longer than five minutes. Eventually she came back on to inform April that PTPR had done a one-off event for them a few years ago. April got virtually the same response from the next five companies – that yes, PTPR had done some work for them, but in the dim and distant past.

  She returned to the ‘Our clients’ page and decided to try some of the smaller companies, as it could be possible Patricia was still on their books. One was for a custom-made cake business, which was no longer operating, the other was for a bespoke Edinburgh ladies’ boutique. The owner was as snooty as April had expected, but when she raised the name PTPR, she replied, ‘Oh, Patricia’s company. I only allowed my logo to be used on her website as a favour to her mother. But Patricia has never worked for me. I do my own press,’ she declared proudly. Which is why, April thought, no one had ever heard of her company.

  46 #ReluctantWitness

  Lieutenant Haye had been a visitor to the maximum security North Branch Correctional Institution so often that almost every guard knew him.

  ‘Who you here for today, detective?’ one of them asked after Haye had routinely handed in his weapon.

  ‘TP,’ he responded.

  The guard shook his head. ‘Okay. Don’t think he’ll wanna talk to you though, but I’ll ask.’

  Fifteen minutes later, a black male in his late-twenties, wearing a regulation orange prison jumpsuit, sat eyeballing Haye from across a table in the interview room. TP may have been a welterweight on the outside, but inside he had turned into more of a heavyweight.

  ‘Jeez, you’ve stuck on the beef, TP. Don’t get me wrong, you look ripped, but twice the size,’ Haye said as way of a compliment.

  ‘So?’ was all Tre Paul Beckett said in response.

  ‘I watched you sparring once at Southside gym – boy, you could move. Like lightning. Lethal. I said to myself, “Now there’s someone who could give Mayweather or Pacquiao a run for their money.” Not saying you could have beat them. But you’d hold your own.’

  TP showed the faintest of grins, before regaining his stony demeanour. ‘You here to blow smoke up my ass, or is there a reason?’

  ‘Sorry, TP. I just love my boxing. Crazy for it,’ Haye continued. ‘I’d love to see you box again. What are you, twenty-eight? Twenty-nine? You’re still young enough. Problem is, you’ve still got five years to do. What if I made that two? You’d be outta here when you’re still 30.’

  ‘I ain’t no rat,’ TP replied bluntly.

  ‘I’m not asking you to rat on no brother. Jeez, give me some credit, TP. I’m asking you to rat on an ex-cop – Coops,’ Haye said, playing all his hand.

  A smile slowly spread across TP’s face. ‘The pigs are turning on themselves. What do I have to do?’

  Haye smiled back. ‘Sign a sworn affidavit saying he beat you in custody. He’ll claim it was in self-defence, of course, after you swung for him…’

  TP cut him off. ‘How could I swing for him cuffed? I asked him for a fair fight, but he’s chickenshit. The motherfucker beat me with my hands behind my back.’

  ‘The lying bastard,’ Haye replied. ‘I knew there was no way he could have taken TP.’

  ‘So, yeah. I’ll sign your papers, mister policeman. Maybe I’ll even get my rematch with Coops. No cuffs this time.’

  Half an hour later, Haye left with what he needed. He knew whose version of events he believed and it wasn’t the ex-detective’s.

  ‘You really are a lousy fucking scumbag, Coops,’ Haye muttered to himself as his sedan roared into life.

  47 #HeadingEast

  Connor Presley @ElvisTheWriter

  Just wanted to see if @AprilReporter1955 is tweeting or eating.

  April Lavender @AprilReporter1955

  Both. Just wondering if I should have healthy porridge or a bacon roll this morning. #dilemma

 
Connor Presley @ElvisTheWriter

  Has someone hacked @AprilReporter1955’s account? Correct Twitter jargon and a bacon dilemma. Why not have both? #Littlepiggy

  April Lavender @AprilReporter1955

  @ElvisTheWriter is a cheeky wee bastard.

  Connor Presley @ElvisTheWriter

  Ah it is really you, @AprilReporter1955. Remember breakfast is the most important meal of the day… before lunch/dinner.

  April likened Twitter to having a private conversation that’s shouted between two people across a busy street. She also found it a more stress-free way to keep in touch with her daughter. Sure, Jayne was still sarcastic as hell in her replies, but there was more humour in her online communication than speaking to her on the phone, where Jayne seemed to regress into the role of a surly teenager. Now, everything from Sunday dinner to looking after her granddaughter could be arranged in 140 characters or less. As far as April was concerned, tweeting was definitely the way to go.

  ‘Pretty soon everyone will be communicating this way,’ she laughed out loud.

  ‘To whom are you talking?’ Big Fergie asked sardonically. ‘How about communicating something for my schedule? I’ll take it in 140 characters or less.’

  The schedule was the be-all and end-all of a newspaper desk head’s day. It was when each head of department took whatever stories they were working on into the midday conference with the editor. Conference was one of the oldest newspaper traditions. The editor would sit at the top of the table, a bit like a messiah – something many editors actually believe they are – while their disciples brought their offerings. A good conference would see a mediocre idea or story bandied about between the executives and worked up into something brilliant. With headline, photograph and graphic suggestions flying in from all angles. But, more often than not, conferences were no more than talking shops, where executives would read from their schedule lists, the editor would make some barely humorous remark or observation, and generally the executives seemed to excel in posturing and jockeying for the editor’s approval.

  Connor had once flirted with an executive career before quickly deciding it was no way for grown adults to behave. He’d told April, ‘It’s supposed to be an ideas factory – it’s more like a sausage factory churning out a barely digestible product.’

  The old newspaper characters, people with a distinctive feel for a story, were being phased out and replaced with a new breed of executives. Before, the best reporters and production journalists rose to the top. Like a football field, newspapers are an easy place to spot the most talented players. Now, mediocrity seemed to be the key to success, along with having a malicious streak. That’s why Big Fergie would never get the gig on a permanent basis. He was too good and far too nice. But staff responded to Big Fergie’s style of management; everyone respected him so much they didn’t want to disappoint by failing to get the story. As Connor once explained, ‘The last thing you want is to see those big sad puppy eyes of his if you come back empty-handed.’ But good guy or bad guy, a news editor still needed stories every day to fill the insatiable list.

  April had a suggestion ready for today’s schedule. ‘Well, with Connor in Baltimore, I thought I would chase up Bryce Horrigan’s family. What about his folks in Edinburgh? I could hit the door this morning.’

  Big Fergie’s eyes lit up, sensing a splash. ‘Brilliant idea. They turned away everyone yesterday. But if they’ll talk to anyone, they’ll talk to April Lavender.’

  April’s strength was on the doorstep. There wasn’t a grieving relative who could say no to her cherub moon face when it appeared at their home, offering to help. For ‘helping’ was the service April believed she offered. Like the successions of police, undertakers or the local GP who would give the shattered parents ‘something’ to make it through, it was April’s job to tell the country about their wonderful son or daughter who had been so brutally murdered or killed in tragic circumstances.

  Other reporters were unable to do the same. They were too heavy-handed, going immediately for the throat: ‘How did you feel when the police told you your loved one was dead?’ That kind of dumb questioning would make parents clam up or turn inconsolable – sometimes both. But April would never be so crass. She would come into their homes and she’d make them cups of tea, fussing around them like a mother hen. With the lightest of nudges it would then all come pouring out of them. Not once, in her thirty-plus years of reporting, did she receive a single complaint from the families. Only letters with words of thanks for ‘writing what I was thinking’.

  Newspaper code under the now defunct Press Complaints Commission dictated that journalists could only approach subjects once for comments before it was considered harassment. The loophole meant families of murder victims, like the Horrigans, could also be approached once by every news agency and newspaper in the land. This could be done right up until the moment the bereaved issued a statement through police or a lawyer asking to be left in peace. Under the new Independent Press Standards Organisation, the loophole was tightened up. But the Horrigans still hadn’t issued any such statement. Therefore, Big Fergie believed they were fully justified knocking the door again as no reporter had even spoken to Bryce’s parents yet, never mind got a knockback from them. April hoped they wouldn’t issue a formal ‘back off’ statement while she was en route.

  The first thing April needed to do was get some background info on the Horrigans, as she didn’t even know Bryce’s parents’ names. That meant doing a cuttings search on the Factiva system, which logs newspaper archives on a daily basis from thousands of media outlets across the globe. Like every other piece of new technology, April hated Factiva. She had never managed to get the hang of refining her searches, with her requests throwing up hundreds of articles as wide-ranging as death notices in Florida to stories from the India Times, meaning time wasted trawling through them for the information required.

  But her luck changed this morning. When she searched for ‘Bryce Horrigan’ and ‘mother’, the very first article revealed that her name was Flora, and that his dad was a solicitor called Donald.

  ‘Good Scottish names,’ April said to herself.

  She then tapped in her password to Tracesmart, which held the electoral roll for the whole of the UK. It was the same system used by banks, debt companies and just about any other agency that needed to trace members of the public. Only one result came back: for Barnton in Edinburgh, one of the capital’s most exclusive areas. The search also contained a phone number, but April preferred the face-to-face approach.

  She sent the address to the picture desk and asked them to have a snapper meet her outside the property in an hour and a half. April then scooped up her bulging bag and coat and headed east. She hoped the Horrigans would let her in, not only for the story, but because she was a natural-born nosey parker and was desperate to see inside their home.

  48 #TheNewVic

  ‘I have a Mr Cooper on the line for you, captain,’ the department secretary said, calling through to Sorrell’s office.

  Finally, Sorrell thought to himself. The captain decided to ditch the charm offensive this time as he was fed up dancing to Cooper’s tune.

  ‘You got a name for me Colin?’ Sorrell said without any preamble.

  ‘I’ve got a name for you. Cliff Walker,’ Cooper replied, knowing he had wrong-footed the captain.

  ‘And just who the hell is Cliff Walker?’ the captain said, losing his cool.

  ‘He’s one of our longest serving porters. Nice old guy. Never forgets a face. It’s his thing. He’s also dead. I’m standing in his apartment right now. Don’t worry, I’ve touched fuck all. But he’s been wasted. His brains are everywhere,’ Cooper said in the matter-of-fact fashion of a man who has seen many dead bodies.

  Sorrell’s head went into overdrive. The porter’s death had to be connected to the Horrigan case. All the staff members who had been on duty that night had all
been interviewed. But Cliff Walker must have witnessed something that hadn’t aroused suspicion at the time. Either that or Cooper was clearing up some loose ends.

  ‘Stay exactly where you are, Colin. We’ll need to bring you in and this time you’re gonna need that lawyer,’ Sorrell warned.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever. But I didn’t take out Cliff. You have my word on that. And fifty dollars says ballistics match the bullets to the Bryce shooting,’ Cooper said with his usual over-confidence.

  Sorrell had no reason to doubt him. He slammed the phone down and hollered at the top of his voice, ‘HAYE, GET IN HERE.’

  49 #DeadPorter

  The blue lights surrounded Cliff Walker’s downtown apartment within minutes of Colin Cooper’s phone call to Captain Sorrell. Haye arrived shortly after, noting the porter lived within walking distance of the Baltimore City Hotel. It would have been easy enough to follow the old man home after he’d finished his shift.

  The lieutenant took one look at the crime scene with the porter’s destroyed head, then turned to Colin Cooper, who had stayed rooted to the spot on Sorrell’s instructions. He was grinning as usual. ‘Not got the stomach for brains and blood, Haye?’

  ‘Shut the fuck up, Coops,’ Haye said, shoving Cooper towards the door. Haye hated the ex-cop with a passion, but he doubted even Cooper would have the balls to shoot dead a fellow member of staff then call a homicide captain from the crime scene.

  Cooper decided to remain silent for the short journey back to police HQ, which suited Haye fine. Captain Sorrell was already waiting for them in the interview room. He began the proceedings before Cooper had even taken his chair.

  ‘Lawyer?’ Sorrell asked.

  ‘Depends on what you have to say,’ Cooper shrugged.

  ‘What were you doing in Cliff Walker’s apartment?’ Sorrell said, getting straight to the point.