by Denise Mina
III
Five miles across town from Granny Annie’s in Rutherglen, in her small grey house in Townhead, Gina Wilcox sat in her immaculately clean living room. She had forgotten to put the heating on and her breath hung before her like a soul leaving her body. She stared, dead-eyed, at the flickering television, waiting for word, vigilant and terrified for her baby.
7
Fears Are Growing
I
Paddy was shielding her eyes against the sleet, standing at the side of Granny Annie’s open grave, watching a silken cord slither down the crumbling black-soil wall, when she remembered that she had left the six boiled eggs she needed for her diet sitting in a saucepan at the side of the cooker. She’d be fat all day without hope of reprieve. She almost cursed out loud. Sean felt her stiffen next to him and mistook her agitation for empathy. He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her near, tucking her head protectively under his chin, unaware that he was digging his fingers into the fat on her arm, reminding her that not only was she fat and shallow, she was fat and shallow and had horrible thick arms too.
II
She pushed open the doors and entered the news room, hanging her wet duffel coat on a hook by the door. Dub was already sitting on the copyboy bench. Keck, the head copyboy, was standing in front of the bench, uncertainly pivoting back and forth on one foot as Dub looked up at him distastefully.
‘No,’ corrected Dub with mock patience,‘you’re not being funny. A joke or a quip are prerequisites to being funny. What you’re being is fucking obnoxious.’
Keck pulled the skin tight on his face, affecting nonchalance, and wandered off to the sports desk. ‘What was that about?’
Paddy picked up a copy of the News and ran her eye over the front page. The Brian Wilcox story had JT’s byline: two young boys were being questioned about his disappearance.
‘That guy’s a prick,’ said Dub softly, watching the room for calls. When he didn’t see any he settled down to read again, folding one gangly leg over the other. He was wearing red-and-green checked trousers and a brown suede-fronted cardigan. One Monday morning Paddy had seen traces of eyeliner between his blond lashes. Dub knew the names of all the local bands, the ones Paddy only heard of after they split up or left for London.
She went back to reading the paper. The boys had been taken in and questioned overnight. Two witnesses had come forward claiming they had seen the boys leading the baby away from his mother’s front garden. Paddy reread the article. She could tell JT had left something out. The Daily News lawyers often censored important bits of information from copy and she could sense it here. The boys were there and the baby was there and then suddenly he was dead: the story read as if the causal paragraph was missing. A boxed insert to the story had been added at the eleventh hour, just before the edition was published. It said that the two boys had been moved to a secret location after a mob had formed outside the police station. Meehan had been mobbed outside Ayr High Court when he was arrested in’69 and she’d done a pilgrimage there one Saturday while she was still at school to see the wide courtyard where the crowd had gathered. The mob had scared Meehan half to death, and he was a hardened criminal. She couldn’t imagine how children would cope with it.
She nudged Dub. ‘What’s the deal with this Wilcox story? What aren’t they saying?’ Dub shrugged.
‘Are they looking for the men behind it all or have they found them?’
‘They’re just looking for the baby’s body as far as I know.’ He went back to his reading.
Dub never listened to office gossip. She didn’t know why he’d applied for the job at the paper; he was hardly even interested in news.
She slapped the underside of his music paper. ‘Someone must have said something.’
‘They’re looking for the baby,’ he repeated indignantly. ‘What can I tell you?’
Sudden movement across the room made them look up. A crowd of men were gathered around a telephone on the news desk, rapt, watching a standing man receive news that made him smile and nod and give the audience a thumbs up.
‘I don’t know how you can read that crap.’ Paddy nodded at his music paper. ‘It’s written by pretentious idiots.’
‘This is crap? You read true crime books and they’re not even writing.’
‘Don’t be stupid. If it’s written, it’s writing.’
‘They’re penny dreadfuls, they’re printed on butcher’s paper. It’s not real writing.’
She kicked his ankle. ‘Dub, Macbeth’s a true crime story. The New Testament’s a true crime story.’
He’d lost the point but wouldn’t concede. ‘I’d never trust the taste of a woman wearing monkey boots.’ Paddy smiled down at her feet. The ankle boots were only made from laminated cardboard but they were cheap and black and they matched everything.
Across the room, Keck whinnied a subservient laugh at something said on the sports desk. He had been trying for four years to move into sports journalism but he never wrote anything. His strategy was to hang around the sports desk and laugh at their jokes. Terry Hewitt, the barrel-bodied cheeky bastard who’d called her a fat lassie in the Press Bar, had been moved up from the bench the previous year, but promotion depended on getting a number of published articles before the editors would even consider it.
Paddy flicked through the inside pages of the paper, looking for any interesting crime stories she could follow up on. Dub let her get comfortable, waiting until her guard was down, and then he kicked her back. Luckily he was wearing inch-and-a-half-deep soft crêpe soles.
‘Hmm, yes, very sore. Is Heather in?’
‘She’s in the building somewhere.’
The cavernous news room was divided into three sections, one for sports, one for news and another for features. A large table sat at the centre of each section, heavy grey steel Atex typewriters and blank work spaces laid out for the editors. Each desk had a different character: Features considered itself intellectual, News was pompous and self-important, and Sports was the good-time gal of the floor, the desk where they always had nice cakes and a laugh and seemed to be perpetually chewing chalky indigestion tablets which they left on the table.
Paddy found Heather sitting on the edge of one of the spare desks, in the distant, cold corner of the office where the specialist reporters and freelancers worked on their copy. She was flipping through an envelope of clippings about the Great Depression that an economics correspondent was using. Heather only worked part-time; the rest of her week was spent studying at the polytechnic up the hill where she was editor of the student paper. If Paddy was ashamed of her ambition, Heather was deliciously bombastic about hers: she had convinced Farquarson to let her research an article for the student paper about journalists and out of it had wangled a union card and a monthly column about student life. Paddy felt lumpen and graceless next to Heather. She was the sort of woman who could tell one type of flower from another and wore her long hair loose. She didn’t suck up to the drunks or the bullies and had the definite air of someone passing through on their way to a national paper. Even Terry Hewitt seemed a bit intimidated by her.
Heather’s box pleat slipped from her knee, navy-blue tights patterned with bows and dots perfectly outlining her elegant calf. It was obvious from twenty feet away that she was flirting with the economics man, touching his arm, listening as he drew parallels between this recession and that one. He was short and had the shoulders of a twelve-year-old boy.
‘God.’ Heather slid a hand under her mane of wavy blonde hair and flicked it over her shoulder. ‘That’s amazing.’ She glanced up, saw Paddy and grinned at her. ‘Hiya.’
‘Hiya, Paddy. Coming for a smoke with me?’ Paddy shrugged. She didn’t smoke, but Heather never remembered. Dropping the papers on the little man’s desk, Heather stood up and followed Paddy over to a corner where they pulled themselves up on the sill, sitting knee to knee. Heat
her flipped open a ten-pack of Embassy Regal, took out one of the stubby cigarettes and lit it.
‘So, listen, what time are you finishing today?’
‘Four o’clock,’ said Paddy. ‘Why?’
‘I’ve been invited out in the calls car with George McVie. D’you want to come?’
Paddy felt a trill of envy on the back of her neck. The calls car had a police frequency radio in it and drove around at night picking up incidents and dramas all over the city. A good quarter of the paper’s news pages could be filled with stories from the calls car. Every journalist had done the shift at some point. There were wild tales of leaps from multi-storey blocks of flats, of parties where the drink was growing out of the bath, of domestic altercations that turned into street riots. Despite all the naked-city action, no-one wanted to work the car: the working culture at the Daily News forbade enthusiasm and it was much harder graft than sitting around the office at night taking occasional calls. Secretly, though, Paddy couldn’t wait for a shift. Her favourite part of the car harvest were the smaller stories, bittersweet snapshots of Glasgow street life that never made the paper: a woman with a hatchet in her skull, still in shock, making polite conversation with an ambulance driver; a man masturbating in a bin shed, killed when a pigeon coop collapsed and crushed him; a violent fight between a couple that ended in the man being battered to death with a frozen side of pork.
‘How did you get invited to that?’ she asked, trying to mask her mean-spiritedness. ‘Did Farquarson ask you to go?’
‘McVie said I could tag along for a couple of hours. I’m thinking of writing a piece about the call-car shift for the poly paper.’
It was all Paddy could do not to roll her eyes. Heather wrote the same two pieces over and over: she wrote about being a student journalist for the Daily News, and about being a journalism student for the poly paper.
‘Yeah, all right then.’ She tried to act casual. ‘I’d like to come.’
But Heather could tell she was pleased. ‘Don’t get too excited, though. I might drop out if the article doesn’t pan. I’ve to meet him in the car outside here at eight.’
She pushed herself off the window sill and walked off, trailing smoke through the news room. She had left a long blonde hair on the sill. Paddy picked it up and wound it around a finger, watching after Heather as she sidled through the tables, her tight little bottom drawing the eyes of the men she passed.
Paddy slid clumsily off the window sill, lifting her legs high to avoid ripping the back of her black woolly tights on the metal ledge. The tights were going baggy at the knee already and they’d come straight from the wash that morning.
III
Farquarson’s office door shut for the two o’clock editorial meeting, everyone in the news room relaxed into an unofficial break or started making personal phone calls. One of the news-desk boys took the call.
‘Brian Wilcox is finally dead,’ he announced, hanging up the phone.
Someone in the room said ‘hurray’ faintly, and the other journalists laughed.
Keck nudged Paddy. ‘You have to pretend to laugh,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s what we do when these things happen.’
Paddy tried. She pulled the sides of her mouth wide but she couldn’t smile convincingly.
‘You don’t have to,’ Dub muttered across Keck’s face. ‘It’s not essential to lose your humanity, it’s just useful.’ Sulking, Keck responded to a hail, leaving them alone on the bench. The journalist who had taken the call about Brian ripped the sheet off his pad with a flourish and stood up, striding to Farquarson’s office, rapping on the window and opening the door.
‘They found Brian Wilcox’s body,’ he said. Paddy could hear Farquarson shout a loud, sincere curse. No-one wanted a brand-new headline in the middle of an editorial meeting. ‘They strangled him and left him at the side of a railway line near Steps station.’
Paddy nodded at Dub. Steps was miles away, far too far for the boys to walk from Townhead. ‘An adult took them there.’
Dub shook his head. ‘You don’t know that.’
‘Bet ye any money.’
‘Any money it is then.’
Through the open door, Paddy heard Farquarson cursing and ordering this schedule to be moved, that to be dropped, the police statement for page one, telling someone to get JT down to Steps with a photographer. ‘Check that those kids are still being held and tell one of the boys to get me a large whisky from the Press Bar.’
A features sub-editor stuck his head around the door and looked at Paddy. ‘Did ye hear that?’
Nodding, Paddy stood up and headed for the stairs. Down in the bar, McGrade was quietly filling up the back shelves with tiny tinkling bottles of mixers. Two journalists were warming up the table for the afternoon rush. McGrade gave her a large Grouse when he heard it was for Farquarson and wrote it down in the big blue book he kept under the counter.
When she got back upstairs everyone in the news room was either out or on the phone. Farquarson was sitting alone at his desk with his head in his hands. She slid the drink between his elbows and he glanced up gratefully.
‘Let me know when you’ve finished, Boss. McGrade’ll want his glass back.’
‘Thanks, Meehan.’
‘Um … Boss? Me and Heather Allen are going out in the calls car with George McVie, if that’s all right? Just for a couple of hours, for work experience.’
Farquarson smiled wryly into his drink. ‘McVie’s awful nice, isn’t he? Check with the Father of the Chapel first, make sure it’s OK with the union. And, Meehan? Calls car is a hard shift, night shift is hard. George may be … lonely. Keep your hand on your ha’penny when you’re with him.’ She nodded.
Father Richards was in the canteen eating a Scotch pie crowned with beans and smoking simultaneously. The cut under his eye was healing but he was still having to manage without his glasses. His face looked raw without them.
‘Ah, here she is,’ he said when he saw Paddy standing at the side of his table,‘straight from the Union of Catholic Mothers.’
Paddy ignored it. She explained that McVie had invited Heather Allen, who in turn had invited her. Richards dropped the fork to his plate with a loud clatter and took a lascivious draw on his Senior Service.
She held up her hand. ‘Stop. I don’t need you telling me. I’m well warned about him by Farquarson. I just want to check the union aren’t bothered about it.’
‘Why would the union bother about McVie trying to ride two birds at once?’ said Richards, and he laughed until his face was pink.
Paddy crossed her arms and waited until he had finished. ‘Can I go, then?’
‘Aye,’ said Richards. ‘Please yourselves. If ye were my daughter I’d say no.’
To cover her excitement Paddy pointed at his eye. ‘I hope ye got that sore eye from the last woman ye laughed at.’
He drew lugubriously on his cigarette and ran his gaze all over her. ‘You’re the last woman I laughed at. Would you like to hit me?’
The words were innocuous but she felt uneasy, as if he was propositioning her somehow.
‘No,’ she said, threatening him in the only way she knew how. ‘But I’d like to take your job.’
8
And People Are Arseholes
I
George McVie was not allowed to drive the calls car. He wasn’t even allowed to sit in the front seat next to Billy because during one of their arguments he’d gone for the wheel and almost killed them both. Neither he nor Billy spoke to each other in the conventional sense. McVie grunted when he wanted to follow up a radio call; sometimes he shouted when he wanted Billy to call back to the office for a photographer; other than that they said nothing. They had been working nights together for five months and were ready to kill each other.
Billy, with his shoulder-length wet-look perm, was already in the car, tuning the radio a
nd putting his fags on the dashboard, making sure he had change for the burger van. McVie, dressed in a crumpled raincoat and cheap acrylic jumper, stood by the car under a heavy grey sky.
‘What d’you mean, she’s not coming?’ He glowered across the roof of the car at Paddy with exhausted baggy eyes.
‘She isn’t coming out in the calls car tonight, but I asked Farquarson and Father Richards and they both said it would be fine if I come.’
She tried to smile but he wasn’t buying it. He looked from her to the building, to the news room window and Farquarson’s office, as if expecting to see his boss there, standing at the window, laughing down at him while fucking Heather Allen himself.
‘Farquarson said for me to come,’ she repeated. McVie looked at her again, just to be sure that Paddy was indeed just as dumpy and not-Heather as he had originally thought. He tutted bitterly, leaning across the roof of the car to her. ‘Listen, bint, I’ve got a lot to do tonight. Don’t talk over the radio calls and stay in the car when we get anywhere. I’m not babysitting you all fucking night. Just fucking shut up and we’ll get on fine.’
Paddy stood back, exaggerating her astonishment. ‘Listen you to me. There is absolutely no call for that sort of rudeness. I’ve been perfectly polite to you, haven’t I?’ McVie glared at her.
‘Haven’t I?’ She was determined to make him say it.
‘Have I been polite to you?’ McVie shrugged grudgingly.
‘You’re pig ignorant.’ She opened the car door and got in.
She had never met Billy before but he introduced himself, shaking her hand over his shoulder as he smiled at her in the rear-view mirror, relishing the sound of someone else fighting with McVie.
They sat there for a moment while McVie fumed, slapping the roof of the car a couple of times. Each time Billy cheerfully waggled his eyebrows at Paddy in the mirror. Finally, McVie yanked open the door and climbed in, angrily pulling the tails of his mackintosh out from under his seat.
