Peter Temple - In the Evil Day

‘Settle down, hold it,’ she said. ‘Just hold on for one second, will you, I’m not…’

Mackie stopped, turned his head. ‘What?’

‘I don’t have the authority to buy something like this.’ She stood close to him, still holding his sleeve, looked into his eyes, it often worked. ‘I’m sorry I said that about, about being faked. I’m sorry. Will you leave the tape with me? A copy? I promise I’ll give you an answer today.’

He moved away from her, just a small distance. ‘No,’ he said, ‘this was a mistake.’

Caroline knew she should plead. There was a time for pleading. It was any time you saw the shimmer of a story that would go on the front page without argument, would require no exercise of editorial judgement by any drink-befuddled executive prat, would speak for itself in short headline words an eight-year-old could understand.

‘Listen,’ she said, holding on to his arm. ‘I don’t need a copy, an hour, two hours, that’s it, two hours, that’s all I need, I’ll talk to people. An answer in two hours. No bullshit. Give me a number.’

He looked at her for so long that she let go his arm and blinked.

‘Please,’ she said. ‘Trust me.’

‘One o’clock,’ he said. ‘I’ll ring you at one. Just say yes or no.’

His accent wasn’t Scottish now. It was South African.

‘Mr Mackie, we might need a contract, a legal document, you know, we could do this through lawyers, you’d be protected and we’d…’ ‘Just say yes or no. Twenty thousand. I’ll tell you where to send it.’

When he was gone, she went to her tiny cubicle, her first day in it.

She rang security and asked for prints of Mackie, sat back and thought for a long time about what she should do. This was her story: the man had come to her because of her byline on the Brechan story. But it was too big for her. He wanted cash for something that might be worthless.

It wasn’t. She felt it in her marrow. Her instinct said this was a big story. And her instinct was good. It had taken her to three big stories in Birmingham.

But Halligan would take it away from her. The story would disappear into the inner sanctum without her.

She had to deliver it personally, the way she’d delivered Brechan. Brechan had been the most wonderful luck. She would be writing lifestyle crap now, ten hottest pick-up bars in the City, if someone hadn’t decided to give her Brechan’s rent boy.

‘We know your work from Birmingham,’ the gaunt man in the pub in Highgate said. ‘We think you’re the person to expose this.’

Luck, just pure luck.

It didn’t happen twice.

Who to go to now? Who to trust? Who could get the money?

Colley. He was the only one. She’d been introduced to him in the pub and he’d bought her drinks and made lewd suggestions. Her boss in the permanent catfight that was the Frisson section had told her that Colley ran his own mini-empire. He kept his own hours, only came to conferences when he felt like it.

She went to his office, not a cubical, a proper office with floor-to-ceiling walls, and knocked.

‘Enter,’ shouted Colley.

He was sitting at a large desk covered with files and newspapers looking at a laptop, a cigarette burning in an old saucer. She thought he looked like someone who had lost a large amount of weight quickly.

‘Caroline Wishart,’ she said. ‘We met in the pub?’

‘I remember. Some things I remember.’

‘I need help.’

Colley looked at her. His eyes were heavy-lidded and he was squinting as if caught in a spotlight. ‘First you pinch the Brechan story from under my nose,’ he said, ‘now you come crawling for help.’ He pointed downwards. ‘Under the desk, you upper-class slut. Unzip me with your teeth.’

Caroline sat down. She had to tough this out. ‘I thought your generation still had button-ups,’ she said. ‘Button-up flies are hard on teeth. All I need is the benefit of your experience.’

He smiled, thin lips, yellow teeth. ‘All? Took me thirty years to get where I am. Cost me my liver and my hair, most of my brain. You ruling-class gels walk in, you pout and shake your little tits and they make you editor of some new fucking rubbish section. Grovel to me.’

‘I’ve just seen a film. Soldiers killing civilians. White soldiers killing blacks. A man wants to sell it.’

She told him about Mackie, about the tape labelled 1170.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘probably South Africans, won’t surprise anybody.

Killed blacks like flies. That’s not news anymore.’

‘He says the soldiers are American. They’re shooting people lying on the ground. Seems like a whole village. It’s like an execution. Kids too.’

Colley moved his head around, light catching his dirty glasses. ‘What was the name again?’

‘Mackie.’

‘And he says people tried to kill him in his hotel in London?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s he want?’

‘Twenty grand.’

‘That’s it? Comes in, shows you the film, says he wants twenty grand?’

‘Yes.’

‘Generally, there’s a bit more mystery and foreplay. What’s your feeling about the film?’

‘Real. And awful. Some of the people might be identifiable.’

‘Soldiers?’

‘There’s a group near helicopters. Might be two civilians. He says someone who wanted to buy the film tried to kill him. When I said I needed time, he walked.’

‘Bluff.’

‘He was walking,’ said Caroline. ‘He was going. No doubt in my mind.’

‘Well, the walk. I’ve had walkers. Let them piss off, get to the lift.

Where’d you let him get to?’

‘Okay, I’m learning,’ Caroline said. ‘He’s ringing at one, he wants a yes or no. Should I take it to Halligan?’

She watched Colley scratch his head, a delicate operation. He’d had two kinds of hair transplants and a surgical procedure involving strips of his scalp being moved around, with strange results.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘My view is that the proper thing to do is take this to Halligan immediately.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘if that’s your advice.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s not. Twenty grand’s nothing. Is this a joint venture then?’

‘It is.’

‘Give me an hour. We can deliver this without Halligan and the fucking lawyers.’

…LONDON…

Niemand found a car hire firm in Clerkenwell, used his passport, the international licence, paid for seven days in cash, a ridiculous sum. He would be gone much sooner, but his instinct said to leave a margin. Hired killers had come for him in the night and he didn’t know how they found him.

He drove around for a few hours, places he knew from his runs. He wanted to be gone, London was full of rich people, he didn’t care about that one way or another, but the poor and the desperate were shamefaced, hiding in alleys and under bridges when they should be in the open, shaming the rich.

He parked and waited for 1 p.m., mobile on the passenger’s seat. He would go to Crete and stay with his cousin. Dimitri was like him, they looked alike, all the relatives said that when they’d come to look at him and his mother after their arrival from Africa. It had been late afternoon when they reached the village in the hills. The taxi dropped them in the square. His mother went somewhere and came back with two men, who took their suitcases. They’d all walked down some narrow broken streets and then it was all old women in black, men with moustaches, staring children, everyone seemed to pay more attention to him than they did to his mother. They didn’t look at her in the way they looked at him. He knew now they were looking at the other blood in him, they didn’t see a lot of strange blood.