Tony Park - Silent Predator

Tom thanked her. He’d taken the Northern Line from King’s Cross to Bank and then switched to the Dock-lands Light Rail to get to the newspaper’s offices. Out of the window he saw a jumbled landscape. Shiny new offices and apartments jostled with face-lifted brick warehouses that had been reinvented as fashionable homes for wealthy incomers. Yet, sporadic remnants of the old Isle of Dogs held on. The last of its undeveloped, soot-blackened buildings waited, destined either for demolition or to be reborn out of the ashes of their grimy past. The planners might have breathed new life into the area, but they had stolen its soul.

The news crawler at the bottom of the television screen was repeating the only part of the PM’s press conference that Tom had paid attention to: PM confirms at least one of Robert Greeves’s abductors, killed in South Africa, was Muslim. Tom heard footsteps and looked over his shoulder. He recognised the thin, pasty-faced, red-haired reporter immediately.

‘Daniel Carney?’ asked Michael Fisher.

Tom nodded and held out his hand, but Fisher kept his by his sides. He looked Tom up and down, and Tom prayed that Fisher had never met the real Carney. He also hoped Fisher wouldn’t recognise him from the press conference he had attended with Greeves.

So far, there had been no photographs of Tom published in the newspapers, as his identity was being protected by a Defence Advisory notice, more commonly known as a D-notice, on the grounds that the terrorist gang which had abducted Greeves was still at large and Tom had been involved in the killing of some of their number. The restrictions were voluntarily complied with by the media, but Tom knew his name and identity would not be kept quiet for long, especially if, as he assumed, things went badly for him at the inquiry. The journalists knew his name, which was why he’d been pestered continually for an exclusive. The fact he hadn’t given one meant the media would show him no mercy when his name was released.

Tom had called Fisher from the train and their conversation had been brief. He’d already gathered from Fisher’s tone that he wouldn’t exactly be welcomed with open arms.

‘I know who you are, Carney,’ Fisher had said when Tom had called, masquerading as the freelance journalist. ‘You’re the bastard who did me out of a cracking story. Well, you won’t get much from the stripper now, will you?’ Tom had simply said he needed to talk to him about Precious Tambo’s death. He had offered to come to the World ’s offices and Fisher had agreed. Tom had no idea what he would find out, but it seemed that so far he was pulling off the charade.

‘Is there somewhere we can talk in private?’ he said.

‘There’s an interview room down the corridor. Is room one free, Sally?’ Fisher asked the receptionist.

She checked her computer screen and said, ‘All yours, Michael. For the next twenty minutes at least.’

‘We won’t be longer than that.’

Fisher led Tom down a hallway off the main reception area. They stopped at a garishly painted red door and Tom followed the shorter man in. He took the new spiral-bound shorthand notebook out of his right suit pocket. From his left, Tom pulled the cheap audio cassette recorder he had bought in an electronics shop on the way. He hoped the props would back up his impersonation of a reporter. He knew Daniel Carney was a journalist because he had seen the man’s business card under Nick Roberts’s refrigerator. He recalled thinking that the card looked low-budget. It was the kind you could make up on an instant printing machine, the sort often found at major railway stations. Whoever Carney was, he probably wasn’t at the top of his game. Tom had wondered if Nick had been handed the card at a function Greeves had attended, or if he knew the reporter socially. Given that his name was in Precious’s diary, though, it was possible Nick had crossed paths with him at Club Minx.

‘You can put that away and all,’ Fisher said. ‘I don’t want anyone taping me.’

Tom nodded and slipped the cassette recorder back in his pocket. He left the notebook closed, on the table, sat down and leaned back in his chair, folding his arms.

Fisher looked at his watch. ‘Well? What have you got to say that’s so important?’

From Fisher’s comments over the phone, Tom realised that Precious had something to tell the media, and that a bidding war had been going on. ‘I’ve been told by the Old Bill that I can’t write anything about Ebony’s death.’

Fisher shrugged. ‘No shit, Sherlock. They’ve done the same to us, by slapping a D-notice on the story. Makes you wonder what else she was up to with Greeves, doesn’t it?’

Fisher was living up to his name, Tom thought, angling for information that he might have missed out on.

‘It’s why I’m here,’ Tom said, keeping his arms folded.

‘Well, I’ve got nothing to tell you, sunshine,’ Fisher said, leaning back and mirroring Tom’s body language. ‘So if you’ve got nothing else to say, you’d best be on your bike.’

‘I never got the whole story out of her,’ Tom said.

Fisher raised his eyebrows, then broke into a grin. ‘Do what? You outbid me by ten thousand quid and you didn’t get the bloody story? You’re fucking joking? Whose money was it?’ Fisher reeled off the names of a few newspapers, but Tom didn’t nod or shake his head to any of them.

‘All I got out of her was the same as what she gave you — enough to get us interested,’ Tom said.

‘What, that she’d been rogered by Greeves?’

Tom nodded.

‘Not bad in itself, but it wasn’t much good to us if she wasn’t going to let us publish her name and picture. She was a babe in the woods, thinking she’d get us to pay fifteen grand for an anonymous tip-off. I’m assuming you did get an agreement from her to go public with all the lurid details.’

‘Of course. The extra cash did the trick.’

Fisher nodded. ‘My editor wouldn’t risk it. Bleedin’ management’s watching the pennies these days. So, who bankrolled you?’

‘Can’t say until it gets a run, but at least we didn’t hand over the money before she disappeared. The coppers have been looking around the club, you know.’

‘Tell me something I don’t know. They were breathing down my neck at one point.’

‘Me too.’ Tom felt the barrier between them crumbling a little. Perhaps Fisher had finally accepted that the competition for Ebony’s story was over and neither man had won. ‘Funny about Greeves, though.’ Tom unfolded his arms and leaned forward a little, as if he was about to share something with Fisher. ‘Such a bloody ramrod-straight type, good family man and all.’

Fisher laughed out loud. ‘What do you mean? They’re always the worst offenders! Think about it. The straighter the public profile, the kinkier they are behind the scenes.’

Tom smiled and nodded. ‘True. Is that why your rag has been hounding him about Africa so much? Were you trying to shake him up, see if he’d been making a habit of bonking black women on his jaunts?’

Fisher relaxed a little as well, nodding as Tom spoke. ‘Yeah, well, once I got an inkling that you were going to outbid us with the slag, I thought I’d try and shake his tree, see what other rotten apples fell out. Oi, and watch what you’re calling a rag, sunshine. That’s offensive.’

As opposed to slag, Tom thought, but said nothing. ‘The other strippers at the club reckon you killed her.’

‘Silly bitches.’ Fisher shook his head. ‘Look, when I found out you’d scooped us I went down there and I was pretty angry. I tried splashing a few tenners around to see if some of the others would talk — or if they’d give me Ebony’s home number. I might have come across like your garden variety stalker, but the cops know I’m clean.’