Хилари Боннер - A Kind Of Wild Justice

He must be talking to one of those new kids, she thought. Only a reporter who was very new and green would ever begin a check call to McKane with the social nicety of asking him how he was. She chuckled to herself. It was McKane who was famously responsible for a 1 a.m. call to a former showbusiness editor of the Comet , the only point of which appeared to be to slag off one of her staff. The woman had apparently listened more or less silently for some minutes, no doubt just hoping McKane would go way. Eventually she decided she should show some sort of support for her man and had told the night news editor, ‘Oh, come on, Andy, Ron’s done some bloody good stuff lately.’

McKane hadn’t argued with that. Instead, he replied in his guttural Glaswegian, ‘Huh, only because you sit on his fucking lap and squeeze his fucking balls.’

The next day the showbusiness editor had approached McKane just as the editor was walking past. ‘Andy, when you said that Ron had only done some good stuff lately because I sat on his fucking lap and squeezed his fucking balls, did you mean by way of punishment or encouragement?’ she had asked in a loud, clear voice. Her timing had been impeccable. The newsroom had erupted in laughter. McKane had had the grace to flush slightly. The showbusiness editor’s response had been spot on, of course.

The same woman, who was almost six feet tall, had once effectively dealt with a diminutive reporter who, upon returning from a heavy lunchtime session in the pub, had beerily informed her that he wouldn’t half like to give her one, as he so charmingly put it. She had drawn herself up to her full height and replied, ‘Well, if you ever do and I find out, I shall be very angry.’

Jo grinned at the memory. Let the bastards think they’d got to you and you were dead. Banter and lack of concern. Looking as if you couldn’t care less — even when you did. Those were your only weapons. And they weren’t much when you were one of a handful of women among several hundred men.

Paul Potter, a talented young feature writer, was still at his desk as Joanna had rather hoped he might be, working on a spread featuring unsolved murders of young women — the peg, of course, being the Angela Phillips case. Joanna knew that he was looking into what had happened in the investigations into each case, some of them going back many years. He was talking to the families and the police officers involved, and sometimes to suspects. In the UK, no unsolved murder investigation was ever closed. The only exceptions were when the police were damn sure they had found the murderer but either could not gather enough evidence to go to court, or their prime suspect was acquitted. Then inquiries were often quietly folded.

There was plenty for Paul to work with. He was nice-looking in an unassuming sort of way, quiet, clever, thoughtful and a good listener. Sometimes she wondered what he was doing in Fleet Street. It didn’t seem his sort of place. He was excellent at his job; it was just that he was so different from the others. It certainly never occurred to her, or indeed anyone else in those days, that he was particularly ambitious.

She paused to speak to him as she passed. ‘How’s it going?’ she enquired.

He looked up in mild surprise. ‘Hi, Jo, didn’t expect to see you until tomorrow.’

‘No, well, it was one of those times at home when I reckoned I’d actually rather be here. Anyway, maybe I can get a quiet hour or so to catch up with the backlog of stuff that is no doubt waiting on my desk.’

There was no one else in the Street of Shame to whom she would have confided even that much about her troubled home life. She knew all too well that another rule of survival in a newspaper office was not to bring your troubles to work with you. Not ever. The guys could do that occasionally, but never the women.

Paul accepted her small confidence without comment, as he almost always did. He never asked questions. ‘Quiet hour or so? In this place? You have to be joking,’ he told her with his familiar tight smile.

‘Oh, well, quiet ten minutes, maybe?’

‘No chance.’ He smiled again. ‘I’ll have wrapped this up in the next hour, I reckon. It’s been a tough one. Not very cheery material, either. Then I’m going to the Stab for a pint. Care to join me?’

The Stab in the Back was the name by which the Comet pub, the White Hart, was invariably known. ‘Sure, that’d be good,’ Jo replied casually. So much for working! But the truth was that the possibility of a quiet pint with Paul had been in the back of her mind since she had decided to go into the office. He was perfect company for her. Sometimes he seemed to be the only person in her life with whom she could spend time without some kind of stress. He did not indulge in the constant, often lewd, banter of so many of her colleagues. He made absolutely no demands on her. She could talk shop with him with more freedom than with anyone else and drown her sorrows without fear. Even if she later felt she had made a bit of a fool of herself, he had never let her down.

He was not only sensitive but also safe. To her those were his finest attributes. And it did not occur to her that he might regard her as anything more than a casual drinking mate.

Joanna was halfway along Knightsbridge on her way home from the Comet office just five days later when she was called on her car phone and told that a man had been arrested in connection with the abduction and murder of Angela Phillips. He had yet to be charged. ‘I’m on my way back,’ she said as, with a screech of tyre rubber, she instantly swung her car into an illegal U-turn just past the Beauchamp Place traffic lights.

The black cab behind her had to brake and swerve to avoid hitting her and the driver shouted a mouthful of abuse at her through his open window. Joanna barely heard him. She belted back along Knightsbridge, racing two red lights, and roared the MG around Hyde Park Corner without even attempting to wait for a gap in the traffic. The other vehicles could dodge her. And thankfully, unlike in America where they kept driving at you because they were so unused to motorists breaking rules, in London they almost always did dodge you — even if accompanied by much horn-blowing and colourfully vocal road rage.

On Constitution Hill, Jo switched her headlights on to full beam and drove down the middle of the road, hoping to God she didn’t encounter a policeman. It was nearly nine on an early September evening, most workers had gone home or were ensconced in a central London pub or restaurant for the night, the theatre crowd were safely locked in for at least another hour. The roads were mercifully clear, for once. She belted past Buckingham Palace, sped down Birdcage Walk and turned left at Westminster along the Embankment. Big Ben was striking nine as she passed the Houses of Parliament.

There was only an hour to go until first-edition time, an hour in which to produce what would be regarded as an early story, to be expanded and updated for later editions. She knew Tom Mitchell himself was editing that night and was glad of it. Sometimes, when his deputy or one of the two assistant editors allowed to edit at night were on duty, they erred on the side of caution a little too much for her liking.

The night desk would already be on the case and almost every reporter on late duty would have been assigned a task which would form just a part of the night’s coverage. When a big story like the arrest of the Beast of Dartmoor broke, every conceivable angle was covered as quickly as possible, somebody would be hammering out a recap of Angela’s disappearance, a number of reporters would be trying to contact Angela’s friends and family, and others would be trying to find out exactly who had been arrested. Frank Manners and Freddie Taylor would also have been alerted and put on the job. Manners had quite a track record of prising information out of police contacts. Joanna wanted to beat them to it.