Ian Rankin - Beggars Banquet

He looked around. One young man stood apart from the others. He looked shy and uncomfortable, and was wearing cheap clothes. There were spots around his mouth and on his neck, and he kept pushing slippery glasses back up his nose as he read from his own sheets of paper, glancing up from time to time to see what the other journalists were doing.

He was perfect.

‘Local are you, chief?’

The young man looked up in surprise at the man with the south-east accent, the man wearing the expensive jacket.

‘Sorry?’

‘You look like the local press.’

The young man twitched. ‘I’m from the Post.’

‘Thought so.’ The sheets of paper were plucked from the young man’s hands. They detailed the morning’s media briefing. There would be a conference at three o’clock, and another at seven. Otherwise, the only news was that the man they’d been questioning was to be held for another twenty-four hours.

‘What do you think, chief?’ The young man looked dazed. ‘Come on, you can tell Uncle Des.’

‘There’s not much to think.’

He wrinkled his nose, folding the press release and shoving it into the young man’s anorak pocket. ‘Don’t give me that. That’s the official line, but this is between you and me. You’re local, my son, you’ve got the edge on all of us.’ He nodded towards the scattering of journalists, none of whom was taking any notice of this conversation.

‘Who are you?’

‘I thought I told you, Des Beattie.’

‘Beattie?’

‘How long you been in this game, son?’ He shook his head sadly. ‘The Ripper case, I covered it for the Telegraph. Freelance now, of course. I can pick and choose my crime stories. A certain magazine has asked me to see if there’s an angle in all this.’ He looked the young man up and down. ‘You might be in for half the byline. Could be your ticket out of here, chief. We all had to start somewhere.’

‘Stefan’s my name, Stefan Duniec.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Stefan.’ They shook hands. ‘What’s that, Russian is it?’

‘Polish.’

‘Well, I’m Des Beattie and I’m from Walthamstow. Only I live in Docklands now.’ He winked. ‘Handy for the newspaper offices. So what’ve you got?’

‘Well…’ Duniec looked around. ‘It’s not really my idea…’ Beattie shrugged this aside. There was no copyright on news. ‘But I’ve heard that someone’s got a name.’

‘For the sod they’re questioning?’ Duniec nodded. Beattie seemed thoughtful. ‘Maybe it’ll tie in with my own ideas. What’s the name, Stefan?’

‘Bernard Cooke.’

Beattie nodded slowly. ‘Bernie Cooke. The businessman, right?’

Now Duniec nodded. ‘Does it tie in?’

Beattie puckered his mouth. ‘Might well do. I need to check a few facts first.’

‘I could help.’ The kid was keen all right. He didn’t want to wear that anorak for ever. Beattie patted his shoulder.

‘Stick around here, Stefan. Keep your ears open. I’ll go make a couple of calls.’ Duniec glanced down at the large pockets of Beattie’s sheepskin. Beattie grinned. ‘We can’t all afford cell phones. Meantime…’ He nodded towards the other reporters. ‘You might try writing this up. You know, something wry about the long wait. Eight hundred words, who knows, there’s always a market for filler. The Sundays are nothing but filler these days.’

‘Eight hundred?’

Beattie nodded, then reconsidered. ‘Seven-fifty,’ he said, heading out of the car park.

A small engineering works on a purpose-built estate.

A helpful sign at the site entrance told him he was looking for Unit 32, Cooke Engineering Ltd. He drove his rented Fiesta slowly through the narrow winding roads, giving way to lorries and delivery vans. Half a dozen cars were parked outside Unit 32 in tightly marked bays. The building was grey corrugated steel, shared by two companies. Unit 31 manufactured frozen foods. Driving past it, he sized up Unit 32. There was a door which would lead to the reception area or offices, and a loading-bay door near it. Both were closed. Parked in the loading bay was a sporty Ford Sierra, one of the custom jobs. In the driver’s seat, a man was talking on a car phone. In the back seat were two more large pasty-faced men. They looked like reporters. Well, if a dolt like Duniec knew about Cooke, the professionals would know too. And though Cooke himself wasn’t here, though he was sweating and dog-tired in one of Castle Lane’s interview rooms, a team had been sent to stake the place out.

He gnawed at his bottom lip, and decided to take a calculated risk. He drove to the next lot of units, parked, and walked back towards Cooke Engineering. The door he was approaching, having ignored the carful of staring eyes, had OFFICE printed on it. He knocked and entered, closing the door behind him. He’d expected noise: after all, only a partition wall separated this part of the unit from the actual production line. But there was silence, punctuated by the slow clack of fingers on a computer keyboard.

‘Can I help you?’ She sat behind a desk, but also behind huge red-rimmed spectacles, which magnified her already large eyes. Her tone was hardly welcoming.

‘Mr Cooke?’ He said nervously. ‘Wondered if I could have a-’

‘Do you have an appointment?’

‘No, well I…’

‘Are you a reporter?’ She examined him, hunched over as he was, shuffling and twitching and awkward. ‘You don’t look like one.’ She sighed. ‘No cold calling, reps by appointment only. I take it you are a rep?’

‘Well, as it happens I-’

‘Sorry,’ she said, seeming to take pity on this particularly pitiful example of an unlovely breed. ‘Mr Cooke’s not here anyway.’

He looked around. ‘Place looks dead.’

‘Dead about sums it up.’

‘Business bad.’

‘Let’s just say you shouldn’t look for too many orders.’

‘Ah…’ He seemed to think of something. ‘But the cars outside…?’

‘We let the guys from the frozen-food place park their excess cars there.’

‘Oh dear.’ He nodded towards where he assumed the production line would be, just through the wall. ‘Then you’re not…?’

‘We’re not producing. So unless you’re selling jobs in the light engineering sector, I shouldn’t bother.’

He smiled. ‘But you’re still here.’

‘Only till the weekend. No pay by Friday, I’m off.’ She went back to her typing, her fingers hammering the keys.

He turned to leave, his back and shoulders more hunched than ever. Then he stopped and half turned. ‘What made you think I was a reporter?’

‘You’ll read about it.’

Only after he’d gone did she pause in her work. She’d seen them all in her time, all the types of rep you could imagine. But she’d never come across one who didn’t even bother to bring samples with him…

Across from the industrial estate was a recently built pub, doubtless put there by a canny brewing concern who knew there would be plenty of clients from an estate of eighty-odd units.

‘That was the idea anyway,’ the barman admitted, pouring a pint of beer, ‘before times got hard. What gets me is that none of these financial projections ’ – he said the words with distaste – ‘ever projected hard times ahead. And let me tell you, there’s no money-back guarantee with these things.’ He had handed over the drink, received a five-pound note, and now pressed a key on the till.

‘Accountants aren’t all bad,’ said the customer.

As the barman handed over the change, the customer asked a question.

‘Does a man called Bernard Cooke drink in here?’

There was a snort from further down the bar, where a man on a stool was doing the crossword in the local paper.