Denise Mina - Slip of the Knife

She had left Fort William in the middle of the night, driving at eighty along back roads to get away from him. His articles told how he had witnessed corruption and brutality, women raped and murdered, children mutilated, whole villages put to the torch. She remembered his article about a fifteen-year-old Angolan boy, shot between the eyes right in front of him. She had been naive to expect him to remain unchanged. Ridiculous.

The work face wasn’t going to come. She’d just have to go in anyway or miss the deadline for the late edition. Taking a deep breath, she reached for the door handle and stepped out onto the buckled concrete floor of the car park, locking the car behind her.

Delivery men loitered in the loading bay, looking up as she came towards them. They stopped talking and watched her walk to the staff entrance, their heads following her, moving as one curious animal. She could say hello to one of them, curry for a champion, but she didn’t have it in her this morning. She pushed the staff door open and stepped in off the street to the cold stone lobby. As soon as the door shut, one of them would say something derogatory, make a comment about the size of her arse or who she’d gobbled.

She let the door fall shut and then yanked it open again, leaning out into the street, staring straight at them. One of them froze with his mouth open, a chest full of breath, ready to comment.

“Who the fuck are you wankers talking about?” she drawled.

They laughed at her for catching them out.

She slipped back into the lobby before they could retort and climbed the stairs heavily, pulling herself forward, pausing at the doors to the newsroom. Flattening her dress, she affected a frown. Most states of emotional turmoil could be covered with a growl, she’d found, especially after her father died, when the grief often ambushed her.

She organized her face into a scowl, pushed the double doors open, and walked in, keeping her chin high.

The night shift started into action like an automaton during a power surge. They saw it was her and toned it down a bit. Light from computer screens filled the gloomy room, uplighting those sitting at their desks.

Merki Ferris, standing near the door, looked shifty and paranoid. He’d been exiled to the night shift for pissing off Bunty, their current editor. He was a cross-eyed trickster, had guile but no wit, could get into anywhere for an interview but then didn’t know what to ask. He was not an attractive man and it was hard to tell in the thin light whether he was smiling or grimacing.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, out of a habit of asking questions.

“Right, Merki?” She slipped past him.

The layout of the room had been changed to fill the gaps. In the old days the noise of typewriters and shouting filled the room, desks were positioned to fit with production needs, and everywhere had to be sidled to. Now the slimmed-down news, sports and features areas were farther away from each other, circular islands with flat electric typewriters and dirty-white plastic computers that pulsed cadaverous green light into the room. The editors had their own island now, away from the journalists.

Paddy walked across the room to a partitioned office for the senior editors. Outside the door she dipped at the knee to see in through the white venetian blinds behind the glass. Larry Gray-Lips, head of the night shift and king curmudgeon, was at his desk. She opened the door without knocking. Larry froze with a sandwich at his mouth, trying to remember whether Paddy Meehan had the clout to give them shit for not doing relay races from one end of the room to the other. He dropped his hand and looked worried.

“What?”

She picked up a schedule from his desk and pretended to read it. Larry put his sandwich down and leaned back in his chair, balancing carefully on two legs as he stared at her with the same languorous, faintly despising expression he always had. “Did you wake up and remember someone ye hated?”

“Nope.” She put the schedule down. “I’ve got a big news story.”

“You’re fucking joking.” He dropped his chair onto all fours. “For fucksake, we’re into feeding time here. Could ye not have come an hour ago?”

She shrugged, looking around the desk. “Just the way it happened.”

“Spit it out, woman.”

“Um…” She hesitated, poking around some papers on his desk. “Terry Hewitt.”

“What about Terry?”

“He’s been killed. Murdered.”

Larry didn’t speak or move. She stole a look at him. He was frowning at the desk, blinking quickly. He saw her looking at him and coughed for cover.

“Well.” His voice was lower. “Fuck me.”

Paddy nodded at the desk and bit her cheek. “I know.”

“No, I mean it.” Larry looked at her. “Fuck me.”

Each smiled weakly at the papers on Larry’s desk, glad of the respite. Quite suddenly the muscles on Paddy’s chin convulsed into a tight ball and she lost her breath.

“So.” She found her voice, higher and unsteady. “They found his body in a ditch. Word is-” she leaned down to whisper to him-“ IRA hit .”

Larry opened his eyes wide. In nine years at the paper she’d never seen him do that. “You’re fucking joking. Here? ”

“I know…”

“The Provos are killing people in Scotland?”

“Well, one anyway. ‘All the hallmarks of an IRA hit,’ said a source within the Strathclyde Police Force. The body was found out near Greenock.” He didn’t seem to realize the significance so she spelled it out. “Off the road to Stranraer, where the ferry runs to Belfast.”

“So was Terry just getting off the boat? Had he been in Ireland?”

“Dunno. He was found stripped naked in a ditch, single shot to the head.”

“Jesus Christ, this is huge.” Larry turned to his computer screen to see who was on. “Merki-”

“No.” Paddy put a firm hand on his desk. “I’ll write it. No byline, but I’ll do it.” Merki was a skilled hack and he’d want to know how Paddy had found out about Terry. If he caught a whiff of her personal involvement he’d tell Larry and they’d have her writing an emotive first-person account about identifying the body. They always wanted that, especially from female reporters.

Larry leaned back in his chair, picking bits of sandwich out of a molar and appraising her suspiciously. There was a time when no one in the press would volunteer to do a job without a byline. Even now it was still the custom to feign reluctance.

“What could you possibly have against Merki?”

“Nothing, just I know Terry. Knew Terry. By the time I’ve briefed him I could have written it.”

Larry hesitated.

“OK.” She threw her hands up. “Get Merki. Better than that: you do it. I’ll fuck off home to my bed.”

“Can you bang it out in five minutes? We’re due to set in ten.”

“No bother. When did you last see him?”

“Friday. He was drinking in Babbity’s. He had a book deal, was showing the check around to everyone. Two hundred quid.”

“Not much, is it? I got more than that for Shadow of Death and no one bought it.”

“Yeah, Terry’s was a picture book, not much text. Expensive to produce.”

“What sort of picture book?”

“Photos of people. Americans. Published by the Scotia Press, who the fuck are they?” Larry looked around his desktop, bewildered. “It’s definitely our Terry? Are they certain? It couldn’t be a mistake?”

For a second they looked one another in the eye, a clear moment of sadness and shock and loss. They had both known Terry Hewitt for a decade, since his parents’ death in a car crash, through his early promise and his trips abroad, had both taken private pride in his triumphs, and, knowing him again more recently, had seen him bloated and scouring for work. Paddy bit her cheek hard, crunching through a nipple of hard skin at the corner of her mouth. She could taste blood.