Read an Excerpt
1
Ned Silver was being banged out.
Across the Edinburgh Post newsroom, journalists were slapping their hands hard on the tabletops. It was a rhythmic racket—some were banging their feet on the floor, others tapping the sides of their grey, flickering monitors. One or two rang peals from their chipped coffee cups, using stained old spoons. The sound rebounded from the worn brown carpet to the stained white ceiling tiles, and out of the open windows to the chilly street outside.
Years ago, typewriters would have been banged, and maybe even print presses clanged, and then, after the tumult of industrial percussion, there would have been a long session of hard drinking in the pub. These days it was only tired hands sounding on dust-smeared laptops, with little time to party, commiserate and celebrate afterwards.
Shona Sandison, senior reporter, watched it all. She had seen many journalists leave in recent months. Unlike most, Ned had been a friend, once. Now he was just a speech and a night in a sodden pub away from being another memory. She watched, unsmiling, as Silver looked out over the newsroom and took a piece of paper from his rumpled corduroys. Colm, the news editor, had already handed Ned a bottle of whisky in a pale cardboard case, an envelope of money gathered from the office, and a fake front page, announcing his departure.
“Speech!” someone yelled.
“Don’t encourage him,” Shona said. She was working, holding a telephone receiver close to her ear, cupping her hand over it to muffle the noise of the newsroom. The phone was ringing and ringing. She was waiting for a police contact to answer his mobile.
Opposite her, swivelling on his seat, the crime reporter, Hector Stricken, grinned. “He’ll love this,” he said. “He’s been waiting years. It’s his grand exit. It might be funny. It probably rhymes or something. Give him a listen, Shona.”
“I’d rather set myself on fire,” she said, lolling back in her chair. Her walking stick, which she had hooked on her armrest, fell to the floor with a clunk. She had a new story to investigate. It was probably a murder, and she was gathering information—an old man in Stockbridge had been found dead in his ground-floor flat.
Shona nodded over to the office of the Post’s new editor, Ron Ingleton, who appeared to be hiding. “Where’s that wee prick, Ingleton?” she whispered loudly to Stricken. “Squatting in his Führer bunker?”
“Shona,” Stricken said, shaking his head.
“The man’s a fuckwit,” she said.
Colm was saying some words about Ned’s long tenure as arts correspondent at the Post . . . broken many stories over the years . . . how he had been an important asset.
“Ass-et,” Shona snorted. Some people looked around. “Near enough,” she muttered. The phone was still ringing, somewhere.
Shona looked over at Silver, his hair thinning, his nose redder that it used to be. When they had been friends, he had not worn his glasses, and now he wore better clothes. Back in those days, he had been floppy-haired, and thin, and funny. This was before she had been stabbed. Then, sometime after that, he had married and didn’t seem to want her company anymore, with no more drinks after work, or coffees at lunchtime. Now he was going to London for some communications job, and that was that. She doubted they would speak again.
She tilted her head and turned away from the hubbub in the room, as the phone was finally picked up with a click.
Detective Reculver answered. “Ah, Shona Sandison,” he said. “The impossible pencil.”
“Ya what?”
“Both blunt and sharp. Go on.”
“I hear a man’s dead,” she said.
“What’s that racket?”
“An old timer is leaving,” she said. “Doing a speech. Anyway, I heard it’s a murder.”
“You might have heard right,” he rumbled. “But I can’t say more at the moment. You’ll get the news release like everyone else. No exclusives, this time.”
“Whatever. Was it a robbery? Who was he?”
“Yes, maybe, and a suspicious death. The name was Love. An artist.” Reculver lowered his voice. “Nasty business—a bloody mess. Look, meet me tomorrow, eleven a.m., normal place.”
“Give me an address for this fella?”
“How about a ‘please’?”
“You can have my ‘thank you’ tomorrow.”
“No. But look near the bookshop on the main road—there’s polis everywhere. Shouldn’t be too hard to spot.”
“A Mr. Love?”
“Aye. Do one of your internet searches—you’ll find him right enough.”
“Okay, see you tomorrow.”
Shona put the phone down and checked her email, but there was nothing from the police communications department yet.
Silver was speaking. “I saw us all at this wee newspaper not as friends or rivals or colleagues, but more a kind of a gestalt . . .”
“Jesus H. Christ,” Shona said. She picked up her walking stick and got out of her seat. Limping on her left-hand side, stick tapping on the thin carpet, she moved through the rows of standing newspaper staff who were nodding, murmuring and chuckling at Silver’s speech. Shona needed some fresh air: to see the silken clouds weaving over the city, casting pale rivers of shadow over the stones and statues. Another good journalist was leaving the Post. Every one that left the paper was like the gasp of a dying man. There were only so many breaths left that it could take before it breathed its last.
She stood in the office block landing, waiting for the lift. Someone outside on Rose Street was playing a saxophone. Then her phone buzzed—a text from Reculver: Statement with you now, it shouted.
“Fucking hell,” she said, turning around and heading back to her desk. The staff had dispersed again, and the noise had fallen. Silver was in the editor’s glass-walled office, and Shona wondered what they were saying to each other.
Colm ghosted over to her desk.
“What do you want?” she said, as her computer screen blinked back to life.
“Six hundred words on the Stockbridge death, Shona,” he said, beginning to roll a short cigarette in his stumpy fingers.
“Fine. Has Silver found his balls in there?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is he lamping Ingleton with the whisky bottle?”
Colm smirked. “Exchanging platitudes, Shona,” he said. “The time for melodrama is over.”
“Don’t I just know it.”
Colm nodded, looked as if he was going to say something, didn’t, and then stumped off again.
Stricken looked over his monitor and raised his eyebrows. “Another corpse for you, is it, Shona? You must be delighted.”
“Fuck off, Stricken.”
“You used to be nice, you know,” he said, rattling his fingers on his keyboard. “Charming, even.”
“Remember when you were quiet, before you decided to grow a character?” she said. “I preferred it that way. What are you working on?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” He tapped his nose. “It could be the big one.”
“The big one?”
“The big one,” he repeated.
Shona shook her head. “Cock,” she said.
Stricken leaned back in his chair. “Have you ever thought, Shona, of living more in the moment, of being less annoyed by the past, and less worried about the future?”
“Like what . . . a whelk?”
He laughed and carried on typing.
Shona checked her email. The police press statement had come through. There it all was, in black-and-white, from the city police: a suspected murder. An ongoing investigation and an appeal for witnesses. She read the news release through again and then began, with a familiar and comforting sense of relief, to write.
Half an hour later, it was done.
The death of Scottish painter Robert Love, who was found in his Edinburgh home this morning, is being treated as suspicious by city cops, the Post understands. The body of acclaimed artist Love, 67, was discovered in his home studio in Stockbridge. Love, a graduate of Glasgow School of Art whose lauded work hangs in the Public Gallery and institutions across the UK, was well known in the arts world. He leaves a daughter.
The story, completed with police quotes and more background about Love’s life and career, was barely edited before being laid out on the page. Colm was reading it over again as Shona prepared to leave the office.
She was about to ring her father. Shona lived with him, and she usually rang at this time to check he was back from the allotment, and what he wanted for dinner. Or whether he was cooking—which he usually was. Silver and some other colleagues had gone to a pub on the corner of the street, and she wondered whether she should join them. Through the open window, she thought she could hear their voices.
Colm walked over from the newsdesk, his shirt half out, a rolled cigarette behind one ear. He was squinting at a large piece of paper: a printout of page three, which he put down on her desk. Her story was the lead. There was no headline, just “headery-headeryheadery” typed in its place. There was also a large picture of Robert Love, taken in his pomp in the early 1980s: he had a drooping moustache, a wild frizz of dark hair and a velvet suit. Dark eyes and a smile.
“He has a daughter, then?” Colm said.
“That’s what it says,” Shona said.
“Have you spoken to her?”
“Not yet.”
“Have you tried?”
She hadn’t. “Of course, I have. Number rang out,” she said. She didn’t have a number. Shona was already planning to track her down for a second story, but she wanted to get home. She had no desire to knock on the door of a grieving woman and ask her how she felt. She had done enough death knocks for one lifetime.
Colm snorted. “Try her again tomorrow, and knock on her door,” he grunted. “And you got an idea for the headline?”
“Colm,” she said, standing up, grabbing her stick, “that’s your job. The most important three words are already there.”
“By Shona Sandison?” he said, his mouth twitching. They had exchanged these lines before.
“Exactly,” she said. “How about ‘Cops Probe Shock Artist Death’? Something like that.”
“Fine,” he said, tucking his shirt in. “Straightforward.”
“Why’s it not the splash?” she asked. She peered at him, and he sighed and rubbed his eye.
“There’s a drug story. A load of cocaine has been found in a boat from Whitby that shipped up in Pittenweem. Worth ten million, apparently. Stricken’s done it.”
Shona looked to Stricken’s seat, but he was gone—he had filed and fled. “Ten million? That’s a lot of coke. And my plans for the weekend ruined.”
Colm smiled. “I can’t imagine you ever doing that sort of thing, Shona, for some reason.”
“I’ve had my moments. Since when is a drugs haul more important than a murder?”
Colm’s eye twitched again. “Since the editor decided that was the case,” he said, his voice low. He rolled up the page into a baton and gently beat the desk with it. The new editor was another angry white man from Glasgow, short and shaven-headed.
“Rightio,” she said, and slammed her notebook in her bag.
Colm’s voice changed to something softer. “The man is settling in. Give him time. Here—you going to Ned’s bash? I won’t be done here until late. Maybe see you there?”
“Not a chance.”
“Fine,” he said. “Why were you shouting at poor Hector about whelks earlier?”
“Mind your own business, Colm.”
There was a shout from the other end of the office. Colm’s deputy was standing up at the newsdesk, looking for him. He called to Colm and held up a telephone receiver in the air as if it was on fire.
“Westminster!” the deputy shouted.
“Great. Another clusterfuck to sort,” Colm said. He sighed and walked slowly back to the newsdesk, and Shona pulled on her coat. It was late now, and only editors and a few writers were left in the office. In the glass office in the corner of the newsroom, the editor was watching a football match. Green and blue flashed on the flickering walls.
Shona made her way to the street outside. The air was cool and the sky was still a cloudless blue over the Scott Monument and the rise of the Old Town to the Castle. The old city glittered under a vast sky. She passed the pub that Ned and half the newspaper were now inside. Another wake, she thought. The newspaper was dying, and Ned leaving was another blow to its life. She could not wish him well, or celebrate his exit: the paper needed journalists like him to stay. And she needed the newspaper for her life to stay as it was.
