The First Novels: Pay Off, the Fireman (31 page)

I leant back and started to shuffle the facts and quotes into a coherent pattern that would get my name back onto the front page. I looked around the office as my mind got into gear.

There were four phones lined up along the gap where our desks met, Roger’s and mine. Two were white, one was black and one was the same musty green you find on bacon that’s been in the fridge for three weeks, hidden behind the bottles of Schweppes tonic. Roger and I each had a white one, both connected to the switchboard, one of those swish jobs that plays ‘O give me a home where the buffalo roam’ to waiting callers. The black and green phones were of the old fashioned type, both were direct lines and we’d taken the numbers off them. The number of the black one we gave out to our police contacts, the green one to anyone else we thought might give us a story. The white ones rang all day, — social chit-chat, the odd punter with a bit of gossip, hacks from the other papers ringing up for info, the odd obscene caller ranting about the politics of the paper or a mistake on the racing pages. We get more than our fair share of nutters on the crime desk, you either hang up on them or, if you’ve got the time, you can play with them, sitting back in your chair with your feet on the desk until you get bored with the game.

If the green phone rang it was more serious and more often than not we’d get a story out of it. If the call came on the black phone Roger and I would reach for it together because it would be a tip off, anonymous or otherwise, that could lead to a splash. Usually he’d beat me to it, maybe because he was six years younger, maybe because he was faster, or had longer arms, but mainly it was because that phone faced toward him. Rank has its privileges. He was the chief crime reporter, it said so on his business card, while mine just said ‘crime reporter’. He got first crack at the black phone, an extra fifty quid a week on his expenses, and a car.

Roger the Dodger was sitting opposite me now filling in an expense sheet, and I knew he’d had a curry last night because his breath reeked of it. He was chewing the end of his felt-tipped pen.

‘Go all right?’ he asked.

‘Not bad,’ I said. Keep your pissy little hands off, I thought. This one’s mine.

‘Andy, any chance of a coffee?’ I asked, and was treated with a contemptuous look that said there was about as much chance of that as of hell freezing.

There were two secretaries servicing the specialist writers’ section, when they weren’t doing the really important work like painting their nails, getting their hair done or typing out press releases for our motoring correspondent’s freelance public relations operation. The better of the two was a squat little blonde with perfect skin and big feet, accurate typing and one hundred and ten words-per-minute shorthand. Her name was Katy and she looked after the two industrial correspondents, the defence/aviation writer, the motoring correspondent and our consumer affairs specialist.

The other girl was Andrea. We called her Andy, which she most definitely wasn’t.

She was a looker, a stunner. Tall and willowy, blonde like Katy but with legs almost half as long again, breasts that you just ached to touch and a smile that made you want to grab her and kiss her. Half the office lusted after her, and the other half were women. Andy had an address book which was slightly smaller than the L-R section of the London telephone directory and a voice that was a cross between Sloane Square and a razor blade being scraped across a blackboard. She spent most of the day on the phone talking to her boyfriends, girlfriends, relatives, lovers; interminable conversations in a voice that set your teeth on edge and she had a laugh like a donkey’s bray. She was supposed to look after five of us: two on the crime desk, our Royal correspondent, the education writer, and the medical expert. I had one fifth of her, and I had the fifth that answered back. She was unreliable and a pain in the arse.

Roger and I had spent the best part of nine months trying to get rid of her, ideally to swap her for Katy so that Willis, the motoring correspondent, could suffer for a change. We’d tried piling work on her, being sarcastic, being rude to her, Supergluing her desk drawers shut, loosening the casters on her chair. None of it had worked and we’d got to the stage where we were talking about putting ground glass in her coffee.

‘Do you want a coffee?’ I asked Roger.

He nodded. ‘Yeah, cheers. Did Bill tell you about the call from Hong Kong?’

‘Yes, thanks. Said he’d call back.’

‘Something up?’ he said, and he had the look of a fox after a chicken, the scent of a trip abroad in his pockmarked nostrils. I was glad to be able to disappoint him.

‘Dunno. Could have been my sister.’ He lost interest as his hopes of a freebie evaporated. I took his chipped Union Jack mug and the pint pot I’d nicked from the Bell pub. I walked over to Andy’s desk and plonked them down on her magazine. ‘Thanks, love,’ I said and bared my teeth. She scowled and took them over to the sink where we kept the coffee machine – God, she had a sexy walk – and a couple of the subs leered over the top of their terminals as she walked by and slammed the mugs down on the draining board. I bashed out the first couple of paras of the story on autopilot, as I thought about the days when I used to spend most of my time on the road, before I had to play second fiddle to the likes of Roger the Dodger.

I missed the adrenaline rush that comes with being a fireman. Time was when all I did was cover the big stories, the ones guaranteed to make page one. I was the guy always ready to get on a plane at a moment’s notice, covering everything from hijackings to ferry disasters, but that was before I’d started to have the blackouts. If it hadn’t been for Bill Hardwicke I wouldn’t even be number two on the crime beat. It was Bill who’d pulled me back from Beirut after I’d gone on a bender and missed a suicide bomber who killed a dozen marines as I lay slumped over a table in some sleazy back street bar. It was Bill who sent me to an expensive private nursing home to dry out at the paper’s expense. And it was his signature on the bottom of the letter in my personal file that said if I ever again let my ‘drinking problem’ get the better of me I’d be looking for a new employer.

I wasn’t teetotal by any means, but I was managing to keep it under control. Sometimes I went for weeks without a drink, and I’d long ago stopped keeping a quarter bottle of gin in my desk drawer. I was doing OK.

I was about half way through the story when my white phone rang, the shrill warble of a dying bird.

Roger was deep in thought over his expenses sheet and looking up at the ceiling for inspiration. There was no way on earth he was going to break off from his work of fiction to answer the phone so I hit the ‘Store’ button, sending the magic words into the machine’s mega-memory, and picked up the receiver.

A voice speaking broken English, the grammar all twisted and the tenses all to cock, asked me my name and then asked me to spell it and then told me to ‘wait for second please for call from Hong Kong’.

My first thought was that it was Sally, and my God had it really been Christmas since I last spoke to her? But I realized that she would have dialled direct and not gone through the operator, at about the same time the clipped male voice came on the line.

It was an inspector from the Royal Hong Kong Police. He checked my name, and the spelling, and then he told me Sally was dead and the room sort of telescoped and Roger looked about a million miles away and I felt cold inside and I wanted to say, ‘are you sure?’ or, ‘there must be some mistake’ but I knew it was only on TV that they make mistakes like that and I didn’t want to sound like a twat.

‘I didn’t catch your name,’ I said.

‘Hall,’ he answered. ‘Inspector Hall. Your name was down as next of kin. Are your parents still living?’

‘Our father died some time ago, but our mother is alive. What happened?’

‘Your sister died yesterday after falling from a hotel window. At this stage it looks like a suicide case, I’m afraid.’

My stomach lurched and the hand that held the phone was shaking.

‘What?’ I said in a voice that was no more than a whisper. ‘That’s not possible.’ Roger was pretending not to listen.

‘I’m afraid it’s definitely her, sir,’ said Hall. ‘She has already been identified.’

My mind froze, there were a million things I wanted to ask, but my head seemed to be filled with a single thought. Sally was dead.

‘Are you still there?’ asked Hall.

‘Yes. Yes, I’m sorry, what do you, I mean, is there anything I have to do?’

He coughed, with embarrassment I guess. ‘There are arrangements that have to be made, sir. It would be a great help if you would come out to Hong Kong.’

‘Of course, I’ll be there, I’ll be there.’ He gave me a telephone number where I could reach him and then he hung up. Roger was looking at me strangely and I realized I was sitting there with the receiver pressed hard against my ear, saying nothing.

‘You OK?’ he asked.

My mouth was dry and my hands were damp with sweat, but I just nodded and said yes. I had to look up my mother’s number in my address book, which gives you an idea of how often I rang her. We were a loose-knit family to say the least. She’d remarried five years after our father had died, and spent a couple of relatively happy years with husband number two, running a kennels outside Nottingham, before he was killed in a car crash. He’d been well insured and my mother took the money and went to live with her unmarried sister in a small village near Truro. I suppose I saw her about once a year now and spoke to her on the phone whenever I felt guilty about not keeping in touch which, to be honest, wasn’t all that often. Sally was all the family I really had, or needed, though I didn’t even call her as often as I should. And now I wouldn’t get the chance.

My mother wasn’t in but my aunt was, and in a way I was relieved because I didn’t know if I’d be able to cope with breaking the news to her. It was bad enough explaining to my aunt that Sally was dead and that I was going to Hong Kong. I hung up on her tears because there was nothing else I could say. If I was distant from my mother I was even further removed from my aunt and the rag-bag of relatives I had scattered around Britain. I only saw them at weddings and funerals, and that was usually only because Sally had dragged me along out of a sense of duty.

I left my coat hanging on the back of my chair and went to see Bill.

‘I need to go to Hong Kong,’ I said.

‘Sally?’ he asked.

‘She’s dead. I have to go.’

He started to get up but only managed halfway before he dropped back into the chair with a thud and a jiggling of flesh. He looked as if he cared.

‘Go,’ was all he said. He didn’t ask any of the questions they teach you when you’re a keen, hungry cub reporter on the make, he didn’t ask why, when, who, what or where, partly because he knew the answers to three out of the five, one didn’t matter and one was the reason I had to go, but mainly because it didn’t make the slightest difference to him. I was in trouble, I needed his help and he’d give it, no questions asked. Bill and I go back a long way, our paths had crossed on the
Mail,
the
Express,
for two fiery months on
The Times,
and we’d come together again on the 24-hour-a-day comic that we both poured scorn on but which paid us twice what we were worth. I’m not going to give you any crap about me loving him like a brother because I’d still stitch him up if it meant I’d get his job, and I’d leave him as soon as a better offer was waved in front of my nose. But he was a friend in a world full of colleagues and competitors. He opened his mouth and I thought for one horrible moment he was going to say something stupid like, ‘I’m sorry’, and I wouldn’t have been able to take that, not even from him. Behind me in the cavernous office I could hear raised voices and then I heard Gilbert Fell, an old-time sports sub in a red cardigan, scream, ‘fuck this stupid machine,’ followed by the expensive crash of an ATEX terminal being thrown to the ground and stamped on.

‘What the hell was that?’ yelled Bill, at last managing to get to his feet.

‘Only the sound of my heart being broken,’ I said. I gave him a half wave and said, ‘See you, I’ll phone when I get there.’ But he knew I would, anyway.

A few years ago I’d have had a travel bag in my bottom drawer, ready, willing and able to be sent abroad at a moment’s notice, but that was before I was a crime reporter. Now the most travelling I got to do was up to Glasgow every once in a while if there was a good murder or a decent rape case. And I’d managed to swing a week in Portugal out of Bill on the back of a time share con that the paper exposed, but generally I was tied to the office and the terminal while Roger snaffled all the trips for himself. Rank has its privileges. And perks. And a car. Bastard. But old habits die hard and I still carried my passport in my inside pocket, and I had a walletful of credit cards.

Andy was gossiping with one of the prettier copy typists, but even if she’d been at her desk there’s no way I would have asked her to arrange things. This was important, I had to get to Hong Kong and I had to get there now.

‘Katy, do me a favour, love,’ I said, and she looked up from her typewriter, keen and eager. She really wanted to be a reporter and if it had been up to me she’d have been given a chance, but there’s no way on God’s earth the unions would let her make the switch.

‘I have to get to Hong Kong right away, fix it will you? I’ll call you from the airport to find out which airline. Just get me on the first flight,’ I checked my watch, ‘after eleven o’clock.’

She was already reaching for her Filofax.

‘Any problems, get Robbie on the case,’ and I gestured a thumb at our airline correspondent, slumped in his chair reading
Flight International
, listening to the phone and drinking herbal tea at the same time. The ubiquitous Robbie Walker, two heart attacks down and one to go, reformed alcoholic and womanizer, he was now a committed health food nut and he would have been out jogging every morning if it hadn’t been for his triple by-pass. He’d been around a good many years and his contacts in the Ministry of Defence were second to none, but that wasn’t the reason he was kept on. Our Robbie’s forte was being able to get free flights for the editor and, as long as he could keep on coming up with the goods, he had a job for life and the editor travelled the world free of charge. As nice a bit of symbiosis as you’d be likely to find in Fleet Street.