In spite of her eagerness to hear how Danny’s trip had gone, Allie hadn’t wasted the days till they were both back in the office. On Sunday, she was back on the day shift, disorientated and short-changed on sleep as always happened on a one-day transition from nights to days. But at least Sunday was usually a quiet news day. Desmond, the deputy news editor, was in charge, a lumbering ox of a man who hid his insecurities behind bluff, bullish banter. His greatest sin was a lack of imagination. His idea of setting the news agenda on a Sunday morning was to focus all his attention on the Sunday Thistle, a publication that was read around the world by ex-pat Scots wallowing in nostalgia for a native land that had never existed outside its pages. It also boasted an ageing circulation among those who still lived in Scotland and who wanted to believe that nothing much had changed since the 1930s. For anyone of Allie’s generation, it held no attraction.
Running the Sunday newsdesk, Desmond loved to scour the columns of the Thistle, tearing out stories he thought were worth following up and scattering them among the duty reporters. Which would have been fine, if the stories had offered any follow-up angles. What made it worse was the invariable imprecision of the stories. They tended to feature vague addresses, often in streets that ran for the best part of a mile. Sometimes they were a straight lift from an edition of the paper from twenty years before, as Allie had found to her cost on her second week on the Clarion.
She’d been sent out to Knightswood, a council estate in the west of the city. It had been built as a garden suburb between the First and Second World Wars, its neat streets comprising semi-detached houses and so-called cottage flats – blocks that resembled large semis but which were in fact four flats. It was the sort of place that gave council housing a good name.
The story seemed straightforward, potentially amusing. A Mrs Aggie Mackenzie faced eviction from her flat because of complaints to the council from the neighbours about her pet parrot. Not only was the parrot loud, it also possessed a rich and ribald vocabulary. According to the Thistle reporter, one neighbour had said, ‘I’ve had to stop the minister coming to visit because of the terrible swearing that bird screams at everybody.’
The only address was Archerhill Road, the longest street on the estate. Allie tried the phone book first. There was a J. Mackenzie and a T. McKenzie. If she was in luck, it would be one of those. Nobody from the picture desk wanted to come with her. ‘If it works out, we’ll send somebody out to do pix,’ was the most she could squeeze out of them. So she summoned an editorial driver and headed for Knightswood. Of course, neither of the Mackenzies in the phone book had heard of Aggie Mackenzie and her parrot. But it being Sunday, she headed for the church and waited till the service was over. She drew a blank with half a dozen members of the congregation, but her luck changed with the deaconess, who gave her precise directions.
Allie rang the bell of the downstairs flat and waited. She was poised to ring again when the door inched open to reveal a stooped woman with an ancient face and thick glasses. Allie hesitated. ‘Mrs Mackenzie?’
‘Aye, hen. Who are you?’
‘My name’s Alison Burns, I’m a reporter with the Clarion.’
‘The newspaper?’ She seemed astonished. ‘What’s the newspaper got to do with me?’
‘It’s about your parrot.’ Seeing the woman’s look of confusion, Allie forged on desperately. ‘About the complaints to the council about the noise nuisance.’
‘My parrot? You’re here about my parrot?’
‘Yes. After the story in the Sunday Thistle today.’
‘Today?’
Allie produced the cutting from her bag. ‘There you go. That’s you, isn’t it? Mrs Aggie Mackenzie of Archerhill Road?’
Suddenly the old woman hooted with laughter, rocking back and forth. ‘By jingo, they’ve got nae shame. Hen, that story was in the paper twenty year ago.’
‘Twenty years ago? Are you sure?’
‘Hen, I might be old but I’m not wandering in my wits yet. Twenty years old, yon story. My parrot’s been dead seventeen years past.’ She shook her head. ‘Somebody’s been playing a joke on you, hen.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Allie said, pink with embarrassment and anger.
‘Don’t you be sorry, I’ve not had a laugh like this for years.’
Back in the editorial car, she’d told the driver what had happened. He’d laughed too. ‘Bloody Desmond on the desk,’ he said. ‘Stupid bastard never learns. Every Sunday, he sends one of you guys out on a Thistle story. It’s either ancient history or totally made up in the first place.’
‘How does a paper get away with that?’ Allie was still raging.
‘Different rules, Allie. It’s not a paper, the Thistle. It’s a comic.’
With that in mind, Allie showed her face in the newsroom then slunk off to the library to avoid a Thistle assignment. She buried herself in cuttings about the SNP’s recent history and the devolution debates for a couple of hours then returned upstairs to find Desmond had taken three of the other day shift reporters off to the Press Club to play snooker. His place at the newsdesk had been taken by a forty-something woman with blazing red hair and black-rimmed glasses. She looked up as Allie approached. ‘I wondered where you were hiding. You must be Allie Burns,’ she said in an accent Allie had learned to identify as ‘posh Glasgow’.
‘I am, and I wasn’t hiding. I told Desmond I was away down to the library. If he’d needed me, he knew where to find me.’
The woman twisted her mouth into a wry smile. ‘Typical bloody Desmond. Divide and conquer. I’m Fatima,’ she said. ‘Fatima McGeechan.’
Allie tried to hide her surprise at the name. She’d never seen anyone who looked less Arabic than the woman running the desk. ‘Good to meet you.’ It came out more of a question than she’d intended.
The woman sighed. ‘Let me explain two things. I’m not a Muslim, I’m a good Catholic girl. Well, a good Catholic girl gone bad, if you want to be pedantic. And pedantic is one of the many attributes a good hack should cultivate. Here’s how the story goes. My mother was desperate for a child that just wasn’t coming until she went to the shrine to Our Lady of Fatima in Johnstone and prayed there. Hence the name. And anybody who tries to shorten it to Fats – the only thing they’re going to shorten is their life expectancy. Clear?’
Bossy, then. ‘Clear.’ A pause. ‘You said, two things?’
Another sigh. ‘I’m here under protest. I’m an editor at the BBC up the road at Queen Margaret Drive. When your esteemed news editor has exhausted his list of Sunday casual desk execs, he bribes me with a double shift payment to come in and hold Desmond’s hand.’ A sardonic smile. Allie was beginning to like Fatima.
‘I suspect you earn every penny.’
‘And more besides. So what were you doing down in the library? Apart from dodging the Sunday Thistle bullet?’
Allie considered. A lie could be unravelled in a thirty-second conversation with the duty librarian, and she wouldn’t put that past ‘Don’t call me “Fats”’. So she shrugged. ‘I’ve only been back in Scotland for three and a bit months. Before that, I was in England for five years. With the devolution referendum coming up, I figured it would be helpful to get some background under my belt.’
Fatima nodded her approval. ‘Smart. Sadly for your education, I’ve got a job for you. ID just in from a fatal car crash just north of Carlisle last night.’ For a moment, Allie’s chest contracted, remembering what Danny had been up to. But relief came with Fatima’s next sentence. ‘A van driver from Kilmarnock. The word is he was taking a delivery down to Preston. It was part of what should have been on a lorry load heading south, but because of the strike … well, you get the picture. Away and talk to the grieving widow and don’t come back without a collect picture. Get an editorial car and—’ She raised her voice to attract the attention of the picture editor. ‘Get a snapper, there might be something to tug the heartstrings if they’ve got photogenic kids.’ She snorted. ‘Who am I kidding? Take a snapper anyway.’
Nobody liked a death knock. But Allie knew she was good at it. It was definitely one situation where being a woman was an advantage. Nobody felt threatened by her except when she was trying very hard to be threatening. It was also a test. Her first assignment from Angus Carlyle, the ruthless, shameless and graceless Clarion news editor, had been a quadruple death knock – four teenagers killed in a late-night car crash on the Rest and be Thankful road. Nobody expected the new girl – Cambridge graduate, training scheme product – to manage that on her first day.
Allie came back with pictures of all four, plus quotes from devastated parents and siblings. It was a quiet Sunday and it earned her a splash with her debut story. ‘You’ll do,’ Carlyle had said. Then spoilt the grudging compliment with a final two words. ‘For now.’
And so she went off to do Fatima’s bidding. Hunkered down in the passenger seat of the company Cortina, Allie went through the notes she’d made, committing the list of women’s names to her memory along with their party affiliations. Now all she had to do was figure out how to transform them into useful sources.