Monday was dreary outside and inside the newsroom. The prime minister had flown back from a conference in the Caribbean, tanned and in denial about any crisis back home. He probably hadn’t noticed the weather either, Allie thought as she struggled to cover the aftermath of the New Year blizzards. The big freeze followed by the thaw spelled misery for millions. Well, it was more like thousands, but the alliteration of ‘millions’ read better. Official statements claimed it had landed Scotland with a £10 million bill. Dozens of homes were uninhabitable because of burst pipes, and the temperatures were plummeting again. Although it was a guaranteed page lead, putting it together meant she had to endure deskbound tedium and endless phone calls. No chance to pursue anything of her own, and no Danny Sullivan till the next day.
Back home, she heated up some soup from the freezer and tried to distract herself with the TV. Blake’s 7, and Strangers, Don Henderson playing the idiosyncratic Detective Sergeant Bulman with his gloves, his inhaler and his habit of taking the bus to crime scenes. Allie would be the first to agree she hadn’t spent a huge amount of time with coppers, but she’d never come across one remotely like Bulman. Between him and Laidlaw, she was forcibly reminded of the gap between fiction and reality when it came to the investigation of crime. How much more interesting her professional life would be if it imitated art more closely, she thought.
In spite of the gas fire, the living room was growing chilly, so she headed for bed with The Women’s Room, another second-hand find. Somehow, it lacked the grip that Laidlaw had exerted and it fell from her hand as sleep overtook her.
By the time she woke next morning, Danny Sullivan was already at his typewriter on the other side of the city, making a final fair copy of his notes from Southampton. Even after a solid nine hours’ sleep he still felt drained, but he was determined to have his story straight for Peter McGovern. And even more importantly, for Allie. She’d be the one sprinkling it with stardust, after all. He couldn’t explain why, but he wanted to impress her with his achievement, even if it needed her polish to make the best impression.
The past few days had been gruelling. The interview with Bill Maclay had demanded focus and concentration as well as the energy it took to maintain a false front. He hadn’t realised how much it had taken out of him till somewhere south of Birmingham, he’d been overwhelmed with the urge to sleep. He’d ended up in an anonymous chain hotel in a Black Country town whose name he couldn’t recall till he checked the receipt. Danny forced himself to drive the rest of the way back on Saturday, his aching body protesting at two nights in terrible beds and two days cramped in a car seat. The driving conditions were still atrocious, and he’d never been happier to make it home.
The ordeal hadn’t finished there, though. He still had to get through the ritual Sunday family meal, knowing what he knew now about his brother. Danny had fidgeted throughout the train journey to Edinburgh, unable to settle, dreading the possibility that somehow his fishing expedition to Southampton had been uncovered. But his fretting had been in vain. It was just like any other Sunday. Joseph self-important, boasting that the weather hadn’t prevented him travelling down south to service his wealthy client. Danny struggled to maintain his composure. But nobody noticed anything amiss, apart from his mother taking offence at his refusal of second helpings of apple sponge and custard. ‘I was out for my tea last night,’ Danny lied. ‘Ate too much curry.’
He’d tried to make an early getaway, but his father had insisted they play cards. He loved Solo, and it was a game that required four players. The afternoon trickled away and by the time they’d finished, Danny was ninepence poorer and the snow had started again. His heart sank as he took in the thick flakes cascading past the window. The road outside was blanketed once more, the scarce traffic crawling and sliding along. A bus attempting to stop slithered sideways and came to a stop at an angle, blocking most of the road. ‘You’re not going out in that,’ his mother proclaimed. ‘Your bed’s made up, you can stay over till morning.’
There were times when argument was futile and this was clearly one of them. Mrs Sullivan made a mound of sandwiches from the leftover roast lamb they’d had for lunch and they munched their way through them as they slumped in front of the TV. Joseph sprawled in his chair, working his way through a few cans of lager, never pausing for long between sardonic comments about plots, presenters and pundits. ‘I can’t believe you spend your life running after stupid wee stories about the likes of her,’ he said, pointing at a Scottish actress. ‘She couldn’t act her way out of a puddle.’
‘At least I’m not some rich man’s lackey, running about at their beck and call in a blizzard,’ Danny muttered.
Joseph scoffed. ‘I’m nobody’s lackey. What I do, it’s a vital role in the lives of powerful men.’
‘Aye, right.’
‘Stop bickering like bairns,’ his mother ordered. ‘I’m watching this. You’re not too old to be sent to your beds.’
Joseph and his father chuckled. And everyone settled down again till the next needle. Now Danny was confident he hadn’t been rumbled – or, if he had, his brother didn’t know yet – his anxiety levels had dropped, only to be replaced by a simmering outrage this his brother had the nerve to sit there, lording it over them all, when he was up to his neck in a criminal conspiracy. It took an effort of will to be civil. As soon as he could reasonably get out of the stifling family embrace, Danny announced he was heading for bed. ‘Busy week ahead,’ he said.
Joseph grinned. ‘Really? Ambulances to chase, panic buying to report?’
‘Your brother does an important job,’ their father said. ‘There’s more worthwhile things in life than helping rich folk get richer, Joseph. Working people deserve to be told what’s going on around them. Wrapping it up in daft wee stories is what Danny has to do to get folk’s attention to the stuff that matters. Right, Danny?’
‘That’s about the size of it.’ Grateful for his father’s intervention, he’d escaped to the small, chilly bedroom where he’d grown up. The piles of Superman and Batman comics remained under the bed, arranged in date order, all in mint condition. They’d been Danny’s escape from the humdrum as a boy; he still flicked through them when he spent a night in the family home. His mother had often threatened to give them away, but she’d eventually recognised how serious her son had been when he insisted that deciding their fate was his decision alone. Now, to calm himself and escape the tension that had been gripping him all day, he fished out a sheaf of Dennis O’Neil’s issues from the early 1970s. The idea of Batman as an obsessive righter of wrongs, confronting killers who murdered without compunction was a potent reminder of the kind of journalist he wanted to be.
As he knocked his notes into shape, he was fired up again by his determination to make the world a fairer place. He sensed that same sense of purpose in Allie Burns and hoped he was right. Soon he’d know for sure.
Allie was already at her desk with a carton of coffee and her first cigarette of the day when Danny arrived. Deliberately casual – for she knew better than to offer ammunition to gossip or malice – she greeted him as he passed behind her on the way to his own place. ‘Good weekend?’ Casual, as if she didn’t care one way or another.
‘Not bad,’ he replied, equally nonchalant.
They kept their distance till the morning news conference drew all the executives away from their seats round the H-shaped central desks, then Danny crossed behind Allie and leaned over, pointing to something with absolutely no relevance on the newspaper she had open in front of her. ‘Library, in five,’ he muttered.
She found him alone in the reference room. The librarians also knew the time of the news conference and invariably sneaked off to the canteen for a mid-morning snack. ‘How did it go?’ Allie demanded, perching on a table.
Danny leaned against the shelves, arms folded across his chest. ‘Honestly? It’s hard to see how it could have gone better. I got in to see the boss right away and he totally fell for my cover story. I made a wee change to my original plan – I dropped my brother’s name, because I knew he’d be in transit and Maclay couldn’t call him to check. I followed it up, dead casually, with the name of the December guy on Joseph’s list and that was the Open Sesame.’
‘He told you how it works?’
Danny nodded, losing the struggle to stay cool with a cheek-stretching grin. ‘The whole thing. Just like I’d worked out. There’s a minimum investment of a hundred grand. The so-called investors buy a yacht, cash on the nail. A crew sails it to Nassau, no questions asked. Jespersen’s sell the boat and the payment goes into a brand-new numbered account in a Nassau bank that has no obligation to tell the UK taxman anything. Presumably Paragon takes a slice off the top. Then Maclays take a ten per cent commission. The investor pays the crew directly, in cash again. Jespersen’s take another ten per cent when they sell it on. So instead of paying the taxman eighty-three per cent of those cash bonuses, they probably only lose around a quarter. And it’s all completely illegal.’
‘That’s an amazing story, Danny. You’ve done a brilliant job. What a bunch of greedy bastards.’
‘I doubt that’s how they see it. Clever bastards, that’s how they’ll think of themselves.’
‘Not clever enough, it turns out.’
‘Serves them right for trusting my crooked brother.’ Danny looked away, his glee momentarily wiped away.
‘You’ll have to protect him when you write it, though?’
Danny groaned. ‘I’m starting to think he doesn’t deserve protection.’
‘Is that why you dropped his name into the interview? Even though you said you wouldn’t?’
‘No, I told you. I realised if I relied on the name of a previous client alone, Maclay could blow me out with one phone call and that would alert all of them to cover their tracks somehow. I did it really casually. “Some guy called Sullivan,” I said, and just motored straight on.’
Allie shook her head. ‘I hope that’s good enough. I can’t help thinking of your family, Danny. You told me just last week how close you all are, how well you all get along. If Joseph is as much of a smoothie as you say, he’ll find a way to make this all your fault. He won’t be the outcast. You will.’
He made a fist and punched one hand into the palm of the other. ‘I don’t care for myself. But I don’t want to hurt my mum and dad. Joseph’s adopted, did I tell you that?’
Allie shook her head.
‘They thought they couldn’t have kids, so they adopted him. And then I came along.’ He laughed without warmth. ‘The original miracle baby. They’ve bent over backwards all his life to make him feel like he was the one they really wanted. It’d break their hearts to see him disgraced. And yeah, you’re right. I’d be the one to catch the blame.’
‘So can you find a way to do it? To keep Joseph’s name out of it?’
Danny scowled. ‘I was thinking about it all the way back from Southampton. I can put Joseph’s boss front and centre.’
‘You think that’ll work? What about the byline? Presumably he’s Joseph Sullivan?’
Danny shrugged. ‘Chances are, either his boss or someone else in Paragon will put two and two together when they see the byline.’
‘And they’re not going to believe him when he says it’s just a coincidence.’ Allie could see her arguments were making Danny uncomfortable, but she suspected things were going to get a lot more uncomfortable for him if he paid her no heed.
Now there was a stubborn cast to his jaw that she’d not seen before. ‘He’ll maybe get the bullet, but I know Joseph. He’ll not carry the can inside the family. Or when he goes looking for another job. He’ll find a way to argue his innocence. Make out that when he found out what was going on, he came to me. He’ll find some lie to keep his nose clean.’
Allie reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘At least you can leave his name out, though. It’s not like you’re weakening the story. Just giving it a wee tweak.’
Before he could say more, they heard voices and one of the librarians walked into the reference room. ‘Oh, love-birds,’ he teased.
Allie drew her hand back as if Danny was a sheet of flame. ‘Is that the best you can do?’ Her voice was a tease. ‘I see why you’re down here and not up on the editorial floor.’
That earned a genial laugh, at least. ‘Conference is out,’ the librarian said.
Danny pushed off from the shelves and made for the door. ‘See youse,’ he muttered on his way out. Allie followed, but slowly. It wouldn’t do to return to the newsroom hot on Danny’s heels. Bad enough that the librarian had teased her. She’d have to talk to Danny again about Joseph. Just not somewhere with prying eyes and flapping ears.
To fill a few minutes, she picked up a paper. The Scottish National Party had formed an unlikely alliance with maverick Labour MP Tam Dalyell to shout down demands by Scots living abroad, and others of Scots descent, to have a vote in the upcoming devolution referendum. They insisted that only ‘full-blooded Scots’ should be entitled to vote. ‘Jeez,’ Allie muttered. Five years away, and this was the country she’d come back to?
On the other hand, there might be something in it for her. Allie tucked it away in a corner of her mind to follow up when she had the chance. Those politically connected women Rona had talked about might have something to say about ‘full-blooded Scots’.