Saturday drifted past in a pleasantly lazy way. Allie slept late enough to avoid a hangover. A couple of letters had arrived from friends; Marcus from the training scheme, now working as a features subeditor in Birmingham, and Jen, her final year tutorial partner from Cambridge, now close to finishing a masters at Bryn Mawr. She read them over her first cup of coffee then luxuriated in a long slow bath, cracking open the new John Le Carré. The Honourable Schoolboy was the sequel to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which had fascinated Allie with its glimpses of the secret world of covert intelligence. She’d been looking forward to the paperback for months.
The phone had dragged her resentfully out of the bath a little after two. ‘It’s me, Danny,’ he said. ‘The cops just finished with me. For now, apparently. They’re not very happy with us doing their job for them.’
Allie scoffed. ‘They should be giving us a commendation.’
‘What? For making them look stupid? Don’t hold your breath. Anyway, I wanted to let you know I’m not behind bars.’
‘Have they tracked down Roddy Farquhar?’
‘If they have, they’ve not told me.’
‘You don’t think that’s suspicious? The one person who could point the finger at Torrance is nowhere to be found?’
‘Of course it’s suspicious.’
‘You don’t think Torrance has … disappeared him?’
Danny scoffed. ‘What have you been smoking, Allie? I think he’s warned him off, not bumped him off. Probably helped him to drop out of sight, but no more than that.’
‘All the same … Farquhar’s the only one who could drop Torrance in the shit, and suddenly he’s out of the picture.’
‘I’m with you, I don’t think there’s any doubt that Torrance tipped off Farquhar, but there’s nothing we can do about that. If we accuse Torrance, we’d have to unspool to how I knew about their connection. And I can’t do that, Allie.’
‘I know.’ All the same, part of her wanted to find a way to expose the underhand dealing of the Special Branch man. And to show Carlyle that Wee Gordon Beattie’s relationship with his contacts sometimes involved him supping a little too heartily with the devil. If she and Danny were running investigations at the Clarion, they’d find a different way to the truth. What was the point of uncovering corruption if you were as corrupt as those you were exposing?
Danny interrupted her train of thought. ‘You still on for tomorrow?’
‘Looking forward to it.’
‘I’ll away to Presto and get the messages, then. See you tomorrow.’
There was much more she wanted to ask, but it could wait for tomorrow. She picked up her book again and as she returned to the secret world, she realised with a jolt how indiscreet she’d been with Danny. Given what she’d been reading, she couldn’t help wondering whether the police had their phones tapped. Had that been the click of a listening device she’d heard, or just the usual crap GPO line? Allie gave a scornful little laugh. Who did she think she was?
Bath over, she dressed and made herself scrambled eggs with a couple of fried potato scones and carried on reading at the kitchen table. She was disturbed again by the phone; her parents had seen the story and in their awkward way wanted to congratulate her. Her mother, of course, was anxious about the people she was mixing with. Her father was more straightforwardly pleased. All told, it was an easier conversation than they usually managed. Maybe they were coming round to the idea of her working for the Clarion.
Afterwards, she went through to the living room and put on Parallel Lines. She spent the afternoon writing letters to friends because today she had something to shout about. Into every envelope, she folded the relevant pages of the Clarion. The reporters she’d trained with in Newcastle would understand what had gone into copper-bottoming a story this intense, and envy her the opportunity to shine. Supersub Marcus would think about how he’d have arranged the material differently. Jen and her other friends from Cambridge days might even be impressed, though she knew that they secretly thought her new employer was decidedly infra dig.
Allie had almost finished the last letter when the phone rang again. Hoping it wasn’t the office, she answered with a cautious, ‘Yes?’
‘Hey, Scoop! It’s me, Rona. I know you’ll have heard this half a million times already, but you are a wee star. Great job, girl!’
Allie chuckled. ‘Takes one to know one.’
‘Shut up with the false modesty. I’ve never ever done stories like this. The nearest I’ve come to putting my life in danger is giving a fashion designer a lukewarm review. But I tell you, you’re not just taking on the bad guys, you’re making some serious political enemies too. I don’t think those nice lassies you made pals with at the SNP meeting are going to be inviting you to their next hen night.’ Rona hooted with laughter.
‘Come on, be fair. I made it clear that these bams were nothing to do with the SNP. There’s even a quote from their press officer expressing their horror and outrage.’
Another throaty laugh. ‘Two pars, right at the end. They’ll not be happy with anything less than an intro that went something like, “SNP leaders denied last night that they had ever heard of the conspiracy to bomb Scotland into independence.” No, Allie, you’re well and truly screwed with the Nats.’
‘Into every life, a little rain must fall, Rona.’
‘Watch out, Allie. When they rule the world, you’ll not be getting any of Scotland’s oil. Anyway, I’ll not keep you, I just wanted to congratulate you.’
‘Thanks, I appreciate it. Do you want to do lunch one day next week? I’ll be back on the rota on Monday, starting with the day shift.’
A momentary pause, then Rona said, ‘What about dinner instead? You know you can never predict what you’ll be doing on the day shift.’
She had a point. ‘Fair enough. I think my diary’s clear, since I’ll not be going to any SNP meetings.’
They settled on Wednesday, and Allie went back to her letter-writing. A brisk walk to the pillar box and back to her flat. Some people might consider a Saturday night alone on the sofa with a good book and a box of chocolates to be pretty pitiful. After the week she’d had, Allie thought it was pretty close to paradise.
And besides, it was the first chance she’d had to think about what Danny had told her about Rona’s sexuality. She’d encountered lesbians before, but none of them had become close friends. She recognised how quickly she’d warmed to Rona and that she wanted them to be friends. But would the ground between them shift now she’d learned about such an important aspect of Rona’s life?
When she woke up next morning, the buzz in Allie’s blood had stilled. Anticlimax had kicked in, and she didn’t have the faintest inkling of the next project that would release her from the tyranny of whatever the newsdesk thought she should be doing. Rona’s tip about the pregnant football referee might grant her a day’s grace, but it wasn’t going to reinforce the marker that the terrorist story had put down.
News of the arrests of Malloch and Bell and of four Irish suspects had made all of the Scottish Sunday papers. Even the Sunday Thistle had given it a few paragraphs. There were hints of a terror plot, but the rules governing what could be reported following an arrest meant the stories read as if written in code. When the two men were charged, there would be another trickle of information, but the major coverage wouldn’t come till the trial, and that was months away.
Hopefully Danny would raise her spirits. Together they might even come up with a story idea. Surely there must be some thread they could pull to unravel a story that would get them back on the front page?
Allie decided to take a cab over to Danny’s. It wasn’t that she wanted to drink much. But she was fed up of wrestling the heavy steering of the Morris Minor through icy streets. Sitting in the back of the lumbering taxi, she was grateful not to be peering through a blurred windscreen at the sleet. She hurried from the warmth of the taxi into the welcome shelter of the close.
She rang Danny’s doorbell and waited. And waited. She rang again, lips pursed. He must have forgotten some key ingredient and popped out to the shop. Already she could feel the cold from the stone stairs creeping into her feet. This was ridiculous. If she hung about on the landing, she’d be chilled to the bone in no time. Danny wouldn’t mind if she let herself in; she’d done it once before, after all.
She pushed the letterbox open and reached inside for the key. There was no welcoming aroma of roasting chicken, but then, the inner door was still closed. She pulled out the key and unlocked the tall wooden door. She stepped into the tiny vestibule and closed the outside door behind her, careful to pull the key back in.
Allie opened the half-glazed door that led into the hall. Definitely no cooking smells. Had he forgotten their arrangement? Had he gone out partying and not come home? When it came down to it, what did she really know about Danny’s lifestyle?
The living room door was ajar and she could see the light was on. Not surprising on a grey Glasgow day, but she couldn’t imagine Danny going out for the evening and leaving the light on. Was he crashed out on one of his big black sofas after a heavy night? Allie pushed the living room door further open and walked in.
Shock saved her from understanding what she was looking at. Her brain had to unpick it in slow motion. The black-and-white room, that connected to her memory. The black onyx candlestick snagged at the corner of her mind. Out of place, that was the problem.
And the figure sprawled on the black-and-white rug … that didn’t fit at all. It was even more wrong.
But none of it was as profoundly wrong as the dark red stain that spread in a congealed puddle round the head of the dead body lying in the middle of Danny Sullivan’s living room.