The lot of a journalist — aside from the long hours and terrible pay — was the balance between loyalty to her sources and loyalty to her job.
Suzanne Corrigan had been updated by DS Wendy Knight about the investigation, but on the strict proviso that none of it was to even be hinted at in the newspapers.
Wendy had told Suzanne some incomplete details in order to test the water. She trusted Suzanne as a source of information following receipt of the Dear Boss letter. Of course, they’d had to probe her whereabouts on the nights of the murders and investigate her background in order to work out why she of all people had received the letter. Put simply, Suzanne Corrigan was not a person under suspicion, and Wendy now wanted to use this opening to foster more positive relations with at least one member of the local press.
It was all about give and take. Suzanne had provided them with a vital piece of evidence and Wendy would keep her in the loop as to what was going on. As soon as something was publishable, Suzanne would have the scoop. In the meantime, she’d had to report only the bare bones, with the police careful not to release any details which would have allowed anyone to draw the obvious links between the killings. The fact that the same person could be responsible for more than one — or all — of them was pretty much accepted as public knowledge, and it had hit the sweet spot between raising awareness and limiting hysteria.
For Suzanne, the decision was gut-wrenching. She knew that this story would easily be the biggest local news story of the year, if not the decade, and would also make for huge national news. She thought back to the press scramble over the Yorkshire Ripper, Harold Shipman and the Ipswich murders and realised that she had an enormous opportunity to break one of the biggest crime stories of all time. A madman terrorising a small English town by recreating the murders of Jack the Ripper? It was pure gold.
Running with the story would, without doubt, completely destroy her relationship with the police. She might get a big payday from the paper, who’d make a mint by selling the story up to the nationals, but it would almost certainly be the last crime story she worked on locally.
All her journalistic instincts told her to go for it, but there was something stopping her. She knew from previous stories on the paper what Wendy Knight had been through, and the focused, confident Detective Sergeant had inspired her. Although quick fixes and riches were one thing, there was no substitute for doing the right thing.
From a purely selfish point of view, she also suspected that this was some sort of test. Perhaps they were trying to see how trustworthy she was, in order that she could be trusted with even bigger stories in future. After all, who knew what went on behind closed doors? A fleeting thought crossed her mind — only for a moment — that they might even be feeding her scraps of false information to try and trace leaks. She knew plenty of colleagues who’d been caught out that way.
When she’d joined the Mildenheath Gazette, Suzanne had had the pleasure of working briefly with Don Norman, a veteran journalist who’d enjoyed a long and fruitful career on the local newspaper and had even had a brief foray into radio and television journalism. He’d told her to always remember what her values and belief systems were before she ever first set foot in a newspaper office. That way, he said, she’d always be true to herself.
It was those words that rung loudly in her ears now as she convinced herself that the urge to take the money and run just wasn’t her. It was something that had wormed its way in and instilled itself in her purely by being surrounded by this culture of dirty journalism.
Suzanne wanted to do things differently. She knew that trust and honour went a long way — much further than many other journalists realised or appreciated — and she was certain that she could carve her way with honesty and respect.
It was a classic psychological battle. She recalled seeing an experiment on an episode of Horizon one time, in which young children were offered a bag of sweets right that second or the opportunity to wait ten minutes and get two bags of sweets. The overwhelming majority went for instant gratification. The understanding of delayed rewards was something that only came with maturity, and she chuckled at the realisation that many of her colleagues were no more psychologically advanced than the four-year-olds on TV.
One other thing Suzanne Corrigan knew that her colleagues didn’t was that tomorrow was going to be one of the biggest days in the history of crime in the UK.