3

Barry Lennox had been editor of the Highland Chronicle for a year. He was a big man, probably muscled at one time but those had long since turned to fat, and he kept his hair in a mullet. He dressed in jeans and denim jackets and he thought he looked like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon. He didn’t. He’d been in newspapers for more than twenty years—first with the dailies, then a time with a Sunday tabloid—and Rebecca thought he’d come to the Highland Chronicle to stay out of the rain, probably in the belief that working in weekly newspapers would be easy. He’d barely deposited his widening backside in the editor’s chair when he was landed with overseeing two other weeklies in the north of Scotland, the owners in London deciding that one editor was enough for all titles on the frontier of their empire. Lennox thought he could manage, because he still believed life in the weeklies was a holiday camp compared to the cut and thrust of national journalism.

He now knew that wasn’t the case.

He looked tired and harassed and, Rebecca noted, extremely pissed off. That seemed to be his fall-back position these days. To his credit, he didn’t take his frustrations out on his staff, or rather what was left of it, for the owners’ cutbacks did not stop at editors and photographers. Profit margins had to be defended and that meant staff had to go, even though they produced the product that created the profits. There didn’t seem to be any reduction in management, Rebecca had noticed; there was always somebody new appointed to come along and tell them all how to do their jobs.

When the previous editor, a smart, tough and funny woman named Elspeth MacTaggart, had finally decided she’d had enough she fired off a stinging memo to the suits in the south outlining exactly where she thought they were going wrong and how much they were damaging not just the business but journalism as a whole. They ignored it and waved her goodbye. Lennox was her replacement.

He looked up from his computer screen as Rebecca walked into his office. ‘How did you do?’

In the car, Rebecca had scribbled the quotes on her pad before she forgot them. She read them back and saw the beginnings of a smile on his broad face.

‘Get it written up, three hundred words for page three but we’ll splash on the front. I’ll send you a box.’ He began to punch the keys again. It didn’t matter if a story called for more words or less—that was the way the designer had formed the page and that was it. Lennox would read her piece, though, and tweak it—knowing him, make it more sensational. He could also amend the page design if he had to, but that was a complicated business and, truth be told, an art he had not yet fully mastered. Only one person in the office had been adept at manoeuvring the intricacies of the page design system but he had been made redundant two months before. The new system, said management, who had never punched a key in anger, was so wonderful sub-editors were no longer needed. So the suits started to call them ‘content managers’ and that made them feel a whole lot better. Rebecca could write neat, clean copy but she had news for them—subs were needed, no matter what they called them. Barry had two content managers but one was on holiday and the other spent much of her time on Mondays and Tuesdays dealing with the various sport pages, meaning the bulk of the news fell to Barry. Hence his current mood.

‘You get a pic?’ asked Lennox.

Rebecca held up her phone. ‘Not a great one. A snapper would’ve done better.’

He shrugged that away, stared at his monitor. ‘As long as it’s in focus and we can see the woman’s face, it’ll be fine. Bung it in the system and I’ll slap it on the page.’

‘Okay,’ she said, fighting down a sigh. She’d only been in the job for three years but even she could see standards were slipping. ‘There’s something else, Barry.’

His eyes flicked a question over the top of his monitor, but he kept banging the keys.

‘I spoke to Chaz on the way back,’ said Rebecca.

‘Chaz who?’ He still wasn’t looking at her.

‘Wymark, the freelance over on the island.’

‘What island?’

Rebecca had never visited Stoirm but she called it simply ‘the island’ like a native. Her father had only ever called it that, even though he rarely mentioned his childhood home.

‘Stoirm,’ she said.

‘Right, okay,’ he said, remembering. ‘The freelance.’

Which is what she’d said. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘he’s come up with a belter of a story.’

Lennox stopped typing, gave her his full attention. ‘Okay.’

‘A woman called Mary Drummond died a couple of days ago, massive heart attack. Her son was Roddie Drummond and fifteen years ago he was tried for the murder of his girlfriend. Acquitted on a Not Proven. He’s not been on the island since, but there’s a chance he’s coming back for the funeral.’

‘Okay, get on the phone, see what you can get. Get that Chaz boy to nose about . . .’

‘There’s still a lot of bitterness over the case, Chaz says. It’s a fairly big island but Portnaseil is a small community, everyone knows each other.’ She immediately regretted using the words ‘small community’ because that translated to tiny sales. She also knew it was unlikely that everyone knew each other, but she thought the idea might strengthen her pitch somehow. ‘But I think this is bigger—prodigal returns, locals resent it. And then there’s the murder mystery, too.’

Lennox sat back, lifted a dagger-shaped letter opener he kept on his desk, even though there were very few envelopes to slit open these days, and twirled it in both hands. This was his habit whenever he wasn’t poking at the keyboard, as if his hands were so restless they simply had to do something. ‘So what you saying, Becks?’

She took a breath. ‘I think I need to be over there.’

His body language had formed ‘No’ before she’d completed her short sentence. ‘I can’t afford to send you over there,’ he said. ‘I need you here. You can do ten stories in the time it would take to get one.’

A story’s not a story unless it can be done on the phone. That was the pronouncement of one of the nimrods sent up from London to tell the staff they were doing everything wrong. It was during her first year on the job but she knew it was bollocks as soon the words came out of his mouth. The thing was, she felt even he didn’t believe it. It was merely the company line.

‘Barry . . .’ she began.

‘Becks,’ he interrupted, ‘you’re not Lois Lane and we’re not the Daily Planet. You’re not going to go over there and solve this mystery . . .’

‘I don’t expect to. I just feel I can get people to talk if I’m meeting them face-to-face. You know I’m good at that.’ A slight incline of his head told her he was forced to agree. ‘So think about this—where’s this Roddie Drummond character been for fifteen years? What’s he been doing? How does he feel about going back home after all this time, with a cloud still over his head? What happened back then? And we’ll get more than one story out of it. I promise you we’ll get a front page splash and a feature piece right off the bat. And who knows what else I’ll trip over. But I need to be there to do that. Some things you can’t do on the phone.’

He dropped the letter opener on the desk and stared at her. She heard his breath exhale as he considered her speech, which, given it was delivered off the top of her head, was a good one. She was bound to have won him over but she hit him with one final blow.

‘And we’re in on this at the beginning, Barry. It’s an exclusive. The P&J, the West Highland Free Press, The Courier, even the dailies won’t have a sniff of this. Not yet. But we need to move on it.’

She had gambled this would appeal to the old-fashioned newspaperman that she hoped still lived inside him. An exclusive. A chance to splash something that no other newspaper had. Journalistic pride. She thrilled at the possibilities. But she had another motive to get to Stoirm. One she wasn’t sharing that with her editor. It was personal.

He shook his head. ‘Can’t swing it, Becks, you know that. See what you can get on the phone. If it’s that exclusive then you don’t need to be there.’

Damn it, she thought.

He turned his attention to his monitor once again and she knew she was beaten. Disappointed, she turned away, then a new thought struck her. ‘Did you hear from Yvonne?’ Yvonne Adams, the only other journalist on the Chronicle team now. She was at court for Greg Pullman’s sentencing.

Lennox didn’t look up from the monitor. ‘He got ten years, banned from driving and a ten grand fine.’

Rebecca left his office, smiling. That was something, at least.

* * *

Her mobile beeped just as she was putting the finishing touches to the Maeve Gallagher piece. She had gone straight for the heart, as befitted the story. Even so, she didn’t fool herself that this was news. In university she’d been taught the adage, attributed to some long dead press baron, that the news was something that someone, somewhere, didn’t want printed. Everything else was advertising. It could be argued, she supposed, that Greg Pullman wouldn’t want this printed, but he had other things on his mind now. What it boiled down to was voyeurism. As much as she sympathised with the bereaved mother, this was a chance for the reader to enjoy someone else’s pain. Rebecca knew she was being hard on readers but that was the way it was. And yet, she provided the suds for this particular soap opera. She did her job because that was what she was paid for, it was what she was good at, but stories like this were not what drew her into journalism.

She scanned her words as she answered her mobile without checking the caller display. Her heart sank when she heard Simon’s voice.

‘It’s me.’

She contemplated simply disconnecting, but she didn’t. She couldn’t be that hard, even though she’d made it clear to Simon that it was over.

‘Becks?’

‘I’m here.’ Her voice sounded strained, even to her.

‘I was wondering if you were free for a coffee, or lunch. Or something.’

‘Kind of busy, Simon. Working.’

‘Right.’ He sounded deflated and she thought to herself, what did he expect? ‘Yeah, sure, but . . . well . . . I was in the area and I just thought . . . well . . .’

Rebecca looked around to ensure no one else was listening. Who would be, though? Yvonne was still out, Barry was hunched over his screen in his office, the reporters on the other titles, two per paper, were busy, the sole content manager was at the table at the far side making herself a coffee while the advertising department was based in another room.

‘Simon, look—it’s not a good idea, okay? You can’t keep calling me.’

‘I know, it’s just . . .’

‘No,’ she said, firmer than she meant it, so she deliberately softened her voice. ‘This has to stop. You know it has to stop.’

‘Becks, you know how I feel. You know I . . .’

Don’t say it, she thought.

‘Love you.’

And he says it.

‘I can’t let things just end, Becks.’

‘But they have ended, Simon.’

‘Maybe for you.’

‘Yes, maybe for me, but that’s still an ending.’

There was a pause ‘It wasn’t my fault, Becks. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.’

She could hear his voice beginning to waver and she couldn’t take it. She knew what had happened wasn’t his fault. She knew it wasn’t hers, either. It had simply happened. She certainly didn’t blame him but afterwards she had come to realise there was nothing between them. As the saying went, it wasn’t him, it was her. She didn’t know what she was looking for but she knew Simon wasn’t it. Not now.

She didn’t say any of that, though.

‘Simon, please, let it go. There’s nothing to be said. Sorry, but I’m under the gun here. I’ve got to get back to work.’

She hung up. She felt bad, but she couldn’t get into that discussion again. It had been six months since it had happened. She’d tried not to think about it too much, but his voice always brought it back and she couldn’t have that, not here, not in the office. She moved to the window and looked down into the street, scanned the cars parked on either side. Yup, there it was. Simon’s blue Audi. Simon was a solicitor based in Dingwall. It was possible he was down in Inverness at court but he had no reason to be out in the industrial units where the Chronicle had its office.

She leaned against the wall beside the window and closed her eyes, blocking the memories. She hoped this wasn’t going to be a problem. She couldn’t let it become one.