John Rose did the story, filed eight hundred words the following day. You had to admire his cheek.
Moir didn’t have time to brood. He was busy again with his gangland stuff. His team were preparing another splash. They were in the office more often now, the Hey You, talking strategy with Rix, working out the angles. They stayed in character, lounging on desks in their jeans and stressed leathers, popping gum and rubbing their four-day beards. They swaggered to the lift in loose
formation
. People kept out of their way, flattened themselves against corridor walls.
The heat was vicious. I was mopping my breastbone with a hankie when Moir stepped out of the lift. He was pointing right at me, grinning and wagging his finger. He bounced over, laughing, and gripped my bicep. He was pumped, his pupils as fat as a cat’s.
‘We’ve got him! Gerry, we’ve only got him!’
I buttoned my shirt.
‘Who? Maitland? When?’
‘No, Gerry. Lyons! We’ve got Peter Lyons!’
He laughed again.
‘Come here!’ He hauled me out of my seat and pulled me over to his desk.
‘Watch this.’ He commandeered a chair and pushed me into it. He drew his own chair in and tapped his space bar.
‘You ready? Watch this.’
He scrolled through some emails and found the one he wanted. He clicked on a thumbnail photo and it scaled up onto the screen. He turned the screen towards me.
A big bay window framed the shot. Two men in
conversation
over a low coffee table. The one on the left wore glasses that caught the light, but the hair and nose and the bandsman’s jawline left no doubt: it was Peter Lyons. The other had a ponytail. His glossy black shirt looked oddly familiar.
‘It’s not, is it?’
‘Our friend from the bowling alley? You got it in one. William James Torrins; racketeer, enforcer,
bad-bastard-in-chief
to our beloved Walter Maitland.’
‘And boon companion of the Minister for Justice.’
I looked at Martin. His grin just kept getting wider.
‘When was this?’
‘Yesterday evening at six o’clock.’
‘Fucking dancer! Congratulations, Martin.’
Moir looked suddenly solemn.
‘This is yours, Gerry. This is your story. You’re going to write it. You have to write it.’
I stood up. The castors squeaked as I wheeled the chair back to its proper desk.
‘Did Rix put you up to this?’
‘C’mon, Gerry.’
‘This is Rix’s idea.’ I turned to face him. ‘You never hear of a dry patch, Martin? I thought you were bigger than this. Here’s a thought: whyn’t you let me write my own stories, all right? And you write your own. How does that sound?’
‘This is your story.’ He gripped my shoulder. His smile was expansive, evangelical. ‘This is
your
story. You set it up, Gerry, you put us onto Lyons. All I did was keep my eyes open.’
‘You kept your eyes open.’
‘I did. I tailed him. Ever since Belfast I’ve been on the guy’s case. He was at Maitland’s place this morning. When he left I tailed him. I had a hunch’ – he laughed at the cop-show idiom. ‘I had a hunch and when he got to Bearsden I knew it was good. I thought he might be
headed
for the Drum but he drove right into Bearsden. I tailed him to a big villa on Roman Road and belled Gavin Doig. He took that with a long lens without leaving the car. Gerry, it’s your story.’
Four hours later the story was done. It was my story now. It had my meanness and spite salted through it. It fairly shone with crooked irony. It was full of words like ‘complicity’ and ‘clandestine’ and ‘conflict of interest’. I made no allegations but I managed to make it plain that the Justice Minister was in the gangster’s pay. I
mentioned
the famous suits, the hand-tooled brogues, the
collection
of contemporary Scottish art. I mentioned the Havana cigars. I mentioned the seventy-pound haircuts. (Last Easter Lyons’s wife had sent him for a haircut and he spent the first ten minutes of a lunch date at Ferrante’s bitching about the price.) Aspersions, hints, asides,
insinuations
: the piece was a shiny cage of gossamer threads, each of them tied to the photograph, the image that would ‘rock to its tottering base the ruling coalition and quiver the collective backbone of the Scottish legal
establishment
’. Torrins became Maitland’s
consigliere
and I catalogued (with help from Moir) the juiciest items on Maitland’s CV. I called in my contacts and lined up the quotes. I had an unnamed QC declaring that Lyons should resign. I had an unnamed cabinet colleague
intimating
the same. I had the Nationalists demanding that Parliament be recalled so that Lyons might make a
statement
to the house. ‘There may be a perfectly innocent explanation for all this,’ the QC observed in my closing par. ‘But we sure as hell need to hear it.’
The story was done. It was Friday afternoon: the desk would get it legalled tomorrow. The last thing to do was to contact Lyons and give him right of reply. I didn’t want to do it. For two years, on any given Sunday, Peter Lyons had known without opening the paper at least one of the
stories
that would go out in my name. I wanted to damage Peter Lyons, I wanted to hurt him. But more than that I wanted to surprise him. I wanted his phone to ring on Saturday midnight. I wanted his people to get him out of bed: ‘Have you seen the paper?’ I wanted to have him jump in his car and drive to an all-night garage, to stand there in the forecourt with the paper in his hands, lost to the
shouting
drunks and passing cars, the distant whine of sirens. But that could only happen if he didn’t know what was coming. I didn’t want to phone him but I knew I had to.
I had his mobile number, of course, and his home
numbers
in Glasgow and Edinburgh. But I was going to do this by the book. I checked my watch: four o’clock. What I ought to do now was phone the Government Press Office at Victoria Quay and ask for the Justice Desk. Then the Justice Desk’s director, or one of his junior POs, would take my details and contact Lyons. In an hour or so, Lyons would call back. I’d tell him what we were going to run and he’d give his comment.
That’s what I should have done. What I did instead was answer some emails, shut down my Mac and go for a walk. The sun was still warm and a nice breeze came up off the river. I slung my jacket over my shoulder and walked right into town, into the cool high canyons of the city centre, the big blocks of glass and steel and
shadowed
sandstone. I walked right up Hope Street in bright sunshine and onto Sauchiehall Street. A busker with an electric guitar and a baby amp was playing ‘Three Times a Fool’ by Otis Rush and I stopped to listen. I’d been planning to walk to the Mitchell and say hello to Doug Haddow but I cut up Rose Street to the GFT.
I sat in the GFT bar with a bottle of Beck’s. An Italian film was starting in forty minutes. I had another Beck’s and bought some chocolate raisins at the kiosk and took my seat. The film was good. It was a Mafia movie with almost no action. A stylish, well-groomed middle-aged man is living in a Swiss hotel. He doesn’t do much. He walks the corridors, takes his meals, plays cards with an elderly bankrupt couple who used to own the hotel. Sometimes he phones home, but his kids never want to talk and he has nothing to say to his wife. Mainly what he does is smoke cigarettes with ferocious, disdainful
elegance
and stare gloomily out of the window. And once a week he takes a suitcase full of money to a bank and has the tellers count the contents by hand.
Piece by piece, we learn his story. Eight years ago, the man was working as a broker. He made a catastrophic loss on the stock exchange. The money he lost belonged to the Mob. To pay them back he is living this half-life, cut off from his family, holed up in the barren luxury of a Swiss hotel, toting his valises to the bank. The Mob knows he didn’t mean to lose the money, so they haven’t killed him; but they haven’t let him live properly either. He’s in limbo, and he shows no real interest in redeeming his life until a waitress at the hotel begins to talk to him. Normally he’s rude and uncommunicative with the hotel staff but this girl gets under his guard. He falls in love. And this man, who for eight years has shown no
emotion
, no spark of volition, decides to act. He knows it’s hopeless, he knows he can’t beat the syndicate, but he acts anyway. When a pair of renegade gangsters steals one of the suitcases, he shoots them dead. But he doesn’t give the money to the Mob. He keeps it. He buys the waitress a new BMW. Finally he’s summoned to Sicily to explain himself. Modestly but resolutely he explains his position: he is keeping the money. The Mob have taken enough of his life; he is taking the money as
compensation
. The gangsters are perplexed, bewildered. In the end, irritably, almost reluctantly, they kill him.
After the movie I walked up Garnethill, past the Art School to Charing Cross. I stopped for a drink in the Arlington Bar. Further up Woodlands Road I stopped again at the Halt. In the lounge I met a guy from my old five-a-side team. I bought him a drink and he bought one back. After a while we started on the whisky and pretty soon it was shutting time. I walked home, stopping at the Philly for a fish supper.
Next morning I was fragile. It was after ten before I made it to the office. At lunchtime Martin Moir stopped by the desk.
‘What did he say then?’
‘Who, Lyons? I don’t know, I’m still waiting to hear from him.’
At ten to three Fiona Maguire came over and asked the same question.
‘I’m on it,’ I told her. ‘I’ll let you know.’
At quarter past three I went out for a smoke.
At half-past three I dialled the number.
‘Victoria Quay, Security.’
The civil servants don’t work weekends. On Saturdays the building’s normally empty apart from security
personnel
. I asked the guard to page the duty press officer. He took my name and details.
‘What’s it in respect of, Mr Conway?’
‘It’s a query for Justice,’ I told him.
‘Let me try the desk,’ he said, and then twenty seconds later: ‘There’s no answer from Justice.’
‘Maybe it’s deaf as well as blind,’ I said. Calls are logged anyway, but there was no harm making sure the guy would remember me. He said he would page the duty officer. Now I just had to sit and wait.
When you leave it this late there’s always a chance. There’s a chance that the PO doesn’t get the message. There’s a chance he can’t get a hold of the subject. That was the best case scenario. Even if Lyons did get the message, it would come too late. He’d have no time to dream up a story. I hung around for half an hour then I went to the canteen.
I lingered as long as I could over a chewy bagel and
hazelnut
latte. Back at my desk there was no blinking light on the phone. There were no new emails, nothing on the mobile. I called up the story and shined it a little.
‘Any joy?’
Maguire was back.
‘I think he’s hiding, Fiona. He’s in the bunker. I put in the call to Victoria Quay and there’s still no word.’
She lifted a snowman from my desk – a botched ceramic thing that Roddy had made in school – and turned it over in her hands.
‘We can’t run the story, Gerry. If we don’t get a comment we’re pulling it, OK?’
‘But he’s hiding, Fiona. He knows I’m looking for him.’
‘You called him when?’
‘Earlier on. This afternoon. Look, I don’t see–’
‘What time, Gerry?’
‘I don’t know. Three o’clock.’
She glanced at the base of the snowman then replaced it on my desk. She wiped her fingers lightly, and delicately sighed.
‘Stop pissing about, Gerry. Phone his mobile. Do your job.’
He answered on the sixth or seventh ring.
‘Peter, it’s me: Gerry Conway.’
‘Hold on.’ I could hear him closing a door, setting a glass on a table.
‘I’ve been trying to get a hold of you,’ I said. ‘I phoned you earlier.’
‘That’s right. You phoned Victoria Quay. At half-past three on a Saturday afternoon. I’m assuming that it couldn’t possibly relate to a story in this week’s paper or you would have phoned me long before now.’
‘Yeah, well, you assumed wrong, Peter. It’s about a story.’
‘I see. Have you stopped giving right of reply? Does Barbara Tennant know about this?’
‘I’m talking to you now, amn’t I?’
‘You certainly are. I take it you think you’ve found something in Belfast?’
‘A little nearer home, Peter. We’ve got a photo–’
‘Another photo! Jesus, Gerry, you’ve missed your
vocation
. You ought to be working in Boots. With a wee white labcoat. What is this one? A wedding party? A First Communion?’
‘It’s a more of a portrait, actually. The Minister
relaxes
. You’re entertaining at home. Your guest’s name escapes me at the moment. He’s about thirty-five, wears a ponytail. Oh yeah: he’s called William Torrins.’
Lyons said nothing. I could hear laughter in the
background
, a door swinging shut.
‘You can’t place the name? Maybe you’ve heard of his boss. Fella called Maitland? He’s nearly as famous as you.’ Lyons had forgotten to breathe. ‘You still with us, Minister?’
‘What are you doing with this, Gerry?’
‘We’re doing a story. We want you to comment.’
The breathing was back.
‘Look,’ he said finally. ‘I’m not going to comment on this just now. Hold off and I’ll talk to you next week. I’ll give you the story next week. That’s a promise.’
‘Give me it now.’
‘I can’t do that, Gerry. There’s things I need to sort out. I need to talk to people. There’s an explanation for all this. That’s all I can say. Just trust me, Gerry. Hold off for now.’
‘We’re running the story.’
‘If you’re running the story you’re running the story. But if I were you, Gerry, I would hold off.’
‘Thank you, Minister.’
I talked it through with Maguire and Rix. Maguire didn’t like it.
‘Why didn’t he phone back when you called Victoria Quay? Why’s he not demanding to see the copy? Why is Kenny fucking Wolfe not bending our ear? He’s playing us, Norman. The prick’s up to something.’