I looked at my father’s watch again.
Cannon arguing the toss with Hadden over bloody Dawson-gate, crap that no-one but Barry gave a fuck about or wanted to read, while downstairs Jack fucking Whitehead wrote up the biggest story of the bloody year.
A story everyone wanted to read.
My story.
Suddenly the door opened and out came Barry Cannon smiling. He closed the door softly behind him and winked at me. “You owe me.”
I opened my mouth but he put a finger to his lips and was away down the corridor, whistling.
The door opened again. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Come in,” said Hadden in his shirtsleeves, the skin beneath his silver beard shining red.
I followed him inside, closing the door and taking a seat. “You wanted to see me?”
Bill Hadden sat down behind his desk and smiled like Father bloody Christmas. “I wanted to make sure there was no bad feeling over this afternoon.” He held up a copy of the Sunday Post to emphasise his point.
MURDERED.
I glanced at the thick black bold headline and then stared at the byline beneath, thicker, blacker, and bolder stilclass="underline"
BY JACK WHITEHEAD, CRIME REPORTER OF THE YEAR.
“Bad feeling?” I said, unable to tell if I was being goaded or placated, hounded or hugged.
“Well I hope you don’t feel that you were in any way bumped off the story.” Hadden’s smile was somewhat wan.
I felt totally fucking paranoid, like Barry had left all his own paranoia dripping off the bleeding walls of the office. I had no idea why we were having this conversation.
“So I’m off the story?”
“No. Not at all.”
“I see. But then I don’t understand what happened this afternoon.”
Hadden wasn’t smiling. “You weren’t about.”
“Kathryn Taylor knew where I was.”
“You couldn’t be reached. So I sent Jack.”
“I understand that. So now it’s Jack’s story?”
Hadden started smiling again. “No. You’ll be covering it together. Don’t forget, Jack was this paper’s…”
“North of England Crime Correspondent for twenty years. I know. He tells me every other bloody day.” I felt sunk with despair and dread.
Hadden stood up, looking out over a black Leeds, his back to me. “Well, perhaps you ought to listen more carefully to what Jack has to say.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, after all, Jack has developed an excellent working relationship with a certain Detective Chief Superintendent.”
Riled, I said, “Well, maybe we should have done with it and just make Jack the bloody editor while we’re at it.”
Hadden turned back from the window and smiled, almost letting it go. “Doesn’t sound like you’re managing to form very many healthy relationships, does it?”
My chest was tight and thumping. “George Oldman’s spoken with you?”
“No. But Jack has.”
“I see. That’s that then,” I said, feeling less in the dark, more in the cold.
Hadden sat back down. “Look, let’s just forget about it. It’s as much my fault as anyone’s. I have a number of other things I want you to follow up.”
“But…”
Hadden held up his hand. “Look, I think we’d both agree that your little theory seems to have been somewhat disproved by the events of today so…”
Farewell Jeanette. Farewell Susan.
I mumbled, “But…”
“Please,” smiled Hadden, his hand back up. “We can drop the missing angle.”
“I agree. But what about this?” I said, pointing at the headline on his desk. “What about Clare?”
Hadden was shaking his head, staring at his paper. “Appalling.”
I nodded, knowing I’d lost.
He said, “But it’s Christmas and it’ll either be solved tomorrow or never. Either way it’s going to die a death.”
“Die a death?”
“So we’ll let Jack handle it for the most part.”
“But…”
Hadden’s smile was fading. “Anyway, I have a couple of other things for you. Tomorrow, as a favour to me, I want you to go out to Castleford with Barry Cannon.”
“Castleford?” My stomach hollow, my feet searching for the floor, unable to fathom the depth.
“Barry’s got this notion that Marjorie Dawson, John Dawson’s wife, will actually see him and provide him with corroboration on everything he’s dug up on her husband. I think it’s somewhat unlikely, given the woman’s mental history, but he’ll go anyway. So I’ve asked him to take you along.”
I said, “Why me?” Playing it dumber than dumb, thinking Barry was right and just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you don’t have every bloody reason to be.
“Well, if it ever did come to anything there would be arrests and prosecutions and what-have-you and you, as this paper’s North of England Crime Correspondent,” smiled Hadden. “You would obviously be up to your neck in it. And, as a favour to me, I want you to make sure that Barry doesn’t go off the bloody deep end.”
“The deep end?”
Hadden looked at his watch and sighed, “What do you know about what Barry’s been doing?”
“Dawsongate? Just what everyone knows, I suppose.”
“And what do you think? Just between you and me?” He was leading me, but I’d no idea where we were going or why.
I let myself be led. “Between you and me? I think there’s definitely a story there. I just think it’s more up Construction Weekly’s street than ours.”
“Then we think alike,” grinned Hadden, picking up a thick manila envelope and handing it across the desk to me. “This is all the work that Barry’s done so far and submitted to the legal department.”
“The legal department?” I felt like fucking Polly the bleeding Parrot.
“Yeah. And, frankly, the legal boys reckon we’d be lucky to print one single bloody sentence of it.”
“Right.”
“I don’t expect you to read it all, but Barry doesn’t tolerate fools so…”
“I see,” I said, patting the fat envelope on my knee, eager to please if it meant…
“And finally, while you’re out that way, I want you to do another piece on the Ratcatcher.”
Fuck.
“Another piece?” New depths, my heart on the floor.
“Very popular. Your best piece. Lots of letters. And now that neighbour…”
“Mrs Sheard?” I said, against my will.
“Yep, that’s her. Mrs Enid Sheard. She phoned and said she wants to talk.”
“For a price.”
Hadden was frowning. “Yeah.”
“Miserable bitch.”
Hadden looked mildly annoyed, but pressed on. “So I thought, after you’ve been over to Castleford, you could pop in and see her. It’d be just right for Tuesday’s supplement.”
“Yeah. OK. But, I’m sorry, but what about Clare Kemplay?” It came from despair and the pit of my belly, from a man seeing only building sites and rats.
Bill Hadden looked momentarily taken aback by the pitiful whine of my question, before he remembered to stand up and say, “Don’t worry. As I say, Jack’11 hold the fort and he’s promised me he’ll work as a team with you. Just talk to him.”
“He hates my guts,” I said, refusing to move or hum along.
“Jack Whitehead hates everybody,” said Bill Hadden, opening the door.
Saturday teatime, downstairs the office thankfully quiet, merci fully devoid of Jack fucking Whitehead, the Sunday Post already in bed.
Leeds United must have won, but I didn’t give a fuck.
I’d lost.
“Have you seen Jack?”
Kathryn alone at her desk, waiting. “He’ll be at Pinderfields won’t he? For the post-mortem?”
“Fuck.” The story gone, visions of waves upon waves of more and more rats scurrying across mile upon mile of building sites.
I slumped down at my desk.
Someone had left a copy of the Sunday Post on top of my typewriter. It didn’t take Frank fucking Cannon to work out who.