The car park was a dirty stretch of ground, not even flattened for the cars. It was concreted over near the building but here, on the far fringes, the ground was potholed and dusty. A city tenement had been pulled down here, a long time ago, whether because of a German bomb or general decay she didn’t know. The pavement was the only part still standing, a ring fence around the empty space. Cars were clustered up near the front of the building, more now than there used to be. A cab rank had been set up at one end, near the road into town, because the paper’s budget had been cut back dramatically and the first thing to go was the pool of cars with staff drivers idling by the front door.
She walked carefully along the pavement, moving at a normal pace, hoping not to be seen. Upstairs the early shift would still be on, the final few pages being set and finished. All it would take was for Bunty or the Monkey to glance out of the window and spot her and she’d be dragged upstairs again, made to write an article about a fictitious visit to Callum. They’d be desperate for any copy about him now. His shoe size would command a front-page lead.
Level with her car, she left the pavement and crossed the dusty ground towards it. She had parked in the same spot this morning as she had been in the other night, when she left Mary Ann smoking fluently in the car. Mary Ann smoking, upset about a boyfriend. It jarred, not just because she was a nun, but because she was a child to them all. Not just a child of the Church but of all the Meehans, and it wasn’t to her benefit but to theirs. She was a token of their childhood, a nostalgic reminder of how they were.
Both the Press Bar doors were open to the summer night and a warble of chat and the chink of glasses sounded warm and friendly. Paddy would have loved to be in there, trouble free, gossiping and having a laugh among her own.
She smiled at the thought as she drew level with the car and stopped, her toes kicking up brown dust from the dry ground. The boot had been broken into, the entire lock drilled out, leaving a gaping black hole thick as a man’s thumb in the carcass of the car.
Reaching forward, she put her finger into the hole and lifted the boot. It opened lightly, the spring mechanism taking the weight after her initial pull. A plastic bag with dry cleaning she had yet to hand in was there, one of Pete’s footballs and a pair of his trainers were there, and a squashed box for apples that she had used to take some frozen shopping to her mother’s was there too, but Terry’s portfolio was gone. His photographs were gone; his notebook full of shorthand that he had tucked protectively into the spine was gone too.
A breeze picked up, swirling grainy dust around her bare ankles. She stared into the messy boot. It was the photographs they wanted, and she knew completely, whatever Knox or Aoife said, that it was McBree. She rummaged in her handbag. The photocopies were in there. They weren’t very good, she didn’t have a proper picture of the woman anymore, but she did have a photo of McBree standing at the door of the car facing a fat man in a dark suit. This story could be huge.
She shut the boot and walked over to the News building, pulling open the fire exit door and jogging purposefully up the stairs.
II
Her entrance to the newsroom elicited a small cheer from those who could remember back to the morning’s drama, but the look on Paddy’s face killed the joy stone dead. The lights were on in Bunty’s cubicle.
She knocked once and opened the door, to find Bunty and the Monkey relaxing at the far end of the table, eating poached salmon sandwiches and drinking half-pints of beer in Press Bar glasses. Bunty retracted his feet from the conference table when he saw it was her, rearranging his face to denote managerial fury.
She held a hand up and took a deep breath. “I lied. I wasn’t visiting Ogilvy, I didn’t even meet him. I was waiting in the car while Sean went in, keeping an eye out for journalists.”
She waited for a moment, steeling herself against a gale of shouting, but none came. She carried on:
“There’s a story, a much, much bigger story going on. It’s a keynote story and I’ve come to you with it because I haven’t got a fucking clue what to do.”
Intrigued, Bunty flicked his fingers, waving her forward, and nodded to the Monkey to leave them alone for a moment. Monkey took his sandwich and half-pint with him.
She sat down near him, feeling exhausted, her stomach aching. She told him about Kevin, about the bruises on his arm and chin and Aoife’s theory about the methods of cocaine ingestion. Ask anyone, she said, about Kevin’s drinking; he wasn’t a man who would take drugs quietly and have a mishap. She told him about Kevin’s disappearance in the ambulance, about the innocuous coffee-table book, about McBree and the portfolio, and her boot being broken into.
“Every single copy of that photograph has been taken. I’ve got some bad photocopies of it.” She pulled them out of her bag and unfolded them on the table.
Bunty glanced through them, chewing his sandwich, looking back at her to continue.
“Now,” she said nervously, “the really interesting thing about this is Knox.”
Bunty looked skeptical. She’d raised Knox with him before and he stymied her plan to do an investigation into him.
“This is real, though, listen: Knox pulled me in for questioning this morning. They made me wait and then in saunters Knox and tells me to stay off McBree: Kevin wasn’t killed by anybody, the IRA had nothing to do with this, I should go home and let the whole thing drop.”
Bunty swallowed his mouthful, took a sip of beer, and looked up at her. “Maybe you should.”
She was shocked. He was a good editor, a good journalist, and any idiot could tell there was a story here. “I cannot believe you’re saying that.”
Bunty took another bite of his sandwich, folding the crusts into his mouth. He leaned back in his chair, lifting his feet up onto the table, making her wait for him to finish his mouthful before he answered her. He swallowed, reached forward for his glass, and took a sip of beer. He rolled his tongue along the line of front teeth, top and bottom.
“Get a fucking move on,” she said.
“Don’t you ever wonder,” he said quietly, “why Knox is out of bounds?”
She didn’t answer. She hadn’t wondered that actually. She often wondered why she couldn’t catch him, wondered what he did to frighten so many people into keeping quiet about him, but she had never been aware that he was being kept from her.
“Is he out of bounds?”
Bunty cradled the back of his head with his hands, sucked a morsel from his front teeth, and nodded once.
“Says who? British Intelligence?”
Bunty raised an eyebrow.
Paddy shook her head at the table: it was so obvious now. Consecutive editors had turned the Knox story back; no one outside the police knew a thing about his activities and she couldn’t find a policeman with a bad word to say, and they had a bad word about everyone. It was a sure sign that he was being kept clean. And then Kevin’s admission to hospital being wiped off whichever record while they fixed the body just so, the deserted office and Knox’s arrogant assurances about what was and wasn’t the case.
She’d interviewed Patrick Meehan many times about his brushes with British Intelligence and what always struck her was how commonplace it all sounded. A room set aside in a police station. Stone-faced men with Oxbridge accents and just the right coat from the right tailor’s, unimaginative and protectionist, unashamed of their agenda. They called them spooks but they sounded like irritable bank managers. Knox had that commonplace look. She remembered him in Babbity’s, recalled him sliding around at a hundred press functions.
“If,” Bunty paused dramatically, “if you can get anything on him, which I doubt, I’ll go with it.”
“You’ll publish it?”