“So.” She nodded. “Who’d want to selectively control the information coming out of the inquiry? If it’s not a seccy or a clerk, there’s only policemen left. How many members of the committee are there? Usually three, isn’t it? Narrows it down a bit.”
Grant was professional enough to suppress his bruised ego, and ask the right question. “What is it? What are you holding back?”
She tried to smile confidently. “You’re being played, you know that, don’t you?”
“Three o’clock.”
Shug watched her pack up her clippings, slip them back into the envelope, and stand up. She turned to back out of the door and saw him again, a bitter twist at the corner of his mouth. He’d warn his leak that she knew and tell them to go for her.
Out on the drafty stairs she thought of Sean. Paul Neilson lived up in Killearn and she’d like to get a look at the house, see the cars outside it and get a sense of the man, but the village was well outside the city limits and she couldn’t justify getting Sean to drive her there when they were supposed to be on call. Sean brought Burns to mind and she remembered him standing in the hotel room in his underpants. She wished to Christ she had slept instead. It might be her last chance for a while.
Exhaustion was creeping through her bones, making her skin feel clammy. She could have thrown up on the stairs.
II
The gray waiting room smelled of dust. Blinding low winter sun shone in through tall windows, making one half of the room uninhabitably bright. Huddled in the shadowed half, in among the thick air swirling with dust motes and the scent of floor wax, sat Paddy, Shug Grant, and three guys from other papers. The men chatted among themselves, sharing cigarettes, gossiping about Random Damage and the reshuffle at the News. JT had walked straight into another paper across town on the same day that he was sacked. He claimed that his new job paid better money but no one was sure. Kevin Hatcher, the drunkest man at the News, had slept on a bench in the Press Club last night. They’d have sent him home in a taxi but no one knew where he lived. This morning he left the second half of a pint on the bar, said he was going to the toilet, and disappeared. Shug had a fiver on him dying in four weeks. A guy from the Mirror knew Kevin when he was a sober freelancer and won prizes for his photo-essays. He was funny, apparently, back in those days, a clever man, educated and erudite.
A uniformed officer was stationed by the door to stop everyone talking about everything before they went into the inquiry. For a secretive committee Paddy thought it particularly stupid to allow journalists into the waiting room, doling out cigarettes to waiting witnesses, there afterward to take them for a friendly drink to calm their nerves. But she knew the witnesses weren’t Grant’s source; he knew what was coming up and what questions they were going to ask her, and the leaks were strategic, not random. They were coming from someone who wanted to control the way the story was reported.
She leaned her poor head against the wall and shut her eyes, just for a moment; she wasn’t going to fall asleep, it was just to give them a rest and avoid talking to Grant. As the skin of her scalp made contact with the plaster she felt the tingling sensation of sleep creeping over the back of her head. She saw Billy in bed in the hospital and smiled to herself about his hair. He might not be back at the job for a long time but he was alive and relatively unscathed. She saw the image of Lafferty in his rearview mirror, carefully creeping up on the car, and Billy inside, smoking, oblivious.
It was warm in the room, body temperature. A veil of sleep slid down from her brow like a black cashmere blanket until a finger poked her on the shoulder. She opened her burning eyes. Grant was watching her carefully.
“Hey, tubs, what’re ye going to say?” He smiled.
The uniformed officer stepped forward. “Ah, come on now, Mr. Grant, you’ve been well warned about that sort of behavior.”
It was as effective as a midgie trying to stop a mudslide. Grant raised a finger, telling her he’d get her later, and sat back. Paddy shrugged as if she was helpless and thought about all the other people Ramage could have sent to cover the inquiry. He was holding on to all the hungry hacks like Shug and herself, stripping the News of kindness and camaraderie. The other journalists were listening for her answers.
“Who have they had in this morning?” she asked them.
A slick guy in a cheap suit sat forward, making Grant sit back. “The operator who got the call for the address. And Tam Gourlay. Dan McGregor was yesterday.”
“Much of a morning, then?”
He smiled coldly. “No, not really.”
She smiled back, baring her teeth. Shug returned the warmth. The two other journalists joined in until they were all smiling insincerely and wondering when they could stop. The inquiry room door opened and Sullivan looked into the waiting room. He clocked Paddy and smiled wide. “Meehan, please.”
She was so tired that her legs felt rubbery, her footfalls uncertain, as she stood up and shuffled over to the door. She paused and took a breath before following Sullivan through the tall double doors, into the official inquiry.
It was a big, empty room for such a small committee. Four great long windows overlooked the Clyde River and a red marble bridge, currently choked with traffic. The ceiling was high but plain with thick, unembarrassed utility pipes snaking across it.
A long table was set to the side of the room. At the far end sat an older woman with thick glasses, head down over a notepad. Along the table, three men in fancied-up police uniforms-a strip of braiding here, some gold trim on a pocket-were sitting in a little line facing an empty chair. They seemed too old to be dressed in uniform, too dignified, and would have looked as if they were in fancy dress but for the obvious quality of the material. They didn’t look at Paddy as she came in but filled up a glass of water or checked through the sets of notes they had in front of them.
Sullivan invited Paddy to sit at the table opposite the men but remained standing himself, hovering in her eye line near the door.
These three were prosperous men, working-class boys who had slowly worked their way up through the ranks. She could see in their faces a kind of rake’s progress of middle age, a warning tableau of what might happen if you didn’t look after yourself. The man nearest the secretary had a red complexion and puffy, blood-pressured eyes. Next to him was a thin, sallow-skinned man with a pinched mouth, bitter perhaps over some blip in his career. The third man was cheerful, glancing sideways at his companions, seeming to look for reassurance or signs of friendship, needy and ungrounded.
Paddy fumbled with her coat and it slid inelegantly to the floor. Rather than bend the four miles to the floor, she kicked it under the chair and sat down, putting her hands on the table, trying to shake the dozy mist from her mind.
The sallow man tapped the table in front of her to get her attention. “Good afternoon, Miss Meehan.”
The secretary raised her pen and began to scribble.
“Hiya.” Paddy raised a hand and waved at them, felt stupid, and dropped her hand to the table, stroking the wood and smiling weakly. She needed to be more lucid, her job was hanging on a shaky nail and these were not kind men.
The sallow man continued: “As you know, Miss Meehan, this inquiry is convened to take evidence about the police call to seventeen Holbart Road, Bearsden, at two forty-seven a.m., one week ago. This is a closed committee. Do you understand what that means?”
She looked young, she knew that, but there was no reason to talk to her as if she was stupid. “I do understand what a closed committee is, yes.”
“Anything you tell us will remain confidential.”