trying to regain composure.
Eyes on him. He felt them and he looked.
Inskip was on the balcony, black T-shirt, shaking his head. He drew on a cigarette. A second, then smoke came out of him like his spirit escaping.
…LONDON…
Security rang and she went to the bare, functional room and looked at the man downstairs. The equipment was good quality, big colour monitor, and there were two angles, full frontal, close up, and full length, left profile.
He was tall, dark hair flat on his head, cut short. He looked French, Mediterranean, a long nose, broken, no twitches or quick eye movements, that was a good sign, coat with a leather collar.
‘Bag?’ said Caroline Wishart.
‘All okay metalwise,’ said the security man.
‘Send him up.’
He was standing when she came into the interview room, nodded at her, eyes grey-green, the colour of the underside of poplar leaves, the poplars at the bottom of her grandmother’s garden.
‘Caroline Wishart,’ she said. ‘I’ve only got a couple of minutes.’
He took a video cassette out of a side pocket.
‘Sit down,’ she said.
She took the tape. A slip of paper was taped to the side with numbers written on it in a strong vertical hand: 1170. Slotted it into the machine, and found the remote control. She switched the set on, pressed the play button. Just static. She pressed again, pressed anything. Numbers appeared at the bottom of the screen.
‘Fuck this,’ she said. She looked at him. He was sitting with his hands on his stomach. Most men would have been twitching to intervene. Either he was different or he was even more technologically incompetent that she was.
He said nothing. He didn’t look at her.
‘Can you do this?’ she said, hating to have to say it.
He held out his hand. She gave him the remote. He switched off the set, switched on, pressed a button, pressed another.
The film began.
The sub-tropical plain, dark.
When she saw the bodies, Caroline felt sweat start in her hair and she began to feel sick, a small wave of nausea, a ripple. She glanced at the man, Mackie. He had laced his fingers.
At a certain point, Caroline closed her eyes. She turned her head slightly so that Mackie couldn’t see.
‘That’s it,’ he said.
She opened her eyes and watched him retrieve the tape. He didn’t sit down again, stood looking at her. She didn’t know what you did with something like this. This wasn’t politicians fucking rent boys. That was simple, just an extension of the story that got her to London, her breakthrough story:
‘They tried to kill me,’ he said.
‘Who?’
He shrugged. ‘Sent people to my hotel.’
‘And?’
Another shrug. ‘I’m here.’
She realised. ‘You offered it to someone else?’
‘And now I’m offering it to you.’
‘Could be faked,’ she said because she couldn’t think of any other response. Distrust, suspicion-they were always sound responses in journalism. ‘I’d have to show it to other people here, they’d check it out…then we could talk about money.’
He said nothing, just picked up his bag and walked. She hadn’t expected that, he was going. She felt something slipping out of her hands, got up, went after him, touched his sleeve, grabbed his arm.
‘Settle down, hold it,’ she said. ‘Just hold on for one second, will you, I’m not…’
Mackie stopped, turned his head. ‘What?’
‘I don’t have the authority to buy something like this.’ She stood close to him, still holding his sleeve, looked into his eyes, it often worked. ‘I’m sorry I said that about, about being faked. I’m sorry. Will you leave the tape with me? A copy? I promise I’ll give you an answer today.’
He moved away from her, just a small distance. ‘No,’ he said, ‘this was a mistake.’
Caroline knew she should plead. There was a time for pleading. It was any time you saw the shimmer of a story that would go on the front page without argument, would require no exercise of editorial judgement by any drink-befuddled executive prat, would speak for itself in short headline words an eight-year-old could understand.
‘Listen,’ she said, holding on to his arm. ‘I don’t need a copy, an hour, two hours, that’s it, two hours, that’s all I need, I’ll talk to people. An answer in two hours. No bullshit. Give me a number.’
He looked at her for so long that she let go his arm and blinked.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Trust me.’
‘One o’clock,’ he said. ‘I’ll ring you at one. Just say yes or no.’
His accent wasn’t Scottish now. It was South African.
‘Mr Mackie, we might need a contract, a legal document, you know, we could do this through lawyers, you’d be protected and we’d…’ ‘Just say yes or no. Twenty thousand. I’ll tell you where to send it.’
When he was gone, she went to her tiny cubicle, her first day in it.
She rang security and asked for prints of Mackie, sat back and thought for a long time about what she should do. This was her story: the man had come to her because of her byline on the Brechan story. But it was too big for her. He wanted cash for something that might be worthless.
It wasn’t. She felt it in her marrow. Her instinct said this was a big story. And her instinct was good. It had taken her to three big stories in Birmingham.
But Halligan would take it away from her. The story would disappear into the inner sanctum without her.
She had to deliver it personally, the way she’d delivered Brechan. Brechan had been the most wonderful luck. She would be writing lifestyle crap now, ten hottest pick-up bars in the City, if someone hadn’t decided to give her Brechan’s rent boy.
‘We know your work from Birmingham,’ the gaunt man in the pub in Highgate said. ‘We think you’re the person to expose this.’
Luck, just pure luck.
It didn’t happen twice.
Who to go to now? Who to trust? Who could get the money?
Colley. He was the only one. She’d been introduced to him in the pub and he’d bought her drinks and made lewd suggestions. Her boss in the permanent catfight that was the Frisson section had told her that Colley ran his own mini-empire. He kept his own hours, only came to conferences when he felt like it.
She went to his office, not a cubical, a proper office with floor-to-ceiling walls, and knocked.
‘Enter,’ shouted Colley.
He was sitting at a large desk covered with files and newspapers looking at a laptop, a cigarette burning in an old saucer. She thought he looked like someone who had lost a large amount of weight quickly.
‘Caroline Wishart,’ she said. ‘We met in the pub?’
‘I remember. Some things I remember.’
‘I need help.’
Colley looked at her. His eyes were heavy-lidded and he was squinting as if caught in a spotlight. ‘First you pinch the Brechan story from under my nose,’ he said, ‘now you come crawling for help.’ He pointed downwards.
