‘No one sent me. What I said at the beginning was true, I came here to see you.’
‘And yet here you are getting your quotes. Do you feel like a big-boy crime reporter now?’
‘No.’ Billy handed back the pipe. ‘To tell you the truth, I feel out of my depth.’
Adele took the pipe but didn’t put it to her lips. She stared in Billy’s eyes for a long time, Billy holding her gaze.
She looked away. ‘I know what you mean.’
‘Can I ask about your black eye?’
She looked at the digital recorder. ‘That’s enough.’ She picked it up, trying to work out the buttons. ‘How do you switch this thing off?’
He put his hand on hers as she held the machine. She took his hand and turned it over.
‘You’ve been bleeding.’
He looked down. A smattering of red marks on his palm, a constellation of blood. He pulled his hand away.
She handed him the recorder and he switched it off and put it in his bag. When he looked up, she was staring past him.
‘Shit.’ She threw the pipe and lighter into the skunk tin, then placed that in a handbag tucked under the sofa.
Billy turned at the sound of the summerhouse door opening. It was a small boy in a Star Wars T-shirt, carrying a plastic lightsaber. He wrinkled his nose at Adele, didn’t even look at Billy.
‘Mummy, it stinks in here.’
‘Yes, it does, darling. Where’s Magda?’
‘We’re playing hide and seek. I’m hiding.’
Billy got up, felt the full force of the skunk on his wobbly legs. ‘I’d better go.’
The boy still hadn’t looked at Billy. He was making lightsaber noises and swinging it at a plant in the corner of the room.
‘Thanks for the quotes,’ Billy said.
Adele looked at him as he picked up his bag and slung it over his shoulder. She went into her handbag, pulled a card out and handed it to him. Her name and mobile number.
‘If you need anything else. Anything at all.’
His cheeks felt hot and he suddenly needed fresh air. He opened the summerhouse door and gulped. Behind him he heard the boy.
‘Who was that man, Mummy?’
‘He’s no one, darling. Now come and give your mummy a cuddle.’
10
He had three missed calls from Zoe and a couple of texts from Charlie wondering where he was.
Instead of heading back to Rankeillor Street, he turned right before Scottish Widows. A trickle of students were coming and going from Pollock Halls. They looked unconcerned about life, joking and laughing. He walked past them down Holyrood Park Road to the roundabout. He knew where he was going.
The barbed-wire cuts stung his hands as he dialled Rose’s number.
‘Hold the front page,’ he said when she answered.
‘Ha, ha. What’s up? I’m in the middle of something here.’
‘I’ve interviewed the widow.’
‘Adele Whitehouse? You beautiful boy. How did you manage that?’
‘I climbed over their back wall. Met her in the summerhouse. She agreed to speak.’
Rose gave a laugh. ‘Hot damn, we’ll make a crime reporter of you yet. How was she?’
Billy thought a moment. ‘Grieving.’
‘She say anything interesting?’
‘The usual platitudes.’
‘How did she seem? Genuinely upset?’
Billy thought about the skunk pipe, the flat voice, the flirting. ‘Yeah, I guess.’
‘Did you ask her about the eye?’
‘Says she walked into a door.’
‘A sense of humour in adversity, that’s good, we can use that. Wait a minute.’
Her voice disappeared for a second. Billy heard a man’s voice he recognised in the background.
‘Rose, are you with the detective inspector?’
‘Never mind that, we’ve got another front page to write. I had a follow-up already done for tomorrow’s first edition, but there wasn’t much in it. The Mackies have alibis, there’s no news about Frank’s whereabouts on the night, blah blah. What you’ve got is better. I’ll call McNeil. Get down to the office and start knocking it into shape.’
Billy was at the top of Queen’s Drive. The evening sun had set, but twilight still bathed the cliffs and the park, the gorse a subdued umber in the shade of the Crags.
‘I’m on my way.’
‘Good. I’ll meet you there in an hour.’
‘That give you enough time to finish off our friendly bobby?’
‘Enough cheek out of you, Kiddo.’ Rose was laughing as she hung up.
His phone rang. Zoe. He diverted the call and put his mobile away.
He began walking down Queen’s Drive. The trees where it happened were a hundred yards away. Cars chugged up and down the slope. Billy scanned them, looking for a red Micra. He hadn’t seen another one since yesterday. He felt dizzy as he tried to focus on the cars blurring past. He looked ahead. He was seventy yards away. His legs were struggling, like wading across the ocean floor. The thud of his heart seemed irregular, speeding up then slowing down. The left side of his face was fizzing with subdued pain. It felt like the skull under his skin was itchy, an itch he couldn’t scratch. Fifty yards. There was a flash of red in the corner of his eye. He thought about his collapse in the toilets at work. Smelt the air. Gorse and petrol fumes. Tarmac beginning to cool in the evening breeze. Thirty yards. A red car streaked past. Not a Micra, not even close. Twenty. He stared at the road, saw a small dark stain. Fifteen. Could be blood, engine oil, dogshit, roadkill, anything. Ten yards. His legs were making him speed up. The stain had dried into the rough surface of the road. He held his breath, his pulse beating against his temples, his throat constricted, his heart thundering now, his face and hands stinging in time, blood bursting to escape his body.
He kept walking. He was past. Heading downhill, speeding up, his body relaxing, his fingers loosening their grip on the strap of his bag. His face still tingling, his mind stepping back from the edge.
He walked and didn’t look back.
*
‘I hereby officially change your nickname from Kiddo to Scoop.’
Rose had just finished reading a printout of his story, going through it with a pen, marking up occasional changes.
‘Congratulations, one month in and you’ve got a front page. Took me two years.’
She threw the printout on to his desk.
‘Make those changes and we’ll run it past McNeil. He’s going to love it.’
Billy looked at Rose’s corrections. He’d written it straight — grieving widow, suspicious death, crime lord and all that. He’d cut Adele’s quotes to make her look more sympathetic, more caring. Used the detail of the son for the human angle. Rose had tweaked it to suggest more, highlighted the black eye, tabloided it up a little, but not too much.
As he made the changes, his phone rang and he got two more texts. He didn’t pick up the phone, concentrating on the story. He finished up, emailed the copy to Rose and McNeil then picked up his bag and walked to Rose’s desk.
