The man stepped forward and pressed a finger into Rose’s chest. ‘You don’t want to mess with me, darling, I can bring you a world of fucking pain, believe me.’
Rose smiled at him. ‘Can I quote you on that?’
‘Here’s a quote for you,’ the man said. ‘My brother Frank was a much loved husband and father, and an upstanding member of this community.’
‘So it was a positive identification. Mrs Whitehouse, how do you feel about the suggestion that your husband committed suicide?’
The woman raised a hand to her forehead, but Billy couldn’t tell what she was thinking. He noticed some discolouration of the skin around her right eye and cheek, the edge of a bruise.
‘Fuck off,’ the man said. ‘Frank didn’t kill himself.’
‘So you suspect foul play?’
Billy almost laughed at the quaint phrase Rose had used, like something out of Miss Marple. He couldn’t take his eyes off Adele Whitehouse. She hadn’t said anything yet. He wanted to hear her voice.
The man was right in Rose’s face now, spit on the corners of his mouth as he spoke.
‘When we find out who killed Frank, they’re gonna wish they’d never been fucking born. And you can quote me on that.’
‘Thank you, I’ll do that. Mrs Whitehouse, do you have anything to add?’
She turned from Rose to Billy. Billy wondered what colour her eyes were.
‘No comment,’ she said.
A soft accent. A hint of west coast.
She turned and walked into the house. Billy stared at her figure, the sway of her red hair on her shoulders, the confident strut in those heels.
‘You heard the lady,’ the man said, giving Rose a gentle shove. ‘Now fuck off and leave us alone.’
‘Of course.’
The man walked into the house and slammed the door.
‘So sorry for your loss,’ Rose shouted after him. She turned to Billy. ‘Nasty little prick. Did you notice her shiner?’
Billy nodded.
Rose laughed a big, throaty laugh. ‘A crime lord dead in suspicious circumstances, a vengeful brother, an abused widow. Oh boy, have we got a front page to write.’
7
‘This is dynamite.’ Tom McNeil sat in his office looking at his computer screen.
Rose grinned. ‘Isn’t it?’
The editor turned to Billy, who was tangled up in an uncomfortable metal chair. ‘Old-school reporting, doing the footwork, doorstepping the story,’ he said. ‘You could learn a lot from Ms Brown here.’
‘I already have.’
‘Screw blogs and tweets, this is real news.’
Billy had already had this lecture when he was hired. Modern mass media and digital formats were all very well, but old-fashioned foot-pounding journalism, getting out there and actually covering a story, blah blah.
McNeil was the same generation as Rose, and Billy could see what he was getting at up to a point, but they were on their way out. The whole newspaper industry was dying. The vast majority of his fellow Napier students had wound up writing online content in one form or another. He was one of the few working in print. And that wasn’t out of any principles, just the only job he could get, like snaring the last berth on the Titanic right before it launched. Lucky boy.
Billy looked at McNeil as he talked, and wondered if Rose had slept with him too. McNeil was a solid and handsome fifty-five, sleeves rolled up, broken nose adding to the rough charisma. Billy tried to think of himself at that age, but couldn’t get his head round the idea.
Just like this story. Rose had written it up in two hours like the pro she was. Leading on the suspicious death, using Dean Whitehouse’s choice quotes about his brother, alluding to Adele Whitehouse’s bruising, rounding up with the dog walker who found the body and the police call for witnesses.
It was all way ahead of the curve. The police hadn’t officially even given out Frank’s name yet. The tabloids would be sniffing, but not too hard, it wasn’t a major story until the Whitehouse name came out, just another jumper.
They were dismissed from McNeil’s office with pats on the back. Billy excused himself and went to the toilets. He splashed water on his face, then took two of Charlie’s pills. His head was pounding again, the pain swimming into his neck and shoulders. He wondered how long it would take the pills to kick in.
He tried to think, but his mind was sludgy. A muscle twitched under his left eye. A tingle spread across his face, the feeling back after the numbness of earlier. There was a sharp pain across his temple and something flashed in the corner of his eye. He moved his head in that direction, but it was gone. There was a whiff of something amongst the stench of urinal cakes, an electrical burning smell, then everything went black. The last thing he felt were his legs crumpling beneath him.
*
Cold tile against his ear. The sound of water trickling in the urinals. Disinfectant smell.
He opened his eyes and look at his watch. Hardly any time had passed. What the fuck? Must be the stress and shock. He was so fucking tired. He felt full of fatigue, his bones aching at the joints. His headache was still there. The cold floor against his face was soothing, but he dragged himself up and checked in the mirror.
He didn’t look too bad, considering. He splashed some more water on his face, dried himself with paper towels then left.
On the mess of his desk was a Post-it note: ‘Go home and get some sleep, you look like you need it. I’ll chase police and forensics, see you tomorrow. Good work today, Rose.’
He grabbed his bag. Instead of heading for the exit he crossed the first-floor mezzanine, through open-plan desks, towards the front of the building. There was an unofficial apartheid in operation, the Sunday paper journalists spread out across the front of the building in the flagship position, the Evening Standard and the daily paper down the two flanks. Mixing wasn’t encouraged.
He spotted Zoe at her desk, pointing at a computer screen. Two plucked and tanned thirty-somethings hovered behind her ergonomic chair and nodded. Zoe had her hair up in a bun, a pencil through it.
The two Sex in the City types frowned as he reached her desk. She looked up, surprised. He’d never come to her desk before.
‘Can we talk?’ He looked at her colleagues. ‘In private.’
Her eyes widened. ‘I’m kind of in the middle of something here.’
He looked at her screen, saw a two-page layout of tasselled handbags. He remembered as students they used to laugh together at the vacuous nature of lifestyle journalism. Not any more.
He walked away, heart stuttering against his ribs.
8
He could feel the thud of a hip-hop beat as he stood digging for his keys. He opened the door and got a blast of Wu-Tang Clan. He followed the noise downstairs and found Charlie at the kitchen table with a sandwich in one hand, fingering the touchpad of a laptop with the other. A San Miguel bottle sat sweating on the table.
Billy grabbed a remote and turned the docked iPod off. Charlie looked up and swallowed a mouthful of sandwich.
‘Hey, Bro.’ He pointed at the laptop. ‘Just checking to see if there’s anything about our little incident last night.’
