punched out in white. Originally the most lowly members of staff were given the lowest shelves and moved up as they got promoted. As the staffing got more bloated, pigeonholes became scarce and everyone tended to hang on to the first one they were assigned. It was a mark of honor to be a senior member of staff with a pigeonhole near the ground.
Paddy’s hadn’t been claimed while she was away and her shelf was one of the lowest. She crouched down on her hunkers, not a very dignified stance but better than bending over and baring her arse to the room. Inside she found some flyers for union meetings. A talk by the new chair of the NUJ, Richards, who had been at the News. A blank sponsored-walk form. And a yellow note from one of the secretaries, a number, time of the call 9.15, McBride’s Solicitors and Notaries, ask for Mr. Fitzpatrick re Terry Hewitt.
“Miss Meehan?”
She looked up to find Bunty’s sidekick standing formally in front of her. He had arrived at the News with Bunty, like a bonded servant. People called him Bunty’s Monkey behind his back but never knew what to say to his face. He hadn’t introduced himself or clarified his position to anyone but he moved and talked like a henchman, always gliding sideways, easing people around his master, human lubricant, making things run smoothly.
“Bunty would like to see you for a moment.”
Bunty, the paper’s editor, had arrived from an Edinburgh daily a year ago. He had promised the Daily News owners an economic miracle but after all the redundancies and reshuffling the paper was still leaking profit. Bunty wasn’t a happy man.
The walk across the floor of the newsroom felt very long. Paddy had time to panic about having been seen with Callum, about Sean losing his job and herself ending up with no job or home and Burns laughing at her as he drove away from her mother’s house with Pete on visitation days. She was very tired, she realized. The weekend had been less than restful.
The glass cubicle Larry Gray-Lips inhabited at night had the lights on inside and the blinds drawn down. The Monkey waved her towards the door with the grace of a butler. She knocked on the glass and opened the door quickly, keeping the advantage.
Bunty sat at a small corner of the big table, pencil in hand, shading in a big doodle. He was a small, bald man and as such didn’t like to be seen doing small, bald things. He stood up, cheeks flushed defensively, and covered the sheet with his hand. The Monkey slipped into the room behind Paddy and tiptoed up the table to his handler’s side.
“Hello, Patricia.” Bunty covered his annoyance with a flash of teeth. “Shut the door, would you?”
She clicked it shut and took a seat in front of the table. It was a surprisingly large room and housed the big table Bunty used for smaller meetings; the full news ed meetings were held downstairs. Despite the table being a good six feet long, the Monkey and Bunty were taking up barely three feet of one side and looked across at Paddy in unison, smiling, mock friendly.
Bunty made a pyramid of his fingers. He looked like a man with the shadow of professional death hanging over his shoulder, which he was. Sales of the Daily News were in a steady decline, and advertising was plummeting as more and more of the big spenders were going over to the Standard. The Daily News wasn’t making a loss but they weren’t turning a great profit either and the board of directors had been through four of the five stages of economic grief already: hope, disappointment, blame and fury. The next stage, Paddy knew, was good-bye Bunty.
“You’ll be pleased to hear that Terry Hewitt’s obituary is going in tomorrow. It’s a full half-page.”
As usual, Bunty had misheard all the office gossip and thought she was Terry’s girlfriend. Paddy thanked him anyway. “That’s good of you. He started here, same time as me.”
“So I read. Shocking business.” Bunty looked over at the Monkey. “It could bring the Irish Troubles over here.”
Everyone knew that twenty hours ago but Monkey took his henchman’s duties seriously and nodded as if he was just finding out.
“So. Yes. Oui, as it were.” Bunty chewed the inside of his mouth and scribbled hard on the sheet, a vicious doodle. “Alors. I heard a rumor about you.”
“There are a lot of rumors about me. I started many of them myself.”
He smiled courteously at her attempted joke. “I heard you were in Babbity’s last night with McVie and you haven’t handed in this week’s Misty. Anything I should know?”
She tried to look noncommittal.
“We’d hate for there to be any misunderstanding.” He looked to Monkey, who nodded and smiled, and Bunty turned back to her. “We value you tremendously.” He strained over the word, closing his eyes. “Just tremendously.” They looked at her expectantly.
“Good,” she said.
“Are you happy here?” Bunty waved across his desk, leaving his fingers wide as an opener for her to say something. Monkey copied his facial expression, as if he’d posed the question himself.
“I asked you for more money two months ago and I’m still waiting for an answer.”
Bunty leaned over the desk, narrowing his eyes at her. “Have you been offered more money elsewhere?”
She stared back at him. She could lie. “I want more money and to investigate Terry’s death.”
Bunty smiled and shook his head. “It’s a long time since you did a news story. We can’t assign stories to placate people. It might be too big.”
“But I want it.” Paddy thought she sounded like Pete.
Bunty sighed at his doodle: a lot of regal looping lines angrily shaded in with pencil. A potentate foiled. “You know,” he sighed, “McVie takes people on and buries them, d’you know that? Gets everyone on short-term contracts and dumps them.”
It was a scurrilous lie.
He scratched in another loop with his pencil as the Monkey watched her for a reaction. “I think, Bunty,” she said carefully, “that you must have been a fucking good journalist.”
Bunty looked up and smiled wide at her. His yellow teeth were gappy, the gums receding. She suddenly, inexplicably, liked him enormously.
He straightened his face. “OK, we’ll give you the money but you’re not getting the story.”
“But I’ve-”
“NO!” His hand was up and that was that. “If you want it you’ll have to do it in your own time. I’ll put someone else on it too. You beat them to it, all well and good.”
“Who?”
“Merki.”
She snorted. “Merki?”
“Merki. Get out.”
Merki was good at finding leads. He could get into a house but people didn’t take to him, no one wanted to talk to him because he was funny-looking. It would be a walkover and she was getting the raise. She stood up quickly and put one knee on the table, clambering across the highly polished wood on all fours, and before the Monkey could intervene to stop her, she planted a wet, noisy kiss on Bunty’s bald head. The skin was smooth and papery.
He laughed, embarrassed, brushing the kiss off coyly as she climbed down off the table and pulled her skirt straight.
“Long live the King,” she said, making her way to the door.
The Monkey called after her. “We’ll have your copy today?”
“I’ll phone it in to Larry tonight,” she called back.
III
She used a phone on Features and called Terry Hewitt’s solicitors. First the receptionist had to put her through to his secretary, then his secretary wouldn’t put her through to the lawyer, then she tried to get Paddy to agree to an appointment two weeks hence.