Wicked Leaks

by Matt Bendoris

  ‘What was your line of work?’ Kelly asked, her nosiness getting the better of her.

  ‘The military, at first. Then private stuff afterwards.’

  ‘Sounds dubious.’

  ‘You’re right. It was,’ Monahan said in a nonchalant manner.

  ‘And this was when you killed Diana?’ Kelly said sarcastically.

  ‘I didn’t actually say I killed her, did I? But yes, she was one of the operations I was involved in.’

  ‘Bullshit!’ Kelly said, surprising herself.

  Monahan laughed again. ‘Now that’s the sort of service I expect from the NHS.’

  ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It was inappropriate.’

  ‘I’d have said the same thing in your shoes. But I can prove it to you,’ he insisted.

  ‘Prove it how?’

  Monahan put his fingers to his lips, indicating she should be quiet. He then took a notepad and pen and jotted down an address with a code. ‘You’ll see what the numbers are for.’

  Kelly took the paper and peered at it momentarily, before folding it and putting it in her top breast pocket, which also contained her scissors and pen torch.

  ‘Indulge me,’ Monahan said, smiling.

  ‘I don’t have time to indulge myself,’ Kelly replied.

  She settled back in the armchair. They didn’t say another word for the rest of the night. But Monahan slept with a smile on his face.

  13: The Lottery

  ‘You owe me £2,’ Connor said without preamble as he arrived after lunch.

  ‘I think that’s going to be your epitaph,’ April said, rooting around her bulging purse, before she began counting out several pieces of silver.

  Connor sighed loudly. ‘Why do we bother with the stupid Lottery anyway? We never win. I’ve got to chase you round the houses for payment and you always, ALWAYS, pay me in pennies.’

  ‘I don’t have anything bigger,’ April replied, counting out the shrapnel. ‘And what’s the harm in having a wee flutter, anyway?’

  ‘Because, between us, we put our numbers on four times a week. That’s £16 a week, right? Times that by fifty-two and that’s £832 a year. Over a decade that’d be £8,320 from our wages, and what do we get back? Nothing.’

  ‘You’ve got to be in it to win it,’ April said cheerily.

  ‘Ah, the mantra of a loser. Why don’t I put our Lottery money in a jar and at the end of the year we’ll divide the kitty?’

  ‘And just where would be the fun in that? Someone has got to win the jackpot, so why not us? We hardly do anything else. You’re always away for your boring runs and my biggest spend is on food.’

  ‘Really, I’d have never known,’ Connor smirked as April reached for the ‘emergency’ packet of biscuits in her drawer, which she used to stave off hunger between meals.

  ‘So I say let’s plough on. We’ll have the last laugh when we win. And win big, we shall. Wait and see.’

  ‘Oh, crap,’ Connor said, logging onto his PC. ‘We’ve got a training session in fifteen minutes.’

  April’s sunny disposition was replaced by a look of abject horror.

  14: You’ve got to be kidding me?

  Kelly arrived home that morning having gone to the supermarket beforehand for the weekend shop. Amazingly her mother had offered to take the children to the zoo tomorrow, which meant she would have a whole Saturday of wonderful, uninterrupted sleep. Then perhaps she could do something with them too, like go and see a movie; she was determined to do more than just recuperate before another week of back-to-back nightshifts.

  The kids were dressed, fed and ready for school, with Beth already babbling excitedly about her pending trip to see the pandas with Nana when Kelly walked through the door with the shopping bags. She gave the kids some extra treats for school and kissed them both before they departed.

  Kelly put away the shopping and then, with her bed beckoning, stripped to shower. She towelled herself dry, studying her naked body in her wardrobe’s sliding door mirror. She turned side-on to inspect her tummy and, with her back to the mirror, looked over her shoulder at her bottom. Finally she cupped and examined her breasts, before affording herself a rare compliment: ‘Not bad, Kelly. Not bad at all for nearly forty.’

  She began throwing her dirty clothes into the laundry basket and inspected the contents of the breast pocket of her nurse’s uniform. On a piece of paper was the address Monahan had written down for her. She googled it on her smartphone: it was just four miles away.

  ‘You must be mad,’ Kelly said, speaking to herself again, as she pulled on a top and pair of jeans that complemented her shape. ‘Maybe we’re all nutters?’ she added, grabbing her pen torch before she did something she hadn’t done in a long time – denied herself some much-needed sleep.

  Kelly placed her smartphone in the holder by her windscreen to follow its directions to the mysterious Monahan location. She recognised various points along the journey as there was always somewhere nearby Kelly had sat with a dying patient or consoled a family. The directions eventually took her down a dead-end street full of lock-ups in various stages of disrepair.

  The phone informed Kelly she had reached her destination. She checked Monahan’s handwritten note again: Count four doors from the left. You’ll see where to use the code. Kelly now understood what he meant. There was an old key safe bolted to the narrow wall between the two neighbouring garage doors. She got out of the car and looked around to check the street was empty before entering Monahan’s five-digit code. The mechanical key safe seemed to accept the numbers but the moment of truth would come when Kelly turned the handle to open it. It was stiff and clearly hadn’t been used in some time, but with a little persuasion it gave up its contents of three keys. She tried them all in the lock on the garage door handle until she found the right one. The others opened two bolt-and-pin systems that had been burrowed deep into the concrete. Someone did not want this garage broken into.

  Kelly prised open the door, which swung out towards her, then up high on a pulley system. The light outside did nothing to illuminate the darkness within. She felt the inside of the concrete pillar for a light switch, but got cobwebs instead.

  ‘Yuk, should have worn my gloves,’ she complained.

  She wiped the webs from her hand and took the torch out of her pocket. Its weak light also struggled to penetrate the dark, but at least she could use it to find the light switch. A fluorescent strip flickered slowly into life, giving off a hum like a hive of bees. Satisfied she could now see, Kelly closed the door behind her to inspect the depths of the garage, which was surprisingly big. It was full of the usual fare, including scattered tools and old, dented paint cans. There were also lots of cardboard boxes. She decided to move one stack to the side so she could gain access to the rear of the garage. The boxes were empty. She pushed the stack out of the way, and then another. It was as if they had been placed on top of each other as a makeshift wall, perhaps as a barrier against prying eyes.

  Behind them was the very clear and distinct outline of a car underneath a heavy black and dusty tarpaulin. Kelly took hold of an edge of the cover and heaved it off. She stared in total disbelief at the car.

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’

  It had seen better days, but, even through the accumulated dust and grime, Kelly could clearly make out the familiar shape of a white Fiat Uno, with French number plates. She ran her fingers along the car towards a large dent at the rear end.

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ Kelly repeated. ‘Just what the fuck are you doing here?’ Kelly asked as if she expected an answer. She stood still for some time, looking at what she had uncovered, occasionally shaking her head and swearing softly under her breath. Eventually she forced herself to peer in the windows with her pen torch, but its weak light failed to penetrate far beyond the tinted glass. Kelly tried the handles but the doors wou
ldn’t budge. She then stood as far back from the vehicle as the garage walls would allow and took some pictures of the car on her phone. But she really wanted to get into the vehicle. She tried the passenger door again and felt it move slightly. She now knew it wasn’t locked, more likely it had seized from lack of use.

  ‘Come on, Kel, you can do this,’ she said, geeing herself up. She pulled on the passenger handle with everything she had, straining to lift the door at the same time. It suddenly gave way with the ripping sound of its rubber seal, which had long since perished and had been wedging the door stuck.

  ‘Gotcha,’ she said, pleased with herself. There must have still been some juice in the battery as the car’s interior light came on. On the passenger seat she could see a black motorbike helmet and remembered reading one eyewitness account that claimed men wearing them had been seen leaving the crash scene at the Pont de l’Alma tunnel before the paparazzi arrived.

  The toppling of a bin directly outside the lock-up startled Kelly. It was followed by the unmistakeable scuff of a shoe on the gravel by the entrance. She looked at the Fiat Uno and suddenly felt very vulnerable. If someone was to enter now she would be trapped. Kelly slipped into the back seat of the car and gently closed the door behind her, which extinguished the interior light. She lay huddled, panicking inside, but trying to slow her rapid breathing lest she be heard. She stayed completely still for several minutes, straining her ears to listen for any more noises outside. There were none. It was time to go. If the police found her here, she could imagine their looks as she tried to explain she was checking out if a patient’s Diana conspiracy theory was true.

  Kelly crawled out of the car to leave, but at that exact moment the fluorescent light went out, throwing the entire lock-up into darkness. Panic returned. She needed to get out now and bolted for the exit, but something caught her foot, sending Kelly crashing, her body spilling into the daylight outside. She reached down to see what had tripped her, to find the tarpaulin that had been covering the Uno was wrapped like an octopus’s tentacle around her left foot. Kelly kicked herself free, stood up and scanned the area. There was nothing of note apart from the overturned bin. Kelly didn’t plan to hang around to find out who or what had tipped it over. She jumped in her car and raced off, forgetting to fasten her seatbelt, just as the absent-minded Princess had done back in 1997.

  15: Crystal meth

  April sat in the training session for the Daily Chronicle’s new operating system, Crystal MPS, or Multi-Platform Systems. Her face wore a fixed grin that barely masked her terror. She had hoped to have retired by the time the company brought in a new computer system, telling Connor, ‘I had only just mastered the last one, but now they’ve gone and replaced it.’

  Connor had given her his usual quizzical expression. ‘I think “mastered” is stretching things a little, don’t you?’

  He now sat opposite April with a smirk on his face, clearly enjoying her discomfort as the over-enthusiastic trainer, called Rob, continued his lecture.

  ‘The beauty about this system is it really gives you the tools to become a multi-platform operator,’ he beamed. April’s plastered-on smile grew a fraction wider. It was as if Rob was speaking Swahili. ‘So, say you’re sitting there with a cracking exclusive. But you just know it won’t hold until tomorrow’s print edition, right? Well, in the digital age, exclusives are only exclusive for a matter of minutes. That means speed is king, so you just click this button here…’ Rob said with his actions being displayed on the projection screen above him, ‘…and voila, a drop-down menu asks how you’d like to publish your content.’

  ‘Bet you’re going to “drop down” any minute,’ Connor whispered out the corner of his mouth to April.

  ‘You can even set the time you want to publish, from here,’ Rob said, clicking on another drop-down menu. ‘So, if a story is embargoed, you don’t go jumping the gun. As you can see, once you start playing around with it, it’s really pretty easy. Now, any questions?’

  April was terrified of asking anything. Afterwards she was close to tears as she confided in Connor in the safety of their broom cupboard.

  ‘I can’t do this again. I can’t learn another system.’

  Connor was truly amazed at the state April would work herself into when it came to technology. ‘Calm yourself down, grandma. You don’t want to have a stroke.’

  ‘But what if I can’t do it? They’ll have to get rid of me. Nothing Ron said stuck in my head.’

  ‘It’s Rob. And not all of it has to stick in your head. You can still type on a keyboard, right? Well, you’ll type your words as normal, and then someone else will send it to all the multi-platforms, or the moon, or wherever.’

  Connor’s assurances did nothing to placate her. ‘But they want us all to be… what did Ron say? “Autonomous”. Writing straight onto the page. On this stupid Crystal Meth system.’

  Connor couldn’t be bothered correcting her this time. But the prospect of every journalist writing straight onto the page actually worried him too. There were more than a few of his colleagues whose copy needed a thorough rewrite by the banks of sub-editors just for it to make sense, never mind fit for print. He had never bought into the ‘them and us’ mentality that existed between the reporters and the subs. Over the years he had been grateful for the way they caught spelling and grammatical errors when he was writing in a hurry for a deadline – and they’d once even averted a horrendous libel he’d included by accident. As one now-retired chief sub had eloquently put it, a decent sub can make a poor writer look good, a good writer look great and a great writer look exceptional.

  As far as Connor was concerned, anyone who made him appear better and smarter was alright by him. And he knew he was one of the half-decent journalists. To think that some of the cretins he’d worked with over the years were going to have their copy published by themselves, with no filters, was utterly alarming. He had witnessed reporters who couldn’t even spell the name of Scotland’s most famous sons. Like the colleague who had once been bollocked for writing ‘Billy Connelly’ instead of ‘Billy Connolly’. Another had gone one better by writing about some famous movie actor called ‘Sir Sean Connelly’, which was so wrong Connor had almost wept when he read the raw copy.

  But at least when he started out there was always some grisly old news editor around to rip the hapless young hacks a new one. That’s how Connor had learned, through fear and humiliation. He hated the new touchy-feely world that had turned the cut and thrust of a newsroom into something more like a Human Relations convention.

  ‘Look, I don’t care much for this multi-platform nonsense either, but we’ve just got to play along with it. It’ll be alright,’ he said, trying to reassure April.

  ‘No, it won’t,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘It bloody well won’t. This will be the end of me.’

  Connor was tired of arguing. A part of him also believed that April could well be right.

  16: The long arm of the law

  Kelly didn’t enjoy her usual dead sleep. Things kept waking her that would never normally raise her from her slumber, like the post arriving or the cat meowing for food. But after her visit to the lock-up, her mind was unsettled. The car couldn’t possibly be what she thought it was, could it? And even if it was, then what? What was a nurse from Glasgow to do with such information? As for Monahan, she didn’t know what to think. What the hell was he caught up in? What had he done? She was scared and she had never felt that way about a patient before.

  The doorbell rang. Kelly rolled over and put a pillow over her head. But whoever the caller was, they weren’t going away. Normally, if the postman had a delivery too big for the letterbox, he’d just put the package behind one of the wheelie bins. But still the bell rang. Maybe it was a new, persistent postie. But Kelly knew she would never get back to sleep unless she answered the door.

  She put on her dressing gown and pulled the cord tight, not
wanting to give the mysterious visitor an eyeful. She opened the door and, to her surprise, was confronted with two policemen. The older one was a sergeant with one of those battle-hardened faces that had seen it all. The younger one was a very tall constable.

  ‘Miss Kelly Carter? May we come in?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, a touch nervously and making sure she wasn’t exposing too much flesh. She showed them to her living room where the officers took a seat directly opposite Kelly.

  The older one spoke first. ‘Where you in Laidlaw street this morning?’ he asked, already knowing the answer.

  ‘Yes, yes, I was,’ she stuttered.

  ‘So you know about the fire?’ the younger one asked, expressionless.

  Kelly felt as though a fire had engulfed her. She blushed and suddenly felt overheated and vulnerable. Both officers stared at her, studying her reaction, waiting to see any sign of a false response.

  ‘I didn’t see any fire.’ The words even sounded hollow to Kelly. But how could she be sure she hadn’t started it in the first place? Maybe the wiring had short-circuited after she left. The place was packed with those empty cardboard boxes, never mind the car. It would have gone up like a tinderbox.

  ‘Can we see the clothes you were wearing to Laidlaw Street.’ It was a command more than a question from the older one, who then referred to a description written down in his notepad: ‘Red top, blue jeans and a faded green skip hat.’

  Kelly led the police officers in silence to her bedroom, where the items of clothing they were interested in were folded over an armchair that acted more as a clothes horse than somewhere to sit. The older one picked up the red top and sniffed it. The younger one did the same with the skip hat. Kelly realised the ridiculousness of the situation of having two policemen in her bedroom smelling her clothes. The officers placed the clothing back on the chair, with the older one asking to speak with Kelly again in the living room. They were keeping this formal and playing it by the book.