‘You have all heard the news.’ He spoke low – or at least he didn’t raise his voice – so that we all craned forward to hear. ‘Martin Moir, Investigations Editor on our Sunday paper, was found dead at the weekend. His body was recovered from a car in Auchengare Quarry on Sunday morning.’
He paused then, looking down at his shoes. The gesture looked rehearsed, but Niven’s face, when he raised it, was blurry and flushed, aswim with emotion.
‘We do not yet know – and neither do the police – what happened to Martin. Whether this was suicide or—’ His raised hand waggled in the air for a second then dropped to his side. ‘Or not.
‘There will be rumours.’ He cleared his throat. ‘There will be speculation. In the canteen. In the Cope. From your colleagues on other papers. I ask you now, for the good of the paper, and out of respect for Martin, please do not add to this. Don’t gossip. Wait until we know the facts.’
The word facts he gave a peculiar, cushioned emphasis, almost breathing the word, as if facts were such fragile, furtive creatures that the smallest unruly sound might scatter them.
At his elbow, Maguire frowned fiercely, her specs flashing green in the overhead lights.
Niven kept twisting his wedding band.
‘Over the coming days, Strathclyde Police will visit the building. They may want to question some of those who worked closely with Martin. We will of course cooperate in every way we can with their investigation.’
He scanned the faces again. He smiled an odd tight smile.
‘For the next few days, this newspaper’ – he pointed at the floor beside his feet; ‘this newspaper is part of the news. It has happened before; it will happen again. We will not lose our heads. We will go about our business and we will do our jobs to our usual high standards. We will report Martin’s death in tomorrow’s paper. Sunday staff, you will wait to see how things develop. We will want a feature on Martin’s career and, of course, obituaries in both papers. John and Fiona’ – the cone of his belly turned on Maguire – ‘will fill you in at conference.’
He stood there glancing nervously round. We wondered if he was finished. A phone rang at a far desk and we had started to break up when he spoke again.
‘This is a difficult time,’ he said. We shuffled back into position. ‘A difficult time. For all of us. Martin Moir was – well, you don’t need me tell you what kind of journalist Martin Moir was. He was a great investigative reporter in the finest traditions of this newspaper.’ He looked round sharply at that point, as if he expected someone to contradict him. ‘But be that as it may’ – he wiped it all away with a languid hand; Martin’s death; his standing as a journalist; the words he’d just spoken: ‘Be that as it may, we have work to do. The best tribute we can pay to Martin is to keep making this paper as good as we can make it.’
This time he was finished. He gave a brief, military nod and clipped back to the lift. There were two or three disjointed claps but nobody took them up.
When Niven left it broke the spell, released the grief that had massed in the air. We hugged each other. We wandered the newsroom, patting shoulders and gripping elbows, clapping each other’s backs. It was like the HQ of the losing party on election night. But there was something else. A little flicker in the eyes. A charge of static in the air as we resumed our desks. This was a story. This was our story. What kind of a spike would it give to the sales? Even in death Moir would jockey us one last boost. The Scotsman would take a tanking tomorrow.
Two hours later I was writing the obit. Conference had been short. Maguire raced us through the schedule. The referendum, house prices, the new anti-sectarian bill: Driscoll, the News Editor, flagged up Sunday’s leads. Neve McDonald gave her curt, bored preview of the magazine. Carson, the new sports guy, ran through his roster of Old Firm transfers, manager profiles, flagged up a rumour about the taxman chasing Rangers for using EBTs.
‘EB whats?’ Maguire screwed her face up.
‘Employee Benefit Trusts.’ Carson consulted his notes. ‘It’s an offshore thing. You pay players without paying tax on top. It’s how you afford the big names.’
‘Cheating?’ Maguire said. ‘Financial doping?’
‘Well. Probably come to nothing. I’ll keep you posted.’
‘Do that then. Nothing else? Good. Let’s talk about Martin.’
We did. Seven days earlier he had been sitting at this table, eating Marks & Spencer sandwiches with the rest of us. Now he was the news.
As Niven had observed, we didn’t know the facts. We still didn’t know if it was suicide or a drunken accident. But whichever door opened, something nasty would come out. Secrets and sins. The old unforeseeable mess. The kind of stuff we dug up about bent councillors and access-peddling cabinet ministers.
We are the news. I looked round the polished table, the troubled faces. They didn’t like it. The telescope was the wrong way round and it made them uneasy. Working at a paper, you think you’re bombproof. You visit chaos on other people. Chaos doesn’t visit you.
It didn’t bother me. I’d been there before. Four years back a gangster I exposed in a front-page lead turned out to be an undercover cop. I looked a little stupid for a couple of weeks as my failings were rehearsed in a dozen blogs and columns. Even at the time, though, it wasn’t that bad. Disgrace. Obloquy. It wasn’t so awful. What I mainly felt was relief. At not having to be right all the time, not having to pretend to know it all. Hands up. Mea culpa. I got it wrong.
‘If anyone knows anything,’ Maguire was saying, ‘now would be a good time.’
Her gaze rested on me for a moment and I stared her out. There was a general crossing of arms and sucking in of lips around the table. Maguire looked around the vacant faces.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘But no surprises, people. If Martin was in trouble, if he was involved in something, it’s better we break it than somebody else. If there is an issue and it turns out that one of you knew—’ She flicked her wrist to indicate some swingeing repercussion further down the line.
By four o’clock that afternoon I was proofing the obit. I had gathered Moir’s cuttings for the past six months. I had phoned his former editor at the Belfast Telegraph and spoken to some of his colleagues there. I was trying to do him, I want to say ‘justice’, but where’s the justice in taking a man’s life and boiling it down into eight hundred words? I was on the final par when I raised my head to see a man pointing at me from Maguire’s office as Maguire and another woman followed the line of his finger. Then Maguire poked her head out and beckoned me over.
Jesus, that was quick, was my thought as I crossed the floor. Maguire passed me on the way in. There were two cops, a woman and a man. They were using Maguire’s office for their interviews. The woman was in charge.
She nodded at the door and I closed it. I eased into the vacant chair.
‘We’re sorry to take you away from your work,’ the woman said. She was leafing through papers. She didn’t look sorry.
‘That’s alright,’ I said. ‘I could use a break.’
‘Good.’ She clasped her hands on the desk. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Gunn and this is Detective Constable Lumsden.’
Lumsden and I nodded at each other. He was big, prematurely bald, with an ugly prop-forward’s mug. He wore a rumpled lilac shirt and leather jacket. His silver and purple tie was ugly too. Gunn was neat and pretty, fair hair back in a scrunchie.
‘You’re the Political Editor, right?’
‘Yeah. On the Sunday.’
‘What are you working on?’
‘You mean right now?’
‘Right now. What are you writing?’
Maguire would have told her.
‘I’m doing the obit, Martin’s obituary.’
She looked young to be a sergeant. Certainly she was younger than I was, younger, too, than the gloomy Lumsden.
‘You knew him well, then?’
Lumsden had his biro out, elbows spread on the desk.
‘I don’t know. I
thought I did.’
Her accent was hard to place. It wasn’t Highland but the vowels had a lightness and bounce. It might have been Canadian but it wasn’t that, either.
‘Your editor says he was closest to you. Out of all the employees.’
I shrugged. ‘That’s not saying much.’
‘You mean he didn’t have many friends among the staff?’
‘I mean he wasn’t here much. He worked from home a lot, when he wasn’t out on a story.’
She nodded, looked down at her notes. ‘When did you see him last? Outside the office, I mean.’
DC Lumsden looked stolidly on, the point of his biro pressing his pad. He looked like a waiter taking an order.
‘Two weeks ago. I took a present down for his daughter’s birthday.’ I paused. ‘She’s my god-daughter.’
‘You’re godfather to Martin Moir’s daughter?’
I nodded.
‘That sounds pretty close.’
I shrugged. ‘Yeah. Well it wasn’t close enough, was it?’
She smiled at the desk and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. She enjoyed her job – you could see that. I don’t mean that she relished the power over others or that proximity to murder and calamity thrilled her – though that may have been true. She enjoyed the game, that’s all – the challenge, the pursuit. I almost wished I had something to hide, to give her the pleasure of teasing it out.
The face was composed again when she raised it.
‘He ever speak about problems? Debts? Marital issues? Depression?’
I snorted. ‘The guy was an Ulster Prod, officer, nobody tell you that? They’re not big on confession.’
‘Never sounded off? Not about anything?’
I frowned. ‘Piss and moan a bit in the pub. Like everyone else. He had it pretty good, though. He didn’t have too much to complain about.’
‘Special treatment,’ she said. ‘The star turn. Lot of professional jealousy?’
‘You mean me?’ I smiled. ‘Was I jealous? Yeah, probably. Might take a little more than that, though, to drive a man to suicide.’
‘Right.’ She was looking through her notes again. ‘What was his actual job here: he was chief crime reporter?’
‘Yeah. He was Investigations Editor. He went after the big players.’ I paused. ‘Did a better job than your lot.’
‘Yeah, well.’ She smiled again. ‘Knowing who did it’s generally the easy bit, Mr Conway. Hard bit’s proving it in court. So Moir got results?’
‘Now and again.’
‘Piss people off?’
I shrugged. ‘It’s in the job spec.’
‘Someone in particular?’
‘What?’
‘He piss off any players? Southside? East End? The Walshes, Neils?’
There was something wrong here. I looked across at Lumsden.
‘Hold on. This was suicide, right?’
The cops exchanged glances.
‘We don’t know, Mr Conway.’ Gunn was looking at her papers again. ‘We haven’t determined that yet.’
‘But it might be murder?’
She nodded. I looked across at Lumsden again and back at Gunn.
‘What makes you think it was murder?’
‘We don’t think it was murder.’
‘But you think it might be.’
Gunn exchanged another glance with Lumsden. It was Lumsden who spoke.
‘He was tied to the wheel.’
‘What?’
Lumsden’s pen skittered onto the table. He held up his hands with the wrists turned out, like a man wearing handcuffs.
‘Ligatures round his wrists. His wrists were lashed to the steering wheel.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
The image came unbidden. The car smacking the surface, water surging in, the body thrashing and bucking, trying to wrench free.
‘Someone tied him to the wheel?’
‘We don’t know. He might have done it himself.’ Gunn stood up from the table. ‘It’s not uncommon. You keep the hands close together, tie the knots loosely. Pull them tight with your teeth.’
‘Oh Christ.’
She gathered her papers, slipped them in a folder. Lumsden stood up too and tucked his notebook into his inside pocket. In his bulky, shapeless jacket he looked like an upright bear.
‘Thank you for your time, Mr Conway.’ Gunn put a business card on the table and slid it across. ‘If anything comes to you.’
‘Of course. Aye.’
The two of them left and I sat there for a minute, my hands flat on the table. Could Moir have been murdered? Could a Tribune reporter of fourteen years’ standing, the current Scottish Journalist of the Year, could a man like this have been taken out? I thought of the offices of the Sunday Citizen in Belfast, a narrow room down an alley in the Cathedral Quarter, a building with security doors and bullet-proof glass. Four years back I stood in an alcoholic haze while the editor – who’d been standing me drinks for most of the afternoon in the Duke of York – showed me the polished brass plaque on the wall. It bore the name of the Citz’s Special Reporter, Brendan O’Dowd, a guy with three kiddies. He was shot in the head by Loyalist paramilitaries, murdered for writing the truth. That’s what happened in Belfast. Not here. Not on the mainland, things were different here.
I heard Maguire come in, close the door behind her.
‘You hear this?’ I said. ‘They’re saying it could be murder.’
‘I know.’
A look passed between us: Could be a bigger story than we thought. I looked down at the table. Maguire turned to the window, fiddled with the roller blind.
‘Let’s sit on this for the moment, Gerry. Let’s not get carried away.’
Back in my chair, I added Gunn’s card to the pile on my desk.
*
At dinner that evening I cut Angus’s gammon into tiny cubes and quartered his potatoes, quartered them again, pretended to salt his food when I salted my own, trailed a bootlace of ketchup over the lot. He set to work cheerily with his blue plastic spoon. Mari talked about work, how busy she was, how challenged, how she loved being back. Six months ago she’d started back part-time at an architects’ firm on St Vincent St. The firm had been great. When she took the job she got pregnant three months later. That was three years ago but they kept her job open, they were glad she was back. The Commie Games was in the offing and the bids had begun – they were working flat out on plans and costings and could use all the help they could get. Mari’s main client was a firm bidding for the velodrome contract, parts of the athletes’ village.
I tried to stay focused, nodding and grunting, chewing my food, but I kept thinking back to Niven’s talk. Wait till we know the facts. That used to be our job, didn’t it – finding the facts? What facts would the cops find out? What facts did we miss, what facts might have shown us that Moir was in trouble, edging towards that hole in the ground? And how come his friend and closest colleague, his daughter’s godfather, failed to spot them?
After dinner I scraped the plates, ran them under the hot tap, stacked the dishwasher. I sprayed the worktops and wiped then down. I ran a bath for Angus, washed his hair without getting water in his eyes, let the mirror steam up while he dunked and emptied his plastic cups, puddling the bathroom floor. I dried him in front of the living-room fire, read his little stack of picture books, put him to bed. I dug the Blue Mountain out of the freezer, made a pot of coffee, took a cup to Mari. Eventually, you run out of things to do, ways to put it off. You tip some Islay into your coffee and sit down at the table, punch the numbers.
A woman answered. Posh voice, Scottish, touch of English: the sister up from Manchester. Clare was sleeping. She’d been sedated, she couldn’t come to the phone. I wasn’t sorry. How do you talk to a woman whose husband has done what Moir had done? I’d done enough death knocks to know how it worked: grief, bereavement, the hunger for blame. Blame themselves, blame the victim, blame you. I asked the sister to pass on my condolences, tell Clare
I’ll call in a couple of days.
Chapter Five
Sunday evening. A back-to-school feeling pervaded the flat. The boys had been with us all day. It was time to take them back, to drive Rod and James down to Conwick. James was playing on the carpet with Angus, building little towers of coloured bricks that Angus would joyfully smack to pieces. Some kids were riding a motorbike on the wasteground across the street, the engine’s whine rising and receding.
‘There’s your phone, Dad.’
Rod was slumped on the couch, the black hyphen of his Nintendo DS barring his eyes.
‘What?’
‘Over there.’ He pointed with his stockinged foot, the game still fixed before his face. ‘I left it on the bookcase. It’s needing charged.’
‘You had my phone?’
‘Yeah.’ He sat up a little from his horizontal slouch, worked himself up with his shoulders. He glanced up blankly. ‘I must have put it in my pocket when I used it last weekend. Remember I was out of credit and I phoned Mum?’
‘Jesus, Rod.’ I turned the phone over in my hands, as if inspecting it for damage. ‘I’ve just spent four hundred quid on a new one. You couldn’t have let me know?’
‘Sorry, Dad.’
I shook my head. There was more to say but I bit it back. We’d be leaving for Conwick in half an hour, there was no point in picking a fight.
I drove them down to Ayrshire after tea. When I got back to the flat, Angus was down and Mari was making inroads on a bottle of Merlot.
‘There’s a glass on the breakfast bar.’
We watched Newsnight and Newsnight Scotland. Mari went to bed and I found Season 5 of The Wire, put it on while I tanned a couple of beers. It was one o’clock when I drained the last Sol. As I turned off the kitchen light I saw the phone, the bright square of its display window, on the breakfast bar. I had plugged it in before taking Rod and James back to Conwick. It would be charged by now. I flipped it open and turned it on and stood there in the dark. I would do the voicemails later; for now I scrolled down the messages.
Where the Dead Men Go Page 5