by Jo Bannister
Rosie didn’t think so, but Sale was right – she couldn’t be sure. She argued a different premise. “But Jackie Pickering wasn’t killed in the heat of the moment. Her murderer wasn’t an angry man striking out at someone who’d abused his trust. He arranged for her to be at the railway yards late in the evening – either he thought up a pretext to take her there or one to meet her there – and he went armed with a knife. Not a penknife, such as anyone might carry, but the perfect shape and length of knife to kill Jackie Pickering in the way that she was killed. It couldn’t have been more premeditated. That wasn’t Shad. I feel absolutely confident of that.”
Sale was nodding slowly. “All right. Good. Because I don’t mind telling you, Rosie, if you’re wrong about him it could be bad news for the Chronicle. He’s your protégé – if it turns out he’s unstable enough to—”
“He is not my protégé!” Rosie shot back fast. “He’s a friend. He does my garden. Four months ago he helped me solve the mystery of the missing bird-watcher for The Primrose Path, and he got hurt doing it. That puts me in his debt, but it doesn’t make him my protégé.”
“Rosie, it does. In the public mind, that’s exactly what it makes him. And the public mind is what’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks if it turns out you’ve misjudged him and there’s a girl dead because of it. It may not be reasonable, it may not be fair, but fickle is the public’s middle name and they can turn against you as quickly as they took to you. You’ve been a huge success in this town, Rosie. People like you being a bit outrageous. But only so far. If you’re implicated in what’s happened, however innocently, they’ll turn on you as they turned on Dick Chauncey.”
Along with the indignation he’d provoked Rosie felt a crawl of unease along her spine. “Dan … are you making this some kind of a warning? Putting me on notice?”
Sale’s brow wrinkled unhappily. “Hell, Rosie, I don’t mean it to sound like that. Yes, it’s a warning, because I think maybe I can see a danger looming that you can’t. Put it down to experience: I’ve been in this business a long time, I’ve seen people scale extraordinary heights and I’ve seen them brought down. It’s that sort of a business. I don’t want the Chronicle to suffer, but I also don’t want you to get hurt. Putting you on notice? – of course not. But what kind of a friend would let you walk into a danger you weren’t aware of without trying to warn you?”
Her hand shot out with impulsive warmth and clasped his on top of his desk. He looked startled but not displeased. Dan Sale had been divorced for some ten years: it may have been longer than that since a woman last held his hand.
“I’m sorry,” Rosie said honestly. “That was unfair and uncalled for. I know you’ve only our best interests at heart. If I say stupid things sometimes it’s because I’m trying to find my way in a field I’m still not familiar with. That means I need your guidance even when I don’t recognise the fact. Perhaps particularly when I don’t recognise the fact. Maybe as time goes on I’ll be less of a trial to you.”
Her quick grin as quickly faded. “But Dan, I don’t know what I can do about Shad that’ll make you rest any easier. As things stand, the police consider him a potential witness and he’s doing everything he can to help with their inquiries. He’s working with a psychiatrist to try and find the missing hours. It may be they won’t succeed; or if they do, they won’t find anything useful – he was floored before he saw a face. But he’s doing his best to behave like a responsible citizen, even though someone tinkering around in his mind is what scares him most.”
“Maybe he’s scared of what they’ll find.”
Rosie frowned and shrugged. “What can I tell you? – I don’t believe it. And if Shad thought there was any danger of that, you wouldn’t get him within shouting distance of a shrink. I can’t give you any guarantees, but all the evidence is that what happened is what looks to have happened: he stumbled across a murder and the killer decked him and made his escape. That’s what Shad thinks, it’s what Detective Superintendent Marsh thinks, and it’s what I think too.”
“And if you’re wrong?” Sale’s voice was flat, uncompromising. People never thought of him as a particularly tough man until they’d had to negotiate with him.
Rosie blinked. “I suppose there’s an outside chance that we’re wrong. I personally would be devastated—but I still don’t see how the paper would be damaged. Whatever happened on Wednesday, the fact remains that four months ago Shad Lucas risked his life to help me help one of our correspondents. We owe him for that. Of course I wouldn’t help him escape the consequences of a crime, but I wouldn’t disown him either. If he’d got himself into that much trouble he’d need his friends more than ever.”
Rosie was puzzled by the tone of the conversation. She seemed to be being accused of something, as if knowing someone who’d found a body showed lack of judgement. But high on her hate list were fair-weather friends. She could no more have tiptoed away from Shad Lucas and his troubles than she could have danced the Dying Swan at Covent Garden. She thought it important that her editor and her proprietor understood that.
“I still don’t believe it, but imagine the worst – that Shad killed Jackie Pickering and that’s the trauma his mind can’t face. If you’re telling me that the Chronicle would need me to cut him adrift, Dan, then I have to tell you we’d have a problem. He’d need me – not to get him off but to get him through. If the precise combination of circumstances arose that led to him killing someone, and just what he is and can do became the subject of official scrutiny, your precious public would be baying for his blood. The only thing standing between him and the mob would be one or two friends.
“Abandoning him then would be a betrayal of everything The Primrose Path stands for. You can’t want me only to help people whose situations aren’t too serious! I don’t mind dealing with the trivia but I’m not going to limit myself to it. I’m not going to help only those who can count on public sympathy – the attractive, the educated, the well mannered. I won’t condone a crime, but even criminals have rights that need protection. I’ll try not to embarrass the Chronicle, Dan, but I won’t throw Shad to the wolves rather than risk it.”
Matt Gosling saw a juncture approaching at which the two people who mattered most to his dream of a successful newspaper were going to dig themselves into trenches it would be hard to leave. Professionally, he was sure Sale was right; on a human level he could see that Rosie was. To him it didn’t matter which of them had the better case, only that some compromise be found. If it wasn’t, he’d be in the invidious position of having to back his editor against his star columnist or vice versa, and the Chronicle would lose one of them.
“Hey, guys, come on,” he pleaded, “we can deal with this. We’re all reasonable people and they’re both reasonable positions – what we have to do is reconcile them. You’re not telling me we can’t find a compromise?”
Sale sniffed. “Matt, I’m not telling you anything more than you pay me to: what sells papers, and what gets papers into trouble. If Shad Lucas killed Jackie Pickering, and he did it because she was using him to get at Rosie, we are in deep shit. Our one shot at damage limitation would be for her to dissociate herself. Lucas helped her once, it was months ago, she pays him to mow her lawn – she’s no more responsible for his actions than the man who services her car. If she attempts to stand by him there’ll be such a backlash against the Chronicle that we may all be queuing at the Labour Exchange by the end of the month.” It was a measure of Dan Sale’s professional success that Job Centres were called Labour Exchanges the last time he was in one.
Rosie hadn’t had much need for them either, wouldn’t actually need another job if she lost this one. So it was easy to make a grand gesture. “Dan, if you need my resignation before I’m seen helping someone who’s done his best to help me, who was probably trying to help someone this time, and who’s scared shitless by what’s happened to him, then so be it. Alex’ll run the page for you, good luck to you and no hard feelings. I’d
be sorry to leave that way, but I’d sooner go than put the boot into a boy who, to the best of my knowledge, has never harmed or tried to harm anyone.”
“I’m not suggesting that!” snapped Sale, incensed. “I’m saying you need to protect yourself by putting some distance between you.”
“Oh, so rather than put the boot in myself I should hold the coats of those who’re doing it for me? Yeah, Dan, that makes all the difference. Me and Shad’ll both feel a lot better about that.”
She’d nailed her colours to the mast: she wasn’t going to drop them. Matt tried appealing to Sale. “Dan, isn’t there room for us to condemn the crime without abandoning the man? Newspapers do sometimes take up the case of people who’ve committed crimes. Women who kill abusive partners, people driven to violence by circumstances beyond their control. The public can understand if they’re helped to.”
Dan Sale’s wrinkles were twitching with the effort to contain his ire. He was the editor of this newspaper: he was responsible for everything that went into it. He worked with his proprietor because, on the whole, it was good for the Chronicle, but he wasn’t used to having to justify either his motives or his decisions. He was due Matt Gosling’s support as of right. At the end of the day a proprietor has only two honourable options: to back his editor or to fire him. He made allowances for Matt, partly because he hadn’t been in the business long and partly because he tried so hard to do it well. That tolerance didn’t extend to letting him think he had any sanction in this other than the final one.
“Yes, it happens. Sometimes: in very precise circumstances, two of which are indispensable. The crime has to be committed by a weaker party against a stronger; and the criminal’s got to be photogenic. We couldn’t find anything to say in defence of a fit man who killed a girl. Even if there were mitigating circumstances, I can’t see a way of telling the story that wouldn’t make readers identify with the pretty, bright young television researcher and against the freak who stabbed her.”
Rosie felt that like a knife under her own ribs. She actually gasped. For a split second she glimpsed the world through Shad’s eyes and it was a hostile place. A place where decent, honest, liberal professional people thought of him as not fully human. A freak. People he’d never harmed, who had no reason to think he might, were afraid of him. What he had – they called it a gift but really it was a curse. It separated him from everyone around him. If he used it, even if it was to help them, they resented him. If he didn’t, it squatted in the bottom of his mind like a toad in a well, growing in the dark.
Of course he was afraid! She’d thought it was the perception he feared; she’d told him to get it out in the daylight, to map it and use it and learn to control it. But it wasn’t the toad that frightened him, it was this: that people like Dan Sale, who knew him, who knew what he’d done and what he hadn’t, could sum him up with such devastating succinctness. His identity was in their hands. If they said he was a freak then he was one.
Rosie lurched to her feet, spilling her chair unheeded. Her broad face was flushed with fury. “My God, Dan – that’s it? You can define another human being in one word? Twenty-five years living and growing, loving and losing, laughing and crying and straggling to make a place for himself, and you can distil that down to one hard word. There’s something about him – just one thing – that’s different to how you are, and that entitles you to call him a freak.
“So what makes you such a perfect template? Being a white middle-class male? Congratulations, Dan, it was a smart move picking your genes like that. No getting stuck with a sub-standard set. Wish I’d thought of it: I’d have had thin ones. Jonah” – Jonah McLeod, the Chronicle’s chief photographer – “would have had tall ones: save him taking a stepladder to markings. Shad could have had five senses like everyone else, the Town Clerk could have avoided that wall eye, and as for people who deliberately pick genes with an extra chromosome on them – well, you can’t call that normal, can you? Freaks, the lot of them! Only a matter of time before they all murder someone.”
Dan Sale had been subjected to a lot of abuse in his time, every journalist has. But not much of it had come from colleagues, and none had accused him of prejudice. He hardly knew how to respond. He thought it was monstrously unfair. But even when they were arguing he respected Rosie Holland’s opinion, and it was enough to stop him dismissing it as febrile nonsense. He’d never seen himself as a bigot. But had he become one? Had other people seen him that way all along?
Rosie saw his hesitation as weakness and went in for the kill. “In fact, it’s hard to see why we need a problem page at all. If everyone’s problems are basically their own fault, maybe we’re just encouraging them by trying to help. Tell you what – in future we’ll just print a photo of you and the caption: ‘It is your patriotic duty to be exactly like this’. Only grow a little toothbrush moustache first.”
She was out of the office and stamping down the corridor before either man found the presence of mind to shut his mouth.
Alex was on her way back from the coffee machine when she met Rosie emerging from the offices of The Primrose Path with a cardboard box under her arm. She stared until her eyes began to water, then she blinked. “Where are you going?”
“Home,” said Rosie shortly.
“But …” It was Monday morning, still too early for lunch, even in Rosie’s book. “We have things to do …”
“No,” Rosie corrected her savagely, “you have things to do. Specifically, you have a page to produce. I have two bits of advice for you. Don’t take risks; and anything that goes wrong in the next six months, blame me.”
Alex had no idea what she meant but not for a moment did she think Rosie was joking. “Tell me what’s happened.”
But Rosie shook her head. “Don’t get involved, Alex. I have to, I’ve no choice, but you don’t. Do what they need you to do, what Matt wants. At least think long and hard before you decide not to. There’s a good job here for somebody: the right person can have a lot of fun and do a lot of good. I just don’t think that person’s me any more.”
She went to shoulder past before Alex could see that some of the glitter in her eyes was not anger but tears. But Alex stood her ground firmly, a greyhound defying a pitbull terrier.
“Rosie, I can see you’re upset. I don’t know why, I don’t know who said what, but I’m absolutely sure that nobody wants you to leave. Not Matt, not Dan, and not you. Put that box down while I get another coffee and we talk about this.”
Protesting weakly, Rosie nevertheless allowed herself to be backed into the office. She put the box on Alex’s desk, where she could sweep it up again with more speed and dignity than if she put it on the floor, and lowered herself into Alex’s chair. She looked like a buffalo ready to stampede at a moment’s notice.
“Now, don’t you move,” said Alex, her gaze like nails. “If you get out of that chair before I come back I will never speak to you again.”
She meant to be away no more than a minute. A stranger to the word Urgency, Rosie never did anything in under a minute. But as she wrestled with the geriatric coffee machine, the lift door opened and Matt, warm-cheeked and flustered, spilled out. “Alex! Is she still here?”
Alex gestured back along the corridor. “She’s in my office. Matt, what’s happened?”
He shouldn’t have told her. At least, he shouldn’t have told her then. There were more pressing needs that had brought him here at as close to a run as his prosthetic foot could manage. But he couldn’t brush her off while he dealt with the immediate crisis. He told her what had passed between Rosie and Dan Sale in the editor’s office.
Alex listened in open-mouthed horror. “She called him a Nazi?”
“She did. But not till Dan called Shad a freak.”
Alex put both hands to her face. “Oh my God. No wonder she’s ready to leave!”
“She is? Alex, I have to talk to her. Things have gone quite far enough, the fences between them are going to take some mending as it is. If
she storms out of the building, I don’t think she’ll ever come back.”
“What will you say?”
Matt gave a harassed shrug. “Beats me. But something. They have to get talking again. Through me, if that’s the only way they can. I won’t let everything they’ve achieved end in meltdown!”
Alex nodded. “All right. We’ll talk to them. We’ll talk to them both. When they’ve calmed down they’ll start seeing sense, trade apologies and work out what’s to be done about all of this.” She set off along the corridor at a brisk walk.
But they’d wasted too much time already. Alex’s door was open and the office was empty. Rosie and her cardboard box had gone.
Chapter Ten
She didn’t go home, she went to Prufrock’s. She knew she’d behaved badly, needed someone to confess to.
The piebald Land Rover was parked in Foxford Lane.
Her first instinct was to come back later. She wasn’t sure why, but she didn’t particularly want to see Shad right now. It wasn’t that she blamed him for any of this. It was more embarrassment that kept her sitting in her car outside the little red-brick house. She was ashamed of what had been said about him. He’d never know about it because she wasn’t going to tell him and she couldn’t imagine anyone else doing. But she knew if she saw him now she’d be unable to look him in the eye. Better to avoid him until she had her own emotions under control.
But her best intentions went for nothing when the front door – it really did have roses round it – opened and Prufrock peered out. She felt she’d been caught reading under the covers after lights out. “Rosie? I thought I heard your car. Don’t just sit there, come inside.”