by Anna Smith
‘Mags . . . It’s me. Tracy . . . Are you there, Mags?’ The voice was clearer than Rosie had expected. ‘Fuck sake, Mags, where the fuck are you? It’s Tracy. Listen, I’m out ma box, I feel funny. Loadsa coke. I feel sick. I’m in the toilet, Mags . . . Mags. Can you hear me? I feel sick. I want off of this fucking boat. These guys are mental. They’re all blootered and coked up. That big Jack guy that brought me doon here in his motor, he’s all right. But that Fox guy, the one whose boat it is? He told me to shut it when I said I wanted to go back, said I could swim . . . Bastard. They’re fuckin’ polis, Mags. Mags . . . Can you hear me? . . . I feel sick, Mags, I want outa here . . .’ The voice trembled and trailed off.
‘See?’ Mags said. ‘She was tryin’ to get me, tryin’ to talk to me, and my fuckin’ phone was switched off. I was out ma face that night. She needed me, Rosie. It was me who got her on that boat, and she wanted to get off, because maybe she’d took too much stuff. Maybe she was dyin’ or somethin’. And I wasn’t even at the other end of the fuckin’ phone. Shit.’ Tears spilled out of her eyes.
‘You couldn’t have done anything anyway, Mags,’ Rosie said, consoling. ‘She was on a boat, miles away. There’s no way you could have got to her.’
Mags nodded. ‘I know. But maybe I could at least have calmed her down or somethin’. At least talk to her. Poor wee lassie.’ She bit her lip and looked away.
Rosie still held the phone. ‘Can I take this with me, Mags? Just for a couple of hours? I’ll get it back to you tonight or tomorrow, but I want to let the editor hear it, and get the number checked. It’s better if I have the actual phone.’
Mags looked edgy.
‘No. No way, Rosie. Sorry. No way.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m no bein’ a fanny or anything, but I need my mobile for the day. I’ve got somebody phonin’ me. Guy I owe money to, and if I don’t take his call then he’ll just come and find me and kick the shit out of me.’ She put her hand out. ‘Sorry. I need it back, Rosie. I’ll get it back to you. Anyway, you’ve taped it haven’t you.’
Rosie didn’t see the point in telling her that a taped conversation recorded from a phone meant nothing. She needed the phone, and she would get technical people onto it, voice experts, anyone who could prove that message came from that number. Anything that would give an indication of where the call was made. Pity there were no other voices in the background, nothing that could link it with Fox and the others, but it was still good. She knew the problems with ID when a mobile wasn’t a contract phone, but she was desperate for technical people to see just what they could find. The phone could be crucial, but she knew Mags wouldn’t part with it. Not today. She conceded, and handed it back.
‘Okay. Tomorrow then, Mags?’
Mags nodded, and Rosie leaned across and touched her wrist.
‘Listen, Mags. The important thing is for you to keep quiet about this. Never – and I mean never – tell anyone you spoke to me. You understand that, don’t you, Mags?
‘Aye, I know.’ She rolled her eyes to the ceiling. ‘I’m not as fuckin’ daft as I look. I’ve got three certificates you know, from school. I did exams. I was goin’ to be a fuckin’ schoolteacher.’ She smiled widely at the thought.
‘Really?’ It wasn’t the first time Rosie’d met junkies who didn’t fit the usual profile. ‘What happened?’
Mags was quiet for a moment. Gemma looked from her mum to Rosie, and back again.
‘My ma died and my da just got drunk all the time.’ She stared ahead, remembering. ‘It was miserable in the house. I was cryin’ all the time, so I started goin’ up to my pal’s house and we were all smoking some hash. Then one night, I tried smack. It was brilliant. Like a blanket. Like my ma had come back and cuddled me. But it’s not like that now. It doesn’t feel like a cuddle any more. It’s just cold all the time. Cold inside.’ She put her arm around Gemma. ‘I’m going to get better though. For her.’
Gemma smiled up at her mum, and Rosie felt like crying. She looked at Gemma and she could see herself all those years ago. She squeezed Mags’s hand.
‘I’m sure you will.’ She swallowed.
Rosie’s phone rang in her pocket. She lifted it out. It was McGuire on his mobile.
‘Where the fuck are you, Gilmour?’ His voice was sharp but Rosie was used to it.
‘Oh, hallo, Mick. I’m with somebody. I had to spend most of the day with them. I’ll be back in twenty minutes. Then I’ll tell you all about it.’
‘It better be good,’ McGuire said. ‘You’ve disappeared off the radar screen. The whole point of these fucking fancy mobile phones is that people can keep in touch. Especially you.’
‘I’m on my way.’ Rosie pressed the button, cutting him off.
She told Mags she had to go, and asked her to phone her that night, just to let her know she was all right. As she left, Rosie gave a couple of pound notes to Gemma for sweets and the kid thanked her with a beaming smile.
CHAPTER EIGHT
On the ground floor of the Post, Rosie shot into the lift just before the doors closed. She could see by the looks on the faces of the telesales girls from upstairs that they were in a hurry. They were carrying a box of cakes and biscuits as well as steaming coffee in plastic cups. Rosie squeezed in and nodded to them, and they all stood in silence watching the little light flash on as it hit each floor. What was it about lifts that rendered people speechless?
When the lift was almost at the editorial floor, the girls started chattering. One of them addressed a middleaged woman next to her.
‘So what about your anal fissures, Shona?’ she asked. ‘Are they any better?’ The other passengers in the lift looked at each other in disbelief.
Shona flicked her eyes upwards and shrugged. ‘Same,’ she replied. ‘Still agony, bleeding every time I—’
‘Thanks for that, Shona,’ one of the younger girls said, cutting her off. ‘I was looking forward to that strawberry tart.’ The girls giggled, and the lift pinged for editorial.
‘Enjoy,’ Rosie said, getting out at her floor.
On her desk was a note saying, ‘See editor’, but before she could pick it up, her phone rang. It was Marion, McGuire’s secretary, who had spotted her coming onto the editorial floor.
‘You’ve to come straight through. The boss is waiting for you.’
‘Should I bring some Chardonnay? Or is it already chilling.’
‘Chilling’s not the word,’ Marion said.
Rosie hung up her coat and went straight across to McGuire’s office. She wasn’t going to tell the news editor, Marty Lamont, what Mags had just told her. She didn’t trust him. He’d only been in the job five weeks, and the pair of them had already clashed. Lamont had flexed his muscles in the first week and sent Rosie to follow a trivial story that a junior reporter could easily have covered. She did it, though, without question, but when she came back in, she took him to one side and told him in no uncertain terms never to pull a stunt like that again. Some fat-arsed news editor, who couldn’t report himself missing when he was a hack on the streets, was not about to push her around. Things had been a little frosty since.
She walked past Marion and knocked on McGuire’s half-open door, then walked in before he could tell her to enter.
‘Come in,’ McGuire said from behind the newspaper, his tone sarcastic. He crumpled the paper and looked at her over narrow reading specs. His heavy, black eyebrows and slicked-back hair made him look like some city finance dealer.
‘Where in the name of Christ have you been, Rosie?’ He motioned her to sit down and leaned back, resting his shiny black Oxford shoes on the desk. He checked that the crease on his blue pinstripe trousers was perfect. As if it was ever anything else.
‘It’s a long story, Mick,’ Rosie said as she sat down, and rubbed her hands across her face. ‘But it’s mega. In fact it’s so mega, I’m scared to repeat it.’ She smiled. McGuire had his hands folded behind his head. He took one hand to remove his glasses and look directly into Rosie’s eyes.
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‘Well? Go on.’ He raised his finger to point at her. ‘But before you start, I’m not happy that you pissed off all day and didn’t even phone. You know the rules.’
‘Sorry. Won’t happen again.’ She smiled at McGuire, because they both knew it would. But Rosie was confident that he liked her enough for her to get away with just about anything – so long as she kept delivering the goods.
There was no easy way into the story, so Rosie just spilled it out, painting the picture for him and watching him reacting to it, just the way she had done. She would trust McGuire with her life, and she knew this was right up his street. He was a ballsy, instinctive editor, and he always relished laying one on the establishment. But Rosie knew that, even as she spoke, he would also be considering the political implications of a such an explosive story.
McGuire punctuated her story with exclamations of ‘Fuck me!’ and ‘Jesus wept!’ and she decided not to tell him anything of what Mags had said about the children’s home. No point in getting him overexcited at this stage. She was still trying to take it all in herself, and would wait until she had done a bit of digging. When she got to the end of her story, McGuire was silent. He lifted his feet off the desk and got up to pace around the room. Rosie’s eyes followed him as he walked up and down, his hands dug into his trouser pockets.
‘So, right. Let’s see what we’ve got here. We have the word of a hooker.’ McGuire turned to Rosie, scratching his chin. ‘A junked-up hooker. That should give the lawyers a good dose of the trots.’
‘I think it’s true, Mick,’ Rosie said. ‘I believe she’s telling the truth.’ She needed him to be on her side on this, but she knew the lawyers would tell him not to touch it with a barge pole, and she felt her confidence weakening a little already.
‘She might well be telling the truth.’ McGuire ran his hand across his thick black hair. He surveyed the awardwinning front pages that were framed and mounted on the wall. ‘Poor bastard probably is. But you can’t go around saying the head of the CID is humping junkie girls on his boat. Under-age hookers, no less. We’d be printing fivers instead of papers.’ He turned to Rosie, saying, ‘You know that, don’t you?’ and went back behind his desk.
He said he could nearly hear the collective screams of panic when the managing editor and the rest of the hierarchy got to know about this – in the unlikely event they could ever run the story.
Rosie’s spirits sank. She thought of Mags, and that innocent snapshot of Tracy before the heroin had swallowed her up. She had hoped for better than this. The sound of Tracy’s voice on the tape still rang in her ears. She reached into her pocket and brought it out.
‘Look, Mick,’ she said, rewinding the tape. ‘Listen to this. Tracy made a call to the girl Mags from the boat. Something happened at some stage of the night, and Tracy phoned Mags in a bit of a state. Mags didn’t get the call because she was, well, the usual junkie stuff, out of her box. But the kid left a message. Mags let me hear it today and I taped it. Listen. It’s her voice.’
She put the volume up as loud as it would go, sat it on McGuire’s desk, and played the message. His eyes narrowed as he listened.
‘Play it again.’
She played it again, and then a third time.
‘You got the mobile?’
Rosie looked at him and sighed. ‘No, Mick. If I had the mobile, you would have been listening to it on the mobile. Mags wouldn’t part with the phone today. Said she needed it for something, and she’ll give it to me tomorrow. But I taped this from the mobile.’
McGuire nodded. They were both well aware of the difficulties.
He folded his arms. ‘It’s great to have the voice on tape, Rosie, but unless we get the mobile and get some techno guys into it, we can’t prove anything. Lawyers will know we can’t prove that the voice on the tape is the kid’s, plus, we can’t prove where it came from. If we had the mobile, well, maybe we could. Need the mobile.’
‘I’ll get it tomorrow, Mick,’ she promised, trying to hide her disappointment, and hearing Tracy’s voice played over and over in her mind.
‘This is going to be a nightmare to get in the paper. A nightmare,’ McGuire said.
‘I know.’
‘But I’ll tell you one thing, Gilmour.’ McGuire looked straight at her. ‘We’ll have a good fucking try.’ He banged his fist on the desk. ‘What’s your next move?’ He had that twinkle in his eye. Rosie had seen it before. He was in.
She told him they were still doing tests on the body, but there were no signs of injuries or struggle.
‘I talked to my man in Forensics,’ she said, ‘and he told me the post mortem didn’t tell them that much. About six months in the water, so there was a lot of decomposition. Obviously there’d be no bodily fluids and no DNA of other parties. Her brain was gone, and there wasn’t much fatty tissue left on the body at all. Probably wasn’t much in the first place. With no brain, they wouldn’t even be able to run tests for drug addiction. Not that it mattered anyway. My man said it would be impossible to prove conclusively the cause of death.’
‘Which would suit the cops perfectly.’
‘Exactly,’ Rosie said. ‘You can guarantee they’ll be saying it was most likely suicide – kid depressed from the earlier abuse and stuff. It gives them an out. People stop looking after someone says suicide.’
‘But we know different,’ McGuire smiled.
‘That we do, sir.’
She suggested that, initially they run the story, having a go at the social work department since this kid was in their care . . . just see what it flushed out. You never know, perhaps someone would ring in with decent information. Stranger things have happened. On the day after that was published, they could run a follow-up story hinting that Tracy may have been with some very important people.
‘That way, we don’t implicate anyone.’ Rosie clenched and unclenched her fist. ‘All we do is get their arses twitching. They’ll know that we know more, and they’ll be panicking, wondering what is going to spill out next.’
McGuire agreed. He said they shouldn’t tell anyone else at the moment, not even Lamont.
‘I know he’s not exactly your best mate,’ he said, with a smirk.
‘He’s an arsehole,’ Rosie said, deadpan.
‘He’s organised. Methodical,’ McGuire offered.
‘So was Adolf Eichmann,’ Rosie said.
McGuire half smiled. ‘Anyway, you don’t have to deal with him, so forget about him. You only answer to me.’ He sat back in his chair, hands behind his head again. He looked slightly puzzled.
‘So tell me this, Rosie.’ He looked at her. ‘Because this is a problem for me.’
She held her breath, wondering what he was going to say.
‘What I can’t get is, why would high-ranking detectives be using cheap hookers like this?’ He screwed up his eyes. ‘I just . . . I just can’t see why. Do you get my drift, Rosie? These guys have been around the block. They’re well paid. If they want a quick shag, there have to be other ways. There are bars where they could pick up a woman for a bit of uncomplicated rumpy.’
Rosie shook her head. ‘They’re all married, Mick. It’s not that easy. They’ll have lives, families. And the thing is, they’re all ex-vice squad, so they grew up messing around with the prostitutes. It’s one of the perks of the job, if you want to put it that way.’
‘Christ.’ McGuire shook his head. ‘Perks? With some syphilated shagbox?’
‘That’s not the point, Mick. With these guys it’s all about using the power they’ve got. Basically, they do it because, well, because they can. They probably always have done. One of my good contacts told me that Fox and his mates were getting paid off by the sauna bosses. One massage parlour in particular. I know a crook who says Prentice used to pick up the wedge of cash every week in a brown envelope. Plus, they got girls to use.’ She could see McGuire was engrossed. She continued.
‘I believe that. These guys might have risen up the ranks in the police, bu
t the bottom line is they haven’t evolved as human beings. You know what I mean? They’re still the same redneck bruisers they always were when they were young coppers, kicking the shit out of delinquents and then getting a blow-job on the way home to the wife.’ Rosie looked at McGuire, who had a wry smile.
‘I do like it when you talk dirty, Gilmour.’
Rosie smiled. ‘C’mon. You know what I mean, Mick. Cops. The police force. It attracts good guys, the oldfashioned Elliot Ness heroes from the movies who want to make the world safe and all that shit, but the very nature of the job means it also attracts bullies. And crooks. That’s always been the way. Bent coppers go back to the beginning of time, it’s part of the culture. The kind of mentality that uses people for sex is part of any institution where there is power. From the clergy to politicians. The list goes on.’
‘Oh, Christ,’ McGuire said. ‘We’re on our soapbox now, right? Okay, Rosie, I get the picture. But you realise they will obviously deny it on a stack of Bibles, so I’m not going anywhere near this unless we can really nail it down.’ His face was stern. ‘Watch my lips, Gilmour. Nail it down.’
‘I will. You know I will.’
McGuire asked about Mags and about her heroin habit. Rosie told him about the girl’s background, and about the child. He seemed sympathetic.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Fine. Let’s get on with it. Just be careful with that girl. And don’t be doing anything daft like giving her money for heroin.’
Rosie was on her feet now, trying not to look at him. But she knew that McGuire was probably aware she had already done that. She smiled as she turned and walked out of the room. As she passed Marion, she winked. ‘He’s a pussycat,’ she whispered.
Back at her desk, Rosie sat down and started typing. Over the top of her screen she could see Lamont watching, and allowed herself a wry smile. She went into the toilet where Annie Dawson, one of their bright young reporters was at the wash basin, slapping cold water onto her flushed face. She had clearly been crying.