Present Tense

by William McIntyre

  ‘Oh, Jerry is it? You two on first name terms? Yeah, came through on the news feed. They found it early this morning. A fishing boat snagged something off Montrose. It was the helicopter.’

  ‘Bodies?’

  ‘No sign of any. Only to be expected after three weeks at the bottom of the North Sea.’

  ‘Look, Kaye. I really need to speak to Cherry Lovell and you’re the only point of contact I have. Do this and I’ll definitely owe you.’

  ‘And what have you got to repay me with? Don’t think you can buy me off with chocolate. Not this time. Well, not just chocolate.’

  ‘You know how I was the lawyer of the man they think downed that helicopter?’ I bent over to put my finger on a knot. ‘What if I told you I was also the lawyer with the evidence to prove who actually did it.’

  Kaye let go the ends of the ribbon. Now she was paying attention.

  ‘You set me up a meeting with Cherry and when I reveal who sabotaged that helicopter, you’ll—’

  ‘Be the first to know?’

  ‘No... but possibly second or third.’

  35

  ‘So what did you think of young Darren?’

  Malky was driving me back from Grangemouth. I’d talked him into going down to watch Billy Paris’s son play in the team’s last match before the winter break. In the space of just over a week the Sunnyside pitch had gone from water-logged to frozen solid, and so Saturday’s postponed game had been shifted to under the floodlights of Planet Soccer’s 4G astro-turf pitch at Little Kerse, near Grangemouth.

  This time there had been no team talks by Malky. We hadn’t even spoken to the coaches, but I’d made sure Maureen saw me making good on my promise.

  ‘He’s a good big lad. Not the quickest, but reads the game well, which makes up for it,’ was Malky’s take on young Darren. ‘With the right partner, someone quicker across the ground than he is and him marshalling things at the back, you could have the makings of a decent central defender.’

  ‘At what sort of level?’

  ‘Too early to say at this stage. He’s a stick-out now because he’s big for his age. If he stops growing and everyone else catches up, things could be a lot different. If he keeps growing, eats a few less burgers, who knows.’

  ‘But you will recommend someone comes and takes a look?’

  ‘I’ll speak to some people.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Happy that I had kept my word, I reclined in the comfort of the BMW’s heated leather seat and relaxed as much as I could relax when my brother was driving. ‘Malky… you know Joanna?’

  ‘Remind me.’

  ‘Joanna who works with me?’

  ‘Oh, Joanna as in...’ Malky’s took his hands off the wheel and made a parallel wavy gesture which I took to be his contour estimation of my assistant’s torso. ‘What about her?’

  ‘I was speaking to someone the other day who thought that maybe she… I don’t know… liked me.’

  Malky pinched my cheek. ‘Of course she likes you. You’re her boss. She’s paid to like you. You pay her to like you.’

  ‘I was thinking, after what that person was saying, I mean, that there might be more to it than that.’

  ‘You mean that she might fancy you?’ I supposed that’s what I would have meant — if I’d still been at school. Malky squinted sideways at me. ‘Have you been eating those mushrooms that grow up by the third tee? Joanna’s way out of your league. I mean way out. She could even be out of my league,’ he said, laughing at the ridiculousness of that last remark.

  ‘It doesn’t matter who I go out with, you always say they’re out of my league.’

  Malky shrugged. ‘What can I say? There are a lot of leagues above you.’

  ‘You said it about Vikki too.’

  ‘And look what happened. Red-carded.’

  Even those conversations with my brother that weren’t about football were usually littered with football analogies. I let it go. This was no time to fall out with him. He’d already done me one favour. Now I needed another.

  ‘You know Cherry Lovell?’

  ‘The girl from that news programme you were on? The wee blonde thing? Don’t tell me she’s got the hots for you too. You really are smoking. I don’t know why I bothered to turn on the heated seats.’

  Before we’d left for the game, Kaye had tried calling Cherry, who wasn’t picking up. After several attempts she’d managed to get through. The news presenter wasn’t keen to meet me again and neither was her expense account. So far as she was concerned she’d spread enough muck about Kirkton Perch as she could legally do at that moment and, until someone came up with hard evidence on him, she had moved onto her next exposé.

  ‘She’s working on a Night News special on sectarianism inside football,’ I told Malky. ‘It’s to coincide with the first Old Firm New Year game since 2012.’

  The ‘inside’ football wasn’t completely true. Actually, it was completely untrue, but then the truth wouldn’t have lured my brother into the trap I was trying to set for that evening.

  Everyone knew how fond the supporters of Rangers and Celtic football clubs were of gathering at stadiums, singing folk songs before later meeting at pubs around Scotland and welcoming each other with open razors, but my brother had always maintained that the players remained apart from all the hate. Some of Malky’s best pals were his former hooped rivals and had the bruises to prove it. It annoyed him to think people thought otherwise, and his keenness to set the record straight, as well as the chance to try it on with Cherry, would be the perfect bait.

  Malky turned off the Cadgers Brae roundabout and onto the M9 motorway. I had to talk him round before we hit the Linlithgow turn-off. I had approximately two miles.

  ‘It was her I was out with on that blind date the other night,’ I said. ‘We had dinner at the Aspen Lounge on Princes Street.’

  ‘Two reasons why I know you’re lying, Robbie. One—’

  ‘Has the first reason got anything to do with league divisions?’

  ‘And two, the Aspen Lounge is way outside your income bracket.’

  And, three, your lips were moving when you said it.’

  Two miles with Malky driving was a distance measured in seconds, not minutes. He flicked on the nearside indicator.

  ‘Well, you’re right about one thing,’ I said. ‘She wasn’t keen on me. You, on the other hand, up there in the premier league…’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Cherry’s a big fan. Loves your show. Thinks you’re wasted on the radio and should be on telly.’

  Malky began to slow. ‘Really?’

  ‘I bet I could set you up. After all, I owe you one for coming to watch Billy Paris’s boy.’

  ‘Do it.’

  ‘It would have to be tonight, now, in fact, because I’m dead busy the rest of the week.’

  ‘Now? Where?’ He turned the wheel to take the off-ramp.

  I gently tugged the steering wheel in the opposite direction keeping him going straight ahead. ‘Edinburgh.’

  36

  The Monday before Christmas, the Aspen Lounge was heaving with office staff from the various financial institutions on St Andrews Square and along George Street.

  From what I could see Cherry and my brother had got along famously. I wasn’t all that surprised. They had a lot in common. Narcissism being the most obvious.

  In gratitude for serving up my brother, I’d been granted an audience. ‘I’ll give you five minutes,’ Cherry said, when she’d eventually finished with Malky and I’d gone over to sit opposite her. She was occupying a corner table on which some papers with scribbled notes were scattered. ‘Malky was great, except I’m not sure how much of his material I can use. I’m more trying to focus in on the hatred between both sides of the Old Firm, than the camaraderie amongst players from yesteryears.’

  Yesteryears? Please tell me she’d said that to Malky.

  ‘Yeah, sorry, about that,’ I said. ‘Malky was always very ecumenical during his football career.
He didn’t mind who he clattered. Still, not to worry, I’m sure you’ll manage to invent something and do a programme on it anyway.’

  I took a sip of ginger beer and looked over to the bar where my brother had already gathered a few well-wishers, whose eagerness to offer the former Scotland centre-back a refreshment was matched only by his willingness to accept. Halfway between Linlithgow and Edinburgh we’d agreed that I’d drive back so he could have a drink. Now that he’d apparently conceded defeat with Cherry he was going to crash at my dad’s house, since Tina was away and there was a bed free.

  ‘I don’t invent things. I report. Anyway…’ Cherry put a hand to her mouth, yawned and started gathering her notes. ‘I don’t care what you think. We’re quits now.’

  ‘Quits? You hung me out to dry last Thursday night and despite that I bring my brother to you for your next piece of sensational TV drivel, and you call us quits?’

  ‘Drivel?’

  ‘I have not the faintest idea who killed Jeremy Thorn or Madeleine Moreau, I’ve already got the cops planting bugs on me because they think I’m withholding information on a murder, and you go throwing petrol on the flames of their suspicion. By the way, you can use that last line when you record your apology,’ I said.

  ‘Drivel?’

  ‘What gives you the right, without my permission—’

  Cherry reached over and placed a hand across my mouth. ‘Enough. That drivel happened to be the culmination of weeks of intensive journalistic research. Tell me one thing that wasn’t factually correct.’

  ‘How about two for starters? First of all, at the time the programme went out the helicopter hadn’t been found and so no one could truthfully say it had crashed, far less been sabotaged.’

  Cherry clicked her pen and dropped it into an expensively vulgar, lime-green handbag that had gold fitments hanging from it and the designer’s name in bold metal letters. ‘Okay, so I was ahead of the curve on that one.’

  ‘Secondly, there is no actual evidence to say that the helicopter was sabotaged.’

  Cherry rolled her eyes. ‘That’s practically the same as the first, and, anyway, you told me your client had said it had been sabotaged.’

  ‘Then, thirdly—’

  ‘It’s still only secondly.’

  ‘Even if the helicopter was sabotaged, I never so much as suggested to you that I had any idea who was responsible.’

  ‘But you do have an idea, don’t you?’

  ‘That’s not the point. You had no right to broadcast a load of speculation as though it was the truth. Night News believes this man holds the answer. What did you think you were doing?’

  ‘What I thought I was doing was saving your life,’ Cherry said, folding her notes in two and stuffing them in her handbag.

  It was a defence to my accusation I hadn’t anticipated. ‘Oh really? Saving my life? How’s that, then?’

  ‘Your client. What happened to him? Just strolled into a canal one evening, did he?’ She snapped her handbag shut. ‘You may think I’m some blonde bimbo who spouts drivel on the telly, but when it comes to politics I know a damn sight more than you ever will.’

  Guilty as charged.

  ‘For instance,’ Cherry said, ‘do you know that the Business Secretary estimates that space innovation, launching satellites, space tourism, all that sort of stuff, will be worth four hundred billion a year to the global economy by two thousand and thirty? Well, it will, and both the Scottish and UK Government want a slice of it.’

  I could only sit back and listen as she continued at full volume in order to be heard above the general hubbub.

  ‘It’s just a matter of time before there are calls for another referendum on Scottish independence. All the Unionist parties are desperate to do something for Scotland that’ll help keep Britain together. Out of the seven sites identified by the UK Space Agency as suitable for a spaceport, somehow five were in Scotland. Then, when Kirkton Perch was elected, the shortlist swiftly came down to one: Prestwick. That is until the late arrival of St Edzell Bay.’

  What had this got to do with Billy Paris being found in a canal or Cherry saving my life?

  ‘If Prestwick wins, it’s a triumph for Kirkton Perch and the UK Government. Strange, don’t you think, that when St Edzell Bay appears on the scene and starts ticking all the right boxes, the owner dies in a helicopter crash and the person most likely to have caused the crash ends up in a canal? Remember what happened to Dr David Kelly when he criticized Tony Blair’s WMD dodgy dossier?’

  I did. If the dossier on Sadaam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction had been dodgy, Dr Kelly’s suicide verdict was even dodgier. Why else would the subsequent Government inquiry have resulted in an order that all evidence relating to Kelly’s death, including photographs and post-mortem examination reports, must remain classified for seventy years?

  ‘If the Government is prepared to kill its own weapons expert, half a million Iraqis and spend four and a half billion pounds to get its hands on a share of some oilfields, what do you think it will do for a chunk of four hundred billion from space?’

  Although I was on the receiving end of a ticking off, I thought I might actually be starting to admire Cherry. On the face of it she seemed like just another TV mannequin; however, scratch the surface and here was a woman passionate about her job. There was only one thing I didn’t understand. ‘So why does you announcing to the world that I hold the very same information that got Billy Paris assassinated protect me from the sharp end of a poisoned umbrella?’

  ‘Thanks to last Thursday night, the Government knows I’m onto them. So do one point four million Night News viewers. And word is spreading. Kirkton Perch is slipping down the greasy pole. Questions are being asked at both Westminster and Holyrood. There are conspiracy theorists all over the country, all over the world, watching to see how this plays out. If anything happens to you, if you get struck by lightning or are hit by a runaway iceberg, the Government is getting the blame. They wouldn’t dare risk it; however, you never know, they might come up with some other way of keeping you quiet.’ She rubbed a thumb and forefinger together. ‘If they do, it’ll be your turn to buy me dinner. Happy now?’

  ‘I know someone who has a different take on things. A conspiracy theory that doesn’t involve Her Majesty’s Government,’ I said.

  Cherry got to her feet and looked down at me, which was figuratively what she did most of the time anyway. ‘Is that so?’

  ‘While everyone is concentrating on Jerry Thorn’s death, they keep forgetting there was someone else in that chopper.’

  Cherry’s expression changed swiftly from cocksure to what would be best described as dangerous. I battered on, fearlessly. ‘People don’t kill only for money and power. They kill for jealousy too. How about that for a documentary?’

  As I did my best to wipe ginger beer from my face, I watched Cherry weave her way through the Christmas party crowd to the exit. It was hard not to admire her style and enthusiasm. Or her bottom…

  ‘Not a bad rear view, eh?’ Malky said. ‘Had her eating out of my hand with all my football chat. Women love that sort of stuff. He slurped the head off a pint of lager. ‘She wasn’t really my type though.’

  ‘Yeah, I know how much you hate the beautiful, blonde ones,’ I said, wringing out my hanky into the now empty tumbler. ‘Still, she liked you. Said your chat reminded her of an evening with her dad, talking about what football was like in the good old days. Yesteryears, I think she called it.’

  ‘Really? She said that?’ Malky smiled thinly, took another long pull of ice-cold lager, held the pint tumbler up to the light in order to admire it all the better and smacked his lips loudly. ‘I like it here. Maybe we’ll stay a wee while longer. Let me buy you another ginger beer.’

  37

  ‘I take it that when the mouse is away, the cat goes down the pub?’ Joanna said.

  Tuesday morning and we were bound for the High Court. Driving to the city that hates motorists was shee
r madness at any time of the year, far less the week before Christmas, and so we’d taken the train. The Glasgow to Edinburgh rail line was Scotland’s busiest. Finding a seat was like finding a politician without a dubious expenses claim. Joanna had managed to squeeze in beside a fat bloke who thought he was two people. I’d had to stand all the way. I wasn’t too disappointed. Five minutes on the platform, being asked my opinion on ski-wear, as my assistant skimmed through an online catalogue on her iPhone, had been enough for me. I didn’t need more of the same on the twenty-minute train journey to the capital.

  ‘Why? Am I looking a bit rough?’ I asked, as we walked up the ramp from Waverley Station and veered left. It was a cold and frosty morning and our white breath billowed, merging into one cloud as we spoke.

  ‘Just a tad. I mean, I’m not your mum or anything, but drinking on a school night? Tut-tut.’

  ‘Trust me, it’s definitely not drink,’ I said. ‘I had a late night. It’s lack of sleep.’

  ‘How come, when Tina’s not here?’

  ‘I went through to Edinburgh to see Cherry Lovell, and—’

  ‘You did what! I mean, you did what?’

  ‘I wasn’t happy about being thrown to the wolves in that documentary last week.’

  ‘And so you went through to give her a piece of your mind?’ Joanna sounded less than convinced.

  We’d reached the foot of the News Steps. One hundred or so of Edinburgh’s steepest steps leading from Market Street at the foot of the mound to the rear of the High Court of Justiciary on the Royal Mile. I offered to take Joanna’s satchel. The one containing the case file for Keith Howie’s rape trial.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because, like I say, I was pretty angry with her.’

  ‘No, why do you want to carry my satchel for me?’

  ‘Will saying because it’s heavy and you’re a woman get me a slap?’

  Joanna’s smile was as tight as her grip on the satchel. ‘Try and find out.’

  I didn’t want to know that much, and, anyway, I already had my own case to carry. By the time we’d reached the top I was breathing like a dirty phone call.