I
Tuesday 8 pm
‘Every day’s newspaper starts empty of ideas – and some of them stay that way.’
Gareth Whelpower, ‘Off-Stone – Memories of a Newspaper Man’
1
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The Canyons
It was like they weren’t there. Millions of Londoners streamed past the Gordon Road Estates every twenty-four hours, in their cars, buses and trains, but they didn’t see them; as if they were invisible, easily ignored. A mixed-up part of town, full of mixed-up people, where nothing much ever happened. Squeezed between the rich glamour of Regent’s Park, the neon buzz of central London and the squat seriousness of Euston. High-rise blocks towered over low ones; pensioners scratched along next to smart-casual media consultants; bankers in Reiss suits lived beside teenage gangsters in shades. If you parked your car next to one of the little squares, you didn’t know if you were going to come back and find a glossy leaflet for Hatha Yoga under the wipers, or the wheels gone and the car up on bricks.
But something was about to happen tonight.
Liam Glass was waiting angrily in the dark outside his front door on one of the first-floor walkways – shuffling from one foot to another, hunched into his hoodie, waiting, waiting, waiting; waiting for his mum, who was inside, searching endlessly through drawers and bags. He shivered as a dankness rose from the concrete and the road below glistened like fire under the street lights. A Tory election leaflet had been shoved half through their letterbox. He pulled it out and scanned it, frowning in concentration.
Katrina finally arrived with her debit card and a bustle of urgency.
‘So as you remember the PIN number,’ she said, holding out a scrap of paper. She thought he was still a kid.
He took the card, but not the note with the PIN, and turned away, grumpily.
‘You'll forget!’ she called. But he was already stomping off down the steps.
Of course, he was just a kid, but not to himself. Tall for his age. Hormones rising. Ready to fight for his place in the world. Down he went, into Gordon Road, down the hard-lit electric canyons like he was in the Wild West. And full of his own thoughts: football matches played and unplayed, Xbox games waiting, friends, Shay Begum and Zen Methercroft, Facebook, Instagram, real girls from school, naked women on websites he thought Katrina didn’t know he knew…
He passed Royland Pinkersleigh, who was rhythmically flailing around with a rag and soap suds, swabbing down the wall outside his little gym, All Roads Lead to Royland. Royland flailed faster, trying not to think of all his problems, trying not to think of his partner Sadé in the tiny gym office, wrestling with the accounts. Sadé, who would be only too pleased to remind him about their debts as soon as he went back inside. Royland half glanced at Liam, thought he’d seen him before but couldn’t remember where, then applied himself to the rag and bucket once more.
Liam stepped into the road, right in front of Jamila Hasan’s green Mini Cooper…
Jamila was distracted, thinking about the art-gallery opening she was already late for – and she the guest of honour as the local councillor. At the last moment, she swerved and missed him. She hooted, but Liam hardly heard above the tick-tick-oomp-oomp of the music playing out of his earphones. She hooted again as she sped away from him, desperately composing the speech she was supposed to be making to the assembled art lovers and local journalists in fifteen minutes’ time.
Liam trotted past Jason Crowthorne, chief reporter of the Camden Herald, who hardly noticed him in the dark, saw him and didn’t see him, just another hoodie, shoulders hunched, round-faced, ear buds in his ears, staring at the phone in his hand.
An hour before, Jason had turned twenty-nine, but he’d kept it to himself and had merely stolen a Twix from the vending machine in the newsroom. He didn’t like sharing personal grief.
Now he locked his car and shivered in the cold April breeze. He turned away from Liam, who was ambling down the road in the other direction.
Didn’t see either, as the others hadn’t, the two dark shapes following.
Jason took out his own phone to tell his ex he’d be late, then put it away again, unused. He walked fast down a narrow side street, checking the names on the ugly square buildings. It was April 2010 and there was an election going on out there. The whole country was fighting for its future, but the deputy editor had sent him down Gordon Road on the Death Knock. He was supposed to be seeing his ex and his daughter tonight. Bea was the most important person in his life and his most fervent fan, but at ten years old how much longer would she be impressed by his stories of basement disputes and endangered trees?
He hated the Death Knock, still found it upsetting getting stories from the recently bereaved, and should have told Tam, the deputy editor, where to stuff it, an experienced journo like him. The Death Knock was for juniors (and him nominated once for Young Journalist of the Year, though longer ago than he cared to remember). But Tam had no experience, had been promoted above her competence. She wouldn’t even have understood. And anyway there was what he’d read in the editor’s office earlier in the day – and was trying hard to forget.
He found what he was looking for, a half-glazed door on the ground floor, and gathered his courage to ring the bell.
‘You must be Danielle,’ he said to the pale face that answered it. The girl was probably in her early teens, with black lipstick and eye make-up and that typical goth softness pretending to be hard. He introduced himself as Jason Crowthorne, senior journalist on the Camden Herald. She grunted and he took a step back. It was a personal technique of his. It took people by surprise and made them feel they were in control. Beyond he could see a dark hallway. Coats were piled up on chairs or folded on the floor and a sad mumble of polite voices came from inside.
‘I was sorry to hear about your dad,’ he said in his most sympathetic voice. ‘I just want to check we have all the facts correct.’ In truth what he wanted was a picture and a heart-warming quote. ‘I feel for you, Dani. And your poor mum too. Your dad… ripped from both your hearts. By a truck laden with frozen foods.’
She stepped to one side. It never ceased to amaze him how keen people were to share their most personal moments with a strange journalist. Twenty minutes later he found himself back on the damp pavement holding the family’s favourite photo of the deceased and a number of unusable quotes about what a drunk, thieving bastard the man had been. He slipped the photo into his pocket and decided to make up some quotes of his own. The Herald’s readers didn’t want bad news about the departed. Not unless they were celebrities. As he walked back to his car, he opted for ‘Overcame personal obstacles’ and ‘An original approach to business’. These pleased him. Just the right amount of truth without depressing the readers.
Liam Glass walked on through the Estates, their silent walkways and covered passageways glittering with night-time drizzle, and just a few teenagers still mooching in holding patterns in the dark, smoking and selling spliffs, keeping an eye out for members of the wrong crew.
The first cash machine the boy came to was jammed. He stood there, taken aback. Then he bent down and inspected it, as if that would help. It looked scratched; someone had been trying to jemmy into it like a fruit machine perhaps, hoping to hit the jackpot. He’d have liked to have given up and gone home, but his mum would have walloped him. He was hungry and it was a pizza-shaped hunger.
After a few minutes of staring and wondering how to make the machine work he remembered there was another cash machine not far off. It was a few hundred metres down the road, stuck in the side of a newsagent’s – or used to be. He hadn’t seen it for a few months. He moved on, pleased with himself for remembering, hoping it was still there. He flipped the card to and fro between his fingers like a magician and recited the PIN under his breath, but he didn’t spot the shadows still following…
…while, at the other end of Gordon Road, Katrina waited, standing in a yellow square of window on the first floor, looking down into the street for her son. Stubbing out another cigarette. Brushing the hair from her face with anxious hands.
2
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Covert Intelligence
Jason sat heavily at his workstation and cast a baleful eye over the lines of deserted computers that stretched across the newsroom, their twirling screen-savers dancing merry patterns for nobody. Through the narrow, dark windows of the Camden Herald flickered the evening lights of Chalk Farm. Two remaining juniors huddled over their keyboards at the far end, their faces pale under the flat light of the fluorescents. None of them should have been working so late on a non-deadline night, but he supposed they were as worried about their jobs as he was.
He dragged his attention back to the computer and tapped out a two-par story about the death-by-frozen-food-truck, but he couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d read in the editor's office. He’d been standing by Whelpower’s desk, waiting to talk about a campaign he wanted to run on cuts in mental-health care, when he saw a memo from Tam, printed out and sitting on a pile of papers. It was facing the other way, but reading upside-down was one of Jason’s most essential journalistic skills. The deputy editor was writing about how to save money on staff, it seemed. One line stood out: experienced journos cost more than juniors. Jason had been re-running the sentence in his head all afternoon, trying and failing to recast its meaning in some positive way.
He glanced at his watch. It was late and he still had to compose captions for some heart-warming photos Tam had fallen in love with. A group of schoolchildren who’d dressed up as hippopotamuses to raise money for a local retirement home. He tried to boost his enthusiasm by doodling with puns. Hippo-hippo hooray. Pachyderm pick-me-up.
He grew distracted by a dim orange glow that filtered out from the editor’s office. Gareth Whelpower was also still working – working, but not on the Herald. His shape could be seen in the gloom through the internal window, sifting through piles of desiccated cuttings for his memoirs.
There was no-one who’d taught Jason more when he joined the paper. A lizard-like man from Antrim, Gareth Whelpower was surprisingly tough. He’d exposed councillors and bishops. MPs and royals trembled before him. Working his way up to the Observer from the Belfast Telegraph, his greatest successes included Combustion-gate, tracking a celebrity businessman whose company made cars that caught fire. And Syringe-gate, publicising the suicide of a doctor hounded by the government for exposing misinformation in a dossier on the war on drugs.
Jason knew a mentor when he saw one and he loved the man’s passion for the newspaper industry. He insisted on being taught, even when Whelpower told him to piss off, calling him a creep and a sycophant. Jason offered the editor his first carefully crafted articles. Whelpower tore his prose apart. He forced Jason to rewrite. And every time he rewrote, his style grew stronger and Whelpower would tear it apart again.
‘What’s the story, man?’ he’d say. ‘Why should I care?’
Jason made sure that Whelpower cared.
‘More details,’ Whelpower said. ‘More precision. More passion.’
Jason added details, precision, passion.
But local journalism was changing. The Camden Herald was fighting for readers, competing against the Hampstead and Highgate Express and the Camden New Journal. The Herald’s owners asked for heart-warming stories about adopted kittens, not difficult issues that might put off advertisers and divide their readership. Whelpower delegated more and more. He shrank visibly and started to look backwards rather than forwards. He set out to write the story of his life. His desk began to fill with piles of old cuttings and trays of congealing Asian takeaway.
Jason wanted to run important campaigns like Whelpower had, on issues such as cuts to disability benefits and fraudulent landlords. He’d gone to him a year before with a list of the number of young men stabbed to death in recent years. ‘This is a big story,’ he’d said. ‘Damian Ross in Tufnell Park last year. Keith Berman in Camden Road. Ahmed Siddiqi after a water-pistol fight at a party. And the councils do nothing. Just close down the police stations and gyms.’
‘Old news, isn’t it?’ said Whelpower, nodding slowly over his cuttings.
‘Kids dying.’
‘Front page for one day and then forgotten. Go do whatever Tam’s told you to do.’ And the editor had turned back to his computer screen with a sigh.
Now, as Jason watched from the other side of the newsroom, Whelpower’s red-rimmed eyes scanned the stacked papers in his office and then lifted towards him. Jason nodded uncertainly in greeting, wondering if he should ask about the memo. Would Whelpower save his job? But the editor’s eyes wavered and dropped to his desk again. Is he deliberately avoiding looking at me? Jason asked himself. Does he know if I’m on the list to be downsized? If I’m going to be dumped, I need to make plans.
He snatched up his mobile.
The first number he tried went straight to voicemail. A bright voice told him his call mattered. He agreed and left a message for them to ignore. The second call also went to voicemail. This one didn’t bother to lie.
A narrow shadow fell across his desk.
‘Tyronne,’ Jason said, without looking. ‘What are you still doing here? It’s Tam you have to impress, not me.’
Tyronne Brewer stood over him, shifting his balance. He was one of the young journos who’d been recruited by the deputy editor to bring fresh blood and think outside the box. Her head had been colonised by an alien being who’d papered the inside with clichés.
‘Tam’s gone and handed me the Primrose School arson.’
Jason tossed the phone down. ‘The Friday Fire Freak!’ The woman was playing games now. This had to be a sign he was on the way out.
‘She says I’m ready to rock,’ Tyronne said with a quaver of nerves. He was keen, thin as a biro and exuded a permanent air of concern. Which in his case was wholly deserved. Despite this, Jason had a soft spot for him. The kid was likeable and tried hard.
‘Does she? Good for you.’ Jason spun round twice in his chair. ‘A big one,’ he said finally. ‘A good byline at your age. More grist for the CV. If you don’t screw it up.’
‘You guess?’ Tyronne sucked his teeth. ‘Is it true that Tam’s making an announcement about downsizing tomorrow? I heard from Yusuf. You didn’t know?’
‘Of course I knew.’ Jason picked up his mobile and jabbed the touch-screen with more force than before. ‘Was that all?’
‘Totally.’ Tyronne ran a hand over his cornrows. Jason waited and Tyronne cracked first. ‘She wants more vox pops, doesn’t she?’
Jason stared out of the distant windows where cars flickered past like commuting fireflies. He wondered what ordinary people did for emotional torture. ‘How many have you found so far?’
‘None.’
‘That’s a starting point.’
‘I can’t get anyone to say a single word on the record.’
‘Sorry, I’m too busy.’
‘I didn’t ask you for anything.’
‘We’re agreed, then. Now, if you’ll kindly step out of the light.’
‘Look…’ Tyronne frowned at him, then folded bravely. ‘OK, that’s OK. I’ll manage.’
But now Jason was feeling sorry for him. ‘Who are you going to try?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Give me a few minutes. Then I’ll see what I can do,’ he said with a sigh, dialling again. The third number answered. Many times, in the next twenty-four hours, he’d wish it hadn’t.
