All the Colours of the Town (23 page)

‘It was your story, Martin.’

‘No, I’m serious. You did a great job.’

‘Well.’ The door opened and a woman with what looked to be pillows in her shopping bags struggled through. ‘It’s nice of you to say.’

‘I’m a little surprised, though.’

‘That no one picked it up? I know. What’s that about?’

‘You want me to phone my guy at the
Record
, see if they’ll run with it? I could give them the photo as well.’

The woman made for the table with the father and son. She kissed them and sat down, settling her bags on an empty seat.

‘Could you, Martin? I’ve got to go.’

The next morning we slept late. I made scrambled egg and listened to Five Live while the boys squabbled over DVDs.

‘Choose one you both want to watch.’

When the noise started to swamp Victoria Derbyshire I went through to sort it out. James was trying to place a DVD in the open tray and Roddy was blocking his way.

‘If you put that on you’re not coming to Brandon’s party with me.’

‘Yes, I am!’

‘No, you’re not.’

‘Dad said I could go!’

‘Hey! I never said anything of the kind.’

They looked at each other. ‘The other dad,’ said Roddy.

‘Oh. Right. Well, that makes sense. Why don’t you watch Laurel and Hardy?’

They did. They’d always loved Laurel and Hardy. It was one of my few parenting triumphs. When I was still at the house I’d made it my mission to convert them. Two or three times a week after dinner, I’d put one of the shorts or maybe
A Chump at Oxford or Way Out West
. They’d both become hooked. They knew whole routines off by heart. I left them guffawing at Brats and went through to butter the toast.

Elaine and Adam arrived at noon. They stayed for
coffee
. The wedding was fine, Elaine said, but the guests had spent a chilly half-hour on the pavement, with hotel bathrobes over their pyjamas, when the fire alarm
sounded
at three in the morning.

‘There she was,’ Elaine said, ‘on her wedding night. Out on the street with no slap and her hair in a scrunchie.’

‘It’s a wedding night they’ll never forget,’ said Adam. He was obviously hungover. That apart, he didn’t look too good. There were swathes of grey in his limp black hair and his profile, when he stood up to stretch, was gratifyingly paunchy.

I caught Elaine’s eye and nodded at Adam’s belly. She shook her head –
would you ever grow up
– and rattled her car keys.

‘Say goodbye to your dad, boys.’

James rushed into my outstretched arms and I
straightened
up, his arms in the quilted anorak tight round my ears, his knees squeezing my ribs. Roddy’s hug was
slacker
. Already he was growing distant, contained. Even his wave, as the car pulled off, was lazy, a louche flourish, next to James’s eager, clockwork to-and-fro.

The day was breezy and fine. On Great Western Road I bought another armful of newsprint and this time the shopowner confined himself to a knowing tilt of the head. Moir’s contact had come through: Lyons was on the
Record
’s front page: ‘MOB JUSTICE’. I read it as I walked. They had the shot of Lyons and Torrins; on the inside pages the UVF colour party and the ancient photo of Lyons in a sash. They’d given it a good show. None of the other papers carried the story at all – I went through them front to back at the kitchen table – but at least now we weren’t alone.

On Monday night I went to bed early. I woke with the phone ringing.

‘Shit, Gerry.’ It was Moir again. The alarm said 12:53. ‘That guy with Lyons: William Torrins? He’s not a
gangster
at all.’

I closed my eyes. My brain sifted the possibilities and came up with the answer as Moir said it.

‘He’s a cop.’

I slid right down and pulled the duvet over my head.

‘Fuck.’

‘I know. My guy in Justice phoned me. Lyons is
holding
a press conference tomorrow. I thought you’d like to know. I’m sorry, Gerry.’

‘Thanks, Martin.’

Fuck. I got back out of bed. I opened a beer and sat at the table.

The bastard had known. He let us run the story. He let us run it, knowing that once the truth came out it would hurt me more.

I barely slept that night. I sat up with the quilt around me, drinking Rolling Rock and watching
The Sopranos
. I woke on the sofa with a neck that seemed less cricked than broken. I felt like I’d been hanged.

The press conference was scheduled for eleven, in time for the lunchtime bulletins. I was tempted to go along, sit there in the front row, do my penance on the cutty stool, but I couldn’t face it. I made it into the office at five to eleven. The telly was on, the whole newsroom waiting for the broadcast. Neve McDonald pointed the remote and turned up the volume.

When they cut from the studio, the press conference had started.

‘For any politician these would be serious allegations.’

Lyons is at a lectern, gripping its sides. ‘For a Minister for
Justice
’ – a little blitz of hissing – ‘they are doubly grave.’

Here he pauses; a big deep breath.

‘I therefore have no option but to reveal that William Torrins’ – he relishes the name, rolls it around his mouth – ‘is a serving police officer.
And
a witness in a criminal case being drawn up by the Crown Office. This case has been in preparation for many months, and has involved much painstaking work by police and prosecutors. As Justice Minister, I have taken a direct and personal
interest
in the case. I asked DS Torrins to brief me on the state of the inquiry, and that is why he was visiting my home.’

Another pause; Lyons scans the bent heads of the press pack. Now he looks like a dominie, an old-school heidie at morning assembly.

‘DS Torrins is currently in hiding. William Torrins is a very brave man, a man who volunteered to infiltrate a dangerous criminal network operating in the East End of Glasgow. He is now in fear of his life and has been moved, with his wife and children, to a safe address.

‘Through his irresponsible and reckless style of
journalism
, Mr Conway has not only compromised a major
criminal
investigation; he has jeopardised the safety – indeed he has endangered the life – of a serving police officer.

‘Now’ – here’s the toss of the hair, the trademark angry flick – ‘let me make one thing perfectly clear.’ A long lull as Lyons scans the heads once more and lets the silence deepen. ‘The freedom of the press is a value very dear to my heart. A functioning democracy – and especially a new democracy, like our own – depends for its effectiveness on a free and fearless press. Politicians
should
be subject to robust scrutiny. But there is a world of difference’ – here he shakes his head, and holds up his finger – ‘a
world
of difference between robust scrutiny and the kind of
scurrilous
innuendo peddled by Mr Conway.

‘Organised crime’ – another finger; he’s not a dominie any more, he’s a courtroom lawyer, Clarence Darrow, Atticus Finch. ‘Organised crime is a cancer in our cities. It is a cancer that Mr Conway’s paper, to its credit, has done much to highlight. In a recent editorial, the
Tribune on Sunday
went so far as to single me out, demanding that I show a firm hand in dealing with this menace. This is precisely what I – together with Strathclyde Police and the Crown Office – have been endeavouring to do. We now find that the action demanded by the
Tribune
has been sabotaged. Not by the political process, not by the judicial system: sabotaged by one of its own journalists.

‘As far as I understand it, Mr Conway’s job is to tell the truth and report the news. My own job is to make this country a safer place to live. In an ideal world, these jobs would complement one another, and Mr Conway and I would be allies, not enemies. That hasn’t happened. In performing his job so recklessly Mr Conway has made my own job that much harder. And we in Scotland are less safe tonight because of the story his newspaper
carried
on Sunday. Thank you for your time.’

There were no questions. Lyons swept from the room with his fringe swinging, his lip snagged in a righteous sneer. A youthful aide skipped to the lectern to lower the mike and field the shouted queries of the hacks. Back at the studio the anchor spun round to her studio guests.

‘Jesus fuck.’ Martin slumped to the desk, his fingers laced on the back of his skull.

Maguire appeared behind us, noiselessly, like a junior demon. She jerked her chin and I rose to my feet. Moir turned back to the screen.

‘You too, Wonder Boy.’

Rix was looking out the window, knuckles on the sill. I got the feeling he’d been holding this pose, waiting to wheel round and fix us with his baleful stare. He nodded at the chairs and Moir and I sat down. Rix leaned against the window and crossed his arms, his big frame blocking the light. Maguire stood by the door, like the duty officer in a nick.

For a moment nobody spoke. Then the room lightened as Rix left the window and crossed to the desk. His shirt was a violent fuchsia, a bordello hue. He hunched forward with his elbows on the desk, as if to make a proposition.

‘One question, gentlemen. Just so we’re clear. What time did you contact the Minister for Justice to give him right of reply?’

I looked at Moir.

‘Don’t fucking confer! Just answer the question.’

‘It was late, Norman. Three o’clock.’

‘You didn’t think to phone before then?’

‘No. Not really.’

He sat back, clasped his hands behind his head. ‘Not really? That’s interesting.’ The black ovals at his armpits widened like eyes. ‘“Not really.” The fuck does that mean?’

I looked at Moir but his eyes were locked on the floor. I shifted my feet.

‘Martin warned me to ask him. He told me to ask him in time but I left it too late. It’s my fault, Norman. I should have called earlier.’

‘You warned him to do it?’ He turned towards Moir: Moir nodded, once.

‘But you left it too late. What was it, you had better things to do? Your fucking watch stopped? What the fuck, Gerry?’

‘I don’t know. Because of Belfast. Because he made everything so bloody hard for us in Belfast, because he did everything he could to stop me getting the story.’

‘I see. He’s supposed to help us bring him down is he? He’s supposed to stick his head in the noose?’

‘You know what I’m saying, Norman.’

‘Yeah. You’re saying he pissed you off. You’re saying he fucked things up for you in Belfast so you wanted to drop this on him. “Fuck him. Let him find out when he opens the paper. How do like them apples, Mr Lyons? That’s what you get when you fuck with Gerry Conway.”’

He had me cold. I didn’t even need to nod.

‘You wanted to nail Lyons. You wanted it so bad you stopped doing your job.’

I shrugged but he wasn’t finished yet.

‘And if Fiona hadn’t forced you to do it, you wouldn’t have phoned him at all. As it is, you put a gun to our head by leaving it so fucking stupidly late. A gun to our head.’

He leaned back and his armpits glared at me again. He shook his head. I could feel him fixing me with a stare but I looked off to one side, to the blue patch of sky in the window. He was just a big vague redness in my
peripheral
vision, a big fat shapeless human heart. After a while the heart aimed at Martin.

‘What’s your line, Wonder Boy? What you got to say about this?’

Moir cleared his throat and said nothing.

‘All the work you’ve done. Your Maitland stuff. Two months’ work? Three? All the surveillance, the fucking
legwork
. And it’s all for nothing. He’s blown it out the water. Your friend here. You might as well not have bothered. You should have just sat on your arse.’

‘I don’t know about that.’

‘Your buddy’s gone and fucked it up.’

Moir was pouting at the floor, his shoulders working like a boxer’s. I felt he might be gathering his forces for a
strident
rebuttal, a righteous vindication of my professional honour. I cleared my throat.

‘So what happens now?’

‘What do you mean, “what happens now”? We take a fucking caning. Anyone that wants to can line us up and dish it out. And we have to sit here and take it. We’ll be
eating
shit for breakfast, lunch and dinner.’

‘I meant with me.’

‘What happens to
you
?’ He snorted. ‘I don’t know, Gerry. I genuinely don’t. For now, what you do is go home. Take a couple of days off till we see where we are with this. OK?’

At least I didn’t have to sit at my desk not writing. I could do that quite proficiently at home. Moir chummed me down in the lift and walked me to the car park.

‘Gerry, I want to tell you I don’t agree with Norman. I hope you know that. I don’t think for a minute that you’ve ruined my investigation. In fact, if anyone’s to blame, it’s me.’

‘I wrote the piece, Martin. I got the byline. It’s my
fuckup
.’

‘OK, but it’s my fault you wrote it. I brought you the photo. I feel terrible, Gerry. If I ever thought–’

‘Martin. Just leave it. All right? Don’t beat yourself up. Rix is right. I saw what I wanted to see. I should have checked it out. I should have done my job. It’s not your fault I didn’t.’

‘Anyway I’m sorry.’ He stood stiffly there in the car park. In his jeans and trainers, his hard-man leather
jacket
, he looked like a schoolboy dressed for a play, the head-boy male-lead in a Year Six production of
Grease
or
West Side Story.

I clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Me too, Martin. I’m sorry too.’

When I got to the flat it was all I could do to avoid going to bed. I stood in my bedroom doorway looking reproachfully at the rumpled sheets for a long minute. Then I went to the kitchen. There was no bed in the kitchen. I made a cup of coffee and sat down at my
computer
. As an afterthought I took the coffee back to the kitchen and tipped a capful of Red Label into it. I sat down again, booted up, and clicked my way through each of them in turn: the websites of the Scottish daily papers.

Everyone led with the story. For the tabloids it was the threat to Torrins (‘Marked Man’, ‘Fears For Undercover Cop’), graphically embellished with bullets and crosshairs. The qualities led with Lyons’s fightback (‘Minister Comes Off Ropes’) and the tottering case against Maitland (‘Journalist Jeopardises Gangland Prosecutions’). A columnist who threw up in my kitchen sink last Hogmanay was calling me ‘the unsavoury face of Scottish journalism’. A
Scotsman
leader regretted that falling sales could prompt a once-proud paper to junk its professional standards. Then there were the posts,
endless 
poisonous kite-tails of stinging barbs, dwindling into cyberspace. I trawled a few of these. The posters greeted my downfall with their usual judicious mix of bile and condescension. There were plenty of asterisks and
transposed
letters. People who misspelled my name and
questioned
my parentage reproached the laziness and moral bankruptcy of the MSM.

After an hour or so of this I took two Solpadeine and went to bed.

But even the Catholics in Glasgow are Calvinist. At seven that evening I threw back the sheets. You have to show face. The stool of repentance might as well be a
barstool
.

The Cope was crowded. Tuesday was Quiz Night and the teams were clustered round the tiny tables, answer sheets and pencils at the ready. I kept my head down and made for the bar. Before I could order, one of the sports guys was gripping my elbow. What was I having? He put an arm round me and actually clapped me on the
shoulder
. He brought me over to his booth. Logan was there with the answer sheet in front of him. A couple of subs and some of the magazine girls raised their glasses and shoved up to make room on the banquette. From the warmth of their welcome I might have been the pub-quiz king of Greater Glasgow, the Napoleon of general
knowledge
. And in fact, when the MC tapped his microphone and started reciting his questions, our table came off
pretty
well. At the half-time interval Neve McDonald came over with two White Russians and squeezed in beside me – she practically perched on my lap – and handed me one. It was mud-coloured and tasted like malted milk. For the rest of the quiz she stayed there, her thigh pressed close to my own, her breast nosing my ribs as she breathed Kahlúa fumes in my ear.

Public obloquy was proving underrated. In fact, as I conceded to myself that night, watching the green
numerals
on Neve’s digital alarm while she snored daintily beside me, the situation was not without an upside. You live for so long with the dread of exposure – the fear of being busted, surprised in a lie – that the feeling, when it happens, is mostly relief. Disgrace was like a landscape I’d visited in dreams. It was a Dead Sea in which I could float at my ease with no effort at all. My attitude to those
Tribune
colleagues I observed from this perspective, as they tramped importantly around on the shore,
maintaining
their reputations, was not envy but pity. I lay back in the buoyant dark and closed my eyes.

My shirt was still damp. I’d hung it up the night before and it still hadn’t dried. I stood in clouds of hissing steam, running the iron back and forth, but when I buttoned it up the fabric clung coldly to my shoulders and ribs.

I put on a suit. I knotted a tie and yanked it off again: I already had the bloody job. My razor needed charging: the light blinked red and it sluggishly growled like a
rousing
dog. The charger was in a dresser drawer, entwined with all the others – the phone charger, the digital camera charger, the charger for the camcorder. At least it should have been, but I wrestled with the braided mess of cords for five minutes before I gave up. Fuck it. I ran the razor over my chin but the blades tugged the hairs instead of cutting them. I splashed some water onto my face. I tipped my head back and dropped some Murine into my eyes to try to dissipate the redness. A taxi beeped in the street.