Country of the Blind (26 page)

Picture: The Queen Mother.

Caption: "SACRED VOWS - Father Shaw insists there
are
practical alternatives to divorce."

Picture: OJ Simpson.

Caption: "NATIONAL EMBARRASSMENT - The country's reputation on the world stage suffered further due to an appalling lack of self-control from Ferguson." As in Duncan. Picture: Sarah.

Bastards.

147

He rubbed his eyes and sighed as the pony-tailed graphic artist, Keith, magnified the four-colour version of the image until it filled the screen on its own. This was the second time he had found himself staring dumbfoundedly at it.

"Look, can I not just get a picture of it on a bit of fuckin' paper?" he had asked earlier, after the pixels had glared back angrily at his strained and complaining retinas.

"No problem," Keith said, and proceeded to print out a colour laser-copy of his creation, which he handed to Ken after it was excreted from the fag-burnt, moulded fibreglass anus of the printer-cum-photocopier. On it there was a blurry and smudged stramash of colours, visible only when the sheet was tilted at an angle that didn't reflect the strip-lighting off its glossy sheen and into the lenses of his specs.

"Bugger it," he had declared, scrunching up the print-out and bouncing it off the head of Keith's assistant, an exasperatingly sloth-like creature whose name he couldn't remember as he had only ever heard him referred to around the newsdesk as Lump. Lump didn't move, didn't even react. Lump evidently didn't have reflexes. And possibly not a spinal cord either.

"Ach, give us another wee look at it on-screen," he sighed. This was bloody hopeless. Apart from the fact that the graphic was presented in a colour-scheme Quentin Crisp would have said no to, there was a rather inappropriate Fred Quimby kind of feel to the icons within it, and he half-expected to see little birds tweeting around the heads of the figures lying in front of the upturned prison bus.

What was even worse was that the manhunt could end at any time, and it was at least eight hours before the first edition of this shite went to bed; eighteen hours before most folk were looking at it next to the coffee and toast. He had said as much in protest, when that pompous fanny of an assistant editor suggested the graphic in the first place, but had been over-ruled with a pile of mince about "reader accessibility" and "leading the eye into the story".

"If they want to look at cartoons they can buy the fuckin'
Beano
," he consumingly wanted to say, but had to bite his tongue, as his jacket was already on a shaky nail, and that skinny wee shite was dying to be the one who gave it the decisive shoogle.

The whole Voss thing had been such an awkward beast to wrestle, and this latest twist was threatening to throw off his grip altogether. Some might have imagined a story like this was a newspaperman's dream, especially with it growing and running on so expansively, but Ken wasn't enjoying it one bit. Oh sure, it meant you didn't have to waste much time deciding what to lead with on the front, and with it all happening up here there was no room for the usual debate over the comparative merits of some local brouhaha against a "national" story that the London papers would be going big on. But the 148

downer with something as toweringly huge as this was that it was never quite yours. You had to queue up with everyone else to get your share, and although there was plenty to go round, well, that in itself was the problem. You sent a couple of hacks to go and collect your wee slice of what the polis were handing out, but tasty as it was, everyone else had got the same, and the cops weren't letting anyone near the pie itself. So you sold your dish to the punter on the strength of your trimmings, rather than the meat. Big background pieces on page two, life of Voss, facts about the four suspects. Sidebar on reaction to events, local angle, national angle, quotes both from political heid bummers and ground level - maybe some wee wummin whose daughter's a cleaner at Craigurquhart. Comment pieces from the picture-byline-status columnists. Plus the obligatory what's-the-world-coming-to hand-wringing article to satisfy the Presbyterian and Catholic needs for assurance that society is indeed gathering speed on its plummet into irreversible moral decline. And the sad thing was that it worked. It sold papers. Even this fucking stupid bus-crash graphic would do exactly what that hand-knitted plamff had said. It would catch the eye. It would attract readers, because they'd have already seen the pictures on TV and if the other papers carried agency shots of the wreck,
The Saltire
would stand out because it was offering something colourful and new.

Ken took a seat between Keith and Lump and stared blankly at the screen, stroking his beard with one hand to give the impression that he was pondering the image, when in fact he was blurring his vision and letting his mind wander. Ken had been at
The Saltire
for nearly forty years, from a fourteen-yearold copy boy to news editor, a position he had held - more or less - for over a decade. There had been an interruption to that tenure when he was appointed deputy editor six years back, at a time when his full editorship seemed inevitable. However, widespread realisation of the haplessness of his replacement on the newsdesk coincided with a realisation of his own. People had always said that if you cut Ken, he would bleed ink, and in those short months away from the coalface, he discovered that it was true. The power, the prestige, the kudos and the cash had always seemed so attractive from below, but once they were within his grasp he understood that what really mattered was doing what you were best at and what you enjoyed.

He returned to the newsdesk on the deputy editor's salary, giving him what seemed for a while like the best of both worlds - until the paper was sold and the new management began to salivate at the prospect of Ken's removal and replacement with someone younger and cheaper.

But that wasn't what was depressing him.

He was lonely in his dissatisfaction with the paper's coverage of the Voss affair. The young reporters were wetting their pants the whole time about 149

getting their bylines on the story of the decade, walking around full of energy and self-importance, like they had just broken fucking Watergate. But none of them had got their hands dirty; not unless the phones hadn't been cleaned for a while. Ken was reminded of a few pompous sports hacks who seemed to think it reflected on their careers and abilities that they had covered Real Madrid v Eintracht Frankfurt at Hampden. Christ, all you needed was eyes and a fucking typewriter.

The circulation department was equally pleased, Monday morning's edition selling more than any other since the Sixties, and Tuesday's a decade record for that day of the week. The boss was happy, and so, reportedly, were the suits upstairs. And given the, er, uncertainty over his position of late, Ken should have been on his knees thanking the heavens for this godsend, making a show of his own efforts and enthusiasm, and reminding a few people that the compliments should be passed to the same place the buck usually was. Ach, he didn't really think so harshly of the young yins. He didn't harbour any sentimental notions that they didn't make hacks like they used to, or that these kids couldn't have handled it back in the [insert personally preferred golden decade]. Hacks never changed much, in any generation. You always got the same complement of trojans, skivers, flakes, whizzkids and bampots. If there was anything different about this crop it was that - probably as a consequence of high unemployment and hence gratitude for not just a job but a job they liked - they maybe worked a bit too hard and drank a bit too little for his liking. But they'd grow out of that in time.

He shouldn't begrudge them their day in the sun with the Voss thing, either. What was bothering him, he knew, was just another bout of the periodic crisis of purpose and identity that afflicted every print news editor in the latter third of the twentieth century, usually precipitated by a big, world-scale event such as this: dealing with a stark reminder that your job wasn't to break the story any more. That lay in the domain of the TV and radio boys. Sure, he knew that when it came to actual coverage, to intelligent, insightful rendering of the facts and details, his paper pissed all over the broadcasters - and from an increasing height since the Beeb and (particularly) ITN started interpreting the news for the sentiently challenged, assuming the comprehensive faculties of a four-year-old viewer. But in a way, that made the reality of it even more painful. These fucking morons told you
first
. No-one had picked up
The Saltire
on Monday morning and learned with a jolt that the Grim Reaper had shown up at Craigurquhart the night before and said "taxi for Voss". No-one bought it on Tuesday because they wanted to find out the latest developments in the investigation. But still they bought it.

Ken knew the game had changed for the print boys, and he wasn't some anachronistic fossil who couldn't deal with it - in fact it was his proven ability 150

to deal with it that had put him where he was now. But the hack's most primal instinct did growl every so often: to be the first to know, first to tell. No - the
only
one to tell. For your paper to be the only place someone could "read all about it".

But that was just a self-torturing pipe-dream, a practical impossibility, even when you did get something ahead of the competition, like some local scandal or even just a new angle. First edition was on the streets for the back of ten at night. Anything you ran that the others didn't have would be quickly shoehorned into their pages within the hour, with some half-redundant new quote added so that they could tag their version of
your
fucking story with

"Exclusive". And by that time it was hardly relevant anyway, because the public already knew the juice before
any
paper hit their doormat, having heard it on the morning radio or caught it at the arse-end of
Newsnight
. There was barely such a thing as an exclusive any more, not really. Not a big one. What passed as a poor substitute these days was when some scheming politico chose one particular paper to leak some hopefully damaging document to. Or when some star-fucker signed up to one or other of the sleaze sheets to exaggerate the sexual content of his or her fifteen minutes. And the success of that tabloid in netting such stories was much like the success of the Rangers in netting league titles: there was little merit to admire when it was simply a matter of having the biggest chequebook.

All of which he could live with - most of the time. See, despite the sales, the quality and the accolades, the Voss affair depressed him because none of it was exclusively his. And for the most part he could live with that too. But as John Cleese had once said in tortured agony: it's not the despair, it's the hope. Every so often something
did
come along that no-one else had, something that even on TV and radio would initially be prefixed with the phrase "revelations in
The Saltire
". So despite putting all his efforts and abilities into making his paper's coverage and analysis of second-hand news the most fresh, incisive and downright fucking
sharp
, a part of him was not only hoping, but indeed had to be alert and ready, for someone to walk in the door and tell him they had an exclusive on the Voss story that would not only blow the competition away, but would rock the whole country.

He shook his head, bringing himself back from his reverie, focusing again on the bus-crash graphic as Keith hovered and Lump vegetated. Then Jack Parlabane walked in the door and told him he had an exclusive on the Voss story that would not only blow the competition away, but would rock the whole country.

"This one comes with fries and salad, Fraz," he said. "Let's go somewhere quiet."

[?] [?] [?]

151

"So what the devil is that?" Ken asked, staring quizzically at the metal contraption Parlabane had dumped on a table in the art office, which was where Keith and Lump lurked when they weren't demonstrating their creations to the appropriate desk.

"That's what was supposed to kill Nicole Carrow, McInnes's lawyer. Fitted under the car, triggered by a remote, takes out the brake cables, then it's down to that law of physics which says two objects can't occupy the same space simultaneously."

"Jesus. Who's trying to kill her?"

"Whoever killed Voss."

Ken leaned back against an old paste-up board, a relic of the lamented preDTP days, apparently saved from the skip by Keith, although as he did all his work on computers too, Ken couldn't figure what it was used for.

"Wait a minute, Jack. You're saying they didn't. . . McInnes, Hannah. . . they didn't do it?"

"It's a set-up, Fraz. They didn't kill Voss and I'd take short odds that they didn't kill anyone last night either. They're the fall guys. Carrow was showing every intention of pointing that out, so she had to be silenced. So did her boss, but I didn't know that in time, and now he's dead."

"Her boss?"

"Finlay Campbell. Murdered yesterday in Glasgow by - reportedly - two muggers. You interested yet?"

This was familiarly bleak Parlabane humour. Ken knew he looked anaemic.

"And the lassie?" he asked stumblingly.

"She's safe for the time being."

"Have you told the polis? I mean, have you shown them this
thing
?"

"Not yet. Whoever's behind this has family-size cop connections. This is the only hard evidence I have right now, and I don't want it going 'missing'. Neither do I want to answer any questions about where Nicole Carrow is, or advertise my own involvement in this thing."

"Fair enough," Ken reflected, folding his arms. "So what does the lassie know that's so dangerous?"

"Tam McInnes and amigos weren't being assisted from the inside, they were being blackmailed. They were being forced into carrying out a burglary - a burglary, note - basically to put them in the right place at the right time to pick up the tab for Mr Voss's sudden demise."

"Any proof?"