1989, page 9
‘Except that Dr Robertson said they fought with him to continue the trials even after they were getting adverse results. He said they blamed the patients, not the drug.’
Jess pulled a face. ‘Sometimes you do get a badly chosen cohort. Doctors put forward patients for emotional rather than scientific reasons. Look, I know you’re missing being an investigative reporter, Allie, but you’re seeing stories where there are none.’
Allie gave a dry little laugh. ‘If you knew how often I’d heard that line . . . Please, Jess, humour me. I promise I won’t monster Colin the geek. I’ll just pop over to Berlin and buy the boy a few beers, see what’s happening. Maybe take Rona with me, let her loose on the Berlin scene.’
‘Now that really would put the fear of God into Colin.’ She sighed and pushed her chair back. ‘I need to get back to work.’
‘The address?’
‘I’m not even sure I kept the card.’ Jess got to her feet, making a fuss of getting her coat on.
‘I’ve been in your house, Jess. You never throw anything away. Please? I’m trying to get some stories in the paper that have a bit of heft to them. Ace Lockhart is dragging us so far down into the gutter, I swear some days I feel like I’m up to my chin in raw sewage.’ Allie tried for a laugh to hide the desperation that had slipped through her protective mask.
Jess sat down again and put her hand over Allie’s. ‘You need to find another job,’ she said softly. ‘This is killing you.’
‘Easier said than done. Used to be we did proper reporting as well as the trivia. Investigations. Revelations that didn’t involve soap stars. But there’s nothing left. And the broadsheets would just laugh at somebody with my track record rocking up for a job. I had a drink with the northern news editor of the Guardian a while back. I said I’d always fancied working for them. He literally snorted beer out of his nose, then said, “Once a tabloid hack, always a tabloid hack, my dear girl.”’ Allie forced a smile. ‘So all I can do is try to keep the aspidistra flying.’
‘I’ll dig out Colin’s address this afternoon,’ Jess said. ‘Don’t break him.’
Allie promised, knowing she’d probably fail to keep her word. She watched Jess make her way through the thinned-out crowd, the cold slither of guilt reminding her how manipulative she’d just been. Sometimes, she despised the depths she’d sink to when she had the whiff of a story in her nostrils.
15
Saturday night and Manchester was buzzing. There was a broad arc of the city centre that was busier between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. than it ever was during daylight hours. For Allie and Rona, Saturday night was either sitting round a table eating and talking and drinking with friends, or clubbing like they’d never left their twenties. They loved to dance. In their early years together, they’d sweated the nights away to hi-energy but when the late eighties hit, improbably they both felt like they’d been waiting all their lives for acid house. Rona had found it first, when she went along to a Hot night at the Hacienda to write an ‘I’ piece. ‘Honestly, I was probably the oldest person on the dance floor by a generation, but Allie, it’s insane. You have to come with me.’
So they’d gone together one night in 1987 and it felt like they’d found their lost tribe. Every time they returned, there was some new bolt-on, some invader from outside that had tweaked the sound, and they loved it. They didn’t care that they didn’t fit; the cool thing was that nobody else seemed to care either. The door team treated them like their favourite aunties. They avoided the drugs. ‘The inside of my head is mad enough without E’s.’ Rona always said. And they danced.
The bonus was that sometimes they even fell over a story. Mostly Rona; features were easier to bump into. But occasionally, one of the regulars would drop a word in Allie’s ear that would pull her towards an unexpected page lead.
The Saturday after she’d come back from Edinburgh, they’d dressed for dancing. Rona in denim shorts and a black camisole top with lace across the yoke and wide shoulder straps, a white leather jacket like Chrissie Hynde had worn on the last Pretenders tour slung over it; Allie in black leggings and a V-necked short-sleeved tee with scarlet piping on the seams that picked up her red Converse shoes. They were a bold contrast to Rona’s black heels. God alone knew how she could dance the night away in shoes that would have Allie weeping inside an hour. Finally, Rona touched up her lipstick, a dark plum to change her vibe. Now they were ready to hit the town and shake off the week.
Exhausted and exhilarated, they left the club just before two, heading for Kai’s, their favourite of the Chinatown restaurants that stayed open till breakfast time. Allie demanded a detour via the all-night news stand on Piccadilly Gardens so she could pick up a first edition of the Globe.
‘Leave it till morning,’ Rona pleaded. ‘You know it’ll only wind you up.’
‘I want to see what they did with my story,’ Allie said.
‘You have a streak of masochism that troubles me.’ Rona, teetering on high heels, hooked her arm through Allie’s. They swung along the pavement, the music still coursing in their bodies. They bought an armful of papers, Rona snatching the Globe from Allie. ‘No,’ she scolded. ‘Wait till we’re at least sitting down with a bottle of Tsingtao.’
The moment the sweating bottles of beer arrived in front of them in the busy restaurant, Rona passed Allie the Globe. Allie flicked swiftly through the pages, scanning the columns with a practised eye. Her spirits sank as she delved further into the paper. If they’d run the story at all, they’d buried it way back. Then she stopped, snagged by her byline. ‘What the fuck?’ she exclaimed, loud enough to turn heads at the next table.
‘What did they do?’
Allie held up a hand, demanding a pause so she could digest what was in front of her. It was the lead on page 23. In bold black capitals, she read, ‘SICK SCOTS EXPORT AIDS TO ENGLAND.’ She felt her heart contract. This was exactly what she’d tried to avoid. She could hardly bring herself to read on. ‘English cities are being flooded with killer infection as Scots flee Europe’s AIDS capital.
‘Junkies and gays carrying the lethal HIV bug are trying to escape the stigma of their disease by moving south from Edinburgh, where many hundreds are already carriers.
‘And a health official in Manchester warned, “Don’t do drugs or have sex with someone who’s come down from Scotland.”’
Allie couldn’t bring herself to carry on. ‘Those bastards.’ She threw the paper across to Rona.
Rona skimmed the ten paragraphs. ‘You didn’t write this.’ It was a statement, not a question. ‘You’ve been stitched up.’
‘Like a bloody kipper.’ Allie groaned. ‘The fucking newsdesk. They’ve gone behind my back and set a freelance on the story. That supposed health official quote – that’s not mine. If I’d been going to write that kind of shite, I’d have quoted the “Don’t jack up with a Jock” line.’
‘I know that.’ Rona reached across the table and squeezed Allie’s hand.
‘They’ve burned me. I can’t go back to any of these people.’ She picked up her beer and downed half the bottle. ‘Alix is going to nail me to the wall.’
‘Alix knows you wouldn’t write this shit.’
Allie stabbed a finger at the page. ‘It’s got my name on it. Everybody will think it’s me. One piece and my credibility in the gay community is shot to ribbons.’ She shook her head. ‘This is what Ace Lockhart’s done to the Globe. We’d never have gone this far down bigotry road before. Murdoch led the way, but Lockhart’s running as fast as he can to catch up.’
A waiter appeared. ‘You ready to order, ladies?’
Rona looked at Allie. ‘The usual?’
Allie nodded. ‘Not that I feel much like eating now.’
‘You’ll change your mind as soon as you smell the hot and sour soup,’ Rona promised. She gave the waiter their order, adding another couple of beers.
‘I thought things were getting better,’ Allie sighed. ‘We came down from Glasgow to get away from the worst of the homophobia. But look at this.’ She slapped the paper. ‘It’s just as bad as what we left behind. The only difference is that we’ve got places to go and have a good time. To fiddle while Rome burns. No, not Rome. The whole bloody world.’
‘It’s because of AIDS. We know now it’s not a gay plague, but there were a few years when it was a brilliant focus for everyone who hated gays. Gay men in particular. Us lesbians, we pretty much got off the hook, Allie.’
Allie scoffed. ‘We got off the gay plague hook, maybe. But now we’ve got Section 28 and that gives all the bigots licence to put us in our place. “You’re not real women, I don’t want you teaching my daughters or in the same gym changing room as my wife.” And anybody that thinks we’re not still staring down the barrel of misogyny only has to do a shift in our newsroom to have their eyes opened.’
‘It only feels so bad because you persist in staying in news. The world I move in isn’t half as bad. I get respect from most of the people I work for.’
‘Lucky you,’ Allie muttered as the waiter arrived with the soup. ‘I used to think I got a bit of respect when I was working investigations. Now I think that was barely skin deep.’
‘They kept you on, running everything north of Stoke-on-Trent. And fired all the guys, babe.’
‘Only because I was the best. And because I didn’t disappear to the pub for two hours every lunchtime.’ She dug into the comforting bowl of complex flavours, her sinuses clearing with the first mouthful.
Rona watched her, and gave a sympathetic smile. ‘There’s nothing that a bowl of soup can’t ease,’ she said.
Allie rolled her eyes. ‘I’ll remind you of that the next time you break a nail and it’s like the end of the world.’ More soup. ‘But honestly, Ro, what am I going to do? It’s not just shit like this. It’s the other stuff too. Lockerbie, the M1 plane crash – it’s draining and there’s no downtime. You go one of two ways – you empathise, you listen to the loss and that destroys you one way. Or you build a wall and hide behind it, and that destroys you a different way. At least doing the investigations, I took away something positive. I might have been exposing total shitehawks, but I felt like I was doing good in the world, not just wallowing in other people’s misery.’
Rona put down her spoon. ‘Then maybe you need to think about getting out.’
The response shocked Allie. It wasn’t that the notion hadn’t crossed her mind. But to hear it from Rona was a different matter. Rona understood the passion Allie felt for nailing stories – and writing them – because she shared it. That she could say the unthinkable brought Allie up short. ‘What would I do?’ she said. ‘I’ve got no other skills, Ro. I’m rubbish at taking orders, I hate working nine to five and I’ve got the lowest boredom threshold in Manchester.’
‘Don’t oversell yourself,’ Rona teased. ‘Allie, you’re the smartest woman I know. You could turn your hand to anything.’
‘I think you might be a wee bit biased, Rona. Name one thing I could walk into with any prospect of being successful.’
The soup occupied Rona for a minute. Then she said. ‘You’d be a brilliant private eye. You’ve got all the skills. You can get a Trappist monk to talk. I bet Bill Mortensen would take you on in a heartbeat. He’s always complaining he’s got more work than he can handle. Mortensen and Burns. It’s got a ring to it.’
Allie burst out laughing. ‘Me? A private detective? Are you kidding?’
‘Why not? You’re always reading those American women private-eye novels with their kick-ass heroines. You could be V. I. Warshawski or Kinsey Millhone or . . . what’s that English one called?’
‘Anna Lee?’
‘Yeah, that’s right. You could be a Scottish Anna Lee.’
‘Rona Dunsyre, that’s the maddest thing you’ve ever suggested. Besides, I don’t want to work for Bill, much as I love the guy.’
Rona wagged a finger at her. ‘I know that. I’m not suggesting you’d be working for Bill. Working with him, that I can see. Don’t dismiss it out of hand, my love.’
‘And what about my writing skills? I love knocking a story into shape and I’m good at that, Ro.’
Rona sighed. ‘Good point, well made. But there’s no reason why you couldn’t still do bits and pieces of journalism. Hell, maybe you could even write your own private-eye novels.’
Allie choked on her beer. ‘Now I know you’ve had too much to drink. There’s no way I could make stuff up. I don’t have that kind of brain.’
‘Some would say that being a tabloid hack is all about making stuff up,’ Rona said, a wicked glint in her eyes.
Suddenly sobered, Allie shook her head. ‘You know that’s not me,’ she said. ‘I feel guilty rewriting a quote when somebody stumbles over their words.’
‘I’m worried about you, my love. You give so much of yourself to the job, you let it take so much from you. What happens when you run out of Allie?’
‘There’s no chance of that, Ro. When I come home to you, it’s like being plugged into the mains. Nights like this, all the stress leaks out of me and I get refilled with the good stuff.’ She reached across the table and tenderly ran a finger down Rona’s hand. ‘I love that you’re trying to fix things for me. But I’m going to have to dig my own escape tunnel out of this one. And I don’t think it’s Bill Mortensen.’
16
When it came to travel arrangements, Genevieve Lockhart moved in a different world from Allie and her fellow employees. She only drove when she wanted to; there was always a driver available to take her to the office, to the shops, to parties and to dinners. Either her father’s helicopter or his private jet were generally available for longer journeys. Staff organised her travel and hotels, and they knew only too well the standards that were demanded. Someone would have packed her case if she’d wanted it; that she always chose her own travelling wardrobe was something Genevieve believed was a mark of her attitude to the staff. She wasn’t a spoiled princess, for heaven’s sake. She could fold her own blouses.
That winter evening, Genevieve was alone in the penthouse flat that sat above the Pythagoras Press operation, making final preparations for a trip to Vilnius. She’d been researching this project ever since she’d elbowed Stephen Lavery out of the picture, setting three of her most trusted staffers the task of identifying the new radicals in a clutch of Eastern bloc countries that were important to Pythagoras Press, either as scientific contributors or eager consumers. She’d analysed the intel her team had accumulated and decided Lithuania would be her first target. When she’d told her father, Lockhart had raised his eyebrows in a quizzical look. ‘Why Lithuania? It’s not one of the big players in our market.’ He puffed strenuously on his cigar, releasing a cloud of blue smoke that obscured his expression. It was a trick he loved to play in negotiations. He banned people from smoking cigarettes in his presence because he considered the smell disgusting, but he used his own smoking habit to powerful effect.
Genevieve counted out the reasons on her fingers. ‘Ever since we published that ridiculous biography of their beloved leader, we’ve had a good relationship with the existing government, so it won’t seem strange for me to turn up on a visit. They’re a good market for PP – they’ve got a young population with frustrated ambition. We’ve got a great fixer there in Tavas Nagaitis. He’s a devious little shit, but he’s our little shit, and I suspect he’ll know exactly who to talk to on the other side of the fence. From what I can gather, there’s already a head of steam building up in favour of change in all the Baltic republics. And Lithuania is small enough that I can get a real sense of what’s going on.’
Lockhart stared hard at his daughter, as if he was trying to penetrate her skull to see what lay within. ‘It’s not a bad place to put your toe in the water. And your Russian and German are both good. Do you have a list beyond that?’
‘Bulgaria next. Zhivkov loves you. He actually believes what we said in the whitewash biography we did for him. He wants you to move there. He’ll be thrilled to see me. He’ll be giving me a guided tour of all the lovely palaces he’d rent to us. But my people tell me there’s real unhappiness bubbling under the surface. They’re only about seven hundred miles from Chernobyl, and that’s no distance at all as the wind blows. When Gorbachev did his Chernobyl revelation, it freaked people out. They were all, “So what else have they not told us about?”’
Lockhart grimaced. ‘Bloody Gorbachev. But I think you’re wrong to prioritise Bulgaria. For a start, you don’t have the language—’
‘But we’ve got good people there,’ Genevieve protested. ‘The people in power all have Russian. And the forces of change – they’ll have an internationalist perspective. English, German—’
‘Turkish, Romani, Genny,’ he cautioned her. ‘Look, I know Bulgaria. And they’re held tight in the party grip. Even if Zhivkov is forced out, and his politburo with him, there won’t be a revolution. A few hotheads, maybe, but conservatism has a tight hold there. Bulgaria drops down your list, OK?’
She stifled a sigh. Always he had to know best. She nodded, lips pursed.
‘Who’s next, after Bulgaria?’
She thought his smile was meant to be benevolent but she read it as patronising. She wished he’d truly let her be in charge of the corner of the empire that was supposed to be hers. A deep breath. ‘East Germany. I want to make a move on East Berlin. I think the dominoes are teetering there.’
Lockhart frowned. ‘You’re there to make contacts. To take the temperature. Not to start a bloody revolution.’
Genevieve flushed. ‘I’m not stupid, Ace. I know this is all about taking soundings.’
‘No, you’re definitely not stupid.’ He broke into an indulgent smile and took a gentle toke on his cigar. ‘But you need to learn caution.’
