"Do you know the nature of those emotional problems?"
"Jerome told me she's been treated for schizophrenia, if that's what you mean."
"That's all he said?"
"Yes, and I didn't press him. Should I have?"
"Not the way I see it. He's your friend, so why should you?" Steele glanced across at a fridge in a corner of the big office. "Do you think I could have some of that water you were offering earlier?" he asked.
"Sure." O'Reilly rose to his feet. "Still or fizzy?"
"Still; and don't bother with a glass. By the neck will be fine."
The Principal Clerk took three bottles of mineral water from the fridge and brought them back to the table. He opened one himself and handed the others to Steele and Regan. As he took his, the sergeant smiled, for the first time. "Why were you guys not on the list for the opening, since you did so much work?" he asked.
"If I was interested, George, that would be another sore point with me.
All us organisers were thanked very effusively, by the boy at the Arts Council, and were told very apologetically that space at the opening bash would be limited and that only the Moderator and the archbishop would be invited; no one else from any of the executives.
"The Mod did his nut, I have to tell you; he was going to decline, but I persuaded him that my Saturday would be more ruined if he did that, than if I missed out. I was sorry Jan and Andrea didn't get in on the act, but as far as I was concerned, he'd drawn the short straw. I'd seen the exhibition and I don't like champagne, even when it's free."
"What about the boy with the Nike baseball cap?" asked Regan, casually.
Cahal O'Reilly frowned, then his face split into a grin. "Oh, he was there all right, don't you worry!"
Twenty-Eight
"You've fair taken my breath away, Robert, I don't mind telling you."
The old man beamed as he handed a cup of tea to his visitor. "When you called it was like hearing a voice from the past."
"I'm just glad you remember me," said Bob Skinner.
"Remember you? Remember you?" Pale blue eyes twinkled in a bald wrinkled head. "I remember you all right, and even if I didn't I only have to look at you to know who you are. You're William Skinner's son, and no mistake. I remember him well, and your grandfather, Mr. Michael Skinner, before him."
The old man lowered himself gently into an armchair. "I'm just astonished that you remember me."
"Don't be daft, man, the whole bloody town remembers you. Nicol Falkirk, CBE, the editor of the Mother well Times for the best part of the last century."
"Not quite the best part," his host corrected him, 'but a good bit of it nonetheless."
"How old are you now, if you don't mind my asking?"
"Eighty-four, and starting to feel it."
"But not look it," said Skinner, deferentially. "I passed by Hope Street when I was driving round town. I guess the paper isn't printed there any more."
"Nor has it been for a long time. They turn it out on a big web offset press somewhere well out of the town. I'm glad I'm not part of it any more. I was an old school editor; I wrote my copy in fountain ink, and it was set in hot lead by craftsmen, then made up into page form by hand, by people who, in the main, lived in the town which they were serving. That's what a local newspaper should be, Robert; truly local. That's what it was like when you worked there as a young man in your holidays, remember; just before it was sold, and everything changed."
"Worked is maybe an exaggeration, Nicol. Copy-boy, they called me."
"Not a bit of it. You did your share in the months you were there. You could write better than some of my regular reporters, I'll tell you.
They were always trying to copy the tabloid style, so they could move on to bigger jobs in Glasgow. More than a few of them did, of course; most of my trainees wound up with their own by-lines on the Herald, the Scotsman, the Mail and so on."
The venerable editor laughed. "I always liked the football reports you wrote, Robert. They were as partisan as anything," he wheezed. "You understood without being told that being unbiased is not the business of a local reporter. The readers expect you to be on the side of the home team."
"They needed all the help they could get," Bob muttered. "They still do."
"Ach, that's changed too. I was never a football man myself, but I don't approve of all these damn foreigners we have these days. This County of Lanark produced the likes of Matt Busby, Jimmy Johnstone and Ian St. John. What chance does a boy have today?"
"Come on, Nicol; times change."
"Maybe, but your father would have agreed with me. He usually did, apart from one time."
"When was that?"
"When I told him that I had hopes you might become a journalist after you left university. He said to me that if I put that idea in your head, he'd hang me up by the thumbs until the rest of me dropped off them."
Bob looked astonished. "My father said something like that?"
"He certainly did; those were his exact words, at a civic centre reception too. And do you know what? I think he meant them. Your father was dead set on you going on to do law after you finished your arts degree, and following him into the firm. He wasn't best pleased at first, when you went into the police. He did his best not to show it, but I remembered that brush that we had, and I knew."
"So did I," Skinner murmured, 'but he got over it, eventually."
"I was sorry to hear about your wife, Robert," the old man said quietly. "I remember young Myra very well; it was just too bad that she should die so young… the motor car's a blessing, but a curse too. That's why I've never had one. Aye, a girl of spirit, she was."
"Sure, and then some. That was a long time ago, though."
"I suppose it was," he mused. "That's the thing about getting old; your time-frame gets jumbled up." He smiled. "And how's your daughter?" he asked. "How's she getting on?"
"My older daughter, you mean. Very well, I'm glad to say. Now, Alexis would have made her grandfather happy. She is a lawyer, and showing promise at it too."
"You have another daughter?"
"Yes, wee Seonaid; she's coming up for a year. Then there's James Andrew, who's four and a handful, and Mark, who's going on nine."
"My, my, you have been busy."
"Not that busy. Mark's adopted."
"Busy enough." Mr. Falkirk picked up his neglected tea, took a sip, screwed up his face and put it down. "Now, Robert," he said. "Charmed as I am to see you, I know that you haven't come all this way to pay me a casual visit. What can I do for you?"
"You can write an obituary for me, and persuade your successors to run it in the Mother well Times?
"Oh, surely not. Whose?"
"You haven't seen a paper today?"
The old journalist shook his head. "I don't bother with them any more.
They're full of nonsense."
"True. I have to read them though, today especially. The obituary's for my brother Michael; he was found dead at the weekend. There's no one but you that I'd trust to do it."
The twinkle had gone from Nicol Falkirk's eyes. "Oh dear me," he sighed. "I wrote your father's, I wrote your mother's, and long before that, I wrote your grandfather's. When a journalist comes round to writing three generations of obituaries, he knows he's lived too long.
Of course I'll do it, and I'll make sure it gets a good show in the paper. I have emeritus status, you know'
"Do you remember Michael?"
"Most certainly; and before you ask, I know the story, Robert. Your father told me what had happened. He wanted to make sure that nothing appeared in the paper. He was the company's solicitor, and so he had influence with the proprietors, but if he'd been any man off the street I'd have done as he asked. It is not the function of a newspaper to pry into the private grief of any family."