‘Come off it, Ty.’
‘Promised,’ I said. ‘They could get their faces pushed in, one way or another.’
‘I’ll have to know. The Editor will want to know.’
I shook my head. ‘Promised.’
‘I could scrub the article altogether...’
‘Tut, Tut,’ I said. ‘Threats, now?’
He rubbed his larynx in exasperation. I looked round the vast busy floor space, each section, like the Sports Desk, collecting and sorting out its final copy. Most of the feature stuff went down to the compositors on Fridays, some even on Thursdays, to be set up in type. But anything like a scoop stayed under wraps upstairs until after the last editions of the Saturday evening papers had all been set up and gone to press. The compositors were apt to make the odd ten quid by selling a red hot story to reporters on rival newspapers. If the legal department and the Editor both cleared my article, the print shop wouldn’t see it until too late to do them any good. The Blaze held its scandalous disclosures very close to its chest.
Derry came back from the lawyers without the article.
‘They said they’d have to work on it. They’ll ring through later.’
The Blaze lawyers were of Counsel standard on the libel laws. They needed to be. All the same they were true Blaze men with ‘publish and be damned’ engraved on their hearts. The Blaze accountants allowed for damages in their budget as a matter of course. The Blaze’s owner looked upon one or two court cases a year as splendid free advertising, and watched the sales graphs rise. There had however been four actions in the past six months and two more were pending. A mild memo had gone round, saying to cool it just a fraction. Loyal for ever, Luke-John obeyed even where he disapproved.
‘I’ll take this in to the Editor,’ he remarked. ‘See what he says.’
Derry watched his retreating back with reluctant admiration.
‘Say what you like, the sports pages sell this paper to people who otherwise wouldn’t touch it with gloves on. Our Luke-John, for all his stingy little ways, must be worth his weight in gumdrops.’
Our Luke-John came back and went into a close huddle with a soccer correspondent. I asked Derry how the funeral had been, on the Wednesday.
‘A funeral’s a funeral.’ He shrugged. ‘It was cold. His wife wept a lot. She had a purple nose, blue from cold and red from crying.’
‘Charming.’
He grinned. ‘Her sister told her to cheer up. Said how lucky it was Bert took out all that extra insurance.’
‘He did what?’
‘Yeah. I thought you’d like that. I chatted the sister up a bit. Two or three weeks ago Bert trebled his life insurance. Told his wife they’d be better off when he retired. Sort of self-help pension scheme.’
‘Well, well,’ I said.
‘So it had to be an accident,’ Derry nodded. ‘In front of witnesses. The insurance company might not have paid up if he’d fallen out of the window with no one watching.’
‘I wonder if they’ll contest it.’
‘Don’t see how they can, when the inquest said misadventure.’
The Editor’s secretary came back with my piece. The Editor’s secretary was an expensive package tied up with barbed wire. No one, reputedly, had got past the prickles to the goodies.
The Editor had scrawled ‘O.K. on the lawyer’s say so’ across the top of the page. Luke-John stretched out a hand for it, nodded in satisfaction, and slid it into the lockable top drawer of his desk, talking all the while to the soccer man. There was no need for me to stay longer. I told Derry I’d be at home most of the day if they wanted me and sketched a goodbye.
I was half-way to the door when Luke-John called after me.
‘Ty... I forgot to tell you. A woman phoned, wanted you.’
‘Mrs Woodward?’
‘Uhuh. Let’s see, I made a note... oh, yes, here it is. A Miss Gail Pominga. Would you ring her back. Something about Tally magazine.’
He gave me the slip of paper with the telephone number. I went across to the under-populated News Desk and picked up the receiver. My hands were steady. My pulse wasn’t.
‘The Western School of Art. Can I help you?’
‘Miss Pominga...’
Miss Pominga was fetched. Her voice came on the line, as cool and uninvolved as at the railway station.
‘Are you coming on Sunday?’ Crisp. Very much to the point.
‘I want to.’ Understatement. ‘It may not be possible to get away.’
‘Well... I’ve been asked out to lunch.’
‘Go, then,’ I said, feeling disappointment lump in my chest like a boulder.
‘Actually, if you are coming I will stay at home.’
Damn Elizabeth’s mother, I thought. Damn her and her cold.
‘I want to come. I’ll come if I possibly can,’ I said.
There was a short silence before she said, ‘When can you let me know for sure?’
‘Not until Sunday, really. Not until I go out to catch the train.’
‘Hmm...’ She hesitated, then said decisively, ‘Ring me in any case, whether you can come or whether you can’t. I’ll fix it so that I can still go to lunch if you aren’t coming.’
‘That’s marvellous,’ I said, with more feeling than caution.
She laughed. ‘Good. Hope to see you, then. Any time after ten. That’s when Harry and Sarah go off to golf.’
‘It would be eleven-thirty or so.’
She said ‘All right,’ and ‘Goodbye,’ and disconnected. I went home to write up Colly Gibbons for Tally and to have lunch with Elizabeth and Mrs Woodward. It was fish again: unspecified variety and not much flavour. I listened to Elizabeth’s sporadic conversation and returned her smiles and hoped fiercely not to be there with her forty-eight hours later. I ate automatically, sightlessly. By the end of that meal, treachery tasted of salt.
6
Time was running short, Tally-wise. With their deadline only two days ahead I went to Heathbury Park races on Saturday to meet Dermot Finnegan, an undistinguished jockey with an undistinguished mount in the Lamplighter.
For a while I couldn’t understand a word he said, so impenetrable was his Irish accent. After he had sipped unenthusiastically at a cup of lunch counter coffee for ten minutes he relaxed enough to tell me he always spoke worse when he was nervous, and after that we got by with him having to repeat some things twice, but not four or five times, as at the beginning.
Once past the language barrier, Dermot unveiled a resigned wit and an accepting contented way of life. Although by most standards his riding success was small, Dermot thought it great. His income, less than a dustman’s, seemed to him princely compared with the conditions of his childhood. His father had fed fourteen children on the potatoes he had grown on two and a half exhausted acres. Dermot, being neither the strong eldest nor the spoilt youngest, had usually had to shove for his share and hadn’t always got it. At nineteen he tired of the diet and took his under-developed physique across the sea to Newmarket, where an Irish accent, irrespective of previous experience, guaranteed him an immediate job in the labour-hungry racing industry.
He had ‘done his two’ for a while in a flat racing stable, but couldn’t get a ride in a flat race because he hadn’t been apprenticed. Philosophically he moved down the road to a stable which trained jumpers as well, where the ‘Governor’ gave him a chance in a couple of hurdle races. He still worked in the same stable on a part-time basis, and the ‘Governor’ still put him up as his second string jockey. How many rides? He grinned, showing spaces instead of teeth. Some seasons, maybe thirty. Two years ago, of course, it was only four, thanks to breaking his leg off a brainless divil of a knock-kneed spalpeen.