‘I’m sorry to interrupt your work,’ she said when they reached the open air.
‘Dunt matter,’ he said equably. ‘I was busting for a smoke, anyway. Do you?’ He proffered the pack and she shook her head. ‘Mind if I do?’ He didn’t wait for her reply, but knocked one out, shoved it in his mouth and lit it like a starving man falling on bread. He was young, mid-twenties, she thought, and staggeringly badly dressed, with a tweed jacket that was far too big, a tie that looked as if it might have been used to tie up a dog, a grubby shirt with a crumpled collar, and cheap, scuffed shoes at the end of what looked like his old school trousers. The dress code for the magistrates’ court had evidently fallen hard on him. He had a snubby, rather pallid but not unattractive face, and spiky fair hair ending in an unfashionable mullet. His fingernails were badly bitten and his fingers badly stained with nicotine. Being a journalist at this level must be really stressful, she thought.
‘I won’t keep you long,’ she said. ‘I’m just interested in a story you filed back in July about an escaped prisoner—’
‘Oh, God, yes, that!’ he jumped in. ‘I thought I’d got it made! Big city here I come! But it all turned out to be rubbish and I got a rocket from my editor. He kicked my bum so hard I couldn’t sit down for a week.’
‘Would you tell me what happened?’
He was so eager to talk she didn’t have to give him a reason for asking. The fact that she was Press seemed to be enough for him.
‘Well, it was just luck I came across it, really, because I was going home one evening and there’s this cut through round the back of Apsley Guise – I live in Husborne Crawley?’ She nodded as if she knew what he was talking about so as not to slow him down. ‘Anyway, it’s just a lane and there’s never much traffic on it, so I wasn’t surprised to find myself on my own. Then I come round a bend, and there’s a barrier across the road. I was on my bike – I’ve got this mini Moto. It’s useful for getting about to stories, easier to park than a car – not that I could afford a car anyway on what they pay me.’
‘Right. You came across a barrier?’
‘Yeah. Well, I didn’t want to go back, so I pushed the bike round it. And round the next corner there’s a local cop I know, Colin Gunter, and he stops me. I look past him and I see a big Ring 4 van and some more police and a couple of patrol cars. So I says, “S’up Col?” and he says, “You can’t come down this way. There’s a prison van been held up.” So then he tells me this prisoner was on the way to Woodhill, the van got held up and he’s on the loose. So I go back and phone the story straight in, and I ring the Telegraph news desk as well. I’ve been doing that for a while, any time I hear anything good, because I’m hoping to make a name with them, and then they’ll give me a job.’
‘Why the Telegraph?’ she asked out of idle curiosity.
‘It’s what me dad reads. Anyway, the Courier puts my story in, but it’s hardly gone to bed when I get a call from Colin to say it was all a mistake, there was no-one in the van, it just broke down, and someone was having a laugh with him, telling him there was an escaped prisoner. I was well gutted, and the next thing the editor calls me in and chews my arse off. It was too late to stop the story, but nobody else had run it and in the end he just left it, cause he said it would look worse to print a retraction. And that was that. I never heard anything more about it.’
‘How did your editor know the story was wrong?’
‘Someone rang him from Ring 4 – the controller down in Luton – Trish Holland, I think her name is. Apparently this bloke was going to be moved, and then it was all cancelled at the last minute. That’s why they thought he was in the van, I s’pose. Anyway, it’s a shame, because it would have been a lot of fun if he really was on the run. We had one over the wall last year and we got three days’ front pages out of him before they caught him.’
‘The Telegraph didn’t print his name, I notice,’ she said.
‘Well, it was only a stop press, and I s’pose they wanted to check it before they ran it properly. Lucky for them they did. Unlucky for me, though – I’ll never get a job there now.’
She felt rather sorry for him, with his forlorn hopes and his lost scoop. She said, ‘The real news is always local. That’s the news that affects peoples’ lives.’
‘Are you local press?’
‘Yes,’ she said, and it was true, though New York was a rather more seething metropolis than Woburn.
The control centre at Luton was sited in a modern block on a small industrial estate, and Trish Holland was a middle-aged woman with a cosy figure and hard make-up. She allowed Emily into her presence with the ease most people seemed to accord to the press, but she grew defensive when she learned the subject for discussion.
‘There never was an escape,’ she said angrily. ‘It was all in the mind of that stupid reporter from Woburn. I suppose he thought he was having a joke. Everyone seems to like poking fun at Ring 4. I’d like to see them do a job like ours.’
‘Yes, and I want to do an article exactly on that point,’ Emily said warmly. ‘I want to put Ring 4’s side of things. It’s all too easy to make cheap jokes without knowing the facts.’
She ceased to bridle. ‘You’re completely right there. Facts were pretty thin on the ground in that story. It wasn’t even one of our vans.’
‘The reporter says he saw the Ring 4 logo on it.’
‘Doesn’t matter. All of our vans were accounted for. And it’s easy enough to hire a suitable van and fake a logo. Film companies do it all the time.’
‘That’s true. But you did, in fact, have a movement order for Trevor Bates?’
‘Yes, he was going to be moved, to Woodhill, and we had the usual paperwork to collect him from Wormwood Scrubs—’
‘The paperwork was all correct?’
‘Of course it was. A copy was sent to me and it was completely in order, otherwise I wouldn’t have put it through. Then at the last minute I was notified that he wasn’t being moved after all, so I cancelled the movement, and that was that. Far from having escaped, he was never in transit at all. He’s still in Wormwood Scrubs, as far as I know.’
‘Who was it who notified you of the cancellation?’
‘One of the directors of Ring 4, Mr Mark. He’d said he’d been notified by the Home Office of the change of plan. He faxed through the paperwork, I stood down the team, and no movement of any sort was made that evening.’
‘Well, thank you, that’s all very clear,’ Emily said. ‘I’m certainly glad to have heard your side of the story. Fortunately it never made it to the national press.’
‘No, and that boy will be more careful in future, after the wigging I gave his editor. But it’s all of a piece with the general attitude that Ring 4 is fair game.’ She went on to complain at length and in detail about various other bad stories Ring 4 had had told against it, and Emily listened for as long as she could bear it before apologising and extracting herself. She needed to get back to her computer to do some more checking.
Hart had discovered long ago in the Job that the recently bereaved rarely resent people coming and asking them questions. It accounted for how often people could be seen on television screens talking about their loss at a time when the uninitiated would have expected them to be prostrate, with the curtains closed. The big, savage grief generally held off for some time, and arrived when everyone else had got tired of the subject and gone away, leaving the bereaved unsupported.