I looked at Ben and raised an eyebrow. He said, “You don’t suppose he’s…” and Lucie shrieked as the back door of the office opened and an awful apparition stepped through.
Rex was covered in blood from head to toe. It was dripping from his nose and his earlobes and the point of the foot-long butcher’s knife he was holding in his hand. He was breathing hard but his eyes were shining.
“Biggest one-day fall in the Dow for two years,” he panted, pointing the knife at me. “Forest fires threaten Malibu. Government troops clash with logging company employees in Borneo. Russia devalues the ruble for the third time this year. Moon Sagan and Buff Rodney say, ‘This time it’s the real thing’.” He took a ragged breath. “What are you waiting for?” he shouted. “If we’re going out, we’re going out in style. Type, you bastards!”
At the desk behind me, Harry heaved a huge sigh. “That’ll be pork chops all round, then,” he said.
The Globe’s favourite watering hole was the Royal Oak, by virtue of the fact that the paper’s offices were right next door, but I preferred the Duke Of York, which was half a mile away on the other side of the village but had the advantage of being half a mile away from the nearest newspaper office.
This early in the evening, the Duke was almost empty. Before The Crash, it had done a roaring trade in the summer from tourists visiting the local caves and hard-core walkers setting off on the notorious Gilbert Dyke Walk, which managed to take in some of the most inhospitable scenery in Northern England between here and Hadrian’s Wall. These days, the pub got by on a deal with a microbrewery in Castleton and some quite staggering customer loyalty among the locals, although tourists were starting to drift back again.
This evening, however, the only occupants of the place were Seth the landlord, and Liam Goodkind, editor and proprietor of the Chronicle, Belton’s other newspaper.
I stood in the doorway for a few moments, sensing disaster, but both Seth and Liam noticed me at the same time and nodded hello. Liam waved me over to his corner table as well, and by then it would just have looked rude to turn round and walk out again, so I went over and sat down.
“I don’t want any trouble, Liam,” I said.
“Well, me neither, old son,” he told me. Raising his voice, he said, “Seth, get this boy a drink.” He raised an eyebrow at me.
“Lager and lime,” I said, feeling miserable.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” He slapped me on the knee. “Rex won’t sack you for having a drink with me.”
“You sacked Robbie Whittaker for having a drink with Rex.”
“Robbie was a bad lad.” Liam lifted his glass and took a thoughtful sip of whisky. “He was robbing me blind. And he couldn’t write to save his life. Had to go.”
Seth came over with my pint glass of lager and lime on a tray. He was a little bald man with a port-wine stain down the right side of his face. He’d been the Duke’s landlord for about twenty years but most of the locals still regarded him as a newcomer. I hadn’t been in Belton nearly as long as he had, and it was faintly depressing to know that I still had several decades ahead of me before I was regarded as anything but That Bloke from London.
“Anything else, gents?” Seth asked us, and Liam shooed him back behind the bar with a languid wave of his hand.
When Seth was more or less out of earshot, Liam said, “I heard about the pig.”
“I told you, I don’t want any trouble.”
He looked offended. “How can this be trouble? Two newspapermen discussing business over a drink. How can it be trouble?”
“It can be trouble in all sorts of ways, Liam. You know that.” I took a mouthful of my drink and became nostalgic for the days of refrigeration, the days when you could just put your hand into one of those plastic bar-top buckets and scoop up a handful of ice cubes and drop them into your lager and lime.
“You’re too suspicious,” Liam told me. His attire today was Country Gentleman In Summer: white flannels, checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up above his elbows to show muscular forearms dotted with freckles and hazed with fine sandy hair, a pair of battered old brogues and a Guards tie, even though the nearest he had ever been to the military was when he sold fifteen hundred acres of his land to the Ministry of Defence to use as a firing range. He looked every inch the Gentleman Farmer, but he had once been managing editor of a newspaper in Manchester, until the death of his universally-disliked father had brought him back to the village.
“I’m not going to tell you what we got,” I said. “You’ll have to read it in the paper.”
“Well, of course I will.” He smiled and took a tin of small cigars and a lighter from the breast pocket of his shirt. “I’m a big fan of the Globe. I’m going to miss it.”
I shook my head and took another drink.
He lit a cigar and blew out smoke. “Look, old son.” He put tin and lighter back into his pocket. “Let’s not beat around the bush, eh? The pig’s gone. Now Rex will have to rely on local news.”
“We’ll manage.”
“Maybe Rex will be able to get his hands on some scabby sheep off the moors,” he went on. “The odd rabbit. How’s that going to help you? No national or international news, the advertisers are going to abandon ship.”
It was, unfortunately, a perfectly accurate summing-up of the Globe’s prospects. I drank some more of my lager and lime and wished I’d gone straight home.
“So how about you come and work for me?”
I snorted beer down my nose. Liam watched me with detached interest while I coughed and gasped for breath, then he said, “You’re a good lad. I’ve always liked your style. There’s a deputy’s chair waiting for you at the Chronicle.”
I mopped my face with my hankie. “I’d rather have my balls bitten off by a horse, Liam,” I said, half-laughing with surprise at the offer. “I wouldn’t work under you if you were the last editor on Earth.”
He didn’t get angry. He just became very still. “You won’t remember what you were like when you arrived here,” he told me calmly. “You were lucky we didn’t just take you out onto the Manchester Road and leave you there.”
I looked at him, trying to decide whether to punch him or not.
“You weren’t even human when Lenny Hammond found you out on the moors,” he went on. “Just an animal dressed in rags.”
I stood up.
“You want to try and work out which side of your bread the butter’s on,” Liam continued. “We’ve been good to you. Rex has been good to you. But you’re a good journalist and you owe this place more than staying with the Globe as it goes down.”
I turned to go.
“I’m trying to turn this village into the centre of news-gathering for the whole North of England,” he said. “It’ll put us on the map, give us a lot of clout. And you could help me do that. I’m offering you a chance to do that.”
I took a single halting step. Then another one. The next one came easier, and the next, and by the time I was through the door and out on the pavement it was no trouble at all to walk away from Liam’s offer. He was like a radio station; the further away from him you were, the weaker his message became, until finally you couldn’t hear him at all.
Liam and Rex were locked in a duel to the death. They pretended it was about who ran the better paper, but it was really about Alice, and it wouldn’t have mattered so much if it hadn’t been for the Crash.
I had missed the Crash. Those who saw it said it was like a swarm of tiny black flies on their monitor screens, or a driving hailstorm, or a slowly-blossoming flower. Nobody knew where it came from, or who had written it, but the Crash blew through every firewall on Earth as if they weren’t there. It took down economies, destroyed telecommunications networks, and effectively ended the War, all in about twenty minutes.