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Where the Dead Men Go

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
256 Seiten
Englisch
Faber & Fabererschienen am03.09.2013Main
After three years in the wilderness, hardboiled reporter Gerry Conway is back at his desk at the Glasgow Tribune. But three years is a long time on newspapers and things have changed - readers are dwindling, budgets are tightening, and the Trib's once rigorous standards are slipping. Once the paper's star reporter, Conway now plays second fiddle to his former protege, crime reporter Martin Moir. But when Moir goes awol as a big story breaks, Conway is dispatched to cover a gangland shooting. And when Moir's body turns up in a flooded quarry, Conway is drawn deeper into the city's criminal underworld as he looks for the truth about his colleague's death. Braving the hostility of gangsters, ambitious politicians and his own newspaper bosses, Conway discovers he still has what it takes to break a big story. But this is a story not everyone wants to hear as the city prepares to host the Commonwealth Games and the country gears up for a make-or-break referendum on independence. In this, the second book in the "Conway Trilogy", McIlvanney explores the murky interface of crime and politics in the New Scotland.mehr
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TaschenbuchKartoniert, Paperback
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E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
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Produkt

KlappentextAfter three years in the wilderness, hardboiled reporter Gerry Conway is back at his desk at the Glasgow Tribune. But three years is a long time on newspapers and things have changed - readers are dwindling, budgets are tightening, and the Trib's once rigorous standards are slipping. Once the paper's star reporter, Conway now plays second fiddle to his former protege, crime reporter Martin Moir. But when Moir goes awol as a big story breaks, Conway is dispatched to cover a gangland shooting. And when Moir's body turns up in a flooded quarry, Conway is drawn deeper into the city's criminal underworld as he looks for the truth about his colleague's death. Braving the hostility of gangsters, ambitious politicians and his own newspaper bosses, Conway discovers he still has what it takes to break a big story. But this is a story not everyone wants to hear as the city prepares to host the Commonwealth Games and the country gears up for a make-or-break referendum on independence. In this, the second book in the "Conway Trilogy", McIlvanney explores the murky interface of crime and politics in the New Scotland.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9780571299591
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2013
Erscheinungsdatum03.09.2013
AuflageMain
Seiten256 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse926 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.1280474
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe




Chapter One


You think it´s deliberate? Do they time these things to fuck us up?´

Driscoll was shaking his head. A dummy was up on the screen, tomorrow´s splash, my first front page in a month: Yes Camp Poll Boost. A YouGov survey pegged support for independence at forty per cent, up five points since June. The real poll - the one that mattered, the be-all-end-all referendum - was still two years off but the shadow war would keep us in headlines till then. Assuming the paper survived that long.

On screen was a headshot of Malcolm Gordon, the Nationalist First Minister, with his schoolboy haircut and lopsided grin, looking like the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo. Who´d bet against him?´ was the caption, a quote from an unnamed Westminster frontbencher. There was a sidebar giving analysis of the figures and a paragraph of comment from a rent-a-quote politics boffin at Strathclyde Uni. The page was toast anyway, if Driscoll got his way.

You´d start to take it personal. Jesus. Do they time it to fuck us up?´

He ran a hand through his too-long hair, rubbed the back of his neck.

They timed it to coincide with a football match, Jimmy.´

Driscoll scowled at me. My eyes were suddenly stinging: Maguire´s acrid perfume. She´d been upstairs for a meeting. Sixth floor. The suits.

She held up her hand as Driscoll started to speak.

Gerry.´ She never even looked Driscoll´s way. This shooting. What do you think?´

Driscoll sagged. He looked away, shaking his head, and then back at me. Blank, bagged eyes. Slack jowls. Roll of belly over the waistband.

It´s an inside lead, Fiona.´ I spoke to Maguire but looked at Driscoll. Page six. Four at best. What do we know at this stage anyway? A guy´s been shot on a football field. Gang-related. That´s it. Nothing´s coming out between now and deadline.´ I shrugged. Lift it from the wire. Top and tail it. No one´s scooping us on this.´

My eldest son had a piping competition that afternoon in Ayrshire. I´d promised him I would make it. Try to make it. Once I filed my copy I was finished for the day.

Six?´ Driscoll was shaking his head. Fucking six? This is the splash, Fiona. The Mail will fucking bury us with this.´ He turned to me. No one scooping us? It´s all over Twitter, photos from the locus.´

Maguire frowned at the screen. Before she got the big chair, Maguire had been news editor. She´d done Driscoll´s job for seven years. But the game was different now. You couldn´t appeal to precedents. We were dropping five per cent, month on month, year on year. There were no precedents for where we were now.

Make the call, Fiona.´ Peter Davidson spoke, production editor, hovering at our shoulders. We´re off-stone by eight. Make a fucking decision.´

This was Glasgow. This was the Trib. We´d like to be quality, the paper of record. We´d like to cover the world from a West of Scotland perspective, reporting far-flung conflicts from every angle and on every front. Correspondents in five continents. But we didn´t have any money. And the readers we retained had other priorities. Celtic and Rangers. The Neils and the Walshes. The city´s tribal battles, on and off the pitch. That was our métier. Bigotry and violence. Football and crime. Maguire had been upstairs, talking numbers. The current figures had just come out. I didn´t know what they were but I knew they weren´t good.

I sympathised with Maguire. The last editor I worked for at the Trib - the guy who fired me four years back - was Norman Rix, a cheerful brutal Cockney who did his stint among the Jocks and went back home to edit the Indy. Between Rix and Maguire the Trib had gone through three editors. Time was, Tribune eds reigned like monarchs - whole epochs passed by under one man´s dispensation. Now they were football managers, turn it round in eight or nine months or face the bullet. It made them nervous, made them prone to bad decisions.

It´s page one. Gerry, you´re on it.´

Driscoll wheeled away, the smirk of glory pasted to his face.

Fiona.´

Maguire was already walking, striding past the sportsdesk.

You´re on it, Gerry. Take a snapper.´

And the splash?´

I was almost trotting beside her, the caustic perfume sizzling in my airways.

It´s not the splash any more,´ she said. It´s page four. Subs´ll finish it.´

Fiona, come on.´ I glanced over at Moir´s empty chair. This isn´t mine. At least let me try and get hold of him again.´

Gerry, you´re not listening.´ She nodded at the empty chair. Your mate´s AWOL. Again. But Martin Moir´s whereabouts is my problem. Your problem - one of your problems, your most immediately pressing problem - is to get this story.´

Aye but, Fiona-´

She stopped in her tracks, turned to face me, fists on hips. Here we go, I thought. I could see it in her eyes before she opened her mouth.

This is the gig, Gerry. If you didn´t want it, why´d you come back?´

She stared in my face for a count of three and then bounced into her office.

I must have missed you,´ I said to her freshly slammed door.

I slumped into my chair, took a pull of lukewarm Volvic. I looked around the floor. Neve McDonald was scowling at her screen, her burgundy lips primly twisted. Kev Carson at the sportsdesk was hunched over his keyboard, fingers stabbing, his nose six inches from the screen. I craned round in my seat. All across the newsroom, the heads were bent, the fingers busy. The insect tick of keyboards, the patient drone of Sky News. It must have been somebody´s birthday: a little string of balloons was pinned to a partition over by Accounts.

Why did you come back? In various forms and inflections, this question had dogged me for the past year, since I threw up my life on the run at Bluestone Media and shuffled backwards along the escape tunnel to my cell at the Tribune on Sunday. Fiona Maguire posed it most weeks, in her snidely rhetorical fashion, but other people were genuinely stumped. The answer wasn´t obvious, to me or to anyone else. Like every Scottish title, the Trib was in freefall, bleeding readers with every quarter. Anyone with a chance to leave seized it. Mostly they went into PR. The world and his managing editor left to set up companies called Impact Media or the Cornerstone Group, each one promising to manage´ a client´s reputation with experience gained at the frontline of news and political reporting´ or skills developed at the pinnacle of British journalism´. I had written some of this horseshit myself: A bespoke team will guide you through the media minefield. We will minimise the impact of negative stories.

I´d been back six weeks when the paper was sold to an American media conglomerate. Lay-offs started soon after. Now the empty workstations dotted the newsroom like foreclosed houses.

Often, when a workstation went suddenly bare, I could no longer picture its occupant. The colleague whose Blu-tacked snaps of ringletted twins or bounding black labs had clogged their monitor´s rim, whose summer suit jackets and winter coats had draped their chair-back, who offered tight little smiles and theatrical shows of professional briskness when you stood behind them in the queue for the fax machine or the copier; that person was now a ghost. I felt bad about this, but who could you ask? It was like the Disappeared in Chile or Argentina, people vanishing overnight, leaving oddly stark chairs and denuded blue partitions, and we carried on as if nothing had happened.

There was one empty chair that stood out from the rest, a chair that marked a presence, not an absence. This was the chair of Martin Moir, the King of Crime, Investigations Editor for the Tribune on Sunday, Scottish Journalist of the Year in 2009 and 2010 and probably - the envelope would be opened at the Radisson Hotel in a fortnight´s time - 2011 as well. The chair was empty because he was out on the job, rooting out stories and standing them up, boosting the circ, saving our jobs. The chair was empty because he was out on the piss, lining up voddies and knocking them back, missing his deadlines, risking our jobs.

I slugged some more water and watched the snow clouds settle on the Campsie Fells. Moir was a mate - the best mate I had. Stories, fights, five-a-side football triumphs, five-a-side football disasters, lost weekends: we´d shared a lot and went back a long way. When Moir first came to the paper I looked out for him, fed him stories, shared my contacts. For a couple of years we worked as a team. Four years ago in Belfast he saved my life. But people change, we both had, and we´d done barely more than pass the time of day since I´d started back at the Trib. Moir was rarely in the building. When he did show up he was curt, aloof; the backhand wave, the guarded nod. Moir was the talent: he didn´t want reminding of the days when he´d featured further down the bill. I didn´t want reminding of them either, truth be told.

I looked sourly at his workstation. The blinded screen of his iMac. Autumnal foliage of notelets on his partition walls. Papers and books. A can of Diet Coke, open. It had been there since Thursday, the last time Moir´s cosseted arse had parked itself on his blue swivel chair. Beside the can of Coke was a framed photo. His girls; six and four. Perfect. Blonde. Sun in their hair. What did he need their photo for? He got to see them every...


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