Lonie 31

Audrey followed Lonie back to the office. There was a new found spring in his step, now that a putative story was taking shape. He stood beside his desk, barely noticing that she was sitting in his office seat, organising his desk into some kind of order. He was too busy smoking and darting little glances to the glassed-in booth where the fatman and his cronies picked apart the day. There was firmness about his unshaved jaw as he waited to deliver the knock- out story, like a prize-fighter sitting on his stool waiting for the bell to ring.

But it was more prosaic than that. Bresslen wandered across the newsroom, with a fag in his bottom lip and over to the desk they shared. He stood for a minute with a half-smile on his lips, a replacement for conversation. He tended to talk down at his hip with his hand over his mouth. All Audrey could hear were his mumbles. Lonie replied with more mumbling and the words, 'Carol Peters,' thrown in. Audrey wasn’t asked to follow them across and into the men’s sanctuary of the fatman’s office.

Audrey was glad to get back to her own desk. She worked her way steadily through some birth and death notices, glad to have something to do whilst waiting for the news from Lonie. It was a a former life that still fitted around her shoulders like an old coat. She didn’t hear Lonie sneaking up on her. But she smelled stale cigarette smoke. When she looked up he was picking at his teeth, grimacing and flossing his canines with the black plastic lid off a pen.

‘The fatman’s happy. And when the fatman’s happy the world sings, or some shit like that. We’ll start low key. A few paragraphs and a picture of Carol tucked into one of the middle pages, near the ads for shiny new cars.’ Lonie didn’t look much like singing. He looked more prone to howling. ‘He says we’ll run with what we got, but first we’ve got to make sure we’ve covered all the angles so that we know what the other paper’s spoilers will be.’

Audrey stopped typing. She’d got to the “sadly missed, a young 79- years- old stage,” and would like to have seen the copy finished. Leaving it white on the page, like that, was like leaving poor Eugenio Fuentes lying unburied. But Lonie seemed restless. He wouldn’t even look at her. He was lost somewhere in his tangled thoughts. She wasn’t going to be left behind on a breaking story, not for anyone, not even for “forever young and in our thoughts Eugenio.”

‘I’m not sure what a spoiler is.’ Audrey watched Lonie leave the pen cap lying on the edge of the desk.

‘When we run an exclusive.’ Lonie sighed. He turned to look out of the open window for inspiration, where the rain was spitting in and lying on the sill. ‘Like you with Carol Peters and me with Larry.’ His hair fell to the one side as he shifted his head to look at her. He scratched at the throat, between the gap of his open- necked shirt, at the clavicle, distractedly pinching and kneading the flesh of his neck. ‘Other papers try to make more noise with their own “exclusives”. We’ve got to make sure we’re ahead of the game. As the fatman says, it’s hardly news that Carol says she’s innocent. She’s been saying that since her trial and she’s been saying the same thing to anybody that would listen ever since.’

‘But I thought Carol Peters didn’t speak to the press.’ Audrey suddenly wanted to console Lonie, even though the story was, in fact, more hers than his and he should be consoling her.

‘There’s ways and there’s ways.’ Lonie shrugged. ‘Anyway time you were goin’. You not got a home to go to? You’ve been here long enough.’

Audrey looked at her watch. ‘Jeez is it that time already.’ She dismissed him with - ‘I’ll just finish this first.’ She started typing, before going home.

Lonie searched his pockets for money, but he came up with little more than enough to buy a packet of fags. He started walking, not really knowing where he was going, but ended up standing outside a building site. The Mitchel Library’s copper dome in the North Street building poked out of the surrounding scaffolding like a bald man wearing a string vest. A statue of Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, winked down at him. Headlines were yesterday’s news, but they were all held together in the same building and he knew if he wanted to know anything about Larry Murray, or Carol Peters, the place to find it was the reading rooms of the largest public library in Europe. It was one of the few times he’d been glad to have paid his rates. He’d spent many of his youthful days lost in the thoughts of others on the page, stumbling around mapless, hoping he might one day understand.

Lonie let his library card do the work. He sat at a desk and let a spectacle wearing librarian dressed in a Fair Isle Jumper, with brown cords tucked into his thick woollen socks, fish out for him the tastiest morsels of the Larry Murray case and place it in front of him for his pleasure. He turned the first page and was drunk on facts.

There was a picture of a young Larry Murray, aged 12, with the distinctive port-wine stain on his face, laughing at the camera. Perhaps it was a trick of the light. A bad photograph. His eyes were not laughing. They looked like the pasted- on eyes of an older man. They glinted like hard candy, even more so, enough to make Lonie shiver and turn the page.

Lonie skimmed through their competitor’s paper, The Glasgow Herald, leaving it half open as a bookmark and started on another. The library wasn’t busy. A young woman wearing a red cashmere jumper sat flicking through some pages of a book. He commandeered the desk next to him for his own exclusive use. Murray’s life was all mapped out in creased papers in black and white. He walked round them reading snippets of depravity. Chewing on the earliest known cases of missing dogs and cats. Animal cruelty. Child molestation, when Murray was still a child himself. Boys and girls recorded with his magic cameras that were found to have no film in them. Sodomy, rape, bestiality, all of which were hard to swallow. No convictions. Acquittal after acquittal.

Then there were the missing years. Years with a solitary picture from The Guardian of Murray, with a shock of dark hair, wearing a Nehru jacket and round collared shirt on a soapbox at Speakers’ Corner near Hyde Park. Did he have disciples then? Lonie looked more closely at the black and white photograph. Even with a magic camera it didn’t look like it. No girls with flowers in their hair, just the bored and curious grey-smudged onlookers, caught in time, looking up at the new self-proclaimed messiah.

Lonie had come full circle, back to the Glasownian’s own headlines. “Missing Boy” aged five, and the mandatory picture of the boy smiling at some great trick life had thrown at him. A smaller, greyer, picture of his mother crying. One picture said life. The other death. The black printed words, in between the dull pictures, connected the two. Lonie with his knowledge of the newspaper world closed the synaptic gap. The reporter was good. It was the fatman in his street walking days. As far as the public was concerned that Dennistoun boy had been taken out of the rat runs of his life and was most likely dead or worse. His mother would always be crying. Kids would be watched like hawks, until apathy grew stronger than vigilance and ripped between the lines.

The picture of Ann Marie McColgan was a good one. A first Communion snap; Ann Marie’s smiling mouth overflowing the spaghetti straps, the floor length snow white satin, speaking of joy. Her mother had called her “my little angel.” “I just looked away and she was gone,” was the headline two months later. There was no headline six months later, no more than a by-line with a small picture of a shrunken old woman, Anne Marie’s mother, asking for prayers, asking for miracles, asking for anybody that had seen anything to contact the police. A phone number was emphasised in black bold print. All joy dissipated. All hope gone. The fatman’s name gave the lead into the story that was not a story.

There was a jump in time. Nine months later. A farmer’s wife that had gone out into the fields to round up the cows and never came back. There was locals hinting at UFOs and lights on the hills of Rannoch Moor, but there was nothing more until her body was found crucified in a children’s play park in Drumchapel, with a tree pole inserted up her vagina. There were no pictures. Lonie took it the dead woman, Mrs Cooke, wasn’t photogenic, or her husband was uncooperative, told the press to go- and- fuck- themselves, which frequently happened, but was never reported. It was one of the rules of the game, never take it personally.

Lonie flicked through page after page, a catalogue of murders and atrocities that would have made an SS officer weep. One girl from Carntyne, a twelve-year-old Alice Devlin, had been staked out on a field raped and her nose bitten off, but her screams had been heard by a couple who had gotten lost whilst walking. The man and woman thinking it some sort of monster had shouted out. Alice had been hit by a shovel to finish her off, but it didn’t. She survived and was able to give a description to the police. One of the things that Lonie didn’t understand was Alice had seen her attacker’s face, but he’d have thought the first thing she’d have mentioned was the two-tone purple face, but it wasn’t. Alice’s description would have collared most of the men in the West of Scotland- average height, brown hair, wearing a denim type jacket, between the ages of 18-50 years. Lonie had a quick shifty look at the librarian. He looked like a denim jacket wearer. His search was getting him nowhere. He noticed the fatman was also involved in this one and he thought it might be better having a word with him about the case in the morning.

Lonie couldn’t help but remember the “trial of the century.” The only outcome, of course, was guilty. Lonie spread different newspaper’s accounts of the trial like a set of marked cards on the desk in front of him. But it was pure performance theatre with all of the best Queen’s Councils getting a chance to preen, parade and show the fruits of the Scottish education system. Insanity suited everyone. But Lonie wasn’t quite sure how the son of a Scottish vicar had come to be treated in a high security institution run by Catholics. He picked up The Guardian account. Murray’s rhetoric in the dock was pure apocalyptic, which didn’t sit well with Protestant sensibilities: “The sword, the sword it is drawn…for slaughter it is furnished.” But there were other more lucid elements. Murray admitted freely to the killings, rejoiced in them, admitted to the prosecutor that they were the most powerful kind of addiction, that whilst others watched history from afar, he was making it and a new world, up close and personal. When asked if he’d anything to say when he was convicted he uttered another biblical quotation: “God is fruitful when you are tempted, he will provide a way out so that you can endure.” Murray finished his address with ‘A new humanity is born.’

Lonie’s neck felt stiff and his eyes were jumping between the lines. He felt suddenly old and in need of being reborn too. He’d perhaps enough whisky in the bottle underneath his bed, for emergencies, to help him sleep.