To Amanda, for always believing in me and
Andrew and Brooke for making it all worthwhile.
My mum, for raising my brother Sean and I on her own and
my beloved colleague Yvonne, for all her assistance.
This book is in memory of Danny Brown, my first, and best editor, mentor and friend.
Osiris – one of the most important gods of ancient Egypt. The origin of Osiris is obscure; he was a local god of Busiris in Lower Egypt and may have been a personification of chthonic (underworld) fertility, or possibly a deified hero. By about 2,400 BC, however, Osiris clearly played a double role: he was both a god of fertility and the embodiment of the dead and the resurrected …
Osiris
Growing up in the post-war shipping port of Hull in England’s North East had been tough. Being called Osiris made it even tougher. Osiris Vincent Vance endured ridicule and exclusion from his first day at school. Even his primary teacher had mocked his unusual name, to the squeals of delight from the rest of the class.
From that moment on Osiris was an outsider. In later years he changed his name to Vinnie, but it made little difference. He would always be Osiris in Hull.
He was named after an entry his mum Veronica had found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which she had unsuccessfully tried to sell on almost every doorstep around the historical city.
She’d been heavily pregnant at the time and lugging those impossibly heavy books had left her with ugly-looking varicose veins covering her legs. She was just nineteen years old.
Her first and only lover had been a merchant seaman, who promised her the earth, then disappeared as soon as her waist began to thicken. He’d known she was pregnant long before the naïve teenager did.
Veronica’s parents ordered an abortion. They knew someone who performed them. Not a doctor, of course. It was 1947, the year before the National Health Service had been formed, and they could afford neither his fee nor the shame it would bring on the family.
The abortion had been bloody, painful, and as it turned out unsuccessful. Her belly continued to grow. As Veronica spent weeks recovering from the botched procedure, she read the encyclopaedias. She didn’t understand many of the big words or explanations. But one entry leapt out: Osiris … both a god of fertility and the embodiment of the dead and resurrected.
‘That’s him alright.’ She knew it was a boy. A boy whose life they had tried to take. But he had survived, resurrected from the dead. This baby was going to be born no matter what and he would leave his mark on this world, of that she was certain.
1
Black & Blue
April Lavender wiped her mouth clean of the flour dust from her morning sausage roll, sprinkled with a liberal helping of salt and smothered in brown sauce. At lunchtime she would return for a cheese and ham roll washed down with whatever soup the Peccadillo café had to offer, which she also routinely salted before tasting. She couldn’t get her head round this new low salt way of thinking. She knew of some younger colleagues who didn’t even take salt on their chips. ‘How could anyone eat chips without salt?’ she muttered a little too loudly to herself, earning a sideways glance from a taxi driver at a neighbouring table.
No, April was too old to change her ways at fifty-six. She loved salt on her food and had the high blood pressure to prove it. Anyway she’d given up trying to be healthy since modern science seemed determined to take away everything she enjoyed. Recently it had reported that bacon shouldn’t be eaten at all and any alcohol shortened your life dramatically. If that was the case it was a wonder she was still breathing.
At least April had managed to quit one vice, smoking, after the birth of her first grandchild last year – spurred on by the cruel ultimatum from her daughter that the baby wouldn’t be allowed to stay over unless Granny stopped her forty-a-day habit.
‘The cheek of her,’ April mumbled, ‘I have to stop smoking so she can get a babysitter.’
The taxi driver shifted uncomfortably in his seat before deciding to pay up and leave in case April tried to strike up a conversation with someone other than herself.
Unfortunately, since the fags had gone April had piled on the weight. Nothing fitted any more. Last week she had to suffer the indignity of her blouse button pinging off and landing on a colleague’s desk, to much hilarity around the office. Her humiliation was complete when she was forced to cover up her decency by stapling her shirt back together.
It hadn’t always been this way. Back in her teens she’d been a real looker. Long blonde hair – not the harsh dye job it was now to cover the grey – shapely legs and a pert bust that sent the fellas wild.
She had settled down with a tall, charming, handsome man, who soon turned into a pot-bellied pig. They stumbled on for five years, producing two children, before she finally had enough, left him and moved back in with her folks. The next few years had been tough. Her ex had refused to pay a penny for the kids. ‘How do these buggers expect their children to survive?’ she’d often say to anyone who’d listen. Conditions were cramped beyond belief in her ageing parents’ tiny bungalow.
April was also what was termed an ‘unskilled worker’. But after a secretarial night class, she got a job on a local paper, the Weekly Extra, based on the Southside of Glasgow. She was the editor’s secretary and loved it. She could never understand why secretaries all wanted to be called personal assistants these days. She’d been proud of her title.
April loved the paper and in particular loved speaking to readers. Even if they called with a complaint she could usually soothe them over without having to bother the boss. People trusted her. They would tell her things that even merited reports in the paper. April hated handing these tips over to the surly journalists, who were more interested in filing their expenses – the most inventive work they produced all week – than filing copy for the paper. They usually made a pig’s ear of the stories, anyway, especially if there was a human interest angle rather than just the formulaic court reporting.
One day April convinced her editor to allow her to write a story of her own. The reporters were outraged and complained to the National Union of Journalists. It was the early 1980s and the whole country was gripped by the miners’ strike and recession. It seemed as if every affiliated union was just itching to join in – including the three reporters at the Extra who were determined to keep a closed shop. They only backed down when the editor promised that his secretary wouldn’t be paid for her work and it would appear under the by-line of ‘April Lavender – guest writer’.
That seemed to placate them for a while. The truth is, April didn’t care about the journalists’ sensitivities. She knew she had that all-important foot in the door. Every week her articles would appear, taking up more and more space and shoving stories by the ‘proper’ journalists into the margins. They resented her, especially when the postbag was full of mail addressed to April. But their resentment turned to outright hatred when five years later she leapfrogged them all to land the post of editor.
Editor. Pride coursed through her body every morning when she read that sign on her office door. The money was okay, but it was the prestige she adored more. She was a pillar of the local community. Just a year later she made another leap, into the nationals, tripling her meagre wage. She had been with the Daily Herald now for nearly twenty years. But the energy and ambition that had once driven her out of a doomed marriage and perpetual poverty was fading.
April had a new boss who didn’t like her. The Weasel was always sending her copy back to be rewritten. That had never happened to her before – in the local newspaper days she had been the one who sent articles back to be redone. And today she’d learned of a new humiliation. She was being shunted s
ideways, from women’s editor to the newly created Special Investigations desk.
The problem was that her newspaper spent little time and resources on proper investigations now. It was the same throughout the industry. Even the world famous Sunday Times Insight team had been disbanded. And she would still have to report to the Weasel. Why didn’t they just say what it really was? One foot out the door.
EU laws made it so much more difficult for employers to get rid of their workforce these days. But give someone a new job then three months later tell them it wasn’t working out and they could still boot you onto the street.
Yip, three months was all she reckoned she had left. Then what? She still had a crippling mortgage, car and all the other bills to pay. She needed that salary, especially since there was only one income now after her third marriage collapsed during one almighty row last Christmas. April felt depressed. She was in desperate need of some comfort food and asked the waitress to add a bacon roll to her bill as well.
Half an hour late April tottered in her high heels towards the office. New day, new desk, new colleague, new career. ‘Who am I kidding?’ thought April. ‘More like the end of an old one.’
A wave of dread swept over April as she thought, ‘There’s no place for an old hack like me any more.’ She stared at the ground and noticed something wasn’t quite right. ‘Oh, great, odd shoes.’ Sure enough, her footwear was identical in style, but very different shades. April waddled slowly to the entrance of her work full of misery. What a state she was in.
And she had a point, what with her peroxide blonde hair blowing in the wind, an ample behind swinging from side to side and her bust straining at her blouse. But it was her shoes that would have caught the attention of a more observant passer-by. In the daylight one was black, the other clearly blue.