4
All Shook Up
The Daily Herald was situated on Albion Street at the north end of Glasgow city centre. At one time there had been four newspapers in the vicinity. Warehouses and factories had made way for tapas bars and fine dining restaurants, making the once thriving journalists’ haunt, the Press Bar, look distinctly tawdry.
April felt a bit like the pub – she was the product of a bygone era. Now she’d learned she was to be teamed up with some young buck from the news desk. She had seen him around, but they’d never really spoken. She’d never wanted to. He was so sure of himself, strutting about like he owned the place. Strange, him being dumped with her. She’d thought he was one of the paper’s high-fliers. A favoured one. Maybe he was being sent over to spy on her, to confirm what her bosses already believed, that she was past it. Great, another snake in the grass. She just knew they wouldn’t get on.
The ‘snake in the grass’ had been christened Connor Presley but would spend his life being called Elvis. It had followed him all the way from school through the doors of his local newspaper where he’d started as a teenage apprentice. Even his own mother called him Elvis. His attempts to label himself with a cooler variation – The King – had been in vain. However, one advantage of being nicknamed after the king of rock’n’roll was the kudos it gave Connor within Scotland’s substantial crime community – an invaluable commodity as chief crime reporter on Scotland’s largest newspaper. Anyone who’s anyone in the crime world has a cool nickname. Adam ‘The Axeman’ Alexander. ‘Two Shooters’ Sheridan. Or one of his personal favourites, Barry ‘The Butcher’ Butcher, given to him without the slightest hint of irony by Glasgow’s Godfather, who out of a mixture of fear, loathing and respect was simply called Mr Ferguson.
The other advantage of being called Elvis was that all of the underworld were as passionate about the King as they were about making money. The American Mafia could keep their Sinatra, as far as Scottish criminals were concerned. In fact, it was rumoured people had been killed in Glasgow just for trying to compare the two.
In Barry ‘The Butcher’ Butcher’s council house, pride of place over his mantelpiece, was a bronze portrait of the King from his chubby Las Vegas era. After suffering decades of accumulated nicotine layers left by Barry’s chain-smoking ninety-year-old mum Jessie, you could just about make out the words ‘Gone – but not forgotten’ inscribed below the King’s bloated neck. With Barry’s infamous temper, visitors were well advised to enthusiastically appraise his favourite piece of Elvis ‘art’ – preserved for eternity by the tar from a million of Jessie’s Benson & Hedges. Connor always made sure to remark, ‘That picture’s fucking magic, Barry,’ each and every time he visited.
This was Connor’s calling in life. Sure, he had to deal with scumbags, but it was a fact of life that their stories sold newspapers. Connor called it ‘West of Scotland showbiz’ for a country that lacked truly big showbiz stars – Sean Connery, Ewan McGregor, James McAvoy and Billy Connolly the exceptions to the rule. But it was more than made up for with a thriving underworld scene. Ironically, it had been covering this sparse showbiz scene where Connor had first made his name. He was not afraid of ruffling feathers and he had trampled over the cosy relationships the country’s actors and TV personalities had enjoyed with his predecessors.
As a kid he’d voraciously read as many papers as he could get his hands on and had come to understand the different tales favoured by certain newspapers and their political leanings. He’d had no time for school. He couldn’t be bothered learning the periodic table when he was more interested in what was making the headlines that morning. Although bright, his grades suffered as a result.
Fortunately, he wanted to be part of an industry where lack of qualifications was never an inhibitor. His first editor Danny Brown had once laughed, ‘Qualifications? Kelvin MacKenzie was the most famous Fleet Street editor of modern times and he only had one O-level. I’ve seen young, so-called journalists qualify from universities top of their class who wouldn’t know a good story if it came up and bit them on the arse. Reporting isn’t something you can be taught. It’s an instinct – and you’ve got it.’
After four years pricking giant-sized egos on the showbiz scene Connor was called in to his editor’s office and told he would be replacing Badger on the news desk. Russell ‘Badger’ Blackwood, the country’s longest-serving and most legendary crime reporter, was about to take an unwanted early retirement.
‘But Russell covers crime,’ Connor protested.
‘I know that,’ barked the editor, ‘but I need someone to replace him before he drinks himself to death or strokes out on me. The change will do you good. Add some strings to your bow.’
So, Connor was placed under the supervision of Badger, who had spent his entire career crafting exclusives and his most distinguished feature, a large, veiny, purple whisky-drinker’s nose. He had greeted Connor on his first day with, ‘So, you’re the cunt after my job,’ but from then on the pair miraculously hit it off. Badger’s job was to take Connor round all his police and crime contacts to show him the ropes.
Basically, it was one big booze-up that lasted for about three months. Badger would arrange to meet Connor in pubs down Glasgow’s old Fruitmarket, sometimes at seven in the morning, where they’d enjoy a ‘breakfast pint’ with market workers and postmen at the end of their shifts, all on the pretence of meeting some valuable underworld contact. When the mysterious contact failed to show – presumably because they were still in bed – they would try to source him out, which meant drifting in and out of pubs in Glasgow’s East End for the rest of the day.
Occasionally, when they did actually bump into some of the crime world’s hierarchy it seemed to come as much as a shock to Badger as it did to Connor. These occasions meant even more drink and late nights, with Badger telling whoever would listen, ‘You can trust Elvis as if he was my own fucking son,’ followed by Badger demanding a version of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’.
But at the end of the initial binging, amazingly, Connor had actually made some huge strides in his new field and managed to file some pretty impressive page leads about ‘hits’ which had been ordered between rival gangs, drug shipments which had been lost by the cops, and even his first exclusive crime splash – front page – on an underworld boss who was getting married to one of his fiercest rivals’ daughters. That had crime reporters in other papers desperately scrambling around the day after for follow-ups, leaving Connor with a smug, satisfied feeling inside.
But he knew his old mentor Badger was a dinosaur who was about to become extinct. In Connor’s short career he could see how reporting had changed out of all recognition in the last decade. The unions had long been crushed and left toothless, and with them old-school reporters like Badger, who would merrily drink their way through morning, noon and night shifts, at the same time hoovering up all the best scoops. He was making way for a new breed of clean-living, ultra-professional ‘millennium reporters’, as Badger once called them, adding, ‘Boring bastards, too, each and every one of them.’
These new reporters certainly couldn’t match Badger for stories – personally or professionally. He told of a sports reporter who turned up a week late for work, the worse for drink, with a shotgun. Surprisingly, this hadn’t sent his colleagues cowering in terror. Instead, the sports editor shouted across the office, ‘Is that thing loaded?’ ‘I don’t know,’ replied the sozzled reporter, swaying gently from side to side. ‘Well, find out,’ replied his boss, which he promptly did – by blasting the door to the editor-in-chief’s office clean off its hinges. This had happened many years before Connor’s arrival, but Badger swore the editor-in-chief emerged from his gunsmoke-filled room and calmly asked, ‘Who’s there?’
The reporter’s nicknames were fantastic, too. Besides Badger, who earned his moniker because he would badger someone relentlessly until they told him the story, there was the Bucket, thus named because of the heroic quantities of drink he could sink – in an in
dustry drowning in alcohol quite a claim, although it never affected his ability to work, or drive home for that matter.
Connor’s personal favourite was the Brick, named not because he was a particularly big, hard chap, but because he kept a solid brick in the top drawer of his desk. This was only discovered when he removed it and threatened to brain a little fusspot from payroll who had innocently forgotten his wages one Friday afternoon – in the days when journalists received weekly pay packets.
Connor had enjoyed a stint as a showbiz reporter working for Piers Morgan on the Sun’s Bizarre column in London in the 1990s. He’d loved Piers’s cheeky style of writing; how he could gently take the Mickey out of subjects he liked and absolutely slaughter those he didn’t. It was something Connor took with him when he moved into crime reporting, and it hadn’t taken Connor long to spot the similarities between celebrities and organised criminals.
First, just about all of them do drugs – great, huge snortfuls of the stuff. Second, they’re both relatively young and rich, with fortunes no decent working person would ever come close to. And, finally, they all love being in the newspapers. While most celebrities claimed this wasn’t the case, and he’d often read of some starlet bleating on about ‘press intrusion’, Connor knew that take away the intrusion and they’d be complaining that no one was interested in them any more. Quite simply, they wanted stories written about their latest squeeze or movie role – anything that added to their image and kept them in the spotlight.
But the most striking similarity between the showbiz and criminal worlds, Connor knew, was that for the most part they both had extremely short careers, the major difference being that while the stars drifted out of favour, the criminals were likely to come a cropper thanks to a lengthy prison sentence – or dying a very violent death.
But in the last week, Connor’s life had been turned on its head.
Without warning, his editor Danny Brown had taken early retirement – or was ‘kicked out on his arse’, as he candidly told his staff – to make way for Nigel Bent, an Englishman who clearly didn’t see the editorship of the Daily Herald as the pinnacle of his career, merely a stepping-stone to greater things. Of course, the problem with using a job as a stepping-stone is that you tend to step on a lot of people, too.
Badger had been the first casualty, dismissed with a pay cheque before the new editor had even taken the chair. Human Resources had obviously had their eyes on Badger for a long time, but Danny Brown had protected him. Without that shield, they thanked him for forty years of service, misspelled his surname as ‘Blackdood’ on his farewell letter, and told him to clear his desk immediately.
Connor was next to be swept aside after the new broom Bent announced during conference one morning that his ‘pet hate’ was gangster stories. Once an editor made a public declaration like that, there was no going back. So, gangsters, thugs and criminals would be sidelined, along with Connor whose job it was to report them. He was summarily dispatched to a new special investigations unit with April Lavender, a batty old bird whom he’d heard had a drink problem.