1989, p.11
1989, page 11
She tried to hide her surprise. ‘If you’re that convinced I’m good, if you’re that determined to keep me, why didn’t you just kick it back to me and demand a rewrite?’
‘Because you’d have done it. And then next week it would have been the same old song. I gave it to Prosser because I knew that would fill you up with rage. I knew you’d be storming the barricades this morning.’
It was moments like this that helped Allie understand how Richardson had climbed the ladder. ‘You’re telling me this for my own good, are you?’ She couldn’t keep the sarcasm from her voice.
‘Don’t be so bloody stupid. I’m telling you this for my own good. I nailed my colours to the mast to give you the northern news editor slot. I’m the one who’ll look like a twat if Lockhart makes you walk the fucking plank. Now settle the fuck down, get yourself a desk and give me five lines for conference.’ He flapped his fingers at her, indicating the door. Then spoke again. ‘No, wait. I only need four from you. Here’s number one. Little Weed’s wife bolts with champion jockey.’ He gave a triumphant wink. ‘Owen Prosser’s payment for coming back into the fold.’
‘Are you serious?’ Little Weed, giant hero of the wrestling ring, his fight name a ridiculous nod to the character from Watch With Mother. It certainly wasn’t a suggestion that he liked a joint. There was nothing chilled about his style in the ring. He made his opponents cry, ‘Wee-eed’ when he forced them into submission. All Allie knew about him was that he frequented Manchester casinos with his rabbity wife, and didn’t like to lose.
‘So the story goes. She’s fucked off with that little Irish squirt, P.J. Flynn. I tell you, he must have balls of steel. Little Weed could eat him for breakfast and not even notice.’ He rummaged through a short stack of papers in front of him and fished out a pale blue square sheet. ‘There’s the memo. I don’t want you to front him up till Friday, though. They’ve buggered off to Ireland, to some stud farm in the middle of County Bogtrotter. I’ve got that Irish lass from Belfast tracking them down. I want her to get the wife onside.’ He dropped his voice. ‘“My life of hell with the monster of the ring.” Then you can go and see the Weed, don’t let on we’ve got her, and offer him the sob story. Then when you’ve stitched him up, hit him with whatever she’s given us.’
‘I do know how to do a showdown, Gerry.’ Allie’s mind was already racing through the game plan. That didn’t mean she was any happier about what he’d done to her copy. But this wasn’t the hill she wanted to die on. ‘By the way, I want to take a few days off. Probably the week after next. I need a wee break.’
‘Off to the sun with the lovely Rona?’ He leered. ‘Bikinis and suntan lotion?’
‘You’re a sick fuck, you know that?’ Allie grabbed her coat and tried to slam the door behind her, remembering too late that he’d had it fitted with a hydraulic closer to prevent that very thing. She truly loathed her boss. But she still couldn’t deny a lurking sliver of respect for the way he ran his operation. You needed nimble feet to dance with a devil like Wallace Lockhart.
18
Doing what she was told didn’t come naturally to Genevieve Lockhart. Though he always made it clear what he expected of her, even her father dialled back his notorious level of bullying when it came to setting her agenda. So she was already chafing against the Lithuanian dissenters before she even met them. It had taken Tavas Nagaitis twenty-four hours longer than she’d demanded to set up a meeting. He had sidled up to her late on Monday afternoon in the Pythagoras Press offices and instructed her to be at the rear of the cathedral the following day at precisely 6 p.m. ‘You must go alone and you must not be late,’ he said, clearly terrified at having to issue such precise instructions.
‘And where will you be?’ she demanded.
‘I . . . I . . . I will . . .’
‘All this time, and you’ve set it up to be somewhere completely useless,’ she snapped. ‘You’re letting me walk into the lions’ den with no cover, no protection.’ She could see the sweat on his upper lip and that gave her some satisfaction.
‘They’re not lions,’ he stammered. ‘They’re harmless.’
‘They’re plotting against the state. And we both know that’s not trivial. How do you know you can trust them not to hold me hostage?’
Nagaitis appeared on the verge of tears. ‘No, you’re wrong. It’s not like that here. The state doesn’t have the nerve to arrest them. Truly, they’re not a threat to you. They know you can be part of their future. I explained you want to build bridges, to build relationships. To embrace an alternative. They want to be your friend, not threaten you.’
Genevieve faked a smile. ‘Just testing, Tavas. If you say they’re to be trusted, I’ll take your word for it.’
But as she slipped out of the hotel in a belted mac and headscarf, trying to look as downtrodden as possible, she couldn’t hide the truth from herself. She was heading for a place where her father’s influence couldn’t protect her. Never mind the secret police, if the dissidents took against her, she had no back-up. To them, the capitalist company that had produced a hagiography of their Soviet-backed leader would likely count as an enemy. She’d have one shot at convincing them she was a good bet.
The streets were quiet now. She walked briskly down the pavement and turned into a narrow alley. If anyone was following her, they’d have to show themselves. She reached the end then doubled back. Confident that she was clear, Genevieve took a circuitous route to the white bulk of the cathedral. She checked her watch and saw she had six minutes to kill. The wide plaza wasn’t a place to hang around unobserved, so she set off for the rendezvous.
She found herself walking round what she took to be a cloister. She kept on going, following the path. As she emerged from the lee of the cathedral into a snow-covered area criss-crossed with dark trodden paths, she was suddenly flanked by two men. She slowed and looked over her shoulder. A few feet behind her was a third man. They were all unidentifiable, muffled in hats and scarves over inadequate-looking coats. ‘Normalno,’ one said, his voice anxious. ‘Nu davay zhe.’
Trying to calm her, she thought. Telling her it’s OK, that she should come with them. Genevieve found them about as threatening as a kindle of kittens. She nodded and let them lead her towards the road, where a battered-looking Lada sat with the engine running. They insisted she sit squashed in the middle of the back seat. It felt like their bulk came from layers of clothes, not muscle. She relaxed a fraction, then they shot off into the sparse traffic. They drove in silence for about fifteen minutes. She could see very little, surrounded by four large men in a small car. She thought they were going round in circles; all she could say for certain was that they crossed the river three times.
At last they pulled up outside a pair of tall doors. The front-seat passenger jumped out, hauled them open and they drove into a courtyard, the snow churned up by tyres. ‘Welcome,’ the apparent spokesman said. ‘We hear you are comfortable speaking Russian?’
‘More comfortable than you are with English.’ Genevieve reverted to Russian as she got out of the car. ‘Thank you for agreeing to meet me.’
They formed a phalanx round her and escorted her to the nearest stairwell. They climbed the dimly lit chipped concrete steps to the second floor and walked into an apartment without knocking. It smelled of cooking and coarse tobacco. In February, she realised, the windows would not have been opened for months. They ended up in a living room furnished with a battered sofa, a pair of unmatching armchairs and a dining table covered in books and papers. Two walls were lined with crammed bookshelves, and stacks of books served as occasional tables for ashtrays. A map of Lithuania was pinned to the wall above a pot-bellied stove that threw out a shimmering circle of visible heat. ‘Please, sit down,’ the man doing the talking said.
Genevieve remained standing. ‘You are clear about who I am?’
Nods all round. ‘You are the daughter of the man who owns Pythagoras Press. They publish many lies about our country and its so-called leadership.’ The speaker was a middle-aged man with wire-framed glasses, his hair awry now he’d removed his hat. He didn’t look like much of a revolutionary. He certainly didn’t inspire fear.
She shook her head, impatiently. Time to talk turkey. ‘I am the person who runs Pythagoras Press now. And I’m here to make sure we end up on the right side after you have liberated your country.’
Later that evening, back in her hotel room, Genevieve typed a report for her father, beginning with the names and the contact addresses of the four men she had spoken to.
Tavas assures me they are the key players among the Vilnius dissidents. They’re serious men – one of them is a professor at the university, and they are all passionate about their politics. Their organisation, Sąju¯dis, was set up last summer and it has connections with similar organisations in Estonia and Latvia. They’ve been organising mass demonstrations and they’re working towards a declaration that the Soviet annexation of their country is illegal. They’ve won seats in the assembly and the apparently impotent communist government hasn’t followed through with its threats to suppress Sąju¯dis.
The three Baltic states are planning a mass movement demonstration in August – a 600-kilometre human chain two million people strong from Vilnius to Tallinn. If we can play a key role in enabling this, we will be in pole position to benefit from the three independent states that will probably result. Nobody believes that Gorbachev will send in troops to quell these rebellions. I’m not so sure, but I suspect you will have a clearer idea than I have of what he is prepared to risk.
The main problem is that these movements are scattered and fragmented, particularly in their communications. There are somewhere around a hundred and fifty different newspapers and leaflets, all with subtly different agendas – you know how it is with the Soviet left. They make the Labour Party seem cohesive! I explained our proposals to them in some detail – that we will support them with practical help in amalgamating these publications. We’ll help put together and distribute news-sheets, flyers and leaflets, and possibly even supply an old printing press (which obviously will not be traceable back to PP). Tavas is confident that we can do this without being discovered or betrayed to the Soviet authorities. He is sure of the discretion of two of his printers who are also active in the dissident movement. And he thinks the authorities don’t have the nerve or the resources to attempt to shut the movement down. As we agreed, I handed over $500 as a token of our good faith.
In return, our mutually beneficial relationship in scientific publications will continue on the same terms. And we will also assist in the preparation and publication of the official history of the uprising and whatever biographies of leading figures are required.
On a separate sheet, Genevieve added a handwritten note:
Ace: I’m so impressed that you chose precisely the right moment to strike. They’re strong but they still need our support and because we’re first to the table, we’ll get the richest pickings. Thanks for entrusting this to me. I’m absolutely convinced you won’t regret it.
With love,
your Genevieve
She could have waited till she’d returned home to write her report, but she knew from long experience of her father that he would want every detail, and relying on her memory alone was a recipe for harsh questioning. Besides, she wouldn’t be able to tell him face to face; by the time she arrived back in the UK, Ace would be cloistered on Ranaig, the tiny Scottish island he’d bought for a song in the 1960s, when nobody wanted remote islands with no modern conveniences.
In the intervening years, he’d installed a turbine in the Atlantic-facing bay that now supplied electricity for heat, light and cooking. A journalist once asked what he did there and he said, ‘I dream big.’ But she knew the attraction right now wasn’t dreaming – it was the installation of one of the new satellite dishes that would, in theory, beam Sky TV into his cottage. He hated that Rupert Murdoch had stolen a march on him with the inaugural UK satellite channels, but Lockhart couldn’t stay away from it. Like a child picking a scab, he needed to see what it was doing, if only to mock. He’d gone to Ranaig to immerse himself in its offering and to plan his return of serve in the tennis match that his relationship with the Murdoch empire had become.
Genevieve would have her report sent up to Ranaig by helicopter, Atlantic gales permitting, and say a little prayer that it would be pleasing enough to push him out of the mood Sky TV would certainly have put him in.
19
Looking at the home of Frannie Sidebottom, aka Little Weed, Allie couldn’t help wondering where all the money had gone. He’d been at the top of the wrestling game for years, a regular on Saturday afternoon’s World of Sport. He was one of a handful of big names who packed out town halls up and down the country, a darling of the old dears who haunted those melodramatic performances. He must have made a fortune. You’d never have known it from his house, Allie thought.
She’d expected one of those Victorian mill owner’s bloated mansions that dotted the landscape of West Yorkshire. Either that or their late-twentieth-century equivalent, the sprawling ranch-style bungalow that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Dallas. She stood at the top of a short flight of stone steps worn uneven by generations of feet and looked down at a meagre cottage and a pocket-handkerchief yard. ‘Are you sure you’ve got the right address?’ her photographer asked. Alan Blyth actually lived less than a mile away, on the other side of the steep valley, separated from Sidebottom’s village by the railway line and the Leeds–Liverpool canal. Blyth’s side was south-facing and prosperous, with a fair few of those mansions. Sidebottom’s side was the opposite in every way, blackened terraces huddled round a former mill that now housed a discount furniture warehouse.
‘I had no idea he lived round here,’ Blyth continued. ‘Mind, I’ve no call to be over this side of the valley. You’d have to be desperate to do your drinking in the Scutcher’s Arms.’
‘I know he likes a night out at the Manchester casinos, but to get through the money he’ll have made, it’s got to be a major addiction.’ Allie squared her shoulders. ‘Now he’s lost his missus as well. Maybe that’s why she walked? Whatever the reason, I don’t think he’s going to be in the best of moods.’
Allie picked her way down steps made slippery by the thin drizzle coming off the hill in wavering drifts. She didn’t check that Blyth was behind her; why would he not be on her heels? She crossed the yard in half a dozen steps. There was no doorbell, just a heavy brass knocker in the shape of a clenched fist. The sound was ridiculously loud for such a small house. There was a long silence and Allie was about to deliver another hammer blow when the door was yanked open. All twenty-two stone and five feet eleven inches of Little Weed stood glowering at her, resplendent in shapeless trackie bottoms and a grubby singlet, a pair of gold-rimmed glasses perched incongruously on the button of fat at the end of his stubby nose.
She got as far as, ‘I’m Alison Burns from the Sunday—’ when he let out a deep growl.
‘And you can get the fuck off my property.’ His hands clenched into meaty fists and he beat his thighs in a rhythm only he could hear.
‘I wanted to ask about your wife. Your side of the sto—’
No words this time. He took a step towards her and shook his head.
‘Your fans, they care about you.’
‘Fucking vultures,’ he roared and covered the remaining feet between them in a split second, fists jabbing at her stomach.
Instinctively, Allie shielded her midriff with her arms and backed away. ‘There’s no need for this,’ she yelped, turning and making for the stairs. She expected Blyth to be at her shoulder but he was already at the top of the steps, heading back out into the street.
Little Weed was at her back, his bulk no impediment to his speed. As she ran, he pummelled her back and sides, every jab a stab of acute pain. Her foot slipped on a step and she fell forward, banging her elbow with a jolt of agony. She scrambled upwards, screaming for help, terrified he was going to throw himself on her as he’d done so often to his opponents in the ring. But he kept enough distance to continue the pounding.
Allie made it to the top of the steps, staggering and swaying into the street. She was aware of Sidebottom retreating as Blyth pulled up next to her, leaning across to open the passenger door. She half fell into the car, shouting out at the pain.
‘Jesus, are you all right?’ Blyth said, driving away with a screech of tyres.
‘Do I sound all right? Do I look all right?’ Allie drew in a sharp breath, instantly regretting it. ‘Where the fuck were you?’
‘When he went for you, I thought I’d better get the car. For a quick getaway.’
‘Bollocks you did. You were scared shitless he was going to turn on you, you gutless bastard.’ She winced at the effort of shouting at him. ‘Did you at least get some pix?’
‘I thought it would wind him up even more. I didn’t want to make him angrier,’ he mumbled.
‘You useless shitepoke,’ she said, reverting in the moment to Rona’s mother’s worst insult. Gingerly she reached into her bag for her mobile. As she pressed the power button, she noticed her fingers were trembling. She stared at the phone, willing herself not to give way, not in front of Blyth. He’d have no hesitation in turning her into a figure of ridicule in the pub. ‘No signal,’ she groaned.
‘I could have told you that,’ Blyth said.
‘God forbid you’d do anything helpful. Find me a phone box that works.’
