The Rise, page 9
‘I’m on top of it, Wes. Don’t worry.’ Zander wasn’t sure who he was trying to convince.
‘You have to be. Because we can’t afford a fuck-up, Zander. There’s too much riding on this.’
Wes’s words lingered longer than the taste of the bourbon he’d downed in the washroom.
Driving home, Hollie realized after five minutes that Zander wasn’t in the mood for conversation, so she’d settled for comfortable silence. The smell of the ocean flooded the car as they pulled up next to his block.
‘Want to come in and order up some food?’ he asked her. There were two motives for this. He felt like company that wouldn’t get him robbed or arrested. And Wes’s words had struck home. He had to pull himself out of this for all their sakes. It was time to sort himself out and get straight.
Hollie leaned over and kissed his cheek. ‘Thanks for the offer, but unlike you, I have a life. And a date.’ She caught his expression and hesitated, realization dawning. ‘Look, I can change my plans – it’s not a problem. Tell me you’re not going to go in there and order two strippers and a Robert Downey Junior-sized speedball.’
He was already out of the car.
‘Don’t be crazy – it’s fine. Think I’ll go catch the last of the waves anyway.’
He was gorgeous Zander Leith again – winning smile, confident, assured and back in charge.
He could do this. He just had to shut down the anxiety.
Remove negativity.
‘Holls, can you call that journo and tell her I’m not available for interview and my family life is private?’ The end. Done.
‘Sure.’ She blew him a kiss. ‘Look, any problems, call me, OK? I’ll have my cell.’
‘Will do.’
Walking to the door, he instinctively scanned for paparazzi. None. They all knew Hollie anyway, knew there was no story there. The two homeless guys perched outside his building’s door raised their liquor bottles to him. He dropped a twenty and tried not to view them as a premonition of his future. ‘G’night, guys.’
Inside, he changed his mind about going for a surf, choosing guaranteed solitude and privacy instead. He pulled off his jacket, turned the water on in the tub and poured in some oils. Jesus, back home in the world he grew up in, this would have made him a prime candidate for merciless slagging. The thought caught him unawares. He’d spent years refusing to let his thoughts cross the Atlantic and now it seemed like he couldn’t get Glasgow out of his mind.
When there was a knock on the door, the diversion was a relief. Typical Hollie. She’d probably got to the end of the road, called her date to cancel and came back for Thai. Or maybe sushi. He didn’t even bother to shove on a robe, just a towel round his waist. There was nothing she hadn’t seen before.
‘Hey, I—’
The door was wide open before his realization caught up.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I brought a friend.’
She held up a bottle of Grey Goose, then pushed herself off the door frame and walked past him.
‘And no, before you ask, my mother doesn’t know I’m here.’
As Chloe Gore kicked off her shoes and slumped onto his sofa, he was in no doubt at all that trouble had just wandered right back into his life.
14
‘ALIVE AND KICKING’ – SIMPLE MINDS
GLASGOW, 1985
Simple Minds blared from the tape recorder on the wooden floor. Jim Kerr, the lead singer, was ‘alive and kicking’. Which was more than could be said for the three teenagers who were lying staring at the roof, blowing smoke rings in some kind of synchronized, lung-clogging competition.
Mirren broke her record of five hoops in a row and then extinguished her cigarette in the glass ashtray she’d smuggled from her house. They’d learned that lesson soon after they’d starting hanging out in the hut at the bottom of Davie’s garden. She’d stubbed a cigarette out on the floor and they’d come back an hour later to find a void the size of a manhole, the edges still smouldering.
Davie covered it up with his mum’s Flymo. If she ever decided to cut the grass, he was dead.
‘A football player,’ Davie announced, continuing the discussion they’d been having before their favourite song had come on. Mirren taped the Top Forty every Sunday night and it became their entertainment for the week.
Mirren pushed herself up onto one elbow. ‘You want to be a football player?’
‘Aye.’
‘Well, can I point out the obvious?’
‘What?’
‘You might want to give up the fags.’
‘Aye, stunts your growth,’ Zander added. ‘And at your height you might manage a game for Subbuteo.’
Their laughter could be heard right across all five back gardens in their block. Not that it mattered. Everyone was inside watching that new soap EastEnders or down the pub. Besides, people were used to seeing them hanging around.
Mirren knew that to everyone else it had seemed strange at first. Two boys and one girl, none of them members of any of the groups that hung out at the garages and shops around the scheme. Davie was the hyper, chatty one, always cheeky and looking for a laugh. Zander was quieter, with that laid-back thing that meant you never really knew what he was thinking. He didn’t take any shit, though. Big Jim Anderson from the bottom end of the scheme had jumped Davie one night for his Walkman and Zander had gone straight down there, battered him and got it back. Didn’t say a word. Just did it. No one else had come near them since then.
It was a strange concept for her. Friends. She’d never had them. All through primary school she’d kept to herself, as the other kids had parties and sleepovers and day trips to Calderpark Zoo. She was never invited. Maybe if she’d made the first move, asked someone to come over to her house, they’d have done it back, but her mum wouldn’t allow it. Bad enough that she had one brat, she said.
So, naturally shy, Mirren just kept her head down. Went to the library after school. Filled her head with books. Snuck out some from the adult section when the old librarian wasn’t looking.
Right now, she was reading Jackie Collins. Hollywood Wives. None of the characters in that was covering up a hole caused by a fag burn with a Flymo.
‘What about you, then?’ Davie asked.
‘Dunno.’ Mirren tried to ignore the fact that he was staring at her now.
‘You’re lying. I can just tell. You look guilty.’
‘Aye. All right then, Columbo,’ she teased.
‘Whatever. C’mon. Tell us. What do you want to do? A lollipop wumman so you don’t need to start work till you’re sixty-five?’
Mirren threw an empty can of Irn Bru at his head. It missed.
‘A writer.’
‘A whit?’
‘A writer.’
She should never have said it. They’d only take the piss. It’s not as if she was even a swot at school. She liked English, but that was it. She still passed her exams right enough, even though everything else bored her rigid.
‘What? Like write books?’
‘No, colour them in. Of course I mean write books. Novels.’
With a twinkle in his eye that guaranteed he was about to continue the mutual slagging, Davie opened his mouth, but shut it again when Zander said seriously, ‘You could do that. Be a writer, I mean.’
‘You think?’
He shrugged. ‘Don’t see why not.’
It was about as talkative as Zander ever got and Mirren had learned not to push. When he had something to say, he spoke. That was it. Besides, he couldn’t get a word in for Davie.
‘Right then, come on, big shot. Tell us what you want to do,’ Davie dared him. ‘Only, they’re looking for new priests doon the chapel. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned: I’ve got off with three lassies in the last fortnight.”’
‘Shut it!’ Zander kicked open the hut door with his foot and threw his cigarette butt outside.
Mirren felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. She hated arguments and confrontations. Bloody Davie should have known better than to mention the chapel. It was bad enough that Zander’s mum spent her whole life there without them talking about it here too.
She watched as he shook his head, then gave Davie’s legs a nudge with the toe of his trainer. ‘You don’t half talk shite.’
‘I know,’ Davie replied, grinning. Mirren felt herself relax. Tension over.
‘You didn’t answer the question,’ she said, keen to move back to neutral territory.
Zander thought about it for a moment.
‘Dunno. Rigs, maybe. Army. Anything that would get me the fuck away from here and him.’
There was no need to ask and it was as well they didn’t because Jono Leith’s frame suddenly filled the doorway. He was swaying from side to side, carrying a bag from the Co-op that clinked as he swung it in front of them.
Zander was the first to speak.
‘Thought you were going to be locked up until trial.’
No happy welcome. No shaking of hands or pats on the back.
‘Well, I’m out today, Sandy. Case dropped. I’m an innocent man and halle-fucking-lujah!’ Jono roared. ‘So up, the three of youse. Over to our house. The lads are on their way and there’s gonna be a bit of a party. C’mon, you young ’uns. Switch that pish aff and come and hear some real music.’
With that, he broke into a song Mirren recognized. The Rolling Stones. ‘Satisfaction’.
‘Come on, come on!’ he repeated after the first verse. ‘Move those lazy arses of yours and let’s go.’
Davie was already on his feet, grinning at the prospect of yet another wild party at the Leiths’, when Mirren caught Zander’s eye and they exchanged a silent message of understanding. He didn’t want to go. Neither did she. But that didn’t matter. Because when it came to the real world, they both knew that no one refused Jono Leith.
15
‘LABOUR OF LOVE’ – HUE & CRY
GLASGOW, 2013
‘Yes, I understand that he’s now on a shoot, but I’d only need twenty minutes of his time. I was under the impression that his Scottish fans were important to him.’
Even as she went for the shameless emotional blackmail, Sarah knew it was futile. She was talking to some PA who was just carrying out orders, not in a position to be swayed by argument. The point was borne out by the click at the other end of the line as Zander Leith’s PA shut her down.
‘Buggering bollocks.’
She tossed her phone on the desk and then stretched back in her chair. The offices of the Daily Scot were in darkness, except for a couple of night-shift subs working in cubicles at the furthest corner of the room.
The rest of the staff were at Epicures, in the upmarket Hyndland, a former wine merchant’s that had been transformed into a two-level café and bar for the trendies of the West End. It was a going-away party for a guy on the news desk who’d decided to toss in the dark side and head to Australia to live life on a beach. Sarah could see why that would be an attraction. This wasn’t an easy job, an easy life. But for her, there was something intoxicating about it. She told the news. Exposed the wrongs. Challenged the establishment.
But for now she was happy with challenging Zander Leith’s PR machine, so she’d left her colleagues dreaming of a better life and trudged through the torrential rain all the way back to the office.
The huge clock on the wall in front of her clicked to 9 p.m. Watching that happen had become a regular occurrence in her life since she’d become obsessed with this case. She’d spent endless hours trawling archives and the internet looking for something, anything that would help, and come up blank every time. Not a single interview or feature on the families of Johnston, McLean or Leith existed. Not one. Had anyone else ever noticed that was odd? Irritation was making it difficult to decide whether to head home or stay here and continue searching the web until it was time to pick Simon up at midnight from some black-tie law thing at the Hilton.
‘Would you stop swinging on those chairs? Health and safety will shut us down.’
Sarah instinctively smiled at the sight of her boss. In his early sixties, with a grey complexion that suggested, accurately, that he had lived life under fluorescent lights, Ed McCallum had been the editor at the Daily Scot for twenty years. He was considered old school. Traditional. Still rumoured to have a half-bottle in the filing cabinet. There weren’t many of that ilk left these days. In an industry that had changed beyond recognition, evolving from ink to internet, most of the newspaper heads were dynamic media guys who talked about critical mass and click rates and had strategies for pulling back the readers that had been lost to the twenty-four-hour news channels and the instant gratification of the online update. They also couldn’t smell a great story if it was served up with their morning skinny frappuccino with a vanilla twist.
That wasn’t to say he was fully on board with her latest line of enquiry. Cutbacks from London had left the paper so short of those little wheel cogs called journalists that she was covering it, with his knowledge, in her spare time.
‘So where are you at?’
‘The square root of nothing.’
Her foot absent-mindedly tapped against the edge of her desk and she twirled a corkscrew of her deep auburn, shoulder-length hair round her index finger. Ed had watched her do that in times of stress since she joined the paper as a twenty-one-year-old rookie fresh out of Napier College.
Even then she’d stood out from the rest. The quiet ambition. The dogged determination. And the complete lack of awareness of the impact she had when she crossed a room. If she wasn’t young enough to be his daughter, Ed might be just a little bit in lust with her.
‘The only glimpse of progress was when Davie Johnston’s PA acknowledged my request for an interview, but now she’s not taking my calls. Not surprising given the shit he’s in, right enough. The press conference the other day made my toes curl.’
Ed’s trademark pause of contemplation lasted just a little longer than usual, before he – as always – cut right to the issue.
‘Have you gone back to the start?’
Sarah nodded. ‘They all grew up in the same street, all only children. Strange, huh?’
‘Did you go knock on doors there?’
‘Ed, it was twenty years ago and their kids are multi-millionaires. There’s no way their parents are still going to be living in Crofthill council houses.’
One of his excessive eyebrows raised just a fraction. Sarah caught on quick.
‘You have got to be kidding me? You think they could still be there?’
Ed shrugged, knowing the effect it would have. With an irritated growl she was out of her seat and heading to the door before he could say another word.
Traffic was quiet, so it took her twenty minutes to get from the office on the Broomielaw to Crofthill, an area that commentators and council officials labelled ‘urban deprived’. It took another two to locate the block that Hollywood’s dream team had grown up in. It was difficult to say what it looked like back then, but now the buildings had been recently painted, the communal garden was tidy, and the only blot on the landscape was the squad of hoodies sitting on a wall next to a row of garages, sharing four bottles of Buckfast between eight.
With the synchronized movements of a tennis audience, they stared at her, looked at her Audi A3 and then back at her. Sarah pulled a wallet out of her pocket, opened it, flashed it in their direction and then closed it again. ‘Police. If there’s so much as a scratch on that when I come back, I’ll hunt you down.’
She congratulated herself on the grit she’d managed to inject into her voice, while praying that at that distance they couldn’t make out that they’d just been served with a membership card for her local health club.
Number 11 was at the nearest end of the block, and she knocked loudly at the door and then stood back, suddenly realizing that making unannounced visits at this time of night hadn’t been a particularly well-thought-out plan.
Right on cue there was a scurry of activity inside, the sound of a door bang, and then a half-dozen teenage boys in tracksuits jumped over the side fence and ran off into the night. Safe to say that unless Zander Leith’s sixty-year-old mother was harbouring a street crew of teenagers, then the house had been taken over by new owners.
There was no point even trying Mirren McLean’s old house. Now that she was closer, she could see that the windows were boarded up, and each one had the telltale signs of smoke damage round the perimeter.
As she banged on the door of number 15, Davie Johnston’s old house, she cursed herself for wasting time. She’d been right all along. Why would the mother of one of the biggest stars in Hollywood live in a scheme that had more burnt-out cars than employed adults?
‘She’s no’ in.’ One of the Buckfast Eight auditioned for the role of Neighbourhood Watch officer. ‘Works on the soup bus some nights.’
An even unlikelier scenario.
‘Who are you talking about?’ Sarah asked.
The helpful pillar of the community spat on the pavement before he answered. ‘You should know – yer banging oan her door.’
His mates laughed, enjoying the show, but Sarah ignored the cheek. ‘I’m looking for Mrs Johnston.’
‘Aye. And she’s no’ in.’ A half-pissed delinquent was talking to her like she was the one with coherence issues. ‘She’s probably on the soup bus,’ he repeated.
‘In town?’
‘Aye. Nae wonder yer a detective,’ the hoodie replied, to more hilarity from his gang.
Despite the piss-take, Sarah tossed them a tenner for the alcohol fund as she passed them, eliciting cheers of thanks. Subsidizing the destruction of a youth’s liver wasn’t normally on her charitable acts list, but this was the closest she’d come to a break since she’d begun looking.
Five minutes were shaved off her previous time as she raced back into Glasgow City Centre, careful to slow down at every one of the hated, cash-generating speed cameras.
