Kinloch — Present Day. A Tuesday morning in late November

Kinloch — Present Day. A Tuesday morning in late November.

Callum Spencer was rereading his own byline for the fourth time that morning — not out of vanity, though he supposed a stranger watching him do it might have concluded that, but because two weeks after publication he still could not quite believe the story had run exactly as he’d written it, with no lawyer’s softening and no editor’s late cut.

The newsroom at that hour had the particular hush of a Tuesday morning in a paper that no longer had the staff to fill a Tuesday morning properly. Four desks, a partition that did more to suggest privacy than provide it, and Grant Fenwick’s glass-walled office at the far end, currently occupied by Grant Fenwick himself, coffee going cold at his elbow, reading something on his monitor with the studied concentration of a man who wanted it understood that he was working and not, in fact, watching the room. He was watching the room. He was always watching the room, in the particular unbothered way of an editor who had learned, over three decades in provincial journalism, that watching cost nothing and occasionally paid dividends.

‘You still getting them?’ Grant asked, not looking up, in the tone of a man continuing a conversation that had been going on, in one form or another, for a fortnight and would probably go on for several more.

‘Getting what.’

‘You know what.’ Grant did look up then, over the top of the reading glasses he wore only when he wanted to appear to be studying something more carefully than he actually was. ‘The calls. The letters. Whatever Graham Tate’s solicitor’s client list is sending you this week to remind you that eleven million pounds buys a great deal of unpleasant persistence.’

‘One yesterday.’ Callum said it the way he’d said it every time Grant asked, which was flatly, and with the specific carelessness of a man who had decided, three years into a story that had nearly ended his career twice, that the only way to survive the aftermath of a thing like the Tate piece was to treat its consequences as weather. ‘Withheld number. Didn’t say much. Breathed for eleven seconds and hung up.’

‘That’s not nothing.’

‘It’s also not something I can take to the police, Grant. A man breathing down a phone line for eleven seconds isn’t a crime, it’s a Tuesday.’ He said it lightly, but he was aware, saying it, of the small cold weight that had settled somewhere under his ribs two weeks ago and had not, in any of the days since, entirely lifted — the particular knowledge that KINLOCH FOUR NAMED AT LAST had not ended anything so much as opened a door onto a room full of people who had, until a fortnight ago, been trusting the darkness to keep certain names out of print forever, and were not, none of them, taking kindly to the correction.

Priya Chandra, two desks over, was on the phone to someone about a planning dispute out at the Marina, her voice carrying the specific patient weariness of a reporter working her third story on the same rezoning application in as many months. She finished the call, set the receiver down harder than it strictly needed to be set down, and swivelled her chair a quarter-turn toward Callum’s desk with the unhurried proprietary air of a colleague who had earned, over four years of sitting eight feet away from him, the right to say things Grant tended only to imply.

‘You haven’t been back to the Old Quarter since the story ran,’ she said. Not a question.

‘I’ve been busy.’

‘You’ve been avoiding your dad’s end of town for a fortnight, is what you’ve been. I drove past the chandlery Sunday and thought of you specifically, which tells you something about how much space this is taking up in my head that it shouldn’t be taking up any space in at all.’ Priya had covered the trial fallout in the weeks after publication — the Vance family’s lawyers, the parish council’s unhappy statement, the small ugly flurry of comment-section vitriol that had followed a story naming, at last and in full, five children whose disappearance had organised Kinloch’s understanding of itself for thirty-seven years — and she had a reporter’s flat, unsentimental read on what all of it had cost him, delivered without much softening because softening, in her experience, rarely helped anyone finish a hard week faster. ‘You wrote eleven thousand words about a town’s worst day, Callum, and you did it a nine-minute drive from where you grew up, and you haven’t set foot there since it went to print. That’s not nothing either, whatever you tell Grant about the phone calls.’

‘I didn’t realise you two compared notes.’

‘We work in an open-plan office the size of a large kitchen,’ Grant said, without looking up again. ‘Compare notes is a generous description of what happens here. Osmosis is closer to it.’

The fourth desk, Douglas Farr’s, sat empty — Douglas covered sport and had not, so far as Callum understood the man’s habits, ever arrived at the office before eleven on a Tuesday in his professional life, on the reasonable grounds that nothing worth reporting on happened to Kinloch’s junior football league before then, a theory Douglas had defended, more than once, with the kind of unbothered certainty Callum privately envied in a man whose worst professional risk was an irate five-a-side coach.

Priya’s remark had not, in fact, finished with him the way her tone suggested she’d allowed it to. He was aware, going back to his own screen, of the particular shape the Old Quarter still occupied at the edge of his attention — not guilt exactly, or not only guilt, but something closer to the specific discomfort of a man who had spent three years constructing a life that ran, deliberately, along a route that avoided a nine-minute drive, and had then spent three weeks writing eleven thousand words that made that avoidance considerably harder to justify to anyone who asked, himself included. He had told his father, at his mother’s sixtieth, in front of a room of people who had all pretended very hard not to be listening, that he was done. He had meant it. He had gone on meaning it, in the abstract, undisturbed way a person can go on meaning something they are never actually required to act on again, for three years — right up until two weeks ago, when a story about five missing boys had put his father’s name, however peripherally, back into a conversation Callum had spent a decade trying to have without him.

Callum had the front page of the paper’s own archive open on his second monitor, the KINLOCH FOUR NAMED AT LAST edition, two weeks old now and still, if he was honest with himself, the thing he found his cursor drifting back to at odd moments during the working day, the way you’d touch a healing wound to check it was still there. Eleven thousand words, the biggest single story the Herald had run in Callum’s four years on staff, and every fact in it stood exactly where he’d placed it, unretracted, uncorrected, unchallenged by a single legal letter in fourteen days, which was, in provincial journalism, as close to vindication as a story of that size ever got to feel.

‘I’ll go and see him,’ Callum said, to Priya, though it came out sounding less like a plan than a debt he was acknowledging owing. ‘Eventually.’

‘Eventually’s doing a lot of work in that sentence.’

‘It usually does.’

Grant made a small noise that might have been agreement or might simply have been the sound of a man deciding not to spend any more of the morning on a subject that clearly wasn’t finished with Callum yet, whatever Callum told himself about it, and went back to his screen. Priya held Callum’s eye a moment longer, the particular look of someone filing something away for a later conversation, then turned back to her own desk and the planning dispute waiting on it.

‘One more thing,’ Grant said, not looking up, in the tone he used when a thing had been sitting on his chest long enough that he’d rather say it to his monitor than to Callum’s face. ‘The proprietor rang me again yesterday. Second time this fortnight. He wanted to know whether our lead reporter breaking the biggest story in this paper’s history was going to turn into an ongoing security consideration for the building, and I told him no, and he told me he hoped I was right, in the specific tone of a man who has already decided he isn’t sure I am.’

‘Is that a warning.’

‘It’s a Tuesday,’ Grant said, handing him back his own phrase with the flat satisfaction of a man who’d been waiting an hour to do it. ‘Do your job. Answer your phone. Try not to make me lie to the man who signs my invoices any more than I already have to.’

Callum let that sit a moment, then turned back to his own screen, where the KINLOCH FOUR NAMED AT LAST masthead still glowed on the second monitor exactly as it had glowed for the better part of two weeks — a fixture now, the way a scar becomes a fixture, something you stopped noticing was there until someone else’s eye caught on it and reminded you. He had written the story alone, in the strict sense that his was the only byline on it, but he understood, sitting in the newsroom on a Tuesday morning fourteen days after publication, that he had not actually been carrying it alone at all. Grant had buried it under three pages of legal caution before he’d let it run. Priya had fielded half the angry phone calls that hadn’t found their way to Callum’s own desk. The story belonged to the paper now in a way it had stopped belonging solely to him somewhere around the second day of publication, when the wire services had picked it up and the name Tate had started appearing in headlines two hundred miles from Kinloch, attached to photographs of a dead man’s house and a live man’s outrage, and Callum had understood, watching it happen from his own small desk, that a story of that size stopped being yours the moment it became everyone’s.

He was reading the third paragraph of his own story again — Robert Tate, who died in 2009 leaving an estate valued in excess of eleven million pounds, organised and financed the events of the twelfth of October, 1987 — when the phone on his desk began to buzz against the wood with the specific insistence of a call that intended to keep ringing until it was answered.

He looked at the screen. A number, not a name.