The office was on the first floor of The Crow’s premises in the centre of Ely, above the front counter and telesales. It looked out on Market Street where, tonight, frozen rain slanted across the amber blaze of the street lights. The top deck of the Littleport bus had just drawn up at the stop directly outside and, barely visible behind the streaming condensation, was what appeared to be the entire cast of St Trinian’s.
Dryden’s story, not surprisingly, had made the lead: HUNT FOR FEN KILLER in sixty-eight point across two decks shouted from the proofs left lying on the subs’ table. The top-single beside it was hardly in the same league: FIREWORK WARNING OVER KIDS’ PRANK.
He was rereading the copy when Kathy Wilde, his fellow senior reporter, thudded up the stairs, kicked open the newsroom door, and deposited the office’s allocation of fifty freshly printed copies on to the floor with a wallop that lifted the floorboards on which Dryden was standing.
Kathy, a red-haired Ulster woman, distracted attention from lurking depression and a tendency to put on fat by a nearly continuous exercise in extrovert behaviour. She knew someone would be in the office from the lights. It was one of her less dramatic entrances.
‘Would yer effing believe it.’ The Ulster accent was sharp enough to make the windows rattle. ‘Page eight! Stark-bollock naked in the front of his bloody Mondeo with a blow-up doll and these tossers stick it in the briefs on page eight!’
‘Pity he didn’t keep it in his briefs,’ said Dryden.
He liked it when Kathy laughed. She let herself go – one of Dryden’s litmus tests of character. She advanced towards him.
Kathy had developed a kind of cat-walk designed to draw attention to her hour-glass figure. It was an ample hour-glass through which a lot of sand had passed, but an hour-glass none the less. The effect was mildly hypnotic and Dryden froze like a rabbit in the headlights of an oncoming car.
Kathy invaded his personal space – in Dryden’s case an area slightly smaller than Norfolk. When she moved she sounded like a mobile in the wind – the earrings, necklace, and bracelets tinkling together.
She removed a piece of imaginary lint from Dryden’s shoulder. ‘You tell me – go on. I’ll take it from you. Tell me I don’t know a decent story when I see one.’ She thrust a mangled copy of the paper – hardly hot off the presses but still warm – into Dryden’s hands.
Kathy had come to England to do feature-writing shifts on the Fleet Street Sunday papers. She’d cut her teeth as a reporter on the stricken doorsteps of the Troubles. The Crow was a day job that paid the bills and gave her a base within striking distance of London for her lipstick-red MG sports car. She had a low view of The Crow’s professional competence and had not taken kindly to the occasional lecture from the paper’s poorly talented senior staff. For Dryden she made an exception: his Fleet Street track record put him on a pedestal. It also made him doubly desirable. She liked the emotional distance, the unselfconscious good looks, the scruffy oversized clothes on the six-foot-plus frame, and the shock of jet black hair. But she loved the CV most of all.
She realized, suddenly, just how close she was standing and backed off in confusion. Subsiding into the newsroom’s one battered armchair she burst into angry tears. It was a regular but effective performance. Her face, impish and animated, slumped and crumpled. A considerable amount of make-up began to coalesce giving her a tragic theatrical appeal to which Dryden was just a little susceptible.
He snapped out of it. ‘So they wouldn’t know a decent story if it bit them on the arse. What’s new?’
Kathy stemmed the floods to a series of appealing snuffles.
Dryden admired the front page splash. He’d been a reporter ten years and had often written the front page lead on the News – circulation one million. But he got just as big a kick out of The Crow – circulation 17,000 and falling.
Kathy’s snuffles threatened to upgrade to sobs. Action, he decided, was the best way to head-off emotion. ‘Look, I’ve got a night job – civic opening at the Maltings. Why don’t you come with me? We can have a drink and discuss Henry’s news judgement at the same time.’
Henry was the The Crow’s ancient editor and the constant object of critical attack. In one memorable harangue Kathy had told the assembled newsroom staff of The Crow – in Henry’s absence – that the editor was to modern journalism what ‘shit pie is to haute cuisine’. Dryden had found this hugely amusing while the rest had made a mental note to look up ‘haute cuisine’ when they got home.
Kathy was transformed. She stood and swung her suitcase-sized handbag over a shoulder, narrowly missing Dryden’s head. ‘You’re on. Let’s go. I could do with a drink and I’m buying.’ One of the many things Dryden liked about Kathy was that she would.