Killing With Confidence Read Free Page B

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 industry
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.