course, the editor had forbidden the call. So, if Laski should take it
into his head to ring the editor–or even the Chairman-Kevin was in
trouble.
So why wasn’t he worried?
He decided that he did not care for his job as much as he had this
morning. The editor had good reasons for killing the story, of course;
there were always good reasons for cowardice. Everyone seemed to accept
that
“It’s against the law” was a final argument; but the great newspapers of
the past had always broken the laws: laws at once harsher and more
strictly applied than those of today. Kevin believed that newspapers
should publish and be sued, or even arrested. It was easy for him to
believe this, for he was not an editor.
So he sat in the newsroom, close to the news desk, sipping machine tea
and reading his own paper’s gossip column, composing the heroic speech
he would like to have made to the editor.
It was the fag-end of the day as far as the paper was concerned.
Nothing less than a major assassination or a multiple-death disaster
would get in the paper now. Half the reporters–those on eight-hour
shifts–had gone home. Kevin worked ten hours, four days a week. The
industrial correspondent, having taken eight pints of Guinness at lunch,
was asleep in a corner. A lone typewriter clacked desultorily as a girl
reporter in jeans wrote an undated story for tomorrow’s first edition.
The copy takers were arguing about football and the sub-editors were
composing joke captions for spiked pictures, laughing uproariously at
each other’s wit.
Arthur Cole was pacing up and down, resisting the temptation to smoke
and secretly hoping for a fire at Buckingham Palace. Every so often he
would stop and leaf through the sheets of copy impaled on his spike, as
if worrying that he might have overlooked the big story of the day.
After a while Mervyn Glazier sauntered across from his own small
kingdom. His shirt was hanging out. He sat down beside Kevin, lighting a
steel-stemmed pipe and resting one scuffed shoe on the rim of the
wastepaper basket.
“The Cotton Bank of Jamaica,” he said by way of preamble. He spoke
quietly.
Kevin grinned. “Have you been a naughty boy too?”
Mervyn shrugged. “I can’t help it if people ring me up with information.
Anyway, if the bank ever was in danger, it’s out now.”
“How do you know?”
“My tight-lipped contact at Threadneedle Street.
“I have looked more closely at the Cotton Bank since your call, and I
find it to be in excellent financial health.” Unquote. In other words,
it’s been quietly rescued.”
Kevin finished his tea and crumpled the plastic paper cup noisily. “So
much for that.”
“I also hear, from a quite separate source not a million miles from the
Council of the Stock Exchange, that Felix Laski has bought a controlling
share in Hamilton Holdings.”
“He can’t be short of a few bob, then. Is the Council interested?”
“No. They know, and they don’t mind.”
“Do you think we made a big fuss over nothing?”
Mervyn shook his head slowly. “By no means.”
“Nor do I.”
Mervyn’s pipe had gone out. He tapped it into the wastebasket. The two
journalists looked helplessly at each other for a moment, then Mervyn
got up and went away.
Kevin returned his attention to the gossip column, but he could not
concentrate. He read a paragraph four times without understanding it,
then gave up. Some large piece of skulduggery had gone on today, and he
itched to know what it was, the more so because he felt so close to
understanding it.
Arthur called him. “Sit behind here while I go to the lav, will you?”
Kevin walked around the news desk and took a seat behind the news
editor’s bank of telephones and switchboards. It gave him no thrill: he
had the job because, at this time of day, it hardly mattered. He was
just the nearest idle man.
Idleness was inevitable on newspapers, Kevin mused. The staff had to be
sufficiently many to cope on a big day, so they were bound to be too
many on a normal day. On some papers they gave you silly jobs to do just