]To look back on Connie Lawson’s disappearance as the turning point in Amanda’s career seemed cruel. That, however, was the unpalatable truth. Amanda had no memory of sleeping much during those seven days. Karl Lawson was running like a fever through her blood as she trawled through his life story and assembled it for public consumption. She had never experienced anything like that rush. If it should come upon her again, she wouldn’t trust it. It made her lose sight of Connie. She was still missing but Amanda was convinced, as were the rest of the media, that he was guilty, and that was the only story she wanted to tell.
She hadn’t realised his connection to Connie until he opened the door of his brother’s house on the first day of the search. He didn’t remember her. Not even a flicker of recognition when he saw her standing outside with Shane.
‘No comment,’ he’d said when she asked him for information about his missing niece. ‘No comment… no comment.’ Dismissing Amanda with the same condescending glance she remembered from her unfortunate interview in his office. As Shane photographed him in the doorway and they retreated down the garden path, she was recalling that humiliating day in precise, painful detail.
She had begun her career with Capital Eye by writing reports on dreary and argumentative county council meetings. That was followed by ‘Life on the Fringe’, a series of columns drawn from interviews she conducted on the steps of the district courts. People’s willingness to talk to her about their lives, their chaotic relationships, their drug use, their alcohol abuse, their shoplifting escapades, never failed to amaze her. Some of her colleagues at Capital Eye accused her of sensationalism and claimed she exploited her interviewees. As ‘Life on the Fringe’ was one of the most popular pages in the tabloid, Amanda viewed such criticisms as a measure of her success.
Eventually she became bored by these confessions, which were becoming repetitive, and her sympathy towards recidivist shoplifters and welfare cheats was wearing thin. She looked longingly towards the brash, barrel-bellied criminal courts where drug lords from the inner city strutted, unafraid and unashamed; and wife murderers hid between the burly shoulders of the police when they were led away in handcuffs.
Lilian Bond, the crime reporter for Capital Eye – embittered as a witch and stooped from the weight of the evil she confronted daily – continued to report on the juicy stories. Amanda willed her to retire or develop some age-related illnesses like arthritis or dementia, but such hopes were punctured when she received an invitation to Lilian’s fiftieth birthday celebration. Fifty. That meant another fifteen years of Lilian at the crime desk. An eternity. Amanda was considering this fact when she heard that Karl Lawson was looking for a features writer for Hitz. Her knowledge of the music industry was scant but she could write a good story. Cocaine, trashed hotel rooms and speed sex with groupies sounded far more alluring than ‘Life on the Fringe’.
On the morning of her interview, as she was about to drive from her apartment car park, she realised she had left her ‘Life on the Fringe’ press clippings behind. When she hurried back to her bedroom, she noticed her fiancé’s iPhone on the bedside locker. Graham, who never left the device out of sight for an instant, was in the shower. His voice came to her from the en suite; he was a baritone and not a bad singer. Not a bad lover, either, as Amanda discovered when she checked his texts. They explained a lot. For six months he had been playing with her mind, ridiculing her suspicions and accusing her of being paranoid when he claimed he had to work late or stay overnight on another unexpected business trip.
Later that night, unaware that his lies had been exposed, Graham would phone to apologise for working late yet again and Amanda would stop shredding his shirts long enough to take his call. Afterwards, she would continue her campaign of retribution by pouring bleach over his entire wardrobe, but that revenge had to wait until after her Hitz interview. She had carried a scream of rage inside her when she sat down in front of Karl Lawson, breathless and distracted when she should have been clear-headed and sharp-witted. She had stammered through her answers and lost the thread of what she wanted to say. His eyes glazed when she spoke about the influences of classical music on rock, the sexual allure of boy bands and the politics of hip hop. The quick glance he exchanged with his deputy editor, Barbara Nelson, told her they had already made up their minds. All Amanda could think about were those texts. Sex texts, clandestine meetings; such smug infidelity. Barbara, who must have gone through a goth phase in her teens and still thought the eye make-up was a good idea, didn’t even bother reading Amanda’s clippings. Karl Lawson, after a cursory glance at them, handed the file back to her.
Outside his office door, she had leaned against the wall to recover her breath. She overheard their laughter and the comment he tossed at Barbara. ‘She’s a good writer so I have to assume there’s a brain somewhere between her ears. But I don’t have the time or the patience to search for it. Who’s next on the list for interviewing?’
A week later the rejection letter from Hitz arrived. He was sorry her application hadn’t been successful and wished her every success in what he believed would be a significant career in journalism. A sugar-coated rejection pill that did nothing to alleviate her humiliation.
Shortly after that disastrous interview, Lilian Bond died from an undiagnosed heart condition and Amanda’s days on the steps of the district court came to an end.
Lilian’s shoes were hard to fill. She had spent her career building up her contacts, crims and constables, as she used to say, and the fact that she had taken those names to her grave didn’t help Amanda settle into her new position. She had made some underground contacts from her ‘Life on the Fringe’ column but she needed a wider network of sources close to the criminal drug gangs. On hearing that Lilian had often frequented Rimbles, a late-night members’-only club, situated in the docklands, she had gone there one night in the hope of picking up information on the Shroff drug gang.