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.In the end it was both.’‘What went wrong? Did the stories dry up?’‘No, quite the opposite.It took me very little time to establish my contacts and get stuck in.I seemed to be notching up another big-splash story every month or so.I wasn’t operating as autonomously as in Glasgow, so I was often following up a lead from the head of the investigative team, with back-up and resources like I had never imagined.Up north I usually had to fish around on my own, chasing down a few blind alleys before I found something worth really going after, and even then I was pretty much a one-man show.‘I felt like the star striker justifying his big transfer fee by enthusiastically flogging my guts out, turning on all the style and getting results.And like the star striker, I had been brought in to finish off the chances being created by the rest of the team.I was so hungry for it that I barely stopped to look around myself for the best part of a year.Or maybe I was believing in my own myth too much to want to see what must have been in front of me all the time.’‘You were being used,’ Sarah stated with a dry smile.Parlabane sighed.‘It’s a sight easier to notice from the outside looking in.I stumbled across something, just as a small follow-up on a big story I had done.There was a very unpleasant land deal going down in East Anglia somewhere.I can’t even remember the name of the shithole.Lots of public protest over the proposed use of the site, industrialisation of what had been a public park that the council had suspiciously let fall into dereliction, that kind of thing.I was doing a hatchet-job on the environmental record of the chemical company that was trying to buy the land.I even found out that one of the local authority planning players had an undisclosed interest in the company concerned.‘Thought I was Mr fucking Green Hero.Expose the polluters, local authority throws out proposal, land stays a park.I could see it all.Christmas card from Jonathon Porritt, environmental journalist of the year award and probably the fucking Nobel prize thrown in.‘And it worked.The planning department guy resigned, the plan got junked.But the land didn’t stay a park.It was sold instead to Woodford’s, a major housebuilder whose proposals were considered more palatable by the locals, still worrying over what might have been.They were building a whole load of yuppie flats with a tiny new swing-park thrown in to sweeten the neighbourhood residents.‘I did some checking, looking for another link between the authority and this time Woodford’s.Instead I found that the chairman of Woodford’s was a close business associate of my newspaper’s proprietor and owned a sizable share of the controlling media group.‘I checked back on all of my big splashes, and every time I had buried someone, there was an anonymous winner, someone in the background quietly doing very nicely thank you from the fall-out from my story.In most cases I could establish the link with the proprietor, but where I couldn’t it was even more interesting, as clearly no one else knew of a connection between these figures.’‘And what did you do with what you found?’‘Nothing, at first.I kept it all quiet and then waited for my next major assignment.Then instead of investigating what I was supposed to, I sought out the intended beneficiaries and dug some dirt on them instead.I filed the story and appended my resignation to the end of it, then went to the pub for a couple of pints.‘When I got home I found my flat burgled.The place had been torn apart, and every computer disk, every file, every folder, every notepad taken.In fact, they even gutted the fucking computer itself.‘I called the police immediately, but as soon as I had put the phone back down I was struck by a paranoid but understandable thought.Anyone organised enough to break in and steal all my research as quickly as that would not be beyond stitching me up as well, and an old favourite was planting class-A drugs then tipping off the police.Except I had called the police for them.’‘Setting your own time-bomb.’‘Well, let’s just say it was the world’s fastest and most high-stakes game of hunt-the-thimble.Colombian dry white, recent vintage, big package, stuffed out of sight underneath my reservoir water tank.It was a lot of stuff – I took it as a back-handed compliment that the proprietor was shelling out so much to get me sent down.’‘What did you do with it?’‘Climbed up on to the roof of the building with it and put it under a bird’s nest.It’s probably still there.’‘And that’s why you left London?’‘Not entirely.My decision was made easier when the cops arrived.It wasn’t some Operation Bumble Bee soco and a flatfoot.Half-a-dozen beat bobbies and two trenchcoats.And they didn’t do a convincing impression of investigating a burglary.One of the trenchcoats made a B-line for the watertank, a rather idiosyncratic place to start any new investigation, I’m sure you’ll agree.’Sarah pretended to dither, then nodded, mock-reluctantly.‘He rammed his hand under the tank without even looking, and got a disappointing surprise.’‘No drugs.’‘Well, partly that, and partly that when he rapidly brought his hand out there was a mousetrap attached to three of his fingers.‘He told me my card was marked, but we both knew I’d foxed them that time
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