Free The Dead Beat by Doug Johnstone Page B

belly.
    Martha gagged.
    The rat began frantically thrashing its head about as the cat retreated. The cat looked first at her then at the prize it had brought her. She had to do something.
    She stepped forward and placed the heel of her shoe on the rat’s head. Heard the skull crush beneath her foot, and felt it up through her leg. Swivelled her heel to be sure.
    She stepped back, dragging her foot on the grass, trying to wipe away rat brains. She looked at the cat.
    ‘You are a sick fuck,’ she said.
    The cat looked pleased with itself as it jogged away.
    Martha stared at the rat, its head a mush of fur and brains. It lay on the grave like a superstitious offering from a primitive tribe. She should move it, but she couldn’t touch it with her hands and she didn’t want to get any more dead rat on her shoes.
    ‘Jesus Christ,’ she said as she turned away from Ian and strode towards the exit.

21
    As she got on the bus, she threw a random tape into the Walkman. A Spanish woman’s voice, lots of reverb, then a riff. She looked at the box – Jane’s Addiction, Ritual de lo Habitual . A guy with a squeaky voice shrieking over some funk-metal. Strange.
    She pulled the printout of Ian’s obituary from her bag. Smudged her thumb against the picture of him, pint glass aloft. Tried to imagine the decomposing corpse in the graveyard, or his smashed-up body underneath North Bridge.
    She read the obit for the sixth time this morning.
    Born: 13 February 1970, in Edinburgh. Died: 17 March 2014, in Edinburgh, aged 44.
    Sometimes the word ‘colleague’ just isn’t enough. Ian Lamb, who died in the early hours of Monday morning after falling from North Bridge, was a distinguished colleague of everyone he worked with at the Standard newspaper, but he was so much more besides.
    From his early days as a trainee reporter on the Standard ’s sister paper the Evening Standard , through to his more recent days as an accomplished and astute news editor, Ian was a companionable and compassionate presence, always ready to listen to the usual workplace gripes, but also to provide vital encouragement to all around him.
    Back in 1991, Ian was studying journalism at Edinburgh University. I first met him around this time, through a mutual love of the indie and grunge music scenes. Ian was a decent guitarist, I remember. He never treated that side of things as anything more than an interesting hobby, although by general consensus he could have made a career out of music if he’d set his mind to it.
    In fact, that applied to most things about Ian. Ahead of anyone else in his journalism class, he landed a prestigious work placement as a trainee crime reporter with the Evening Standard , at a time when the newspaper industry was flying high and competition was fierce.
    Ian was already working as a freelance writer, penning gig and album reviews, and contributing heavily to music fanzines and magazines both local and national, but he craved something more serious. His nose for news stood him in good stead at the Evening Standard , where he rose quickly through the ranks of crime reporting and then news journalism.
    He was responsible for breaking any number of high-profile stories at the paper over the years, from the Hearts FC tax scandal to the terrible revelations about the disposal of remains at Mortonhall Crematorium.
    When a vacancy came up at the Standard for a news editor, Ian seemed the obvious choice. He brought to the role something of his dark sense of humour, as well as a down-to-earth quality that marked the paper’s newsgathering for the subsequent years.
    Latterly, Ian was less than enamoured with the way things were going within the newspaper industry in general, and at the Standard in particular. He was heard to comment on more than one occasion that in a few years all this would be gone, and yet he maintained impeccable levels of professionalism from the moment he entered the office until the moment he left.
    Outside of the