Free Dead Won't Sleep by Anna Smith

He raised his finger to point at her. ‘But before you start, I’m not happy that you pissed off all day and didn’t even phone. You know the rules.’
    ‘Sorry. Won’t happen again.’ She smiled at McGuire, because they both knew it would. But Rosie was confident that he liked her enough for her to get away with just about anything – so long as she kept delivering the goods.
    There was no easy way into the story, so Rosie just spilled it out, painting the picture for him and watchinghim reacting to it, just the way she had done. She would trust McGuire with her life, and she knew this was right up his street. He was a ballsy, instinctive editor, and he always relished laying one on the establishment. But Rosie knew that, even as she spoke, he would also be considering the political implications of a such an explosive story.
    McGuire punctuated her story with exclamations of ‘Fuck me!’ and ‘Jesus wept!’ and she decided not to tell him anything of what Mags had said about the children’s home. No point in getting him overexcited at this stage. She was still trying to take it all in herself, and would wait until she had done a bit of digging. When she got to the end of her story, McGuire was silent. He lifted his feet off the desk and got up to pace around the room. Rosie’s eyes followed him as he walked up and down, his hands dug into his trouser pockets.
    ‘So, right. Let’s see what we’ve got here. We have the word of a hooker.’ McGuire turned to Rosie, scratching his chin. ‘A junked-up hooker. That should give the lawyers a good dose of the trots.’
    ‘I think it’s true, Mick,’ Rosie said. ‘I believe she’s telling the truth.’ She needed him to be on her side on this, but she knew the lawyers would tell him not to touch it with a barge pole, and she felt her confidence weakening a little already.
    ‘She might well be telling the truth.’ McGuire ran hishand across his thick black hair. He surveyed the awardwinning front pages that were framed and mounted on the wall. ‘Poor bastard probably is. But you can’t go around saying the head of the CID is humping junkie girls on his boat. Under-age hookers, no less. We’d be printing fivers instead of papers.’ He turned to Rosie, saying, ‘You know that, don’t you?’ and went back behind his desk.
    He said he could nearly hear the collective screams of panic when the managing editor and the rest of the hierarchy got to know about this – in the unlikely event they could ever run the story.
    Rosie’s spirits sank. She thought of Mags, and that innocent snapshot of Tracy before the heroin had swallowed her up. She had hoped for better than this. The sound of Tracy’s voice on the tape still rang in her ears. She reached into her pocket and brought it out.
    ‘Look, Mick,’ she said, rewinding the tape. ‘Listen to this. Tracy made a call to the girl Mags from the boat. Something happened at some stage of the night, and Tracy phoned Mags in a bit of a state. Mags didn’t get the call because she was, well, the usual junkie stuff, out of her box. But the kid left a message. Mags let me hear it today and I taped it. Listen. It’s her voice.’
    She put the volume up as loud as it would go, sat it on McGuire’s desk, and played the message. His eyes narrowed as he listened.
    ‘Play it again.’
    She played it again, and then a third time.
    ‘You got the mobile?’
    Rosie looked at him and sighed. ‘No, Mick. If I had the mobile, you would have been listening to it on the mobile. Mags wouldn’t part with the phone today. Said she needed it for something, and she’ll give it to me tomorrow. But I taped this from the mobile.’
    McGuire nodded. They were both well aware of the difficulties.
    He folded his arms. ‘It’s great to have the voice on tape, Rosie, but unless we get the mobile and get some techno guys into it, we can’t prove anything. Lawyers will know we can’t prove that the voice on the tape is the kid’s,