Free The Fireman by Stephen Leather Page A

young and keen, have notebook will travel and because I needed the money.
    The high spot of the shift was organizing the curry run for the subs and a trip out to the main police stations delivering the first edition and picking up the details of the nightly stabbings and assaults. And at closing time there were the phone calls from the drunks, ‘Hey Jim, can you settle a wee argument that me and my pal are having. In the 1972 cup final . . .’ And you had to deal with the complaints if the compiler of the TV page had cocked it up again. That was a real pain until one of the subs gave me a tip. ‘Ask them for the number of their TV licence. That usually shuts them up.’ It worked every time.
    I’d just got back with the curries for the lads when the news desk phone rang. It was a watchman at the British Rail works in Springburn ringing to say that a young lad had just got himself electrocuted at the yard. He was one of a group of neds breaking into carriages to steal the first aid kits. They weren’t worth anything but it gave them something to do. This nutter had been standing on the roof of a train, using an iron bar to smash in the windows. He’d swung it too high, touched an overhead power cable and was lying in hospital with third degree burns over most of his body. The caller gave me the kid’s name and address, and his own, not out of any sense of public duty but because he knew I’d put him in the tip-off book and that at the end of the month a cheque would be winging its way to him. That one phone call would earn him almost as much as I got for a full eight-hour shift.
    I dragged the late driver out of the photographers’ rest room where he’d been watching a blue movie on their video recorder. He reeked of whisky and his flies were at half mast. Twenty minutes later we were in front of the grey tenement block where the boy lived and I told the driver to wait and went up to the second floor alone and rang the door bell until the lights went on and a small, pale woman in a yellow floral nightie and curlers opened the door and peered at me.
    ‘What d’ye want?’ she barked.
    What I wanted was a quote from the tearful mother and a collect picture of her dying son, and then what I wanted was any other pictures of him so that when the Glasgow Herald and the Express arrived they’d be shafted. That’s what I wanted, but first I had to get inside the house. I was English but I’d been north of the border long enough to switch into the Glasgow accent and I was young enough to give her the little-boy-lost-look and appeal to her maternal instincts.
    ‘Oh, I’m from the Record , Mrs McNee,’ I said. ‘I’m terribly sorry to hear what happened to wee James. Could I come in and have a word with you?’
    ‘What?’ she said, and coughed like a rheumatic otter.
    ‘Well, Mrs McNee, we thought if we printed what had happened to James it would serve as a warning to other children.’
    A man appeared behind the yellow nightie, the same size as the woman, with a crew cut and several days’ growth of stubble on his face. His chin was up in the arrogant pose of a small, angry man. In his greying string vest and baggy underpants he looked like an over the hill boxer that some up-and-coming champion had been using as a sparring partner.
    ‘What did he say, hen?’ he asked his wife.
    ‘He said something’s happened to Jim.’
    The man opened the door wide.
    ‘You’d better come in, son,’ he said. And that was how they heard that their boy was dying in a hospital bed, from a young reporter who was only there for the story and the picture. She cried and he put his arm around her and then she went and made me a cup of tea and then there was the crackle of a two-way radio and a policewoman and a male colleague rang the doorbell. It happens that way sometimes. And yes I got the quotes, and the pictures, and the page three lead in the second edition. And I left my card on the mantelpiece so that when the guys from