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TWO

Friday, 9.46pm, Manhattan

The chorus took their bows, the conductor bowing sweatily. But Will could only hear one noise: the sound of his father clapping. He marvelled at the decibels those two big hands could produce, colliding in a smack that sounded like wood against wood. It stirred a memory Will had almost lost. It was a school speech day back in England, the only time his father had been there. Will was ten years old and as he went up to collect the poetry prize he was sure that, even above the din of a thousand parents, he could hear the distinct handclap of his father. On that day he had been proud of this stranger’s mighty oak hands, stronger than those of any man in the world, he was sure.

The noise had not diminished as his father, now in his early fifties, had entered middle age. He was as fit as ever, slim, his white hair cropped short. He did not jog or work out: weekend sailing trips off Sag Harbor had kept him in shape. Will, still applauding, turned to look at him, but his father’s gaze did not shift. When Will saw the slight redness around his dad’s nose he realized with shock that the older man’s eyes were wet: the music had moved him, but he did not want his son to see his tears.

Will smiled to himself at that. A man with hands as strong as trees, welling up at the sound of an angels’ choir. It was then he felt the vibrations. He reached down to his BlackBerry to see a message from the Metro desk: ‘Job for you. Brownsville, Brooklyn. Homicide.’

Will’s stomach gave a little leap, that aerobic manoeuvre that combines excitement and nerves. He was on the ‘night cops’ beat on the Times Metro desk, the traditional blooding for fast-trackers like him. He might be destined to serve as a future Middle East correspondent or Beijing Bureau Chief, ran the paper’s logic, but first he would have to learn the journalistic basics. That was Times thinking. ‘There’ll be plenty of time to cover military coups. First you have to know how to cover a flower show,’ Glenn Harden, the Metro editor would say. ‘You need to learn people and you do that right here.’

As the chorus basked in their ovation, Will turned to his father with a shrug of apology, gesturing to the BlackBerry. It’s work, he mouthed, gathering up his coat. This little role reversal gave him a sneaky pleasure. After years living in the glow cast by his father’s stellar career, now it was Will’s turn to heed the summons of work.

‘Take care,’ whispered the older man.

Outside, Will hailed a cab. The driver was listening to the news on NPR. Will asked him to turn it up. Not that he was expecting any word on Brownsville. Will always did this – in cabs, even in shops or cafes. He was a news junkie; had been since he was a teenager.

He had missed the lead item and they were already onto the foreign news. A story from Britain. Will always perked up when he heard word from the country he still thought of as home. He may have been born in America, but his formative years, between the ages of eight and twenty-one, had been spent in England. Now, though, as he heard that Gavin Curtis, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was in trouble, Will paid extra attention. Determined to prove to the Times that his talents stretched beyond the Metro desk, and to ensure the brass knew he had studied economics at Oxford, Will had pitched a story to the Week in Review section on only his second day at the paper. He had even sketched out a headline: Wanted: A banker for the world. The International Monetary Fund was looking for a new head and Curtis was said to be the frontrunner.

‘. . . the charges were first made by a British newspaper,’ the NPR voice was saying, ‘which claimed to have identified “irregularities” in Treasury accounts. A spokesman for Mr Curtis has today denied all suggestions of corruption.’ Will scribbled a note as a memory floated to the surface. He quickly pushed it back down.

There were more urgent matters at hand. Digging into his pocket he found his phone. Quick message to Beth, who had picked up his British fondness for texting. With a thumb that had become preternaturally quick, he punched in the numbers that became letters.

My first murder! Will be home late. Love you.

Now he could see his destination. Red lights were turning noiselessly in the September dark. The lights were on the roofs of two NYPD cars whose noses almost touched in an arrowhead shape, as if to screen off part of the road. In front of them was a hastily installed cordon, consisting of yellow police tape. Will paid the fare, got out and looked around. Rundown tenements.

He approached the first line of tape until a policewoman strolled over to stop him. She looked bored. ‘No access, sir.’

Will fumbled in the breast pocket of his linen jacket. ‘Press?’ he asked with what he hoped was a winning smile as he flashed his newly minted press card.

Looking away, she gave an economical gesture with her right hand. Go through.

Will ducked under the tape, into a knot of maybe half a dozen people. Other reporters. I’m late, he thought, irritated. One was his age, tall with impossibly straight hair and an unnatural dusting of orange on his skin. Will was sure he recognized him but could not remember how. Then he saw the curly wire in his ear. Of course, Carl McGivering from NY1, New York’s twenty-four-hour cable news station. The rest were older, the battered press tags around their necks revealing their affiliations: Post, Newsday, and a string of community papers.

‘Bit late, junior,’ said the craggiest of the bunch, apparently the dean of the crime corps. ‘What kept you?’ Ribbing from older hacks, Will had learned in his first job on the Bergen Record in New Jersey, was one of those things reporters like him just had to swallow.

‘Anyway, I wouldn’t sweat it,’ Old Father Time from Newsday was saying. ‘Just your garden variety gangland killing. Knives are all the rage these days, it seems.’

‘Blades: the new guns. Could be a fashion piece,’ quipped the Post, to much laughter from the Veteran Reporters’ Club whose monthly meeting Will felt he had just interrupted. He suspected this was a dig at him, suggesting he (and perhaps the Times itself) were too effete to give the macho business of murder its due.

‘Have you seen the corpse?’ Will asked, sure there was a term of the trade he was conspicuously failing to use. ‘Stiff’, perhaps.

‘Yeah, right through there,’ said the dean, nodding towards the squad cars as he brought a cup of Styrofoam coffee to his lips.

Will headed for the space between the police vehicles, a kind of man-made clearing in this urban forest. There were a couple of unexcited cops milling around, one with a clipboard, but no police photographer. Will must have missed that.

And there on the ground, under a blanket, lay the body. He stepped forward to get a better look, but one of the cops moved to block his path. ‘Authorized personnel only from here on in, sir. All questions to the DCPI over there.’

‘DCPI?’

‘Officer serving the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information.’ As if speaking to a dim-witted child who had forgotten his most rudimentary times tables.

Will kicked himself for asking. He should have bluffed it out.

The DCPI was on the other side of the corpse, talking to the TV guy. Will had to walk round until he was only a foot or two from the dead body of Howard Macrae. He stared hard into the blanket, hoping to guess at the face that lay beneath. Maybe the blanket would reveal an outline, like those clay masks used by sculptors. He kept looking but the dull, dark shroud yielded nothing.

The DCPI was in mid-flow. ‘. . . our guess is that this was either score-settling by the SVS against the Wrecking Crew, or else an attempt by the Houston prostitution network to take over Macrae’s patch.’

Only then did she seem to notice Will, her expression instantly changing to denote a lack of familiarity. The shutters had come down. Will got the message: the casual banter was for Carl McGivering only.

‘Could I just get the details?’

‘One African-American male, aged forty-three, approximately a hundred and eighty pounds, identified as Howard Macrae, found dead on Saratoga and St Marks Avenues at 9.27pm this evening. Police were alerted by a resident of the neighbourhood who dialled 911 after finding the body while walking to the 7-Eleven.’ She nodded to indicate the store: over there. ‘Cause of death appears to be severing of arteries, internal bleeding and heart failure due to vicious and repeated stabbing. The New York Police Department is treating this crime as homicide and will spare no resources in bringing the perpetrator to justice.’

The blah-blah tone told Will this was a set formulation, one all DCPIs were required to repeat. No doubt it had been scripted by a team of outside consultants, who probably wrote a NYPD mission statement to go with it. Spare no resources.

‘Any questions?’

‘Yes. What was all that about prostitution?’

‘Are we on background now?’

Will nodded, agreeing that anything the DCPI said could be used, so long as Will did not attribute it to her.

‘The guy was a pimp. Well-known as such to us and to everyone who lives here. Ran a brothel, on Atlantic Avenue near Pleasant Place. Kind of like an old-fashioned whorehouse, girls, rooms – all under one roof.’

‘Right. What about the fact that he was found in the middle of the street? Isn’t that a little strange, no attempt to hide the body?’

‘Gangland killing, that’s how they work. Like a drive-by shooting. It’s right out there in the open, in your face. No attempt to hide the body ’cause that’s part of the point. To send a message. You want everyone to know, “We did this, we don’t care who knows about it. And we’d do it to you.”’

Will scribbled as fast as he could, thanked the DCPI and reached for his cell phone. He told Metro what he had: they told him to come in, there was still time to make the final edition. They would only need a few paragraphs. Will was not surprised. He had read the Times long enough to know this was not exactly hold-the-front-page material.

He did not let on to the desk, to the DCPI or to any of the other reporters there that this was in fact the first murder he had ever covered. At the Bergen Record, homicides were rarer fare and not to be wasted on novices like him. It was a pity because there was one detail which had caught Will’s eye but which he had put out of his mind almost immediately. The other hacks were too jaded to have noticed it at all, but Will saw it. The trouble was, he assumed it was routine.

He did not realize it at the time, but it was anything but.