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Sweet Molly
Maguire
by
Terry Houston
Chapter One
EDWARD
JAMES MULLIGAN. That was the name he had given the police as he stood
shivering and shaking in the hallway of his flat, his shirt soaked and
stained pink by the red bath water that was really Molly's blood.
Edward James Mulligan.
He watched the plain clothes detectives write it down in their notebooks,
and realised that only two people in the world ever called him Edward
- Molly and the news editor, Matt Whooper.
Everyone else at the Morning Despatch called him Two Coats.
It had been a random thought, culled out of his misery, while he
and the detectives waited for the police doctor to arrive and formally
pronounce her dead. Inconsequential, or a telling statement upon his life?
The man standing in the kitchen nursing his whisky wasn't sure.
The nickname had been around years. Any sting it once contained had vanished
with the passage of time. Anyway, Mulligan wasn't much given to bouts
of self-honesty. Especially about his drinking. All reporters drank; it
went with the territory.
Mulligan had been a reporter with the Dispatch for fifteen years,
and it showed. Middle age comes early in journalism. At thirty-eight,
he had the eyes of a man for whom there were no more victories to be won,
only defeats to be avoided; the stamp of life's disappointments was already
etched in his pinched features and the harsh cut of his mouth.
The nickname, Two Coats, arose out of Mulligan's habit of wearing
two identical jackets at the Dispatch to confuse his boss.
On day shift Mulligan would arrive punctually for work wearing the
first of them, a hound's tooth check sports jacket that would have seared
the eyes of a blind man. He would drape it over the back of his seat,
then after a few minutes hanging around the news room, sniffing and twitching
a little as he leafed through the morning papers, Mulligan would drift
off to the men's toilet to retrieve its twin from a hiding place in the
cleaners' broom closet, to which he had a spare key. He would then slip
away by the back stairs to the office pub, The Cock Crows Thrice.
All the reporters, and most of the news desk executives, knew about
Mulligan's second jacket. The only person who didn't know was Matt Whooper.
Looking down the open-plan office to the reporters' desks, Whooper
would see Two Coats' jacket hanging over the chair and assume Mulligan
was somewhere in the building. But then Whooper never knew what was going
on.
In the Cock Crows Thrice, Two Coats could be found most mornings
imbibing a carefully calibrated alcoholic intake to calm his jumpy nervous
system and ease him gently towards the rigours of the day. Mulligan had
a theory that, as long as he did his morning drinking in a pub, he was
not an alcoholic; and he prided himself that he always left the Cock Crows
Thrice before it officially opened for trade.
It was a childish conceit, not dissimilar to avoiding the cracks
on the pavement so the monsters don't catch you. Others took a more realistic
view of Two Coats' drinking habits. In the graffiti-scarred toilet of
the Cock Crows Thrice, inside an elaborately drawn scrolled panel, an
unknown artist had written in a neat Gothic script: "Two Coats Mulligan
drinks and drinks and drinks - then he falls down."
For some unknown reason, in the kitchen of his flat, Two Coats'
mind skittered back to the unknown graffiti artist's message and he silently
acknowledged the jibe was pretty near the mark. He was painfully thin,
and the boils on his arms - caused by lack of vitamins - were refusing
to clear up. Not many people knew about the boils, but Two Coats realised
that in an industry of two-fisted drinkers he was beginning to stand out.
He slopped more whisky into his glass. Aloud, he said: "It
wasn't always like this, Molly. If you'd seen what I've seen, done what
I've done ... a man's entitled to a drink now and then."
The sound of his voice in the empty flat, talking aloud to a dead
girl startled Two Coats, so he fell silent. His thoughts veered away from
the uncomfortable subject of his drinking, back to the first time he had
met Molly Maguire.
It was only four months ago, but it seemed a lifetime away; another
country, another existence. He had watched her walk into the Dispatch,
power-dressed in a smart, grey suit designed - and failing miserably -
to make her look older than her years. With her big, frightened green
eyes and hair of burnished copper, she looked young, vulnerable and graceful
at one and the same time. The sight of her walking up the editorial floor
hit Mulligan like a thunderclap. He thought her the freshest human being
to enter the Dispatch in years. She also had good legs. Two Coats was
a sucker for good legs.
Chapter Two
The Dispatch building was intimidating enough. A glass-walled palace large enough to accommodate its owners' egos, it dominated the Northern city skyline with opulent confidence, a steel and glass monument to an ephemeral trade. The brutal mechanics of newspapers is a simple one: today's hot news is tomorrow's hot fish and chip wrapper.
Snowflakes spiralled down out of a louring sky at Molly as she scuttled across the pavement into the Dispatch's cavernous foyer. Molly clacked her way across the marble floor to the reception desk and asked for Matt Whooper. She waited like a supplicant in a cathedral while the commissionaire summoned a copy boy to take her up.
In the express lift whisking her towards the editorial floor, Billy, the head copy boy, glanced surreptitiously at Molly, taking in the cascade of red hair, the trim figure and slender ankles, and wondered if he dared ask for a date. Billy was eighteen, a well set up youth trying hard to break through to manhood.
"New job?" he asked.
Molly smiled brightly and nodded. "What's Mr Whooper like?"
"He shouts a lot," said Billy.
They lapsed into silence and watched the lift destination board winking upwards.
There were only three reporters around when Billy led Molly onto the editorial floor - Two Coats Mulligan, Philby the office spy, and William D'Artagnan Smith. In an office not noted for the mental and emotional stability of its occupants, Smith was in a class all his own.
"Oooh ... Oooh," moaned Smith, who was first to spot Molly. "I think I'm in love."
Two Coats looked up from his typewriter." Oh, yes. Very tasty. Who is she?"
"She's Whooper's new temp," said Philby the spy.
The reporters watched Molly's progress. As she neared them, Smith cracked. Leaping from his seat, he flung himself in front of Molly, blocking her way. He went down on one knee, flung his arms wide open and emitted a strangled, piteous cry: "Hinginootcha!"
Startled, Molly drew back. "What's the matter with him?" she asked. "Is he Italian?"
Billy and the reporters burst out laughing. Molly looked bewildered.
"I'm sorry," said Two Coats. "It's what you might call a quaint mating call."
Molly had been around Glasgow long enough to decode the local patois. She quickly worked out the phrase in English - "Hanging out of you." She flushed and tried to move on, but Smith rolled over on his back and did the flight of the dying fly.
"Zzzzz," he buzzed, limbs flailing wildly as he tried to look up Molly's skirt. "Oooh ... legs right up to her bum," he yelped in ecstasy.
Pulling her skirt tightly around her legs, Molly hobbled quickly past the human fly, then fled towards the sanctuary of the news desk and Matt Whooper.
Whooper was on the phone. A big slab of a man, well over six feet tall, with receding grey hair which he vainly combed forward to disguise the fact, he looked a formidable boss. His heavily-jowled face was clean-shaven and his upper lip was beaded with small drops of perspiration, which the reporters called the Danger Dew. Every day, they and the news desk executives watched anxiously for its ominous glisten because its appearance signified a day of heavy flak all round.
Most days it was there, a weeping Niagara Falls of bile and bad temper as the news editor blitzed the troops over flaws, real and imaginary, in their copy or the logistics of news gathering.
Whooper had been news editor of the Dispatch for seventeen years, the longest period any desk man had held the post without getting promotion, a fact which prompted his deputy to remark bitterly in the Cock Crows Thrice: "The only way I'll ever get his job is if I drive a stake through his heart."
The reporters reckoned that to really do the business, silver bullets and garlic wreathes would not go amiss, either.
Molly Maguire stood nervously beside Whooper, waiting for him to finish his phone call. The news editor was issuing instructions to a district reporter covering a tug-of-love story in Perthshire. A lorry driver, estranged from his wife, had snatched his two children on their way to school, and vanished. The distraught mother was refusing to talk to the press, and relatives had already threatened to remove the Dispatch man's head from his shoulders should he bother the family again. The reporter had just suggested to the desk he try another tack, and concentrate on tracing the lorry driver's whereabouts. Whooper disagreed.
"I'm talking about mother love, you brainless bastard," he roared down the phone. "Mother love - that's what this story is all about. What's the point of tracing two kids before anyone even knows they've been missing? I want the mother's story ... The anguish of losing two children ... The nightmare she has always feared. Pathos, heart ache. Shit like that. That's what I want. Tell her we'll help find her kids if she talks to us. Exclusive, mind."
Whooper paused to draw breath. With one hand he tortured the thick spectacles chain he wore round his neck like a dowager Duchess's rope of pearls. The reporter seized his chance and gabbled furiously down the phone.
Whooper scowled. "What do you mean she won't talk to us? Doesn't she know this is the Dispatch, the paper that cares? Hound her ... Badger her until she caves in ... No, no, I don't mean that literally. Haven't you any finer feelings, shithead. The woman's emotionally distraught ..." Whooper paused to light a cigarette ... "Just use polite persistence ... Yes, that's what I mean. And don't leave that stake-out even for a piss, OK?"
Whooper slammed down the phone. Swivelling round in his chair, he saw Molly for the first time.
"Ah, my dear," he said, gallantly rising to his feet. "You must be my new secretary."
Molly gulped and nodded.
Whooper put a fatherly arm around her shoulder. "Let me introduce you to the staff. They're a good bunch of lads and I'm sure we'll all get along famously. I pride myself I run a happy ship."
And that was Molly's introduction to newspapers, thought Mulligan bitterly. She should have obeyed her first instincts and run like a deer - run as fast and as far as she could from the crazy, distorted world of newspapers. Not that she'd stayed long anyway.
Three days. That was all it took for the denizens of the fun factory to maim her, casually and without malice, in a gratuitous rape as she lay unconscious in a darkened bedroom at a newspaper party held in Mulligan's flat. Three days to be jettisoned and forgotten. Mulligan wondered if the unknown rapist even knew her name.
Muzzily, he reached out to pour himself another whisky and discovered, to his surprise, that he'd killed the bottle stone dead. He had no recollection of drinking it.
If only she'd agreed to get rid of the baby, thought Mulligan, everything would have been fine. But Molly Maguire, the Good Catholic Girl whose innocence was stolen in the night as she slept, was a stubborn bitch.
"Maybe it was someone really, really famous," said Molly in wistful tones. The dead girl was playing her favourite game: Find The Father. She was sitting in an armchair opposite Two Coats, her long legs curled up beneath her in her usual manner. "I mean, an artist or a writer. Somebody really creative and artistic."
Two Coats stared dull-eyed at the apparition and said nothing. Privately, he reckoned it didn't take the brains of a louse to rape an unconscious girl lying on a pile of party-goers' discarded coats in a bedroom. And the intellectual calibre of guests at his parties fell far short of the brain surgeon league.
"I mean, he could grow up to be a famous author. That would be grand now, wouldn't it?" persisted Molly.
Mulligan asked: "How do you know it's a boy?"
Molly shrugged. "I just do, that's all."
Two Coats tried again. "Look, you don't have to go through with this, you know. There's still time."
"Don't start that again," Molly flared. "I won't, and that's flat. I'm not getting rid of him. That's a crime against God. What I've got inside me is the gift of life."
"A gift from a party lush, is more like it," Two Coats said with studied brutality. "Don't ruin your life for something that wasn't your fault."
Two enormous tears welled up in Molly's lustrous green eyes. Angrily she brushed them away, and stood up.
Two Coats was panic-stricken.
"Don't go near the bathroom," he yelled. Then he suddenly remembered.
"You're dead," he accused.
Molly's mouth formed a startled O. Mulligan clenched his eyes tight shut like a child shutting out the Bogey Man. When he opened them Molly was gone.
Shakily, he decided to make himself some strong, sweet coffee. He went over to the sink and filled the kettle. Waiting for it to boil, his mind flipped back to the party at which Molly had been raped. Suddenly it had become extremely important to him that he remember it, but his bruised mind couldn't conjure up the details let alone tell him why he wanted to know. A nameless dread swept over Mulligan and he found himself drowning in it like a swimmer suddenly sucked under by a rip tide; his temples pounded so hard he couldn't see properly. He rocked back and forth over the sink, holding his head with both hands, trying to think back to how it had all started.
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Also
by Terry Houston
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The Wounded Stone |
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
The rights of Terry Houston to be identified as the author have been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and patents act 1988
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