Cover Story - 5

The glittering skyscrapers of Castlefield juxtaposed against the red brick of old Victoriana Manchester looked like science fiction to Bel, CGI trickery. In the city’s building boom of the twenty-first century, spaceships had landed behind railway arches and viaducts. Her cab swept past this city centre scenery, then tightly packed terraces and further out, onto dual carriageways and into the suburbs. It was three miles to Southern Cemetery in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, and Bel welcomed the chance to collect more geographical reference points.

Her youthful visits to Manchester were to nightclubs, and not heavy on drinking in the landscape.

Bel had prepared a lie about how she needed photographs for an art project if the driver asked her if she was visiting the deceased, but he seemed more interested in chatting on his hands-free in Urdu than any intention of his passenger’s. She idly wondered if he’d be able to give a decent description of her if she was about to disappear.

Bel phone scrolled the intriguing email exchange that had begun earlier in the week. It was downright prime-time thriller stuff and she’d go so far as to say it gave her The Shiver. If you didn’t recognise The Shiver, you shouldn’t be in her profession, in her opinion. The Shiver was the rare, delicious frisson that you might’ve stumbled on something large and meaningful. Often The Shiver didn’t pay off, but you needed to be alert to the possibility for the few times that it did. You maybe only got two or three genuinely bombshell leads in a career, if you were lucky.

In fact, recognising The Shiver went deeper than bylines and exclusives. It connected you to the important truth that the world was always interesting, endlessly exciting, and all kinds of ripe, nefarious shit was afoot beyond the dull workaday veneer of energy bills, queues in Boots and traffic jams at rush hour. The job was about facts, truth and verifiable reality – but it could still provide exhilarating, pacy narrative. Bel had begun her podcast to prove this. She lived in hope of a New Yorker- style long read that merited a non-fiction book and got adapted for film. Social responsibility was her other concern, yes, but oh God, the heady allure of a proper yarn.

Bel people-watched Friday afternoons flashing past the car window: a young woman in patterned leggings on a home-working jog, phone Velcro-strapped to upper arm, shoals of kids in sweaty, half-unbuttoned school uniforms giddy with escaping for the weekend. Men in short sleeves at picnic tables outside pubs. Two middle-aged women carrying a canvas holdall, one handle each, into a house with a SOLD sign outside it.

If life wasn’t a series of stories and surprises for everyone, how many people were going to meet the love of their life tonight? Or alternatively, make torturous small talk with two male colleagues over pierogi, one of whom didn’t want to be there.

But then Bel had always had a vivid, runaway imagination, her mother said. In the last year that observation had changed from charming to an indictment.

The email sender had scrambled his address, so it arrived without any clues to his identity beyond the moniker ‘Grendel 505.’ Wasn’t Grendel a monster in Beowulf ? Bel thought. Encouraging.

Grendel 505

I might have a story for you. It’s big and scandalous, and it might be very hard to prove. It could also lose me my job and see me exiled from what we can laughably call high society in this city, so forgive the cloak-and-dagger but I’m not going to give you my name for now.

Bel

Hard to prove is often my remit. Can you give me more details?

Grendel 505

It involves a prominent Manchester individual sleeping with their staff. I know politicians being extra-marital cheats isn’t a huge shock, but there’s details here that make this really quite torrid. And I do know for certain what I’m talking about, given my proximity to said individual. Best to tell you in person. Could you get to Southern Cemetery at 3 on Friday?

Bel

I could, but can I ask why you want to meet in a graveyard?

Grendel 505

I need an outdoor location where we can’t be overheard or recorded, or more importantly, seen together or recognised, and parks have too many people in them at this time of year. I know it’s a faff of a distance, but it also seems entirely safe in a way I can’t think anywhere else is.

Bel

OK! How will I know who you are?

Grendel 505

I’ll be the only balding fifty-year-old man lurking around notable people’s graves on a weekday afternoon, with a look of nervous anticipation?

Bel

Fair

Grendel 505

In case of any doubt as to identity, I’ll wait by Jerome Caminada’s headstone, which seems fitting . (Manchester’s Sherlock Holmes of the 1800s, if you haven’t heard of him.)

Bel

I hadn’t heard of Jerome, I’m from York, please forgive me! See you there.

If Grendel 505 was a psychopath, he was of the articulate and persuasive variety.

She was cautiously hopeful, foregrounding caution before hope. If he wasn’t an active danger, Bel was still prepared for Grendel 505 to tell her – in the same tone you might say you didn’t like the colours of the latest public transport livery – that the Government were using air fryers as listening devices. For there to be a needle-scratch moment where she realised she was in a garden of the dead with a headbanger.

One of the first rules of journalism was ‘anyone might be lying about anything, and for no reason. Trust nobody until they’ve earned it.’

Bel’s mentor and hero wasn’t anyone she’d worked with, it was her late Aunt Tamara who’d blazed a trail through the tabloids in the fag-smoke-wreathed 1970s and 80s, going from newsroom librarian to reporter and sub-editor. She’d no children of her own and had seen something in Bel, regaling her with inappropriate tales of Fleet Street from a young age.

As per established safety protocol, Bel had forwarded the email chain to Shilpa with ‘work! NFS’ (not for sharing) and she’d made sure Share My Location and Find My iPhone were active, too. It was daylight, it was a public place, there was a digital paper trail.

‘Why don’t you just tell people you work with where you’re going?’ Shilpa said.

‘Because they’ll nick your story,’ Bel said. ‘I’ve told you this. I don’t discuss sensitive stories with Aaron. I use code words in our Teams meetings that are only understood by me and editor Toby. We all use Signal cos it can’t be hacked. Paranoia reigns. But better paranoid than scooped.’

‘ Journalists!’