Quite Ugly One Morning by Christopher Brookmyre

had an undisclosed interest in the company concerned.
    ‘Thought I was Mr fucking Green Hero. Expose the polluters, local authority throws out proposal, land stays a park. I could see it all. Christmas card from Jonathon Porritt, environmental journalist of the year award and probably the fucking Nobel prize thrown in.
    ‘And it worked. The planning department guy resigned, the plan got junked. But the land didn’t stay a park. It was sold instead to Woodford’s, a major housebuilder whose proposals were considered more palatable by the locals, still worrying over what might have been. They were building a whole load of yuppie flats with a tiny new swing-park thrown in to sweeten the neighbourhood residents.
    ‘I did some checking, looking for another link between the authority and this time Woodford’s. Instead I found that the chairman of Woodford’s was a close business associate of my newspaper’s proprietor and owned a sizable share of the controlling media group.
    ‘I checked back on all of my big splashes, and every timeI had buried someone, there was an anonymous winner, someone in the background quietly doing very nicely thank you from the fall-out from my story. In most cases I could establish the link with the proprietor, but where I couldn’t it was even more interesting, as clearly no one else knew of a connection between these figures.’
    ‘And what did you do with what you found?’
    ‘Nothing, at first. I kept it all quiet and then waited for my next major assignment. Then instead of investigating what I was supposed to, I sought out the intended beneficiaries and dug some dirt on them instead. I filed the story and appended my resignation to the end of it, then went to the pub for a couple of pints.
    ‘When I got home I found my flat burgled. The place had been torn apart, and every computer disk, every file, every folder, every notepad taken. In fact, they even gutted the fucking computer itself.
    ‘I called the police immediately, but as soon as I had put the phone back down I was struck by a paranoid but understandable thought. Anyone organised enough to break in and steal all my research as quickly as that would not be beyond stitching me up as well, and an old favourite was planting class-A drugs then tipping off the police. Except I had called the police for them.’
    ‘Setting your own time-bomb.’
    ‘Well, let’s just say it was the world’s fastest and most high-stakes game of hunt-the-thimble. Colombian dry white, recent vintage, big package, stuffed out of sight underneath my reservoir water tank. It was a lot of stuff – I took it as a back-handed compliment that the proprietor was shelling out so much to get me sent down.’
    ‘What did you do with it?’
    ‘Climbed up on to the roof of the building with it and put it under a bird’s nest. It’s probably still there.’
    ‘And that’s why you left London?’
    ‘Not entirely. My decision was made easier when the cops arrived. It wasn’t some Operation Bumble Bee soco and a flatfoot. Half-a-dozen beat bobbies and two trenchcoats. And they didn’t do a convincing impression of investigating a burglary. One of the trenchcoats made a B-line for the watertank, a rather idiosyncratic place to start any new investigation, I’m sure you’ll agree.’

    Sarah pretended to dither, then nodded, mock-reluctantly.
    ‘He rammed his hand under the tank without even looking, and got a disappointing surprise.’
    ‘No drugs.’
    ‘Well, partly that, and partly that when he rapidly brought his hand out there was a mousetrap attached to three of his fingers.
    ‘He told me my card was marked, but we both knew I’d foxed them that time. However, I wasn’t waiting about for the rematch if the bad guys had bent cops on their team.
    ‘I made a call to an ex-colleague in LA who had once approached me about doing a stint out there as a crime reporter, giving an outsider’s perspective on the kinds of atrocities Angelinos had come to