Union Jack. V. McDermid L.

One of the reasons she’d left Britain was because she’d had one too many close encounters with police interviewing techniques. Because her investigative journalism had once poked the authorities in the eye with a sharp stick, it had become clear to her that she was always going to be top of the list when the command came to ‘round up the usual suspects’. It wasn’t a role she relished. Moving to California might have been a leap into the dark, but at least the cops wouldn’t be breathing down her neck every time something criminal happened within a mile of her.

      Their relationship had only just begun to find its rhythm and shape when Sophie had been offered the sort of opportunity that comes along only a couple of times in a consultant gynaecologist’s career. A leading hospital in San Francisco was head-hunting an experienced team to staff a new unit, and Sophie’s work in Glasgow with HIV positive mothers-to-be made her the ideal choice. She had leaped at the chance and Lindsay, only too glad to escape the bitter memories Glasgow now held for her, had chosen to trust enough to go too.

      They’d moved into a wood-framed house above the beach, an hour’s drive from the city, with a view of the Pacific that made Lindsay feel instantly at home. The best times in her life had been lived by the sea. First, growing up in a small Scottish village on the Atlantic coast. Later, learning to be a journalist in the cosy picture-postcard world of Cornwall. And later still, escaping from the security services’ awkward questions and restoring herself to sanity in a humble and repetitive daily routine on the Adriatic coast. For the first few weeks in America, she’d been happy to put her mind on hold again while she sanded and sealed floors, stripped and painted woodwork and walls, and learned the basics of surfing. She’d hardly even begun to get to know San Francisco in all its glorious charm. Then suddenly, she’d woken one morning, alert and restless, needing to find something that would give her the same fulfilment that Sophie found in her harrowing role at the hospital.

      Strangely, she found it in passing on the very skills she’d declared redundant in herself. Although she knew she could never again be a working journalist, Lindsay had never doubted her abilities. Her background in mainstream newspaper journalism coupled with her single foray into enemy territory, treading on the toes of the security services, made her the ideal choice for the job she landed as a university lecturer in journalism and media studies. Although she’d been apprehensive about moving into the world of higher education, it had been less of a shock to the system than she had anticipated. University life in California couldn’t have been more different from the memories of her own student days at Oxford. Somehow, Lindsay couldn’t imagine her former tutors in Bermuda shorts, playing volleyball at a Sunday afternoon beach barbecue.

      The one fly in the ointment was the pressure to pile up qualifications and publications. Publish or be damned was an expression that could have been coined for her new world instead of her old one, Lindsay often thought. But when she’d chosen to write a doctoral thesis researching women’s roles in the trade union movement, she hadn’t expected it to be a straight road back to a police interrogation.

      Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the door opening. Lindsay’s eyes snapped open and focused on the woman who had just walked in. She was tall to start with, but the three-inch stilettos she had chosen put her near six feet. Her hair was short and neat, emphasising the kind of bone structure that has generated the fashion industry’s demand for striking black models. Her skin was the colour of copper beech leaves in summer. Lindsay took in a pair of sharply tailored trousers in hounds-tooth check, a black matador jacket and a spotless white blouse open at the neck. Lindsay jumped to her feet. ‘You must be my solicitor,’ she said as the woman moved towards her.

      The solicitor shook her hand and perched on the edge of the bed. ‘Right. I’m Jennifer Okido,’ she said.

      Lindsay shuddered at the thought of how she must appear to this woman who couldn’t have looked less like she’d been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night. ‘Lindsay Gordon,’ she said. ‘Sorry you had to be called out so early.’

      ‘It’s no problem, Ms Gordon. I’m used to it. There aren’t many firms in the city who do criminal work any longer, thanks to the Legal Aid changes. We’re the largest, and I’m the senior criminal partner. By the way, I’m sorry about this, but we’ll have to talk in here. Since the Strangeways riots, our police stations are so overcrowded with remand prisoners that there are no more secure interview rooms. They’ve all become holding cells. Now, if I can just sort out some details?’ She took a pad from her briefcase and moved swiftly through the formalities. ‘So what brings you back to Britain?’ the solicitor asked.

      Lindsay ran a hand through her hair and pulled a wry face. ‘I’m beginning to wonder myself,’ she said. ‘My doctoral thesis is a study of how women have worked within the trade union movement to achieve changes in media attitudes towards them. That’s why I came back for the Amalgamated Media Workers’ Union’s first annual conference. Years ago I used to be active in the Journalists’ Union, which has been swallowed up by the new union, and I needed to talk to people who were involved in the equality struggles of the seventies and eighties. I thought that coming to the conference would be a good way of catching several of them in the same place.’

      Jennifer nodded as she jotted notes with a shiny silver fountain pen. ‘And you arrived here when?’

      Lindsay closed her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose. ‘Monday afternoon,’ she said.

      The foyer of Wilberforce Hall was buzzing. But the focus of attention wasn’t the long trestle table where arriving delegates were registered and supplied with their conference packs. It was the photocopied A4 sheets that the earlier arrivals were waving under the noses of their friends and acquaintances as soon as they put their noses across the threshold. As Lindsay joined the queue, the pony-tailed young man behind her was accosted by a woman in her mid-forties.

      ‘Have you seen this, Liam?’ the woman demanded in a harsh Ulster accent. ‘It’s outrageous! Look what they’re saying about Fearghal O’Donovan!’

      Lindsay sneaked a look over the young man’s shoulder as he took the brandished sheet of paper. She read:

       Conference Chronicle The Paper Off The Record

      When Irish Ayes Are Lying?

      Some of us were more than slightly gobsmacked at the turn-out in the election for an assistant general secretary (Ireland) last month. For those of us more familiar with the depressingly low numbers of members who normally vote in elections for fulltime officials, seeing returns of sixty-two per cent was pretty astonishing. And a staggering eighty-nine per cent of them voted for former despatch worker Fearghal O’Donovan.

      The reason for O’Donovan’s phenomenal success, however, has more to do with chicanery than popularity. O’Donovan has always performed better in secret ballots than in workplace shows of hands.

      The reason for this is that in Irish secret ballots, the ballot papers never actually reach the voters, particularly in the offices of more remote local papers where there is traditionally a low or nonexistent turn-out in union elections.

      And in the major newspaper offices where the forms are actually handed out, Fearghal’s cohorts simply make sure they collect up any unused forms, then put the crosses in Fearghal’s box.

      What’s in it for them? Well, guess who controls all the highly-paid casual Saturday night-shifts at the Sunday Sentinel? None other than Dermot O’Donovan, brother of the more famous Fearghal.

      Of course, Fearghal will deny Conference Chronicle’s claim. Maybe it’s time someone went through the ballot papers and compared how many were filled in with the identical pen and the identical cross.

      Lindsay reached the end of the piece ahead of the young man. She couldn’t keep a smile from her lips. There were a lot of journalists who’d be walking round with sanctimonious smirks on their