Deadline by Bill Knox

Author:Bill Knox [Knox, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Before the days of the telephone, reporters had to make all their inquiries by personal visit, or, on occasion, written correspondence.

Their stories, if important enough, made their way back to the offices by telegraph, or even, on occasion, by carrier pigeon.

As far as the View office was concerned, however, the latter method went out of favour one Saturday afternoon when a pigeon, carrying the second-half report and final score of the main Scottish League football match of the day, being played at Hampden, only a few miles away, refused to land on the office dovecot.

Despite all coaxing, it fluttered and hopped from window ledge to window ledge, holding up the paper’s production for nearly three-quarters of an hour before it decided that it would, after all, enter the pigeon loft.

But the telephone is now the all-important news-gathering instrument. Major happenings have been described by men who at the time were more than 300 miles away from the spot concerned, but who were prepared to sit with an opened telephone directory and pass call after call after call until they obtained the information they desired.

To gather the material for his proposed article on new precautions being taken by business firms, Renfield sat down at his desk with a cup of tea, a directory, and a packet of cigarettes. Then he began his phone bombardment.

Mr False Face, he discovered, had by stealing the Swivney payroll awakened several firms to the weaknesses of their own security measures in a way that succeeded where all the lectures read to the public over the years by successive Chief Constables had failed.

‘We’re changing things right away, old boy,’ the manager of one large works assured him. ‘You’ll hardly believe it—and, of course. I’m sure you won’t mention our name, bad publicity and all that—but we found that the payroll for this factory was actually collected from the bank each week by two of the typists, who walked there and back. Shocking! You’ll appreciate I can’t tell you what we are doing now—but we are taking no more chances like that!’

An insurance company had cause to be grateful for another reason. Business was booming for a combined policy in which they specialised, covering money, both on the move and kept overnight in offices, against the risk of theft.

The whole shaped nicely into a one-thousand-word article which he patiently shaped and polished most of that Saturday afternoon, ignoring the conditions around him as the Saturday night sports paper was produced in miraculous fashion from madhouse activity.

He finished his duty at five o’clock, ducked into a nearby restaurant for a meal, then, lacking a date with Jean, who was visiting a girlfriend, went along to the Gaumont and sat through a rip-roaring Technicolor Western.

After the usual catalogue of thrills, the cowboy drama reached the evergreen climax. The chief goodie chased the chief baddie, the latter hiding behind a rock to shoot down the hero.

But, naturally, the gun was empty, and in the fist-fight which followed—goodies never shoot unarmed men—the baddie naturally fell over a cliff.

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