The Talion Code by Catriona King

Author:Catriona King [King, Catriona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hamilton-Crean Publishing
Published: 2016-04-19T22:00:00+00:00

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Royal Avenue, Belfast. 10.30 a.m.

Liam wasn’t sure what he’d expected The Belfast Mirror’s Royal Avenue offices to look like. If he’d given them any thought at all before he’d arrived, it would probably have been that they would have looked exactly like The Chronicle’s; the newspaper where Davy’s fiancée was News Editor. A four storey Victorian building with stone staircases and metal-grilled lifts, leading to a newsroom filled with towers of paper just waiting to be toppled by a breeze. A breeze that would never be admitted into the sash-windowed, wooden-floored room that smelt of tobacco, even though smoking had been banned eight years before.

As The Chronicle’s was the only newspaper office he’d ever been in, in his mind that was how they should all look now, in the same way that all police stations were built of grey or red brick and all interview rooms were small and musty with faulty neon lights. It was the traditional way of things and Liam was a man of tradition. So it was with some disgruntlement that he climbed out of his car and found himself standing in front of a modern glass walled building, and even more disgruntlement as he gazed up at its twenty storey façade.

Perhaps the address should have hinted at its glossiness; after all, rents in Royal Avenue weren’t cheap (the landlords took the ‘Royal’ a little too seriously) so only those with money could afford the address. But still, he’d expected something older, lower, more in keeping with Belfast’s past. This building looked like it was more suited to Manhattan than a small city in Europe.

He parked his disgruntlement along with his car and walked through the building’s street level front door, adding another annoyance to his list. Newspaper buildings should be like libraries, meaning that they should all be like Belfast’s Central Library and have steps up to the front. Street level made him feel like he was entering a shop. No, there was modern and there was just ripping the ass out of it, and this was a step, or rather a lack of steps, too far.

By the time the detective had reached the reception desk, where a white-toothed, peroxide blonde woman came perilously close to telling him to ‘have a nice day’, his feelings had altered to despair. He could have been in any glossy building in any city in the world; nowhere had any character any more. It was in that frame of mind that he entered and exited the high speed lift, practically stumbling out of it on the eighteenth floor. Even the thought of how high he was made him nauseous, he was a man who liked to keep his feet firmly on the ground. The combination of nausea and annoyance showed in his sharp shove against The Belfast Mirror’s doors and the equally grumpy thump of his fist on the first desk he encountered, followed by his shouted.

“Where can I find P. Lynch?”

The man at the desk gazed up at

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