A Voss and Pike Casefile
Section 11: The Folk Devil
Halloran's grin thinned. He swivelled the second screen towards you. A photograph: five young men in hoods under the lamp outside the Lantern, lit like a poster for a film nobody would want to see. Timestamp 8.40 pm. The proofs of the 9 pm edition beside it: MENACE AT THE LANTERN. Printed before anything had happened.
"You wrote the headline," said Jonah slowly, "before the murder."
"I wrote it before the gala." Halloran shrugged. "We paid the boys fifty quid a head to look menacing under the canopy for the photographer, eight till nine. They're good at it. They've had practice being looked at that way."
The Sentinel hadn't reported a threat. It had manufactured one. A ready-made folk devil, so the city would know exactly where to point its fear tomorrow morning.
"They were in your photographer's frame from 8.40 to 9.05," you said. "So they weren't in the corridor at the interval."
Halloran said nothing. Which was a kind of yes.
Halloran's paper paid Kez Doyle's crew £50 each to loiter menacingly outside the Lantern from 8 till 9 pm. A pre-printed "MENACE AT THE LANTERN" front page proves the press manufactured a folk devil. The photograph puts the crew in front of a camera when the water was tampered with.