Paradise City (41 page)

‘Tricky,’ Dave said. ‘But we can’t go there legally. We don’t have on-the-record confirmation.’

Cathy nodded.

‘Perhaps Esme could work on that,’ she suggested, twiddling her pen in what was intended to be a nonchalant manner, and the two of them looked over and Esme’s heart sank. She didn’t relish the prospect of calling up a man who had potentially just been informed his daughter had been horrifically murdered and asking if he’d like to comment on media speculation over her identity. Especially not a man who had been kind to her, professionally speaking; a man with whom she felt a kind of empathy.

She couldn’t admit this to her colleagues, and especially not to Dave, but she had a connection with Howard Pink. Perhaps she flatters herself to believe that she understands him, but there is something in his manner that speaks to her.

When she looks at Sir Howard now, Esme no longer sees him as a boorish, brash millionaire whose primary concern is the bottom-line. She had viewed him like that before, when her knowledge of him was based on newspaper articles and TV appearances and disobliging profile pieces written by journalists bitter they hadn’t got an interview. But now they had met, Esme saw his behaviour as a necessary carapace: a constructed defence against a world he expected to be hostile. After the disappearance of his father, the death of his mother, the loss of his daughter and the breakdown of his first marriage, Sir Howard had invented his own narrative to replace the crueller one fate had dealt him. And there was no better disguise, Esme realised, than obscene amounts of money. A personal fortune dazzles even the most curious bystander. It deflects any questions. Because how could someone be unhappy when they were so rich? What gave him the right to grieve?

‘Happy to,’ she said to Dave, not meaning it. She’d put in a call to Rupert and hope that it was his voicemail so she could leave a message. Cathy smiled at her.

‘Thanks, Esme,’ she said patronisingly. ‘I’ll give you an add-rep if you get anything.’

Esme pretended to smile. An add-rep was an additional reporter credit, stuck in italics at the end of a piece so that no one could see it. Cathy had said it on purpose. She knew how the older woman’s mind worked, how territorial she was. Cathy defended her bylines in much the same way as sixteenth-century merchants protected their treasures by building fortified castles against pirate invasions. And if she had a chance to pull rank while doing so, then so much the better.

Cathy was going to be completely insufferable now. The editor had already sent her a herogram over email. Esme wouldn’t normally have minded so much or, at least, she would have done a better job of pretending not to mind – but she felt she had ownership over the Howard Pink story and was frustrated not to have been one step ahead of her colleague. And, although she would never own up to this in the newsroom, there was a part of her that felt sad. She liked Sir Howard. She tried not to let on to the others. They would be derisive. Sir Howard wasn’t the usual cuddly parent of a missing child, wheeled out to elicit sympathy every few years or so. As a reporter, she knew, you were expected only to have so much humanity but no more. If you felt too much, it would be the undoing of you.

But in the end, she never had to make the call to Sir Howard because events overtook them. The news that it is indeed Ada Pink’s body under the flower bed in SW18 drops on the wires just as Esme is getting ready to go for a Friday night drink with Sanjay at the Elephant and Castle. When it happens, Dave is in his element. He thrives under pressure and treats a breaking news story as if it were a crucial military campaign.

Esme, who had been in the process of gathering up her coat and bag, sits back down again and watches as Dave comes striding out of his office in his shirtsleeves, barking out orders about word counts and drop intros and getting the fucking graphics department to pull their fucking finger out. In this kind of situation, his brain operates on a higher frequency than anyone else’s.

It’s not that he is callous, exactly; it’s just that he sees the story in everything. He knows tragedy makes good copy. When, a couple of weeks ago, Prince Philip had been taken into hospital for a bladder infection, Dave had walked around with a flicker of a smile on his face for days and pulled up the pre-prepared obituary with what could only be described as glee. He was genuinely disappointed when the Prince pulled through.

Esme has witnessed him in full flow before. He can visualise, in his mind’s eye, the way the pages should be laid out. He knows instinctively which rent-a-quotes he should call, what size a headline should be and which photo to use. He relishes the spirit of inventiveness that a tight deadline gives him. He is a human adrenalin pump, capable of injecting a surge of energy into anyone who comes within a 5 metre radius. When a big story breaks, Dave circles the office with his voice raised to just below shouting level. Occasionally he’ll give a word of encouragement as he passes your desk. Sometimes, he will launch into a non-specific bollocking just to keep the pace up. Mostly, he’ll give a reporter a yellow Post-it note onto which he’s scribbled a single word which is intended to get them thinking along certain lines. These notes are always accompanied by a question mark, although whether interrogative or gently querying, Esme is never entirely sure.

He is walking towards Esme’s desk now, bearing down on her with a furious look on his face.

‘Esme,’ he says and she knows that’s a bad sign because he hardly ever uses her full name. ‘Where did you get to with speaking to Howard Pink?’

‘I put in a phone call to Rup –’

‘You put in a fucking phone call? Great. Well done. Gold fucking star. And am I right in thinking that that phone call delivered precisely the square root of fuck all?’

Esme nods.

‘Jesus H. Christ.’

He sweeps his hair back with his hands. Esme chews her lip. She lifts the phone, props it under her ear and says in what she hopes is a conscientious fashion, ‘I’ll follow up now.’

Dave looks at her. His skin is flushed and he has dry, red patches at the corners of his mouth. There is a pause and Esme can see him weighing up whether to carry on being angry or not, just to make a point. He decides to be lenient.

‘Good,’ he says finally and then he turns his attention to Sanjay who looks like a terrified squirrel and says yes to everything Dave asks.

She catches sight of the TV on the far wall. A blonde anchorwoman on
Sky News
is doing a two-way with a man in a raincoat at the end of Lebanon Gardens. The rolling news ticker across the bottom of the screen flashes up with ‘Breaking’. Then it says that Alan Clithero, the prime suspect in the murder of Ada Pink, has been arrested in Scotland. A still photograph of Clithero comes up. It is the one all the papers have been using for days, of him wearing a green tracksuit top and smiling stupidly, a gap between his two front teeth, a sprig of tinsel hanging from a window in the background.

‘Dave,’ Esme says. At first he doesn’t hear her so she has to stand up and tap him on the sleeve. ‘Dave,’ she says again.

‘What?’

She points at the TV. ‘They’ve arrested him.’

In an instant, the clatter of the newsroom dies down. Several reporters stand to watch the unfolding events on screen. Someone finds a remote control and turns up the volume so the anchorwoman’s voice booms out.

‘. . . that he was hiding out in a remote part of the Highlands, do you have any more detail on that, Gavin?’

There is a time delay as Gavin, his hair ruffled by a gust of wind, raises one finger to press in his earpiece and replies, ‘No, not as yet, Anna. We’ll get you more news on that as and when we have it. What we can tell you is that Sir Howard and his ex-wife, the former Lady Pink, have been informed and we have been told there will be a statement from them later this evening.’

The screen cuts away to show library footage from a few days earlier of Sir Howard and a petite woman with tidily bobbed hair going into a modern-build terraced house, surrounded by police. The woman has her head down and is holding a scrunched-up tissue to her nose. The police are trying to shelter them as best they can, lifting their arms so that the cameras don’t get a clear shot. But then, just before he walks through the front door of Number 12 Lebanon Gardens, Sir Howard turns back and the screen freezes on a perfect still of his face. Esme keeps watching. He seems to be staring directly at her and it is a look Esme recognises.

At first, she cannot place it. But the more she stares, the more familiar it becomes. And then she remembers. A hospital corridor. Dark outside. The smell of disinfectant and boiled cabbage. Sitting on a hard chair, feeling her skirt bunched up with sweat beneath her thighs. Holding her brother’s hand because Robbie was tired and starting to grizzle and she didn’t want him to make a scene. Footsteps squeaking. Wheeled trolleys. A distant moan. Light snoring. The rattle of a curtain being drawn around metal rails. A nurse answering a phone call and smiling at them as she spoke. A big purple tin of Quality Street chocolates on the counter.

And at the same time, a vision of her mother walking towards them. She was walking slowly and she was covering her mouth with her hand, trying to stifle the sobs because she didn’t want to scare the children and she couldn’t lose control of herself, not now, not when she had to keep a grip on things for their sake.

Esme remembers her mother kneeling down on the floor in front of them and thinking how odd it was to see her do that, how she was usually so particular about the right way to behave. She didn’t even wipe the floor first, Esme thought. She could be picking up all sorts of germs.

And there was that look, the same look that she sees now on Sir Howard’s face. Despair greeted with numb recognition.

It is the look Esme’s mother has on her face when she tells them their father is dead.

In the newsroom, the typing resumes and the television is muted again. Esme sits and tries to focus on the trail of words lengthening across her computer screen. But she feels faint and has to rest her head on her arms. Bile rises in her throat and she thinks she is going to be sick. She dashes to the toilet, letting the door slam behind her. When she kneels on the tile floor with her head over the bowl, nothing comes out and she retches drily instead.

She thinks of Ada Pink, of the single reproduced photograph of her used over and over again through the years depicting her delicate face, her sad eyes, the dip below each cheekbone and she can’t help but let her mind wander to imagine Ada in the hands of that grinning psychopath, in a state of frenzied terror, being subjected to the worst kind of pain one human being can inflict on another.

She thinks of her corpse being buried, of Ada’s pretty features becoming blurred and indistinct underneath scattered lumps of soil until they gradually disappear altogether and then this picture is superimposed by the memory of Sir Howard’s face as he walked into that house and also by the recollection of her mother telling Esme her father had died and then, without meaning to, she thinks of her father and for the first time in years, Esme can see his face, the heavy-lidded eyes, the craggy outline of his jaw, the long strip of each sideburn carefully delineated as if lit up from behind like an X-ray. She shuts her eyes tightly, unwilling to let go of this precious scrap of memory.

There is a loud knock.

‘Esme, are you OK?’ It’s Sanjay.

She unlocks the cubicle door.

‘I was worried about you.’ Sanjay crouches down and hands her a cold can of Coke. ‘Got you this. Thought your blood sugars might be low.’

She accepts the can gratefully and presses the metallic coolness to her neck before opening it. When she takes a sip, the synthetic sweetness hits the back of her tongue and she senses an instant release of energy. She realises she hasn’t eaten since breakfast.

‘Thanks, Sanj.’

He shifts into a sitting position, sliding down onto the floor, with his back resting against the paper towel bin and his legs stretched out in front of him. He appears to be magnificently unconcerned about being in the ladies’ loos.

‘It’s awful, isn’t it, when you stop and think?’ he says. ‘All these years . . .’

She doesn’t reply. He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes with his knuckles.

‘Don’t be too hard on yourself,’ Sanjay continues. ‘Sometimes it’s good to let things get to you. It means you’re human. It means you care.’

He holds out his hand. She lets him take hers and he squeezes it gently before letting it drop.

‘Thanks,’ she says again, her voice croaky.

‘Don’t mention it’ Sanjay says, brushing down his trousers and pushing himself into a standing position. And then, ‘Best get to it.’

They work into the night. Esme puts in another call to Rupert who – as expected – doesn’t answer, so she follows up with a carefully worded email, describing how sensitively any piece would be handled and offering him quote approval (something she rarely did, but needs must). In the meantime, Dave asks her to go through her transcript from the Howard Pink interview and cull any quotes about his daughter that they hadn’t already used.

‘We can cobble something together,’ he says, standing behind her desk as she types so that she can sense his presence, the bristle of his physicality, the barely constrained enthusiasm in his words. News is his drug, Sanjay had once told her when she first joined, before going on to explain that, for Dave, it was like smoking crack: there’s a big hit at first, then you end up a glassy-eyed addict scrabbling for even bigger highs. Before you know it, you’re lusting after tragedy like a rubber-necker on a motorway – more accidents, more earthquakes, more wars, anything so that you can be first, get the scoop, print it better than anyone else. And then, once Sunday comes and the paper is on the news-stands, there’s the inevitable comedown. Thinking about it now, Esme wonders if that’s why Dave has affairs: he needs the chaos. It is only when he is on the verge of losing control that he feels truly in his element.