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‘But why don’t I do a quick call-round of the newspaper editors and ask them to refrain from using it? They’ll be only too willing to play ball if it means they get more access.’
‘I don’t want to give more access, Rupe.’
Rupert tittered ‘Yes, but they don’t need to know that, do they? Leave it with me, Howard.’
Rupert had done his ring-round and, for a few weeks, the photograph had retreated from view like an unsightly child. But then, yesterday, there it was again: slap bang in the middle of a page in the Sunday Tribune, accompanying an article based on the wafer-thin scientific premise that life is kinder to optimists. The caption read: ‘Despite personal unhappiness, the self-made millionaire Sir Howard Pink has always looked on the brighter side.’
He’s sick of everyone assuming they know him. He’s sick of the caricature. He fears he’ll never be taken seriously. The BBC had never asked him back, had they? Instead, any time they needed a talking head, they got that preening old buffer with the luxuriant white hair who ran the Association of British Retail and who wouldn’t know what good sense was if it painted itself purple and jumped on his nose. Wanker.
‘They can’t disassociate you now from what happened with Ada,’ Rupert had told him once, choosing his words carefully. ‘They see the tragic backstory, not the business acumen.’
‘The tragic backstory’. Those had been his exact words.
Howard feels anger rising in his gut. He goes to the window, draws back the curtain and peers out at London’s grubby weekday glamour, looking for something to soothe his nascent agitation. A black trickle of taxicabs is beetling its way to the hotel entrance like a spreading trail of petrol. From his vantage point, Howard can make out the shiny hardness of their bonnets, the lucent yellow of each ‘For Hire’ sign reflected in the dark pool of the paintwork. Shifting his gaze along the road, he sees a young woman in high heels and a flapping mackintosh, belt knotted at the back, a copy of the Evening Standard peeking out of her handbag. She is holding a lit cigarette between two fingers and a café-chain cardboard cup of coffee in the other hand and she is walking so quickly that the coffee keeps spilling over the aperture in the plastic lid and splashing onto the checked lining of her coat. He wonders if she’ll notice soon, or if it will only be later, when she takes off her coat and is assailed by the musty smell of stale, too-sweet coffee, that she will realise. He wishes he could follow her to find out. He likes to know how a story ends.
The woman carries on walking: a brisk tick-tacking on the paving stones that echoes then fades. Up above her, a metal criss-cross of scaffolding has been erected to cover the façade of the mansion block opposite, each slotted-in pole the precise pigeon-grey of the sky beyond, each brick the damp russet colour that Howard has come to associate uniquely with his city. A builder in a hard hat and a reflective vest sends a formless shout into the street below.
Howard wishes they’d stop tampering with everything. There was so much building going on in London these days. Lumbering mechanical cranes pierced the skyline at regular intervals. Hoardings patterned with the meaningless insignia of redevelopment had cropped up everywhere. Streets were shut down, traffic diverted, bridges closed, all in the name of a frantic progress, an endless quest for more things that were shiny and new and glittering, when increasingly all Howard lusts after is the past, packaged up, preserved and honoured. Nice, historical buildings that didn’t demand attention, designed to a manageable scale so that everyone knew what they were getting.
He lets the curtain fall and then reminds himself he is not here to get annoyed by modern architecture. These monthly nights in this Mayfair hotel are meant to be his meditation space, a few hours’ holiday from himself and his memories. Only Rupert, Claudia and Tracy, his PA, know about them. Everyone else is told he’s away on business. He tells himself he must make the most of it before going back to normality tomorrow morning.
He takes slower breaths. He pushes back his shoulder blades and stretches his arms. He tries counting to ten but only gets to three before he remembers the Chablis.
Howard takes the bottle out of the minibar, unscrews the top and pours himself a healthy measure. The glass frosts up satisfyingly. Perfect temperature. A viticulturist (there are such things) once told him he shouldn’t over-refrigerate white wines. Howard repeated this to anyone he thought might be impressed and sometimes sent back cold wine at restaurants just to show he couldn’t be made a fool of. In the privacy of these four walls, however, he felt at liberty to indulge his own secret taste.
Or lack of it, as the case may be.
There is a knock on the door.
‘Housekeeping,’ comes a disembodied voice from the other side of the lustrous wood laminate.
Howard looks at the bedside clock. He is shocked to see it is already 6 p.m. and the maid is coming to do the pre-dinner turn-down. He opens the door. A black face smiles at him broadly.
‘I can come back later if you like,’ the woman says, her voice lightly accented. Howard takes in the smoothness of her skin, taught over high cheekbones, and the compactness of her diminutive frame, clad in a fitted black blouse and black trousers. She is carrying a moulded plastic basket, filled with cleaning products and mini-packets of shortbread.
‘No, no,’ he replies, loosening the belt of his robe ever so slightly. ‘Come on in.’ He holds the door with his arm so that the maid has to bend under to walk through. She giggles as she does so. Howard is encouraged.
The maid checks the tea tray and replaces a sachet of hot chocolate, then goes into the bedroom with a quick economy of movement. When Howard follows, he sees she is piling the purple and brown cushions neatly at the foot of the bed. She glances over her shoulder, catches his eye and giggles again. He laughs lightly, then takes two steps towards her. She is bending over the bed and her backside is pressing against the fabric of her trousers. Howard, who knows how these things are done, who has successfully initiated a handful of similar transactions in high-end hotels across the globe, comes up close behind her, puts his hands on either side of her waist and nudges the knot of his robe belt against the maid’s haunches.
For a second, she tenses and does not move. Then, without looking at him, the maid straightens up, letting the pillow she is holding in one hand drop onto the Egyptian cotton, 450-thread count sheets.
‘Sir … I …’
‘Shhh,’ Howard says, nuzzling her neck, smelling the sweetness of cocoa butter. He does not like to talk in these situations. Talking would make it more real.
With the maid still turned towards the bed, he unbuttons her shirt with the quick fingers bequeathed him by generations of Finks. He slips his thumb underneath the wiring of her bra, easing in his hand until it cups the maid’s right breast. He groans, in spite of himself. With his free hand, he undoes his belt, lets the robe fall open, and grips his erection. He starts slowly, rhythmically, moving up and down the shaft, all the while holding the maid’s breast, feeling the nipple turn hard underneath his touch. She is breathing more quickly now. He cannot see her face but he knows, without needing to have it confirmed, that she is smiling, that she is enjoying this, that she is loving the attention, that she is gagging for it, that she needs him to thrust against her and take her and spill his white seed across her skin … He comes with a half-suppressed sigh and a feeling of disgust. It is all over in a matter of seconds.
He is aware, even in the midst of his supposed abandon, of the need not to stain the maid’s dark trousers.
Once a tailor, always a tailor, as his mum might say. God rest her soul.
ESME (#u718a0743-1663-5813-9828-8e6b38fbb191)
Esme has started walking to the office as part of a springtime health kick. She lives in Shepherd’s Bush and works on High Street Kensington, so admittedly, it’s not the most arduous walk and, according to those miserable cut-out-and-keep fitness guides in various women’s magazines, it will hardly burn any calories at all (something called spinning does that, she has discovered, and she imagines a stuffy room filled with Victorian peasants frantically producing exercise leotards from their super-fast spinning wheels). Anyway, apparently spinning gets rid of 450 calories an hour. A Mars bar contains 280. So the chances are that her forty-five-minute walk will allow her to eat approximately half a molecule more chocolate than she would do otherwise.
But the walk makes her feel better, mentally. It makes her feel she’s doing something, at least, instead of sitting on her arse all day, either at her desk or in the train on the way to another futile doorstep on editor’s orders. Esme doesn’t need to lose weight. She possesses the natural slenderness of the terminally neurotic. But, being a woman, she feels guilty about not exercising. And her colleague Sanjay once told her that your metabolism slowed down to a crawling pace when you hit thirty. She’d been eating a baked potato at the time.
‘You won’t be able to do carbs any more,’ he’d said, flicking an elegant wrist in her direction. ‘You’ll want to be eating seeds and grains.’
‘Seeds and grains?’ She pushed the baked potato to one side, regretfully. ‘What, like birds?’
Sanjay nodded knowledgeably. He was the health editor and abreast of such things.
‘Keen-wah,’ he said. ‘That’s what you’ll need.’
‘Bless you.’
‘Ha-de-bloody-ha. I’m only telling you this for your own good, missy. This’ – he flapped a hand in front of her torso – ‘doesn’t come for free.’
When she’d turned thirty last December, Sanjay’s words had jangled in her head like a drawerful of mismatched cutlery. She was terrified that she’d pile on unwanted pounds purely by eating the same as she’d always done. For about a week, Esme had stuck faithfully to the recipes provided by a ‘Low-GI’ website but, by the end of seven days, she was heartily sick of egg-white omelettes and slow-release oats. Then it was Christmas anyhow so there was no point in thinking about calorie control, and after a few months she realised nothing had changed. She still hovered around nine stone and ideally wanted to be eight, like Liz Hurley, but there were some things you just had to live with.
If only she were more like Robbie. Her brother had an innate capacity for getting on with life. He never worried too much about anything and, as a result, he seemed to love exercise purely for the uncomplicated physical motion, as if the pump and pound of each straining muscle could push out extraneous thought. He’d done the London Marathon last year in under five hours without even trying. She’d been there to cheer him on past the finish line and he’d given her a huge, sweaty hug from underneath a crinkly silver blanket that was meant to help his muscles relax.
She hates running. The walking though … the walking was a good thing. Esme liked the routine of it. She liked putting on her trainers (last worn when she tried out – unsuccessfully – for the university hockey team) and packing her smart shoes in a bag to change into later because it prolonged the morning, delaying the inevitability of work just that little bit longer.
The trainers make her feel she is bouncing along the pavement. Today, the bounce is accentuated by her good mood. She’d had a page lead-in on Sunday about the power of optimism that was followed up by most of the dailies including the Mail, which carried a substantial op-ed piece by a ‘self-confessed Victor Meldrew’ headlined: ‘Optimism? Bah humbug!’ For the Mail to follow you up was a considerable feather in your cap. Dave, the news editor, would be pleased.
She reaches a stretch of Holland Park Road lined by upmarket shops. There is a butcher’s here that is rumoured to be patronised by the Queen. Esme once bought a chicken from them in an emergency (she’d forgotten the main part of a roast she was meant to be cooking) and was charged £16 because it had been ‘corn-fed’. At £16, she would have preferred it to have been fed the sacrificial entrails of small human babies, but she didn’t complain out loud. Most of her fury was internal. She was that kind of person.
She crosses the road at the traffic lights, upping her pace to fit in with the rhythm of a new boy-band hit that is storming the charts. It is a saccharine number about finding teen love and although Esme knows she should hate it, knows that any journalist worth their salt would pour cynical bile over the lyrics and the sentiment, secretly she loves it. At work, Esme tries to keep her naïve idealism under wraps, but it’s not easy. When they’d covered the Royal Wedding last year, she’d cried a little watching the service on the big screens in the office – just at the bit where William saw Kate in that amazing dress for the first time – and Dave had caught her.
‘Time of the month?’ he said, patting her on the shoulder. And then, condescendingly, ‘Don’t worry, Es. Harry’s still on the market.’
Her prolonged single status was a source of much office merriment. Well, she thinks, as she powers on up towards Notting Hill, she’d rather be on her own than in a marriage like Dave’s. He’d been with his wife since time began but was known as a shagger – it was all those long office hours and willing student journalists, desperate for a job on a national straight out of the City postgrad course. Shame, really, as his wife was lovely and normal: she’d been to a couple of the office Christmas parties and was a petite, surprisingly pretty blonde woman who worked as a supply teacher and – shockingly – didn’t drink much. They had four photogenic children at various schools and universities which meant Dave had no hope of quitting any time soon, unless an exceptionally generous voluntary redundancy package came his way.
‘You want my advice?’ he’d said to Esme at a recent leaving party, slurring his words and bending his head in too close to hers so that she could smell the brackishness of hours-old white wine on his breath. ‘Get out while you can. Go and make some money. Wish I’d done that. Wish I’d gone into fucking PR like my mate Rupert …’
She didn’t like it when Dave got drunk. It demeaned him, she thought, made him like all the others. Sober, he was a brilliant news editor: dogged but instinctive and blessed with a peculiar ability to inspire loyalty despite his personal failings. You genuinely wanted Dave to say something you did was good. In his day, he’d been a solid but unexceptional reporter on the Express and covered the first Iraq War. But it was editing that brought the best out of him, that played to his sense of mischief and his mistrust of authority.
Esme sighs. She has a bit of a crush on Dave, actually, which is odd considering he isn’t what you might describe as a looker. He is half an inch shorter than her for a start, with boxer’s shoulders and a chunky, muscular frame: not the type she’d normally go for at all. But there’s something about him. She’s always been a sucker for men in power, for a start, and he’s funny too, in a quiet, lethal way. She catches him sometimes, just after he’s issued one of his sarcastic put-downs to an unsuspecting reporter, and his face looks like a small boy’s: cheeky eyes and a lopsided grin that almost makes you forget the bad teeth and the irritating habit he has of practising his golf swings when you’re trying to talk to him.
She’s not stupid though. Esme won’t let anything happen. It’s hard enough being a woman in a newsroom without the whispers behind your back that you’re only getting the good jobs because you’re sleeping with the boss. Besides, she flatters herself that he respects her too much to try it on.
She turns right down Kensington Church Street, looking in the windows of all the lovely antique shops as she passes, filled with beautiful trinkets she would never be able to buy. The blossom is out on the trees: big pink clouds that she wants to squeeze, like a baby’s legs. Esme feels a surge of happiness that spring is here. The evenings are lighter and longer, sunlit by the yellow-green London glow. Ever since she moved here from her family home in Herefordshire, the excitement of the city has pulsated through her veins: a buzzing, booming sensation of being at the centre of things, of believing anything could happen.
Her pleasant mood is accompanied by a feel-good soul number, courtesy of Radio 1, so that, for a few moments, she feels as though she is the star of a beautifully shot indie film with an interesting soundtrack.
Then she remembers that morning conference is less than an hour away and a panic rises in her gullet. Stories, she thinks. I need stories.
The Sunday Tribune was one of the only nationals that still insisted its reporters must gather at 10.30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning in the offices of the overall editor and pitch two news stories for the weekend’s edition. When Esme first started there a little over eighteen months ago, fresh out of the Hunter Media trainee programme (flagship publication: Trucking Today), she had been desperate to impress. She’d brought in a bona fide scoop in her second week, involving the discovery of a protected bird species on land that had been earmarked for a controversial detention centre for asylum seekers. It ran on page five (right-hand pages were always the best) alongside a picture of an owl and some sad-looking Africans. The RSPB had called her story ‘game-changing’. The detention centre had to be shelved. A local MP had written to Esme to thank her in person. Dave hadn’t publicly acknowledged her success, but she had detected a slight thawing in his attitude towards her. She’d been thrilled.
But now, after a year and a half of Freedom of Information requests on how many chocolate HobNobs Cabinet ministers bought for hospitality purposes and Googling consumer-friendly research studies from American universities, Esme was starting to tire of it all. She had one half-baked notion for this morning’s conference about the rise in popularity of semi-naked charity calendars. They were everywhere, she’d noticed of late: middle-aged women with their baps out hiding their private parts behind a giant milk urn to raise money for some worthy cause. Esme had a hunch that the National Association of Nudists, a humourless organisation she’d dealt with in the past, would be unhappy about this. They’d probably think it wasn’t taking nudism seriously enough. She was sure she could whip them up into some kind of newsworthy frenzy.
Other than that, the story cupboard is bare and she’s almost at work. She alights onto High Street Kensington and looks up at the art deco Barker’s department store building, squinting as she always does to see if she can find her desk through the narrow, slatted windows. She waves at the security guard because she never remembers his name, then swipes her pass over the electronic entry gates and takes the escalator to the first floor.
Looking down, she realises she’s forgotten to take her trainers off.
‘Shit.’ Esme hates the thought of anyone seeing her like this: half-formed and unprofessional, like a mismatched extra out of Working Girl (perhaps her favourite 1980s film, in a closely fought contest with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). She struggles to get her heels from her canvas bag before the final step of the escalator. At the top, she changes shoes quickly, slipping her stockinged feet into a pair of mildly uncomfortable patent-leather courts from Marks & Spencer and putting her dirty white trainers back into her bag. She hopes no one notices. But then, glancing up at the mezzanine balcony where everyone goes for their fag breaks, she sees someone staring at her. It’s Dave, shaking his head at her through a fug of cigarette smoke. The management had tried to move the smokers outside after the ban but no one had taken any notice and, in the end, they’d admitted defeat and built partitions on the balcony to pen everyone in. You could always tell what time of day it was according to how much smoke the enclosed balcony was holding. In the morning, it was a gentle mist of grey. By lunchtime, the smoke would have acquired its own twisting logic, pressing against the glass like freshly shorn strands of sheep’s wool. By evening, the balcony was a choking-hole filled with toxic dry ice.
Esme gets to her desk and logs on. Sanjay is already at his seat, directly opposite her, his face half obscured by the large Mac screen.
‘Morning, sunshine,’ he says, without taking his eyes from the computer. ‘Nice weekend?’
‘Yeah, thanks, um … what did I do?’ Esme puts her jacket on the back of her ergonomic chair, adjusted by Occupational Health to precisely the right height in order to avoid repetitive strain injury. ‘Can’t remember. But it was nice, whatever it was. You?’
Sanjay nodded.
‘The boyfriend was over from Rome,’ he said. ‘We stayed in and watched Breaking Bad because we’re exciting like that.’ He sipped from a giant Starbucks cup. Esme knew it would be a Green Tea. Sanjay had given up caffeine for a new year’s resolution and was still sticking to it with all the puritanical zeal of a Mayflower pilgrim.
‘Have you got stories?’ he asked.
She shook her head.
‘Me neither.’
There was a special rhythm to Sunday newspapers. Tuesday mornings were tense and mildly fractious as everyone tried to cobble together something for conference. By lunchtime, a relaxed bonhomie had set in. When Esme had first started at the Tribune, most of the newsroom then disappeared to lunch ‘contacts’ while secretly lunching each other and racking up considerable wine bills that they then claimed on expenses. Those days had long passed and she wasn’t entirely sad to see them go. There was a limit to how effective she could be after several large glasses of Sauvignon blanc in the middle of the day.
Wednesdays were for faffing around – doing the odd telephone interview to stand up a story and surreptitiously booking holidays online when Dave wasn’t looking.
By Thursday, you needed to have at least one concrete story for that weekend’s paper so that Dave could add it to the news list and present it to the editor. If you didn’t, then you were in the perilous position of being sent out to cover running stories like murder cases or political scandals and that involved a lot of standing around with other journalists in the rain, waiting for an important person to comment, then elbowing your way to the front when they did so.
Friday consisted of long hours, frantic typing and last-minute changes of mind from the desk. You were lucky to get out by midnight. Then on Saturday, the misery of working on a weekend gave rise to a shared solidarity of spirit that left you feeling strangely cheerful. When the paper went off stone at 7.30 p.m., almost everyone decamped to the pub (apart from Rita, the part-time sub, who was older and wore the perpetually harassed expression of a working mother whose needs were conspicuously not being met).
Sunday started with a hangover and a nervous feeling in the pit of Esme’s stomach about where her article would appear and whether she’d got any fact or quote horribly wrong. The first thing she did was to walk round the corner from her flat to buy the papers from a shop on the Uxbridge Road. Every week, without fail, the newsagent would make the same joke as he totted up the total on the cash register.
‘Light reading?’
Every week, Esme gritted her teeth and smiled politely at this charmless imbecile then went home and flicked straight to her pieces. Some weekends, the article she’d expected to see wasn’t there and she realised it had been spiked and no one had bothered to tell her. Those were the worst days. She found it hard to pull herself out of a bad mood when she had no byline in the paper. It felt as though she didn’t exist.
It is just as she is typing ‘academic study’ into Google News that Esme feels a looming presence behind her chair.
‘Try “Watergate”,’ Dave says, smirking. ‘See if anything comes up. I’ve heard, on the down low, that geezer Nixon might be up to something.’
Esme flushes. Across from her, Sanjay is busy looking busy.
‘Can I have a word?’ Dave asks ominously. ‘In my office.’
She follows him into a glass-partitioned box that Dave has clung on to, in spite of the owners’ constant attempts to make everything into an open-plan, twenty-four-hour, internet-focused news hub. It is an airless room: the windows overlook the building’s interior atrium and the walls are lined with bookcases stuffed with out-of-date editions of Who’s Who, lever-arch files and long-ago awards certificates encased in dusty Perspex. On one wall, there is a framed picture of the Sunday Tribune wall clock from the glory days of Fleet Street, set perpetually to ten past two: a civilised time, Esme always thinks, for a more civilised era.
‘Take a seat,’ he says, gesturing to a chair covered in back copies of the New Statesman and old Snickers wrappers. Esme removes the detritus and sits, opening her notepad to a fresh page and readying her pen in an effort to look on top of things.
‘Nice piece on Sunday,’ Dave says, chewing his thumbnail.
Esme is surprised. The optimism study was precisely the kind of thing Dave usually hated: no investigation, no titillation, just a space-filler to keep the readers happy while they ate their Sunday morning croissants and muesli.
‘Sir Howard complained,’ he says.
‘Howard Pink?’ Esme jots down his name for no reason.
‘Yeah. We used a picture he wasn’t happy with.’
‘Well that was the picture desk, not me …’
Dave waves her objections aside. ‘Yeah, I know that, obviously,’ he says, over-enunciating each word to underline her frustrating slowness. He looks at her levelly across his desk. His skin is weathered and pouchy and he has a patch of eczema on one corner of his mouth. The backs of his hands are smattered with faint brown hairs. He’s only forty-seven but seems older, more weary. Esme realises she is staring and drops her gaze. Her mouth is dry.
‘I wondered why Mike used it actually,’ she says. ‘Given all the stuff that happened to Sir Howard. It didn’t seem exactly right for a light-hearted …’
Dave cuts across her. ‘I told Mike to use it.’
‘Oh. Right. I just thought, what with Sir Howard’s daughter going missing all those years ago …’
‘Yeah, I know, all very sad,’ Dave says, not seeming remotely perturbed. ‘But life goes on, doesn’t it, and Sir Howard hasn’t exactly been the shy and retiring type since then, so we were perfectly within our rights to use the picture, but …’
She waits. Dave stands up, flexes his arms and takes up the imaginary 4-iron, swinging it back and forward, warming up to hit some non-existent ball. ‘Well, his PR guy had asked newspapers not to use that particular photo. Pink doesn’t like it, apparently. Thinks it makes him look like a buffoon which is, of course,’ Dave takes aim somewhere near the under-watered rubber plant on his bookshelf and swings, ‘true.’
Esme suppresses a groan. She finds this display extremely tiresome. It is what Dave believes to be a show of masculinity, the news editor’s equivalent of a peacock displaying its plumage. Every time she thinks she might properly fancy Dave, that it might be more than a workplace crush, he goes and does something that shatters the idea completely.
‘Right, so why did you use it then?’
Dave grins. ‘Because he told me not to.’
Esme smiles in spite of herself. ‘And what I’d like you to do, young lady, is to call Pink up, apologise, say it’s not your fault, beyond your control blah, blah, blah but that the least you could do is take him out for lunch to say sorry.’ Dave flicks through a Rolodex on the desk in front of him. He is the only person she knows who refuses to get an iPhone or a BlackBerry and keeps all his contacts on a series of battered index cards. ‘Take him to Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester, he’ll love that,’ he says, handing over a card which has several numbers on it, all but one of them scribbled out in red ballpoint pen.
‘Thanks, I can look the number up …’
‘Take it.’
She reaches across, accidentally touching his fingers as she takes the card. She feels a small internal spasm as she does so.
‘You’ll need to speak to his PR man first. Rupert Leitch. He’s a mate of mine from university days. I’ll let him know you’re calling—’ Dave hands her another dog-eared card. ‘Well sod off then,’ he says, clicking on his computer mouse. ‘Look lively.’
Esme returns to her desk, closing the door to Dave’s office as she leaves.
‘What was that about?’ Sanjay asks.
‘Howard Pink,’ she says.
‘The guy whose daughter went missing?’
