“Hold on Dreebedee, it’s beenyonks. What’s with all this straight-to-business tosh?”
What it mostly was, was that Audrey and Andrew Spencer-Johns had never actually been anything even close to friends. They’d worked together, he’d been vaguely in the room that onetime she’d tried cocaine, and he’d made fewer awful comments about her sexuality than most of the other guys she’d worked with. But that didn’t exactly make them mates.
“Sorry, just on a bit of a clock here.”
“Really? I was talking to N the other day and she said that you were working for some nowheresville shitrag and trying to get onThe Apprentice.”
It was, a cynical part of Audrey observed, very typical of Natalie to be paying enough attention to know that she was going to be on TV but to performatively misidentify the show so that everybody could see that she was terribly above it all. “Shropshire’s second largest regional newspaper,” she clarified. “And I’m onBake Expectations.”
“Right, right.” Andrew seemed only to be half listening. “But what’s Shropshire got to do with a jet-set society rando?”
There was a limited amount Audrey could say here without massively pissing off—and for that matter actively betraying—Jennifer. “She had a kind of a thing with a local back in the forties and it didn’t work out so there’s this whole human-interest-forbidden-romance piece I’m working on.”
“And it’s suddenly on a clock despite the fact that it’s waited more than seventy years already?”
Audrey didn’t like playing the mocking-the-elderly card, but there were times you had to do what it took to get the outcome you wanted. “Well, yeah. Because either one of them could drop dead any moment.”
It got a laugh, which had been the whole point. People thought less critically when they were congratulating themselves for how clever and detached they were being. “Touché, Audie, touché. But very well. I’ve had a bit of a word with Seb—you rememberSeb, works forMilieunow—and he was saying that she’s actually a touch infamous in the right circles.”
“Atouch infamous?”
Andrew gave a kind of verbal shrug. “You know: old, rich, doesn’t give a shit. Bit of a nightmare by all accounts but something of a fixture.”
“Great.” Audrey readied a pen. “So where can I find herexactly?”
“Hotel Metropole. But”—a note of embarrassed condescension crept into Andrew’s voice—“not wanting to be too dismissive, you might not want tooveremphasise the regional newspaper angle. I can’t imagine it’ll go over well.”
The sad thing was, it wasn’t too dismissive. It was just kind of a fact.Let me through, I’m with Shropshire’s second largest regional newspaperdidn’t exactly open a lot of doors. So Audrey just said, “Cheers,” and left it at that.
“Oh, by the way, Aubore. What would you say to cocktails sometime in the next few? I know the lads here wouldloveto catch up.”
Knowing full well that they wouldn’t at all, Audrey replied with a sincere-sounding, “Yeah, that’d be great.” Then because it was how you played the game, she added a, “Let’s work something out.”
They made mutually polite goodbye noises and Audrey was left alone to decide how to convertThis woman is probably in this one hotel in Monte CarlotoThis woman is talking to me face-to-face right now.
Hotels, as a rule—and especially rich people hotels—did a pretty good job of screening out irritating journalists, especially irritating journalists whose credentials the wider industry tendedto see as one step up from a school newspaper. Of course, if Emily was as infamous as Andrew had suggested, she might not be too hard to at least get a message to, even if she wouldn’t take a call. And then the trick would just be making sure she’d call back.
Two hours later, having spent most of the afternoon gaming out scenarios in her mind, Audrey decided that she might,mightbe stalling.
Besides, she had a pretty good idea of which approach would work best. If any would work at all.
So she called the Hotel Metropole and asked if she could leave a message for Emily Branningham. And when the whatever-you-called-the-person-who-answered-phones-in-an-expensive-hotel answered that she could, Audrey left her number and seven words:I want to talk about the nymph.
Wednesday
Audrey’s phone started ringing at four in the morning and she rolled sideways on the bed to answer it.
“Who is this?” asked a silken, upper-class voice from the other end of the line.
Had she been very slightly more conscious, Audrey would have identified the caller at once, but she wasn’t so she didn’t. “You’re the one who called me.”
“You left a message.”
With an internalfuck, Audrey swivelled herself into a sitting position. “You’re Emily Branningham.”
“And you still have the advantage of me.”
Audrey really wished she’d had the foresight to leave coffee by the bed, because if there was anybody who’d call back at the exact least opportune time, it was Emily. Still, she tried to come across as confident, assured, and professional instead of, for example, somebody whose mouth still tasted like midnight.
