“Jennifer wants to see you.”
It had been an abrupt introduction, and Audrey wasn’t sure she wanted to reward abruptness. “Sorry, who are you?”
The man winced as though he’d accidentally taken a vegan to a restaurant that served nothing but veal and foie gras. Then he held out a shaky hand and said, “Thrimp. Colin Thrimp. Jennifer’s assistant. Jennifer Hallet. She’s in charge of”—he made an expansive gesture—“well, everything really. And she wants to talk to youespeciallybecause of your…you know…”
Audrey should have seen something like this coming. Nobody trusted media people, especially other media people. “Job?”
He nodded.
“Does she think I’m going to write some kind of searing exposé?”
Alanis grinned in a way that Audrey didn’t think she’d have had the confidence to grin, even at sixteen. “You should. That’d be effervescent.”
“Stop it,” said Audrey, trying to sound playful rather thansnappish and mostly succeeding.
Colin Thrimp wrung his hands. “Can you just go to see her? She said I had to bring you to her yesterday, which normally means soon and it’s already been a bit longer than soon and she’ll be in afearfulmood if you don’t go and speak to her.”
“How fearful, exactly?” asked Audrey. It had been a long day and an executive in a fearful mood—or really any kind of mood—fell pretty close to last on her list of things she wanted to deal with.
“Fearfully fearful.”
It wasn’t the most helpful of answers, but Audrey had met several Colin Thrimps in her life and didn’t think there was much point protesting further. After taking a responsible but obviously futile moment to make certain that Alanis would be okay on her own (she was, she was probably okayer than most adults would have been by a long way), Audrey set off in search of the fearfully fearful producer.
* * *
Jennifer Hallet’s trailer was unmarked, which made it mildly awkward for Audrey to find, but only mildly. Her keen investigative instincts told her to try the biggest, swankiest one, and the biggest, swankiest one it was.
She knocked on the door and then stood outside waiting. When she’d been waiting for just long enough that she was about to give up, a voice from within called out, “Who the fuck is it?”
“It’s Audrey?” she tried. “Audrey Lane.”
There was the sound of movement and then the door was thrown open by the most intimidating woman Audrey had ever seen. Jennifer Hallet was tall and cold-eyed, with lips that curledinto a permanent frown. There was something arresting about the sheer concentrated hostility of her, almost a challenge—the most undirected, universal kind of challenge, as if she was telling the entire world to come and have a go if it thought it was hard enough. And Audrey only realised she’d been staring when Jennifer asked her, quite pointedly, what she was staring at.
“Sorry, I—you wanted to see me. I’m the journalist.”
“Ohthat. Took you long enough.”
“Your assistant only just found me.”
“Then it tookhimlong enough.” Jennifer went back inside the trailer and, suspecting that waiting for an invitation would be an exercise in futility, Audrey followed her.
Inside, she found a setup that looked one step more supervillain than was strictly necessary. While the wall of constantly shifting monitors was probably a legitimate necessity of the job, and the various keyboards, microphones, and panels of miscellaneous switches likely had their uses, the enormous black swivel chair was a Persian cat away from full Blofeld. Right in the middle of the functionality to evil spectrum were the two smaller seats that had been set up at optimal bollocking distance.
“I just thought,” Jennifer said in a voice as smooth and pleasant as honey over razor blades, “that we should have a nice, polite, face-to-face conversation so that we can both be crystal fucking clear how our relationship is going to work.”
Settling herself onto a bollocking chair, Audrey did her best to remain composed. “If you like, but I’m not sure what there is to—”
“I’ve got yournumber, sunshine.”
“Which number, exactly?”
“Seventy-nine thousand, four hundred and six.”
To anybody else, the number would have been meaningless. But to Audrey it had a very clear, very specific meaning. It was the circulation of theEcho. “We get over half a million unique visits on our website as well.”
“And do you know what I do with half a million unique visits?” asked Jennifer Hallet.
Audrey was pretty sure she could tell where this was going, and how this particular TV big shot liked to express herself. “Do you, perhaps, wipe your arse with them?”
