“Bastards!” My father, obviously miffed he’d missed the biggest story of the day, dropped a plate.
“Yes, that’ll show them, Hugo,” Mummy said. She scrambled through the papers until she found theBulletin, right at the bottom of the pile, unfolded it, and stared wide-eyed at the picture. Father, tea towel wrapped tight around his hand in anguish, stood behind her, reading it over his shoulder. In the background, Lucy Veeraswamy continued talking as if she hadn’t just completely upended the mornings of Hugo and Beverley Barker-Boche.
“The paper claims the woman, known as Ekaterina Ivanova, used her influence to sway the minister’s decision on the controversial Leicestershire nuclear power plant, which was to be built by the Belarusian company Mogilatom, owned by oligarch Yevgeny Safin,” Veeraswamy said.
I stood up and walked around the table, joining my father in reading the article over Mummy’s shoulder. There it was, staring back up at me from the front page, the photo byline of the beautiful freckled boy with the silly name. The one who’d knocked me back. The one I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about since getting home.
“Well done, Sunny Miller,” I said.
My father looked at me like I’d just taken a dump in his pocket.
“Friend of yours, darling?” Mummy asked.
“Yes,” I said. “We were on Shetland together.”
In the background, Lucy was still banging on.
“And we’ll be talking to theBulletin’s Sunny Miller about that story after eight o’clock,” she said.
I smiled. I couldn’t help it. I’d be at ballet by then, surrounded by twenty-two tutued toddling terrorists, trying to turn them into tiny Tamara Toumanovas.
“Someone must have dropped this to him,” Father said. “Who the bloody hell dropped it to him?”
“You mean why didn’t they drop it to you?” I suggested.
“No, Ludovic. Why didn’t they drop it toyou! This is your story. You’ve dropped the ball on this. How the bloody hell did you miss it?”
What the? I wasn’t having this. I opened my mouth to protest, but Mummy beat me to it.
“Don’t be silly, Hugo. You wouldn’t have printed something as salacious as a minister of the Crown having an extramarital affair. Sex between consenting adults is a private matter. Isn’t that your policy?”
“With a spy, Beverley. It’s sex with a bloody spy! Of course we would have bloody well printed it.”
“Fine. But would you have given it a headline like this?”
Mummy held the paper a little higher. A grainy image of Wynn-Jones leching all over a woman, one hand ferreting around under her skirt, dominated the left-hand side of the page. Beneath a big red banner that screamed “SEXCLUSIVE,” the front-page headline read “BONK WYNN-JONES’ SEXPLOSIVE SECRET!” Underneath, in inimitableBulletinfashion, they had chosen the subheading “Revealed: Energy Secretary shagging Soviet honeypot at centre of Leicester nukes deal.” That was at least two factual errors and one instance of base misogyny in the space of a dozen words. Remarkable, even by the standards of theBulletin. But the top prize went to the photo caption, which read “POWER PLAY: Bob sticks two fingers up to Britain, while the rest disappear up Belarus.”
“This story wasmadefor a tabloid like theBulletin,” Mummy said. “And whoever dropped this to Sunny Miller wanted Bob Wynn-Jones not just out of the cabinet but out of politics for good.”
“Bloody hell!” Father was angry now, balling up the tea towel as if he wanted to strangle it. He threw it hard against the table, but it just kind of flopped there, the perfect symbol of his impotence.
“You took your eyes off the ball, Ludo,” Father said. “I knew you weren’t ready for the big league.”
“Wait, what?”
“You need to lift your game, young man, if you don’t want to find yourself stuck down in features writing obituaries and reviewing last night’s episode ofEastEnders. You should have been all over this. It wasyourstory.”
Father was stabbing a finger at me, his face radicchio red.
“How did you miss it?”
I was speechless. Father ripped the paper out of Mummy’s hands, shaking it like he wanted to throttle the life out of it.
“You can bloody well go in tomorrow and clean up this mess.”
“It’s my day off. Uncle Ben and I are?—”
“News isn’t a nine-to-five job, Ludo. News is happeningnow—and it’s your job to break it!” He slammed the newspaper into the table and marched out of the kitchen and up the hall.
