“Allow me,” Krishnan said. He put a hand on my shoulder to turn me around slightly and disappeared behind me to fiddle with the battery pack. Was this flirting? It gave him a marvellous view of the ballet butt. Naturally, I leant forward to accentuate the fall of the curve—because, apparently, I flirt like an alley cat. It seemed to be having the desired effect. If Krishnan stayed back there much longer, he’d have to sign a consent form. My heart quickened. A chorus line of butterflies danced the grand jeté in my stomach. I heard the click of the knob, and Krishnan’s hands guided me back around to meet his face.
“I wanted to ask you…” Krishnan said. He was a good six inches taller than me, so I was forced to look up to meet those ravishing eyes. He leant his face close to mine. It felt intimate. His cologne, all spice and musk and manliness, hung in the air between us. I was suddenly very conscious of my breath, which must have smelt like a Caffè Nero dumpster.
“Yes?” I asked, already imagining our future together—the cottage in the Cotswolds, the two corgis, the groundskeeper with arms like Christmas hams.
“I was just wondering whether your dad mentioned anything to you about my proposal for a regular column in theSentinel?”
There it was. Bewitched by the prettiest face on British television, I hadn’t even seen it coming this time. The butterflies in my stomach must have been equally blindsided, because they jetéd into overdrive. I threw up, spewing coffee and contempt all down the front of television’s most eligible totty.
It was a spectacular and complete disgorgement. I really,reallygot it all out. The bad TV coffee, the imagined corgis and the house in the Cotswolds, the anticipated lifetime of invitations to BAFTA after-parties, the insane belief anyone would be interested in me for me. I expelled it all.
Chapter3
Sunny
TheBulletinoffice was in a brutalist concrete eyesore near London Bridge, but it was handy for Borough Market, if you wanted a cheap lunch, and it was handy for the Thames, if life all got a bit too much. Which it often did when your chief of staff was an unreformed homophobe, racist, and misogynist bellend like JT Thorpe.
I wasn’t looking forward to seeing him this morning. I took the stairs up to the fourth floor and slid into the newsroom, hoping to sneak to my desk without anyone noticing my arrival. I wanted to make some phone calls to my old contacts up in Leicester to find out what the deal was with this nuclear power plant story before facing JT. It was just after eight, but the newsroom was already humming. The website team were beavering away, like the sweatshop automatons they were, unable to go home unless an algorithm told them to. One of the early-shift crime reporters was busy on the phone, jotting down notes.
“Sorry, Sergeant, your phone broke up then. Which part of the victim’s head did you say was missing?”
I grimaced. It was a relief to be on the politics team now and not have to do police-reporting shifts any more. All the gory details and dead bodies were hard enough to deal with, but when you worked at theBulletin, every death and trauma was given the fullMidsomer Murderstreatment. Recent headlines we’d carried included “Body in forest eaten by badgers!,” “Constable’s bellend badly bruised after beating with own baton!,” and “Dogger collared! Naked vicar nicked at notorious A12 sex hotspot.”
“Miller! My desk.Now.” JT’s booming voice rolled across the newsroom like thunder, rattling the perpetually clenched sphincters of every journalist on the news floor. I hadn’t even reached my cubicle-prison yet. How did he know I was in the building? Was I being tracked with the same microchips he used on the website team?
“Coming,” I shouted.
I scooted across to my desk and ditched my bag. The rest of the politics team was nowhere to be seen. Smart tactic. If it was going to be a first-come-first-eviscerated kind of morning, it was better to take your time coming in and let JT exhaust himself disembowelling your colleagues first. Better to return only in the relative safety of that period when he was dopily digesting the blood of his victims but wasn’t yet back to full strength.
As I collected my notepad and pen, I noticed Cathy’s handbag open on her desk. It seemed Cathy, the political editor and therefore the person who would, in a real workplace, be called my team leader, had come in first. Cathy might already be dead.
When I got to JT’s door, Cathy was very much alive and well, sitting opposite the chief of staff in one of his “naughty chairs.” They’re the chairs you sit in while he calls you a “useless festering cockwomble” and makes you question why you ever thought journalism was the career for you. JT pointed a finger at the empty seat beside Cathy.
“Sit,” he said.
I plonked myself down with all the gusto of a man who had just performed his own haemorrhoid surgery. JT Thorpe was a Generation X newsman with the soul of a baby boomer. Not one of the good baby boomers. Not the sort who talk like Dot Cotton and buy Branston Pickle in bulk from Aldi. JT was the kind of baby boomer who thought the concept of white male privilege was a conspiracy pushed by leftards who would not rest until every red-blooded heterosexual man had been forced to wear nail polish and bleach his anus. He had the bearing, manner, and fashion sense of a pot-bellied railway workers’ union shop steward from the 1950s. He wore braces and kept his shirtsleeves rolled up to display heavily tattooed forearms that saidIf you mess with me, I’ll lamp you. JT also had wildly expressive veins in his neck, and those veins were currently dancing their way up to his head like vigorously copulating snakes.
“How did we miss it?” he asked. He held up a copy of theSentinel, slapping the paper with the back of his hand. I looked at Cathy, hoping she might jump to my defence. You know, like a team leader is meant to do in these situations. She sat there stony-faced, saying nothing, unable to meet my eye. That told me everything I needed to know. Gestapo Officer JT Thorpe had let her live only because she’d given him the names of her collaborators. She had survived by shifting at least some of the blame onto me.
“Boche must have a contact in Energy,” I said. “This wasn’t on anyone’s radar.”
“I know it wasn’t on anyone’s radar,” JT said. He slammed the paper down on his desk and drove his fat, sausagey finger into it. “That’s the point. I don’t know if you’ve realised, sunshine, but that’s what we do here. We find out things, and we put them on people’s sodding radars. The question is, Where the hell were you? Off buggering the animals of Farthing Wood while the government secretly planned to irradiate your whole family with strontium-90.”
“I’m not sure that’s how nuclear power pla?—”
“It’s your hometown, you arse-fingering pisswizard.”
I was painfully aware of that. On the Tube ride in, as I considered which of my contacts to call for comment, I thought about what the jobs might mean for people back home, and what it would mean for them if, once the plant was operational, something went wrong. It didn’t bear thinking about.
“There must be a leak from inside the Department for Energy, because if anyone back home knew?—”
“A leak? You don’t say.” The sarcasm dripped from JT’s mouth and made a soupy pool on his desk. I changed tack.
“I know we missed it, and I’m sorry,” I said. The veins in JT’s neck were now so engorged I genuinely thought-slash-hoped he might have a stroke. “If I jump on a train this morning, I can be in Leicester by lunchtime. I know the people, the leadership. I can get their reactions while Cathy gets the political response out of Westminster.” I looked at Cathy for support.
“Adib is already on a train to Leicester,” Cathy said.
“You’re sending Adib?” The hope of taking me mum up the Bells for a cheeky fish supper on the paper’s dime while I was in town evaporated. Good job I hadn’t texted her.
