‘She’s only messing with you, Joe,’ said Diarmuid, bored. ‘Eden here will make mincemeat out of you all, so be nice to her. FWF means Fourth Wave Feminists, by the way.’
Today, Eden’s father-in-law was not smiling at her when she entered the upper chamber with its smell of coffee, men and the illicit cigars that Diarmuid smoked in the back room with the door to the fire escape open.
His eyes alighted on Eden and narrowed.
‘Gentlemen, I need the room,’ he said.
The room emptied sharpish. They all knew that tone. Only Rian remained.
He was the exact opposite of his boss: Diarmuid was tall and stately. Rian was skinny, a bit haunted-looking, like a rat in human form.
Eden sat down warily. Rian leaned against the wall to one side of his boss. He was watching her.
‘I had a phone call,’ began Diarmuid, doing that steepling-his-fingers thing he did on important television programmes when he wanted to look statesman-like. Eden was having media training but she already knew all the moves. She was a quick study.
‘Yes,’ she replied, giving him her innocent faun look.
Diarmuid glared at her and dropped his steepled hands. ‘Listen, you little madam, don’t make the cow eyes at me. I got a phone call that the Indo have a juicy piece of gossip on you—’
Eden kept her face neutral but all twenty-two metres of her guts screamed with anxiety. The spasms rippled. How could he know about the scary notes? About what they referred to? Still, she stared neutrally back at him.
‘About what?’ she asked. Oscar-winning, definitely.
Diarmuid stared at her: grizzly grey eyebrows lowered, gauging her for lies.
‘Someone told me that there’s a freedom-of-information request on you.’
‘Gosh,’ said Eden.
She kept looking at him with what Diarmuid had already called her cow eyes.
‘So do they have any idea what it’s about?’ she said, managing to look astonished.
‘I know there was a lot in the papers about that water deal over in Baltinglass. But so much was written about that. There wasn’t a thing wrong about it. It was just someone causing hassle.’ She could sense Rian watching her now. She knew it would be dangerous to actually look at him.
Rian might look like a rat but he was a psychically enhanced rat, created in a laboratory to gaze at people with his predatory rat eyes and possibly had superhuman abilities to work out if people were lying based on what way their pupils flickered when asked a tricky question.
Instead, she looked at Diarmuid with as much innocence as she could possibly manage, desperate for him to believe her.
‘I don’t think it’s about the water thing,’ he said, a fleeting look of annoyance on his face.
And she realised he didn’t know what the Freedom of Information request was about.
‘What else can it be?’ he said.
‘I don’t know. Could it be a scraping-the-barrel exercise just to cause trouble? Someone from the opposite side getting a tame journalist to investigate me? Everyone knows I’m going to be running for Fergal Maguire’s seat when he retires in September. Is this how they normally do it?’ she asked, going for the ‘you are the senior politician and I know nothing’ schtick. Diarmuid’s ego was so big, it probably needed planning permission.
‘I have nothing to hide, so are they trying to create something, make it sound as if I’ve something to hide?’ Her guts clenched even more tightly. He couldn’t know. But could whoever was searching for her know? While trying to look slightly confused, she racked her brains. There could be nothing official, nothing. The letters had been sent to her directly.
‘Well, think; is there anything?’ Diarmuid said.
‘No,’ said Eden, feeling on slightly firmer ground. He didn’t know, he absolutely didn’t know. She knew the party had investigated her before she joined. But even so political investigations into candidates were often desultory. Secrets came back and bit politicians in the bum all the time. Unbelievable secrets, things so huge it was astonishing that they’d never been revealed before.
Like the candidate who got elected and then it turned out he’d married bigamously and that his first wife was living happily in Thailand.
Or the fervently religious guy who’d been photographed buying hard-core bondage gear from a sex shop. On his own credit card.
If you had a secret, chances were, it would be found out unless you were careful.
