by Holly Watt
Nicky was on the business desk. She dressed like a banker and read balance sheets as if they were trashy novels, and sometimes they were. She talked fluently about collateralised debt obligations and credit default swaps, PIK notes and senior credit. It unnerved Ross, and Nicky enjoyed unnerving Ross.
Alphavivo, the biggest commodities traders in the world, had not enjoyed Cormium appearing in their rear-view mirror, swallowing up the competition.
‘I’ll check in with her,’ said Casey. ‘I know where they hang out now, and when, so that’s something.’
Dash glanced at the clock. ‘Got to go.’
It was coming up to 4 p.m., the conference where the editor decided the front-page stories.
The conferences punctuated the day, like rocks in a river. Set times in a day of ducking and diving, as they alchemised the chaos into thousands of words and dozens of photographs, every single day.
Dash powered out of the office. Casey and Miranda strolled back to their desks.
Some of the male reporters watched them with interest. Miranda was wearing a very short blue PVC skirt.
‘I used to wear grey polo necks and brown skirts, right down to my ankles,’ Miranda had told Casey once. ‘Because I wanted to be taken seriously as a journalist and all that. But then I realised that I was twenty-six and smoking hot, and so no one was ever going to take me seriously whatever I wore. So I offed a couple of cabinet ministers and wore whatever the fuck I wanted.’
Today, though, Miranda’s thoughts were elsewhere.
Miranda and Casey had a small room, off to the side of the main office. They used it for making the calls that needed a silent background. Or the shadier documents. Or bouncing around ideas that couldn’t be broadcast, not even in a newsroom.
Now they retreated there. Miranda leaned against her desk.
‘I don’t know about this, Casey . . . It could be dangerous.’
Her concern, masked mostly, shimmered for a moment.
‘It could be,’ Casey agreed. ‘But those Wynford documents are starting to drive me crazy.’
‘And he didn’t kill it.’
‘No.’
Casey sat down at her computer.
‘Where?’ she said, almost to herself. ‘A camp. A campsite.’
‘They can’t mean something like Glastonbury,’ said Miranda. ‘Or Burning Man.’
Casey thought of the thousands of colourful tents, sprawling across the desert acres. Faces giggling, bright flags fluttering in the wind. The music pounding, and a fire blazing into the sky.
‘We’d know,’ said Casey. ‘It would be a huge story, if anything like that happened there. We hear if one person overdoses there.’
‘A camping site? For holidays?’ suggested Miranda. ‘Camping always sounds hellish to me, but who knows?’
‘Again,’ said Casey. ‘We would know about it. I’ll do the checks, but I am sure we would have heard.’
Casey fiddled with the necklace around her neck, a little silver bird.
‘How about’ – she didn’t want to say it – ‘the shanty towns?’
The huge slums, bound around some of the biggest cities in the world. Cape Town, Nairobi, Mexico City, Dhaka, they all had their miles of shacks, built from anything to hand.
‘Some of those shanty towns make their own laws,’ said Casey.
‘And if you think about gun crime in Rio,’ Miranda said thoughtfully, ‘there’s almost two hundred shootings a week, I think, so would a few extra deaths be noticed in a favela?’
‘They would,’ Casey said, ‘by the people around them.’
‘But those people,’ said Miranda, ‘might not be heard.’
They sat in silence, for a moment.
‘Oi, Case.’ It was the paper’s diarist at the door. ‘Felix Lincombe snogging someone who isn’t his wife in Gigi’s last night. Is the source kosher?’
Felix Lincombe was currently Macbeth in the West End, burnishing his already stellar acting credentials ahead of next year’s Oscar battle. The Post had given him a particularly dazzling review.
‘Totally, Bill.’
‘Wouldn’t ask, only Legal want to know. They’re a bit jumpy.’
The legal team at the Post were fearsome. They read through any article flagged as sensitive, and red-lined anything the reporters couldn’t stand up.
‘Tell them it’s fine,’ Casey said. ‘I saw it with my own eyes. Snapped it too, though we’d better not mention that.’
‘You were in Gigi’s last night?’ He laughed. ‘When the hell do you sleep?’
He shambled off.
‘You filed that?’ Miranda asked.
‘This morning. First thing.’
‘Jesus, you never fucking stop.’
‘It’s a story,’ Casey protested. ‘A good one. The bad guys will never notice, and Jazz’s lot will like the publicity. It’ll look like it came from her, whoever the hell she is.’
Miranda rolled her eyes, and they got to work.
4
The foundations of an investigation take time. Casey began by trawling through the data. Companies House, Electoral Roll, Land Registry. Slowly, she learned how Cyan thought. She disentangled its successes, and its failures. There weren’t many of the latter.
The spiderweb grew.
She needed the name of the American. That was her target. Forensically, she made a list of Azarola’s associates, and then all his connections. It grew slowly, like a photograph coming to life in a bowlful of chemicals. Ghosts, rising.
On the big television screen above her head, a murder, on a street in Cobham. A husband battering his wife, they thought, and fleeing into the night. A neighbour was being interviewed, neat in her navy cardigan and surprised at herself for being on television. Casey didn’t need to turn up the volume to know what she was saying.
Such a shock. You wouldn’t think that sort of thing could happen here. Lovely family, you know. He always seemed so polite. You never can tell, can you? The woman shook her head, and the pearl drop earrings danced.
*
Her mind switched back to her investigation again.
That American could be a brother, a friend, a friend of a friend of a friend. But they probably worked together, because those are the easiest friendships for those City boys. It would be easy if she could show the photograph to someone in their postroom. Because the postroom always knew.
‘Why do you want to know . . .’
A shrug, a smile, a tenner.
‘Oh, yeah, him . . . That’s . . .’
But it was a risk, and she didn’t take risks. Not until she had to. Then it might become a secret crush. A giggle, and a flick of the hair. I just want to drop off a card for him . . .
‘There’s always someone doing the photocopying,’ Miranda said to her early on.
There’s always a weak link in the chain. Someone who cares less, someone who is paid less, someone who no one else notices. Ross spent a lot of time debriefing confused Bulgarian cleaners, because they emptied the bins at the Post, and could know it all if they cared.
But not this time.
She emailed a list of names to the picture editor. No questions asked, the photographs appeared. She stared at the blurry photograph of her American, and tried to fit the jigsaw together.
It was always hard to be sure.
Different angles. Different expressions. Different outfits.
She tested a few possibilities on Miranda.
‘Look at his eyebrows,’ Miranda shook her head. ‘The way they curve up at the end. Not him.’
‘Couldn’t it be? A few years on. And a couple of stone. Smiling.’
‘No.’
Casey glanced up. The network had dispatched their star anchor to the murder case. She looked otherworldly, stranded in a Cobham cul-de-sac. The red bob that hadn’t changed for a decade glistened in the weak sun and she was nodding to an elderly neighbour.
Who are you? Tell me who you are.
The red bob nodded aga
in. The wife filled the screen, blonde and smiling, and frozen for ever.
We only know snapshots.
Casey worked on.
‘Him? With a bit of a tan. And longer hair.’
‘Look at the angle from cheekbone to eye socket. No.’
You recognise a walk, Casey learned early on. The way someone tilts their head. A voice could tell her everything. Looking from a photograph to a person was like looking from a map to a mountainside. You learned to read them, but it could catch you out.
As she worked, Casey made careful notes, all the time. Partly because it was easy to forget stuff you thought you never could. Partly because, some day, Legal would crawl over every word. Investigations take days, weeks, months. She messaged Jasper.
‘Let me know if Azarola comes back to the club. Priority one.’
‘Will do. He’s not a regular though. I asked around a bit. Carefully. Nothing.’
‘Spread the net a bit? He might be in Geneva. Anyone from Cyan Capital, too. That’s his fund.’
‘Will try. Promise.’
‘Star.’
That network of bar staff was vital. They gossip and compete, but they know who’s been chucked out of the club just up the road for taking a swing at a barman, and which girls are dirty drunk and will be sick in the loos.
And there’s the unofficial whisper, too, when the undercover police are trawling the clubs, on the hopeless pursuit of the endless drugs that swirl across the capital.
She went down to Gigi’s on Saturday. Sulked across the room, at where the American should have been.
The Cobham neighbours got bored with the drama, and eventually the cameras moved on.
Carefully, dangerously, Casey started to wonder how she might get alongside them. Into the heart of the secret, wherever it was. In any investigation it could take months, getting to that final scene. She rarely just walked up to someone. A phone call out of the blue raises hackles. And that initial meeting would define everything. So Casey and Miranda would plot for hours, days, weeks.
The brush-by was one option. They’d done it a dozen ways to a hundred people.
Bumping into a target in a lift in Malta, ‘Haven’t I met you somewhere before? Don’t I recognise you from something?’ Handing over a business card, and walking away. His eyes following, as she broke the contact, so casual.
He was flattered to be recognised, anyway. And no newspaper would send a team to Malta when the introduction could be done in a London lunch break, would they . . . That would make no sense, would it?
So he relaxed abroad.
Or someone could recommend the target.
Gosh, I need someone who can get things done. A lobbyist, I suppose.
Oh, sure, I know a guy. Let me give you his number.
And the first contact would pause, and think – maybe quite slowly, so Casey needed an unfamiliar patience – that it would be helpful for the target to know who is sending business his way.
‘Tell you what,’ he’d say eventually. ‘I’ll email you both. Put you in touch. Yeah.’
‘That’s so helpful,’ with just the right touch of gratitude.
You scratch my back . . .
And already she would have email addresses and business cards and a website. Maybe even a company.
And, of course, after that the first guy, consciously or not, needs her to be real. He can’t have been the one to open the gates for the Trojan horse.
Dash peered into the investigations room. Casey and Miranda, heads close together, were deep in thought.
‘Where?’ he said. ‘Where is this happening? Try working it backwards.’
Miranda looked up and smiled. Casey glowered at the interruption.
‘I am,’ Casey said. ‘Always. Backwards and in heels.’
Miranda smiled again. She was eating a cupcake absentmindedly. Casey, whippet slim, forgot to eat.
‘It was just’ – Dash pacified Casey now – ‘a thought.’
He disappeared towards the news desk, and Casey bit the end of her pen. Where.
They hushed as the editor walked past their desks.
The Editor. As an American president is always awarded his definite article, so the Editor will also be known at his newspaper.
Andrew Salcombe had worked his way up through Fleet Street, each paper a stepping stone to the next. New to the Post, he was regarded with suspicion by his newsroom.
Casey watched him now. With red-gold hair and glasses, his pale skin looked bloodless. Bloodless and ruthless, she thought.
Salcombe was quiet compared with the Post’s last editor, whose laugh had clattered round the office as the paper went to press. Much lamented, the last editor used to wander round the office waving a polo stick around his head and exhorting his troops onwards into battle. A bottle of champagne arrived on a reporter’s desk after an especial triumph.
But the last editor had departed three months ago, after some row with the newspaper’s owners.
Salcombe had shown up within hours, suspiciously fast to some, the Post the latest stage of his seamless rise. Miranda thought Dash might have aspired to the editorship. A bit young though.
This editor listened in silence in conference, absorbing ideas and then the credit. A perfectionist, his allies called him. A control freak, said everyone else. Casey had heard the editor ripping into journalists, quietly vicious. The attacks had an edge of sadism that no one liked. The journalists were getting wary.
Dash had muttered something about budgets, too. The investigations team was expensive, Salcombe had pointed out. Necessary? Huge legal risk on every story, too. Then the other papers ripped off three months’ work in three minutes. And some of the readers didn’t like the brutality.
‘Bollocks,’ snapped Ross.
Out of the corner of her eye, Casey occasionally caught the editor watching her, both watchful and indifferent. It made her feel uneasy. He looked at Casey now, pale eyes flickering, and she was a butterfly on a pin. Dash hadn’t briefed him on her wild goose chase yet.
‘I’m going to head out,’ she muttered to Miranda, sliding towards the door.
Later, Casey sat outside Azarola’s house. Knightsbridge. Stuccoed white frontage. Unarguable wealth. The sort of money that buys you anything.
Anything.
There was a park opposite, and she lay in the grass with an ice cream, invisible in a cotton skirt and pink flowery top. From there, she had been watching the Azarola family come and go. Nanny. Yoga teacher. Wife. Learning the routines. Learning the weaknesses.
Azarola was rarely there, she knew now. None of the faces marked possible in her file came or went. And Azarola disappeared for days at a time, and Casey couldn’t know where he went.
Who are you? Tell me who you are.
‘There’s something very weird about sitting outside someone’s house for hours at a time,’ she said to Miranda, as she wrote up her notes back in the office.
‘You have to worry if it stops being weird,’ Miranda answered.
He never went back to Gigi’s.
Days crawled past.
‘You getting anywhere?’ Dash paused at her desk.
‘No,’ Casey had to admit.
She hunched over her story, as if encircled by hyenas.
‘It could all be nothing, Casey.’
And, of course, it could be nothing. It could be an urban myth – a friend of a friend of a friend. A boast that ran out of control. It could, so easily, be a drunken fool exaggerating a story to a credulous buddy.
She could – worst case – have misheard.
‘It could be.’
‘Miranda needs help on the Wynford Mortimer stuff,’ said Dash. ‘It’s millions of documents. Plus I woke up in the middle of the night and just thought, it’s complete and utter madness, isn’t it? No one could actually do that. And, anyway, you’d need to see it happen to write that story, or no one would ever believe it.’
‘You’re probably right.’
‘Well. G
et on with it.’ He was almost sympathetic.
Failure burned through Casey. She hadn’t pulled the threads together. She hadn’t worked it out. She’d fucked up.
Failure might be the only thing that could make Casey cry.
Miranda nodded at her.
‘It was worth chasing, babe. It’s what we do. It’s not your fault.’
Dash and Miranda were being kind, she knew. Newsrooms could be far less forgiving.
‘Fuck.’ Casey kicked her wastepaper bin over. ‘Fuck it.’
‘You can’t stand up every story. We know that.’
‘Maybe we should just do a really aggressive front-up on Azarola? And bounce him?’
Legally, the Post had to go to people before it published stories. It was duty-bound to report fairly, which was the opportunity to give the other version of events.
Even if that was: ‘No comment, or I’ll call the police.’
Casey might also ambush someone, fire questions, watch their reactions as the worst of the allegations were slapped down in front of them. And sometimes, quite often, she broke through and got an admission, or a half-admission, or a denial of one aspect of the story, which might mean the rest was true.
Surprise could be exploited. The TV crews routinely chased people down the street.
‘You can front him up, sure,’ said Miranda. ‘But I don’t think you’ll get anywhere. You don’t have enough detail.’
Because if you say ‘You killed someone’, people can shrug it off. But if you have the details – ‘It was Miss Scarlett in the drawing room, with a candlestick at 4 p.m. last Tuesday’ – they pause, and think, how do they know that? And what else do they know?
Confronting, but without revealing your hand.
‘It really is the last play, if I do that.’ Casey’s shoulders slumped. ‘He doesn’t look like he would scare. And you never know, something else might come in.’
‘You never know.’
Casey sat at her desk. And she felt it. The flicker of rage.
All journalists have done something appalling, but they have to get up in the morning. They have to think, yes, OK, I can live with this. I can sleep at night.
