by Carmen Reid
Now she could hear footsteps – maybe Joan had gone to get her dressing gown – then the door opened and sure enough, a dressing-gowned woman stood in front of her.
Gingerish hair, streaked with grey and up on end, a pale, early morning face without make-up. Jo put her at late forties, which was consistent with all that she knew about her so far.
‘Ms Theroux?’ Jo asked with the smile, but trying not to be too door-to-door saleswomanish.
‘Yes,’ Ms Theroux replied, looking totally confused.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you so early on a Saturday. But it’s important. My name’s Jo Randall, I’m a journalist, I’m with the—’
But Ms Theroux had already let out a gasp which, Jo knew, was never a good sign. ‘You’re from the paper,’ she said, ‘I thought I recognized you.’
‘I know that you and Wolff-Meyer are involved in legal proceedings and I’m here because I was hoping to talk to you about that.’
‘No. No. I can’t say anything. Please go away.’
And then with an embarrassed fumble, Joan shut the door and Jo – not for the first time in her career, or indeed the last – found herself staring at a small brass bell.
Drat. Arse. Bugger.
As a reporter, you always lived in the overoptimistic hope that someone, somewhere wasn’t going to make it this hard for you. That someone really did want to talk about something interesting.
She turned from the door and walked slowly down to the end of the street, turned left and took deep calming breaths as she carried on walking. Finally, she doubled back and was at the door again.
She pressed the buzzer firmly.
It didn’t take long for Joan to come back. She’d got dressed in the five minutes or so since Jo had left her and now stood in her doorway in jeans and a baggy grey top.
She looked taken aback to see Jo there again. Maybe she’d been expecting someone else.
‘This is really important, Ms Theroux,’ Jo got in straight away. ‘An eight-year-old girl is in a coma, someone might lose their child over this. We’ve got to know more about this strain of whooping cough.’
The woman’s face seemed to pale even further.
1 can’t talk about it, I just can’t,’ she said, agitated now.
‘I don’t have to bring you into this by name,’ Jo was talking quickly, trying to say as much as she could before the door closed on her again, ‘I know a lot about this already and I need to ask you for some more background information.’
‘Please,’ Joan looked genuinely frightened now, ‘leave me alone.’
The door shut with a bit more force this time.
Jo walked slowly back to her car. She suspected someone like Joan would usually talk by the second or third day you came back to them. But there was no time for that. She would have to give it an hour and try again. Sometimes people just needed a bit of time to come to terms with the fact that the press was onto it and the inevitable was going to happen, before they could make the decision to speak.
Climbing back into the passenger seat, Jo took out her computer. At least she could start writing up the Savannah story. The whooping cough situation was more tricky: she had enough information to write a story, but it was all from a dodgy source . . . er, well, computer hacking? Make that an illegal one . . . She needed Joan in person backing it all up.
She connected her mobile phone to the laptop so she could check this morning’s emails and began to whirr through the start-up procedure.
There was an email from the Wolff-Meyer press officer at last.
In line with latest recommendation from the government, we would urge parents to have their children protected with the Quintet five-in-one vaccination. This injection has been extensively trialled and found to be overwhelmingly safe.
There is no significant evidence to suggest that Quintet can cause whooping cough or is linked in any way to brain damage, epilepsy or seizures.
Jo looked at the words carefully. Have your children ‘protected’ . . . ‘extensively trialled’, ‘overwhelmingly safe’ and ‘significant’. They were all weasel words. She knew how carefully they’d been chosen. How essentially meaningless they were.
She flipped on the car radio and kept one ear out for the news. There was a name and mobile phone number at the bottom of the statement, so she unplugged her phone from the computer and punched in the number.
It rang for a long time, and finally a woman’s voice answered.
‘Hello is that Nicola Stoppes?’ Jo asked.
‘Yes, can I help you?’
Jo introduced herself.
‘Right, yes, I’m duty press officer, what can I do for you?’
‘Hang on a sec,’ Jo told her. The beeps announcing the on-the-hour news headlines had just sounded on her car radio.
A deep male newsreader voice began to go through the headline news. Whooping cough was the third item on the agenda. The coma girl was ‘showing signs of improvement’ but a second child in hospital was now judged to be ‘critically ill’. No new cases of the illness had been reported for a second day.
Jo turned her attention back to the phone call.
‘Nicola, have you got a pen and paper handy? OK, I want you to get a response from Wolff-Meyer for me on this question. Did a rogue strain of whooping cough from the Wolff-Meyer lab in Bedford escape and cause the current outbreak? Which by the way is proving extremely serious. Two children are critically ill. OK, that’s the question.
‘Now just to underline it: we have reason to believe that the Wolff-Meyer research lab is the sole cause of this outbreak. Not the Quintet vaccinations, but the lab itself. Have you got that? And please, Nicola,’ Jo added, ‘don’t mess me around on this. Get the question to the person who needs to see it. I don’t want to hear that you couldn’t contact anyone, because I’ll know that’s rubbish. My deadline is 2 p.m. All clear?’
It certainly seemed to be clear to Nicola, but not altogether welcome. Poor old thing, getting all that overtime for being duty press officer and then having to work for it. . . imagine!
When Jo clicked off the phone, she had several decisions to make.
First of all she called Jeff back.
‘You have got someone at this hospital, haven’t you?’ she asked him as soon as he answered.
‘Where the whooping cough children are?’ was his response.
‘Yeah.’
‘Aidan’s there. He’s briefed to phone both of us if there’s any word.’
‘Oh good.’
‘Take it you’re not having any luck.’
‘No. Not yet. But I’ll sit in the car. Try her again later.’
‘Better get writing.’
‘Yeah. Don’t worry, I was coming to that.’
‘Were you? Nice of you to think of us back here in the office getting our arses chewed off by Spikey.’
‘Now there’s an image.’
It felt cosily private holding his voice to her ear.
‘What did you want to talk to me about, Jeff?’
‘We’ll save it for tonight, if you’re still on for that.’
She’d missed an entire night’s sleep but somehow still seemed to be functioning, and now Jo heard herself agreeing to join him for the Saturday night post-office drinks.
After a brief catch-up chat with Aidan, she put her phone to the side, opened a new file on the computer and finally began typing:
Savannah Tyler, the woman who hopes to become Britain’s first ever Green MP next week, has spoken for the first time about the death of her only child and how the tragedy has inspired her fight for a cleaner, Greener Britain.
Ms Tyler, now 38, watched her severely allergic baby son, Felix, die in her arms of an asthma attack seven years ago.
With the emergency services on the line, Ms Tyler fought to save 19-month-old Felix but she tearfully admitted: ‘When I saw he was really going. . . I had to stop. I had to put the phone down, stop battling and just hold him for one moment longer. Let him go in s
ome sort of peace.’
Jo didn’t need to double-check that quote, like many other words from interviews done over the years, it had been imprinted on her mind.
Just before her son’s death, Ms Tyler had lost both of her parents in an air crash. The combination of the two tragedies sent her into a depression that ruined her relationship with Felix’s father, Philippe Teyhan, and led to many dark years.
Baby Felix suffered from multiple allergy syndrome, a condition not widely understood when he was alive. He was allergic to most of the common chemicals found in every household and suffered chronic eczema and asthma.
Ms Tyler who, if the polls are right, will take a seat in the House of Commons for Oxford North in next week’s by-election said: ‘I’m a scientist by profession but my special interest in the far-reaching and long-term effects of chemicals on our planet is inspired by Felix.
‘I think about him every single day and about the kind of world I would have liked to hand on to him. I suppose you could describe what I do as a tribute to my beautiful baby boy.’
It was hard to repress both the tearfulness and the buzz of excitement Jo felt as she wrote this. It was true that some stories just wrote themselves, the words spread like butter over the page.
A half-glimpsed movement made Jo lift her head, just in time to see Joan stepping out of her house. Bugger!
She moved the laptop to the driver’s seat, grabbed her keys and scrambled out of the car door. Slamming it shut, she started to run down the road.
Joan heard the slam, saw her and began to speed up to get away from her. ‘Ms Theroux!’ Jo called out as she was almost level with her. ‘I don’t want to follow you about all day, but I’d really like to talk to you.’
Joan continued walking briskly with her head tucked down.
Jo walked beside her. ‘There’s another child critically ill in hospital today did you know that?’ she asked.
This seemed to slow Joan for a moment, but then she carried on walking.
‘I know this is in the hands of the lawyers. I know you are taking Wolff-Meyer to tribunal and that they are accusing you of negligence. But I still think there are ways you can talk to us about this.’
Joan looked round at her with something close to amazed fear on her face.
‘How do you know this? Have they been talking to you?’
‘No, not the people in charge of Wolff-Meyer, but some other people down the line, like yourself,’ Jo lied. Well, what else could she do? Admit to spending a whole night hacking into files?
‘Who?’ Joan asked, but at least she had stopped walking now.
‘Look, I have to respect their request for anonymity.’
‘Would you talk to me anonymously?’
‘I’d prefer to use your name, use your picture and let everyone know that you’ve nothing to be ashamed of,’ was Jo’s response to this.
There was a pause. Joan was obviously thinking hard.
Another villager turned into the pavement and walked towards them. ‘Morning Joan,’ the woman said and fixed Jo with a questioning stare.
‘Good morning,’ both Jo and Joan replied.
For a moment, it looked as if the woman was going to stop and talk, but then she thought better of it and carried on along the pavement.
‘You’ve already spoken to someone else?’ Joan asked Jo, once the woman was out of earshot.
‘Yes.’ Jo hoped the God of White Lies wouldn’t strike her down on the spot.
‘You already know what’s happened?’ Joan asked.
‘Yes.’ Same prayer to the same god.
Joan’s shoulders sank a little. Jo took this as a sign of something she’d observed in other reluctant interviewees: Joan had probably been living and worrying about this for weeks, maybe it was something of a relief to finally talk and get it out in the open.
Slowly Joan turned and began to walk towards her front door without saying anything. She pushed open the gate and said the four words Jo had been praying to hear.
‘You’d better come in.’
Chapter Nineteen
Erections lasting longer than four hours – though rare – may require immediate medical help.
Warning on TV ad for Cialis
Saturday: 11.45 a.m.
Marcus was standing in the glitzy handbag section of a big, glamorous department store. He had absolutely no idea what he was looking for, but he kept telling the various super-groomed shop assistants who approached every so often that he was fine: ‘just looking’.
There were little alcoves with all the big names: Gucci, Prada, Burberry. But none of those bags looked right. Plus, he didn’t even want to see the price tags.
He’d walked in on a whim, with some thought in his mind that he’d like to buy Jo a bag and now he was on that shopping knife-edge. Was he going to give in? There was just too much choice, effort, hassle, expense. Or was he going to manfully soldier on, braving the quite frankly rude stares of the glacial blond assistant over by the till? Did he look that much like a shoplifter? Was it the large messenger bag slung over his shoulder? Did she think he was going to stuff one of her precious little handbags into it and bolt through the revolving doors?
‘Look,’ he said, giving her a smile, ‘I want to buy someone a present. I want it to be special but not too . . . well. . .’ he made a wave at the Gucci sign: ‘Not too over the top. Something original.’
‘What’s your budget?’ She of the ironed-straight curtain of highlighted hair and razor sharp black trouser suit wanted to know.
‘Well, that’s a bit personal.’ Marcus put his head to the side, smiled with raised eyebrows, willing her to be just a little bit charmed.
‘I don’t want to waste your time,’ she replied, but in the frosty way that meant she certainly didn’t want to waste hers.
He gave her a figure around about what he had in mind and when she heard, she stepped out from behind the counter and led him to a section round the corner he hadn’t looked at properly yet.
‘Day or evening?’ she asked.
‘What?’
She rewarded this with a little sigh.
‘A day bag or an evening bag?’
He hadn’t realized there was a distinction.
‘Erm . . . well, is there something for both?
Something not too big? Maybe colourful?’
She pointed to the brightly lit glass shelves in front of them: ‘There’s quite a few to choose from here.’
She picked up a small lime green bag and unzipped it with her long-nailed fingers. ‘They have really nice linings,’ she pointed out.
And so it did. Bright orange silky stuff with pink flowers. But lime green? It wasn’t really Jo’s colour, he didn’t think.
Higher up on the shelf was a brown bag. He brought it down: it was small, but not too small, decorated with brass studs, some orange and pink appliquéd flowers and a tassel on the zip. He slid open the aged brass zip on top and saw the pink silk lining. Nice, very nice. He held it up at arm’s length.
She would hardly be able to get any of the things she liked to carry everywhere into this little bag.
But maybe that was a good thing. When she had this bag, she could just take what mattered . . . and come out dancing with him.
She needed more dancing and more laughter in her life. When she threw back her head and laughed, her fringe fell off her face and he could see her white forehead, slim eyebrows and it was like a glimpse of an unseen Jo, the private person: someone was there who was maybe quite different from the public, driven, coping-with-everything person she was the rest of the time.
He had dared to poke about in her overstuffed leather monster one evening to see what all she schlepped about with her every day. He’d found an A4 notebook full of pages of notes, three spiral-bound reporter’s notebooks, two stuffed with notes, one empty. A grey folder filled with her newspaper’s headed notepaper and contract forms, a bunch of pens, tied about with elastic bands, a calculator, a Palm Pilot, a mobile
phone with charger and car charger, keys, a crammed wallet, a crushed packet of cigarettes and a lighter, a battered looking box of tampons, an ancient and well worn address book, her passport, two nail files, both snapped in half, a lip salve, two lipsticks, a compact mirror, a small and shrivelled tangerine. Half a packet of chewing gum. There was a small pink folder with a scrawl he could just make out as ‘girls’ on the front – because she had the worst handwriting he had ever encountered. He had just taken a peek inside to find three snaps of her daughters and a selection of their crayon and felt-tip drawings when he’d heard her voice coming from the doorway.
‘That’s a bit nosy, isn’t it?’
He’d looked round to find that the sharp question came with a smile. ‘Sorry,’ he’d said immediately, ‘I just. . . Sorry . . . I shouldn’t have,’ he’d stumbled, a little embarrassed. ‘I just wondered what the hell you kept in there.’
‘We can’t all show up for work with just an apron, you know,’ she’d replied.
She’d come over and crouched down beside the chaos. After a moment spent looking over it all, she started scooping it back into her bag with the words: ‘No, there isn’t anything I can take out of here. I need it all.’
He’d laughed at this, but hadn’t tried to dissuade her.
Now, holding the funky little brown, pink and orange bag in his hand, Marcus knew that it would at least make Jo laugh. And for that reason alone, he handed it to the shop assistant, without too much of a bad conscience about the price, and told her he would buy it. In the back of his mind was also the thought that maybe this would be a goodbye present. Maybe. He couldn’t decide, felt unusually confused about this. He was going to go away in June, for a long summer . . . and after that? He didn’t know.
He really liked Jo, but his instinct with women was to keep it fun, keep it friendly and move on. Get out while the going was good. That had always been his way. He’d never stayed on to see what came afterwards. But then, Jo made no demands on him. She didn’t ever ask ‘why haven’t you called?’ or expect to know what he was doing every night of the week, every hour of the weekend. She made no claims on his time, she was the most unpossessive woman he’d ever dated. In fact, he found himself checking his phone messages just a little bit too often in the hope that she had called. Maybe that was the reason to move on: maybe she just wasn’t that into him and he should get out before there was any chance of suffering a serious flambé or fricassée of the heart.
