The Talk Show: the gripping thriller everyone is talking about

by Harry Verity

  The Talk Show

  Harry Verity

  Copyright © 2021 Harry Verity

  The right of Harry Verity to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 2021 by Bloodhound Books.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  www.bloodhoundbooks.com

  Print ISBN 978-1-913942-30-4

  Contents

  Love crime, thriller and mystery books?

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  The Owl, p.2

  The Lion, p.1

  The Lion, p.1

  The Owl, p.2–3

  The Lion, p.1

  The Lion, p.5

  The Lion, p.1

  The Lion, p.1

  The Lion, p.4.

  The Lion, p.1

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Untitled

  SOME WEEKS EARLIER

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Acknowledgements

  A note from the publisher

  Love crime, thriller and mystery books?

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  – To Nanna and Granddad Verity –

  Who will no doubt despair at the sixty-eight uses of the ‘f word’, one character’s cocaine habit and all the other innumerable acts of depravity contained within this book. Without their support I would not have been able to get to this point.

  – And to my friends, the people and the government in Vietnam –

  Whose swift action against COVID-19 in February 2020, generosity and hospitality has allowed me to enjoy a relatively normal life during the completion and publication of this book.

  Xin Cảm Ơn

  1

  ‘There’s the granddad who pawned his wife’s jewellery to fund his crack habit and has been disowned by the rest of the family…’

  Edward could hear a discussion taking place behind the production gallery door. They were female voices. He knocked.

  ‘No, we’ve had enough old bags on the show… next.’

  No response.

  ‘There’s a man with an addiction to dog food, wife left him…’

  ‘Imagine. We’d save a fortune putting him up in doggy daycare rather than a hotel…’

  Edward could wait no longer. He prized open the door and slid in.

  There were indeed two women inside the cramped room, both sat around a rickety-looking desk. One was white-haired, short and casually smoking a cigarette. The other was taller and a lot younger, sporting pink jeans and a white cardigan; she wouldn’t have looked out of place in a fashion catalogue.

  ‘Hello,’ Edward said. ‘Is this the Michael O’Shea Show? I’m the new junior researcher…’

  But before he could proceed any further with his introduction, the elder woman’s phone rang. She picked it up straight away.

  ‘What! Oh, fucking hell!’ She marched to the back of the small room and turned on a desktop computer. She tapped the mouse impatiently as she waited for it to load up and then scrolled straight to the home page of The Lion newspaper.

  The younger woman – who could only have been in her early twenties, Edward’s age – picked up her moleskin notebook and followed the elder woman to the computer monitor. Edward huddled in too, trying to get a glimpse of the headline that had been posted just minutes ago:

  TV MICHAEL IN FAMILY PAEDO ARREST

  -O’Shea ‘on the rocks’ after brother ‘bang to rights’ for sex crimes

  -Family yet to make statement

  -Fears O’Shea will return to the bottle

  There were shocking scenes today as the brother of controversial talk show host and celebrity judge Michael O’Shea was sensationally arrested and charged with viewing indecent images of children on the web and sexually abusing his neighbour’s son. Phillip O’Shea, 36, the younger brother of the embattled presenter, is a regular guest on the show. He was taken from his home at dawn to a police station where he was allegedly questioned for just twenty minutes before he was charged with being in possession of over five hundred indecent images of children and three counts of indecent assault against a minor, aged nine.

  ‘Yes. Yes, it’s Mags.’ The elder woman, Mags, was still on the phone. ‘Yeah, get over here ASAP. We’ll get on this.’

  She ended the phone call and turned to Edward. ‘Here’s a job for you. We’ve been shat on, sort it out.’

  Edward had expected many things when he’d applied to work on The Michael O’Shea Show as a junior researcher but not this.

  ‘I was planning a holiday. I was supposed to be on a beach. A beach! And instead I’m dealing with the fact our star guest is a fucking kiddy fiddler.’

  Edward read on, as Mags scrolled through the various photos of Michael O’Shea with his arms around his younger brother. Edward knew enough about The Michael O’Shea Show to understand why this story had gotten so big.

  Phillip O’Shea had appeared on the show no less than twenty times in the past year. He was the flagship example of Michael’s self-help mantra. Disabled and living on benefits and family handouts, Michael had cut off his funds, forcing him into getting a job. With each episode, viewers had seen him make progress – from refusing to turn up to interviews Michael had arranged for him, to volunteering at a local shop. By the time of the latest segment Phillip had become an ambassador for a homeless charity and was about to start writing an autobiography.

  ‘This is what you’re going to do. At this very moment Michael is on his way over. He is a busy man and he’s got no time, no time whatsoever, to be dealing with this bullshit. I don’t want a single pap of him on the way in. So you’re going to distract the press. Violet,’ Mags, the woman with a penchant for cigarettes, pointed to her younger colleague on her left, ‘is going to dress up in a
driver’s uniform, go down to the garages and sneak out the back, you will be in the passenger seat with a towel over your head. She’ll drive around for a bit in a blacked-out car and then come in through the front. When you’re in position, about to enter, text me and Michael will come in round the back.’

  ‘Right,’ Edward said, though he was still struggling to take in everything Mags had told him.

  ‘Once you’ve done that, you will spend the rest of the day putting together a show to go out tonight! You will ring round every paper, putting a good spin on this and if any of these shitty rags have got the tenacity to suggest that this bullshit might have even an ounce of truth, you tell them straight: the old boys in blue have got fuck all on Michael’s brother. They’ve barely spoken off-camera the last year and if he’s found guilty, Michael will disown the little bastard. Got it?’

  Edward, fairly speechless at this point, could do little more than nod as Mags hurried them out of the gallery.

  ‘Didn’t know this job involved PR,’ Edward joked to Violet as they headed to the garages.

  She didn’t smile. ‘There’s a lot you don’t know about this job.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘One guy, long before you, couldn’t hack it. After two weeks tried to kill himself.’

  ‘He did?’

  ‘Yep.’ It didn’t seem as if she wanted to elaborate.

  ‘I reckon I’ll last longer than two weeks.’

  They made their way through an underpass to a set of garages – a gated compound – on the other side of the road. Inside the end garage was a black BMW with tinted windows.

  ‘Get in,’ she murmured, opening the passenger door. Edward climbed in while Violet went to use the driver’s door and Edward, his heart already racing, recoiled as she reached behind her for a drivers’ uniform and a towel on the back seat and then started to undress in front of him. She unbuttoned her cardigan but then grabbed the towel and tossed it squarely over Edward’s head.

  He smirked under the towel as he waited for Violet to finish getting dressed into the uniform and for the engines to rev up. He felt the car jolt forward and plod towards the gates of the compound.

  They drove around the side roads a few times, then Violet pulled over, texting the producer. This was it. They were going in. And suddenly Edward’s towel was ablaze with light. Cameras flashed in his face and he could hear questions repeated over and over.

  ‘Michael, Michael, what do you have to say about your brother? Is Phillip a paedo, Michael? Will you disown him?’ Edward didn’t flinch as the questions continued. ‘Are you a paedo too? Have you been helping your brother with his crimes?’ It was hard to keep a straight face. Edward imagined his own sarcastic response Yes, he thought, Yes, you got me. I’m guilty of it all. He felt the motors rev forward and then come to a sudden stop.

  ‘Wait,’ Violet whispered. It was a good call. Even after the main front gates had completely closed behind them, he could still hear a helicopter hovering above.

  ‘This towel doesn’t come off until we’re back in the studio,’ she whispered, again. He heard a door shut and felt a breeze as Violet opened his car door and grabbed hold of his hand, dragging him inside.

  ‘Looks like phase one of the operation didn’t go too badly!’ Edward joked. They were back in the studio and the real Michael O’Shea, suited and even more slick in real life, had made it in, unscathed. Edward and Michael were around the same height and of similar build, though there were twenty years between them.

  ‘Phase one?’ Mags, who Edward now knew was the producer, said, puffing away.

  Michael took over. ‘This is not a game, son, there are no phases, no strategy. You have one task and one task only, to cover my arse.’

  ‘We’ve stopped The Lion, for now…’ Mags said. ‘No guilty-as-fuck shot of you in the back of the car.’

  ‘Good.’ Michael brushed through his hair with his hands. ‘They’re absolute pricks at that paper. Now,’ he clasped his hands together, ‘this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to put out a show tonight. A one-off special. Upstairs will clear whatever bollocks is on this evening and give us our usual five thirty slot. Victims of press abuse, how the tabloids ruined my life. We’re going to track down anyone that paper has trashed and we’re going to give them a platform to shit on those bastards. Don’t believe everything you read.’

  Mags licked her lips. ‘We could start a campaign, a national day of action, boycott The Lion, burn the rag live on stage.’

  Michael smirked but said nothing and the meeting seemed to be at an end.

  ‘Do we have an office?’ Edward asked Violet, as Mags and Michael wandered out of the production gallery.

  Violet tilted her head towards the back of the room.

  Edward was confused. He saw a small battered-looking desk at the back of the gallery, covered in rubbish. There was one telephone and a dated desktop computer. It seemed quite unreasonable to Edward that a huge television network like People had cramped him into a small corner of a basement.

  ‘Rather an odd way to meet someone isn’t it, driving round London with a towel over your head?’ Edward said.

  She shrugged. ‘We need to get moving if we’re going to put out a show tonight. Here…’ She handed him a huge file.

  ‘This is a list of people who’ve rung the show. We’re looking for anyone who’s been a victim of press intrusion, anything we can spin. Failing that, get on Google. Look for any high-profile cases… people wrongly accused of murder, oddballs that the press has trashed, low-list celebs looking to make a comeback who want to rant about being caught cheating by the papers.’

  ‘But no one is going to be available at such short notice…’

  ‘You really know nothing about television, do you? How on earth did you manage to get a job here?’

  2

  The breathy saxes of the theme tune reached their coda and the cameras panned to Michael O’Shea as he bounded onto the stage, his stage, shaking hands with as many members of the audience as he could before their applause fell away.

  ‘Every day this show gets taken apart in the press. Last week I’m a cokehead who’s out every night and this week my wife is about to leave me for a younger man because I’m too dull! Too dull, folks?’

  There was a faint murmur of laughter that didn’t seem to satisfy him.

  ‘Today, we’re looking at victims of the press. That’s right, we’re turning the tables…’

  The lights in the audience dimmed and a montage began to play of various newspaper stories and a dramatic strapline:

  ‘Don’t Believe All that You Read. The Truth Behind the Headlines’

  From the gallery above Edward looked on. His ‘office’ was now a hive of activity. A host of techies huddled around the gallery control desk, talking between themselves, with Mags at the centre. Edward was wearing a headset so he could talk to Violet who was backstage with the guests…

  Suddenly Michael O’Shea was sombre as he introduced his first guest.

  ‘Some of you may have followed his career since he was dramatically forced to quit the second series of Make Me a Star after false allegations emerged that he lied and cheated his way to the final. Here’s just a snippet of what he had to put up with…’

  Michael’s voice narrated another montage of newspaper headlines and clips.

  ‘On the cusp of stardom, singer Charlie Heaton was just twenty when, days before the final of the country’s biggest talent television contest, Make Me a Star, allegations emerged in certain newspapers that he’d tried to bribe one of the judges, had taken professional singing lessons – strictly against the rules – and had a secret cocaine addiction. From national sweetheart to enemy number one, the press turned on Charlie. He was forced to leave the show and endure a month-long police investigation for bribery. All the while he was subjected to a tirade of abuse from newspaper columnists and branded Britain’s biggest liar…’

  The sequence panned onto a particularly furious colu
mn from the gossip pages of The Lion.

  ‘Nearly six months later it turned out that the allegations were false. The newspapers had not checked their sources and a vital tape of him discussing bribing the judge was found to be fake. Many believe the newspaper deliberately doctored the tape. But the damage was done.’

  The cameras panned away from the montage and back to the stage.

  ‘Following his abrupt exit from Make Me a Star he’s recently been doing the rounds to set the record straight… and relaunch his career, Charlie’s on the show, everyone.’

  A taller and visibly older looking man with a trimmed beard and a low-cut V-neck made his way out on the stage, his hands in his pockets.

  In the gallery, Mags was puffing away, apparently enjoying herself.

  ‘Doing the rounds? Cheating Charlie’s been on every show going for the last two years, bleating out the same sob story over and over. He’s probably made more money from appearance fees than if he’d actually got the record deal; abuse, my arse.’