The Diaries of a Fleet Street Fox

by Lilly Miles

  ‘Fine,’ I said, wondering why he was so moody. ‘Who’s in it?’

  ‘Dunno,’ replied Bish with a scowl. ‘Just get it in here, right? Promise him whatever he wants. No mentioning it outside of this office, and no official paperwork.’

  I left, confused – why was Bish interested if he didn’t know who was in it? – and headed to an address in Mayfair. It was a flat in a good block, and a woman buzzed me up.

  At the door of the flat she greeted me and introduced herself as Martha. I guessed immediately she was a hooker. High class, but easy to spot nonetheless. The nails, hair and make-up were perfect, but the heels a bit too high and the eyes a bit too dead. Her breath smelled of wine, and it wasn’t quite noon. As Martha walked me into the living room, which was spacious and clean, I caught glimpses of a dirty kitchen with dishes piled in the sink, and a bedroom with the curtains still drawn and pill bottles by the bed.

  In the living room a suave man in a dark suit got up from a sofa to shake my hand. He wore an expensive watch, but had too much oil in his dark hair and his eyes constantly flicked from side to side, like a snake’s. Meet Martha’s pimp, Danny.

  Danny said he had a video and was sure it was worth a lot to the newspapers. I explained that I could tell him a rough figure, once I’d seen the video and worked out what we could do with it, but my boss would need to see it, too, before we could offer a firm sum. Danny smirked and said he was happy to show me. He gestured towards a huge flat screen on one wall, flicked a remote control, then lounged back on the sofa.

  It was grainy CCTV footage of a bedroom, presumably at night-time. Martha walked in, leading a man by the hand, and they were joined by a second girl. The two women put on a show of taking off their clothes, watched by the man, who had his back to the camera. There was music playing in the background, and you could hear the women giggling while the man made appreciative noises.

  So far, so usual. The kind of thing I see regularly, before having to tell someone that the person they thought was David Beckham is, in fact, just some scrote, and it’s not worth anything to us. I looked at Danny and raised my eyebrows; he gestured to keep watching, and smirked again.

  I looked back at the screen. Martha had beckoned the man on to the bed and was kissing him. Then he turned his attentions to the second woman, and I saw his face for the first time.

  HOLY HELL! I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was like catching the Queen and Terry Wogan in flagrante, or hearing Bish was boffing Cheryl Tweedy. It was astonishing.

  It was Elliot.

  Tight, prissy, sanctimonious Elliot. With two hookers. I could feel Danny smirking again, but refused to look at him. The video wound on and I saw bits of Elliot I never want to see again. He had sex with both girls in a variety of ways with a range of props, then the action began to flag. ‘Thank God,’ I thought, hoping I could stop watching. Then Martha reached into the bedside unit and pulled out a small bag of white powder, which Elliot snatched off her excitedly. He positioned both girls on their hands and knees on the bed in front of him, and carefully shook the bag until he had four rough, fat lines laid out on each of their bum cheeks. He knelt down, put a finger against one nostril, and snorted each line up with every apparent sign of glee.

  Then he leaned back on his haunches, wiped his nose and said, loudly and distinctly: ‘Don’t worry about the cost, girls – I’ll be able to put all this through on expenses!’

  I put a hand over my eyes. ‘OK, I’ve seen enough,’ I told Danny. ‘You can turn it off. What do you want?’

  ‘Forty k,’ he said with a reptilian grin.

  ‘FORTY K? We don’t pay that for a splash!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Won’t look good for your newspaper, though, will it? I could take it to one of your rivals, they might publish it. Or the BBC, they don’t like the tabloids much. It looks bad when you think about how many stories your paper has done about other people’s misbehaviour.’

  Outraged at being put in the same category as politicians and celebrities, I nevertheless realized he was right. The Groaner would never pay £40,000 but they hate us and would make a meal out of Elliot and our whole newspaper, as would the Beeb in revenge for the kickings it regularly gets over what it does with the licence fee. I remembered Bish’s orders – get the video at all costs, but nothing official – bit my morals back, and told Danny he’d ‘probably’ get the money but I needed the DVD to show my boss first. He gave me a copy and said he was keeping the original, and I took it back to the office.

  I handed it to Bish, and he put it straight into his bottom desk drawer, dropping it like it was hot. ‘Is it worth the money?’ he asked abruptly.

  ‘Depends,’ I said. ‘Be cheaper to sack him.’

  Bish gave me a look. ‘Can’t do that, lass. His auntie’s a major shareholder. But we’re not going to pay for his troubles, he can pay the man off ’isself. I’m not going to watch this. Was it . . . y’know, normal?’

  ‘Only a bit kinky,’ I said. ‘Two girls, some lesbian stuff, a little light spanking. It was when he snorted coke off their arses and told them he’d get it on expenses that he really dug himself a hole.’

  ‘Fook,’ said Bish with a sigh. ‘Oh well, at least it weren’t kiddies. Thanks – and oh, not a word now. Not one, d’you hear me?’

  Walking past Elliot back to my desk, I felt him glaring at me, and wondered if being busted would change him. Five minutes later he went into the Bunker. I could see him and Bish through the glass wall, talking. Elliot went white, began gesticulating, then fell silent as Bish carried on, staring at his desk and fiddling with paperclips. Elliot looked up for a moment, and stared right at me. Bish carried on at him, and then Elliot left and hurried straight out of the office. No doubt to his bank, and then Mayfair. I heard he got it for £20,000 in the end.

  Rather than having the stuffing knocked out of his sails, Elliot has gone on behaving the same as always. He seemed to delight in getting me to rewrite a three-par picture caption eight times, and sending another reporter on a six-hour round-trip to Cornwall for a pointless story just as they were about to leave the office at 8 p.m. He obviously has no remorse, no self-doubt, no sense even of ‘that was a close one’. Meanwhile I can now see Elliot’s bad moods are the result of drug paranoia – and what he does in his private life impacts on dozens of people every day.

  But that’s the way of it now. Selfishness has become socially acceptable, along with nebulous ‘rights’, hypocritical demands for privacy from celebrities whose only income is from hawking photographs of themselves, and a refusal, at the highest levels, to take any kind of responsibility.

  MPs blame ‘accounting errors’ and ‘oversights’ rather than admit they are frauds; Kate Moss can be pictured snorting lines of white powder but is never prosecuted; bankers who brought the world’s economy to the brink of collapse get bonuses; celebrities caught at orgies criticize others’ prudishness. No one puts their hands up to say ‘I’m sorry, I did that, it was my fault.’

  And the average cokehead in the street thinks their little habit affects only them, so they can do what they like. They think it’s their choice, their fun, or their pain. And they think it’s not a problem.

  Not everyone who uses becomes an addict, but many are more dependent than they realize. Worse, you don’t know in advance how you will react to a drug – you might just have a giggle, or you might go home and argue with your wife. You might get hooked.

  Take the Suffolk Strangler killings of 2006. Each of the five murdered women was a prostitute who sold herself on the street to get her next fix. One was from a poor and troubled family, another from a balanced middle-class home with tennis lessons and ponies. A third was pretty, a fourth was not, yet another had fallen in with a violent man who forced her on to the streets. They all ended up dumped in a ditch.

  The one thing they had in common was that with one hit, they were hooked. One girl started on glue, another skunk, a third on speed. They simply had the kind of brain chemistry
which made them susceptible, and by the time they realized that, it was too late. I’ve got plenty of friends who indulge appetites for one thing or another, and most of them are fine with it. They’ll have a bit of this or that on a night out and see it as nothing, more or less, and I daresay Elliot is the same. Twatface went out partying with him a few times – friends in common, that sort of thing, although Elliot always used to look down on him – and while it didn’t use to bother me now I’m left to wonder what they might have got up to together. Elliot is paranoid and mad with me at work, and Twatface would be angry and mad with me at home.

  Everyone who develops a problem with drugs has loved ones who are equally abused and damaged by the addiction. When I think back to the year things were really bad with Twatface all I can really remember is a constant sense of low-grade fear – a vague worry that the next phone call would bring me dire news of some kind or another.

  Even recreational users are paying money to nasty people who murder, rape, beat and intimidate on a global scale in order to maintain their grasp on a criminal network that does zero good for anyone, anywhere.

  Of course, it’s impossible to make every pound you spend a clean one – for some part of it not to go to a country or company that does things which you don’t like, even if you’re buying only broccoli. But there are not many ways I can think of to make that pound as dirty as you do by giving it to drug lords.

  How many of the estimated one million people in the UK who regularly take cocaine think, before putting it up their nose, how it got there? Or wonder how everyone else manages to have fun without it?

  And it’s all to feel like slightly less of a prat for a few minutes. For the sense of imperfection, of ugliness or stupidity or pain – or the bad memories that we all have – to recede for a while, so that we can pretend they were never there at all.

  I have lost count of the numbers of rapes I have covered; but most were allegedly carried out when the girl could barely uncross her eyes, much less her legs, and most of the men walked free. I have heard in inquests how one spliff led to another and another, then eventually to mental illness, years of agony, and suicide. I have sat through hundreds of trials for sex assaults, violence, murders and mistakes, fuelled by too much booze and too many drugs. I have knocked on the doors of dozens of families whose children have died or been damaged by too much of something.

  Each of those people has pointed the finger – at their son’s bad friend who sold him the dope, at someone taking advantage of their daughter, at society for allowing cheap booze to be peddled to children, at the government, at schools, at the system. They don’t point the finger at themselves. Or ask: ‘What did I do?’

  No one takes responsibility, and the same story is told so often it is no longer shocking. The Reader just rolls their eyes and turns the page.

  There is no fault or blame to be accepted for anything. No one is punished, no one is held to account, and the finger always points elsewhere. Questions are asked, but usually of the wrong damn people.

  Well, I question why no one holds their hand up to anything, says they were wrong, and publicly atones for it. That happened publicly in 1982, when Lord Carrington resigned as foreign secretary because he had not foreseen that the Argies were going to invade the Falklands. He said his department had screwed up, and as their boss he took the blame. But nowadays a politician will hang on for as long as he can, pointing the finger at someone else, say sorry while never feeling it, without a thought for old-fashioned public honour. A celebrity will only admit their behaviour was a bit off if they’re caught on video smoking crack, or kill some children while drink-driving. The rest of the time they cry ‘intrusion’ or threaten to sue; they blame the Press for catching them out rather than wonder if they should have been doing it in the first place. When a parent raises a child badly, they say: ‘What can I do?’ and shrug their shoulders. Children are no longer naughty – instead they are diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder, and we are told to make allowances.

  And when you get divorced, it is officially no one’s fault. Whatever the reason for your split, legally it does not change the financial settlement or any rights over children. That may be fine for some couples who just decided it was for the best, but what about the woman who for thirty years had every bone in her body broken by an abusive husband, and who, when she finally gets the strength to leave him, has to split the proceeds of the sale of their marital home 50-50? That’s not right. What about a husband whose wife cuckolded him for years, who made him think her children by other men were his? What about someone whose partner one day just ups and goes, without any reason, breaks their heart and leaves them railing at the world? Not right. Not right at all.

  It’s not right that Twatface can get a divorce, sign a form admitting adultery, and no one seems to think any the worse of him for it. I want him in the stocks for a day, to have rotten tomatoes thrown at him, to hear him admit he bears the blame for breaking my heart.

  It’s not right that no one tells Elliot his bullying is wrong, not to mention the hookers and drugs. If Elliot had been a Royal, we would have run the video, caused a scandal, and he would have apologized publicly and been sent off to rehab. Instead it’s swept under the carpet and we all pretend it’s normal.

  Well, fuck that shit. We are not islands, to do as we will and sod the rest of the world. Humans are a network, and everything we do has an impact on other people. You cheat on your wife and hurt her, and you also hurt your children, your parents, her parents, and all your friends. You fail with your kids, and they will go down the pan taking other people with them. If you take drugs then you fund a network of really bad people who do more bad things with your money in a cycle of horribleness.

  And you’re not cool – you’re just selfish.

  It’s enough to make you want to switch the world off at the socket, reboot and start again. This time without people.

  DAY SIXTY

  BEING cheated on is bad for your brain. Aside from anything else, you get so used to claiming the moral high ground that you become a monster. You rewrite your own moral code at will, certain you can do no wrong because you are In The Right. Stalin had much the same problem.

  It’s perfectly explicable; your friends are on your side, so tell you how wrong he is and how right you are. The lawyers tell you how wrong he is and how much he should pay you. The central drama of your break-up occupies all your waking moments and conversations to the extent that you believe everyone else feels it as painfully as you do, and that karma, Buddha and the Force are all going to gang up and kick your husband in the nads.

  This is normal human behaviour I suppose – we’d soon go mad if we realized just how small a minority our peccadilloes put us in. For example, there was one national newspaper where I had been working for only a few weeks before I was taken aside and had it kindly pointed out that if I wanted to get on I should not wear trousers to work.

  This is the kind of suggestion that would send most women rampaging straight to human resources and the sort of ‘ism’ which would, in any other situation, make me willingly hurl myself under the winner of the four-thirty at Epsom in protest. But journalists are a practical breed and prefer to go under the radar whenever possible, so I took no offence, and switched to skirts and heels even on cold and rainy night shifts. It didn’t make an awful lot of difference – a few more stories and the occasional ogle by the scary editor, and I soon left anyway. But as far as I was concerned the misogyny was a trap for them, not me – something that constrained and ordained their behaviour, whereas I had the freedom to change how they thought of me simply by switching my clothes and shoes, the poor muppets. If any of those bosses had seen themselves as I did they would have crumbled to dust.

  In the case of divorce, especially when you are the wronged party, there is so much leeway given by friends and family that it would take a saint not to fall into a petulant psychosis. Polarized by the legal process, and emboldened by a sense of ethical cer
tainty so strong you could bend horseshoes around it, you stride on defiantly, unable to see any of the pitfalls until suddenly you’re at the bottom of one and the light’s gone out. Or, in my case, you start arguing over the most minor things. There were holiday photographs (I went through the albums, took out every picture of him and his family, and gave them to him. ‘Can I have some of you?’ he asked. ‘Why?’ I said. ‘I’d like something to remember you by,’ he replied. ‘Drop dead,’ I told him). There were CDs (‘Is this my White Album or your White Album?’ he asked. ‘Mine’s the one without coffee stains,’ I said, and he didn’t believe me, so we argued viciously about it for an hour or so). It got so petty I was genuinely worried he’d claim the fridge magnets too.

  In my defence they are a damn fine set of magnets. An ironic, nerdy collection of mementoes gathered from around the globe. There is one from the set of a TV soap, which I bought after two weeks’ work on a highly successful attempt to catch the soap’s barmaid shagging the soap’s Romeo. Then there is the one from Indonesia, which I grabbed at the airport after three weeks covering the tsunami, up to my arse in rotting corpses and rat curry. There is even one of the Portuguese church in Praia da Luz, where Madeleine McCann went missing and most of Fleet Street spent what felt like ten years of our lives trying to find either her or a good line on the story – we failed at both.

  I would bring these magnets home from my globetrotting, whack them on the fridge and tell Twatface my travellers’ tales while he cooked me my first decent meal in weeks and listened, admiring and a little jealous because he was no longer an on-the-road reporter but chained to a news desk in an open-plan office with pretend daylight and internal politics.

  As the divorce rows got more silly he sent, via his lawyer and mine, petty little lists of worthless bits and bobs he insisted were his. He claimed one of a pair of chairs, a bookcase that wasn’t straight, a bare lampstand. On one visit I had caught him in front of the fridge with the Praia da Luz church in his hand and a stupid smile on his face, and it took all my control not to claw his face off but simply grab it back, and tell him to not even think about it. We argued about every little unimportant thing.