A knock on the door. Sir Gavin himself, dressed casually in a golfing jumper and trousers, like he’d unexpectedly been hauled off a golf course and reluctantly had to be dragged back into the office to deal with some emergency. Immediately an alarm bell rang in her head. What the hell was he doing here? He was rarely around in the mornings, was in fact famous for keeping as far from the building as possible until lunchtime at the earliest. Even more worrying; the T. Rexes had already had their weekly meeting/grilling/hauling over the coals with her the previous day, so why would he need to see her again so soon? And if he did want an emergency meeting with her, why not just call her and summon her up to the T. Rexes’ floor, like he normally would?
He very pointedly didn’t call her Madame Editrix either.
Very Bad Sign.
Come in, sit down, she’d managed to say calmly enough, only the slight tremble in her hands betraying just how nervous she was. Janus-like, her head was normally focused in two directions so she’d always know exactly what any unexpected meeting was about, but for once she was completely stumped.
‘We need to talk,’ he’d said, easing his considerable girth down into the chair opposite her. He had a newspaper tucked under his arm, which he faux-casually spread out across his lap. Annoyingly, he laid it out face down, so she couldn’t read what was on it, but she was pretty certain it was their rival paper, The Chronicle. One she made it a point of principle never to buy, read or even glance at, on the grounds that she begrudged that shower of bastards the extra business.
So what was Sir Gavin doing with the rival paper?
‘Just a little chat, one on one, you and me privately Eloise, before the board will want to see you. I felt it was the very least I could do for you.’
Oh Christ, she’d thought, this is worse than I thought. Far worse.
‘Name of Michael Courtney ring a bell with you?’
She nodded mutely, suddenly sick to her stomach. Years of instinct instantly telling her exactly where this would lead. She immediately felt like someone who knew for certain they were about to be murdered, but just couldn’t guess how. Hung, drawn or quartered.
‘It’s come to my attention …’
Via Seth Coleman of course, she thought, her quick mind jumping ahead. Who else would bring this on her?
‘… That for whatever personal reasons you may have had, you buried a story about him, Eloise. Care to comment?’
She bit her tongue, not sure where to start. He knew the truth, she was certain of that. He’d been told. And now there was nothing for it but to face the music.
‘Because,’ she stammered awkwardly, ‘I felt at this point, the story wasn’t sufficiently newsworthy.’
Weak, stupid, lame. She knew it as soon as the words tripped out of her mouth. She knew it and what’s more, so did he.
‘Not newsworthy?’ he replied, eyeballing her coolly. ‘The crime boss single-handedly responsible for most of the heroin trade in the city? Whose reign of terror takes in a spate of tiger kidnappings, bank raids, art theft, you name it … And you, as editor, decide this somehow isn’t newsworthy?’
Eloise couldn’t ever remember a time in her life when she’d felt so small. She had to at least try to defend herself, but what to say?
‘As I say, Sir Gavin,’ she said weakly, her voice sounding so faint it was as if it was coming from another room, ‘I had every intention of monitoring it in a few weeks’ time, as the trial progressed, but at this point, felt that there was little to be gained from covering it.’
‘So, no connection at all with the fact that Michael Courtney just happens to be the same boss your close friend Jake Keane worked for? And even more disturbingly I now hear, actually served a prison sentence for?’
Oh Christ, she thought, physically starting to get nauseous, he really knows. Knows everything. But if Seth had been the one to rat her out, then who told him in the first place? Her mind raced, working backwards at the speed of light.
And then suddenly it all fitted. Jim Kelly, the bloody Snoop Dog himself, that’s how. Who else could possibly have that information? Wasn’t that how she’d found out about Jake in the first place for herself? And what could have been easier for Seth Coleman than to prise it out of him behind her back?
Now she suddenly felt weak at the enormity of what hit her. Because she hadn’t a leg to stand on here. She knew it, Sir Gavin knew it; it was official. Game over. She’d fucked up, royally fucked up. And all for what? For a man who wouldn’t return her calls, who’d effectively vanished into thin air and who it was doubtful she’d ever even see again.
But if she thought she’d heard the worst of it, she was very much mistaken.
‘And then, as if things weren’t looking bad enough for you,’ said Sir Gavin, picking up The Chronicle from his lap and tossing it across the desk to her, ‘this was brought to my attention at my golf club this morning by a colleague, who, let’s just say, happened to recognise a familiar face from the directors’ weekend.’
Christ, what now? Eloise thought, greedily taking the paper from him and doing a lightning-quick scan of the front page. But there was nothing there. She speed-read through the headlines again, in case she’d missed something, but no, nothing. Basically just a rehash of what the Post had already run with, lazy shower of unimaginative hacks, she found herself angrily cursing them.
‘Turn to page five,’ said Sir Gavin calmly, almost passively, fully aware that he held whatever career still lay ahead for her in the palm of his hand, but chose to wear this power lightly.
Eloise did as he asked, and there it was.
Her worst nightmare come to light. Exactly what she’d tried to bury in the first place. In black and white, for all the world to see.
As usual, Joe McHugh, her court correspondent, had been on the money. She hadn’t run with it, so therefore her rivals had.
Beside a half page photo of Michael Courtney and a full exposé on the charges police were levelling against him, was a two-inch banner headline that screamed, ‘AND MEET THE COHORTS WHO LOYALLY SERVED HIM’.
Five names were listed below, but it was only when she saw the very last one that her heart physically twisted in her ribcage.
‘… the youngest of his henchmen, convicted of driving the getaway van during the 2010 raid on a post office in Arklow, Jake Keane. Keane, 31, however, operates under many aliases and was recently released on parole from Wheatfield prison …’
It got worse.
There was a photo of Jake too, albeit a bad one. Clearly a police mugshot taken under fluorescent strip lights, one of those incriminating photos that could manage to make anyone look like they’d just massacred a roomful of orphans.
‘So Eloise, my obvious question to you is,’ said Sir Gavin, his round, florid face puffed scarlet with … what exactly? Mortification? Embarrassment? Hard to tell. ‘is exactly how long do you think it will take for the connection between Jake Keane and you to be traced? And what then? You do understand, it’s the reputation of this paper that I have a sacred duty to uphold.’
She couldn’t meet his gaze, but felt his eyes burning into her and knew she’d have to come out with something, however pitiful. Suddenly she was aware of her mouth moving but without necessarily finding the sound to come out of it. Pointless for her to protest that Jake had been guilty of nothing more than weakness and being unable to say no to a bad crowd he’d got in with when he was barely a teenager. Pointless to try and explain that he’d done the crime, done the time and had paid his debts to society.
She wasn’t stupid; all those long months ago, when she first discovered he was serving time in Wheatfield, she’d made precisely the same assumptions that everyone else was probably making right now. Initially she’d been petrified, determined never to allow Lily within ten feet of a convicted criminal. She’d had him down as a hardened serial offender, an unreformed bad boy who’d more than likely nick the credit cards and car keys out of her handbag if she ever was reckless enough to come into
contact with him.
But all that had changed in a single phone call. She’d spoken to the prison governor who’d put her completely straight about Jake. He’d patiently gone through Jake’s file with her and explained that this guy wasn’t like any of the others. Yes, he’d got himself involved in one job for Michael Courtney, but as a driver, nothing more sinister. He was an accessory, a first-time offender who’d been tried and found guilty and was now deeply repentant for what he’d done and highly unlikely ever to reoffend. He’d made a stupid mistake, had fallen in with a dodgy crowd who he’d borrowed money from, and their way for holding him to that debt was to coerce him into acting as their driver for that one job. If you were ever to meet with him, the governor patiently explained to Eloise, you’d see what I mean. This wasn’t your usual low-rent criminal; Jake genuinely had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and had now most definitely learned his lesson, the hard way.
And so Eloise had braced herself, remembering that this was all for Lily and Lily alone, and had gone to see him. And the rest was history.
But somehow she couldn’t find the words to even try explaining this now. As far as Sir Gavin was concerned, she herself was tainted by association and now this was it; endgame. She’d effectively buried a story to protect Jake and now it was just a waiting game till she herself became part of the story.
‘How do you want to proceed on this?’ she asked him, surprising herself by sounding that bit calmer now. The worst, the absolute worst had happened and there was nothing for her to do now but to roll with the punches.
Sir Gavin sat right back, patting his portly stomach as though his ulcers were at him and exhaling deeply.
‘I’m very fond of you Eloise, you know that.’
She didn’t as it happened; in all her years working for him he’d never treated her with anything other than a cool, businesslike detachment. But she managed to nod her head politely enough.
‘But when your number’s up, I’m afraid it’s up. You don’t need me to tell you that this will be seen upstairs as a massive error of professional judgement on your part. You are, after all, a public figure with a profile and I’m afraid our rival papers will have a field day with this if it leaks. The editor of the paper of record must at all times be above reproach and unfortunately …’
She was, if nothing else, oddly grateful to him for not finishing that sentence.
‘Look Eloise,’ he went on, surprising her by sounding more kindly now. ‘You’re a smart woman. In your position, you must hear things. And your contract expires in a few months anyway. All I’m saying is if you happened to hear of any senior positions coming up, say at a rival newspaper, then you’d do well to pay close attention. Maybe speak to a few headhunting agencies while you’re at it. You know I’ll do my best for you upstairs to make your exit as dignified as possible and would even be happy to write glowing references for you. You will, of course, have to come upstairs to see all of us together; so we can discuss this, let’s just say further and more fully. The sooner the better too. I’ll make the necessary calls and set something up ASAP.’
She couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, could barely even acknowledge what he was indirectly telling her.
‘But I need hardly tell you, I’m afraid it’s not looking good for you. Not looking good at all.’
‘I know,’ she half-whispered. Had known all along in fact, with all the linear certainty of a Greek tragedy, that it would ultimately boil down to this. How could she not have known? She just never thought the whole house of cards would come crashing down on her so spectacularly fast.
‘And if I may, just add on a personal note,’ Sir Gavin said, hauling himself up to go, ‘Eloise, really. An ex-convict? Some random jailbird? And you, of all people? You do know that this is complete madness, don’t you?’
All she could do was nod mutely. Course she knew, she thought about little else these days.
‘Must admit though,’ were his final words to her, ‘when I was first told, I was surprised. I thought Jake was quite the gentleman when we met.’
‘He is,’ she managed to say, a bit stronger now. ‘He may not have been born a gentleman but take it from me, he’s one by nature.’
Which was more than ninety per cent of the people I work with, she thought, as he closed the door on her with a decisive and very final thud.
And virus-like, the story spread. Eloise had numbly spent the morning closeted up in her office, outwardly trying to act like she always did, while inwardly panicking. Heart walloping away like it was outside of her ribcage.
Please don’t let it leak, please dear God, she found herself praying to a God she didn’t particularly believe in. Please let the story just end here, don’t let it get any worse … I need this job, because, well, without this job, what am I?
Sometimes brief clutches of hope would break in; after all, she did her best to reason with herself, very few people had actually seen her with Jake. Their friendship had always been so private, so personal. And really when it boiled down to it, out of all the people she dealt with on a daily basis, who really was in a position to link the two of them? Apart from Helen, only the colleagues who’d been at the directors’ weekend, that was it.
Admittedly, to her shame, she reckoned that up to a few short months ago, any one of them would most likely only have been too delighted to shop her to the media along with a pull-out colour supplement on what an out-and-out bitch she was to work for, in an effort to prise her arse out of the editor’s chair that bit faster. But surely it was all change round here now? Or was she completely misled in thinking that? She was, after all, getting on well with everyone now, so would anyone really want to rat her out?
And that’s when all her stressing and fretting would come round to one thing and one person only. The devious, behind-the-scenes machinations of Seth Coleman. She could never prove it of course, never even hope to, but knew in her waters that he was the only mole in the building with enough of a grudge against her to leak everything he knew. Christ alone only knew what else he’d done behind her back; gone through her bins maybe, rooting for dirt on her? Given the bloody chance, she wouldn’t have put it past him to sell tickets to her public execution and distribute free T-shirts with her picture on them bearing the slogan, Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.
Every three minutes, she was online ego-Googling, checking that the story hadn’t spread to her. Typing ‘Eloise Elliot’ with trembling fingers into the search bar, yielded literally thousands of finds, but as she quickly scrolled down through them, she could see that they were all professional, articles she’d written in the past, or maybe editorials, or the odd photo of her, ghostly pale in a black suit standing alongside the T. Rexes, all looking florid and half-pissed in their suits of grey.
So then … nothing to worry about. At least, not yet.
Her luck held out till lunchtime and in the end, it was Robbie Turner, lovely, caring Robbie with a heart the size of the Port Tunnel who told her. Who had the manners, not to mention the compassion, to alert her to what had just broken. Funny thing was, that even though what he showed her put her into shock, deep shock on an almost cellular level, later on she could still recall each and every moment with perfect clarity. Could remember ever tiny detail, as though she might have to take a test on it later on.
Robbie discreetly knocking on the door. Sticking his white shock of hair round the door, politely asking her if he might have a quick word. Hours later she could still vividly recall his gently closing the office door behind him, then coming round to her side of the desk to tell her.
The story had finally broken. He’d just seen it on Twitter. About her and Jake. From a made-up-sounding user name, but then, weren’t most of them? Worst of all, there was even a link conveniently posted to a photo of her and Jake that Robbie reluctantly showed her.
Shaking, she clicked on the link and there they were, looking every inch a devoted couple. Eloise in the silver shimmering slinky dress she’d worn to the
directors’ dinner that miserable night, Jake with his arm around her. She had to physically fight to stop hot, stinging tears from springing to her eyes; they both just looked so – no other word for it – happy.
‘EDITOR AND EX-CON, TAKEN ON A RECENT ROMANTIC GETAWAY, AT A LUXURIOUS FIVE-STAR COUNTRY RETREAT’, screamed the caption.
Numbly, Eloise slumped back against her chair, staring straight ahead of her. The shagging directors’ weekend. Someone had photographed them and now had leaked it onto Twitter. Not too difficult to guess who, of course, but she knew only too well she’d never be able to pin it to anyone, or more correctly, on the one person she’d have liked to, given half a chance. But no, Seth would have been far too careful for that; even this Twitter account was under an anonymous name, ‘@concerned_onlooker’. Jaysus, what kind of a user name was that, anyway? And what hope could she possibly have of ever confronting him?
Besides she had to remind herself, at the end of the day, apart from the ‘recent romantic getaway’ bit, the story was one hundred per cent true, wasn’t it? There was nothing for her to deny or contradict or even try to wriggle her way out of, politician-style; best she could hope for was that it would all blow over and fast.
Yeah right, she thought. Like that was ever going to happen. Not a chance. Not after what she’d done, and worse, in suppressing the story, what she’d tried to do. Automatically, she grabbed for her phone, feeling an overpowering need to call Jake, to tell him, warn him, if needs be to sob down the phone to him. And then she stopped herself in time, remembering all the countless late-night phone messages she’d already left for him in the past days and weeks that had gone unanswered.
Okay, so now she felt sick. And just looking into Robbie’s concerned eyes confirmed her very worst fears and pretty much told her everything she needed to know. What in fact everyone working in this building knew only too well.
That of course once a story hit Twitter, the papers were bound to pick it up at the speed of light. Twitter was if nothing else a godsend for lazy hacks; all they had to do was pick up a story there and half their work was done for them.
A Very Accidental Love Story Page 28