Monday
“Audreeey,” said the voice down the phone. The voice that belonged to Andrew Spencer-Johns, one of Audrey’s erstwhile colleagues from her London days. “Dreedree, the Dreester.”
“Hi Andrew,” Audrey replied, newly weary despite not having heard this particular introduction in more than two years.
“So that chick you emailed about?”
“You mean that nearly a-hundred-year-old woman?”
“That’s the one. Think I’ve got a lead.”
Audrey grabbed a notepad. “Fantastic, where?”
“Monaco.”
Of course. Emily Branningham couldn’t be somewhere nice and accessible like Dagenham or Cleethorpes. “Care to narrow that down a bit?”
“Hold on Dreebedee, it’s been yonks. What’s with all this straight-to-business tosh?”
What it mostly was, was that Audrey and Andrew Spencer-Johns had never actually been anything even close to friends.
They’d worked together, he’d been vaguely in the room that one time she’d tried cocaine, and he’d made fewer awful comments about her sexuality than most of the other guys she’d worked with.
But that didn’t exactly make them mates.
“Sorry, just on a bit of a clock here.”
“Really? I was talking to N the other day and she said that you were working for some nowheresville shitrag and trying to get on The Apprentice.”
It was, a cynical part of Audrey observed, very typical of Natalie to be paying enough attention to know that she was going to be on TV but to performatively misidentify the show so that everybody could see that she was terribly above it all.
“Shropshire’s second largest regional newspaper,” she clarified. “And I’m on Bake Expectations.”
“Right, right.” Andrew seemed only to be half listening. “But what’s Shropshire got to do with a jet-set society rando?”
There was a limited amount Audrey could say here without massively pissing off—and for that matter actively betraying—Jennifer. “She had a kind of a thing with a local back in the forties and it didn’t work out so there’s this whole human-interest-forbidden-romance piece I’m working on.”
“And it’s suddenly on a clock despite the fact that it’s waited more than seventy years already?”
Audrey didn’t like playing the mocking-the-elderly card, but there were times you had to do what it took to get the outcome you wanted. “Well, yeah. Because either one of them could drop dead any moment.”
It got a laugh, which had been the whole point.
People thought less critically when they were congratulating themselves for how clever and detached they were being.
“Touché, Audie, touché. But very well. I’ve had a bit of a word with Seb—you remember Seb, works for Milieu now—and he was saying that she’s actually a touch infamous in the right circles. ”
“A touch infamous?”
Andrew gave a kind of verbal shrug. “You know: old, rich, doesn’t give a shit. Bit of a nightmare by all accounts but something of a fixture.”
“Great.” Audrey readied a pen. “So where can I find her exactly?”
“Hotel Metropole. But”—a note of embarrassed condescension crept into Andrew’s voice—“not wanting to be too dismissive, you might not want to overemphasise the regional newspaper angle. I can’t imagine it’ll go over well.”
The sad thing was, it wasn’t too dismissive. It was just kind of a fact. Let me through, I’m with Shropshire’s second largest regional newspaper didn’t exactly open a lot of doors. So Audrey just said, “Cheers,” and left it at that.
“Oh, by the way, Aubore. What would you say to cocktails sometime in the next few? I know the lads here would love to catch up.”
Knowing full well that they wouldn’t at all, Audrey replied with a sincere-sounding, “Yeah, that’d be great.” Then because it was how you played the game, she added a, “Let’s work something out.”
They made mutually polite goodbye noises and Audrey was left alone to decide how to convert This woman is probably in this one hotel in Monte Carlo to This woman is talking to me face-to-face right now.
Hotels, as a rule—and especially rich people hotels—did a pretty good job of screening out irritating journalists, especially irritating journalists whose credentials the wider industry tended to see as one step up from a school newspaper.
Of course, if Emily was as infamous as Andrew had suggested, she might not be too hard to at least get a message to, even if she wouldn’t take a call.
And then the trick would just be making sure she’d call back.
Two hours later, having spent most of the afternoon gaming out scenarios in her mind, Audrey decided that she might, might be stalling.
Besides, she had a pretty good idea of which approach would work best. If any would work at all.
So she called the Hotel Metropole and asked if she could leave a message for Emily Branningham. And when the whatever-you-called-the-person-who-answered-phones-in-an-expensive-hotel answered that she could, Audrey left her number and seven words: I want to talk about the nymph.