Chapter 7
The screen was blurring in front of Jo’s eyes.
No escaping the fact that her tired eyes needed her to put on her reading glasses.
Reading glasses! Reading glasses? Just not what you were supposed to have at thirty-five.
She’d never told Marcus about the reading glasses, had she?
There had been a rash of emails to come back to.
Press releases, and more press releases, she had scanned and deleted many:
New Rural Recycling initiative launched
Small cars not as safe for pedestrians
Hospital waiting lists up
Then Green Tony with a few lines about how he’d put their idea to Savannah and she was thinking about it.
Oh hell… Jo really didn’t want to doorstep Savannah.
It wasn’t just that her taste for badgering people on their doorsteps seemed to have diminished over the years.
It was also because she admired Savannah too much.
Jo was somehow hoping to make Savannah into a top contact one day.
Turning up on her doorstep wasn’t exactly going to be the start of a beautiful relationship, was it?
What else was in this list? Her contact, Jayne, asking how the interview with the Townells had gone.
A few lines from parents she’d interviewed in the past asking if she would like them to comment on the current outbreak.
New research from a meticulous, reliable scientist she’d used before about pollution causing a huge rise in brain diseases.
She transferred that to the holding file and sent a return message to ask if the story had gone out to everyone yet or could they hold it for her exclusive until Sunday.
There was an email in her basket from:
noreply@
an email address she didn’t recognise. She double-clicked to open: It was an early news report about the whooping cough outbreak that looked as if it had come from the BBC’s website.
It named the first official whooping cough case, a girl from Bedfordshire who’d been so severely affected, she’d been hospitalised.
A quote from the child’s father, Morris Theroux, was included:
‘We can’t understand how this has happened because Katie had been vaccinated.’
Underneath in a different typeface were the words:
Not all cases of whooping cough are the same.
And that was it, nothing else. Jo typed out a reply:
Hello, who are you? Would you like to tell me more?
and sent it, but as she’d suspected, it just came back with a ‘Delivery Failed’ notice.
No time to worry about that. Her desk phone and her mobile began to ring at the same moment. She asked Dominique to deal with the desk call and answered her mobile.
The receptionist from the clinic where she was planning to have the girls injected against whooping cough was on the phone, offering an appointment in two weeks’ time.
‘You really haven’t got anything before that?’ Jo pleaded.
‘If you can come at fairly short notice, we can put you on standby for a cancellation.’
‘Well, OK, if that’s the best you can do,’ she answered, knowing Simon was going to freak out at this. Two weeks!
Dominique was looking quite animated at the call she was taking, scribbling down lots of notes.
‘I’m meeting my Oxford Green pal tonight—’ Aidan was up at the side of her desk.
‘I think he’s going to be quite useful. He’s in with them all without being too tied up in party politics.
There are maybe some things he could find out for us, maybe some things he’d like to leak, that’s what I’m hoping. ’
‘Oh, right.’ Jo wasn’t really very comfortable with this.
She had her own relationship with the Green Party to maintain, she didn’t want Aidan stumbling in and upsetting things – or nicking any exclusive stories.
But then, she pulled herself up, this was a free country.
There must be plenty of other reporters Green Tony cosied up to as well.
Aidan was leaning over Jo’s desk in a way that made her push her chair back slightly from him.
He was dressed in one of his soft, tactile corduroy suits that matched his soft, chocolatey hair which flopped constantly to one side, so he was always pushing it back.
His face was creamy pale, punctuated by a large mole in the middle of one cheek, and he had high cheekbones and naturally arched eyebrows.
He was clever, very well read, idealistic in the way almost everyone who becomes a journalist is, to start with.
And Jo knew perfectly well that she was just a little bit too taken with him.
Sometimes she wondered if Jeff had assigned Aidan to her department as a sort of morality test; if there was a bet on somewhere in the executive upper echelons, odds on as to whether or not she was going to do what certain male department heads had been doing for decades: seduce the fresh-faced new talent on the news floor.
Of course, if she didn’t have any shame, or morals, or sense of decency, she could take Aidan under her wing, devote some special attention to him… She looked up from his expressive hands to the smooth face.
‘Aidan,’ she began. He was looking at her just a little too intently, probably about to take notes on what she was going to say to him.
‘Journalism isn’t just about stitching people up.
You can make friends, you can do stories on people you admire and with people you admire, just as much as you can do stories on people you’re trying to expose.
’ She gave him a smile. ‘I just wanted to make sure you were aware of that. Don’t go looking for trouble that isn’t there.
You can get pretty far as a journalist who people like and trust. It’s not all Watergate, you know, conspiracies, secrets and cover-ups. ’
He smiled back, a charming dimply, arched-eyebrow thing. So, she quickly picked up the phone and dialled the first number to come into her head, to make sure he went away, stopped leaning over her like that.
There was a whole list of contacts she phoned at least once a fortnight to check on, to make sure nothing had happened or was about to break that she didn’t know about. She was already behind on this week’s calls.
‘Hi, Dr Wilson’s office, please.’
‘Putting you through.’
‘Is Dr Wilson about?’
‘Who’s calling please?’ She recognised the voice of Ted’s secretary.
‘It’s Joanne Dundas.’ Her married name and alias.
‘I’ll see if he’s available.’
After a moment or two she heard Ted’s warm hello.
‘I’ve nothing for you yet,’ he added. ‘God, woman, leave me alone for a week or two and maybe I’ll get some work done.’
‘Nothing! Are you sure, not even the slightest preliminary indication?’
‘No!’
‘But how am I going to make sure you come to me first if I don’t phone you up regularly and flirt?’
‘I will come to you with a lovely big leak, you have my word, you know you do. But you can flirt away anyway.’
‘Oh, Ted. But how can I be sure your partners won’t be giving some lovely big leaks to someone else?’
‘Leave them to me.’
‘So when can I pencil in a date?’
‘For dinner?’ he asked, almost certain that wasn’t what she meant.
‘No, for leaks. Dinner! Pah. I’m far too busy to have dinner even in my own home.’
‘No time for dinners. Single life can’t be much fun for you then, can it?’
‘No, no, it’s fine. Honestly. We will do drinks very soon, OK? Meanwhile should I keep my phone in my handbag? Should I hold it twelve inches from my head when I’m talking to you? Or what’s your entirely off-the-record, unofficial advice?’
Jeff was at her desk now, a big notepad in hand, ready to get an update on how the day’s stories were progressing.
‘You are absolutely outrageous and shameless. I’m not giving you anything yet. Not one word.’
‘Do your children have mobiles?’ she asked.
‘I’m not telling,’ was his answer to this.
So, still no word on the three-year-long, government-funded study into the long-term damage caused by mobile phones yet…
But one day very soon. She was looking forward to that story.
One night, after a very nice dinner and two bottles of decent wine, Ted had told her that he was expecting to break very bad news.
Manufacturers might face radically altering the designs of their phones, having to put health, exposure and age restrictions on them and site all mobile phone masts well away from built-up areas.
Out of the corner of her eye, Jo saw something flick past. Then again. What was that?
She bent down, phone still against her ear. Flick. It was a wire poking out of her top drawer.
What the hell was that attached to?
‘OK. Speak to you soon, Ted, take care.’
She put out her hand to catch hold of it when it moved again, and she realised it was a long, straight tail.
Her scream was tempered by the fact that she was on the phone and in the middle of a busy office.
She tried to strangle the last of it.
‘What’s the matter?’ Ted asked. Jeff’s face, as he stood on the other side of her desk, was the picture of concern. Aidan and Dominique had both turned to stare in her direction.
‘Nothing, nothing,’ Jo managed. ‘It’s a— it’s a— thing— in my drawer. I have to go.’
‘Are you sure? Are you really OK?’ Ted asked.
‘Yup, yup, fine. Speak soon,’ she said, pointing frantically at the drawer, hoping Jeff would go and investigate, while she tried to move as quickly as she could round to the other side of her desk, stretching the receiver wire as tight as it would go.
‘Bye.’ She put the phone down.
‘Jeff, there’s a frigging rat in my drawer!’ she burst out.
Jeff didn’t waste any time, he pulled open the drawer and they both caught sight of the tail and the brownish-grey back legs of the rodent. Inside the drawer, a packet of nuts Jo had no recollection of bringing in, had been shredded to pieces.
‘Jeez,’ Jeff shut the drawer abruptly. ‘It’s a mouse,’ he said in an effort at consolation.
‘Don’t lie, it’s a freaking rat!’ Jo realised her hands were shaking. A rat. A rat’s tail and she’d tried to grab it. Aargh.
Dominique was on her feet, Aidan was coming over to see and so were a few more interested parties.
‘It’s a young one, though,’ Jeff said, still looking at the drawer. He moved slowly round her desk, assessing the rat’s chances of escape. ‘Anyone got a big, padded envelope?’ he asked.
‘No, no way, you are not rat-catching in my desk.’
‘Got any better suggestions?’ he asked. ‘Do you want to wait the month it’ll take janitoring or pest control to make it up here?’
‘No! Get the rat out! But I can’t look. I really can’t.’ This was horrible.
Aidan, with a slightly incredulous look, handed Jeff a big brown envelope: ‘I don’t think it’s going to just hop into this, is it?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said Jeff, eyes fixed on the drawer. ‘I’ll have to stun it with something first.’
A little crowd had gathered round, while Jo tried to back away from her desk as far as possible.
She really did not want to see an agitated rat scampering out of her drawer and across the floor.
Jeff armed himself with the nearly full 1.
5-litre bottle of Evian water on Jo’s desk and carefully opened the top drawer.
About fifteen people had gathered around the desk now. There was the hush of amused suspense.
‘He’s not here any more,’ Jeff said in a low voice, slightly conscious that his authority over the newsroom was possibly at stake here. He slid the top drawer shut, opened the one beneath it then put his head down low to peer into the stacks of papers and files Jo had stashed in there.
‘Nope. OK, third and final attempt.’ He opened the last drawer with something of a flourish, paused for a split second, spied the rat and banged the water bottle down on it.
A cheer erupted from the onlookers. Jeff put his hand into the drawer and pulled the animal out.
He quickly stuffed it into the envelope Aidan was holding out for him.
‘Is it dead?’ Jo wanted to know, feeling both horrified and impressed with Jeff’s hitherto unknown talent for rodent-catching. She knew he was always calm under pressure, but this was a whole new level of grace under fire.
‘I don’t think so,’ Jeff replied.
‘What are you going to do with it?’
‘I’ll go down to the back courtyard and let it go there. Either that or find it a new home in Spikey’s office.’
‘Why are there rats in our desks?’
‘Because we leave food all over the place,’ Jeff replied.
‘Or maybe it’s because the accountants on floor five have still not pulled the plug on the cleaning contractors even though they were investigated by our reporters and found to be not only useless, but employing illegal immigrants at half the minimum wage. Funny old world,’ he added.