Chapter 7
Sunny
I sat outside the chief whip’s office for what could have been several days.
It felt like being sent to the headmaster.
When, finally, the terrifyingly triangular form of Vladimir Popov arrived to reunite me with my phone, he looked chuffed with himself, considering his government had just had a truly terrible day at PMQs.
The prime minister had been forced to publicly state his support for Energy Secretary Bob Wynn-Jones, and that was the political equivalent of pulling the pin out of a grenade and sitting on it.
The grenade, that is. Not the pin. Speaking of grenades, VladPop had my phone in is hand.
“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” he said.
“I’m so, so sorry,” I said, starting my plea bid early.
VladPop made a tutting noise as he inserted his key into his office door.
“It was an accident,” I said, fear rising inside me.
“Let’s discuss this inside, shall we? Calmly. Like rational adults.”
The chief whip swung his door open, and I stepped past him into the room.
He smelt of spice, hair gel, and raw masculinity.
His office was a Hansard-lined vault with a view out over the Thames and, at a quick count, at least a dozen pieces of taxidermy.
The head of a deer. Some kind of ferret under a glass dome.
The cat from the Pet Sematary films. Someone had been a bit light-fingered on a visit to the Natural History Museum.
It was as ghoulish as a dead-Victorian-aunt convention.
Which, I imagined, was the point. VladPop sat down and placed my phone on the green leather lining of his vast wooden desk.
I perched myself in one of the naughty chairs opposite.
“I like your friends,” VladPop said. He smiled broadly, revealing vampiric canine teeth. “Very much.” Then he opened my phone and started scrolling.
“Wait, how did you do that without putting in the code?”
He shrugged. “I disabled the code.”
“Don’t you need the code to disable the code?”
He shrugged again. I was starting to wonder whether Vladimir Popov really was a KGB agent rather than the Very Establishment fourth-generation Old Etonian descendent of a Russian aristocrat who’d fled to England a century earlier to escape the Bolsheviks.
“I’ll bring you up to speed,” he said. “Peter wanted to go a club in Vauxhall instead of Hades, because there’s a new place that’s wheelchair accessible for Nick.”
This was surreal.
“Do you mind if I ask about Nick? Why does he use a chair?”
“An accident,” I replied, shocked to find myself answering this question. “On his bike. First year of uni.”
“So young. How sad.” VladPop was still scrolling through my phone. This was a gross violation of my privacy, but I was powerless to say anything, given that not an hour ago I’d tried to kill him with it.
“Then Stavros suggested going to Maxime’s in Soho, and they held a vote and the others agreed, so you’re all going there after drag at the Duncan. You were the casting vote, so I voted in favour. I hope that works for you?”
“Er, yes,” I said. Apparently, the chief whip was now my personal assistant and diary secretary.
“Good. I thought, well, Sunny doesn’t have a boyfriend, and Maxime’s seems like the kind of place you might find the kind of chap who’d put a bit of lead in your pencil.
Better than some sleazy club, hey? By the way, I’m worried about Peter’s fornicatory habits.
Does he visit a sexual health clinic regularly?
If not, I can get someone from the Department for Health to give him a call. They’re very discreet.”
This wasn’t just surreal. This was Salvador-Dalí-shagging-a-horse-in-Trafalgar-Square-while-Picasso-fingered-Max-Ernst levels of surreal.
“Can I have my phone back now?” I asked.
“In a minute.”
“Listen, I’m really very sorry.”
“Don’t mention it. It’s fine. Accidents happen.
” He put the phone down on the desk in front of him, lining up the edges to make sure it was square with his blotting pad and pen.
Everything in here, I now realised, was fastidiously clean and perfectly square with everything else.
Even the taxidermy was remarkably free of dust. These were the hallmarks of a serial killer in almost any thriller you cared to watch.
Vladimir fixed me with his steely blue eyes and clasped his hands in front of his chest. Here comes the kill, I thought.
“I did want to ask for your help on something, though,” he said.
“Help?”
“Well, not so much help. Let’s call it a mutually beneficial arrangement.”
I swallowed.
“I could be very useful to you. Professionally,” he said. “In my line of work, I come across a lot of… information. And sometimes it’s, shall we say, in the public interest for that information to find its way into a respected and august newspaper like the Bulletin.”
He was taking the piss.
“You want to leak stories to me that could bring down your political opponents?”
“Leak is such a loaded word. You should be less judgemental in your line of work. How about we say share?”
“Fine. You want to share stories to me that could bring down your political opponents?”
“Not necessarily bring down,” he said. He raised his eyebrows. “Not necessarily my opponents.”
This felt grubby but, I confess, it was tempting.
If I wanted to get noticed by the respectable end of Fleet Street, an alliance with the chief whip might be just the thing to help me do it.
It was probably an arrangement exactly like this that got Ludo Boche today’s big splash.
If the rich end of town was doing it, why the hell shouldn’t I?
“Sure,” I said. “Only politics, though. Matters of genuine public interest. Corruption. Misappropriation. Tax evasion. Things of real political consequence. I’m not interested in sleaze just because I work for the Bulletin.”
He smiled. “Then we have an understanding.” He picked up my phone and held it out towards me.
But as I leant forward to grab it, he pulled it back.
“Speaking of things with real political consequences,” he said.
He leant back in his chair, tapping my phone against his chest. This was torture.
“The government is making a series of big climate change announcements up in the Shetland Islands next week. It’s all about reaching net zero by 2050 and so on.
It’s terribly important stuff. Saving transgender badgers and all that rubbish.
Right up your alley. It’s not an exclusive, we’re giving it to everyone, but it is big, and I’d like you to cover it. ”
“I don’t get to decide what I cover,” I said. “JT decides—”
“You leave JT to me. Just make sure you’re on that plane on Monday morning.”
Honestly, this sounded great. My deal with the devil was already paying off. I nodded my acceptance. This had gone much better than expected.
“Good,” VladPop said. But just as he leant forward to give me back my phone, the distinctive peal of a GayHoller notification rang out.
“Hello, what do we have here?” VladPop said. To my horror, the chief whip’s fingers began rifling through my phone’s messages once more. Then they stopped, and his eyes widened in a mixture of disbelief and delight, like a teenage boy surprised by naked breasts.
“You have a message from someone called Cabbage98,” he said. More dings rattled out of my phone. “Several, in fact.” He began reading.
Cabbage98: Dear Ginger. When you’ve finished meeting with Scary, can I buy you that coffee? I wanted to say sorry for the whole phone thing.
My heart raced.
“Scary,” Vladimir said. “I’m Scary. Because you’re Ginger. Oh, that’s clever.”
Cabbage98: This is Ludo, by the way.
Cabbage98: Ludo Boche.
Cabbage98: From the Sentinel.
“Gosh, isn’t he sweet?” VladPop continued his unwelcome narration.
Cabbage98: Dammit, I should have said this was Posh. Can we pretend I said this was Posh?
“Oh, he’s ruining it now,” VladPop said.
Cabbage98: Wait. This is Sunny Miller, right?
Cabbage98: God, I hope so. If you’re not Sunny Miller, please ignore this.
“I think someone is sweet on you!” Vladimir said, his voice sing-songing.
He was beaming. I could feel my face go phone box red, my heart still thudding.
A colleague was flirting with me on GayHoller, and I was sharing the moment with the government’s political spymaster.
I didn’t know what to panic about first. VladPop began swiping enthusiastically through Ludo’s profile photos.
“He has very good hair, doesn’t he?”
Swipe.
“Here’s a picture of him with some old queen. Nice scarf, though.”
Swipe.
“Wow. For a skinny guy, he has impressive glutes. Have you noticed his glutes?” VladPop turned the phone around to show me the screen.
“Do you think he goes to the gym?” Ludo was wearing ballet tights, bum centre stage, looking back over his shoulder at the camera.
His athletic rear was in full view, round as two cantaloupes stuffed into a sock.
Jesus. Vladimir turned the screen back to himself.
“I wonder how much he squats.”
Swipe.
“Can I have my phone back now?” I asked again.
VladPop looked up from the screen, as if I’d broken a spell. He nodded and handed the phone across to me. I snatched it out of his hand.
“Thank you,” I said.
“No problem at all. You should invite young Ludo along to the Otter Rewilding party on Friday night.”
This was too much. The chief whip’s interest in my private life had to stop right here. He was a source. We were not friends.
“I don’t date other journalists. It’s policy.”
“Seems a bit short-sighted. You must have so much in common, surely?”
“I have nothing in common with Ludo Boche.”
Determined to head off the prospect of VladPop adding a Sunny-and-Ludo folder to his (apparently not metaphorical) dirt file, I reopened GayHoller in front of him and made a somewhat theatrical show of blocking Ludo’s profile.