Chapter 55
Ludo
It was mid-afternoon before I surfaced from a miasma of grief and checked my phone.
Twenty-four missed calls from Sunny. Ruddy hell.
He was mad. Two dozen calls did feel like overkill, though.
I slumped into a chair in a hospital waiting room that stank of bleach and heartache.
Mummy and Father had gone to find some food for us all.
Jonty was being surprisingly helpful and making phone calls to people we needed to notify of Uncle Ben’s death.
I flicked through my notifications. For all the missed calls, there was only one text from Sunny.
Sunny Miller: Go fuck yourself.
OK, I was prepared for mad. I didn’t anticipate that level of mad.
I called him, hoping to explain everything and, when I had done apologising for disappearing unannounced, frankly, get a little apology of my own for such a jolly rude text.
It clicked through to voicemail. I tried again.
Nothing. I waited a few minutes, then tried again. Still nothing. I sent a text.
Ludo Boche: Sorry for disappearing. Sorry I missed your calls. Bit of a big morning. Can we talk when you’re free? x
My parents walked around the corner, laden with paper bags and a tray of coffees.
“It’s sandwiches, I’m afraid,” Mummy said, spilling open the contents of the bags on the waiting room coffee table. I didn’t respond. She looked across at me. “Ludo?”
“Sunny isn’t answering my calls.” My cheeks were wet again. I was crying.
“He’s probably in an interview or something,” Father said, flopping himself down in the chair beside me, wrapping his mouth around an egg-and-cress sandwich. Come the apocalypse, all that will be left of Britain is cockroaches and the factory that makes those bloody egg-and-cress sandwiches.
“I missed twenty-four calls, and his only text says ‘go fuck yourself.’”
Father burst out laughing, nearly choking on his sandwich.
“Is this a joke to you?” My eyes were on fire, raw from a day of crying, stinging with the addition of yet more tears. Father coughed, hit his chest with his fist, and downed a thick gulp of his coffee.
“He’s probably just annoyed about today’s front page.”
“What front page?”
“I meant to say, Ludo. Very well done. You played a blinder, digging up all that stuff on the Newton Bardon deal. Why didn’t you tell me you were working on it? We could have thrown some resources at it for you.”
My aching heart now stopped beating entirely. My bowels turned to water.
“What?”
“Your piece on the nuclear power plant. I saw it on your laptop last night when I went in to collect all the dirty dishes. You’ve been living like a pig in there, by the way. You could at least bring the plates in.”
“You read what was on my laptop?”
“The company’s laptop, Ludo. It and, need I remind you, anything on it is Sentinel property.”
“And you just… printed it?”
“All the evidence was right there in the paperwork on your desk. I went through it with Ford on the phone, we ran it past the lawyers, and we managed to splash with it on the late edition. It’s been all over the news all day. I thought you’d be thrilled.”
He took another mouthful of his sandwich.
“I’m terribly proud of you,” he said, egg and cress peering at me from between his teeth. I could have punched him then and there, just to wipe the smarmy grin off his face. If my father’s pride was indeed a drug, I had just discovered how to rapidly detox.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
He swallowed.
“Probably sold an extra fifty thousand copies up and down the country, got a huge amount of free publicity, and put yet another rocket under my son’s growing reputation as a promising future Fleet Street heavyweight?”
“That wasn’t my story!” I stood up, surprising myself with how angry I was. “Sunny did most of the work on that story. He did all the investigating. He only shared it with me because we got the tip-off together. We were supposed to publish it together. We had a deal.”
“Sunny did all the investigating?” Mummy said, clearly missing what was important here.
“I told you he was good, Bev. Didn’t I tell you?”
“I didn’t need you to tell me, Hugo.”
I was shaking, my whole body, every cell, quaking with rage.
“Does anyone even care that my boyfriend now thinks that I’ve used him, deceived him, and run off into the night like a cold-hearted killer?”
“So, call him and explain everything, darling,” Mummy said.
“He’s not answering my calls!”
Mummy stood, put a hand on my shoulder, and pushed me back down into my chair. This was what passed for affection in our family.
“Calm down, darling. You’ve had a stressful day.”
“Stressful? Stressful? I started the day with everything, and now I have nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
“You have a great front page,” Father said.
I screamed and lunged for him, enraged. I found myself pinned back by my mother’s arms. Tears burnt my cheeks.
I was filled with anger, but not the fight I needed to go with it.
I was exhausted, powerless, helpless. I sank to the floor, sliding from my mother’s arms, my knees crumpling under the weight of me.
The will had completely left my body. I had no energy left.