The Night Bus

Chapter One Daisy

Chapter One

Daisy

There wasn’t much that Daisy didn’t love about this early part of the day. The air had a different scent to it. The birds

that built up inside her chest. Anything could happen, because the day had only just begun.

Today Daisy sat in her usual seat (ground floor, one row from the back, driver’s side) and pulled out her phone, going straight

to the E! website as she always did. Whatever the Kardashians, Bennifers and Meghan Markles of the world had been getting

up to in America while she slept should already be on these pages and she could start writing a few scripts on her phone.

Her fiancé, Zack, regularly questioned why showbiz news was so urgently required first thing in the morning, and who wanted

to know about some woman from Selling Sunset anyway? To be fair to him, the question normally came as Daisy’s alarm went off at 3:30 a.m., waking him, so he’d probably

have said the same thing were it about anything, including his true passion—padel.

It was a question she asked herself when she was first offered the early-shift journalist role at Entertainment Now! five years ago. Did people really need to know what Kim Kardashian wore to the Met Gala while they ate their breakfast? Or who Taylor Swift had allegedly criticized

on her latest single while they did a 5:00 a.m. abs workout? She learned very quickly the answer was yes, and once she understood

it was her job to provide them with that information, she began to take it more seriously.

Scanning the headlines as the bus kept moving, an actor from the new Marvel film was photographed leaving a restaurant with

his costar, rather than his girlfriend. Could there be a good pun in there somewhere? Turning his womanizing into a superpower?

She stared ahead, pondering something better as they pulled in at Angel station; the double doors opened, and someone stepped

onboard.

It was him, again. The same man she’d seen almost every day for the last three months. This morning he was dressed in baggy

light blue jeans, a tight brown jacket zipped up and a cream baseball cap, pulled low over his face. He tapped his card and

walked toward Daisy. She looked away, only turning back once she heard that he’d taken his seat. The same seat he always took,

two rows in front of her and on the opposite side of the bus. He reached into the backpack he put on the seat beside him and

she kept watching; she needed to know for sure what she already suspected.

She couldn’t help it. She let out one small laugh—a single breath out of her nose—as he pulled out the exact same book he’d

pulled out every day since he started sharing this bus journey with her in early July. It wouldn’t be that unusual except

she had witnessed him, a couple of weeks after first seeing him, reach the final page of the book, pause for a minute with

a small tilt of his head, and turn it right over to the beginning and start again.

Daisy had made many wild assumptions as to why.

He was an actor playing one of the parts in the book and this was how he got into character.

She’d even searched IMDb which had discounted this idea as there was, according to the internet, no film or play of a Virginia Woolf book she’d never heard of called Orlando in the works. So perhaps he was writing a remake.

Perhaps he was an author and wanted to copy the style of Woolf’s prose so completely that he was reading it until it absorbed

into his bones.

Maybe he was a spy, and this book was his cover and he didn’t think anyone would be observant enough to notice it was the

same book every day. He had misread his bus audience. Whether she’d always been that way, or her job had made her so, Daisy

was observant. It was something her best friend, Clara, regularly declared as creepy. “How did you even notice that?” she’d ask as Daisy accurately deduced someone’s entire mood based on the way they walked into a party, or from the

pitch of their laugh. Given that Clara was also a journalist at Entertainment Now! and one of the least observant people Daisy

had ever met, it probably wasn’t her job that made her that way. Daisy had once sobbed all night long after being bullied

into a dramatic bob haircut by her bored hairdresser (and by bullied, she meant he excitedly suggested it and she agreed because

she hadn’t wanted to disappoint him) and the next day at work Clara hadn’t even noticed.

Perhaps he was reading the book to—

Her phone pinged with an alert. A-list movie star Gary Newman has been airlifted to hospital in Hollywood following a car

crash. Shit. Daisy scrolled through the article and then googled other sites to get as much information as she could, typing up a quick script so that by the time the bus reached Goodge Street, she’d gotten something ready she could immediately post. She grabbed her bag as the bus slowed, waved a hurried thanks to the driver and scrambled off.

As the N73 pulled away to continue its route toward Oxford Circus, Daisy ran across the road and up Torrington Place, using her fob to enter the four-story building that housed the entire Now! news network, including her department.

She waved at Clive on security, who she’d usually stop and chat to, shouting “Gary Newman’s in hospital” as she passed to

explain her urgency.

“Oh shit. I love that guy!” he shouted after her as she took the stairs to the second floor and ran to her computer, immediately

uploading the script she’d emailed to herself onto the system, so radio stations across the country could download it for

their 5:00 a.m. bulletin.

Daisy scanned articles and wrote up a few other news stories: a singer taking on her first acting role, complete with audio

from an interview her colleague Felicity had done on Friday. A sports personality who was making a public apology for tax

evasion. A reality TV star who was speaking out about the dangers of cheap Botox.

At five minutes to five Daisy’s phone started flashing with a call from her mum. That was odd; she never called too close

to the hour, and rarely this early. She knew that in Daisy’s job the minutes in the run-up to a live bulletin were precious.

It had to be something important.

She scanned the news one more time, sure that she’d covered everything, and picked up.

“Have you heard from Dan?” Daisy’s mum asked, the moment she answered.

Daisy sighed, pressing her thumb and forefinger into the bridge of her nose.

“It depends when you last heard from him?”

“Lunchtime yesterday, which was early morning in San Francisco. Which means he’s been gone a whole day.”

Daisy squinted, doing the maths. “Well, not a whole day because it’s not lunchtime here, is it? It’s . . .” She looked at

her watch. “Four fifty-six. Why are you awake?”

“Because I set an alarm to say good-night to Dan.”

And yet I didn’t get a good morning, Daisy thought, but it was pointless saying that. Her younger brother was the love of their mother’s life, and to be honest

Daisy preferred it that way. Since he’d gone traveling, Daisy had fielded more calls from her mum than she had in the last

thirty-one years of her existence, and she didn’t know how Dan put up with it.

“I’m sure he’s fine. I haven’t heard from him either, but—”

“Oh God.”

“But I often don’t when he’s moving between places. Wasn’t he headed to Big Sur?”

“Yes and I’ve googled the roads. They’re treacherous.”

“Mum,” Daisy said, adopting the calmest voice she could. She understood that Dan doing a road trip, plus how similar he looked

to her dad, was prompting her mum’s escalating worry. “He’s going to be okay.”

It was, in fact, incredibly selfish for Dan to go off on a solo road trip when their dad had died in a car accident fifteen

years ago, because it meant that for the first time in her life, their mum couldn’t watch over him every second to ensure

he survived.

“You don’t know that,” her mum said, her voice breaking.

Daisy checked the time—4:58. She refreshed the E! page, her heart landing in her throat as she took in the headline. Gary Newman Confirmed Dead.

She dropped her phone, copying the script she’d written on the bus, but replacing the first line about him being in hospital with the new headline.

She clicked upload, adding an urgent tick.

What time did the story break? 4:57. She could have done it quicker.

She could have given the reporters more time to add it to their bulletin.

Some of them might not have even seen it.

They might still be running with the news that he was in hospital, when the rival stations will have picked up on it quicker.

They’ll have picked up on it quicker because their mother didn’t call the news desk almost bang on the hour, because she didn’t give a shit about the chaos that might cause.

Heart in her chest, Daisy waited as the jingle played for the bulletin.

“It’s five o’clock, I’m Harriet Brown. Gary Newman . . .” she squeezed her eyes closed and clenched her teeth “. . . has died.”

Daisy let out a breath, fist pumping the air, hearing the quiet voice in the background.

“Are you still there? Daisy?”

She scrambled to pick up her phone.

Daisy’s morning flew by after that. News was slowly drip-fed as to how Gary Newman had died, and each headline was reworked

so that there was a fresh update every hour. She sent her reporter Felicity out onto the street to get some vox pops for a

reaction piece. They varied from “Who? Never heard of him” to “Absolutely devastated. I had posters of him on my wall as a

girl” to “I loved him in Terminator” (a film he wasn’t in so they had to cut it.)

The next time Daisy had a chance to look at the time, it was way beyond when her shift was due to finish. She was going to

be late to meet Zack.

On my way! she messaged while still at her desk typing up a final piece for the 1:00 p.m. news, outlining quotes from fellow celebrities

and costars who had already posted about Gary’s death on Instagram.