Chapter 56
Now
quinn
‘It’s a huge fucking exclusive,’ Quinn says. ‘C’mon, Ollie. What the fuck is there to think about?’
‘The small fact that she’s a minor, and she’s just come out of a fifteen-month coma?’ the news desk editor says. ‘Christ knows what she’s going to say.’
‘That’s kind of the point.’
‘What if she starts drooling while we’re on air?’
‘She’s fine, Ollie. She’s got all her marbles, trust me. And the kid knows where all the bodies are buried. Maybe even literally.’
Ollie Hardman sighs. ‘Sorry, Quinn. We’re not doing this interview live, end of. I’ve got legal crawling up my arse as it is. Given all the lawsuits around this story, they want to review everything she says before it airs, especially if she names names.’
‘Fuck’s sake, Ollie. You used to have balls.’
‘You’re thirty years too late, darling. My ex-wife uses them for earrings.’
Quinn stalks back into the hospital, pissed. It took a lot of persuasion to get Coma Girl’s mother to go for a live interview, and now she’s got to go and tell her it’s off.
They’ll do the interview anyway as a pre-record, of course, but Ollie’s just tied one hand behind her back.
When you’re live, it’s like walking a tightrope without a safety net. Quinn’s had interviewees break down, walk off set, even fling water over her. But she’s also held their feet to the fire and given them nowhere to run from the truth.
She’d been relying on ambushing Ashley into saying something live on air that incriminated Colt.
But pre-recording it kills any hope of that: when legal gets their hands on the interview, the spineless fuckers will eviscerate it.
There’s no way they’ll let the girl accuse Colt Smith of so much as picking his nose without giving the man the right of reply.
If Ollie doesn’t locate his ball sack soon, the interview will never even see the light of day.
She smacks the elevator call button in frustration. Iris Gray’s testimony is dynamite, but Quinn simply doesn’t have enough to go public with it yet. She’s got the pieces of the jigsaw, but she can’t quite fit them together.
She knows from Rose that Nicky Gray saw a body – presumably Luke Connelly’s – being dragged into the woods a week before the accident, and that Connelly was investigating the illegal dumping of waste from Colt’s brewery into the lake when he disappeared.
She knows Colt and Jesse went out on Mac’s dredger to clean out the zebra mussels from the waste pipe, removing evidence of the brewery’s pollution, and that the dredger then hit the Lady.
She also knows they fled the scene of the accident instead of staying to help look for survivors, breaking every maritime law – and code of human decency – to save their own skins. So far, so straightforward.
But she still doesn’t know who killed Luke Connelly, or what happened to his body.
And now she’s beginning to wonder what really happened to Nicky Gray, too.
Nicky had a very good reason to want to disappear. Is it really just coincidence his is the only body that’s never been found?
Ashley Lincoln is the one person who might give her some answers.
According to Iris, Colt bribed Ashley to set Mac up, so that he could ensure his son’s silence over the dredger.
How much does Ashley know? If the girl was part of the plan to blackmail Mac, is it possible she was also involved in Luke’s death?
At the very least, if she’s in cahoots with Colt, she may know something about it.
Phil is waiting for Quinn when she steps out of the elevator on the third floor. Ashley’s no longer on a ventilator, of course, but she’s still in the ICU.
‘Well?’ he says. ‘Are we going live or not?’
‘Fucking pussy,’ Quinn says.
‘An interview doesn’t have to be live to blow shit up,’ Phil says, as he shoulders his camera and leads the way to Ashley’s room.
‘This is the first time Coma Girl’s spoken to anyone.
She was there that night. All the other kids who were trapped with her are dead.
If we don’t run the interview, you can bet your ass CNN or the BBC will be on it like flies on shit. This is gonna be huge, trust me.’
‘It’s not going to give me Colt Smith, though, is it?’
Phil stops outside Ashley’s room, and puts his camera down between his feet.
‘Quinn, you’re letting this get personal,’ he says.
‘It’s fucking with your judgement. I know you want to nail him, but Colt Smith isn’t the heart of this story.
Outside of this town, no one really gives a shit what caused the accident.
They care about two sisters trapped at the bottom of the lake with a bunch of teenagers, including their own two sons.
They care about what they had to do there to survive. That’s what Ashley’s gonna give us.’
He’s right.
Quinn’s hair-trigger fairness button needs Colt Smith held to account, but what viewers really want is the human interest angle. They want to suck the horror out of this story like emotional vampires, savouring every grim, pitiless, harrowing detail.
And she doesn’t judge them for it. It’s the same reason people feel a secret thrill when they’re driving down the motorway and see flashing lights and ambulances on the other side of the crash barrier.
They may hate themselves for it, but they’ll slow to a crawl so they can get a good look, just in case there’s a mangled body crushed beneath all that bloody metal.
Not because they’re voyeurs who want to see a gory corpse, but because it’s cathartic.
There but for the grace of God.
It’s why people want to watch disaster movies about a rugby team stranded for two months in the Andes after their plane has crashed, with no food but the frozen bodies of their dead friends.
It’s the reason a story about a mother swept up in a tsunami in Thailand with her two children, forced to choose which one to save, goes viral.
People want to hear about ordinary men and women just like them who are thrust into extraordinary situations. They want to hear about people who survive the unsurvivable, who somehow prevail even in the midst of unimaginable horror.
None of these stories are news. None of them will change the world the way, say, a summit of secretive tech billionaires in Silicon Valley will change it.
But they’re the stories people remember.
They shudder over the traumatic details and then go home and hug their children a little tighter and thank God it wasn’t them.
She watches Phil set up his camera next to Ashley’s bed, checking the framing in his viewfinder and then tweaking the height of his tripod. She used to hate human interest stories like this, finding them voyeuristic and intrusive, but she’s come to realise all stories are human interest stories.
There’s a reason the two Gray sisters haven’t spoken in fifteen months. Something terrible happened down there that night.
Something that cuts to the heart of what it means to be human.
Phil gives Ashley the mike to thread beneath her new pink silk pyjama jacket, and then secures it to her collar for her.
‘Are you comfortable, Ashley?’ Quinn asks.
The girl nods bravely, playing the fragile Victorian heroine to the hilt. She looks innocent and beautiful, with her doe eyes and long platinum hair fanning across her delicate shoulders.
But Quinn’s read the transcript of Maggie’s suicide note. The poor, sweet girl didn’t name Ashley as the person who fat-shamed and bullied and trolled her until she wanted to die, but Rose has told Quinn everything.
The coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death for Maggie despite the note: no one knows exactly what happened out there on the lake, whether Maggie deliberately jumped into the water, or drowned in the accident.
But everyone knows who really killed her.
And Quinn hates bullies.
‘Shall we get started?’ she says.